> For Messenger, I think differentiation is extremely important and something we haven't focused on yet. We've spent the past 6-12 months catching up to WhatsApp and competitors on table stakes like performance, reliability, pushability, etc. This work isn't done and we will continue to do it, including catching up in areas like groups.
> But to get people to ditch WhatsApp and switch to Messenger, it will never be sufficient to be 10% better than them or add fun gimmicks on any existing attribute or feature. We will have to offer some new fundamental use case that becomes important to people's daily lives.
They never did catch up on table stakes, nor did they discover that new fundamental use case. But they had a good fallback plan: Just buy WhatsUp.
Bummer for the users, though.
I find myself wishing something along the lines of antitrust was enforced more rigorously to help preserve competition.
And yet their purchase of WA shows Zuck's ruthlessness and business genius. He saw his team fail to beat WA, he realized they would never beat them, and he made a decision to buy WA for what was an insane price.
16 billion dollars for a 24(?) person company with no revenue.
I think 99% of executives on earth wouldn't have made that decision. They would have believed their teams that said victory was around the corner, or deluded themselves into thinking success was inevitable, or would have been afraid to demoralize their team, or would have rationalized away why messaging wasn't important after all.
He just acted and won, for what now seems like a bargain.
It was a smart acquisition for sure, but "ruthless business genius" is a bit of hyperbole imho. FB's market cap was in excess of 200B at the time and they were growing like crazy. 16B on buying what they had failed to build internally and needed as a moat around their core business seems pretty straightforward.
Mere mortals like us just get caught up on all the extra zeroes these guys are playing around with.
Exactly, spending 10% (!) of your business to buy something that adds no revenue, was built by 20 people, where your team is working on an alternative that is "better", "just around the corner", etc is actually insanely counterintuitive. If it were one percent of the business, sure, play defense, whatever--but 10%, over an abstract notion of "defensibility" is a really hard pill to swallow.
It would be amazing to know what the FB board thought at the time, and if zuck had to push hard for the transaction or not .
> Exactly, spending 10% (!) of your business to buy something that adds no revenue, was built by 20 people, where your team is working on an alternative that is "better", "just around the corner", etc is actually insanely counterintuitive.
It's not, and Facebook of all companies knows why. What they have is not some stupendous, irreplaceable technology. What they have is users and their relationships. That's how they killed myspace, not with revenue, not with their employee count, and not with their masses of technology, but with their users and the network effect. And that's how they will be killed.
Zuck controls the board though! Majority voting rights. Still, have to give it to him. Need guts to make such a call. WA and Instagram, the Crown Jewels of Meta.
Then again, nobody wins all the time (cough oculus cough).
I don’t think Facebook’s social graph / ad-based business model can be connected to a successful hw/sw XR experience.
However, Oculus is way too early to call as a bad bet.
Oculus could be like late model, pre-touchscreen Blackberry.
Where it is proving potential and demand for a new type of connectivity, but unable to leap forward far enough and fast enough to counter an entrance from Apple.
It could pivot its business model and become the most successful XR platform for Android users, consolidating support from Epic, Snap and others.
If Zuck wrote that email in 2013, he knows the headwinds against this direction and I don’t think he’s reached the Bowling Alley scene of There Will Be Blood quite yet.
Not sure what you allude to with Oculus, but the Oculus Quest is the best selling VR headset ever and is growing like crazy. With their research, they've also pushed the technological boundaries (things like inside out tracking, the new pancake lenses coming with Cambria by the end of this year, passthrough).
I truly believe that VR headsets will become the major computing platform. Not in the next 5 years, and not overnight, but eventually.
They sell Quest units at a loss and absolutely nobody is using VR to interact with any of Facebook's properties in a meaningful way. As of right now, it's a total distraction to their core business.
Granted, Oculus makes fantastic products that are making VR more accessible. However, as a business, it has been investment heavy[1]. Meta continues to make 10s of billions of dollars worth of investment to build an ecosystem around it.
I don’t think Zuck foresaw the level of investment he’ll need to make before turning profit.
Oculus (and the “Metaverse”) is a 10-20 year play, betting on people changing their habits and using VR as their primary medium of engagement online. They’re trying to build an iPhone/iOS like integrated hardware and marketplace experience, but it remains to be seen if they’ll be profitable as a business.
I surely wouldn't want to bet against Zuck, having bought multiple Quest2s, it surely has hit the product-market fit! Unless Apple steals their lunch coming year, Meta is going to be a big hit.
The quest2's standalone casual gaming capabilities are great - it's easy to setup a party guest for a round of beat saber in a couple of minutes, reminiscent of how accessible the Wii was
if the rumors of Apple's device costing $2000 are correct, they're not going to push the Quest out of that market.
You don’t need to respect him but continuing to disregard the intelligence of people you’re against (or not ) arbitrarily isn’t a smart move. Zuckerberg has proven beyond doubt that he’s more of a visionary than all other tech bro cEOs he gew along side.
In addition to the agreed price of $16B, Facebook added $3.6B to retain employees. WhatsApp had 55 employees at the time [0]. Near the end of the referenced article is an interesting comparison of different prices/employee for other acquisitions.
Most of users never paid it, and skeleton of the team they had was supported also by contractors, and most importantly, ignoring any abuse. That was ok in those days, but it wasn’t sustainable as they grew. Dealing with abuse, spam, misinformation is very costly, even when you’re e2ee.
I don't trust big tech to regulate truth, but let's not dismiss misinformation with such broad strokes.
There are deliberate attempts by politically and monetarily motivated groups to spread objectively false propaganda. FUD/HODL to mislead investors, conspiracy theories to sway public opinion, pseudoscience to peddle ineffective medical treatments... The people doing this effectively aren't individuals disagreeing with mainstream discourse, they know exactly what they're doing.
According to Wikipedia: "Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information presented as fact. It is differentiated from disinformation, which is deliberately deceptive."
> I think 99% of executives on earth wouldn't have made that decision.
We conclude, 99% of executives are geniuses. I just feel like the term 'genius' gets thrown around inflationary. Being successful != being a genius. There is more to it (it actually isn't even a requirement) . At least I want to believe that.
> 16 billion dollars for a 24(?) person company with no revenue.
You are minimizing the impact of WA….. by a lot. At that time, almost all the smartphone users in India were using WA. The transaction gave FB all of those ~half billion users in just one shot.
It’s notable here that none of the founders of IG and WA are with Meta today - due to ethical differences.
I think they did, just not in the way they expected. They've developed a messaging platform where finding the user you want to message is handled outside of something as arbitrary and transitory as a phone number.
For example, military members (in the US) rely heavily on FB Messenger because deployments, short tours, and overseas assignments kill the reliability of using a regular phone number to maintain contact with friends and family. Messenger handles that by connecting via Facebook and maintaining that connection regardless of the users' phone numbers or email addresses.
Back in the early days that was the only way these services operates: AOL IM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, IRC, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, MySpaceIM etc.
Even now you have Discord, Slack, Steam Chat… and that’s before you start taking federated services like (Matrix and XMPP) or other social networks (like Twitter, Reddit, etc) into account.
This shift to using mobile numbers is a recent change. And not one I’m particularly fond of either.
When your phone number changes, WhatsApp asks if you want to change your number. You don't have to accept this, it will work fine on your old number. It is risky if you lose the SIM card but it works, I continued using an old number for three or four years after changing numbers and I was never forced to prove that I still was the owner of the old number.
And when your old phone number gets re-used by the telco, some random person will start getting your messages.
A friend was quite freaked out when multiple afgans started messaging him on whatsapp on their "new" phone number. Apparently it formely belonged to a member of the local afgan diaspora.
Thankfully they ware able to get a new number from the telco to deal with it.
What didn't they catch up on? To me Messenger seems like a better user experience than WhatsApp or any of the other three messaging clients I need to use.
Indeed WhatsApp is lacking basic functionality like a desktop app.
Also, a client tied to a phone number may work well for some people, but a pain whenever you change your number, and it makes discovery of people much harder.
Does my phone need to be on/connected to the internet for it to work? That's always been the weird thing for me about Whatsapp, is that your phone seems to be the "server" for the app.
Except now it won't sync older messages and sometimes messages only get delivered to your phone but not the desktop. They took a decade to roll out a desktop app and even then it's a mess. WhatsApp has been degrading under Meta's ownership.
I know everyone else in the west seems to use WhatsApp but in my social circle I connect to nearly everyone via FB Messenger. I have but don't use WhatsApp. I have no idea what it provides that FB Messenger doesn't provide and better. I don't need a phone number for FB Messenger. I can access it trivially at messenger.com, no need for the crazy QR code non-sense of WhatsApp. I also do not have to give FB Messenger access to my contact list, unlike WhatsApp (maybe that's changed but it used to be required).
WhatsApp doesn’t provide anything messenger doesn’t. As far as I can tell, WhatsApp as a product reached its ‘market fit’ years and years ago, in that they stopped bothering trying to add anything to it. Real pity in some ways its not even slightly extensible
I mean you could just tell how unpopular WhatsApp is in the US. I still remember no one in the US have heard of Whatsapp when Facebook announce the 16B acquisition.
But WhatsUp could certainly be another Startup idea.
I went to college in the USA, and none of my classmates had any idea what WhatsApp is.
Funnily enough, my US university's "international office" (the department that deals with international students including facilitating visas, travel signatures, SEVIS, resolving other confusions of international students etc) setup a WhatsApp group to communicate with all international students because that's the one app all of us had in common.
As far as I can tell, there seems to be a great deal of competition in the messaging app space, in addition to Whatsapp and Messenger, you have Hangouts, Signal, Viber, Telegram, Wire, Skype, Slack, Discord, and of course good old SMS. And these are just off the top of my head.
I would not be surprised if we see more consolidation in the sector.
In what sense? The table stakes of boring functionality seem to me to be much better implemented in messenger than whatsapp. Everything from a more intuitive UI to a web option is better done in messenger.
I'd say Zuckerberg is the clear loser in this story: what could be worse than failing to catch up with WhatsApp and discovering a new fundamental use case?
Failing, then spending an obscene amount of money on buying WhatsApp, then seeing a considerable part of that money enabling the Signal Foundation and watching Signal eat up the user base of both WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger. Users are fine.
Telegram has made some impressive strides over the past few years (it's quite mainstream as a messaging platform and social platform in some countries)
Idk, I feel like Telegram is viewed more like a subscription based twitter feed. It’s more about pushed updates to groups of people then communication between loved ones. (It’s also used a lot as a support medium, although I wouldn’t considered forced adoption for support or even notification as an indication of user adoption that’s like saying EV adoption is trending up while some areas almost force conversion).
Here in India, Whatsapp is pretty much a basic utility. A small vocal percentage moved to Signal around the time of Whatsapp's privacy policy furore. But anecdotally, most of them have moved back to Whatsapp because ditching it would mean ditching contact with most of their social circle.
Using several messengers is what enables competition between them in the first place. It's great for the ecosystem. All messages end up in my notification bar anyway, irrespective of the underlying app.
In my German peer group almost everyone is on Signal as well as WhatsApp. (... and Telegram, for that matter.)
Definitely happening in my little corner of humanity. Not happening as in usage of the Meta messengers has dropped to zero, but it's becoming more and more like "funny how this group is still on WhatsApp, do they
live under a rock?" At least FB messenger has a tiny niche left as the way to communicate if you are connected on FB but haven't shared phone numbers.
Whatsapp is still by a longshot the most used messenger app across the world. The user you're responding to is just pulling a "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"
It's definitely happening in some circles. I was quite surprised to hear that my dad's reasonably active sibling chat group uses Signal, and we're talking about a dozen+ mostly technologically-inept people aged 40-70.
To give an example of how inept, my dad recently discovered that iOS Safari has tabs, and he's had a smartphone for close to a decade and uses Safari heavily. I have no idea what prompted them to switch away from WhatsApp, and before that, GroupMe (which they used for a while because it worked through SMS), but they did.
That tells you nothing about a trend though, right? We'd have to look at this over time to see if people are actually moving to/starting to use signal.
If you look at the data over time, you'll find that both Messenger and WhatsApp have grown MAUs every quarter since their existence. You're free to draw your own conclusion to the question.
Bummer for the users who chose WhatsApp over Messenger. Many didn't want a company, like Facebook, to have PII on them, yet FB just bought it all up pretty much screwing these people.
It's telling that Watsup did never "catch up" on performance reliability, and pushability. They started top notch on those, and if anything, moved down a bit with time.
That's because you simply can't catch up on those. It's not something that happens inside the constraints of software development. That's why Facebook didn't.
"Catching up" is even a very weird way to say it. That wording implies Watsup was a huge entrenched company with a lot of resources spent on development, and Facebook was a nimble team that was working hard to add enough development effort to be an equal.
The WhatsApp situation was a huge driver behind Facebook's 2013 acquisition of Onavo.
FB first positioned Onavo as an "Opera Mini"-like data-compressing VPN for people with mobile data caps, later as "Onavo Protect" so they could scare people into installing it with the threat of the big bad open Internet, and lastly as "Facebook Research".
It gave FB five years of passive market research data so they could identify and acquire (or clone) popular new apps before they could grow into WhatsApp-sized competitors. Think of all the Snapchat-like features that appeared in Instagram around this time, for example, after they failed to directly clone Snapchat as "Slingshot".
The data from Onavo was so strategically-important that FB were willing to pay teenagers to install it and burned their Enterprise iOS cert doing so:
I’m curious about this. Is it not possible to buy usage data from other network operators without owning them? As much as I hate it, I’d expect this is sold much like location data is.
Sure, you may not get the raw traffic but that seems not very useful for FB.
A lot of that data probably is for sale, but think how much more powerful the VPN is when the metadata is more valuable than the probably-encrypted-anyway raw traffic:
- you can directly correlate an Onavo user's traffic to their Facebook profile for demographic and interest data which telecoms won't even know.
- if two Onavo users are both Facebook users, you can identify up-and-coming apps which pose a threat to Facebook's most valuable asset: the social network itself (the links between people, not any FB software). That includes both explicit links ("Friend" requests) as well as implicit links like mutual group memberships, mutual participation in comment threads, mutual "private" sharing of the same content, etc.
- you get a more complete picture of a person's phone habits across the entire day, not just when the Facebook app is front and center. Remember that this happened immediately after the failure of the "Facebook Home" product which provided application usage tracking by acting as an Android "Launcher" replacement.
- you get a more complete picture of up-and-coming apps' "stickiness", i.e. if a person opens the competitor app immediately when a notification comes in versus if they leave it for a while and get back to it later.
- you get a more complete picture in markets where dual-SIM phones are popular (e.g. when people might have voice/SMS service on one and pre-paid data on the other).
- you get a more complete picture in markets where people seek out Wi-Fi for high-bandwidth activities due to the expense or unavailability of unlimited mobile data.
- you can use Facebook's ad targeting system to directly push Onavo on people in markets you want to enter and dominate.
Amazing how wrong Mark was about lots of things related to Messenger, and how just two months after this email FB ended up paying 20 billion to buy WhatsApp. You get the sense there was a real paranoia about WhatsApp being an existential threat but now almost a decade later and it's hard to see how FB got a return on that 20 billion investment for that particular acquisition.
Also, I find it particularly interesting how Mark is so focused on pushing everything into the public "news feed" style sphere, and seems to have a kind of wishful thinking involving messaging in particular transitioning from a private activity you do with your friends to this public bombastic twitter-esque landscape of public figures "sending messages" to their followers and removing the barriers between those communications and "real" communications between your actual friends. He seems to intensely believe that this is really the only way to create a giant business - essentially destroying and corrupting personal private connections to fill your experience with "more engaging" public content to keep you addicted to the platform.
Well, especially for chat, that didn't pan out. And now we are entering a period where private stories, private communication, and meaningful communication matters more - Instagram growth falling to single digits and rapidly losing ground to other platforms among younger users (a harbinger of things to come) - Mark's dogmatic commitment to the alter of public newsfeed paradigms has caused almost all his platforms to evolve towards a dying entity one by one - all except for, notably, WhatsApp.
One gets the sense that Mark has one trick, and that trick is no longer effective at meaningfully growing and positioning FB for the future, especially compared to its historical growth rates (maybe those were unsustainable anyway).
Re your first part, WhatsApp could've expanded out into a full social network the same way LINE and WeChat did in Asia. So I think Zuck was onto something
Re: the rest: That's an interesting outlook. I wonder if younger audiences are more resilient to being tricked into trying to compete for "Likes" in a semi-public forum of their friends and family..
> WhatsApp could've expanded out into a full social network the same way LINE and WeChat did in Asia
That was never going to happen. If you listen to the interviews from Brian Action, he wanted WhatsApp to stay minimal. He didn't like those other apps that had tons of features/ bloat.
Acton left Facebook over a dispute in the direction Facebook wanted to take WhatsApp. Changing the app's direction after his departure seems like it would have been entirely possible.
Not really. Action knew what Zuckerberg was up to. That's why he implemented e2ee behind Zuckerberg's back so he couldn't scrap users' data like he does with Facebook Messenger. To double back and remove e2ee would have caused lot of users to leave. You can't run finance/marketplace on e2ee because you need to know the flow of funds for money laundering regulations.
Brian made sure Zuckerberg couldn't turn Whatsapp into another Facebook: data hoarding to sell it. I think he regretted selling Whatsapp deep down. That's why he left a billion on the table. To show to himself he wasn't a complete sell out. That's just my take though.
> but now almost a decade later and it's hard to see how FB got a return on that 20 billion investment for that particular acquisition.
WhatsApp is the 3rd largest social media platform in the world with 2 billion users. FB today is worth about $400 billion more since buying whatsapp. This is after the recent stock market correction. FB could today sell WhatsApp for a lot more than what they paid for in 2014. Say what you want about zuckerburg, but his purchase of instagram and whatsapp was a big win for him and facebook.
> Mark's dogmatic commitment to the alter of public newsfeed paradigms has caused almost all his platforms to evolve towards a dying entity one by one
Dying? Facebook owns 4 out of the top 7 social media platforms.
It's current enterprise value is only part of the story - and as we all know a valuable company today can entirely disappear in the future if it is sufficiently mismanaged. Vendor lock in was the favorite tool of IBM and Oracle. Things certainly change no matter how dominant a company can appear at a moment in time. Doubly so with social media with fickle users and generational opportunities with younger cohorts replacing and redefining usage patterns.
Yes, Facebook has by all accounts a commanding position, except competitors are demolishing it with younger demographics in key bellwether regions, and there are many concerning aspects about it's recent growth prospects. Facebook holds the record for the biggest single day market cap evaporation in stock market history (and also the record for second biggest). They are closer to their pre-WhatsApp market cap today then they are to their previous peak.
This was around the era where Snapchat was starting to take off, and I think someone real forward-thinking should have seen the writing on the wall that young people don't want to be doing all of their social interactions in public any more, nor do they want their cringey past coming back to haunt them. They were on Facebook, and then their moms all joined Facebook. They migrated to Instagram, and then Facebook bought it and pushed all the moms there too. Snapchat though, has a couple unique aspects that I think were critical to its success.
First, all the interactions are built around curating who sees it, and keeping things private and temporary. The most public thing you can do is post a story, and that's where you send stuff that even if your mom adds you, you can keep that in mind while sharing to that. But for anything else, you build up a list of people who can see your private story, and send it to that one. And everything that goes to either of those places is gone after 24 hours, which was also not exactly a selling point for the older generation that want to use social media as a scrapbook.
The other thing is that Snapchat is quite unintuitive and confusing to use. I've seen this stated as a criticism, and sure you can make it that, but I think that's also part of the secret sauce that made it so successful. The way you use the app is like its own separate language compared to all social media platforms of the past. And that in itself is enough to keep older people off of it, who had enough trouble trying to figure out Facebook. Plus I think there's some fun and engagement to be had when someone says "hey did you know you can do this?" and you discover a new feature in the app. I've been of the theory that Snapchat keeps itself awkward to use on purpose, because it seems legitimately beneficial to keeping its user base.
It did, but it still doesn't have the quickly-expiring content and fast interactions like Snapchat. Google+ was basically a Facebook clone but with more complicated sharing settings.
If anything, Google+ seemed to encourage people posting everything publicly. I didn't use it much, but I recall being able to click around into people's profiles and see a bunch of public posts, more than you'd expect clicking into a random profile on Facebook. I'm sure this was in part due to the fact that once they got people to merge their YouTube channel with their Google account, all your comments would show up as public G+ posts. Nothing about Google+ seemed like a private social experience to me.
It's almost like he isn't a good businessman and was just at the right place at the right time.
I worry that the majority of billionaires were just lucky and confused that for skill. Then we give them disproportionate influence over society. Basically letting the pigeons drive the bus.
The most important men in town would come to fawn on me!
They would ask me to advise them,
Like a Solomon the Wise.
"If you please, Reb Tevye..."
"Pardon me, Reb Tevye..."
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes!
And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know!
>It's almost like he isn't a good businessman and was just at the right place at the right time.
What's this claim based off of? Is there anything concrete you can point to in the earnings reports, whether recent or any of them over the last decade, to justify this statement?
Back then, everyone was thinking about how to make a super app like WeChat. The thinking was that if you hooked everyone on some practical application, like chat, you could add in banking, lending, games, news, etc. FB sorta did this with FB itself to some extent but never completely achieved that super app status. Messenger obviously did not, and neither did WhatsApp. If someone did do this, they would have achieved complete dominance.
It's interesting how detailed and thorough his thinking is and at the same time all his strategic direction seems to be 100% personal intuition. FB must have an army of researchers who could tell him what users actual want and he doesn't even think of that.
Many of the ideas he expressed (in terms of interacting with businesses) seem to be how WeChat runs, very successfully (never used it myself, just based on what I've heard).
Booking a restaurant is generally ok by phone but if you try to do it online you often get some crappy random website that’s different every time. I can imagine a world where you do it by some messenger interface which somehow Facebook make hard to fuck up for the business. I can imagine that being good, half good (I think there are roughly two kinds of booking. One starts with criteria about date/time/occasion/party/budget/location/cuisine and looks for available places and the other starts with a specific restaurant with other particulars relatively free. An experience might only work well for one), or bad. But it isn’t obviously bad.
Much as a decentralised Internet has good properties, having every small business outsource a nontrivial online presence to a bunch of crappy other companies that lack the scale or incentives to do well is not one of them.
The problem is it's never been his Kool Aid. He stole the Kool Aid from multiple other people and is pretending like he invented the concept (yes people will now argue you can't steal the 'concept' of Kool Aid, and it's about execution; but my point stands, other people can't borrow the concept if one person pulls the rug out from everyone else) of Kool Aid
>"Just like News feed started out as friends content only but eventually expanded to included more content that is now critical to everyday engagement..."
Aged like milk, and not only in the context of the 2016 election.
Friends' generated content was the main reason why I started using Facebook back in '08. Content that showed up on my newsfeed not created directly by friends triggered my - and perhaps many other folks' - leaving the platform.
NLP not being nearly ready. Some of the requests were powered by people on the backend and we hoped to use that as a training set. We could, but we only were able to automate the most basic things like reminders, weather, todo lists, daily transit, etc
People have been using text menus, back through early SMS, all the way to dialup in the 70s. Probably before.
But instead of proper menu items (1 for restaurants, 2 for blah blah), then submenus (1 for order, 2 for reservation), there is this strange fascination with natural langiage parsing via text.
Meanwhile, typing '1', then '1' is far better than 'i want to order from a restaraunt'.
Shorter, no mistakes, more precise, easy to use.
Search, such as 'search restaurants' has been a thing too.
I don't want to talk to a machine, which is designed to use as many glue words as possible, and seeks natural language as a reply. What a time waste!
All that politeness is for humans, we don't need it from a bot.
Interesting to get an more raw insight into Mark's thinking. In some ways its insightful and prescient, but also feels like there is desperation and a kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. I suppose Facebook has/had the resources to do plenty of spaghetti throwing though.
Another observation is that this would have been the moment for Facebook to lean into short video content a la TikTok. But it seems like the video content is just an after thought for Zuck. Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose, but its interesting that they almost got there. Vine already existed at this point and I guess Zuck did not view it as a threat. Perhaps that's one downside of the "defensibility" mindset that seems to pervade this writing and most of the ideas. I get the sense that this is Zuck responding to competitors, and not really crafting a unique vision for Facebook as its own entity.
Reading this fascinating thread makes me finally understand why I left Facebook as a platform - and that's because Facebook ISN'T a platform.
Zuckerberg thinks of Facebook in terms of technology - it's an application platform with certain features like messaging, a news feed, an API and so forth.
That isn't what Facebook was to me. In the beginning, Facebook was a community. As An Application, the problem it solved, that of staying in sync with your community, had many other solutions: Meeting IRL, talking on the phone, going to reunions, and so forth. Facebook was just a convenient virtual place to put those conversations and meetings instead. It felt neat, it felt good to have your community in a digital space.
The reason I left has nothing to do with the features. Facebook is a perfectly FINE application. I cannot point to a single technological flaw with it. The flaw is in the community. Every year since 2016, I have felt that much of the communities that I interacted with are no longer relevant to me, and somehow the old ways of finding community : Reunions, talking on the phone, meeting IRL for events - just feels like a better community somehow.
I am sure Zuck and Team over at Facebook will continue to add new and amazing features to Facebook that make it a better and better platform, application and API every day. But I don't think I will ever go back, because the community that I found and loved there in 2011 died in 2016, and I cannot imagine it ever coming back. When I go online and see some of the ways in which friends have changed - I just cannot imagine wanting to be close to them again.
I have a criticism of Zuckerberg which may seem unfair, but it is what it is. Zuckerberg is very intelligent, and he's a technologist. But he's not a community organizer. He isn't someone who inspires people to come together; he's not a "bringer" as an organizer might say. I don't think Facebook needs more technology. It needs reconciliation and healing of deep and painful divides that were formed over the past decade that mirror a tear in the fabric of our very society - the deep and brewing divisions in values in western society are NOT going to be papered over by an algorithm. If anything, profit maximizing algorithms that create cliques and insular societies that only see what they want to see make the problem WORSE.
Facebook needs a Martin Luther King Jr, not a Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs.
This description by Zuck of Messenger and News Feed in technological terms only reinforces by opinion that I'm never going back.
> Facebook needs a Martin Luther King Jr, not a Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs.
Every part of society needs an MLK Jr.
We pay so much attention to elites who are as trivial and uninspiring as they are rich and powerful. It's been so long since a public figure was someone to believe in. Other than perhaps briefly Obama, I don't think it has happened in my lifetime (I'm under 40).
It’s funny to read this now; I remember a big surge of excitement about Facebook chat bots among organizations. It was going to be a cool new way to engage followers on Facebook: they could message your org as if it were a person, and a bot would immediately handle the most common requests. FB even started putting a little score near the message button on pages for how fast replies happened. (Still there, last I checked.)
The excitement faded pretty quickly once folks realized that it was just a FB chat version of an automated phone menu. We know how popular those are. I don’t think it ever caught on with users, at least among the orgs I’m aware of.
They may be more popular outside the US. Where I am a lot of big businesses still use facebook for their online presence, and use those very annoying chat bots as their support gateways. Really frustrating as a user, but that's the state of things where I am.
Chat bots are definitely still a big thing, but the value proposition has completely flipped.
Zuckerberg (and others) were pushing an experience for the user, where they'd be delighted by interacting with a humanlike support bot that could interpret their human request. The value would come from additional user engagement with the platform, and therefore ad revenue.
In reality, chat bots are a cost optimization technique for businesses, where they save money by paying support bot services in exchange for reduced support staff. Still making money for someone, but they're nearly universally a worse experience for the end user, and certainly not a reason why users would engage with the FB platform.
On the contrary, I've had much better experiences with chat bots than I have had speaking with customer support on the phone. With a chat bot, I can wait for a response and be notified immediately. I wouldn't even mind if they took multiple hours to fulfill my request. Staying on hold on the phone for even 5 minutes feels like hell.
An app is constrained by the functionalities it is designer for.
Chatbot, OTOH, is more flexible as it may be able to verify questions, offers nuanced answers, improves over time without changing the interface, and can be backed up by real humans if needed. If it is working of course, which can be a big if.
It's interesting that Mark Zuckerberg saw the transition to privacy / private channels back in 2013. From what I remember, sharing to your feed, posting to other people's walls, tagging each other in images, were all still very popular back then. But as Mark Zuckerberg predicted, usage of these features has dropped dramatically (at least from what I've seen).
He himself was burned by Facebook's privacy settings when private photos of him and his then girlfriend were leaked. In other photos his laptop has tape over the webcam and microphone. He knows why people are privacy advocates. Probably moreso than anyone else, given the data he has access to.
Personally, I think it was always a matter of time until this sentiement found it's way to the general public.
It feels like the thrust here was to merge the concept of “community engagement” with “messaging”.
Public conversations vs private conversations.
The challenge I see is that users don’t want to mix the two - I imagine a version of “newsfeed meets google reader” (aka twitter) being very different from “messages to macys or my friends”.
The incentive he’s creating for people to move to messenger seems to be “combine everything” vs “focus”, which ultimately failed. Instead it was instagram that propelled that to the detriment of messenger.
I'm wondering if now people like Zuckerberg, for communications like this, instead of email will be using something with auto-delete features to avoid get this messages on the internet in 10 years.
Do you think that on the time of writing he knows that this can be public someday?
This is public because some law force Facebook to give this messages to the government and they publish it? Some recipients leaked it? FB was hacked?
I get some negative feeling on reading this messages that seems to be written as private.
Companies aren't allowed to auto delete messages for legal reasons. At any point communications can be subpoenaed for a lawsuit and companies will have to show them in court and if they are caught deleting messages, they could be in even bigger trouble if they don't have a legitimate reason for deleting them.
Ideas number 3 and 4 together sound to me like the foundations of a generalised "intent economy": a buyer expresses what they want, and the platform dynamically builds the graph of agents required to fulfill that intent, including quotes, bidding, idea/pitch refinement etc. as necessary. Maybe you just want a burger. Maybe you want a gift for Mother's Day but you have no idea what. Maybe you want a new house designed and built.
I don't think I actually _want_ this (I view Uber-for-everthing as kinda dystopian) but I'm amazed that nobody has made a serious attempt to build this. Uber has one part of the puzzle in their driver-customer connection and order fulfillment platform. Facebook has another in its social graph. Amazon has another in its marketplace and Mechanical Turk. And a thousand other companies have one highly specialised subset of this, like finding and scheduling a couple of tradespeople required to do a job on your home.
I must be missing something that makes it a lot harder than it seems, or that means there's a lot less value there than it looks like on the surface, because why else have none of these huge players decided to go for it?
Seems like few people remember that for a brief period, messenger bots were all the rage in the tech press and a lot of investment money was lit on fire to support them. I suspect most or all of that fervor can be traced back to this email. Concise, visionary... and wrong.
It's a classic example of confusing what's good for business with what's good for consumers, and then getting wrapped up in a story that rationalizes the use case. Messaging is a convenient interface in theory, but in practice it's not.
Zuck talks about opening a specific app to perform a specific action as if it's some terribly onerous process, but consider that most common use cases are the first or second button on an app's home interface. Tap to open, tap to do the action.
Even if it technically takes longer because of load times, it feels shorter because you're doing less work. Two or three taps to complete a task vs. opening messenger (tap), then TYPING what you want and hoping it's parsed correctly. Sounds awful.
Zooming out, this is a microcosm of how we get the labyrinthine user experience of so many popular apps and web sites: Executives suppose they know where the future of their business is, then insist the UX be built around that (instead of how or why people actually engage).
Note that Zuck's analysis here isn't based on any data whatsoever - it's purely "here's what I think the future of this business is," and then the entire company pivots around it. Is it all bad? No, having some kind of vision isn't bad. But... This is one of those areas where we can point to someone like Steve Jobs and say, at least he generally focused on the end-user experience and worked towards building the right product; FB/Meta's business-first consumer-later approach is backwards.
It might seem at first like it's framed as being about the consumer experience, but if you pay close attention the primary questions answered are: What can we do to increase engagement on the platform? And: What might others do to drive engagement that we can do first?
Wait a minute, what might others do that we can do first? That sounds like... playing defense. Except, the others haven't done it yet, so it's speculative proactive defense, which is something just about any startup advisor would caution against.
But FB/Meta is at the point where they're focused on market share above all else, so decisions are being made from this backwards second-guessing defensive position. And because so many of us are already locked into the ecosystem, we're experiencing the consequences.
> it's speculative proactive defense, which is something just about any startup advisor would caution against
True, but at that point, Facebook was not a startup anymore. Playing defense as a startup might be silly, but as a large tech company, it's arguably essential.
Pivoting entire company divisions based on what you think other companies might do without data or research to back up the decisions is not the way to play defense.
Facebook-in-Facebook later got renamed to Workplace and launched as a separate product, which IMO is fantastic for engineering organisations with >1000 people.
innovation and differentiation are not things i need or want in my messaging app, holy cow, i just want to send messages. use a standard protocol or write a new one, i don't care, but the problem you are solving is SENDING MESSAGES TO A KNOWN USER. write a protocol, document it, and let the client handle the rest. omg. grow up
What's interesting about this to me, is how many times he refers to the user wanting to go one way, namely private and uninterrupted, and him continuing to drag the user back into the public, data-mining open. He and the lot are creeps. These platforms pretend like they're social services first that mine usage to keep the lights on, when in fact they're data-mining services first, baiting users into engaging in a public forum so they have more data to mine. It's lame and super average, vanilla, capitalist bs.
It's wild how much of this long post is just about addressing potential concerns about spam. I remember how annoying early Facebook News Feed was with Farmville, but it sounds like this was a recurring problem for them that they had to constantly pay attention to.
They did try the agent approach, called M. It failed.
It wasn’t a meta-agent, however. My guess is people didn’t like the idea of only sometimes being used if Facebook thought they should route to them, no ability to control end user experience or brand loyalty, every random service would need to be world class at NLP, and other miscellaneous reasons associated with being just confined to a simple textual transaction.
There are also probably less examples of this than you’d think — restaurants and movies are 101, but where else does this go? Even getting the next obvious thing — concert tickets - all of the sudden requires picking seats, looking at photos of the venue, constraining different options, understanding how many seats are together, etc. Even with crappy UI of Ticketmaster you want the breadth of options and probably to comparison shop. Things quickly get out of hand, and unless you trust the agent to make decisions for you and explain it’s rationale, there are better interfaces than just text.
I loved it when Facebook released the Messenger app, because I could occasionally install Facebook to post vacation pics without ever installing Messenger. I've still never used Messenger.
I think a lot of tech companies / products at tech companies, (e.g. Netflix, YouTube, Messenger) fundamentally get one thing wrong. They don't "value" the user's time and drive for *maximum* engagement. Maybe the problem is that there's a new sucker born everyday, but I despise using Netflix and YouTube, and I use them only because I have to.
With Messenger specifically, I absolutely don't want to spend quality time with someone communicating over a digital device. I'd much rather just use it to make plans with the person I want to hang out with.
And when I am making plans to spend time with a significant other, if I made a request to a service for "buying two tickets for hunger games at 9pm" and it returned a message saying "I can get you two tickets for shoreline at 9:10pm", I'd want to throw my phone into the ocean. I'd feel differently if I said "buy two tickets to any movie at 9pm", that'd be a completely different story.
This is the same problem with YouTube. If you've recently subscribed to a user, or watched one of their videos for the first time, and then make a search for something completely different, one of a first few results will be a video of the user you initially interacted with. It is SUCH a bonkers user experience for me and I want to never give YouTube any information about myself for recommendations just because of that.
These platforms / products should be just services. Give the user enough information to make the decision themselves, and help them make the best decision with the most accurate and pertinent information. I hate that these products shove content into your face.
Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of us?
> Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of us?
Kind of.
But I also use Fastmail. And Fastmail is shockingly, mindboggling good.
And I basically have the tools I need to work from home in perpetuity. While I have lots of things to critique about Slack or Google Docs, I don't have to spend an hour or more a day in traffic anymore, so that's cool. Also Video chat actually works now, which is crazy if you think about it.
I just bought an album from an obscure artist off Bandcamp. It was seamless. And it comes in FLAC if that's your jam.
Speaking of which I've been meaning to run to a neighborhood bakery today and it took 3 seconds to confirm they're still open.
Is the party over? Actually, I'm not sure.
Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social media is not and never has been the web, despite their power grabs.
According to Screen Time, I spend five times longer on TikTok than Safari. HN comes in at just 39 minutes over the last week. The two possibilities are that I’m consumed by the social media cycle, or that I learn more from TikTok than any other source. Since I love learning, empirically social media seems to be the web.
Don’t slay the messenger; I’m just as nervous about this as you. But we’ve all seen what happens to those who cling to old trends, hoping the golden ages will return. It rarely goes well.
I like the web. It has its purpose. But one could also say it’s served its purpose. The power grab exists because it wasn’t serving a very real gap in the transmission of knowledge.
I agree. I think it's fair to say the entertainment/time-vortex/scrolling element of the web more or less moved on from the open web to mobile apps etc a long time ago and there's no reason to think it will come back. I'm not even on tiktok, but there's nothing open web about my Apple TV either.
If you’d like to give it a try, I’m currently watching a lovely stream where an Irish artist is drawing a pug. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdtqCc7E/
The smaller streams seem to be the most interesting, which is sort of the inverse of twitch. Where else can you pass the time while seeing an artist at work?
The history content was the real surprise. I was glued to the history channel as a kid, and watching its demise was a sad point in life. But it seems to be reviving itself in an ad hoc way; there are dozens of channels that go into detail about topics I’d never heard of.
The key is to use the “not interested” button. You have to long press on a video. They make it hard to discover, and it’s the only way to get away from the phenomenon you pointed out. Takes maybe 30 minutes of tuning, and I’m also convinced that yesterday’s “not interested” presses inform the content that shows up today, so give it a bit of time. But it’s hard to gauge how any of these black boxes work.
> Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social media is not and never has been the web, despite their power grabs.
Is this really true? I feel like there are some good social media sites still out there, like certain small parts of reddit and this website we're both commenting on.
Personally, DMs are the only real thing in my life. Everything else feels artificial. You even set aside time to go see your parents, and make plans to go on vacation.
DMs are where the magic is. Even HN comments are starting to lose the feeling, but it’s probably because I’m getting old.
I remember! Selecting profiles on ICQ as if on a dating website, and talking with someone in China! No dickpic, just naive remote friendship, well in fact he did fall in love with me but… wait was it only because we had no numeric cameras at the time?
Small? Basically everyone born in the late-80s/early-90s used AIM, ICQ, or MSN Messenger when they got into high school or college.
That's an entire generation!
I agree that classic IM was best IM, though. Unfortunately you can't make money on IM alone, and AOL isn't the portal of choice anymore. (Google was so close with Hangouts!)
I exclusively used MSN Messenger in my elementary and high school days (which admittedly straddles 2005).
I can't say that an unbloated app like Signal is a fundamentally different experience except for some of the deficiencies that've been ironed out (better file/image sharing is one that certainly comes to mind).
I'm open to being wrong on this point though!
EDIT: Actually, you can add Discord/Signal/Telegram to Pidgin for the throwback UI.
I'm 34 and my whole school was on MSN Messenger from 5th grade until senior year. Even into college a lot of friends were on MSN until Facebook really started catching on. That's my experience from rural North Dakota.
Unfortunately I can attest to the fact that chat apps is where it's at. I personally would much rather make plans in person but it's hard to get anyone to do anything, especially now. One of my friends jokes that COVID turned us all into "online friends" which is just a little too true to be really funny.
It’s true that in a thousand years, the systems that exist today are likely not going to be those of the next millennia.
But it’s also true that the incentives of society change very, very slowly. And right now the most impactful work seems to be done by politicians and corporations.
Which means the ambitious will always be attracted to those, like flies to sunlight.
I just don’t see the point in even recognizing these truths, let alone trying to change them. There’s nothing —- nothing —- that you or I can do about it. Not even YC could. They sailed with the wind, not against it.
The most we can do seems to be to maximize our own individual happiness.
Speaking of happiness, dear readers, remember that 35 is middle age. Working until you’re 60 is the biggest corporate triumph of them all. Do the things you want before you retire.
And what makes it possible for lots of startups to exist? What makes it possible for upstarts to rapidly rise and replace an incumbent?
Todays Big Tech replaced the earlier generation. But the markets have been so thoroughly captured that it seems impossible for any startup to replace Meta or Apple or Google. Netflix is struggling not against another startup but industry incumbents replicating its technology.
Until the markets get competitive again, there won’t be much innovation domestically. TikTok should have shocked the entire US tech industry but rather than try to come up with better products the Tech industry tried to dismember the company and gobble up its US assets ( a process that stopped only because of a change in administration).
Shareholder value is a business term, sometimes phrased as shareholder value maximization or as the shareholder value model, which implies that the ultimate measure of a company's success is the extent to which it enriches shareholders.
To be clear, “at Shoreline” refers to a specific movie theater (probably the Century Cinema on Shoreline Blvd in Mountain View), not a different movie.
I think the lesson here is not that you misunderstood (which is completely understandable, no reason you should know the name of a local theater) but rather that it's never a good idea to assume the worst reading of a situation.
Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of us?
I have this theory, for a long time, that a lot of what sucks in computing is simply because at some moment it was the only thing that worked at certain scale.
Computing is said to be the second industrial revolution and therefore there is an overwhelming force to adopt whatever already works, no matter how much it sucks.
Later, inertia keeps the sucking solution for longer that it would stand on its own, until someone manages to put something obviously better in the market.
Some day recomendation systems will stop sucking. Meanwhile, take them for what they are.
I worry that it's an inevitable outcome of capitalization akin to what I think we've seen in physical goods:
Stage 1: make crappy products because you don't know better
Stage 2: make quality products because now you can
Stage 3: realize that you can make more money by making your product cheaper. Outsource the labor, turn the metal into plastic. People won't even mind if it breaks if they can just get another one. In fact, why not design it to eventually break so you can sell even more?
Stage 4: realize you can make even more money by turning your product into a service with app integration
And it's difficult to go back to a previous Stage because you'll always lose, like trying to un-invent gunpowder weapons. From the perspective of a consumer who cares and wants Stage 2 products, the system's decayed to maximum entropy; the forest is gone; all the trees have been chopped down; the soil's depleted. :C
My favorite example of this is the “whirly pop”, which is a stovetop popcorn maker with a little device for stirring the popcorn kernels. They did the MBA thing and slowly chipped away at the cost, to the point that the lid is a piece of aluminum equivalent to 3 sheets of foil. It’s non-functional and possibly dangerous - but still $30 at Walmart.
The twist is they did go back - you can buy something closer to the 1990 version at Williams Sonoma, except it’s $90.
This is just how we've fought inflation for many years. Things have gotten more accessible, not by accident, but through innovation. And, if your want to pay for quality, you typically still can. Seems like the best of both worlds.
Oh, I'm sorry, did you want to get all the quality but at the low-ball price? Doesn't work that way.
(Not intending to direct this at you specifically spooky. Just hammering your point home for parent poster.)
> Did you want to get all the quality but at the low-ball price? Doesn't work that way.
This is patently false. Look at innovation in things like TVs and personal computers. Technology has gotten significantly cheaper and significantly better quality (although TVs have started to decline in recent years).
I understand your sentiment but I don't think it's impossible to ask for innovation to allow old products to be created cheaper without compromising on quality.
Sure, not to say it's impossible. Sometimes you have early technology that can be refined through mass production. But at some point, you optimize as well as you can, and then the only way to continue driving or keeping prices down is to make compromises.
The user is the person who consumes your product and gives you money for it. 'End users' are hostages. The real user is the ad-company. Once your product is feature complete, your ability to make money from the product doesn't scale with the technical quality of the product itself.
Facebook cares about making money. Period. Zuck's emails clearly show that his eyes are pointed at the exact point where some form of advertisements can be brought into the messenger platform. (indirectly through new feed in this case)
Youtube tried to sell people a subscription model, and most users do not want to pay the kind of money that youtube would lose by allowing them to avoid ads and low-quality content wormholes.
Netflix has an entirely different problem all together. It is a bunch of mega companies burning capital faster than it can be replenished, hoping to win the 'streaming' game. Unfortunately for Netflix, Disney practically has a warchest ready to go at all times.
Funny thing is, eventually a product comes along that provides the same value to the 'end user', without all the baggage of the 'money making' service. This is usually the point of exodus (digg/orkut/myspace) or acquire. (whatsapp)
I feel as though you're just being nitpicky for the sake of missing the point.
the overarching issue is that this " 'End users' are hostages. The real user is the ad-company" is a terrible problem which needs to be addressed, and politicians and other elites are terribly failing to do this in the west.
> Facebook cares about making money. Period.
you misspelled "every modern corporation"
all this to try to highlight how there's a problem here, and there seems to be a failure of society at large in the capability to deal with it.
> The user is the person who consumes your product and gives you money for it. 'End users' are hostages. The real user is the ad-company. Once your product is feature complete, your ability to make money from the product doesn't scale with the technical quality of the product itself.
Clearly this is not what society wants, and it would be great if there was a law against this business model (at least until there are plenty of competitors who behave better).
I actually like the YouTube recommendation system. It manages to pleasantly surprise me pretty often. I don't have significant privacy concerns about it - the stuff I enjoy on YT is quite aligned with my public persona, so to speak. I'm not disclosing anything that I don't already disclose to the outer world.
And furthermore, "bare" YouTube experience (what type of stuff they promote on their front page when it's not customized by my recommendations - basically what I see when I'm not logged in) is truly nauseating to me.
> if I made a request to a service for "buying two tickets for hunger games at 9pm" and it returned a message saying "I can get you two tickets for shoreline at 9:10pm", I'd want to throw my phone into the ocean.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand your point here. You asked for 9 and it gave you an option of 9:10 at the Shoreline theater by the Googleplex. That’s usually the most common spot in this area. Are you saying it’s the wrong location for you?
> This is the same problem with YouTube. If you've recently subscribed to a user, or watched one of their videos for the first time, and then make a search for something completely different, one of a first few results will be a video of the user you initially interacted with. It is SUCH a bonkers user experience for me and I want to never give YouTube any information about myself for recommendations just because of that.
YouTube's recommendation system has been terribly broken for me for years.
I used to occasionally watch Lex Fridman's show casually, but now I despise it because it's all that YouTube's autoplay and homepage steers me towards. I guaran-fooking-tee you that I can fall asleep to Spongebob Squarepants clips and wake up in the morning to Lex's monotone voice... every single time.
Worst yet, it doesn't even do much to show me episodes I haven't watched yet. It replays the same ones countless numbers of times.
Thing is, I do want to watch some of Lex's episodes when they come out, so unsubscribing isn't a good answer. I've tried telling YouTube to "show me less of this" or whatever the equivalent option is, and it doesn't get the clue that it's overwhelming me.
People wonder why I'm such a pessimist about Silicon Valley and the world of software engineering despite that I'm a programmer. UX patterns such as those found on YouTube and The Google are the opposite of excellence. Either they lack competence or they are specifically designed to waste your time.
I don't even buy the notion that "most users don't care." People in my life who aren't technologists complain about tech all the time.
Same as it ever was, I suspect. Why do all parents know in their bones that TV is kind of bad and they should limit their kids' consumption of it?
It sucks that a lot of problems are very old and just keep manifesting in different ways. But the flip side is the strategies for resisting are also old and well-known.
My toddler is unaware that there is a whole world of video content made just for him - as far as he knows, the only videos that exist are nature documentary clips, cooking shows, church services and tech conference talks.
I know that as soon as some of his daycare classmates can really start talking, the veil will be pierced and he'll be begging to see (judging by said classmates' t-shirts and backpacks) Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig and Frozen.
And I'm not sure how we're going to deal with that.
I'd disagree with the characterization that Facebook is maximizing user engagement with messenger. Rather, they wanted messenger to
1. Be the de facto protocol used by companies
2. Let people spend less time on messenger, and render planning of events efficient
For point 1, this is evident with the mention of the Facebook SDK being used by many apps, thereby rendering the adoption of a messenger API easy. I find the timing of these emails __very coincidental__ since Facebook recently announced an API for WhatsApp that effectively achieves "app-to-person messages" [1]. Based off rapper Ryan Leslie's great success with automating consumer engagement [2], I think this will succeed given a right signal-to-noise balance (also mentioned in the emails!). That said, interesting __anti-trust questions__ also arise, see Twilio, SuperPhone, etc.
For point 2, I frankly welcome messenger facilitating the planning of vacations/outings. It's very common for people my age to say "let's hang out" or "let's go to this concert", yet no one wants to spend the time to plan it. If my non-vacation-planning messages can be hermetically demarcated from every advertiser's eyes, then I wouldn't mind this addition.
Relevant Note: This comes from the perspective of a Gen-Z denizen.
P.S. As an aside, it would be interesting to see the implementation of a cryptocurrency to reward users for engaging with ads. I conjectured this was the purpose behind the ill-fated Libra coin. That said, it's not immediately clear how proof-of-work would be implemented, or if blockchain would be needed at all.
Then use Discord to tell them to download an XMPP client and join a real IM platform that isn't some vendor's proprietary, inferior, walled-garden B.S.
Matrix IMs like Element look cool, but feature parity and usability seem far away...
Fat-client P2P IMs like WLM died because there was no business model, but there's not even much of one in thin-client ones like Discord (which I praise for refusing to be bought by Microsoft).
It seems like a market failure thing perfect for an open source solution, but alas.
yes. The YouTube results are horrendous. I get a mix of things unrelated to my search that YouTube wants me to look at and a mix of related things and what feels like a never ending loop through some other material.
Older videos can be very hard to find at times. I sometimes use a regular search engine to try to get to it.
This probably isn't because of bad technology though, although that is possible. I suspect it is part of a revenue maximizing strategy, like you implied about them not valuing user time, to get users to focus on viral content to drive engagement (addiction) and highly monetized content. But it could be because of poor machine learning models I just suspect it's a new type of dark pattern.
Yes I wish that more software (and hardware) focused on being good tools. I should use software to achieve my ends, not the inverse.
Accept my input, produce the output I need, and do it with as little friction as possible. Don't assume what I want, and definitely don't shove it down my throat.
What people ideally want to do and what they actually do are different, yes, but that doesn't mean it's moral or good to disregard what they ideally want.
If a heroin user wants to get clean, and you are the dealer, it is not okay to say "sure, you say that, but you keep coming back to me". It is morally monstrous.
I know you don't realize this, and you think you're a legitimately good person. But you're basically saying "We know you better than you know yourself, and we're going to manipulate you into pissing away as much time and energy on our platform as possible because we can"
I hate Facebook as much as the next guy, but this part is correct:
The things people say they don’t want to do and what they actually don’t do are often surprisingly different
When television ratings measurement started moving from people writing down their viewing habits in a diary to automated system measuring what they were actually watching, suddenly "PBS" ratings tanked, and have stayed down in automated measurements.
The same thing happened in radio. People would write down that they listen to whatever station was trendy, or cool, or advertised the most. But when Portable People Meters became a thing, we found out that people listen to a little bit from all different kinds of radio stations.
People are sometimes untruthful. Even when they're assured of anonymity.
While that's true, there's another layer to it: impulse control.
When I consciously think about what I'd like to watch on Youtube, it doesn't include some of the things I'd click on if they were put in front of my face. The same is true of food I might take from a buffet versus what I'd order for a catered meal.
I'd like to have an algorithmic feed that gives me the kinds of things I say I want rather than basing it on my actual behavior. I'd spend less time on Youtube and watch things my conscious mind says are more valuable to me. Of course, that's less profitable.
There is a third interpretation I'd like to posit starting from the oft-quoted phrase "Know thyself." One, it implies that knowing thyself isn't a guaranteed ability - it takes effort for example. Furthermore, we can without difficulty agree that knowing thyself has degrees, dimension, and quality.
So what then, if someone does not know thyself in some way? They leave open the possibility to have others define them, take advantage of them, and influence one's agency. This doesn't exclude the possibly of someone knowing something about you better than you know, only to say that maligned agents can capitalize on one's lack of self-knowing.
We can then extend the original quote in this specific content to "Know yourself so that you alone can define your agency." This extension allows for nuance in epistemological introspection and accounts for inter-subjective manipulation.
I agree with you here, but bringing it back to the context at hand: Facebook knows what will keep people hooked in a way that helps Facebook, and sneakily optimizes for that. They don't care if the product sucks or if it radicalizes people with aggressive, difficult-to-debunk BS memes and grinds them against each other.
Yeah, OK, a lot of people don't know themselves well enough to turn their phone notifications off and delete their Twitter accounts. That's the part I don't like, and it's all cloaked behind "We're increasing engagement with a data-driven approach!"
Yes, I know that is what I’m saying. And no, I don’t think of myself as a legitimately good person. Fairly stupid. Pretty selfish. Decent cook, so that’s something.
>2. The things people say they don’t want to do and what they actually don’t do are often surprisingly different.
Personally I find recommendation engines abhorrent. And still, when a recommendation engine works well for me, I am pleasantly surprised and happy with the product.
That's nonsense. First, he never spoke for anyone else. Second, ask any expert in econometrics; they'll tell you he's correct.
Also, it's obvious he's right just based on Facebook's interest in Messenger. Otherwise, they'd just work on implementing functionality to manage scheduling and meeting with friends in person and never develop all their extraneous Messenger features to begin with.
> But to get people to ditch WhatsApp and switch to Messenger, it will never be sufficient to be 10% better than them or add fun gimmicks on any existing attribute or feature. We will have to offer some new fundamental use case that becomes important to people's daily lives.
They never did catch up on table stakes, nor did they discover that new fundamental use case. But they had a good fallback plan: Just buy WhatsUp.
Bummer for the users, though.
I find myself wishing something along the lines of antitrust was enforced more rigorously to help preserve competition.