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Same! What a sad state the internet is in when a megaevil corp is used by local services to provide updates. I thought that was what Twitter was for?I know several pacific islands were going to ban Facebook but apparently it&#x27;s heavily in use by businesses.Regina Lepping, a young entrepreneur from capital city Honiara, said the announcement had sent many small business owners scrambling to find alternatives to Facebook.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2021-01-15&#x2F;solomon-islands-backtracks-on-plan-to-ban-facebook&#x2F;13060246" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2021-01-15&#x2F;solomon-islands-backt...</a>

The federal government should launch its own platform for the US government and state and local governments to push all their updates. Something like Star Wars&#x27; Holonet.

This has always irked me. Perhaps it&#x27;s heavy handed, but I would love a law that (1) requires governments at all levels to use open-access websites (and radio, a local newspaper of record, &amp;c.), and (2) requires services like Facebook to syndicate any news and updates.

Where I live they use nextdoor for that purpose. I’m not sure which is worse.

It really gets me down when local&#x2F;state emergency services etc. use it as their primary means of news&#x2F;updates.

I basically still log in for interest group posts (e.g., photos from my son&#x27;s preschool) and to RSVP for party invites. I&#x27;d love to see alternatives take over for these.

Their mobile site forces you to login to even view things anymore.

(Bridges) (Open Now)&lt;&lt; We found this slower route instead &gt;&gt;

You&#x27;re right, it&#x27;s dismal. I appeal you make it the furthest away bridge, give yourself plenty of time to reconsider, and maybe find a nice restaurant, concert, business or event along the way.

That&#x27;s an interesting comparison, I never before thought of AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe as belonging to the walled-garden.

Yep I guess the pull to be a walled garden is too great. Even Twitter, a product that should have been the true antithesis to walled garden pigeon holed themselves into walled garden state. I wrote a blog post about it a long time ago <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@shareU&#x2F;we-built-this-city-2cb97437942f" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@shareU&#x2F;we-built-this-city-2cb97437942f</a>

Yes, it feels like a return to the walled-garden days of America Online, Prodigy,  CompuServe, etc.  Essentially, they seem to be want to create a separate network that they control--one that is not &quot;internet-ed&quot; to other networks in an open fashion.

Thanks for putting into words what I&#x27;ve been noticing and feeling. There&#x27;s something dreadful that ephemerally appears whenever a service or someone links to an FB page.

This is my question too. I’ve never used Facebook, yet I’ve never had any trouble finding the information I am looking for. Is it just very very specific places?

It&#x27;s possible you&#x27;re not in the same market as us. Lots of small businesses have no interest in running and updating a website, especially when there&#x27;s a free alternative that most of their customers have access to.

My local ferry <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.libertylandingcityferry.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.libertylandingcityferry.com&#x2F;</a> only has its service updates on FB <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;LibertyLandingFerry" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;LibertyLandingFerry</a>

I didn&#x27;t have facebook for the last few years and I was wondering if I&#x27;d have to come back to it to be able to access local news&#x2F;info. Never happened and never needed to. It&#x27;s true though that in some countries that&#x27;s the primary communication channel for businesses and even governments unfortunately.

Why have I never ever run into this problem in the ten years of not having Facebook?Admittedly I use Google for the answers. But I’ve never once needed FB. Is this a regional thing? Some areas exclusively use FB for a storefront?

All of your customers will continue to be Facebook users if you post things on a Facebook page that only Facebook users can view. And Facebook users are an apparently diminishing portion of the population, as per the article this thread is discussing...Not a good plan for any business, I would think. Would be nice to see more businesses on Mastodon or (gasp!) just run their own websites again. Can you imagine how difficult it must be for a business to buy a domain, hosting, and slap together a static site in this day and age?

Given the efficacy of Facebook&#x27;s targeted advertising this may be inevitable.Some random website containing a restaurant&#x27;s information simply isn&#x27;t worth maintaining if all your customers use Facebook anyway.

Some local businesses only provide their &quot;number&quot; as a WhatsApp contact, so you&#x27;re kinda stuck on a Facebook-owned platform anyway.

If you call a local business you can usually get that sort of information without logging into facebook.

Many restaurants don&#x27;t have a website anymore. Yes, you can google for directions and opening times, but you can find menu or daily lunch on their Facebook only.

I&#x27;m not sure if Google put a stop to it, but in my area there was an issue about 6-8 months ago with the business hours listed on Google being changed by competitors. Usually they would alter opening or closing hours by an hour or two, so it wasn&#x27;t obvious.

why don&#x27;t you just use Google search for checking such info as restaurant hours, direction etc? Much easier than checking on FB I suppose.

There are many businesses (Restaurants, doggy daycare) that no longer have websites but have transitioned solely to a Facebook page for cost and technical ease of maintenance reasons.

I have never used Facebook and I’ve never had trouble finding that kind of information on non-Facebook sites. Are you just used to looking on Facebook first?

I only use it to find local events. If it weren’t for fb and insta you’d think nothing was happening at all. The old local publications were all mothballed by the pandemic.

In there just for collectible items, in my country most of the second hand sellers use facebook.

I wonder what percentage of Facebook&#x27;s users are only there because of 3 or fewer friends, bands, groups&#x2F;clubs&#x2F;interests, or businesses that still use Facebook as their primary means of communication.

This is the reason I went anti facebook years back not because of privacy implications but I felt with facebook the web will become less open. As most business will make a facebook page instead of a website accessible to everyone

Its already frustrating enough having to use Facebook just to look up a restaurant&#x27;s information, the set times for a concert, or whatever about a local business or event. If all that stuff starts to disappear behind a meta-verse wall, I might just leap off the nearest bridge instead.

I mainly use it to sell things locally. Or maybe there&#x27;s a local apartment rental group. That&#x27;s about it.

I also see them using &quot;Family daily active people (DAP)&quot; and monthly active people (MAP). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;investor.fb.com&#x2F;investor-news&#x2F;press-release-details&#x2F;2022&#x2F;Meta-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2021-Results&#x2F;default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;investor.fb.com&#x2F;investor-news&#x2F;press-release-details&#x2F;...</a>I wonder if that counts unique&#x2F;distinct people, taking into consideration a person with multiple accounts -- FB, IG, WhatsApp, etc.

This would be reflected in change to Monthly Active Users which seems way more relevant than total users.

I&#x27;m starting to notice this trend in my group of contacts.

Does it count people who have messenger but never open it, but their device is signed it? It is cramware on a lot of android phones.

The stat being referenced is daily active users, so not counting people who have an account but never login.

I don&#x27;t use the main Facebook app much, but I use Instagram and Messenger daily, Whatsapp sometimes as well.What do you use for your friend group chats?

Which is impressive because I still have Facebook I just don&#x27;t login and never use any of its services - the account now exists to simply hold a lock on my name on the service.I suspect I&#x27;m not the only one doing this.

This may be like the first time McDonalds posted a loss:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;2&#x2F;hi&#x2F;business&#x2F;2688665.stm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;2&#x2F;hi&#x2F;business&#x2F;2688665.stm</a>I still remember it and the changes that came after it, the McDonalds of today is nothing like the McDonalds of 2003.We&#x27;ll see what Facebook does, I assume buy out Snapchat or Tiktok or some other product where the kids hang out.

I think they only lost a half million users (which wouldn&#x27;t even show up as a blib on that number)

More likely FBs network effort is the weakest in those markets: less internet penetration, weaker brand loyalty, Fb is also relatively new in these markets, more competition from tiktok and others.These markets likely to first have user attrition

Isn&#x27;t it suspicious that the losses conveniently happened in Africa and Latin America which contribute to a smallest share of their revenue

Do we have any hypotheses, anecdotes, etc for why that&#x27;s happening in these regions?

&gt; Daily active users dropped from 1.93 billion to 1.92 billion, with the drop coming from Africa and Latin America.

I think it&#x27;s because of the perception TikTok=cat and dance videos, FB=misinformation. At least that&#x27;s what my feeds looks like. Also: TikTok=kids, FB=adults

Agreed - we should symmetrically apply their laws in the US as well and require that they be locally owned.Or just block them. Maybe that would be better.

I agree that TikTok is much worse, but thankfully I rarely hear about it and don&#x27;t personally know anyone who uses it.

I don&#x27;t use either service, but it&#x27;s my impression that the misinformation on TikTok is more on the &quot;petty harm to individuals&quot; level and less on the &quot;destroys the social and political fabric of societies&quot; level.

The problem with TikTok is that it&#x27;s even more opaque than Facebook.Content can be said to exist or not exist on Facebook, and that&#x27;s usually it. Sure they monkey with the feed, but it&#x27;s still essentially user-derived.TikTok effectively exposes one interaction: get next.What that returns is completely at the mercy of whatever TikTok decides it should be. They&#x27;ve optimized for virality. But it would be pretty easy to tweak that and optimize for something else.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;22772157&#x2F;tiktok-tics-suggestible-distress-teens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;22772157&#x2F;tiktok-tics-sug...</a>I think researchers are starting to notice mass psychological phenomenon specific to the platform already, though maybe &#x27;tiktok tics&#x27; just sounds nicer than any of the other social media networks and &#x27;tics&#x27;

Don&#x27;t worry, tik tok is just new.  Wait a few more years and they&#x27;ll be put through a similar rigamarole, although I don&#x27;t think it will be as severe as FB.  Maybe youtube level?

Why do I feel like I&#x27;ve read hundreds of comments saying &quot;is there a strange lack of criticism about China?&quot;We literally almost banned TikTok, and statements were made about the necessity of doing it from the President of the United States. For weeks. Almost resulting in a government mandated forced sale.

It is just me or there seems to be a strange lack of criticism about TikTok on the same or stricter level than FB. Especially that it is a Chinese company HQ’ed in Beijing. Neither do I ever see discussion about the asymmetry in China’s trade policies with regards to FB&#x2F;Tiktok. Tiktok enjoys free market access (except India), whereas FB is banned in China just like many other US-based platforms. On the contrary, there seems to be praise about TikTok on HN!How come we don’t see scathing articles on NYT about TikTok but on WSJ? Has this become a partisan issue (Trump wanted to ban Tiktok)?

Groups used to be broken off into a separate iOS app.  That time period was blissful.  Then they removed that app because it allowed users to escape the newsfeed.

Perfect Facebook: Break off groups, silo it. I&#x27;ve been off FB for almost a decade but I&#x27;m at the point where I have to actually use it for the first time, as it&#x27;s where all the types of events I want to go to exclusively get organized. For amateur racing at least, it&#x27;s pretty much all Facebook.

Platforms like Facebook just expose some of the bad parts of human nature such as cult like behaviour. Tech is neither the source of all evil nor the solution to all our problems like people in tech like to treat it to be.

This is good news. Facebook has proven itself to be a negative influence on people and countries.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;PPaDg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;PPaDg</a>

I dumped facebook, linkedin, snapchat.  I can dump another.

&gt; Im consideringIn poker they call this a bluff

Don&#x27;t you love going to Instagram and having it refuse to show you pictures without logging in? I sure do

Exactly. The main feed doesn&#x27;t hold any meaning for me now. I find I miss around 50% of my friend&#x27;s posts and reels if I don&#x27;t check their profile manually. I only use it for seeing and posting stories now. I&#x27;m sure stories would get similarly ad-clogged in 1-2 years as well.Just to clarify, I&#x27;m fine with seeing some ads in between chronological posts. But the feed is entirely ads after 5-6 posts. Hoping some brave instagram PM reads this comment.

Instagram is arguably fast becoming the 21st century version of the glossy fashion magazines my parent&#x27;s generation often read to kill time, where every second page would be a full page advert for a perfume or a watch.

It&#x27;s almost impressive how much of Instagram is just ads. I keep it around to follow a few people, but it seems like more than half of what scrolls by is either ads or totally off-base account recommendations (Which are themselves, essentially ads)

Agreed. They have really bumped up the advertising the last couple of years. Now every second or third story or post in my feed is an ad.

Theres so many ads on instagram Im considering dumping it.  Thats the only social platform I ever liked because I dont have to hear peoples opinions on things.  But Im at a breaking point.

If someone asks you for $25.00 for an acre on the moon, you&#x27;d probably pay it just in case its a future lottery ticket.

I feel like &quot;selling acres on the Moon&quot; and &quot;smart&quot; are at significant odds with each other...

The &#x27;metaverse&#x27; in terms that there will absolutely be a VR cyber&#x2F;world&#x2F;land&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;sims2&#x2F;second life experience.  Will it be what FB wants it to be (they want to cash in), probably not but this is 100% coming.  Looks at every immersive games (WOW, Second Life, etc...) in the past, even if its just that it will be hugely lucrative and successful.

that&#x27;s until you get accessible haptic feedback devices and realistic comfortable VR

I agree. It doesn&#x27;t carry anything intrinsically interesting. You&#x27;d have far more luck porting VR into an existing popular game that is fun and making it more of a social hang out scene. You&#x27;ll struggle greatly trying to make it a mainstream social media platform. Imagine a social media player that you could only log into from your computer at home.

I predict the Metaverse will fail, and fail early. It will be Google Plus, but worse.No one I personally know cares about Metaverse, including young people and Facebook users.

What you&#x27;re forgetting is the 3D TV aspect of this version of Second Life that will push it over the top. What Second Life was missing is a pair of goggles that you had to wear and a Facebook login.

I&#x27;m hoping for a better looking second life. If they can achieve that..

What is it good for?- Work meetings- Socializing- Dating- Creative endeavors- Improved workspaceYou&#x27;ll be able to have work meetings at a virtual office. You can do that now, but the experience will be better. You&#x27;ll be able to socialize with friends across the world, meet up at virtual replicated areas (like a rooftop bar in NYC..) and meet other people while you&#x27;re there. You&#x27;ll be able to go on virtual dates with a long-distance partner. You&#x27;ll be able to put on your lightweight VR headset and be stationed at a better workstation, with larger monitors where you can manipulate the interface with movements of your hands without the cost of buying such a work set-up in real life. You&#x27;ll be able to sit on your couch, put on your VR headset and watch movies on a 100 inch TV screen without having to furnish your home with a TV.The possibilities are endless. Where&#x27;s your imagination?

&gt; When the metaverse actually launchesI think you need to define &quot;metaverse&quot;.What is it, besides an ugly, much less functional Second Life? Who&#x27;s launching it? What is it good for? Why would someone use it over...well, you have to define what it&#x27;s good for before I can even ask that question.

That is why I related it to people selling real estate on the Moon when moon landings were yet feasible. They are clearing trying to associate the brand Metaverse with Facebook right now, and hoping they can fill in the backend when they (possibly) have the capability to. They are trying to steal brand recognition for vaporware right now. Playing the long game.

It kills me that they are pushing and have everyone talking about the worst, most boring uses of VRI&#x27;m guessing what will happen is that this will open enough doors and develop some early talent to go on to something worthwhile

&gt; It feels as astroturfed as crypto is.I&#x27;m curious, how do you expect promotion to actually happen if you feel like &quot;this&quot; (this being a change in branding by a large company) is astroturfing? What is a non-astroturfing way to promote a new idea&#x2F;product&#x2F;thing? Or do you think any form of promotion is astroturfing?

Your first sentences and last sentences contradict each other in my mind. They&#x27;re selling nonense. I don&#x27;t know why they&#x27;re pushing the metaverse so hard in media. It feels as astroturfed as crypto is. I&#x27;m not putting on a VR headset to go to a meeting, I would literally never want that.

VR is gimmicky, like the Wii. Its full of worlds with great freedom of movement that are designed to hide the fact that you have very limited freedom of movement.

I&#x27;m long on Meta as well and I really like the Quest (2), but the metaverse already had a soft launch. What Meta has been able to accomplish so far is impressive, but it&#x27;s still not enough.What&#x27;s the status quo with VR problems?- Price: This was fixed with Quest 2- Complexity: This was also fixed with Quest.- Socially acceptable: Nope. Even when you remove the issue of the toxicity surrounding Facebook&#x27;s brand, most people refuse to either try or use VR regularly. Case in point, Meta is giving away Quest 2&#x27;s to their employees and contractors. imo it&#x27;s surprising to me that not all of them took the offer. One common answer I get is, &quot;This is going to be as gimicky as the Wii right?&quot;. imo the form factor is what drives normal people away. It has to be smaller and closer to goggles before mass acceptance happens. Apple is most likely right on their approach, based on their patent submissions. Conversely, Apple&#x27;s weakness will be price.

I was searching for a way to describe how the meta is being marketed, and this is perfect.

Agreed, and they also could have named this concept after something cooler than the metaverse from Ready Player One. It was a pretty bad book and movie IMO. They should have chosen the &quot;Holodeck&quot; and renamed themselves &quot;Holo&quot;.

I think renaming was a massive strategic mistake. The metaverse, even if it succeeds from a technical standpoint, will need to be deemed &#x27;cool&#x27; for people to adopt it. And generally, if you have something cool, you don&#x27;t prematurely blurt it out to the rest of the world.

The metaverse already exists. It has for 10+ years.FB isn&#x27;t betting on the metaverse existing. They are betting that they can make some new walled portion off it that will be so big that it will esentially be the whole thing.Personally, I don&#x27;t like their odds at all.

The main issue with selling &quot;the metaverse&quot; is that Facebook can&#x27;t do it. Zuckerberg has made sure that the would be early adopters are steering clear of anything coming out of Facebook&#x2F;Meta.You can&#x27;t piss of the tech entusiasts, reviewers, podcasts and everyone in between by constantly exhibiting poor judgement, arrogant behavior and blatantly invading peoples privacy, and then expect them to be excited about your next venture.Facebook has burned pretty much any goodwill it might have had, and now it want&#x27;s you to emerge yourself in it&#x27;s VR world? Zuckerberg has to be incredibly delusional if he think that&#x27;s going to sell.

When the metaverse actually launches they will skyrocket.  They were smart to pivot early.  Saying the &#x27;metaverse&#x27; is on FB right now is similar to people selling acres on the Moon before anyone landed.  FB is planting an imaginary flag on the &#x27;metaverse&#x27; hoping they can technically catch up to their claims and capitalize on it.

I&#x27;m still hoping that Google buys Pinterest somehow and then let it rot.

Twitter (and I&#x27;m only half joking). Clubhouse. Discord. Pinterest.

I wonder if they tried to buy wordle...
What&#x27;s the hottest social network they could buy?

Well, diminishing returnsMark Z talked about S curves 10 yea to ago

This is huge. Facebook is 2% of the S&amp;P 500, it basically dragged the whole market slightly down.

Expectations were that it would do like the other internet giants and beat by miles. Yes it&#x27;s weird that the expectations are not just their own performance, but that&#x27;s often how the market works.

Yes, unfortunately I bought in 2 days ago. The market is irrational. Facebook literally missed its projections by 3% and loses 0.15% of its active users (mostly due to things opening up) and investors panic. Good time to buy in.

&gt; I got a message that said &quot;We aren&#x27;t cool enough to support your browser&quot;. Something about the sarcastic snootiness of the message really angered me and prevented me from ever opening a Facebook account.Really? I think Facebook&#x27;s message is kind of nice compared to the standard &quot;Please use a different browser&quot;. Whereas the common message implies that you are the problem for using an unusual browser, Facebook&#x27;s message acknowledges that they are the problem for being less cool than you.

Tbh, you don’t have a point of view on Facebook that people have come around to. You didn’t like FB for their condescension. Today people are walking out of fb for their business practices (and ppbly a myriad other reasons).Your reason and theirs have little overlap though it could be argued that condescension is a symptom of internal malaise which is also reflected in shady business practices which is causing users to now abandon FB.

I&#x27;m sure that was the intent. Maybe I was just mad I couldn&#x27;t complete the task but somehow the tone of the message really angered me and I never forgot it. It just seemed sarcastic and condescending.Don&#x27;t try to be cute in your messaging, just straightforward and direct is my takeaway. Some people might appreciate the cute but others you might anger if you don&#x27;t get the tone just right.

I&#x27;m surprised that message irked you that much, doesn&#x27;t sound that bad to me. Almost sounds sincere, rather than sarcastic.

When Facebook first started getting users I tried to access it from a script using Lynx. I don&#x27;t remember why but it was nothing nefarious, I think I simply wanted to download something for GF periodically.I got a message that said &quot;We aren&#x27;t cool enough to support your browser&quot;.Something about the sarcastic snootiness of the message really angered me and prevented me from ever opening a Facebook account. Later I blocked all Facebook domains in Host files and it&#x27;s been that way ever since.For awhile it was a bit awkward with people demanding to know why I didn&#x27;t have a Facebook page but apparently I hold grudges for a long time. It&#x27;s been delightful to see people come around to my point of view on Facebook.They really are like a seedy bar in the bad part of town. With snooty messages for circumventors. But I have to thank them for that snooty message otherwise I would have probably caved and opened an account years ago.

Your point is taken, but I think it&#x27;s kind of clear Facebook&#x27;s only strategies are &quot;lie&quot; and &quot;copy&#x2F;buy everyone else&quot;

Literally all Zuckerberg has to do is be the same person who made him worth $80 billion.

Hitting quarterly numbers, amassing wealth and power is difficult to do if he is not doing what he does.Human greed has no limits. And once someone gets a taste of that amount of wealth and power, it is difficult to not get morally and ethically corrupt, either directly, or by turning a blind eye to reality.

Hate has always been popular, the punching bag just changes every few decades.

It&#x27;s funny because Zuckerberg isn&#x27;t even a public figure. I&#x27;m sure someone will make some ethical claim, but I&#x27;ve read all the articles and they are hardly conclusive. It&#x27;s probably better to just wait for a regulatory decision, otherwise you&#x27;re just going to be reading someone else&#x27;s agenda.

Why does it seem like I&#x27;m the only one who doesn&#x27;t hate Zuckerberg?I&#x27;m genuinely confused.Can someone please explain this to me?I want to understand better.

Literally all Zuckerberg has to do is not be the kind of person he is... his product itself did achieve success in that a huge number of people are using it, but then he had to prove himself to have no ethical standards

Soft drinks mostly, but even that appeared to be in the early stages of tapering as of 2005. What is next?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ers.usda.gov&#x2F;webdocs&#x2F;charts&#x2F;58920&#x2F;finding_buzbyfig.gif?v=7945" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ers.usda.gov&#x2F;webdocs&#x2F;charts&#x2F;58920&#x2F;finding_buzbyf...</a>

Here is an article [1] that shows consumption of coffee and soft drinks in 1946&#x2F;47 and 2005. Adding coffee and soft drinks together there has been an increase of approx 32% in consumption since 1946.Coffee 1946: 46.4 gallons per personCoffee 2005: 24.2 gallons per personSoft drinks 1947: 10.8 gallons per personSoft drinks 2005: 51.5 gallons per personTotal caffeinated consumption in 46&#x2F;47: 57.2 gallons &#x2F; personTotal caffeinated consumption in 2005: 75.7 gallons &#x2F; personThe chart seems to indicate tea has stayed relatively flat in the same time period. I&#x27;m not sure the history of caffeine pills or ADHD medicine, but those may also contribute to an increased consumption in 2005.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ers.usda.gov&#x2F;amber-waves&#x2F;2007&#x2F;june&#x2F;coffee-consumption-over-the-last-century&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ers.usda.gov&#x2F;amber-waves&#x2F;2007&#x2F;june&#x2F;coffee-consum...</a>

I think it has more to do with alternatives (except perhaps in case of cigarettes which have direct measurable health effects) availability rather than society starting to unplug from addictive substances.Peak coffee is in 1946, but what have consumers moved onto from then? Alcohol, Tea, Energy drinks, Soft Drinks ?

I am assume this doesn&#x27;t refer to &quot;volume of coffee beverage&quot; consumed. As far as I&#x27;m aware only the US seems to gravitate towards these extremely large coffee beverages. Other nations drink more coffee, but in smaller serving sizes less diluted by milk&#x2F;sugar.Perhaps the US used to drink espressos in the 1940s, I&#x27;m not sure. That&#x27;s if this fact is even accurate.

Drip coffee constant refills.  Also, bottled water was yet to be a thing.

Wow I had no idea Americans used to drink more coffee than now. Surely serving sizes have grown and grown - absolutely nobody was having a 20-ounce coffee in 1946, but now that&#x27;s normal. Doesn&#x27;t seem to add up but I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;re right.

The difference is, the US population kept growing, so while per capita figures falling is noticeable, total coffee&#x2F;cigarette consumption may not have fallen.Facebook&#x27;s numbers are falling despite a growth in world population, and I&#x27;d bet a larger growth in the internet-connected population. That&#x27;s worse, especially for a platform heavily reliant on network effects.

Right, if anything -- coffee consumption has only gone down because we&#x27;ve moved on to more efficient stimulants. Either higher concentration&#x2F;lower cost artificial substitutes or prescription drugs.Hardly the best example of America getting over an addiction.

&gt; Peak coffee consumption (per capita&#x2F;US): 1946This one interested me. We&#x27;re at a local maximum in terms of coffee consumption in recent years. After WWII coffee fell off in popularity and due to the substitute of carbonated soft drinks. Most likely in simplest terms it was a cheaper energy drink for the poor.

With that description, I can&#x27;t help but think of &quot;the entertainment&quot; from infinite jest.

I get hypnotized by tiktok even by seeing it over other people&#x27;s shoulders. HN and reddit already makes me feel guilty. I am not even starting with that one.

TikTok, for it&#x27;s many faults, is at least not ragebait farming. It is distracting junk. Facebook feels more malicious in my mind.

Surprisingly this time the dopamine providers are .. us.

Tiktok is absolutely more addictive than Facebook.

Facebook has been primarily displaced by Tiktok, which is considerably more addictive than FB. It&#x27;s like zonking out in front of cable TV in the olden days, if the cable TV had access to an essentially unlimited content library of short-form dopamine hits, was capable of determining exactly what you like, and showing you exactly that forever.

Back in the good ole days when people drank coffee after dinner.

Big difference in comparing an entire product area with a specific company and brand. Individual cigarette companies, coffee shops etc. have been going in an out of fashion the entire time. Similarly, the total number of social media users is nowhere near its peak.I&#x27;d say it is actually remarkable just how long Facebook (the site) has been able to maintain relevance, whereas people should have been bored and migrated to something newer and shiner a long time ago (as is now finally happening with apps like TikTok).

But coffee has just been replaced by sugary soda drinks, laced with 4x the caffeine...

I think 2014. Just by looking at things like wall posts on my personal page, around 2015, things went downhill and after 2016, it became really quiet. Almost none of my friends (23 to 33) use Facebook anymore except for the occasional photo dumps. Most are on instagram but even the number of stories posted has gone down as well.

How is the coffee one even possible? I don’t drink coffee, but almost everyone else I know does. There is a Starbucks on every corner. Every coffee shack always has lines.

If you include Facebook then you may as well include all other social media platforms.Facebook is the least of my problems when it comes to addictive substances. Youtube, Reddit, Hackernews, TikTok. They&#x27;re all the same even if they don&#x27;t go out of their way to insight addiction.

It is suprising, seeing as it would have been more of a luxury item in the past.

We reached peak coffee long ago!? Sad news indeed

Sorry but tobacco gets to Europe just after Columbus reaches America, and gets consumed in Europe by then.And the indians of America consumed it much earlier.Just to clarify.

When did the begin?Coffee consumption begin 15th centuryTobacco 18th centuryOil: 347 ADSocial Networks: circa. 2002.

Peak coffee consumption (per capita&#x2F;US): 1946Peak cigarette consumption (per capita&#x2F;US): 1963Peak oil production (global): unknown, maybe 2020-2030Peak Facebook: ??That&#x27;s an incomplete peer group, but I find it interesting that at some point, society does start to unplug from addictive substances. The tapering off is quite slow, though. Unclear whether heavy users cut back, or new generations just don&#x27;t develop the habit as older ones die off

There is nothing facetious or self-flattering here, these things aren&#x27;t achievements, rather reactions to dependence on some massive facets of modern life, which, as it turns out, are not critical or even necessary.

Careful not to pull something patting yourself on the back like that.

I am thankful to these evil companies. Thanks to them - I spend less time online, try to read more books, appreciate real-life conversations, rely on locals for information and news, and let my mind wander.

I think this has been pretty obvious for a while... MAU doesn&#x27;t tell the real story and I think we all have anecdotal evidence that the engagement and demographics changed substantially over the last 5 years.

reddit wouldn&#x27;t be so bad re: free speech if you could ignore all of the non-sense, sadly they push it out to everyone by design

Circa 2005 reddit was a forum for nerdy young tech people, talking about miscellaneous web links but mostly focused around nerdy tech stuff. Nobody I know who read reddit circa 2005 wanted it to become a white supremacist hate forum. When it started to attract large numbers of white supremacists who deposited their steaming piles of bullshit (hate speech, vicious personal attacks) all over the site, lots of people reading the site (including those who had been there since 2005) were appalled. Obviously advertisers also don’t want to associate their brands with hate speech (or child porn, etc.).

Reddit should break off all political content into its own site, porn into another, and keep the rest in place. If a post is porn or political, mods can click a button to move it to the dedicated site. This would be similar to the “move topic” functionality from phpBB and vBulletin.This might solve a lot of problems, but it would create issues on the edge, like r&#x2F;pics content that may not be overtly political but clearly has an agenda.Personally I use Reddit exclusively for political flamewars on one account, and in-depth technical content on another account.I’m starting to feel pretty unwelcome, though, when it comes to anything “misinformarion” related. Once you get banned from one subreddit, if you have a post reported on the same subreddit from another account, then both your accounts get banned site-wide. Combine this with the dragnet, unsolicited bans that some mods are sending to anyone who posts in certain subreddits and you have a real chilling effect.The average IQ on Reddit is also about 110, which is just boring in most cases. When you can predict the top comments on a thread, reading them is probably a waste of time.

It feels like reddit changed in line with the rest of the Internet though.In 2022 you have the choice of a) &quot;suppressing free speech&quot; or b) &quot;platforming racists&quot; and there is no middle ground and no way to win. You can&#x27;t pass the buck to moderators.The choice did not feel so stark in 2005.

Reddit also stopped showing users the red background on their mod-removed comments. So when you&#x27;re logged in it looks like your comment is live [1]. You can try it here [2].I once tried looking through their archived code base to find when they made that change but couldn&#x27;t decipher it. It&#x27;s possible they never showed authors the red background at all.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;E3bFvKh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;E3bFvKh</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;CantSayAnything&#x2F;about&#x2F;sticky" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;CantSayAnything&#x2F;about&#x2F;sticky</a>

Is propaganda free speech? That is the question of the open internet.

reddit used to be great until they pulled their great bait &amp; switch, then added all kinds of authoritarian features.A brief history of reddit:&gt;We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.— Reddit FAQ 2005&gt;We&#x27;ve always benefited from a policy of not censoring content— u&#x2F;kn0thing 2008&gt;A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it,&quot; he replies. [reddit]&#x27;s the digital form of political pamplets.— u&#x2F;kn0thing 2012&gt;We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.— u&#x2F;reddit 2012&gt;We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that&#x27;s the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that&#x27;s what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn&#x27;t clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it&#x27;s just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).— u&#x2F;yishan 2012&gt;Neither Alexis [u&#x2F;kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech— u&#x2F;spez 2015

There are definitely parts users of HN that are not same, but the conversation is normally at auch higher level and most people welcome a different viewpoint instead of seeing it as an attack.

Every social network (including so many bulletins and forums from ≤90&#x27;s) models the relationships and culture of its initial cohort, and it always becomes self-isolated to that imprint, so as people change their life priorities they leave and the network dies. The same will happen to hacker news.

I’m not the poster, but I’m between 16-19 and seeing the same thing over last 2 years I’ve been almost completely out of social media,- 0 minutes of facebook- 0 minutes of Instagram- 0 minutes of Twitter- 20 minutes of Telegram per day to catchup on messages- 10 minutes of MatrixA few years back the aggregate was easily 10-12 hrs per day (rest were spent watching movies and writing code) . Nowadays my brain automatically will close the sites if I spend more then 2 minutes on them.But it’s not just social media, I lost my appetite for movies, tv shows too.Most of this purge was unintentional , however now that it’s done. I’m glad. Other than that I come on HN once or twice a day to have fun and comment and read stuff.I wouldn’t say HN is more saner then other social media, most of the peers I engaged with in the more popular social media apps were equally as nice, amicable and fun to talk with.But these days I mostly spend my days reading story books, blogs, write code, make drinks and cook food, and solve fun puzzles that I design.Who knows, maybe it’ll all change to something else in 2 years again.I hope you have a lovely day !

52, and I’m getting tired of a lot of things. May be the testosterone. From a VR standpoint, Battle Royal zombie shooters with bow and arrow mechanics in a game with crafting and skill trees holds NOTHING for me anymore

&gt; I went back to my forums, find myself easily disengaging from Reddit (around the election, Reddit was nothing but stress), Check Twitter maybe 10 minutes a week, go to Instagram once a week because my kid posts his artwork there.Are you a teen or a young adult. I am guessing you are in between age of 35 - 45 because, I am that age myself and have started weaning off of social media lately. The dopamine rewards are just not worth it.I have, however, moved on to saner places like HN.

VR has nothing to do with facebook, at least at the moment.  Just logging in with your facebook account doesn&#x27;t mean its suddenly sucking all your life from you and piping it right to facebook.  If you enjoy video games, its hands down the best way to game right now.

They finally monitized their products and customers to a breaking point. They run on engagement metrics without common sense or empathy to how fear and anger impact their user&#x27;s wellbeing.I most definitely do not need or want a VR immersed version of that toxicity.

&gt; Facebook tried to take over forums and mailing lists, their market was full of scams (which had me going round and round with Paypal and the bank when ‘Sally’ selling an iPad from Massachusetts sent a receipt with an email from a Guy in Turkey.What blows my mind are all of the blatant scam replies on sponsored content. You&#x27;ll get sponsored content from, say, Bloomberg or CNBC, and half of the replies are cryptocurrency scams. I&#x27;ve even seen top replies that were &#x27;ads&#x27; for witch doctors that will cast spells for you if you send them money on Venmo.It makes both Facebook&#x2F;Meta and the sponsored brands look terrible.

reddit is great if you curate your feed. If you go to &quot;popular&quot; or &quot;trending&quot; it&#x27;s a dumpster fire. I still love reddit though with my 10 or so subreddits that I follow.

I went back to my forums, find myself easily disengaging from Reddit (around the election, Reddit was nothing but stress), Check Twitter maybe 10 minutes a week, go to Instagram once a week because my kid posts his artwork there.But in general, ALL of the sticky sites aren’t…sticky anymore. I took 2 weeks off at the worst of it and it did an amazing job of breaking the feedback loop.Facebook tried to take over forums and mailing lists, their market was full of scams (which had me going round and round with Paypal and the bank when ‘Sally’ selling an iPad from Massachusetts sent a receipt with an email from a Guy in Turkey.Then they started poking around with VR and Meta and man, I really don’t want to use this headset if I’m forced to log into Facebook and you’ve got 6 outward facing cameras, Zuckerberg.Good. Can’t come soon enough.

Cant wait for this frustrating company to shut down.

Because it is rotten to the core? Because of its utterly unsympathetic upper management? (Ok, Bezos as runner up). Because of all of the deceptive things it has done over the years?

The decline is only one-sided. Facebook down, TikTok up. The mean amount of social network users is not declining at all.

I hope platforms that are focused on topics instead of people will prevail. There is still some exaggerated self-promotion, but it is far less pronounced.Oversharing is a really bad idea in the long run. Your opinions from 30 years ago are probably hated today. Imagine the trauma that is caused if you could read what your parents thought before you were born.

Personally, I applaud decline in engagement with any of the social networks, not just Facebook.

At least I have the feeling that newcomers like TikTok don’t have this &quot;embrace the web&quot; thing that Facebook had during a decade with embedded tracking scripts everywhere on any website.I feel like TikTok is more closed and that I don’t have a shadow profile on it like Facebook did.But it’s also because the web (especially the browsers and mobile OS) learnt its lessons.OTOH, it also means that newcomers will have to make even more efforts to to &quot;compete&quot; with the historical open web which can create even more situations of information disappearing from the open web.

Exactly. It is no different to the rest of them. This game is simply one tyrant (TikTok) dethroning another (Meta) and all of them make money out of our personal data.Facebook (the social network) was known to be in decline for years. The real attention is on Instagram and WhatsApp are still adding users. I wouldn&#x27;t rush to rule them out yet over this.

They don&#x27;t have as much of a network effect either.

That stuff matters too but I think the size is what matters. HN stays clean because it stays small. Lots of posts are boring for the average person’s interests. I’ve seen the same thing on Reddit. Once you go above a certain size, a subreddit completely degrades.

They are also anonymous. I could be flaming somebody I know in real life but it does matter. Don’t ask don’t tell.

I have seen all 3 things on Hacker News. In addition to large threads about conspiracy theories, antivax and misinformation.

All social networks with voting systems are optimised to maximise engagement and promote outrage. Just look at how every single country subreddit is a constant flamewar.HN _mostly_ prevents this by having strong and good moderation, but there&#x27;s still a fair amount of negative metrics coming from it.

Hacker News and other relatively smaller forums are different. They are free social media networks that aren&#x27;t optimized to maximize engagement, promote outrage, or instill a fear of missing out.

This has become me. Facebook encourages you to become confrontational with all your friends.

Pretty sure IRC&#x2F;ICQ started the 18 messengers. It&#x27;s too bad Adium&#x2F;Pidgin can&#x27;t exist for mobile.

The problem is that there is social media. Facebook is the biggest success, which is why people focus on it. Facebook displaces other forms of communication I prefer to use. I used to use email heavily to communicate with friends. Email was the best format for me, now no one uses it. Everyone is on 12 messaging platforms, Facebook started that trend with messenger.I used to be able to go to business websites and get the information I needed, now everyone primarily uses Facebook pages to post information, which means I have to log in on many occasions to view the content. The Internet before Facebook was much more convenient for me.Facebook hasn’t resulted in any positive interactions for me. Something about the platform drives people to be confrontational. Years ago when I participated on the platform I would reply to friend’s posts. Sometimes I would get replies from their friends and they tried to argue with me. It boiled down to them believing I said something in my post that I did not write. That drove me to not write my thoughts about something, and when I did reply, it was with shallow positive comments. That is a very boring way to interact with people, so I stopped using the platform.

NO thanks, I am not planning on using yet another service that is trying to psychologically milk every ounce of my attention. Reddit and Hackernews is bad enough. I am also not interested in looking at lewd teenagers dancing to the latest tune or whatever the kids are doing these days.

TikTok is very different and will probably turn your view of what drives engagement upside down. Try it for a bit, it&#x27;s an alternate universe.

&gt;People like to hate on Facebook, but how is any other social media different?I think the main reason for it is that most of us are just old enough to remember what facebook was before they started filling the site with ads and recommended&#x2F;paid&#x2F;suggested&#x2F;etc posts. It was really fucking great back when you would logging and there would be literally no content&#x2F;ads other than what your friend manually took the time write&#x2F;post.they gave us a taste of what a great minimalist social media platform could be and then turned monetisation&#x2F;engagement to 9000.Imagine if HN was bought by reddit and they decided to use the reddit platform (new skin only, no &quot;old.XX...&quot;) with all the ads and everything. That&#x27;s kinda what happened to facebook.

The three critically different things to me:- they have&#x2F;had a critical size. No other social media was that big, and size matters.- they required (still do?) real IDs. Forcing people to use their real name is a special kind of awful, especially when it&#x27;s the main network- they push a unified account platform for everything they owned. Other companies tried too but most failed (I also hate Apple for that, if you were to ask).

People like to hate on Facebook, but how is any other social media different? They are all free services that profit from your personal information. Some just have better PR than the other.

They&#x27;re still growing year-over-year. They were just off their target in the last quarter by 3%. They&#x27;re valued at $3.67 per share versus the $3.78 expected. Their stock literally dropped ~25% because they were only 3% off expected earnings. And lost 0.15% active users, which is expected as the world opens up again. I don&#x27;t see what the big deal is. The market is overreacting.

The revenue guidance for next quarter is not very great either, so given the user numbers ARPU is not growing

Yeah, I &quot;log in&quot; a few times a day to answer messages. I don&#x27;t think that should be considered a user since I&#x27;m not consuming anything facebook-related, just responding to messages because everyone is on facebook

Also: does visiting a web page with Facebook comments or embedded Facebook video count as login?

&gt;&gt;artificially inflated in all sorts of ways like having fb.com tab open on my browser and never actually going to it as one example.Worse, Logged in once, then told Facebook to keep themselves logged in forever. This technically means users who have logged in.

I&#x27;d like clear qualifying of what a login means. Does that mean I goto facebook.com or open FB app at least once a day? I imagine &quot;daily login&quot; could be artificially inflated in all sorts of ways like having fb.com tab open on my browser and never actually going to it as one example.

The fact of the matter is they still have close 2 billion active logins each day. Even if they have settled in matters of user acquisitions they haven&#x27;t stopped harvesting increasing amounts of profit from each users. I would like to know how the statistics of revenue per user would be from this point on.

Yes but lets not talk about fb&#x27;s harming algorithm that amplifies dumb views

Only a few people closed their accounts, many leave them as husks. The account is there but dead.

&gt; Facebook is a shadow of what it use to be after running off everyone.Yes, everyone ran off, leaving only 1.9B subscribers.

Do you know what sort of posts they were? There are some real nutty pro-violence Republicans in WA state (ex: Shea) which could trigger bans or suspensions.

Facebook suspended the official washington state republican group multiple times for posts, they finally moved over to mewe.Facebook is a shadow of what it use to be after running off everyone.

Facebook is for old people.Instagram is for moderately old people.Snapchat is for moderately young people.TikTok is for young people.

Actually TikTok is now the leader with teens. [0] And I don&#x27;t believe the CCP would allow a sale to a US-based company, least of all Facebook&#x2F;Meta.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;18&#x2F;tiktok-usage-topped-instagram-in-2021-among-kids-12-to-17-forrester-.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;18&#x2F;tiktok-usage-topped-instagra...</a>

But they use Instagram instead. Either way Zuck wins.

Or perhaps your daughter will start using it in here early 20&#x27;s when life gets busier and people dont have the same interaction expectations?I dont know the answer but as a non-FB user I do see limitations when people organise events or group chats on messenger. If my wife wasn&#x27;t connected to most of my friends I&#x27;d probably miss out on a bunch of relevant things. So for youth not on FB, I guess time will bring them back into the fold.

Except there are 2 major differences:1. Even if FB isn&#x27;t forced to divest their recent acquisitions, the regulatory environment will make it much more difficult to do the equivalent of buying Instagram in the future.2. Any good ideas on how I can short &quot;The Metaverse&quot;? I still think the Metaverse is bullshit and will continue to be bullshit for the near future. The very first time I got on Facebook I was pretty enthralled - I was connecting with friends that I hadn&#x27;t seen in years, and I really liked reconnecting. I have heard basically nobody say they are looking forward to the Metaverse, besides aging tech giants trying to push it.

You know how some people still think we can live in a world where covid is eradicated? I still think we can live in a world where major social media companies are eradicated. Or at least can&#x27;t churn out new dangerous variants to re-infect the immunologically naive 14 year olds who think it&#x27;s a brand new generational trend every year.I&#x27;ve watched this marketing turnover at least three times now in the music industry, and I really think the killer antibody is exposure to history. The operative question for a 14 year old hearing a super &quot;original&quot; band isn&#x27;t what does this say to you... because they know what it says to them but they don&#x27;t know how easily they&#x27;re being manipulated by the distillation of time-worn, shop-worn, lazy songwriting. The question is: Hey, do you realize who they&#x27;re ripping off? You&#x27;ll be a lot cooler if you know.That&#x27;s the pill every human needs when they encounter a new and addictive social media platform.

&gt; Once the teens in IG grow into adultsThat already happened btw, teens are on TikTok not IG

I guess the business model of social media companies is coming to fore.FB has a captive audience, that is aging with facebook and will continue using it.It is clear why FB purchases IG &#x2F; WA. They are paying money to capture audiences with money earned from FB.Going ahead, the cycle will repeat. Once the teens in IG grow into adults, FB will use money from that to buy &#x2F; make another platform.In this context, the metaverse makes sense. It is a virtual world, where new SM platforms are churned, with all future populations being part of one or more platforms. FB wants to be the owner of all the platforms.From a business point of view, it makes more sense, in that, FB can now target ads across platforms, meaning, they target the same number of individuals, but with ads being channeled through different platforms, the ad density comes down, and the feeling of &quot;the feed is all ads&quot; might reduce.

You think TikTok is facsimile of Facebook?

Please tell her how she feels when 23 and whatever websites she uses are replaced by some random new fac simile with a different css.

I feel that way except I’m older than 16.In my circles the only time I have to use Facebook is when Gen Xers are organizing something that requires my participation there, and I delete the account afterwards.Or I wind up in small town America and the people there believe that Facebook marketplace + groups has better resources for sale and meetups. My experience with that was that generally accessible forums (even with being private and an “approval” process) all being full of scammers and time wasters. I found resources and niches in person. I checked the same groups 6 months later and nobody was getting anywhere with anything. YMMV of course, but the scammers are integrated everywhere.Small town America is a big place so there is a market for the illusion of utility!

My 16yo daughter says FB is for old people and nobody in her age group is using it.

Facebook loses users for the first time