I didn't quite understand, what is the problem with Instagram? It's too popular? Or just that it's not dropping in popularity vs Facebook (due to their recent adjustments)?
I wouldn't consider Instagram to be a messaging app - in fact they're spinning off another app from Instagram just to do messaging (because it's not exactly great at that).
It sounds to me more like Facebook might have some problem and Instagram is just doing it's own thing (as are Facebook's other services).
Somehow I completely missed the news about the standalone Instagram messaging app (called Direct, for anybody interested). Looks like I should jump ship just like I did with Facebook before it's too late.
Honestly with all the changes to Instagram I find myself using the app less and less. The changes I'm thinking about are ads in the feed and random content to drive engagement.
Both of these things are driving me to use the app less.
I'm realizing that Facebook does two things builds a social network and then strip mines it off all value.
I mean, I'm sure there's an ostensible reason. Maybe there's metrics that show it increases engagement (which I'd believe, since it kindof fits with the studies that say an uncertain reward is more addictive than completely predictable reward). Maybe adding a special sauce ML algorithm to the feed generation process lets a product manager add a bullet point to their resume and yearly review.
But I kindof think the reason has to be something that is not going to be particularly user driven or otherwise reflect well on FB, because as far as I can tell most users who are conscious about it reaaaally would like to be able to at least set a setting that would give them a strict chronological feed. And yet, that's never an option, and FB never even seems to talk about reasons why they know their way is totally awesome.
> Maybe there's metrics that show it increases engagement (which I'd believe, since it kindof fits with the studies that say an uncertain reward is more addictive than completely predictable reward)
I wonder how much of those metrics are false positives due to people scrolling more in frustration to find the user updates that they are missing
Realises they could have searched for that friend and opened their profile
Cue 15 more minutes of scrolling before realising they're two months back because they missed the actual post, because Facebook does not show every update by default
Isn't it only non-linear on the first load? Whenever I open the app for the first time in a while it shows me "top content while I was gone", and after refreshing it appears to be linear again.
Nope, it's always non-linear. It does appear to hold back some posts from your first load in some kind of idiotic attempt to give you additional things to look at later.
I see ads on Instagram all the time. Just scrolling through two days of my feed (but it's hard to tell, because it's not chronological anymore), I see some ads from therealcost, xbox, lovepop cards, kelloggs frosted flakes, m&m's chocolate, some music festival, instagram itself, and six posts from accounts I don't follow, as part of its new 'Recommended for You' (aka garbage I don't care to see) sections. Perhaps I fit their demographics, so I get more of them.
I used to see them, but recently they have all vanished. No idea why. Maybe I was too low engagement.
The addition of stories does make it feel busier though. I'm enjoying my time on it much less than I used to. Even after muting stories from people whose stories I wasn't interested in watching.
That's strange, I get a sponsored content like every 5 to 6 pictures.
It's annoying to the point that it's about to be the last straw for me.
While there are talented photographers on Instagram, the app is really poor as a way to appreciate photography (can't zoom, no iPad app to better view content) and it's also poor as a community, favouring instead over-consumption and poor engagement (low quality comments, if any).
Then there are the shenanigans that game user engagement, like delaying likes to force people to check the app more often or nagging me to enable notifications every single time I open the app.
It has become little more than an ad-delivery platform.
They just announced they're (after years of holding the line) opening up the API for publishing photos, so it'll be a spammy feed of corporate stuff very soon.
I feel very similarly. It reminds me of facebook's transition to the News Feed -- even without ads, the introduction of a content algorithm ruined my main use case for the platform: following just my very central friend group and seeing everything they post.
On the plus side, Facebook has now taught me (twice!) that they (or any other "social media" company) can't be trusted. Now I'm just deciding whether I should give up social media altogether. I already deleted my Facebook since it became completely useless over the past few years (friends don't post, I don't see their posts when they do, notifications are useless and diluted), I'm considering deleting my instagram (far, far, far too many ads; friends don't post as much)... is it worth it to try to build out a presence on Mastodon? Or is that doomed, too?
For some reason, the ads I’m seeing on Instagram are creepily relevant for me. I just checked and literally it just shows me advertisements for furniture (I like design…) and plants (I like plants…). I’ve actually bought a plant related thing from one of them, and the ads that show up actually do make me stop and look at them.
On the other hand, it’s also showing me advertisements for watches. I have no idea why, because I hate wearing watches and I’ve definitely never googled for watches before.
Maybe it knows you're always late for meetings and appointments and is giving you a subtle hint that you need to up your game and get a watch. ;)
That, or their model has found a correlation between liking chairs, plants, and watches but doesn't account for your unusual distaste for watches. Take heart, facebook doesn't know you well enough to convince you to hand over your wallet to their customers (yet).
> Messaging apps are the third phase of platforms on which digital audiences congregate. First came websites, then social networks and now messaging apps—which collectively accounted for 7.7 billion monthly active users (MAUs) at the end of 2017, up from 6.6 billion in 2016 and 5.5 billion in 2015. This is a massive segment that continues to grow at pace.
That's a pretty misleading claim. I guess I sort of understand what's being expressed here, but it feels weird to just add up every platform's monthly active users and come up with a number larger than the population of the Earth.
Also, chat programs are older than social networks. You could even say it's the only application with direct lineage to using a phone as a phone (and let's not forget about texting).
So how can they be the third phase after regular websites and then social networks?
yeah, the best parts of the internet in the late 90s was chats and messenger apps.
remember excite chat? i loved that, but mostly used irc.
messenger wise, started using icq but people (me included) hated remembering a huge number to log in. AIM was great though, and msn messenger was great because it tied right into your email too.
My brother and I spent hours every evening on a chat service called the Palace. I don't know what happened to it but it was probably responsible for at least a full point off my grade average. :)
Facebook has a messaging app problem, same as Google. Between those two companies they must have a dozen shitty apps, when icq solved that problem 10-15 years ago.
totally logged into my account for the first time in like 16-17 years. can't believe the service is still up and running, and that I haven't changed my default password since then... lol
Agreed for Google, but what are facebooks "dozen shitty [messaging] apps"? They own Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram. Pretty much all relevant DM vectors apart from Snapchat and twitter.
Yeah, and one of the most important features of IRC being "lightweight native client, integrating seamlessly with my environment". Somehow, these "modern" chat systems just can't do that.
I’ve never used IRC before, so I’m honestly curious, what features does IRC have that Slack(/Discord) don’t or can’t have through extensions like bots and plugins?
And some people have multiple accounts. Lots of these apps (Twitter, Instagram, etc) have corporate users. The corporate spokesperson on twitter probably also has a personal account.
The title doesn't match the article's content: the content primarily notes that Facebook's own messaging apps Messenger, WhatsApp, and seemingly, in the article's interpretation, Instagram-as-a-messaging app are siphoning screen-time away from Facebook itself, but Instagram is the least likely to present an a true threat.
After all, Instagram lends itself well to high-margin brand advertising, interest-based advertising, and hyperlocal content. It's hardly a problem that certain demographics spend less time on Facebook and go on Instagram instead, especially if these demographics are quite valuable on their own.
Even the article admits that the more traditional messaging networks like Messenger and WhatsApp are harder to monetize. They have had some experiments the past [1] but with so many competitors, user resistance is a risk.
> When the sector first started emerging, Facebook could have battened down the hatches and played a defensive hand. Instead, it did what the bravest companies do: it decided to disrupt itself before the competition did.
> For video, expect the messaging apps to start acting as virtual TV programming guides and remote controls for what will likely be a semi-scheduled ad supported and premium video offering.
Facebook doesn't just have a Whatsapp and Instagram "problem". They have a core Facebook problem.
The Facebook app and websites have barely innovated in years and the changes they HAVE made have slowly but steadily eroded the core user experience.
What was once a SOCIAL NETWORK - a place where friends could come together or new friendships were made - has become a disjointed "news" feed full of gossip, fake news, Russian propaganda or US politics division. All this interspersed with cat pics and buzzfeed top ups.
It's hard to find and enjoy the 'social' aspect of this social network if it's full of oddly unedited "news" footage.
I'm going to pick this part of your comment out specifically since I largely agree with the rest of it.
People have said there's a lot of this going around, but I struggle to see what they mean. What propaganda, specifically Russian, do you mean? I see this kind of baseless conjecture much like I did back in the Cold War. The "communists" or "Russians" were just around the corner kind of nonsense is eerily similar to what people are claiming these days.
So really, if you have any actual proof do enlighten us with it.
10 years ago I would routinely go to facebook and see friends saying what they were planning to do and make plans with them. Facebook served a real purpose in college (we got it my junior year iirc).
Now its nearly all trash. People bitching, posting memes, sharing slideshows, etc. The only thing I go there for is 1 specific local group and even that is pointless because there is a discord.
Facebook is essentially dead to me, and certainly dead to all my younger cousins 15-19 yos. I feel like I must be missing something, because I have no idea why anyone would visit. It's so negative and low quality.
I agree with you about the news feed. FB messenger is still the easiest way to contact people (almost everyone has it, you don't need any information being a name). Events are great for easily informing people of what you're doing. Groups are great for alerting a group of people to some information (basically better mailing lists).
Sounds like alienation. Have you tried communal living? Getting more in touch with your friends will make you a more genuine person and you will feel more humanized.
I think it's just something that happens with growth. At first it's a small group and it's cool, then your group gets larger, it's still cool, but now more to manage.. then at some point the group gets so large that unless you're trying to push something, there's often very little that you want to say to your 3rd grade teacher, some guy you met on a bus, your old roommate from ten years ago, your boss, and your grandparents all at the same time.
I disagree. There were very specific product changes Facebook made a while back that fundamentally changed the experience of using Facebook. It was all related to Facebook trying to clone Twitter: public posts by default, emphasis on news articles, emphasis on paid content, deprecation of events, deprecation of groups, and deprecation of photos.
With the implosion of Twitter, Facebook has since undone a lot of these changes, but the damage had already been done. People had already learned to stop going to Facebook to be social.
I don't remember them deprecating events (though I'd believe it), and I definitely don't remember them deprecating photos (like, that one I am having a hard time even conceptualizing, given how awkwardly core Photos has been to Facebook feature set for as long as I've been using it, which has been a very very long time now). Can you provide more context for this?
> The Facebook app and websites have barely innovated
They even do the opposite. Maybe a half a year ago they removed one of the best features Facebook had - the event calendar. My guess is to promote a standalone events app that was released around that time.. but the app doesn't seem to be around any longer, and the events calendar is still gone. Replaced by a shitty list of upcoming events.
That's good, but the UI/UX was actually quite great. Differentiated between invites/accepted events, showed birthdays separately, even had opportunity for suggested (sponsored) content (not sure if that was ever used). It was very quick and easy to find past events too.
Facebook threw away one of their best social features: events. It used to be front and center when you logged into Facebook. Now it's hidden away in menus.
i think at least part of the problem is that when they were a social network, they pushed so hard for everything to be shared with as many people as possible that users stopped posting as much personal stuff.
I always tell people Facebook went to shit when they tried to clone Twitter. It was a series of product strategy blunders after another until Facebook became the dysfunctional un-social network it is today.
Messenger apps, more than anything are screaming out for decentralisation. I'm not sure what the solution is - none of the major clients operate outside of a centralised model yet - and it's incredibly difficult to counteract the hive effect when it comes to these kinds of services.
Messenger apps are also inherently highly personal. It's your primary means of communication in the digital age. The idea of ads being injected into that experience appalls me.
They used to be decentralised. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Gtalk were all based on XMPP and they all deliberately switched off the federation feature, then changed protocol.
I've posted a link earlier about 'Scuttlebutt' (and the actual client on top of it, Patchwork), which is kind of a decentralized Facebook.
It's main innovation, as far as I can tell, is that it uses the real world as a model for its approach. Your content spreads as 'gossip', peer to peer (over LAN/wifi), but also propagates through 'pubs' that are internet-accessible.
What first made me interested is that the Patchwork client is quite user-friendly and I've noticed that the relatively small group of current users are not all tech-savvy. That's something of an achievement. Furthermore, some other options I've looked into strike me as either unrealistically decentralized, or too (pragmatically?) centralized.
Anyways, even as just as a look into how thing could work different I can highly recommend checking out these types of alternatives!
You might have to poke around the channels and, more importantly, follow people that you find interesting. That should liven things up a bit.
That said, I suppose the whole thing is inherently quieter than something like Facebook or a forum because it's decentralized and, of course, still a small community at this point. And quite possibly the whole point is not to be as busy as other social platforms :).
Thanks for the advice, following people made it much more interesting.
I also started to appreciate what's the price for decentralization: after following just a couple of users I already have several hundreds megabytes downloaded.
It's really unfortunate that Facebook was allowed to buy WhatsApp. This could have been good news, and maybe it still is since end-to-end encrypted messaging apps may not enable the same data abuse as Facebook's social network. Still would have been nicer if it was a separate entity.
Also, pretty insane Instagram numbers. Now that is a service I really don't get, yet considering how many people use it, it can't just be being too old.
Instagram is Facebook where the news feed is only photos. People want that. People also wanted that out of Facebook, but Facebook became the unsocial network when it tried to clone Twitter so everyone flocked to Instagram to be social again.
And also, there are insanely good professional photographers on Instagram and some people just like looking at pretty photos instead of thumbnails grabbed from political news articles.
It's the way they broke the mobile web messaging experience that bothered me. Even if I turn on desktop mode the input box deletes the last word when I press space.
It used to be fine, minimal and functional. I won't install any fb app, I just want to use it on the web.
But, the problem with messaging apps is that no one has really worked out how to monetise them yet
Not sure this is true; back in the day BlackBerry used to be the combo of the handset + backend services provided by RIM, including BBM, which they charged a fiver a month for and people didn’t mind paying it. If RIM had been willing to take the risk of extending BBM to other devices (sooner and better) perhaps the whole world would be paying them a vig now.
Apple’s iMessage is arguably monetised in advance by hardware sales, and I’ve only recently learned does group chat too.
Ultimately it is really quite hard to monetize a platform that is so easy to implement with so little product differentiation. People use messaging for messaging. I don't care if you have better emojis. I will certainly leave if you show me adverts. If it really turns out that most people only want simple messaging apps then maybe there isn't that much money in it. Maybe that's ok.
The problem is that there is something of a network effect at play. It might be okay between a couple of people but I'm in some group chats on Whatsapp and Messenger and it would be difficult to move away from those as you'd have to get buy in from everyone in the group.
You know Facebook has a problem when a social network has become anti social.
All I see on Facebook is friends of friends fighting over politics with other friends of friends, fake news, stupid animal pics, people with low self esteem hunting for the likes, stupid mainstream commentary, "look at me how awesome I am" status updates, rants where everyone feels to be treated unfairly by the world because of [insert the single characteristic about yourself where you can pretend to be discriminated], etc.
I only go to Facebook for one reason now, to check that I'm not missing a birthday of some close extended family. This takes me about 1 minute every day and then I don't visit FB for another 24 hours.
Out of curiosity, how much infrastructure goes into making a messaging app?
My gut feeling is that you can run a messaging app for a million users on the same infrastructure you would use to run Facebook for 1000 users. So having a messenger app with a ton of users and no monetization is bad, but not that expensive?
I always think of it like this: if Google fell apart, the world as we know would change if. If twitter/facebook fell apart, my day to day life would not change in any way.
I have played the same mind game. Literally nothing would change for me if facebook/twitter/instagram/snapchat ceased to exist now. Whatsapp I use but with friends who I have other contact info, like a phone number...
Google on the other hand is immensely useful.
It still amazes me that there are so many billions of advertising dollars to prop up something as useless as facebook and their snowflake-innovator-genius engineers with over 100k salaries.
Then probably you haven't understood one of the biggest user needs - people don't want to "be bored". They constantly want some entertainment as stimulus.
Look at people around you (grocery checkout lines or bus stop or subway or Starbucks) - everyone is glued to their phone screens. And Facebook is the ultimate magnet to waste those 2-5 min wait times one has to endure every so often. Earlier, people would get bored waiting in line, or strike conversations with strangers or just muse over random thoughts. No more. All that attention has gone to their smartphones.
And advertisers are simply following those eyeballs. Since Facebook manages to capture so much attention of so many humans, they rake in billions.
97 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadI wouldn't consider Instagram to be a messaging app - in fact they're spinning off another app from Instagram just to do messaging (because it's not exactly great at that).
It sounds to me more like Facebook might have some problem and Instagram is just doing it's own thing (as are Facebook's other services).
Both of these things are driving me to use the app less.
I'm realizing that Facebook does two things builds a social network and then strip mines it off all value.
I mean, I'm sure there's an ostensible reason. Maybe there's metrics that show it increases engagement (which I'd believe, since it kindof fits with the studies that say an uncertain reward is more addictive than completely predictable reward). Maybe adding a special sauce ML algorithm to the feed generation process lets a product manager add a bullet point to their resume and yearly review.
But I kindof think the reason has to be something that is not going to be particularly user driven or otherwise reflect well on FB, because as far as I can tell most users who are conscious about it reaaaally would like to be able to at least set a setting that would give them a strict chronological feed. And yet, that's never an option, and FB never even seems to talk about reasons why they know their way is totally awesome.
I wonder how much of those metrics are false positives due to people scrolling more in frustration to find the user updates that they are missing
"Hey, did you see what $mutual_friend has posted on Facebook this morning?"
Cue 15 minutes of scrolling past two-weeks-old posts
Cue 15 more minutes of scrolling before realising they're two months back because they missed the actual post, because Facebook does not show every update by default
I've noticed this as well, and it appears to have gotten more pronounced in the last month or so.
I don't understand why this isn't a setting that users can toggle. "Show feed strict in linear order" or something like that.
It's hidden under News -> Most Recent
EDIT: Oh wait, Instagram. No idea what to do there, sorry.
The addition of stories does make it feel busier though. I'm enjoying my time on it much less than I used to. Even after muting stories from people whose stories I wasn't interested in watching.
While there are talented photographers on Instagram, the app is really poor as a way to appreciate photography (can't zoom, no iPad app to better view content) and it's also poor as a community, favouring instead over-consumption and poor engagement (low quality comments, if any).
Then there are the shenanigans that game user engagement, like delaying likes to force people to check the app more often or nagging me to enable notifications every single time I open the app.
It has become little more than an ad-delivery platform.
They just announced they're (after years of holding the line) opening up the API for publishing photos, so it'll be a spammy feed of corporate stuff very soon.
On the plus side, Facebook has now taught me (twice!) that they (or any other "social media" company) can't be trusted. Now I'm just deciding whether I should give up social media altogether. I already deleted my Facebook since it became completely useless over the past few years (friends don't post, I don't see their posts when they do, notifications are useless and diluted), I'm considering deleting my instagram (far, far, far too many ads; friends don't post as much)... is it worth it to try to build out a presence on Mastodon? Or is that doomed, too?
On the other hand, it’s also showing me advertisements for watches. I have no idea why, because I hate wearing watches and I’ve definitely never googled for watches before.
That, or their model has found a correlation between liking chairs, plants, and watches but doesn't account for your unusual distaste for watches. Take heart, facebook doesn't know you well enough to convince you to hand over your wallet to their customers (yet).
That's a pretty misleading claim. I guess I sort of understand what's being expressed here, but it feels weird to just add up every platform's monthly active users and come up with a number larger than the population of the Earth.
So how can they be the third phase after regular websites and then social networks?
remember excite chat? i loved that, but mostly used irc.
messenger wise, started using icq but people (me included) hated remembering a huge number to log in. AIM was great though, and msn messenger was great because it tied right into your email too.
I still remember my icq number: 5588776
73117649 :D
My username still reflects when I played starsiege as a kid at some silly time over a dial up modem.. Wow!
After all, Instagram lends itself well to high-margin brand advertising, interest-based advertising, and hyperlocal content. It's hardly a problem that certain demographics spend less time on Facebook and go on Instagram instead, especially if these demographics are quite valuable on their own.
Even the article admits that the more traditional messaging networks like Messenger and WhatsApp are harder to monetize. They have had some experiments the past [1] but with so many competitors, user resistance is a risk.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13489098#13489554
Yes, buying all the competition.
wat
The Facebook app and websites have barely innovated in years and the changes they HAVE made have slowly but steadily eroded the core user experience. What was once a SOCIAL NETWORK - a place where friends could come together or new friendships were made - has become a disjointed "news" feed full of gossip, fake news, Russian propaganda or US politics division. All this interspersed with cat pics and buzzfeed top ups.
It's hard to find and enjoy the 'social' aspect of this social network if it's full of oddly unedited "news" footage.
I'm going to pick this part of your comment out specifically since I largely agree with the rest of it.
People have said there's a lot of this going around, but I struggle to see what they mean. What propaganda, specifically Russian, do you mean? I see this kind of baseless conjecture much like I did back in the Cold War. The "communists" or "Russians" were just around the corner kind of nonsense is eerily similar to what people are claiming these days.
So really, if you have any actual proof do enlighten us with it.
Now its nearly all trash. People bitching, posting memes, sharing slideshows, etc. The only thing I go there for is 1 specific local group and even that is pointless because there is a discord.
Facebook is essentially dead to me, and certainly dead to all my younger cousins 15-19 yos. I feel like I must be missing something, because I have no idea why anyone would visit. It's so negative and low quality.
With the implosion of Twitter, Facebook has since undone a lot of these changes, but the damage had already been done. People had already learned to stop going to Facebook to be social.
Sure you're not spreading your own here?
They even do the opposite. Maybe a half a year ago they removed one of the best features Facebook had - the event calendar. My guess is to promote a standalone events app that was released around that time.. but the app doesn't seem to be around any longer, and the events calendar is still gone. Replaced by a shitty list of upcoming events.
Random screenshot for those who didn't see it: https://ucarecdn.com/9bd0a297-7576-41ee-9580-f7ee0ef50943/
Now they have all sorts of things cluttering the feed besides just Ads... Recommended Posts, Friend-Invite Recommendations, Mid-feed stories.
The clutter is making it less and less enjoyable to use the app, and I've started considering dropping the only social platform I actively use.
Messenger apps are also inherently highly personal. It's your primary means of communication in the digital age. The idea of ads being injected into that experience appalls me.
It's main innovation, as far as I can tell, is that it uses the real world as a model for its approach. Your content spreads as 'gossip', peer to peer (over LAN/wifi), but also propagates through 'pubs' that are internet-accessible.
What first made me interested is that the Patchwork client is quite user-friendly and I've noticed that the relatively small group of current users are not all tech-savvy. That's something of an achievement. Furthermore, some other options I've looked into strike me as either unrealistically decentralized, or too (pragmatically?) centralized.
Anyways, even as just as a look into how thing could work different I can highly recommend checking out these types of alternatives!
It might be that I joined a pub with very little traffic, I haven't spent much time on it and I plan to have another look when I have some free time.
That said, I suppose the whole thing is inherently quieter than something like Facebook or a forum because it's decentralized and, of course, still a small community at this point. And quite possibly the whole point is not to be as busy as other social platforms :).
I also started to appreciate what's the price for decentralization: after following just a couple of users I already have several hundreds megabytes downloaded.
Also, pretty insane Instagram numbers. Now that is a service I really don't get, yet considering how many people use it, it can't just be being too old.
And also, there are insanely good professional photographers on Instagram and some people just like looking at pretty photos instead of thumbnails grabbed from political news articles.
It used to be fine, minimal and functional. I won't install any fb app, I just want to use it on the web.
FB app on ipad disallows pinch/zoom. You better be damn happy with the font sizes they dictate. Or you could stick with the web version.
Not sure this is true; back in the day BlackBerry used to be the combo of the handset + backend services provided by RIM, including BBM, which they charged a fiver a month for and people didn’t mind paying it. If RIM had been willing to take the risk of extending BBM to other devices (sooner and better) perhaps the whole world would be paying them a vig now.
Apple’s iMessage is arguably monetised in advance by hardware sales, and I’ve only recently learned does group chat too.
All I see on Facebook is friends of friends fighting over politics with other friends of friends, fake news, stupid animal pics, people with low self esteem hunting for the likes, stupid mainstream commentary, "look at me how awesome I am" status updates, rants where everyone feels to be treated unfairly by the world because of [insert the single characteristic about yourself where you can pretend to be discriminated], etc.
I only go to Facebook for one reason now, to check that I'm not missing a birthday of some close extended family. This takes me about 1 minute every day and then I don't visit FB for another 24 hours.
My gut feeling is that you can run a messaging app for a million users on the same infrastructure you would use to run Facebook for 1000 users. So having a messenger app with a ton of users and no monetization is bad, but not that expensive?
It still amazes me that there are so many billions of advertising dollars to prop up something as useless as facebook and their snowflake-innovator-genius engineers with over 100k salaries.
Look at people around you (grocery checkout lines or bus stop or subway or Starbucks) - everyone is glued to their phone screens. And Facebook is the ultimate magnet to waste those 2-5 min wait times one has to endure every so often. Earlier, people would get bored waiting in line, or strike conversations with strangers or just muse over random thoughts. No more. All that attention has gone to their smartphones.
And advertisers are simply following those eyeballs. Since Facebook manages to capture so much attention of so many humans, they rake in billions.