Facebook’s Retirement Plan
economist.com
economist.com
Abercrombie [...] became inseparably linked with Americans who came of age around the turn of the century. The price of being so closely associated with one generation was that the next wanted nothing to do with it.
Facebook, which took off around the same time [and] which began as a way for oversexed Harvard undergraduates to rate each other’s looks, is now seen by youngsters “as a place for people in their 40s and 50s”
Those aren't the same! In the Abercrombie case, the case being made here is that the same people are wearing it, but that cohort has naturally aged and younger people don't want to follow them. In Facebook's case, older people have joined the network over time -- the stereotypical aunts, uncles and grandparents on Facebook are late adopters, not the original users who have naturally aged.
Edit to add: to put it another way, if you think of a 37-year-old techie like Zuckerberg, the social network that immediately comes to mind isn't Facebook, but Twitter. Twitter has plenty of problems, but "only my crazy uncle uses it" isn't one of them. Twitter isn't unfashionable because of all the old people on it, at least not to nearly the same degree as Facebook.
Facebook's age demographic has changed beyond naturally ageing out, which might mean that it's possible it could change again in the other direction. I'm skeptical about that, but I don't think Abercrombie is a very good analogy. Fashion brands are famously cyclical; is the same true of social networks?
Before your aunt, grandma, and gradeschool cousin could join facebook, it was a place to be pretty open about having fun in college. That openness didn't work well with expanding the population to people who wanted to do what the cool college kids were doing because the college kids didn't want to share their weekend party plans nearly so much when grandma started to comment on them.
Your aunt didn't need to see that you were invited to a kegger on Thursday, and you didn't want her to.
How exactly is "inclusiveness" inappropriate here? Because it goes against the agenda that inclusiveness is always good? I guess using different synonyms for positive and negative connotations is one way to preserve doublethink.
Teens don’t want to catch up with friends spread across the world, etc. But this means the next generation lacked the critical mass of young people which keeps a social network alive. Worse they eventually turned on monetization strategies which are effective for a captive audience but discourage further adoption.
The real question is a new generation will age into Facebook or is it ultimately doomed to irrelevance.
The question becomes whether leadership will set their ego aside, stop trying to make the world like them, and own the actual future. No generation wants a Metaverse. Literally no one was asking for it until crypto got kicked out of Mom's house and needed a reason to crash on the couch.
I agree with you though: Facebook _optimized_ as it is trying to do with the eyeballs of all humans (e.g. VR color theory). Problem is that society learned its lesson. We became aware of how software aggregates our behavior for major ad deals with no regard for our collective health – mental & physical. Just like smoking in 1950, Facebook had its day. It's time to change some laws based on what we learned and get back to building genuinely cool stuff.
Can that software really “thrive” if the core part of the business were to fade away, though?
Big companies can’t live on tech alone. I’m thinking of companies like Sun and Yahoo that made some cool software but ultimately didn’t have sustainable businesses.
None of that is "tech" as I would understand. No one is for example paying them for their work with Proton to make Windows games run on Linux. And I don't think there is even such market.
source? Or did you pull this out of your behind
The movement into generation-focused apparel was a pivot. They didn't make the next pivot to maintain. I think most companies need to continuously evolve.
Not a fisherman but Orvis is better than most. But they're also still family-owned.
REI is also probably better than most but they're a co-op.
But even in those cases they're pretty mass-market oriented which is pretty inevitable unless you're mostly niche mail order. REI doesn't stay in business and support a broad retail network selling climbing ropes and carabiners.
The first one is the initial popularity. The second one is the dead cat bounce of nostalgia 20 years later. After that, they become costumes, not fashion.
The crazy uncle vibes are off the charts on Twitter. Considered that the two personalities most entwined with the platform are Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Ethically, morally, emotionally (empathy) - he's been pretty out of touch this whole time, not understanding the full breadth of consequences of his actions, and therefore not caring.
People get confused by the popular media depictions - sociopaths are just people with very little empathy and virtually no remorse. People who do tremendous harm are not sadistic cruel people, they’re often just boring people who have no empathy for others and show very little remorse or none at all when lying or engaging in deception - which is why it’s hard to tell they’re even lying - they don’t show the tells of self doubt and remorse that we use to detect deception.
As far as I know, Facebook has never innovated. It’s either bought or copied every single feature it’s ever implemented, with the exception of course of giant shameless data gathering on an industrial scale that has led to cognitive warfare being part of political battles in the West.
And now of course a huge increase in depression and mental illness due to poor incentives on their social media platforms. If Facebook/Instagram was a physical product that you would take, that lets say reduces anxiety temporarily but increases depression in the long run, it would likely be banned.
And of course they won’t fix anything because “reducing engagement” is a mortal sin for the company.
Sure there are paranoid delusional maniacs who sometimes lead them (and then you see the real damage). But a person with very low empathy can create enormous damage. I see them often working in finance in London and ignoring the second order effects of ie tax avoidance schemes for the super rich, or selling real estate to the Saudis while going with their friends to the local LGBT disco. They just don’t care.
Part of the whole origin story of TheFacebook that falls in line with this is that his university actually had a print version of a compilation of people's face - I presume like a yearbook - that they were planning to make an online version of; it was actually called The Facebook from my recollection, and another place Mark wasn't creative or innovative and took from as well.
Apparently they were taking a long time to make the site, Mark couldn't understand why. The reason? Apparently the group who was working on bringing the print version online were brainstorming through the potential consequences of doing so.
I remember reading about it many years ago online in one of the university's student newspapers, I think I remembered it correctly but my memory of it is a little fuzzy; I believe it'll be in one of these articles: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/tag/mark-zuckerberg/
I don't think the problem at Facebook/Meta is that it's a mortal sin to reduce engagement, I honestly think they just aren't creative enough and they don't understand from foundational principles why they have what they have, nor how to improve on it in a nuanced way.
As you said it's basically an industrial machine with very few wheels, where all of the basic or crude parts are in place, where their guide is the most basic-shallow metric possible is whether engagement goes up or down; where it's the network effects that kept it together for so long. Mark certainly isn't a creative visionary, and so with him at the helm, all of his decisions of who he empowers under him will be random as to whether they are beneficial or not - but logical decisions looking at user numbers and growth made purchases like WhatsApp and IG no brainers.
Interestingly, you are actually correct, in that the original meaning for sin is aim related - and so because of their lack of sophistication, the only thing they see or know how to aim at are engagement numbers. The sin will be by not aiming at the only thing they are good at aiming at, where they otherwise miss the mark - and sin; is it irony that his name is Mark and he's arguably been missing the mark this whole time - or perhaps a generous perspective is that he's really good at hitting one specific mark, the Mark? Anyway..
In contrast, Elon Musk functions creatively, an imaginative open mind, and has developed an understanding of first/foundational principles that he works from. Twitter will likely be a good buy once Elon re-lists it. I'll still be investing in my projects though.
I have been working on my own platform solution to solve for our society in crisis mode. It unexpectedly was a relief when Elon bought Twitter, as I am primarily driven by necessity. Elon will course correct Twitter away from the ideological and censorship bent platform it was becoming, so at least there's one major battleship on our side, funded by the person who most definitely has Fuck You money and competent to boot.
If he doesn’t have psychotic phases and how bipolar is not so strong, he can be a high performance individual but I think it’s something he will eventually have to take a look at.
https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/elon-musk-admits-to-un...
I can’t tell nor would I diagnose someone I don’t know.
However - his current tweet storm has included imo a lot of Juveline type stuff. He also seems to be tweeting more than usual. - this matches with the impulsivity you’d feel in a manic phase. You’re also full of dopamine so you feel like you “can do anything”. This can lead to irresponsible behaviour and grandiose dreams that you feel “are totally possible”. - it’s possible he has a low-grade bipolar type mood swings. I had something like bipolar, but not quite, before I had my first psychotic episode. Very high highs and very low lows. Same as he’s described. I’m not sure if you can live your entire life this way, but it’s possible that it is and he’s a case. His behaviour certainly reminds me of my own previous to my outbreak. - one of the things that destroys you with bipolar and that they warn you about is compulsive buying. Your impulsive behaviour + money is the worst aspect of even a low manic phase, since you can easily blow all your money very quickly.
Looking at his purchase of twitter, his prolific tweeting, the way he’s acting in those tweets (juveline, impulsive) he really really reminds me of someone in a low-grade manic phase.
In a manic phase you are pumped full of absurd amounts of dopamine, so you have tremendous energy, you think you can do anything, you can fall into impulsive buying, and you are so led by impulse you can do a lot of irresponsible behaviour.
Him purchasing twitter reminds me of people who buy boats/homes in mania essentially. He doesn’t seem to have a master plan that I’ve heard about to turn it around. Even if he does have a master plan, his behaviour suggests mania to me.
Like I already said I can’t diagnose anyone, but his behaviour is so familiar I can’t help but wonder.
I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but I think there's more to Musk than this. He's incredibly intelligent, and has radically innovated in two industries (Space and EVs), but I don't think he has the maturity/emotional intelligence or societal vision that's needed for combatting the problems that Twitter (and social media) present to democratic societies.
I'm a massive fan of what he's achieved in many areas - and watch every Falcon 9 landing with the same child-like awe that I did the first one that nailed it, and I watched every Starship test live. But this is the same man who had a battle calling a cave rescuer a 'pedo guy' and I'd be surprised if Twitter goes in a direction which will benefit society in the way that EVs and making life interplanetary will do.
I can see where you are coming from with this, and I agree with the general premise, but I think about it a bit differently.
Twitter already had a few "mature" people with "emotional intelligence or societal vision" that ran it at different points in time, and yet here we are in Twitter's current state. Clearly something isn't working.
There is a non-zero possibility that someone like Elon (who is very unlike those previous people who ran twitter) might be exactly the right kind of a person to address the ailments of twitter and course-correct it. He could also fail miserably at it, but I think it is definitely worth a shot to find out.
I think a common misconception is that one’s morals and ethics prohibits them from doing not-socially acceptable actions. I don’t believe this to be true. Rather , I believe one might hesitate (and for all we know he might have) but if this incentive is greater than aligning with what’s commonly accepted as right, than I don’t see Mark’s actions as Sociopathic. It’s what I expect most people to do , especially in the business world.
Does it not have the same outcome that greed or excitement is overriding morality?
That's a very pessimistic view that you expect most people to function from a lack of conscience. You're probably not wrong that it's more common in the business world as well where there's more to gain. I used to think that too, still to some degree but I understand that most people's selfishness is give themself a comfortable amount.
I think maybe you're confusing my saying he's sociopathic with that it's malicious or with intent, which I don't believe Mark to have conscious or willful intent for harm behind his actions; and he's not a psychopath.
Yes but many things can override morality. I believe it all comes down to how strong you hold are to your morals. But I see your point and it’s probably the case.
> That's a very pessimistic view that you expect most people to function from a lack of conscience. You're probably not wrong that it's more common in the business world as well where there's more to gain. I used to think that too, still to some degree but I understand that most people's selfishness is give themself a comfortable amount.
I don’t think it’s a lack of conscience but moreso an overide of it. I think depending on the incentive a lot of people would overide their morals. Though maybe not most people. Idk.
They also do events pretty well. It's easy to invite people and most people my age have a neglected facebook account so you can usually find who you want to invite. You just have to make sure you don't miss seeing the event.
FB, PayPal, the bank all stopped the charges quickly enough, but it was 6 weeks of bullshit in the meantime.
People should have a score and be excluded from it based on their shit ghosting behavior and lack of follow though.
On the other hand, I'd been looking for a used car on FB Marketplace for about 3 years and couldn't find a single listing that seemed like it was from a legit owner (i.e. someone who wasn't selling a bunch of random cars parked on the street or a dealer posting fake prices).
However, they don't do social private groups well at all. For them it's all or nothing. Meetup, unfortunately, is still used for that.
They either force you to do all private events or all public and broadcasted events. Theres no way to maintain a community or a LUG on FB.
I've been working on an app inspired by challenges I had organizing hack nights and poker games. It's kind of a cross between Facebook events and Google Calendar, and allows you to send an invite link and send text updates. Would love to hear your thoughts!
I have to aggressively block all jokes (there were funny 1000 shares ago), memes (always stupid, but they seem insightful), politics (left and right wing extremism), cats (not your cat, I don't care), and other things people share that get in the way of the purpose of seeing what my friends and family are up to.
I think it is because so many people have low trust in Facebook. For years there has been a huge movement of people encouraging each other to lock down their FB account. So while they might keep an account to check in on old friends and family, they have set their profiles to be not searchable.
Those days are gone. People have moved from landlines to permanent cell numbers, so once you have someone's number, you always have it. Email addresses are gmail.com, outlook.com, etc. As with the phone number, once you have an email address, you always have it. Plus, with widespread cellphone usage and unlimited text messaging, it's low cost for both parties to send a quick text message to stay in touch.
Facebook's original source of popularity is now dead. Of course this does not imply that Facebook will disappear.
Instagram.... Whatsapp... FB marketplace...
I don't have a Facebook account (or Instagram or Whatsapp) but Facebook (Meta) is more than just Facebook. Maybe FB is just the product targeted toward older adults and grandparents now? That seems fine.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/aarp-backed-soci...
Instagram only allows you 10 pictures per album, has no good auto-tagging, and has no good way to download pictures from the app (which causes deep-fried screenshot hell). None of my friends are in Flickr or whatever picture site is common these days.
It's a pity that Facebook the company seems to have prioritised engagement so much over sanity.
I dont trust them to not hose it up in the future.
Albums are shared intentionally rather than indiscriminately for anyone who you happened to click "Accept" on years ago to view. There are fewer privacy implications - I can be sure that the photos I share aren't crowbar'ed into someone else's feed.
If I was heading facebook product, I would move all that fluff to other apps, and make the core of facebook a useful simple tool to connect people again. The removal of the historical newsfeed is the first thing that shows that it’s not made to be useful anymore. Listen to the users.
That is good, not bad. I have never sat through a vacation slideshow with more than 10 interesting photos.
It seems odd that they would have left out "shirtless" in that list of adjectives to describe Abercrombie and Fitch's obsession. There's a group called "Improv Everywhere" who once staged a funny event where they assembled 100 regular looking guys to descend on the Abercrombie store in SOHO in NYC while shirtless. They proceeded to shop for shirts and perhaps unsurprisingly they were kicked out the store. The video of this outing is available here:
Meanwhile, in my household, Instagram and Youtube continue to show me ads for some product or restaurant I was just talking about, or for a store I just visited. I think my home needs a pi-hole.
When he suggested I try the same group for meeting new people when I moved to my first job post-uni we looked up the society, but it was almost exclusively populated by people much closer to his age than mine. While the remit of the society hadn't changed, as people had got older they had never actually left the society to make space for the young, and so the group lost the ability to deliver on its promise.
It's a natural effect and you can't really fight it, people will grow in places their parents aren't, and so they'll seek spaces where their parents aren't.
Facebook has the luxury of generally being able to buy competition as it grows before it's too large to grow too big. Generally they'll still have the metrics and data to be able to spot new competition before it grows very large at all.
Tik Tok is of course an exception, fueled by both a vast amount of inorganic early growth and being out of reach of an easy acquisition before it grew too large.
I’d add that Facebook had the luxury of buying the competition. They even used to own a fairly popular mobile VPN provider just for the purpose of collecting data about which apps and services are on the rise.
But that was five years ago. Now every move by Meta is under intense scrutiny by three regulators who love to assert their power: USA, EU and UK.
Post-Brexit, the UK’s antitrust regulator wants to demonstrate its new independence. They blocked Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy even though the latter has no operations in Britain, on the theory that Giphy might eventually sell ads to UK businesses and thus become a competitor to Meta.
Meta isn’t eager to risk another of these multi-year acquisition drama episodes. They’re all in on decades-long metaverse platform building, with organic growth at Instagram and WhatsApp hopefully tiding over until Zuck’s dream AR devices become feasible.
Not only do you need photorealistic graphics (just becoming feasible) but you need these graphics in 8k, on a mobile device with long battery life. The hardware to support this will run 20 pounds with a 500+ watt power draw.
Beyond that, you need to ability for everyone to interact seamlessly over the internet in “fun” spaces that they enjoy hanging out in. This means next generation immersive haptics etc. I don't see much excitement for haptica in the wild.
Then there is a whole crazy idea that users should be able to bring stuff across meracerse games/worlds and have it just work...
I see this ending in 3-5 years with a major AAA studio making a billion dollar met averse experience that flops.
Zuck knows this. He's spending $10-15 billion per year on this tech with the goal of having a compelling consumer experience ready in 2030 — still optimistic, but not outrageously so.
I'm not sure if being early will work for Meta. One could look at Symbian which was very early in the smartphone market, with major investments into a power-efficient C++ based OS and GUI API already in 1996. They got app-capable devices with relatively good graphics and resistive touchscreens in the market early, but all that R&D then became a boat anchor when the iPhone happened and Symbian's embedded-style paradigm was immediately obsolete.
Part of my concern is that it's not clear that we even have enough tech to sensibly spend money on. Is the money going to go into BCI interfaces? Haptics? VR? Software? All of the above? Or just big marketing campaigns promising the metaverse?
Maybe? I mean, it's still possible to have expressive representations at lower fidelity. Cartoon characters are way more expressive (and fun!) than actors in movies.
Facebook has proven they need more regulation, not less. Brexit could not have happened without Zuckerberg's gormless leadership. He built a machine for influencing populations and he mindlessly loans it out to authoritarianism while he's off slaughtering goats in his back yard, pretending he's a hunter.
At this point the oldest members have passed on or shifted to weekday-only use (it's cheaper), so things have mostly settled down, but there was definitely some drama during the transition. And that's with ~50 families engaged in a recreational/social activity. Imagine the same in a huge company with customers and business needs and people's livelihoods involved. That is always going to be a bit rough.
That is actually nice, it's good to know association of people/friends that are long lasting (for non-political purposes).
I figure the society didn't get inherited from before your father's time, maybe you'll just need to find/found your own group/society.
In that sense, being the "town square" (e.g. Twitter) is a better bet than being the place where you meet your friends.
Unless you are able to continuously create the new space where the young meet. But, historically, that does not seem to be the case.
When I first moved to Chicago, I signed up for "sports" leagues via "Chicago Sport and Social" (it also includes card games and trivia games). They matched you up with a team in a league with your requested skill level (from "I suck but like going through the motions" to "I played in college and want to WIN WIN WIN"). Your team would be sponsored by a bar or restaurant near the playing fields and your team was supposed to go there after the game and get a free pitcher of beer or appetizer to share while you all socialized.
It was around 20 years ago and (checking the website) is still around now, with the same 20-something target market. I honestly can't imagine that there isn't a similar organization in every single big city that has a constant influx of fresh college grads.
Wasn't she just a product manager?
So, I got an idea, Zuck! Move to the metaverse! Sell us expensive VR headsets tied to your services. That way we can go online and virtually harass each other in person (virtually). It'll be fun! It'll be bigger than Facebook! Go for it.
I feel like facebook would be much more usable if I could do two simple things: hide all posts I'm only seeing because a friend commented on a thing I wouldn't otherwise see, and disable posts where a friend re-shared another post without adding or commenting on it. It wouldn't fix everything, but those two are by far the biggest source of low-signal crap.
Though at this point it would probably be too little and too late.
What the parent commenter is talking about is whether the Facebook newsfeed algorithm will even show that post to the people allowed to see it in the first place. Or will Facebook just hide that post from your friends in favor of ads, clickbait, etc. on their feeds.
In many ways, Facebook is pulling a Myspace. User count goes down, so, to maintain revenue, ad content goes up. Repeat until it's all ads and few users.
Does anyone know if this is true or just eat-the-rich color commentary from the author?
> Mark Zuckerberg, who still wears his college uniform of skinny jeans and hoodies
I’m also having a hard time finding any photos of him in skinny jeans
But yes, it would be funny. :) JNCO is already making a non-ironic comeback, so we might be closer to a CEO wearing them than we think.
Can we all, in this comment thread, form a pact to be as successful as possible so that some day we may make this happen?
(i was too poor for JNCOs so i got some 40x pants at a thrift store and a cheap belt)
Original comment preserved below for posterity:
The New Yorker is pretty thorough about fact-checking their writers. In general, if you read a statement like “nowadays, x does y” in an article of theirs, it’s unlikely to be something that the author just made up to add color.
The problem with FB is just their newsfeed algo. If I go to individual friends, they have lot of interesting posts but none of them show up in my newsfeed. Someone in that org ruined FB.