511–520 of 609 posts
I honestly don't see how Facebook is any worse than Google, Amazon, Twitter, etc. Google can destroy a business by changing its algorithm or censoring a result and collects just as much information as Facebook, often vastly more personal. Amazon owns the entire logistics space. Twitter often makes partisan decisions when it comes to censorship and gives voice to propaganda outlets from the likes of the CCP, Taliban,…
"Opprobrium"? "Tendentious"? The author of this piece really broke out the thesaurus, didn't they?
So they're going to go through some things, no? But I agree that so far they have managed to acquire the services most likely to destroy them.
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FB's emphasis on family connections makes it much more... potent, and almost cult-like in some ways. Families stay in touch and plan events on FB. Your mom, aunt, and uncle-in-law are rather likely to be on FB, but not Twitter. If they are on Twitter, Twitter doesn't hector you to "connect" with them with nearly the same fervor as FB. That has somewhat profound implications. If one ditches FB, one loses access to you…
To me, this is what makes Twitter (and Instagram and anything else aimed at talking to the public) mostly useless. I don't want to hear about the day-to-day lives of Twitter randos at all or follow celebrity gossip. On Facebook, I talk to and organize events with my friends and family. My conversations are continuous across devices, and they are not mobile-first like texting or whatsapp or snapchat or some of the new…
To me, this is what makes Twitter (and Instagram
and anything else aimed at talking to the public)
mostly useless. I don't want to hear about the
day-to-day lives of Twitter randos at all or
follow celebrity gossip.
It's about 50% friends I know personally and 50%... well, not "celebrities" but like... local personalities, independent musicians, leaders of open source projects, etc. The ones I follow are actually very responsive to replies which is very very cool and useful to me.
I'm not sure where else I could easily and enjoyably aggregate that stuff.
No. That’s what people like us and all the main stream media hope for. But: most people I know don’t have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong to the FB group. And even worse: most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share pictures through those apps.
Looks like the parent comment is some sort of "reply" to the title. Curiousity might lead some to actually look at the article. It is very short. For those who won't, the tag line is "The problem starts at the top". Perhaps that is a reference to Zuckerberg. The topic is reputation. The article quickly summarises the recent complaints being made against Facebook. Then it cuts to the chase. "The most damaging claim th…
In sum, TFA suggests that the business may need a better spokesperson. The business model isn't going to vanish, but it is very dependent on perception.
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Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook. I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own. But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirel…
>But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise. I don't use FB but I would imagine if I did and I wanted to get off it and there were dozens of people I wanted to keep in touch with but would lose touch with I would send these dozens of people a message a week before, saying "I am going to get off facebook, can you send me your email…
But people might not see your "hey, leaving FB post." They might not check FB often. Or it just kind of gets buried. etc.
Phone numbers and emails change, though. "Contact rot" happens. So, I don't know. I guess I like to have multiple ways to contact people.
This is all predicated on the fact that FB is absolutely not a distraction to me. I look at it maybe once or twice a month. I have all notifications turned off. So, it is not a drain on my (fragile) attention span.
Maybe most importantly, a lot of the folks I keep up with on FB aren't necessarily people I talk to directly. We would not really be keeping up by email/phone/letter/whatever. Some people see that as evidence that, hey, those are obviously people you don't need in your life. Perhaps that's true for some. For me, I enjoy having acquaintances as well as friends.
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It's been so long since a company reached Facebook's heights and fell that a whole generation doesn't know what it looks like. AOL was the Facebook of its time: a joke to system admins, a default ban on small game servers and IRC channels. Meanwhile, most people had no idea anyone had a problem with AOL. Like with Facebook, there were people reporting on its follies like Observers.net[0], but it mostly went unremarke…
I'd hesitate to generalize AOL's fall into Facebook's future. AOL's core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL's value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation. And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because i…
The only way it can sustain it's growth and profitability would be to find more ways to hijack your mind and your feelings and keep you more "engaged" and addicted, and keep repeating that behavior to more and more people on earth. To become more toxic.
Unless they decide to completely remodel their business, and lose money (never going to happen), it's only going to remain a force for bad in the world. Nothing can change that really because we all know that after spending an hour on Facebook, we feel worse. I don't feel like this after using Google search for an hour (although I know there are negatives too that too).
What's happened is, it's unmasked now, everyone can see that it is bad, studies have shown it's negative effects, now we're just working out what we do with it, how do we get away from it. Do we kill it, ignore it, put warnings on the login page that it' addictive, how do we cure ourselves from Facebook?
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>The loudest critics of social media are the old vanguards of news who are upset that the new kid on the block took their ad money. Also activists who are clearly engaging in motivated reasoning in arguing that Facebook needs to do more to censor conservative opinions.
Lies aren't opinions. "Hillary Clinton is a Gila Monster" is not an opinion but a complete fabrication. That's what mainstream liberals are deeply concerned about, not conservative ideas about taxation.
So be concerned about people calling Clinton a Gila Monster if that's your most pressing concern. But by censoring it, you will also miss out on contrarian reporting that's actually true.
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Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook. I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own. But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirel…
> Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook. Email, probably.
I was thinking of proprietary platforms such as FB, not open protocols like email.
If we're counting protocols then I suppose we'd have to include the phone networks and MMS and I think those would eclipse email.
Although, I don't think it's useful to compare proprietary closed social networks to open protocols; seems very apples-vs-oranges.
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Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook. I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own. But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirel…
> Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook. Facebook's network effect was overwhelmed twice, once by instagram and again by whatsapp... shame both those ended up squarely in Facebook's court. Remains to be seen how much dent can TikTok / Twitch / YouTube / Snap / Azar / Telegram can make on to that once-in-a-generation trifecta.
This doesn't seem accurate, do you have evidence to back up this claim? Instagram had 30 million users and no revenue upon acquisition. Facebook had over a billion, and billions in revenues.