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> 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 user

> 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.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    There's no way to disrupt that market without first owning the audience. Facebook and Google can afford to build awful ad management software, because that's the only way advertisers can reach their audiences.
- prox 4y ago
  I need to explain the user interface of Facebook to one of my clients but it would be a lot easier if the interface didn’t change every week and it didn’t had 4 points of contact for settings all in different places. I guess design by committee is at work here.
  - geesejuggler 4y ago
    My guess is that (just like other big players) they have a team for each part/page/section of their platform. There is no cohesive product vision and no product principles (promises) to the users.
- badpun 4y ago
  Perhaps it's the classical case of enterprise software - the people who make the call to spend on Facebook ads mostly don't have to work with the advertiser UI themselves - they have underlings for that.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Remember teaching people how to navigate and use that is a whole industry for them too. Pretty sure you can do courses and get certified in it.
- jahnu 4y ago
  Experimented with it recently to see if we could advertise to people with an interest in our audio plugins. Ended up with a bunch of likes from mostly single mothers in Mexico who didn't seem at all interested in spectral audio processing :'(
cft 4y ago
Even though the original product is dead, they bought WhatsApp and Instagram, which are far from dead
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  Instagram is moribund. People's accounts are being stolen left and right, users' feeds are full of unasked-for shit, and "stories" are an absolute mess. Facebook and its properties are dead. Good riddance. TikTok is next, of course. Just ask Vine.
  - happymellon 4y ago
    I see that they have raised the price of the Oculous Rift. Daft move unless it isn't sustainable or they want to phase it out.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- tomgp 4y ago
  Instagram’s incessant design tweaking, it’s algorithm adjustments which now give preferential treatment to “reels” to an absurd degree and the expansion of advertising on the feed (I’ve seen people write as much as 5x more) all positively reeks of desperate product managers. Instagram is going the same way as facebook it just has a bit further to go
  - parineum 4y ago
    Algorithmic feeds are the harbinger of doom for social media. They all get immediately and progressively worse when it's implemented (and it always will be because that's the business model).
  - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    This is endemic to Metas culture though, they’re a metrics driven company so metrics drive their design decisions. No one important at Instagram is fighting for the vision of what IG is. They’re just fighting to try and claw eyeballs away from emerging platforms and their success is being judged on how many people they get to push on these new formats. They don’t care if it’s at the detriment to what made their product great to begin with, because all they’re looking at is “how many reels are they watching. How many stories are they posting”. Thing is with this strategy because there is no overall vision and no one standing up and saying “we shouldn’t add this” you get the equivalent of a burger restaurant serving sushi and tacos too but their burgers just suck now. Crazy seeing it happen as the competing experiences encroach on screen space. IG now has Snapchat at the top and TikTok “ad breaks” in the feed. Twitter now has Clubhouse at the top. Etc.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I doubt it. Facebook may have issues but they aren't going to disappear anytime soon.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Some of us are old enough to have been through Hi5 and MySpace....
  - blackoil 4y ago
    And some are old enough to have read millions of predictions of death of IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and FB.
    - FullyFunctional 4y ago
      and Sun, Netscape, etc. Just because some of these predictions didn't happen doesn't mean a lot of them did. Sun Microsystems appeared solid. Apple _did_ almost die. IBM is only a shadow of their former self (IMO, the original IBM _did_ die). FB and Google are still young in comparison. I have no stake in either, but IMO Google is more likely to survive than FB. FWIW, both have high quality staff that will bail if the growth stalls.
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
        The old IBM really just sold itself off in little pieces. What's left is a few pieces that have no idea what they want to be but they just keep doing what they do because the brand name assures them customers.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Some of which we were actually right about. By the way, Apple only survived thanks to Microsoft money and being reverse acquired by NeXT.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    Myspace was never a ~trillion dollar company.
atq2119 4y ago
> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers. You're confusing users with customers. The customers are advertisers. The users overwhelmingly aren't.
- zdkl 4y ago
  Well, the only active users I see anymore are engaged in advertising even if not necessarily for profit. (Self) Promotion always was one of the draws of fb.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Really? I have not used FB in like 5 years. One of the things it had for it compared to Instagram and Twitter is how it was not celeb or micro-celeb oriented. Has that changed?
    - neutronicus 4y ago
      In my experience, the people doing self-promotion on FB are generally not trying to be famous, they are trying to drum up customers for their own or their friend's business. So no one is really trying to get you to "follow" them, they just hang around neighborhood groups to see if they can find someone who needs a caterer or a contractor.
  - rtpg 4y ago
    Speak for yourself, i know loads of people who use it to keep in touch with family and friends and posting updates every once in a while. There’s a lot of stuff wrong with FB but it’s fundamentally a useful thing where there’s no great alternative (being vaguely aware of what not-so-close acquaintances are doing)
    - neutronicus 4y ago
      > a useful thing where there’s no great alternative (being vaguely aware of what not-so-close acquaintances are doing) It has also basically eaten Craigslist where I live (Baltimore) My wife and I were not Facebook users five years ago, but our neighborhood organizations are on Facebook, and so are the best places to find secondhand stuff. So we're Facebook users.
baud147258 4y ago
> nobody under 30 uses FB any more. well, aren't older eyeballs more valuable anyway? Like more disposable income, maybe more free time for those retired? The mine might be empty some day in the future, but it doesn't seem to be the case right now
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  I'm no advertising expert but IIRC marketers tend to like the younger demographic because even though older folks have more money they also are wise enough not to spend it on stupid shit they don't need. Unless you're selling a new kind of golf putter or a very expensive prescription medicine for high blood pressure. Then you want the oldsters.
  - Idiotfucker 4y ago
    I mean, the big bucks in advertising are coing from established companies anyway right?
    - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
      I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad from an established company on Facebook. It’s always fly by night junk or scams. Occasionally I find myself having lunch someplace that has daytime tv on. That’s where I see the ads for pharmaceuticals and insurance.
  - postsantum 4y ago
    Wasn't there statistics indicating the group with the most amount of expendable money are women in their forties?
- nprateem 4y ago
  Younger people have a longer lifetime value than older ones
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> one day they will simply slink away in the middle of the night leaving several thousand mine workers unemployed and holding the bag. When that day comes, the moment Facebook and Meta are declared dead I will go out, order the most expensive bottle of champagne, and celebrate all night. Future generations of an advanced technological society will look back in horror and disbelief that a small cadre of privateers were allowed to run amok dominating the cultural communications of billions of people. The harms to individuals and society will take decades to reckon with. The lost opportunities for us to evolve instead of "amusing ourselves to death" will be one of the great questions of the future. "Why, while the planet was burning", they will ask, "did people spend all day sending each other selfies?"
- hgazx 4y ago
  The day meta is declared dead will be the day some other corporation has released an alternative to Facebook/Instagram/etc, probably worse. Hardly anything to celebrate. The cat is out of the bag.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    I'm really curious to know what you think that "cat" is ? Are you thinking that digital technology is irrevocably corrupted and hereafter can only be employed toward abusive and manipulative ends? Or are you supposing that because we have allowed some companies to damage society through abuses of technology, that the situation can never be remedied. No laws can ever be brought to bear? Or are you alluding to something within the collective psyche, making a social-anthropology statement of sorts, that people, having tasted the ruin of apathy, nihilism and decadence will not recover in spirit and build a more positive technological world? Or something else? I'm genuinely curious what you imagine is the powerful force that underwrites malevolent entities in the digital realm?
    - hgazx 4y ago
      It’s not that profound. Humans have become addicted to sharing every moment of their lives through social media, and then watching what other people have shared. Most people no longer have time to themselves since they feel like if they don’t share what they are doing they aren’t doing anything. And if they aren’t doing anything they have to keep up with others (FOMO). Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more engaging and therefore malignant platform.
DrBazza 4y ago
> nobody under 30 uses FB any more As someone the wrong side of 50, I can actually tell you that practically none of my friends in my age group use FB any more either. For my non-techie friends, we're all in whatsapp groups. The only thing that keeps me on facebook are sports clubs that I'm a member of, organise a lot of activities via facebook.
- thaanpaa 4y ago
  Yep, 47 here, and no one except a couple of right-wing, anti-immigration activist "friends" seem to actively use Facebook anymore, out of hundreds. In fact, that's the main reason why I and many of my friends don't use it — it's around 90 % conspiracy theory, and hatred towards government and minorities now, and it's super tiresome. Everyone else is long gone. In my opinion it's not the UI that is the problem; it's the decision they made to allow all nutcases with their nutjob theories to run rampant, in order to make a quick buck out of peoples' outrage.
  - DrBazza 4y ago
    The signal-to-noise ratio gets lower and lower with every "overhaul" of FB. Without even looking (and I can't be bothered either), it feels like 1 friend post to 10 or more group or ad posts.
annadane 4y ago
They don't even care about their advertisers, they knowingly perpetrate click fraud (and lying about video metrics). They don't care. Because Zuck doesn't care, he has contempt for everybody, advertisers and users alike
ransom1538 4y ago
"Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers." The elephant in the room is advertising tracking. Nothing to facebook matters. If I as an advertiser can't see what I am paying for, I am leaving. Advertisers DO NOT want to pay for impressions - they want to pay for conversions (clicks/installs/etc). Without a way to see if a particular ad spend converted - all ad spend ends. Facebook could now be doomed. Apple has changed its policies [1] to help its users to remove advertiser tracking. Mobile has taken over almost all impressions. "They're throwing whatever they can think of at the wall to see if anything sticks." They are beyond fucked here. Whatever they create, apple is blocking tracking. So new products/features do NOT matter. They need a way to figure out tracking - I don't have a solution (besides leaving and just using apple store iads). https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22405474/apple-app-tracking-transparency-ios-14-5-privacy-update-facebook-data https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22405474/apple-app-tracki...
- ransom1538 4y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/xECOsSr.png https://i.imgur.com/xECOsSr.png
andsoitis 4y ago
> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers. > You and I aren't Facebook's users A user is someone who uses a product, by any reasonable definition. Advertisers are certainly (commercial) customers, but the average person IS a user of Facebook. > we are the ore Facebook has been mining This I do agree with, my own metaphor has been harvesting rather than mining (like in the Matrix or in Jupiter Ascending). But being something mined/harvested does not preclude also being a user.
ed_elliott_asc 4y ago
Won’t the bag be in a virtual world though? :)

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.
- rchaud 4y ago
  There's no way to disrupt that market without first owning the audience. Facebook and Google can afford to build awful ad management software, because that's the only way advertisers can reach their audiences.
prox 4y ago
I need to explain the user interface of Facebook to one of my clients but it would be a lot easier if the interface didn’t change every week and it didn’t had 4 points of contact for settings all in different places. I guess design by committee is at work here.
- geesejuggler 4y ago
  My guess is that (just like other big players) they have a team for each part/page/section of their platform. There is no cohesive product vision and no product principles (promises) to the users.
badpun 4y ago
Perhaps it's the classical case of enterprise software - the people who make the call to spend on Facebook ads mostly don't have to work with the advertiser UI themselves - they have underlings for that.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Remember teaching people how to navigate and use that is a whole industry for them too. Pretty sure you can do courses and get certified in it.
jahnu 4y ago
Experimented with it recently to see if we could advertise to people with an interest in our audio plugins. Ended up with a bunch of likes from mostly single mothers in Mexico who didn't seem at all interested in spectral audio processing :'(

cft 4y ago

Even though the original product is dead, they bought WhatsApp and Instagram, which are far from dead

NonNefarious 4y ago
Instagram is moribund. People's accounts are being stolen left and right, users' feeds are full of unasked-for shit, and "stories" are an absolute mess. Facebook and its properties are dead. Good riddance. TikTok is next, of course. Just ask Vine.
- happymellon 4y ago
  I see that they have raised the price of the Oculous Rift. Daft move unless it isn't sustainable or they want to phase it out.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tomgp 4y ago
Instagram’s incessant design tweaking, it’s algorithm adjustments which now give preferential treatment to “reels” to an absurd degree and the expansion of advertising on the feed (I’ve seen people write as much as 5x more) all positively reeks of desperate product managers. Instagram is going the same way as facebook it just has a bit further to go
- parineum 4y ago
  Algorithmic feeds are the harbinger of doom for social media. They all get immediately and progressively worse when it's implemented (and it always will be because that's the business model).
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  This is endemic to Metas culture though, they’re a metrics driven company so metrics drive their design decisions. No one important at Instagram is fighting for the vision of what IG is. They’re just fighting to try and claw eyeballs away from emerging platforms and their success is being judged on how many people they get to push on these new formats. They don’t care if it’s at the detriment to what made their product great to begin with, because all they’re looking at is “how many reels are they watching. How many stories are they posting”. Thing is with this strategy because there is no overall vision and no one standing up and saying “we shouldn’t add this” you get the equivalent of a burger restaurant serving sushi and tacos too but their burgers just suck now. Crazy seeing it happen as the competing experiences encroach on screen space. IG now has Snapchat at the top and TikTok “ad breaks” in the feed. Twitter now has Clubhouse at the top. Etc.

encryptluks2 4y ago

I doubt it. Facebook may have issues but they aren't going to disappear anytime soon.

pjmlp 4y ago
Some of us are old enough to have been through Hi5 and MySpace....
- blackoil 4y ago
  And some are old enough to have read millions of predictions of death of IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and FB.
  - FullyFunctional 4y ago
    and Sun, Netscape, etc. Just because some of these predictions didn't happen doesn't mean a lot of them did. Sun Microsystems appeared solid. Apple _did_ almost die. IBM is only a shadow of their former self (IMO, the original IBM _did_ die). FB and Google are still young in comparison. I have no stake in either, but IMO Google is more likely to survive than FB. FWIW, both have high quality staff that will bail if the growth stalls.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      The old IBM really just sold itself off in little pieces. What's left is a few pieces that have no idea what they want to be but they just keep doing what they do because the brand name assures them customers.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Some of which we were actually right about. By the way, Apple only survived thanks to Microsoft money and being reverse acquired by NeXT.
- thfuran 4y ago
  Myspace was never a ~trillion dollar company.

atq2119 4y ago

> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers. You're confusing users with customers. The customers are advertisers. The users overwhelmingly aren't.

zdkl 4y ago
Well, the only active users I see anymore are engaged in advertising even if not necessarily for profit. (Self) Promotion always was one of the draws of fb.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Really? I have not used FB in like 5 years. One of the things it had for it compared to Instagram and Twitter is how it was not celeb or micro-celeb oriented. Has that changed?
  - neutronicus 4y ago
    In my experience, the people doing self-promotion on FB are generally not trying to be famous, they are trying to drum up customers for their own or their friend's business. So no one is really trying to get you to "follow" them, they just hang around neighborhood groups to see if they can find someone who needs a caterer or a contractor.
- rtpg 4y ago
  Speak for yourself, i know loads of people who use it to keep in touch with family and friends and posting updates every once in a while. There’s a lot of stuff wrong with FB but it’s fundamentally a useful thing where there’s no great alternative (being vaguely aware of what not-so-close acquaintances are doing)
  - neutronicus 4y ago
    > a useful thing where there’s no great alternative (being vaguely aware of what not-so-close acquaintances are doing) It has also basically eaten Craigslist where I live (Baltimore) My wife and I were not Facebook users five years ago, but our neighborhood organizations are on Facebook, and so are the best places to find secondhand stuff. So we're Facebook users.

baud147258 4y ago

> nobody under 30 uses FB any more. well, aren't older eyeballs more valuable anyway? Like more disposable income, maybe more free time for those retired? The mine might be empty some day in the future, but it doesn't seem to be the case right now

dreamcompiler 4y ago
I'm no advertising expert but IIRC marketers tend to like the younger demographic because even though older folks have more money they also are wise enough not to spend it on stupid shit they don't need. Unless you're selling a new kind of golf putter or a very expensive prescription medicine for high blood pressure. Then you want the oldsters.
- Idiotfucker 4y ago
  I mean, the big bucks in advertising are coing from established companies anyway right?
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad from an established company on Facebook. It’s always fly by night junk or scams. Occasionally I find myself having lunch someplace that has daytime tv on. That’s where I see the ads for pharmaceuticals and insurance.
- postsantum 4y ago
  Wasn't there statistics indicating the group with the most amount of expendable money are women in their forties?
nprateem 4y ago
Younger people have a longer lifetime value than older ones

nonrandomstring 4y ago

> one day they will simply slink away in the middle of the night leaving several thousand mine workers unemployed and holding the bag. When that day comes, the moment Facebook and Meta are declared dead I will go out, order the most expensive bottle of champagne, and celebrate all night. Future generations of an advanced technological society will look back in horror and disbelief that a small cadre of privateers were allowed to run amok dominating the cultural communications of billions of people. The harms to individuals and society will take decades to reckon with. The lost opportunities for us to evolve instead of "amusing ourselves to death" will be one of the great questions of the future. "Why, while the planet was burning", they will ask, "did people spend all day sending each other selfies?"

hgazx 4y ago
The day meta is declared dead will be the day some other corporation has released an alternative to Facebook/Instagram/etc, probably worse. Hardly anything to celebrate. The cat is out of the bag.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I'm really curious to know what you think that "cat" is ? Are you thinking that digital technology is irrevocably corrupted and hereafter can only be employed toward abusive and manipulative ends? Or are you supposing that because we have allowed some companies to damage society through abuses of technology, that the situation can never be remedied. No laws can ever be brought to bear? Or are you alluding to something within the collective psyche, making a social-anthropology statement of sorts, that people, having tasted the ruin of apathy, nihilism and decadence will not recover in spirit and build a more positive technological world? Or something else? I'm genuinely curious what you imagine is the powerful force that underwrites malevolent entities in the digital realm?
  - hgazx 4y ago
    It’s not that profound. Humans have become addicted to sharing every moment of their lives through social media, and then watching what other people have shared. Most people no longer have time to themselves since they feel like if they don’t share what they are doing they aren’t doing anything. And if they aren’t doing anything they have to keep up with others (FOMO). Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more engaging and therefore malignant platform.

DrBazza 4y ago

> nobody under 30 uses FB any more As someone the wrong side of 50, I can actually tell you that practically none of my friends in my age group use FB any more either. For my non-techie friends, we're all in whatsapp groups. The only thing that keeps me on facebook are sports clubs that I'm a member of, organise a lot of activities via facebook.

thaanpaa 4y ago
Yep, 47 here, and no one except a couple of right-wing, anti-immigration activist "friends" seem to actively use Facebook anymore, out of hundreds. In fact, that's the main reason why I and many of my friends don't use it — it's around 90 % conspiracy theory, and hatred towards government and minorities now, and it's super tiresome. Everyone else is long gone. In my opinion it's not the UI that is the problem; it's the decision they made to allow all nutcases with their nutjob theories to run rampant, in order to make a quick buck out of peoples' outrage.
- DrBazza 4y ago
  The signal-to-noise ratio gets lower and lower with every "overhaul" of FB. Without even looking (and I can't be bothered either), it feels like 1 friend post to 10 or more group or ad posts.

annadane 4y ago

They don't even care about their advertisers, they knowingly perpetrate click fraud (and lying about video metrics). They don't care. Because Zuck doesn't care, he has contempt for everybody, advertisers and users alike

ransom1538 4y ago

"Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers." The elephant in the room is advertising tracking. Nothing to facebook matters. If I as an advertiser can't see what I am paying for, I am leaving. Advertisers DO NOT want to pay for impressions - they want to pay for conversions (clicks/installs/etc). Without a way to see if a particular ad spend converted - all ad spend ends. Facebook could now be doomed. Apple has changed its policies [1] to help its users to remove advertiser tracking. Mobile has taken over almost all impressions. "They're throwing whatever they can think of at the wall to see if anything sticks." They are beyond fucked here. Whatever they create, apple is blocking tracking. So new products/features do NOT matter. They need a way to figure out tracking - I don't have a solution (besides leaving and just using apple store iads). https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22405474/apple-app-tracking-transparency-ios-14-5-privacy-update-facebook-data https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22405474/apple-app-tracki...

ransom1538 4y ago
https://i.imgur.com/xECOsSr.png https://i.imgur.com/xECOsSr.png

andsoitis 4y ago

> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers. > You and I aren't Facebook's users A user is someone who uses a product, by any reasonable definition. Advertisers are certainly (commercial) customers, but the average person IS a user of Facebook. > we are the ore Facebook has been mining This I do agree with, my own metaphor has been harvesting rather than mining (like in the Matrix or in Jupiter Ascending). But being something mined/harvested does not preclude also being a user.

ed_elliott_asc 4y ago

Won’t the bag be in a virtual world though? :)