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Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

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Re: Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

#251
post #9

>The company also wants professional creators to post more videos to the site and make the platform a content hub on par with YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google. That's interesting, because I've never been able to find a second time a video that popped up in my feed. For my experience, videos on Facebook might as well be ephemeral. forever vanishing the moment my feed refreshes itself automatically.

Not to mention it's an incredible challenge to share a Facebook video outside of Facebook.

It's a challenge to share anything inside of Facebook! Look at any popular video and all the comments are nothing but people tagging a friend, no actual discussion. It's impossible (or I haven't figured out how) to share something I come across with an individual friend. My wife and I just text each other screenshots of our Facebook feed when we want to share an image or post with each other.

Re: Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has lost ground for genuine social interaction. Facebook is more serious stuff such as life announcements for new job, grad/college acceptance, engagement to their significant other, uploading a vacation photo as their profile pic in Grand Canyon as a DSLR, etc.. Everything feels so "official" and "serious" Snapchat is low-stakes and more playful for throw-away stuff in people's day-to-day life.

None of my extended friends around the world (late twenties so we are not that old) nor my family use Snapchat. So in my opinion Snapchat is so niche and has such narrow group of users it will never replace what Facebook used to be.

i don't think its a bad thing that Snapchat will replace Facebook. People don't want an imitator.

The whole point of Facebook is to "record personal history".

The whole point of Snapchat is to maintain "privacy". It fills a void that Facebook was never meant to do nor intends.

Before someone says "you can still screenshot" on Snapchat. While that is true, the platform strongly discourages it and millions of users do not screenshot for every single photo. Whereas FB, is default "save"

The way a platform facilitates interaction is very important.

Re: Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

#253
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People grow in age. The audience that is using Snapchat now (I talk to a dozen friends on Snapchat) are going to keep using Snapchat (I haven’t seen any age based dropoff), and younger people start using Snapchat. I don’t even have some fairly close friends on FB!

Sure but I doubt it. For example after initial students on college campuses who started using Facebook, it has spread to older generations and people in 30s, 40s even 50s now use Facebook. With Snapchat I don't see such trend. It has no website, only a confusing mobile app with horrid UX that most people can't figure out and is mostly used for adding pig noses and cat ears to pictures by teenagers.

if Snapchat had a website, then users could screenshot photos/conversations without notifying the other person. That's exactly why they don't have one.

Re: Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of my extended friends around the world (late twenties so we are not that old) nor my family use Snapchat. So in my opinion Snapchat is so niche and has such narrow group of users it will never replace what Facebook used to be.

i don't think its a bad thing that Snapchat will replace Facebook. People don't want an imitator. The whole point of Facebook is to "record personal history". The whole point of Snapchat is to maintain "privacy". It fills a void that Facebook was never meant to do nor intends. Before someone says "you can still screenshot" on Snapchat. While that is true, the platform strongly discourages it and millions of users do…

I think people want to keep personal history in most cases. Like all normal conversations with friends or family, you would want to keep history of it so you can go look up things in the future.

Sending pictures that disappear and are not recorded is a valid use case but it's a very narrow one in my opinion. It might be useful for dating or "flirting" conversations so maybe 10% of human interaction.

Therefor I think the way Snapchat works it will never become mainstream like Facebook did because it doesn't work well for normal interaction between friends & family which is 90% of most peoples' social interaction.

Re: Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

#255
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways I think Americans are cheap. I'm imagining a paid FB-like service in the range of $5-10/mo, considering ISP packages can easily run up to $80/mo, and a FB-like site should ideally only consume a portion of that. But I think you really need to re-think the core concept of a social platform. Can't find the comment on HN, but someone a few days ago mentioned: social platform vs. social technology . A social…

Interesting points. I'm not sure if SMS is rich enough to support a full fledged social tech, but I kind the idea of keeping the technology open. I will definitely keep thinking about this!

Right, SMS probably wouldn't be able to bear that full weight of a whole social tech, but I believe with just a few additional features added to its spec (or a fork), the effort-to-payoff ratio would be large, if your goal is to help ween people off of sites like Facebook. There's no reason why I shouldn't just be able to use my phone to invite a bunch of friends to some event, and have them indicate with a checkmark or red X whether they will be going or not.

I have some other ideas that I was going to formally write up and thinking of submitting it to Mozilla. Feel free to email me (email in my profile) to discuss more if interested.

Re: Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

#256
post #174
post #60

They're dying, it may be a very slow death but the process has begun. They will become like Yahoo, Myspace, Aol, etc. They are not a Google that can pivot and do a number of different things. Also I've come to realize that Google has a much different relationship with it's users, Google doesn't try to suck up all your time it just tries to give you what you want when you want it, Facebook tries to gamify everything s…

Their active user count increases in every region every year. Their revenue is growing 50% per year. They are not dying.

Trust me that if they lose a lot of users in the US but gain users in some place like India or China they will be much worse off. It takes a lot of users from those places to equal one US user due to massive income differences so ads shown to them are much less valuable

Re: Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

#257
post #234
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would people in Indonesia and India join Facebook if it were mostly old people and people from their own countries Shockingly, people join networks that are used by people they know and their circle of friends is in their own country, for most part. If you think young Indian people are desperately trying to copy what's cool in America you'd have to explain why Whatsapp has been (and continues to be) the dominant ne…

> you'd have to explain why Whatsapp has been (and continues to be) the dominant network in India you have to pay for each sms in India so people preferred watsapp which was free for unlimited sms. The interface is simple even my mom understands how to use watsapp without me explaining how to use it.

This is the case in many countries, is this way in Venezuela too, for example

Re: Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

#258
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experience the same thing and it's really frustrating. I refuse to install Facebook applications on my phone, and they've needlessly crippled their mobile site (disabling messages except mbasic.facebook.com among many other things). If I so much as check a notification then go back to the newsfeed, it's different content and hit/miss as to whether I can find the top post again.

I had to wonder for a second whether I was looking at a post of mine! A year or two ago they made the change to disallow access to messages from m.facebook.com, so I started using mbasic.facebook.com for messages. Recently they blocked the mbasic.facebook.com entirely for iPhones. It's clear that there reason is to force mobile users to install messenger, because messages are still available on m.facebook.com and mba…

mbasic works on my iPhone. Just deleted the app!

Re: Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

#259
post #9

>The company also wants professional creators to post more videos to the site and make the platform a content hub on par with YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google. That's interesting, because I've never been able to find a second time a video that popped up in my feed. For my experience, videos on Facebook might as well be ephemeral. forever vanishing the moment my feed refreshes itself automatically.

> I've never been able to find a second time a video

You can see all the videos you watched as a list in your activity log.

This link works after inserting your username:

https://www.facebook.com/username/allactivity?privacy_source...

It's not working for videos you did not watch long enough.

Re: Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think its a bad thing that Snapchat will replace Facebook. People don't want an imitator. The whole point of Facebook is to "record personal history". The whole point of Snapchat is to maintain "privacy". It fills a void that Facebook was never meant to do nor intends. Before someone says "you can still screenshot" on Snapchat. While that is true, the platform strongly discourages it and millions of users do…

I think people want to keep personal history in most cases. Like all normal conversations with friends or family, you would want to keep history of it so you can go look up things in the future. Sending pictures that disappear and are not recorded is a valid use case but it's a very narrow one in my opinion. It might be useful for dating or "flirting" conversations so maybe 10% of human interaction. Therefor I think…

> Therefor I think the way Snapchat works it will never become mainstream like Facebook did because it doesn't work well for normal interaction between friends & family which is 90% of most peoples' social interaction.

I'd caution against using your personal experience to judge the medium's validity. Adolescents & young adults have plenty of non-sexual conversations on Snapchat. Sometimes you don't need it to be recorded not because you want privacy, but because it's unnecessary. Further, in the event you do want to save a picture you can. :)

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