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Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over

• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• barbazoo 1y ago
  Did they finally dogfood their own shit and realize what a dumpster fire it is? :)
• codr7 1y ago
  Can't wait for Zucker to be over.
• ColinWright 1y ago
  From the article: "The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram." So they algorithmically force various other posts into your feed, and then observe that people are spending more time looking at that crap and less time actually connecting with real people and friends. Colour me unsurprised.
  • vseplet 1y ago
    Yes, they themselves are making more and more efforts to isolate each individual user. Facebook or VK - but the essence is the same
  • d13z 1y ago
    Very true and I think is part of their business model. A more lonely/isolated user is more likely to buy stuff to soothe themselves thus clicking in the advertisements they show.
    • troupo 1y ago
      Not just theirs. The recent Switch 2 ad with Paul Rudd replaced friends coming to join him with tiny images on screen, leaving him utterly alone. Or the Apple "Intelligence" ads that insist on never having any human-to-human communication (let an AI send that letter to mom) etc.
  • CharlieDigital 1y ago
    Yes, I read that quote in befuddlement. The only things I _want_ to see are my family and friends, but Zuck keeps shoving softcore porn into my feed.
    • mnky9800n 1y ago
      you could just delete your accounts. i find that my family and friends still seek out connection and interactions with me, as i do them, even without some sort of computational facilitator like instagram.
      • CharlieDigital 1y ago
        Easy Asian countries still appear to be heavy FB users even among Millennials. Most of my family is there so it is how I keep tabs on them.
        • grugagag 1y ago
          Don’t be surprised if your family gets radicalized with some idea they were against just a generation ago. Facebook and social media is so many bad things at the same time: propaganda, surveilance, consumerism, deception, addiction, and complete isolation from one another. I find social media responsible for a lot of modern ills in our society.
        • tboyd47 1y ago
          Net neutrality is not a thing there and telcos usually offer free GBs of FB/TikTok access.
    • chrisco255 1y ago
      IG has slowly become a gateway to OF hasn't it?
      • martin_a 1y ago
        My recommendations are _full_ of girls with very few clothes on doing sports, showcasing outfits and whatnot. IG is just broken at this point.
  • iamcalledrob 1y ago
    I'd bet that this is ultimately about people's preferences for consuming content, unfortunately. People will say they only want content from friends, just as they say they want to eat healthily. But the desire and the reality end up looking very different. People at large will spend time in whatever surfaces are the most engaging (~addictive), and if a platform like Facebook removed those "other posts", it's likely that people would just spend time on another platform instead -- TikTok, Reddit, YouTube Shorts, etc... It's like if the #1 grocery chain removed all the addictive stuff. No junk food, no soda, no alcohol. In the short term, people might consume less bad stuff. But in the long run, the #2 chain would take over, and we'd be back where we started. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's a very tricky problem to tackle at scale.
    • idle_zealot 1y ago
      > It's like if the #1 grocery chain removed all the addictive stuff. No junk food, no soda, no alcohol. In the short term, people might consume less bad stuff. But in the long run, the #2 chain would take over, and we'd be back where we started. What you are observing is a case where market signals result in obviously undesirable outcomes. The problem cannot be solved from within the market, the market's signaling needs a tweak. In the case of this example, a tweak to bring purchasing behavior inline with what people want to be buying in the long term, what they know is good for them. This could be achieved by mandating some form of friction in buying unhealthy food. Banning outright tends to go poorly, but friction has seen great success, like with smoking. I'm not sure exactly what this looks like for social media, or if it's even a necessary form of action (would banning surveillance-based advertising kill feed-driven platforms as a side effect?) but as you say, the market will not resolve this even if an industry leader tries to do the right thing.
    • rightbyte 1y ago
      There is a good reason I don't stock my freezer with microwave pizza.
    • GuB-42 1y ago
      > People will say they only want content from friends I actually don't want content from friends, at least not in the way Facebook presented it before becoming another TikTok. Facebook showed me the worst of my friends: polarizing political opinions, viral marketing, etc... These come from really nice people in real life, but it looks like Facebook is trying its best to make me hate my friends, it almost succeeded at one point. Thankfully, we met some time later, didn't talk about all the crap he posted on Facebook, it and was all fine. I'd rather hate on public personalities and other "influencers", at least, no friendship is harmed doing that. The only thing I miss about Facebook is the "event" part. If you want to invite some friends for a party, you could just create an event and because almost everyone was on Facebook, it made knowing who came and who didn't, who brings what, etc...
• ColinWright 1y ago
  $ URL="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zuckerberg-says-social-media-is-over https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zucke..." $ lynx -dump $URL | less
• throw_a_grenade 1y ago
  https://archive.is/UnNjh https://archive.is/UnNjh
• misja111 1y ago
  Does anybody know a good alternative to Facebook that doesn't force you to read its feed suggestions? I only have FB because I'm member of some groups where people post content that I'm interested in. I'm not interested in anything else. I find FB's constant stream of suggestions annoying as hell.
  • cjs_ac 1y ago
    If the only thing keeping you on Facebook is sources of specific content, you're looking for a platform that also has sources of that specific content. So it depends on what that content is, doesn't it?
  • dr_dshiv 1y ago
    Can operator be used to extract my social network data from fb?
  • mkayokay 1y ago
    Maybe there are subreddits or discord servers about your topics
  • ColinWright 1y ago
    I use Mastodon almost exclusively. It requires that you curate your connections, and discoverability is a known problem. But I get to see posts from the people I follow, and "boosts" of posts they think are worth seeing, and there are no ads, and no algorithms deciding what I should be seeing and filling my feed with them. I'm not saying it's a good alternative, but I'm finding it useful and refreshing.
    • nottorp 1y ago
      > discoverability is a known problem Is it? Are you sure centralized authorities for "discovery" are a good thing? After all, the "discovery" algorithm is making people move off FB to Mastodon...
      • ColinWright 1y ago
• CPLX 1y ago
  The relevant fact here is contained in this article's subheadline, which starts with: "During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial..." He's saying "social media is over" because if it is then his company, which dominates social media, does not have market power and thus is not a monopolist. The statement should be evaluated for what it actually is, the statement of an accused lawbreaker during a prosecution by the government.
  • FinnLobsien 1y ago
    I actually think he's correct and the gov's case doesn't really correspond to reality. It's actually true that social media as it was in the 2010s (when the Instagram and WA acq's happened) is basically over. They're no longer social, they're mostly just media: apps designed to be portals into consuming as much content as possible, by whomever (so you watch more ads). I'm not saying Meta is a great company or Zuck is a great person, but the idea that Instagram & Facebook compete with TikTok and YouTube is 100% true.
    • gessha 1y ago
      > gov's case doesn't really correspond to reality It does because if Facebook didn't monopolize the social media space maybe we would see innovation instead of blatant feature copying. Instead we have 3(4 if you consider Threads as one) platforms owned by the same company that push the same content - posts, reels, stories and actively try to unify and cannibalize each other. Breaking them down to individual companies will absolutely improve the market.
      • FinnLobsien 1y ago
        But how will it improve the market? By making a less addictive (read: less engaging) app that does social media "the old fashioned way" where you connect with friends an not much else? I love that intention, but it wouldn't be competitively viable. That's why yes, social media in that form is over. The reason Instagram and Facebook are valuable is because billions of people have accounts there and are habituated to go there in every spare second and look at whatever the screen serves them, whether that's Johnny from 7th grade math getting married or a snake being friends with a cat in rural Egypt.
• netsharc 1y ago
  I read this yesterday about Zuck. God, Zuck, what a cunt. It's a review of Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, which Meta tried to kill. It also mentions Zuck's motivation for learning Mandarin. Yes it's off-topic, but I think it's important to know when discussing Zuck/Meta: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf > There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). > At one point, Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais (he's repeatedly described as unwilling to consider any briefing note longer than a single text message). When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world. [...] > Meanwhile, Zuck is relentlessly pursuing Facebook's largest conceivable growth market: China. The only problem: China doesn't want Facebook. Zuck repeatedly tries to engineer meetings with Xi Jinping so he can plead his case in person. Xi is monumentally hostile to this idea. Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down. > After years of persistent nagging, lobbying, and groveling, Facebook's China execs start to make progress with a state apparatchik who dangles the possibility of Facebook entering China. Facebook promises this factotum the world – all the surveillance and censorship the Chinese state wants and more. [...] > According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users. [...] > Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China. However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
  • candiddevmike 1y ago
    Mark sounds like he negotiates as well as his "Art of the Deal" buddy Donald.
• pcarolan 1y ago
  I’ve noticed my kid (12) primarily uses group chats over social apps. Some of his chats have several dozen kids in them. It could be social media got so bad that the protocols became the best alternative. An old programmer like me sees a glimmer of hope in a sea of noise.
  • bognition 1y ago
    Group chat has always been the killer social app. 6 years ago I convinced my browser friends group to adopt Telegram and since then we’ve all abandoned FB, Instagram, etc… We have a ton of different threads all with different topics: kids, food, gardening, exercise, pets, memes, and a bunch of serious topic threads as well. It’s been incredibly effective at keeping us connected and engaged as we’ve all moved across the country and grow in an apart physically. The take away is; what people want from social media is to be connected with their real friends. However that isn’t as engaging as a random feed, so the companies push people away from that.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • foobarian 1y ago
      I'm in a similar group but using Discord. It seems that lack of advertising or any kind of algo feed is the common feature. Who runs your Telegram server?
      • robrtsql 1y ago
        Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted (unless I am misinformed..).
        • balamatom 1y ago
          Neither can Discord; its usage of "server" in particular is a weaponized misappropriation.
• comoloaf 1y ago
  The disproportionate amount of impact this one hit wonder had on civilization is astonishing.
  • HDThoreaun 1y ago
    Mark owns 3 of the most popular apps in existence. Hard to call him a one hit wonder even if his other hits were just recognizing which companies to buy
    • oofManBang 1y ago
      True. He hasn't actually built anything since the very first days.
    • CPLX 1y ago
      The other hits came from breaking laws against anti-competitive behavior by his company, which is the exact subject of the trial this article is based on.
    • knorker 1y ago
      Buying WhatsApp was about having the money and not being obviously blocked by courts. Not exactly galaxy brain to decide to buy a lottery ticket that's already declared the winning one. And not like they ruined it, I mean integrated/synergized it.
      • HDThoreaun 1y ago
        lots of people had money. Only mark bought whatsapp
        • fullshark 1y ago
          It was a defensive acquisition most likely and the app has pretty much not changed functionally one bit from when he acquired it. He had no vision for it clearly.
        • knorker 1y ago
• seydor 1y ago
  > Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram Such a liar. Of course users will watch whatever FB shoves in their eyes. That doesn't make it a preference. > Meta exhibited a graphic of a boxing ring showing the logos of Instagram, Facebook, and the various companies that Meta argues are competitors, including TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s iMessage, So his defense is that Facebook & Insta are just like youtube and tiktok. But Google is already under fire for divesting youtube, and tiktok is banned. Is that a good defense?
  • martopix 1y ago
    It depends on what you mean by "preference". If you show me a pic of a hot guy and the picture that a friend took while hiking, I'll probably look at the hot guy for longer, so one could claim I prefer it. But that doesn't mean I think it's better to spend my time like that.
  • mycatisblack 1y ago
    But … insta is owned by meta
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• coolThingsFirst 1y ago
  ofc they aren't, they show ads and they are focused on damaging the mental health of their users. Facebook is all slop nowadays. X is amazing thoughj.
  • grugagag 1y ago
    X is full of bots and forcefeed content.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • coolThingsFirst 1y ago
      You don't have to follow the bots. My feed is amazing tech content and people attempting to do crazy things. It's pretty awesome.
  • differentView 1y ago
    Name one amazing thing on X.
    • oofManBang 1y ago
      dril
      • cryptopian 1y ago
        Also on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/dril.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/dril.bsky.social
      • GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
        just buy the book, it's enough dril for a lifetime
    • alex1138 1y ago
      The fact that the old system would ban people for completely absurd reasons (including covid "misinformation" that all turned out to be true, but not exclusively that) and one thing Musk did do is put a stop to some of that I'm fully willing to listen to all the arguments that he's actually a horrible person but I don't see how people feel that part of it wasn't necessary to fix
• jgalt212 1y ago
  If social media is over, how does Meta's revenues keep climbing?
  • bamboozled 1y ago
    We're just scrolling random content now and not using "social media". Basically like watching tailored made, but really really shit quality TV. Instagram is massive for this.
• philipwhiuk 1y ago
  > Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, Yeah, because you filled the feed with garbage so obviously they don't get to see as much. Has 'percentage of time viewing content' declined?
  • martopix 1y ago
    Instagram actually used to be quite nice when it was pics of friends. Now I find it scary.
    • carefulfungi 1y ago
      IG was a social network that made me feel better after using it. It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos. It really sucks that every single platform is lured into the brain-attention hack of short form video and the optimization of attention quantity over interaction quality. All cycles repeat though - here’s hoping.
      • xtiansimon 1y ago
        > “It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.” Ha! This is the opposite of my experience. I feel Tumblr was superior platform for images and art on small phone for no other reason than you can easily pinch and zoom. I still prefer still images on the Tumblr platform, and my feed is filled with artists, designers, photographers and comic book covers. I never liked the experience of viewing stills on Instagram and only when my friend started producing small videos and another friend started sending me fishing meme videos, did I start engaging. Now I do spend some time each week in Instagram (same as YouTube shorts). The platform is perfect for sharing small instructional videos. My feed is full of motorcycle mechanics hacks, fly fishing lessons, fitness instructions, and camping knots—all to my recreational interests—I’d rather be fishing.
    • kodt 1y ago
      It seems to largely be a mirror for tik-tok these days.
• techterrier 1y ago
  I hope so, and things might go back to having nice platforms for niche verticals, im making one of my own, for wildlife photography now that insta hates us :D https://toggr.io https://toggr.io
• jmyeet 1y ago
  Another way to put this: Tiktok won. I agree that the days of posting "this is what I had for dinner" are over. Facebook is a cesspool of your weird uncle posting conspiracy theories. IG isn't a friends network anymore. It's for following influencers. Tiktok has a following tab but anecdotally I don't know anyone who uses it regularly and as a significant portion of time on the app. It's all about the FYP. And Tiktok's algorithm is far superior to any other in this one way: how quickly it updates. You watch a video about ducklings and within 2-3 videos you'll be seeing more videos about ducklings. Compare this to FB, IG and Youtube: it seems like the process of learning what you like is far less responsive, almost like there's a daily job that processes your activity and updates the recommendation engine to your new interest levels. Also, Tiktok is very good at localizing your interests. By this I mean, the other platforms will push big creators on you. On Tiktok it's a common occurrence to stumble on a video from someone I've never heard of who has 20M+ followers and this is the first video I've seen in 2+ years from them. On FB or IG, if someone has a massive following, you'll almost have to block them to avoid seeing them if it's something you have zero interest in. These companies like the whole friends connection because it's a network effect, keeping users on the platform. Without that, it's so incredibly easy to switch when the new thing comes along. I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence of how social media is failing users. People do want to communicate with a closed group. It's like they say: any organization app has to compete with emailing yourself. Any social media has to compete with a group chat.
  • FinnLobsien 1y ago
    I think you're right (though YT is crazy good and finding what you like imo). > I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence of how social media is failing users. People do want to communicate with a closed group. It's like they say: any organization app has to compete with emailing yourself. Any social media has to compete with a group chat. This is true, but the truth is that you spend maybe 1 hour (if that) in group chats, while many people spend 4-5 hours a day on Tiktok/IGReels. So the revealed preference is that yes, they want to be connected to their friends via group chats, but they want mindless entertainment a lot more.
• incomingpain 1y ago
  I only have facebook for messenger, but lets look at my feed now. 1 sentence question from a page i dont follow. Funny joke from a page i dont follow. 3dmakerpro ad swimsuit picture of sister in law. 3d ai studio ad anti trans post from page i dont follow polymaker ad Reels? polymaker ad picture from highschool friend science/astronomy post from page i dont follow planetarium ad Less than 20% are anything I might even be interested in; the rest are pushed. I havent 3d printed in quite awhile. Astronomy is cool i guess. SOCIAL media is over if you're on facebook.
• 3np 1y ago
  So briefly, Zuck is arguing that the social media which was Facebooks main business of 2010s no longer exists and that Facebook has now pivoted to generic content consumption, competing with YouTube, TikTok, Reddit etc. The article says FTC is in a bind here. IMO it's veey simple: Yes, FB shifted their focus and are now a content hose. They still have monopoly on some market(s) - not where they are competing with e.g. TikTok. Local events, marketplace, genuine personal social networks. That doesn't mean that they don't also compete with TikTok elsewhere, where further market consolidation could be a concern.
  • Workaccount2 1y ago
    Anyone who uses instagram should be abundantly aware of this. The default behavior of the app became "Serve you all content we think you would like, in the order we think you would enjoy it". This pretty much means "You may or may not see the content of channels/people you specifically follow". The app went from just showing you a stream of posts from people you follow, to just showing you a stream of posts it thinks you would like.
    • alabastervlog 1y ago
      I use it exclusively for announcements from certain brands with e.g. seasonal rotations or sales (small shops, especially, are often way more consistent about updating one or more social media accounts, often Insta, than their website, if they even have a website) and it's such a pain in the ass for that reason. I don't trust ads or their "algorithm" to promote quality (I reckon they're more likely to promote rip-offs and fly-by-night operations) so I super don't care about anything else they want to show me, even if it's directly related to the kinds of brands I'm following. I deliberately do not do new-stuff discovery in the app, because they have incentives to screw me. The only thing I want out of it is to see the posts made by the accounts I'm following, since the last time I checked. That's 100% of the functionality I care about, and the app goes out of its way to not deliver it.
      • 3np 1y ago
        And the shops are on FB/Insta/WhatsApp only because that's where users are. Classic entrenchment of network effects is a two-sided matketplace.
• KingLancelot 1y ago
  [dead]
• Pxtl 1y ago
  Them grapes are mighty sour, eh? Social media is just fine. Yes, paying people to post content has created a wider divide between content-creators and social follows, but social follows still exist. It's just Facebook that is over.
• geff82 1y ago
  So there is now a new possbility to create a new social network, retro style in a sense.
  • mikez302 1y ago
    Kind of on that subject: https://directing.attention.to/p/why-is-no-one-making-a-new-version https://directing.attention.to/p/why-is-no-one-making-a-new-...
• ubermonkey 1y ago
  Well, thank god for that.
• corobo 1y ago
  I've just loaded my Facebook home page. 6 'pages' (I know it's infinite scroll but you know what I mean) before I saw an actual friend's post, and it was from 2 weeks ago. Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because there's no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm shite anymore? E: haha, the rest of the comments say likewise. Redundant comment but +1 anecdata. Also for what it's worth I've checked a few profiles and yeah friends are still posting, I'm just not seeing it. I guess I scrolled past some post about something too quickly and now Facebook thinks I don't care? Maybe the algorithm is just broken lol.
  • esperent 1y ago
    It's because everyone moved over to using Whatsapp groups instead, for the actual social stuff, and TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for the gratuitous lusting after other people's perfect lives stuff. It used to be that we looked at the perfect shared moments from our friends lives, but this didn't make us feel bad enough so we outsourced it to models backed by teams of experts so that we can compare ourselves to impossible highs and thusly feel only the most exquisite of lows when comparing our own real and therefore often shitty lives.
    • aprilthird2021 1y ago
      This is the right answer, and it's something I believe Meta has also said publicly, that messaging apps have become the family and friends connection machine as people shifted to using mobile phones and messaging became free and able to handle multimedia.
    • zpeti 1y ago
      Yes this is the key point, and I really don't think Zuckerberg is to blame for this. It's just how the market moved. Before tiktok Zuck did actually try and move facebook back to friend territory, but tiktok became such a threat to time spent online they had to shift to "engaging content" And everyone is in whatsapp groups anyway for personal content... When Elon bought twitter he bought back the "following" tab on twitter, and frankly, I used it a few times then stopped. It was just boring. Shifting through pages and pages of random content from people I follow is just too much energy. The fact is, personalised feeds do just work. We hate this, but it works. It's a bit like sugar, I know it has zero benefit in 2025 eating sugar, but I just do it, because its nice and it works, and it feels good. My brain knows its bad for me, but I just can't resist. Now you can blame restaurants and ice cream shops for this, but the fact is, if the particular ice cream shop I buy ice cream at closed, or offered less sugar alternatives, it would in fact lose market share. And of course, there are sugar free ice cream shops, but their market share will never be that big. If facebook wanted to actually stay on top, they were forced into this.
• ksec 1y ago
  This also means it is now the time to reinvent Social Media.
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Or we can let it become a relic.
    • fullshark 1y ago
      I think this will be the case, part of the charm of early social media was everyone was authentically oversharing. That got people in trouble or they embarrassed themselves. That's why snapchat with automatically deleted posts got a foothold, there wasn't a permanent record of your embarrassing fuck ups. That will not happen again, we won't be so collectively naive and any new social media will be taken over by PR + brand advertisers almost immediately. Just look at how threads started.
  • jdross 1y ago
    In my life this has been replaced by group chats on WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal etc
  • dgimla20 1y ago
    Why bother reinventing it? The only social apps that have ever been needed are basic chat apps (group or private) and tools for meeting up in real life (such as group chats). Everything else has always only ever been fluff.
  • jajko 1y ago
    You mean make them as they originally were? Sure, but better learn lessons about how FB ended up such a shithole while still massively used, or you will just repeat that lesson (while massively less successful due to initial momentum)
• TomMasz 1y ago
  Says the man who killed it. Has he even used his own product in recent years?
• NullPointerWin 1y ago
  So Meta basically turned Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content' and now claims that's what users wanted? That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy and then saying 'See? Nobody wants real meals anymore!'
  • gus_massa 1y ago
    There are icecream stores, where you can seat and take icecream and most of the time also cofee or cake. I've seen candy stores, but they don't have chairs and tables.
  • curiousllama 1y ago
    I think it's more like a restaurant offering both candy and burgers. When candy sales outpace burgers, they're naturally going to invest more in candy. Eventually, they start to compete more with Hershey's than McDonald's. Businesses evolve or die, no?
    • diggan 1y ago
      > Businesses evolve or die, no? What I constantly see, are businesses that would be just fine continue doing the same, but die instead because they tried to evolve into something and alienated all their existing customers/users and couldn't attract new ones because what they evolved into made no sense. But no, businesses want to take over the world (or at least have a large slice from the pie) so they "evolve" no matter what. Case in point: Facebook.
      • pixl97 1y ago
        Numbers must go up. In the stock market anything steady state is dead.
        • zelphirkalt 1y ago
          Infinite growth!!! How silly we still are as a species. The more of us there are, the stupider we act, and we don't even do anything to prevent it, we just let the consequences of our own stupidity roll over us one day, when they can no longer be stopped.
• adverbly 1y ago
  Does this confirm at least part of the dead internet theory?
  • timbit42 1y ago
    The internet's not dead. The web maybe.
• blibble 1y ago
  you know what this means he has plans to start injecting "feed content" (eg shrimp jesus) into whatsapp group chats
• curiousllama 1y ago
  There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down. The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken. Social Media hasn't died - it just moved to group chats. Everything I care about gets posted there. Honestly, I would love a running Feed of my group chats. Scan my inbox, predict what's most engaging, and give me a way to respond directly.
  • dataflow 1y ago
    > There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down. The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. Is that really the only problem? How many taps/clicks do you need to get there? Can you make it the default? And how obvious is it that it actually exists?
    • yason 1y ago
      My facebook bookmark takes me to https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr I still see other content, even there, but it's still somehow manageable. I run out of updates very quickly though whereas I'd like to just start seeing older posts from friends that I've seen already.
      • dataflow 1y ago
        This just opens the app for me on mobile. I guess on desktop it might do something.
    • voxic11 1y ago
      It takes 2 clicks and you can just bookmark it. https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
      • alanbernstein 1y ago
        For fb app users (most) I think bookmarks are irrelevant.
• grahar64 1y ago
  Write an algorithm to maximize in app time, so he ended up building a content media platform not a social one. If the goal is to show as many ads as possible, you will always end up with more media than social
  • frollogaston 1y ago
    Not if they think long-term they should focus on retaining users so they can be shown ads forever.
• MOARDONGZPLZ 1y ago
  Ok I am going to click on FB for the first time in a month or so. Here we go, not expecting much. I have two notifications, one is about a birthday today, one is about someone I don't know asking me to like an AirBnB page. Let's go to the feed. 1. Sales thing from some group 2. A Boomer looking "reel" of a classic car (I don't like classic cars and nothing I have done suggests I do) 3. People You May Know (I've seen these same suggestions over the last several years, still don't know any of them and still don't want to connect) 4. Friend post, death in the family 5-9. Also friend posts 10. That exact same Boomer reel again 11-15. Friend posts or people I follow 16. "Memes Daily," which I don't follow so must be an ad 17-20. Friend posts and a group post from a group I follow Overall, this really isn't bad, surprisingly. At one point, which is when I stopped checking it for months at a time, it was literally post after post after post from people I don't follow of the most garbage AI generated slop, like the sloppiest you can imagine. For example, the AI generated ones with the wounded soldier and a birthday cake with some message like "it's my birthday and no one came" level of slop, or an AI generated lady with an AI generated picture saying something like "this is my first painting but no one liked it," each with tens of thousands of likes and Boomers commenting things like "It's ok I am giving you a like happy birthday," just maddeningly ad infinitum and nausea-inducing. So, maybe they fixed the above. Still, I can live without Facebook so am not planning on going back.
  • zpeti 1y ago
    This is quite an interesting post. I would guess that facebook does actually show you friend content if that's what you engage with. After all their single metric of success is ads viewed on the platform, which is the same as time spent. So theoretically, everyone here complaining about not seeing friend content should probably try and train the algorithm to show more of it. Or to be an asshole about it - if you see generic clickbait content on facebook, its your fault. You engage with it...
    • alex1138 1y ago
      Which is a horrible way to do it Ok, let's say you're my friend on Facebook. I care about you (I haven't explicitly unfollowed you) enough that I want you in my feed Do I now click Like on every post you make? Is that how I get the "privilege" of seeing more of you? Some people may dislike Likes because it leads to narcissism, and ok, fine, whatever. But nobody knows what it does and how it influences what you see (Liking certain pages has in the past auto subscribed you to them) and I consider that to be broken behavior
• reverendsteveii 1y ago
  >Meta’s counter-argument is, in a sense, that social media per se doesn’t exist now in the way that it did in the twenty-tens, and that what the company’s platforms are now known for—the digital consumption of all kinds of content—has become so widespread that no single company or platform can be said to monopolize it. Sure, and as long as people are making things Ford can't monopolize the auto industry. As long as people talk to each other Bell can't monopolize telephones. This thing where people just generalize the conversation into meaninglessness is so frustrating. Everyone knows what social media is and does until it's time to do something about it then all of a sudden like a Roman salute no one actually has any idea what this is and really telephones are also social media but also social media doesn't exist anymore at all and also some social media is an existential threat to democracy and human rights but not the one that I own which, again, doesn't exist but still somehow makes me enough money that I can put the president on layaway. I generally trend away from authoritarianism but I can see the appeal in just saying "Jesus Christ shut up we all know what's actually going on here" and just doing something
• atum47 1y ago
  Don't remember the last time I saw a post from a friend in Instagram. It is just random shit and ads
  • Ajedi32 1y ago
    You can turn off suggested posts in settings, but Instragram flagrantly turns them back on after 30 days.
    • atum47 1y ago
      Haven't seen that one, I'll try it. Thanks
    • atum47 1y ago
      That is somewhat new, I don't remember ever seeing that before. Thanks
• osigurdson 1y ago
  All we ever really wanted was to watch nasty but injury-free car crash videos all day. Even Linked-in is getting into the game these days.
  • selimthegrim 1y ago
    Maybe JG Ballard’s rotating corpse can power a data center
    • acureau 1y ago
      Completely off topic, but I stumbled across a comment you made about commuting from NO in the monthly hiring thread. I checked your profile and you're the only other user in our state who registered on the meet.hn platform. So, hello HN neighbor!
      • selimthegrim 1y ago
        There are at least three others on here that I know of who live in NOLA and one in BR.
• midzer 1y ago
  Long live the Fediverse!
• fredgrott 1y ago
  actually its alive and well on bluesky...my profile: https://bsky.app/profile/fredgrott.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/fredgrott.bsky.social join me on on bluesky
• glacier5674 1y ago
  [dead]
• throwaway984393 1y ago
  [dead]
• pmdr 1y ago
  Interpersonal social media is dead thanks to Zuck and his companies, sacrificed on the altar of endless growth. His objective now is to profit from keeping people addicted to slop. I wonder if he ever had a moment of self-reflection to understand how far he veered off the path he'd started on. If he ever considered himself a hacker, then I doubt that all he wanted to build was slop machines.
• throw0101d 1y ago
  Someone made the observation that the problems started when things changed from social networking (family/friend) to social media. From actually keeping up with people to 'keeping up' with content.
  • Frieren 1y ago
    Yes. Social sites had a card blanche to publish anything without consequences because it was user-generated content. Social sites used that power to publish their own stuff under the same protection. That has broken the system. Social media sites are 100% responsible for all the misinformation, scams, and hate that they publish or promote. And they should be legally accountable for it. "We are not accountable because the users are the ones posting the media"... but we post and promote whatever we want is a terrible way for the world to work.
  • jt2190 1y ago
    Turns out most people don’t have a friends and family group that can generate exciting content at a rate that most people want. The platforms oblige this with “reshares” and “you may also like” content, and eventually everyone’s like “who gives a s*t about aunt Millie’s cupcake recipe, check out this dude trying to skateboard off of the Eiffel Tower!”
    • LeifCarrotson 1y ago
      A rate people want, or advertisers? I'm sure I could (indeed, I do) get pertinent updates from actual friends and family with <10 minutes of checking messages, voicemails, and emails per day. I wouldn't mind increasing that to 15 minutes if it meant I got a few less relevant but still interesting updates about their lives. But that's way, way under the daily minutes spent by most people on TikTok. And if I wanted/my addiction demanded another hit of that "Oh, neat!" buzz when I'd just put my phone down 10 minutes ago, there's little chance that anyone in my small circle would have posted a single thing in the interval. I don't spend nearly enough time in my group chats to justify Facebook's valuation. And there are no ads (yet, I'm sure they're working on it) in those chats.
    • 1y ago
• MattDaEskimo 1y ago
  Social Media suffered the same fate as all companies. A constant, relentless, unnatural pursuit of growth by stripping all humanity and focusing on numbers. Social Media has turned into an unhealthy addiction
• Nckpz 1y ago
  I think it just took the world a while to realize that social media is a replacement for cable TV and magazines, not a replacement for communication tools. Looking at old high school classmates' lunch and vacation photos was never good content, never good for business or mental health, and higher quality communication works fine with texting + Discord.
• nickdothutton 1y ago
  Social media has now reached a state of equilibrium with normal society.
• everdrive 1y ago
  Zuckerberg is one of the architects responsible for its demise, so he'd be well-placed to declare its death. Early facebook really was an amazing product; all you saw was content from your friends, no one shared links, it was just a way to communicate with each other. Importantly, very few people were on facebook, which helped people be much, much more candid on the platform. Zuckerberg killed both of these features -- pushing garbage and ads, pushing the feed, and populating facebook as thoroughly as possible. I looked at my early feed (~2008?) years ago, and it was actually just friends catching up and girls flirting with me. I wasn't even that popular. To them, it was just another chat venue. They'd never consider the same these days. The platform is a cesspool.
• thrownaway561 1y ago
  Thank God!!!
• ycombinatornews 1y ago
  Maybe should have not done 2016 Facebook elections? Ads all the way, almost no posts from my network, and bunch of unmoderated, Onlyfans promoting reels. Thanks.
• synergy20 1y ago
  it's over for me 10 years ago, I spent 10 minutes annually on facebook, life is good without it.
  • RyanOD 1y ago
    Same. I closed my FB account 16 years ago and I've never once missed it.
• Fokamul 1y ago
  In my country (CZ) Facebook is now only used by people 40+ for Russian/Anti-government propaganda (and it works sadly)
  • asdfman123 1y ago
    Same in the US for the most part
• havaloc 1y ago
  I support a small group of elderly people on the side. At least once of week they land on a Facebook video which then leads to the "your phone has 78 viruses" scare ad. I tell them to stop using Facebook and they look at me like I'm crazy. One of them even said, if I turn off my phone when I get that scary ad, does that keep me safe?
• jjulius 1y ago
  >During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram. I find this very interesting. Yes, there has been a decline, but even before this decline, this data suggests that users "viewing content posted by 'friends'" was only at 22% on FB and 11% on IG. That feels incredibly low to begin with to me, and suggests that it already wasn't about friends. I wonder what the longer trend looks like.
  • fourteenfour 1y ago
    How can they honestly present a chart like that when they are the ones serving the content on the feeds?
    • jjulius 1y ago
      I don't expect them to be honest at all. But if we're operating under the assumption that they can't be trusted to be honest with their data, it makes it even weirder to me that they would start with numbers that already showed such low friend-focused usage when trying to make their point.
      • imhoguy 1y ago
        We can assume the data is both made up and honest – they tuned feed algos to show more non-friend content and these results reflect that exactly.
• Hilift 1y ago
  META creates $70 billion per year in NET profit. Mark Zuckerberg is the best business person in the history of business. He's an angel to investors and advertisers. Vanguard has 43 million shares of TSLA. They lost $10 billion in stock depreciation since peak in December 2024. Vanguard has 191 million shares of META valued at $101 billion. No one is losing money on META.
  • DudeOpotomus 1y ago
    Conflating luck and timing to skill and intent is a hell of a way to lionize someone. One man's wealth is not a measure of skill, it's a measure of greed.
  • mrweasel 1y ago
    Both META and TSLA are magic stocks, completely unaffected by reality. Zuckerberg says social media is over... so why isn't his stock tanking? Meta is a social media company! Tesla reports huge dips in sales, nothing... sure it's down since December, but it's still up year to year.
  • GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    this is a baffling and terrifying worldview/basis of principle.
• ea550ff70a 1y ago
  [flagged]
• the_af 1y ago
  A lot of people here are arguing there's no use for Facebook anymore, save maybe for Marketplace. But there's another big reason to use it, and it's how I use it primarily: special interest groups, such as hobbies, communities around games, etc. They used to be hosted in forums and bulletin boards in the olden times, but there was a big migration to Facebook (even though Facebook was objectively worse for keeping track of conversations) and that was that. If you wanted to keep in touch with those communities, you had to be on Facebook. Now there's another migration going on for hobby/game groups, one I won't follow this time: Discord. Discord stresses me out, real-time chat is all about being constantly connected and FOMO. And, to me, the UX sucks even more than Facebook's, which is saying a lot! Not for me.
  • cruffle_duffle 1y ago
    I really never understood discord. The last thing on earth that would be healthy for me is yet another real-time chat program. Yet maybe I’m missing out avoiding it.
• JoeAltmaier 1y ago
  We still need the 'organization' part. Clubs and social circles moved from blogs etc to Facebook because it was easy. Room for a startup? A simple club hosting site, that does substantially what you get from a facebook club page. Maybe even a tool to scrape facebook and automatically create your ClubPage entry painlessly?
  • __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    https://mobilizon.org/ https://mobilizon.org/ ?
  • DudeOpotomus 1y ago
    Apple could / should be the one to tackle this by allowing iPhone iOS users the ability to create their own social circles. They dipped their toes into this a little with Invites. Do we really need a central server to manage our friends and our circles? Decentralize the whole thing and it neuters FB and the ad surveillance universe.
  • belthesar 1y ago
    The key thing that Facebook Groups and Pages solved was the network effect. If you were on Facebook already, you could join a group or a page without signing up users. If a post from a Group or a Page came in, it came in through a common notification platform. It was the place where people already were, and if they weren't there, eventually there was enough pressure to join because "everyone else was already there". And all of this was good for Facebook, because it was at the time when they were trying to capture more users, which brought more eyeballs to ads. I think any startup trying to solve this problem is going to have a really hard time because it will ultimately be external to the platforms where people already are, and user behavior has shown that they're inherently sticky to platforms. I wish it wasn't this way, because I think it'd be great for folks to be able to do this on their own.
    • JoeAltmaier 1y ago
      Aren't we positing that Facebook is no longer sticky? What solution is there now.
• dedlockdave 1y ago
  And we killed it
• isoprophlex 1y ago
  Zucchini my boy, it's over because you killed it
• nixass 1y ago
  He tells it like its bad thing. Anyway.. I was listening Acquired podcast on Meta yesterday (yes, the whole 6h30min thing) and what we have today is so far away and different than what he was preaching 15-20 years ago and so distanced to original idea of connecting with people you know and you want to be connected with. Don't even want to talk about ads..
• balamatom 1y ago
  Good fucking riddance. Now do smartphones.
• delfugal 1y ago
  sudo nano /etc/hosts page down, add 0.0.0.0 facebook.com 0.0.0.0 linkedin.com 0.0.0.0 adobe.com Ctrl z Life is so much better now.
  • latexr 1y ago
    No longer works if you use Safari on macOS.
    • tap-snap-or-nap 1y ago
      Perhaps use Little Snitch or Lulu
  • samizdette 1y ago
    Why adobe?
• DarkNova6 1y ago
  Social media has died many years ago. What we are left with is corporate media.
• scyzoryk_xyz 1y ago
  Ack, I'm getting the sense that the author of this article is getting caught up in the argumentation prepared for use in the trial. Of course the Meta people are going to do everything they can to get everyone feeling it's like this to shake at the logical foundations of the case. The F.T.C. is not chasing an old problem. A case like this may serve as precedent.
• _7acn 1y ago
  GitHub and X are the only social media I respect :-)
• partiallypro 1y ago
  This is kind of bad, because it makes it very hard to reach people for social events. I run a fan group for a European soccer team and it's very hard to do outreach because no one is really checking social media for that type of thing. Even meet-ups in general are difficult. There is of course meetup.com but it's niche and expensive.
• bk496 1y ago
  some say it never started
• trbleclef 1y ago
  Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Are* Over
• JamesLeonis 1y ago
  > The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram. There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in Zero To One is Google disguising its online advertising market by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both online and offline. I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news, lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0] [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony. Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate on what it values. [0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-developers-help-us-destroy-193722549.html?guccounter=1 https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-developers-help-us-destr... [1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/facebook-secretly-spied-on-snapchat-usage-to-confuse-advertisers-court-docs-say/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/facebook-secretl... [2]: https://www.wired.com/story/copycat-how-facebook-tried-to-squash-snapchat/ https://www.wired.com/story/copycat-how-facebook-tried-to-sq... [3]: https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2018/12/6/18127980/facebook-uk-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2018/12/6/18127980/...
  • kmeisthax 1y ago
    In other words, "We can't be a monopoly, we haven't even taken over the government yet"
• kstrauser 1y ago
  Hey, it's my day to be the Mastodon Guy! But for real, small, federated social media is so freaking pleasant compared to Facebook and friends. No, the kid from my 8th grade soccer team isn't on it, nor is my next door neighbor, or my kid's nanny from 3 moves ago, but that's fine. Sure, I wish more of the authors I like to follow were on there, and it's not a great way to call out megacorp support teams when something breaks horribly, but I'm completely OK with that tradeoff. What I get instead is a collection of small, resilient servers where the feed algorithm is FIFO, there's no advertising, and moderation is local.[0] It's my favorite parts of the old Internet before things got centralized and enshittificated. I hope megasocial media is over. I doubt it, but a guy can wish. That doesn't mean all social media is dead. [0]Mastodon doesn't have moderation. Individual servers do. That's the way it should be.
  • WorldPeas 1y ago
    I just wish an owner of a journal of record like Condé Nast would "adopt" a Mastadon instance, they already have Reddit but that's so impersonal.
    • kstrauser 1y ago
      I agree. There's probably money to be made running an enterprise Mastodon hosting service.
    • krapp 1y ago
      I have seen some journalists and orgs move to Mastodon but the culture being what it is, people will be hostile to anything that looks like an attempt by corporate entities or propaganda outlets to capture and commoditize the platform. And honestly, I'm fine with it. Corporate media is a cesspool. It can all choke on its own fetid stench and die for all I care.
      • WorldPeas 1y ago
        right, but save for.. threads federation... there's been trepidation in my more normal friends to use anything other than the shibboleth. I'd rather an incompetent like Nast manage the platform than a company like Facebook that knows all too well how to leverage their scale. Anyways they're one of the better ones.. from what I've been told.
• WorldPeas 1y ago
  I've always wished an owner of a journal of record like Condé Nast opened a mastadon instance or the like. I know they already have Reddit but that's not personal media
• joduplessis 1y ago
  I'm surprised about the amount of comments here berating FB & social media companies. You have the option to deactivate your account and stop using it, to "vote with your feet". Meta is a company and will maximise revenue & engagement - what's actually more worrying is that people still use these sites and doom scroll their nights away (generally speaking of course).
• blueprint 1y ago
  yeah - he killed it when was the last time you were social on Facebook? and maybe threads would count if it weren't 95% filled with bots and mentally ill weirdos pretending to know quantum physics (and how dare you judge them for doing so; whether or not they know quantum mechanics is like totally subjective and your frequency is clearly too low). so either social is not dead or he killed it
• dehrmann 1y ago
  He's a bit late to this conclusion. For a while, Facebook supposedly didn't see TikTok as competition because it isn't social, but Facebook and Instagram have been entertainment feeds for a decade, now.
  • mxfh 1y ago
    So it Twitter now, breaking news only bubble up after 6 hours after all the engagement slop has been served.
• amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  By "over" he means it isn't going to make him billions of more dollars.
• tartoran 1y ago
  I think I know why TikTok made it to the top of social media. They did not coerce weird corporate rules and let the users have what they wanted. Simple as that. Grown organically. That does not mean it isn't bad for the users in the long run but at least they get what they want.
• k__ 1y ago
  Interesting how quickly social media started resembling mass media.
• erelong 1y ago
  tiktok is thriving
• slicktux 1y ago
  I recall having Facebook and always had that feeling the algorithm was messing with me and my posts… Come to find out a few years later it was exposed that Facebook was conducting mass social experiments to users and their comments and posts. Shadow banning and I just never liked the feed…it was not organic.
• AlienRobot 1y ago
  I checked Facebook the other day. Every post is a vertical video. I'm on desktop. If I wanted to see vertical videos, I'd go to TikTok.
• Havoc 1y ago
  >“the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” What a unique way of saying algorithmically maximizing addiction to doomscrolling!
• kranke155 1y ago
  Grim Reaper proclaims he’s done his job?
• bdangubic 1y ago
  if social media is over why is anyone still on facebook? to watch ads? (asking for a friend, I got off Facebook long time ago...) :)
• tantalor 1y ago
  Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video. March 20, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY
• torginus 1y ago
  At this point he's just saying what he thinks is expedient in order to avoid the government breaking up his companies. It's why the whole Meta thing exists - they wanted to be seen as a VR company who has a side hustle in social media to avoid being classified as a monopoly. That argument has failed so now he's asserting that social media doesn't matter.
• hcarvalhoalves 1y ago
  I login to Instagram and I see: - Ad promoting "investment" platform with deep fakes of personalities - Ad from radicalized politician promoting hate speech - Semi-naked girl promoting their "other" social media (OnlyFans) - Ad disguised as content of some dude promoting a random restaurant I agree with Zuckerberg, it's not social media anymore. I don't see content from any friend, only scams.
  • arnaudsm 1y ago
    I've noticed that every single website that I enjoy on the internet is non-profit. Did we optimize for the wrong metric since the beginning?
    • hcarvalhoalves 1y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
      • alok-g 1y ago
        Loved reading this. Thanks for sharing.
  • frollogaston 1y ago
    My YouTube account had recommendations for music because that's what I use it for. When they launched YT Shorts (basically their version of TikTok), that section was 75% thirst trap videos, albeit still music-related. Like "cool violin solo" but played by a girl sorta pointing the camera up her skirt in the thumbnail. I never watched those or anything similar, but I guess they knew I was male and wanted to hook me.
    • selfhoster 1y ago
      I dislike Shorts with a passion.
      • 1y ago
• bcrosby95 1y ago
  Social Media is over because the quest for infinite growth killed it.
• taco_emoji 1y ago
  Yeah I wish
• nothrowaways 1y ago
  Yeah, let's do metaverse lol
• aaroninsf 1y ago
  Zuckerberg saying this is more or less perfectly analogous to Jared Leto's character killing the nascent replicant in the Blade Runner sequel. The more you consider this assertion, the more true it will appear.
• charliebwrites 1y ago
  What I wonder is did everyone stop posting because there was too much content spam or did they fill the newsfeed with content because everyone stopped posting?
• Hansenq 1y ago
  I'm surprised most commenters haven't mentioned that the presence of Tiktok as the biggest reason why Facebook was pushed into this direction. Ben Thompson of Stratechery did a great deep dive into Facebook's Three Eras here (https://stratechery.com/2025/meta-v-ftc-the-three-facebook-eras-video-slop-and-market-forces/ https://stratechery.com/2025/meta-v-ftc-the-three-facebook-e...). Essentially, Meta could afford to prioritize positive well-being when it had a monopoly on social media, but as soon as Tiktok came onto the scene and Meta started bleeding users to it, they had to respond. Now, everyone (Instagram, Youtube Shorts, Twitter, LinkedIn) is copying the model of vertical auto-scrolling short-form videos, because it's a battle for attention. What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its users leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything? Though it's terrible that everything is now a short form addicting video platform, I understand the logic behind why the company did what they did (and why everyone is building this). People say they want real connection, but really, they just want to be entertained.
  • alex1138 1y ago
    People want connection too and Facebook won't give it to them Maybe the reason people were leaving for TT is they were doing this kind of thing for years already https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
  • ViktorRay 1y ago
    Reminds me of that Netflix documentary. The Social Dilemma. “Race to the bottom of the brain stem”
  • chasing 1y ago
    > What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its users leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything? Though it's terrible that everything is now a short form addicting video platform, I understand the logic behind why the company did what they did (and why everyone is building this). People say they want real connection, but really, they just want to be entertained. Innovate. It’s not necessary to turn your company into a toxic disaster to compete.
• malthaus 1y ago
  isn't that the same guy who said the metaverse is the next big thing?
• jaco6 1y ago
  [dead]
• _hao 1y ago
  I've been of the opinion for the last 5 years at least, that if Meta and all of it's associated products and platforms suddenly disappear from existence, nothing of actual value will be lost. There are better competitors for everything they do. I don't think I can pinpoint one single unique thing about Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp at this stage in time. Everything they do is done or executed better by a competitor. They had some sort of advantage in the late 2000's and early 2010's, but that's it. I'm not optimistic for their future and relevance.
  • pesus 1y ago
    I would go even further and say the world would be a significantly better place without any Meta products (and most other social media). At this point, they are a considerable net negative on society as a whole.
  • olejorgenb 1y ago
    What's a good event planner/organizer?
  • tmpz22 1y ago
    I'll reach for it - Meta increases consumer spending and has enabled a lot of small businesses to profit during the previous economic booms. Yeah they were drop shipping products from China using the de minimis exception, or hocking worthless supplements, or promoting influencer products that are no different then the generic but costs twice as much, but a lot of people made a living off an ecosystem that arguably would not exist without Meta. Further the success of Facebook was arguably the biggest contributor to startup culture ever - I would expect we'd have seen a fraction of the growth in VC if Facebook had never come to pass. Groups, WhatsApp, etc, would be replaced overnight with, at least initially, a worse version. More hacking, probably worse moderation at scale, worse accessibility, etc. Meta also gentrified East Palo Alto, and the Zuckerbergs now own a substantial amount of real estate in Redwood City and elsewhere. They've made a big footprint on the peninsula that deserves credit for the now $8 lattes in my hometown.
  • davidjade 1y ago
    For better or worst, Fb has become the de facto place for cruising sailors to share information about different regions of the world. Tips, alerts, advice, questions, etc. I sail the world and there is no other place for groups quite as good for finding the information we need. There’s a niche group for every area around the world full of people sharing advice and answering questions. The good groups have great moderation and quality content.
• dhruv3006 1y ago
  social media just got started.
• flkiwi 1y ago
  It's astonishing to read this and see not only Zuckerberg but also the article itself present this as something that happened to Facebook/Meta rather than something driven by Facebook/Meta to satisfy Wall Street. Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today: engagement bait, consumption of content creator and advertiser content, etc. resulted from purposeful business strategic decisions to pivot from a place to learn your first cousin remarried to a place where advertisers and monetization rule. Towards the end of my time on Facebook, I never, ever saw content from family, including from my own sister documenting her terminal disease. But I sure did see lots of car dealerships from states I don't live in, news stories about people with two heads, and nubile young women surely-SURELY-attractive to a middle aged man like me.
  • 1970-01-01 1y ago
    >Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today...resulted from purposeful business strategic decisions I disagree about the actual mechanism at play. It is a cart before the horse situation. Yes, it was driven by business, but that business was being driven by Web 2.0, which was being driven by the natural evolution of communication technology.
    • lukev 1y ago
      Let's follow this train of thought. What are the selective pressures on the "natural evolution of communications technology?"
      • tux1968 1y ago
        Consumers willing to engage in any specific tech, enough to trigger network effects.
        • lukev 1y ago
          So you think consumer engagement ultimately drives what types of tech that companies invest in building? I can see that argument. Why do companies want consumer engagement to start with?
• mac3n 1y ago
  and the new thing is the metaverse, right?
• gilbetron 1y ago
  Broadcast social media is so odd to me now. It feels like walking to the center of town and shouting about your life to everyone. I go to Facebook once a week or so, scroll for about a minute, then close it. It was a novel experience reconnecting with people from my past, but in the end, I just found out too much about people, realized it may be best to let people in your past stay there, and that comparison is truly the thief of joy. Now, I just like watching interesting people talk about interesting things. I get that here, somewhat, reddit but lately only in a very narrow way, tik tok as long as I carefully maintain the algorithm, and youtube. All of them I have to be careful with, otherwise I can get pulled into hellholes of outrage bait. And I'm really, really wary of engaging in dicussions anymore. HN is about the only place, and even then I often regret it. One time, on reddit, there was a discussion about dishwashers, and how people needed to clean food off dishes, otherwise it would fill up the filters. I posted a link to a user manual showing that it was common to hook up the dishwasher to the garbage disposal to take care of that. I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual. Even here, half the time I post, I feel I will end up regretting it.
  • disqard 1y ago
    I've had the same mental model as you (shouting in a town square) and that's why Twitter always seemed weird to me. Lately, I've found that another mental model fits that sort of medium even better: Hot takes scrawled on the bathroom walls of pubs.
  • amiantos 1y ago
    And here, if you post something you later regret, you can't delete it or delete your account, which is pretty questionable on a social network in the modern age. So much for 'the right to be forgotten'.
  • rglover 1y ago
    Glad to hear my own experienced echo'd. I've been dialing off of the stuff (even HN) for these very reasons. The staggering one is this: > I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual. One of the darker side-effects of social media is that everything now feels very ideological and "team sports." You're either "with us" or "against us," nuance has basically been obliterated. Even more shocking is that in some places, it seems like anything that's truthful/factual or plausibly truthful triggers a visceral negative reaction in people (to the point where, what used to be polite disagreement is now a rage-dump).
• yason 1y ago
  Shouldn't be too hard to rewrite 2010 Facebook from scratch, and keep it like that. Follow what your friends are doing, and when you post yourself be certain that your friends will actually see your update.
  • asadm 1y ago
    fb has a tab that works like this now.
    • yason 1y ago
      Can you elaborate? Where do I find this? (Using desktop version.)
• namuol 1y ago
  Good riddance.
• jader201 1y ago
  It should be pretty obvious, but… When social media started out, it was simply a feed of what you followed. FB, Twitter, Reddit, everything — they showed you a chronological list of everything that the people/groups you followed posted. It was glorious. But it wasn’t making money. These platforms were all funded by investors in hopes that they would someday make money. And now they are — through ads and sponsored content that no one asked for or wants, via algorithms designed for one thing: profit. It’s zero surprise to me that social media platforms have become the garbage that they are now. I’ve moved on from all but a couple platforms (HN, Board Game Geek, and Bogleheads — arguably not social media platforms in the same vein as the others mentioned, because they aren’t trying to monetize, except BGG which monetizes via traditional banner ads, which I’ll take 10/10 over “content ads”). But I have zero interest in returning to anything that injects their sponsored content in the middle of feeds. If social media platforms can’t figure out a way to monetize without injecting this garbage, I’ll stick to these others.
• wood_spirit 1y ago
  How much is the algorithm swayed by the behaviour of stealth bots trying to act human in order to gain the cred to be a more effective bot?
• Apocryphon 1y ago
  Kind of hilarious to juxtapose with recent news of OpenAI (contemplating) starting its own social network to mine training data
• selfhoster 1y ago
  Is it a diversionary ploy, perhaps the DOJ is looking at breaking up megacorps or something? I think you have to subscribe to read the full story either that or it was really short. Either way, I didn't see a mention of the DOJ on the page.
• mullingitover 1y ago
  If social media is over, why isn't Zuckerberg laying off staff in social media? Instead he's laying off Reality Labs staff[1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/meta/655835/meta-layoffs-reality-labs-vr-supernatural https://www.theverge.com/meta/655835/meta-layoffs-reality-la...
• camilo2025 1y ago
  Every time I open my FB I get hammered with dozens of random ads. Also, a randomly generated lists of posts from my network where things pop up, and are then completely lost in the aether, because that is how FB thinks it is going to increase engagement. Facebook, and Instagram, is a frustrating, infuriating, alarming experience that really does not "bring joy" to my life.
• laweijfmvo 1y ago
  This kind of reminds me of when Fox News had to admit (in court) that their news wasn’t really news, it was entertainment. It’s wild how they always say the quiet part out loud when they’re being sued.
• josefritzishere 1y ago
  Mandatory "enshittification" comment.
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  The writing was on the wall a decade ago when everyone and their cat was posting junk content. Zuck's original idea was outstanding. He slowly cannibalized the massive success into outright gross platform: Get to know girls at Harvard! --- Get to know girls at select universities! --- Get to know anyone we've invited! We're so popular, we've got profiles of people at every major university! Write them messages, organize parties, etc! Upload pictures of parties or anything interesting! --- And now you can play addicting games on Facebook! --- And you can make a profile if you don't have a school! And be fed ads and clickbait! --- while we quietly dump-sell all your info to anyone! --- Now meet 20% more criminals and scammers! Sell your car on our marketplace! You'll regret every message! --- Now with international crime! --- Now with more bots than humans! --- Why is everyone not respecting us? Oh, its over!
• JCattheATM 1y ago
  Social media predates the term social media by decades. It isn't dead and won't ever die because humans love to socialize and we will continue to use tech to facilitate that. Commercial social media on the other hand may well be dying.
• jrochkind1 1y ago
  "We brought you into this world, and we can take you out!"
• elijahbenizzy 1y ago
  And then says... "you're welcome"
• blitzar 1y ago
  Someone tell him Amazon now sells more than books and Netflix doesn't send DVD's in the post anymore they beam it directly into your home.
• npc_anon 1y ago
  Meta is an ad business. You maximize ad revenue by maximizing time spent. You maximize time spent with a slot machine that exploits our psychological weaknesses. Meta intentionally drives this and don't forget that it's helped by millions of influencers that learned how to maximize engagement. A good-faith Facebook with exclusively a friends-only timeline might generate 20% of the current ad revenue. And it won't matter much because the bad-faith competitor will do the dopamine approach and users will be attracted to it like flies.
• freitasm 1y ago
  Says the person running a social network website where I see one of my friend's posts amid eight "suggestions" that bear no interest to me. I have kept my FB account open just to contact some members of the family that live far away. Or to check someone I know in my circle that I haven't heard from a while. But scrolling? Nah. I don't have the app and only open it once a month. There's a word for it: enshitification. Blame yourself for making it a crap experience, Mark.
• CalChris 1y ago
  So I hate Medicare Advantage (and conversely rather like Traditional Medicare) because private companies have perverse incentives when managing public goods. I think social media is a public good and what we’ve seen is a result of Facebook’s perverse incentives. A friend asked what do we do about the perverse incentives? That’s kind of difficult when Citizens United represents regulatory capture by corporations.
• herbst 1y ago
  Pretty sure Zuck never looked at Telegram Group's and Channels if he concludes that
• rubyfan 1y ago
  Didn’t he also say the metaverse was the next big thing?
• omoikane 1y ago
  Offtopic, but I wonder why they have the umlaut in "reëvaluating".
  • ranadomo 1y ago
    this is a somewhat unique new yorker style habit https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-... Umlaut is a separate concept from diaeresis but shares the symbol
• chasing 1y ago
  “We added cocaine to our menu and now nobody’s buying our healthier food options. Also our customers are acting increasingly deranged.”
• Animats 1y ago
  This has been called "pulling a Myspace", back from when Myspace lost to Facebook. The sequence: - Competition appears, usage decreases, revenue declines somewhat. - Ad density is increased to increase revenue. - Usage decreases further as users are annoyed by excessive ads. - Ad density is increased even further. - Death spiral. How could Zuckerberg not know this? He was on the other side of it last time around.
  • paxys 1y ago
    Why do you assume he didn't know this? He very knowingly pivoted from friends' content to where the real money was – politics, clickbait, outrage bait, doomscrolling, gambling, scams, illegal ads.
• jason-phillips 1y ago
  Not once in the article does Mark say social media is over.
  • thomasfromcdnjs 1y ago
    And to think that he thinks that is even more folly.
• film42 1y ago
  To quote David from the Acquired episode on Meta: > I really want to keep hitting on this insight again, that Mark correctly identified of social shifting from the town square to the living room. This is a second order effect of that shift that the company didn’t see coming. Because once you shift social from the town square to the living room, it now becomes possible to divorce media from social. You’re already getting your social now in private, in your digital living room. The town square can become something that is completely not social.
• zelon88 1y ago
  How can social media be dying when people like Elon Musk have like, 6,000 profiles? /sarcasm Seriously though, if Facebook put in even a modicum of effort to block the traffic from like, a dozen cities or usernames the platform could regain some semblance of what it used to be. Failing that, they could provide users with bulk blocking based on geolocation or regex username match and let users take some control over what they get spammed with. The tools provided are completely inadequate.
• wij4lij5 1y ago
  LinkedIn is the only social whatever that I still use, and that's only bearable with a LOT of filtering courtesy of uBlock Origin. Even after that, it's 95% corporate advertising and 5% humans I know.
• xracy 1y ago
  Obligatory Eric Andre meme of "Who killed social media?" I think a lot of folks are correctly pointing out that new social media is probably much closer to something like Discord, where individuals can define their own communities and make sure they're only getting the content from their family in that community. It means they're much more responsible for policing their own content and don't have to worry about agreeing with the central policing platform. Seems like a much healthier direction for Social Networks... At least... healthier than whatever is happening at Facebook.
• chris_wot 1y ago
  It’s been over for years. At least Facebook has for me. I got rid of it several several years ago - didn’t delete it, just never logged in again and deleted Facebook from my phone. Never looked back. One of the few online actions I can honestly say made my life better.
• acidburnNSA 1y ago
  My mom's area in northern Michigan got hit by a huge ice storm last month that took out hundreds of power lines and cable/internet. Facebook was the primary way the community communicated during the 5-15 day power outage. That was extremely valuable. There are a few special topic groups that are still great as well. Other than that rare situation it's been a desert.
• lakomen 1y ago
  [dead]
• _wire_ 1y ago
  //What, exactly, does a social network do?// <i>It's as if no one had ever thought of any of it before</i> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry Go on... //Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you.// There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. And from such an auspicious start, an empire was born.
• wormius 1y ago
  Social Media was around before Zuck, and it will be around after.
• DecentShoes 1y ago
  So he'll be shitting down Facebook, then?
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• grandempire 1y ago
  The title of this article is misleading. Nowhere in the article does Zuckerberg say "social media is over" or anything close to it.
• yergi 1y ago
  Yea, well. Facebook will eventually disallow you to even search marketplace without a face picture. Punishment for not feeding their databases I guess. It doesn't matter if you have 100 friends. It doesn't matter if you post 1,000 pictures of your farm. That's some dystopian ish right there. People have definitively noticed and many in my circles have refused to engage because of it. Good riddance.
• linuxhansl 1y ago
  Social media has become tribal media, where people form strong tribal structures and stay within those. IMHO that has caused the great division we are seeing in many places. Maybe "cult-media" is a better term even. Instead of coming together we ignore (or berate) each other, which in turn gives rise to the many extremist and authoritarian movements we are witnessing these days.
• qwertox 1y ago
  It could also mean that their recommendation algorithms are highly effective and managing to get people to spend more time on social media. And if "friends" aren't publishing enough, then foreign content will fill that void. Probably other content the user is interested in. > “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years Which does not mean that the time overall has declined. This could even mean that the time itself spent viewing content posted by "friends" did in fact increase, if the percent of time spent on social media increased enough.
• MarceliusK 1y ago
  The irony is that Meta's defense in an antitrust trial is basically "we're not dominant anymore because everything is a chaotic content soup now." And… they're not entirely wrong? But also, who made it that way?
• fuzzfactor 1y ago
  So he's going to do the right thing, and shut down?
• sub7 1y ago
  Everyone relax - this moron Zuck still has Whastapp left to shittify and it's already begun with businesses spamming people en mass Old firms that did sms spam as a service now all do whatsapp spam as a service - just one example of the process already inevitably started I can't wait until people are communicating entirely via algorithms/OS clients with donations running server temp storage. Then this 21st centure nicotine dealership that has created riches by extracting untold value from people's lives will finally be in history's dustbin where it belongs.
• DrScientist 1y ago
  Sure Zuckerberg et al turned social media into unsocial/psychopathic media. However isn't this simply a blatent attempt to pretend the monopoly he is accused of having doesn't exist by using semantics?
• mrkramer 1y ago
  So Facebook is the new MySpace? Damn.
• butlike 1y ago
  Oh my god it was an antitrust trial? Of course he's going to say it's "over" to reduce it's perceived relevancy and hopefully avoid having the legislators break it up
• victor871129 1y ago
  As someone said, given a long time and every webpage becomes a porn fetish page
• whoomp12342 1y ago
  thanks mark, you ruined myspace and orphaned us from fun
• ulech 1y ago
  reading this in the light that openai is testing ideas for a new gen of sns; it might be where ai lives as “natives” along with human users connecting “friends” leveraging their superhuman information processing
• stevage 1y ago
  > Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram. But Meta controls what people get to see, so this is pretty dubious data, right?
• m-p-3 1y ago
  Absolutely not, but the landscape is definitely changing. I suspect most of the traditional social media platforms are polluted with bots and AI-generated comments now, and that certainly won't help with user's trust.