It’s also interesting to track the evolution of the Facebook feed. Shifting from updates from friends, to updates from news sources, to suggested ads and content, to reels and marketplace…Facebook has become less of a platform to connect you with friends than a platform to make your attention available to those who want to pay for it. So a user who relies on Facebook over decades will gradually be shifted from hearing from real friends to hearing from special interests that don’t offer a friend-relationship. Which makes Zuckerberg's comments even more ironic: your product strategy contributes to a problem that you now claim needs to be solved.
Going back even one step farther, to when The Feed hadn't even been invented yet, and your interaction with the site was limited to looking up your friends and posting on their wall, or joining groups and doing the same thing.
When it first came out, Facebook required a fair amount of direct input from the user
Yeah, you see a variation of that evolution with a lot of platforms. Instagram went from “Share fun photos with friends” to “share polished photos with strangers”
It seems to be totally lost on Zuckerberg that a huge part of friendship is doing stuff together. Can’t hike and go out for brunch with an AI bot. All these resources could be used to build and support something actually useful, what a shame.
As Our Host alludes to, "friend" is an emotional button Facebook uses to connect users to the service, not a description of a relationship. This new business model for Facebook can be more accurately described as flop sweat.
When the Xerox copier came out, people would copy papers and articles they wanted to read. They'd pile up in folders or on desktops, but they'd never get read.
When the video cassette recorder came out, people would record shows and movies they wanted to watch. They'd fill up tapes and take over shelves, but they'd never get watched.
When Facebook came out, people would like and befriend people they'd consider being friends with. They'd have dozens of "friends" online, but they'd never do the kind of things actual friends did.
Marshall McLuhan argued that every time we add a new medium, we cut off some part of ourselves, an amputation. I read this in high school and didn't quite understand it, but since then I've gotten a sense of how new media isolate us from things even as they offer the pretense of involvement.
I think it was Phillip K. Dick in his The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch who introduced Dr. Smiles, a personal companion designed to destroy one psychologically to dodge the draft sending people to colonize Mars. No one should be surprised that Dick was prescient.
Dick was up there with J.G. Ballard in that neither were great prose stylists but both imagined the 21st century in ways that turned out to be WILDLY prescient.
As an Old musician, I can tell you that Facebook is used by musicians over 50 (to be kind, it's really more over 60) to promote gigs, mostly to each other. The younger ones use Instagram and probably Tik-Tok. The tech equivalent of stapling flyers on a telephone poll. Facebook of course encourages you to "boost" your posts, so that people on the East coast can see posts about your gig on the West coast. Go ahead, ask me how I know that.
The dysfunctional billionaires we hear about are either social media barons or psycho VC gamblers playing with a marked deck. I don't know how representative they are of Silicon Valley as a whole, the mere multi-millionaires, but money and clout matter, so their lunatic obsessions and rambling gets taken seriously. Zuckerberg is a prime example of their desperation for the Next Big Thing. He's gonna pound that square AI peg into his round Facebook hole no matter how many billions he has to set on fire. The flailing for a business model is only gonna get worse the bigger the bubble gets. I guarantee if they find one it will be completely by accident.
I got off FB maybe 8 years ago. I sometimes miss having those threads tying me loosely to friends from 6th grade, but I manage. I have quite a few actual flesh-and-blood friends, and I agree, what sort of future is the man envisioning? Yikes.
It is truly remarkable that Zuck controls the online platform best suited to use the modern Internet to actually REINFORCE friendships, and yet cannot see that opportunity
I have to wonder at the 3-friends statistic. This is not from IRL, but probably FB data, and that is skewed by friendless bot accounts. But as the post and commenters say, who wants a bot friend? They are not real, biased to be super-pro-you, very persuasive, and therefore going to be used to influence your decisions from voting to buying stuff you don't need. It is truly a dystopia to support Zuck's desperate need to generate "growth".
The phrase you're seeking is "Facebook Fatigue" and is a natural progression of platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification ... But what Zuck wants to sell you is suck-up yes-bots, ghosts that validated your pitiful existance of 0-3 "friends".
The only useful way to use Facebook is in a web browser, not the app, and have the Fluff Busting Purity extension installed. It's the only way to see what your real friends post and hide the ads and other crap.
Here's a guy with zero people-skills, an arrested adolescent incompletely socialized, and he's projecting his needs and deficiencies on a cohort who could surely be better served than plagued with some "empathetic' fecking bot, ffs!
I've been fully online for nearly 25 years (started my blog in 2002), so a large proportion of my Facebook friends are people I only know online. I guess some of them might be bots. In fact, I recall there is a mental disorder based precisely on the delusional belief that your friends and family have been replaced by bots. Maybe Zuck wants to mkae the deluson reality.
One of the things I find it hard to convey to Zoomers (so everyone younger than me, in my mind) is how laudatory and admiring America was of Big Tech/Tech Culture in the late 2000s/early 2010s. The 2000s were a rough period for US industry and institutions. Every major one - the military, energy, finance, and defense, all the flagship sectors of the US economy disgraced themselves. The economy was in the toilet. Tech came along, and they seemed to be the only people offering up a positive vision of the future. No wonder that people ran towards it.
The thing was it was those economic circumstances along with technological change (cloud computing and smartphones mainly) that made the growth of the FAANGs possible. What all of this stuff is - the Metaverse, crypto, AI - is an attempt to recapture that moment attempted by billionaires that are too cosseted by yes men and ass kissers to realize that's impossible. Tom from MySpace showed incredible wisdom when he realized you can just walk away.
It’s also interesting to track the evolution of the Facebook feed. Shifting from updates from friends, to updates from news sources, to suggested ads and content, to reels and marketplace…Facebook has become less of a platform to connect you with friends than a platform to make your attention available to those who want to pay for it. So a user who relies on Facebook over decades will gradually be shifted from hearing from real friends to hearing from special interests that don’t offer a friend-relationship. Which makes Zuckerberg's comments even more ironic: your product strategy contributes to a problem that you now claim needs to be solved.
Going back even one step farther, to when The Feed hadn't even been invented yet, and your interaction with the site was limited to looking up your friends and posting on their wall, or joining groups and doing the same thing.
When it first came out, Facebook required a fair amount of direct input from the user
You're right! Completely forgot about that!
Yeah, you see a variation of that evolution with a lot of platforms. Instagram went from “Share fun photos with friends” to “share polished photos with strangers”
It seems to be totally lost on Zuckerberg that a huge part of friendship is doing stuff together. Can’t hike and go out for brunch with an AI bot. All these resources could be used to build and support something actually useful, what a shame.
As Our Host alludes to, "friend" is an emotional button Facebook uses to connect users to the service, not a description of a relationship. This new business model for Facebook can be more accurately described as flop sweat.
Don't worry. He's probably working on a bot that can go hikit with you all you have to do is listen to ads the whole time you're out on the trail 😅
Can we get the 'torment nexus' tweet made into a banner towed behind a plane and just have it circulate over San Fransisco, as a public service?
When the Xerox copier came out, people would copy papers and articles they wanted to read. They'd pile up in folders or on desktops, but they'd never get read.
When the video cassette recorder came out, people would record shows and movies they wanted to watch. They'd fill up tapes and take over shelves, but they'd never get watched.
When Facebook came out, people would like and befriend people they'd consider being friends with. They'd have dozens of "friends" online, but they'd never do the kind of things actual friends did.
Marshall McLuhan argued that every time we add a new medium, we cut off some part of ourselves, an amputation. I read this in high school and didn't quite understand it, but since then I've gotten a sense of how new media isolate us from things even as they offer the pretense of involvement.
I think it was Phillip K. Dick in his The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch who introduced Dr. Smiles, a personal companion designed to destroy one psychologically to dodge the draft sending people to colonize Mars. No one should be surprised that Dick was prescient.
Dick was up there with J.G. Ballard in that neither were great prose stylists but both imagined the 21st century in ways that turned out to be WILDLY prescient.
As an Old musician, I can tell you that Facebook is used by musicians over 50 (to be kind, it's really more over 60) to promote gigs, mostly to each other. The younger ones use Instagram and probably Tik-Tok. The tech equivalent of stapling flyers on a telephone poll. Facebook of course encourages you to "boost" your posts, so that people on the East coast can see posts about your gig on the West coast. Go ahead, ask me how I know that.
The dysfunctional billionaires we hear about are either social media barons or psycho VC gamblers playing with a marked deck. I don't know how representative they are of Silicon Valley as a whole, the mere multi-millionaires, but money and clout matter, so their lunatic obsessions and rambling gets taken seriously. Zuckerberg is a prime example of their desperation for the Next Big Thing. He's gonna pound that square AI peg into his round Facebook hole no matter how many billions he has to set on fire. The flailing for a business model is only gonna get worse the bigger the bubble gets. I guarantee if they find one it will be completely by accident.
I got off FB maybe 8 years ago. I sometimes miss having those threads tying me loosely to friends from 6th grade, but I manage. I have quite a few actual flesh-and-blood friends, and I agree, what sort of future is the man envisioning? Yikes.
It is truly remarkable that Zuck controls the online platform best suited to use the modern Internet to actually REINFORCE friendships, and yet cannot see that opportunity
I have to wonder at the 3-friends statistic. This is not from IRL, but probably FB data, and that is skewed by friendless bot accounts. But as the post and commenters say, who wants a bot friend? They are not real, biased to be super-pro-you, very persuasive, and therefore going to be used to influence your decisions from voting to buying stuff you don't need. It is truly a dystopia to support Zuck's desperate need to generate "growth".
…i wonder how many real friend’s Mark, Elon, Jeff or Tim really have…
The phrase you're seeking is "Facebook Fatigue" and is a natural progression of platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification ... But what Zuck wants to sell you is suck-up yes-bots, ghosts that validated your pitiful existance of 0-3 "friends".
Zuckerberg needs to step down.
Wouldn't it be more fun if he just drove Facebook and its ilk into a telephone pole?
The only useful way to use Facebook is in a web browser, not the app, and have the Fluff Busting Purity extension installed. It's the only way to see what your real friends post and hide the ads and other crap.
Here's a guy with zero people-skills, an arrested adolescent incompletely socialized, and he's projecting his needs and deficiencies on a cohort who could surely be better served than plagued with some "empathetic' fecking bot, ffs!
I've been fully online for nearly 25 years (started my blog in 2002), so a large proportion of my Facebook friends are people I only know online. I guess some of them might be bots. In fact, I recall there is a mental disorder based precisely on the delusional belief that your friends and family have been replaced by bots. Maybe Zuck wants to mkae the deluson reality.
Honestly, who gives a flying fuck about Meta or Zuck? Seriously.
One of the things I find it hard to convey to Zoomers (so everyone younger than me, in my mind) is how laudatory and admiring America was of Big Tech/Tech Culture in the late 2000s/early 2010s. The 2000s were a rough period for US industry and institutions. Every major one - the military, energy, finance, and defense, all the flagship sectors of the US economy disgraced themselves. The economy was in the toilet. Tech came along, and they seemed to be the only people offering up a positive vision of the future. No wonder that people ran towards it.
The thing was it was those economic circumstances along with technological change (cloud computing and smartphones mainly) that made the growth of the FAANGs possible. What all of this stuff is - the Metaverse, crypto, AI - is an attempt to recapture that moment attempted by billionaires that are too cosseted by yes men and ass kissers to realize that's impossible. Tom from MySpace showed incredible wisdom when he realized you can just walk away.