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by strangesongs 1693 days ago
"Reels users said they sometimes stopped the sessions early, finding it hard to hit the 10 minutes required because the videos were “stale, boring or repetitive,” while TikTok users self-reported using the app for hours a day beyond the study. The Reels users also found that Facebook’s algorithm didn’t stop showing them content they weren’t interested in, and rarely showed videos made by people of color to white viewers."

obvious they can't innovate on their own at this point

2 comments

Are you being facetious? If they can't innovate and they are losing customers, how does that support breaking them up? It seems to make the opposite point.
Lots of monopolies suck at their core business - because they've lost the need to compete due to either suffocating the competition or growing into adjacent markets to lock down their user base. Facebook can both be incompetent and an economic danger.
But FB loses eyeballs when it fails to innovate, which is kind of a demonstration that it doesn't have monopoly power.
So if, when Standard Oil was still operating as a monopoly, a single well had decided to refuse to sell to them - or even a dozen wells - or a conglomerate of wells - that means they'd no longer be a monopoly?

Just because you don't own 100% of a market doesn't mean you don't have a commanding position.

1) Comparing Tik Tok to a single oil well is laughable.

2) If someone who owned a single oil well in time of Standard Oil could get their oil to consumers and profitably sell it, then however big Standard Oil might be, then it didn't have a standard monopoly. Of course, that's not how things work back then. Standard Oil controlled the refineries and so well owners were over a barrel. Facebook has tried to control the Internet pipes but basically failed everywhere.

Because a company should be able to stand on its own merit, not be sustained through entrenched monopoly power.
Is your argument that if they got broken up they could innovate more to ... get more people to spend more time on new products that push them into radicalized rabbit holes?