If she uses Instagram she's using Facebook. If she has a Facebook account and goes anywhere on the web while she is logged in, she's giving money to Facebook. It is not so simple now. She doesn't have to "use" Facebook for them to monetize her image, her privacy, her network of friends. A company like Meta will always have new products to take in kids. That's what their new "Reels" is about, trying to compete with TikTok. They know that their old product is not cool. This is why they changed their name to "Meta"!
This is a battle you and your kids can't win unless your kids know how to identify when a nasty company is trying to steal their data. If your daughter thinks something else is cool, I bet that's another nasty company trying to steal her data instead of Facebook. Our society can't get out of this trap until your daughter says, "they all SUCK"
Yeah but that's what I mean. I'm in my 40s. I can vaguely guess the age differences between Instagram and TikTok kids. I'm sure some new great thing (like Facebook's "Reels") will be next, for the under-12 set. My point is IT'S GOING IN FUCKING CIRCLES and it's still run by the same few companies, and it's always the same. Oh it's NEW? for your 12 year old?
NO: Teach your 12-year old that ALL these things are COMPLETE FUCKING BULLSHIT. Not just Facebook. All of them.
I should also add... when I was young, music from the 50s was dated. When I was starting a company, startups from the 90s felt dated. Yet we are all recycling the same concepts and emotions and hooks and human longing, in a marketing sense, just using one generation's innocence after another, so they all feel like they're new and they're the first. You can't build on a platform like that. In a pissant way that's why facebook doesn't matter, but in a bigger way it's why you need to teach children to see patterns, not just objects of good and bad.
What service did you have as a kid that was "cool" but didn't engage in dubious marketing practice nor sell your data around ?
My personal favorite is Chevignon selling cool clothes for teenagers for years, to then enter the cigarettes market because why not.
Some might argue Facebook/Meta is on another scale, but everything is on another scale, I think we'd need to adjust expectations like we adjust for inflation.
I mean ... "cool" when I was a kid was having a stereo with two tape decks so you could copy and trade music mixes. Or getting together with 14 year old friends to drink 40s in an abandoned house where someone would bring an air rifle and girls would drink Zima. Doing anything online wasn't "cool" as it was all CLI anyway, but for me trading cracked games and porn gifs on BBSs was cool before we got a dialup internet connection and I discovered IRC. Spending hours browsing in a used record shop or book store was a cool use of a Saturday. Going to a party or the beach was cool. Surfing was cool although I sucked at it. Roller hockey was semi lame but I thought it was cool.
Watching TV or talking about shows wasn't cool. Movies were. Having a pager or godforbid a giant cell phone was extremely uncool as it meant your parents could find you. The closest thing to a smart phone was a TI-82 calculator and that wasn't cool at all. I had a Palm Pilot... I even got a cell cradle for it and could browse the web in black and white in 1996. That was considered insanely not cool, and something only a total nerd would do. (But a Lynx or a Game Gear was alright - and a neogeo meant your parents were super rich). Clove bidi cigarettes were cool but they could make your lungs bleed. Weed and LSD were cool. Fake IDs were cool and making them made you popular. Playing in a band even if you didn't have a lot of shows was cool, and if you did have a show half the kids from your school would be there.
I can't really think of anything I did as a teenager that collected data about me or anything that was a "service" run by a company that was cool or would have been considered cool. AOL was extremely uncool, the way facebook is now. A bit later, I guess a lot of us used Friendster and Myspace (and boards like LnC) but none of those things were central to daily activity or something you spent a lot of time on. It wasn't even the third or fourth thing you'd do to waste time, let alone a place to spend time with friends. So just because it wasn't very central to the teenage experience, and the technology wasn't there to track your interactions and location, there was by definition a lot less data to collect.
I'm describing a world that is for all practical purposes dead, buried and forgotten, in which human interaction was mostly unmediated by corporate grifters.
Video games were popular and well selling, but to my recollection they had an uphill battle in the wide public’s perception. If we were to ask, I’d wager Sony had a way stronger “coolness” factor in the 80s 90s.
I guess the business model of social media companies is coming to fore.
FB has a captive audience, that is aging with facebook and will continue using it.
It is clear why FB purchases IG / WA. They are paying money to capture audiences with money earned from FB.
Going ahead, the cycle will repeat. Once the teens in IG grow into adults, FB will use money from that to buy / make another platform.
In this context, the metaverse makes sense. It is a virtual world, where new SM platforms are churned, with all future populations being part of one or more platforms. FB wants to be the owner of all the platforms.
From a business point of view, it makes more sense, in that, FB can now target ads across platforms, meaning, they target the same number of individuals, but with ads being channeled through different platforms, the ad density comes down, and the feeling of "the feed is all ads" might reduce.
1. Even if FB isn't forced to divest their recent acquisitions, the regulatory environment will make it much more difficult to do the equivalent of buying Instagram in the future.
2. Any good ideas on how I can short "The Metaverse"? I still think the Metaverse is bullshit and will continue to be bullshit for the near future. The very first time I got on Facebook I was pretty enthralled - I was connecting with friends that I hadn't seen in years, and I really liked reconnecting. I have heard basically nobody say they are looking forward to the Metaverse, besides aging tech giants trying to push it.
I'm sorda looking forward to the Metaverse. Or rather, I'm pleased that FB is baiting the rest of the tech giants into an arms race on VR hardware and software development.
I'm a huge fan of VR gaming. The state of the art is incredible right now, but it'll get so much better the more money is shoveled in.
I'm skeptical about Metaverse and collaborative VR in general:
* much higher barrier to entry (requires specialized hardware)
* much more difficult to produce content (3D worlds to build from the ground up vs text and images of the real world)
* less cool than most video games (YMMV, there might be good VR games, but toons with amputated legs flying around are not cool, and that's what we saw in the Facebook demo)
* several safety and social acceptance issues (basically, you don't see the real world when you're using a VR headset)
* VR is not fun to spectate (checkout twitch, there is not much VR content)
* VR has been around for many years already, and it stays... a niche game accessory.
I agree with you, but I find it important to note that it seems like the people who are most into VR gaming also hate the broader concept of the Metaverse.
That is, VR gamers just want to play games, including collaborative games. They don't want to sign in to Facebook to do it, they don't want to "live" in the metaverse, they don't want some shyster hocking their NFTs in VR while they're just trying to play a game.
This whole Metaverse BS just completely feels like Second Life 2.0 (Third Life??)
Or perhaps your daughter will start using it in here early 20's when life gets busier and people dont have the same interaction expectations?
I dont know the answer but as a non-FB user I do see limitations when people organise events or group chats on messenger. If my wife wasn't connected to most of my friends I'd probably miss out on a bunch of relevant things. So for youth not on FB, I guess time will bring them back into the fold.
33 years old here. Deleted my FB acct in 2012. I stay in contact with everyone I care to be in contact with still over text/Signal/Slack/email. I cannot say I have regretted not having a FB account once in the last ten years.
I'm the same age and deleted my FB account around the same time. Got rid of Instagram a few years ago. I used to think I had a LOT of friends because they would 'like' all of my photos and I was in my 20s so I'd see lots of these social-media-friends out at parties. Once I dropped out of the night life and got rid of social media, I made a big effort to text a large portion of my friend group, but gradually I realized that I was the one putting in most of the effort and the social media interaction was shallow. Now I have a core group of friends in a group chat, and occasionally meet up with people IRL for coffee/lunch/whatever. Social media amplified my perception of social life in my 20s, but for the most part it wasn't nearly as important/real/deep as I once believed it was.
You know how some people still think we can live in a world where covid is eradicated? I still think we can live in a world where major social media companies are eradicated. Or at least can't churn out new dangerous variants to re-infect the immunologically naive 14 year olds who think it's a brand new generational trend every year.
I've watched this marketing turnover at least three times now in the music industry, and I really think the killer antibody is exposure to history. The operative question for a 14 year old hearing a super "original" band isn't what does this say to you... because they know what it says to them but they don't know how easily they're being manipulated by the distillation of time-worn, shop-worn, lazy songwriting. The question is: Hey, do you realize who they're ripping off? You'll be a lot cooler if you know.
That's the pill every human needs when they encounter a new and addictive social media platform.
In my circles the only time I have to use Facebook is when Gen Xers are organizing something that requires my participation there, and I delete the account afterwards.
Or I wind up in small town America and the people there believe that Facebook marketplace + groups has better resources for sale and meetups. My experience with that was that generally accessible forums (even with being private and an “approval” process) all being full of scammers and time wasters. I found resources and niches in person. I checked the same groups 6 months later and nobody was getting anywhere with anything. YMMV of course, but the scammers are integrated everywhere.
Small town America is a big place so there is a market for the illusion of utility!
I mean... add text and you can describe most of the internet and digital information in general. I don't think it's a useful way to make a comparison at all.
The commonality between FB, IG, Tiktok, Snapchat, Twitter (and YouTube to some extent) is that they're primarily personalized algorithmically generated infinite feeds of stories. The particular algorithms and their objective functions differ from app to app but the underlying model is just the same. These sites generally do have other ways of consuming information, but the dominant mechanism is the algorithmically generated personalized feed.
There are alternatives, such as sites like HN (single feed for everyone), Reddit (per-subreddit ranking which is global rather than algorithmically targeted), many news sites (organized by department vs infinite scroll, newsletters (here's today's set of stories for everyone), etc.
I see what you mean but this string of social network website all have this "come together to do nothing but comment" basis. And that's probably why they spin into data hoarding nothingness, because there was no evolved purpose in the first place.
I'd have a hart time comparing HN, deviantart and a few other places with facebook and instagram..
I've literally never logged in to any one of those. I have to say, I'm kind of proud of that.
Occasionally people will send me a link to something and it's on Instagram. Clicking for me give me a Login modal. They make it too easy for me, click.
It's completely unlike other social media and it's addictive without being negative, which kind of goes against our current instinctive thinking about social media.
At the start, it's completely dumb videos that kids will find funny.
But the algorithm is smart and will find content you like.
My feed is now ultra cute cat and cat rescue stories, and really, really sharp non-professional comedians acting out vignettes, they are better than anything pro, and better than anything on TV, and, amateur musicians playing solos, odd instruments etc..
I enjoy TikTok more than Television or Netflix.
It's very hard to describe to non-users because on paper it's very much like YouTube, but the format is so short, and the kinds of bits are so much more ephermal ... and for some reason most of the toxicity is not there.
Also, you get to see first hand some 'live events' because people stream from everywhere, and it gives you neat perspective. For example, the 'Trucker Convey' in Ottawa Ontario. After watching the event live from various perspectives on TikTok, while simultaneously watching broadcast news cover the event, it became unsettlingly clear how aggressively misinformative broadcast news was of the event. (Even if I fully disagree with the protesters, they should be represented fairly)
TikToks has radically changed my view of content moderation and demonstrated that it additivity does not have to be based on fear and anger.
They censor aggressively, and get away with it partly because it's not really seen as a platform for 'information'. So you won't see a lot of controversial things there, and also I don't mind that technically 'Tiannamen Square' content will be absent. I mean, it's just TikTok (is what I tell myself).
It's disturbingly addictive without being particularly political or controversial and for that reason alone it's worth having a look at for those who care to pay attention.
It's a bit distressing the number of negative commenters indicating that they don't even want to try something that's the #1 digital in the world. It's like saying 'I don't want to see what TV is because I already don't like the radio'.
TikTok is nothing like Instagram at all, which is mostly oriented towards imagery.
It definitely is a bit like Vine, but the longer segments allow for a lot more creativity, moreover, I think the number of people with smartphones and 'decent cameras and willing to make content' is just considerably bigger than it was previously.
I watch cat rescue videos, and then the 'day after follow up' appears in my feed the next day, I find it intriguing.
It's certainly not for everyone, but it's definitely something that anyone working in tech should try out, so they get a grasp of what is happening in the world.
It’s funny that you describe Instagram as being more about imagery and therefore distinguishes itself from TikTok. My perception is that Instagram is about vanity. Front and center. Look at me. I find the premise offputting in and of itself. And in that sense, TikTok is no different. Look at me. But with motion instead of still images. Doesn’t change the crux of it.
Why would anyone want to go against their judgment just to try out an app which is, in the absolute best case scenario, a brainless waste of time? What is it about cat videos that is making you so adamant that everyone download this app? Nobody on this planet needs exposure to more media content.
I'm a bit shocked to see such self imposed ignorance implied as a virtue.
-- First - we are curious, we try things 'just because'. Of course, nobody has to be.
-- Second - if you want to work in an industry, you're going to have to have at least some baseline understanding of what's going on. 'Experiencing' something gives you quite a lot of insight into the nature of the system that cannot be described otherwise. It doesn't mean you have to like it.
For example, the content moderation algorithms in TikTok are unlike any other app. So different in fact, that it's revelatory.
The 'consensus view' among most people in the industry is that FB and other social media drive attention via toxicity. The TikTok algorithm turns that view on it's head. For most people, it's completely the opposite of toxic, it's quite fun and it's frankly more 'addictive' than FB.
Some deride the notion of 'additivity' as 'toxic' but I'd argue that's not necessarily the case, for most people it just means 'it's good and they like it'.
-- Third - " in the absolute best case scenario, a brainless waste of time?" - this bit is really dim, seriously, I can't believe I'm reading it.
The whole point of my claim that 'you should try it to see what it is' would be to take a moment to grasp actually the reality at hand, instead of coming to arbitrary conclusions that make you seem completely out of touch, like the 'Boomer who can't use Zoom' (as a negative stereotype).
Some examples of unique content on TikTok that doesn't exist the same way on other sites:
1) Vignette soliloques - actors playing short-hand hilariously comedic characters, snarky bits of satire and comedy. There are few accounts I follow that I consider funnier than anything on TV.
2) 'Cat Rescue Series'. There are memes of mostly middle aged married white women tracking down federal cats and rescuing them from sometimes harrowing situations. You can see the transformation of feral cats, through their episodes at the vet, sometimes through rehabilitation. Sometimes the animals are permanently injured and learn to live blind, or without a limb. You can follow along with their recovery process in almost a 'real time' basis, with videos coming out sometimes more than once day. They're 'just cats' but it's incredibly invigorating, because it's real. It's more engaging than any 'reality TV'.
Cats being rescued from trees. There's a few channels for that, the videos are almost live.
Other animal related memes include animals being born on farms, for example a liter of goats, with the 'runt' being saved by the farmers wife, and their growth.
The semi-domestication of a pet Coyote etc.
3) 'Intelligent Pet Meme's - there's a dog called 'Bunny' who has learned to 'talk' with a series of 50 or so buttons, and the creator provides content updates almost daily. You can literally see an animal learning to communicate with words, learning 'tenses' (like tomorrow, yesterday, this morning, this afternoon) etc. and it's incredible.
4) 'Live Streams' from events all over the world, for example, the current 'Truckers Sit In' in Ottawa, which I do not support, however, seeing inside the protest, the kinds of people, how they are acting ... it's enlightening.
And all sorts of other bits of content the algorithm brings up.
Some of it is ridiculous, arguably much of it is a 'waste of time' but not more so than television or Netflix, but in the end, it's a unique and new experience, essentially it's unlike anything else.
Personally, I can see this being a bit of a fad over time, but the sheer number of people using it, the nature of the creators, the explosion in 'variety' of content will permanently make its mark.
Refusing to 'try' TikTok is akin to refusing to 'trying' Netflix or streaming. It's ridiculous.
Why would someone who doesn't enjoy television or movies want to try Netflix? That's not ridiculous, that's spending your time on what you value. Every example you posted sounds completely inane to me, and I wouldn't consider wasting my valuable life on any of that inanity for a moment, if I'm being honest. There is no type of content I would consider valuable which comes best in the form of very short videos. And if we go beyond value to just wanting an app to relax and turn my brain off, I'd prefer to relax in ways that don't destroy my attention span and that aren't designed to be addictive.
Yeah I find a lot of toxic stuff on TikTok, but whenever I bring this up people say something like "ahh, the algorithm has discovered that you actually like toxic stuff, so it's your own fault".
Eh… anecdotes are anecdotal, but in my experience the only reason people use Instagram is for messenger. Almost everyone is on Instagram, so it makes it really easy to connect with people. Kind of like a giant phonebook.
I almost never see any of my friends posting on Instagram anymore. The only ones that do are artists and people with some “personal brand” to promote (aka, they have a business interest in posting to IG). Some more people post on stories, but even that’s rare.
Like Facebook, most people I know hate using Instagram, so I figure it’s only a matter of time before it’s engagement numbers go down.
I’m in my 20s for reference.
I feel like in the coming years we’ll see these Gen Z kids almost entirely eschew posting on social media. Most young people I know are almost entirely socializing with their friends via messaging apps, while very rarely making posts on social media. Instagram will fade from relevance for the youth, much like Facebook, and I don’t expect that any social media platform will replace it. Yes, TikTok is popular, but it’s more akin to YouTube that twitter/Facebook/Instagram.
We’ll probably see some dramatic headlines about “the death of the social network” at some point over the next few years. Messaging will be the future of digital socializing.
I think this is ultimately driven by young people coming to the realization that posting to social media is either completely unfulfilling, or actively detrimental to their mental well being. Platform owners thought they could ignore the issue, without considering that their target demographic may very well just reject social networking all together.
Most of the “not so young” people I know do not even have an Instagram account. Of my two teens, only one of them uses it (the other has zero interest).
I’m trying to do my part in keeping my teens off social media. I’m about 50% successful.
For now yes, but I would say it's really meant as replacement for Instagram rather than Facebook. So videos only seems fine compared to a service that was primarily for pictures.
They can always expand, but I feel like these social media services usually have a hard time pivoting to a different medium after their initial success.
TikTok feels like YouTube. It has hundreds of millions of users, but only a small fraction will ever post anything. Unless the dynamics of TikTok radically change, I can’t see it being an Instagram replacement.
Nothing wrong with old people. There's quite a few of them in our world, and only increasing. Also, old people have money, unlike teenagers. Also, old people stick around, unlike teens that switch networks every year or so.
So...what is the appeal of teenagers again? Is it being "cool"? What can I buy for cool?
You're not wrong but what Facebook needs for its investors is growth. If your audience is only old people then the possibility for growth is much more limited. If you frame it like resources then a young audience is renewable. While an aging audience is more like oil, less exciting, and requiring more and more effort to aquire over time.
It’s not hating your family obviously, it’s the fact that all your stupid and embarrassing stuff you typically discuss/share with your friends when you are young is now visible to your extended family.
They did use IG ~2y ago, but then it went out of vogue. Same fate for SnapChat. It is very likely there will be something new next year end they will all move on from TikTok.
Fascinating to observe how they have zero product loyalty. And I realized FB can have a problem, unless they want to spend billions on acquisitions every single year. It’s good for everyone that their monopoly is crumbling a bit.
