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What will become of Mark Zuckerburg's empire of shit?
I was recently thinking wistfully of the brief golden age of Facebook, and how it made me more connected to my social network. At one point, most of my friends and family posted updates about their lives. I knew all about my friends from high school and college. I even connected to members of my extended family. And I could easily ask questions to my network and receive answers. It was great.
That was a long time ago. Zuckerberg pissed it all away. At first, he tried to replace the news media. Later, when that failed, he went all in on maximizing ad revenue. Facebook is now a wasteland of ads, AI, and clueless boomers. Nearly 100% of its value proposition is gone. No one I care about posts there any more.
Zuckerburg did a few things right, all more than a decade ago:
He figured out that people will give you all their personal info for free and that this is worth a lot to advertisers. In his words, "they trust me, dumb fucks".
He made sure his voting shares didn't get diluted so he has, in theory, monarchal control of Facebook
He bought Instagram for cheap in 2012
He has reaped the rewards of these decisions handsomely and currently is the world's 4th richest person with a net worth north of $200 billion.
But what has he done more recently?
Bought WhatsApp for $19 billion and promised to never advertise on the platform. Even though he has broken the promise, it's unclear how they will ever recoup this
Blown tens of billions on the "Metaverse", a project which no one wants and has negative traction
Made "Stories", "Reels", and "Threads" – blatant knockoffs of existing products which failed to win in the marketplace
Made an open source LLM called LLAMA which was initially a success but has been blown out of the water by a Chinese startup that trained a superior model for just $6 million
I recently read the book "Titan", about John D. Rockefeller. Despite being history's greatest philanthropist, Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity. People take the wrong lesson from his life, which is generally viewed as "he did a bunch of evil shit to get rich but he gave it all away, so it's okay."
Bill Gates folllowed that model. Maybe Zuckerberg thinks the same way. But it's unlikely that anything he can do with his billions can undo the damage his social networks have done, and continue to do to the social fabric. The irony is that if he had just focused on making Facebook the best version of itself, he would probably be even richer today, and beloved for making the iconic product of the age.
But instead we have Instagram, Reels, and a bunch of other shit that just makes people miserable. Will it stand the test of time? I doubt it.
I think Facebook simply died a natural death that can't really be attributed to anything Zuckerberg did or didn't do. I don't think it's a coincidence that the demise of Facebook roughly corresponds to the rise of Reddit as a mass-market phenomenon. Though the platforms seem very different, they essentially serve the same purpose — a time suck for bored people. People who used to spend their free time scrolling Facebook now spend it scrolling Reddit, and Reddit offers more in the way of content than Facebook ever could. Message boards have existed since the dawn of the internet, but they were mostly specialized. Now, everyone has a whole universe of them in one convenient place, and the more popular subs like AmItheAsshole aren't the kind of thing that can exist as a stand-alone site.
That and there was just a general weariness about some of the shit that went on there. I'm not talking about politics, except in the sense that everyone had a friend that posted about nothing but politics and you didn't give a shit about their opinions regardless of whether you agreed with them or not. And then there were the people who posted nothing but memes. And the people who posted nothing but pictures of their kids. This was all relatively benign, though. The worst was the people who overshared personal information, or hinted at personal problems without giving details, all of it for the express purpose of generating lazy sympathy. The politics was often the most interesting thing about it, because at least it gave you the chance to engage in a way similar to how you would in person. But even in person, the guy who always has to bring up politics is annoying.
So the normal discussions that you would have with these friends were few and far between. Then sponsored content began taking up a greater and greater percentage of your news feed (I don't look at my account often anymore, but when I do I'm lucky to get one or two posts from friends, even if profile checks show a significant number of them still posting regularly; it's really something to behold). So people lose interest and go to places that aren't as irritating. Also, like Reddit, they changed to a "modern" interface that does the site no favors. The best thing they could do is go back to the 2010 UI. But it won't happen.
Yeah, I left Facebook after they made an algorithmic change that led to my feed being taken up by toxoplasmosis-inducing posts full of scissor statements that generated clicks by being controversial. I had carefully curated my feed to see only posts from local organizations and friends who posted things I wanted to hear, but they spit right in the face of that and filled my feed with things designed by robots to make people maximally angry.
This is the same reason I can't use Twitter or even reddit nowadays, I log in for 5 minutes -- literally -- and I'm overwhelmed by 50,000 people trying to get me to feel fear or anger or hate. But listening to the teaching of the Jedi that these things lead to suffering, and the apostolic teaching that "enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, and envy" leads to ruin, I chose to walk away from such things and focus on "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, and whatever is gracious," which leads not to suffering and anxiety but to peace that passeth all understanding. Iterum dico, gaudete!
I disagree with you that the problem with Facebook was too much personal stuff or memes or pictures of people's kids... IMO that was the nice side of Facebook that gave you a small sense of connection to people you know in real life. I'm not annoyed by calls for sympathy, but I don't talk politics in real life outside of a small group of people I can have motte-style conversations with, so Facebook politics was much more grating to me than it was to you. But maybe this is an agreeableness thing.
They filled my feed with images generated by robots to make people maximally "ooh" and "aah". I guess I posted about hiking one time too many and now I'm damned to see every half-assed Midjourney output for a "fancy cabin in the woods" prompt? If I manually go to whatever "show me less like this" button I can find on each post, things might clear up for a week or a month, but eventually to goes right back to AI slop.
It's utterly baffling to me. I understand the ads, since they gotta pay for the site somehow, and I'd be content to wade through 33% ads to see 67% posts from friends and family ... but it's not 33/67 on my feed, it's 33/33/33. For exactly the same revenue to them, I get a 2:1 ratio of non-content to content instead of a 1:2 ratio. Why!?! They've driven me away successfully enough that they should have a huge backlog of things I'd want to see available every time I actually go back to the site, yet rather than digging in to the backlog they show me garbage. Are other people drawn in by the garbage, and I'm an odd exception not the target audience? I just wanted to see pictures of family's and old friends' kids.
The non-ad slop posts are probably also some form of ad -- you can do "boosted" posts on Facebook, anyways; not sure about IG. Or else just people farming engagement so they can be paid by someone else to create ads -- which would be trivial for Meta to detect, but they choose not to because "engagement" is also one of their key internal metrics so employees are incentivized towards "number go up".
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I am surprised that nobody has filled the niche that facebook is useful for, keeping track of distant acquaintances. Facebook was decent in 2010 when it let users keep track of their second cousin's graduation and high school classmate's new house. There should still be a market for a listing of life events for people on the periphery of your life. Linkedin has weirdly enough partially filled the role but there is no true platform for this.
You knew, but did you care? I think that's what ultimately did the platform in. Seeing pictures of people you actually knew was one thing. Seeing the wedding pictures of someone you hadn't talked to in a decade was just crap that cluttered up your feed. There was a certain novelty to it for a while, but as soon as people realized that that was as far as the relationship was ever going to go (or, more ominously, that they had no interest of pursuing the relationship any further), the novelty wore off and people stopped caring. I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I no longer know what some guy I was sort of friends with in college is up to now.
People's opinions on this are going to differ, but I personally really like being able to passively keep up with people I was once close with.
The tall awkward girl who flirted with me in high school is now married to an indian guy and is a therapist out in LA, my study buddy from college is swimming and biking a lot and recently changed jobs, another reconnected with the girl we always knew he was destined for and has a kid....
I do see these people in real life occasionally as I travel back home, attend a wedding, or put together a guy's trip. Being able to launch directly into relevant conversation is worthwhile, and I still actually do care about what they're up to.
Sure, there were some folks who went off the deep end in some sort of way, and changed beyond recognition or value as people. But is a tweet or some harebrained shit from reddit really more worthwhile content than staying connected to the mostly-good people I've met? I'd argue no. I miss Facebook quite a bit.
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Yeah, I’ve heard other people say this in real life too, that there was this brief period from like 2009 to 2017 when you actually knew what your random high school friends and extended family had going on in their personal lives on a weirdly intimate basis, and now nobody knows anymore. You get curated glimpses of it on Instagram (although most users just lurk or post once a year), and you see the career side on LinkedIn like you say, but it’s not the same.
IMO it's not that weird: My parents' generation sends annual Christmas cards with updates on career moves, births, deaths, graduations, and marriages to people they might not have seen IRL in a decade.
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I think social networks just have a natural lifespan. Their users are their product, and as they grow old, they become less attractive to the real customers: they stop posting cool stuff and they stop browsing the network. Facebook aged quicker than most because it tried to become the network for the whole family. That's why Mark bought Instagram, to preserve a separate "hip" social network for Millennials. Now it's full of moms promoting their small businesses, and hip Zoomers are on TikTok instead. As they become squarer with age, some other network will capture the new generation of users.
Instagram is still pretty hip IMO. Lots of young people on there posting bikini pics. It's just a matter of who you follow. But I think the instagram format of photo-dominance is well suited for anyone who wants to be hip, regardless of age. Despite it's name, Facebook was more of a text platform.
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Oh definitely. Facebook was doomed to lose young people posting about last night's drunken debauchery.
But that's okay. They could have been so much more. If they hadn't tried to go political or maximize ad revenue, people would have stayed with the platform and it would be a great place to post family friendly stuff.
There's huge value to a platform that 90% of your friends and family are on. For example, sharing contact info, Facebook groups, Facebook marketplace. Hell, even Facebook dating might have worked.
But since everyone left, its just a wasteland of AI and ads, and nothing came up to replace it.
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