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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 d

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.
- quartesixte 4y ago
  The change for Apple was a slow boiling pot. And initially you couldn’t even set up an iPhone without a computer (with Mac OS integration making it a lot smoother).
- fullshark 4y ago
  More like MTV non longer showing music videos imo. Facebook could have stayed your personal Rolodex and serve that use case but decided to chase engagement wherever it could. Maybe it was inevitable and necessary to avoid death or maybe they abandoned their primary purpose and turned off their users and therefore the network / social graph from which they derived value. Or maybe they will continue to print money.
  - ardit33 4y ago
    That did happen! MTV was showing more 'reality shows' and such for a while as they were more successful. Then you had MTV2 and MTV3 showing actual music videos. What killed MTV was youtube around 2007-2008, not another tv channel, but a completely different tech.
- philistine 4y ago
  Aside from iPods, which they have wisely cannibalized themselves with the iPhone, Apple still sells all those items, with headphones a Fortune 500 company all on its own. It's not that Apple changed its menu, it expanded it.
  - naravara 4y ago
    Apple brought the sensibilities that made their computers interesting to other consumer electronics. Facebook seems to be doing the opposite and trying to mimic whatever's popular. The only "Facebook" sensibility they ever bring to the table seems to be figuring out ways to over-optimize and over-monetize until the golden-egg-laying-goose dies.
yalogin 4y ago
It’s not that easy. This is life and death for Facebook. TikTok is really taking over and is a force. It’s also a Chinese company and so they can’t buy it. They are forced to compete, either they do this or become fully irrelevant
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Facebook is a sinking ship. It's hard to turn that around. It seems like it would've been easier to go after TikTok with Instagram - which is basically the same product, growing, and still has some brand value.
  - mysterydip 4y ago
    Maybe other people's feeds are different (admittedly I don't do much on it), but almost all I see on instagram are screenshots of twitter, tumblr, reddit, and tiktok videos. Very little content original to the platform.
    - tayo42 4y ago
      If you don't much on it that seems right. That seems like generic content. I used to get a lot of that, now mine is the stuff I follow. Mostly art and people I know in real life
  - holler 4y ago
    They are, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233415
  - rvz 4y ago
    Meta already knew Facebook would sink someday. As they have Instagram, they don't care and Meta will be around for another 10 years to extract more from Instagram and their other unused platforms. I'd expect the hype and growth around TikTok to peak once their parent company IPOs, as more corporations, advertisers, mainstream media accounts, move in to the platform to ruin it just like they did with the rest of the other social networking platforms, especially for YouTube and Instagram. If they don't IPO soon, TikTok will get much worse for their users. Either way, the users will eventually get annoyed by TikTok's changes, pushed and boosted by the company.
mentalpiracy 4y ago
Had this same thought a few weeks ago too. Nothing short of contempt.
paulcole 4y ago
McDonald’s does remove menu items that a vocal minority of customers happen to enjoy. They freak out, everybody else shrugs, and the world moves on. Also TikTok is dope and I only go to Facebook to see ads for clothes and other stuff I might want to buy.
- scifibestfi 4y ago
  > I only go to Facebook to see ads for clothes and other stuff I might want to buy. That's interesting. It never occurred to me that people would use Facebook that way.
quartesixte 4y ago
This isn’t “Taco Bell outsold McDonald’s for six months so all of a sudden McD’s sells McTacos.” This is, “McDonald’s realizes about two years too late that no one wants to eat burgers anymore so in a last-ditch attempt they add tacos to the menu.”
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  I believe the real world analogy would be that McDonalds started using real beef and chicken in their food, expanded out the breakfast menu hours. Which they did, deciding whether it strengthened their future prospects is an exercise best left up to each individual.
- tomlin 4y ago
  Your analogy doesn't work because people /do/ like Tacos, and people /do/ like Facebook to not be TikTok. The proof is in the active users. Silicon Valley is such a self important circle jerk. You can operate a business, it lose users, and still exist. Christ.
- ulfw 4y ago
  Then you make burgers hip again. You extend the menu. You bring out cool new styles. You advertise hard. You give samples, you discount, you run specials, you collab with others. 100 things you can do to reinvigorate your 'boring Burger' business. You don't just pivot to copycat the tacos business years late. Why would customers go to you rather than staying with their Taco brand of choice?
- HeyItsMatt 4y ago
  You laugh, but there are still franchisee owned stores selling McPizza and *the horror, the horror* McSalads.
jallen_dot_dev 4y ago
Sounds awful, but it could be worse. At least the Facebook-managed McDonald's is trying to chase after what most people seem to want. A Google-managed McDonald's would just shut down, even though everyone loves McDonald's, because somebody at Google figured starting a new fast food chain is the best path to a promotion.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  I don't think it's what people want, per se. I think it's what some metrics say people want. Might be good for "engagement", but bad for retention in the long term. People were on facebook for the features facebook had.
  - grog454 4y ago
    > People were on facebook for the features facebook had. People were on Facebook for the people that were on Facebook.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
      One of the features of Facebook was the people who were on Facebook.
      - andsoitis 4y ago
        Where have they "gone"?
        TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
        They were on Facebook. They still are, but they were too.
    - owlninja 4y ago
      Anecdotally I quit Facebook in 2016 but of my friends and family that still use it, I would say most simply use it for marketplace. They may still view the updates that people still post to see what's going on but it doesn't seem to be near as about keeping in touch (I'm in the US).
chrischen 4y ago
Yep, rather than focusing on how they are are different in providing value (connecting people) they are chasing attention and ad revenue. It’s sad because that type of person to person social connection is being relegated back to instant messengers which still function more or less like the ones from the 2000s.
- holler 4y ago
  > It’s sad because that type of person to person social connection is being relegated back to instant messengers which still function more or less like the ones from the 2000s. What about mixing forum-like experience with open messaging? That's what we're doing over at https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
- jjfoooo4 4y ago
  The person to person interaction went back to messengers because most people don’t like the exposure of all their social interactions being laid bare for all to see.
- Siira 4y ago
  I guess you haven’t been using Telegram. It introduces new useful features every year.
warabe 4y ago
I think the problem boils down to the same mantra as always: users are not customer, but product.
next_xibalba 4y ago
> the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs. Wouldn't a consequence of this be that Facebook would be losing users in drovers? And yet the data seem to disagree. This is a type of take that feels very "inside baseball" and fueled more by the feelings of its proponents than any kind of empiricism.
- maxfurman 4y ago
  They just posted their first net user loss - so maybe not "in droves" but their username is certainly declining and will continue to do so without drastic change
  - next_xibalba 4y ago
    Where are you getting this information? AFAIK, 2Q22 earnings (and metrics) are released tomorrow. The whispers I've heard are that any loss of M/DAU is contained to Europe and is caused by Russia going offline.
    - jahewson 4y ago
      Given that they lost users in the final quarter of 2021 that’s a remarkable time travel machine your whisperers seem to have invented.
    - aahortwwy 4y ago
      > Social media giant Facebook has seen its daily active users (DAUs) drop for the first time in its 18-year history. > Facebook's owner Meta Platforms says DAUs fell to 1.929bn in the three months to the end of December [2021], compared to 1.930bn in the previous quarter. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60238565 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60238565
    - ARandomerDude 4y ago
      Ah yes, the familiar "everything is Putin's fault" refrain. He's a bad guy and invading Ukraine is horrible, all the usual caveats. But Putin under every rock and behind every bush being responsible for every toothache and hangnail is getting old.
anothernewdude 4y ago
I'm already there for McDonalds. No idea how to order what I want from those machines.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  They are a complete disaster. Unusable. Pro tip, you will get better service in the Drive-Thru. The large majority of their sales come from there, and they prioritize filling drive thru orders to keep the line moving.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Hum... Just like any SaaS company out there. I wonder if somebody will create a "keep track of your friends" application again. There is obviously a need, but there isn't a channel that enables it to appear anymore, unless Google allows (hum... that's how industries die). Anyway, user hostile is how any software acts nowadays. From becoming difficult to interact with, exploiting the user on unexpected ways, all the way into refusing to fulfill its primary use case. Users don't seem to care.
choward 4y ago
> Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook And nobody hates Facebook more than Facebook users. I don't use Facebook and because of that I don't have many problems with it. Same goes for the people that don't use Facebook that I know. The only people I see complaining about Facebook are Facebook users.
- oska 4y ago
  To give a counterexample of one, I've never been a user of Facebook (never signed up to FB, IG or WA) but I absolutely loathe the company and its sociopathic behaviour under Zuckerberg. I hate everything the company represents. I take an active interest in its travails and will celebrate its downfall.
  - choward 4y ago
    I agree with that. I just mean I'm pretty much never directly interacting with Facebook so I don't have to think about them. People who use Facebook every day are constantly experiencing the terribleness directly. So yes, I hate Facebook, but luckily it's not a direct part of my life so I don't have to think about it.
capybara_2020 4y ago
Didn't Facebook already die years back? People moved onto Instagram, Whatsapp, Snap and a few other places already. The only reason Facebook was able to pull along was because it bought Insta and Whatsapp so they did not have to compete. But that now that they have to actually compete, the cracks are showing.
- aurelius12 4y ago
  That's a strange take isn't it? Facebook has like twice the # of daily users as Instagram, and 6x that of Snap...
- 650 4y ago
  Tons still use Marketplace, Groups, etc. Especially in non-Western countries as well as older (40+) people.
safety1st 4y ago
To quote the article Facebook really has "unleashed waves of democratic empowerment" among the youth in certain countries where democracy is not present or is under serious assault and the domestic media is censored. If some random dictatorship has strict anti-speech laws Meta is way more lax about following them than the domestic media (who are just going to get arrested if they don't). This really has created a generation of young people in some places who have a less censored view of the world and have a more pro-democratic, pro-egalitarian, anti-dictatorship bent. The only people who miss this are the ones whose reality is generally confined to an e.g. US-only point of view where democracy is secure and stable and the only "threats" to it are basically a joke, like the whole panic over January 6, and you've never seen tanks roll into the capital and depose your elected officials. In countries where real threats to democracy like that exist, Facebook and Twitter have played a huge role in communicating suppressed information, aiding protest organization, etc. and by and large the kids are into it. As for a pivot to a Tiktok-style experience -- that's a hard pass for me, it's like mixing cocaine with television. The kids are into that too and it's pretty scary to watch them switch off their brains, set aside their humanity and obediently wait for the ML algorithm's function calls to twitch_human_thumb() that arise every few seconds. Of course people were saying something similar about MTV, remote controls and the boob tube back in the day and somehow we survived... Ultimately if you're Meta and the government tells you it's OK for you to sell cocaine, after all they're OK with your Chinese competitor importing it -- who are you to say no? Under the current climate my only confusion is why we haven't let Coke reintroduce their namesake ingredient to their formula. Or to use your example yes I could totally see Taco Bell lacing their meat with drugs if it was allowed!
- guelo 4y ago
  - mulmen 4y ago
    We do know. Joe Biden would still be president. The question is what would have happened if that mob actually got their hands on the representatives. We have a pretty good idea there too, and it isn't pretty.
dylan604 4y ago
>Maybe you can still order the <burger> if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted. You just described In&Out
- eks391 4y ago
  Facts. I went to InNOut with a friend because he swore by it and I ordered first. I got a tasteless burger and he got one that actually had food between the buns. AND his fries looked actually edible. I was confused, asked which options he chose, and he said something about secret menus which pisses me off. Why must I be prepared with inside knowledge for a store that claims to be fast and easy? I ate my crappy meal and dont plan on going back when there are other places that are full willing to show you what meals are available
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yieldcrv 4y ago
Well yes But Facebook is trying to get new users Correct about the fairy tale of endless growth But they just need to convince shareholders for a couple quarters so a couple employees don’t get collateral called on shares they borrowed against and the corporation can dilute more shares issued on behalf of the same employees And its going to work, long enough
badcarbine 4y ago
Poor comparison. McDonalds and Taco Bell are not as culturally divisive as Tik Tok and Facebook. Governments don't request nearly as much sensitive data from fast food chains as they do from modern IT companies. It's more like China having too much power over American citizens and Facebook desperately trying to overtake their market share, either for control or for a platform to fall back on once, or if, Tik Tok were to go under.
- chrismarlow9 4y ago
  Poor comparison was also my first thought. Taco bell and McDonald's fundamentally do different things (although they seem to be expanding into each other turf with things like nacho fries), but Facebook and TikTok really don't, neither does Twitter or Instagram or any other social network (even email for that matter, the oldest social network). They're communication tools. On all of these platforms you can post video, images, and text either privately or publicly. I can use Facebook the same way someone might use Twitter. I can post only images to TikTok or Facebook and forget about Instagram. I cannot buy a hamburger and taco bell, or tacos and tostada's at McDonald's. A better comparison would be saying that Chili's saw Applebee's have a great year and decided to make the inside decor and outside building look more like Applebee's. Both restaurants basically serve a bit of all types of food and the menus probably overlap heavily.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
They're building it back better.
kristopolous 4y ago
It'd be more like if McDonald's used the same ingredients and stuffed them into taco and burrito shapes and lazily renamed themselves to something like mcdonaria, had their employees say hola when you walk in and their receipts say gracias... The issue is Facebook misunderstand both their customers and their competition so they're just blindly smashing things together I blame modern tech hiring processes that filter out people who aren't conforming enthusiastic obedient cheerleaders. You get a sustain and self-extinguish product instead of one that can respond to what the necessity of the times demand You must have passionate grumps otherwise you're just shaking pom-poms as you run over a cliff.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > their customers Just so we're clear, the users are NOT the customers. I think Facebook absolutely understands their customers -- the companies that spend the most advertising and marketing through Facebook.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    All of the paying customers have Facebook accounts and most personally use them. If it's a bad experience and "boosting" posts leads to noise and garbage they're going away. The tiering of customers and users is incorrect, Facebook is the meeting place for the two sides of the attention market and they are increasingly doing a failed execution. The clean delineated hierarchy model where the users are treated as foolish rubes is part of the problem. There's an insular Silicon Valley elitism that is excessively self-congratulatory and is positively allergic to systemic criticism
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      Have we already forgotten the aphorism "if the service is free, you are the product"?
beambot 4y ago
Irony. McDonald's was instrumental in creating Chipotle -- literally making burritos & tacos. Not at all dissimilar from Facebook & Instagram.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess I was immediately reminded of Mozilla when I read this.
SkyMarshal 4y ago
TBH this is also exactly what Google tried to do with Google+ back in the day. Facebook was a new model that provided online folks with a new and more personal experience, which scared Google management, so they tried to pivot the whole company to become a social network, including forcing their users to abandon their pseudonyms and reveal their irl identity, despite the original implicit social contract allowing pseudonyms. It was idiotic. You would think Facebook would have learned from their primary competitor's (at the time) mistake.
woah 4y ago
Restaurants do sometimes change their menus, you know
foobiekr 4y ago
All of those restaurants sell poisonous trash. Which makes this a good analogy for social media. We should all be happy they may finally be peaking and fading.
- judge2020 4y ago
  Except that TikTok is going strong[0], and is arguably just as bad. 0: https://radar.cloudflare.com/#most-popular-domains https://radar.cloudflare.com/#most-popular-domains
gonehome 4y ago
The brick and mortar is a good example because if they did what Facebook is doing fewer may have gone bankrupt when they were destroyed by Amazon. I’m not a fan of the ad driven business model and the damage it’s done, but Zuckerberg and Facebook are correct here. They know the users better than the users know themselves. It’s been true since the launch of the news feed. Don’t listen to what users say, watch how they behave. Everyone says they want to be fit but people just sit around and eat chocolate cake. Zuckerberg has reorganized and saved Facebook a few times now despite hysterics from users and the press. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.
dreamcompiler 4y ago
> Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs. Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers. You and I aren't Facebook's users; we are the ore Facebook has been mining at a cost approaching zero for over a decade and selling at a huge markup to its actual customers. But now the mine is playing out. We no longer cost Facebook zero to mine and the advertisers are beginning to realize the gold (us) is no longer 24-carat because nobody under 30 uses FB any more. Like any mining entrepreneur when the mine begins to play out, FB is panicking. They're throwing whatever they can think of at the wall to see if anything sticks. None of it will work. FB will keep publicly saying "everything is fine" until one day they will simply slink away in the middle of the night leaving several thousand mine workers unemployed and holding the bag.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  > Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers Anyone who's tried to use their advertiser tools is unlikely to agree with this. Hard to remember any software I've used with a worse user interface in recent memory.
  - pmx 4y ago
    Google ads is pretty bad too but facebook's business portal / ad manager / whatever they call it this week almost seems to be designed to be a nightmare to use on purpose. I sincerely hope a player comes along to disrupt this market with a product that is actually nice to use and offers decent customer support - these shouldn't be unrealistic wishes!
    - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
      Haha, they AB tested on there "customers" to get them to overspend and dark patterned even the imperators salon. This is hellarious.
      - dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
        Actually I think this could be the reason. Given the sufficient number of A/B testing, it may turn out the more complex the interface is, the more likely the customer is likely to (make the mistake of) spending more.
drdaeman 4y ago
I don't think they hate them, they - I believe that despite hoarding all this supposedly useful data - simply have absolutely no idea who they are and what they want/need.
dheera 4y ago
> Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs. Not only that, they're actually killing and destroying art forms. Many forms of art don't lend themselves to 15-second videos, and they're being actively downranked and not even shown to their own friends and followers anymore. Facebook is gatekeeping content between friends. You could have spent 500 hours painting a picture but Facebook will HIDE it from your friends just because it isn't a 15-second "Reel". Zuck: "We want Reels to be the best place for creators to connect with their community and make a living" Well, did you even bother asking the creators? A lot of them CANNOT make a living through short videos. They need still pictures, writing, interactive pages, and other ways to present their creations. No, Zuck, you don't want it to the best place for creators. You actually don't give a flying f about creators. You just want to copy and compete with TikTok. I do a lot of landscape photography and astrophotography, and my views have been slashed to 1/3 of what they were last year. Same quality content, it's Instagram HIDING stuff from my own followers and friends. I'm just glad I don't make a living from it, but feel really bad for those who do.
b112 4y ago
Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac Your point is 100% valid, so don't consider this a disagreement. It is merely that McDonalds has changed, and it annoys me. I went to the one on El Camino near Oregon, and waited 7 minutes to have my order taken, and 14 minutes more for my food. Why? Doordash, and others. https://nypost.com/2022/02/14/doordash-to-penalize-mcdonalds-outlets-that-take-too-long/ https://nypost.com/2022/02/14/doordash-to-penalize-mcdonalds... This is a pivot too, from restaurant to delivery as a primary business model. But, just like facebook, mcdonalds borked this. Its whole business model was fast food, and really the only reason I ever went there. They could have added more cooks, and another cashier, keeping the responsiveness and speed of old, keeping their food fast for walkins. But instead, drop the old, and now I can go to a real restaurant, order a burger, and get it made and on my table faster. Good job McDonalds!
- zerocrates 4y ago
  I noticed the last time I went to a McDonalds a huge sign on the door advertising that they're on DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc., basically saying "don't come here!"
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Really short term thinking if that's true. DoorDash/UberEats might not be around forever. Its also not clear whether people will order the same amounts if an actual recession rolls around. By prioritizing DoorDash over in-store customers, you're just destroying your long-term value prop and brand.
    - rob74 4y ago
      Plus there's one small detail: you can still enjoy e.g. a pizza that's not hot anymore; other food (Indian, Chinese, ...) can mostly be kept hot without losing its quality. With burgers and fries (especially McDonalds), you have to eat them hot, and trying to keep them warm during delivery results in a soggy mess that's not enjoyable at all anymore IMHO.
Banana699 4y ago
>Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook Not disputing that facebook is uniquely poison, but that's most sane users on social giants. Users of reddit and twitter specifically absolutely and openly loath them, users of instagram and linkedin are too stifled by the ultra-superficial cheeriness of the platforms to openly admit their hatred on the platform itself, but it's burning inside them quietly. Socials are an amazing\terrifying experiments in how you can use the herd instincts of humans to hold them hostages against their will.
Joeri 4y ago
Counterpoint: facebook are going to add the classic chronological friends and family experience as a second tab “feeds”. In your analogy it would be like mcdonalds splitting down the middle, with the main entrance leading you to tacodonalds and a side door from that hallway leading you to the classic mcdonalds. Parents could send their kids to tacodonalds for a burger taco because that’s what the kids love, while nearby they could enjoy a classic big mac. Most people would probably prefer it that way. This is just diversification to reach more market segments, and as long as that feeds tab exists they aren’t doing anything different from e.g. youtube, where the home tab is not what I want at all, but the subscriptions tab does exactly what I want.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  If Facebook was into that kind of thing, we would still have a proper chronological feed.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Not to mention the fact that the feed itself wasn't part of Facebook's original proposition but was a controversial change introduced despite user protests, and the content of the feed today doesn't remotely resemble the content of the feed in 2006 which doesn't remotely resemble the content of the feed in 2009 or 2015 If McDonalds had been a pizza joint within the memories of much of its user base before introducing a Big Mac which was chicken one year and beef the next with constant tweaks to the sauces and vegetable content, I'm not sure the introduction of tacos would be that controversial.
madeofpalk 4y ago
I wonder who hates their product more - Facebook or Twitter?
shreyshnaccount 4y ago
if as a result McDonald's has an amazing growth in revenue, sure this will happen it's just a matter of when
agumonkey 4y ago
I have a feeling that 1) this is a global phenomenon 2) it's due to computing lightness (it costs few energy to change programs and websites compared to physical things). Google keeps swinging secondary apps in and out of existence, social networks come and go every 5 years. It's low energy high frequency, low integration and unstable.
Siira 4y ago
> Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't Lazy people need to own their laziness. What alternative is there? The UI can’t get infinitely complex.
tmaly 4y ago
I understand that they think growth is in the younger users, but I can't see granny creating twerking videos. There is a sizable chunk of people that just want to post text and look at pictures of their relatives.
harry8 4y ago
> Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/ Beg to differ there. Facebook should be broken up and senior execs facing charges. [1] Loads of people think so and has been motivating for many to delete their account. Don't overlook that group of people. (There are dozens of us, DOZENS!) [1] In weaker moments this can be expressed with rather more venom.
rmbyrro 4y ago
I'm failing to understand: Why is any of this news!? Facebook (and Instagram) has been using an algorithmic discovery engine for years, hasn't it?
bongoman37 4y ago
I think Facebook user numbers could drop just as fast as they rose. The network effects that drive a social network to add members could operate in reverse as well when higher engagement users drop and the remaining users either leave or become dormant.
DrBazza 4y ago
I'm now down to Facebook on my phone only, and it gets checked once or twice a day, and the first N posts are all "not friends" - group posts, ads, surveys. There's hardly any of my friends left actively using it. All my friends are now in fb messenger groups, whatsapp groups, discord, and so on. Until they get "monetized", then we'll be off to somewhere else I suppose.
6t6t6t6 4y ago
Facebook cares about their customers, which are the companies that want to use its AD network. Users are not customers.

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.

quartesixte 4y ago
The change for Apple was a slow boiling pot. And initially you couldn’t even set up an iPhone without a computer (with Mac OS integration making it a lot smoother).
fullshark 4y ago
More like MTV non longer showing music videos imo. Facebook could have stayed your personal Rolodex and serve that use case but decided to chase engagement wherever it could. Maybe it was inevitable and necessary to avoid death or maybe they abandoned their primary purpose and turned off their users and therefore the network / social graph from which they derived value. Or maybe they will continue to print money.
- ardit33 4y ago
  That did happen! MTV was showing more 'reality shows' and such for a while as they were more successful. Then you had MTV2 and MTV3 showing actual music videos. What killed MTV was youtube around 2007-2008, not another tv channel, but a completely different tech.
philistine 4y ago
Aside from iPods, which they have wisely cannibalized themselves with the iPhone, Apple still sells all those items, with headphones a Fortune 500 company all on its own. It's not that Apple changed its menu, it expanded it.
- naravara 4y ago
  Apple brought the sensibilities that made their computers interesting to other consumer electronics. Facebook seems to be doing the opposite and trying to mimic whatever's popular. The only "Facebook" sensibility they ever bring to the table seems to be figuring out ways to over-optimize and over-monetize until the golden-egg-laying-goose dies.

yalogin 4y ago

It’s not that easy. This is life and death for Facebook. TikTok is really taking over and is a force. It’s also a Chinese company and so they can’t buy it. They are forced to compete, either they do this or become fully irrelevant

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Facebook is a sinking ship. It's hard to turn that around. It seems like it would've been easier to go after TikTok with Instagram - which is basically the same product, growing, and still has some brand value.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  Maybe other people's feeds are different (admittedly I don't do much on it), but almost all I see on instagram are screenshots of twitter, tumblr, reddit, and tiktok videos. Very little content original to the platform.
  - tayo42 4y ago
    If you don't much on it that seems right. That seems like generic content. I used to get a lot of that, now mine is the stuff I follow. Mostly art and people I know in real life
- holler 4y ago
  They are, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233415
- rvz 4y ago
  Meta already knew Facebook would sink someday. As they have Instagram, they don't care and Meta will be around for another 10 years to extract more from Instagram and their other unused platforms. I'd expect the hype and growth around TikTok to peak once their parent company IPOs, as more corporations, advertisers, mainstream media accounts, move in to the platform to ruin it just like they did with the rest of the other social networking platforms, especially for YouTube and Instagram. If they don't IPO soon, TikTok will get much worse for their users. Either way, the users will eventually get annoyed by TikTok's changes, pushed and boosted by the company.

mentalpiracy 4y ago

Had this same thought a few weeks ago too. Nothing short of contempt.

paulcole 4y ago

McDonald’s does remove menu items that a vocal minority of customers happen to enjoy. They freak out, everybody else shrugs, and the world moves on. Also TikTok is dope and I only go to Facebook to see ads for clothes and other stuff I might want to buy.

scifibestfi 4y ago
> I only go to Facebook to see ads for clothes and other stuff I might want to buy. That's interesting. It never occurred to me that people would use Facebook that way.

quartesixte 4y ago

This isn’t “Taco Bell outsold McDonald’s for six months so all of a sudden McD’s sells McTacos.” This is, “McDonald’s realizes about two years too late that no one wants to eat burgers anymore so in a last-ditch attempt they add tacos to the menu.”

edmundsauto 4y ago
I believe the real world analogy would be that McDonalds started using real beef and chicken in their food, expanded out the breakfast menu hours. Which they did, deciding whether it strengthened their future prospects is an exercise best left up to each individual.
tomlin 4y ago
Your analogy doesn't work because people /do/ like Tacos, and people /do/ like Facebook to not be TikTok. The proof is in the active users. Silicon Valley is such a self important circle jerk. You can operate a business, it lose users, and still exist. Christ.
ulfw 4y ago
Then you make burgers hip again. You extend the menu. You bring out cool new styles. You advertise hard. You give samples, you discount, you run specials, you collab with others. 100 things you can do to reinvigorate your 'boring Burger' business. You don't just pivot to copycat the tacos business years late. Why would customers go to you rather than staying with their Taco brand of choice?
HeyItsMatt 4y ago
You laugh, but there are still franchisee owned stores selling McPizza and *the horror, the horror* McSalads.

jallen_dot_dev 4y ago

Sounds awful, but it could be worse. At least the Facebook-managed McDonald's is trying to chase after what most people seem to want. A Google-managed McDonald's would just shut down, even though everyone loves McDonald's, because somebody at Google figured starting a new fast food chain is the best path to a promotion.

mysterydip 4y ago
I don't think it's what people want, per se. I think it's what some metrics say people want. Might be good for "engagement", but bad for retention in the long term. People were on facebook for the features facebook had.
- grog454 4y ago
  > People were on facebook for the features facebook had. People were on Facebook for the people that were on Facebook.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
    One of the features of Facebook was the people who were on Facebook.
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      Where have they "gone"?
      - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
        They were on Facebook. They still are, but they were too.
  - owlninja 4y ago
    Anecdotally I quit Facebook in 2016 but of my friends and family that still use it, I would say most simply use it for marketplace. They may still view the updates that people still post to see what's going on but it doesn't seem to be near as about keeping in touch (I'm in the US).

chrischen 4y ago

Yep, rather than focusing on how they are are different in providing value (connecting people) they are chasing attention and ad revenue. It’s sad because that type of person to person social connection is being relegated back to instant messengers which still function more or less like the ones from the 2000s.

holler 4y ago
> It’s sad because that type of person to person social connection is being relegated back to instant messengers which still function more or less like the ones from the 2000s. What about mixing forum-like experience with open messaging? That's what we're doing over at https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
jjfoooo4 4y ago
The person to person interaction went back to messengers because most people don’t like the exposure of all their social interactions being laid bare for all to see.
Siira 4y ago
I guess you haven’t been using Telegram. It introduces new useful features every year.

warabe 4y ago

I think the problem boils down to the same mantra as always: users are not customer, but product.

next_xibalba 4y ago

> the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs. Wouldn't a consequence of this be that Facebook would be losing users in drovers? And yet the data seem to disagree. This is a type of take that feels very "inside baseball" and fueled more by the feelings of its proponents than any kind of empiricism.

maxfurman 4y ago
They just posted their first net user loss - so maybe not "in droves" but their username is certainly declining and will continue to do so without drastic change
- next_xibalba 4y ago
  Where are you getting this information? AFAIK, 2Q22 earnings (and metrics) are released tomorrow. The whispers I've heard are that any loss of M/DAU is contained to Europe and is caused by Russia going offline.
  - jahewson 4y ago
    Given that they lost users in the final quarter of 2021 that’s a remarkable time travel machine your whisperers seem to have invented.
  - aahortwwy 4y ago
    > Social media giant Facebook has seen its daily active users (DAUs) drop for the first time in its 18-year history. > Facebook's owner Meta Platforms says DAUs fell to 1.929bn in the three months to the end of December [2021], compared to 1.930bn in the previous quarter. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60238565 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60238565
  - ARandomerDude 4y ago
    Ah yes, the familiar "everything is Putin's fault" refrain. He's a bad guy and invading Ukraine is horrible, all the usual caveats. But Putin under every rock and behind every bush being responsible for every toothache and hangnail is getting old.

anothernewdude 4y ago

I'm already there for McDonalds. No idea how to order what I want from those machines.

deleted 4y ago
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SoftTalker 4y ago
They are a complete disaster. Unusable. Pro tip, you will get better service in the Drive-Thru. The large majority of their sales come from there, and they prioritize filling drive thru orders to keep the line moving.

marcosdumay 4y ago

Hum... Just like any SaaS company out there. I wonder if somebody will create a "keep track of your friends" application again. There is obviously a need, but there isn't a channel that enables it to appear anymore, unless Google allows (hum... that's how industries die). Anyway, user hostile is how any software acts nowadays. From becoming difficult to interact with, exploiting the user on unexpected ways, all the way into refusing to fulfill its primary use case. Users don't seem to care.

choward 4y ago

> Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook And nobody hates Facebook more than Facebook users. I don't use Facebook and because of that I don't have many problems with it. Same goes for the people that don't use Facebook that I know. The only people I see complaining about Facebook are Facebook users.

oska 4y ago
To give a counterexample of one, I've never been a user of Facebook (never signed up to FB, IG or WA) but I absolutely loathe the company and its sociopathic behaviour under Zuckerberg. I hate everything the company represents. I take an active interest in its travails and will celebrate its downfall.
- choward 4y ago
  I agree with that. I just mean I'm pretty much never directly interacting with Facebook so I don't have to think about them. People who use Facebook every day are constantly experiencing the terribleness directly. So yes, I hate Facebook, but luckily it's not a direct part of my life so I don't have to think about it.

capybara_2020 4y ago

Didn't Facebook already die years back? People moved onto Instagram, Whatsapp, Snap and a few other places already. The only reason Facebook was able to pull along was because it bought Insta and Whatsapp so they did not have to compete. But that now that they have to actually compete, the cracks are showing.

aurelius12 4y ago
That's a strange take isn't it? Facebook has like twice the # of daily users as Instagram, and 6x that of Snap...
650 4y ago
Tons still use Marketplace, Groups, etc. Especially in non-Western countries as well as older (40+) people.

safety1st 4y ago

To quote the article Facebook really has "unleashed waves of democratic empowerment" among the youth in certain countries where democracy is not present or is under serious assault and the domestic media is censored. If some random dictatorship has strict anti-speech laws Meta is way more lax about following them than the domestic media (who are just going to get arrested if they don't). This really has created a generation of young people in some places who have a less censored view of the world and have a more pro-democratic, pro-egalitarian, anti-dictatorship bent. The only people who miss this are the ones whose reality is generally confined to an e.g. US-only point of view where democracy is secure and stable and the only "threats" to it are basically a joke, like the whole panic over January 6, and you've never seen tanks roll into the capital and depose your elected officials. In countries where real threats to democracy like that exist, Facebook and Twitter have played a huge role in communicating suppressed information, aiding protest organization, etc. and by and large the kids are into it. As for a pivot to a Tiktok-style experience -- that's a hard pass for me, it's like mixing cocaine with television. The kids are into that too and it's pretty scary to watch them switch off their brains, set aside their humanity and obediently wait for the ML algorithm's function calls to twitch_human_thumb() that arise every few seconds. Of course people were saying something similar about MTV, remote controls and the boob tube back in the day and somehow we survived... Ultimately if you're Meta and the government tells you it's OK for you to sell cocaine, after all they're OK with your Chinese competitor importing it -- who are you to say no? Under the current climate my only confusion is why we haven't let Coke reintroduce their namesake ingredient to their formula. Or to use your example yes I could totally see Taco Bell lacing their meat with drugs if it was allowed!

guelo 4y ago
- mulmen 4y ago
  We do know. Joe Biden would still be president. The question is what would have happened if that mob actually got their hands on the representatives. We have a pretty good idea there too, and it isn't pretty.

dylan604 4y ago

>Maybe you can still order the <burger> if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted. You just described In&Out

eks391 4y ago
Facts. I went to InNOut with a friend because he swore by it and I ordered first. I got a tasteless burger and he got one that actually had food between the buns. AND his fries looked actually edible. I was confused, asked which options he chose, and he said something about secret menus which pisses me off. Why must I be prepared with inside knowledge for a store that claims to be fast and easy? I ate my crappy meal and dont plan on going back when there are other places that are full willing to show you what meals are available

deleted 4y ago

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yieldcrv 4y ago

Well yes But Facebook is trying to get new users Correct about the fairy tale of endless growth But they just need to convince shareholders for a couple quarters so a couple employees don’t get collateral called on shares they borrowed against and the corporation can dilute more shares issued on behalf of the same employees And its going to work, long enough

badcarbine 4y ago

Poor comparison. McDonalds and Taco Bell are not as culturally divisive as Tik Tok and Facebook. Governments don't request nearly as much sensitive data from fast food chains as they do from modern IT companies. It's more like China having too much power over American citizens and Facebook desperately trying to overtake their market share, either for control or for a platform to fall back on once, or if, Tik Tok were to go under.

chrismarlow9 4y ago
Poor comparison was also my first thought. Taco bell and McDonald's fundamentally do different things (although they seem to be expanding into each other turf with things like nacho fries), but Facebook and TikTok really don't, neither does Twitter or Instagram or any other social network (even email for that matter, the oldest social network). They're communication tools. On all of these platforms you can post video, images, and text either privately or publicly. I can use Facebook the same way someone might use Twitter. I can post only images to TikTok or Facebook and forget about Instagram. I cannot buy a hamburger and taco bell, or tacos and tostada's at McDonald's. A better comparison would be saying that Chili's saw Applebee's have a great year and decided to make the inside decor and outside building look more like Applebee's. Both restaurants basically serve a bit of all types of food and the menus probably overlap heavily.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

They're building it back better.

kristopolous 4y ago

It'd be more like if McDonald's used the same ingredients and stuffed them into taco and burrito shapes and lazily renamed themselves to something like mcdonaria, had their employees say hola when you walk in and their receipts say gracias... The issue is Facebook misunderstand both their customers and their competition so they're just blindly smashing things together I blame modern tech hiring processes that filter out people who aren't conforming enthusiastic obedient cheerleaders. You get a sustain and self-extinguish product instead of one that can respond to what the necessity of the times demand You must have passionate grumps otherwise you're just shaking pom-poms as you run over a cliff.

cratermoon 4y ago
> their customers Just so we're clear, the users are NOT the customers. I think Facebook absolutely understands their customers -- the companies that spend the most advertising and marketing through Facebook.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  All of the paying customers have Facebook accounts and most personally use them. If it's a bad experience and "boosting" posts leads to noise and garbage they're going away. The tiering of customers and users is incorrect, Facebook is the meeting place for the two sides of the attention market and they are increasingly doing a failed execution. The clean delineated hierarchy model where the users are treated as foolish rubes is part of the problem. There's an insular Silicon Valley elitism that is excessively self-congratulatory and is positively allergic to systemic criticism
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    Have we already forgotten the aphorism "if the service is free, you are the product"?

beambot 4y ago

Irony. McDonald's was instrumental in creating Chipotle -- literally making burritos & tacos. Not at all dissimilar from Facebook & Instagram.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

> Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess I was immediately reminded of Mozilla when I read this.

SkyMarshal 4y ago

TBH this is also exactly what Google tried to do with Google+ back in the day. Facebook was a new model that provided online folks with a new and more personal experience, which scared Google management, so they tried to pivot the whole company to become a social network, including forcing their users to abandon their pseudonyms and reveal their irl identity, despite the original implicit social contract allowing pseudonyms. It was idiotic. You would think Facebook would have learned from their primary competitor's (at the time) mistake.

woah 4y ago

Restaurants do sometimes change their menus, you know

foobiekr 4y ago

All of those restaurants sell poisonous trash. Which makes this a good analogy for social media. We should all be happy they may finally be peaking and fading.

judge2020 4y ago
Except that TikTok is going strong[0], and is arguably just as bad. 0: https://radar.cloudflare.com/#most-popular-domains https://radar.cloudflare.com/#most-popular-domains

gonehome 4y ago

The brick and mortar is a good example because if they did what Facebook is doing fewer may have gone bankrupt when they were destroyed by Amazon. I’m not a fan of the ad driven business model and the damage it’s done, but Zuckerberg and Facebook are correct here. They know the users better than the users know themselves. It’s been true since the launch of the news feed. Don’t listen to what users say, watch how they behave. Everyone says they want to be fit but people just sit around and eat chocolate cake. Zuckerberg has reorganized and saved Facebook a few times now despite hysterics from users and the press. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.

dreamcompiler 4y ago

> Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs. Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers. You and I aren't Facebook's users; we are the ore Facebook has been mining at a cost approaching zero for over a decade and selling at a huge markup to its actual customers. But now the mine is playing out. We no longer cost Facebook zero to mine and the advertisers are beginning to realize the gold (us) is no longer 24-carat because nobody under 30 uses FB any more. Like any mining entrepreneur when the mine begins to play out, FB is panicking. They're throwing whatever they can think of at the wall to see if anything sticks. None of it will work. FB will keep publicly saying "everything is fine" until one day they will simply slink away in the middle of the night leaving several thousand mine workers unemployed and holding the bag.

petesergeant 4y ago
> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers Anyone who's tried to use their advertiser tools is unlikely to agree with this. Hard to remember any software I've used with a worse user interface in recent memory.
- pmx 4y ago
  Google ads is pretty bad too but facebook's business portal / ad manager / whatever they call it this week almost seems to be designed to be a nightmare to use on purpose. I sincerely hope a player comes along to disrupt this market with a product that is actually nice to use and offers decent customer support - these shouldn't be unrealistic wishes!
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    Haha, they AB tested on there "customers" to get them to overspend and dark patterned even the imperators salon. This is hellarious.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
      Actually I think this could be the reason. Given the sufficient number of A/B testing, it may turn out the more complex the interface is, the more likely the customer is likely to (make the mistake of) spending more.

drdaeman 4y ago

I don't think they hate them, they - I believe that despite hoarding all this supposedly useful data - simply have absolutely no idea who they are and what they want/need.

dheera 4y ago

> Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs. Not only that, they're actually killing and destroying art forms. Many forms of art don't lend themselves to 15-second videos, and they're being actively downranked and not even shown to their own friends and followers anymore. Facebook is gatekeeping content between friends. You could have spent 500 hours painting a picture but Facebook will HIDE it from your friends just because it isn't a 15-second "Reel". Zuck: "We want Reels to be the best place for creators to connect with their community and make a living" Well, did you even bother asking the creators? A lot of them CANNOT make a living through short videos. They need still pictures, writing, interactive pages, and other ways to present their creations. No, Zuck, you don't want it to the best place for creators. You actually don't give a flying f about creators. You just want to copy and compete with TikTok. I do a lot of landscape photography and astrophotography, and my views have been slashed to 1/3 of what they were last year. Same quality content, it's Instagram HIDING stuff from my own followers and friends. I'm just glad I don't make a living from it, but feel really bad for those who do.

b112 4y ago

Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac Your point is 100% valid, so don't consider this a disagreement. It is merely that McDonalds has changed, and it annoys me. I went to the one on El Camino near Oregon, and waited 7 minutes to have my order taken, and 14 minutes more for my food. Why? Doordash, and others. https://nypost.com/2022/02/14/doordash-to-penalize-mcdonalds-outlets-that-take-too-long/ https://nypost.com/2022/02/14/doordash-to-penalize-mcdonalds... This is a pivot too, from restaurant to delivery as a primary business model. But, just like facebook, mcdonalds borked this. Its whole business model was fast food, and really the only reason I ever went there. They could have added more cooks, and another cashier, keeping the responsiveness and speed of old, keeping their food fast for walkins. But instead, drop the old, and now I can go to a real restaurant, order a burger, and get it made and on my table faster. Good job McDonalds!

zerocrates 4y ago
I noticed the last time I went to a McDonalds a huge sign on the door advertising that they're on DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc., basically saying "don't come here!"
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Really short term thinking if that's true. DoorDash/UberEats might not be around forever. Its also not clear whether people will order the same amounts if an actual recession rolls around. By prioritizing DoorDash over in-store customers, you're just destroying your long-term value prop and brand.
  - rob74 4y ago
    Plus there's one small detail: you can still enjoy e.g. a pizza that's not hot anymore; other food (Indian, Chinese, ...) can mostly be kept hot without losing its quality. With burgers and fries (especially McDonalds), you have to eat them hot, and trying to keep them warm during delivery results in a soggy mess that's not enjoyable at all anymore IMHO.

Banana699 4y ago

>Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook Not disputing that facebook is uniquely poison, but that's most sane users on social giants. Users of reddit and twitter specifically absolutely and openly loath them, users of instagram and linkedin are too stifled by the ultra-superficial cheeriness of the platforms to openly admit their hatred on the platform itself, but it's burning inside them quietly. Socials are an amazing\terrifying experiments in how you can use the herd instincts of humans to hold them hostages against their will.

Joeri 4y ago

Counterpoint: facebook are going to add the classic chronological friends and family experience as a second tab “feeds”. In your analogy it would be like mcdonalds splitting down the middle, with the main entrance leading you to tacodonalds and a side door from that hallway leading you to the classic mcdonalds. Parents could send their kids to tacodonalds for a burger taco because that’s what the kids love, while nearby they could enjoy a classic big mac. Most people would probably prefer it that way. This is just diversification to reach more market segments, and as long as that feeds tab exists they aren’t doing anything different from e.g. youtube, where the home tab is not what I want at all, but the subscriptions tab does exactly what I want.

andrewflnr 4y ago
If Facebook was into that kind of thing, we would still have a proper chronological feed.
notahacker 4y ago
Not to mention the fact that the feed itself wasn't part of Facebook's original proposition but was a controversial change introduced despite user protests, and the content of the feed today doesn't remotely resemble the content of the feed in 2006 which doesn't remotely resemble the content of the feed in 2009 or 2015 If McDonalds had been a pizza joint within the memories of much of its user base before introducing a Big Mac which was chicken one year and beef the next with constant tweaks to the sauces and vegetable content, I'm not sure the introduction of tacos would be that controversial.

madeofpalk 4y ago

I wonder who hates their product more - Facebook or Twitter?

shreyshnaccount 4y ago

if as a result McDonald's has an amazing growth in revenue, sure this will happen it's just a matter of when

agumonkey 4y ago

I have a feeling that 1) this is a global phenomenon 2) it's due to computing lightness (it costs few energy to change programs and websites compared to physical things). Google keeps swinging secondary apps in and out of existence, social networks come and go every 5 years. It's low energy high frequency, low integration and unstable.

Siira 4y ago

> Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't Lazy people need to own their laziness. What alternative is there? The UI can’t get infinitely complex.

tmaly 4y ago

I understand that they think growth is in the younger users, but I can't see granny creating twerking videos. There is a sizable chunk of people that just want to post text and look at pictures of their relatives.

harry8 4y ago

> Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/ Beg to differ there. Facebook should be broken up and senior execs facing charges. [1] Loads of people think so and has been motivating for many to delete their account. Don't overlook that group of people. (There are dozens of us, DOZENS!) [1] In weaker moments this can be expressed with rather more venom.

rmbyrro 4y ago

I'm failing to understand: Why is any of this news!? Facebook (and Instagram) has been using an algorithmic discovery engine for years, hasn't it?

bongoman37 4y ago

I think Facebook user numbers could drop just as fast as they rose. The network effects that drive a social network to add members could operate in reverse as well when higher engagement users drop and the remaining users either leave or become dormant.

DrBazza 4y ago

I'm now down to Facebook on my phone only, and it gets checked once or twice a day, and the first N posts are all "not friends" - group posts, ads, surveys. There's hardly any of my friends left actively using it. All my friends are now in fb messenger groups, whatsapp groups, discord, and so on. Until they get "monetized", then we'll be off to somewhere else I suppose.

6t6t6t6 4y ago

Facebook cares about their customers, which are the companies that want to use its AD network. Users are not customers.