This could turn into the online video equivalent of the Burma Shave road signs.
> Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product.
One of the biggest steps down in Facebook history was their removal of RSS syndication. There was a time in the past when you could subscribe your Facebook account to external RSS feeds. The entries in those feeds would create new content on your "Facebook wall". This essentially let you use any third party that supported RSS to publish content into your Facebook feed.
Facebook removed that feature. The effect of this was that people had to create content within facebook instead of outside it. This reoriented the flow of content creation so that it must originate inside of Facebook, removing the ability to use FB as a passive consumer of content created in a workflow where the creators chose the entire flow.
IMHO this is one of the biggest steps down ever in FB history. It was one of the biggest attacks on the open web, and I'm sad to say that it mostly worked, and the internet at large is worse as a result.
That's why I wonder if, deep down, Zuck realizes the walled slop garden he's ultimately created instead of what it looked like he'd set out to create 18-20 years ago.
The problem is, despite all of the slop and garbage and surveillance and everything, Facebook is still actually valuable for many people.
People use it to keep in contact with relatives and friends, I follow work groups, my mother took COPD therapy through Facebook and chatted with relatives in other countries. I think Hacker News has been so radicalized against social media and "algorithms" that they forget most people's relationship with social media is entirely mundane.
You are right that a lot of people use social media for good things. The problem is that these usages are orthogonal to what these platforms are designed for and the reason why people use them for that anyway is mostly not for the value they provide but due to the network effects they have achieved though their market capture. On the technical side these are all long solved problems and many others could provide a platform for actually connecting real people. Facebook and etc. are parasitically absorbing this markets while actively undermining any healthy activity they platform.
> most people's relationship with social media is entirely mundane.
I think the engagement numbers of the social media platforms say something different. They wouldn't keep feeding everyone all that toxic stew if it didn't work with most people.
The large social media platforms are hostile to actual social activity.
Speaking of industry wide shift, how many companies has FB fucked up by proxy?
I refer to the video metrics scandal. How many video autoplay and other things has everyone felt obliged to copy because Zuckerberg (who seems to care about nobody) made FB into a fradulent company?
Remember when Facebook was an application development platform? And people built businesses on that, and then they just kind of stopped allowing that? Good times.
I guess it happens when engineers stop driving decisions and the finance people take over. Won't be too good for the company's valuation if people can access the content elsewhere.
I guess that's why Discord is also locked down as much. They have community content that is inaccessible anywhere else but Discord.
I don't like this engineers vs. finance people / MBA divide that I see parroted a lot on HN. And obviously, it's parroted by engineers.
Like, all engineers are saints and the other side are all sinners. What crap. Get real, guys. There are all kinds of multicolored and multidimensional people.
Having been on all 3 or 4 or 5 of these sides :) (dev, sysadm, manager, consultant, ...), I have seen that.
Grow up, folks, and enjoy life in all its richness.
Yeah but Zuck has always been a nasty piece of work. He wasn't "just young" and "grew up" when he wrote those IMs. See: (to list just one) the constant copying of Snapchat
Did he/didn't he steal? Dunno, though there's a fair few bits of evidence in the various lawsuits (Winklevoss, Greenspan)
But if you didn't know about any of that you could make some inferences. Like his neverending "ooh, shiny new thing, want" (and then lie to people along the way, trick Indians into signing up for your internet.org thing)
I was willing to take his side on a few things because the political situation is genuinely unclear and the public has been misled but then right after he wrote the open letter to Jim Jordan about censorship coercion (which was a real problem, I want to see more tech companies talking about it) he does this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178
It's kind of like he has raw bits of intelligence but doesn't quite know how to piece it together and besides "his" inventions (even FB) are put together (largely?!) by other people
>But if you didn't know about any of that you could make some inferences. Like his neverending "ooh, shiny new thing, want" (and then lie to people along the way, trick Indians into signing up for your internet.org thing)
Yeah, that trying to trick Indians into that thing (IIRC, it was also called Free Basics or something like, to sound attractive, prolly) became a big issue in India at the time, I remember, although I didn't delve deep into the matter. I think a group of leading Indian freedom activists took on FB in the media and petitioned the government, and it resulted in the whole scheme collapsing.
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
A few days ago I started up an old Windows 10 laptop that I haven't used in a few years so my son could play a game that I haven't taken the time to set up in proton on linux. I was amazed at how much the Windows OS experience seems like an unhealthy relationship where the OS is trying to manipulate you and control you. It feels like it's not even my computer, it's a Microsoft owned kiosk that I'm allowed to partially use.
Another really remarkable thing is how cloud connected it is. For instance, the lock screen had online feeds shown. The setting to disable them is on a remote website, not in the screensaver prefs or some other local system pref. That was astonishing, and IMHO absurd. If it hadn't been clear to me before, that made it crystal clear that what MS wants the OS to be and what I want the OS of my personal computer to be are not remotely the same thing.
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