[cloutchaser]

This is a really silly point frankly, and can be applied to any product people have ever gravitated towards.

You might claim to not like tv but it still became the most used entertainment product for decades.

Same goes for the newsfeed.

Any social network or product with a newsfeed will easily beat one without for users using it. Whether utopians like yourself think people like it or not is irrelevant. It’s about survival. Not “corporate wallets”

[nprz]

Crack seems to be a product people gravitate towards, but that doesn't mean it's a good product or beneficial for the user.

[awillen]

Nobody said good product or beneficial to the user - the discussion is about people's preferences. Many people have very strong preferences for crack over not crack.

[strogonoff]

Since we’re discussing preferences, drug sellers have a strong preference for people choosing crack over not crack.

Furthermore, their preference is the one that is consequential. Once you are addicted and chemically compelled to choose crack over what is more or less torture, the amount of agency you have is relatively insignificant.

[cwkoss]

(Crack) consumers like crack. Nobody likes news feeds filled with ads.

[mbesto]

> news feeds filled with ads.

The OP's point wasn't about ads but about the algorithmic newsfeed. The newsfeed is designed and optimized to make you like scrolling. So, yes people do like to scrolling but hate it when they realize that it might take you 20 minutes instead of 2 minutes to get to your best friends new baby announcement. Sure, ads contribute to that frustration, but they aren't the sole reason for it.

[cwkoss]

The key distinction is that news feeds' customers are advertisers, not the audience. News feeds were not built to maximize the audience's experience: it's an inherently consumer-adversarial technology.

[strogonoff]

What are those alternatives that you are comparing TV and newsfeed-powered social to? Point to a single product without newsfeed that lost to a product with newsfeed because of refusing to implement this feature.

[np_tedious]

MySpace?

[strogonoff]

If you are really suggesting MySpace lost to Facebook because of the lack of newsfeed, you should do your research. FB introduced the feed—in the sense that we’re talking about, as a non-chronological selection of content by an algorithm that maximises ad revenue—only after MySpace was no longer a threat. That’s when FB could get away with it, since the critical mass has been achieved and users had nowhere to run anymore.

[np_tedious]

2005 - Fox buys MySpace

2006 - Facebook introduces newsfeed

2006 - Facebook open to everyone (no need for college email)

2008 - FB unique users overtakes MySpace's

[strogonoff]

Facebook’s news feed in 2006 was not even remotely what’s being discussed in this branch.

It was a simple timeline of all of your friends’ actions. A raw chronological feed.

The outcry it caused was because it felt like stalking. The following dominance of Facebook did not have anything to do with people’s “revealed preferences” in favour of the algorithmic instrument being discussed (which individually selects content to appal or otherwise engage you so that you spend the most time and generate the most ad profit). News feed wasn’t that instrument—until MySpace went away and Facebook had users reliably locked in.

Facebook didn’t win because users liked the algorithmic news feed that maximises corporate profits by amplifying troll takes and aggravating our psychological well-being, Facebook won before that. It’s important to get the causal relationship right.