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Facebook loses users for the first time

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#851

Post by m4rtink »

j1elo wrote: post #739
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Controlling the VR metaverse... I just don't see it. Too much innovation. Too much invention. Remember FB can always purchase themselves into the market - pick up a few startups and bodge together a consistent product. I think the problem is that VR tech and apps will take too long to arrive to gain any traction with the wider public, before FB needs it. FB needs hundreds of millions/billions of users, VR hasn't pu…

> even those were balking at having to have FB accounts It's been like what, 3 years? that I've been patiently waiting for the UE (or someone , in general) to mandate Facebook to remove mandatory account signup and tie-in, before buying an Oculus Quest (now 2). I don't care if this means I end up not buying and enjoying it at all in the end. Sadly I guess just a minority have such firm positions when it comes to "vot…

This is the reason I backed the Lynx R1[0] headset instead of buying an Oculus - no way in hell I'm going to sign in to a Facebook account on a device with bazillion cameras for inside out tracking!

I'm sure many of the supporters of other independent VR hardware project (such as Simula VR[1]) are of the same opinion.

[0] https://www.lynx-r.com/

[1] https://simulavr.com/

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#852

Post by prostoalex »

ubermonkey wrote: post #797
jmacd wrote: post #774

There is something else going on around FB. Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working…

I think there are a lot of people who are in my position, which is "I would absolutely love to ditch FB entirely, but I can't because of ____". The value of ____ might be "seeing pictures of family", or it might be "coordination of/participation in a group that has settled on Facebook as the easiest path" ( But none of these are positive reasons. There is no love of Facebook behind any of them. It's Facebook being to…

Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism" addresses this common use-case scenario.

1) Remove the apps from your phone and log out on mobile browser, making each future login a concentrated intentional effort. (You can leave Messenger if that might be used for emergency contacts).

2) Use www version only.

3) Choose a time when you're going to sit by your home computer, and use social media for some pre-determined time slot, let's say 30 minutes.

The social networks are very good at serving this use case - showing most important content first, and relegating the junky stuff further down the feed. This way you won't miss any baby photos or wedding announcements, but will be spared from your uncle getting into a heated political discussion.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#853

Post by nradov »

ubermonkey wrote: post #797
jmacd wrote: post #774

There is something else going on around FB. Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working…

I think there are a lot of people who are in my position, which is "I would absolutely love to ditch FB entirely, but I can't because of ____". The value of ____ might be "seeing pictures of family", or it might be "coordination of/participation in a group that has settled on Facebook as the easiest path" ( But none of these are positive reasons. There is no love of Facebook behind any of them. It's Facebook being to…

I don't have any particular love for Facebook, but it remains the best way to share my underwater photography with friends. That's a positive reason. I appreciate how they give me a convenient distribution platform and it's all free.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#854

Post by soundnote »

jacobolus wrote: post #147
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reddit used to be great until they pulled their great bait & switch, then added all kinds of authoritarian features. A brief history of reddit: > We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. — Reddit FAQ 2005 > We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content — u/kn0thing 2008 > A bastion of free speech on the World Wide We…

Circa 2005 reddit was a forum for nerdy young tech people, talking about miscellaneous web links but mostly focused around nerdy tech stuff. Nobody I know who read reddit circa 2005 wanted it to become a white supremacist hate forum. When it started to attract large numbers of white supremacists who deposited their steaming piles of bullshit (hate speech, vicious personal attacks) all over the site, lots of people re…

It never was though? Not the site. Some subs might've been, but the site overall never was. Most I've seen is having to leave some subs I used to frequent because the mods became crazy, and their madness definitely didn't lean right. Most I've seen of odious subs like that is people complaining of their existence, but they didn't contaminate the rest of reddit.

The place used to be far more liberal both in the sense of openmindedness and in the sense of people having the ability to tolerate people they didn't actively like. That atmosphere is mostly gone.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#855

Post by redisman »

safog wrote: post #816
jmacd wrote: post #774

There is something else going on around FB. Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working…

Re: metaverse, it's not really a handwavey after thought - they've been investing quite significantly ($10bn lost last year alone while all of Google's bets including deepmind and waymo lost ~1.45bn. >10k people working on it now AFAIK). I think Facebook just got burned by not having a hardware platform this cycle - Apple and Google control the phones and Microsoft has the PC, XBox etc. They just want control over th…

I just wonder where the software for it is at. Oculus is chugging along and I believe that can get quite good. But building a impressive MMO-like 3D world/game is probably a 5-10 year endeavor and runs a high risk that it won’t be fun or novel. I guess they’ll mainly build the platforms but then they need someone to build the worlds on top of it.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#856

Post by lariati »

dspillett wrote: post #724
davedx wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of what you wrote up to this point: > He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play He made a school yearbook on the internet and copied some features from existing social networks like MySpace. Facebook was just in the right place at the right time and executed well. The jury is very much still out on whether "VR is a good play", too. It might turn out to be a gigantic o…

> Facebook was just in the right place at the right time and executed well. I wouldn't even go that far: it was merely executed well enough that it didn't squander being in the right place at the right time by being terrible. This is one of the reasons why getting a minimal viable product out quickly (where the definition of “minimal viable” includes that not-being-terrible caveat) can be so important when working on…

This is just wrong. I would question if you ever went on Myspace.

Facebook figured out that using your real full name in an electronic social network had huge advantages in terms of connecting your real world social network.

They killed Myspace because of the network effect the above had when people started finding their friends from high school easily online. Early on I think you even had to join a network specifically for your high school so everyone had their first and last names along with their labeling for their high school.

It sounds stupid and obvious now but before Facebook the average person didn't broadcast their first and last name on the internet.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#857

Post by redisman »

w_t_payne wrote: post #828
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook was never ever about the Social Graph. It was always about user profiling and activity/interest monitoring which could be sold to advertisers. The Social Graph was just one tool for that. Coincidentally the profiling is also extremely useful for political leverage and behaviour mod. I'm sure that never occurred to anyone around the company, and the links to operations like AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica…

Election years are big money years for the entire Ad industry. Political advertising is not something that a sane Advertising company will ignore.

Facebook has basically been a magical money printing machine for political fundraising. Put a dollar in with a nice outrageous ad and get two back in donations.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#858

Post by redisman »

it_does_follow wrote: post #823
jmacd wrote: post #774

There is something else going on around FB. Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working…

What all of this points out is that Facebook never really solved the "MySpace/Friendster" problem, they just had the better product at the right time and were able to get a few more years of safety by acquiring threats (which is not a long term strategy). It's wild that FB has become such a highly valued company despite the fact that they have always been resting on rather shaky foundations. We can also start to see…

Seems right. In my and my close friends/family experience it’s all the same - all the cool/interesting people stopped posting many years ago and with each one, more and more followed them or got bored and stopped going. Now it’s just the dorks posting stale memes or boring updates. I haven’t posted anything actively for many years now but still check it now and then and shake my head.

I think it started a slow bleed when they removed the chronological view. After that it became “evil” and not about social connection anymore. No longer was my post being seen by my friends unless the algo thought it was saucy enough. It was a great business but I dont think you’ll ever get the people who are fed up to come back.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#859

Post by browningstreet »

jmacd wrote: post #774

There is something else going on around FB. Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working…

I really do miss the utility apps of the early 2000s that went social. I'm travelling soon and want to re-visit a restaurant I went to some time ago and none of the apps on my phone will make it easy to look up where it was I ate before. When I was living abroad in the early 2000s, the social apps like Foursquare made that kind of utility-to-me feature fun and useful.

FB, as a social platform, is moving away from being a social app. Same thing happened to other social apps. The original utility they had in the early days was subsumed by social, which is now being subsumed by something else. The original utility can't be found anywhere... it was dragged down into the depths and drowned.

In some ways, my iPhone now is less useful to me than it was before. I can look things up in the moment, but in terms of connecting me to my past activities -- not so much.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#860

Post by electrondood »

polote wrote: post #758
randomsearch wrote: post #504

This is how the narrative of Facebook looks to me: Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that. Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do. Without a stream of new id…

> Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Facebook has created Facebook Workplace from scratch which is very successfull, is this not innovating ? Facebook has resisted the growth of Snapchat, is this not innovating ? WhatsApp has continued to grow after its acquisition and is very successful today. Facebook is clearly one of the most innovative company of this size. Buying companies and being able to make t…

Facebook Workplace "from scratch?" It was basically a fork of Facebook.
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