29 ms·

Facebook's TikTok-like redesign marks sunset of social networking era

683 points by jedwhite 4y ago

psuresh 4y ago
Social media platforms/apps are fad. Won't last. Think about Orkut. Or Myspace for that master.
slategruen 4y ago
I hate to say this but Google, particularly YouTube, has the best "discovery engine" in my experience. I'm a fan of long-form content so that must be the primary reason why I prefer it over other platforms.
xnx 4y ago
Wait, I thought Facebook was going all in on VR? /s
boraturan 4y ago
building an open, white-label, embeddable Instagram/Tiktok as SAAS solution at alvin5.com. The idea is that communities and individuals can create their own Instagram like social media app/feed (Shopify for Social media), would love to meet with interested parties.
chrononaut 4y ago
> Mark last week as the end of .. What a unique garden-path sentence.[0] I had to re-read that a couple times since I thought it was referring to Mark Zuckerberg given the title of the article.. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
- andreygrehov 4y ago
  Thanks for the link. Never heard of Garden-path sentence before. I had the exact same experience.
- chucky123 4y ago
  Interesting insight. I though of Mark Z too.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  This might be the first time I've seen one of these in the wild since I learned about this in college. Thanks for pointing it out
timcavel 4y ago
[dead]
SrslyJosh 4y ago
Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/ I've tried to type out several pithy comments, but the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs. Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac, but it's not on the menu anymore because Taco Bell had a few really good quarters, so McDonald's decided to pivot to tacos. Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted. Edit: To clarify, this example is contrived and the details are not the point. The point is that Facebook offered something to their users, spent years and billions of dollars making sure that as many people as possible got it from Facebook, and then decided to just yank the rug out from under all those people to chase the fairy tale of endless growth.
- HeyItsMatt 4y ago
  Facebook doesn't respect it's users, it's staff, or it's retail investors. As the companies stock is currently structured it exists as Mark Zuckerberg's personal plaything and no one can get rid of him until he runs out of cash.
- GrumpyNl 4y ago
  They are driven by the numbers, the numbers cant be wrong.
- Alex3917 4y ago
  > Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? The difference is that, similarly to how social networks grow exponentially when things are going well, they lose users even faster when things are going bad. There are tons of academic papers explaining this.
- ardit33 4y ago
  Yeah, apple went from selling personal computers to iPods, phones and headphones, where they make most of the money.... Would you have said the same for Apple back in 2007? Ps. Restaurants change menus all the time.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
inversefft 4y ago
Went to facebook for the first time in months to check this out. Clicked the little TV icon and waited for 20 seconds on a blank page before some worthless smut loaded. I don’t see this going well for facebook.
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  I sometimes try to use Facebook to find events and such. Finding an old invite to my friends event was quite impossible since it was drowned out by spam. It feels like it could have a lot of utility but the incentives are very misaligned.
draw_down 4y ago
RichardCNormos 4y ago
> TikTok-style "discovery engine" model shares many of the same problems. > - Posts are even less rooted in a web of social relationship. > - The larger the crowd, the louder the threshold for speech to be heard. This is prescient. The "social media" of today is more like Napster than it is like the the early-2000s Facebook: * People look for content that they want (political rage, softcore pornography, funny videos), with little concern for who it comes from. * Content is exchanged between peers, but centrally indexed and mediated. * While the network is ostensibly peer-to-peer, the content exchanged on it is filtered by the central entity according to any policy they see fit.
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  Yet somehow me and my group of friends all use Instagram to keep in touch in the same way we’ve done for years, and in the same way we will likely continue to do so for years longer, mostly undisturbed by the changes that come and go…
  - prawn 4y ago
    I try to use it the same way but find the changes disturbing. More and more ads. More and more suggested content. The ratio of stuff I'm there to see versus the stuff I don't want to see isn't very good in 2022.
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      My friend group has gravitated heavily towards stories, which seem to be much less impacted by how the feed is curated.
throwaway892238 4y ago
Did Facebook ever really need to become such a behemoth? Could they not have been mildly profitable just hosting pictures and helping people stay connected? Would it have been impossible for them to simply keep operating without capitalism's Blob-like need for growth at all costs?
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  I pray that someday an original-Facebook social media site returns. I'd really like to keep in touch with friends and family over large distances. I'm even willing to put up with ads in the sidebar, or at this point in my life donate to a site that provides such a valuable service. But I won't use or even condone a product that actively manipulates its users via dark patterns. Such a blatant disrespect for personal choice and autonomy. No thought about the consequences on democratic systems, or radicalization of folks exposed, or mental health... just greed, money, and growth above all else. There is a very special place in hell for people who talk in the movie theatre. And Mark Z.
  - worldsayshi 4y ago
    The incentives need to align with the users for it to work on the long term.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > Did Facebook ever really need to become such a behemoth? How many non-behemoths survived and are still used by real people? Even something like IRC is pretty much dead these days because it is too simple.
- grishka 4y ago
  It's the IT industry we're talking about here. I feel like no one in IT is capable of "just stopping" when the product is good enough. Everything is required to have scope creep or at the very least feature creep and regular UI redesigns for no good reason, seemingly by law.
- adra 4y ago
  When money (credit) is cheap and plentiful, there's all the incentives to push the company to bigger and more speculative growth. When credits expensive, you actually have to sell something. Let's see if this downturn is an end to this eras fast money or just a temporary blip before the helicopters of cash start flying again.
liberia 4y ago
All the platforms have their own TikTok style mechanism now. YouTube has Shorts, Facebook has its Reels feature which is tightly integrated with Instagram and you need an Instagram account to engage with Reels on Facebook, which is a bit of a growth hacker dark pattern. For now, Reels is not interspersed with ADs which is refreshing, but that could all change. The whole vertical video craze is a weird one, and one I’ve only recently tried to adjust to. I mean the pace of it is so fast, and I barely have time to process each video before moving to the next one. A whole generation are going to be raised on cheap dopamine hits and will probably suffer mild ADD symptoms because of this. I want the slow web back where I can chew on long form content and mull over large pieces of text and long winded podcasts, not boiled down snippets of info that prey on my base instincts and giddy 1 minute dopamine fixes.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > I want the slow web back where I can chew on long form content and mull over large pieces of text and long winded podcasts… It is what you make it, really. I watch YouTubers who make long videos, go deep diving on subjects which have no real use in my daily life and have very, very few apps on my phone — all but one are something which makes my life easier than not having it and the exception is because I want to buy a condo. No Instagrams, Facebooks, TikToks, Twitters, nothing. I don’t even feel I’m missing out on anything worthwhile either.
  - drunkpotato 4y ago
    I did this because my relationship to social media was unhealthy, and now it feels much better. Hacker news, because duh. Instagram is for softcore porn. Facebook I deleted years ago, no regrets. (I'm aware they own Instagram, and I don't care. This is just a personal issue for me.) Tiktok I watch funny videos when people send them to me, I feel no need to install an app. Twitter, I read tweets when people link to them, and every time Twitter reminds me why I'm glad I don't use Twitter. I understand why other people use them, and some people can do it in a healthy way, but for me, this is the absolute maximum I can use social media without losing myself.
- 4y ago
Olumde 4y ago
Hey Facebook. Fix the auto scrolling desktop bug first. I've pretty much stopped using Facebook because of this.
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  This
nowherebeen 4y ago
I recently download the Facebook app to sell something in the marketplace. It has become so bloated and un-user friendly, I question why anyone would use it on a daily basis. The new feeds is a bunch of irrelevant posts I don’t care about. I guess it was bound to happen when you hire thousands of workers to work on one app. It’s been optimized into a deformed monster.
- robswc 4y ago
  Exactly. I never really got it until I grew up and ditched the social media apps but when people say "its just nonsense" it truly is just nonsense. It's "news" for the sake of news. Do I need to know there was a robbery in some town a few states over? Do I need to know Selena Gomez celebrated her birthday in a pink brand dress? Do I need to know Trump recently returned to DC for the first time in a year? (taken from just seeing front page of news site) No, no and no. It's all nonsense. Yet to some degree, I will have to use energy to process and engage with it. If it "annoys me" I may comment, which wastes even more energy. (and yes, I do get the irony of complaining about this, lol) I'm not saying all news is bad or to turn it all off... just that one has to realize so much of it is news for the sake of news and the world will still turn without your investment in it.
  - nowherebeen 4y ago
    You hit the nail on the head. News for news sake; drama for drama sake. At some point we need to realize this and give up on it. It does nothing to help us in life other than give us misery. There are enough problems in life to handle. I don’t need to know about the drama of another stranger.
Linda703 4y ago
[dead]
1270018080 4y ago
Is there an example of the redesign? I was hoping to see screenshots on the article. I haven't had an account since 2018 or so.
rascul 4y ago
Facebook will die with what is currently the older generation. They're addicted, and while they're still around, Facebook will survive. Nobody else seems to care so much about Facebook anymore.
- justusthane 4y ago
  I think this suggests that isn’t the case. Facebook knows they can’t survive long term with that strategy and they aren’t happy stagnating, so they’re making changes to try to attract younger users. Except they’re going to fail to do that while also driving away their existing users.
  - alexashka 4y ago
    Facebook can not only survive, but thrive if it fires 95% of it's employees and goes git checkout facebook from 5-10 years ago. That's all it has to do to be a great, profitable, thriving business. But that's not what 95% of the employees at facebook want, for obvious reasons :) It's that classic tragedy of the commons - what a business school/marketing/advertising graduate wants is always at odds with what's good for the rest of society.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  All social networks are fads and generational, Tik Tok is no different. I think Facebook still has value when it comes to private social networking and marketplace. Tik Tok isn't made for any of that. Personally I don't like Tik Tok. I'm sure there is good content on that platform but I don't like the format, just like I despise Twitter. It's all made for people with a short attention spam and I've seen way too much creepy and unhinged stuff on it.
thenerdhead 4y ago
> Facebook and its rivals call this a "discovery engine" because it reliably spits out recommendations of posts from everywhere that might hold your attention. All I can think about is how every big social media company continues to invent persuasive technology to keep everyone glued to their devices and steal away our most precious asset in our lives; our attention. Where your attention goes, your life goes. I'm only 30 and much of my 20s went to these platforms. I can't say for the better. I think we all need to be bored again and not have a constant IV drip of dopamine in our hands at all times. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology
ulfw 4y ago
What's going on with Facebook product management? It's shocking to see core products deteriorate, others barely every improve (where's instagram and whatsapp for iPad?), while competitors (these days tiktok, before Snap) are merely imitated years later. Actually kind of sad to see considering I'm a big fan of Social and 'Meta' has been on the forefront for years. I hope they find a way to rethink this.
- Drew_ 4y ago
  > What's going on with Facebook product management? The culture of Facebook is to drive metrics so they're doing their job just fine according to this.
  - alonmower 4y ago
    Ya, this is it. Myopically metrics driven cultures like this have a failure mode where you're too successful at chasing the metrics and the organization's sense of taste atrophies (you grow to lose trust in your taste because it's disagreed with the metrics so often, or other people push back on it because the metrics say ____) So there you are: your organization has no taste or ability to create 'good' things that people enjoy, you're also so large that big or wild bets are too hard for the org to stomach. What options do you really have? Pretty much just 1) buy companies or 2) fade into obsolescence...
- akomtu 4y ago
  Each team chases its own metric, even if it obviously hurts other teams, shareholders and the cattle (sorry, the users).
xwdv 4y ago
It’s crazy to think the social media era may finally be ending. There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing. Everything is about feeding you content you didn’t ask for but may be targeted enough to catch your attention. And for what? To show you some ads here and there? To collect data that can be used to… sell more ads and products? Instagram was once my favorite app. There was a golden age before stories came a long where people just posted random pictures of what they were up to or what they were seeing. Things weren’t too memefied or political, unlike Facebook. Then photos got more and more glamorized and more about flexing and showing how much cooler and more awesome your life was. People started following themes and niches for their profile content rather than just posting random unorganized series of photos. Businesses and brands started getting built on the platform. Building an Instagram clone the way it used to be is fairly trivial these days. I could probably throw one together in a few months, but growing its popularity is practically impossible these days with such entrenched incumbents and no niches left to start a user base with. …unless perhaps… we build a social network on the blockchain
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
  > There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing. Is this something that people really want to do though... I did that for a bit back when fb was still new but quickly and I mean quickly fell off the habit and stopped using fb.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    Yes, otherwise it’s basically back to the dark age where I have no idea what other people are doing because I have no close friends.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Then get off the computer and go makes some friends.
robswc 4y ago
I know it sounds dumb but its hard to say we haven't moved closer to what only ~10 years ago we considered a "playful exaggeration" on the worst of humans and social media. In WallE, everyone is floating around in chairs having their content spoon-fed to them with a generous amount of ads mixed in. If you've ever scrolled or seen someone scroll, its kinda close. Just mindlessly moving their thumb up and down, taking in content that will be forgotten within minutes. Ask a tik tok user to tell you even 10% of the videos they saw within the last hour. I'd be surprised if they could. I hope its not too "old man yelling at cloud" because I do my 15 minutes of mindless instagram scrolling but I have a timer that locks the app and I usually only need 15 minutes, more just feels bleh. Some of my family/friends "brag" about having 7+ hrs of "tik tok time" on their iphone stats. Just crazy.
- SamuelAdams 4y ago
  > Ask a tik tok user to tell you even 10% of the videos they saw within the last hour. I'd be surprised if they could. Heck you could ask the same for any HN user as well :) Yes this is social media. Yes some of it is mindless time wasting. For me personally I sometimes get useful information that helps improve my work / profession. At least that’s how I justify it.
  - Gunnerhead 4y ago
    > Heck you could ask the same for any HN user as well I remember reading some article about the sunset of social media and TikTok and Facebook and stuff.
    - imron 4y ago
      Link?
  - robswc 4y ago
    Haha, true! Tbh tho I usually only click on a few of the posts on here, the one's that interest me. The signal to noise ratio just seems awful on tiktok, marginally better on reddit and HN. There you can scan the page and see what interests you. On these new "endless scroll" types you have to at least invest a few seconds time into each video. Say you skip ~10 videos, that's ~10 seconds to just find a 10 second video you wish to watch. At the very least I think we have to admit a 15 min session on HN will be more productive, memorable and engaging than 15 minutes on tiktok. Again, if your goal is mindless scroll, I get it, I do it too... but still, lol Not to get all high and mighty but I dunno, I guess I see it like alcohol. A little is fine but I can't imagine a barrage of second-sized content being optimized to perfection (to keep you scrolling) is a "good" thing for any long period of time.
markus_zhang 4y ago
I hope my child does not fall into the tiktok future. How can I fight against it? I don't use such app but I'm sure it's popular for younger people especially teenagers.
lamontcg 4y ago
Bjorkbat 4y ago
This actually makes me pretty sad. For all of Facebook's ills, it did at least do a good job of keeping me connected with friends before it got weird. Same with Instagram. Twitter is fantastic because it helps me discover new people, new interests, new worlds, in a way. TikTok doesn't feel social at all. It feels entirely too performative. Everything on there is a performance. Everything is an act. Everything is simply an effort of some kind or another. Sounds more exhausting than fun. Really wish there was a thriving ecosystem of small online communities that had some sort of financial structure that could collectively create as much money as these larger companies do. Instead, well, here we are.
- Figuringitout 4y ago
  What does the research show as to why people won't pay a subscription or entertain another type of monetization model?
  - dsir 4y ago
    If you look at platforms like Twitch, Substack, and Patreon, I think it's pretty clear people are willing to entertain other models in large enough volume to support the livelihoods of the recipients. I do find it curious why there isn't a "paid" option from services like Facebook where you pay a monthly fee to essentially opt out of being their product opposed to user and not get targeted with ads. I guess in their case the monetization prospects from the hyper targeting they are able to do is probably too lucrative to even give people the option to opt out of.
    - zerocrates 4y ago
      Part of the basic issue with that kind of "opt out" system is that the users who will pay for no ads probably have more disposable income and are therefore desirable advertising targets. I believe I've heard it said that Hulu makes _more_ money per user on "with-ads" tier users than those that pay extra to remove the ads.
      - 4y ago
eyeownyde 4y ago
Am I the only one who found the article's formatting confusing and unnecessary? The bullet points don't seem to be used for lists, and it isn't clear to me why many words are bold... can someone educate me on this formatting?
geuis 4y ago
Facebook hasn't actually showed me a timeline of what my family and friends have posted in YEARS. I stopped using FB years ago because of this. I've also stopped using instagram on the last couple of years for the same reason. I'm constantly being shown recommended posts from either random people or ads rather than a basic linear timeline of people I actually give a fuck about. FB can go die in a fire.
mjfl 4y ago
I just checked facebook newsfeed and it looks the same.
nyxtom 4y ago
> The dominant player in social media is transforming itself into a kind of digital mass media, in which the reactions of hordes of anonymous users, processed by machine learning, drive the selection of your content. It's becoming more and more evident that this whole thing is one giant intelligence bootstrapping simulation.
civilized 4y ago
How are the Boomers going to adapt to this? Where are they going to get their Brandon and Stop the Steal memes now?
partiallypro 4y ago
It's very difficult to get much engagement on Facebook anymore without boosting your post artificially by paying. I remember being able to just post some random article or status to my timeline and friends would chime in and give their opinions or share jokes...can't really do that anymore, at least not consistently. Now I mostly just use Facebook for chat and news. Tiktok is fun, but I don't understand why it needs to be replicated. There is plenty of room for multiple avenues on how to engage with people, or your friends, etc. It's not just Facebook either, Twitter is also becoming harder and harder to get good engagment on unless you're already a big account. It wasn't always like that.
mullingitover 4y ago
I'm just disappointed that Facebook doesn't accept bounty where they'll kick your parents off the platform for life for $1k per parent.
oneepic 4y ago
I'd like to side with the article, but it posts no screenshots whatsoever to support its point. I can google it, but come on, at least try.
est 4y ago
I am not against swipe up/down UI, but I really hate vertical vids. And sadly they won today.
annexrichmond 4y ago
Somewhat unrelated, but the other day I was trying to see which of my friends still live in the city I used to live in, as I was about to visit. I could not find a way to filter friends by current city. Seems like such an obvious feature meant for a side supposedly about connecting you with friends. Guess it wouldn’t move the right KPIs.
- webo 4y ago
  This seems obvious to the younger generation but “my friends who live in X” works just fine on Facebook. I know the older (my) generation is used to more filters but google/fb/ig/tt handle context-free queries fine by default.
site-packages1 4y ago
I stopped using this years ago, except I still have an account and minorly check once a week or month depending on my mood. I'll give the same refrain I expect from most: how do I keep up with goings-on of long-lost friends, family members with whom I don't want to directly interact but want to know what they're "up to" and to know about major life events? Maybe the answer is that I should delete facebook and go back to beforetimes when the world was smaller and I only interacted with people in my immediate geographic area except at decennial family reunions.
- prawn 4y ago
  Remarkably, given the variety of social platforms and amount of money invested in them, this appears to be an unsolved problem. It was solved previously, but they've managed to unsolve it again!
- momojo 4y ago
  You ask some good questions. I wonder sometimes; if Facebook disappeared tomorrow, how badly would my life be affected? And it's strange to me that the disappearance of a platform which seems to pervade my daily life would only cause minor inconvenience. I'll admit that Messenger has greater sway over my daily life, but I could probably switch over to an alternate messaging platform with minimal pain. > Maybe the answer is that I should delete facebook and go back to beforetimes when the world was smaller It's absurd how highly we've come to value a platform that brings only an incremental amount of joy to our lives (and who knows how much grief). I would be lying if I said I don't enjoy seeing what my old friends are up to, or knowing who's had kids, etc. But well, maybe I'll have to call them up for coffee and a chat instead.
- asdff 4y ago
  You can just call or text people every now and then if you want to keep up with them.
- ickelbawd 4y ago
  Sure. You see them once in a blue moon and catch-up. Or you go back to ye ole grapevine, and ask the people you do want to talk to about the people they talk to that you don’t. Or you forget about them and life carries on.
hiptobecubic 4y ago
I feel like half the comments here about "facebook dying" and how "facebook can't compete with tiktok" are missing the big picture about facebook. For a lot of people, facebook basically is the internet. The same way AOL was a long time ago. Everyone they want to talk to as they go about their day is there. Basically every business in the US that bothers with an online presence at all either has a facebook page or exclusively has a facebook page. Craigslist is being eaten by facebook marketplace. Even Facebook messenger is still a wildly successful chat app and it's like... their 3rd or 4th-place messaging platform. Facebook has become a sort of digital town square that is a pretty significant part of the economy; the real-world brick-and-mortar economy. Tiktok and instagram are much more recreational.
- 12907835202 4y ago
  It's not just Facebook. For some people Instagram is the internet. For others Reddit is the internet. For others YouTube. Lots of people log into one app or website and get all their news, culture, politics, entertainment, sports in that one place. It's interesting that you call it the new Aol, to me it's the new Yahoo.com. Maybe in hindsight it's always been this way?
- weq 4y ago
  No. Facebook DOES NOT OWN social networking. Facebook improved on an existing design at the right time, PERIOD! Now, as before, the world has moved on, and the bubble has burst. The laggards in 3rd world countries will flock to the next service to disrupt social media, just like before. Facebook innovated at a time when mobile phones were being delivered to these countries. Not because they were a superior service or somehow godlike in its ability to hold mindshare. Tiktok, by its very nature, is its own worse enermy. Chinas economy is crumbling as we speak, and its not going to be long before the CCP will get caught with their hands in the cookie jar. No one makes money in China without authority from the superme leader. And No one can be more famous then the supreme leader. Tiktok, tiktok; Huawi 2.0.
  - harshthedev 4y ago
    >The laggards in 3rd world countries will flock to the next service to disrupt social media Oh no man, a laggard from a 3rd world country has already reached HN. Maybe you should pack your bags now because the future of HN looks grim.
aquova 4y ago
I'll admit that I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and thus haven't seen what this redesign looks like, but this sounds like a baffling move. Facebook has been less and less popular with the younger crowd; and is now mainly associated as a place for older generations, who like use it primarily as a way to keep track of friends and family and secondarily as a way to see the news. I can't see the "Tiktok-ification" of their platform as being successful at all. My grandmother wants to see pictures of their neighbor's holidays, not scroll through the antics of kids she doesn't know. Again, the article doesn't give any screenshots, but expanding the feed pool to encompass the whole world is the exact opposite of why people are still sticking around.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Fortunately itll still be neighbors and adults posting, just like TikTok is now
- asdff 4y ago
  basically the redesign is exactly the same as its always been, only they sexied up the lefthand column with friends, saved, pages, now marketplace is there because presumably a lot of people just use fb to sell or buy crap. The top bar with notifications got moved to the left hand side, and the chat window is expanded to the entire right third of the screen. It looks like any other electron-esque app now basically, and it takes longer to load to the point where they've added a splash screen. Every other item in your news feed is a sponsored post or something someone put up days ago versus the most recent content.
socialcapital 4y ago
I can only assume they did a shit ton of testing to arrive at this decision.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"TikTok and Facebook's antics (existence?) have me seriously considering quitting tech. I feel like no matter what I do, I am feeding one of these societal cancers by implementing tracking for whoever is paying me currently, lifting dark patterns, etc, using the API of Google... I tried to avoid doing these things for awhile but nobody pays me to be ethical. My only marketable skill is software development and I pretty much hate what it has become. 16 years down the drain." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233969 I remember being disappointed that an early iPhone I bought came with some Facebook preset/integration pre-installed.
bathtub365 4y ago
What’s up with the format and writing style of this article? Bulleted lists are used to make points rather than list things, and the first few words of some paragraphs are bolded. Is this a new style of writing that their algorithm shows them is effective?
Barrin92 4y ago
I always thought Facebook sat at a very awkward, uncanny-valley type position on the social media spectrum. On the one hand it doesn't feel (or is) private or personal. The feed mechanic doesn't really make for great conversations and everything is half public, the line between friends and other people isn't that clear, and so on. Chat platforms like Telegram/Discord/Whatsapp and TikTok clearly lean into one direction (albeit on opposite ends of the spectrum). TikTok tends to be a mile wide and an inch deep but at least it leverages what the internet is good at, and chat apps do the reverse. I think that bifurcation is just happening in general, not just on social media apps. There's more interest in private spaces as well as mass popular culture but the middle-ground isn't that appealing any more.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Yeah it started off basically private, social, with people you care about and has gradually slid into people you don't really know commenting on non-social stuff. Nobody I know uses it anymore and we were Facebook's core audience when it started. We all just use WhatsApp now.
landryraccoon 4y ago
Back around 2009 when Facebook was first becoming ascendant, people wondered if social networks were generational. I.e., would each younger generation be willing to use the same social network as their parents? I think the de facto surrender of Facebook to TikTok here is evidence that social networks ARE generational. That implies that TikTok may reign supreme for about 20 years, but thereabouts, they'll have to contend with yet another rising challenger.
danrl 4y ago
This Axios „article“ is the written version of a TikTok session, in an ironic turn of events. The bite sized information and the excessive use of bullet points is designed to keep readers engaged in a world driven by ultra short attention spans. I bemoan the lack of a well researched, deep article around this latest pivot of Facebook.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  I mean, this style of writing is actually very old. It's just a thing. Have you ever read Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, for example? Similar brief and punctuated style. Written in 1845. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/thes...
allenrb 4y ago
For those old enough to recall Nancy Reagan, perhaps the time has finally arrived to "JUST SAY NO!"
hit8run 4y ago
No one needs Zuckerberg and his shitty services.
- hit8run 4y ago
  Apparently the person who downvoted does
oxff 4y ago
Why is it so hard to have a site where I can share pictures with and for friends and see them in chronological order
eyelidlessness 4y ago
I wanted to read this out of sincere curiosity but it put a big popup covering everything that I couldn’t dismiss or even agree to. So welp so much for the content, good luck with all your fish.
patwater10 4y ago
Spending a few minutes coming back to FB after this article, the chronological feed and news feed seem pretty similar in terms of content. Maybe that's just who I'm friends with though.
rileyphone 4y ago
Previously: "The end of Facebook" (2011), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660680
fbn79 4y ago
No sunset, just two different kind of products that coesists. Social networking still strong but shifted to direct messaging app like whatsapp or telegram. The difficult for meta is structure Instagram to keep this two kind of products together.
cpeterso 4y ago
Here is Adam Mosseri, "Head of Instagram at Instagram", talking about why Instagram is leaning into Reels videos: https://twitter.com/mosseri/status/1551890839584088065 https://twitter.com/mosseri/status/1551890839584088065 He says users are using Reels more, even though they say they don't want Reels. Replies say content creators are reluctantly making Reels because the algorithm favors Reels over regular posts. Ironically, he posted this on Twitter (as a video) because it's a better medium for reaching Instagram users?
- BbzzbB 4y ago
  He has obviously posted it on both Instagram and Twitter.
  - cpeterso 4y ago
    Good point. I see his Twitter post has about 8000 replies and his Instagram post has over 24,000 replies.
scrame 4y ago
thank god.
zambal 4y ago
To me it seems that all social media platforms converge to some user hostile version of Reddit. You can argue that it got worse over time too, but it still is the platform that gives me most control over what I like to see. The other model that seems to work well for users are obviously platforms like Signal/Matrix/Whatsapp.
pleb_nz 4y ago
Seems this maybe one of those very rare cases where I might be ahead of the curve ball and what's cool.
vivekzorp 4y ago
Havent used Facebook in ages, so cant say what they have become. But one of the primary reasons why i left FB was because it had become junk, and was of no value. Will i go back and use it because it has a new design. probably not, as i believe FB's core approach has not changed
turing_complete 4y ago
Axios marks the sunset of good english prose. This article reads like a twitter thread, rather than a well-craftet, coherent text.
xbruteforce 4y ago
Sadly most internet users do not care. 1984
vasco 4y ago
Only a Mark kinda guy would invest in building a whole new ecosystem to try and win in it just because he didn't come up with the fact that video is much more catchy than your grandma's motivational pics.
kukkeliskuu 4y ago
It is strange that it is so difficult to be social on a platform that is supposedly "social media". For example, I cannot just follow my friends' feed like I want, the comment editor is often unusable on mobile phone. I cannot send messages to others without installing the app, etc. Social media facilitates the forming of grassroots movements and this challenges the existing power structures. What Facebook does is curiously well aligned with preventing people from forming grassroots movements. It does not require a conspiracy for this to happen. It may just be that FB gets pressure from some governments to set up policies that effectively curb down grassroots movements, and if it does not comply, it would get pushed out.
dgudkov 4y ago
>That's what younger users right now seem to prefer They don't prefer it. They just can't resist.
WesternWind 4y ago
I don't miss it being run by google or forced into every product, but google+ circles were so much better then facebook friend lists. But I refuse to be nostalgic for FB, it's always been meh to me. And the sad thing with all these changes is it's going to frustrate all the old retirees who just want their computer to do the same thing that it used to do.
mikaeluman 4y ago
The "discovery" setups of increasingly all social media platforms is a big turn off for my use case of actually being social with my friends when we are away from each other. In instagram the only redeeming feature left is the "story" buttons at the top. I stopped using Facebook long ago, though I still use messenger. I also use Slack and WhatsApp to communicate, basically SMS texting but in groups. Whatever the "social" platforms now are, they are very off putting to say the least. Maybe good for killing time writing for the bus? A reversion back to cute cat and dog videos.
lizardactivist 4y ago
Those who cannot compete, copy.
trasz 4y ago
So American companies are now stealing Chinese solutions? :-)
holografix 4y ago
I like to go against the current on these topics, try to bring a different perspective even if I don’t fully agree with what I’m saying: I think the TikTok threat to Meta is overblown. They’re a one trick pony and their trick is the unhealthiest of them all, presenting the user with the least amount of control and provided by the most opaque, state controlled, spyware-esque organisation. You thought Russia using Facebook for political interference was bad? The CCP is hardwired into TikTok for fucks sakes! I think Facebook has a longer runway. They will keep milking insta and will prob start doing a better job of monetising Whatsapp. Also, I think the Occulus is actually pretty great, especially for the price. I can envision a “dumber” version, lighter and with more battery life but 5G dependent for the compute requirements being a thing for external use. Once a company gets VR done well the smartphone is OVER.
- syrrim 4y ago
  > Once a company gets VR done well the smartphone is OVER. AR maybe. I seriously doubt that VR will ever be the primary way people interact with computers. People tend to use their phones as a distraction in public, and as a brief reprieve in private. VR entails completely submerging yourself in the computer interface, which might be fine occasionally, but I doubt will ever be most people's preferred way to access social media and the like. AR would enable you to distract yourself while still leaving you aware of what's going on around you. The issue there being that its much more difficult to do AR well. I doubt that VR will take off until someone does AR or MR really well, after which enough people will be already using the headsets for a VR application to become popular.
gw67 4y ago
FB stock returned near IPO price (2017, 150$). Investors believed for 5 years to the "growth first, profit later" theory. But now, another competitor (TikTok) is stealing their market share and profits for FB will never arrive. This is also a confirmation that not always focusing on growth will give you confidence on market share.
jug 4y ago
It's sad how they aren't instead capitalizing on their niche and going back to their roots, instead choosing to go against TikTok which is probably a futile endeavour because they already grabbed and established that culture. If I've learnt one thing from social networks, it's that competitors only rarely succeed in capturing another network's niche. Instagram has tried to become TikTok too but few would say the Reels concept is a smashing success... Facebook has tried to be Snapchat as well with ephemereal messaging, but few would say Facebook is known for that and recapturing the youth culture today. Meanwhile, Snapchat still thrives at a more rapid rate than Twitter and Facebook. You can not simply copy features and then the culture will come. And when Google+ was rising, Facebook desperately tried to introduce more ways to handle your friend lists due to the innovative "circles" of Google+. These features still remain but few today are aware that Facebook posts to Friends aren't seen by friends in your Acquaintances friend list because those are there to only see Public posts... This is an example of a relic from those days but there are other examples too. Despite the confidence you would expect them to have from having more than a billion users, they are surprisingly unsure of themselves and who they want to be. You can also see it happen with Meta and VR. Is that supposed to now work in tandem with the TikTokification (how? a clip feed is hardly interactive?), or are they still just confused about who they want to be? I wonder how much of it has to do with Zuckerberg himself?
- lopis 4y ago
  You are not the target audience. The fact that HN thinks this spells doom for Instagram just shows how out of touch HN users can be with the average Internet user. When facebook bought Instagram and changed everything around, people screamed wolf, but IG's popularity exploded. When IG copied snapchat and added stories, techies said it was terrible, the end of IG, but it only caused its popularity to skyrocket, snapchat to practically die, and stories to become the main way people used IG. The average user doesn't care - IG will continue growing and most users will get used to the new normal. A few unhappy users will leave, but they won't even make a dent. Competition in the platform will only increase as every company and "content creator" tries to be on top of the reels feed. I say this as an outsider that doesn't really use IG.
parkingrift 4y ago
Can someone please explain to me why Facebook shouldn’t be treated as a news publisher? They are now outright choosing what content to show you. This is indistinguishable from opinion or freelance journalism sites. Facebook is now explicitly deciding which content to allow, editorializing content at will, and dictating the content that you see. Looks like a news publisher. Sounds like a news publisher. Acts like a news publisher. Facebook should not receive Section 230 protections any longer.
- hgazx 4y ago
  Facebook, or Twitter, or… Twitter shows clearly editorialised content in the trending sidebar.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Agree completely. If you want Section 230 protection, present posts chronologically or based on some user-chosen criteria. If you want to "curate" people's feeds based on some opaque algorithm you should not be able to hide behind Section 230 when people complain about the results.
madseas 4y ago
intrasight 4y ago
I am very surprised that there are nearly 500 comments on this item and none mentioned VR. VR is the uncharted territory of social media. Facebook has a head-start but TikTok is also investing billions and will catch up. Just as desktops are legacy, soon smartphones will be too. I also saw no comments about this "Facebook will continue to provide old-school friends-and-family networking via a subsidiary tab. Those posts will be chronologically ordered, as some users have long wished for." One final point is political ads being big business at FB. So it'll be interesting how are their numbers in the 4th quarter.
- anhner 4y ago
  > Just as desktops are legacy, soon smartphones will be too. This is the same as saying "in 10 years we'll have flying cars". No, we won't.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    I think you are wrong. We'll know in 5 years.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    It's more like how 3d televisions were going to take over. Turns out people don't want it.
v4dok 4y ago
IMO this is the normal lifecycle of any social media. I would even argue that advertising just a part of it. Kids think its cool and use it -> Slightly older generation enters because its cool with the kids -> even older generation enters -> now its cringe for the kids -> they find something else. Add on top the fact that the business model incentive is to push as many ads as possible and any medium is transformed from an exclusive sharing space to a public square with your awkward aunt and a million ads. TikTok is not escaping this. Its still early and people share a lot of intimate things on there (and they are proud that they can do it), but that will quickly change as it becomes more mainstream.
nonfamous 4y ago
Does this mean Facebook’s privacy model is going to change radically? [1] TikTok’s “for you” feed works because all posts are globally-visible, but on Facebook isn’t sharing generally limited to your social network? Will they change things so that every Facebook post is globally visible by default? [1] Or maybe it changed already. I haven’t used Facebook in a long time.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fariszr 4y ago
Looks like the only platform that hasn't switched to tiktok style is Twitter,because all the other are owned by Facebook. Oh also Snapchat. I'm still waiting for the tiktok redesign for WhatsApp lol
thecast 4y ago
I belive this is the future of “social media” short snippets of video that does not require a attention span greater then that of a goldfish. Facebook will follow tiktok example, since it seems like that is what people wants to see
hestefisk 4y ago
FWIW, I deleted my Facebook account years ago and never looked back. I’m not on Twitter, TikTok, instagram, or Snapchat. I only maintain presence on LinkedIn due to work (staying in touch with clients), painful as it it. Perhaps there is white space for a new generation of social networks, which are not privacy hoarding ad machines?
aceazzameen 4y ago
I'm curious if this decision was made to be ready for an eventual TikTok ban? The drums have been beating on that for a while. FB might know this is coming and wants to slurp up the displaced users when it happens.
franklampard 4y ago
I am really confused by the writing style of this author.
roody15 4y ago
So this is my own conspiracy rabbit hole… I get the impression all of these sites that use quick 10-15 second video clips followed by screenshots of a tweet or quote are a dystopian method of controlling human behavior. It seems like a way to implant a thought or feeling and minimize critical thinking. In the past social media sites reddit / facebook had great comment sections and links to actual articles. Although this still exists (to some extent and on niche subreddits for example) it seems to be rapidly changing to screenshot of a tweet, or quote or a short video clip. Followed by one line responses or even just a single emoji. For example you will see a quote from politician x … as a screenshot …. ughh that makes me so mad!!! But little context is provided about the quote, when it was said, was it actually said and is the the expanded text available to help understand. Nope it’s .. just a quick emotion that makes me mad!!… followed by scroll to cat video #532 Watching people sitting at parks, waiting for a bus, waiting at a restaurant … lots of the same … scroll scroll … giggle giggle… go political team A they are saving world … ugghh political team B is so bad and makes me mad they hate everyone … scroll .. scrolll .. did you know if you eat Kale you live forever … scroll … scroll Just something really off putting about this experience IMO. Seems very shallow / minimal thinking …
- tizzy 4y ago
  It's the reduction of attention-span. Can't have critical thinkers if they can't focus for more than 15 seconds at a time. I've noticed a lot of people hold conservative views despite growing up fairly liberal because a lot of the solutions to difficult problems are difficult. An easy way out is to accept the first thing that seems fine without any thinking involved. Add to that the fact that it's a worldview that doesn't make sense at first (like many things in maths and science) and people just give up.
chadlavi 4y ago
I sure hope so
rufusroflpunch 4y ago
The social network is dead. Long live the social network.
beckingz 4y ago
Several years ago I saw an ad on Tumblr (I know, I know), for a strange meme site. After seeing several hundred of these ads, I got curious about how it could be profitable to run such nonsense and clicked. Content that was just funny enough to keep me scrolling mixed with ads. It turned out, that was a site run by an Israeli ad-tech media company that used algorithms to find out how many ads they could could put in while maintaining attention, a sort of google ads style auction running on the page to determine if it should add an ad or a meme to the page next. Linkedin has public research doing the same type of thing.
kinnth 4y ago
FB/Meta still has phenomenal value, just the FB app is being sunset. The Whatsapp acquisition, fb friends list and all those photos you have uploaded will be worth so much in time to come. Where FB wins is it owns the best connections. Who cares what the app shows you, FB actually knows more about who you care about. When that comes to the metaverse that will be like owning the yellowpages and always brings added value. FB App is dead. Meta is still winning.
- seydor 4y ago
  What they really sell is user's attention , and dashboards for advertisers. The user connections and photos are useful for maintaining that attention but are rather a burden without it.
AlexandrB 4y ago
If you look at the recent Facebook news in concert - "turning up the heat" on employees, Oculus price increase, and copying TikTok as quickly as possible - it seems like Facebook is in real trouble. This is the flailing of a drowning man.
- 202206241203 4y ago
  Like Microsoft without Azure. Or Google without... or like Google.
greyhair 4y ago
The same problem has destroyed instagram. I closed my Facebook account years ago, pre COVID, but still enjoyed instagram. In the last six months, a steady rot has crept into instagram. I hardly see any of my friend's photos anymore. Just reel after reel after reel from people I have never heard of. I wish they had a settings button to block all reels, but they don't. So, that is the end of instagram for me. Meta sucks.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
The hacks I've done to make facebook kind of useful - Turn on every privacy setting they have available and "serve me up generic ads only" - Unfollow EVERTYTHING and EVERYONE, cut your friends list down too, or click on the "follow" only of your real most frequent friends of concern except your core groups of interest, pare it down to less than 20-30, and more so if your groups are active. - Turn off active status except for your top 10 friends/family and treat messenger like email otherwise (I do the same with do not disturb mode on iphone) - Use the "Most Recent" button on the left and make it a habit so you don't see the same posts over and over. It become a lot more useful of a tool after that. Everyone whines but like a lot of things for it to be useful you have to put in a little bit of time and trim your hedges instead of letting them grow into amorphous blobs. or delete it, there's not much in between. Also I hate hate hate tiktok and this whole video thing, I don't think they bring very much more useful info to the social media conversation.
- kayxspre 4y ago
  I used to do this to keep my feed concise, only showing posts my friends interacted with (I don't follow any pages), but recently it has become more or less useless. Facebook decided that it wanted to show content that might catch interests by throwing it under the header "Suggested for you". Some time before that, I can simply dismiss it and it won't show again for some time, but right now it showed every day, and I can't dismiss it at all. The most "suggested" page in my feed right now is a fan page of One Piece's author, which posted memes or content related to the manga despite I not showing interest in it, and I can't make it perish.
fritztastic 4y ago
I really miss the experience I had with MySpace back in 2004-2007. It gave users a lot of control over their personal pages, and I had a lot of fun adding all sorts of wacky things. I got to communicate with some of my favorite bands and authors, all the content in someone's profile was contained in a single place. There was almost a diy feel to it. I sometimes even feel nostalgic about the "Top 8" drama. It was a simpler time. I was also young so I probably overlooked the darker side of things then. People did warn a lot about putting your real name online because it might give murderers your information, granted there were fewer people on the internet then and it had a certain wild west vibe to it, the great unknown with associated fears- somewhere along the way society did a 180 and everyone started putting all their information online. It's really strange to think about the shifts, but even stranger to think about the sources of the moving parts bringing the changes. There are alternatives to corporate-run social media (the Fediverse, to name one off the top of my head) that are less-known. I've personally just left social media altogether. I had a period of time I spent in cycles of addiction/absrinence and I have to say I much prefer to keep in touch with people on more personal direct contact (snail mail, e-mail, messaging) without meddling, extra baggage, advertisers, my data being sold off to unknown entities to do as they please according to their most likely not benign motivations. But the biggest factor in my exit from social media was how negative it all became. I joined facebook in 2007 when you needed to be invited in and it was basically mostly students. Ober the years things went from "so neat I can connect to people all over the world" to an online battleground in the span of a decade (arguably 2 decades, depending on your online experience). The convenience of keeping in touch with relatives/friends overseas and the wonderment of making friends online has become eclipsed by all the other things which have nothing to do with people being able to connect. If anything these big platforms have become all about (directly, indirectly, incidentally, regardless) gaming the divisions between people to push them apart and foment rifts they can profit from, at least that's how I see it and I am just done with all that.
mvkel 4y ago
it marks the sunset... except they already rolled it back. The sun rises another day.

683 points by jedwhite 4y ago

Social media platforms/apps are fad. Won't last. Think about Orkut. Or Myspace for that master.

I hate to say this but Google, particularly YouTube, has the best "discovery engine" in my experience. I'm a fan of long-form content so that must be the primary reason why I prefer it over other platforms.

xnx 4y ago

Wait, I thought Facebook was going all in on VR? /s

boraturan 4y ago

building an open, white-label, embeddable Instagram/Tiktok as SAAS solution at alvin5.com. The idea is that communities and individuals can create their own Instagram like social media app/feed (Shopify for Social media), would love to meet with interested parties.

chrononaut 4y ago

> Mark last week as the end of .. What a unique garden-path sentence.[0] I had to re-read that a couple times since I thought it was referring to Mark Zuckerberg given the title of the article.. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

andreygrehov 4y ago
Thanks for the link. Never heard of Garden-path sentence before. I had the exact same experience.
chucky123 4y ago
Interesting insight. I though of Mark Z too.
lelandfe 4y ago
This might be the first time I've seen one of these in the wild since I learned about this in college. Thanks for pointing it out

timcavel 4y ago

[dead]

SrslyJosh 4y ago

Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/ I've tried to type out several pithy comments, but the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs. Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac, but it's not on the menu anymore because Taco Bell had a few really good quarters, so McDonald's decided to pivot to tacos. Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted. Edit: To clarify, this example is contrived and the details are not the point. The point is that Facebook offered something to their users, spent years and billions of dollars making sure that as many people as possible got it from Facebook, and then decided to just yank the rug out from under all those people to chase the fairy tale of endless growth.

HeyItsMatt 4y ago
Facebook doesn't respect it's users, it's staff, or it's retail investors. As the companies stock is currently structured it exists as Mark Zuckerberg's personal plaything and no one can get rid of him until he runs out of cash.
GrumpyNl 4y ago
They are driven by the numbers, the numbers cant be wrong.
Alex3917 4y ago
> Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? The difference is that, similarly to how social networks grow exponentially when things are going well, they lose users even faster when things are going bad. There are tons of academic papers explaining this.
ardit33 4y ago
Yeah, apple went from selling personal computers to iPods, phones and headphones, where they make most of the money.... Would you have said the same for Apple back in 2007? Ps. Restaurants change menus all the time.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

inversefft 4y ago

Went to facebook for the first time in months to check this out. Clicked the little TV icon and waited for 20 seconds on a blank page before some worthless smut loaded. I don’t see this going well for facebook.

worldsayshi 4y ago
I sometimes try to use Facebook to find events and such. Finding an old invite to my friends event was quite impossible since it was drowned out by spam. It feels like it could have a lot of utility but the incentives are very misaligned.

draw_down 4y ago

RichardCNormos 4y ago

> TikTok-style "discovery engine" model shares many of the same problems. > - Posts are even less rooted in a web of social relationship. > - The larger the crowd, the louder the threshold for speech to be heard. This is prescient. The "social media" of today is more like Napster than it is like the the early-2000s Facebook: * People look for content that they want (political rage, softcore pornography, funny videos), with little concern for who it comes from. * Content is exchanged between peers, but centrally indexed and mediated. * While the network is ostensibly peer-to-peer, the content exchanged on it is filtered by the central entity according to any policy they see fit.

AmericanChopper 4y ago
Yet somehow me and my group of friends all use Instagram to keep in touch in the same way we’ve done for years, and in the same way we will likely continue to do so for years longer, mostly undisturbed by the changes that come and go…
- prawn 4y ago
  I try to use it the same way but find the changes disturbing. More and more ads. More and more suggested content. The ratio of stuff I'm there to see versus the stuff I don't want to see isn't very good in 2022.
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    My friend group has gravitated heavily towards stories, which seem to be much less impacted by how the feed is curated.

throwaway892238 4y ago

Did Facebook ever really need to become such a behemoth? Could they not have been mildly profitable just hosting pictures and helping people stay connected? Would it have been impossible for them to simply keep operating without capitalism's Blob-like need for growth at all costs?

vanilla_nut 4y ago
I pray that someday an original-Facebook social media site returns. I'd really like to keep in touch with friends and family over large distances. I'm even willing to put up with ads in the sidebar, or at this point in my life donate to a site that provides such a valuable service. But I won't use or even condone a product that actively manipulates its users via dark patterns. Such a blatant disrespect for personal choice and autonomy. No thought about the consequences on democratic systems, or radicalization of folks exposed, or mental health... just greed, money, and growth above all else. There is a very special place in hell for people who talk in the movie theatre. And Mark Z.
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  The incentives need to align with the users for it to work on the long term.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> Did Facebook ever really need to become such a behemoth? How many non-behemoths survived and are still used by real people? Even something like IRC is pretty much dead these days because it is too simple.
grishka 4y ago
It's the IT industry we're talking about here. I feel like no one in IT is capable of "just stopping" when the product is good enough. Everything is required to have scope creep or at the very least feature creep and regular UI redesigns for no good reason, seemingly by law.
adra 4y ago
When money (credit) is cheap and plentiful, there's all the incentives to push the company to bigger and more speculative growth. When credits expensive, you actually have to sell something. Let's see if this downturn is an end to this eras fast money or just a temporary blip before the helicopters of cash start flying again.

liberia 4y ago

All the platforms have their own TikTok style mechanism now. YouTube has Shorts, Facebook has its Reels feature which is tightly integrated with Instagram and you need an Instagram account to engage with Reels on Facebook, which is a bit of a growth hacker dark pattern. For now, Reels is not interspersed with ADs which is refreshing, but that could all change. The whole vertical video craze is a weird one, and one I’ve only recently tried to adjust to. I mean the pace of it is so fast, and I barely have time to process each video before moving to the next one. A whole generation are going to be raised on cheap dopamine hits and will probably suffer mild ADD symptoms because of this. I want the slow web back where I can chew on long form content and mull over large pieces of text and long winded podcasts, not boiled down snippets of info that prey on my base instincts and giddy 1 minute dopamine fixes.

UncleEntity 4y ago
> I want the slow web back where I can chew on long form content and mull over large pieces of text and long winded podcasts… It is what you make it, really. I watch YouTubers who make long videos, go deep diving on subjects which have no real use in my daily life and have very, very few apps on my phone — all but one are something which makes my life easier than not having it and the exception is because I want to buy a condo. No Instagrams, Facebooks, TikToks, Twitters, nothing. I don’t even feel I’m missing out on anything worthwhile either.
- drunkpotato 4y ago
  I did this because my relationship to social media was unhealthy, and now it feels much better. Hacker news, because duh. Instagram is for softcore porn. Facebook I deleted years ago, no regrets. (I'm aware they own Instagram, and I don't care. This is just a personal issue for me.) Tiktok I watch funny videos when people send them to me, I feel no need to install an app. Twitter, I read tweets when people link to them, and every time Twitter reminds me why I'm glad I don't use Twitter. I understand why other people use them, and some people can do it in a healthy way, but for me, this is the absolute maximum I can use social media without losing myself.
4y ago

Olumde 4y ago

Hey Facebook. Fix the auto scrolling desktop bug first. I've pretty much stopped using Facebook because of this.

rossdavidh 4y ago
This

nowherebeen 4y ago

I recently download the Facebook app to sell something in the marketplace. It has become so bloated and un-user friendly, I question why anyone would use it on a daily basis. The new feeds is a bunch of irrelevant posts I don’t care about. I guess it was bound to happen when you hire thousands of workers to work on one app. It’s been optimized into a deformed monster.

robswc 4y ago
Exactly. I never really got it until I grew up and ditched the social media apps but when people say "its just nonsense" it truly is just nonsense. It's "news" for the sake of news. Do I need to know there was a robbery in some town a few states over? Do I need to know Selena Gomez celebrated her birthday in a pink brand dress? Do I need to know Trump recently returned to DC for the first time in a year? (taken from just seeing front page of news site) No, no and no. It's all nonsense. Yet to some degree, I will have to use energy to process and engage with it. If it "annoys me" I may comment, which wastes even more energy. (and yes, I do get the irony of complaining about this, lol) I'm not saying all news is bad or to turn it all off... just that one has to realize so much of it is news for the sake of news and the world will still turn without your investment in it.
- nowherebeen 4y ago
  You hit the nail on the head. News for news sake; drama for drama sake. At some point we need to realize this and give up on it. It does nothing to help us in life other than give us misery. There are enough problems in life to handle. I don’t need to know about the drama of another stranger.

Linda703 4y ago

[dead]

1270018080 4y ago

Is there an example of the redesign? I was hoping to see screenshots on the article. I haven't had an account since 2018 or so.

rascul 4y ago

Facebook will die with what is currently the older generation. They're addicted, and while they're still around, Facebook will survive. Nobody else seems to care so much about Facebook anymore.

justusthane 4y ago
I think this suggests that isn’t the case. Facebook knows they can’t survive long term with that strategy and they aren’t happy stagnating, so they’re making changes to try to attract younger users. Except they’re going to fail to do that while also driving away their existing users.
- alexashka 4y ago
  Facebook can not only survive, but thrive if it fires 95% of it's employees and goes git checkout facebook from 5-10 years ago. That's all it has to do to be a great, profitable, thriving business. But that's not what 95% of the employees at facebook want, for obvious reasons :) It's that classic tragedy of the commons - what a business school/marketing/advertising graduate wants is always at odds with what's good for the rest of society.
throw_m239339 4y ago
All social networks are fads and generational, Tik Tok is no different. I think Facebook still has value when it comes to private social networking and marketplace. Tik Tok isn't made for any of that. Personally I don't like Tik Tok. I'm sure there is good content on that platform but I don't like the format, just like I despise Twitter. It's all made for people with a short attention spam and I've seen way too much creepy and unhinged stuff on it.

thenerdhead 4y ago

> Facebook and its rivals call this a "discovery engine" because it reliably spits out recommendations of posts from everywhere that might hold your attention. All I can think about is how every big social media company continues to invent persuasive technology to keep everyone glued to their devices and steal away our most precious asset in our lives; our attention. Where your attention goes, your life goes. I'm only 30 and much of my 20s went to these platforms. I can't say for the better. I think we all need to be bored again and not have a constant IV drip of dopamine in our hands at all times. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology

ulfw 4y ago

What's going on with Facebook product management? It's shocking to see core products deteriorate, others barely every improve (where's instagram and whatsapp for iPad?), while competitors (these days tiktok, before Snap) are merely imitated years later. Actually kind of sad to see considering I'm a big fan of Social and 'Meta' has been on the forefront for years. I hope they find a way to rethink this.

Drew_ 4y ago
> What's going on with Facebook product management? The culture of Facebook is to drive metrics so they're doing their job just fine according to this.
- alonmower 4y ago
  Ya, this is it. Myopically metrics driven cultures like this have a failure mode where you're too successful at chasing the metrics and the organization's sense of taste atrophies (you grow to lose trust in your taste because it's disagreed with the metrics so often, or other people push back on it because the metrics say ____) So there you are: your organization has no taste or ability to create 'good' things that people enjoy, you're also so large that big or wild bets are too hard for the org to stomach. What options do you really have? Pretty much just 1) buy companies or 2) fade into obsolescence...
akomtu 4y ago
Each team chases its own metric, even if it obviously hurts other teams, shareholders and the cattle (sorry, the users).

xwdv 4y ago

It’s crazy to think the social media era may finally be ending. There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing. Everything is about feeding you content you didn’t ask for but may be targeted enough to catch your attention. And for what? To show you some ads here and there? To collect data that can be used to… sell more ads and products? Instagram was once my favorite app. There was a golden age before stories came a long where people just posted random pictures of what they were up to or what they were seeing. Things weren’t too memefied or political, unlike Facebook. Then photos got more and more glamorized and more about flexing and showing how much cooler and more awesome your life was. People started following themes and niches for their profile content rather than just posting random unorganized series of photos. Businesses and brands started getting built on the platform. Building an Instagram clone the way it used to be is fairly trivial these days. I could probably throw one together in a few months, but growing its popularity is practically impossible these days with such entrenched incumbents and no niches left to start a user base with. …unless perhaps… we build a social network on the blockchain

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
> There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing. Is this something that people really want to do though... I did that for a bit back when fb was still new but quickly and I mean quickly fell off the habit and stopped using fb.
- xwdv 4y ago
  Yes, otherwise it’s basically back to the dark age where I have no idea what other people are doing because I have no close friends.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Then get off the computer and go makes some friends.

robswc 4y ago

I know it sounds dumb but its hard to say we haven't moved closer to what only ~10 years ago we considered a "playful exaggeration" on the worst of humans and social media. In WallE, everyone is floating around in chairs having their content spoon-fed to them with a generous amount of ads mixed in. If you've ever scrolled or seen someone scroll, its kinda close. Just mindlessly moving their thumb up and down, taking in content that will be forgotten within minutes. Ask a tik tok user to tell you even 10% of the videos they saw within the last hour. I'd be surprised if they could. I hope its not too "old man yelling at cloud" because I do my 15 minutes of mindless instagram scrolling but I have a timer that locks the app and I usually only need 15 minutes, more just feels bleh. Some of my family/friends "brag" about having 7+ hrs of "tik tok time" on their iphone stats. Just crazy.

SamuelAdams 4y ago
> Ask a tik tok user to tell you even 10% of the videos they saw within the last hour. I'd be surprised if they could. Heck you could ask the same for any HN user as well :) Yes this is social media. Yes some of it is mindless time wasting. For me personally I sometimes get useful information that helps improve my work / profession. At least that’s how I justify it.
- Gunnerhead 4y ago
  > Heck you could ask the same for any HN user as well I remember reading some article about the sunset of social media and TikTok and Facebook and stuff.
  - imron 4y ago
    Link?
- robswc 4y ago
  Haha, true! Tbh tho I usually only click on a few of the posts on here, the one's that interest me. The signal to noise ratio just seems awful on tiktok, marginally better on reddit and HN. There you can scan the page and see what interests you. On these new "endless scroll" types you have to at least invest a few seconds time into each video. Say you skip ~10 videos, that's ~10 seconds to just find a 10 second video you wish to watch. At the very least I think we have to admit a 15 min session on HN will be more productive, memorable and engaging than 15 minutes on tiktok. Again, if your goal is mindless scroll, I get it, I do it too... but still, lol Not to get all high and mighty but I dunno, I guess I see it like alcohol. A little is fine but I can't imagine a barrage of second-sized content being optimized to perfection (to keep you scrolling) is a "good" thing for any long period of time.

markus_zhang 4y ago

I hope my child does not fall into the tiktok future. How can I fight against it? I don't use such app but I'm sure it's popular for younger people especially teenagers.

lamontcg 4y ago

Bjorkbat 4y ago

This actually makes me pretty sad. For all of Facebook's ills, it did at least do a good job of keeping me connected with friends before it got weird. Same with Instagram. Twitter is fantastic because it helps me discover new people, new interests, new worlds, in a way. TikTok doesn't feel social at all. It feels entirely too performative. Everything on there is a performance. Everything is an act. Everything is simply an effort of some kind or another. Sounds more exhausting than fun. Really wish there was a thriving ecosystem of small online communities that had some sort of financial structure that could collectively create as much money as these larger companies do. Instead, well, here we are.

Figuringitout 4y ago
What does the research show as to why people won't pay a subscription or entertain another type of monetization model?
- dsir 4y ago
  If you look at platforms like Twitch, Substack, and Patreon, I think it's pretty clear people are willing to entertain other models in large enough volume to support the livelihoods of the recipients. I do find it curious why there isn't a "paid" option from services like Facebook where you pay a monthly fee to essentially opt out of being their product opposed to user and not get targeted with ads. I guess in their case the monetization prospects from the hyper targeting they are able to do is probably too lucrative to even give people the option to opt out of.
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    Part of the basic issue with that kind of "opt out" system is that the users who will pay for no ads probably have more disposable income and are therefore desirable advertising targets. I believe I've heard it said that Hulu makes _more_ money per user on "with-ads" tier users than those that pay extra to remove the ads.
    - 4y ago

eyeownyde 4y ago

Am I the only one who found the article's formatting confusing and unnecessary? The bullet points don't seem to be used for lists, and it isn't clear to me why many words are bold... can someone educate me on this formatting?

geuis 4y ago

Facebook hasn't actually showed me a timeline of what my family and friends have posted in YEARS. I stopped using FB years ago because of this. I've also stopped using instagram on the last couple of years for the same reason. I'm constantly being shown recommended posts from either random people or ads rather than a basic linear timeline of people I actually give a fuck about. FB can go die in a fire.

mjfl 4y ago

I just checked facebook newsfeed and it looks the same.

nyxtom 4y ago

> The dominant player in social media is transforming itself into a kind of digital mass media, in which the reactions of hordes of anonymous users, processed by machine learning, drive the selection of your content. It's becoming more and more evident that this whole thing is one giant intelligence bootstrapping simulation.

civilized 4y ago

How are the Boomers going to adapt to this? Where are they going to get their Brandon and Stop the Steal memes now?

partiallypro 4y ago

It's very difficult to get much engagement on Facebook anymore without boosting your post artificially by paying. I remember being able to just post some random article or status to my timeline and friends would chime in and give their opinions or share jokes...can't really do that anymore, at least not consistently. Now I mostly just use Facebook for chat and news. Tiktok is fun, but I don't understand why it needs to be replicated. There is plenty of room for multiple avenues on how to engage with people, or your friends, etc. It's not just Facebook either, Twitter is also becoming harder and harder to get good engagment on unless you're already a big account. It wasn't always like that.

mullingitover 4y ago

I'm just disappointed that Facebook doesn't accept bounty where they'll kick your parents off the platform for life for $1k per parent.

oneepic 4y ago

I'd like to side with the article, but it posts no screenshots whatsoever to support its point. I can google it, but come on, at least try.

est 4y ago

I am not against swipe up/down UI, but I really hate vertical vids. And sadly they won today.

annexrichmond 4y ago

Somewhat unrelated, but the other day I was trying to see which of my friends still live in the city I used to live in, as I was about to visit. I could not find a way to filter friends by current city. Seems like such an obvious feature meant for a side supposedly about connecting you with friends. Guess it wouldn’t move the right KPIs.

webo 4y ago
This seems obvious to the younger generation but “my friends who live in X” works just fine on Facebook. I know the older (my) generation is used to more filters but google/fb/ig/tt handle context-free queries fine by default.

site-packages1 4y ago

I stopped using this years ago, except I still have an account and minorly check once a week or month depending on my mood. I'll give the same refrain I expect from most: how do I keep up with goings-on of long-lost friends, family members with whom I don't want to directly interact but want to know what they're "up to" and to know about major life events? Maybe the answer is that I should delete facebook and go back to beforetimes when the world was smaller and I only interacted with people in my immediate geographic area except at decennial family reunions.

prawn 4y ago
Remarkably, given the variety of social platforms and amount of money invested in them, this appears to be an unsolved problem. It was solved previously, but they've managed to unsolve it again!
momojo 4y ago
You ask some good questions. I wonder sometimes; if Facebook disappeared tomorrow, how badly would my life be affected? And it's strange to me that the disappearance of a platform which seems to pervade my daily life would only cause minor inconvenience. I'll admit that Messenger has greater sway over my daily life, but I could probably switch over to an alternate messaging platform with minimal pain. > Maybe the answer is that I should delete facebook and go back to beforetimes when the world was smaller It's absurd how highly we've come to value a platform that brings only an incremental amount of joy to our lives (and who knows how much grief). I would be lying if I said I don't enjoy seeing what my old friends are up to, or knowing who's had kids, etc. But well, maybe I'll have to call them up for coffee and a chat instead.
asdff 4y ago
You can just call or text people every now and then if you want to keep up with them.
ickelbawd 4y ago
Sure. You see them once in a blue moon and catch-up. Or you go back to ye ole grapevine, and ask the people you do want to talk to about the people they talk to that you don’t. Or you forget about them and life carries on.

hiptobecubic 4y ago

I feel like half the comments here about "facebook dying" and how "facebook can't compete with tiktok" are missing the big picture about facebook. For a lot of people, facebook basically is the internet. The same way AOL was a long time ago. Everyone they want to talk to as they go about their day is there. Basically every business in the US that bothers with an online presence at all either has a facebook page or exclusively has a facebook page. Craigslist is being eaten by facebook marketplace. Even Facebook messenger is still a wildly successful chat app and it's like... their 3rd or 4th-place messaging platform. Facebook has become a sort of digital town square that is a pretty significant part of the economy; the real-world brick-and-mortar economy. Tiktok and instagram are much more recreational.

12907835202 4y ago
It's not just Facebook. For some people Instagram is the internet. For others Reddit is the internet. For others YouTube. Lots of people log into one app or website and get all their news, culture, politics, entertainment, sports in that one place. It's interesting that you call it the new Aol, to me it's the new Yahoo.com. Maybe in hindsight it's always been this way?
weq 4y ago
No. Facebook DOES NOT OWN social networking. Facebook improved on an existing design at the right time, PERIOD! Now, as before, the world has moved on, and the bubble has burst. The laggards in 3rd world countries will flock to the next service to disrupt social media, just like before. Facebook innovated at a time when mobile phones were being delivered to these countries. Not because they were a superior service or somehow godlike in its ability to hold mindshare. Tiktok, by its very nature, is its own worse enermy. Chinas economy is crumbling as we speak, and its not going to be long before the CCP will get caught with their hands in the cookie jar. No one makes money in China without authority from the superme leader. And No one can be more famous then the supreme leader. Tiktok, tiktok; Huawi 2.0.
- harshthedev 4y ago
  >The laggards in 3rd world countries will flock to the next service to disrupt social media Oh no man, a laggard from a 3rd world country has already reached HN. Maybe you should pack your bags now because the future of HN looks grim.

aquova 4y ago

I'll admit that I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and thus haven't seen what this redesign looks like, but this sounds like a baffling move. Facebook has been less and less popular with the younger crowd; and is now mainly associated as a place for older generations, who like use it primarily as a way to keep track of friends and family and secondarily as a way to see the news. I can't see the "Tiktok-ification" of their platform as being successful at all. My grandmother wants to see pictures of their neighbor's holidays, not scroll through the antics of kids she doesn't know. Again, the article doesn't give any screenshots, but expanding the feed pool to encompass the whole world is the exact opposite of why people are still sticking around.

yieldcrv 4y ago
Fortunately itll still be neighbors and adults posting, just like TikTok is now
asdff 4y ago
basically the redesign is exactly the same as its always been, only they sexied up the lefthand column with friends, saved, pages, now marketplace is there because presumably a lot of people just use fb to sell or buy crap. The top bar with notifications got moved to the left hand side, and the chat window is expanded to the entire right third of the screen. It looks like any other electron-esque app now basically, and it takes longer to load to the point where they've added a splash screen. Every other item in your news feed is a sponsored post or something someone put up days ago versus the most recent content.

socialcapital 4y ago

I can only assume they did a shit ton of testing to arrive at this decision.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"TikTok and Facebook's antics (existence?) have me seriously considering quitting tech. I feel like no matter what I do, I am feeding one of these societal cancers by implementing tracking for whoever is paying me currently, lifting dark patterns, etc, using the API of Google... I tried to avoid doing these things for awhile but nobody pays me to be ethical. My only marketable skill is software development and I pretty much hate what it has become. 16 years down the drain." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233969 I remember being disappointed that an early iPhone I bought came with some Facebook preset/integration pre-installed.

bathtub365 4y ago

What’s up with the format and writing style of this article? Bulleted lists are used to make points rather than list things, and the first few words of some paragraphs are bolded. Is this a new style of writing that their algorithm shows them is effective?

Barrin92 4y ago

I always thought Facebook sat at a very awkward, uncanny-valley type position on the social media spectrum. On the one hand it doesn't feel (or is) private or personal. The feed mechanic doesn't really make for great conversations and everything is half public, the line between friends and other people isn't that clear, and so on. Chat platforms like Telegram/Discord/Whatsapp and TikTok clearly lean into one direction (albeit on opposite ends of the spectrum). TikTok tends to be a mile wide and an inch deep but at least it leverages what the internet is good at, and chat apps do the reverse. I think that bifurcation is just happening in general, not just on social media apps. There's more interest in private spaces as well as mass popular culture but the middle-ground isn't that appealing any more.

IshKebab 4y ago
Yeah it started off basically private, social, with people you care about and has gradually slid into people you don't really know commenting on non-social stuff. Nobody I know uses it anymore and we were Facebook's core audience when it started. We all just use WhatsApp now.

landryraccoon 4y ago

Back around 2009 when Facebook was first becoming ascendant, people wondered if social networks were generational. I.e., would each younger generation be willing to use the same social network as their parents? I think the de facto surrender of Facebook to TikTok here is evidence that social networks ARE generational. That implies that TikTok may reign supreme for about 20 years, but thereabouts, they'll have to contend with yet another rising challenger.

danrl 4y ago

This Axios „article“ is the written version of a TikTok session, in an ironic turn of events. The bite sized information and the excessive use of bullet points is designed to keep readers engaged in a world driven by ultra short attention spans. I bemoan the lack of a well researched, deep article around this latest pivot of Facebook.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I mean, this style of writing is actually very old. It's just a thing. Have you ever read Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, for example? Similar brief and punctuated style. Written in 1845. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/thes...

allenrb 4y ago

For those old enough to recall Nancy Reagan, perhaps the time has finally arrived to "JUST SAY NO!"

hit8run 4y ago

No one needs Zuckerberg and his shitty services.

hit8run 4y ago
Apparently the person who downvoted does

oxff 4y ago

Why is it so hard to have a site where I can share pictures with and for friends and see them in chronological order

eyelidlessness 4y ago

I wanted to read this out of sincere curiosity but it put a big popup covering everything that I couldn’t dismiss or even agree to. So welp so much for the content, good luck with all your fish.

patwater10 4y ago

Spending a few minutes coming back to FB after this article, the chronological feed and news feed seem pretty similar in terms of content. Maybe that's just who I'm friends with though.

rileyphone 4y ago

Previously: "The end of Facebook" (2011), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660680

fbn79 4y ago

No sunset, just two different kind of products that coesists. Social networking still strong but shifted to direct messaging app like whatsapp or telegram. The difficult for meta is structure Instagram to keep this two kind of products together.

cpeterso 4y ago

Here is Adam Mosseri, "Head of Instagram at Instagram", talking about why Instagram is leaning into Reels videos: https://twitter.com/mosseri/status/1551890839584088065 https://twitter.com/mosseri/status/1551890839584088065 He says users are using Reels more, even though they say they don't want Reels. Replies say content creators are reluctantly making Reels because the algorithm favors Reels over regular posts. Ironically, he posted this on Twitter (as a video) because it's a better medium for reaching Instagram users?

BbzzbB 4y ago
He has obviously posted it on both Instagram and Twitter.
- cpeterso 4y ago
  Good point. I see his Twitter post has about 8000 replies and his Instagram post has over 24,000 replies.

scrame 4y ago

thank god.

zambal 4y ago

To me it seems that all social media platforms converge to some user hostile version of Reddit. You can argue that it got worse over time too, but it still is the platform that gives me most control over what I like to see. The other model that seems to work well for users are obviously platforms like Signal/Matrix/Whatsapp.

pleb_nz 4y ago

Seems this maybe one of those very rare cases where I might be ahead of the curve ball and what's cool.

vivekzorp 4y ago

Havent used Facebook in ages, so cant say what they have become. But one of the primary reasons why i left FB was because it had become junk, and was of no value. Will i go back and use it because it has a new design. probably not, as i believe FB's core approach has not changed

turing_complete 4y ago

Axios marks the sunset of good english prose. This article reads like a twitter thread, rather than a well-craftet, coherent text.

xbruteforce 4y ago

Sadly most internet users do not care. 1984

vasco 4y ago

Only a Mark kinda guy would invest in building a whole new ecosystem to try and win in it just because he didn't come up with the fact that video is much more catchy than your grandma's motivational pics.

kukkeliskuu 4y ago

It is strange that it is so difficult to be social on a platform that is supposedly "social media". For example, I cannot just follow my friends' feed like I want, the comment editor is often unusable on mobile phone. I cannot send messages to others without installing the app, etc. Social media facilitates the forming of grassroots movements and this challenges the existing power structures. What Facebook does is curiously well aligned with preventing people from forming grassroots movements. It does not require a conspiracy for this to happen. It may just be that FB gets pressure from some governments to set up policies that effectively curb down grassroots movements, and if it does not comply, it would get pushed out.

dgudkov 4y ago

>That's what younger users right now seem to prefer They don't prefer it. They just can't resist.

WesternWind 4y ago

I don't miss it being run by google or forced into every product, but google+ circles were so much better then facebook friend lists. But I refuse to be nostalgic for FB, it's always been meh to me. And the sad thing with all these changes is it's going to frustrate all the old retirees who just want their computer to do the same thing that it used to do.

mikaeluman 4y ago

The "discovery" setups of increasingly all social media platforms is a big turn off for my use case of actually being social with my friends when we are away from each other. In instagram the only redeeming feature left is the "story" buttons at the top. I stopped using Facebook long ago, though I still use messenger. I also use Slack and WhatsApp to communicate, basically SMS texting but in groups. Whatever the "social" platforms now are, they are very off putting to say the least. Maybe good for killing time writing for the bus? A reversion back to cute cat and dog videos.

lizardactivist 4y ago

Those who cannot compete, copy.

trasz 4y ago

So American companies are now stealing Chinese solutions? :-)

holografix 4y ago

I like to go against the current on these topics, try to bring a different perspective even if I don’t fully agree with what I’m saying: I think the TikTok threat to Meta is overblown. They’re a one trick pony and their trick is the unhealthiest of them all, presenting the user with the least amount of control and provided by the most opaque, state controlled, spyware-esque organisation. You thought Russia using Facebook for political interference was bad? The CCP is hardwired into TikTok for fucks sakes! I think Facebook has a longer runway. They will keep milking insta and will prob start doing a better job of monetising Whatsapp. Also, I think the Occulus is actually pretty great, especially for the price. I can envision a “dumber” version, lighter and with more battery life but 5G dependent for the compute requirements being a thing for external use. Once a company gets VR done well the smartphone is OVER.

syrrim 4y ago
> Once a company gets VR done well the smartphone is OVER. AR maybe. I seriously doubt that VR will ever be the primary way people interact with computers. People tend to use their phones as a distraction in public, and as a brief reprieve in private. VR entails completely submerging yourself in the computer interface, which might be fine occasionally, but I doubt will ever be most people's preferred way to access social media and the like. AR would enable you to distract yourself while still leaving you aware of what's going on around you. The issue there being that its much more difficult to do AR well. I doubt that VR will take off until someone does AR or MR really well, after which enough people will be already using the headsets for a VR application to become popular.

gw67 4y ago

FB stock returned near IPO price (2017, 150$). Investors believed for 5 years to the "growth first, profit later" theory. But now, another competitor (TikTok) is stealing their market share and profits for FB will never arrive. This is also a confirmation that not always focusing on growth will give you confidence on market share.

jug 4y ago

It's sad how they aren't instead capitalizing on their niche and going back to their roots, instead choosing to go against TikTok which is probably a futile endeavour because they already grabbed and established that culture. If I've learnt one thing from social networks, it's that competitors only rarely succeed in capturing another network's niche. Instagram has tried to become TikTok too but few would say the Reels concept is a smashing success... Facebook has tried to be Snapchat as well with ephemereal messaging, but few would say Facebook is known for that and recapturing the youth culture today. Meanwhile, Snapchat still thrives at a more rapid rate than Twitter and Facebook. You can not simply copy features and then the culture will come. And when Google+ was rising, Facebook desperately tried to introduce more ways to handle your friend lists due to the innovative "circles" of Google+. These features still remain but few today are aware that Facebook posts to Friends aren't seen by friends in your Acquaintances friend list because those are there to only see Public posts... This is an example of a relic from those days but there are other examples too. Despite the confidence you would expect them to have from having more than a billion users, they are surprisingly unsure of themselves and who they want to be. You can also see it happen with Meta and VR. Is that supposed to now work in tandem with the TikTokification (how? a clip feed is hardly interactive?), or are they still just confused about who they want to be? I wonder how much of it has to do with Zuckerberg himself?

lopis 4y ago
You are not the target audience. The fact that HN thinks this spells doom for Instagram just shows how out of touch HN users can be with the average Internet user. When facebook bought Instagram and changed everything around, people screamed wolf, but IG's popularity exploded. When IG copied snapchat and added stories, techies said it was terrible, the end of IG, but it only caused its popularity to skyrocket, snapchat to practically die, and stories to become the main way people used IG. The average user doesn't care - IG will continue growing and most users will get used to the new normal. A few unhappy users will leave, but they won't even make a dent. Competition in the platform will only increase as every company and "content creator" tries to be on top of the reels feed. I say this as an outsider that doesn't really use IG.

parkingrift 4y ago

Can someone please explain to me why Facebook shouldn’t be treated as a news publisher? They are now outright choosing what content to show you. This is indistinguishable from opinion or freelance journalism sites. Facebook is now explicitly deciding which content to allow, editorializing content at will, and dictating the content that you see. Looks like a news publisher. Sounds like a news publisher. Acts like a news publisher. Facebook should not receive Section 230 protections any longer.

hgazx 4y ago
Facebook, or Twitter, or… Twitter shows clearly editorialised content in the trending sidebar.
AlexandrB 4y ago
Agree completely. If you want Section 230 protection, present posts chronologically or based on some user-chosen criteria. If you want to "curate" people's feeds based on some opaque algorithm you should not be able to hide behind Section 230 when people complain about the results.

madseas 4y ago

intrasight 4y ago

I am very surprised that there are nearly 500 comments on this item and none mentioned VR. VR is the uncharted territory of social media. Facebook has a head-start but TikTok is also investing billions and will catch up. Just as desktops are legacy, soon smartphones will be too. I also saw no comments about this "Facebook will continue to provide old-school friends-and-family networking via a subsidiary tab. Those posts will be chronologically ordered, as some users have long wished for." One final point is political ads being big business at FB. So it'll be interesting how are their numbers in the 4th quarter.

anhner 4y ago
> Just as desktops are legacy, soon smartphones will be too. This is the same as saying "in 10 years we'll have flying cars". No, we won't.
- intrasight 4y ago
  I think you are wrong. We'll know in 5 years.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  It's more like how 3d televisions were going to take over. Turns out people don't want it.

v4dok 4y ago

IMO this is the normal lifecycle of any social media. I would even argue that advertising just a part of it. Kids think its cool and use it -> Slightly older generation enters because its cool with the kids -> even older generation enters -> now its cringe for the kids -> they find something else. Add on top the fact that the business model incentive is to push as many ads as possible and any medium is transformed from an exclusive sharing space to a public square with your awkward aunt and a million ads. TikTok is not escaping this. Its still early and people share a lot of intimate things on there (and they are proud that they can do it), but that will quickly change as it becomes more mainstream.

nonfamous 4y ago

Does this mean Facebook’s privacy model is going to change radically? [1] TikTok’s “for you” feed works because all posts are globally-visible, but on Facebook isn’t sharing generally limited to your social network? Will they change things so that every Facebook post is globally visible by default? [1] Or maybe it changed already. I haven’t used Facebook in a long time.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fariszr 4y ago

Looks like the only platform that hasn't switched to tiktok style is Twitter,because all the other are owned by Facebook. Oh also Snapchat. I'm still waiting for the tiktok redesign for WhatsApp lol

thecast 4y ago

I belive this is the future of “social media” short snippets of video that does not require a attention span greater then that of a goldfish. Facebook will follow tiktok example, since it seems like that is what people wants to see

hestefisk 4y ago

FWIW, I deleted my Facebook account years ago and never looked back. I’m not on Twitter, TikTok, instagram, or Snapchat. I only maintain presence on LinkedIn due to work (staying in touch with clients), painful as it it. Perhaps there is white space for a new generation of social networks, which are not privacy hoarding ad machines?

aceazzameen 4y ago

I'm curious if this decision was made to be ready for an eventual TikTok ban? The drums have been beating on that for a while. FB might know this is coming and wants to slurp up the displaced users when it happens.

franklampard 4y ago

I am really confused by the writing style of this author.

roody15 4y ago

So this is my own conspiracy rabbit hole… I get the impression all of these sites that use quick 10-15 second video clips followed by screenshots of a tweet or quote are a dystopian method of controlling human behavior. It seems like a way to implant a thought or feeling and minimize critical thinking. In the past social media sites reddit / facebook had great comment sections and links to actual articles. Although this still exists (to some extent and on niche subreddits for example) it seems to be rapidly changing to screenshot of a tweet, or quote or a short video clip. Followed by one line responses or even just a single emoji. For example you will see a quote from politician x … as a screenshot …. ughh that makes me so mad!!! But little context is provided about the quote, when it was said, was it actually said and is the the expanded text available to help understand. Nope it’s .. just a quick emotion that makes me mad!!… followed by scroll to cat video #532 Watching people sitting at parks, waiting for a bus, waiting at a restaurant … lots of the same … scroll scroll … giggle giggle… go political team A they are saving world … ugghh political team B is so bad and makes me mad they hate everyone … scroll .. scrolll .. did you know if you eat Kale you live forever … scroll … scroll Just something really off putting about this experience IMO. Seems very shallow / minimal thinking …

tizzy 4y ago
It's the reduction of attention-span. Can't have critical thinkers if they can't focus for more than 15 seconds at a time. I've noticed a lot of people hold conservative views despite growing up fairly liberal because a lot of the solutions to difficult problems are difficult. An easy way out is to accept the first thing that seems fine without any thinking involved. Add to that the fact that it's a worldview that doesn't make sense at first (like many things in maths and science) and people just give up.

chadlavi 4y ago

I sure hope so

rufusroflpunch 4y ago

The social network is dead. Long live the social network.

beckingz 4y ago

Several years ago I saw an ad on Tumblr (I know, I know), for a strange meme site. After seeing several hundred of these ads, I got curious about how it could be profitable to run such nonsense and clicked. Content that was just funny enough to keep me scrolling mixed with ads. It turned out, that was a site run by an Israeli ad-tech media company that used algorithms to find out how many ads they could could put in while maintaining attention, a sort of google ads style auction running on the page to determine if it should add an ad or a meme to the page next. Linkedin has public research doing the same type of thing.

kinnth 4y ago

FB/Meta still has phenomenal value, just the FB app is being sunset. The Whatsapp acquisition, fb friends list and all those photos you have uploaded will be worth so much in time to come. Where FB wins is it owns the best connections. Who cares what the app shows you, FB actually knows more about who you care about. When that comes to the metaverse that will be like owning the yellowpages and always brings added value. FB App is dead. Meta is still winning.

seydor 4y ago
What they really sell is user's attention , and dashboards for advertisers. The user connections and photos are useful for maintaining that attention but are rather a burden without it.

AlexandrB 4y ago

If you look at the recent Facebook news in concert - "turning up the heat" on employees, Oculus price increase, and copying TikTok as quickly as possible - it seems like Facebook is in real trouble. This is the flailing of a drowning man.

202206241203 4y ago
Like Microsoft without Azure. Or Google without... or like Google.

greyhair 4y ago

The same problem has destroyed instagram. I closed my Facebook account years ago, pre COVID, but still enjoyed instagram. In the last six months, a steady rot has crept into instagram. I hardly see any of my friend's photos anymore. Just reel after reel after reel from people I have never heard of. I wish they had a settings button to block all reels, but they don't. So, that is the end of instagram for me. Meta sucks.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

The hacks I've done to make facebook kind of useful - Turn on every privacy setting they have available and "serve me up generic ads only" - Unfollow EVERTYTHING and EVERYONE, cut your friends list down too, or click on the "follow" only of your real most frequent friends of concern except your core groups of interest, pare it down to less than 20-30, and more so if your groups are active. - Turn off active status except for your top 10 friends/family and treat messenger like email otherwise (I do the same with do not disturb mode on iphone) - Use the "Most Recent" button on the left and make it a habit so you don't see the same posts over and over. It become a lot more useful of a tool after that. Everyone whines but like a lot of things for it to be useful you have to put in a little bit of time and trim your hedges instead of letting them grow into amorphous blobs. or delete it, there's not much in between. Also I hate hate hate tiktok and this whole video thing, I don't think they bring very much more useful info to the social media conversation.

kayxspre 4y ago
I used to do this to keep my feed concise, only showing posts my friends interacted with (I don't follow any pages), but recently it has become more or less useless. Facebook decided that it wanted to show content that might catch interests by throwing it under the header "Suggested for you". Some time before that, I can simply dismiss it and it won't show again for some time, but right now it showed every day, and I can't dismiss it at all. The most "suggested" page in my feed right now is a fan page of One Piece's author, which posted memes or content related to the manga despite I not showing interest in it, and I can't make it perish.

fritztastic 4y ago

I really miss the experience I had with MySpace back in 2004-2007. It gave users a lot of control over their personal pages, and I had a lot of fun adding all sorts of wacky things. I got to communicate with some of my favorite bands and authors, all the content in someone's profile was contained in a single place. There was almost a diy feel to it. I sometimes even feel nostalgic about the "Top 8" drama. It was a simpler time. I was also young so I probably overlooked the darker side of things then. People did warn a lot about putting your real name online because it might give murderers your information, granted there were fewer people on the internet then and it had a certain wild west vibe to it, the great unknown with associated fears- somewhere along the way society did a 180 and everyone started putting all their information online. It's really strange to think about the shifts, but even stranger to think about the sources of the moving parts bringing the changes. There are alternatives to corporate-run social media (the Fediverse, to name one off the top of my head) that are less-known. I've personally just left social media altogether. I had a period of time I spent in cycles of addiction/absrinence and I have to say I much prefer to keep in touch with people on more personal direct contact (snail mail, e-mail, messaging) without meddling, extra baggage, advertisers, my data being sold off to unknown entities to do as they please according to their most likely not benign motivations. But the biggest factor in my exit from social media was how negative it all became. I joined facebook in 2007 when you needed to be invited in and it was basically mostly students. Ober the years things went from "so neat I can connect to people all over the world" to an online battleground in the span of a decade (arguably 2 decades, depending on your online experience). The convenience of keeping in touch with relatives/friends overseas and the wonderment of making friends online has become eclipsed by all the other things which have nothing to do with people being able to connect. If anything these big platforms have become all about (directly, indirectly, incidentally, regardless) gaming the divisions between people to push them apart and foment rifts they can profit from, at least that's how I see it and I am just done with all that.

mvkel 4y ago

it marks the sunset... except they already rolled it back. The sun rises another day.