See the below excerpt from Meta's Q2 earnings call:
"One of the main transformations in our business right now is that social feeds are going from being driven primarily by the people and accounts you follow to increasingly also being driven by AI recommending content that you'll find interesting from across Facebook or Instagram, even if you don't follow those creators. Social content from people you know is going to remain an important part of the experience and some of our most differentiated content. But increasingly, we'll also be able to supplement that with other interesting content from across our networks. Reels is one part of this trend that focuses on the growth of short-form video as a content format."
2020 — Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels: https://www.axios.com/2020/08/05/facebook-launches-its-tikto...
2021 — TikTok overtakes Facebook as world's most downloaded app: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/TikTok-overtakes...
Feb. 2022 — Facebook loses users for the first time in its history — https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/02/faceboo...
July 2022 — Facebook and Instagram are going to show even more posts from accounts you don’t follow — https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23281451/facebook-instagr...
July 2022 — Instagram knows you don’t like its changes. It doesn’t care. — https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/instagr...
Mid-2022, I find Instagram to be just as useless as FB.
I find I'm spending far less time on big social platforms. And a little more time in niche web forums. And I mostly feel better (sanity-wise) for it.
The only things I find FB useful for are Marketplace and Messenger. Marketplace is an OK way to sell your junk locally (it basically took over from Craigslist because CL was taken over by scammers and CL never bothered to do anything about it), and Messenger is a convenient glorified phone book and chat app which has a video chat feature that actually works quite well through any browser and doesn't require a local client application like Zoom. It's also really convenient that it works through both my phone and through a browser on my PC, so it's easy to switch back and forth (much easier to type messages on a PC, for instance).
Who would have thought that paying for something is correlated with positive expectation of outcome?
Someone should formalise this business model.
I'm just spitballing, but I might call it: Doing business.
I'm not sure what's going on with internet ads.
I've blocked them everywhere I can.
The gatekeepers on some of the more popular gaming servers (where they know they are more necessary than usual) are reddit levels.
The need to host a server somewhere. It silos info, makes that info less permanent and less findable. I've gone to all iDevices at home, so can't self-host.
It also doesn't have great visibility outside the tech worker and gaming worlds. I'm happy to use it if somebody sends me a link, but it's not the default for most people I know (except for those that game). Slack is a bit more common, mostly because of broad adoption at workplaces.
In an ironic twist these changes has made it much easier for me to stop using Facebook and Instagram. My usage was never high to begin with but some people in my life only used those apps and I wanted to stay connected. Now every single time I visit either of those apps and I see suggested content I close the app and move on with my day.
"Do you want plus sized carrots with your meal?"
The real danger FB finds themselves in is that the initial value prop (make and maintain your friendships with less friction) is LONG gone.
Instead, they are relying almost entirely on the network effect now. You have to be on Facebook because your grandma is on Facebook. This is not sustainable long-term, for obvious and perhaps morbid reasons.
This suits me just fine and it works well for friends who actually deserve this moniker.
A 'strategic shift' to present suggested content may be what Facebook wants to do (or would like to tell investors it is doing).
However, the amount of real content being posted appears to have fallen off a cliff. This is obviously very subjective but holds true for both my own experience and friends/family who have commented.
So there isn't just a similar level of content but the algorithm is displaying less - but literally everyone I know no longer posts to Facebook in remotely the same way.
The only time I see regular updates are 'happy birthday' posts.
Everything else has moved to other apps - mostly Instagram stories.
Now I’m in my early thirties and I maybe open it two or three times a week — I hit the “you’ve run out of content from your friends” message in less than five minutes (and I follow ~400 people). It’s even worse because half of that five minutes is spent scrolling past the INSANE number of ads and suggested posts (most of which are terrible ads as well).
My friends are still actively posting “stories,” but I can’t imagine that will last forever (stories are also littered with ads, it’s insane).
Facebook has been out of ideas for a while, but it wasn’t so apparent until recently since they faced relatively soft competition, and they either acquired popular social media start ups or if they couldn’t, stole from them wholesale (snapchat). They now have a real competitor in TikTok and on the last earnings call it became clear they have no plan for regaining users / organic engagement, so they’ve decided to pump the short term financials by serving everyone a shit load of ads. Facebook’s long term prospects are bleak imo.
At different point in time, the feed prioritized: posts from friends, posts from games from your friends, friends' sharing of links to compete with Twitter, videos to compete with Youtube, moments to compete with Snapchat, comments that friends made, posts from friends again as growth slows down
I wonder what percentage of users drift off every time they shifted the algorithm.
My entire suggested feed relates to US politics. I keep getting suggestions for Second Amendment groups, "Stand your Ground" groups, pro life groups, "Isn't she beautiful" (a gun lobby group), "Texans for God" and so on. I'm Australian. I guess this is what I get for doing an occasional checkin at a place named Texas BBQ.
Couldn't it just be that suggested content is not only placed "between" in-network posts to achieve a certain minimum ratio, but also some small number of suggested-content posts are inserted at a constant drip into your feed (e.g. every N minutes in the feed's timeline) to ensure a certain minimum absolute amount of advertising happens per day per account?
Which would mean that, if all your friends are people who don't post very much on FB any more, there could be 50 dripped in suggested-content posts (to achieve the minimum absolute suggested posts per day) for each one in-network post.
Even without "ensuring a minimum absolute amount of advertising", I presume this would have to be happening on some level, to ensure that anyone who tries to use Facebook "like TikTok" (effectively an RSS reader for suggested content), ends up with a non-empty feed.
FB's bet (that tiktok user behavior validates) is high quality out-of-network creates higher engagement than in-network content.
I see the ads as a lot like cutting timber out of a finite forest - it's profitable, but potentially harmful to the ecosystem in a way that can make it unsustainable. As long as you don't cut too much, replant aggressively, then you can make a sustainable business out of it - but it doesn't scale past the point where your harm to the ecosystem causes collapse. Once people exit FB because it's all ads, then the network benefits begin to evaporate, a little bit at first, then all at once...
Then again I don't run a social media company, so what do I know. ;-)
Maybe not a little as you think. Just because the social media companies are "runing", running into the ground is still running. They just have so much momentum that the ship is going to keep moving along.
Facebook need to just settle back and offer dividends. It's over.
Keep margins low and don’t make too much money in order to starve any potential competitors of capital.
Of course - you still need to grow revenue for this to work - just not profits.
It can be counter-intuitive but this is often seen in recommendation systems. In music for example, the song most likely to be played after a song is... that same song again.
However, it is painfully clear that there are very obvious categories of products that it does not work on. 99% of the time, if someone buys a refrigerator, they will not be interested in buying another refrigerator.
It would not be that difficult for Amazon to detect these product types and give other kinds of recommendations for them. Unless their algorithms and the data that drive them are much, much less comprehensive than they want us to believe.
Most people have not bought a fridge in the last month. Most people will not buy one in the next month. Taking your estimated 99%, that leaves 1% who just bought a fridge but it doesn't work, or didn't fit their room, or for whatever other reason they've sent it for a refund... and are about to want a fridge again!
1% might sound low, but if you look at the group of people who haven't just bought a fridge... maybe only 0.1% of them will buy one in the next year, vs. that suddenly huge-seeming 1% of recent fridge buyers. Suddenly, not such a bad idea to advertise to them :)
Most people, after all, don't really have the spare money to buy two fridges at once, so they're going to want their money back from the first one before they buy the second.
Once they've started the return process, then Amazon can start recommending new fridges to them.
Again: this is all data Amazon totally has access to. Whether they are failing to gather it, failing to recognize its value, or simply choosing not to use it when they know it's creating a lot of bad recommendations, is unclear.
Or maybe by the time they've fully made up their mind to return the fridge, it's often after they've first decided there is indeed a better fridge out there, and already chosen where to buy it in the day or two before they start a return. In which case the time to advertise to them would be the window after purchase and before initiating a return.
Maybe... etc.
I don't know for sure, having neither worked at Amazon nor tried to market fridges. But I have seen many examples of this sort of retargeting of people who've just bought something with ads of the same type of thing, where general intuition, even that of experienced marketers yet alone normal shoppers, made it seem like a dumb idea and yet the data actually did prove it was a great use of advertising.
So maybe your gut instinct is better than the ad conversion predictions Amazon's code is making, with all their data. But I'd be surprised.
I'm not sure as to their reasoning. But maybe this decision is in fact based on their data? They're a pretty data driven company
Somehow it's always about some big appliance that lasts years and I just bought. It's never about "you might be running out of toilet paper."
On the other hand, if you are looking to preserve stock price in the short-term you need to at least create the illusion of sustainable revenue growth. And there is a lot to be said for this later strategy if you don't really want to run Facebook in maintenance phase. Seems that Mark and Co. might not be all that concerned about "deforesting" Facebook with ads because the end game here is the Metaverse...?...
I’m kind of enjoying the fact that newer sites and apps like Discord don’t let Google index them after Google killed off a large part of the independent Internet. We’re missing out on a lot of good content that would be put up in an alternate universe with a less greedy and shortsighted Google.
I'd guess that it is possible most people visit a dozen or fewer websites regularly, of which half a dozen or so are in the Top 10, and the rest include things like news/media sites that are most likely to be popular (if only nationally). Seems likely the older the person the narrower range of things they do online, apparently the most common activities for the over-60s are email and checking the weather lol.
https://www.creditloan.com/blog/how-the-world-spends-its-tim...
Google Search could honestly be dethroned if someone really wanted to. The usage at this point is habit, not because it’s still a good search engine.
Google Image search these days seems to be "Oh that image you sent me is an Apple, here are pictures of other Apples" rather than showing me other sizes of the same image, and other images that are very similar looking.
edit: I just attempted to look up what kind of taxes on has to pay if one receives donations. I cant carve out a query that gives me anything other than tax deductible donations. The "receiving" part is completely ignored.
But when I connect to Google on VPN "from the US", I can't find it in the first 3 pages. Very strange.
Search is not perfect, for sure. It has different problems.
Does it give better results than Google? I find Google's results to be pretty horrible, and worry that if Kagi is using Google's index, then I wouldn't get better results with them.
The problem is paying a steep fee to proxy Google's index... It benefits you and Kagi in the short term, but strengthens the Google/Bing/Yandex index oligopoly [0] long term. Bad search results are the symptom - scarcity and opaqueness of viable indices is the root cause
https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
The way we look at it as that it gives Google a non-ad based source of revenue, which is a good thing for the future of the web. If one day that revenue could displace all ad-based revenue, by Google selling data to providers like Kagi, we would reverse the current state of the web.
the answer to the problem includes the concept of less is more.
Then why is adblocking so popular?
Pretty sure at least 80% (probably 95%+) of low-quality SEO content is generated by computers, or at least by very low-skill outsourced labor in a machine-assisted way.
It then makes sense that the mature Internet can probably match any search query in a manner that leads to a site that sells something vaguely matching the query, through sheer quantity of available content.
In other words - there is enough SEO content generated and indexed that most queries will be able to be monetized by a search engine like Google.
Edit: and also Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22high%20tc%22%20record
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...
Or perhaps more generally for materials with a high Curie temperature, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature
Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about this field.
FWIW, I would also have no idea what that search is supposed to return.
To improve user experience.
https://gizmodo.com/lightspeed-presents-the-perfect-match-by...
I don't know what you are trying to search for. A record for total compensation? Something related to Tesla coils? Turing Complete? Thread Count is a totally valid interpretation.
I'm getting links about the highest temperature on earth and it is listing it in Fahrenheit so if the "tc" means "temperature celsius" it is failing for me.
All the other links are about high temperature superconductors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...
"High-temperature superconductors (abbreviated high-Tc"
Seems like google search is working quite well if the second link is what the person wanted.
Initially, they seemed to stop pushing out good on topic content. Instead, they rewarded and promoted Facebook style posts and made up stories probably due to metrics and A/B tests.
The good authentic posters then either stopped posting or had to feed the beast by pushing out the same crappy content in the house style which the algorithm rewards.
Almost everyone on there now is writing purely for the algorithm and not their industry peers whether they realise that or not. They are just chasing the doamine hit of likes.
The product is worse for it and I’m sure it ultimately kills the golden goose for social platforms despite a short term uplift. They become much less engaging and sticky when the social element is lost.
Friendster, Myspace, Orkut, Facebook.... Similar things for social. Use the network to find more people to hang out with, feel less alone. But then, again, that is not actually a business and people aren't paying for it. So, you either show generic ads (not a bad idea) or you get people to pay to get their content in front of you. But then people stop caring about what they see there and move on.
I agree with other posters -- I used to keep Facebook around because my family was there. Now I don't even see their posts when I'm on it. So, there's no value anymore.
Now LinkedIn still does the same job. As far as I’m concerned, while “thought leaders” and other spam is more prominent, dealing with egos is the price to pay for making it easier to find a job, and to be found as a candidate. It’s not materially different to IRL corporate world.
Like ... why would I stay on a platform that was so deeply unpleasant to interact with all the time?
suppose you're in the meeting room and you're the product guy and you'll make this case. Indeed let us not optimize for the presently advantageous local maxima lest it come back to swallow and end us. How is this communicated? And what does it take to convincingly persuade people, or investors of this -- to even bear through a temporary downward period with the understanding that fundamentals must be respected?
As long as their top priority is next quarter's result, you can't. You may get small wins here and there, but nothing fundamental will change unless they have a long term vision. When I say "long term", I'm talking 10 - 20 years, not 1 year.
They didn’t build the iPhone or even like Google Maps and Google Images by walking into the meeting room with data. They instead said “what if maps were as easy as we’ve made search”
Of course it becomes a problem when no one even to the CEO level has lost vision. Never put the numbers guy in charge.
It can go both ways, of course: Mad Men is full of examples of stupid business ideas that went spectacularly wrong. And while it wasn’t the focus of Mad Men, the real world is full of examples of business that went the metrics way and were successful.
But IMHO, if I was the CEO of a social media company, I sure wouldn’t focus on A/B testing and engagement metrics.
The death spiral is:
1. Show friends content to attract users
2. Realize that friends don't product enough content to increase engagement.
3. Start introducing suggested content to increase engagement
4. Friend stop producing content since their content is deprioritized and not getting engagement
5. Now your feed is full of suggested content and isn't interesting any more
6. You leave and find another platform
Good article on that point: https://rosie.land/posts/stop-measuring-community-engagement...
MLMs make billions, but they are still MLMs.