[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

[badc0ffee]

> 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].

My takeaway from that presentation is more that:

* Games cost more to make but there is resistance from players to pay more

* A number of growth areas (mobile, social gaming, displacing other forms of media, battle royale) are exhausted

* A lot of attention in China is moving to Chinese-made games

* The marketplace is overcrowded with titles

* Gaming is more social now, so a significant number of users are sticking to the same big 5/10 games where there friends are, which leaves even less room for the zillions of new games to gain traction.

I think the industry had a role in this, namely in locking people in to games, and simultaneously overspending on and underpricing games. But I'm not getting the sense (at least from this presentation) that the new games that are coming out aren't what users want.

[maxsilver]

> Games cost more to make but there is resistance from players to pay more

It's a little bit more involved than that. Games don't have to cost much more to make, they just are due to declining quality of leadership and poor executive decisions. It's more like, "AAA studios are running their budgets up (arbitrarily, usually not driven by any customer request or engagement)" and "players are resistant to paying for that".

"Clair Obscur Expedition 33" literally just came out a few days ago. It's gorgeous high-fidelity AAA-like art, it's super well done, it's incredibly well received, and it's retailing at $50 ($60 for the 'Deluxe Edition') at launch (not including current steam sale). It's doing great, because they made a great product, kept to a reasonable budget, and sold it at a reasonable price. Oblivion also just got a remaster at the same pricing by Virtuos, and it's doing really well. Baldur's Gate 3 is also another example, amazing title, AAA quality graphical fidelity, $60 launch pricing (digitally on Steam & GOG, anyway).

Compare that to something like Ubisoft's "Star Wars Outlaws", which was $70 digital base ($130 Deluxe Edition) at launch. Yes, it's high-fidelity and AAA-like too, but it's very much not well done, it's not well received, and it's arbitrarily super expensive on top of all of that.

Games don't just "cost more to make" automatically, it's mostly not based on inflation or underlying costs. AAA studios are increasingly more mismanaged (or just demanding higher margins) than they did before, and that mismanagement is impacting their cost structures. Instead of fixing those mistakes, companies are expecting players to just forever eat those additional costs.

If the game is really, really good, they might get away with it. (Nintendo, probably). If their games aren't that good, players are going to walk (Ubisoft).

It's not "the market is saturated". It's not "the market is overcrowded". It's "the market is competitive and expects quality", you can't just shove a half-baked only-ok game at high pricing, and expect it to be a success.

[badc0ffee]

> Games don't just "cost more to make" automatically, it's mostly not based on inflation or underlying costs.

That doesn't contradict what I wrote, so much as expand on it. The presentation linked above (which I was attempting to summarize) says there's a push for, for example, more photorealism, that players don't really care about, but balloons various costs. It also mentions recurring costs for online games too unpopular to cover their expenses.

> It's not "the market is saturated". It's not "the market is overcrowded". It's "the market is competitive and expects quality", you can't just shove a half-baked only-ok game at high pricing, and expect it to be a success.

I don't doubt what you're saying about quality of gameplay, but that's really not the focus of the linked presentation. It mentions that too many game studios are chasing dead trends, and unpopular payment models. But it's also making the claim that there might be tons of great new games coming out, but hardly anyone is even trying them.

Honestly I'm out of my depth with this, as I barely game at all, and if you had asked me yesterday, I would have thought the industry was still booming. I clicked caseyy's link and expected something concise about the state of gaming, but ended up reading (most of) a 200-slide presentation.

[IgorPartola]

This. As someone who used to play a lot and doesn’t as much, graphics were only impressive for a minute. Story and gameplay cost roughly the same today as they did 20 years ago and are infinitely more important.

[permo-w]

I remember people saying all this same stuff 10-15 years ago, and Ubisoft and EA are still going. Will they ever go too far with it I wonder

[caseyy]

Similar thoughts by Jason Schreier: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-01-10/why-so...

https://archive.is/oLwbP

[Aeolun]

> It's "the market is competitive and expects quality"

This just can’t be anything but nonsense when EA can release the same game literally decades in a row and have people eat it up anyway.

[Spivak]

Because it's a good game and the new editions are literally seasons of the same game. World of Warcraft has adopted a model for the last few expansions and players love it. It's literally HN's darling pricing model where it's a subscription but you can stop and keep all the versions you have.

HN just doesn't skew really getting sports people.

[stock_toaster]

I also wonder if the decline of the middle class and a growing lack of leisure time for the lower/middle class (more people than ever working multiple jobs to make ends meet), also have been having an impact on sales.

[jonfromsf]

No. People have endless hours to waste on numbing themselves. The worse their life is going the more they do that.

[caseyy]

There is much to be said about the industry. Most game releases compete for significantly less than 20% of the net bookings each year. Others are black hole games (the multi-year/multi-decade lifespan games that attract players and hardly let go at all), accounting for about 30% of the annual net bookings. The top 20-30 franchises account for about 50%, and the 20,000 other games made annually account for about 20%. Of the 20%, the top 50 releases each year will take 19% of the bookings, with remaining 19k+ sharing the 1%.

Just like Facebook, the first-mover advantage has favored many now-established studios and franchises. They exploded game-development costs because they could, and funneled these costs into marketing and moat features indie developers could not build (such as huge open worlds, amazing sweaty character face wrinkle rendering tech, and SOTA systems). But many of these companies did not respect the player's wishes for well play-tested games with interesting stories and mechanics. Still, they captured the top 20-30 franchise part of the annual net bookings, and strongly compete in the top-50 game part. Some even built some black hole games (GTA Online, Rainbow Six: Siege, Fortnite). For a long time, they avoided much of the pressures felt strongly by smaller companies. They were "above" the 99% of games that have to compete for close to 1% of the revenues. Their marketing was so strong (plus, they strengthened it with access journalism) and features so moated, they could do no wrong.

However, over the last 5 years, things have changed. Many AAA industry legends have left their jobs at major studios to start small studios and create games as a form of interactive art, rather than to make publishers rich. Ultimately, in their view, the greed and blind following of what players would consume (trends) in large numbers led to a sterile industry that could no longer create art.

The growth engines got exhausted because players did not actually demand what they were offering, such as season passes, eSports corporate shooters, microtransactions, padded playtimes, user-generated content, and the other things. The new growth engines (AI, targeting kids, etc) are also what the players don't want very much. The industry understands it, and investors are starting to catch on after facing a decade of poor returns, too. The crucial point I am trying to make is that the industry spent a lot of money on these growth engines that the players didn't truly want, led by market metrics that genuinely showed they were consuming it. But now the gig is up, the writing is on the wall, and everyone inside and out of the industry sees it.

As a contrast, many Eastern companies (Nintendo is an especially prominent example) stuck to classic pricing models, did not inflate the cost of their games with their money for moat (most indie developers can make games to compete with Nintendo outside of the IP), and never used the growth engines used in the West. These companies, along with many people in them whom I know personally, are largely unaffected by the industry crisis. They were always making games their users wanted.

Finally, I have to say, the industry is split in two. 8/10 AAA companies are struggling because they cling to the growth engines (old and new) that the players don't want. About 2/10 game developers and publishers genuinely build games that people want, even in the West. And now that the pressure is up, some AAA executives from the 8/10ths are becoming acutely aware of this. Emphasis on "some". So, yes, the industry in some part was, is, and will continue to make games that players want. But the more interesting part for our discussion is the large part of it that wasn't, isn't, and perhaps won't be.

Of course, there's some probability I'm reading this wrong. I'm making my business bets in the industry based on it, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily right.

And thanks for reading the report before engaging in the discussion. That is appreciated.

[yungporko]

games don't cost more to make, just certain out of touch companies keep dumping tons of money into dumb shit gamers don't care about. it has never been easier to make games with a lower entry barrier than it is right now.

[trod1234]

I think you've misunderstood some critical aspects of that demo.

The growth numbers don't show what people attribute to them. That timeframe aligns with increases in discretionary spending, and also QE/loose financing requirements. The boom bust cycle can easily be explained as a result of debt financing, and leveraged buyout.

The bust part of the cycle is what you get naturally when you finance poor investment choices.

This is the same Atari story, all over again. Those spends also don't appear to normalize against inflation.

Main console manufacturers also require additional costs which the developer must carry if you want to develop games on those platforms, and the industry has been devoid of anti-trust for decades, and exploitive of its workers (all which increase costs), and regulatory is paying much closer attention to deceptive business practices, with addictive design in some places being comparable to civil battery. The elements for this type of design are scientific, and are based in early last century torture findings.

What you naturally get is overinvestment, shortfall in delivery, stark losses, and a burning down of your supply logistics, where they stop carrying your goods, and won't carry your goods at any price (even on contingency), on top of the rising costs. In other words, you have benefits front-loaded, followed by diminishing returns, followed by outflows exceeding inflows. This is Ponzi, followed by deflation leaving the market chaotic.

Cooporation between large platforms and developer monopoly has shrunk the market over time as well. Extracting revenue in a race to the bottom, with fixed barriers to entry concentrating marketshare.

[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."

[disqard]

Right, and the things preventing restaurants from doing this:

1. At-scale boycott: would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it? But somehow, this doesn't work for "social" media -- we're all aware what it is, yet we still use it, unironically.

2. Regulation: if a food inspector eats at your restaurant and confirms rumours that your food is actually addictive, your restaurant will get shut down. But somehow, FB/IG/etc. can operate without regulation, and free of any consequences. Sarah Wynn-Williams' book "Careless People" is worth reading.

[LeifCarrotson]

> Would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it?

This is largely a communication problem. Fentanyl is unacceptable, but a large subset of people would be glad to get food with CBD oil for free. Or caffeine - as last year's Panera charged lemonade scandal [1] revealed. Or alcohol, that's already very normal. Or monosodium glutamate, a personal favorite of mine which was once surrounded by negative press, or high-fructose corn syrup, or trans-saturated fats. Or maybe not an intentional part of the food, but traces of herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics may end up in food, and microplastics or PFOS from packaging will be eaten as well. And I'm sure you've seen old advertisements for cure-all elixirs that contained cocaine.

Health experts know that certain ingredients are bad, and many others are regularly consumed in quantities far, far exceeding their safe levels, but you don't have to look too deeply at a grocery store shelf or fast food menu to realize that the contents are boycott worthy but normalized to the point of being inescapable.

People know even less about what Meta is doing with their data or what their addictive apps do to their brains, and are equally powerless to learn about it or change it.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/panera-charged-lemonade-drinks-ca...

[dfxm12]

People start using/abusing alcohol (and cigarettes, etc.) knowing it is addictive and damaging. This has not affected the business of bars/pubs. With this in mind, it shouldn't be a surprise that people still start using FB, IG, etc.

The fact that Zuck (and Elon) are all buddy buddy with the current admin in Washington shouldn't be lost in the conversation.

[tshaddox]

> we're all aware what it is, yet we still use it, unironically.

Well, part of that is because people got addicted gradually, starting before it was common knowledge. Another part of it is that people actually do need to use these services (for some reasonable definition of "need") because some friends, family members, government/community services, etc. can only be contacted via these services.

[IgorPartola]

So McDonalds puts quite a bit of sugar into their beef patties. We know sugar is quite addictive to humans. And harmful. Hard drugs are not so acceptable but this is exactly what McDonalds has been doing and yes inspectors confirm this is what’s happening. There is even lots of regulation around food. Yet they find a way.

[barbazoo]

> With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.

And we all probably would want it if we tried! It's not that we're in any way better than the folks suffering from opioid addiction. It's all just chance.

[karmakurtisaani]

It think the second paragraph sort of agrees with you.

[karaterobot]

> With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.

One difference that may possibly affect the strength of your argument is that fentanyl is a physically addictive drug. Social media may be "addictive" but they aren't addictive. If you genuinely believe they're equivalent, use social media for a year, and fentanyl for a year, and see which is easier to quit.

Actually, scratch that: make it a thought experiment. But if you can see that they aren't equivalent, you can see that it's not a good comparison.

[Hasu]

As someone who has struggled with physical and mental addictions for my entire life: breaking a physical addiction is trivially easy compared to breaking a mental addiction. And breaking a physical addiction is really hard (I'm currently suffering withdrawal effects from a recent decision to quit vaping nicotine and it sucks).

Mileage varies for different people, of course. But dopamine is dopamine and addiction is addiction and it's neither kind nor fair to tell someone else that their addiction isn't real because there's no change in their blood chemistry.

[baxtr]

What do you think Starbucks is?

Sure there are nice small restaurants. But look at all the big chains.

[AndrewKemendo]

You just described Starbucks

It started as small roaster of coffee but now it’s a Sugar+Caffeine drink system for addicts.

[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?

[bluGill]

Or users eventually get used to it until one day they wake up and realize that the thing they went there for isn't what they get.

I check Facebook less than once a month. I want to see what my distant friends are doing. Instead though I see subversive political memes, and other things (jokes) that are fun once in a while but not worth spending much time on. Because Facebook isn't giving me what I really want I gave up on them. But it took me a while in part because the things I want to see are there - they are just hard to find.

[motoxpro]

It's just how you define "want." They a-b tested the algo vs chronological feed and the algo one because more people used it. It's just stated vs revealed preference. As a business, who's goal is to make money, does something that makes them more money, are they supposed to stop?

Whether it's good for society is another question but, users definitely didn't show that they "wanted" a chronological feed, they only said it. There was a JUMP in engagement, not a decline.

[TheBicPen]

"want" is different from "will consume if offered". Arguably, the definition of "want" that most people use is one of higher-order desire. E.g. a drug addict wants drugs, but doesn't want to want drugs. People might choose a certain feature if offered and they aren't aware of its negative impact on their mental health. Then they might become cognizant of the negative effects but by then the choice to not use that feature is no longer available so they're stuck with what they have. Alternatively, the choice to not use the feature might still be present, but the neural reward pathways have already been built. The user then wants the feature, but they don't want to want it.

[motoxpro]

Well articulated :). I can get on board with that

[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.

[Barrin92]

People want slop, they always wanted slop and there is no magical mind controlling powers in a Facebook feed. It was the case in the age of TV, magazines and when nobody had any idea how to even measure what people want.

If Mark Zuckerberg forcibly injected educational material and long form journalism into everyone's feed the average user would uninstall the app. People have been consuming crap since they were able to draw boobs on cave walls with chalk. Do you know why every belief system that claims people are ensnared by some false consciousness fails? Because they aren't, there's no such thing. Mark Zuckerberg is exactly right about one thing, he gave the people what they wanted, and if he's going to lose to a platform like TikTok it's because they're even better at it

[al_borland]

I was speaking more to the work of Nir Eyal. His ideas were widely used in the tech industry and he quite literally wrote the book on how to build habit forming products.

[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

[worldsayshi]

Facebook has simply been climbing towards a local maxima that is poorly correlated with what people need to connect. They rely on mountains of data for their optimization but their reward function is just off.

[bilbo0s]

There already is a reasonable alternative for connecting with the people you know. Group chats.

Your implication is correct in that there is no reasonable alternative for distracting oneself. At the same time, I'm not sure that if you were to build an alternative, it would not degrade into "content" scrolling as well.

[FinnLobsien]

That’s the problem:

-under network effects, you can’t spin up a viable indie alternative (like you could for a note taking app) because you need to massively attract users

-the less engaging social platform is the less economically viable social platform

So the natural end point for any social app is content doomscrolling

[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.

[djeastm]

>No one "wants" to be addicted

Not consciously, no. But our conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg, half-filled with post-hoc rationalizations for numerous unconscious urges. We don't have to call them "wants", but maybe "desires" works better.

[timewizard]

The problem is we know people are capable of seeing through their own ego and witnessing these urges for what they are. This usually leads to them gaining control over them. This is mostly what therapy is supposed to be about.

Taming our internal animal nature is possible. People don't for all kinds of reasons. This leaves them susceptible to simple addictions.

[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.

[Spivak]

You're describing the cozy web. The Eternal September problem is actually solved right now it's just semi-invite-only.

I am a part of more genuine social networks now then when facebook launched. They're all around you, it's just "giant supermassive public square" never really worked even with strong recommendation algorithms to try to ad-hoc connect related people and cut down on the perceived size.

Most of them live on Discord, others on the fediverse, none are large by any metric and highly personal.

[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?

[HKH2]

What they do. There are long-term goals and short-term goals (convenience etc.) Society pressures you into having long-term goals even if you don't do anything about them.

[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.

[bluGill]

Are they? I know that many of us have got off. The question is are we minor outliers or a wave? I don't know.

[lurk2]

There’s a few trends at play:

Young people in Europe and North America do not use Facebook anymore, if they even have an account at all.

It is still popular among older users in North America. This is one of the wealthiest demographics on earth, so Facebook’s advertising model will be ok for the foreseeable future.

Growth is still positive on Instagram and WhatsApp, though Instagram’s engagement levels have begun to decline.

Facebook’s main growth areas for all three apps are in the developing world. They pay carriers to allow Facebook to be accessed without counting against user data limits, so in a lot of these countries Facebook is synonymous with The Internet. Young people in these countries still see Facebook as cool, and they aren’t as likely to seek out platforms to avoid their parents on. The key problem is that these markets are not worth very much to advertisers because they have low levels of discretionary spending. This makes operating in these markets a long play for Meta; they spend some money on subsidies to build a user base in the hope that the users will gain higher levels of discretionary spending in the future, increasing the value of the market for advertisers.

[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.

[Aeolun]

Probably because it looks so boring and dry that anyone motivated by blinking lights and fast cuts is immediately turned away.

The prospect of having to read is a large turnoff for many people.

[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.

[tantalor]

This is partially true. FB was initially much more classy in its exclusivity, i.e only certain universities had access. That only worked while they were scaling up, and ended in 2006, long before Facebook became dominant.

[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.

[tantalor]

This is very true, and pairs well with the other comment about netiquette.

95% of people would not enjoy polite technical discussion forums, but the 5% that do are enough traffic for a site to survive.

[xandrius]

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

[tantalor]

That was parent comment:

> That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy

[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.

[pixl97]

Numbers must go up. In the stock market anything steady state is dead.

[ViktorRay]

This isn’t quite true. There are many businesses like Colgate that are steady state with a reasonable amount of growth that do fine in the stock market.

[psunavy03]

But that doesn't conform to the internet's stereotype of mustache-twirling capitalists in top hats and monocles, so obviously it can't be true . . .

</SARCASM>

[FeteCommuniste]

Numbers can naturally go up with the population, unless the product stays the same and newer generations decide they don't want it. Facebook suffered a double hit from both changing the product to scrollslop instead of a way to check on friends, and from becoming "uncool" with young people because it's what their boring parents used.

[zelphirkalt]

Infinite growth!!! How silly we still are as a species. The more of us there are, the stupider we act, and we don't even do anything to prevent it, we just let the consequences of our own stupidity roll over us one day, when they can no longer be stopped.