8 ms·

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

by baxtr 2y 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 2y ago
It makes one wonder whether "what I want" is really the best thing to optimize for.
FinnLobsien 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
AndroTux 2y ago
While that’s true of course, I find that a bit of a harsh conclusion. Yes, that’s the end result for any greedy company in a world without regulation. But you can make that case for most business models. Restaurants? They’ll all eventually turn into fast food chains, because our human lizard brain appreciates fat and sugar more than actually good meals. Gaming? Let’s just replace it all with casinos already. Loot boxes are just gambling anyways. There’s absolutely a market for proper social media that’s actually social. It’s just that companies are way too greedy currently.
kevinob11 2y ago
I know from a strictly economic standpoint the things I do are the things I want. But is doing an activity are you addicted to what you really want in a human sense?
otikik 2y ago
That is true but you have to be very specific about who your "users" are. If your "users" are the guys in charge of showing more ads to people, then yes. People, on the other hand absolutely prefer watching their contacts' posts first. Recommendations related with their individual preferences, second. Random dopamine-inducing stuff, only from time to time. If you prioritize the third kind only is like someone said already on the commments here: like a restaurant that only serves candy. They will have customers for a while but eventually they will burn them down (or kill them).
dan_quixote 2y ago
> Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want" I might fine tune this to "users most likely to click ads"
rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago
>Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want". With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl. Open a restaurant masquerading as providing high-quality, locally sourced organic food, discreetly sprinkle the hardest drug on the most popular plates, slowly increase the dosage until people are completely hooked, and voilà, you can legitimately claim "people wanted the drug; it was their choice."
- baxtr 2y ago
  What do you think Starbucks is? Sure there are nice small restaurants. But look at all the big chains.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  > With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl. And we all probably would want it if we tried! It's not that we're in any way better than the folks suffering from opioid addiction. It's all just chance.
  - karmakurtisaani 2y ago
    It think the second paragraph sort of agrees with you.
- disqard 2y ago
  Right, and the things preventing restaurants from doing this: 1. At-scale boycott: would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it? But somehow, this doesn't work for "social" media -- we're all aware what it is, yet we still use it, unironically. 2. Regulation: if a food inspector eats at your restaurant and confirms rumours that your food is actually addictive, your restaurant will get shut down. But somehow, FB/IG/etc. can operate without regulation, and free of any consequences. Sarah Wynn-Williams' book "Careless People" is worth reading.
  - LeifCarrotson 2y ago
    > Would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it? This is largely a communication problem. Fentanyl is unacceptable, but a large subset of people would be glad to get food with CBD oil for free. Or caffeine - as last year's Panera charged lemonade scandal [1] revealed. Or alcohol, that's already very normal. Or monosodium glutamate, a personal favorite of mine which was once surrounded by negative press, or high-fructose corn syrup, or trans-saturated fats. Or maybe not an intentional part of the food, but traces of herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics may end up in food, and microplastics or PFOS from packaging will be eaten as well. And I'm sure you've seen old advertisements for cure-all elixirs that contained cocaine. Health experts know that certain ingredients are bad, and many others are regularly consumed in quantities far, far exceeding their safe levels, but you don't have to look too deeply at a grocery store shelf or fast food menu to realize that the contents are boycott worthy but normalized to the point of being inescapable. People know even less about what Meta is doing with their data or what their addictive apps do to their brains, and are equally powerless to learn about it or change it. [1] https://apnews.com/article/panera-charged-lemonade-drinks-caffeine-3d0f74907be3b755b71b7c47d2dfc85d https://apnews.com/article/panera-charged-lemonade-drinks-ca...
spacemadness 2y ago
Advertisers are also good at weaponizing psychology to manufacture wants that people didn’t know they had and in many cases don’t want to have after the purchase.
caseyy 2y ago
What users want, and what they collectively consume, are two different things. This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0]. It turns out that demand matters when you sell a product or a service. And it is elastic in ways other than price (such as convenience, value, appeal), but not infinitely so. In plain English, you can force anti-social media onto the market by making it appealing/hooking/addictive/convenient/supposedly valuable for a while, but not indefinitely. People do demand proper socializing, especially recently. Many are realizing they've been sold a total bag of goods just because they consumed it, and it's not good enough to displace real human connection. [0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025
- badc0ffee 2y ago
  > This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0]. My takeaway from that presentation is more that: * Games cost more to make but there is resistance from players to pay more * A number of growth areas (mobile, social gaming, displacing other forms of media, battle royale) are exhausted * A lot of attention in China is moving to Chinese-made games * The marketplace is overcrowded with titles * Gaming is more social now, so a significant number of users are sticking to the same big 5/10 games where there friends are, which leaves even less room for the zillions of new games to gain traction. I think the industry had a role in this, namely in locking people in to games, and simultaneously overspending on and underpricing games. But I'm not getting the sense (at least from this presentation) that the new games that are coming out aren't what users want.
  - caseyy 2y ago
    There is much to be said about the industry. Most game releases compete for significantly less than 20% of the net bookings each year. Others are black hole games (the multi-year/multi-decade lifespan games that attract players and hardly let go at all), accounting for about 30% of the annual net bookings. The top 20-30 franchises account for about 50%, and the 20,000 other games made annually account for about 20%. Of the 20%, the top 50 releases each year will take 19% of the bookings, with remaining 19k+ sharing the 1%. Just like Facebook, the first-mover advantage has favored many now-established studios and franchises. They exploded game-development costs because they could, and funneled these costs into marketing and moat features indie developers could not build (such as huge open worlds, amazing sweaty character face wrinkle rendering tech, and SOTA systems). But many of these companies did not respect the player's wishes for well play-tested games with interesting stories and mechanics. Still, they captured the top 20-30 franchise part of the annual net bookings, and strongly compete in the top-50 game part. Some even built some black hole games (GTA Online, Rainbow Six: Siege, Fortnite). For a long time, they avoided much of the pressures felt strongly by smaller companies. They were "above" the 99% of games that have to compete for close to 1% of the revenues. Their marketing was so strong (plus, they strengthened it with access journalism) and features so moated, they could do no wrong. However, over the last 5 years, things have changed. Many AAA industry legends have left their jobs at major studios to start small studios and create games as a form of interactive art, rather than to make publishers rich. Ultimately, in their view, the greed and blind following of what players would consume (trends) in large numbers led to a sterile industry that could no longer create art. The growth engines got exhausted because players did not actually demand what they were offering, such as season passes, eSports corporate shooters, microtransactions, padded playtimes, user-generated content, and the other things. The new growth engines (AI, targeting kids, etc) are also what the players don't want very much. The industry understands it, and investors are starting to catch on after facing a decade of poor returns, too. The crucial point I am trying to make is that the industry spent a lot of money on these growth engines that the players didn't truly want, led by market metrics that genuinely showed they were consuming it. But now the gig is up, the writing is on the wall, and everyone inside and out of the industry sees it. As a contrast, many Eastern companies (Nintendo is an especially prominent example) stuck to classic pricing models, did not inflate the cost of their games with their money for moat (most indie developers can make games to compete with Nintendo outside of the IP), and never used the growth engines used in the West. These companies, along with many people in them whom I know personally, are largely unaffected by the industry crisis. They were always making games their users wanted. Finally, I have to say, the industry is split in two. 8/10 AAA companies are struggling because they cling to the growth engines (old and new) that the players don't want. About 2/10 game developers and publishers genuinely build games that people want, even in the West. And now that the pressure is up, some AAA executives from the 8/10ths are becoming acutely aware of this. Emphasis on "some". So, yes, the industry in some part was, is, and will continue to make games that players want. But the more interesting part for our discussion is the large part of it that wasn't, isn't, and perhaps won't be. Of course, there's some probability I'm reading this wrong. I'm making my business bets in the industry based on it, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily right. And thanks for reading the report before engaging in the discussion. That is appreciated.
watwut 2y ago
Except that facebook is slowly failing into obsolence. Or fast.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Are they? I know that many of us have got off. The question is are we minor outliers or a wave? I don't know.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    There’s a few trends at play: Young people in Europe and North America do not use Facebook anymore, if they even have an account at all. It is still popular among older users in North America. This is one of the wealthiest demographics on earth, so Facebook’s advertising model will be ok for the foreseeable future. Growth is still positive on Instagram and WhatsApp, though Instagram’s engagement levels have begun to decline. Facebook’s main growth areas for all three apps are in the developing world. They pay carriers to allow Facebook to be accessed without counting against user data limits, so in a lot of these countries Facebook is synonymous with The Internet. Young people in these countries still see Facebook as cool, and they aren’t as likely to seek out platforms to avoid their parents on. The key problem is that these markets are not worth very much to advertisers because they have low levels of discretionary spending. This makes operating in these markets a long play for Meta; they spend some money on subsidies to build a user base in the hope that the users will gain higher levels of discretionary spending in the future, increasing the value of the market for advertisers.
timewizard 2y ago
> Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want". No it isn't. No one "wants" to be addicted. > Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time. They will measure you then do everything they can to increase the number of minutes you spend on the site. The media recommendation is a consequence of cost. It's very cheap for them to maximize your time spent using other peoples content. > It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine. There are tons of ways to get dopamine flowing into your brain. Which is why it was important for Meta to monopolize and dominate the field. Turns out lizard brains are exceptionally fickle.
- djeastm 2y ago
  >No one "wants" to be addicted Not consciously, no. But our conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg, half-filled with post-hoc rationalizations for numerous unconscious urges. We don't have to call them "wants", but maybe "desires" works better.
  - timewizard 2y ago
    The problem is we know people are capable of seeing through their own ego and witnessing these urges for what they are. This usually leads to them gaining control over them. This is mostly what therapy is supposed to be about. Taming our internal animal nature is possible. People don't for all kinds of reasons. This leaves them susceptible to simple addictions.
tmpz22 2y ago
Missing ingredient: endless greed. Social media is just fine. Trillion dollar ad conglomerate staffing menlo park software engineers making 500k/yr? That requires enshittification.
tim333 2y ago
Users, or me at any rate, want more than one thing. For my family and friends I want to see what they say without junk added and my family has currently moved from facebook to a whatsapp group to achieve that. I also browse random junk on xitter. It's a different thing.
darth_avocado 2y ago
> it is exactly what users “want” It’s actually what users want “now”. When instagram initially stopped chronological feed users didn’t want it. When they started injecting random posts from people you didn’t follow. Users didn’t want that either. When they launched reels, they also didn’t want that. When they started almost exclusively showing reels like TikTok, users still didn’t want that. The problem with all of the above is that users eventually got used to the new norm and their brains established the dopamine rewards pathways according to what they were offered. And that’s why they think they “want” it now. But we’ve seen this happen before. FB did the exact thing and now it’s almost dead, even Zuckerberg acknowledged it. But they somehow think, users won’t eventually get off Instagram because somehow this time it’s different?
- bluGill 2y ago
  Or users eventually get used to it until one day they wake up and realize that the thing they went there for isn't what they get. I check Facebook less than once a month. I want to see what my distant friends are doing. Instead though I see subversive political memes, and other things (jokes) that are fun once in a while but not worth spending much time on. Because Facebook isn't giving me what I really want I gave up on them. But it took me a while in part because the things I want to see are there - they are just hard to find.
- motoxpro 2y ago
  It's just how you define "want." They a-b tested the algo vs chronological feed and the algo one because more people used it. It's just stated vs revealed preference. As a business, who's goal is to make money, does something that makes them more money, are they supposed to stop? Whether it's good for society is another question but, users definitely didn't show that they "wanted" a chronological feed, they only said it. There was a JUMP in engagement, not a decline.
  - TheBicPen 2y ago
    "want" is different from "will consume if offered". Arguably, the definition of "want" that most people use is one of higher-order desire. E.g. a drug addict wants drugs, but doesn't want to want drugs. People might choose a certain feature if offered and they aren't aware of its negative impact on their mental health. Then they might become cognizant of the negative effects but by then the choice to not use that feature is no longer available so they're stuck with what they have. Alternatively, the choice to not use the feature might still be present, but the neural reward pathways have already been built. The user then wants the feature, but they don't want to want it.
einpoklum 2y ago
You do realize that by applying quotation marks you've basically nullified your argument, right? :-(
al_borland 2y ago
It’s only what they “want” after the various social media companies to deliberate steps to addict their users to feeds that maximize engagement. Does an addict really want to be an addict? The Light Phone, screen time features, and various other things exist for a reason. People don’t want this, but feel helpless to break free from their addiction, which entered their life like a trojan horse.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  People want slop, they always wanted slop and there is no magical mind controlling powers in a Facebook feed. It was the case in the age of TV, magazines and when nobody had any idea how to even measure what people want. If Mark Zuckerberg forcibly injected educational material and long form journalism into everyone's feed the average user would uninstall the app. People have been consuming crap since they were able to draw boobs on cave walls with chalk. Do you know why every belief system that claims people are ensnared by some false consciousness fails? Because they aren't, there's no such thing. Mark Zuckerberg is exactly right about one thing, he gave the people what they wanted, and if he's going to lose to a platform like TikTok it's because they're even better at it
  - al_borland 2y ago
    I was speaking more to the work of Nir Eyal. His ideas were widely used in the tech industry and he quite literally wrote the book on how to build habit forming products.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
twelve40 2y ago
Well people really-really "want" many other things too, like free money, sex, etc etc. Does it mean that something that started as a way to connect with friends and family must turn into Only Fans for example? Or cater to all those other wants that have nothing to do with friends and family, just to make a few more bucks?
Clubber 2y ago
I agree. People want to eat well, quit smoking and get in shape, but mostly they eat crap and sit on the sofa in front of the TV (present company included). Which is what they really want?
- HKH2 2y ago
  What they do. There are long-term goals and short-term goals (convenience etc.) Society pressures you into having long-term goals even if you don't do anything about them.
zombiwoof 2y ago
We don’t know it’s what we don’t want because of the addictive nature
toofy 2y ago
> … what users “want”. what *some* users want. sure, it may have been a majority at the time. but imo chasing that was incredibly short sighted. many many many people warned them this would be the outcome. in typical fashion for these people, they ignored it, imagining themselves to be smarter in every area than everyone else. i’ve said it before and i’ll say it so many more times: we need to better at realizing where our intelligence is behind. some people are untouchably genius in social situations but absolutely terrible at stem. and some stem people may be absolute genius at engineering work but entirely lack understanding of social/humanity issues. far too often only one of those two groups understands their lack of understanding. if you ask the best party planner in the state to engineer an automobile, they’re going to look at you like you’re a crazy person. ask the best engineer in the state to plan the years most important ball, we’re going to fully delude ourselves into thinking we can do it better than the party planner.
wij4lij5 2y ago
It's what "remaining users" want after the many users who didn't want that left
zemo 2y ago
sure, that's "what people want" inasmuch as if you put every button through a statistical microscope, that's what the statistics will tell you, but if you give a rat cocaine-dispensing button and measure how many times it hits the "more cocaine" button you'll also come away with the conclusion "rats want cocaine", a thing they never encounter in nature and would never have encountered without you putting it in front of them, and you'll pat yourself on the back and say "now I understand rats: they are all vicious cocaine fiends", but you haven't really learned about rats' true nature, you'll have only conned yourself into a false narrative that confirms that your own actions are only "giving the rat what it wanted", and after it dies of an overdose, you declare yourself innocent. Anyway that's a/b testing and the tech industry.
casey2 2y ago
Complete nonsense, they just have a bot that optimizes for engagement, engagement doesn't equal longevity or increased revenue volume over some number of years. Nor does engagement mean that it's what you want. If someone walks up to you on the street, gets in your face and start assaulting you and you engage is a fight does that mean you "wanted" to get into a fight? This is like an old school forum optimizing for flamebait threads, it's clearly not going to work. The major problem is that while advertisers love engagement they hate toxic content, low quality content, violence, drugs, porn, illegal activity, extremism, bots, trolls, etc Eventually the media will build some story and the bottom will fall through, this process is just slower than usual because users are siloed into bubbles (like if you report a racist video they will show you much less, but there are still tons of people watching tons of racist videos and getting ads)
jackcosgrove 2y ago
It's what most users want. Most users want to scroll through internet TV passively. However there is a big enough minority of users who want authenticity, novelty, and creativity in their online experiences. This group is big enough to sustain, say, a social network. We've just never solved the Eternal September problem.
- Spivak 2y ago
  You're describing the cozy web. The Eternal September problem is actually solved right now it's just semi-invite-only. I am a part of more genuine social networks now then when facebook launched. They're all around you, it's just "giant supermassive public square" never really worked even with strong recommendation algorithms to try to ad-hoc connect related people and cut down on the perceived size. Most of them live on Discord, others on the fediverse, none are large by any metric and highly personal.
wing-_-nuts 2y ago
>Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time. This is unironically why I think we need a government funded non profit website for friendship and dating. Any such site subject to the whims of capitalism is doomed to become toxic

by baxtr 2y 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 2y ago

It makes one wonder whether "what I want" is really the best thing to optimize for.

FinnLobsien 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.

AndroTux 2y ago

While that’s true of course, I find that a bit of a harsh conclusion. Yes, that’s the end result for any greedy company in a world without regulation. But you can make that case for most business models. Restaurants? They’ll all eventually turn into fast food chains, because our human lizard brain appreciates fat and sugar more than actually good meals. Gaming? Let’s just replace it all with casinos already. Loot boxes are just gambling anyways. There’s absolutely a market for proper social media that’s actually social. It’s just that companies are way too greedy currently.

kevinob11 2y ago

I know from a strictly economic standpoint the things I do are the things I want. But is doing an activity are you addicted to what you really want in a human sense?

otikik 2y ago

That is true but you have to be very specific about who your "users" are. If your "users" are the guys in charge of showing more ads to people, then yes. People, on the other hand absolutely prefer watching their contacts' posts first. Recommendations related with their individual preferences, second. Random dopamine-inducing stuff, only from time to time. If you prioritize the third kind only is like someone said already on the commments here: like a restaurant that only serves candy. They will have customers for a while but eventually they will burn them down (or kill them).

dan_quixote 2y ago

> Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want" I might fine tune this to "users most likely to click ads"

rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago

>Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want". With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl. Open a restaurant masquerading as providing high-quality, locally sourced organic food, discreetly sprinkle the hardest drug on the most popular plates, slowly increase the dosage until people are completely hooked, and voilà, you can legitimately claim "people wanted the drug; it was their choice."

baxtr 2y ago
What do you think Starbucks is? Sure there are nice small restaurants. But look at all the big chains.
barbazoo 2y ago
> With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl. And we all probably would want it if we tried! It's not that we're in any way better than the folks suffering from opioid addiction. It's all just chance.
- karmakurtisaani 2y ago
  It think the second paragraph sort of agrees with you.
disqard 2y ago
Right, and the things preventing restaurants from doing this: 1. At-scale boycott: would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it? But somehow, this doesn't work for "social" media -- we're all aware what it is, yet we still use it, unironically. 2. Regulation: if a food inspector eats at your restaurant and confirms rumours that your food is actually addictive, your restaurant will get shut down. But somehow, FB/IG/etc. can operate without regulation, and free of any consequences. Sarah Wynn-Williams' book "Careless People" is worth reading.
- LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  > Would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it? This is largely a communication problem. Fentanyl is unacceptable, but a large subset of people would be glad to get food with CBD oil for free. Or caffeine - as last year's Panera charged lemonade scandal [1] revealed. Or alcohol, that's already very normal. Or monosodium glutamate, a personal favorite of mine which was once surrounded by negative press, or high-fructose corn syrup, or trans-saturated fats. Or maybe not an intentional part of the food, but traces of herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics may end up in food, and microplastics or PFOS from packaging will be eaten as well. And I'm sure you've seen old advertisements for cure-all elixirs that contained cocaine. Health experts know that certain ingredients are bad, and many others are regularly consumed in quantities far, far exceeding their safe levels, but you don't have to look too deeply at a grocery store shelf or fast food menu to realize that the contents are boycott worthy but normalized to the point of being inescapable. People know even less about what Meta is doing with their data or what their addictive apps do to their brains, and are equally powerless to learn about it or change it. [1] https://apnews.com/article/panera-charged-lemonade-drinks-caffeine-3d0f74907be3b755b71b7c47d2dfc85d https://apnews.com/article/panera-charged-lemonade-drinks-ca...

spacemadness 2y ago

Advertisers are also good at weaponizing psychology to manufacture wants that people didn’t know they had and in many cases don’t want to have after the purchase.

caseyy 2y ago

What users want, and what they collectively consume, are two different things. This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0]. It turns out that demand matters when you sell a product or a service. And it is elastic in ways other than price (such as convenience, value, appeal), but not infinitely so. In plain English, you can force anti-social media onto the market by making it appealing/hooking/addictive/convenient/supposedly valuable for a while, but not indefinitely. People do demand proper socializing, especially recently. Many are realizing they've been sold a total bag of goods just because they consumed it, and it's not good enough to displace real human connection. [0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025

badc0ffee 2y ago
> This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0]. My takeaway from that presentation is more that: * Games cost more to make but there is resistance from players to pay more * A number of growth areas (mobile, social gaming, displacing other forms of media, battle royale) are exhausted * A lot of attention in China is moving to Chinese-made games * The marketplace is overcrowded with titles * Gaming is more social now, so a significant number of users are sticking to the same big 5/10 games where there friends are, which leaves even less room for the zillions of new games to gain traction. I think the industry had a role in this, namely in locking people in to games, and simultaneously overspending on and underpricing games. But I'm not getting the sense (at least from this presentation) that the new games that are coming out aren't what users want.
- caseyy 2y ago
  There is much to be said about the industry. Most game releases compete for significantly less than 20% of the net bookings each year. Others are black hole games (the multi-year/multi-decade lifespan games that attract players and hardly let go at all), accounting for about 30% of the annual net bookings. The top 20-30 franchises account for about 50%, and the 20,000 other games made annually account for about 20%. Of the 20%, the top 50 releases each year will take 19% of the bookings, with remaining 19k+ sharing the 1%. Just like Facebook, the first-mover advantage has favored many now-established studios and franchises. They exploded game-development costs because they could, and funneled these costs into marketing and moat features indie developers could not build (such as huge open worlds, amazing sweaty character face wrinkle rendering tech, and SOTA systems). But many of these companies did not respect the player's wishes for well play-tested games with interesting stories and mechanics. Still, they captured the top 20-30 franchise part of the annual net bookings, and strongly compete in the top-50 game part. Some even built some black hole games (GTA Online, Rainbow Six: Siege, Fortnite). For a long time, they avoided much of the pressures felt strongly by smaller companies. They were "above" the 99% of games that have to compete for close to 1% of the revenues. Their marketing was so strong (plus, they strengthened it with access journalism) and features so moated, they could do no wrong. However, over the last 5 years, things have changed. Many AAA industry legends have left their jobs at major studios to start small studios and create games as a form of interactive art, rather than to make publishers rich. Ultimately, in their view, the greed and blind following of what players would consume (trends) in large numbers led to a sterile industry that could no longer create art. The growth engines got exhausted because players did not actually demand what they were offering, such as season passes, eSports corporate shooters, microtransactions, padded playtimes, user-generated content, and the other things. The new growth engines (AI, targeting kids, etc) are also what the players don't want very much. The industry understands it, and investors are starting to catch on after facing a decade of poor returns, too. The crucial point I am trying to make is that the industry spent a lot of money on these growth engines that the players didn't truly want, led by market metrics that genuinely showed they were consuming it. But now the gig is up, the writing is on the wall, and everyone inside and out of the industry sees it. As a contrast, many Eastern companies (Nintendo is an especially prominent example) stuck to classic pricing models, did not inflate the cost of their games with their money for moat (most indie developers can make games to compete with Nintendo outside of the IP), and never used the growth engines used in the West. These companies, along with many people in them whom I know personally, are largely unaffected by the industry crisis. They were always making games their users wanted. Finally, I have to say, the industry is split in two. 8/10 AAA companies are struggling because they cling to the growth engines (old and new) that the players don't want. About 2/10 game developers and publishers genuinely build games that people want, even in the West. And now that the pressure is up, some AAA executives from the 8/10ths are becoming acutely aware of this. Emphasis on "some". So, yes, the industry in some part was, is, and will continue to make games that players want. But the more interesting part for our discussion is the large part of it that wasn't, isn't, and perhaps won't be. Of course, there's some probability I'm reading this wrong. I'm making my business bets in the industry based on it, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily right. And thanks for reading the report before engaging in the discussion. That is appreciated.

watwut 2y ago

Except that facebook is slowly failing into obsolence. Or fast.

bluGill 2y ago
Are they? I know that many of us have got off. The question is are we minor outliers or a wave? I don't know.
- lurk2 2y ago
  There’s a few trends at play: Young people in Europe and North America do not use Facebook anymore, if they even have an account at all. It is still popular among older users in North America. This is one of the wealthiest demographics on earth, so Facebook’s advertising model will be ok for the foreseeable future. Growth is still positive on Instagram and WhatsApp, though Instagram’s engagement levels have begun to decline. Facebook’s main growth areas for all three apps are in the developing world. They pay carriers to allow Facebook to be accessed without counting against user data limits, so in a lot of these countries Facebook is synonymous with The Internet. Young people in these countries still see Facebook as cool, and they aren’t as likely to seek out platforms to avoid their parents on. The key problem is that these markets are not worth very much to advertisers because they have low levels of discretionary spending. This makes operating in these markets a long play for Meta; they spend some money on subsidies to build a user base in the hope that the users will gain higher levels of discretionary spending in the future, increasing the value of the market for advertisers.

timewizard 2y ago

> Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want". No it isn't. No one "wants" to be addicted. > Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time. They will measure you then do everything they can to increase the number of minutes you spend on the site. The media recommendation is a consequence of cost. It's very cheap for them to maximize your time spent using other peoples content. > It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine. There are tons of ways to get dopamine flowing into your brain. Which is why it was important for Meta to monopolize and dominate the field. Turns out lizard brains are exceptionally fickle.

djeastm 2y ago
>No one "wants" to be addicted Not consciously, no. But our conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg, half-filled with post-hoc rationalizations for numerous unconscious urges. We don't have to call them "wants", but maybe "desires" works better.
- timewizard 2y ago
  The problem is we know people are capable of seeing through their own ego and witnessing these urges for what they are. This usually leads to them gaining control over them. This is mostly what therapy is supposed to be about. Taming our internal animal nature is possible. People don't for all kinds of reasons. This leaves them susceptible to simple addictions.

tmpz22 2y ago

Missing ingredient: endless greed. Social media is just fine. Trillion dollar ad conglomerate staffing menlo park software engineers making 500k/yr? That requires enshittification.

tim333 2y ago

Users, or me at any rate, want more than one thing. For my family and friends I want to see what they say without junk added and my family has currently moved from facebook to a whatsapp group to achieve that. I also browse random junk on xitter. It's a different thing.

darth_avocado 2y ago

> it is exactly what users “want” It’s actually what users want “now”. When instagram initially stopped chronological feed users didn’t want it. When they started injecting random posts from people you didn’t follow. Users didn’t want that either. When they launched reels, they also didn’t want that. When they started almost exclusively showing reels like TikTok, users still didn’t want that. The problem with all of the above is that users eventually got used to the new norm and their brains established the dopamine rewards pathways according to what they were offered. And that’s why they think they “want” it now. But we’ve seen this happen before. FB did the exact thing and now it’s almost dead, even Zuckerberg acknowledged it. But they somehow think, users won’t eventually get off Instagram because somehow this time it’s different?

bluGill 2y ago
Or users eventually get used to it until one day they wake up and realize that the thing they went there for isn't what they get. I check Facebook less than once a month. I want to see what my distant friends are doing. Instead though I see subversive political memes, and other things (jokes) that are fun once in a while but not worth spending much time on. Because Facebook isn't giving me what I really want I gave up on them. But it took me a while in part because the things I want to see are there - they are just hard to find.
motoxpro 2y ago
It's just how you define "want." They a-b tested the algo vs chronological feed and the algo one because more people used it. It's just stated vs revealed preference. As a business, who's goal is to make money, does something that makes them more money, are they supposed to stop? Whether it's good for society is another question but, users definitely didn't show that they "wanted" a chronological feed, they only said it. There was a JUMP in engagement, not a decline.
- TheBicPen 2y ago
  "want" is different from "will consume if offered". Arguably, the definition of "want" that most people use is one of higher-order desire. E.g. a drug addict wants drugs, but doesn't want to want drugs. People might choose a certain feature if offered and they aren't aware of its negative impact on their mental health. Then they might become cognizant of the negative effects but by then the choice to not use that feature is no longer available so they're stuck with what they have. Alternatively, the choice to not use the feature might still be present, but the neural reward pathways have already been built. The user then wants the feature, but they don't want to want it.

einpoklum 2y ago

You do realize that by applying quotation marks you've basically nullified your argument, right? :-(

al_borland 2y ago

It’s only what they “want” after the various social media companies to deliberate steps to addict their users to feeds that maximize engagement. Does an addict really want to be an addict? The Light Phone, screen time features, and various other things exist for a reason. People don’t want this, but feel helpless to break free from their addiction, which entered their life like a trojan horse.

Barrin92 2y ago
People want slop, they always wanted slop and there is no magical mind controlling powers in a Facebook feed. It was the case in the age of TV, magazines and when nobody had any idea how to even measure what people want. If Mark Zuckerberg forcibly injected educational material and long form journalism into everyone's feed the average user would uninstall the app. People have been consuming crap since they were able to draw boobs on cave walls with chalk. Do you know why every belief system that claims people are ensnared by some false consciousness fails? Because they aren't, there's no such thing. Mark Zuckerberg is exactly right about one thing, he gave the people what they wanted, and if he's going to lose to a platform like TikTok it's because they're even better at it
- al_borland 2y ago
  I was speaking more to the work of Nir Eyal. His ideas were widely used in the tech industry and he quite literally wrote the book on how to build habit forming products.

deleted 2y ago

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twelve40 2y ago

Well people really-really "want" many other things too, like free money, sex, etc etc. Does it mean that something that started as a way to connect with friends and family must turn into Only Fans for example? Or cater to all those other wants that have nothing to do with friends and family, just to make a few more bucks?

Clubber 2y ago

I agree. People want to eat well, quit smoking and get in shape, but mostly they eat crap and sit on the sofa in front of the TV (present company included). Which is what they really want?

HKH2 2y ago
What they do. There are long-term goals and short-term goals (convenience etc.) Society pressures you into having long-term goals even if you don't do anything about them.

zombiwoof 2y ago

We don’t know it’s what we don’t want because of the addictive nature

toofy 2y ago

> … what users “want”. what *some* users want. sure, it may have been a majority at the time. but imo chasing that was incredibly short sighted. many many many people warned them this would be the outcome. in typical fashion for these people, they ignored it, imagining themselves to be smarter in every area than everyone else. i’ve said it before and i’ll say it so many more times: we need to better at realizing where our intelligence is behind. some people are untouchably genius in social situations but absolutely terrible at stem. and some stem people may be absolute genius at engineering work but entirely lack understanding of social/humanity issues. far too often only one of those two groups understands their lack of understanding. if you ask the best party planner in the state to engineer an automobile, they’re going to look at you like you’re a crazy person. ask the best engineer in the state to plan the years most important ball, we’re going to fully delude ourselves into thinking we can do it better than the party planner.

wij4lij5 2y ago

It's what "remaining users" want after the many users who didn't want that left

zemo 2y ago

sure, that's "what people want" inasmuch as if you put every button through a statistical microscope, that's what the statistics will tell you, but if you give a rat cocaine-dispensing button and measure how many times it hits the "more cocaine" button you'll also come away with the conclusion "rats want cocaine", a thing they never encounter in nature and would never have encountered without you putting it in front of them, and you'll pat yourself on the back and say "now I understand rats: they are all vicious cocaine fiends", but you haven't really learned about rats' true nature, you'll have only conned yourself into a false narrative that confirms that your own actions are only "giving the rat what it wanted", and after it dies of an overdose, you declare yourself innocent. Anyway that's a/b testing and the tech industry.

casey2 2y ago

Complete nonsense, they just have a bot that optimizes for engagement, engagement doesn't equal longevity or increased revenue volume over some number of years. Nor does engagement mean that it's what you want. If someone walks up to you on the street, gets in your face and start assaulting you and you engage is a fight does that mean you "wanted" to get into a fight? This is like an old school forum optimizing for flamebait threads, it's clearly not going to work. The major problem is that while advertisers love engagement they hate toxic content, low quality content, violence, drugs, porn, illegal activity, extremism, bots, trolls, etc Eventually the media will build some story and the bottom will fall through, this process is just slower than usual because users are siloed into bubbles (like if you report a racist video they will show you much less, but there are still tons of people watching tons of racist videos and getting ads)

jackcosgrove 2y ago

It's what most users want. Most users want to scroll through internet TV passively. However there is a big enough minority of users who want authenticity, novelty, and creativity in their online experiences. This group is big enough to sustain, say, a social network. We've just never solved the Eternal September problem.

Spivak 2y ago
You're describing the cozy web. The Eternal September problem is actually solved right now it's just semi-invite-only. I am a part of more genuine social networks now then when facebook launched. They're all around you, it's just "giant supermassive public square" never really worked even with strong recommendation algorithms to try to ad-hoc connect related people and cut down on the perceived size. Most of them live on Discord, others on the fediverse, none are large by any metric and highly personal.

wing-_-nuts 2y ago

>Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time. This is unironically why I think we need a government funded non profit website for friendship and dating. Any such site subject to the whims of capitalism is doomed to become toxic