> And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse
Zuckerberg has been a surprisingly good steward of the one successful idea he came across, the social network graph. His acquisitions (Instagram, etc) worked very well to supplement the social network graph and keep it going longer than it otherwise might have gone. But now that no one gives a shit about what anyone else is doing and just wants to see some jokes, that graph is getting less and less complete.
The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt to lock people back into the grid by turning them into cartoon versions of themselves in a private-sector universe. It's ridiculous. Facebook is flailing.
I joined FB in 2004 as a stanford student. I used it religiously in college because it was the cool new thing at the time, but after that I mostly didn't see the appeal. I really never gave a shit what some guy from high school who I haven't spoken to in 10+ years is posting about. When there is so much more interesting content to consume in the world, why would I bother with the crap someone is posting just because we happened to touch paths at some point in the past? I care about good content, not content just because it comes from someone I know. If it's coming from a close friend, like news about a new job or a baby, I'll find out about it anyway when I see them. So for the last decade or so I sign into Facebook on avg once / month for maybe a minute at a time (only when someone tells me I need to check something), and it always perplexed me how people could spend so much time there. If everyone used Facebook like I did, it probably would have folded long ago. So I am either just a hermit or ahead of the curve, I guess time will tell.
Interesting. I feel the exact opposite. I don't really care about content anymore, it's really just mind numbing drudgery. There's a reason there's a meme about getting addicted to HN and doing "deep work" with "digital minimalism".
In recent times I've cared more and more about what my friends and family are doing, because those are the people I'm connected with in actuality, in real life.
I agree with your position - but I don't think it necessarily means you disagree with the other post.
I've completely stopped using FB because I want to connect with my friends and family. After using the product for many years I realized that idly surfing past pictures of children, weddings, BBQs, etc, that despite FB's loud insistence, that's not connection. Even commenting on friends' posts isn't... really connection?
It was idle voyeurism, or drive-by socialization.
Now I make an active attempt to keep in touch with people by, well, directly talking to them. This isn't some brilliant insight on my part - let's be honest, online socialization has been moving towards this for some time. The group chats I'm a part of, and the virtual/IRL meetings are far more fulfilling to me than any amount of FB feed surfing.
That's true, I have group chats in in as well, but FB and IG serve somewhat of a different purpose for me. See my other comment:
>I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way.
>It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something. People might also not necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time, so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and what you're up to.
>You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and family.
I prefer direct communication even though the surrounding culture seems to be less comfortable with that these days. While I will still post an update
on FB every few months, I got annoyed with how the algorithm made the feed harder to follow so many years ago. In the early days I was a big proponent of blasting out a post to whoever might see it, but I have too many “friends” and even if I curated that list I’d still miss so much amidst the clutter because the algorithm made it so some important-to-me stuff will never appear in my feed. And so often the people I want to see something don’t see my posts. Hence directly texting and emailing them photos! If there were a social media tool that had my best interests in mind, perhaps I could trust it to show my people the content I want to share. Maybe I’m old school since I appreciate getting email and snail mail letters from people, but now if I want to tell people something I send it to them directly. If there are too many people to email/text/call, maybe I should rethink what I’m doing and why. Some people respond positively to that and I’m guessing others find it too forward, but I don’t feel bad about being too forward. Decades ago we used to knock on front doors without telling them in advance that we were dropping by, so I don’t feel an unsolicited texted photo of my baby is so uncomfortably forward compared to that. :)
I don’t understand why you need Facebook or TikTok or Instagram to stay connected with friends and family. What even is “being connected”? I think people hold on to friends they meet too hard. People come and go. If you don’t maintain a friendship outside of social media then that’s ok. Let them go. Move on.
We run a family Slack group. All the functionality of being connected, none of the bullshit.
I can follow all my friends and family on Instagram and see what they're doing. I don't necessarily need all my friends and family to talk to each other like in a big group chat. It's a one to many relationship (me to them) versus many to many (everyone to everyone else).
I mean content as in what reddit or HN has, articles, posts, videos about a topic etc. Of course on Instagram people need to post stuff, photos and videos, but I don't think that when people say content they mean interpersonal photos and videos.
I see. I definitely think it is content (I wouldn’t draw a distinction between origin), but I can see how you have a different interpretation.
When you use Instagram do you see ads or posts from people who aren’t your friends or family members? I’ve never used it so I’m not sure how the algorithms work.
Personally if someone is my friend and has something worth sharing they’ll tell me about it directly or send me a picture. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I’ve had people I was friends with move and we’ve lost touch and so forth. I don’t see a reason to struggle to try and stop that myself. Been pretty happy this way but that is what works for me.
Ads yes, usually from random B2C companies, but I adblock so I don't see any. People who aren't your friends, no, you only see those who you follow.
I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way.
It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something. People might also not necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time, so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and what you're up to.
You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and family.
> It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something.
Again just my perspective but I don’t see value in broadcasting experience to a wide audience. I would view that as “content”. I don’t think it has any positive qualities. The RSS feed is a good way of thinking about it, but I say just don’t post and who cares about your trip ya know? If you don’t care to tell someone in person or over a phone call or some other directed means I think you don’t need to share anything. Again just my perspective on that. Which is why I’ve really only ever used Twitter to complain into the void from time to time.
Again, it's too many people to tell individually, it's easier for me to broadcast it and those who are interested will automatically reach out to me. There's no need on my end to do additional work so to speak, ie I don't have to message every party in the hopes that they might be interested, that's why I liken it to something like a broadcast.
There's an element of having shot themselves in the foot. FB moviled from content driven purely by your friends and what they post to content that FB have decided to feed you.
That worked great in a lot of senses. You never run out of content. FB have a lot more options for their optimisation efforts. It also made them more of a general media company.
But... it also devalued the social network/friends aspect. Now it's just about content and holding user attention. Well... that means competition is everything again. Anyone can post anywhere, or consume content anywhere.
Yeah, whenever I see others scrolling through content at Facebook, I can't help but wonder who would voluntarily subject themselves to so much garbage information. It is similar with Twitter, which I use for "science communication". But the amount of miscellaneous memes and low quality click bait ads that one has to endure is almost physically painful.
Pretty sure some people’s brains are just stuck in an infinite dopamine kick loop. I consider it similar to the opioid epidemic, where people’s brains have been re-wired to compulsively do things they might not want to do. Next time try asking someone you see scrolling Facebook if they’re actually enjoying themselves and I guarantee they will express some form of regret (but then will continue doing it).
Isn't the short answer to "why are people subjecting themselves to this" just dark patterns?
I know it sounds overly reductionist or boogeyman-esque, but they captured a market and refuse to let go, doing every single thing they can to keep and monetize human attention.
> The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt
Exactly. It's a bet-the-farm move from a company that has a track record of, best I can tell, a big fat zero in terms of in-house innovation. This is like Google deciding to shift the entire company to Google+, except Google+ was just a clone of an existing thing that actually worked. Meta has no precursor. It's an entirely new thing that Facebook is trying to will into existence without even so much as testing the waters first.
I have a feeling Zuckerberg is going to enrage investors enough that he has to flee Facebook in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness with the help of a few loyal toadies providing safe passage, or he's going to start building his Führerbunker and be the last man standing while Facebook turns to rubble. I'm slightly joking, but also... Zuck has to be in the running for the worse tech CEO ever. They paid $16 billion for WhatsApp and then started promoting their own Facebook Messenger which no one used. I feel like their intent was to kill WhatsApp in the crib. But the "crib" turned out to be the entire global population and was, in fact, too big for them to kill and get people to switch to their own garbage chat app.
I concur. At some point I started looking for the best contest over caring about yahoo classmates engaging in political wars. It’s entertainment for them but not for me.
I couldn't agree with you more here. To me, it's a clear sign that he "wears no clothes". The Metaverse presentation was the most idiotic presentation I've ever seen. He must be completely surrounded himself by people that just agree with him.
I wouldn't describe the presentation as idiotic but it was hard to take seriously. The dream of immersive VR experiences showcased in Snow Crash and Ready Player One will be realized.
But it won't be soon, and the ideas shown in the video--like the surfing game--were the kind of ideas that litter the floor of the App Store.
Compelling product experiences, especially on new platforms, are extremely difficult to craft.
The taste of the creators must be exceptionally good and in this case the hardware quality and onboarding experience must bowl over anyone who touches it.
The Facebook video for Meta looked very speculative. I suspect Meta was planned for 2023 or 2024, but was rushed out the door because the brand was getting pummeled.
In that way, changing to Meta was very effective at derailing the negative attention. But not actually having a there, there is a problem when the chicken comes home to roost.
It's realized right now -- as a heavy sweaty low res tech demo not many people would want to for long. I don't doubt something like that will eventually be possible as promised. However, the tech is so far from being there, I don't think it'll happen in our lifetime.
Zuck may had well renamed his company "Flying cars".
Even in my older demographic (i.e. those of us who got in when you still needed edu addresses or shortly thereafter) which is supposedly more the core audience for Facebook this days, I don't see people "rage quitting." But I do see essentially everyone in my circles (including myself) having dialed down usage a lot.
Mid 30's here and I joined right after the .edu requirement was dropped. Everyone in my age group is on Facebook but they rarely post anymore because they are busy! They all have kids and jobs and house projects they are working on and the novelty of updating about everything has worn off so they post very infrequently. When Gen-Zers make jokes about Facebook being for old people, that's us!
The algorithmic feed can't handle the "lack" of new posts though so it keeps inserting lots of ads, videos, and whatever that I don't actually care about. I really like Facebook when it is about interacting with my friends but everything else is a distraction. The level of distraction in Facebook is just too high. It's okay if nothing is going on!
Mid 40's here. I have a single friend that still posts frequently. Everyone else has either dropped off entirely or rarely posts. My wife is on facebook all the time, but it's for her social groups, like Mom, teacher groups.
At least for me, the overheated political posts became a huge turn off. I think many people left after the election.
I agree he’s been a good steward of the graph — even people who hate Facebook and don’t use Facebook are actually using Facebook! — but I suspect he needed Sandberg to turn it into the big money.
It's very unclear to me why Second Life v2 would be of interest to more than a tiny sliver of the population. The last thing I'd want from Facebook is to turn into a more immersive experience.
>Accelerated by the happenings of the last 2 years.
How? A fair number of people prefer to shut off their video on calls. And my observation is that coming out of COVID people want more in-person interactions, not less.
Zuck moved first in “metaverse” with Oculus 7 years ago and what does he have to show for it?
Some decent/good hardware locked behind logging into your Facebook account.
If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
>If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
Probably true but no one else would probably have made it work either.
VR tech isn't really there today but even if it were better, it's still more of a niche use case than its fans would have it be. (Certain types of gaming, maybe virtual tourism...) People don't want things to be immersive most of the time. Ask me to wear a VR headset for a routine work meeting? That will be a big "nope" from me.
>If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
Did they fail? Most people don't hate Facebook as much as HN and seem not to have a problem with Oculus requiring a Facebook account, given that the Quest 2 is the best selling VR headset by far.
In my account they definitely failed.
As you say, they did a great job with the hardware but the only real software they are even advertising for it is a worse version of vrchat that they took way too long to clone.
I don’t know how to chock it up other than as a failure, they acquired instagram only 2 years earlier. Instagram is now a Snapchat tiktok and a little YouTube wrapped into one.
> And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse
Zuckerberg has been a surprisingly good steward of the one successful idea he came across, the social network graph. His acquisitions (Instagram, etc) worked very well to supplement the social network graph and keep it going longer than it otherwise might have gone. But now that no one gives a shit about what anyone else is doing and just wants to see some jokes, that graph is getting less and less complete.
The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt to lock people back into the grid by turning them into cartoon versions of themselves in a private-sector universe. It's ridiculous. Facebook is flailing.