[NullPointerWin]

So Meta basically turned Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content' and now claims that's what users wanted? That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy and then saying 'See? Nobody wants real meals anymore!'

[baxtr]

Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".

Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.

It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.

[caseyy]

What users want, and what they collectively consume, are two different things. This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0].

It turns out that demand matters when you sell a product or a service. And it is elastic in ways other than price (such as convenience, value, appeal), but not infinitely so. In plain English, you can force anti-social media onto the market by making it appealing/hooking/addictive/convenient/supposedly valuable for a while, but not indefinitely. People do demand proper socializing, especially recently. Many are realizing they've been sold a total bag of goods just because they consumed it, and it's not good enough to displace real human connection.

[0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

>Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".

With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.

Open a restaurant masquerading as providing high-quality, locally sourced organic food, discreetly sprinkle the hardest drug on the most popular plates, slowly increase the dosage until people are completely hooked, and voilà, you can legitimately claim "people wanted the drug; it was their choice."

[darth_avocado]

> it is exactly what users “want”

It’s actually what users want “now”. When instagram initially stopped chronological feed users didn’t want it. When they started injecting random posts from people you didn’t follow. Users didn’t want that either. When they launched reels, they also didn’t want that. When they started almost exclusively showing reels like TikTok, users still didn’t want that.

The problem with all of the above is that users eventually got used to the new norm and their brains established the dopamine rewards pathways according to what they were offered. And that’s why they think they “want” it now.

But we’ve seen this happen before. FB did the exact thing and now it’s almost dead, even Zuckerberg acknowledged it. But they somehow think, users won’t eventually get off Instagram because somehow this time it’s different?

[AndroTux]

While that’s true of course, I find that a bit of a harsh conclusion. Yes, that’s the end result for any greedy company in a world without regulation.

But you can make that case for most business models. Restaurants? They’ll all eventually turn into fast food chains, because our human lizard brain appreciates fat and sugar more than actually good meals.

Gaming? Let’s just replace it all with casinos already. Loot boxes are just gambling anyways.

There’s absolutely a market for proper social media that’s actually social. It’s just that companies are way too greedy currently.

[otikik]

That is true but you have to be very specific about who your "users" are.

If your "users" are the guys in charge of showing more ads to people, then yes. People, on the other hand absolutely prefer watching their contacts' posts first. Recommendations related with their individual preferences, second. Random dopamine-inducing stuff, only from time to time. If you prioritize the third kind only is like someone said already on the commments here: like a restaurant that only serves candy. They will have customers for a while but eventually they will burn them down (or kill them).

[zemo]

sure, that's "what people want" inasmuch as if you put every button through a statistical microscope, that's what the statistics will tell you, but if you give a rat cocaine-dispensing button and measure how many times it hits the "more cocaine" button you'll also come away with the conclusion "rats want cocaine", a thing they never encounter in nature and would never have encountered without you putting it in front of them, and you'll pat yourself on the back and say "now I understand rats: they are all vicious cocaine fiends", but you haven't really learned about rats' true nature, you'll have only conned yourself into a false narrative that confirms that your own actions are only "giving the rat what it wanted", and after it dies of an overdose, you declare yourself innocent. Anyway that's a/b testing and the tech industry.

[twelve40]

Well people really-really "want" many other things too, like free money, sex, etc etc. Does it mean that something that started as a way to connect with friends and family must turn into Only Fans for example? Or cater to all those other wants that have nothing to do with friends and family, just to make a few more bucks?

[tim333]

Users, or me at any rate, want more than one thing. For my family and friends I want to see what they say without junk added and my family has currently moved from facebook to a whatsapp group to achieve that.

I also browse random junk on xitter. It's a different thing.

[wussboy]

It makes one wonder whether "what I want" is really the best thing to optimize for.

[al_borland]

It’s only what they “want” after the various social media companies to deliberate steps to addict their users to feeds that maximize engagement.

Does an addict really want to be an addict? The Light Phone, screen time features, and various other things exist for a reason. People don’t want this, but feel helpless to break free from their addiction, which entered their life like a trojan horse.

[dan_quixote]

> Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want"

I might fine tune this to "users most likely to click ads"

[FinnLobsien]

Yeah that’s the problem. Ultimately, people want to distract themselves more than they want to connect with people.

And with both in the same platform… I know where I’m going.

I think another problem are network effects. They make it much harder to build a reasonable alternative

[timewizard]

> Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".

No it isn't. No one "wants" to be addicted.

> Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.

They will measure you then do everything they can to increase the number of minutes you spend on the site. The media recommendation is a consequence of cost. It's very cheap for them to maximize your time spent using other peoples content.

> It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.

There are tons of ways to get dopamine flowing into your brain. Which is why it was important for Meta to monopolize and dominate the field. Turns out lizard brains are exceptionally fickle.

[spacemadness]

Advertisers are also good at weaponizing psychology to manufacture wants that people didn’t know they had and in many cases don’t want to have after the purchase.

[jackcosgrove]

It's what most users want.

Most users want to scroll through internet TV passively. However there is a big enough minority of users who want authenticity, novelty, and creativity in their online experiences. This group is big enough to sustain, say, a social network.

We've just never solved the Eternal September problem.

[Clubber]

I agree. People want to eat well, quit smoking and get in shape, but mostly they eat crap and sit on the sofa in front of the TV (present company included). Which is what they really want?

[kevinob11]

I know from a strictly economic standpoint the things I do are the things I want. But is doing an activity are you addicted to what you really want in a human sense?

[casey2]

Complete nonsense, they just have a bot that optimizes for engagement, engagement doesn't equal longevity or increased revenue volume over some number of years. Nor does engagement mean that it's what you want. If someone walks up to you on the street, gets in your face and start assaulting you and you engage is a fight does that mean you "wanted" to get into a fight?

This is like an old school forum optimizing for flamebait threads, it's clearly not going to work. The major problem is that while advertisers love engagement they hate toxic content, low quality content, violence, drugs, porn, illegal activity, extremism, bots, trolls, etc

Eventually the media will build some story and the bottom will fall through, this process is just slower than usual because users are siloed into bubbles (like if you report a racist video they will show you much less, but there are still tons of people watching tons of racist videos and getting ads)

[wij4lij5]

It's what "remaining users" want after the many users who didn't want that left

[zombiwoof]

We don’t know it’s what we don’t want because of the addictive nature

[watwut]

Except that facebook is slowly failing into obsolence. Or fast.

[toofy]

> … what users “want”.

what *some* users want.

sure, it may have been a majority at the time. but imo chasing that was incredibly short sighted.

many many many people warned them this would be the outcome. in typical fashion for these people, they ignored it, imagining themselves to be smarter in every area than everyone else.

i’ve said it before and i’ll say it so many more times: we need to better at realizing where our intelligence is behind. some people are untouchably genius in social situations but absolutely terrible at stem. and some stem people may be absolute genius at engineering work but entirely lack understanding of social/humanity issues.

far too often only one of those two groups understands their lack of understanding. if you ask the best party planner in the state to engineer an automobile, they’re going to look at you like you’re a crazy person. ask the best engineer in the state to plan the years most important ball, we’re going to fully delude ourselves into thinking we can do it better than the party planner.

[wing-_-nuts]

>Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.

This is unironically why I think we need a government funded non profit website for friendship and dating. Any such site subject to the whims of capitalism is doomed to become toxic

[tmpz22]

Missing ingredient: endless greed.

Social media is just fine. Trillion dollar ad conglomerate staffing menlo park software engineers making 500k/yr? That requires enshittification.

[einpoklum]

You do realize that by applying quotation marks you've basically nullified your argument, right? :-(

[tantalor]

High end restaurants work against this trend by cultivating taste. They convince their customers to eat their vegetables, literally. They can do this because there is an ethical value associated with dining which is embedded in our culture. You enjoy a fine restaurant because it is right to enjoy it.

Facebook failed because there is no ethic associated with social media. You can continue to degrade the quality and nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that". FB bootstrapped by co-opting the instinctual value of social connection with your friends, which TikTok and IG also copied but with strangers instead of friends.

[toxik]

HN is a kind of this thing. It's netiquette. We still stay around here because it's the only place with tech discussions and at least some amount of decorum.

[ironmagma]

> nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that".

Is that not exactly what drew people from Myspace to Facebook in the first place? There was a lack of appetite for the flashiness and gaudiness, and an appeal to how classy FB was.

[tpdly]

There is definitely an ethic associated with 'being informed'; I remember being told to read the news as a kid and it felt like vegetables.

Scroll media is fast food, and fine dining is books or long form sub-stack-- which cost more money but also will-power. The question of how scroll media can deliver high quality information is similar to asking how drive through can serve vegetables. I think it comes down to the fact that you can't cultivate taste unless people are paying with will-power.

[lotsofpulp]

I would venture to say 95% of people don't enjoy (and/or cannot afford) "fine" restaurants. But mostly don't enjoy. And a restaurant would go bankrupt trying to convince them to eat healthy. The proof is the existing state of the market. Although daily GLP-1 pills might be able to change that.

[xandrius]

I don't really get your comparison with restaurants. Could you elaborate?

[peacebeard]

Casinos say gambling is what people want. Tobacco companies say cigarettes is what people want. Drug dealers say fent is what people want.

[laweijfmvo]

at least until it kills them!

[aprilthird2021]

It is what people wanted though, from Facebook. Most people, including you and I, connect with friends through DMs in various apps, WhatsApp, or an equivalent group chat messenger (iMessage, etc.)

Facebook has become a lot like TikTok because that's what people want from an app that has a feed. We, en masse, don't engage with a feed of just our friends' posts (FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage). When we open a feed-based app, we want the long doomscroll. I do think your restaurant analogy is apt. I mean nutritious food is healthier for people, but a miniscule number of restaurants serve such a thing, and none do which aren't trying to fill a small niche in the market

[i80and]

> FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage

I've never seen this, despite frequently being irritated with Facebook mainly showing me random shit I don't care about.

Companies always squirrel away the "works correctly" button and then are like whelp nobody is using the thing we hid! Nothing we can do!

[skydhash]

> it is what people wanted though, from Facebook.

I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with personal details, then share happenings with your friends. And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities, pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.

[flkiwi]

> FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage

Because everything about the Facebook user interface discourages its use.

What if, and I know this is craaaaazy, the friend feed was just the feed? Facebook was growing fine with that.

[dkarl]

> It is what people wanted though, from Facebook

Facebook used to provide a good experience of staying in loose touch with people I didn't know well enough to have ongoing conversations with. It was nice to know roughly what was going on with people, and if something big happened (like a kid, a new job, a death) I would see it and could reach out with congratulations or condolences.

But some people posted every meal and cup of coffee, and others only posted occasionally, and Facebook decided to bury the occasional posters and promote the high-engagement users instead. That's when Facebook became more bad than good for me, and I left.

If we could go back in time to that point, and prioritize posts in inverse relation to the poster's frequency instead, I'd use that service.

[gus_massa]

There are icecream stores, where you can seat and take icecream and most of the time also cofee or cake.

I've seen candy stores, but they don't have chairs and tables.

[zbendefy]

This is such a good analogy. Awereness about social media shluld be like awereness about junk food you consume.

[29athrowaway]

Meta was losing to TikTok so they had to adapt by promoting brain rot[1]

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/brain-rot

[0x6c6f6c]

Except the content quality on TikTok wasn't only brain rot, and the algorithm often grew into valuable content. That is, if you actually wanted it. If you want brain rot, it'll give it to you.

Meanwhile, you don't even get the choice on Facebook.

[spoonsort]

> doom-scrolling

Just wait 'til you find out about imageboard doom-scrolling.

[BeFlatXIII]

On the flip side, there hasn't been enough worthwhile posts from friends in years.

[curiousllama]

I think it's more like a restaurant offering both candy and burgers.

When candy sales outpace burgers, they're naturally going to invest more in candy. Eventually, they start to compete more with Hershey's than McDonald's.

Businesses evolve or die, no?

[matthewdgreen]

I guess the problem with this analogy is that it fails to capture the essential nature of Facebook: that its base product ("hamburgers") has a network effect, and the new product ("candy") doesn't.

If Facebook is a social network for seeing my friends, then there's nowhere else for me to go. They're on Facebook and it's unlikely they're all going to join some new network at the same time.

If Facebook is a high engagement content farm designed to shove random engagement-bait in my face, then it's just competing with Reddit, Digg, Twitter, 4chan, TikTok. Folks can get addicted to this in the short term; but they can also get bored and move on to another app. Based on conversations with all the IRL human beings I know, this is what they've all done. (The actual question I have is: who is still heavily using the site? Very old people?)

[diggan]

> Businesses evolve or die, no?

What I constantly see, are businesses that would be just fine continue doing the same, but die instead because they tried to evolve into something and alienated all their existing customers/users and couldn't attract new ones because what they evolved into made no sense. But no, businesses want to take over the world (or at least have a large slice from the pie) so they "evolve" no matter what.

Case in point: Facebook.