>The fact that Facebook is uniquely held responsible for the societal problems engendered by the Internet does, I suspect, stem from the fact that Zuckerberg is an obvious target. How many people concerned about anti-vax rhetoric, for example, can even name the person in charge of YouTube, a far more potent vector?
This article makes a very cogent point: Zuckerberg has too much baggage with the general public and Meta would be much better off if he stepped out of the light.
Sorry but YouTube is not a far more potent vector.
Facebook and Zuckerberg were fairly blamed because they actively developed features that amplified misinformation, and refused to take any action to curb their damage.
We've seen many articles over the last few years about the YouTube recommendation rabbit hole radicalizing young people online. Facebook is not blameless, but they've become a scapegoat for issues plaguing an entire industry.
"Facebook is a potent vector for misinformation" doesn't disprove the contention that YouTube is a more potent vector. We're aware of Facebook's issues around this largely because Facebook became the de facto representative for Everything Wrong With Big Tech -- and while there's a solid case to be made that it's their own damn fault they're in that position, it's kept documented problems with other platforms out of the spotlight. YouTube's recommendation algorithm is notorious for leading you to ever-more extremist ("high engagement!") takes on a variety of topics. And in some high-profile cases -- for instance, Alex Jones back in 2018, coronavirus vaccine disinformation just this year -- YouTube was well behind other social media platforms in executing bans. There is an arguable case to be made that compared to YouTube, Facebook is a relative model of responsibility.
(And, yes, there's a larger question about how companies like YouTube and Facebook should be approaching moderation at all, who gets to decide what is and isn't misinformation, who watches the watchmen, etc. But if we presume there's a rationale for moderation at all, then YouTube should be getting way more scrutiny than it generally receives.)
Agreed, Meta's "good parts" would have a better chance to succeed if it weren't entangled so much with Mark and Facebook at large. Listening to the interview made me feel that Mark/Facebook have good intent with this work (and are clearly doubling down ala rename) but the metaverse feels like something that's being pushed through vs a natural extension of human connection. They are making sure they have a big say on how it unfolds by shifting the focus on the company towards. Good and bad.
I was "defending" the metaverse to a friend outside of the tech bubble last night and I talked a lot about how much I learned about socialization/human connection when I used to play Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft. That those relationships which started somewhat "metaverse"-first meant as much as my "real" connections did... and that's what I feel the essence of Meta/metaverse is really trying to bring to everyone.
I have no idea if FB or YT is more potent, but Ben didn't offer any evidence so this looks like shilling for Zuckerberg.
Facebook's potency is in the reshares, and in the "headline only" feed format where lies in headlines are persuasive even when the linked content is not. YT algorithm shows one person more bad content, but doesn't spam their friends. And in a video the viewer has time to think if the claims make sense.
The author of this piece pointed out on his podcast that Zuckerberg, despite his baggage, is a founder and thus the only person who can sell such a huge change to employees and investors.
If building a metaverse is a good idea, and that is a large if, then it will have been good for him to stay.
> The fact that Facebook is uniquely held responsible for the societal problems engendered by the Internet does, I suspect, stem from the fact that Zuckerberg is an obvious target
Interestingly, the most vocal opponents of Facebook are... traditional medias. The same medias that are competing (and losing!) against Facebook for add revenue.
Keep in mind that before Facebook, for a story to get any traction it had to be approved by the "editorial board" of a legacy news outlet. What do you think happened if the owner of the TV station or newspaper didn't want a story to hit the front page?
That's why it's important to have several TV stations and newspapers with different management in the same area. The actual enemy is corporate consolidation, both online and offline.
It's amazing how much bike-shedding there is here around the name and logo, and how little capacity most have for what these changes actually mean.
Meta is going full in on the metaverse... so that's going to be hitting some critical mass fairly soon (less than a decade). And that's nuts. We should take this time to enjoy living before that moment. Who knows what changes it will bring, but surely enough that there will be no going back.
I think as technology goes more... meta, the more valuable reality will become. I can't help but thing of Duncan Trussell's quote: "Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be."
The way I see this playing out is that the metaverse is going to be for poor people while reality is enjoyed by those with resources for "all five senses".
> The way I see this playing out is that the metaverse is going to be for poor people while reality is enjoyed by those with resources for "all five senses".
Given my experience in Alt Space thus far, I think there's a really good chance you're right.
I don't claim to know what exactly the metaverse will look like, but I remember the first time I put on an Oculus Quest.
The first experience you have is being dropped into your "home" and mine defaulted to a big mountain side house, warm wood, fireplace, massive window looking out into a beautiful valley.
It was virtual but convincing enough and I still sometimes enjoy just taking in the virtual view before or after playing a VR game.
I remember thinking it a bit odd, the actual world around me could be awful, but in here it was just good enough to trick my brain. Throw $10B at that experience and I'm curious to see what happens. Maybe a scarcity-free utopia where everyone can "live" in whatever beautiful environment they want to, maybe a dystopia where you get home and enter your unadorned concrete cube and plug in to your real home, needing just enough physical space to use the VR.
If they can ever get it fully jacked into your brain, I could see people just plugging in and never coming out.
My home isn't primarily for looking at. It's mainly where I keep my things, a collection of comfortable surfaces, a place to cook and entertain, and a place for privacy. VR gives you none of those.
edit: home is also a place to work on projects, so I guess that VR fulfills that in a minecraft-type fashion.
> Meta is going full in on the metaverse... so that's going to be hitting some critical mass fairly soon (less than a decade).
That's a stretch. Tech history is littered with big companies who went hard on a technology only for their attempt to flop. See: Newton, Virtual Boy, Windows Phone, and most recently Google Stadia. There's also little reason to think that CEO Mark Zuckerberg of 2021 is as in-touch with the what the public wants and tech trends as college student Mark Zuckerberg was in 2004.
Edit: Another way to look at is: Has Facebook ever launched a product as successful as their primary business?
They've acquired some wildly successful properties (I'm thinking Instagram & WhatsApp) - but their in-house product efforts outside of Facebook itself have either flopped or been marginal at best - Facebook Phone, Facebook Portal. Oculus might be the exception - for now - but there's healthy competition in the VR headset space and the market isn't yet big enough for a "metaverse" to be widely accessible like the Facebook website was in 2004.
And there's also little reason to think that anyone on Hacker News is more in-touch than Zuckerberg of 2021 with what the public wants and the tech trends. Someone who owns Facebook and Instagram can identify the trend easier than you. Unless you also happen to have a platform of more than billion of users, then please share your thoughts about trends.
This is truly an optimistic take. Mark's "maybe no one else would bother building this if I don't" ethos is inspiring. But, man, that can justify absolutely anything. It seems like an expensive hobby, like Rod Stewart's model trains. Impressive, amazing, had to be built by that one person or it never would have been made....but, it's gratifying to only that one person, too.
I see it as closer to the Amazon pivot from selling physical goods to selling digital goods (using digital as an umbrella encompassing AWS, Kindle, Prime (which essentially digitizes fulfillment and delivery), etc.).
FB sold users to advertisers. Very Web 2.0.
Well the potential decentralization of Web3 potentially destroys that business model and the Meta strategy seems like it reflects this potential change in the way Amazon saw the world going to digital?
Very not so. Amazon was merely making available externally to others the very production line that they used to make their own site (at a very healthy profit).
What in world is Mark offering here? He's investing $10B into... what? AWS/Cloud was a reasonable business pitch (which seemed crazy but essentially: outsource your IT ops to AWS and we can help you scale like crazy very quickly).
What's Mark's pitch here? VR is nowhere near prime-time - just read around even on HN. It's got major issues and still lacks a killer app.
It's a vanity project that only a fantastically rich, out of touch person can indulge in. That or FB is toxic.
The Amazon comparison is apt, but I think Apple shifting revenue from hardware to services is a better one.
Apple was able to catch the paradigm shift of us starting to use our phones for everything, and make loads of money by offering services to a captive audience and sharecropping opportunities to app developers.
Facebook tried to become a platform during the last paradigm shift and failed. Selling users to advertisers has been lucrative but clearly isn't as sticky as the platform model (which is why they have to keep buying up their competitors). So they're trying to push another shift to VR and be the platform for that.
Apple leveraged the power of its brand in that transition (and created a flywheel of sorts to strengthen its brand), whereas the current FB brand wouldn't likely extend as well.
So helps show one reason why FB likely saw the need to change naming and start building a new brand (whereas Apple (and Amazon) went the other way).
FTA: > “Meta”, on the other hand, is explicit: CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook is now a metaverse company
I'm not sure anyone (other than some geeks) really understands what the "metaverse" is... or cares.
The name/symbolism/demo were uninspiring and vague at best.
Not to mention Mark isn't the best salesman for this. It seems so egotistical of him to assume HE needed to be the front-man for this effort other than to say "all of this... it's about me".
They are investing heavily in AR/VR and they have a proven track record in new product categories e.g. smartphone, tablet, headphones, watch.
Once the technologies improve such that the glasses/headsets are light and small enough then it's going to be something you can bring and use everywhere. And then the popularity will increase which in turn will attract developers. Repeat this cycle a few times and you have another $100+ billion App Store business on your hands.
FB is pushing AR and VR as I understand it. The VR part is just what's already shipped. I think it'll be similar to iOS/Android because FB will beat Google to the punch.
Fortnite is probably the most obvious one, unless you’re talking about facebook specifically or VR specifically (VR chat is big but nowhere near Fortnite).
> Zuckerberg made a similar mistake last year, forcing Oculus users to login with their Facebook account, which not only upset Oculus users but also handcuffed products like Horizon Workrooms, Facebook’s VR solution for business meetings.
IMO this point is just a single example of the pattern we've seen. Everything done at Facebook is to drive that network data even if it harms the individual component. That's why Meta is so different from Alphabet. Alphabet is legitimately a collection of pretty independent companies - some of them synergize but never unnecessarily[1]. I purchased a VR headset last year and I ended up getting an Index after being mightily tempted by the Oculus - it's my first headset and I wasn't sure how much I'd like VR so I was really hesitant to drop a grand on it but... the likely future where all my activity is forcefully broadcast to all my family and friends on Facebook is a price I'm not willing to pay.
Facebook's non-Facebook products suffer from the fact that they so habitually pipe data right back to Facebook.
1. Oh - I'll add a caveat here about google accounts and Youtube. Google did try to merge the two at one point, but they got a huge amount of negative PR and ended up stepping it back significantly with aliases and multi-account management tools.
> stepping it back significantly with aliases and multi-account management tools
PdM: "Oh, users don't want one account? OK, let them make aliases they think are different, and log in that way. They won't realize it's all still one account, even when we show them their picture and list all these ~~aliases~~, er, "different accounts" they can log in as ..."
Users: "Yay, different accounts!"
Analytics: "Yay, one account!"
Advertisers: "Hey, thanks for tying even more of their identities together for me."
For content producers it has a very real effect - that behind the scenes linking doesn't threaten to expose your real identity to creepy people on the internet. It does expose it to YouTube people, but I think that's reasonable given that there's money involved. It also (so long as you aren't receiving a check) doesn't actually require any connection to your real name anymore.
Article doesn't mention but Zuck wanted to acquire Unity because he thought Unity will be future VR/AR engine/platform and Facebook wants to own it and not be at the mercy of Apple and Google.
I don't know why he didn't pursue it if he is so sure in Metaverse VR/AR thing.
Fortnite seems to have the virtual event model working pretty well. Movies and concerts with friends and random annoying people jumping around.. but it does work,
Epic's valuation is around $30bn and Facebook has the cash to do it but arrogant Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney would never sell to big bad Facebook. Maybe he gives in and sells to Facebook because they have common enemies(Apple and Google).
FTC is another problem but they would probably allow this acquisition no matter how big it is because Facebook is not in the business of making video games or game engines.
Besides owning Fortnite and major content creation engines for the metaverse like you said another good synergy is boosting Facebook's Twitch and YouTube Gaming competitor Facebook Gaming with Epic's expertise.
This makes me think of Comcast rebranding to Xfinity (USA); though I didn't really grasp what the intended reach of the rebranding to Meta will be from the last post [1]. It seems like it's for the umbrella entity, no product renames. But it still seems like a play to distance their image from Facebook, only to be referenced in court. And if it's anything like the Comcast rebrand, it's like, everyone still knows who you are--and yes we're still stuck using your products--it's just pretentious, annoying, and you're just creating another bad name for yourself lmao.
Remember that the Facebook renaming was for a very good purpose. It became clear as the company aged and grew that the initial name choice was quite poor, unfortunately in a lot of areas around the globe that name has a very negative association that wasn't obvious to Mark when he chose the name. The problem is that the word Facebook just happens to have a historical association with companies that don't respect your privacy - thankfully changing the name to Meta will let this company stand on its own merit. It's so Meta.
Personally, I'm less bullish on FB/Meta now. Half of me believes if someone can turn it around it would be Zuck, and the other half believes that FB's culture has optimized the wrong the thing for the past 5 years.
Consider this, and call me out if I'm wrong, for the past 5 years we were led to believe by FB/YouTube that algorithmically generated could only have negative consequences as it moved people to more and more reactionary content as it was the only way to optimize time on site. The only way FB could grow was by pushing content that got people riled up. Then TikTok came along and it's kind of disproven that? I started using TikTok as a joke and it's by far my most use social app now, and none of the algorithmically generated content is as polarizing as what I would find on the other apps; and clearly they are growing fast. There was another way but the local-maxima prevented FB from seeing it and as a result they have lost major brand cachet.
I don't know what is different about TikTok but the way I see it is Meta's problem will be avoiding their user base dying off and the USG will likely prevent any future acquisitions. Their standalone apps (M, Rooms, Riff, Gaming, Dating, Collab) haven't been major successes (although given the size of Facebook some of these have 10s of millions of users); and I'm not confident a VR platform will have major penetration outside of "Ready Player One" fanboys.
That said, FB is a trillion dollar company and betting against a company with such a huge war chest is like trying to catch a falling knife.
> The only way FB could grow was by pushing content that got people riled up.
Not sure if I've ever believe it was the only way for them to grow. I hate Facebook (product) for what it has become but it is an excellent tool for its original use, which is keeping in touch with friends/family/communities.
What? The core aspect of FB/Twitter/etc. is twofold
1. No guaranteed-attention obligation from your circle, so you're free to share more things
2. Algorithms for YOUR attention so you see what you want to see in the order of importance. If you have very little time, you only see the most important things.
Email, Slack etc. are not even in the same category, it's like comparing a postcard to a newspaper headline
> betting against a company with such a huge war chest is like trying to catch a falling knife.
Indeed. My biggest fear is that succeed.
I happen to prefer PCs (and there is no reason to argue for or against that). Apple has been incredibly successful at capturing market share and their devices are now mandatory at my new job. I might not like it, but it's not the end of the world: Apple behaves ethically.
Now imagine your [otherwise] dream job demands that you strap a Quest on and feed Zuck's data fetish.
Apple behaves ethically with those file scanners on your devices? Iphone parts that show errors when replaced with the same parts from another phone? Lobbying against the right to repair? Blocking access to 3rd party app stores?
Apple has certainly displayed some anti-consumer behavior. No one will argue with that. But not all sins are equal. Let's not say that blocking access to repair stores is the same thing as knowingly aiding and abetting genocide.
a) The CSAM scanning on your phone only happens if you specify that you want your photos to be uploaded to iCloud Photo Library. And if doesn't happen client-side then it simply happens server-side with less privacy and security.
b) iPhone parts showing errors issues was a bug that was already fixed and applied to TouchID security validation. If it's something new then it's almost guarenteed that this is a good thing i.e. you're trying to tamper/remove the biometrics components.
c) Apple's customers don't want 3rd party App Stores. It's not a computer to them but an appliance like a microwave. They want security, privacy, moderation, convenience and alternate stores trade those away for features e.g. flexibility, price that no one really wants.
1) Lets not have client side scanning apologists here. They are setting a terrible precedent. Even if apple does it right, the copy cats won't and that'll be terrible for everyone.
2) Apple customer support has a history of being deceitful. In the US it is illegal for them to reject jailbroken devices from warranty and I've been told by apple they will void your warranty on their internal services if you bring them a device.
3) Not all customers want a 3p App Store. Some do. iPhones are not microwaves, they are computers.
> They want security, privacy, moderation, convenience
Like a microwave? Wtf. Also, all these things can come through 3p app stores. Security is provided by the OS not App Store. Privacy is by app. Moderation apple still doesn't do right. Convenience is IAP that apps will actually use.
>Lets not have client side scanning apologists here.
It's not scanning on the client side, it's hashing. People on this site should really understand the difference. The alternative, as many have pointed out, is them uploading your whole image to be scanned server side.
Smart money is that this is a move in front of Apple encrypting your whole icloud backup, and they have to do something if they don't want the legal, political, and social liability of being a free encrypted cloud storage for CSAM.
There's lots of reasons to criticise Apple, this isn't one.
Well that's a convenient set of arguments, lets politely agree to disagree.
Privacy is #1 selling point for Apple phones for geeks, it for sure ain't some mediocre hardware catching what chinese manufacturers released 1-2 generations before, nor sheepish bragging mentality that is so popular in poorer parts of the world.
They broke privacy. It ain't some super bendy term that you can argue about and twist to suit your current needs, in similar vein as ie truth. Lets break it down - private means mine and mine only, 0 other access, here, there, everywhere. Anything else is not private, whatever 'noble' cause you wrap it in that keeps shifting with time, location, political regime etc..
They claimed they had it. Many honestly believed them. They openly kicked it out and failed at it so badly they didn't even grok it could be an issue. Then whole clusterfuck happened as we all saw from first row.
Apple doesn't have privacy, period. It can claim to have some other features, and with some they are correct. And that's about it.
What is scanning if not reading every byte of your private images and using an algorithm to decide whether or not to call the cops on you? It's scanning.
Apple doesn't do E2E, and there's no evidence they are going to. It's very likely they just legally can't.
First, the FBI (which supposedly stopped the last attempt to introduce E2E) has more concerns than CSAM.
Second, the current scanning system + E2E will have significant weaknesses* compared to server side scanning. As it is, Apple will pay the same legal costs as it would be if it had implemented E2E without scanning.
The only way to answer both concerns is to have way more invasive scanning than Apple told us it would do. IMHO, iCloud E2E is just a made up slogan to justify Apple snooping on the device. The real future is just way more scanning.
* The scanning database must receive updates after the images have been uploaded, because the hash as described inherently cannot catch most offenders right away. It's an issue of both space (the proposal is based on a perceptual hash, but the hash must be far smaller than the original, so similar images can't all get the same hash) and timing (NCMEC can't find new CSAM right away).
However, the images were likely deleted on the device, so neither side has access to allow rescanning in the E2E scenario. Unless.. The solutions here all involve more scanning than the original proposal.
> It's not scanning on the client side, it's hashing.
They are (their code is) looking at every item and reviewing it opaquely to us, and deciding if they should have an employee look at tiny thumbnails to tell the cops the owner is a pedophile. Its (a) not real hashing - its "perceptual" which is fancy math that says they're looking at thumbnails and (b) cycling through every item in a list and running an Algo against it is what I'd call scanning - lets not get bogged down on the terms.
We all know the tech details they shared, people on this site all understand the difference. We know the algorithm is easy enough to produce collisions. We know that apple said multiple 3 letter agencies can determine what goes in the bloom filter, and it would be downloaded from the internet and not audited. We know they are going to open it up to other countries governments too. We know that its on if you want to use opt-out services.
> The alternative, as many have pointed out, is them uploading your whole image to be scanned server side.
> Smart money is that this is a move in front of Apple encrypting your whole icloud backup
The whole image is being uploaded server side anyways.
My smart money says that this won't lead to encrypted backups anytime soon. Too many other things in those backups.
> social liability of being a free encrypted cloud storage for CSAM
I don't really think there is much tbh. That said, it is clear people would rather have non-absolutely-private cloud than a non-absolutely-private personal device. I know I would!
People criticize apple for "not letting you own the device" and this is a much bigger step down that road. I would rather a less-absolutely-private cloud service than an absolutely-private-everything where my local stuff is scanned.
> There's lots of reasons to criticise Apple, this isn't one.
There's lots of reasons to criticize Apple. Including this one.
I agree that most customers are not asking for another App Store, but they are being negatively impacted.
1. Apple has blocked apps as objectionable because they were political even though simply factual. [1]
2. Apple's lock on the App Store facilitates government blocks on apps that Apple itself would otherwise deem fine. [2]
3. Apple blocks "adult" oriented apps. How many times do people have to rehash the lines between art and porn with authority gatekeepers instead of making their own choices?
4. Apple blocks game streaming apps, and other apps that act as front ends to other app-like worlds on the web, a whole new category of innovation cancelled. [3[
5. Apple inserts itself into otherwise peer-to-peer transactions, i.e. in-app non-code content purchases. This economic tax is both unfair, but also a dampener on innovation.
6. Apple on iOS restricts the downloading of code within apps to educational situations. (Currently rule 2.5.2 [4]) This is a huge dampener on innovation. Coding, including no-code coding, should be available to anyone wanting to be code literate or want to make their own tools. I get that their are safety issues, but those can be addressed with sandboxes, etc. Again, another layer of innovation killed off.
In summary, instead of being a bicycle shop for the mind, Apple's app stores block many kinds of innovation, tax providers in ways unrelated to Apple's role as phone provider, and routinely censor useful apps that are politically unappealing to Apple or governments, threaten Apple's lock on development tools, or based on Apple's sensitivity to safe (from a tech point of view) material where legitimate opinions vary as to what is desirable or not.
This is all user hostile.
Noting that there are alternative phones isn't a good response, as Apple's phones are at the center of tightly knit ecosystems. Customers do not have the ability to mix and match products between a few ecosystems and get the same value.
I view the App Store as Apple's new Achilles heal.
Apple's gatekeeper role has created perverse incentives for Apple to block significant innovation, economic viability, and freedom of expression on devices at the center of many of our lives.
Perverse incentives don't go away. They tend to metastasize (pun very much intended) [5].
Apple has knowingly used child labor for a few years in China, and are alleged to do the same thing in Congo. This is not just them, but the people who hate on FB for being unethical while lauding Apple for being ethical... the cognitive dissonance or willful ignorance is astounding.
> Now imagine your [otherwise] dream job demands that you strap a Quest on and feed Zuck's data fetish.
Its very likely that a commercial Oculus device won't collect data (what company approves that?), so it might actually give FB a path to money that is free of data+ads.
Haha I work for a company that literally bought and distributed Quest 2s for an event and I had to create a Facebook account for it.. not much imagining needed for me!
Oh and it was my otherwise dream job at the time :)
I don't think I've gotten an actual misinformation / hate speech / etc. recommendation from Youtube, Facebook, or Tiktok.
On Facebook, I see potentially divisive posts from friends with very different political views. The difference with TikTok is that those friends don't post content.
I think if you explicitly seek out problematic content you can end in a rabbit hole on any large algorithmic app.
I get far-right, anti-vaxxer, conspiracy, misinformation recommendations from Youtube at least a few times a week. And it's been like this for years despite me asking them not to show this type of content again.
Anyone who thinks these issues are somehow unique or exclusive to Facebook is simply being dishonest. They are a byproduct of the anonymous, unfettered free speech we get from the internet not something intrinsic to recommendation algorithms.
We had free speech before social networks and this wasn’t an issue. The problem is when you encourage all the 5000 lunatics who think the earth is pizza-shaped to congregate and consume each other’s content.
They have allowed anti-vaxxer, conspiracy, misinformation etc communities to thrive and flourish and it's happened without recommendation algorithms. It happened because when people can see other's peoples comments they are able to follow them to discover more people like that.
Twitter absolutely uses an algorithmic feed to show you content you'll engage with more.
On Reddit this is somewhat true, but it's a well-known part of Reddit culture (though this has been changing as they've been kicking out more subs) that each sub has its own set of cultural mores, opinionated mods, and memes. There's lots of drama/hate on subs from other subs but you'll see the same phenomenon on the Fediverse or, for that matter, in a neighborhood gossip group.
It's not like these views go away without algorithmic newsfeeds, it just that algorithmic feeds accelerate their spread.
You must be really good at only reading content you already agree with.
The moment you watch a few seconds of a polarizing video, out of curiosity, they will start recommending more of the same. This is how people fall into more radicalized bubbles.
Your experience is anecdotal. What "you think" isn't what others have found through actual testing, there are actual papers written about this. Also, I don't think TikTok is different because they are more ethical or anything; I think the framework they operate in (China) has forced them to take a heavier hand on emotionally extreme content.
> Then TikTok came along and it's kind of disproven that? ... none of the algorithmically generated content is as polarizing as what I would find on the other apps.
I don't think this is fully accurate. The big differentiator for Tik Tok's algorithmic feed from FB's or Youtube's (in my mind) is not its accuracy or lack of polarization, it's actually that it draws much firmer and harder to cross lines between the parts of its userbase with an (IMO intentionally) nerfed search capability, so it's very difficult to break out of the demographic/interest bubble it decides you are in for feed purposes. So you, personally, probably receive literally no polarizing, political, etc content that you aren't happy to see. But that doesn't mean it's not there!
Here's an example: a researcher set up a new account, interacted with transphobic content, and was very quickly (in a few hours of viewing) seeing far-right conspiracy theory, antisemitic, white supremacy (and so on) content, some of which was endorsing violence. https://twitter.com/abbieasr/status/1445888305997000705
In my personal experience with tiktok it will pigeonhole you rapidly. But overall the platform is heavy on silly and fun content (not sure if it intentionally maintained like that by the owners). So before you know it you are pigeonholed into extremely fun stuff (compared to tediously polarizing content on other big apps).
Now over time it might devolve into bad content if there is no higher level moderation to keep it on lighter side of things. I would personally be okay with not all platforms being totally democratic.
ByteDance (字节跳动) the parent company that owns TikTok and mainland china Douyin 抖音 have been caught suppressing and hiding videos from disabled or LGBTQ users so that they are not shown to regular users. [0] [1]
One might wonder what other content is suppressed on the platform. [2]
Knives may be snapped mid air by the appropriate adversary.
The tide is correctly turning against the manifest abuses of this organization, regardless of what it asks to be called; with any luck it will be systematically dismantled and defanged.
The pathology and amorality inherent in its DNA goes back to Zuckerberg; the fish has rotted from the head from the start. That pathology leads to market valuation is not a surprise but it's also not conducive to survival.
> Then TikTok came along and it's kind of disproven that?
TikTok is the epitome of content augmentation through engagement. They literally will push more and more of what you're engaging with. Their algorithm is highly optimized to put you into very deep rabbit holes of content.
During the BLM protests you could see two very different feeds depending what content were you liking and engaging with. After a few minutes of browsing it would literally feed you only pro-BLM or anti-BLM. No middle grounds.
I think Snap or TikTok should rebrand to Antimeta, or at least build a subsidiary with that name to show how ridiculous this is. Facebook, or however the want to call themselves, is still the same company with its unethical leadership.
Unless leadership changes, nothing good will be in store for society at large.
My opinion is a name change is just that. You can also put a Ferrari body kit for a Pinto, but it’s still a pinto. Name change is just them trying to dodge their own brand’s untrustworthiness.
3-5 years ago, the prevailing narrative about Facebook and other social media was that of the 'filter bubble', where you would only see things you agreed with. More recently, it's been a 180 to decrying Facebook force-feeding users content they disagree with. TikTok is basically the old model, the one that was blamed for things like Trump being elected.
FB has so much money they could try literally hundreds of thousands of ideas, have all of them fail, and still have money for hundreds of thousands more. Eventually they will find the next big thing and execute perfectly.
I think part of it is demographics. Facebook's userbase is and continues to trend older especially for Facebook/WhatsApp and slightly for Instagram as well compared to TikTok/Snap. I'm not saying Facebook has abandoned the younger demo but wants to continue to cater to the earning and older demo. We're not going to live in Wall-E's world but when the older generation no longer wants to or can engage in IRL experiences that require being full mobile and healthy, AR and moreso VR will allow them to immerse themselves and "preserve" youth well longer than we thought possible. We are at an interesting time in history where wealth inequality is growing and the wealth transfer from rich to poor and more significantly from old to young may not happen as quickly as society needs it to. If the older demographic can and wants to hold on a decade or 2 longer compounded with healthcare advances giving them longer life expectancy and their existing investments/savings growing well, who knows what and when the future will look like?
it will be interesting to see what facebook turns into if/when they get a new ceo who is business success focused, like tim cook and satya nadella, who are just corporate mercenaries trying to run the most efficient business possible, which is not what the founders of those businesses did. then there’s the question of, will zuckerburg ever even get fb now meta to that point or will he insist on maintaining control and using the company to fund his pet projects to the detriment of the bottom line? zuck spends his time, pie in the sky, while cook and nads eat sleep and breath spreadsheets! riveting!
Nadella joined Microsoft in '92. Cook joined Apple in '98. I'm not sure I'd describe either of them as "mercenary".
Tim Cook told an investor to "get off the stock" over criticisms that investing in things that don't contribute to the bottom line (such as sustainability initiatives). "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI" is not something you expect a bean counter to say in a shareholder meeting.
tim cook was obviously lying in that instance, as is shown by the amount of heavy metals he personally has coaxed out of the ground in pursuit of plausible deniability, oh no i meant, planned obsolescence and the apple app store tax.
Aside from the personal things about Cook and Nadella you’re saying that you want a product guy / founder in charge. The thing is that Meta is a huge company with a massive impact and the man in charge is spending his time on his dream and not fixing issues that affect billions.
It's really hard to use much of what Zuck says for reasonable analysis. Examples:
> I care about this existing, not just virtual and augmented reality existing, but it getting built out in a way that really advances the state of human connection...
> I think we’ll have hopefully an opportunity to shape the development of the next platform in order to make it more amenable to these ways that I think people will naturally want to interact.
I mean, how can you read stuff like this and not laugh?
Has a huge company ever rebranded themselves like this to a dream that they're so far away from delivering on? The Metaverse isn't an unfamiliar or abstract thing, it's well represented in movies and TV, and it's a pretty dramatic territory to claim: full sensory immersion in an infinite, interactive world. No one has gotten even a fraction of those things "right" and a social media company is gonna bet the farm on it because they bought a company that made VR goggles?
Most major tech companies seem to be betting that non-shit AR glasses aren't far off, and are prepping to be ready for that day 1.
Big VR bets makes less sense to me. AR is the next smartphone. VR is the next... TV or workstation monitor, and even then, only for some use cases. Just seems like a much smaller opportunity.
Are you implying that their interest suggests that non-shit AR glasses will actually happen in the relatively short term? Big tech companies were and ostensibly are interested in self-driving too, and that seems to be taking much longer than they expected.
They all keep announcing AR features for their devices and operating systems, even though those are very niche except as a "gee isn't that nifty" demo on current hardware—anyone who's held a phone or tablet or Gameboy or whatever up to interact with these things can attest it's pretty terrible overall UX, even if it's really cool as a demo. Glasses fix that problem. I assume the reason companies are continuing development of those capabilities is that they're pretty sure AR glasses aren't too far off. Seems like a much more tractable problem than self-driving, anyway—mostly a waiting game for battery and display/input tech to hit just the right spot and for someone to package it just right, like smartphones were.
VR is the next PC. "VR headset in every home" could be the next Microsoft like company mission and vision. I think for instance VR will have big impact in medicine and education but like I said it is decades away something like PC industry in 1970s.
Right, but my point is that the PC is kinda niche, itself, as a consumer product. "The next PC" is a very different prospect—and far more B2B—than "the next smartphone". It could still be pretty big, but it's always seemed to me like a weird place for Facebook, especially, to be investing. Best-case you also become "the next video game console", but consoles (+TVs) are so much more (locally, IRL) social than PCs that I wouldn't bet on that working out. Worst-case, companies focusing more on AR also crack the problem of making their glasses function for VR, and you can throw all your VR-only hardware investment in the trash (though some of the software would be salvageable, I assume).
VR is the next 3D TV. A cumbersome, marginal improvement on something that already works fine.
Even for industrial use, its only cases I've heard about have been to transmit manual labor over a network. There are very limited cases where we need to do that, although I have no doubt that VR will be useful for undersea or outer space welding, or something, with a very skilled operator. Otherwise, the accuracy necessary is going to make the machine (at the endpoint) far more expensive to build and maintain than it is to just send the human.
edit: It'll be good for killbots. They'll be largely autonomous other than Tesla autopilot-style nudges. The work doesn't require a lot of accuracy, and there are still a few social hangups about totally autonomous killing machines that would make an operator in a VR set more acceptable, even if they don't have much to do.
> VR is the next 3D TV. A cumbersome, marginal improvement on something that already works fine.
I think it's always worth considering the timeframe with these sorts of things.
Right now, yes, you're probably right.
But in 5, 10, 20, 50 years?
I see widespread VR/AR (especially AR) as being inevitable at some point in the future. But we still have a long way to go. It could still tangibly be decades away before the technology evolves into the right "shape".
Even with the current generation of VR hardware we're still looking at the equivalent of Charles Babbage's difference engine and trying to predict the iPhone from it.
I think Zuck is aware that they are a dying company (with a lot of cash and a cash cow) and instead of being a sitting duck they are embracing the "move fast, break things" and picked an un-exploited market (that involves hardware - to own the whole stack) and run with it. They still have the nuclear option anyways, it fails, they revert and Zuck leaves and becomes part of the board, keeping soft control of whoever yes-man from the c-suite gets the CEO position.
The one thing they might have done that is closer to a metaverse than just immersion though: creating a completely digital economy, where work inside the metaverse has value based on creating within the metaverse. Facebook has nailed the economic walled garden, so may have some good ideas for digitalizing people's work using VR/AR as a starting point.
This is exactly it, IMO. People are so focused on the VR/AR/"immersion" aspect of the whole metaverse concept – rightfully so, given the Meta keynote – but there's much more to an actual metaverse than some cool goggles/glasses.
If the point of a true metaverse is a persistent, always-on, digital universe that exists parallel to our own, it seems like the company that defined "social media" is well-positioned to define that universe as well.
I hope society improves to the point that we are comfortable just being around each other IRL, instead of needing to escape to a simulated world in our _sonas.
> Has a huge company ever rebranded themselves like this to a dream that they're so far away from delivering on?
Theranos, when they pivoted from a medication-delivering patch to a blood testing analytics company. Neither of which they ever actually had the tech for!
Overall this new focus suggests to me that Facebook (Meta) sees limited potential future growth of their social media properties as such, and needs to look to new markets to sustain future growth.
However, it is very rare for companies -- especially large, established ones -- to succeed in pivoting themselves to deal with new market realities and ways of doing business. The entrenched interests and culture inside these organizations tend to resist significant change. There's an irony that the bigger the company, the less power a CEO actually has.
But not always successfully. It helps to have a big warchest so you can try more than once or keep a money-losing business running while you figure it out (XBox, Bing).
I don’t get the hype around metaverse. It’s between Zuck and Jensen. Sure those two guys can push a lot of eyes and start something but the products simply do not exist. It’s as if they’re living in this fantasy world to create…Habbo Hotel for 2025.
The metaverse they have a vision for won't exist, but social VR is on the rise, even if it won't take over everyday life. VRChat consistently has 25k players these days and that's not including the amount of people playing it on Quest devices.
The official VRChat Discord bot reports the true player numbers and while it isn't very high now "27997", on weekends I have seen it reach near 50k.
There are as many people playing it on Quest as there are on Steam, which is wild considering just how many more Quest owners without a gaming PC there must be.
Wow, so much negativity! I'm surprised to find that I am one of the few who was super inspired and excited by the keynote. Granted, I'm a VR/crypto fanboy, but it all just seemed like a move in the right direction.
We used to call "reactionary" content sensationalism, and that type of content has always been predicated on fallacious arguments, but especially appeals to emotion.
Facebook's algorithms seems very good at dectecting and pushing content that makes users have an emotional response.
They now have developed a feature where is someone or a page posts a comment to a page or group that I am not subscribed to, Facebook will push that content on to my feed.
It is just about the most annoying thing ever. I am profoundly not interested in people who I follow on what they post on Ted Cruz's Facebook page. Why is Facebook pushing Ted Cruz on to my feed if I am not subscribed to him? I want to see my friends posts, but not their responses to Ted.
Facebook sucks ass now, and I am going to convert over to mastidon or something.
It’s sucked for a long time. I quit over 5 years ago. I can only imagine how bad it is now.
Algorithmic content is great when it shows us things we want to see, but by it’s very nature it can be exploited to show us that which we most despise in an attempt to increase engagement.
I’m willing to go so far as to say the Algos in question are actually just optimized for engagement, not necessarily nefarious, but because we’re human, most people have an innate desire to make the world better in whatever way they can. Many believe discourse can help, but that’s obviously turned out to be flawed in the context of online conversation, where others can distance themself behind an online facade.
As long as we are optimizing for engagement, I feel all social media is doomed to the same fate.
Honestly, I am dismayed by the negative reactions. Even if facebook fails at this, they will produce huge technical innovation. This is an expensive space, you need a big player willing to spend 10-20 billion on it. You need the technical resources and data. The end result will be a ton of open source and new know how in AR/VR. What a blessing!
I'm with you on this. I was an original backer of the Oculus on Kickstarter, and it's just mindblowing to see how far it's come to the Quest 2.
And while the original Oculus shows you what promise there is from a hacker in the garage, the Quest 2 shows you what can be done when significant capital is invested in development.
I bought a Quest for my little brother across the country, and hanging out in VR is pretty cool. I can definitely believe there's something here. I don't know if Meta will actually end up being the platform in the future, but I certainly think there will be a platform, it will be good in a lot of ways, and because of this frankly audacious move by Meta we'll be getting there sooner.
There's a difference between not wanting to venture into the unknown at all, and not wanting to venture into the unknown led by a shady billionaire whose previous work involves rampant misinformation campaigns.
Regardless of how this turns out, $10 Billion per year is a lot for an early/R&D level product (unless you consider the Horizons stuff closer to the endgame).
Sometimes major upfront investments can create situations where its own size and expectations cannibalize their own potential.
What surprised me was how pathetic the move looks (as does the logo, that looks like the brainchild of an actual child; infinity symbol? srsly?). Not only has Facebook proven unable or unwilling to make even less immersive wide-scale online interaction pleasant and beneficial that they claim it's time to be looking for the next challenge (oh, and did they forget about their digital currency?), but they don't even have the technology to start. If this had come at the same time they unveiled some impressive skunkworks project, or even after they emerged from their "trial by fire" as the article calls it, it might have been a different story, but as it is, it appears like a weak act of desperation. Is Facebook feeling that threatened?
This is an investor's view and the subtext seems to be "We're making a lot of money out of this, and I expect we'll make a lot more."
The problem is that it's only an investor's view. It's quite dismissive of Facebook's very real political problems, and doesn't acknowledge that for many people - especially, but not exclusively younger users - Facebook is a terminal combination of boring, evil, and cringe.
But more than that, Facebook isn't in a unique position to own the metaverse. The rest of MANGA will be converging on similar space. If there's any possibility at all of open hardware - or at least of an open standard - it's likely the real competition will come from an unexpected direction.
Social and AR/VR are fundamentally different spaces and Zuckerberg's idea of what's supposed to happen in those spaces is fundamentally weird and very possibly ridiculous.
Between the absence of consumer-friendly hardware - nothing is going to happen until the tech fits into very wearable low-effort glasses - and Facebook's eccentric history, I would expect Meta to fail and the metaverse to happen elsewhere, leaving FB to carry on as a kind of AOL for an ever-decreasing userbase until it's sold off for far too much money to some other large corporation which should know better.
The other subtext is that Zuck was always frustrated that he didn't have control of the underlying mobile platforms (ios/android) which strangled a bunch of FB's strategy for over a decade.
This was a funny bit when i saw it on twitter yesterday, but if we're actually going to update our top 5 tech companies acronym let's do it comprehensively.
Google has been Alphabet for a while, so MANGA should be MANAA. And I haven't understood why Netflix is in there for a while now, I think we should swap it for Microsoft.
> leaving FB to carry on as a kind of AOL for an ever-decreasing userbase until it's sold off for far too much money to some other large corporation which should know better.
Mapping FB onto AOL here feels like an effective way of summing things up. Although I'm trying to remember because it was a long time ago: did AOL make any grandiose product moves that ended up signalling its decline? I'm inclined to say no, but I could be completely wrong and forgetting something. What I recall was just a complete lack of innovation from AOL and a regression to money printing mode on the antiquated ISP with fancy user portal model.
Although perhaps you weren't trying to make a direct comparison between the two.
This is a very bad sign for facebook. They are betting on everyone walking around with 3D goggles talking in Zoom like meetings.
I personally would rather go outside and see reality than virtually doing it.
Only time will tell, but I'm betting on reality.
I think it's a bit naive to think it's either that or nothing. As long as they can develop new high quality VR experiences with high adoption, they would succeed. I don't think they even know what they will end up with in 5-10 years. It's a big and expensive experiment with non insignificant chance of success in my opinion.
I'm not a fan of Facebook/Meta, but I'm also not sure about this take. Rewind the clock 30-40 years, and I feel like it'd be easy to say something like "This is a bad sign for IBM. They are betting on everyone sitting around staring at a monitor sending electronic messages instead of talking."
That's not to say that they'll actually deliver on this idea, but we've definitely seen the transformative power of tech on society. Whether that's a good thing or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
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[ 256 ms ] story [ 472 ms ] threadhttps://www.google.com/search?q=webex+logo&tbm=isch
https://www.google.com/search?q=meta+logo&tbm=isch
This article makes a very cogent point: Zuckerberg has too much baggage with the general public and Meta would be much better off if he stepped out of the light.
Facebook and Zuckerberg were fairly blamed because they actively developed features that amplified misinformation, and refused to take any action to curb their damage.
(And, yes, there's a larger question about how companies like YouTube and Facebook should be approaching moderation at all, who gets to decide what is and isn't misinformation, who watches the watchmen, etc. But if we presume there's a rationale for moderation at all, then YouTube should be getting way more scrutiny than it generally receives.)
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/youtube-an... (2021)
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/youtub... (2019)
I was "defending" the metaverse to a friend outside of the tech bubble last night and I talked a lot about how much I learned about socialization/human connection when I used to play Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft. That those relationships which started somewhat "metaverse"-first meant as much as my "real" connections did... and that's what I feel the essence of Meta/metaverse is really trying to bring to everyone.
Facebook's potency is in the reshares, and in the "headline only" feed format where lies in headlines are persuasive even when the linked content is not. YT algorithm shows one person more bad content, but doesn't spam their friends. And in a video the viewer has time to think if the claims make sense.
If building a metaverse is a good idea, and that is a large if, then it will have been good for him to stay.
Interestingly, the most vocal opponents of Facebook are... traditional medias. The same medias that are competing (and losing!) against Facebook for add revenue.
Keep in mind that before Facebook, for a story to get any traction it had to be approved by the "editorial board" of a legacy news outlet. What do you think happened if the owner of the TV station or newspaper didn't want a story to hit the front page?
It's amazing how much bike-shedding there is here around the name and logo, and how little capacity most have for what these changes actually mean.
Meta is going full in on the metaverse... so that's going to be hitting some critical mass fairly soon (less than a decade). And that's nuts. We should take this time to enjoy living before that moment. Who knows what changes it will bring, but surely enough that there will be no going back.
The way I see this playing out is that the metaverse is going to be for poor people while reality is enjoyed by those with resources for "all five senses".
Given my experience in Alt Space thus far, I think there's a really good chance you're right.
The first experience you have is being dropped into your "home" and mine defaulted to a big mountain side house, warm wood, fireplace, massive window looking out into a beautiful valley.
It was virtual but convincing enough and I still sometimes enjoy just taking in the virtual view before or after playing a VR game.
I remember thinking it a bit odd, the actual world around me could be awful, but in here it was just good enough to trick my brain. Throw $10B at that experience and I'm curious to see what happens. Maybe a scarcity-free utopia where everyone can "live" in whatever beautiful environment they want to, maybe a dystopia where you get home and enter your unadorned concrete cube and plug in to your real home, needing just enough physical space to use the VR.
If they can ever get it fully jacked into your brain, I could see people just plugging in and never coming out.
edit: home is also a place to work on projects, so I guess that VR fulfills that in a minecraft-type fashion.
That's a stretch. Tech history is littered with big companies who went hard on a technology only for their attempt to flop. See: Newton, Virtual Boy, Windows Phone, and most recently Google Stadia. There's also little reason to think that CEO Mark Zuckerberg of 2021 is as in-touch with the what the public wants and tech trends as college student Mark Zuckerberg was in 2004.
Edit: Another way to look at is: Has Facebook ever launched a product as successful as their primary business?
They've acquired some wildly successful properties (I'm thinking Instagram & WhatsApp) - but their in-house product efforts outside of Facebook itself have either flopped or been marginal at best - Facebook Phone, Facebook Portal. Oculus might be the exception - for now - but there's healthy competition in the VR headset space and the market isn't yet big enough for a "metaverse" to be widely accessible like the Facebook website was in 2004.
FB sold users to advertisers. Very Web 2.0.
Well the potential decentralization of Web3 potentially destroys that business model and the Meta strategy seems like it reflects this potential change in the way Amazon saw the world going to digital?
What in world is Mark offering here? He's investing $10B into... what? AWS/Cloud was a reasonable business pitch (which seemed crazy but essentially: outsource your IT ops to AWS and we can help you scale like crazy very quickly).
What's Mark's pitch here? VR is nowhere near prime-time - just read around even on HN. It's got major issues and still lacks a killer app.
It's a vanity project that only a fantastically rich, out of touch person can indulge in. That or FB is toxic.
Apple was able to catch the paradigm shift of us starting to use our phones for everything, and make loads of money by offering services to a captive audience and sharecropping opportunities to app developers.
Facebook tried to become a platform during the last paradigm shift and failed. Selling users to advertisers has been lucrative but clearly isn't as sticky as the platform model (which is why they have to keep buying up their competitors). So they're trying to push another shift to VR and be the platform for that.
Apple leveraged the power of its brand in that transition (and created a flywheel of sorts to strengthen its brand), whereas the current FB brand wouldn't likely extend as well.
So helps show one reason why FB likely saw the need to change naming and start building a new brand (whereas Apple (and Amazon) went the other way).
I'm not sure anyone (other than some geeks) really understands what the "metaverse" is... or cares.
The name/symbolism/demo were uninspiring and vague at best.
Not to mention Mark isn't the best salesman for this. It seems so egotistical of him to assume HE needed to be the front-man for this effort other than to say "all of this... it's about me".
They are investing heavily in AR/VR and they have a proven track record in new product categories e.g. smartphone, tablet, headphones, watch.
Once the technologies improve such that the glasses/headsets are light and small enough then it's going to be something you can bring and use everywhere. And then the popularity will increase which in turn will attract developers. Repeat this cycle a few times and you have another $100+ billion App Store business on your hands.
I don't think it makes sense to conflate those two distinct use cases as the tech is different and user experience is vastly different as well.
Can you name a "digital space" or is this still vapor?
IMO this point is just a single example of the pattern we've seen. Everything done at Facebook is to drive that network data even if it harms the individual component. That's why Meta is so different from Alphabet. Alphabet is legitimately a collection of pretty independent companies - some of them synergize but never unnecessarily[1]. I purchased a VR headset last year and I ended up getting an Index after being mightily tempted by the Oculus - it's my first headset and I wasn't sure how much I'd like VR so I was really hesitant to drop a grand on it but... the likely future where all my activity is forcefully broadcast to all my family and friends on Facebook is a price I'm not willing to pay.
Facebook's non-Facebook products suffer from the fact that they so habitually pipe data right back to Facebook.
1. Oh - I'll add a caveat here about google accounts and Youtube. Google did try to merge the two at one point, but they got a huge amount of negative PR and ended up stepping it back significantly with aliases and multi-account management tools.
PdM: "Oh, users don't want one account? OK, let them make aliases they think are different, and log in that way. They won't realize it's all still one account, even when we show them their picture and list all these ~~aliases~~, er, "different accounts" they can log in as ..."
Users: "Yay, different accounts!"
Analytics: "Yay, one account!"
Advertisers: "Hey, thanks for tying even more of their identities together for me."
I don't know why he didn't pursue it if he is so sure in Metaverse VR/AR thing.
Fortnite seems to have the virtual event model working pretty well. Movies and concerts with friends and random annoying people jumping around.. but it does work,
Not to mention all that sweet, sweet game developer data and owning one of the most popular social multiplayer games out there today.
FTC is another problem but they would probably allow this acquisition no matter how big it is because Facebook is not in the business of making video games or game engines.
Besides owning Fortnite and major content creation engines for the metaverse like you said another good synergy is boosting Facebook's Twitch and YouTube Gaming competitor Facebook Gaming with Epic's expertise.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029317
(Also, /s)
"Yes, we know who you are."[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOrbrjBQf7Y
Consider this, and call me out if I'm wrong, for the past 5 years we were led to believe by FB/YouTube that algorithmically generated could only have negative consequences as it moved people to more and more reactionary content as it was the only way to optimize time on site. The only way FB could grow was by pushing content that got people riled up. Then TikTok came along and it's kind of disproven that? I started using TikTok as a joke and it's by far my most use social app now, and none of the algorithmically generated content is as polarizing as what I would find on the other apps; and clearly they are growing fast. There was another way but the local-maxima prevented FB from seeing it and as a result they have lost major brand cachet.
I don't know what is different about TikTok but the way I see it is Meta's problem will be avoiding their user base dying off and the USG will likely prevent any future acquisitions. Their standalone apps (M, Rooms, Riff, Gaming, Dating, Collab) haven't been major successes (although given the size of Facebook some of these have 10s of millions of users); and I'm not confident a VR platform will have major penetration outside of "Ready Player One" fanboys.
That said, FB is a trillion dollar company and betting against a company with such a huge war chest is like trying to catch a falling knife.
Not sure if I've ever believe it was the only way for them to grow. I hate Facebook (product) for what it has become but it is an excellent tool for its original use, which is keeping in touch with friends/family/communities.
1. No guaranteed-attention obligation from your circle, so you're free to share more things
2. Algorithms for YOUR attention so you see what you want to see in the order of importance. If you have very little time, you only see the most important things.
Email, Slack etc. are not even in the same category, it's like comparing a postcard to a newspaper headline
Indeed. My biggest fear is that succeed.
I happen to prefer PCs (and there is no reason to argue for or against that). Apple has been incredibly successful at capturing market share and their devices are now mandatory at my new job. I might not like it, but it's not the end of the world: Apple behaves ethically.
Now imagine your [otherwise] dream job demands that you strap a Quest on and feed Zuck's data fetish.
lol. It's just marketing, nothing more.
b) iPhone parts showing errors issues was a bug that was already fixed and applied to TouchID security validation. If it's something new then it's almost guarenteed that this is a good thing i.e. you're trying to tamper/remove the biometrics components.
c) Apple's customers don't want 3rd party App Stores. It's not a computer to them but an appliance like a microwave. They want security, privacy, moderation, convenience and alternate stores trade those away for features e.g. flexibility, price that no one really wants.
2) Apple customer support has a history of being deceitful. In the US it is illegal for them to reject jailbroken devices from warranty and I've been told by apple they will void your warranty on their internal services if you bring them a device.
3) Not all customers want a 3p App Store. Some do. iPhones are not microwaves, they are computers.
> They want security, privacy, moderation, convenience
Like a microwave? Wtf. Also, all these things can come through 3p app stores. Security is provided by the OS not App Store. Privacy is by app. Moderation apple still doesn't do right. Convenience is IAP that apps will actually use.
It's not scanning on the client side, it's hashing. People on this site should really understand the difference. The alternative, as many have pointed out, is them uploading your whole image to be scanned server side.
Smart money is that this is a move in front of Apple encrypting your whole icloud backup, and they have to do something if they don't want the legal, political, and social liability of being a free encrypted cloud storage for CSAM.
There's lots of reasons to criticise Apple, this isn't one.
Privacy is #1 selling point for Apple phones for geeks, it for sure ain't some mediocre hardware catching what chinese manufacturers released 1-2 generations before, nor sheepish bragging mentality that is so popular in poorer parts of the world.
They broke privacy. It ain't some super bendy term that you can argue about and twist to suit your current needs, in similar vein as ie truth. Lets break it down - private means mine and mine only, 0 other access, here, there, everywhere. Anything else is not private, whatever 'noble' cause you wrap it in that keeps shifting with time, location, political regime etc..
They claimed they had it. Many honestly believed them. They openly kicked it out and failed at it so badly they didn't even grok it could be an issue. Then whole clusterfuck happened as we all saw from first row.
Apple doesn't have privacy, period. It can claim to have some other features, and with some they are correct. And that's about it.
First, the FBI (which supposedly stopped the last attempt to introduce E2E) has more concerns than CSAM.
Second, the current scanning system + E2E will have significant weaknesses* compared to server side scanning. As it is, Apple will pay the same legal costs as it would be if it had implemented E2E without scanning.
The only way to answer both concerns is to have way more invasive scanning than Apple told us it would do. IMHO, iCloud E2E is just a made up slogan to justify Apple snooping on the device. The real future is just way more scanning.
* The scanning database must receive updates after the images have been uploaded, because the hash as described inherently cannot catch most offenders right away. It's an issue of both space (the proposal is based on a perceptual hash, but the hash must be far smaller than the original, so similar images can't all get the same hash) and timing (NCMEC can't find new CSAM right away).
However, the images were likely deleted on the device, so neither side has access to allow rescanning in the E2E scenario. Unless.. The solutions here all involve more scanning than the original proposal.
They are (their code is) looking at every item and reviewing it opaquely to us, and deciding if they should have an employee look at tiny thumbnails to tell the cops the owner is a pedophile. Its (a) not real hashing - its "perceptual" which is fancy math that says they're looking at thumbnails and (b) cycling through every item in a list and running an Algo against it is what I'd call scanning - lets not get bogged down on the terms.
We all know the tech details they shared, people on this site all understand the difference. We know the algorithm is easy enough to produce collisions. We know that apple said multiple 3 letter agencies can determine what goes in the bloom filter, and it would be downloaded from the internet and not audited. We know they are going to open it up to other countries governments too. We know that its on if you want to use opt-out services.
> The alternative, as many have pointed out, is them uploading your whole image to be scanned server side.
> Smart money is that this is a move in front of Apple encrypting your whole icloud backup
The whole image is being uploaded server side anyways.
My smart money says that this won't lead to encrypted backups anytime soon. Too many other things in those backups.
> social liability of being a free encrypted cloud storage for CSAM
I don't really think there is much tbh. That said, it is clear people would rather have non-absolutely-private cloud than a non-absolutely-private personal device. I know I would!
People criticize apple for "not letting you own the device" and this is a much bigger step down that road. I would rather a less-absolutely-private cloud service than an absolutely-private-everything where my local stuff is scanned.
> There's lots of reasons to criticise Apple, this isn't one.
There's lots of reasons to criticize Apple. Including this one.
1. Apple has blocked apps as objectionable because they were political even though simply factual. [1]
2. Apple's lock on the App Store facilitates government blocks on apps that Apple itself would otherwise deem fine. [2]
3. Apple blocks "adult" oriented apps. How many times do people have to rehash the lines between art and porn with authority gatekeepers instead of making their own choices?
4. Apple blocks game streaming apps, and other apps that act as front ends to other app-like worlds on the web, a whole new category of innovation cancelled. [3[
5. Apple inserts itself into otherwise peer-to-peer transactions, i.e. in-app non-code content purchases. This economic tax is both unfair, but also a dampener on innovation.
6. Apple on iOS restricts the downloading of code within apps to educational situations. (Currently rule 2.5.2 [4]) This is a huge dampener on innovation. Coding, including no-code coding, should be available to anyone wanting to be code literate or want to make their own tools. I get that their are safety issues, but those can be addressed with sandboxes, etc. Again, another layer of innovation killed off.
In summary, instead of being a bicycle shop for the mind, Apple's app stores block many kinds of innovation, tax providers in ways unrelated to Apple's role as phone provider, and routinely censor useful apps that are politically unappealing to Apple or governments, threaten Apple's lock on development tools, or based on Apple's sensitivity to safe (from a tech point of view) material where legitimate opinions vary as to what is desirable or not.
This is all user hostile.
Noting that there are alternative phones isn't a good response, as Apple's phones are at the center of tightly knit ecosystems. Customers do not have the ability to mix and match products between a few ecosystems and get the same value.
I view the App Store as Apple's new Achilles heal.
Apple's gatekeeper role has created perverse incentives for Apple to block significant innovation, economic viability, and freedom of expression on devices at the center of many of our lives.
Perverse incentives don't go away. They tend to metastasize (pun very much intended) [5].
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/28/apple-drone-striking-app-remo...
[2] https://www.vox.com/recode/22680010/russia-apple-app-store-s...
[3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/07/apples-block-of-x...
[4] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/29/facebo...
How can a company claim to be privacy friendly because it blocks ads while sharing private messages with a genocidal government?
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-knowingly-used-child-l...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mining-children-trfn/...
edit: for reference https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-28/leaked-ph...
Its very likely that a commercial Oculus device won't collect data (what company approves that?), so it might actually give FB a path to money that is free of data+ads.
Kissing by the number that have FB accounts, most?
Oh and it was my otherwise dream job at the time :)
Oh yeah, and it's a YC company.
There was that whole no poaching thing.
caught attempting to be a book cartel
hostile to right to repair
browser render lockdown in iOS
slow moving PWA support in Safari
deliberate slowdown of older iPhones due to battery
On Facebook, I see potentially divisive posts from friends with very different political views. The difference with TikTok is that those friends don't post content.
I think if you explicitly seek out problematic content you can end in a rabbit hole on any large algorithmic app.
Anyone who thinks these issues are somehow unique or exclusive to Facebook is simply being dishonest. They are a byproduct of the anonymous, unfettered free speech we get from the internet not something intrinsic to recommendation algorithms.
They have allowed anti-vaxxer, conspiracy, misinformation etc communities to thrive and flourish and it's happened without recommendation algorithms. It happened because when people can see other's peoples comments they are able to follow them to discover more people like that.
On Reddit this is somewhat true, but it's a well-known part of Reddit culture (though this has been changing as they've been kicking out more subs) that each sub has its own set of cultural mores, opinionated mods, and memes. There's lots of drama/hate on subs from other subs but you'll see the same phenomenon on the Fediverse or, for that matter, in a neighborhood gossip group.
It's not like these views go away without algorithmic newsfeeds, it just that algorithmic feeds accelerate their spread.
The moment you watch a few seconds of a polarizing video, out of curiosity, they will start recommending more of the same. This is how people fall into more radicalized bubbles.
Only on Tiktok have I seen teen girls dancing along to clearly white supremacist content about racial superiority.
I don't think this is fully accurate. The big differentiator for Tik Tok's algorithmic feed from FB's or Youtube's (in my mind) is not its accuracy or lack of polarization, it's actually that it draws much firmer and harder to cross lines between the parts of its userbase with an (IMO intentionally) nerfed search capability, so it's very difficult to break out of the demographic/interest bubble it decides you are in for feed purposes. So you, personally, probably receive literally no polarizing, political, etc content that you aren't happy to see. But that doesn't mean it's not there!
Here's an example: a researcher set up a new account, interacted with transphobic content, and was very quickly (in a few hours of viewing) seeing far-right conspiracy theory, antisemitic, white supremacy (and so on) content, some of which was endorsing violence. https://twitter.com/abbieasr/status/1445888305997000705
Now over time it might devolve into bad content if there is no higher level moderation to keep it on lighter side of things. I would personally be okay with not all platforms being totally democratic.
One might wonder what other content is suppressed on the platform. [2]
[0] https://www.dailydot.com/irl/tiktok-fat-lgbtq-disabled-creat...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50645345
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
The tide is correctly turning against the manifest abuses of this organization, regardless of what it asks to be called; with any luck it will be systematically dismantled and defanged.
The pathology and amorality inherent in its DNA goes back to Zuckerberg; the fish has rotted from the head from the start. That pathology leads to market valuation is not a surprise but it's also not conducive to survival.
TikTok is the epitome of content augmentation through engagement. They literally will push more and more of what you're engaging with. Their algorithm is highly optimized to put you into very deep rabbit holes of content.
During the BLM protests you could see two very different feeds depending what content were you liking and engaging with. After a few minutes of browsing it would literally feed you only pro-BLM or anti-BLM. No middle grounds.
Unless leadership changes, nothing good will be in store for society at large.
It is inevitable.
Maybe. But if money could buy product adoption we'd all be using Microsoft phones right now.
Tim Cook told an investor to "get off the stock" over criticisms that investing in things that don't contribute to the bottom line (such as sustainability initiatives). "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI" is not something you expect a bean counter to say in a shareholder meeting.
> I care about this existing, not just virtual and augmented reality existing, but it getting built out in a way that really advances the state of human connection...
> I think we’ll have hopefully an opportunity to shape the development of the next platform in order to make it more amenable to these ways that I think people will naturally want to interact.
I mean, how can you read stuff like this and not laugh?
Big VR bets makes less sense to me. AR is the next smartphone. VR is the next... TV or workstation monitor, and even then, only for some use cases. Just seems like a much smaller opportunity.
Even for industrial use, its only cases I've heard about have been to transmit manual labor over a network. There are very limited cases where we need to do that, although I have no doubt that VR will be useful for undersea or outer space welding, or something, with a very skilled operator. Otherwise, the accuracy necessary is going to make the machine (at the endpoint) far more expensive to build and maintain than it is to just send the human.
edit: It'll be good for killbots. They'll be largely autonomous other than Tesla autopilot-style nudges. The work doesn't require a lot of accuracy, and there are still a few social hangups about totally autonomous killing machines that would make an operator in a VR set more acceptable, even if they don't have much to do.
I think it's always worth considering the timeframe with these sorts of things.
Right now, yes, you're probably right.
But in 5, 10, 20, 50 years?
I see widespread VR/AR (especially AR) as being inevitable at some point in the future. But we still have a long way to go. It could still tangibly be decades away before the technology evolves into the right "shape".
Even with the current generation of VR hardware we're still looking at the equivalent of Charles Babbage's difference engine and trying to predict the iPhone from it.
If the point of a true metaverse is a persistent, always-on, digital universe that exists parallel to our own, it seems like the company that defined "social media" is well-positioned to define that universe as well.
Theranos, when they pivoted from a medication-delivering patch to a blood testing analytics company. Neither of which they ever actually had the tech for!
However, it is very rare for companies -- especially large, established ones -- to succeed in pivoting themselves to deal with new market realities and ways of doing business. The entrenched interests and culture inside these organizations tend to resist significant change. There's an irony that the bigger the company, the less power a CEO actually has.
Time will tell if they succeed.
Phone/ARM tablets were not.
[0] https://news.scott.services/microsoft-bing-usage-and-revenue...
There are as many people playing it on Quest as there are on Steam, which is wild considering just how many more Quest owners without a gaming PC there must be.
Facebook's algorithms seems very good at dectecting and pushing content that makes users have an emotional response.
They now have developed a feature where is someone or a page posts a comment to a page or group that I am not subscribed to, Facebook will push that content on to my feed.
It is just about the most annoying thing ever. I am profoundly not interested in people who I follow on what they post on Ted Cruz's Facebook page. Why is Facebook pushing Ted Cruz on to my feed if I am not subscribed to him? I want to see my friends posts, but not their responses to Ted.
Facebook sucks ass now, and I am going to convert over to mastidon or something.
Algorithmic content is great when it shows us things we want to see, but by it’s very nature it can be exploited to show us that which we most despise in an attempt to increase engagement.
I’m willing to go so far as to say the Algos in question are actually just optimized for engagement, not necessarily nefarious, but because we’re human, most people have an innate desire to make the world better in whatever way they can. Many believe discourse can help, but that’s obviously turned out to be flawed in the context of online conversation, where others can distance themself behind an online facade.
As long as we are optimizing for engagement, I feel all social media is doomed to the same fate.
And while the original Oculus shows you what promise there is from a hacker in the garage, the Quest 2 shows you what can be done when significant capital is invested in development.
I bought a Quest for my little brother across the country, and hanging out in VR is pretty cool. I can definitely believe there's something here. I don't know if Meta will actually end up being the platform in the future, but I certainly think there will be a platform, it will be good in a lot of ways, and because of this frankly audacious move by Meta we'll be getting there sooner.
Sometimes major upfront investments can create situations where its own size and expectations cannibalize their own potential.
The problem is that it's only an investor's view. It's quite dismissive of Facebook's very real political problems, and doesn't acknowledge that for many people - especially, but not exclusively younger users - Facebook is a terminal combination of boring, evil, and cringe.
But more than that, Facebook isn't in a unique position to own the metaverse. The rest of MANGA will be converging on similar space. If there's any possibility at all of open hardware - or at least of an open standard - it's likely the real competition will come from an unexpected direction.
Social and AR/VR are fundamentally different spaces and Zuckerberg's idea of what's supposed to happen in those spaces is fundamentally weird and very possibly ridiculous.
Between the absence of consumer-friendly hardware - nothing is going to happen until the tech fits into very wearable low-effort glasses - and Facebook's eccentric history, I would expect Meta to fail and the metaverse to happen elsewhere, leaving FB to carry on as a kind of AOL for an ever-decreasing userbase until it's sold off for far too much money to some other large corporation which should know better.
He's not going to let that happen again.
This was a funny bit when i saw it on twitter yesterday, but if we're actually going to update our top 5 tech companies acronym let's do it comprehensively.
Google has been Alphabet for a while, so MANGA should be MANAA. And I haven't understood why Netflix is in there for a while now, I think we should swap it for Microsoft.
What do we think about MAMAA?
Mapping FB onto AOL here feels like an effective way of summing things up. Although I'm trying to remember because it was a long time ago: did AOL make any grandiose product moves that ended up signalling its decline? I'm inclined to say no, but I could be completely wrong and forgetting something. What I recall was just a complete lack of innovation from AOL and a regression to money printing mode on the antiquated ISP with fancy user portal model.
Although perhaps you weren't trying to make a direct comparison between the two.
That's not to say that they'll actually deliver on this idea, but we've definitely seen the transformative power of tech on society. Whether that's a good thing or not is left as an exercise to the reader.