Author of the Damn Interesting post here. Internally we worried that there would be some fallout from abandoning our Facebook page--by the numbers we had more followers there than any other social media platform, by far. But the response from our audience has been almost 100% positive, even from our Facebook followers[1]. It put only a tiny dent in our site's daily traffic. It resulted in many new subscribers to our email list. There was a flurry of new donations, with attached supportive comments about the amputation. Facebook was exactly the gangrenous thing it appeared to be, and we are better off without it. If you will permit me the indulgence of quoting my own post:
> Some call it a “necessary evil,” but if that’s the case let’s do all we can to make it unnecessary.
For any organizations considering the same move, I cannot recommend it enough. It feels like cutting off contact with a toxic acquaintance--equal parts relief and optimism.
Thank you for posting this here. It is exactly the kind of public service announcement other organizations need to see, because it will encourage them to question and reevaluate the benefits and costs of their relationship with Facebook.
If enough organizations change their behavior, I'm hopeful the folks at Facebook will be forced to change their behavior too. I mean, shouldn't be possible for Facebook to be profitable without also doing all those toxic/evil things?
Then your mods are terrible. FB's moderation tools are primitive, but they do exist. Your group should require a moderator's approval to gain posting privileges, and require a few questions to be answered as well:
- Do you agree not to make posts advertising any business or profit-making entity on this group?
- Do you agree that all of your posts and comments on this group will be individually written by you?
Reject any user who doesn't say yes to both of those and set all new users to post approval for the first week.
It's a lot of work because, as mentioned, FB's tools are crap.
Your problem might be exacerbated by the subject matter.
Interesting, if you had more follower on facebook than any on other social media, and turns out, these are the core followers that are not abandoning you after you left facebook. Wouldn't that suggest that Facebook algorithms actually did an excellent service for you and your audience? If so, my reading is that Facebook does a great job overall matching audience with content, and opening a Facebook page seems like a great move!
You seem to be taking a single metric out of context and using it to draw a dubious conclusion. Facebook was showing each of our posts to very few of our fans. It was hiding our posts from a lot of people who wanted to see them. Myself, I would not categorize that as 'excellent service'.
> ... from scores of long-time fans who were under the mistaken impression that we had ceased all operations years ago
> ...When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their Facebook news feeds.
I understand that the article is an opinion piece against facebook, but I just think that the data provided is ambiguous. Looks like Facebook did a great job showing the blog to the relevant people. So much so, that years after the people reach to author with questions where it disappeared.
One could argue that Facebook did a "did a great job showing the blog to the relevant people" years ago, before they implemented boosting (although my intuition is that it was mostly the other way around, most of our Likes were from fans of our site who subsequently liked our page). But even if that argument holds water, all of the water leaks out at the introduction of Boosting, where they began withholding our content from people who asked to see it.
I don't known how boosting works or what is it exactly, but judging by its name, one could assume that boosting is a zero sum game. Namely, if Facebook, for one reason or another, boosts your content, this would come at a cost to other relevant blogs that also compete for the same screen real-estate on Facebook. So it sounds natural to ask you to pay money for ads service to promote your content, that's what ads are for. It's just that reading you post it looks like, in retrospective, the anecdotal evidence that you provided, gives the impression that facebook ads actually might have worked well for you.
> I don't known how boosting works or what is it exactly
In that case, perhaps you should resist expressing strong opinions about it one way or the other. I anticipate that you, like most humans, find it annoying when other people have strong opinions in domains where they lack even superficial knowledge.
I think you comment does not contribute to the conversation. If you're annoyed by my question that does not make it an argument or move the conversation forward. If you can share some aspects of boosting that clarify your argument, please do so.
The funny truth is, I strongly suspect, I know about ads and ranking and boosting no less than you do. What's called boosting could be complex set of many different algorithms that change over time. Boosting that was a year ago is not the same one that is now, etc.
But overall the irony of our exchange is here. Quoting from DI about section:
> We are ardent proponents of quality over quantity, and accuracy over hyperbole.
Feels like this specific post about facebook is actually quite a hypebole a bit like a propaganda post. With a lot of assumptions and accusations. With the purpose to push specific agenda. In your post you spit hate towards facebook, but when confronting with some questions to test the logic of your claims, you finally appeal to authority rather than clarifying your claims.
"One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not enough about the subject to know you're wrong." Neil deGrasse Tyson
Change "you're right" -> "you know the subject" & "you're wrong" -> "you don't know the subject".
Saying Facebook introduced "boosting" does not mean a lot...
No, it suggests that people liking Damn Interesting on Facebook were already readers and that Facebook wasn't providing more than "a tiny dent" of additional traffic.
Facebook likes to try to take credit for 100% of the traffic they send from their platform, but seems like the people they were reaching would have gone anyways.
I dont understand where does your claim come from that the users were already readers of the blog before seeing it on Facebook.
It says in the article that once facebook promotions were gone, people were not able to find the content, so much so, that they would reach out to the blog years after- to asked if the blog still operates... that sounds to me like facebook identifying new core audience for the blog. Which is a great service done by an ads company.
I just wish more people and especially companies would join this movement to leave.
I hate that the city I live in has almost zero online presence. If I want to sell something, everyone says 'use FB market.'
As someone who refuses to, I have a ton of stuff waiting for the yearly yard sale.
The neighborhood I live in also only posts updates to FB. So cue the monthly surprise(garbage not picked up, road repaving, etc) and never knowing about it in advance.
And don't get me started on companies with zero website and only some FB page.
I know it's 'free', and at this point it feels petty, but I'm literally holding out until the end.
It's not free, you have to agree to terms and conditions. You shouldn't have to agree to FB terms to learn about government services, like your garbage schedule. Could be a lawsuit here.
Facebook is heavily oriented toward photos and audio/video. Does this emphasis ever have a discriminatory effect on, e.g., sight or sound-impaired users.
A local or state government using Facebook exclusively for announcements would arguably be covered by the ADA.
Technically perhaps correct, but my HOA pays for garbage so it's more neighborhood level. I have zero interest in interacting with them much less suing them. I just wish they'd spend 10 dollars to setup some simple website, but don't care enough to go through the ranks to suggest that...
Nasty grams about how they dont post updates anywhere would be a start.
I'm sure that their laws say something vague about updates must be made available to all residents and you can swing that Facebook doesnt include all residents
What everyone forgets is how important 'notifications' on Facebook are. When making a post, many if not most residents are likely to see the update. It may even be better than physical mailers, and I doubt many other options even compare for awareness.
A website is unlikely to get nearly any traffic, and especially not timely views for upcoming events. Emails will probably head to spam or not get read.
It shouldn't be Facebook as the default, but the simplicity of reaching most of your audience is valuable.
How would you even measure that? Announcments don't really require engagement or acknowledgement. I guess you could A/B test announcing city hall events and watching for turnout?
I see you've never met the typical HOA. Let me explain...
One person who usually isn't even the 'president' but still sycophantic about it creates a private group, which only he or she can delete things or add people. Then they distribute flyers every couple weeks informing you about it and how you need to join.
HOAs here are unfortunately the lesser of two evils, but they are far from a good thing.
The goings-on of HOAs typically aren't publicly posted unless required by law. They'd rather keep it to the neighborhood and not have others up in their business.
Why would there be a lawsuit? There's no law that forces local government to run a media company or media companies to run government announcements for free. If the local government had decided to advertise in the local newspaper then the citizens would have to subscribe to this newspaper and pay for all issues in the hope that some of them contained public announcements. Facebook has a different business model and, in this case, the local government (which was elected by the citizens) decided this was a better match for its community's needs. If the citizens don't like it they always have the option to elect someone else instead. (Although, in all likelihood, receiving a decent number of complaints would probably do the trick too.)
I think the lawsuit might come, if the local government switched to facebook in lieu of all other options. Right now, at least where I am, they have to provide freely accessible info ... even if I have to drive to the town hall to get it.
But if they said, instead, "We don't print on paper any more, it's all on facebook", then I think a lawsuit could happen, and win.
Of course, you weren't replying to that. I just have seen, however, leanings in that direction here and there, so it's worth noting.
Playing around with automatically accessing Facebook from the command line using netcat, without a browser, I found it is quite easy to "mirror" a Facebook page to a local HTML file. A simple shell script rewrites the HTML into a simple page with no Javascript, suitable for a text-only browser. I see no reason one could not mirror a Facebook page in this way to a web server on the open internet.
The reason I created this is that I did not want to keep opening up a graphical web browser to check Notifications. I can also "follow" any page I want, directly, without relying on FB's algorithms which selectively hide or show certain items to maximise advertising or whatever sort of user manpiulation they are trying to pull off at the moment.
FB marketplace is a horrifyingly bad interface and platform - just like the rest of Facecrook's site. I assume it is all just some dark pattern though as they must be paying top $ for their UX people.
FB Marketplace is full of sellers who list items for $1 and want to waste your time by getting you to DM them instead of telling you what they really want for the item. Total waste of time.
I don't live in a big city or even a metro area. We surprisingly do have a Craigslist, but it covers the entire rather huge county and it's rather dead. Both times I've used it there were zero replies. Tried OfferUp and such, and same.
If it hasn’t grown by 10x over the last decade as all of the population got online with smartphones, it’s stagnating. It might still be active with the same OG users, but it missed the new market and that’s squarely in the “stagnant” category.
It's a bit more than that. I always respected cl for their simple clean design.
But then the internet evolved. On one side prostitution and trafficking became rampant, on the other scammers and spammers. And CL did nothing until court ordered.
Sometimes that's the right decision. But legitimate people suffered through all of it, and left for the first possible replacement.
Nextdoor was good when posts were local to 1 neighborhood (~100 people). Now that posts default to 20+ neighborhoods in a 10 mile radius, the conversations are far less personal and neighborly. And more political topics now, and less moderation.
Pushing beyond Dunbar's number in order to maximize growth and "engagement" was a mistake.
So Facebook is no longer showing all posts to people who intentionally subscribe to a page? If so, what, if anything, does “subscription” or “following” mean, then?
I realize I’m showing my age here, but I remember when missing an issue of a paper “subscription” was cause for anger and resulted in an apology from the publisher (and usually a redelivered copy). But I also remember when “follow” meant “show me all new posts from this user” on Facebook, too, back before they fucked up the News Feed in the 2010s and turned it into their manure delivery system.
Once I realized that FB was controlling what posts I see, I started the painful process of deleting my account. I was furious that a friend of mine was in town, posted on FB but they filtered the post. Then I realized that they were blocking my posts from being seen my actual friends (not FB 'friends'). It was 2014, FB DELETE (disable? Who really knoes with those bastards). Wish I never signed up to the toxic dump of a website.
Check out Neal Stephenson Fall or Dodge In Hell. As usual, Neal called it.
Two questions, since I enjoyed the few Stephensons I've read:
1) a quick search of FoDiH brings up that it's from the perspective of a character in Reamde, which is one of his I have not read yet. Is it a mandatory prerequisite, a good-to-have but optional prerequisite, or essentially unrelated?
2) that search also brings up that it came out in 2019, but your comment says "It was 2014" w.r.t. something to do with FB (I actually had a lot of troubling parsing the meaning of that specific sentence and am still unsure, but that isn't the point). Can you really say he "called it" if he's reasoning a posteriori?
>> a quick search of FoDiH brings up that it's from the perspective of a character in Reamde, which is one of his I have not read yet. Is it a mandatory prerequisite, a good-to-have but optional prerequisite, or essentially unrelated?
I read Reamde about 8 years before FoDiH. I recognized some of the characters but I had forgotten the details. I never got the feeling I needed to go back and reread it. And I enjoyed FoDiH for its own sake.
I wish there was a class action lawsuit for people who missed events (from venues they subscribed to) because facebook holds audiences hostage behind "organic engagement"
And they continue to make it harder and harder to make your feed a simple reverse chronological list of all the things you follow. You have to submit to 'the algorithm'
Facebook and Twitter went from having relatively resource light pages to having "simple" interfaces that somehow use 2GB RAM per tab in Chrome or Firefox. Same thing with Reddit and its redesign.
At one point in the growth of social media there was a legit argument that a strictly correct (or even approximately time-ordered) reverse chronological list of all the things a user followed didn't scale sufficiently, past a certain level. While there really is a level of combinatorial complexity which makes it hard, I no longer believe it's any less scalable than the algorithm complexity involved in their little game of "pull the lever to see if you get something interesting this time".
Before facebook was born, users had client-side tools to help filter, sort, & highlight things that were important to them. NNTP, Mail, & RSS clients would consume volumes of data, sort through thousands of posts or articles, and users could focus and prioritize on what they knew to themselves what was important.
Facebook strips users of those tools, and the only choice users have is to trust their algorithm to do it for them, and do it in the user's interest. They actively work against users trying to pull data from facebook's feed into their own clients not only by making it a ToS violation, but by scrambling the html layout of the page that renders it, making it extremely difficult to parse. And also using newspeak-esque language like "We are trying to protect you by doing this", suggesting that you're doing something bad by consuming your data.
I think it's becoming painfully clear these social networks have an increasingly twisted view of what they feel is the user's interest.
> If so, what, if anything, does “subscription” or “following” mean, then?
It means Facebook is using its system to game page owners into buying "boosts" or straight up ads. We know social media companies use the same psychological tricks that casinos use to get users to keep coming back, would it shock anyone to know that the company is turning the technology towards organizations and companies that have hitched their fortunes to it? All FB has to do is massage the algorithms just right to generate appropriate variable rewards and random payoffs to nudge page owners into thinking paying for attention is a good deal.
What I really dislike now about YouTube's algorithm is its insistence on showing short videos. I do not come to YouTube to watch 30 second videos. If I want to watch short videos I'd go to Instagram or Tiktok. Yet, no. I am bombarded with short videos.
I removed the videos from showing up on the home page with some CSS, so now I solely rely on related videos for non-subscription content. Those seem to be delivered based on engagement so they're usually longer. Unfortunately, half the time they're hour long videos.
Come on YouTube, just give me a 5-10 minute video.
> What I really dislike now about YouTube's algorithm is its insistence on showing short videos. I do not come to YouTube to watch 30 second videos. If I want to watch short videos I'd go to Instagram or Tiktok. Yet, no. I am bombarded with short videos.
Was it always like that, or is it them trying to ape Tiktok? I use Youtube a lot, but never from their home page.
One of the most annoying things is how, whenever there's some hot new thing, the old things I like seem to race to destroy themselves to imitate it.
I use YouTube mostly from the Android app, and they are constantly pushing their "shorts" and COVID-19 propaganda. I'm even a Premium subscriber and have found no way to disable this.
I was listening to the latest Reply All podcast about TikTok and they theorized that one big advantage the TikTok algorithm has for getting to know you is it gets to see like 50 - 60 reactions per hour of app usage, of whether the algo was hot or cold with each minute long video. YouTube is probably jealous because most of their data is just people putting on music playlists and not interacting at all.
I know this isn't a YouTube algorithm discussion thread, but just to jump-in and say that I try to use the 'home' view in the iOS app as discovery for content that's related to my subscriptions to find new channels.
The actual 'Discovery' tab is completely useless to me, as it's exclusively filled with complete trash that's trending locally (and in my case in Sweden, this means endless videos of local reality 'stars' doing 'crazy' stuff, interspersed with young women with well-filled tops talking to camera about 'something' from their beds, and what appear to be Arabic romantic dramas, and of course videos about sports cars).
The home view mostly shows me content that includes my subscriptions and is related to it (programming channels, large-format analog photography channels), but about once a month - despite being a Premium subscriber with a very carefully curated watch history (I don't even click on friends' 'hilarious' YouTube links anymore) - the whole algorithm breaks down and even my Home view is totally overtaken by big-breasted girls, Arabic(?) dramas, some sort of Free Fight boxing competition, and other trash that has to be removed one video at a time with at least two clicks each.
The whole process is really fiddly and I'm always in dread of accidentally clicking the wrong tiny and poorly-designed little interface element so the video plays instead of confirming (for the fiftieth time) that what I really want is "don't recommend channel".
I've rage-quit my Premium subscription a few times about this. But always come back as otherwise YouTube interrupts the videos every few minutes with their random spray ads these days - making it impossible to watch a 40-minute video and retain my sanity.
I agree. My revenge as a user has been to scrape entire channels I want to watch, as I can only imagine things getting worse than they are now (less free, less intrusive, more thought-police). I now have a lifetime worth of non-perishable knowledge/wisdom stored up in video form, which compliments ebooks. It's like prepping but for data. Shot out to r/datahoarder.
I've actually started using Facebook again regularly, recently. Not really to connect with friends... mainly for Marketplace (RIP Craigslist, unfortunately) and to post on a couple active private Facebook Groups. Local community groups and some for hobbies/interests.
What strikes me is how exhausting using Facebook is for these purposes.
To read any Group you are constantly tapping tiny a "View More Comments" button. Very hard to read FB as you would HN or a forum, despite some great Groups and information there. When you get to the bottom of a group post, it shows you an endless scroll of "similar" content from entirely separate groups. I hate the entire experience. Anything to get you to keep scrolling and see another sponsored post.
Marketplace started out as a modern, local, second-hand goods CL competitor, but has devolved into shipping new cheap meme items. My main Marketplace feed is now crap like Rick & Morty stickers. Or the constant sponsored ads for new furniture or other products. Very hard to use Marketplace how I want to, which is finding local used antiques and unique items. I really wish CL had adapted to the new mobile landscape and competition a decade ago.
I deleted my real account earlier this year, but if I want to get to the marketplace I use a fake account (I had set up several years ago for political research.) I then use FBPurity and some uBlock Origin code to remove all "ship to you" ads.
The uBlock codes are on reddit, search for "Blocking "Ships to you" posts in Facebook Marketplace"
> In a move that feels long overdue, we at Damn Interesting are abandoning all interactions and connections with Facebook.
> We really should have done this back when it was revealed that Facebook used the ubiquitous embedded “Like on Facebook” buttons to follow people’s movements around the web without their knowledge or consent. We should have done this when Facebook literally toyed with people’s emotions by showing some people more positive stories in their newsfeeds, and others more negative stories, to see how it would affect their emotional states. We should have done this when it was revealed that Facebook allowed advertisers to target ads to people who expressed interest in topics such as “Jew hater.” We should have done this so many times before.
Couldn’t agree more. I deleted Facebook years ago and haven’t missed it.
>Couldn’t agree more. I deleted Facebook years ago and haven’t missed it.
This is absurdly close to the exact same thing i say to the people i know lol. The only difference being that it's only been a little over a year since mine was deleted.
This feels almost like just desserts to me. They had several obvious opportunities to take a moral stand, but they didn't, until it directly affected their organization.
This is the same bullshit we have been seeing for years. Nobody cares about privacy or security or social justice or anything other than their own narrow little world.
This is really interesting to watch, I hope there are some academics out there charting out the facts of the rise and fall of social networks for the rest of us to follow along, there are so many interesting things happening in the US big tech world.
I think people overestimate how quickly competition happens and underestimate how powerful it is. There is a massive hole for new competitors to move in to the social media space. I see Brett Weinstein has finally decided YouTube is untenable, for example. This is just another data point in a trend of people with interesting opinions rediscovering the dangers of centralisation.
I single out this quote from early in the article:
> For the past few years, we at Damn Interesting have been hearing from scores of long-time fans who were under the mistaken impression that we had ceased all operations years ago.
What this says to me is it takes people a few years to notice when a social network is no longer providing value. That sits well with my assumption that users actually leaving a platform is a long lagging indicator that the platform is dead. The early sign is that the content producers are being squeezed.
End of the day, these big companies are full of smart people who do dumb things.
Facebook has the whole tone deafness and awful governance, Twitter sucks at execution, and of course Google did many things (killing RSS, bungling messaging, etc) that were from any point of view dumb.
..yeah, that's why we are all talking about Mastodon and Diaspora right now, because there was a massive hole they rushed in to fill. Funny how even on HN people have completely forgotten about the former; I haven't seen it on the feed here in weeks.
Youtube is untenable, lol. Hey everyone, the Ipod was untenable! Everyone is moving to Microsoft Zune! Ninja is going to livestream on Mixer, that will teach Twitch!
This is like the Death of Wal-mart or something, people constantly proclaim it but it keeps chugging along.
Youtube will be fine, it is a pretty good platform as long as you aren't looking for political opinions.
And Apple has historically been very methodical about closing down opportunities to compete with their products. The only part of the market they leave open is the part that has no money. There was a truly funny span of time when the iPhone accounted for more than 100% of the phone market because other mobile manufacturers were making losses. The Zune never had an obvious market segment that it could target.
At the moment, anyone trying to produce right wing content would have to be mad to be comfortable on the major platforms. Even Amazon seems to be unreliable after what looks a lot like a political hit on Parler. There is a large, obvious & dissatisfied group to target here and potentially a valuable advertising market.
I recall there was a point in time where my boss had an iPod, my co-worker had a Zune, and I had a Sandisk E250.
They had some fairly different niches-- both the iPod and Zune were in the relatively narrow selection of high-capacity, hard-disc based MP3 players. In that environment, tje iPod was the minimalist option-- less complex UI, seamless package, but feature-poor. The Zune offered far more features and customizability. I can recall being aghast that you couldn't get a FM radio feature on an iPod, when the cheapest 'flash drive with dreams of grandeur' MP3 players offered it. (This, of course, being relevant when a 2Gb player wouldn't contain enough music to feel "infinite" and you'd want more variety)
Christ, talk about taking the comments out of context. They were saying that strictly forbidding your child access would just make them do an end-run around their parents and use it behind their backs. If you think a no-tolerance rule for something as pervasive as social media is going to yield some unspoiled angel of a child, you're in for a rude awakening.
Edit: it's also completely unrelated to the comment you responded to, which was talking about one social media giant going out of favor for another. You conflated it with "all social media" just to bring your drama into another post (which it looks like you've done elsewhere too).
Sorry if the truth hurts, I'm just, as your profile states, "confronting you with radical honesty."
There are lots of good answers there to the same question that essentially say the same thing as you, but minus telling your kids to fuck off and that you are the boss and smashing the phone. I tend to agree with them, as well as the people who replied to you saying that that’s not a very good parenting style. You’ll likely alienate your children and not teach them anything, except perhaps that they need to respond unquestioningly to authority or they will be met with violence.
I suspect that is more why you were downvoted, but not really sure why you want to re-litigate it here in the first place.
No, I am saying that telling your kids to fuck off, you’re the boss, and smashing their phone is poor parenting. Same as everyone else with whom you are arguing here.
It would be better parenting if you didn’t smash the phone, tell them you’re the boss, and that they should fuck off. I am sorry but if it’s still confusing to you after repeating the same thing three times, along with everyone else saying similar things, then maybe you can start to understand why so many of your comments are flagged dead now. Nobody really wants to have a multi-day conversation with someone who isn’t listening, cross-posts their drama in multiple posts, puts words in others mouths, and generally behaves like an internet addicted teenager themselves.
I have kids, but they are not yet teenagers. I could see taking the phone away, or even selling it… but smashing it is both wasteful and sets a bad example for how we deal with issues.
I do and would agree smashing a phone is terrible example.
If anything it shows authority has been lost and the parent is flailing desperately.
Sure, you can get compliance just like you can get compliance by pepper spraying someone but it's not how to do good parenting.
You can of course remove the phone if it seems it's warranted. Parents are eligible to critical interventions IMO.
There are times when parents actually need to intervene. But this intervention should be taken from a position of dignity, authority, respect and minimal violence.
The quality of intervention depends on the situation. As a parent of a slightly autistic child for example I've had to restrain the child physically to stop the child for harming themself or the anyone else during a meltdown.
I would never smash any of my childs property. Remove - yes, if the situation warrants it.
I have found, through practice, that temporary removal entices false incentives when the actual problem is substance addiction because it doesn’t remove/repair the problematic behavior.
If only it were limited to noncompliance you probably wouldn’t have to go as far as removal.
Actually we had a severe youtube and game problem. Not just being glued to it, but up to a point were the child became a "zombi" just wanting the screen.
Removing the phone temporarily, and then saying unless limits were followed the phone would be removed again actually worked. This of course needed to be repeated at every lapse. The most difficult thing as a parent was being thoroughly consistent - no ifs or buts. It would create a terrible scene every time. But after a few bouts things became much better.
But kid's are different. It totally varies from person to person what works and not.
“Yes, we know Facebook is not the only harmful corporation on Earth, but sweet-jeepers-boy-howdy it is a blood-curdling fart in the elevator of existence.”
Great post. Even if you think you will disagree with it, go read the whole thing.
In particular, I found this passage compelling:
> In a move that feels long overdue, we at Damn Interesting are abandoning all interactions and connections with Facebook. We really should have done this back when it was revealed that Facebook used the ubiquitous embedded “Like on Facebook” buttons to follow people’s movements around the web without their knowledge or consent. We should have done this when Facebook literally toyed with people’s emotions by showing some people more positive stories in their newsfeeds, and others more negative stories, to see how it would affect their emotional states. We should have done this when it was revealed that Facebook allowed advertisers to target ads to people who expressed interest in topics such as “Jew hater.” We should have done this so many times before.
I've tried. I deleted my FB account. All it really got me was cut off from a lot of old friends and extended family. I ended up re-creating the account after a year, and then slowly building my friends list back up (but I'm far more restrictive now about who can be FB friends). A couple old friends won't talk to me because they think I de-friended them specifically and took it personally. Oops!
I always have dreamed of a world in which the global Facebook that won was more like Wikipedia.
I bet if we didn’t have Wikipedia, people would say such a project would never work. Fortunately we do.
Now, imagine a basic, open “friend book” with barebones Wikipedia-esque design for the purpose of maintaining social connections. Wouldn’t that be grand?
Bah, Larry Sanger tried to shill me Everipedia at a crypto conference a few years ago. Maybe he is worth listening to on this topic but Everipedia is a complete joke.
All platforms have problems. I don’t like a lot of Wikipedia’s policies. But I’d for damn sure choose a Wikipedia run “Face Book” over Facebook, Inc.
The old friends who assume such negative intent… Are those friends worth keeping around anyway?
I deactivated my FB page over a year ago and never looked back. I still keep my Messenger and Instagram accounts active, so while I’m still in Facebook’s sphere of influence, I’ve got two ways of staying in touch with most of the people I like and I’m no longer susceptible to the doomscrolling and perpetual outrage machine of their newsfeed. It’s been a huge net positive for me. Much like fitness or improving our environmental impact, harm reduction is still worthwhile even if it falls short of some the most extreme ideals. I’d love to be completely out of Facebook’s ecosystem but for now, I’m happy to settle for limiting its ability to wreck my mood and devour my time.
I feel that. I realized the same. But my view was...if people couldn't be bothered to reach out to me if it wasn't plastered in their face, were they really important in the first place? To me obviously, no, so I didn't rejoin.
Secondly, the system will only break down with people leaving. Once your friends are gone, whats the point. Just being the first in your friend or family group is really tough.
The worst part is there's no viable replacement outside of what, MMS group chats?
So, people who didn't get sucked into facebook, twitter and other social media problems, are they just like stopped clock right twice a day, or should we consult their prescience on other things that may also be not in our best interests?
There are people who want to turn the real world into a live action version of facebook/reddit/twitter. They've got this one weird trick, and historians hate them. You'll never guess where they work now.
I deleted all my social media accounts in 2008. I'm not here to say "I told you so", because I didn't actually tell anybody anything. Just my choice.
But, here is the one weird trick: If you think something is good, do it. But, if you make up your mind that it's bad, stop doing it. Following that rule would have kept a lot of people off these services.
To my knowledge, nothing people say about social media today is fundamentally different than what they were saying in 2008: it destroys privacy, it destroys discourse, it consumes attention, and it puts control over your life into the hands of corporations. And people recognize this: I can't even count the number of times I've heard someone say (or write) "social media sucks" and then kept right on with it. My only advice is, if you feel like something is bad for you, don't do it.
I stopped using social media because I was sick of having this critic in my brain constantly judging if an experience is worth posting on social media.
Of course this is a huge trade off with not knowing what my elderly neighbor at a cottage I never go to had for lunch.
> should we consult their prescience on other things
Absolutely. just buy my book for $9.99 ahem sorry
Truly, all the things people are now seeing as bad did get mentioned by some of the crusty holdouts and refuseniks. It can be especially personally edifying, for example, to go back and read opinions you disagreed with then but now value more; this is one of those cases where there's plenty of "I told you so." Some of which was horseshit then and is still is now.
One of my favorites is "geolocation should be used as network ID"; much of the hard routing becomes "free" and the need for encryption and forwarding points becomes explicit from the start. Now with 5G we're reaching that point; but with literally layers of legacy translations that are just extra baggage now. Wouldn't it have been easier to just do it right at the beginning?
In my circles, the people who didn't get sucked in were not vocal about it. It wasn't a conscious action. They just didn't care. They had a life, and it didn't occur to them that they had to prove it.
I've tapered down my usage of Facebook over the past few years. Now when I use it, it just makes me angry.
Why would I spend time on a website that makes me angry?
What's worse is the implied social obligation to use Facebook. My mom occasionally informs me that I've been invited to a family event through Facebook. I now just wait for a normal invitation, (mail, phone call, email,) or ignore the event.
I just don't want to get sucked into Facebook just to check on party invites.
I just tell people "I don't use Facebook anymore" and let them deal with it. It's a reverse network effect: the more people that stop using the platform, the more people will give up on it.
When I tell people I have no social media, they can text me or email me, I always get kind of a weird look but they mostly do it. I'm sure I'm missing out on some stream-of-consciousness blather from a lot of my acquaintances, but I grew up without any of that and I don't feel that I need it now.
I wonder how long before the groups on these platforms realize how much the social media companies are using the same variable rewards, random payoff, low friction, and rule of reciprocity to manipulate the groups or companies into buying (or continuing to buy) ads? Measuring ad effectiveness is already hard, now the social media giants are both the platform and the technology for measuring "engagement".
Isn't it blindingly obvious that organizations that use social media to reach their audiences are essentially putting coins in a slot machine, pulling the "show my content" lever, and getting a good feeling when the metrics show their post 'went viral'?
Facebook even fails as a tool for keeping your friends and family updated with life events. I quit when I realized that my "friends" weren't even seeing my posts unless Facebook deemed them worthy. When I started jazzing up my posts, adding happy pics and extra emojis, I realized I was being manipulated. I was having to compete with professional spammers^H^H^H marketers for my friend's attention. It's gross.
Yup, that's completely stupid: 1. Join Facebook so you can keep up with what your friends are doing 2. We're not going to show you random half of what your friends are doing because we need space for those ads. WTH is the point then?
For the past few years, we at Damn Interesting have been hearing from scores of long-time fans who were under the mistaken impression that we had ceased all operations years ago. These fans are typically delighted to hear that a) we are still writing and podcasting; and b) there is a wealth of new content since they last visited. When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their Facebook news feeds.
This trend roughly coincides with Facebook’s introduction of “boosting” for pages; in this new model, according to the stats we can see, Facebook stopped showing our posts to approximately 94% of our followers, demanding a fee to “boost” each post into an ad, which would make it visible to more of our audience. We lost contact with tens of thousands of fans practically overnight. We don’t mind paying for a service if it is valuable, but we absolutely don’t want to reach our audience by buying ad space on Facebook. Yuck. But no other option is given to reach the many people who previously followed our posts, and who presumably want to continue to do so.
We established our Facebook page in 2008 as the fledgling social media site was gaining in currency, and we continued to maintain our page on the side, mostly as an afterthought. In the intervening years Facebook evolved from a dubious curiosity into a megacorporation that is firmly in the service of bad ideas. In a move that feels long overdue, we at Damn Interesting are abandoning all interactions and connections with Facebook.
We really should have done this back when it was revealed that Facebook used the ubiquitous embedded “Like on Facebook” buttons to follow people’s movements around the web without their knowledge or consent. We should have done this when Facebook literally toyed with people’s emotions by showing some people more positive stories in their newsfeeds, and others more negative stories, to see how it would affect their emotional states. We should have done this when it was revealed that Facebook allowed advertisers to target ads to people who expressed interest in topics such as “Jew hater.” We should have done this so many times before.
To the tens of thousands of fans who follow us on Facebook: our sincere apologies. You’re probably not seeing most of our posts there, anyway. For the few who do still see them, we no longer wish to share content on Facebook which might cause people to spend time there. We hope you’ll stay in touch via one of our multiple non-Facebook options
I've been thinking about this a lot over the past couple of years. I even took a sabbatical from my job to build a prototype.
IMO the big thing that most alternatives are missing is end-to-end encryption, like Signal. Otherwise there's no guarantee that you gain anything by moving to a new platform, as long as they can still track/profile you and sell your data, and as long as they can inject whatever garbage they want into your feed. I think this explains a lot of the reluctance to try anything new. Might as well stick with the Zucc you know than risk it with a new one.
Maybe controversial but I think the only way is benevolent dictatorship. Anything run by a large group of people eventually becomes political and corrupt or a money grab. People forget for the first 10 years of its existence up until about 2015 most people thought Facebook was a great company. Zuck could turn it back into that since he has control, but it’s a huge machine now and a public company so it would be very tough to do so.
A public benefit corporation that provides a way to keep family and friends in the loop. No news. No businesses. No politics. Lots of baby and dog photos.
It’s sad people think this way. In general people working at Facebook are some of the most liberal and open minded people I’ve met. They are part of a huge organization and probably doing things you would agree with in their little piece of the world.
I don't think facebook is going to lose much sleep over that site going; it looks painfully low-rent, and when your grand "to hell with facebook" post gets all of 45 comments in 12 days, I'd worry less about moral posturing and more about getting new users.
And honestly, the anti facebook hate gets old. You all are just using it as a scapegoat to avoid thinking about what your own companies are doing or the changes you can make; its a ritual in this place now to have fashion-hate on certain things, and it gets really tiring. There is no way you can avoid negative interactions on the web if you have any real presence at scale, and complex systems are always going to have unintended effects that won't be seen till later and only can be mitigated up to a point.
The constant longing for a small scale web with large scale benefits simply isn't feasible.
I mean I hate Facebook because they messed up the feed, but looking at it from their point of view, why would anyone advertise if they just give you an rss(like) feed to your fans? Is there some balance of algorithmic feed with ads where it isn’t awful and some people buy ads?
Advertising is also used to keep a brand in the forefront of people's mind. Advertising evolved from selling an item/service to selling a lifestyle. There are ad campaigns that never really mention a product specifically, but just emphasize the brand. They want to ensure that even if you currently use their product, you will not just take a chance on the competitor's product because your subconcious is flooded with these re-enforcement campaigns and it becomes Pavlovian response
It's great that people are starting to wake up to the costs of using Facebook as a primary platform. I unfortunately have to visit the site from time to time due to a couple of groups - like my gym or my gaming club - having a page there, but I wish people started finding better solutions (which by now is anything, most social media platforms would do, and Facebook literally doesn't have a single service those pages need that isn't available on a dozen of other platforms).
On that note, does anybody know of any way of exporting FB group content outside FB - as RSS or whatever else feed? I couldn't find any obvious way and I don't have enough free time to develop an unobvious way from scratch. Any help (even getting 80% there) would be greatly appreciated.
Interested in what value $FB ends up at when Instagram, Whatsapp and possibly Messenger are split away. For some reason, individual companies used to appreciate after being spun out. How much value past Events is left in Facebook? Marketplace? VR? Workplace? Metaverse?
I think it's worth pointing out that Zuckerberg and Sandberg both knew this was the trend and that eventually Facebook.com would burnout, hence the acquisitions of Whatsapp, IG etc... to ensure that they would have long term relevancy.
I noticed that Facebook made a few friends completely disappear, even though they posted regularly.
Now that I think of it, I just need Facebook to be an RSS reader. Show me a list of unread events from different channels in chronological order. That's it.
In any case, I don't use Facebook anymore. I unsubscribed from everything and everyone, and stopped posting a long time ago.
It’s clear companies are now going overboard with algorithms.
Instead of getting fancy, they should just give it to you straight. Chronological ordering. You subscribe to a page? You see that content. You don’t follow something? You don’t see that content.
Just keep it simple. Will there be less revenue? Perhaps, but the platform may become more enjoyable to use.
Isn't this also true of Twitter? Why always such unique hate for FB? Because they don't deplatform conservatives quite as aggressively as Twitter? "We’re sure many of you, like us, have experienced first-hand how Facebook gives people license to be their worst selves. It can elevate mere differences of political opinion into anger and hostility, pushing friends and family into extreme views, turning loved ones into ugly caricatures of their former selves. Perhaps you have even regretted some of your own posts there; the Facebook interface is designed to make it difficult to engage in good-faith disagreements."
Twitter is totally unsuitable for intelligent discussion. To make a point with nuance requires paragraphs of text. Even a typical forum (looks around) can't really handle the amount of text required to make a satisfying, representative and well rounded argument.
Twitter gets some hate because it can push the vibe of a situation in a weird political direction, but Facebook's overzealous moderation actually stifles something closer to real debate. Also, Facebook is where communities are organising so the bans hurt more.
Twitter is a smaller, less powerful company with a much smaller userbase and it only really has the main Twitter service, while Facebook is more encompassing with services like Messenger, groups, events, pages, Marketplace, Workplace, dating, Portal and now a Substack clone (not to mention Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus).
But the things this author is criticizing about Facebook in the quote I posted really only apply to the main Facebook service -- not Messenger, Marketplace, Workspace, dating, Instagram, etc. And they apply equally to Twitter.
Chronological is not the default on Twitter. You have to toggle to "Latest" for that. Twitter knows that showing what the algorithm wants you to see drives more engagement than a chronological feed.
> Isn't this also true of Twitter? Why always such unique hate for FB?
Twitter also gets criticized a lot, people talk about leaving Twitter all the time. The main difference with Facebook is probably that for many people, it covers more things, is more integral and thus harder to leave.
> Some call it a “necessary evil,” but if that’s the case let’s do all we can to make it unnecessary.
For any organizations considering the same move, I cannot recommend it enough. It feels like cutting off contact with a toxic acquaintance--equal parts relief and optimism.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/DamnInt/posts/10158097374656961