That's of course not to say they aren't maliciously misused.
I want to see the photos my crazy aunt posts of her family and dogs, but I would love to not see the alt-right political memes she also posts.
I can do this already to some extent by simply blocking certain sources that she's reposting from. It's harder to do when the content is copied and pasted.
Will they revolt, though? Will consumers pay for it, though?
I sure hope so, as this is basically the whole reason I started working on communick[0]. But every feedback I've been collecting so far has been along the lines of "You should target this for the enterprise, not end-users". I went to Brave's BAT subreddit (a group of people supposedly tech-savvy people and who I thought were privacy-conscious) to ask them how/if they would like to spend the BAT received in privacy-oriented services[1]. The answers were depressing.
Granted, I was not expecting communick to be an overnight success and there is still a lot of work to be done to help people get onboard - both the technology and the privacy-first mindset. But even running super-lean I am far from covering my operational costs. If I don't get to the end of year and it is still not paying itself, I guess I will have to pivot and focus only on enterprise customers.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/i46g72/howwhere...
I have some faith that Facebook's redesign isn't losing them a ton of money, or they would've reverted it. It's probably increasing the KPIs they're trying to target.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277963/facebooks-quarter...
Facebook will not eat itself for a very long, long time. Their corruption of various nice things in life will be with us for many decades.
I read HN headlines + top comments, because I have no patience to read a 20 page article that is badly written, or is written in such a way to get more pageviews.
You want engagement? Give me high quality content. Short, long, doesn't matter. High quality, dense content.
The internet is full of fluff. It's like everybody is using this xantham gum these days.
Most of the content on FB is either exclusive to it (all your friends are on there) or the majority of their target market doesn’t know/care about finding other sources which provide that content with a better experience.
Most posts these days are tiktok reposts anyway. The only things I like about fb these days:
- Some groups I'm in
- I like the marketplace
- For people to find me
In the 19th- and mid-20th centuries, all of the big advertising agencies handling consumer goods were headquartered in Chicago (many still are).
They would test products by introducing them a couple of hundred miles away in Peoria, Illinois. If the items were well accepted there, then they were rolled out to the rest of the country. It's where the expression, "But will it play in Peoria?" comes from.
This still happens. Back when Starbucks was still cool, it would roll out new drinks in Chicago and a couple of other cities as test markets, and then later in the rest of the nation if they were successful.
And props for history less on "But will it play in Peoria?"
No.
This trend will continue until users revolt against this by refusing to use engagement-funded services in favor of service they actually pay for, so that the incentive is no longer to waste the user's time to generate engagement but to give the user what they want in the most efficient way possible in order to keep them paying for the product.