> CNBC spoke to a former advertising executive who said that even though TikTok is a Chinese-owned business, it has a recruiting edge over Meta because it is viewed as having less of a “moral downside.”
I actually view the moral downside with TikTok as at least as bad as Meta. The PRC isn’t exactly some bastion of freedom and excellence. Neither is the US, but you’re fooling yourself if you think a highly influential company headquartered in China isn’t being manipulated by the CCP.
by "military contracts" do you mean selling some sort of non-military SaaS to the military (eg. office 365), or actually selling arms or arms related software?
Here's the trust you can put in Meta to deal fairly with military
personnel [1]. If that's how they deal with those who've served,
imagine the contempt they have for the service.
Even completely setting aside the political aspects, how does TikTok have less of a moral downside as a product?
At least Facebook and Instagram can genuinely claim to be built on the idea of helping people build relationships.
As far as I understand it, TikTok completely eliminates the friend and family network. It's simply providing mind numbing bite size entertainment. It's genius is removing everything that might distract someone from scrolling mindlessly.
I view this quote as less about morals and more about Meta's reputation and failing recruiting efficiency.
Yes, the target candidates who buy into this are fooling themselves but only because Meta's recruiting techniques no longer work in the current climate.
Anyone that thinks this fails to understand the impact Facebook has had on the division and polarization of people through the spread of mis/disinformation and what companies like Cambridge Analytica has been able to accomplish through the Facebook platform.
We can say this is true about youtube, twitter and probably someday tiktok, but at least for now Facebook / Meta is absolutely the worst as they not only sold/leaked the PII but they've also been actively encouraging all of this.
As a software developer this makes me sad. META set a new standard for developer compensation. Hope downfall of SNAP, META doesn't cause developer comps to roll back to early 2010s level.
I'm a big fan of increasing developer compensation, but if that compensation is based on inflated and unsustainable business models/goals, then it's a false promise.
Meta is certainly not the first tech company I'd accuse of having an unsustainable business model, they actually built a money printing machine and aren't getting devs on illusory future revenue streams.
I'll admit I don't know a ton about how much this would have affected it but could it be because FB/Meta was not part of the salary fixing ring (Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe) so they were paying "market" rates vs the fixed ones.
Watching him rent out the UFC event on Saturday night and cheering while his wife sat by him horrified just looked like he’s slowly starting to burst the bubble he’s been living in.
Not judging the move at all, as I think many people change in their middle age adult lives. But just looked to me like a departure from the early days of Zuck.
Bezos right now looks straight up as a mafia boss.
In the 90's videos he looks like a typical nerd (video can be seen on 90 minutes america).
Right now, he looks like a mafia boss with his bald/shaved head and the gang member jacket (from the photos I have seen).
It's a shame the returns on this is so sputtering and confusing. VR continues to show a great deal of promise as an excellent tool for supporting HCI. Using my Quest 2 has been an absolute pleasure, and it seems an obvious choice over producing and transporting gargantuan televisions, creating separate rooms to support projectors, trying to figure out how to produce holograms, as a natural stop-off before BCI is viable, providing widespread affordable and comfortable living situations, and any other competing technology I can think of
In fact, the only truly useful thing it provides is Whatsapp (which it acquired primarily to gain users); and there are good alternatives to Whatsapp, so it's an "also".
The actual human connection features of Facebook turned out to be a novelty as humans discovered that they don't really do enough interesting things often; so keeping up with one's friends doesn't require a live feed, but rather a weekly or monthly note will do.
So once the friend status stuff became so blasé, and users were spending less attention on FB, FB amped up the suggested content. Now, as has been illustrated on some HN posts, the vast majority of what one sees on FB is just suggested content.
Instagram is the same. People just aren't interesting enough to keep an entire platform alive. Sure, the influencers and posers will provide a lot of content, but within any given category there are hundreds of similar (and quickly boring) options.
The grand business model of attracting people to a platform and then showing them lots of ads just cannot survive long term without real content; and there's less and less real content each year.
Meta is so large and has so much marketshare already that no pivot could save them. Their only chance is to merge with a content company like Netflix (where the content machine is arguably already oversaturating the channels and leaving viewers bored despite many new series each year).
In 10 years, Meta is likely to be just another AOL.
> So once the friend status stuff became so blasé, and users were spending less attention on FB, FB amped up the suggested content. Now, as has been illustrated on some HN posts, the vast majority of what one sees on FB is just suggested content.
>
> Instagram is the same. People just aren't interesting enough to keep an entire platform alive. Sure, the influencers and posers will provide a lot of content, but within any given category there are hundreds of similar (and quickly boring) options.
The irony (for me, at least) is that it was Meta's attempts to drive more engagement that pushed me away from both platforms. When Facebook was just the actual activity of my friends, I enjoyed it. Once they started messing with things and it became more about "suggested content" than a useful way to keep in touch with my friends, I realized how much of a time waste it was and deleted my account. I haven't deleted my Instagram account yet, but it seems to be inevitable as Instagram turns more and more into a low-rent TikTok where the feed has been taken over by content suggested by the algorithm rather than just the photos posted by my contacts (and FWIW, I don't follow any "influencers", only people that I actually know or artists whose work I enjoy).
I may be an outlier, but to me every "improvement" that they've made to try to increase the amount of content and engagement has made it less attractive because it feels less genuine and more generic. On the other side of it, it also makes me less likely to bother posting content because I know that the algorithm won't be showing it to anyone or will be prioritizing it lower than the stuff that's been carefully constructed to be "engaging".
I think this has been the mayor difference between Facebook and Twitter (which still allows chronological sort, even if you have to "remind" the website to do so) and the explanation of why still use the second but not the first
I wonder if we've been hitting a lot of peaks in recent times and will continue to do so in the near future. Peak-social media, peak-influencer, peak-outrage, etc. The result will be a more boring, but hopefully saner, set of spaces we point our eyeballs at.
At a high level, perhaps this was a necessary phase for human society to transition through in order to come to terms with these new technologies. Our relationship with them was always likely be chaotic at first, then settle into a more healthy and sustainable one. I'm personally looking forward to it. The past 10-15 years of this stuff has been tiring, to say the least.
> People just aren't interesting enough to keep an entire platform alive
This is a really interesting point, and probably mostly true.
I'd add onto it, that even for people who are doing lots of interesting things, that Instagram soon becomes awkward to use for fear of "showing off" and that it's fundamentally set up as more of a broadcast-to-audience system rather than any sort of interact-with-friends system, which makes it worse.
The parasocial influencer thing works, because it's supposed to be a hollow one-direction "watch me have fun doing X", but real friendships aren't a series of watching each other have fun, they're about actually doing things together and/or having deeper conversations about the experiences, and Instagram fundamentally pushes interactions into "Publisher-Subscriber" model rather than the "Peer-to-Peer" relationship of natural human friendship.
BeReal, for example, is still really tied to how we've been doing things for the past decade and a half, but it's actually a bit more boring and personal, so I enjoy it way more than current Meta offerings.
> The actual human connection features of Facebook turned out to be a novelty as humans discovered that they don't really do enough interesting things often; so keeping up with one's friends doesn't require a live feed, but rather a weekly or monthly note will do.
Oh gosh no. This is not what society has learned at all. See Instagram, Tik Tok. Not being interesting enough is not a barrier to posting incessantly.
>>The actual human connection features of Facebook turned out to be a novelty<<
I don't agree. FB play(ed) an important role for me: helping me keep my extended family across the goings on in my child's life (they all live elsewhere). It was quite good at making grandparents/aunts/uncles feel connected etc.
But that utility is largely buried beneath a growing list of 'features' with little appeal - I don't need prompts to add people I know. I don't need yet another marketplace. I don't need short-form videos from complete strangers.
Today, 80%+ of my newsfeed feels like irrelevant content - and that's what's killing FB.
I agree with this. I moved across country when I was 16 and have been able to regain friendships that would have been lost otherwise. However lately it seems to be 80% adds and unrelated videos. Often if I seek someone out I find they have been putting a bunch of stuff up there that I missed. It has made me much less interested in the Facebook product.
On the other hand, we have an Oculus and I'm quite enjoying some of the "metaverse" worlds in Horizons. I think I'm firmly in the minority there.
Online marketing, its processes and practices, need to be revisited. I know some small companies that don't even have public websites, just "pages" within Fb/Insta, so their entire marketing operation relies on Meta's policies of the day.
Not surprisng that companies with extreme levels of cash will eventually fall off a cliff.
At least Musk starts up other companies since 10 medium sized companies are potentially more sustainable and useful than one enormous one.
As soon as you are that rich, you can afford to waste unimaginable amounts of money on concepts or ideas - even terrible ones, when smaller companies would be forced to prove the market before they spent their much smaller budgets.
This is no surprise to me, as a manager of several large groups and pages.
There is no real moderation, raids are commonplace and while trolls are able to bypass the moderation algorithm to write their post, real users regularly get banned for responding to them harshly.
Public groups are simply a chore, anyone can raid with laughing reactions and, depending on the setting, leave comments. The moderation and pending membership queue of a public group that has one or two controversial viral posts becomes immediately unusable.
Fake accounts are rampant and users you ban as a community moderator always come back with a similar name accompanied by "II", "III", "IV"... when you report them as fake accounts, the algorithm responds that there is no problem. When you report oblivious trolls and hate speech (with only one letter changed, think n-word but with a w, etc.), the algorithm responds that there is no problem with the message.
These days, Facebook is simply not safe for most organic uses other than corporate pages and maybe the occasional meme pages. But please, don't read the comments if you value your wellbeing.
Meanwhile, I can't create an account without giving a phone number.
I tried to create a Twitter account, but was either instantly banned the moment I completed the sign-up form (using an incognito window) or was blocked from completing the form due to mandatory phone number. It's even worse if you try to use a VPN, TOR or any other privacy-protecting browser plugins to block tracking.
Somehow we've gotten the worst of both worlds, where real users are blocked but spammers can get in.
If Zuckerberg is serious about turning his company around he should bring back Palmer Luckey, but now as head of content moderation. Making peace with his former enemies and turning the company into a true melting pot would boost its value to users and bring innovative content. However, I fear he lacks the wisdom and boldness to do the right thing.
What I want from Facebook: To know what my friends are up to.
What I get is, well - of the top ten items in my feed right now:
5 are actual updates from friends
3 are ads
2 are "Have you considered adding these people? Or using this functionality?".
I find it off-putting and makes me less likely to actually use the app.
"What I want from Facebook: To know what my friends are up to."
I found out that this bend my view on people that I know. I prefer to curiously ask in real life about what they are doing instead to start coversion with knowing of what they want to be known about them online. Which is mostly saturated with "filters" and not real.
So I disabled feed completely by plugins in browser 4 years ago. Nowadays I use FB only for marketplace and sharing links of my works from portfolio.
I have friends all over the world, from various stages of my life. And I have two small children. I literally cannot have that kind of conversation with the majority of people. I'll take what I can get.
For me, there is no value of friendship maintained by baised digital connection. I rather invest time in real relationships. There I find people with similar approach.
Because digital communication without natural interaction on spoken word tend to made biased image of self. I find this harmful for society because it shift dialogue to extreme.
I don’t know if it’s a free fall or not but once this is negative news cycle and particularly the phrase free fall is used, it becomes very tough to get out of.
meta, metaverse, sandberg.. all these things are happening simply because they saturated fb user growth. stock market doesnt care how big you are, they just want growth. meta is flailing about in the water, if they cant find growth from somewhere they will drown. (and i will celebrate)
I'm late to the party, but I'll chime in anyway... Keeping up with friends can only work if one has friends; We are more isolated than ever. I always blamed the boring suburbs/built environment for this, but Japan has the same problem, so idk.
The poll of 1,254 adults aged 18 and older found that 27 percent of millennials have no close friends, 25 percent have no “acquaintances” and 22 percent — or 1 in 5 — have no buddies at all.
Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported On the 12th, citing the results of the survey, 31.3 percent of Japanese surveyed said they had no close friends, far higher than the United States, Germany and Sweden.
"Every empire contains the seeds of its own destruction" -G.W.F. Hege
The Metaverse is just an example of everything that's wrong with it. Why would anyone want to spend time in something that looks horrendously outdated?
56 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 91.0 ms ] threadI actually view the moral downside with TikTok as at least as bad as Meta. The PRC isn’t exactly some bastion of freedom and excellence. Neither is the US, but you’re fooling yourself if you think a highly influential company headquartered in China isn’t being manipulated by the CCP.
[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/news/2022/09/28/meta-ordered-t...
At least Facebook and Instagram can genuinely claim to be built on the idea of helping people build relationships.
As far as I understand it, TikTok completely eliminates the friend and family network. It's simply providing mind numbing bite size entertainment. It's genius is removing everything that might distract someone from scrolling mindlessly.
Yes, the target candidates who buy into this are fooling themselves but only because Meta's recruiting techniques no longer work in the current climate.
The media really have new ways of spinning the cauldron and have an extremely short attention span on what is going on with TikTok, don't they?
We can say this is true about youtube, twitter and probably someday tiktok, but at least for now Facebook / Meta is absolutely the worst as they not only sold/leaked the PII but they've also been actively encouraging all of this.
They already get hit with constant legal battles and fines regularly when on their "best behavior".
Watching him rent out the UFC event on Saturday night and cheering while his wife sat by him horrified just looked like he’s slowly starting to burst the bubble he’s been living in.
Not judging the move at all, as I think many people change in their middle age adult lives. But just looked to me like a departure from the early days of Zuck.
In the 90's videos he looks like a typical nerd (video can be seen on 90 minutes america). Right now, he looks like a mafia boss with his bald/shaved head and the gang member jacket (from the photos I have seen).
In fact, the only truly useful thing it provides is Whatsapp (which it acquired primarily to gain users); and there are good alternatives to Whatsapp, so it's an "also".
The actual human connection features of Facebook turned out to be a novelty as humans discovered that they don't really do enough interesting things often; so keeping up with one's friends doesn't require a live feed, but rather a weekly or monthly note will do.
So once the friend status stuff became so blasé, and users were spending less attention on FB, FB amped up the suggested content. Now, as has been illustrated on some HN posts, the vast majority of what one sees on FB is just suggested content.
Instagram is the same. People just aren't interesting enough to keep an entire platform alive. Sure, the influencers and posers will provide a lot of content, but within any given category there are hundreds of similar (and quickly boring) options.
The grand business model of attracting people to a platform and then showing them lots of ads just cannot survive long term without real content; and there's less and less real content each year.
Meta is so large and has so much marketshare already that no pivot could save them. Their only chance is to merge with a content company like Netflix (where the content machine is arguably already oversaturating the channels and leaving viewers bored despite many new series each year).
In 10 years, Meta is likely to be just another AOL.
The irony (for me, at least) is that it was Meta's attempts to drive more engagement that pushed me away from both platforms. When Facebook was just the actual activity of my friends, I enjoyed it. Once they started messing with things and it became more about "suggested content" than a useful way to keep in touch with my friends, I realized how much of a time waste it was and deleted my account. I haven't deleted my Instagram account yet, but it seems to be inevitable as Instagram turns more and more into a low-rent TikTok where the feed has been taken over by content suggested by the algorithm rather than just the photos posted by my contacts (and FWIW, I don't follow any "influencers", only people that I actually know or artists whose work I enjoy).
I may be an outlier, but to me every "improvement" that they've made to try to increase the amount of content and engagement has made it less attractive because it feels less genuine and more generic. On the other side of it, it also makes me less likely to bother posting content because I know that the algorithm won't be showing it to anyone or will be prioritizing it lower than the stuff that's been carefully constructed to be "engaging".
At a high level, perhaps this was a necessary phase for human society to transition through in order to come to terms with these new technologies. Our relationship with them was always likely be chaotic at first, then settle into a more healthy and sustainable one. I'm personally looking forward to it. The past 10-15 years of this stuff has been tiring, to say the least.
This is a really interesting point, and probably mostly true.
I'd add onto it, that even for people who are doing lots of interesting things, that Instagram soon becomes awkward to use for fear of "showing off" and that it's fundamentally set up as more of a broadcast-to-audience system rather than any sort of interact-with-friends system, which makes it worse.
The parasocial influencer thing works, because it's supposed to be a hollow one-direction "watch me have fun doing X", but real friendships aren't a series of watching each other have fun, they're about actually doing things together and/or having deeper conversations about the experiences, and Instagram fundamentally pushes interactions into "Publisher-Subscriber" model rather than the "Peer-to-Peer" relationship of natural human friendship.
Oh gosh no. This is not what society has learned at all. See Instagram, Tik Tok. Not being interesting enough is not a barrier to posting incessantly.
I don't agree. FB play(ed) an important role for me: helping me keep my extended family across the goings on in my child's life (they all live elsewhere). It was quite good at making grandparents/aunts/uncles feel connected etc.
But that utility is largely buried beneath a growing list of 'features' with little appeal - I don't need prompts to add people I know. I don't need yet another marketplace. I don't need short-form videos from complete strangers.
Today, 80%+ of my newsfeed feels like irrelevant content - and that's what's killing FB.
On the other hand, we have an Oculus and I'm quite enjoying some of the "metaverse" worlds in Horizons. I think I'm firmly in the minority there.
At least Musk starts up other companies since 10 medium sized companies are potentially more sustainable and useful than one enormous one.
As soon as you are that rich, you can afford to waste unimaginable amounts of money on concepts or ideas - even terrible ones, when smaller companies would be forced to prove the market before they spent their much smaller budgets.
There is no real moderation, raids are commonplace and while trolls are able to bypass the moderation algorithm to write their post, real users regularly get banned for responding to them harshly.
Public groups are simply a chore, anyone can raid with laughing reactions and, depending on the setting, leave comments. The moderation and pending membership queue of a public group that has one or two controversial viral posts becomes immediately unusable.
Fake accounts are rampant and users you ban as a community moderator always come back with a similar name accompanied by "II", "III", "IV"... when you report them as fake accounts, the algorithm responds that there is no problem. When you report oblivious trolls and hate speech (with only one letter changed, think n-word but with a w, etc.), the algorithm responds that there is no problem with the message.
These days, Facebook is simply not safe for most organic uses other than corporate pages and maybe the occasional meme pages. But please, don't read the comments if you value your wellbeing.
I tried to create a Twitter account, but was either instantly banned the moment I completed the sign-up form (using an incognito window) or was blocked from completing the form due to mandatory phone number. It's even worse if you try to use a VPN, TOR or any other privacy-protecting browser plugins to block tracking.
Somehow we've gotten the worst of both worlds, where real users are blocked but spammers can get in.
He was previously on Firefox on Win10.
What I get is, well - of the top ten items in my feed right now: 5 are actual updates from friends 3 are ads 2 are "Have you considered adding these people? Or using this functionality?".
I find it off-putting and makes me less likely to actually use the app.
I found out that this bend my view on people that I know. I prefer to curiously ask in real life about what they are doing instead to start coversion with knowing of what they want to be known about them online. Which is mostly saturated with "filters" and not real.
So I disabled feed completely by plugins in browser 4 years ago. Nowadays I use FB only for marketplace and sharing links of my works from portfolio.
- Got distracted by launching a crypto currency
- Overhired in 2021, thinking pandemic media consumption would continue. I blame this on Bay Area bias.
- Overinvested in the Oculus side project.
- Got distracted by the "Meta" rebrand. It's telling how they fell so shortly after the rebrand.
- Sandburg left. She's someone who could stand up to Mark.
- Apple and tracking. This was always a risk. It's ok to take the money while you can, but it feels like there wasn't a plan for later.
- Got distracted and didn't take TikTok seriously.
The poll of 1,254 adults aged 18 and older found that 27 percent of millennials have no close friends, 25 percent have no “acquaintances” and 22 percent — or 1 in 5 — have no buddies at all.
Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported On the 12th, citing the results of the survey, 31.3 percent of Japanese surveyed said they had no close friends, far higher than the United States, Germany and Sweden.
"Every empire contains the seeds of its own destruction" -G.W.F. Hege