231–240 of 593 posts
I use Facebook way less than I used to...but I use Instagram way way more than I used to. So, I'm not sure it's all doom and gloom for Facebook as a company.
I realized I was checking facebook a lot each day whenever I had a spare moment, but didn't have anything really interesting happening, and I wanted to engage more with those around me and have more time for down-time thinking. So I deleted the app, knowing that making the threshold higher for checking it would reduce my usage, now I might check facebook once a month on my desktop, and still nothing happening, so it…
I believe that is how Facebook dies. Not people deleting their account, they’ll just stop checking their feed, because it’s spam and stuff friends likes or share and no longer posts about their life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Code size is based on a thing called optimization. If your application is too big, and it's because you think that there's too many engineers because there's too much code because the final application is three times as large as it has any right to be, then you have a problem of too many cooks in the kitchen. If you're ignoring optimization in favour of hiring more people, you, as a software company, have your pr…
You seem to be convinced that you've solved the application size problem that literally thousands of engineers have been working on for years. Or that you've got more insight into the engineering tradeoffs made at the company. I can assure you that's not the case.
Between the God-awful performance of the Facebook web site itself (on my 2018 15" MacBook Pro i9/32GB RAM/512 GB SSD, it still manages to make the fans spin. Loud.), and the ludicrous file size of the Facebook app, any developer worth their salt would actually have to wonder if optimization is something Facebook actively ignores. Ever since Facebook unnecessarily divided their application into two, (Facebook and Mess…
Don't worry: they've been slowly hobbling the mobile site to make the application more and more attractive. iirc you can't even message on the normal (non-basic) mobile site any more: it just shows a splash screen requesting that you download messenger. And of course their site uses screen dimensions and user agents to decide to force you onto mobile even if you request desktop.
You have to go a long way to make anything that bad, it can't be accidental.
There's just no way I could keep myself up to date with local events without Facebook. I live in a post-soviet country so Snapchat and Instagram are considered pretty niche here so every social event is always documented on Facebook. I also hold a monthly gamedev meetup, which would be utterly impossible without Facebook. The attendance has grown from 5 to 30 people in a few months and is now helping jump start the g…
It is evil but it's really not as necessary as you think. I'm known to ALL of my friends and ALL of my family as someone who will not ever be on Facebook. You know what they do? They call me. Or text me. Or email me. And I never miss out on events. Even people I rarely interact with know how to, and do reach me outside of Facebook. People make such a big deal out of how impossible their social lives would be without…
So either I can be there and find out about them, or I can hope someone I know notices them and notifies me.
Both are terrible options.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether or not they are actually listening to conversations, the effect is the same; ads that are way too personal. I suspect they have much more information than what we tell them, and I mean raw data, not what's derived from collaborative filtering or other techniques. I wonder if our ISPs, streaming services, banks, visa, etc, share data. Maybe it's just the trackers all over the internet. Getting ads for a specif…
> I suspect they have much more information than what we tell them, and I mean raw data, not what's derived from collaborative filtering or other techniques. I wonder if our ISPs, streaming services, banks, visa, etc, share data. Maybe it's just the trackers all over the internet. They absolutely do. You should download your FB data, if you have an account. It's basically a list of everywhere you've shopped/been/etc.…
That, and I don't allow the app to know my location, or have access to my photos.
That limits the damage to a significant degree.
There are too many apps causing too many dopamine hits. How is anyone supposed to do the meaningful work or gain the appropriate skills in the supposedly AI/ML dominated future without doing deep work away from these things? Everyone deletes these apps and turns their phones to gray scale so they can focus. Speaking of focus, one thing I want to focus less on is the continual security/privacy nightmare of using Faceb…
What? Are saying the existence of apps makes it impossible to study/do work? This makes no sense. You could make the same (flawed) claim about tv, books, newspapers, sports, friends, etc.
The key with things like Facebook, which makes them different, is not that it takes you away as much as they are designed to trigger dopamine levels in ways TV, books, etc that you mentioned never could. Constantly and at a very high rate. You can't be thanked 100x times by friends... unless you have a super popular post with comments and reactions and now you can. You can't read 10-20 sensational articles back to back on a newspaper like you can on an endlessly scrolling page or even watching videos on Facebook ( I have ended up losing hours on this before). There are fundamental differences which let them do what previous mediums or activities could do but in a way which our brains are simply not equipped to deal with without intervention. It's similar to refined sugar or highly refined anything works. By itself it isn't bad except it's addictive and often leads you astray from your self-set goals.
So, in fact, it makes total sense that people would realize this and increasingly control or remove it from their lives. And more importantly that they'd focus on using only a few of them not every single app there is. Which means two things: 1) people are wary of being sucked in like this and 2) they are likely not willing to leave an app/network where they already spend their time.
I realized I was checking facebook a lot each day whenever I had a spare moment, but didn't have anything really interesting happening, and I wanted to engage more with those around me and have more time for down-time thinking. So I deleted the app, knowing that making the threshold higher for checking it would reduce my usage, now I might check facebook once a month on my desktop, and still nothing happening, so it…
I believe that is how Facebook dies. Not people deleting their account, they’ll just stop checking their feed, because it’s spam and stuff friends likes or share and no longer posts about their life.
Facebook in 2007 was also mostly about friends, and not selling me stuff that it couldn't possibly know I was interested in unless my movements over the entire internet were being tracked.