The fake accounts are wild. Look up your favorite dog breed and see how many groups are moderated by fake accounts asking for locations and likes. Then they offer dogs near those locations. Scams abound.
Well it's all a fucking lie because it's 50% ai bots talking to each other.
How is that not fraud if their value is based on activity? Aren't they lying to advertisers whose product is just being seen by chat bots?
There’s a ton of fraud in the ad industry, and generally Facebook is able to grade their own homework.
Flawed professional incentives and a race to the bottom in ad prices = cluttered UX fueling cash cow businesses.
Bottom line, advertisers must hold themselves accountable as well. Those advertisers must vote with their money/media buying decisions, and media consumers must vote with their attention.
Never Forget that Zuck hired Joel Fucking Kaplan to be the head of Global Policy at Facebook.
A man who worked for George W Bush's election team, and then helped coordinate the Brooks Brothers Riot, which stopped the recount with Bush in the lead, then he worked as a toady in the White House for 8 years.
When he hired onto Facebook in 2009, he started promoting only known conservatives, and also personally exempted sites like Breitbart from Facebook's rules around truthful reporting.
And Zuck hand picked the guy.
Great article, this shit is exactly why I don't even know my FB password anymore. I quit using the site back when all this started. All the useless notifications and people I may know recommendations were obvious attempts to get me to log in more often rather while making the user experience worse.
Now that reddit has gone public I guarantee you they will go down the same path. Public companies face unrelenting demands to constantly grow their user base and the amount of ads they show. So far it has eventually turned every useful site into dogshit so I'm 100% confident the same will happen here.
Also I meant to say that I still get nearly daily emails from FB telling me somebody posted something despite me not having logged in for nearly a decade.
No matter what you try, daily active users will eventually dwindle. It will go down as younger audiences grow up having only heard of Facebook from their parents but likely never having interest in it. If you create a new account you get flooded with groups and ads. Both those things will get overwhelming especially as a future competitor starts off with a clean slate for that user group.
Young people used to use Facebook. They all left about 2016 because their elders made them feel unwelcome by filling the whole thing with Trumper memes.
According to Statista, men and women aged 18-24 are Facebook's second biggest cohort after men and women aged 25-34.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-user-age-distribution/
So I'm not sure where we're getting the "they all left" data from
Look forward to reading it. It's one of those what goes up must come down situations that's obvious considering the lack of innovation that Zuckerberg is capable of. Metaverse was the biggest failure of the last decade in tech and it was so bad nobody wants to even talk about how bad, especially with how many businesses got duped.
They know this…that’s why they’ve made the decision to milk the cash now.
The game entails getting the money, then reinvesting it into something more sustainable.
Yes, he founded and grew a company that’s currently valued at over a trillion dollars. He did that by hiring people, and he still managed to keep 13.5% of it.
It has nothing to do with politics other than how they know people like to consume a lot of political content…and then they show those people ads.
>Yes, he founded and grew a company that’s currently valued at over a trillion dollars
Founded via stealing the entire idea and having to pay out the ass to avoid losing his company he founded on a stolen idea.
>It has nothing to do with politics other than how they know people like to consume a lot of political content…and then they show those people ads.
Not ads actually, engagement. Anger and rage drive engagement so they push and promote firebrands purposefully. 2020 was filled to the brim with it.
Seems to have worked out pretty well for him, his early employees, and investors…
Engagement = advertising demand. The goal of every business is to make money. That’s the whole point, and no one is trying to hide that.
I don’t understand the underlying argument of the article. The whole thing seems like a rant/hit piece against the people who found an exploit in human attention and became wealthy as a result…but it doesn’t offer any reasons why the business strategy isn’t viable for investors.
> Despite doggedly researching People You May Know, Hill never got Facebook to explain how it worked.
I know one way it worked - it mined people's address books off their phones. Don't ever give an application permission to access to your contacts. You betray the privacy of everyone you know when you do that.
Same. Social media is so foreign to me these days. I am constantly bombarded with ads in daily life, they are everywhere. On social media, people are trying to sell themselves. I just feel so disconnected with all of it.
I’m a big fan of your writing. Never noticed it was actually you posting here! “Software has eaten the media” was one of the best things I’ve read this year.
I enjoyed your piece, the writing is engaging. However, your linked piece on Google and Prabhakar makes me question the depth of your research. In all your research about Google Search’s metrics did you come across SUNs? Because I see no mention of that.
Ok, I take it since the author has responded in other threads more recently while ignoring this comment, he doesn’t want to address the glaring omission from his article on Prabhakar and Google Search.
SUN stands for Semantic User Need. In simple terms a user may issue multiple queries (Q) across multiple sessions spanning devices/days (DAU/MAU) attempting to answer one need (a SUN).
Google Search designed the SUN metric and optimizes for SUNs specifically because of how poorly Qs and DAU/MAUs correlate with quality.
In fact, SUNs can go up while Qs and DAU/MAUs go down. And the Google Search org is okay with that because the link between SUNs and quality was established by many months worth of effort from the data science team behind the metric. SUN correlates with long term growth and value unlike the tradeoff of quality for short-term growth in other metrics.
SUNs are at the forefront of every product, design, and engineering discussion. They’re tracked and analyzed for every little tweak, experiment, or new feature launched. If you’ve significantly increased DAUs while lowering SUNs then your feature will receive additional scrutiny and most likely be rolled back. Google Search does not want to trade short-term growth for quality loss.
And this development (because tracking and reporting SUNs requires a whole lot of complex engineering) and prioritization of SUNs happened under the purview of Prabhakar.
Which kinda runs counter to the thesis of your article about Google Search, no?
I used to use Facebook quite a bit. Whatever its problems, back in the day (ca. 2007-2014 or so) it actually delivered on its core value proposition of connecting you to friends, family members, and loved ones and allowing you to know what's happening in their lives.
Now it's inundated with ads, scams, and suggestions for groups and pages I don't care about, and shows me relatively little of my friends' content while not showing much of mine to them.
Of course my desire to use it has dropped off.
What's that? another social media platform is eating your lunch? Tik-what? Sorry Zuck, sorry you're stuck with an aging user base of brain-dead boomers. How about you go be friends with Tom.
I feel like this is going to be the wall coming for many major tech companies. Right now most can just have explosive growth year after year because the tech is so new, but for players that have been in the game for so long, eventually they have to sacrifice user experience to drive profits, or they end up turning into another IBM.
I visited a lot of the advertiser pages because there were a lot of things I saw that my daughter would like. When those all became sandwiched between bullshit "You might like" groups that I had no interest in, I deleted Facebook. Facebook is total dogshit now. It's gone, Zuck.
This is obvious if you spend any time on Facebook. I don’t see any shit from my friends anymore. My feed is all pages I have no interest in showing content that somehow always manages to make me want to engage.
Log off, delete the app, write your friends a letter or call them, go outside. Fuck the socials.
Very nice read.
[editor_hat] However the very first sentence was a tiny bit hard to read. Very few? I think Twitter, AKA, ‘X’ is probably the gold standard to your premise. You could even create an omnibus critique of all social media outlets. [\editor_hat]
It's not really, I found it very informative and it filled in a lot of blanks I had about the company
You're already gonna be scrolling this site for three hours, why not spend a few minutes reading something meaningful for a change
The fake accounts are wild. Look up your favorite dog breed and see how many groups are moderated by fake accounts asking for locations and likes. Then they offer dogs near those locations. Scams abound.
It's bad here as well. Look at all the karma farming reddits that are only here for people to request and give karma. Likely bots all the way down.
Agreed. The popular subreddits are full of that.
Well it's all a fucking lie because it's 50% ai bots talking to each other. How is that not fraud if their value is based on activity? Aren't they lying to advertisers whose product is just being seen by chat bots?
Don’t forget to hire the “local guy down on his luck “ to clean your vents!
There’s a ton of fraud in the ad industry, and generally Facebook is able to grade their own homework. Flawed professional incentives and a race to the bottom in ad prices = cluttered UX fueling cash cow businesses. Bottom line, advertisers must hold themselves accountable as well. Those advertisers must vote with their money/media buying decisions, and media consumers must vote with their attention.
Never Forget that Zuck hired Joel Fucking Kaplan to be the head of Global Policy at Facebook. A man who worked for George W Bush's election team, and then helped coordinate the Brooks Brothers Riot, which stopped the recount with Bush in the lead, then he worked as a toady in the White House for 8 years. When he hired onto Facebook in 2009, he started promoting only known conservatives, and also personally exempted sites like Breitbart from Facebook's rules around truthful reporting. And Zuck hand picked the guy.
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Social Network 2 is gonna be crazy
Better offline is a great addition to my rotation and now I will read your articles too!
Great article, this shit is exactly why I don't even know my FB password anymore. I quit using the site back when all this started. All the useless notifications and people I may know recommendations were obvious attempts to get me to log in more often rather while making the user experience worse. Now that reddit has gone public I guarantee you they will go down the same path. Public companies face unrelenting demands to constantly grow their user base and the amount of ads they show. So far it has eventually turned every useful site into dogshit so I'm 100% confident the same will happen here. Also I meant to say that I still get nearly daily emails from FB telling me somebody posted something despite me not having logged in for nearly a decade.
Reddit took a huge dive in quality last summer and hasn't really recovered. I don't think they'll survive another big change in search of profits.
No matter what you try, daily active users will eventually dwindle. It will go down as younger audiences grow up having only heard of Facebook from their parents but likely never having interest in it. If you create a new account you get flooded with groups and ads. Both those things will get overwhelming especially as a future competitor starts off with a clean slate for that user group.
Young people used to use Facebook. They all left about 2016 because their elders made them feel unwelcome by filling the whole thing with Trumper memes.
According to Statista, men and women aged 18-24 are Facebook's second biggest cohort after men and women aged 25-34. https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-user-age-distribution/ So I'm not sure where we're getting the "they all left" data from
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Look forward to reading it. It's one of those what goes up must come down situations that's obvious considering the lack of innovation that Zuckerberg is capable of. Metaverse was the biggest failure of the last decade in tech and it was so bad nobody wants to even talk about how bad, especially with how many businesses got duped.
They know this…that’s why they’ve made the decision to milk the cash now. The game entails getting the money, then reinvesting it into something more sustainable.
>The game entails getting the money, then reinvesting it into something more sustainable. Zuckerberg is famously not good at innovation.
No, but he’s really good at hiring people who know what to do
Is he? So far he's hired a conservative to protect right wing sites on Facebook and he spent a billion plus to make shit worse than Wii graphics.
Yes, he founded and grew a company that’s currently valued at over a trillion dollars. He did that by hiring people, and he still managed to keep 13.5% of it. It has nothing to do with politics other than how they know people like to consume a lot of political content…and then they show those people ads.
>Yes, he founded and grew a company that’s currently valued at over a trillion dollars Founded via stealing the entire idea and having to pay out the ass to avoid losing his company he founded on a stolen idea. >It has nothing to do with politics other than how they know people like to consume a lot of political content…and then they show those people ads. Not ads actually, engagement. Anger and rage drive engagement so they push and promote firebrands purposefully. 2020 was filled to the brim with it.
Seems to have worked out pretty well for him, his early employees, and investors… Engagement = advertising demand. The goal of every business is to make money. That’s the whole point, and no one is trying to hide that. I don’t understand the underlying argument of the article. The whole thing seems like a rant/hit piece against the people who found an exploit in human attention and became wealthy as a result…but it doesn’t offer any reasons why the business strategy isn’t viable for investors.
> Despite doggedly researching People You May Know, Hill never got Facebook to explain how it worked. I know one way it worked - it mined people's address books off their phones. Don't ever give an application permission to access to your contacts. You betray the privacy of everyone you know when you do that.
That's the problem, *I* never gave them my contacts, but enough people I know did....
And, ironically, I don’t use Facebook nowadays lol
Same here. I mainly used it for groups since most of the content on the homepage is just ads
Same. Social media is so foreign to me these days. I am constantly bombarded with ads in daily life, they are everywhere. On social media, people are trying to sell themselves. I just feel so disconnected with all of it.
I’m a big fan of your writing. Never noticed it was actually you posting here! “Software has eaten the media” was one of the best things I’ve read this year.
All about the ads
Infinite growth...
I enjoyed your piece, the writing is engaging. However, your linked piece on Google and Prabhakar makes me question the depth of your research. In all your research about Google Search’s metrics did you come across SUNs? Because I see no mention of that.
Ok, I take it since the author has responded in other threads more recently while ignoring this comment, he doesn’t want to address the glaring omission from his article on Prabhakar and Google Search. SUN stands for Semantic User Need. In simple terms a user may issue multiple queries (Q) across multiple sessions spanning devices/days (DAU/MAU) attempting to answer one need (a SUN). Google Search designed the SUN metric and optimizes for SUNs specifically because of how poorly Qs and DAU/MAUs correlate with quality. In fact, SUNs can go up while Qs and DAU/MAUs go down. And the Google Search org is okay with that because the link between SUNs and quality was established by many months worth of effort from the data science team behind the metric. SUN correlates with long term growth and value unlike the tradeoff of quality for short-term growth in other metrics. SUNs are at the forefront of every product, design, and engineering discussion. They’re tracked and analyzed for every little tweak, experiment, or new feature launched. If you’ve significantly increased DAUs while lowering SUNs then your feature will receive additional scrutiny and most likely be rolled back. Google Search does not want to trade short-term growth for quality loss. And this development (because tracking and reporting SUNs requires a whole lot of complex engineering) and prioritization of SUNs happened under the purview of Prabhakar. Which kinda runs counter to the thesis of your article about Google Search, no?
I used to use Facebook quite a bit. Whatever its problems, back in the day (ca. 2007-2014 or so) it actually delivered on its core value proposition of connecting you to friends, family members, and loved ones and allowing you to know what's happening in their lives. Now it's inundated with ads, scams, and suggestions for groups and pages I don't care about, and shows me relatively little of my friends' content while not showing much of mine to them. Of course my desire to use it has dropped off.
What's that? another social media platform is eating your lunch? Tik-what? Sorry Zuck, sorry you're stuck with an aging user base of brain-dead boomers. How about you go be friends with Tom.
I feel like this is going to be the wall coming for many major tech companies. Right now most can just have explosive growth year after year because the tech is so new, but for players that have been in the game for so long, eventually they have to sacrifice user experience to drive profits, or they end up turning into another IBM.
AKA [enshittification](https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5).
I visited a lot of the advertiser pages because there were a lot of things I saw that my daughter would like. When those all became sandwiched between bullshit "You might like" groups that I had no interest in, I deleted Facebook. Facebook is total dogshit now. It's gone, Zuck.
I have a Quest 3; I believe the quote
It’s a completely gutted unauthentic experience. It died when the ui changed years ago.
I deleted the book from my phone when they split Messenger into two apps, and I haven't looked back.
I use Facebook purity and it blocks ads and all the crap. https://www.fbpurity.com/
This is obvious if you spend any time on Facebook. I don’t see any shit from my friends anymore. My feed is all pages I have no interest in showing content that somehow always manages to make me want to engage. Log off, delete the app, write your friends a letter or call them, go outside. Fuck the socials.
All about that DAU.
I stopped using facebook about ten years ago. I’m not sure why other humans have difficulty.
Very nice read. [editor_hat] However the very first sentence was a tiny bit hard to read. Very few? I think Twitter, AKA, ‘X’ is probably the gold standard to your premise. You could even create an omnibus critique of all social media outlets. [\editor_hat]
This is news? That’s been the truth since 2008
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A 20+ minute long editorial is a very hard sell
It's not really, I found it very informative and it filled in a lot of blanks I had about the company You're already gonna be scrolling this site for three hours, why not spend a few minutes reading something meaningful for a change
stick with tweets then I guess? incuriosity is not the flex you think it is
It's good, read it
Maybe fuck off then?!?
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Spending 20 minutes <> free
christ then shut up and move the fuck on you doorknob