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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 res

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.
    - ViktorRay 1y ago
      This isn’t quite true. There are many businesses like Colgate that are steady state with a reasonable amount of growth that do fine in the stock market.
      - psunavy03 1y ago
        But that doesn't conform to the internet's stereotype of mustache-twirling capitalists in top hats and monocles, so obviously it can't be true . . . </SARCASM>
    - FeteCommuniste 1y ago
      Numbers can naturally go up with the population, unless the product stays the same and newer generations decide they don't want it. Facebook suffered a double hit from both changing the product to scrollslop instead of a way to check on friends, and from becoming "uncool" with young people because it's what their boring parents used.
- matthewdgreen 1y ago
  I guess the problem with this analogy is that it fails to capture the essential nature of Facebook: that its base product ("hamburgers") has a network effect, and the new product ("candy") doesn't. If Facebook is a social network for seeing my friends, then there's nowhere else for me to go. They're on Facebook and it's unlikely they're all going to join some new network at the same time. If Facebook is a high engagement content farm designed to shove random engagement-bait in my face, then it's just competing with Reddit, Digg, Twitter, 4chan, TikTok. Folks can get addicted to this in the short term; but they can also get bored and move on to another app. Based on conversations with all the IRL human beings I know, this is what they've all done. (The actual question I have is: who is still heavily using the site? Very old people?)
aprilthird2021 1y ago
It is what people wanted though, from Facebook. Most people, including you and I, connect with friends through DMs in various apps, WhatsApp, or an equivalent group chat messenger (iMessage, etc.) Facebook has become a lot like TikTok because that's what people want from an app that has a feed. We, en masse, don't engage with a feed of just our friends' posts (FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage). When we open a feed-based app, we want the long doomscroll. I do think your restaurant analogy is apt. I mean nutritious food is healthier for people, but a miniscule number of restaurants serve such a thing, and none do which aren't trying to fill a small niche in the market
- skydhash 1y ago
  > it is what people wanted though, from Facebook. I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with personal details, then share happenings with your friends. And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities, pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.
- i80and 1y ago
  > FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage I've never seen this, despite frequently being irritated with Facebook mainly showing me random shit I don't care about. Companies always squirrel away the "works correctly" button and then are like whelp nobody is using the thing we hid! Nothing we can do!
- dkarl 1y ago
  > It is what people wanted though, from Facebook Facebook used to provide a good experience of staying in loose touch with people I didn't know well enough to have ongoing conversations with. It was nice to know roughly what was going on with people, and if something big happened (like a kid, a new job, a death) I would see it and could reach out with congratulations or condolences. But some people posted every meal and cup of coffee, and others only posted occasionally, and Facebook decided to bury the occasional posters and promote the high-engagement users instead. That's when Facebook became more bad than good for me, and I left. If we could go back in time to that point, and prioritize posts in inverse relation to the poster's frequency instead, I'd use that service.
baxtr 1y ago
Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want". Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time. It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.
- wussboy 1y ago
  It makes one wonder whether "what I want" is really the best thing to optimize for.
- FinnLobsien 1y ago
  Yeah that’s the problem. Ultimately, people want to distract themselves more than they want to connect with people. And with both in the same platform… I know where I’m going. I think another problem are network effects. They make it much harder to build a reasonable alternative
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    There already is a reasonable alternative for connecting with the people you know. Group chats. Your implication is correct in that there is no reasonable alternative for distracting oneself. At the same time, I'm not sure that if you were to build an alternative, it would not degrade into "content" scrolling as well.
    - FinnLobsien 1y ago
      That’s the problem: -under network effects, you can’t spin up a viable indie alternative (like you could for a note taking app) because you need to massively attract users -the less engaging social platform is the less economically viable social platform So the natural end point for any social app is content doomscrolling
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    Facebook has simply been climbing towards a local maxima that is poorly correlated with what people need to connect. They rely on mountains of data for their optimization but their reward function is just off.
tantalor 1y ago
High end restaurants work against this trend by cultivating taste. They convince their customers to eat their vegetables, literally. They can do this because there is an ethical value associated with dining which is embedded in our culture. You enjoy a fine restaurant because it is right to enjoy it. Facebook failed because there is no ethic associated with social media. You can continue to degrade the quality and nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that". FB bootstrapped by co-opting the instinctual value of social connection with your friends, which TikTok and IG also copied but with strangers instead of friends.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  I would venture to say 95% of people don't enjoy (and/or cannot afford) "fine" restaurants. But mostly don't enjoy. And a restaurant would go bankrupt trying to convince them to eat healthy. The proof is the existing state of the market. Although daily GLP-1 pills might be able to change that.
  - tantalor 1y ago
    This is very true, and pairs well with the other comment about netiquette. 95% of people would not enjoy polite technical discussion forums, but the 5% that do are enough traffic for a site to survive.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- toxik 1y ago
  HN is a kind of this thing. It's netiquette. We still stay around here because it's the only place with tech discussions and at least some amount of decorum.
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    Probably because it looks so boring and dry that anyone motivated by blinking lights and fast cuts is immediately turned away. The prospect of having to read is a large turnoff for many people.
peacebeard 1y ago
Casinos say gambling is what people want. Tobacco companies say cigarettes is what people want. Drug dealers say fent is what people want.
- laweijfmvo 1y ago
  at least until it kills them!
zbendefy 1y ago
This is such a good analogy. Awereness about social media shluld be like awereness about junk food you consume.
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
On the flip side, there hasn't been enough worthwhile posts from friends in years.
spoonsort 1y ago
> doom-scrolling Just wait 'til you find out about imageboard doom-scrolling.
29athrowaway 1y ago
Meta was losing to TikTok so they had to adapt by promoting brain rot[1] [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/brain-rot https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/brain-rot
- 0x6c6f6c 1y ago
  Except the content quality on TikTok wasn't only brain rot, and the algorithm often grew into valuable content. That is, if you actually wanted it. If you want brain rot, it'll give it to you. Meanwhile, you don't even get the choice on Facebook.

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.
  - ViktorRay 1y ago
    This isn’t quite true. There are many businesses like Colgate that are steady state with a reasonable amount of growth that do fine in the stock market.
    - psunavy03 1y ago
      But that doesn't conform to the internet's stereotype of mustache-twirling capitalists in top hats and monocles, so obviously it can't be true . . . </SARCASM>
  - FeteCommuniste 1y ago
    Numbers can naturally go up with the population, unless the product stays the same and newer generations decide they don't want it. Facebook suffered a double hit from both changing the product to scrollslop instead of a way to check on friends, and from becoming "uncool" with young people because it's what their boring parents used.
matthewdgreen 1y ago
I guess the problem with this analogy is that it fails to capture the essential nature of Facebook: that its base product ("hamburgers") has a network effect, and the new product ("candy") doesn't. If Facebook is a social network for seeing my friends, then there's nowhere else for me to go. They're on Facebook and it's unlikely they're all going to join some new network at the same time. If Facebook is a high engagement content farm designed to shove random engagement-bait in my face, then it's just competing with Reddit, Digg, Twitter, 4chan, TikTok. Folks can get addicted to this in the short term; but they can also get bored and move on to another app. Based on conversations with all the IRL human beings I know, this is what they've all done. (The actual question I have is: who is still heavily using the site? Very old people?)

aprilthird2021 1y ago

It is what people wanted though, from Facebook. Most people, including you and I, connect with friends through DMs in various apps, WhatsApp, or an equivalent group chat messenger (iMessage, etc.) Facebook has become a lot like TikTok because that's what people want from an app that has a feed. We, en masse, don't engage with a feed of just our friends' posts (FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage). When we open a feed-based app, we want the long doomscroll. I do think your restaurant analogy is apt. I mean nutritious food is healthier for people, but a miniscule number of restaurants serve such a thing, and none do which aren't trying to fill a small niche in the market

skydhash 1y ago
> it is what people wanted though, from Facebook. I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with personal details, then share happenings with your friends. And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities, pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.
i80and 1y ago
> FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage I've never seen this, despite frequently being irritated with Facebook mainly showing me random shit I don't care about. Companies always squirrel away the "works correctly" button and then are like whelp nobody is using the thing we hid! Nothing we can do!
dkarl 1y ago
> It is what people wanted though, from Facebook Facebook used to provide a good experience of staying in loose touch with people I didn't know well enough to have ongoing conversations with. It was nice to know roughly what was going on with people, and if something big happened (like a kid, a new job, a death) I would see it and could reach out with congratulations or condolences. But some people posted every meal and cup of coffee, and others only posted occasionally, and Facebook decided to bury the occasional posters and promote the high-engagement users instead. That's when Facebook became more bad than good for me, and I left. If we could go back in time to that point, and prioritize posts in inverse relation to the poster's frequency instead, I'd use that service.

baxtr 1y ago

Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want". Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time. It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.

wussboy 1y ago
It makes one wonder whether "what I want" is really the best thing to optimize for.
FinnLobsien 1y ago
Yeah that’s the problem. Ultimately, people want to distract themselves more than they want to connect with people. And with both in the same platform… I know where I’m going. I think another problem are network effects. They make it much harder to build a reasonable alternative
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  There already is a reasonable alternative for connecting with the people you know. Group chats. Your implication is correct in that there is no reasonable alternative for distracting oneself. At the same time, I'm not sure that if you were to build an alternative, it would not degrade into "content" scrolling as well.
  - FinnLobsien 1y ago
    That’s the problem: -under network effects, you can’t spin up a viable indie alternative (like you could for a note taking app) because you need to massively attract users -the less engaging social platform is the less economically viable social platform So the natural end point for any social app is content doomscrolling
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  Facebook has simply been climbing towards a local maxima that is poorly correlated with what people need to connect. They rely on mountains of data for their optimization but their reward function is just off.

tantalor 1y ago

High end restaurants work against this trend by cultivating taste. They convince their customers to eat their vegetables, literally. They can do this because there is an ethical value associated with dining which is embedded in our culture. You enjoy a fine restaurant because it is right to enjoy it. Facebook failed because there is no ethic associated with social media. You can continue to degrade the quality and nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that". FB bootstrapped by co-opting the instinctual value of social connection with your friends, which TikTok and IG also copied but with strangers instead of friends.

lotsofpulp 1y ago
I would venture to say 95% of people don't enjoy (and/or cannot afford) "fine" restaurants. But mostly don't enjoy. And a restaurant would go bankrupt trying to convince them to eat healthy. The proof is the existing state of the market. Although daily GLP-1 pills might be able to change that.
- tantalor 1y ago
  This is very true, and pairs well with the other comment about netiquette. 95% of people would not enjoy polite technical discussion forums, but the 5% that do are enough traffic for a site to survive.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
toxik 1y ago
HN is a kind of this thing. It's netiquette. We still stay around here because it's the only place with tech discussions and at least some amount of decorum.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  Probably because it looks so boring and dry that anyone motivated by blinking lights and fast cuts is immediately turned away. The prospect of having to read is a large turnoff for many people.

peacebeard 1y ago

Casinos say gambling is what people want. Tobacco companies say cigarettes is what people want. Drug dealers say fent is what people want.

laweijfmvo 1y ago
at least until it kills them!

zbendefy 1y ago

This is such a good analogy. Awereness about social media shluld be like awereness about junk food you consume.

BeFlatXIII 1y ago

On the flip side, there hasn't been enough worthwhile posts from friends in years.

spoonsort 1y ago

> doom-scrolling Just wait 'til you find out about imageboard doom-scrolling.

29athrowaway 1y ago

Meta was losing to TikTok so they had to adapt by promoting brain rot[1] [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/brain-rot https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/brain-rot

0x6c6f6c 1y ago
Except the content quality on TikTok wasn't only brain rot, and the algorithm often grew into valuable content. That is, if you actually wanted it. If you want brain rot, it'll give it to you. Meanwhile, you don't even get the choice on Facebook.