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The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt the

The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line. For a while it seemed like companies like FB had captured enough of the market that they seemed impervious to backlash from their many controversies, too big to fail in a way. It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of FB’s demise, but it looks like letting resentment towards your product build among your user base can come bite you in a very real way after all. FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. When Apple added restrictions that cut off oxygen to FB, FB started a PR campaign to paint it as one grave injustice. It seems like that was met with a collective shrug. Who cheers for the bad guy? All that is to say, it seems like Google has been in this value extraction mode for a while and I don’t see what the long term plan is. They don’t seem to be innovating much, but are instead intent on squeezing as much money as they can from their existing assets. And while that may work in the short term, FB has shown tech giants are not invincible. I’ve seen a lot of talk online lately about how bad the quality of search results have gotten. If a credible competitor emerges, I think a lot of users would gladly switch. If/when that happens, Google better hope they don’t find themselves in FB’s position where they can’t acquire their way out of their rut.

el-salvador 5y ago
> FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement with their product and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. > Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. Tiktok does this very well. I usually end up feeling good after using TikTok. On the other hand Twitter makes me stressed, FB is not much used by my friends age group or only used for memes, and Instagram is now showing me two ads every three stories that is really a pain to use.
- eftychis 5y ago
  Should we be concerned if the goal of a social network is to just make people feel well? (This is a serious question to ponder as a society perhaps (or just for me).) The goal of these products of course is to keep people around.
  - rtheunissen 5y ago
    Not to feel good as a goal but certainly as an effect of positive human interaction and experience. It's a desired outcome that interaction with the product makes you happy.
  - kadoban 5y ago
    I'd be less concerned about that than social networks designed to make people angry at each other.
vgeek 5y ago
Where do normal people go from Google? I've seen plenty of billboards for DDG, and even radio ads, but how likely is it that a user will switch (& persist) when their browser is controlled by the offending company that isn't afraid of implementing dark patterns to get the users back? Anecdotally, I have a senior citizen neighbor who asked me to look at her computer because of ads (I figured malware/adware) and she was somehow already using Firefox as her browser, so her problem was just resolved by installing uBlock Origin. Users defecting from FB have a number of options, driven by their in person network, search doesn't. How do new search engines communicate that Google is turning up the (ad/spam) heat and they need to escape the pot? Search results are subjective (that's why Google uses human raters), so what does it take for users, en masse, to start questioning their search results quality and/or excessive number of ads?
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Bing, Yandex, and DDG are more than serviceable. Furthermore, you have to imagine every search counts. Sure, Siri results might come directly through Google but that doesn't mean they won't lose some other fraction of your searches if you set your default search on Safari to be Bing.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Yandex in particular is way better than Google for finding illegal content in my experience.
    - david12345 5y ago
      Yes, because it is based in russia, but not for long https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/13/sites-with-pirated-content-will-be-removed-from-yandex-and-other-domestic-search-engines/ https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/13/sites-with-pirated-content...
      - danuker 5y ago
        I wonder what is next. Baidu?
jws 5y ago
…a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line… Reading that line I just realized that google lost me as a YouTube viewer in the past two weeks. I used to follow a bunch of ~100k subscriber channels that produced content every couple of weeks on building things and how to build things. I'd generally watch one or two 10-30 minute videos a day. They've cranked the ads through the roof to the point that I'd see the same 6 second Liberty Mutual bit three times before the video even got through its introduction along with a couple other ads. I now realize its been days since I even went to the site. So I guess for this n=1 we've found the limit.
- gxs 5y ago
  I quit because I was getting 2-3 30 second ads per video, 5 minute videos that is. Ended up getting an ad blocker on my iphone and deleting the app. I now have to use youtube.com and settle for 720p, but it's far and away better than the shit ads it served. Don't get me started on the relevancy of the ads.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    You don't have to settle for 720p change the quality 720p is the default
    - gxs 5y ago
      I think on the mobile site 720p is the best you can do. On the app/desktop you can get 1080p. I, at least, have never seen that 1080p option on the mobile site.
  - IX-103 5y ago
    You may have been in the heavy ads group from some sort of A/B experiment on how the number of ads they show affects engagement. YouTube runs these sorts of experiments all the time to improve "metrics". I've heard that there's even a long-running "control group" that doesn't get ads on YouTube.
- danuker 5y ago
elliekelly 5y ago
The top reply to the linked tweet shocked me: > further evidence to long $GOOG tbh
- physicles 5y ago
  Our lives will suck but at least we’ll be swimming in money!
endisneigh 5y ago
You're misreading the situation. It's not user hostility that's inherently the issue, it's that the demographics are aggressive and Facebook is failing to capture the younger, more captive audiences.
soheil 5y ago
FB is not losing because it's user-hostile. It simply was outcompeted by TikTok because it has a better and more engaging video product.
- dylan604 5y ago
  FB went with jacking people's emotion with rage, fear, and other scare tactics. Monsters Inc however showed us there's more power in laughter than screams. It's a shame nobody on FB's board ever watched a movie.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > Monsters Inc however showed us there's more power in laughter than screams. It's a shame nobody on FB's board ever watched a movie. To be fair, everything in Monsters, Inc. was made up.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Seemingly, so is everything on FB!
bentcorner 5y ago
I think the risk here is that adblocking can only grow (and maybe Manifest v3 is the only answer Google has had to that so far). As people become more frustrated with Google they either complain to their friends/family or search online for help and inevitably learn about adblocking. Once they do that they become lost to Google forever. Perhaps the only holdout is mobile. But otherwise ad-tech is poisoning the well for themselves.
- UnFleshedOne 5y ago
  Adblocking works just fine on mobile too, with a few more jumps, at least on adnroid.
- SCLeo 5y ago
  Speaking of Manifest v3, I really hope all these adblock extensions secretly work together and on the day Manifest v3 is released, they all display a gigantic red-backgrounded warning on startup telling the user Google Chrome has turned evil and suggesting them switching to Firefox or some other browser.
dillondoyle 5y ago
I can't speak to the market, but for me personally the restrictions on ad targeting and more specifically conversion tracking is what made me think FB loses a lot of value - not the reverse in user growth. Though that's not great for a long term window. It seems the most profitable users don't care and typically engage with the ads. Or they used to before apple came in and lowered the quality. Arguments about ethics/ads aside
keewee7 5y ago
>Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. TikTok has by far the best recommender system I have ever tried. After an hour of use the system had correctly narrowed down my interests of exoplanets, space exploration, technology, and startups. However that also means TikTok is the most hypertuned echochamber. I hope people don't get their political views from TikTok.
- phreack 5y ago
  Your intuition is correct. According to [1] it can take 2 hours of browsing and interacting with transphobic content to get straight into neo-nazi content. Many people don't ever see such videos, and don't think it's on the platform - it does become a very hypertuned hyperfocused echo chamber. [0] https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-leads-users-transphobic-videos-far-right-rabbit-holes https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-leads-...
  - tonguez 5y ago
    The web page you linked seems like it was written by someone who lives in a basement and has never logged off of Twitter. “ We defined “prominent far-right figures/prominent far right talking points” posts as those that contain prominent far-right figures such as Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones…” “ We defined “racist/white supremacist” posts as those which… support white supremacy by using white supremacist talking points such as “white pride” or “white lives matter.”” So do white lives not matter? Seems like whoever wrote this hates themselves and is racist.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Bravo, best self-own I've seen in a while. And thanks for letting us know you're the kind of poster who unironically echoes white supremacist talking points.
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    Are there any papers on this matter that are not made by explicitly political think tanks?
oblio 5y ago
Their bottom line was hurt by Apple, not by their anti consumer policies.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  It isn't an either or situation. Personally I used to watch Youtube quite a bit more but barely watch it at all these days thanks to their oppressive censorship policies.
  - oblio 5y ago
    In my experience people making these "freedom stands" are a statistical minority that in no way influences actual mass markets, much like those Greenpeace people chaining themselves to oil & gas equipment to stop it from being used. I mean, it's nice and noble but the vast majority of people don't follow you and corporations don't care as long as you don't become a social and political landmark. If you go quietly for sure it doesn't matter to their bottom line. People generally give stuff up for prosaic reasons, instead such as: too many ads, favorite content producers moved to another platform, content they like becomes paid, their social circles don't consider the platform cool anymore, etc.
    - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
      >In my experience people making these "freedom stands" are a statistical minority that in no way influences actual mass markets >.., favorite content producers moved to another platform,.. This was my grip against youtube, it wasn't merely a principled stand. Numerous independent content creators that I had followed and subscribed to on Youtube have been either censored, demonetized or blocked completely in the last couple of years. It doesn't matter to your bottom line until you censor, discourage, or otherwise drive away enough people where it does start to matter, as Facebook found out a few days ago. Perhaps Youtube/Google is such a monopolistic revenue juggernaut that it can continue to censor, demonetize and ban content creators liberally and without any coherent standards and still churn out a profit. We'll see.
taurath 5y ago
I remember digg. Network effects can turn on you.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

el-salvador 5y ago

> FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement with their product and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. > Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. Tiktok does this very well. I usually end up feeling good after using TikTok. On the other hand Twitter makes me stressed, FB is not much used by my friends age group or only used for memes, and Instagram is now showing me two ads every three stories that is really a pain to use.

eftychis 5y ago
Should we be concerned if the goal of a social network is to just make people feel well? (This is a serious question to ponder as a society perhaps (or just for me).) The goal of these products of course is to keep people around.
- rtheunissen 5y ago
  Not to feel good as a goal but certainly as an effect of positive human interaction and experience. It's a desired outcome that interaction with the product makes you happy.
- kadoban 5y ago
  I'd be less concerned about that than social networks designed to make people angry at each other.

vgeek 5y ago

Where do normal people go from Google? I've seen plenty of billboards for DDG, and even radio ads, but how likely is it that a user will switch (& persist) when their browser is controlled by the offending company that isn't afraid of implementing dark patterns to get the users back? Anecdotally, I have a senior citizen neighbor who asked me to look at her computer because of ads (I figured malware/adware) and she was somehow already using Firefox as her browser, so her problem was just resolved by installing uBlock Origin. Users defecting from FB have a number of options, driven by their in person network, search doesn't. How do new search engines communicate that Google is turning up the (ad/spam) heat and they need to escape the pot? Search results are subjective (that's why Google uses human raters), so what does it take for users, en masse, to start questioning their search results quality and/or excessive number of ads?

jimbob45 5y ago
Bing, Yandex, and DDG are more than serviceable. Furthermore, you have to imagine every search counts. Sure, Siri results might come directly through Google but that doesn't mean they won't lose some other fraction of your searches if you set your default search on Safari to be Bing.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Yandex in particular is way better than Google for finding illegal content in my experience.
  - david12345 5y ago
    Yes, because it is based in russia, but not for long https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/13/sites-with-pirated-content-will-be-removed-from-yandex-and-other-domestic-search-engines/ https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/13/sites-with-pirated-content...
    - danuker 5y ago
      I wonder what is next. Baidu?

jws 5y ago

…a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line… Reading that line I just realized that google lost me as a YouTube viewer in the past two weeks. I used to follow a bunch of ~100k subscriber channels that produced content every couple of weeks on building things and how to build things. I'd generally watch one or two 10-30 minute videos a day. They've cranked the ads through the roof to the point that I'd see the same 6 second Liberty Mutual bit three times before the video even got through its introduction along with a couple other ads. I now realize its been days since I even went to the site. So I guess for this n=1 we've found the limit.

gxs 5y ago
I quit because I was getting 2-3 30 second ads per video, 5 minute videos that is. Ended up getting an ad blocker on my iphone and deleting the app. I now have to use youtube.com and settle for 720p, but it's far and away better than the shit ads it served. Don't get me started on the relevancy of the ads.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  You don't have to settle for 720p change the quality 720p is the default
  - gxs 5y ago
    I think on the mobile site 720p is the best you can do. On the app/desktop you can get 1080p. I, at least, have never seen that 1080p option on the mobile site.
- IX-103 5y ago
  You may have been in the heavy ads group from some sort of A/B experiment on how the number of ads they show affects engagement. YouTube runs these sorts of experiments all the time to improve "metrics". I've heard that there's even a long-running "control group" that doesn't get ads on YouTube.
danuker 5y ago

elliekelly 5y ago

The top reply to the linked tweet shocked me: > further evidence to long $GOOG tbh

physicles 5y ago
Our lives will suck but at least we’ll be swimming in money!

endisneigh 5y ago

You're misreading the situation. It's not user hostility that's inherently the issue, it's that the demographics are aggressive and Facebook is failing to capture the younger, more captive audiences.

soheil 5y ago

FB is not losing because it's user-hostile. It simply was outcompeted by TikTok because it has a better and more engaging video product.

dylan604 5y ago
FB went with jacking people's emotion with rage, fear, and other scare tactics. Monsters Inc however showed us there's more power in laughter than screams. It's a shame nobody on FB's board ever watched a movie.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Monsters Inc however showed us there's more power in laughter than screams. It's a shame nobody on FB's board ever watched a movie. To be fair, everything in Monsters, Inc. was made up.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Seemingly, so is everything on FB!

bentcorner 5y ago

I think the risk here is that adblocking can only grow (and maybe Manifest v3 is the only answer Google has had to that so far). As people become more frustrated with Google they either complain to their friends/family or search online for help and inevitably learn about adblocking. Once they do that they become lost to Google forever. Perhaps the only holdout is mobile. But otherwise ad-tech is poisoning the well for themselves.

UnFleshedOne 5y ago
Adblocking works just fine on mobile too, with a few more jumps, at least on adnroid.
SCLeo 5y ago
Speaking of Manifest v3, I really hope all these adblock extensions secretly work together and on the day Manifest v3 is released, they all display a gigantic red-backgrounded warning on startup telling the user Google Chrome has turned evil and suggesting them switching to Firefox or some other browser.

dillondoyle 5y ago

I can't speak to the market, but for me personally the restrictions on ad targeting and more specifically conversion tracking is what made me think FB loses a lot of value - not the reverse in user growth. Though that's not great for a long term window. It seems the most profitable users don't care and typically engage with the ads. Or they used to before apple came in and lowered the quality. Arguments about ethics/ads aside

keewee7 5y ago

>Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. TikTok has by far the best recommender system I have ever tried. After an hour of use the system had correctly narrowed down my interests of exoplanets, space exploration, technology, and startups. However that also means TikTok is the most hypertuned echochamber. I hope people don't get their political views from TikTok.

phreack 5y ago
Your intuition is correct. According to [1] it can take 2 hours of browsing and interacting with transphobic content to get straight into neo-nazi content. Many people don't ever see such videos, and don't think it's on the platform - it does become a very hypertuned hyperfocused echo chamber. [0] https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-leads-users-transphobic-videos-far-right-rabbit-holes https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-leads-...
- tonguez 5y ago
  The web page you linked seems like it was written by someone who lives in a basement and has never logged off of Twitter. “ We defined “prominent far-right figures/prominent far right talking points” posts as those that contain prominent far-right figures such as Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones…” “ We defined “racist/white supremacist” posts as those which… support white supremacy by using white supremacist talking points such as “white pride” or “white lives matter.”” So do white lives not matter? Seems like whoever wrote this hates themselves and is racist.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Bravo, best self-own I've seen in a while. And thanks for letting us know you're the kind of poster who unironically echoes white supremacist talking points.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  Are there any papers on this matter that are not made by explicitly political think tanks?

oblio 5y ago

Their bottom line was hurt by Apple, not by their anti consumer policies.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago
It isn't an either or situation. Personally I used to watch Youtube quite a bit more but barely watch it at all these days thanks to their oppressive censorship policies.
- oblio 5y ago
  In my experience people making these "freedom stands" are a statistical minority that in no way influences actual mass markets, much like those Greenpeace people chaining themselves to oil & gas equipment to stop it from being used. I mean, it's nice and noble but the vast majority of people don't follow you and corporations don't care as long as you don't become a social and political landmark. If you go quietly for sure it doesn't matter to their bottom line. People generally give stuff up for prosaic reasons, instead such as: too many ads, favorite content producers moved to another platform, content they like becomes paid, their social circles don't consider the platform cool anymore, etc.
  - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
    >In my experience people making these "freedom stands" are a statistical minority that in no way influences actual mass markets >.., favorite content producers moved to another platform,.. This was my grip against youtube, it wasn't merely a principled stand. Numerous independent content creators that I had followed and subscribed to on Youtube have been either censored, demonetized or blocked completely in the last couple of years. It doesn't matter to your bottom line until you censor, discourage, or otherwise drive away enough people where it does start to matter, as Facebook found out a few days ago. Perhaps Youtube/Google is such a monopolistic revenue juggernaut that it can continue to censor, demonetize and ban content creators liberally and without any coherent standards and still churn out a profit. We'll see.

taurath 5y ago

I remember digg. Network effects can turn on you.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]