Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. For me, social media feeds were never addicting, but more tedious. I found visiting friends pages and sometimes finding an update, sometimes not, like a slot machine, more addicting. And there was a whole culture around what it meant if you saw somebody (a crush?) visiting your profile, sending a "poke", or commenting on a picture.
I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant, and I believe it was also not inconvinient for FB as they moved from home pages and Farmville to newsfeeds and now videos (which probably earns them more).
Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.
I think this is Facebook's biggest issue: they moved from being a very useful tool to being the app that tries to drive traffic and engagement so much that it becomes less useful. I think they should refocus back on being a useful tool to keep track of friends, and keep in touch with people you meet, and then do the other stuff they want to do separately. Facebook IS still useful, but because of all the noise now people mostly use it to be able to contact old friends OR they don't use the close social network features that use to make facebook useful.
> I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006
I think that's projecting. Many countries don't care, and many groups of people don't care.
> people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006
I disagree with this one. They might be afraid of sharing their data explicitly i.e. sharing everything happening to them for everyone to see (even strangers). The trend now is sharing content to people they only have very close relationships with. But them being afraid of big tech collecting and analyzing their data? I don't think so.
I thought I would love Facebook but apparently people don't.
My family do not share more than a few holiday pictures.
No one really shared normal likeable lifevents.
WhatsApp groups are totally fine and even showed me how little I care about constant updates from other life's.
And no people also don't care what I do.
People are busy. Family people think about school issues and handling their daily life and planing a family holiday.i care about science and politics. My mother cares about the next hiking tour.
Google+ circle feature was already the technology highpoint of handling social media and no one really had the motivation to setup their circles or even use Google+.
Even sharing specific things is hard. Over or under sharing: I would have loved to see much more of a friend's house building for example.
While it feels like digital is the future, the people around you are. That's something Facebook and co teached me. It's a bad substitute.
I don't think that gap actually exists. That "directory of people" is now people's whatspp/discord/snapchat/instagram/messenger DMs. I think people are over the one giant hirehose of people you're loosely acquainted with, so social media has split into two extremes - a big feed of content from others, like reddit/tiktok/twitter. And a lot more closed/private groups, like DMs, group chats, and discords.
We have moved from a people focus to a content focused UX design. TikTok is this in perfection as while "creators" get millions of views, remembering them on scale is hard and following usually doesn't alter the experience much.
The reality is that a "people directory" doesn't have the same level of engagement.
Personally I think Instagram (The core product, not stories or reels) is to today what Facebook and MySpace where back in the day.
Obviously though that is being eroded away by Instagrams lack of confidence and insistence to fight TikTok, which I also find strange I mean yeah its a vertical feed of video but really why you go to it is really different for why you go to IG, TikTok has more in common with YouTube than IG.
>Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers.
This was Social Networking 101 and Zuck got it right and he won big but there are so many different forms of social networking that are possible and are happening today like ephemeral content(Snapchat), short videos(TikTok) etc.
Video was and still is huge opportunity and you could see that from the astronomical rise of YouTube since 2005/2006 till today. YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world and the second most visited website in the world.
Speaking of TikTok; the rise of TikTok was inevitable since Vine was also huge video opportunity but Twitter simple blew it away. If Vine had good leadership TikTok probably wouldn't exist or it wouldn't be as popular as it is today.
And also YouTube and TikTok are sort of hybrid social networks in a way that they are modern form of TV entertainment platforms because you can passively watch videos and get entertained nonstop without interacting with anybody. So they are not really at the same conceptual level as Facebook is.
>I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006.
Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers.
> because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant
What are you talking about? These assholes invented panopticon surveillance based advertising.
Instead of making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars selling normal ads to normal people the way it had been done for decades (buy an ad on a page people who see the page see the ad) they pushed and pushed to climb into every corner of your digital life to know exactly who you are to squeeze out even more profits.
Then they used monopoly power so gained to illegally crush all competitors while buying off the political leadership that should have stopped them.
But this is somehow the fault of “old media”? Come on.
The reason it would be hard to start something like that is because of overwhelming monopoly power these platforms hold and their commitment to using surveillance. In a sane freely competitive world these alternatives would already exist.
> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.
It has been 6 years since Mastodon should have accelerated to be a viable alternative to Twitter and today the only successful Mastodon-derivative that is in operation is Truth Social; a centralized social network and even that has more users than Mastodon itself.
I don't know but that already sounds like a failure, where it has helped the 'undesirables' get their own platform, unfortunately.
But that's free software folks, where anyone can use it.
We probably need a social media craigslist that implements the basic features you are describing and then is ok with keeping things running without the need for growth.
The problem with social media is that most people want to fill their free time consuming social media. But you have to have creators that want to create content for everyone else to consume. So you need to have some kind of addicting reward mechanism to get people to create content. (The simple upvote here and Reddit)
Have you looked at Tumblr lately? It always sounds just like what people say they miss nowadays from social media. Its feed is chronological by default (for now), and it does allow you to customize your own page in a lot of ways. I feel it's inevitable that it'll become a soulless ad space like all others eventually, but it's not there yet.
They're trying to monetize it with different approaches at the time like being able to boost a post's visibility without giving you any targeting tools, tipping, or giving another user a button to spawn crabs on the UI for a day.
Will it last? Probably not! But it's not a terribly awful dystopic place yet.
I completely agree that the “people directory” isn’t coming back due to to social hesitation. And I think I stand counter and say it was an anomaly that it existed. It existed solely because it was new. People have different identities across the internet and it’s best to keep them separate. You don’t use your work email for personal stuff. You don’t use your LinkedIn account when you want to create a Tinder account for a reason.
I also agree that the “old media” trashed tech until people finally agreed it was bad. I think some of it’s justified but not all. I’ve long complained about the bias here. I think the shift of democratizing the voice of the people is only going to change society more (in the short term we may call this bad for democracy but I think it’ll be good in the long term). For example, no news site would have run a story about George Floyd, but thanks to social media we don’t need them to. The flip side is misinformation, of course.
I think facebooks drive to video is probably benign trend chasing. I don’t know if it earns them more but I’m sure they’re lowering ad value in the short term until advertisers figure out how to make good ads on it. I don’t have data but I suspect the “home page and FarmVille” era died on its own and the newsfeed was facebooks way of injecting new life (as opposed to the NF killing individual postings)
> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.
And no body will use it, like how no one uses Mastodon.
Because discovery on Activitypub is one of the worst especially on an independent server, where you are basically "tooting" to your self.
Normal users don't understand what is an instance or what is a server.
Which is fine, if advanced users adopted Mastodon it would be enough for the HN crowd, but they didn't because of the network effect.
Of all the platforms today, linkedin might be the closest to that. Maybe that's part of why it's become so garbage - in filling a niche as a people directory its accidentally providing a half baked solution to the gap that used to be filled by old facebook.
"This explains Facebook’s recent transition toward short videos and algorithmic recommendations of content that doesn’t come from friend groups."
I agree with the authors perspective that if Facebook and Twitter try and capture the TikTok market they will only in the end up hurting themselves. In fact the reason I don't use Facebook much anymore is because of the changes they have made...
When I login I may see a funny video of a guy falling in Texas (Who I don't know) or an attractive women in exercise pants doing somethings quasi provocative.
I am not coming to Facebook for national news, for TV 3.0 like entertainment... I am coming to check in with friends, family see some pictures of relatives and see what people have to say about what is happening in their life.
The further they move away from this model.... IMO could lead to further decline in the platform.
I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces. I wouldn't know because I don't get a lot of satisfaction from groups and I don't use the marketplace, but people say that they serve as a small town gathering place in a lot of locations, sort like Craigslist was for awhile.
I don't see how introducing flashy short videos that produce a dopamine hit in the easily amused is going to grow Facebook
> Facebook, it seems, is moving away from its traditional focus on text and images, spread among people who know one another, to instead adopt TikTok’s emphasis on pure distraction. This shift is not surprising given TikTok’s phenomenal popularity, but it’s also shortsighted: platforms like Facebook could be doomed if they fail to maintain the social graphs upon which they built their kingdoms.
This. I on occasion visit Facebook to keep up with what friends are doing. If they turn it into TikTok, I will have zero reason to go there any more.
In my experience, FB and others moved away from being about your friends to become content sharing machines long time ago. It’s like reddit but without sub separation + influencer glamour.
Tiktok on the other hand came from purely creative angle. It’s not about your friends, it’s about using creative tools to express something. That’s why TikTok dominated the original new content market. TikTok’s editing tools are phenomenal and people are using them so creatively.
IMHO, the traditional social media giants optimized for profit only, destroyed any potential competitors and up until TikTok we have been left to terrible state of the social media.
If you recall, FB and others were involved in political manipulations and accused of spreading extremism.
It might seem like long time ago but American-made social media was riddled with conspiracy theorist and white supremacists and the tech giants were blamed for spreading that in the name of engagement. At some point the place has become so horrible that they started blocking prominent accounts, including the American President.
It feels that we are thinking all of the social media the same, but in reality some of them are content platforms and some of them are social media and some of them are in between.
Facebook trying to become content platform like Youtube or TikTok is killing itself.
They already moved from being this useful tool to keep track of friends and people you meet to being a noisy content platform. BUT, you can still use it (via messenger) to keep track of your friend, so people (including me) still use it for that. It is still a shame that they didn't preserve the old utility of facebook and created the noisy content platform as a separate thing.
Social media and Websites in general are like TV shows or recording artists - they exist within an era and eventually become legacy/classic and irrelevant to the new youth culture.
No one wants to engage with the same cultural artifacts of their parents or the previous generation. They want to establish themselves as a distinct cultural era and need symbols, etc that are distinct.
Tiktok here does not force you to login for watching the videos (unless you want to like / comment / subscribe etc.. ). And also allows downloading the videos right from the app (if the creator has enabled download for the video), so I download the ones that are to be bookmarked.
This is in stark contrast to what the FB and Insta like companies do.
Since I don't login, I use multiple devices to access tiktok. And I noticed that the stream content is different on my phone (mostly used while traveling / outside home and contain news and semi serious random stuff), tab (mainly used in the bed and contain light funny contents) and computer (serious stuff - arts, tech etc..).
BTW - I am only a tiktok consumer and not creator.
A good analysis. Whether you like it or not, Tiktok is a classic example of disruption. They've not only circumvented the moat of their biggest competitors, but made it a liability - FB & Insta can't just abandon the social graph without disenfranchinsing their existing users. Absolutely textbook innovation.
TikTok is pretty diverse. I get zero view / like videos. Facebook got tiring all anyone did was call out / be offended / be outraged. Nothing fun anymore . TikTok has a surprising amount of fun stuff.
Facebook, it seems, is moving away from its traditional focus on text and images, spread among people who know one another, to instead adopt TikTok’s emphasis on pure distraction.
I don't know why the author didn't make the obvious connection here. TikTok's emphasis is not on distraction, but on video. TikTok is successful because it understands the power of video without the legacy mental model of television: longer videos punctuated by attention-breaking ads. YouTube is still firmly operating in this legacy model.
In the beginning I liked the easy way it afforded me to keep in contact with friends and acquaintances. Then it included more and more "other" stuff, and I just lost interest in it. Shame really. In the beginning it was so useful and I honestly did not mind being shown some ads in exchange for that.
But now my data would be used not only to selects ads but also the other content, blurring the difference between what is an ad and what is "content". Facebook lost its way, and it looks like they're not looking for a path back.
I could never get Twitter. I remember friends being excited by it, but to me it was just adding short text to a page that probably nobody is going to see anyway. Then Instagram - I couldn't get that either. I put my photos up and what? I could do that on a forum with people with common interest. Eventually forums got closed so I realised you can add a # with the topic you photos / videos are about. But this is so limited and there is no guarantee people who are interested in it are actually going to see (because algo won't show them).
Then I installed Tik Tok to see what's the fuss about. So it's clearly aimed at people with short attention span. It was entertaining, but you can quickly catch the patterns of a typical Tik Tok video and it becomes boring. Basically the same themes just different people, locations and music. I couldn't watch that.
Then Facebook filled the niche of forums with their groups, but this is a dumpster fire - they hide comments, posts are not coming up chronologically and so on.
These platforms are not for you to learn anything or enterntain you, they just want your money.
The author of this article is Cal Newport. A computer science professor and the author of my favourite non-fiction book: Deep Work. It's the one book I recommend to any knowledge worker.
With the decline of Instagram, and Facebook's like of vision and product, I wonder if it's time for a new site to share pictures (and specifically not video since it seems to be cursed) with friends.
I see people uploading pictures to Instagram less and less each day, where they'd have over a hundred at once before, but it's not that they don't want to, it's just that the app feels too complex and repelling.
For Twitter, however, arguably the most important event of 2009 was not these publicity bonanzas but the introduction of the retweet button... As with Facebook, the larger that Twitter’s social graph grew, the more attractive the network became. Pretenders to the short-message throne, such as Parler or Gab, struggled to get traction, as their networks lacked sufficient size and numbers of influential users to compete in a battle for attention. By 2011, Twitter, following in Facebook’s footsteps, passed the milestone of a hundred million users.
While discussing the time period from 2009-2011, the article claims thats Gab and Parler "struggled to gain traction", but those services didn't launch until 2017 and 2018.
TikTok is crazy addictive. I’m in my 50s and I watch it for an hour when I wake up and an hour before I sleep. It’s entertaining as hell but I know it’s bad for me.
What's most bizarre is that Meta has two popular and quite distinct social media apps and it now seems to be changing both to mimic TikTok. I'm sure that some smart people have analyses showing that that's what maximises engagement for each product, but from a strategy perspective they really seem to be throwing a potential huge advantage out of the window. Why not just change one app and keep the other one distinct?
Especially the old Facebook-style 'keep up with friends and family' app would seem to have potential for sustained long-term use from a different user base than a TikTok clone.
> Unlike Twitter, TikTok doesn’t need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging.
I would go further: celebrities often treat Tiktok as just another distribution channel and they seem to flop because of it.
Another point: Tiktok has incredibly slick UI/UX. IG used to have this but that's been lost in the constant battle of competing interests. Even the search isn't terrible. Probably the best feature is you can search videos you've watched and/or liked. I can't tell you how many times I've found what I've been looking for because of that.
Stitching and dueting are genuinely new formats too. Plus it's not all dance videos (eg [1]). One issue Tiktok does have is brigading/mass-reporting. You have to identify people who make false reports (eg when a video is reviewed and reports are found baseless you could make such reports as false). Collect too many and your reports get ignored (ie you're shadowbanned).
FB/IG managed to successfully steal the stories feature (from Snapchat) but I don't think that's going to work with Reels. As noted, Tiktok isn't really based on a social graph so there's a disconnect there.
Some commenters here have talked about data collection. Literally nobody cares about that.
People forget how controversial introducing the news feed was. IIRC ~10% of users said they'd quite FB over the news feed. But that decision has proven to be correct. What I think is actually the most controversial FB thing did was enable sharing of links. This boosted engagement but I think really killed the use case many had for FB: to find out what friends, relatives and acquaintances were up to. Nobody cares about Aunt Alice's posts about how the pigeons are government cameras.
One area I think FB really dropped the ball on was Groups. For a lot of active FB users this is why they use FB. It should be more central to the experience (IMHO).
Tiktok isn't hte first existential threat to FB. IG was. Back then FB could buy IG. It's why they did. In a decade we've had two existential threats to FB. This is why I don't think government action is really needed in the social media space. It'll work itself out.
I hope someone working at YouTube see this. I was watching Shorts and it's infested with literal horse fucking videos from countless India spam channels. NSFW example: https://youtube.com/shorts/8Pd4s07vIq0?feature=share
I have mixed feelings about this. For all their fault, social media websites (e.g., fb) reflected our reality, but amplified the controversial parts to increase "engagement".
TikTok, OTOH, is shaping our reality by literally altering our culture. I'm not that old, but even 10 years ago, the concept of dancing in front of a camera on the street was odd, but now almost every teenager and college student does that. What worries me is the constant pressure to "conform" by TikTok which could potentially result in a generation of young people without real life skills.
>TikTok, OTOH, is shaping our reality by literally altering our culture
that's in the nature of every technology. 20 years ago nobody took selfies, a hundred years ago nobody took pictures (probably, idk when people got cameras)
Honestly it's quite a leap from kids doing fortnite dances for likes to assume they fall off the wagon and attain no real life skills. I think that's just called getting old.
In India WA does an excellent job of being that social graph. There are segregated groups of family, colleagues, collage friends and what not. Messages, memes, updates are shared on those groups. Lot of commercial transactions also take place.
So Facebook usage has dropped significantly. Of course WA is owned by FB.
[+] [-] captainmuon|3 years ago|reply
I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant, and I believe it was also not inconvinient for FB as they moved from home pages and Farmville to newsfeeds and now videos (which probably earns them more).
Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.
[+] [-] baby|3 years ago|reply
I think this is Facebook's biggest issue: they moved from being a very useful tool to being the app that tries to drive traffic and engagement so much that it becomes less useful. I think they should refocus back on being a useful tool to keep track of friends, and keep in touch with people you meet, and then do the other stuff they want to do separately. Facebook IS still useful, but because of all the noise now people mostly use it to be able to contact old friends OR they don't use the close social network features that use to make facebook useful.
> I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006
I think that's projecting. Many countries don't care, and many groups of people don't care.
[+] [-] skummetmaelk|3 years ago|reply
A quick dismissal of the fact that this data collection was and is happening and has already had massive effects on society.
Just because it is in the interest of "old" media to point this out doesn't mean they're wrong.
[+] [-] slategruen|3 years ago|reply
I disagree with this one. They might be afraid of sharing their data explicitly i.e. sharing everything happening to them for everyone to see (even strangers). The trend now is sharing content to people they only have very close relationships with. But them being afraid of big tech collecting and analyzing their data? I don't think so.
[+] [-] Delwtion|3 years ago|reply
My family do not share more than a few holiday pictures.
No one really shared normal likeable lifevents.
WhatsApp groups are totally fine and even showed me how little I care about constant updates from other life's.
And no people also don't care what I do.
People are busy. Family people think about school issues and handling their daily life and planing a family holiday.i care about science and politics. My mother cares about the next hiking tour.
Google+ circle feature was already the technology highpoint of handling social media and no one really had the motivation to setup their circles or even use Google+.
Even sharing specific things is hard. Over or under sharing: I would have loved to see much more of a friend's house building for example.
While it feels like digital is the future, the people around you are. That's something Facebook and co teached me. It's a bad substitute.
[+] [-] madeofpalk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsemrau|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|3 years ago|reply
Obviously though that is being eroded away by Instagrams lack of confidence and insistence to fight TikTok, which I also find strange I mean yeah its a vertical feed of video but really why you go to it is really different for why you go to IG, TikTok has more in common with YouTube than IG.
[+] [-] mrkramer|3 years ago|reply
This was Social Networking 101 and Zuck got it right and he won big but there are so many different forms of social networking that are possible and are happening today like ephemeral content(Snapchat), short videos(TikTok) etc.
Video was and still is huge opportunity and you could see that from the astronomical rise of YouTube since 2005/2006 till today. YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world and the second most visited website in the world.
Speaking of TikTok; the rise of TikTok was inevitable since Vine was also huge video opportunity but Twitter simple blew it away. If Vine had good leadership TikTok probably wouldn't exist or it wouldn't be as popular as it is today.
And also YouTube and TikTok are sort of hybrid social networks in a way that they are modern form of TV entertainment platforms because you can passively watch videos and get entertained nonstop without interacting with anybody. So they are not really at the same conceptual level as Facebook is.
>I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006.
Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers.
[+] [-] CPLX|3 years ago|reply
What are you talking about? These assholes invented panopticon surveillance based advertising.
Instead of making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars selling normal ads to normal people the way it had been done for decades (buy an ad on a page people who see the page see the ad) they pushed and pushed to climb into every corner of your digital life to know exactly who you are to squeeze out even more profits.
Then they used monopoly power so gained to illegally crush all competitors while buying off the political leadership that should have stopped them.
But this is somehow the fault of “old media”? Come on.
The reason it would be hard to start something like that is because of overwhelming monopoly power these platforms hold and their commitment to using surveillance. In a sane freely competitive world these alternatives would already exist.
[+] [-] dopa42365|3 years ago|reply
People may say they're afraid of big data, but it's just mindless repetition of something they heard and doesn't affect their behaviour at all.
70%+ of them are mobile users on a first party app and happily receive targeted ads.
Realistically, how many people use instagram etc. on a browser with an adblocker (especially on mobile), less than 1%?
[+] [-] Diris|3 years ago|reply
Like this? https://jasonrobinson.me/ (uses https://socialhome.network/)
[+] [-] rvz|3 years ago|reply
It has been 6 years since Mastodon should have accelerated to be a viable alternative to Twitter and today the only successful Mastodon-derivative that is in operation is Truth Social; a centralized social network and even that has more users than Mastodon itself.
I don't know but that already sounds like a failure, where it has helped the 'undesirables' get their own platform, unfortunately.
But that's free software folks, where anyone can use it.
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phreack|3 years ago|reply
They're trying to monetize it with different approaches at the time like being able to boost a post's visibility without giving you any targeting tools, tipping, or giving another user a button to spawn crabs on the UI for a day.
Will it last? Probably not! But it's not a terribly awful dystopic place yet.
[+] [-] MomoXenosaga|3 years ago|reply
Make no mistake the very fact that these services are free lead to their popularity.
[+] [-] anonu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vineyardmike|3 years ago|reply
I also agree that the “old media” trashed tech until people finally agreed it was bad. I think some of it’s justified but not all. I’ve long complained about the bias here. I think the shift of democratizing the voice of the people is only going to change society more (in the short term we may call this bad for democracy but I think it’ll be good in the long term). For example, no news site would have run a story about George Floyd, but thanks to social media we don’t need them to. The flip side is misinformation, of course.
I think facebooks drive to video is probably benign trend chasing. I don’t know if it earns them more but I’m sure they’re lowering ad value in the short term until advertisers figure out how to make good ads on it. I don’t have data but I suspect the “home page and FarmVille” era died on its own and the newsfeed was facebooks way of injecting new life (as opposed to the NF killing individual postings)
[+] [-] ImPleadThe5th|3 years ago|reply
All this talk of decentralised social media and all these new solutions, just to full circle back to self-hosted personal blogs.
I feel like in the tech circle they never left, but they aren't consumed by the general population.
[+] [-] jacooper|3 years ago|reply
And no body will use it, like how no one uses Mastodon. Because discovery on Activitypub is one of the worst especially on an independent server, where you are basically "tooting" to your self.
Normal users don't understand what is an instance or what is a server. Which is fine, if advanced users adopted Mastodon it would be enough for the HN crowd, but they didn't because of the network effect.
[+] [-] ngold|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vikramkr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decafninja|3 years ago|reply
Is such a business model like Facebook circa late 2000s simply not viable? How did Facebook make money back then before they turned "evil"?
[+] [-] earlyriser|3 years ago|reply
Not a real directory as it's limited to the core circle of friends.
Also no data-selling, ads.
[+] [-] roody15|3 years ago|reply
I agree with the authors perspective that if Facebook and Twitter try and capture the TikTok market they will only in the end up hurting themselves. In fact the reason I don't use Facebook much anymore is because of the changes they have made...
When I login I may see a funny video of a guy falling in Texas (Who I don't know) or an attractive women in exercise pants doing somethings quasi provocative.
I am not coming to Facebook for national news, for TV 3.0 like entertainment... I am coming to check in with friends, family see some pictures of relatives and see what people have to say about what is happening in their life.
The further they move away from this model.... IMO could lead to further decline in the platform.
My two cents.
[+] [-] labrador|3 years ago|reply
I don't see how introducing flashy short videos that produce a dopamine hit in the easily amused is going to grow Facebook
[+] [-] thematrixturtle|3 years ago|reply
This. I on occasion visit Facebook to keep up with what friends are doing. If they turn it into TikTok, I will have zero reason to go there any more.
[+] [-] mrtksn|3 years ago|reply
Tiktok on the other hand came from purely creative angle. It’s not about your friends, it’s about using creative tools to express something. That’s why TikTok dominated the original new content market. TikTok’s editing tools are phenomenal and people are using them so creatively.
IMHO, the traditional social media giants optimized for profit only, destroyed any potential competitors and up until TikTok we have been left to terrible state of the social media.
If you recall, FB and others were involved in political manipulations and accused of spreading extremism.
It might seem like long time ago but American-made social media was riddled with conspiracy theorist and white supremacists and the tech giants were blamed for spreading that in the name of engagement. At some point the place has become so horrible that they started blocking prominent accounts, including the American President.
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
Facebook trying to become content platform like Youtube or TikTok is killing itself.
[+] [-] baby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo44x|3 years ago|reply
No one wants to engage with the same cultural artifacts of their parents or the previous generation. They want to establish themselves as a distinct cultural era and need symbols, etc that are distinct.
[+] [-] someonenice|3 years ago|reply
This is in stark contrast to what the FB and Insta like companies do.
Since I don't login, I use multiple devices to access tiktok. And I noticed that the stream content is different on my phone (mostly used while traveling / outside home and contain news and semi serious random stuff), tab (mainly used in the bed and contain light funny contents) and computer (serious stuff - arts, tech etc..).
BTW - I am only a tiktok consumer and not creator.
[+] [-] nprateem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timeimp|3 years ago|reply
Educators and employers are noticing they cannot keep students / new employees engaged.
Makes me wonder what damage is happening, long-term, with all these short bursts of dopamine that TikTok gives it users.
[+] [-] onphonenow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|3 years ago|reply
I don't know why the author didn't make the obvious connection here. TikTok's emphasis is not on distraction, but on video. TikTok is successful because it understands the power of video without the legacy mental model of television: longer videos punctuated by attention-breaking ads. YouTube is still firmly operating in this legacy model.
[+] [-] linuxhansl|3 years ago|reply
In the beginning I liked the easy way it afforded me to keep in contact with friends and acquaintances. Then it included more and more "other" stuff, and I just lost interest in it. Shame really. In the beginning it was so useful and I honestly did not mind being shown some ads in exchange for that.
But now my data would be used not only to selects ads but also the other content, blurring the difference between what is an ad and what is "content". Facebook lost its way, and it looks like they're not looking for a path back.
[+] [-] varispeed|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BasilPH|3 years ago|reply
Nice to get his perspective on this topic.
[+] [-] phreack|3 years ago|reply
I see people uploading pictures to Instagram less and less each day, where they'd have over a hundred at once before, but it's not that they don't want to, it's just that the app feels too complex and repelling.
[+] [-] bumbledraven|3 years ago|reply
While discussing the time period from 2009-2011, the article claims thats Gab and Parler "struggled to gain traction", but those services didn't launch until 2017 and 2018.
[+] [-] remflight|3 years ago|reply
The fact that Instagram is copying them is sad.
[+] [-] t_mann|3 years ago|reply
Especially the old Facebook-style 'keep up with friends and family' app would seem to have potential for sustained long-term use from a different user base than a TikTok clone.
[+] [-] cletus|3 years ago|reply
I would go further: celebrities often treat Tiktok as just another distribution channel and they seem to flop because of it.
Another point: Tiktok has incredibly slick UI/UX. IG used to have this but that's been lost in the constant battle of competing interests. Even the search isn't terrible. Probably the best feature is you can search videos you've watched and/or liked. I can't tell you how many times I've found what I've been looking for because of that.
Stitching and dueting are genuinely new formats too. Plus it's not all dance videos (eg [1]). One issue Tiktok does have is brigading/mass-reporting. You have to identify people who make false reports (eg when a video is reviewed and reports are found baseless you could make such reports as false). Collect too many and your reports get ignored (ie you're shadowbanned).
FB/IG managed to successfully steal the stories feature (from Snapchat) but I don't think that's going to work with Reels. As noted, Tiktok isn't really based on a social graph so there's a disconnect there.
Some commenters here have talked about data collection. Literally nobody cares about that.
People forget how controversial introducing the news feed was. IIRC ~10% of users said they'd quite FB over the news feed. But that decision has proven to be correct. What I think is actually the most controversial FB thing did was enable sharing of links. This boosted engagement but I think really killed the use case many had for FB: to find out what friends, relatives and acquaintances were up to. Nobody cares about Aunt Alice's posts about how the pigeons are government cameras.
One area I think FB really dropped the ball on was Groups. For a lot of active FB users this is why they use FB. It should be more central to the experience (IMHO).
Tiktok isn't hte first existential threat to FB. IG was. Back then FB could buy IG. It's why they did. In a decade we've had two existential threats to FB. This is why I don't think government action is really needed in the social media space. It'll work itself out.
Disclaimer: Ex-Facebooker.
[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRD4rLYo/?k=1
[+] [-] friendlypeg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] behnamoh|3 years ago|reply
TikTok, OTOH, is shaping our reality by literally altering our culture. I'm not that old, but even 10 years ago, the concept of dancing in front of a camera on the street was odd, but now almost every teenager and college student does that. What worries me is the constant pressure to "conform" by TikTok which could potentially result in a generation of young people without real life skills.
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
that's in the nature of every technology. 20 years ago nobody took selfies, a hundred years ago nobody took pictures (probably, idk when people got cameras)
Honestly it's quite a leap from kids doing fortnite dances for likes to assume they fall off the wagon and attain no real life skills. I think that's just called getting old.
[+] [-] vishnugupta|3 years ago|reply
In India WA does an excellent job of being that social graph. There are segregated groups of family, colleagues, collage friends and what not. Messages, memes, updates are shared on those groups. Lot of commercial transactions also take place.
So Facebook usage has dropped significantly. Of course WA is owned by FB.