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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 somet

• 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?
        • charcircuit 1y ago
          Engagement is a proxy for user value. Things that User value can be monetized.
          • lukev 1y ago
            So it's fair to say that effectiveness at monetization is an extremely strong evolutionary pressure on how technology evolves?
            • charcircuit 1y ago
              No, something can monetize well but only for a small audience. This is what building for a niche does. What works for a niche may not match the macro trends that are at play.
              • fsckboy 1y ago
                the thing about evolutionary pressure is, it works on all niches, all at the same time
                • charcircuit 1y ago
                  But the pressure doesn't follow monetization efficiency.
  • conductr 1y ago
    No. You have it backwards. It came out of a web 2.0 phase but everything it became was driven by a focus on metrics & growth.
    • 1970-01-01 1y ago
      And metrics and growth was driven by the new ability to make discussions out of posted content (i.e. Web 2.0)
      • saltcured 1y ago
        I feel like you have that exactly backwards? To me it was a shift in roles in the old field of dreams storyline. I.e. "if you build it, they will come". In Web 1.0, you posted content and an audience came. In Web 2.0, you tried to open an empty field and commenters came and played with each other. If anything, what happened next was a sort of halfway reversion, as the platforms tried to stratify and monetize two types of user. A subset who were the Web 2.0 contributors and another tier of more passive consumers. I think a lot of the "likes" stuff was also less about self-moderating channels and more about making passive users feel like they're engaging without actually having to contribute anything substantive.
      • quickthrowman 1y ago
        There was plenty of discussion online prior to XmlHttpRequests, see vBulletin, Fark, Digg, etc. The only thing new about “Web 2.0” was a page refresh not being needed after an http request.
        • paradox460 1y ago
          Digg doesn't predate Ajax
      • conductr 1y ago
        No, metrics and growth always existed and could be measured there wasn’t some technological breakthrough to enable that with Web 2.0. They, Facebook, decided to use it as their guiding principle. They decided to force the feed on their users. They knew their users had no real alternative and the value they had built with getting everyone on the network itself. If anything, their move was anti-web 2.0. As they moved forum and blogs and news, pretty much all open and accessible content into their walled garden. Even the famous quote “know what’s cooler than being a millionaire? Being a billionaire.” Or however it goes, is a ruthless capitalist telling Zuck he needs to wake up and realized how valuable this thing he’s built really could be. Carry on if you want but I think you’re very much the one that gets it backwards? Do you remember how it all transpired or are you too young to really understand what it was and what Web 2.0 really was about?
  • dleary 1y ago
    This is crazy. You’re saying that Facebook was somehow helpless to avoid changing from a “friends feed” to an ad-maximizing outrage-inducing misinformation machine because of web2.0 communication technology? Someone invented XmlHttpRequest and Facebook was like, “well that’s the ballgame, I guess we have to suck now?”
    • 1970-01-01 1y ago
      Much like a shot of heroin, yes, this is the take. Facebook got a taste of Web 2.0 and couldn't use it recreationally. It became their entire life. They immediately integrated it into every part of business until it was the only thing that mattered.
      • nrb 1y ago
        Letting unchecked greed guide decision-making is not a new phenomenon that came out of Web 2.0 though. To use your metaphor, the heroin was human attention. Web 2.0 was, at best, the syringe.
        • 1970-01-01 1y ago
          Yes, this is why I disagreed with the mechanism, and not the phenomenon.
      • dleary 1y ago
        What I’m taking issue with is you disagreeing with the GP assertion that Facebook made purposeful business decisions. I agree that a Facebook had a powerful incentive to act this way. But they didn’t have to. The fact that they chose to reflects on their moral character. Internal leaks let us know that Facebook has pretty advanced sentiment analysis internally. They knew that they were (are) making people miserable. They know that outrage causes engagement. Other internal leaks let us know that Facebook was aware of how much disinformation was (is) being used on their platform to influence elections. To attack democracy. They didn’t just look the other way, which would be reason enough to condemn them. They helped. When they saw how much money the propagandists were willing to pay, they built improved tools to better help them propagandize. After the UK was shattered by the Brexit lies, when Facebook were called in front of parliament and congress to explain themselves over the Cambridge Analytica and related misinformation campaigns, they stalled, they lied, they played semantic word games to avoid admitting what is clearly stated in the leaked memos. These were all choices. People should be held accountable for making awful choices. Even if those choices result in them making a lot of money. It sounds kind of crazy to even have to say that, doesn’t it? But that is where we are, partly because of arguments like yours from otherwise well-meaning people. Don’t absolve them. Hold them accountable. Zuckerberg wants to own the whole world and thinks you’re an idiot for trusting him. An egocentic sociopath who can’t imagine trusting anyone else because he knows what he will do when you give him your trust.
  • tshaddox 1y ago
    Some communication technology isn't paid for by behavioral advertising. I think that's probably the most relevant distinction here.
• nprateem 1y ago
  You don't think he's saying it so he can say "... so there's no point breaking us up"?
  • flkiwi 1y ago
    Sure. Taking that perspective even begins to explain some things, like a lot of the pointless me-too developments (short form videos?) Facebook has been implementing for years: if they dilute the product by incorporating others' ideas, even if those ideas go nowhere FB can claim everybody is in the same boat. But it doesn't make it any less ridiculous. This is like the meme of the guy shooting the other dude in the chair.
  • zombiwoof 1y ago
    The argument I would make as the government is the reason Facebook isn’t a social network is because it is a monopoly and didnt need to innovate and compete
• zeptonaut22 1y ago
  Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.) I think on the How I Built This Instagram episode the Instagram founder said that Zuck was basically reading the data from Facebook's interactions and saw that the demographics and sharing tendencies of Facebook users meant that it was in a death spiral: people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels). Looking back at what I posted on FB in 2008-2012 is like observing an alien from another planet: it was a completely different platform.
  • addicted 1y ago
    Superpower is one way to phrase it. Another is illegally using Facebook’s monopoly and data to crush or buy potential competitors. I think the olds used to call that anti-trust.
  • pipes 1y ago
    It was just never clear who I was sharing with. At least on a private chat there's a list of users and that's it.
    • zeptonaut22 1y ago
      Definitely true, but back in the day that was sort of the fun of it -- similar to putting up an AOL Instant Messenger away message, it was just... a blast of a funny thought to the people that you knew. Over time, that network got stale and it included "people you sort of used to know", and then it included your grandma and uncle and rest of the world. There are few things that are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of "things I want to share with all of those people", especially as I get older.
    • RajT88 1y ago
• zombiwoof 1y ago
  Nailed it
• kryogen1c 1y ago
  Zuck is learning theres a difference between shallow short term engagement and deeper long term engagement. Who could have seen this coming, except literally everyone? It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one party destroying all resources for themself
  • const_cast 1y ago
    In Zuck's defense, it's not just him, it's the entire American school of business. They never learn. GM, GE, RCA, you name it. They always want to make more money now now NOW. They don't understand they're taking on a metaphorical loan. They don't understand the interest they have to pay. It's the ultimate greedy algorithm. Just make the decision that makes the most money right now, every time, over and over and over again. Don't look at anything else.
    • thephyber 1y ago
      What makes you think “they don’t understand the interest they have to pay”? They are optimizing for short-medium term profits. The people there in the early days pull the ejection code when the “interest” is due. The company coasts until some private equity runs the numbers and realizes the parts are worth more than the whole. This is capitalism. You are using “interest” (a finance term) seemingly in a moral / ethical critique. If so, use a moral / ethical term instead.
      • frollogaston 1y ago
        Corporate valuation isn't about short-term thinking. It's actually all very long-term. Plenty of companies are not paying out all their profits to shareholders, and their valuation is entirely based on expectation that it'll happen in the distant future and the discounted perpetuity value will equal the initial investment, probably after the current investors are dead. There are still plenty of vulture investors who find a way to trick the market in the short-to-medium term. I'm not convinced Facebook is a case of that, even though I hate what they do.
    • grugagag 1y ago
• tombert 1y ago
  I recently bought a new account on Something Awful [1], having not been on there in about seventeen years. It's almost surreal, because it still feels like 2005 internet, but people will talk about current topics and the community is generally more engaging. The moderation isn't some soulless ML model designed to optimize marketing revenue, it's a few dedicated people who want to make the community more fun and I've actually really enjoyed re-discovering the community there. I guess I had simply forgotten about linear web forums as a concept. Places like Reddit (Hacker News, etc.) have a recursive reply model, which is nice in its own right, but there's something sort of captivating about everything being one long giant thread. It's more chaotic, it's less refined, but it's also kind of unpretentious. [1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.
  • isk517 1y ago
    I did the same about a year ago. Large enough that the community is extremely diverse with a wide range of life experiences but small enough that you'll start to recognize certain people. Also the completely linear threads means people will actually see what you post and not just ignore any conversation that isn't part of the top 10 most uploaded replies.
    • tombert 1y ago
      Yeah, and the simple $10 one-time-fee actually is surprisingly effective at filtering out spam bots and people who post crap content. People don't just make an account in thirty seconds and create a bunch of spam until they're banned, or at least they don't do that much because it would get relatively expensive fairly quickly.
      • isk517 1y ago
        At the very least the few weirdos that seem to create daily accounts just to get banned after 2-3 posts are funding forum by doing so.
  • lapetitejort 1y ago
• Wilsoniumite 1y ago
  > [...] 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: As soon as you have any platform which says "hey you there with an email address, you can put content on here that can be seen by anyone in the world." you will slowly end up with a scene that looks like all these sites we have now. Advertiser's and influencers will be there, at your behest or otherwise. There's only two options to avoid this. 1. Aggressively tune your algorithm against pure engagement and toward proximity. 2. Explicitly dissallow broad reach of content. And when I say aggressively I really mean it. If people can "follow" others unilaterally, even only showing "followed content" will still lead to most people seeing mostly high engagement posts, rather than their friends. At what point (degree of intervention) does something go from "natural" to "driven"? It's a hard question, but one things for sure, a Facebook that didn't allow high engagement content would already be dead.
  • sumeno 1y ago
    Exclusively chronological timelines improve this situation immensely. As soon as you're using "algorithmic" timelines the battle is lost.
• suzzer99 1y ago
  I only use Facebook on desktop, and I use Fluff Busting Purity. I still see enough family and friends content to make it worthwhile. Every now and then I browse FB on my phone and it's an endless hellscape of ads and promoted content.
  • intrasight 1y ago
    Same here. So weird to me that the tech crowd on Hackernews don't all use FBP or use the Facebook API to build their own front end.
    • eadmund 1y ago
      Remarkably, despite caring about this kind of thing, I had never heard of FB Purity until today! I am paranoid enough to wonder if I should be suspicious, but I am hopeful enough to wonder what other amazing stuff is out there to learn about.
  • jayknight 1y ago
    Use the "Feeds" tab (you have to go searching for it) but it allows you to just see stuff from your frields, pages you follow, groups, etc, purely in reverse chronological order, like God intended.
• the_clarence 1y ago
  It started when they introduced the non chronological timeline. Everything from then on was about driving users to use the app more as opposed to being a tool to connect friends. Thanks to facebook I have met many friends throughout the world, including my now wife, and have managed to keep in touch with them as I travel the world and land in my friends home countries. It is so sad that the tool I'm describing doesn't really exist anymore.
  • frollogaston 1y ago
    And the non-chrono timeline was said to be necessary because friends are posting too much to keep up with.
    • kalleboo 1y ago
      Before they introduced the non-chrono timeline the main complaint about Facebook was "I don't care about seeing what my cousin ate for lunch", and from that perspective it almost makes sense.
      • frollogaston 1y ago
        Yeah but that was in the earlier days, and I think that stopped happening well before they went non-chrono. Which is also maybe they went non-chrono, they realized the social part was losing steam.
  • Semaphor 1y ago
    Fwiw, https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr still/again works. Recently rediscovered it, and essentially got my old fb experience back. Add a normal adblock, and manually block reels, and you'll only see what friends and followed pages (90% musicians for me) post.
• api 1y ago
  That had to happen. People didn’t pay for Facebook and it was expensive to run.
• frollogaston 1y ago
  Even following the $, there was a case for keeping Facebook social. Users are valuable, and networking retains them, otherwise Facebook has nothing over competitors like TikTok. I'll bet Zuck considered that. Maybe he figured upfront money was more important, especially for acquiring competitors like Instagram and sorta WhatsApp. He might be right, hard to tell.
• austin-cheney 1y ago
  This is why non software people think developers are generally autistic. Zuckerberg is a super obvious sociopath. There is no mystery to any of this.
• MarceliusK 1y ago
  It's wild how the narrative gets framed like Zuckerberg just observed this shift from the sidelines, when in reality, Meta steered the ship straight into this model
• trod1234 1y ago
  Is it really a surprise that evil people lie? If you know how to recognize evil people, this doesn't come as a surprise, and there are so many because society has been changed to protect them. You recognize evil people by their blindness to the consequences of their destructive actions and the resistance to repeat such similar actions. That kind of blindness is almost always accompanied by false justification, false reasoning, omission, or clever dissembling, or gaslighting to introduce indirection between accountability (reality) and their actions. There is a short progression from complacency (the banality of evil) to the radical evil. This used to be an important part of history class in public education.
• 0asa 1y ago
  Exactly. That.