I don't understand how they think an algorithm can decide better what I want to see than me myself (by adding friend and blocking the ones that irritate me). In the end they lost me as a customer(or... Product :) ) altogether and I assume that's not their end-goal.
I agree with your points, except I believe there is a limited role for algorithms that help users discover new things they might like but not know about. I prefer Spotify's approach, where there's a specific area of the app (a "Discover Weekly" playlist) that gets refreshed but not so often that it becomes a dopamine lever. Although that kind of recommendation algorithm can't seem to handle multifaceted "loves rap but also renaissance music" users' tastes very well yet—in that regard Pandora's separate stations were better.
"Each song [representative of other songs in its group] is analyzed by a musician in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per song. Ten percent of songs are analyzed by more than one musician to ensure conformity with the in-house standards and statistical reliability." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project
I think the real downfall was not that they added the timeline, it's that it's impolite to not accept friend requests from e.g. coworkers or relatives that you know but don't really care about.
And then you end up with a news feed full of people you don't care about. I think by the time they added "unfollow" options everybody had moved to WhatsApp where conversations are between 15 people you know quite well rather than 300 people you met once.
I have no idea how they can fix that, or even how they could have prevented it. Google clearly foresaw that problem with their "circles" feature.
This always confuses me. I feel like it's more impolite or disrespectful to be two-faced about this.
What's wrong with telling someone, politely, that you try to curate your social media and restrict it to personal friends and family?
If they get offended, is that not their fault? Should they not respect your boundaries?
Presumably, they don’t think they can decide what you want better than you can. But they think they can decide what will make you engage more, and they’re probably right. The damage is not accidental.
A random feed of micro blogging posts/status that is not random but heavily leans toward resharing led to outrage porn addiction.
;-)
We want to believe that FB is a corporation and therefore must act with a certain economic logic, but within the bounds of what can be optimized for the bottom line, there can often be a huge amount of room for founder neuroses, fantasies, etc. (I mean cmon, Jeff Bezos literally just went to space. And if you like history, remember William Randolph Hearst?)
Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself. It was the core neuroses. Money just happens to be the thing people “universally” care about in middle life, as opposed to university life, but that much is an outgrowth of the neuroses.
I don't think this is a useful way to summarise it. You could say any business' main gig is not making money if you want to (this bank isn't about making money; we just intrinsically love signing people up to financial services!) I don't know if it adds anything, and I think it does subtract.
Facebook was not created to make money. It came about from the era when people thought, just grow really big and figure out how to monetize later. It was not yet established that you could monetize something after making it big (which was a thing in the dot-com bust of 2001). It seems targeted advertising like a given today but back in 2011 (a decade ago, and not long after DoubleClick was bought by Google), this was still being established. It took a long, long time for FB to monetize.
To that end, you need to have been there in the thick of it. Back then it may have seen like it was fun and games. Playing silly “viral” “games” was a big chunk of how people were spending time, back in 2008.
But more than FB’s specific case, founder’s personas can be a bit unappreciated as the guiding hand in what happens with the company. We know that founder disagreements are a large percentage of startup failure. It really come down to the people, and their base impulses. Which is so trite and petty, but sometimes life just is.
Looking at it now, at least to me, it seems obvious that the purpose of facebook has changed from "make money by showing people what their friends are up to" to "keep those dumb fucks as long as possible by whatever means possible to make as much fucking money as possible, everything else be dammed". And this is being generous with their beginning.
Also they send me click-baity emails like "John Doe has posted a status update!"
Heck, they've even started TEXTING me to lure me back.
I'm dreading having to log back in to try to figure out how to get them to stop trying to contact me.
> The biggest difference between deactivating and deleting a Facebook account is that deactivating your Facebook account gives you the flexibility to return whenever you wish, while deleting your account is a permanent action.
From what I remember, reactivation of a deactivated account merely requires logging back in. Which sounds like you did exactly that.
I hear you but I'm past that phase. "They" don't listen. It's not worth my time and energy being angry and going down that rabbit hole to "remind them" (my base anger level is high enough :P). Why? "They" don't have the capacity to listen. It's not in their interest to make their product better for you. You think you can't scroll back and see what you saw just a second ago because it's a really challenging technical problem? You think you can't set your home and work location in google Maps when you have location tracking disabled because it's a really complex problem?
No. They'll listen when they'll get their teeth kicked in by a regulator. I'm just glad that they consistently keep fucking up, even in the face of mounting negative sentiment.