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Knowing the beast firsthand, there's no trace of doubt in my mind that the convergence to a junk product outcome involved a monotonous increase in ad revenue an

• pfortuny 4y ago
  Ordinary people put up with a lot of inconvenience just to stay connected (in some way). This is why fb has not collapsed yet. I left it years ago when I realized it was just annoying me.
  • yieldcrv 4y ago
    It hasn't collapsed because everyone with a half-baked idea feels they need to purchase ads to syndicate across Facebook or Instagram and some of the fully baked ideas with a budget do it too its the crux of most modern online marketing strategies, its always an overhead cost, recurring
  • dvtrn 4y ago
    I made the conscious effort before leaving Facebook to trade phone numbers, addresses and birthday dates from the people I wanted to really wanted stay in touch with, and put them in my phone. This was all within the last three years. I’ve sent birthday gifts in the mail, and I’ve gotten gifts in mail from these very people. Sometimes, when I wonder where the convenience that gets talked about in the context of Facebook and “staying in touch” ends and a more delicate form of “you’re probably not as close to some of the people on your friends list as you think” (which was absolutely the case for me) begins. It took really minimal effort on my part to find other ways of staying in touch, but I think maybe the key is you have to WANT to stay in touch with people? Just a shower thought.
    • avgDev 4y ago
      I'm doing this too and it has been great for me in general. I looked at my fb friends and thought to myself which people I really liked and would like to reconnect with. I messaged "facebook friends" I have not talked to in a while and told them it may seem weird but I really would like to reconnect. I have never done anything like this, as I am extremely prone to losing touch with people. I ended up reconnecting with a few people in real life and it has been great. I also plan on sending cards and stuff.
    • pfortuny 4y ago
      I do send postcards and people like it so much they ask me not to stop.
      • badwolf 4y ago
        Big fan of this. I also print and mail memes and photoshops I make to people. It's nice getting something in the mail that's not a bill.
    • ticviking 4y ago
      The art of deliberately staying in touch has been lost, and taking the time and effort to do so makes one stand out.
    • robert204 4y ago
      Same. I've been pretty happy with Clay (https://clay.earth https://clay.earth). They just rolled out a Facebook birthdays integration and between that and Linkedin / iMessage it has most of the people I care about seeing.
    • JohnFen 4y ago
      This is a really good point. It explains why I didn't actually lose touch with anyone I didn't want to lose touch with after I left Facebook. In fact, my bonds with them actually strengthened.
  • webmobdev 4y ago
    Users of FB have migrated to Instagram and WhatsApp (all owned by Meta) ... FB is now for old people / those who don't like new tech.
    • cbozeman 4y ago
      Instagram and Facebook don't have the functionality that Facebook has, that's the problem. Instagram is for photo sharing. Hell, it's not even for that... it's a dating app for women, that doesn't advertise itself as a dating app for women. WhatsApp is just another telephone and messaging app, there's not much special about it as far as I can tell. It's ICQ on a smartphone and I guess, maybe, a better interface. I was more connected back in the email / ICQ / Skype / forums age than I am in the so-called "social" media age.
      • webmobdev 4y ago
        WhatsApp is huge in some countries (even bigger than some telecom companies in the number of users it has).
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • anotheracctfo 4y ago
        • cbozeman 4y ago
          Sir, this is a Hacker News.
      • WHYLEE1991 4y ago
        in what respect is Instagram a dating app for women or anyone? Because it's a social media site primarily used by younger-ish people? by that metric any site that features young people is just an over-glorified dating platform. (not to say that this is a negative implication, dating websites are great to some extent) Do you believe that young people are capable of using social media platforms for things other than base urges or is that something only middle aged people are able to accomplish?
• indigochill 4y ago
  > There's a tragic dimension that a system which connected so much of humanity to itself How would you say Facebook connected humanity differently from what MySpace was doing before Facebook ate their lunch with a more consistent UI? I also am increasingly of the opinion that humanity is not wired to connect globally. Our local social networks give us a buffer against centralized bad actors. When everyone was connected directly to everyone else, what we used to call "chain letters" before social media took off won the information war because they could bypass fact checkers that would refuse to pass them to their network back when social networks were more separated.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    > I also am increasingly of the opinion that humanity is not wired to connect globally. Sociologists generally agree.
    • yazzku 4y ago
      We are in agreement that we don't want to hear from one another. This is the last you will hear from me.
  • wing-_-nuts 4y ago
    >before social media took off won the information war because they could bypass fact checkers that would refuse to pass them to their network Lmao, my mother used to forward me these political chain letters. I'd reply all with sources debunking them. I quickly got removed from the list :^)
    • didgetmaster 4y ago
      You probably got removed from the list because it cost someone a stamp to mail you the letter. These days if you respond to anything, that just puts you on the 'real person' list that gets distributed to all the spammers. Email and robocalls are essentially free so there is no incentive to take dead ends off the lists anymore.