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In a comment I made about 18 months ago, I noted that Facebook's insufficient investment in anything useful would hold them back. The true cost of the Metaverse

by jmacd 3y ago

In a comment I made about 18 months ago, I noted that Facebook's insufficient investment in anything useful would hold them back. The true cost of the Metaverse isn't solely the capital needed for development; it's also the opportunity cost that will become apparent in the future. What aren't they doing that they could be? There is also another aspect to consider. The swift expansion of generative AI is driving the transition from a Social Graph to a Content Graph. Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube pioneered this trend, while Twitter's timeline modifications serve as a functional yet imperfect example. Content discovery now takes precedence over static friend lists. The core principle that Facebook was built on is gradually crumbling. This isn't just about Apple's privacy policies or regulatory constraints; it's a fundamental shift in user behavior. The primary reason people visit Facebook—connecting with people they know—is now at odds with their main online activity: consuming content from strangers. Facebook has become a platform for discovering uncomfortable opinions of acquaintances and realizing the irrelevance of past social connections. Facebook is attempting to adapt, but their efforts only diminish the platform's value for average users. Instagram's discovery page and Reels are examples, but the latter pales in comparison to TikTok. Facebook's endeavors in short-form video are likely a futile game of catch-up, a classic innovator's dilemma. The Metaverse's introduction seemed like a desperate, last-minute attempt from the C-suite to save face. Anyone who has worked at a high-profile tech company has likely seen this tactic before: weak financial quarters lead to premature product announcements. The all-encompassing nature of the Metaverse announcement signals that something is amiss. It's only more futile now.

helen___keller 3y ago
> Facebook has become a platform for discovering uncomfortable opinions of acquaintances and realizing the irrelevance of past social connections. At some point, the social internet started existing primarily to make people feel good about their own strongly held controversial opinions. Why would I go on Facebook, where the experience is seeing an old friend hold some dumb half baked opinion they picked up from Fox/CNN then bicker with them, when I could go to twitter and watch the top influencer in my ring dunk on the top influencer in the competitions ring, making myself instantly feel more right?
dddddaviddddd 3y ago
> Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities. I'm still interested in keeping up with friends, but Facebook has undermined this by anti-patterns that show me more ads, more trashy content, more recommendations, and less actual content from friends. If Facebook wasn't incentivized to maximize the number of ads it showed, maybe it would be able to actually deliver on that value proposition to users.
asdfman123 3y ago
> Facebook has become a platform for discovering uncomfortable opinions of acquaintances and realizing the irrelevance of past social connections This is it. FB was actually super fun in college: it was a virtual dorm hall. It was a party. You could post crazy shit, post party pictures, and hope that girl you liked saw it. Now it's a combination of a class reunion and your aunt's 70th birthday party, but the usual social restraint is conspicuously absent. Meta as a company seems unable to recognize the change, because doing so would have threatened their cash cow.
- jeffwask 3y ago
  > Meta as a company seems unable to recognize the change, because doing so would have threatened their cash cow. While I agree with the rest of what you say, I don't know if this is true. They pushed their platform to this. They pushed the controversial and divisive content. They platformed questionable advertisers. The negative interaction was more profitable than a place to share pics of your kids with friends or plan a birthday party. I think they absolutely know but you can't unring that bell which is why they were running so hard at something else to be their primary product.
jltsiren 3y ago
> Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities. You can't infer what people want to do from what they are doing when the platform is trying to influence their behavior. Facebook has not been a good platform for keeping up with your friends in 10+ years. The main reason is that Facebook is a business that needs a business model. It's not enough to provide a useful service to the users, but you must also be able to monetize it. For FB that meant ads, and then it meant an addictive algorithmic feed to make more money. That happens often when you run an online service as a business. First you have a good service that attracts a lot of users, and then you gradually destroy it and replace it with something similar but worse to make money. When young people started preferring other social networks, it was a clear sign that Facebook had done that.
themagician 3y ago
The core principle that Facebook was built on is nearly as strong as ever , doubly so with the demographics that actually have money to burn. Facebook's core principle was to make you feel less lonely so you'd give them outrageously specific data about yourself—for free—which they would then sell to someone else who would use that information to sell you things that prey on your specific insecurities. You can do this on TikTok with a new generation today, and Facebook is banking on being able to do this in VR tomorrow. Tell us what makes you happy and sad. Tell us everything about you. Tell us for free and we will give you an endless stream of content/notifications/things to do that make you feel less lonely. We will then work with companies that inject ads that directly prey on your insecurities. You need these things or you can't be happy. All your friends have these things. We will reinforce this message several times per hour. The only way for Facebook to "double down" on its core principle within its current platform is to do something like buy QVC and start to really focus on bleeding seniors. There's a lot of money to be made on Social Security Wednesdays.
luckylion 3y ago
> Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube pioneered this trend, while Twitter's timeline modifications serve as a functional yet imperfect example. Aren't users mostly forming parasocial relationships with "creators" and consider them friends, and want to be with those friends, regardless what they'll do? I never understood the reaction videos and found them boring and stupid, if I wanted to have an idiot constantly pause the video and say something dumb that shows they didn't understand it, I'd watch it together with my 15yo self. But when I read discussions about it, users commented that they like it because it's something they can do "with" the content creator and they'll get signals to what their famous friend thinks about some topic etc.
- jmacd 3y ago
  I think that's fair, but it's not like it's actually a 2-way relationship. It's just some approximation of one. One that is easier to consume and requires less commitment. It all feels like the groundwork for "AI lovers" anyway. Our desire to reshape the world in our own view and to our own desires is how this feedback loop is going to be used. We do it now in social groups that are self-reinforcing, like churches, cults, interest related groups, workplaces (one team!) etc, but I think those will all become superfluous to our desire to just feel seen, heard and entertained. In a group you have to compete to have those needs met, in the future it might be easier to just get it from a robot that understands us far better, gives us undivided attention, and only responds in ways that elicit the feelings and experiences we want.
  - luckylion 3y ago
    On the commercial level at least AI-personalized interaction. You'll actually be able to have a 2-way relationship with Justin Bieber, and he'll chat with you and comment on your goofy pictures, and message you late at night when he can't sleep. Or rather when the AI has estimated that him sending you a message about not being able to sleep because he's anxious because of the album release will increase the chances of you buying that album. What will be the term? It's no longer just parasocial. Augmented Relationship? I believe you're spot on with regards to it being easier to get positive social interactions from a robot. I don't think that's a bad thing either. Many social dynamics are close to winner takes all, and especially among teens often work by singling out someone and mercilessly attacking them to induce group cohesion. Opting out of that hell and having a nice chat with a bot instead? That'll be an improvement for the victims at the very least. The same goes for loneliness, I'd rather people talk to robots than to not communicate at all when they have a desire to interact with others but no means to.
ZooCow 3y ago
>The swift expansion of generative AI is driving the transition from a Social Graph to a Content Graph. . . . The core principle that Facebook was built on is gradually crumbling. Arguably, the proliferation of cheap generative AI content will cause the value of that “fake” content to decrease. Users may begin to value the “real” content created by one’s friends. So Meta’s social graph may become increasingly valuable in the age of AI content.
- jmacd 3y ago
  Personally, I like that future. I just don't see any evidence that social graphs are becoming more relevant or even that they exist for many people onboarding on to the internet/apps for the first time. You can use Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and even Facebook now without creating any social graph at all. In fact, it seems like they prefer it that way.
  - surgical_fire 3y ago
    Same here. People repeat ad nauseam that AI generated content is somehow of worse quality, without ever saying why. It's left as an undeniable fact. Some point at AI generated content being "fake", which is even more of a head scratcher. What can even be considered fake in that context? As long as it's not misleading, AI or human generated content should amount to the same. Once I'm consuming content from strangers, why would the creator matter?
    - DoughnutHole 3y ago
      Plenty of content derives its value from perceived authenticity. Content that is made by humans that is fictitious/constructed is perceived differently from content that is considered "real" - tweets from an American pretending to be in Ukraine would be perceived differently from tweets from someone actually in the warzone. A novel written by someone reflecting such an experience can also affect how we relate to it. There will certainly be some content where people won't care if it's AI generated or not (certain kinds of fiction, technical writing (provided the reliability issues are resolved), etc) - but a lot of content (fictional and non-fictional) derives it's value from reflecting in some way things that actually happened to actual people. Of course AI could still very much play a part in putting that content to paper, so to speak.

by jmacd 3y ago

helen___keller 3y ago

> Facebook has become a platform for discovering uncomfortable opinions of acquaintances and realizing the irrelevance of past social connections. At some point, the social internet started existing primarily to make people feel good about their own strongly held controversial opinions. Why would I go on Facebook, where the experience is seeing an old friend hold some dumb half baked opinion they picked up from Fox/CNN then bicker with them, when I could go to twitter and watch the top influencer in my ring dunk on the top influencer in the competitions ring, making myself instantly feel more right?

dddddaviddddd 3y ago

> Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities. I'm still interested in keeping up with friends, but Facebook has undermined this by anti-patterns that show me more ads, more trashy content, more recommendations, and less actual content from friends. If Facebook wasn't incentivized to maximize the number of ads it showed, maybe it would be able to actually deliver on that value proposition to users.

asdfman123 3y ago

> Facebook has become a platform for discovering uncomfortable opinions of acquaintances and realizing the irrelevance of past social connections This is it. FB was actually super fun in college: it was a virtual dorm hall. It was a party. You could post crazy shit, post party pictures, and hope that girl you liked saw it. Now it's a combination of a class reunion and your aunt's 70th birthday party, but the usual social restraint is conspicuously absent. Meta as a company seems unable to recognize the change, because doing so would have threatened their cash cow.

jeffwask 3y ago
> Meta as a company seems unable to recognize the change, because doing so would have threatened their cash cow. While I agree with the rest of what you say, I don't know if this is true. They pushed their platform to this. They pushed the controversial and divisive content. They platformed questionable advertisers. The negative interaction was more profitable than a place to share pics of your kids with friends or plan a birthday party. I think they absolutely know but you can't unring that bell which is why they were running so hard at something else to be their primary product.

jltsiren 3y ago

> Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities. You can't infer what people want to do from what they are doing when the platform is trying to influence their behavior. Facebook has not been a good platform for keeping up with your friends in 10+ years. The main reason is that Facebook is a business that needs a business model. It's not enough to provide a useful service to the users, but you must also be able to monetize it. For FB that meant ads, and then it meant an addictive algorithmic feed to make more money. That happens often when you run an online service as a business. First you have a good service that attracts a lot of users, and then you gradually destroy it and replace it with something similar but worse to make money. When young people started preferring other social networks, it was a clear sign that Facebook had done that.

themagician 3y ago

The core principle that Facebook was built on is nearly as strong as ever , doubly so with the demographics that actually have money to burn. Facebook's core principle was to make you feel less lonely so you'd give them outrageously specific data about yourself—for free—which they would then sell to someone else who would use that information to sell you things that prey on your specific insecurities. You can do this on TikTok with a new generation today, and Facebook is banking on being able to do this in VR tomorrow. Tell us what makes you happy and sad. Tell us everything about you. Tell us for free and we will give you an endless stream of content/notifications/things to do that make you feel less lonely. We will then work with companies that inject ads that directly prey on your insecurities. You need these things or you can't be happy. All your friends have these things. We will reinforce this message several times per hour. The only way for Facebook to "double down" on its core principle within its current platform is to do something like buy QVC and start to really focus on bleeding seniors. There's a lot of money to be made on Social Security Wednesdays.

luckylion 3y ago

> Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube pioneered this trend, while Twitter's timeline modifications serve as a functional yet imperfect example. Aren't users mostly forming parasocial relationships with "creators" and consider them friends, and want to be with those friends, regardless what they'll do? I never understood the reaction videos and found them boring and stupid, if I wanted to have an idiot constantly pause the video and say something dumb that shows they didn't understand it, I'd watch it together with my 15yo self. But when I read discussions about it, users commented that they like it because it's something they can do "with" the content creator and they'll get signals to what their famous friend thinks about some topic etc.

jmacd 3y ago
I think that's fair, but it's not like it's actually a 2-way relationship. It's just some approximation of one. One that is easier to consume and requires less commitment. It all feels like the groundwork for "AI lovers" anyway. Our desire to reshape the world in our own view and to our own desires is how this feedback loop is going to be used. We do it now in social groups that are self-reinforcing, like churches, cults, interest related groups, workplaces (one team!) etc, but I think those will all become superfluous to our desire to just feel seen, heard and entertained. In a group you have to compete to have those needs met, in the future it might be easier to just get it from a robot that understands us far better, gives us undivided attention, and only responds in ways that elicit the feelings and experiences we want.
- luckylion 3y ago
  On the commercial level at least AI-personalized interaction. You'll actually be able to have a 2-way relationship with Justin Bieber, and he'll chat with you and comment on your goofy pictures, and message you late at night when he can't sleep. Or rather when the AI has estimated that him sending you a message about not being able to sleep because he's anxious because of the album release will increase the chances of you buying that album. What will be the term? It's no longer just parasocial. Augmented Relationship? I believe you're spot on with regards to it being easier to get positive social interactions from a robot. I don't think that's a bad thing either. Many social dynamics are close to winner takes all, and especially among teens often work by singling out someone and mercilessly attacking them to induce group cohesion. Opting out of that hell and having a nice chat with a bot instead? That'll be an improvement for the victims at the very least. The same goes for loneliness, I'd rather people talk to robots than to not communicate at all when they have a desire to interact with others but no means to.

ZooCow 3y ago

>The swift expansion of generative AI is driving the transition from a Social Graph to a Content Graph. . . . The core principle that Facebook was built on is gradually crumbling. Arguably, the proliferation of cheap generative AI content will cause the value of that “fake” content to decrease. Users may begin to value the “real” content created by one’s friends. So Meta’s social graph may become increasingly valuable in the age of AI content.

jmacd 3y ago
Personally, I like that future. I just don't see any evidence that social graphs are becoming more relevant or even that they exist for many people onboarding on to the internet/apps for the first time. You can use Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and even Facebook now without creating any social graph at all. In fact, it seems like they prefer it that way.
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  Same here. People repeat ad nauseam that AI generated content is somehow of worse quality, without ever saying why. It's left as an undeniable fact. Some point at AI generated content being "fake", which is even more of a head scratcher. What can even be considered fake in that context? As long as it's not misleading, AI or human generated content should amount to the same. Once I'm consuming content from strangers, why would the creator matter?
  - DoughnutHole 3y ago
    Plenty of content derives its value from perceived authenticity. Content that is made by humans that is fictitious/constructed is perceived differently from content that is considered "real" - tweets from an American pretending to be in Ukraine would be perceived differently from tweets from someone actually in the warzone. A novel written by someone reflecting such an experience can also affect how we relate to it. There will certainly be some content where people won't care if it's AI generated or not (certain kinds of fiction, technical writing (provided the reliability issues are resolved), etc) - but a lot of content (fictional and non-fictional) derives it's value from reflecting in some way things that actually happened to actual people. Of course AI could still very much play a part in putting that content to paper, so to speak.