I've enjoyed the analogy so adding onto it:

Google would open up 5 competing, different burger places next to each other and then close them all down a year later, confused that none of them did well enough. All to open a new Taco stand on the other side of town and claim it's got the same great food you liked before (it doesn't).

Apple would sell exactly one kind of burger, which is great but costs $20. The wrapper is rose gold or space grey. Only Apple-certified condiments can be applied to the burgers, and a packet of ketchup is $5. Each year the faithful queue outside for the privilege of obtaining the latest burger.

The burger is nearly always great, but occasionally it tastes strange. You are not allowed to see the ingredients and the staff suggest you might be able to improve the situation by re-wrapping and re-unwrapping the burger. This does nothing. The senior staff suggest leaving the burger in the fridge overnight and trying again in the morning. This does nothing. None of the staff actually know how to make a burger, but they will swap your strange burger for a refurbished burger for only $18.

I think this thread has transitioned from interesting analogy to just describing Apple's business model with the word burger instead of phone

Now, imagine McDonald's selling phones...

Microsoft would license their burger recipe. All the licensees would sell unique, subpar versions. They'd also for some reason have a $10 billion contract to supply burgers to the military.

They would also stop providing plates with the meal. They would be available for an additional charge.

Well, McDonalds did that like ~70 years ago.

https://youtu.be/KultzqPJaJs?t=264

and drinks would come in cans that require a special adapter but the adapters are so expensive you need to carry one around with you so you can drink when you’re thirsty.

and more and more people would simply accept that great burgers cost $20 and come from Apple if you want a decent one. While there are some other burgers that sound great at a lower price point, they occasionally give you e-coli. Mediocre burgers at a low price are still widely available.

All mediocre burgers are also sponsored by local companies who pay to have their logo on the wraps and their commercials on the wall in the restaurant.

Some new people try to make fresh burgers and get funding, only to be bought up by Mediocre Ads Burger and killed a year later.

Unfortunately people found out that they payed $20 for the sense of a great burgers, but found out that they were mediocre at best which began a new trend of making your own burgers - either from ready made components from all kinds of price/quality or even make them more or less from scratch. Though, some people insisted on keep buying overpriced burgers as they believed the ads made in the format as objective benchmarks or reviews.

I would pay $20+ for a fantastic burger, especially if all other burgers made people sick.

I love reading those.

That being said, I can make a pretty damn good burger myself. Sadly, can't say the same about Google/Apple/Microsoft products.

Found the Linux burger.

The silver lining is if you pay for it it pretty much will always taste decent.

Unless you like your burgers with barbecue sauce. That use case is bravely unsupported.

You’re eating it wrong!

In'n'Out burger?

I think they're pretty reasonably priced burgers.

Oh sure, was instead referring to the lineup.

They'd also switch how one orders food every 18 months, and have them migrate to the new way of ordering food. Food ordering in gmail, food ordering as an app, food ordering using a kiosk, then back to an app, then merge it into the wallet app because why not.

And the food is delivered using an old-school automat format where you can see people on the other side but never talk to them if anything is wrong.

They'd start giving out a free family meal, which is a medium combo version of their corporate banquet pack, and they'll promise it's free forever.

Then after 15 years, they'll, give you three months to upgrade, then five months, then after three months of pushback, they'll begrudgingly let you keep having the free family meal, so long as you promise you're not using it to cater for a business event.

The five wouldn't compete, one would sell buns, another patties and lettuce, one would have a door so confusing that nobody knows what it actually sold inside, another would sell burgers but advertise itself as something completely unrelated, and the final one would be an acquisition that immediately shut down for a complete rebuild while its staff are fired or reassigned to the other stores.

"Hey, As some of you know, we've been working hard on a complete redesign of BurGer, and we are happy to announce that it's ready! The new GerBug is square, with cheese and bun swapped places. All is this to give our customers a new great experience. Truly yours, the GerBur team."

AWS would provide one large kitchen in backstage for all of these people to cook. You’d be like “Well I could just buy the appliances” but regulations mandate a certain way of cooking with autocleanup of desks, that can only happen in the AWS kitchen, unless you want to hire dozens of workers to do menial tasks.

I don't think it's what people want, per se. I think it's what some metrics say people want. Might be good for "engagement", but bad for retention in the long term. People were on facebook for the features facebook had.

> People were on facebook for the features facebook had.

People were on Facebook for the people that were on Facebook.

And they were on Facebook instead of MySpace because Facebook worked better for sharing news snippets. Then facebook changes to the "most interacted-with posts", then politics took a dump on everypne's sharing from about 2015 onward, then facebook changed to a bunch of spammy videos from "content creators", and most of everyone gave up and left.

I lost track of the number of people saying (myself included) "Give me all my friends posts, in chronological order", and facebook just ignored us and slowly removed the ability to do anything close to that.

Ironic how Google tried Google+ and failed because Facebook had all the users and content. If Google had just shelved theirs as-is for 10 years and pulled it back out now, people would flock to it because it would actually be a feed of your friends/family posts in chronological order, with user-customized filtering, again.

Anecdotally I quit Facebook in 2016 but of my friends and family that still use it, I would say most simply use it for marketplace. They may still view the updates that people still post to see what's going on but it doesn't seem to be near as about keeping in touch (I'm in the US).

For those of us in families that are spread over the globe in a dozen time zones and separated in different countries, what other methods of connection even come close to social media? Facebook (and the rest) have provided a way for us to vicariously experience glimpses into each other's lives and in many cases reconnect with people who we never would have otherwise.

I have siblings, cousins and other relatives and friends spread around the globe.

We keep in touch over Signal, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Jitsi, Messages... It's a little more work. We don't speak as often as we used to see each other's posts on Facebook but when we do get in touch it's a lot more personal and meaningful. It's not rare either. I speak to some pretty much daily, others weekly to monthly, and others perhaps more spread apart but it's always great when we do get in touch.

No vicarious experiences, no voyeurism into one another's lifes. Only pure and intentional human connection with all the imperfections that come with it. I recommend it.

I can't even remember when I deleted my FB account, but my experience matches yours exactly: less but better.

It _is_ a bit of a pain to juggle the matrix of options, but the bulk go through iMessages, Keybase Chat, Twitter, and good ol' mail.

I am way past that point. I used to use Slack personally but I like Slack about as much as FB, so I now primarily have reverted to my own personal blog, where I make posts with video etc and take comments, and post those posts on FB, Twitter and other social media. It's like I have gone back to what works. My closest family and friends have a login to that blog where we share posts that are private. All our YouTube videos are unlisted and embedded on the blog with settings to prevent "Watch on YouTube" etc. I have my own nix servers and maintain shared family audio/photo/video/media content. We extensively use Signal, Facetime and Skype. When you have a large extended group that wants to stay interconnected globally there is only so much you can do - different participants have their own preferences and if you want to stay connected with them you have to use their poison of choice. It is unrealistic to alienate users who only know one or two platforms and lack the technical expertise, time and yes money to invest in yet again something new.

Also, I never did understand the benefit you get from deleting your FB/Instagram account - Meta still owns your content. It never gets deleted. Isn't it better to maintain your account but lock it down to your own standards? (e.g. link external content, share content to focused groups of users, etc). You can use Messenger (which is all some people actually use). What do you gain by deleting the account? Just losing control.

EDIT: One thing I think is great with FB is the ability to export all your content. I do that at least annually and have a MySQL database into which I import it all (which gives me the coveted ability to search for a specific post either by date back in 2008 for instance, by text etc). Why would I want to lose all that?

> Meta still owns your content. It never gets deleted.

How can you verify that? This would be against the GDPR and other data protection laws in other countries.

I urge you to read Facebook's "Terms of Service" [0]. 'Facebook's terms allow them "a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook." In layman's terms' [1]

Obviously the internal procedures Meta follows regarding content is unknown. It is probably different for different countries - you mention GDPR, well very little of my content is shared in Europe, so I'm sure the rules that apply to me are completely different from rules that apply for Europeans. It is probably different for different time periods in Facebook history, and it is definitely different for different levels of universality of sharing. That is if you post something "Publicly" then it gets shared by another user, then the original post account is deleted, in all my testing the content that was shared by the other user persists. Facebook has argued that it is "public" content [2]. I personally have seen corporate posts get LIKED and commented by users who delete their accounts, but their content endures on the corporate page.

I do not envy Meta. Knowledge of the legal environment in every country for a global operation makes programming in assembly seem trivial by comparison. I had a friend who was a federal (securities) agent who told me back in the 1980's that the legal environment in the US is deliberately complicated/obfuscated to the point where if you are in compliance with one law, you are automatically in violation of another. It is up to you to pay for representation to contest constitutionality on appeal to a high enough level for acquittal.

If you are unsure about what Facebook does and it matters to you, then test it - you will find FB still has a few human users, some of whom may be interested in running tests with you. Posting content of different types, different sharing, deleting different users etc ... test it! Just delete your account. Then later try and recover the account. It is all still there.

For me, I just assume when FB says 'it may retain copies of "some material" from deleted accounts' [2], I just assume there is no privacy and that I own nothing.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

[1] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/who-legally-...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ok-youve-deleted-facebook-but-i...

Thanks for the information.

> Knowledge of the legal environment in every country for a global operation makes programming in assembly seem trivial by comparison.

That may be so but they still need to comply.

I've just signed up with the same email address I had on my old account. I can't say for certain whether my data has been permanently deleted but I can't find any of it.

I'll try to get in touch with others who have had access to my old posts and comments and see if they are still there.

Edit to add:

The deletion option on Facebook states:

    Delete account
    This is permanent.
    When you delete your Facebook account, you won't be able to retrieve the content or information that you've shared on Facebook. Your Messenger and all of your messages will also be deleted.

Hopefully this means everything does get deleted.

I wish you every good thing. I'm going down something of a rabbit hole on this and was so surprised at the Wikipedia discussion on US privacy:

'Some conservative justices do not consider privacy to be a legal right, as when discussing the 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas (539 U.S. 558), Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did not consider privacy to be a right, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that there is "no general right to privacy" in the U.S. Constitution in 2007. Many Republican interest groups and activists desire for appointed justices to be like Justice Thomas and Scalia since they uphold originalism, which indirectly helps strengthen the argument against the legal protection of privacy.' [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy#Argument_against_legal...

Wow... That's dystopian at best.

My extended family shares a paid Slack instance and it works great. Some of them are on Facebook as well, mostly for marketplace and groups; I don't use FB (I am not really interested in seeing glimpses of distant relatives' lives). I think there is a real future for services targeting the middle ground between the very public nature of Facebook and the very private nature of an email.

I would point out that email also serves here but with worse algorithms for displaying what you want to see :-)

I can understand this for sure! In my experience Facebook degraded and a lot of people that just posted pictures with small updates moved to Instagram. Again, anecdotally, I have a pocket of friends in Prague and they mostly used Instagram. But now Instagram is moving the same way with a clutter of suggested posts or 'reels' - or whatever their version is.

My chosen family (most of the people of my bio family I kept in touch with have passed on) are very much like that, but I keep in touch with them via a mixture of IRC, gchat and twitter DMs (fascinatingly the one member of my bio family I enjoy talking to who's still here uses twitter DMs to talk to me.)

The people who're local to me I catch up with in person, and regularly get "oh, yeah, you're not on facebook, I can actually tell you about this" with a huge grin and it's a big happy for me every time.

I've found that for whatever reason people's twitter feeds are "stuff I've found interesting" and I catch up with them separately from that, which I've found fine.

(note: this is an observation of what works for me, please don't consider this as in any was a criticism of your use of facebook if it's working for you, keeping in touch with people is awesome and "whatever works for that is good" applies)

IRC > *

Why not "closed world" apps like Whatsapp or Discord ? I personally loath them (specifically Discord) but they seem optimized for the kind of use case you want. Facebook and friends are a huge and dysfunctional towns square, but you don't need a towns square to talk to your family, you need a private shed.

Those two seem very different to me.

Discord, to me, is "shiny consumer IRC that I hate" (I similarly consider Slack to be "shiny commercial IRC that I hate").

Whatsapp, to me, is "the thing I use to replace SMS when I'm talking to people in other countries and don't want my phone bill to explode."

One of the things I do enjoy is Google Meet videos with my grandchildren that allow for the video to be saved. I can then save that video in my own (private) blog on my own private server. I have found that recording Facetime QT video on macOS/iOS is too problematic.

If they haven't already, it's only a matter of time before Discord spins up a way for companies to advertise on their platform.

Marketplace and the groups for goods or meeting up are full scammers and time wasters

People are under the illusion of some fleeting chance of working as advertised

Yep. One of the reasons that old-style classified ads in newspapers worked is that you had to pay to post an ad. Did people run scams in newspaper classifieds? Yes, but by and large the ads were legit. Today, legitimate online marketplace ads are drowned by the scam ads.

Some of the private groups are still pretty good, it's what the web should have been, could have been, if a better commenting system had been in place and if we had had a better aggregator.

As far as I can tell, marketplace has displaced Craigslist. It's still low-friction and local, but a bit more trustworthy.

And this is was what people warned us about when FB became the new single destination. It became its own walled off version of the web.

I think it's nice. It provides some additional accountability that Craigslist doesn't provide.

I don't know what you mean by "walled-of version of the web". At least, I don't know what kind of warning you are talking about, with respect to Facebook Marketplace.

I think they mean Facebook is the new AOL where it has it's own content (Marketplace) that non-users can't access. While Craigslist is available to anyone on the web.

One of the features of Facebook was the people who were on Facebook.

Where have they "gone"?

They were on Facebook.

They still are, but they were too.

Well, what people want if you define people as humans between the age of 18 and 24 and ignore the rest.

> I don't think it's what people want, per se. I think it's what some metrics say people want

This is true and realistically this is what any business should be chasing. People don't know what they want is something I sincerely believe in.

I do agree that people are good a voicing problems, but not desires.

Engagement is a pretty shitty metric when used in isolation though. I've worked at places where changes that increased engagement were considered successful at higher levels even though the support team knew the increased engagement was caused by increased confusion and friction in using the product.

You missed out how Google would also take your order but when you get to the window there is just a piece of paper stuck to the glass telling you:

There was something wrong with your order. Please do not try again as we will ban you.

They will also lock you out of your car.

Well not quite. Shutting it down takes effort. First you have to let it sit and rot away until it becomes a meme. Then you can squeeze another round of promotions out of the deprecation work.

A meme is what is popular (= a unit of culture).

"Memetic Unit of Culture" would be an excellent Banksian Culture ship name.

Edit: Got to be a GCU really.