This is probably the most accurate description of Facebook I've seen.

"HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who never left our hometown & thinks Olive Garden is fancy. Anyway, here's a racist article."

It's funny because it's something many, many people identify with. A good chunk of Americans with the ability to do so leave small, provincial areas they grew up in for better opportunities in larger, more diverse cities. This leads to a pretty huge disconnect between them and those who, for whatever reason, stayed in their hometown.

It wasn't something that you noticed as much until Facebook exploded, and then everyone got re-connected with people from high school that, in some cases, you'd neither seen nor thought about in 20 years. And then the sort of post that prompted the joke happens, and you see it clearly.

And I assure you, as someone who grew up in and later left arguably the MOST racist state in the US south, the articles these archetypes are sharing are often quite explicit in their racism.

Many don't optimize their life their lives around "better opportunities" and "diverse cities". It sounds like you do, and good for you.

You DO realize that it's not at the expense of MERELY staying in a small, provincial, homogeneous place, right? It's ALSO continuing to embrace the blinkered worldview that growing up in such a place engenders. You need both for the joke to land.

You're reacting here as thought it's JUST about moving away (or not). It isn't.

I know educated, open-minded people who stayed in my hometown who have grown personally and intellectually and morally since youth. They stayed there for a handful of reasons, and some of them are as you state: an inability or unwillingness to be more than an hour from family, for example.

But I know of far more people who have not advanced in any meaningful way since they were 18 or 20. They often find the VERY IDEA of a world beyond the hometown to be fishy and untrustworthy. They are, uniformly, uncritical consumers of Fox News. They are the ones posting racist memes about, say, the Obamas, or proudly touting their COVID vax refusenik status.

This is who the joke is about.

The joke is not from a journalist.

The joke was copied widely when originally posted, and it wasn't clear to me who wrote it in the first place -- but if I was going to reference it here, I wanted to give proper credit.

I found a story in the WaPo about online joke plagiarism, and it used this joke as an example -- and cited musician Kevin Farzad as the original author. Based on this, I credited him in my comment accordingly.

Of course there is nothing wrong with thinking OG is fancy and so on. Better to avoid folks who make a big deal out of it IMO.

The stereotype is orthogonal to class.

Is this a slur for my kind?

Classical guitar teacher here. I'd never have been able to buy the house I'm writing this from on my salary if not for also prostituting myself in the it sector :-)

District attorneys don't necessarily get paid well, but they are pretty high up in local social class.

"largely irrelevant to your life a decade later."

hey, 2013 was about a decade ago, you nailed it

The original argument was that Facebook is failing to keep up with the times, hence why the back-home losers are still using it while you, the successful urban-dweller, have moved on.

Your argument that Facebook is “a pipeline to deliver brain poison” has a lot more value, even if only because it’s more objective.

The friend's perception of the poster would be "HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who went to New York and thinks is better than you. Anyway, here's a woke article."

I think it matters largely because I don’t believe that most people just want content. Everyone I speak with who uses FB on a daily basis has made the decision to excuse the habit purely because they are interested in keeping in touch with people. But by excusing that habit, they end up mostly consuming content because that’s what the feed gives them.

I left FB the day their “timeline” stopped supporting chronological sort.

the increasing hew and cry suggests that it actually is

When everyone is still actively building their friend list (remember this started for college students) its an amazing product because it brings you closer to people in a new way and allows for curation without investing a ton into AI/ML.

For people who stay in a static social bubbles for long times (e.g., your parents, your friends from HS who didn't move to a coastal city) it's also perfect, because they tend to value content related to their social group more than something new and interesting.

But for the highest value users (e.g., the ones with high-paying knowledge-based jobs and a willingness to try new things) the social graph will never keep up with their lives. Bad content from the edges of the graph will slowly creep into feeds (MLMs being a prime example) and those high-value users will seek out new platforms that conform better to their interests.

Instagram was a brilliant stop-gap, but Mark never saw the writing on the wall about algorithmic content (probably b/c Bytedance had the advantage of cutting its teeth in China first) and is just too far behind to ever really catch up.

So now he's trying to out-future Bytedance with VR (and even got them to burn $1bn on Pico), but unless he has some hard-tech rabbit to pull out of his hat, there's just not anything there.

We may very well be seeing the largest (negative) turn-around story in history since Yahoo! play out in front of our eyes.

They already have, and if the US Government would allow them to make another acquisition over $1bn, they already would have (I guarantee 5 different Biz Dev associates have made very long PowerPoints about Roblox and Rec Room only to be told the idea is DOA).

It's actually kind of amazing that Mark's off-putting personality and desire to remain the face of the company is what will kill it (let's just hope Aaron Sorkin stays alive long enough for the sequel, because it might rival Citizen Kane).

The value of ____ might be "seeing pictures of family", or it might be "coordination of/participation in a group that has settled on Facebook as the easiest path" (<-- this is me), or it might be "professionally necessary to be there" or a number of other things.

But none of these are positive reasons. There is no love of Facebook behind any of them. It's Facebook being tolerated. This is bad for Meta.

This is probably good for society at large, though. Or at least I hope it will be.

My neighborhood exclusively uses Facebook for neighborhood communication.

My kid's school PTA exclusively uses Facebook.

Most of the local food trucks only post their schedules on Facebook.

Since the pandemic started I have been taking the opportunity to go through my house and clean out lots of things that have just been hanging around for years. I list everything I sell on Facebook, Craigslist, OfferUp, and Nextdoor. I can’t remember the last time I got a bite from any of the other services that aren't Facebook. It’s been awhile.

It honestly drives me be crazy how this company has wormed their way into being such an essential piece of communication infrastructure for so many people that I can’t quit without sacrificing my ability to participate in some of the things I really enjoy.

So I begrudgingly tolerate Facebook.

>Most of the local food trucks only post their schedules on Facebook.

Oh, god, that's annoying. I've actually seen some businesses forgo a proper web site and instead JUST USE FB, which is crazy annoying.

Do people really participate in something like school PTA and eat often at food trucks?

I guess electronic platforms are more fragmented here in Europe. Google Maps owns business hours, various classified sites (such as Ebay's) own selling stuff locally. But everything might be different in each country really.

I think people have become more vary to post personal things online. I know very little parents that would be okay to publish pictures of their kids online (including on Facebook).

Yes, parents often participate in PTAs. Parent engagement is a big deal in education.

Yes, in many places in the US there are food trucks. People often enjoy them. Finding out where a given truck will be on Tuesday is useful!

Businesses generally keep Facebook pages in the US, usually as a supplement to a real web site, but also because Facebook has traditionally been where everyone is already.

* lost and found (including pets)

* HOA announcements

* changes to the trash pickup schedule, special trash collections, etc

* other events (Santa parade)

* new neighbor introductions

* recommendations (repairs, babysitting, dog sitting)

* free stuff or stuff for sale

* general advice on house construction (many houses are similar)

It’s not important per se, and not everyone is in the group. But it does come in handy.

I have a few Facebook friends that refuse to post pictures of their kids on Facebook. I also have a LOT of friends that post nothing but.

Would love some feedback on if you think it would help solve communications from: 1) PTA -> resident 2) Food Trucks -> nearby people

1) Remove the apps from your phone and log out on mobile browser, making each future login a concentrated intentional effort. (You can leave Messenger if that might be used for emergency contacts).

2) Use www version only.

3) Choose a time when you're going to sit by your home computer, and use social media for some pre-determined time slot, let's say 30 minutes.

The social networks are very good at serving this use case - showing most important content first, and relegating the junky stuff further down the feed. This way you won't miss any baby photos or wedding announcements, but will be spared from your uncle getting into a heated political discussion.

Only up to a point. I have actually missed wedding announcements because the announcement was pushed far down by more recent but less relevant news. Yes, if you use Facebook for 30 minutes a day, you probably won't miss anything. But if you use Facebook less often than that (like an hour a week, or once a month), you will absolutely miss relevant news because it'll be pushed down by whatever political shoutfest is currently drawing comments and reactions.

Which I'm sure is complete coincidence and not at all intended to draw you into using Facebook every second of every hour of every day

Is facebook trending in that direction? Seems like it.

Maybe too pessimistic.

I quit Facebook years ago and do not miss anything either, so maybe it's just me.

My son's daycare has a facebook page. It's very convenient to stay up to date on my own schedule without having to deal with emails. My pizzeria also has a facebook page. It's an easy way to look up hours or any updates. My gym has an instagram page to post their workouts and schedule. It's very convenient. The owners aren't very tech savvy so its easy for them. And its easy for me because the website isn't broken, gives me everything I need, lets me comment or reach out to the owners and is well indexed

It's like saying "I wouldn't use product if not for the value I get from the product".

They try to make you think they invented the wheel but really they’re just offering the same services as elsewhere under their umbrella.

I deleted it anyway. Deleting facebook didn't change my real world in anyway.

I think Facebook just got burned by not having a hardware platform this cycle - Apple and Google control the phones and Microsoft has the PC, XBox etc. They just want control over the next big hardware platform.

Whether that's a reasonable bet or not who knows? But I wouldn't be as dismissive of their ambitions in the space.

Perhaps I'm just an outlier, but it's the same with Twitter for me. I use it more these days than I did some years ago, but I also use it mostly like an RSS feed. I follow video game devs, musicians, etc. so I can be kept in the loop on the latest releases and whatnot.

I think you make a good point about content graph. I think there is some truth to that, although I have never really taken any interest in anything but the kind of content that YouTube offers.

I don’t mind the marketplace architecture, it’s quite nice actually. But Groups is the absolute worst place to house former forum content because it’s just not indexed well. There a few groups that I’m in that are managed really well, which gives them ~60% the utility of a tradition forum still.

What I’ve done on FB is aggressively unfollowed every single friend and page that I don’t care about. My feed is now strictly a feed of group posts from people I don’t know about my hobbies that I enjoy…it’s actually quite nice!

It's wild that FB has become such a highly valued company despite the fact that they have always been resting on rather shaky foundations.

We can also start to see Goodhart's Law in action at scale. Running your company by constantly optimizing for metrics (as so many startups mimic now) eventually does catch up to you. The vitriolic content that initially got them massive engagement eventually gets more and more people repulsed by the service.

In the end, just like MySpace and Friendster, there is nothing that really prevents users from exiting from the platform extremely fast once the tide of the network effect turns the other way.

I think it started a slow bleed when they removed the chronological view. After that it became “evil” and not about social connection anymore. No longer was my post being seen by my friends unless the algo thought it was saucy enough. It was a great business but I dont think you’ll ever get the people who are fed up to come back.

I believe the reason Instagram, Snapchat, and now TikTok grew the way they did was because the parents weren't on those apps. Even now we see that young people migrate to other platforms as their parents start paying attention to the current one.

I don’t want to buy the next card game booster pack in any way or form. I don’t care about theme parks I’ve never heard of, or the new game that lets me save a half naked hottie. And for that matter I also won’t change for a new car insurance.

Now, someone in my life pushing for the formers might force my hand.

Coincidentally the profiling is also extremely useful for political leverage and behaviour mod. I'm sure that never occurred to anyone around the company, and the links to operations like AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica are incidental among the ad noise.

The incoming anti-trust cases are going to be interesting.

FB, as a social platform, is moving away from being a social app. Same thing happened to other social apps. The original utility they had in the early days was subsumed by social, which is now being subsumed by something else. The original utility can't be found anywhere... it was dragged down into the depths and drowned.

In some ways, my iPhone now is less useful to me than it was before. I can look things up in the moment, but in terms of connecting me to my past activities -- not so much.

There are mountains of quality information online and while I would absolutely resent having to grow up in the age of social media, the kids are way better at parsing and questioning rapid onslaughts of information because of the tribulations there.

They get caught up for a while, but the guise wears away. Young people can easily see outside their immediate world, and any adopted worldview, unlike we've ever known. When I was growing up that meant a lonely kid wandering down to the library to flip through magazines from the big city to inject some new ideas into one's world. Now, young people from anywhere can dig into the most arcane of information and worldviews in seconds and begin integrating them earlier on in their lives.

The world will look very different in outlook in a short amount of time, and it will not be for the sake of "content". Just gimme some truth, all I want is some truth.

Unlike high attention media with placement and interstitial opportunities, Marketplace and Groups are not great business models.

Why do they have to be non-religious?

Fact. I unfollowed pretty much every person connected to me on facebook, and now my feed consists primarily of posts from 'This cat is C H O N K Y', 'Foods with threatening auras,' and the like. Huge quality of life improvement, second only to basically never using Facebook at all.

I mean to say that a change of editorial policy in a given media outlet is often related to a change of political direction; is that the case?

Funny aspect: big tech wants to obtan some real influence and weight in society, so they introduce more censorship as a means of obtaining this weight. Now incidentially this erodes their base, as their clients loose interest in the toy, and start to use something else instead.

Acquisitions are a critical instrument for large corporations in terms of competition. TikTok's parent, ByteDance, is not restricted by such problems despite how massive they are, for example.

ByteDance is a $400 billion market cap company that doesn't have to play the game the same way Facebook does despite the fact that they're clearly competing in the same tier of scale now.

And that's not a statement of woe-is-Facebook, nobody should feel bad for Facebook, it's just the fact of the real context they're stuck with and their giant competitor is not.

Don’t forget the US came perilously close to banning TikTok last year. As much as Facebook probably doesn’t have the US government on their side, it’s more on their side that TikTok’s.

Thanks, @libsoftiktok.

That doesn’t seem that eerie to me. Your partner is most likely logging in from the same IP, and perhaps your mother-in-law has done the same at least once, or is friended to your partner. Making this association is pretty straightforward

What does 'hand wave' mean in this context?

You know, like your on-demand TV channel that knows what you want, already.

User growth in the US may be flat but earnings per US/CA active user is up which implies that the value is here and growing for users in the US/CA