9 ms·

The Lie That Facebook Sold You

73 points by mawise 4y ago

crorella 4y ago
If you unfollow everyone you don't see ads ever again. You just have to visit your friend's profiles one by one (or whatever group of friends you have created) to see their unaltered feeds with no ads.
- Overtonwindow 4y ago
  You can also use FluffBuster. I never see ads ever. My Facebook page is a very stripped down news feed.
  - timbit42 4y ago
    I use that web browser add-on and I set it to not show things people share and like so I only see what my friends post themselves. It's a much better experience.
- jeanofthedead 4y ago
  Honest question: how many of your friends are still on Facebook? I remember it being wildly popular when I was in college, but since then, I think that only two of my friends still have accounts.
  - crorella 4y ago
    I haven't checked recently, but last time I visited the site there were some ppl that is consistently posting high quality content, but it is like 5-10%
ThinkingGuy 4y ago
I feel like "I only use Facebook to keep up with family and friends" is the 21st century equivalent of "I only drink socially" - True for some people, less true for many others.
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  If "keep up with" involves reading people's feeds, are you just.. using Facebook normally? The "I only..." that's most common around me is only using it for Events and Marketplace functionality, but never looking at people's feeds.
  - notinfuriated 4y ago
    I deleted my Facebook in 2016, and the only reason I've ever wanted to go back was for Marketplace and Events functionality. And if I wanted to keep up with people's feeds, I'd use Instagram (roughly the same thing, I know, but less wordy for me and more enjoyable).
    - ev1 4y ago
      Amusingly, some of my friends that use it for Marketplace express a desire for Craigslist to be popular again, if not only for the absolutely insane people on Marketplace that demand to pay $20 for an item listed at $300 and then start spamming you and making public posts about how you're a thief and scammer for trying to rip off a single parent who just wanted to get their kid a present for $20, linking your profile the entire time.
    - 8note 4y ago
      The events functionality stopped working well around then, so you didn't miss anything there
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Meanwhile half the population is freebasing TikTok and insisting that it's healthy.
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    Half the US population. The version in China is a bitters and soda, for good reason.
avgcorrection 4y ago
> That’s the lie that gets you in the door, and then Facebook uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling. I get to the bottom of my feed pretty quickly. Yes, you can have an end to your feed! It says this: > No More Posts > Add more friends to see more posts in your Feed. > Find Friends [button]
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  When I reach the end of my feed I get an error, 100% of the time. I see 3 days of content followed by: "News Feed isn't available right now. This may be because of a technical error that we're working to get fixed. Try reloading this page."
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
robotsteve2 4y ago
This is just an ad for an RSS reader.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I tried the demo of Haven that this site is advocating for and found it was a perfect storm of a bad demo. (I'd be very happy to talk w/ the Havenites about the details) I like what they are trying to accomplish but from a marketing perspective it's going nowhere. Someone who is unhappy with the current state of feeds may or may not be interested in publishing a blog for instance, and they ought to offer people an easy way to set up a feed and see how it works, or get some idea of what it looks like w/o having to create an instance and log in (even a video would be good) Also for as long as RSS feeds have been around the UIs have been something only a mother could love, particularly they don't address the problem of overloading, particularly the spamming with "me-too" articles (I have seen so many articles about "the nearest black hole to the Earth" being discovered for such a long time that I'm starting to wonder if they discovered another one, not to mention the breathless clickbait articles from The Atlantic about the Twitter collapse that are 72 hours out of date) Text analysis technology was good enough in 2005 to filter articles from a feed that you'd like, I know because I used old technology to do it https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ I'm pretty sure that some kind of dimensional reduction on the data (say Latent Dirichlet Allocation) would cut the error rate in half and slightly less sure that spending $1500 on a GPU and using currently fashionable language models would cost you $1500 and a few months of time and not make much of a difference if you ever get it to work. I also know the "twisty little articles that all look alike" problem (a.k.a. "me-too") was solved by Google when they developed Google News because whenever The New York Times publishes an article 300 other papers write an article that says "The New York Times reported that..." and Google News would be completely unusable, the same way that RSS feed readers are completely unusable. I'd guess some kind of clustering is the answer to that but I'm not so sure what kind of clustering. (I think the language model might help with that)
havblue 4y ago
Personally I'm just becoming more private about what I say online as well as what I want to share about the family. I just think Facebook reached a tipping point where it became stale, I got sick of political arguments, I started to distrust my "friends", and I just switched to directly texting people photos.
- fragmede 4y ago
  pull vs push though. of course my closest friends get sent pictures of everything, but for other friends, sending each and every one of them a picture of my latest hairdo or new pet or whatever just seems weird. But a post on Facebook that they have to pull to receive, isn't at all weird.
tejohnso 4y ago
> This leaves an open question: how do you keep in touch with your friends online? That implies that one must keep in touch with friends online. The question I asked myself is "Do I need this to keep in touch with my friends?" The answer was obviously no. I wasn't using Facebook to "keep in touch" with friends as I was primarily passively consuming whatever was being put out. That's not keeping in touch in any meaningful way, and it's highly selective for specific friends. Email, telephone, and text messaging are far superior for keeping in touch as far as I'm concerned. My mother uses Facebook now, and from what I can tell she's primarily using it as Facebook intends. Endless scrolling through nonsense.
yalogin 4y ago
Not to criticize but the post would be most appropriate 5-7yrs ago. Nowadays this is a known secret. TikTok abandoned all posturing and came out as a purely ad driven network to make you scroll. What facebook and others say is mostly moot. They already have a diminishing user retention problem to deal with. The overall perception of these services have changed over the last five years and particularly facebook only has the volume but not the momentum anymore.
- wlesieutre 4y ago
  What's funny about Facebook's user retention problem is that if somebody built the same product that Facebook had back in 2010 I might want to use it again. Except that now we all know the trajectory that services like that seem to end up on, so I probably wouldn't.
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    The product mentioned in this post, Haven, seems very much like a self-hosted (optionally cloud-hosted, for a fee) 2010-era Facebook to me. The distributed nature suggests that it won't go down the Facebook path.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nicolashahn 4y ago
Disclaimer: positive sentiment towards Meta app I'm a millennial and I use Instagram (mainly stories) as the primary tool for keeping in touch with people. It's easier to share an image, maybe with a short caption, rather than composing a post, and consuming friend's stories are quicker than text posts since you don't need to read. It's a more efficient/faster way to know what my friends and family are up to and it prompts me to communicate with them more. I may be an outlier but I'm very bad at remembering to text/call/email friends if I don't see them regularly, so following them on IG helps a lot.
- ipv6ipv4 4y ago
  "It's easier to share an image, maybe with a short caption, rather than composing a post, and consuming friend's stories are quicker than text posts since you don't need to read." I don't want to invest the time and effort to really connect with people. "It's a more efficient/faster way to know what my friends and family are up to and it prompts me to communicate with them more." So I pretend. "I may be an outlier but I'm very bad at remembering to text/call/email friends if I don't see them regularly" In general, I can't be bothered to care about other people. Meaningful connections with people require time, effort, and care. There are no shortcuts.
  - nicolashahn 4y ago
    You woke up and chose violence today, didn't you? Or is it just so impossible to believe that a social media product actually promotes pro-social behaviors?
    - ipv6ipv4 4y ago
      What you are describing is not pro-social. It's anti-social. That's the problem. Clearly, I failed in conveying that message.
      - cr1895 4y ago
        Your last line can stand very well on its own, and the judgmental fabrication before it was totally unnecessary.
taylodl 4y ago
I think most people have figured out by now the pitfalls associated with using Facebook and have devised strategies for mitigating the worst of them. If they haven't, then they soon will.
gerash 4y ago
The whole article is: FB optimizes for user retention so Booo! evil. Use RSS instead. Yeah, these kind of posts are out of touch IMO. This is very much like the food industry where sugar drinks give you instant gratification but isn't good for your health long term. Same should be true in the digital realm. The current solution is implementing screen time usage limitation on mobile OSes. Even though that's good but it works at the app level. I'd like a more high tech solution that works at the content level. Something that can limit how much pet videos or comedy I watch across apps.
mgraczyk 4y ago
Interesting to see posts like this where people speculate on specific factual things, but they don't have any information about the specific factual thing. This post is factually wrong about how Facebook works and what the goals are. Facebook does not "uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling". I worked on the feed algorithm for Instagram and know how the Facebook feed algorithm worked in 2020. I read all the code. The #1 goal of the Facebook feed algorithm is to get users to post more. The #2 goal is to get you to engage in interactions like commenting and liking. Facebook cares about how much you scroll and would like you to do more of it, but posting and interacting is way more important. Facebook optimizes for more posting at the measured cost of less scrolling. Instagram does the same thing but at the time was less successful at it.
- hn8305823 4y ago
  It's not hard to see how the author got there when FB and especially IG feeds are absolutely nothing but "videos you just can't stop watching" It's a huge turnoff for me and I close app as soon as I realize it's happening, meaning I use the app for about 5 seconds total each week now. Maybe that's not what they were trying to do but it sure is what those platforms have become and does not bode well for Meta's future.
- nescioquid 4y ago
  Thanks for the facts. I think the basic premise of the article seems sound and unsurprising -- facebook users are the product sold to advertizers. > That’s the lie that gets you in the door, and then Facebook uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling. As long as you’re scrolling you’re looking at Facebook ads. What your comment suggests to me is that getting users to post and comment is probably instrumental to getting them to view more ads? More content, more scrolling, more ads? Or is that mistaken as well based on your experience?
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    Yes in the long term. People who post are more likely to be retained for a long time for a lot of reasons, partially because they are more likely to receive feedback on their posts and the feedback keeps them engaged. The ultimate long term goal of Facebook is to get everyone to use VR. The shorter term goal (3-5 years) is to get people to keep coming back to Facebook and enjoying it.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Why can't there be a social media site that lives in locally optimal minima? One where there is enough ad revenue to cover costs but not so much that it leads to bloat. One where instead of trying to compete with the likes of TikTok and YouTube by maximizing time spent on the site, the goal is "can catch up with friends in X amount of time".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
somenewaccount1 4y ago
as a person that works for a healthcare startup that relies on facebook ads, while I agree with how much it sucks as a consumer, as a business offering there is nothing like it. There is no add network that reaches more people, and gets more clicks, than the facebook add network. We felt it hard when Apple mucked with them, as well did a lot of other startups. So while I understand the "privacy risks", I think it's equally foolhardy to ignore the positive impact it has for many businesses. It accounts for more than 1/2 of total revenue, for sure. If it went away, something would fill it's shoes for us eventually, and quite frankly I don't think that replacement would be any better for humanity.
- worik 4y ago
  > We felt it hard when Apple mucked with them, as well did a lot of other startups I have no sympathy for that. Creepy stalking as a business model? There is no polite response that does it justification. > I think it's equally foolhardy to ignore the positive impact it has for many businesses. Even less sympathy. Find a business model that does not treat your customers as fungible units to be reached en mass. Your benefit does not make me happier about my suffering. The creation of a surveillance network that removes privacy entirely (which is what we do not have because we stopped facebook, but it is still a risk - forever vigilant) is too high a price to pay for your business success. Golly. You made me angry.
  - andirk 4y ago
    Breathe. I agree that stalking people without their permission (can one be stalked with permission?) should not be an option and is a bad necessity of a business. The goal of the customer is to use the product to its fullest potential. Re: advertising, customer will hyper target as much as possible. The blame is squarely on Facebook for allowing invasive targeting. That said, I really enjoyed the fine grained hyper targeting when I was running some local election campaigns. I could literally send messages to specific friends via the ads!
- hbn 4y ago
  While I understand the cancer risks, it's foolhardy to ignore the positive impact asbestos had for construction businesses in terms of affordability and convenience of installation.
smm11 4y ago
This is a sad post.
personjerry 4y ago
Seems like nothing new, classic "attention economy" stuff we've all known for years now. I wondered why they wrote the article, but then I saw the plug at the bottom - This article is an ad.
andirk 4y ago
I should have more sympathy for all of these addicts, but I don't. I sympathize w/ a herion addiction because it's physically addictive, etc etc. Addicted to Facebook, to other people's baby pictures?? Consider this: everything you learn about your friends through Facebook, you weren't important enough to be reached out to personally about. THEREFORE! You shouldn't even know those things.
- jefftk 4y ago
  I have a lot of people I like to talk to where I'm not close enough for 1:1 communication to make sense. Most of my FB usage is talking with these not-especially-close friends about whatever we're interested in. Not that different from talking here, except that my FB friends (and especially my FB friends with FB's learned weighting of how interested I am in what each posts) are on average more likely to be interested in the same things I am and have more similar preferences around conversational norms.
- coalbin 4y ago
  It's important to remember that modern social media is a complete assault on your dopamine receptors. If you take a look at your feed, a vanishingly small amount of the content Facebook belches up is created by your friends. Instead you're shown content that you're likely to interact with. That's not to mention that people use social media as a substitute for personally reaching out to friends.
- 1MachineElf 4y ago
  >Consider this: everything you learn about your friends through Facebook, you weren't important enough to be reached out to personally about. THEREFORE! You shouldn't even know those things. Interesting take. One thing I struggle with is a diverse set of interests that practically nobody in my life shares with me. A common denominator for these interests is that most were/are cultivated by online content. There is a pervasive feeling of loneliness throughout my life, and I can't help but view the internet with suspicion as a possible threat vector to my sanity. I stay engaged here on HN, but I don't have any real friends here. All of my friends are hundreds or thousands of miles away, and I can count them all on one hand. Facebook and other attention-capitalizing networks provide an empty nicotine-buzz mimicing the real social interactions that I probably need. The idea that social media is toxic isn't new, but I guess lately that truth has been resonating deeper within me.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> Over the last quarter of 2021, Facebook made over $60 per user In the US and Canada. Wow. I guess it's clear why they would never move away from an ad-based model, to an ad-free paywall for example. No way anyone is paying $20/mo (maybe $5/mo in the US, and much less than that in most of the world).

73 points by mawise 4y ago

If you unfollow everyone you don't see ads ever again. You just have to visit your friend's profiles one by one (or whatever group of friends you have created) to see their unaltered feeds with no ads.

Overtonwindow 4y ago
You can also use FluffBuster. I never see ads ever. My Facebook page is a very stripped down news feed.
- timbit42 4y ago
  I use that web browser add-on and I set it to not show things people share and like so I only see what my friends post themselves. It's a much better experience.
jeanofthedead 4y ago
Honest question: how many of your friends are still on Facebook? I remember it being wildly popular when I was in college, but since then, I think that only two of my friends still have accounts.
- crorella 4y ago
  I haven't checked recently, but last time I visited the site there were some ppl that is consistently posting high quality content, but it is like 5-10%

ThinkingGuy 4y ago

I feel like "I only use Facebook to keep up with family and friends" is the 21st century equivalent of "I only drink socially" - True for some people, less true for many others.

thundergolfer 4y ago
If "keep up with" involves reading people's feeds, are you just.. using Facebook normally? The "I only..." that's most common around me is only using it for Events and Marketplace functionality, but never looking at people's feeds.
- notinfuriated 4y ago
  I deleted my Facebook in 2016, and the only reason I've ever wanted to go back was for Marketplace and Events functionality. And if I wanted to keep up with people's feeds, I'd use Instagram (roughly the same thing, I know, but less wordy for me and more enjoyable).
  - ev1 4y ago
    Amusingly, some of my friends that use it for Marketplace express a desire for Craigslist to be popular again, if not only for the absolutely insane people on Marketplace that demand to pay $20 for an item listed at $300 and then start spamming you and making public posts about how you're a thief and scammer for trying to rip off a single parent who just wanted to get their kid a present for $20, linking your profile the entire time.
  - 8note 4y ago
    The events functionality stopped working well around then, so you didn't miss anything there
smoldesu 4y ago
Meanwhile half the population is freebasing TikTok and insisting that it's healthy.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  Half the US population. The version in China is a bitters and soda, for good reason.

avgcorrection 4y ago

> That’s the lie that gets you in the door, and then Facebook uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling. I get to the bottom of my feed pretty quickly. Yes, you can have an end to your feed! It says this: > No More Posts > Add more friends to see more posts in your Feed. > Find Friends [button]

dpkirchner 4y ago
When I reach the end of my feed I get an error, 100% of the time. I see 3 days of content followed by: "News Feed isn't available right now. This may be because of a technical error that we're working to get fixed. Try reloading this page."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

robotsteve2 4y ago

This is just an ad for an RSS reader.

PaulHoule 4y ago

I tried the demo of Haven that this site is advocating for and found it was a perfect storm of a bad demo. (I'd be very happy to talk w/ the Havenites about the details) I like what they are trying to accomplish but from a marketing perspective it's going nowhere. Someone who is unhappy with the current state of feeds may or may not be interested in publishing a blog for instance, and they ought to offer people an easy way to set up a feed and see how it works, or get some idea of what it looks like w/o having to create an instance and log in (even a video would be good) Also for as long as RSS feeds have been around the UIs have been something only a mother could love, particularly they don't address the problem of overloading, particularly the spamming with "me-too" articles (I have seen so many articles about "the nearest black hole to the Earth" being discovered for such a long time that I'm starting to wonder if they discovered another one, not to mention the breathless clickbait articles from The Atlantic about the Twitter collapse that are 72 hours out of date) Text analysis technology was good enough in 2005 to filter articles from a feed that you'd like, I know because I used old technology to do it https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ I'm pretty sure that some kind of dimensional reduction on the data (say Latent Dirichlet Allocation) would cut the error rate in half and slightly less sure that spending $1500 on a GPU and using currently fashionable language models would cost you $1500 and a few months of time and not make much of a difference if you ever get it to work. I also know the "twisty little articles that all look alike" problem (a.k.a. "me-too") was solved by Google when they developed Google News because whenever The New York Times publishes an article 300 other papers write an article that says "The New York Times reported that..." and Google News would be completely unusable, the same way that RSS feed readers are completely unusable. I'd guess some kind of clustering is the answer to that but I'm not so sure what kind of clustering. (I think the language model might help with that)

havblue 4y ago

Personally I'm just becoming more private about what I say online as well as what I want to share about the family. I just think Facebook reached a tipping point where it became stale, I got sick of political arguments, I started to distrust my "friends", and I just switched to directly texting people photos.

fragmede 4y ago
pull vs push though. of course my closest friends get sent pictures of everything, but for other friends, sending each and every one of them a picture of my latest hairdo or new pet or whatever just seems weird. But a post on Facebook that they have to pull to receive, isn't at all weird.

tejohnso 4y ago

> This leaves an open question: how do you keep in touch with your friends online? That implies that one must keep in touch with friends online. The question I asked myself is "Do I need this to keep in touch with my friends?" The answer was obviously no. I wasn't using Facebook to "keep in touch" with friends as I was primarily passively consuming whatever was being put out. That's not keeping in touch in any meaningful way, and it's highly selective for specific friends. Email, telephone, and text messaging are far superior for keeping in touch as far as I'm concerned. My mother uses Facebook now, and from what I can tell she's primarily using it as Facebook intends. Endless scrolling through nonsense.

yalogin 4y ago

Not to criticize but the post would be most appropriate 5-7yrs ago. Nowadays this is a known secret. TikTok abandoned all posturing and came out as a purely ad driven network to make you scroll. What facebook and others say is mostly moot. They already have a diminishing user retention problem to deal with. The overall perception of these services have changed over the last five years and particularly facebook only has the volume but not the momentum anymore.

wlesieutre 4y ago
What's funny about Facebook's user retention problem is that if somebody built the same product that Facebook had back in 2010 I might want to use it again. Except that now we all know the trajectory that services like that seem to end up on, so I probably wouldn't.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  The product mentioned in this post, Haven, seems very much like a self-hosted (optionally cloud-hosted, for a fee) 2010-era Facebook to me. The distributed nature suggests that it won't go down the Facebook path.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nicolashahn 4y ago

Disclaimer: positive sentiment towards Meta app I'm a millennial and I use Instagram (mainly stories) as the primary tool for keeping in touch with people. It's easier to share an image, maybe with a short caption, rather than composing a post, and consuming friend's stories are quicker than text posts since you don't need to read. It's a more efficient/faster way to know what my friends and family are up to and it prompts me to communicate with them more. I may be an outlier but I'm very bad at remembering to text/call/email friends if I don't see them regularly, so following them on IG helps a lot.

ipv6ipv4 4y ago
"It's easier to share an image, maybe with a short caption, rather than composing a post, and consuming friend's stories are quicker than text posts since you don't need to read." I don't want to invest the time and effort to really connect with people. "It's a more efficient/faster way to know what my friends and family are up to and it prompts me to communicate with them more." So I pretend. "I may be an outlier but I'm very bad at remembering to text/call/email friends if I don't see them regularly" In general, I can't be bothered to care about other people. Meaningful connections with people require time, effort, and care. There are no shortcuts.
- nicolashahn 4y ago
  You woke up and chose violence today, didn't you? Or is it just so impossible to believe that a social media product actually promotes pro-social behaviors?
  - ipv6ipv4 4y ago
    What you are describing is not pro-social. It's anti-social. That's the problem. Clearly, I failed in conveying that message.
    - cr1895 4y ago
      Your last line can stand very well on its own, and the judgmental fabrication before it was totally unnecessary.

taylodl 4y ago

I think most people have figured out by now the pitfalls associated with using Facebook and have devised strategies for mitigating the worst of them. If they haven't, then they soon will.

gerash 4y ago

The whole article is: FB optimizes for user retention so Booo! evil. Use RSS instead. Yeah, these kind of posts are out of touch IMO. This is very much like the food industry where sugar drinks give you instant gratification but isn't good for your health long term. Same should be true in the digital realm. The current solution is implementing screen time usage limitation on mobile OSes. Even though that's good but it works at the app level. I'd like a more high tech solution that works at the content level. Something that can limit how much pet videos or comedy I watch across apps.

mgraczyk 4y ago

Interesting to see posts like this where people speculate on specific factual things, but they don't have any information about the specific factual thing. This post is factually wrong about how Facebook works and what the goals are. Facebook does not "uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling". I worked on the feed algorithm for Instagram and know how the Facebook feed algorithm worked in 2020. I read all the code. The #1 goal of the Facebook feed algorithm is to get users to post more. The #2 goal is to get you to engage in interactions like commenting and liking. Facebook cares about how much you scroll and would like you to do more of it, but posting and interacting is way more important. Facebook optimizes for more posting at the measured cost of less scrolling. Instagram does the same thing but at the time was less successful at it.

hn8305823 4y ago
It's not hard to see how the author got there when FB and especially IG feeds are absolutely nothing but "videos you just can't stop watching" It's a huge turnoff for me and I close app as soon as I realize it's happening, meaning I use the app for about 5 seconds total each week now. Maybe that's not what they were trying to do but it sure is what those platforms have become and does not bode well for Meta's future.
nescioquid 4y ago
Thanks for the facts. I think the basic premise of the article seems sound and unsurprising -- facebook users are the product sold to advertizers. > That’s the lie that gets you in the door, and then Facebook uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling. As long as you’re scrolling you’re looking at Facebook ads. What your comment suggests to me is that getting users to post and comment is probably instrumental to getting them to view more ads? More content, more scrolling, more ads? Or is that mistaken as well based on your experience?
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  Yes in the long term. People who post are more likely to be retained for a long time for a lot of reasons, partially because they are more likely to receive feedback on their posts and the feedback keeps them engaged. The ultimate long term goal of Facebook is to get everyone to use VR. The shorter term goal (3-5 years) is to get people to keep coming back to Facebook and enjoying it.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

Why can't there be a social media site that lives in locally optimal minima? One where there is enough ad revenue to cover costs but not so much that it leads to bloat. One where instead of trying to compete with the likes of TikTok and YouTube by maximizing time spent on the site, the goal is "can catch up with friends in X amount of time".

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

somenewaccount1 4y ago

as a person that works for a healthcare startup that relies on facebook ads, while I agree with how much it sucks as a consumer, as a business offering there is nothing like it. There is no add network that reaches more people, and gets more clicks, than the facebook add network. We felt it hard when Apple mucked with them, as well did a lot of other startups. So while I understand the "privacy risks", I think it's equally foolhardy to ignore the positive impact it has for many businesses. It accounts for more than 1/2 of total revenue, for sure. If it went away, something would fill it's shoes for us eventually, and quite frankly I don't think that replacement would be any better for humanity.

worik 4y ago
> We felt it hard when Apple mucked with them, as well did a lot of other startups I have no sympathy for that. Creepy stalking as a business model? There is no polite response that does it justification. > I think it's equally foolhardy to ignore the positive impact it has for many businesses. Even less sympathy. Find a business model that does not treat your customers as fungible units to be reached en mass. Your benefit does not make me happier about my suffering. The creation of a surveillance network that removes privacy entirely (which is what we do not have because we stopped facebook, but it is still a risk - forever vigilant) is too high a price to pay for your business success. Golly. You made me angry.
- andirk 4y ago
  Breathe. I agree that stalking people without their permission (can one be stalked with permission?) should not be an option and is a bad necessity of a business. The goal of the customer is to use the product to its fullest potential. Re: advertising, customer will hyper target as much as possible. The blame is squarely on Facebook for allowing invasive targeting. That said, I really enjoyed the fine grained hyper targeting when I was running some local election campaigns. I could literally send messages to specific friends via the ads!
hbn 4y ago
While I understand the cancer risks, it's foolhardy to ignore the positive impact asbestos had for construction businesses in terms of affordability and convenience of installation.

smm11 4y ago

This is a sad post.

personjerry 4y ago

Seems like nothing new, classic "attention economy" stuff we've all known for years now. I wondered why they wrote the article, but then I saw the plug at the bottom - This article is an ad.

andirk 4y ago

I should have more sympathy for all of these addicts, but I don't. I sympathize w/ a herion addiction because it's physically addictive, etc etc. Addicted to Facebook, to other people's baby pictures?? Consider this: everything you learn about your friends through Facebook, you weren't important enough to be reached out to personally about. THEREFORE! You shouldn't even know those things.

jefftk 4y ago
I have a lot of people I like to talk to where I'm not close enough for 1:1 communication to make sense. Most of my FB usage is talking with these not-especially-close friends about whatever we're interested in. Not that different from talking here, except that my FB friends (and especially my FB friends with FB's learned weighting of how interested I am in what each posts) are on average more likely to be interested in the same things I am and have more similar preferences around conversational norms.
coalbin 4y ago
It's important to remember that modern social media is a complete assault on your dopamine receptors. If you take a look at your feed, a vanishingly small amount of the content Facebook belches up is created by your friends. Instead you're shown content that you're likely to interact with. That's not to mention that people use social media as a substitute for personally reaching out to friends.
1MachineElf 4y ago
>Consider this: everything you learn about your friends through Facebook, you weren't important enough to be reached out to personally about. THEREFORE! You shouldn't even know those things. Interesting take. One thing I struggle with is a diverse set of interests that practically nobody in my life shares with me. A common denominator for these interests is that most were/are cultivated by online content. There is a pervasive feeling of loneliness throughout my life, and I can't help but view the internet with suspicion as a possible threat vector to my sanity. I stay engaged here on HN, but I don't have any real friends here. All of my friends are hundreds or thousands of miles away, and I can count them all on one hand. Facebook and other attention-capitalizing networks provide an empty nicotine-buzz mimicing the real social interactions that I probably need. The idea that social media is toxic isn't new, but I guess lately that truth has been resonating deeper within me.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

> Over the last quarter of 2021, Facebook made over $60 per user In the US and Canada. Wow. I guess it's clear why they would never move away from an ad-based model, to an ad-free paywall for example. No way anyone is paying $20/mo (maybe $5/mo in the US, and much less than that in most of the world).