I for one am not surprised that when one of the top 3 most-visited-domains in the world goes down, other sites are visited more often, in particular news sites.
I am also not surprised, though I'm not sure I would have guessed the increase in traffic to other sites would be this large (38%). It's always nice, though, to see data that confirms your intuition.
In this case a majority of the traffic certainly came from Google. If all social media and search engines vanished (including the suggested site feature on safari) for a few hours, we’d definitely see traffic to news sites go down.
I guess that says something about the difficulty of discoverability on the internet.
Most people are probably aware of the names of several major news organisations in their country or city, but it's less obvious what the domain name should be - what is written in full? what is abbreviated?
If you prohibit the use of a lookup system (that's what you did, effectively), some people will be able remember the domain name (it's easier than a telephone number), but it's not hard to guess people will find the system much less useful.
It's a little like saying "if everyone had to use a CLI to start the programs they want to use on their phone, more people would watch TV".
To me, it’s more an indication that news sites are a another dopamine-fulled entertainment business, people are addicted to “checking something online”, and shows the news have lost their standing. In a parallel world, people watch the news to make good decisions, not to satisfy their dopamine receptors.
I'm curious how much of it was people trying to figure out what was going on with Facebook.
It's framed on such a way as to imply that people are more informed without Facebook, and maybe that is true, but that isn't all that is going on there.
>> when one of the top 3 most-visited-domains in the world goes down
Which is in itself a major news story. Before talking about facebook v. other new sites we mush take account of the greater number of people looking for news content regardless of platform. The increase might more people looking for news rather than people having to go elsewhere than facebook.
I agree, HN itself slowed to a crawl and eventually went down temporarily for me but I’d bet one of my toes that it’s because half the devs, sysadmins etc of the world were trying to find out what was going on rather than people no longer distracted by Facebook looking for something else to do.
Which now also explains why the biggest news sites are so rabidly working on attacking Facebook at every chance they have - every FB loss is their immediate financial win.
I'd prefer them to do honest reporting and not just be another fake news spreading engine which will keep doing the same kind of harm just with different money pockets.
After all, what does facebook really do except just repost news from low quality article factories?
PBS News Hour (who has Zuckerberg up their ass) treatment has been very professional despite all the donations. They ran full pieces reporting on the outage and the testimony in the Senate. They stopped short of being judgemental though...unlike some of the other reporting where it is safe for them to do so. I was satisfied but not terribly impressed. They should be exploring the issue deeper but they do not. For obvious reasons. Nonetheless, they fulfilled their doctrinal duty.
What do you mean? Public trust in the media is at an all time low. News companies almost died at the advent of the internet but came back fighting by drive engagement with emotions. Even documentaries like “The Social Dilemma” are guilty of using the tactics they blame FB for using. Trump made his presidency off of “fake news” and distrust of the media.
The game is all about starting with a narrative that follows your audience’s wants and then cherry-picking facts to confirm that bias. All sides are guilty of this. FB’s PR department is guilty of this as well, if we are to be honest.
There's now an obvious conflict of interest with regard to news sites reporting on Facebook. Their generalized antagonism towards Facebook, and the tech industry has a pretty clear root: they're getting outcompeted, thus the calls for regulation.
There's no competition because Facebook is a monopoly.
Also remember that media companies tried collaborating with Facebook. Remember Pivot to video? Only to discover that Facebook inflated their stats on video views.
Facebook is "outcompeting" other news sites in the very narrow sense of "bigger number better" - they have more users, more pageviews, and so on. But they absolutely play dirty when it comes to how they get those numbers. They control the algorithm and the user interface by which people discover news - so they can pick and choose who wins and loses on their platform. The reason why people want Facebook regulated is because Facebook is already, in a sense, regulating the rest of the web.
Furthermore, many of the original landmark copyright decisions regarding, say, Google; were specifically decided to be fair use... partially on the basis that things Google did were sending monetizable traffic back to web publishers. Facebook's actions take the form of these fair uses, but they use their control over their platform to reclaim the value they would ordinarily be creating for publishers. This puts those exceptions to copyright in jeopardy - and that's exactly what we're seeing in, say, the EU.
- The increases far exceeded what was lost. The dip in the social line was offset three-fold when you add up external, search and direct. They're not to be averaged.
- Unmentioned, but reflected in graph: people using facebook tend to share articles far more than they read them. As in social share count > pageview count. Sometimes by a factor of 100.
Traffic for basically every site went up. People thought it was an internet-wide DDOS attack when it was just the 3B people on FB's properties finding entertainment elsewhere.
I'm pretty sure I saw reports that internet speed tests were going down as well from people checking their connections. I can't confirm it but if it's true, it's pretty interesting the chain reaction that occurred.
traffic at my job was funny, it was chaos trying to handle it, then facebook came back and you can see it in the charts the drop in requests. it was a pretty quick return to normal.
idk im surprised people just like didnt go do other things, like we just have to scroll?
On one hand, it's worrying that Amazon is so huge that we have these two categories; on the other hand we should be glad that there still is some "non-Amazon" left...
This assumes it's in Amazon's interest for there not to be.
Theoretically all companies under capitalism would want to become true monopolies because having competition means leaving money on the table, but in practice a duopoly or a de facto monopoly is preferable to skirt regulations and interventions. There is a good reason Google still props up Mozilla despite competing with them in the browser space.
It would also be interesting so see how many of the larger non-Amazons run on AWS.
If Amazon ever tries to get into Switzerland again we are getting the pitchforks out.
It's so nice to have hundreds of small online shops actually competing with quality and or cheap products. Instead of a AliExpress clone with worse support.
I can believe that. My father often bugs me to buy things he saw advertised on Facebook ads. For older generation like him who spend a lot of time on Facebook, Facebook is a good avenue for non-Amazon sites to peddle their wares.
I find that the type of person who thinks FB did this intentionally (either to "erase data" or as a distraction) vastly overestimates the impact of whistleblowers.
There have been ex-FB employees publicly accusing the company of enabling foreign political interference in the US, lynching mobs forming via WhatsApp, governments spreading misinformation, not to mention gross privacy abuses by its own employees. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
Heck, nothing fundamentally changed after Wikileaks' Collateral Murder video (in fact, there have now been reports that the supposed retaliatory precision strike in Afghanistan actually killed an aid worker and his children and this too changes nothing) and nothing fundamentally changed after the Snowden leaks. Obama literally went on public television and admitted to torture and nothing fundamentally changed.
As much as us nerds tend to think otherwise, information on its own changes nothing. Scandals like this are just another piece of outrage fuel to be consumed on social media and to be liked, shared and subscribed to. Without actually organizing and defining solutions rather than just the problems, nothing fundamentally changes. Otherwise the best you can hope for is the POTUS reading off a script while making a concerned face or Congress passing a toothless bill before things return to normal.
I unironically heard/read this from nuts on both the Left and the Right. As if Facebook would risk that much money to take their services offline for 7 hours.
I remember when my town lost power for a week. It was glorious. People started talking to their neighbours, kids started playing outside. Magic.
Does Facebook really make anyone's life better?
Sometimes I wish I born before the internet, or even a century ago.
I wish I was born at a time so that I'd be able to experience the early internet. And then die of natural causes, so that I didn't have to live through the hell that is the internet today.
I mean, if you really want it today, there are places in the world you could go to that have little to no internet access.
Where people still communicate mostly in-person.
(I'm only half joking haha).
> Does Facebook really make anyone's life better?
I can only answer for myself. It made my life better:
1. At the start of my career, I got connections, jobs, etc from local groups.
2. I connected with old school mates I wouldn't have found other wise.
3. ...
My assumption is when people are not addicted or living/following fake lives on social media, there is a lot of benefits to it.
You could move somewhere like Pitcairn Island, it’s actively looking for immigrants or at least it was last time I checked. There’s other isolated island communities out there which are a bit less extreme too with limited access to the internet. Saint Helena would be an example, although I’m not sure what the immigration requirements are.
You could also get into sailing, specifically offshore cruising. Until Starlink becomes available for mobile installations your options are either ruinously expensive and slow satellite internet or if you’re a radio amateur shortwave services for email and SSB voice.
We saw an increase in traffic in all of our portfolio's mobile games so instead of "News sites saw more traffic because of Facebook was down" it was "People did something else than browse Facebook while Facebook was down".
this seems right to me. would love to see a real analysis of what sort of traffic news sites saw.
my hunch is, yeah, maybe people had a look to see if the news confirmed their suspicions... but then maybe stayed a while and/or sought out alternatives for the ultimate distraction contraption.
For sure HN did; it was struggling to stay up from the load. Several threads were suggesting logging out -- which would let HN load static content -- to help it load, for example.
And this is what's motivating the establishment's campaign against social media. Many people think that information should go through gatekeepers - that people shouldn't be able to share information peer-to-peer without filters.
The claims of Facebook promoting hate and extremism are part of this campaign to rollback the changes brought about by Facebook. And the claims are all disingenuous nonsense.
The Facebook "whistleblower" for example explained how she was motivated to blow the whistle after one of her friends was, in her words, radicalized, through Facebook. Of course she doesn't consider herself, a lifelong "ally" and supporter of far-left causes, who worked on a search feature allowing Pinterest users to search by skin tone - in order to discriminate in favor of people of certain colors - radicalized. Because that's pro-establishment radicalism.
The solution is to set FB's incentives right, which can be done by banning ads from social networks. With this solution, no other type of censoring is necessary.
Agreed, they are less like a biased newspaper editor and more like a bouncer at a night-club who does not intervene when there is a fight provided the 'right' customer is winning, and then we can debate whether it's because the bouncer is racist or getting bribed.
If anyone else is wondering what that "dark social" in the chart is:
> […] social shares that do not contain any digital referral information about the source.
> In contrary to the sharing on social networking service like Facebook, which is done publicly, Dark social is done privately through IRC channels, emails, SMS or simply copy-and-paste and other ways of private sharing.
I was actually quite happy when I heard about the outage. I’ve managed to disconnect myself from Facebook’s services sufficiently that I didn’t even notice they were down...
218 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadIt could also just be looking for their content fix.
Most people are probably aware of the names of several major news organisations in their country or city, but it's less obvious what the domain name should be - what is written in full? what is abbreviated?
If you prohibit the use of a lookup system (that's what you did, effectively), some people will be able remember the domain name (it's easier than a telephone number), but it's not hard to guess people will find the system much less useful.
It's a little like saying "if everyone had to use a CLI to start the programs they want to use on their phone, more people would watch TV".
It's framed on such a way as to imply that people are more informed without Facebook, and maybe that is true, but that isn't all that is going on there.
Which is in itself a major news story. Before talking about facebook v. other new sites we mush take account of the greater number of people looking for news content regardless of platform. The increase might more people looking for news rather than people having to go elsewhere than facebook.
After all, what does facebook really do except just repost news from low quality article factories?
There's now an obvious conflict of interest with regard to news sites reporting on Facebook. Their generalized antagonism towards Facebook, and the tech industry has a pretty clear root: they're getting outcompeted, thus the calls for regulation.
Also remember that media companies tried collaborating with Facebook. Remember Pivot to video? Only to discover that Facebook inflated their stats on video views.
Of course, Facebook was sorry.
Furthermore, many of the original landmark copyright decisions regarding, say, Google; were specifically decided to be fair use... partially on the basis that things Google did were sending monetizable traffic back to web publishers. Facebook's actions take the form of these fair uses, but they use their control over their platform to reclaim the value they would ordinarily be creating for publishers. This puts those exceptions to copyright in jeopardy - and that's exactly what we're seeing in, say, the EU.
- The increases far exceeded what was lost. The dip in the social line was offset three-fold when you add up external, search and direct. They're not to be averaged.
- Unmentioned, but reflected in graph: people using facebook tend to share articles far more than they read them. As in social share count > pageview count. Sometimes by a factor of 100.
For example, see https://www.akamai.com/blog/news/the-impact-of-third-party-s... and https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1445244384598011906
idk im surprised people just like didnt go do other things, like we just have to scroll?
https://twitter.com/AaronandML/status/1445162492909531137
Theoretically all companies under capitalism would want to become true monopolies because having competition means leaving money on the table, but in practice a duopoly or a de facto monopoly is preferable to skirt regulations and interventions. There is a good reason Google still props up Mozilla despite competing with them in the browser space.
It would also be interesting so see how many of the larger non-Amazons run on AWS.
There are many sites I want to buy off of, but just don't trust them with my banking info.
And yes--I know many websites accept Paypal.
Amazon is just ease of mind with the negative of counterfeit products.
(I think I'm hellbanned again, but don't really care.)
It's so nice to have hundreds of small online shops actually competing with quality and or cheap products. Instead of a AliExpress clone with worse support.
Link for reference:
https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2...
There have been ex-FB employees publicly accusing the company of enabling foreign political interference in the US, lynching mobs forming via WhatsApp, governments spreading misinformation, not to mention gross privacy abuses by its own employees. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
Heck, nothing fundamentally changed after Wikileaks' Collateral Murder video (in fact, there have now been reports that the supposed retaliatory precision strike in Afghanistan actually killed an aid worker and his children and this too changes nothing) and nothing fundamentally changed after the Snowden leaks. Obama literally went on public television and admitted to torture and nothing fundamentally changed.
As much as us nerds tend to think otherwise, information on its own changes nothing. Scandals like this are just another piece of outrage fuel to be consumed on social media and to be liked, shared and subscribed to. Without actually organizing and defining solutions rather than just the problems, nothing fundamentally changes. Otherwise the best you can hope for is the POTUS reading off a script while making a concerned face or Congress passing a toothless bill before things return to normal.
Sometimes I wish I born before the internet, or even a century ago.
(A bit dramatic - it's meant to be satiric).
Where people still communicate mostly in-person.
(I'm only half joking haha).
> Does Facebook really make anyone's life better?
I can only answer for myself. It made my life better:
1. At the start of my career, I got connections, jobs, etc from local groups. 2. I connected with old school mates I wouldn't have found other wise. 3. ...
My assumption is when people are not addicted or living/following fake lives on social media, there is a lot of benefits to it.
You could also get into sailing, specifically offshore cruising. Until Starlink becomes available for mobile installations your options are either ruinously expensive and slow satellite internet or if you’re a radio amateur shortwave services for email and SSB voice.
my hunch is, yeah, maybe people had a look to see if the news confirmed their suspicions... but then maybe stayed a while and/or sought out alternatives for the ultimate distraction contraption.
Same as saying people who wanted to go to the park did something else instead because the park was closed. Its not good or bad. It just 'is'.
I guess you could look for Facebook’s spiders retrieving content and block those requests. But why bother?
The claims of Facebook promoting hate and extremism are part of this campaign to rollback the changes brought about by Facebook. And the claims are all disingenuous nonsense.
The Facebook "whistleblower" for example explained how she was motivated to blow the whistle after one of her friends was, in her words, radicalized, through Facebook. Of course she doesn't consider herself, a lifelong "ally" and supporter of far-left causes, who worked on a search feature allowing Pinterest users to search by skin tone - in order to discriminate in favor of people of certain colors - radicalized. Because that's pro-establishment radicalism.
The claims of Facebook promoting hate and extremism are part of this campaign to rollback the changes brought about by Facebook"
You think Facebook not a gatekeeper? You think it liberalized speech?
4chan is free speech, facebook just privatised hate
> […] social shares that do not contain any digital referral information about the source.
> In contrary to the sharing on social networking service like Facebook, which is done publicly, Dark social is done privately through IRC channels, emails, SMS or simply copy-and-paste and other ways of private sharing.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_social_media)
> To combat this lack of transparency, websites can include more attractive ways to share links than simply copy-pasting into another application; ...
I guess one man's privacy is another man's "lack of transparency".
A good example of this are jobs that post your salary online. Those are usually in government and some NGOs.
Interestingly, some Nordic countries allow people to see each others income tax info.
What's more interesting for me is that Pornhub's traffic surged by 10% [1] during the outage ;)
[1] - https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2...