Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over

Sure. Taking that perspective even begins to explain some things, like a lot of the pointless me-too developments (short form videos?) Facebook has been implementing for years: if they dilute the product by incorporating others' ideas, even if those ideas go nowhere FB can claim everybody is in the same boat.

But it doesn't make it any less ridiculous. This is like the meme of the guy shooting the other dude in the chair.

No. You have it backwards. It came out of a web 2.0 phase but everything it became was driven by a focus on metrics & growth.

Let's follow this train of thought.

What are the selective pressures on the "natural evolution of communications technology?"

This is crazy.

You’re saying that Facebook was somehow helpless to avoid changing from a “friends feed” to an ad-maximizing outrage-inducing misinformation machine because of web2.0 communication technology?

Someone invented XmlHttpRequest and Facebook was like, “well that’s the ballgame, I guess we have to suck now?”

What users want, and what they collectively consume, are two different things. This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0].

It turns out that demand matters when you sell a product or a service. And it is elastic in ways other than price (such as convenience, value, appeal), but not infinitely so. In plain English, you can force anti-social media onto the market by making it appealing/hooking/addictive/convenient/supposedly valuable for a while, but not indefinitely. People do demand proper socializing, especially recently. Many are realizing they've been sold a total bag of goods just because they consumed it, and it's not good enough to displace real human connection.

[0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025

> it is exactly what users “want”

It’s actually what users want “now”. When instagram initially stopped chronological feed users didn’t want it. When they started injecting random posts from people you didn’t follow. Users didn’t want that either. When they launched reels, they also didn’t want that. When they started almost exclusively showing reels like TikTok, users still didn’t want that.

The problem with all of the above is that users eventually got used to the new norm and their brains established the dopamine rewards pathways according to what they were offered. And that’s why they think they “want” it now.

But we’ve seen this happen before. FB did the exact thing and now it’s almost dead, even Zuckerberg acknowledged it. But they somehow think, users won’t eventually get off Instagram because somehow this time it’s different?

>Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".

With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.

Open a restaurant masquerading as providing high-quality, locally sourced organic food, discreetly sprinkle the hardest drug on the most popular plates, slowly increase the dosage until people are completely hooked, and voilà, you can legitimately claim "people wanted the drug; it was their choice."

Users, or me at any rate, want more than one thing. For my family and friends I want to see what they say without junk added and my family has currently moved from facebook to a whatsapp group to achieve that.

I also browse random junk on xitter. It's a different thing.

While that’s true of course, I find that a bit of a harsh conclusion. Yes, that’s the end result for any greedy company in a world without regulation.

But you can make that case for most business models. Restaurants? They’ll all eventually turn into fast food chains, because our human lizard brain appreciates fat and sugar more than actually good meals.

Gaming? Let’s just replace it all with casinos already. Loot boxes are just gambling anyways.

There’s absolutely a market for proper social media that’s actually social. It’s just that companies are way too greedy currently.

That is true but you have to be very specific about who your "users" are.

If your "users" are the guys in charge of showing more ads to people, then yes. People, on the other hand absolutely prefer watching their contacts' posts first. Recommendations related with their individual preferences, second. Random dopamine-inducing stuff, only from time to time. If you prioritize the third kind only is like someone said already on the commments here: like a restaurant that only serves candy. They will have customers for a while but eventually they will burn them down (or kill them).

It makes one wonder whether "what I want" is really the best thing to optimize for.

Yeah that’s the problem. Ultimately, people want to distract themselves more than they want to connect with people.

And with both in the same platform… I know where I’m going.

I think another problem are network effects. They make it much harder to build a reasonable alternative

HN is a kind of this thing. It's netiquette. We still stay around here because it's the only place with tech discussions and at least some amount of decorum.

I would venture to say 95% of people don't enjoy (and/or cannot afford) "fine" restaurants. But mostly don't enjoy. And a restaurant would go bankrupt trying to convince them to eat healthy. The proof is the existing state of the market. Although daily GLP-1 pills might be able to change that.

at least until it kills them!

> FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage

I've never seen this, despite frequently being irritated with Facebook mainly showing me random shit I don't care about.

Companies always squirrel away the "works correctly" button and then are like whelp nobody is using the thing we hid! Nothing we can do!

> it is what people wanted though, from Facebook.

I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with personal details, then share happenings with your friends. And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities, pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.

> FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage

Because everything about the Facebook user interface discourages its use.

What if, and I know this is craaaaazy, the friend feed was just the feed? Facebook was growing fine with that.

> It is what people wanted though, from Facebook

Facebook used to provide a good experience of staying in loose touch with people I didn't know well enough to have ongoing conversations with. It was nice to know roughly what was going on with people, and if something big happened (like a kid, a new job, a death) I would see it and could reach out with congratulations or condolences.

But some people posted every meal and cup of coffee, and others only posted occasionally, and Facebook decided to bury the occasional posters and promote the high-engagement users instead. That's when Facebook became more bad than good for me, and I left.

If we could go back in time to that point, and prioritize posts in inverse relation to the poster's frequency instead, I'd use that service.

I guess the problem with this analogy is that it fails to capture the essential nature of Facebook: that its base product ("hamburgers") has a network effect, and the new product ("candy") doesn't.

If Facebook is a social network for seeing my friends, then there's nowhere else for me to go. They're on Facebook and it's unlikely they're all going to join some new network at the same time.

If Facebook is a high engagement content farm designed to shove random engagement-bait in my face, then it's just competing with Reddit, Digg, Twitter, 4chan, TikTok. Folks can get addicted to this in the short term; but they can also get bored and move on to another app. Based on conversations with all the IRL human beings I know, this is what they've all done. (The actual question I have is: who is still heavily using the site? Very old people?)

> Businesses evolve or die, no?

What I constantly see, are businesses that would be just fine continue doing the same, but die instead because they tried to evolve into something and alienated all their existing customers/users and couldn't attract new ones because what they evolved into made no sense. But no, businesses want to take over the world (or at least have a large slice from the pie) so they "evolve" no matter what.

Case in point: Facebook.

It takes 2 clicks and you can just bookmark it. https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

My facebook bookmark takes me to https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

I still see other content, even there, but it's still somehow manageable. I run out of updates very quickly though whereas I'd like to just start seeing older posts from friends that I've seen already.

They actually made it even easier to find recently on mobile. Right there at the bottom.

Independent social media run in a cost-effective way and actually helping their community is the future. I really hope non-American devs learn this because most American devs are too busy trying to get rich.

Since it's E2EE, do you have a limit on the number of members in a group/friends?

> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.

Are kids really that simplistically divided?

Whenever I hear this iMessage thing I’m surprised. Is that a US / Canada thing?

Here in Europe, everybody uses WhatsApp and/or similar products for chat and they are all multi platform.

> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.

Craig Federighi fought against supporting iMessage on Android and RCS for a long time saying, quote, "It would remove obstacles towards iPhone families being able to give their kids Android phones."

It literally works seamlessly though? Just converts to MMS and you don't notice outside the "liked BLABLABLA" sort of messages that trickle in without the imessage emoji system.

I guess group chat would be fine if all your friends are friends of each other. High School and college ages maybe, but as an older adult, I have so many different groups of people that I interact with that it would be obnoxious to deal with. I also find that there are certain people in group chats who are lonely and spam crap.

I'm in a similar group but using Discord. It seems that lack of advertising or any kind of algo feed is the common feature. Who runs your Telegram server?

I hate group chats (hate). It's a cliquey childish high-school cafeteria mode of communicating (thus why highschoolers use group chats). It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large (and maybe, given what we've learned about social media and nation-states, that's not without merit -- i.e the UK). Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections and expanding your little room(s).

>?All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app.

I begged Microsoft to make MSN on Windows Mobile and later on Android or iPhone.

They just dont get it nor do they care. Whatsapp wasn't even a thing on Smartphone. Its dominance came a little later.

And without a smartphone or mobile network, people keep in contact especially those not in close group via Social Media aka MySpace and Facebook or Friendster.

Now smartphone ubiquitous in most places. The contact list has taken over. Social Media became a news feed.

This is actually one of the great entrepreneurship lessons of my career, which I think about a lot.

Around 2009, as smart phones were on their exponential leg up, and when I was still pretty new in the workplace, I remember thinking (and talking with my coworkers) about how messaging and chat rooms were really well suited to the technology landscape. But I lamented "too bad the space is already too crowded with options for anyone to use anything new.

But all of today's major messaging successes became household names after that! What I learned from this is that I have a tendency to think that trends are played out already, when actually I'm early in the adoption curve.

I think those networks never figured out how to make money off of it. Without the tracking (and piles of VC cash) that modern social media got, the ads were not worth enough. Microsoft and AOL just saw them as cost centers so when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols they saw no value in investing in rewriting everything.

Wasn't Skype a proper mobile app decently early ?

The core issue was of course being a second class citizen on iOS, using a Skype phone number purely on mobile was real PITA for instance.

Personally I put a lot more blame on Google for everything they did on the messaging front.

Feels like it went myspace -> facebook -> snapchat and never went back to such "public profile" ideals and stayed in chat apps. When I was in college in the early '10's, it seemed like everyone was obsessed with the "temporary chat" idea and actually believed that you could guarantee a message or picture could be temporary.

Did they become less popular? I think they are just less visible by nature, they've always been pretty common. I guess some people switched to Facebook Groups for a time, but even that is sort of a form of group chat.

They never worked properly on phones, including images/video and history. Same for SMS chats on top of being hideously expensive because the phone companies thought it was still the 1960s.

Revolt looks neat thanks for sharing.

A rate people want, or advertisers?

I'm sure I could (indeed, I do) get pertinent updates from actual friends and family with <10 minutes of checking messages, voicemails, and emails per day. I wouldn't mind increasing that to 15 minutes if it meant I got a few less relevant but still interesting updates about their lives.

But that's way, way under the daily minutes spent by most people on TikTok. And if I wanted/my addiction demanded another hit of that "Oh, neat!" buzz when I'd just put my phone down 10 minutes ago, there's little chance that anyone in my small circle would have posted a single thing in the interval.

I don't spend nearly enough time in my group chats to justify Facebook's valuation. And there are no ads (yet, I'm sure they're working on it) in those chats.

What is worse is that the feed is generated on the fly. Switch apps for a second and your os kills instagram in the background, and you might not ever find those posts it showed you a few minutes ago ever again.

I use it exclusively for announcements from certain brands with e.g. seasonal rotations or sales (small shops, especially, are often way more consistent about updating one or more social media accounts, often Insta, than their website, if they even have a website) and it's such a pain in the ass for that reason. I don't trust ads or their "algorithm" to promote quality (I reckon they're more likely to promote rip-offs and fly-by-night operations) so I super don't care about anything else they want to show me, even if it's directly related to the kinds of brands I'm following. I deliberately do not do new-stuff discovery in the app, because they have incentives to screw me.

The only thing I want out of it is to see the posts made by the accounts I'm following, since the last time I checked. That's 100% of the functionality I care about, and the app goes out of its way to not deliver it.

> They don’t really have a monopoly on local events or marketplace.

Yeah, I'd say from 2004 - 2015 was the heyday for me on local events for small bands, house shows, and punk/DIY venues. Eventually FB Events died out socially by not being able to send invites to mass groups of friends/previous attendees, and attrition, and so on... A real shame for non-major venue events and the DIY scene.

Marketplace is semi-useful still, quasi-better than craigslist, but keeps getting filled with a lot of cruft of drop-shippers and scammers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

I dislike Shorts with a passion.