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Facebook is now a birthday-reminder and old-connection-keeper tool loaded with empty content to feel less sad. Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards co

Facebook is now a birthday-reminder and old-connection-keeper tool loaded with empty content to feel less sad. Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content consumption. Messaging and group chats are the only real social media now

corobo 1y ago
Ooh speaking of birthday reminders - if Facebook is browsing this thread looking for things to fix: bring back the birthday iCal feed! You literally had notifications via my calendar bringing me back to your site every few days/weeks to say happy birthday and maybe have a bit of a browse. Now the reminders are in my todo list and I say happy birthday via text or call instead. Path of least pain in the backside. Absolutely bizarre they ditched the birthdays and events iCal feeds.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  Funny that you think they’d prioritize something that’d be useful, good for you.
  - corobo 1y ago
    Haha of course. I was probably just one of a mere few hundred million people using it in a way that brought me back to the algorithm so it got scrapped for underutilisation :(
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Boss: "you're only allowed to work on things that serve more ad views"
  - reverendsteveii 1y ago
    Remember when they told us that capitalism would cause people to trip over themselves to give us what we want and need because that would naturally be where most of the profit could be had? Why do you think it didn't do that in this case? The answer of course is that facebook does serve it's customers. It serves the people who can afford to buy ads, and what it serves them is you.
    - anonymars 1y ago
      The missing ingredient is usually "competition" Same thing with the "private sector is always better" religion - if there's no meaningful competition, you end up no choice coupled with a profit motive, vs. no choice but I can at least nominally vote and be represented ISPs are usually a good example in the US. My old apartment had one provider, and wouldn't you know it, at my new apartment with multiple providers, I got five times the bandwidth for half the price. See also: enshittification
      - reverendsteveii 1y ago
        In light of competition being the missing ingredient, the question becomes how does one maintain ongoing competition in a system where the bigger of two competitors tends to win and the winner of two competitors tends to get bigger? That's exactly what happened here: Facebook was bigger than WhatsApp, and FB+WA is bigger than Insta, so FB+WA+Insta is a lot bigger than anyone else. Back in the day when Microsoft was the one in the DoJ's sights someone compared it to a dog race. Dogs don't have jockeys, so you have to figure out some other way to induce them to run. The way most tracks (probably all, idk much about dog racing but it's a useful metaphor here) do that is by having a mechanical bunny that runs out ahead of the dogs and activates their prey drive. The bunny has to be ahead of the dogs, but not so far ahead that they don't think they can catch it and give up. That means that every once in a while a dog will get the timing just right, go extra hard, and actually catch the bunny. At that point, the race is over for everyone until someone steps in to shake the dog loose from the bunny and give everyone a reason to run again. Our system is like that: we have to encourage everyone to do everything they can to catch the bunny but also ensure that they never actually do. Bill Gates was the first person in my memory to catch the bunny, and needed to be shaken loose. Now it's Zuckerberg, and probably Google, that need to be pried off of their respective bunnies so that everyone else has something to chase.
        safety1st 1y ago
        For a start, and it might even be enough, you strictly enforce anti-trust laws which are already on the books that prevent sufficiently large firms from acquiring their competitors and doing exclusivity deals. These laws have largely been ignored for decades and I don't know what to call that other than blatant corruption of our government, but it's slowly starting to change, in a bipartisan way. Microsoft escaped the worst of what the government wanted to do to them for their anti-trust violations. It may not go so well for Google as they hold the distinction of being the only company in US history to have been tried and found guilty in three separate cases of possessing three illegal monopolies all at the same time. Two example measures under discussion in the court at the moment are forbidding any renewal of their browser default deal with Apple, and forcing them to sell off Chrome. We will see soon enough what comes next.
  - philjohn 1y ago
    They already send an email or push notification ... so yeah, there would be very little metric movement to justify this as having enough impact for year end PSC.
  - fallingknife 1y ago
    We don't pay them, so really why would they? I don't do work for people who don't pay me either.
- jandrese 1y ago
  iCal feeds don't bring you into the site. The whole point of Facebook is to be a walled garden that discourages you from going elsewhere. You're lucky they are not like X and deprioritize external links. Or maybe they do, I have not tested it myself. https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
  - corobo 1y ago
    I would click the link in the event to go say happy birthday to the person! I guess I wasn't the norm though aye, it's big numbers that matter
  - wwweston 1y ago
    The popular wisdom is that FB has deprioritized external links -- some accounts on FB are now posting an image with a blurb and then saying "link in comments." I don't know if they're doing it on rumor, official communication, or having tested clickthru rates themselves, but several of these have large enough media operations that all of those sources are plausible.
- sunnybeetroot 1y ago
  Sounds like you use iOS? Add the birthday to the friend’s contact and it’ll appear in your calendar automatically. You’re welcome in advance.
  - corobo 1y ago
    Interesting idea and kinda really makes sense.. I guess at the time I just chucked them into todos as I have plenty of friction free ways to get tasks into Todoist haha. I'll give it a go, nice one
diggan 1y ago
> Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content consumption Huh? They were explicitly built for that purpose, not "trending towards". Without content consumption, those platforms are nothing.
- KeplerBoy 1y ago
  I guess he meant content produced by "professional" content creators with the only goal of earning money instead of interesting pictures from your friends' life. At least that's how I experience Instagram these days. It's a chat app where people send each other content made by others in the DMs. Very few of the people I know personally have posted in the last few years, but most of them seem to casually use the app to explore whatever the algorithm shows them.
xyst 1y ago
Anybody worth keeping in contact with, I have their phone number. The only use for Facebook is for the marketplace.
- the_af 1y ago
  Sadly for me, there's another use case for Facebook: special interest groups (as in niche groups for hobbies). When the Great Migration away from phpbb forums and bulletin boards happened, lots of these groups moved to Facebook. I loathed it, but joining the migration was the only way of keeping up with stuff that interested me. Now there's another Great Migration to Discord, which I won't follow. Real-time chat simply triggers my FOMO and is stressful to me. So any community that moves primarily to Discord will lose me as a member. I suppose nobody will miss me though.
dspillett 1y ago
> Facebook is now a birthday-reminder It isn't even good at that. I'll often see “it was [whoever]'s birthday yesterday” when I did login on the last couple of days, and it didn't bother to mention the fact then. Too many ads and pointless reals to show me on those days, to have space to insert the now/upcoming birthday reminder, presumably.
boringg 1y ago
Actually it's biggest value is marketplace though the scammers know that too.
- wintermutestwin 1y ago
  Marketplace is the absolute worst UX I could imagine.
  - slt2021 1y ago
    highly overpaid Facebook engineers must be forced to use Marketplace to try to buy their cars, instead of buying from a dealer. maybe that way they would improve things a bit
reverendsteveii 1y ago
I was thrilled to find out that I can block facebook.com in my etc/hosts and still have access to messenger. Hard limiting the time I spend being "social" with robots and hostile outsiders has gone from being a good idea to being a survival strategy as we got further into the industrialization of the attention economy.
yieldcrv 1y ago
(now as in 10 years ago)
wil421 1y ago
Facebook groups are like the new Internet forums. There’s tons of stuff that’s moved to Facebook groups like Fishing and Car forums. For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums. Marketplace seems to be the new Craigslist and much better IMHO. Posting is probably dead or dying. I haven’t done it in a decade or so.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- throw042425 1y ago
  That's interesting. In what sense would you say FB groups are much better than forums? But yeah I agree, groups and marketplace are the only things keeping FB alive.
  - iamacyborg 1y ago
    They’re better in the sense that people actually use them
    - shanecleveland 1y ago
      Probably true with most successful things. Marketplace is just a low barrier to entry for people already using Facebook. I find it generally terrible, but that's where people are selling.
- HeadsUpHigh 1y ago
  >For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums Facebook groups are very disjointed and the algo does a bad job and keeping the good bits floating to the top.
- ultrarunner 1y ago
  They could be huge in this, but sadly they'll continue to ruin it because (IMHO) they are rotten at the core. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a question posted on a relevant topic, switched tabs to consult the manual to verify my memory, and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question. Once people get sufficiently frustrated and the ad revenue declines below the cost of running the servers, we will immediately lose all of the information shared there. None of it will be archived like the old forums. It's a genuinely sad situation.
mrspuratic 1y ago
"mbasic.facebook.com" was a vastly simpler UI, and had notably less noise content. Sometimes "back" navigation even worked properly. They killed that last year :/ Were it not for distant family using it, I would almost certainly download my content and nuke my account.
bentcorner 1y ago
Discord are where the kids are at. But with them going public it's going to enshittify quickly and it's only a matter of time before they move onto something new.
endemic 1y ago
> Messaging and group chats are the only real social media now This is accurate as far as I'm concerned. Interacting directly with actual friends; no ads or clickbait content injected.

corobo 1y ago

Ooh speaking of birthday reminders - if Facebook is browsing this thread looking for things to fix: bring back the birthday iCal feed! You literally had notifications via my calendar bringing me back to your site every few days/weeks to say happy birthday and maybe have a bit of a browse. Now the reminders are in my todo list and I say happy birthday via text or call instead. Path of least pain in the backside. Absolutely bizarre they ditched the birthdays and events iCal feeds.

barbazoo 1y ago
Funny that you think they’d prioritize something that’d be useful, good for you.
- corobo 1y ago
  Haha of course. I was probably just one of a mere few hundred million people using it in a way that brought me back to the algorithm so it got scrapped for underutilisation :(
- pixl97 1y ago
  Boss: "you're only allowed to work on things that serve more ad views"
- reverendsteveii 1y ago
  Remember when they told us that capitalism would cause people to trip over themselves to give us what we want and need because that would naturally be where most of the profit could be had? Why do you think it didn't do that in this case? The answer of course is that facebook does serve it's customers. It serves the people who can afford to buy ads, and what it serves them is you.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    The missing ingredient is usually "competition" Same thing with the "private sector is always better" religion - if there's no meaningful competition, you end up no choice coupled with a profit motive, vs. no choice but I can at least nominally vote and be represented ISPs are usually a good example in the US. My old apartment had one provider, and wouldn't you know it, at my new apartment with multiple providers, I got five times the bandwidth for half the price. See also: enshittification
    - reverendsteveii 1y ago
      In light of competition being the missing ingredient, the question becomes how does one maintain ongoing competition in a system where the bigger of two competitors tends to win and the winner of two competitors tends to get bigger? That's exactly what happened here: Facebook was bigger than WhatsApp, and FB+WA is bigger than Insta, so FB+WA+Insta is a lot bigger than anyone else. Back in the day when Microsoft was the one in the DoJ's sights someone compared it to a dog race. Dogs don't have jockeys, so you have to figure out some other way to induce them to run. The way most tracks (probably all, idk much about dog racing but it's a useful metaphor here) do that is by having a mechanical bunny that runs out ahead of the dogs and activates their prey drive. The bunny has to be ahead of the dogs, but not so far ahead that they don't think they can catch it and give up. That means that every once in a while a dog will get the timing just right, go extra hard, and actually catch the bunny. At that point, the race is over for everyone until someone steps in to shake the dog loose from the bunny and give everyone a reason to run again. Our system is like that: we have to encourage everyone to do everything they can to catch the bunny but also ensure that they never actually do. Bill Gates was the first person in my memory to catch the bunny, and needed to be shaken loose. Now it's Zuckerberg, and probably Google, that need to be pried off of their respective bunnies so that everyone else has something to chase.
      - safety1st 1y ago
        For a start, and it might even be enough, you strictly enforce anti-trust laws which are already on the books that prevent sufficiently large firms from acquiring their competitors and doing exclusivity deals. These laws have largely been ignored for decades and I don't know what to call that other than blatant corruption of our government, but it's slowly starting to change, in a bipartisan way. Microsoft escaped the worst of what the government wanted to do to them for their anti-trust violations. It may not go so well for Google as they hold the distinction of being the only company in US history to have been tried and found guilty in three separate cases of possessing three illegal monopolies all at the same time. Two example measures under discussion in the court at the moment are forbidding any renewal of their browser default deal with Apple, and forcing them to sell off Chrome. We will see soon enough what comes next.
- philjohn 1y ago
  They already send an email or push notification ... so yeah, there would be very little metric movement to justify this as having enough impact for year end PSC.
- fallingknife 1y ago
  We don't pay them, so really why would they? I don't do work for people who don't pay me either.
jandrese 1y ago
iCal feeds don't bring you into the site. The whole point of Facebook is to be a walled garden that discourages you from going elsewhere. You're lucky they are not like X and deprioritize external links. Or maybe they do, I have not tested it myself. https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
- corobo 1y ago
  I would click the link in the event to go say happy birthday to the person! I guess I wasn't the norm though aye, it's big numbers that matter
- wwweston 1y ago
  The popular wisdom is that FB has deprioritized external links -- some accounts on FB are now posting an image with a blurb and then saying "link in comments." I don't know if they're doing it on rumor, official communication, or having tested clickthru rates themselves, but several of these have large enough media operations that all of those sources are plausible.
sunnybeetroot 1y ago
Sounds like you use iOS? Add the birthday to the friend’s contact and it’ll appear in your calendar automatically. You’re welcome in advance.
- corobo 1y ago
  Interesting idea and kinda really makes sense.. I guess at the time I just chucked them into todos as I have plenty of friction free ways to get tasks into Todoist haha. I'll give it a go, nice one

diggan 1y ago

> Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content consumption Huh? They were explicitly built for that purpose, not "trending towards". Without content consumption, those platforms are nothing.

KeplerBoy 1y ago
I guess he meant content produced by "professional" content creators with the only goal of earning money instead of interesting pictures from your friends' life. At least that's how I experience Instagram these days. It's a chat app where people send each other content made by others in the DMs. Very few of the people I know personally have posted in the last few years, but most of them seem to casually use the app to explore whatever the algorithm shows them.

xyst 1y ago

Anybody worth keeping in contact with, I have their phone number. The only use for Facebook is for the marketplace.

the_af 1y ago
Sadly for me, there's another use case for Facebook: special interest groups (as in niche groups for hobbies). When the Great Migration away from phpbb forums and bulletin boards happened, lots of these groups moved to Facebook. I loathed it, but joining the migration was the only way of keeping up with stuff that interested me. Now there's another Great Migration to Discord, which I won't follow. Real-time chat simply triggers my FOMO and is stressful to me. So any community that moves primarily to Discord will lose me as a member. I suppose nobody will miss me though.

dspillett 1y ago

> Facebook is now a birthday-reminder It isn't even good at that. I'll often see “it was [whoever]'s birthday yesterday” when I did login on the last couple of days, and it didn't bother to mention the fact then. Too many ads and pointless reals to show me on those days, to have space to insert the now/upcoming birthday reminder, presumably.

boringg 1y ago

Actually it's biggest value is marketplace though the scammers know that too.

wintermutestwin 1y ago
Marketplace is the absolute worst UX I could imagine.
- slt2021 1y ago
  highly overpaid Facebook engineers must be forced to use Marketplace to try to buy their cars, instead of buying from a dealer. maybe that way they would improve things a bit

reverendsteveii 1y ago

I was thrilled to find out that I can block facebook.com in my etc/hosts and still have access to messenger. Hard limiting the time I spend being "social" with robots and hostile outsiders has gone from being a good idea to being a survival strategy as we got further into the industrialization of the attention economy.

yieldcrv 1y ago

(now as in 10 years ago)

wil421 1y ago

Facebook groups are like the new Internet forums. There’s tons of stuff that’s moved to Facebook groups like Fishing and Car forums. For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums. Marketplace seems to be the new Craigslist and much better IMHO. Posting is probably dead or dying. I haven’t done it in a decade or so.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
throw042425 1y ago
That's interesting. In what sense would you say FB groups are much better than forums? But yeah I agree, groups and marketplace are the only things keeping FB alive.
- iamacyborg 1y ago
  They’re better in the sense that people actually use them
  - shanecleveland 1y ago
    Probably true with most successful things. Marketplace is just a low barrier to entry for people already using Facebook. I find it generally terrible, but that's where people are selling.
HeadsUpHigh 1y ago
>For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums Facebook groups are very disjointed and the algo does a bad job and keeping the good bits floating to the top.
ultrarunner 1y ago
They could be huge in this, but sadly they'll continue to ruin it because (IMHO) they are rotten at the core. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a question posted on a relevant topic, switched tabs to consult the manual to verify my memory, and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question. Once people get sufficiently frustrated and the ad revenue declines below the cost of running the servers, we will immediately lose all of the information shared there. None of it will be archived like the old forums. It's a genuinely sad situation.

mrspuratic 1y ago

"mbasic.facebook.com" was a vastly simpler UI, and had notably less noise content. Sometimes "back" navigation even worked properly. They killed that last year :/ Were it not for distant family using it, I would almost certainly download my content and nuke my account.

bentcorner 1y ago

Discord are where the kids are at. But with them going public it's going to enshittify quickly and it's only a matter of time before they move onto something new.

endemic 1y ago

> Messaging and group chats are the only real social media now This is accurate as far as I'm concerned. Interacting directly with actual friends; no ads or clickbait content injected.