It seems like FB goosed conflict on the platform until everyone decided they’d had enough and left or stopped posting. There is nothing in the newsfeed from my contacts at this point, the feed is either entirely ads or bottom barrel MLM scams. Instagram is going the same direction with everyone growing exhausted from competition for likes. TikTok seems successful in part because the primary purpose isn't to engage with your friends.
So where does that leave social networking amongst your peers? SMS seems to be making a comeback.
Whether or not the metaverse is anything but marking would require me to look at a balance sheet, but facebook seems to be moving through the business life-cycle at a much more rapid pace than i expected it to. They are wringing the value out of the product for revenue growth at the expense of long term adoption. Always a mixed bag but I'm sure an MBA could explain it better.
Suffices to say. I have no idea whether or not their products have are long-run competitive, because I'm very much not the target demo.
i wonder if FB as result of all its A/B testing and engagement maximization has built a "faster horse".
Aside from the occasional scam ad, I mostly get animal videos from facebook.
I tried clicking on a few profiles I hadn't seen in a while and a lot of them had nice posts too. I saw everything from them for about a month then it disappeared again.
I am very worried about what will become of all the very private stuff in their database as they begin to decay.
Right now I assume it would take very sophisticated effort to steal all that messenger data, but what about if/when Facebook is a zombie company with a skeleton crew or an unloved subsidiary of a conglomerate?
They did the same with Instagram. Click Instagram logo and select "Following" to get a chronological timeline. Possibly also only in Europe.
So Facebook just made his posts my... uh entire newsfeed. Like my newsfeed would just be 5-10 posts from this guy, some political bullshit and then another 5-10 posts from the same guy.
Even if that were the stuff I was engaging with, surely it is obvious that I don't want it in that quantity.
I'd love to hear from Facebook newsfeed product managers as it really seems like no humans actually contributed to decisions.
Animals could be a similar “no fill” response reflecting that your network doesn't have much going on.
Do you engage with political content on facebook or other platforms where facebook has tracking agreements? they're maximizing engagement. facebook knows I'm way more likely to click on a "we rescued a dog" video than political stuff, so doesn't show me political stuff. Their data points don't just come from the facebook website.
Marketplace sucks compared to other alternatives out there (Craigslist has never been big in the European countries I've lived in so can't comment on that in particular).
Groups are a horrible alternative to forums. An algorithm decides which posts are "hot" and posts die over time. Forums can provide highly informative long-running threads (which FB groups and Reddit cannot). Sure, manually moderating a forum is hard work but the end result is so much better.
Messenger? There are so many better (and encrypted) alternatives to communication.
The only thing FB has going for it is that almost everyone is there. It's super easy to hook up with someone you just met the other day just by searching for them on FB, sending a friend requests and then you can be chatting within minutes. You don't even necessarily need to know their name, you can go through list of friends of a common friend and look for them by face. All other solutions practically involves having to remember asking someone for their phone number. This is also why marketplace/groups are "successful", due to the sheer number of people already on the platform.
As products they all pretty much suck.
True, but they are harder to maintain because of the spam. Facebook has more data on genuine users than a bank and it’s easy for them to block low quality or fraud posts. That’s the true value of Facebook - they know more about of your life than you do.
Not so sure that they do.
If they knew so much about me why is it that I dislike most that they show me?
Perhaps - and that is now the most worrisome thought - that crap is the "best" they can show and everything else is much worse.
Now that does not bode well for FB's future. Or Meta's, whatever, even their brand feels a lot dumber now.
If you engage with it, they'll keep showing it to you. Their goal is not to make you happy, it's to keep you engaged so there is an audience for their ads.
In fact, this is why the outrage engine everywhere on social media. People who are upset are going to need an outlet to blow off that steam.
Disliking what they show you doesn’t mean they know less about you than a bank. It just means they’re not yet perfect in utilizing said information.
> one could easily have two-three chat apps and use each with different people
I guess theoretically, but in reality, no. People are going to use one app. Apple realized this with iMessage and it's become one of their biggest advantages in the U.S. market. Texting an iPhone user as an android user is legitimately a bad experience, because apple knows that their users aren't going to download a new chat app so they can go ahead and make the experience dogshit for the out group users.
But it doesn't have the most people. I have long lost that sense that FB is where everyone is. That feels so 2016
> Apple realized this with iMessage
In general iMessage is not a good example because it a product that leverages the unique position of Apple owning the hardware. No other company can play the same game. Apple don't want you to use iMessage on other systems, they deliberately make the experience worse for Android. But who else can afford that?
You definitely can seamlessly use Whatsapp, Viber, FB Messenger, Telegram and Signal all at the same time on all your devices.
I think you misunderstand my point about iMessage. Apple users have a very good reason to use different chat apps. Most people probably text non iPhones every once in a while. Yet every iPhone user I know refuses to download other chat apps. It’s not like there’s a big barrier to getting WhatsApp, they just don’t want multiple chat apps. People who are already using WhatsApp feel the same way, and there’s much less reason for them to switch, since the product doesn’t purposefully knee cap users.
People who care about something, like, here? I think FB was a transitory medium for people who were not on the internet to discover what's out there. Most of them are going to end up in topical communities because the central market is too crazy
What are the issues? I never use text except for spams at this point, all discussions I have with friends are on whatsapp/messenger.
Because all their friends use iMessage too. Switching isn't trivial when you have to convince your whole network tos witch with you.
Facebook was my go to place to find events around me. Now they've dumbed down the page and removed the ability to search by date and location, and made it useless.
The same can and will happen to their other properties.
For example one could easily have two-three chat apps and use each with different people. I still use Craigslist, I think it works better and has better organization of categories.
The main Facebook app, now that is a unique product - yet frankly, from my perspective it feels completely marginalized, the content there is in worse shape than ever. I find the news feed absurdly bad, GAG videos and ads.