[HN Gopher] Mark Zuckerberg on Messenger (2013) ___________________________________________________________________ Mark Zuckerberg on Messenger (2013) Author : mfiguiere Score : 175 points Date : 2022-05-21 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (twitter.com) (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com) | frob wrote: | This is eerie for me to read, especially this line: "If messenger | came with Andrea for everyone, that would clearly be amazing for | the world." | | Eleven months later, FB bought a little startup I was part of to | try to build exact this. (Spolier: it flopped) | avivo wrote: | I'm curious, why did it flop? Internal coordination issues? NLP | tech not being ready yet? | frob wrote: | NLP not being nearly ready. Some of the requests were powered | by people on the backend and we hoped to use that as a | training set. We could, but we only were able to automate the | most basic things like reminders, weather, todo lists, daily | transit, etc | woojoo666 wrote: | It's interesting that Mark Zuckerberg saw the transition to | privacy / private channels back in 2013. From what I remember, | sharing to your feed, posting to other people's walls, tagging | each other in images, were all still very popular back then. But | as Mark Zuckerberg predicted, usage of these features has dropped | dramatically (at least from what I've seen). | noodleman wrote: | He himself was burned by Facebook's privacy settings when | private photos of him and his then girlfriend were leaked. In | other photos his laptop has tape over the webcam and | microphone. He knows why people are privacy advocates. Probably | moreso than anyone else, given the data he has access to. | | Personally, I think it was always a matter of time until this | sentiement found it's way to the general public. | pentagrama wrote: | I'm wondering if now people like Zuckerberg, for communications | like this, instead of email will be using something with auto- | delete features to avoid get this messages on the internet in 10 | years. | | Do you think that on the time of writing he knows that this can | be public someday? | | This is public because some law force Facebook to give this | messages to the government and they publish it? Some recipients | leaked it? FB was hacked? | | I get some negative feeling on reading this messages that seems | to be written as private. | xmprt wrote: | Companies aren't allowed to auto delete messages for legal | reasons. At any point communications can be subpoenaed for a | lawsuit and companies will have to show them in court and if | they are caught deleting messages, they could be in even bigger | trouble if they don't have a legitimate reason for deleting | them. | lwhi wrote: | I've been a victim of this in the past; it's very easy to excited | about the flavour of your own Kool Aid. | | Mark getting excited about using a message to book a restaurant | seems like a prime example of this. | tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: | Many of the ideas he expressed (in terms of interacting with | businesses) seem to be how WeChat runs, very successfully | (never used it myself, just based on what I've heard). | annadane wrote: | The problem is it's never been his Kool Aid. He stole the Kool | Aid from multiple other people and is pretending like he | invented the concept (yes people will now argue you can't steal | the 'concept' of Kool Aid, and it's about execution; but my | point stands, other people can't borrow the concept if one | person pulls the rug out from everyone else) of Kool Aid | mrkramer wrote: | Microsoft stole GUI concept from Apple and Apple stole it | from Xerox. Good artists copy but great artists steal. | dan-robertson wrote: | Booking a restaurant is generally ok by phone but if you try to | do it online you often get some crappy random website that's | different every time. I can imagine a world where you do it by | some messenger interface which somehow Facebook make hard to | fuck up for the business. I can imagine that being good, half | good (I think there are roughly two kinds of booking. One | starts with criteria about | date/time/occasion/party/budget/location/cuisine and looks for | available places and the other starts with a specific | restaurant with other particulars relatively free. An | experience might only work well for one), or bad. But it isn't | obviously bad. | | Much as a decentralised Internet has good properties, having | every small business outsource a nontrivial online presence to | a bunch of crappy other companies that lack the scale or | incentives to do well is not one of them. | mrkramer wrote: | >Mark getting excited about using a message to book a | restaurant seems like a prime example of this. | | He was basically explaining chat bot/s without knowing it. | bpodgursky wrote: | If you read point (4) he clearly did know it, he just saw it | as a more ambitious and challenging problem. | azinman2 wrote: | Chat bots usually are built by the end service, not acting as | a meta agent. | xeromal wrote: | Just tried to paste the content of the tweets, but too long so I | dropped it in pastebin for anyways who's interested. | | https://pastebin.com/e6af5MRv | dredmorbius wrote: | Can haz moar weitspaze | | https://pastebin.com/raw/TJypYNGQ | Jaruzel wrote: | Thank you for that. | | Pasting a long document as multiple images via a Twitter thread | needs to be some sort of punishable crime. | xeromal wrote: | Yeah, twitter is definitely not meant for long content! | dilap wrote: | > For Messenger, I think differentiation is extremely important | and something we haven't focused on yet. We've spent the past | 6-12 months catching up to WhatsApp and competitors on table | stakes like performance, reliability, pushability, etc. This work | isn't done and we will continue to do it, including catching up | in areas like groups. | | > But to get people to ditch WhatsApp and switch to Messenger, it | will never be sufficient to be 10% better than them or add fun | gimmicks on any existing attribute or feature. We will have to | offer some new fundamental use case that becomes important to | people's daily lives. | | They never did catch up on table stakes, nor did they discover | that new fundamental use case. But they had a good fallback plan: | Just buy WhatsUp. | | Bummer for the users, though. | | I find myself wishing something along the lines of antitrust was | enforced more rigorously to help preserve competition. | root_axis wrote: | Why was it a bummer for the users? | marcosdumay wrote: | It's telling that Watsup did never "catch up" on performance | reliability, and pushability. They started top notch on those, | and if anything, moved down a bit with time. | | That's because you simply can't catch up on those. It's not | something that happens inside the constraints of software | development. That's why Facebook didn't. | | "Catching up" is even a very weird way to say it. That wording | implies Watsup was a huge entrenched company with a lot of | resources spent on development, and Facebook was a nimble team | that was working hard to add enough development effort to be an | equal. | jgalt212 wrote: | > Bummer for the users, though. | | The game's not over yet. Maybe Meta sells, or is forced sell, | WhatsApp. Or maybe people move on to the new thing. | thomasahle wrote: | > They never did catch up on table stakes | | What didn't they catch up on? To me Messenger seems like a | better user experience than WhatsApp or any of the other three | messaging clients I need to use. | | Indeed WhatsApp is lacking basic functionality like a desktop | app. Also, a client tied to a phone number may work well for | some people, but a pain whenever you change your number, and it | makes discovery of people much harder. | jowsie wrote: | WhatsApp has had a desktop app for years. | neodymiumphish wrote: | I think they did, just not in the way they expected. They've | developed a messaging platform where finding the user you want | to message is handled outside of something as arbitrary and | transitory as a phone number. | | For example, military members (in the US) rely heavily on FB | Messenger because deployments, short tours, and overseas | assignments kill the reliability of using a regular phone | number to maintain contact with friends and family. Messenger | handles that by connecting via Facebook and maintaining that | connection regardless of the users' phone numbers or email | addresses. | [deleted] | [deleted] | usrusr wrote: | Bummer for the users? | | I'd say Zuckerberg is the clear loser in this story: what could | be worse than failing to catch up with WhatsApp and discovering | a new fundamental use case? | | Failing, then spending an obscene amount of money on buying | WhatsApp, then seeing a considerable part of that money | enabling the Signal Foundation and watching Signal eat up the | user base of both WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger. Users | are fine. | VWWHFSfQ wrote: | > watching Signal eat up the user base of both WhatsApp and | the Facebook Messenger | | Is this actually happening or just wishful thinking | usrusr wrote: | Definitely happening in my little corner of humanity. Not | happening as in usage of the Meta messengers has dropped to | zero, but it's becoming more and more like "funny how this | group is still on WhatsApp, do they live under a rock?" At | least FB messenger has a tiny niche left as the way to | communicate if you are connected on FB but haven't shared | phone numbers. | Closi wrote: | Not happening here in the Uk - the world over here is | still on WhatsApp. | simonswords82 wrote: | Definitely the latter | frosted-flakes wrote: | It's definitely happening in some circles. I was quite | surprised to hear that my dad's reasonably active sibling | chat group uses Signal, and we're talking about a dozen+ | mostly technologically-inept people aged 40-70. | | To give an example of how inept, my dad recently | discovered that iOS Safari has tabs, and he's had a | smartphone for close to a decade and uses Safari heavily. | I have no idea what prompted them to switch away from | WhatsApp, and before that, GroupMe (which they used for a | while because it worked through SMS), but they did. | hbn wrote: | Telegram has made some impressive strides over the past few | years (it's quite mainstream as a messaging platform and | social platform in some countries) | | I don't think I'd say the same for Signal though. | freeflight wrote: | Bummer for the users who chose WhatsApp over Messenger. Many | didn't want a company, like Facebook, to have PII on them, | yet FB just bought it all up pretty much screwing these | people. | badkitty99 wrote: | menzoic wrote: | They didn't need to since they bought WhatsApp | wutbrodo wrote: | > They never did catch up on table stakes, | | In what sense? The table stakes of boring functionality seem to | me to be much better implemented in messenger than whatsapp. | Everything from a more intuitive UI to a web option is better | done in messenger. | chinchilla2020 wrote: | My takeaway from this entire post is that Twitter is not | appropriate for long essays and people need to stop acting like | it is. | queuebert wrote: | Not only that, but a long essay broken up into dozens of | screenshots of text. Is there a prize for the most bits per | character? | a3w wrote: | TIL Elon Musk goes by the handle of chinchilla2020 on HN. Just | kidding. | triyambakam wrote: | I find it strange that Facebook communicates across the | company... using Facebook. It doesn't seem like a medium well | suited for that. | didip wrote: | These are all great ideas. Why didn't they implement many of | these inside Messenger or WhatsApp? | | I also wonder why Meta suddenly lost their competitive spirit in | Messaging space. WA is so behind compared to WeChat/Line/Kakao. | azinman2 wrote: | They did try the agent approach, called M. It failed. | | It wasn't a meta-agent, however. My guess is people didn't like | the idea of only sometimes being used if Facebook thought they | should route to them, no ability to control end user experience | or brand loyalty, every random service would need to be world | class at NLP, and other miscellaneous reasons associated with | being just confined to a simple textual transaction. | | There are also probably less examples of this than you'd think | -- restaurants and movies are 101, but where else does this go? | Even getting the next obvious thing -- concert tickets - all of | the sudden requires picking seats, looking at photos of the | venue, constraining different options, understanding how many | seats are together, etc. Even with crappy UI of Ticketmaster | you want the breadth of options and probably to comparison | shop. Things quickly get out of hand, and unless you trust the | agent to make decisions for you and explain it's rationale, | there are better interfaces than just text. | [deleted] | qqtt wrote: | Amazing how wrong Mark was about lots of things related to | Messenger, and how just two months after this email FB ended up | paying 20 billion to buy WhatsApp. You get the sense there was a | real paranoia about WhatsApp being an existential threat but now | almost a decade later and it's hard to see how FB got a return on | that 20 billion investment for that particular acquisition. | | Also, I find it particularly interesting how Mark is so focused | on pushing everything into the public "news feed" style sphere, | and seems to have a kind of wishful thinking involving messaging | in particular transitioning from a private activity you do with | your friends to this public bombastic twitter-esque landscape of | public figures "sending messages" to their followers and removing | the barriers between those communications and "real" | communications between your actual friends. He seems to intensely | believe that this is really the only way to create a giant | business - essentially destroying and corrupting personal private | connections to fill your experience with "more engaging" public | content to keep you addicted to the platform. | | Well, especially for chat, that didn't pan out. And now we are | entering a period where private stories, private communication, | and meaningful communication matters more - Instagram growth | falling to single digits and rapidly losing ground to other | platforms among younger users (a harbinger of things to come) - | Mark's dogmatic commitment to the alter of public newsfeed | paradigms has caused almost all his platforms to evolve towards a | dying entity one by one - all except for, notably, WhatsApp. | | One gets the sense that Mark has one trick, and that trick is no | longer effective at meaningfully growing and positioning FB for | the future, especially compared to its historical growth rates | (maybe those were unsustainable anyway). | queuebert wrote: | It's almost like he isn't a good businessman and was just at | the right place at the right time. | | I worry that the majority of billionaires were just lucky and | confused that for skill. Then we give them disproportionate | influence over society. Basically letting the pigeons drive the | bus. | NegativeLatency wrote: | Reminds me of Fiddler on the Roof: | | The most important men in town would come to fawn on me! They | would ask me to advise them, Like a Solomon the Wise. "If you | please, Reb Tevye..." "Pardon me, Reb Tevye..." Posing | problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes! And it won't make | one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong. When you're | rich, they think you really know! | hbn wrote: | This was around the era where Snapchat was starting to take | off, and I think someone real forward-thinking should have seen | the writing on the wall that young people don't want to be | doing all of their social interactions in public any more, nor | do they want their cringey past coming back to haunt them. They | were on Facebook, and then their moms all joined Facebook. They | migrated to Instagram, and then Facebook bought it and pushed | all the moms there too. Snapchat though, has a couple unique | aspects that I think were critical to its success. | | First, all the interactions are built around curating who sees | it, and keeping things private and temporary. The most public | thing you can do is post a story, and that's where you send | stuff that even if your mom adds you, you can keep that in mind | while sharing to that. But for anything else, you build up a | list of people who can see your private story, and send it to | that one. And everything that goes to either of those places is | gone after 24 hours, which was also not exactly a selling point | for the older generation that want to use social media as a | scrapbook. | | The other thing is that Snapchat is quite unintuitive and | confusing to use. I've seen this stated as a criticism, and | sure you can make it that, but I think that's also part of the | secret sauce that made it so successful. The way you use the | app is like its own separate language compared to all social | media platforms of the past. And that in itself is enough to | keep older people off of it, who had enough trouble trying to | figure out Facebook. Plus I think there's some fun and | engagement to be had when someone says "hey did you know you | can do this?" and you discover a new feature in the app. I've | been of the theory that Snapchat keeps itself awkward to use on | purpose, because it seems legitimately beneficial to keeping | its user base. | Firmwarrior wrote: | Re your first part, WhatsApp could've expanded out into a full | social network the same way LINE and WeChat did in Asia. So I | think Zuck was onto something | | Re: the rest: That's an interesting outlook. I wonder if | younger audiences are more resilient to being tricked into | trying to compete for "Likes" in a semi-public forum of their | friends and family.. | annadane wrote: | Using a spyware VPN called Onavo might not be the same thing | as 'onto something' | nowherebeen wrote: | > WhatsApp could've expanded out into a full social network | the same way LINE and WeChat did in Asia | | That was never going to happen. If you listen to the | interviews from Brian Action, he wanted WhatsApp to stay | minimal. He didn't like those other apps that had tons of | features/ bloat. | fragmede wrote: | Acton _left_ Facebook over a dispute in the direction | Facebook wanted to take WhatsApp. Changing the app 's | direction after his departure seems like it would have been | entirely possible. | zzzoom wrote: | > it's hard to see how FB got a return on that 20 billion | investment for that particular acquisition. | | In many many countries you can't live without WhatsApp. That | can't be said about the rest of their apps. | jorblumesea wrote: | Back then, everyone was thinking about how to make a super app | like WeChat. The thinking was that if you hooked everyone on | some practical application, like chat, you could add in | banking, lending, games, news, etc. FB sorta did this with FB | itself to some extent but never completely achieved that super | app status. Messenger obviously did not, and neither did | WhatsApp. If someone did do this, they would have achieved | complete dominance. | | That's why it was worth 20B. | mlom wrote: | innovation and differentiation are not things i need or want in | my messaging app, holy cow, i just want to send messages. use a | standard protocol or write a new one, i don't care, but the | problem you are solving is SENDING MESSAGES TO A KNOWN USER. | write a protocol, document it, and let the client handle the | rest. omg. grow up | SemanticStrengh wrote: | Where are the messenger platforms ideas?? The next mails are | missing :( | sz4kerto wrote: | They're in the following tweets. E.g. | https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1528063317041766400 | SemanticStrengh wrote: | twitter is one of the worst thing that happened to humanity | viksit wrote: | It feels like the thrust here was to merge the concept of | "community engagement" with "messaging". | | Public conversations vs private conversations. | | The challenge I see is that users don't want to mix the two - I | imagine a version of "newsfeed meets google reader" (aka twitter) | being very different from "messages to macys or my friends". | | The incentive he's creating for people to move to messenger seems | to be "combine everything" vs "focus", which ultimately failed. | Instead it was instagram that propelled that to the detriment of | messenger. | blindseer wrote: | I think a lot of tech companies / products at tech companies, | (e.g. Netflix, YouTube, Messenger) fundamentally get one thing | wrong. They don't "value" the user's time and drive for *maximum* | engagement. Maybe the problem is that there's a new sucker born | everyday, but I despise using Netflix and YouTube, and I use them | only because I have to. | | With Messenger specifically, I absolutely don't want to spend | quality time with someone communicating over a digital device. | I'd much rather just use it to make plans with the person I want | to hang out with. | | And when I am making plans to spend time with a significant | other, if I made a request to a service for "buying two tickets | for hunger games at 9pm" and it returned a message saying "I can | get you two tickets for shoreline at 9:10pm", I'd want to throw | my phone into the ocean. I'd feel differently if I said "buy two | tickets to any movie at 9pm", that'd be a completely different | story. | | This is the same problem with YouTube. If you've recently | subscribed to a user, or watched one of their videos for the | first time, and then make a search for something completely | different, one of a first few results will be a video of the user | you initially interacted with. It is SUCH a bonkers user | experience for me and I want to never give YouTube any | information about myself for recommendations just because of | that. | | These platforms / products should be just services. Give the user | enough information to make the decision themselves, and help them | make the best decision with the most accurate and pertinent | information. I hate that these products shove content into your | face. | | Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is | behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of us? | screye wrote: | > fundamentally get one thing wrong | | I don't think they do. | | The user is the person who consumes your product and gives you | money for it. 'End users' are hostages. The real user is the | ad-company. Once your product is feature complete, your ability | to make money from the product doesn't scale with the technical | quality of the product itself. | | Facebook cares about making money. Period. Zuck's emails | clearly show that his eyes are pointed at the exact point where | some form of advertisements can be brought into the messenger | platform. (indirectly through new feed in this case) | | Youtube tried to sell people a subscription model, and most | users do not want to pay the kind of money that youtube would | lose by allowing them to avoid ads and low-quality content | wormholes. | | Netflix has an entirely different problem all together. It is a | bunch of mega companies burning capital faster than it can be | replenished, hoping to win the 'streaming' game. Unfortunately | for Netflix, Disney practically has a warchest ready to go at | all times. | | Funny thing is, eventually a product comes along that provides | the same value to the 'end user', without all the baggage of | the 'money making' service. This is usually the point of exodus | (digg/orkut/myspace) or acquire. (whatsapp) | bsedlm wrote: | I feel as though you're just being nitpicky for the sake of | missing the point. | | the overarching issue is that this " 'End users' are | hostages. The real user is the ad-company" is a terrible | problem which needs to be addressed, and politicians and | other elites are terribly failing to do this in the west. | | > _Facebook cares about making money. Period._ | | you misspelled "every modern corporation" | | all this to try to highlight how there's a problem here, and | there seems to be a failure of society at large in the | capability to deal with it. | amelius wrote: | > The user is the person who consumes your product and gives | you money for it. 'End users' are hostages. The real user is | the ad-company. Once your product is feature complete, your | ability to make money from the product doesn't scale with the | technical quality of the product itself. | | Clearly this is not what society wants, and it would be great | if there was a law against this business model (at least | until there are plenty of competitors who behave better). | V-2 wrote: | I actually like the YouTube recommendation system. It manages | to pleasantly surprise me pretty often. I don't have | significant privacy concerns about it - the stuff I enjoy on YT | is quite aligned with my public persona, so to speak. I'm not | disclosing anything that I don't already disclose to the outer | world. | V-2 wrote: | And furthermore, "bare" YouTube experience (what type of | stuff they promote on their front page when it's not | customized by my recommendations - basically what I see when | I'm not logged in) is truly nauseating to me. | civilized wrote: | Same as it ever was, I suspect. Why do all parents know in | their bones that TV is kind of bad and they should limit their | kids' consumption of it? | | It sucks that a lot of problems are very old and just keep | manifesting in different ways. But the flip side is the | strategies for resisting are also old and well-known. | MandieD wrote: | My toddler is unaware that there is a whole world of video | content made just for him - as far as he knows, the only | videos that exist are nature documentary clips, cooking | shows, church services and tech conference talks. | | I know that as soon as some of his daycare classmates can | really start talking, the veil will be pierced and he'll be | begging to see (judging by said classmates' t-shirts and | backpacks) Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig and Frozen. | | And I'm not sure how we're going to deal with that. | civilized wrote: | Probably time limits. | Robin_Message wrote: | N.B. that shoreline is a cinema local to silicon valley, not a | different movie. | vmladenov wrote: | > if I made a request to a service for "buying two tickets for | hunger games at 9pm" and it returned a message saying "I can | get you two tickets for shoreline at 9:10pm", I'd want to throw | my phone into the ocean. | | I'm sorry, I don't understand your point here. You asked for 9 | and it gave you an option of 9:10 at the Shoreline theater by | the Googleplex. That's usually the most common spot in this | area. Are you saying it's the wrong location for you? | sophiebits wrote: | To be clear, "at Shoreline" refers to a specific movie theater | (probably the Century Cinema on Shoreline Blvd in Mountain | View), not a different movie. | blindseer wrote: | Ah, my bad. I read that section three times and still missed | that, and feel quite dumb now. | tqi wrote: | I think the lesson here is not that you misunderstood | (which is completely understandable, no reason you should | know the name of a local theater) but rather that it's | never a good idea to assume the worst reading of a | situation. | darkerside wrote: | And also that a movie messenger app might need to be | smart enough to know if you know all the local movie | theaters? | [deleted] | raverbashing wrote: | Closer to Google HQ than FB HQ for extra irony | foolfoolz wrote: | closest venue to where zuckerberg lives | onetimeusename wrote: | yes. The YouTube results are horrendous. I get a mix of things | unrelated to my search that YouTube wants me to look at and a | mix of related things and what feels like a never ending loop | through some other material. | | Older videos can be very hard to find at times. I sometimes use | a regular search engine to try to get to it. | | This probably isn't because of bad technology though, although | that is possible. I suspect it is part of a revenue maximizing | strategy, like you implied about them not valuing user time, to | get users to focus on viral content to drive engagement | (addiction) and highly monetized content. But it could be | because of poor machine learning models I just suspect it's a | new type of dark pattern. | coffeefirst wrote: | > Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is | behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of | us? | | Kind of. | | But I also use Fastmail. And Fastmail is shockingly, | mindboggling good. | | And I basically have the tools I need to work from home in | perpetuity. While I have lots of things to critique about Slack | or Google Docs, I don't have to spend an hour or more a day in | traffic anymore, so that's cool. Also Video chat actually works | now, which is crazy if you think about it. | | I just bought an album from an obscure artist off Bandcamp. It | was seamless. And it comes in FLAC if that's your jam. | | Speaking of which I've been meaning to run to a neighborhood | bakery today and it took 3 seconds to confirm they're still | open. | | Is the party over? Actually, I'm not sure. | | Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social | media is not and never has been the web, despite their power | grabs. | cmeacham98 wrote: | > Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social | media is not and never has been the web, despite their power | grabs. | | Is this really true? I feel like there are some good social | media sites still out there, like certain small parts of | reddit and this website we're both commenting on. | sillysaurusx wrote: | /me nods while switching from Safari to TikTok | | According to Screen Time, I spend five times longer on TikTok | than Safari. HN comes in at just 39 minutes over the last | week. The two possibilities are that I'm consumed by the | social media cycle, or that I learn more from TikTok than any | other source. Since I love learning, empirically social media | seems to be the web. | | Don't slay the messenger; I'm just as nervous about this as | you. But we've all seen what happens to those who cling to | old trends, hoping the golden ages will return. It rarely | goes well. | | For evidence, I flicked through about ten nonsense videos | just now before landing on this gem: | https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdtq8Mmc/?k=1 | | I like the web. It has its purpose. But one could also say | it's served its purpose. The power grab exists because it | wasn't serving a very real gap in the transmission of | knowledge. | coffeefirst wrote: | I agree. I think it's fair to say the entertainment/time- | vortex/scrolling element of the web more or less moved on | from the open web to mobile apps etc a long time ago and | there's no reason to think it will come back. I'm not even | on tiktok, but there's nothing open web about my Apple TV | either. | sillysaurusx wrote: | If you'd like to give it a try, I'm currently watching a | lovely stream where an Irish artist is drawing a pug. | https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdtqCc7E/ | | The smaller streams seem to be the most interesting, | which is sort of the inverse of twitch. Where else can | you pass the time while seeing an artist at work? | | The history content was the real surprise. I was glued to | the history channel as a kid, and watching its demise was | a sad point in life. But it seems to be reviving itself | in an ad hoc way; there are dozens of channels that go | into detail about topics I'd never heard of. | catflop wrote: | You doxxed yourself sharing that tiktok link. | rakamotog wrote: | +1 |or that I learn more from TikTok than any other source | | You learn from TikTok, for me thats the place to see hot | girls(arbitrary). | | But, | | |empirically social media seems to be the web. ' | | is true. | | Learn has such positive connotation and I want to highlight | how a sentence with a not so positive connotation looks | like. | sillysaurusx wrote: | The key is to use the "not interested" button. You have | to long press on a video. They make it hard to discover, | and it's the only way to get away from the phenomenon you | pointed out. Takes maybe 30 minutes of tuning, and I'm | also convinced that yesterday's "not interested" presses | inform the content that shows up today, so give it a bit | of time. But it's hard to gauge how any of these black | boxes work. | ravenstine wrote: | > This is the same problem with YouTube. If you've recently | subscribed to a user, or watched one of their videos for the | first time, and then make a search for something completely | different, one of a first few results will be a video of the | user you initially interacted with. It is SUCH a bonkers user | experience for me and I want to never give YouTube any | information about myself for recommendations just because of | that. | | YouTube's recommendation system has been terribly broken for me | for years. | | I used to occasionally watch Lex Fridman's show casually, but | now I despise it because it's all that YouTube's autoplay and | homepage steers me towards. I guaran-fooking-tee you that I can | fall asleep to Spongebob Squarepants clips and wake up in the | morning to Lex's monotone voice... _every single time_. | | Worst yet, it doesn't even do much to show me episodes I | haven't watched yet. It replays the same ones countless numbers | of times. | | Thing is, I _do_ want to watch _some_ of Lex 's episodes when | they come out, so unsubscribing isn't a good answer. I've tried | telling YouTube to "show me less of this" or whatever the | equivalent option is, and it doesn't get the clue that it's | overwhelming me. | | People wonder why I'm such a pessimist about Silicon Valley and | the world of software engineering despite that I'm a | programmer. UX patterns such as those found on YouTube and The | Google are the opposite of excellence. Either they lack | competence or they are specifically designed to waste your | time. | | I don't even buy the notion that "most users don't care." | People in my life who aren't technologists complain about tech | _all the time_. | narag wrote: | _Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is | behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of | us?_ | | I have this theory, for a long time, that a lot of what sucks | in computing is simply because at some moment it was the only | thing that worked at certain scale. | | Computing is said to be the second industrial revolution and | therefore there is an overwhelming force to adopt whatever | already works, no matter how much it sucks. | | Later, inertia keeps the sucking solution for longer that it | would stand on its own, until someone manages to put something | obviously better in the market. | | Some day recomendation systems will stop sucking. Meanwhile, | take them for what they are. | shrimp_emoji wrote: | I worry that it's an inevitable outcome of capitalization | akin to what I think we've seen in physical goods: | | Stage 1: make crappy products because you don't know better | | Stage 2: make quality products because now you can | | Stage 3: realize that you can make more money by making your | product cheaper. Outsource the labor, turn the metal into | plastic. People won't even mind if it breaks if they can just | get another one. In fact, why not _design_ it to eventually | break so you can sell even more? | | Stage 4: realize you can make even more money by turning your | product into a service with app integration | | And it's difficult to go back to a previous Stage because | you'll always lose, like trying to un-invent gunpowder | weapons. From the perspective of a consumer who cares and | wants Stage 2 products, the system's decayed to maximum | entropy; the forest is gone; all the trees have been chopped | down; the soil's depleted. :C | Spooky23 wrote: | My favorite example of this is the "whirly pop", which is a | stovetop popcorn maker with a little device for stirring | the popcorn kernels. They did the MBA thing and slowly | chipped away at the cost, to the point that the lid is a | piece of aluminum equivalent to 3 sheets of foil. It's non- | functional and possibly dangerous - but still $30 at | Walmart. | | The twist is they did go back - you can buy something | closer to the 1990 version at Williams Sonoma, except it's | $90. | darkerside wrote: | This is just how we've fought inflation for many years. | Things have gotten more accessible, not by accident, but | through innovation. And, if your want to pay for quality, | you typically still can. Seems like the best of both | worlds. | | Oh, I'm sorry, did you want to get all the quality but at | the low-ball price? Doesn't work that way. | | (Not intending to direct this at you specifically spooky. | Just hammering your point home for parent poster.) | pm90 wrote: | As a counterpoint international calling/messaging has | become free and of much better quality. | xmprt wrote: | > Did you want to get all the quality but at the low-ball | price? Doesn't work that way. | | This is patently false. Look at innovation in things like | TVs and personal computers. Technology has gotten | significantly cheaper and significantly better quality | (although TVs have started to decline in recent years). | | I understand your sentiment but I don't think it's | impossible to ask for innovation to allow old products to | be created cheaper without compromising on quality. | sillysaurusx wrote: | I think you're just getting old. It happens. | | Personally, DMs are the only real thing in my life. Everything | else feels artificial. You even set aside time to go see your | parents, and make plans to go on vacation. | | DMs are where the magic is. Even HN comments are starting to | lose the feeling, but it's probably because I'm getting old. | Flankk wrote: | It's not a getting old thing. Corporations ruin everything. | Maximizing revenue at the expense of everything else has its | cost. | [deleted] | sillysaurusx wrote: | Is there an alternative? | | It's true that in a thousand years, the systems that exist | today are likely not going to be those of the next | millennia. | | But it's also true that the incentives of society change | very, very slowly. And right now the most impactful work | seems to be done by politicians and corporations. | | Which means the ambitious will always be attracted to | those, like flies to sunlight. | | I just don't see the point in even recognizing these | truths, let alone trying to change them. There's nothing | --- nothing --- that you or I can do about it. Not even YC | could. They sailed with the wind, not against it. | | The most we can do seems to be to maximize our own | individual happiness. | | Speaking of happiness, dear readers, remember that 35 is | middle age. Working until you're 60 is the biggest | corporate triumph of them all. Do the things you want | before you retire. | marcosdumay wrote: | > Is there an alternative? | | Yes, make the markets competitive. | nichos wrote: | Competition comes from corporations and start ups. | pm90 wrote: | And what makes it possible for lots of startups to exist? | What makes it possible for upstarts to rapidly rise and | replace an incumbent? | | Todays Big Tech replaced the earlier generation. But the | markets have been so thoroughly captured that it seems | impossible for any startup to replace Meta or Apple or | Google. Netflix is struggling not against another startup | but industry incumbents replicating its technology. | | Until the markets get competitive again, there won't be | much innovation domestically. TikTok should have shocked | the entire US tech industry but rather than try to come | up with better products the Tech industry tried to | dismember the company and gobble up its US assets ( a | process that stopped only because of a change in | administration). | tonguez wrote: | the alternative is humans decide to invest their energy | in improving the quality of life of other humans instead | of pure (financial) domination | papito wrote: | Not revenue. "Shareholder VALUE". | Spooky23 wrote: | There is a small cohort of people, 40-48 years old, who | experienced the ideal of instant messengers in the late 90s | to circa 2005. | | After that, everything in the unified/personal communications | space got technically better but worse. | jszymborski wrote: | I exclusively used MSN Messenger in my elementary and high | school days (which admittedly straddles 2005). | | I can't say that an unbloated app like Signal is a | fundamentally different experience except for some of the | deficiencies that've been ironed out (better file/image | sharing is one that certainly comes to mind). | | I'm open to being wrong on this point though! | | EDIT: Actually, you can add Discord/Signal/Telegram to | Pidgin for the throwback UI. | | https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins | Fargoan wrote: | I'm 34 and my whole school was on MSN Messenger from 5th | grade until senior year. Even into college a lot of friends | were on MSN until Facebook really started catching on. | That's my experience from rural North Dakota. | nunez wrote: | Small? Basically everyone born in the late-80s/early-90s | used AIM, ICQ, or MSN Messenger when they got into high | school or college. | | That's an entire generation! | | I agree that classic IM was best IM, though. Unfortunately | you can't make money on IM alone, and AOL isn't the portal | of choice anymore. (Google was so close with Hangouts!) | markb139 wrote: | We had instant messaging in the 80's at college on a VAX. | Admittedly only 8 people in any one chat. | kortilla wrote: | Agree but you did the math wrong. Teenagers in 2005 were | all over instant messengers and they would only be 30s. | Spooky23 wrote: | They were, but at that point it was a truly mass market. | I poorly expressed the population that I was trying to | describe. | | Circa 1999-2000, you could IM random ICQ users and they | were not 100% dickpic creeps. It was almost like a pre- | AOL internet for people in the know. | eastbound wrote: | I remember! Selecting profiles on ICQ as if on a dating | website, and talking with someone in China! No dickpic, | just naive remote friendship, well in fact he did fall in | love with me but... wait was it _only_ because we had no | numeric cameras at the time? | csallen wrote: | I'm 34 and all my friends were using AIM in middle school | back in 1999 | natly wrote: | I really doubt young people don't resonante with this | message. | DangitBobby wrote: | Unfortunately I can attest to the fact that chat apps is | where it's at. I personally would much rather make plans in | person but it's hard to get anyone to do anything, | especially now. One of my friends jokes that COVID turned | us all into "online friends" which is just a little too | true to be really funny. | kvathupo wrote: | I'd disagree with the characterization that Facebook is | maximizing user engagement with messenger. Rather, they wanted | messenger to | | 1. Be the de facto protocol used by companies | | 2. Let people spend less time on messenger, and render planning | of events efficient | | For point 1, this is evident with the mention of the Facebook | SDK being used by many apps, thereby rendering the adoption of | a messenger API easy. I find the timing of these emails __very | coincidental__ since Facebook recently announced an API for | WhatsApp that effectively achieves "app-to-person messages" | [1]. Based off rapper Ryan Leslie's great success with | automating consumer engagement [2], I think this will succeed | given a right signal-to-noise balance (also mentioned in the | emails!). That said, interesting __anti-trust questions__ also | arise, see Twilio, SuperPhone, etc. | | For point 2, I frankly welcome messenger facilitating the | planning of vacations/outings. It's very common for people my | age to say "let's hang out" or "let's go to this concert", yet | no one wants to spend the time to plan it. If my non-vacation- | planning messages can be hermetically demarcated from every | advertiser's eyes, then I wouldn't mind this addition. | | Relevant Note: This comes from the perspective of a Gen-Z | denizen. | | [1] - | https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/pfbid0TGYGr4hijxJdL9CawU... | | [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PtyXnFVNDw | | P.S. As an aside, it would be interesting to see the | implementation of a cryptocurrency to reward users for engaging | with ads. I conjectured this was the purpose behind the ill- | fated Libra coin. That said, it's not immediately clear how | proof-of-work would be implemented, or if blockchain would be | needed at all. | [deleted] | nicbou wrote: | Yes I wish that more software (and hardware) focused on being | good tools. I should use software to achieve my ends, not the | inverse. | | Accept my input, produce the output I need, and do it with as | little friction as possible. Don't assume what I want, and | definitely don't shove it down my throat. | shrimp_emoji wrote: | > _With Messenger specifically, . . . I 'd much rather just use | it to make plans with the person I want to hang out with._ | | Same. I'd much rather tell them to download Discord, add me, | and then we talk on there. Why are we talking over an inferior | IM platform? | mindcrime wrote: | Then use Discord to tell them to download an XMPP client and | join a real IM platform that isn't some vendor's proprietary, | inferior, walled-garden B.S. | shrimp_emoji wrote: | One can dream. :`) | | Matrix IMs like Element look cool, but feature parity and | usability seem far away... | | Fat-client P2P IMs like WLM died because there was no | business model, but there's not even much of one in thin- | client ones like Discord (which I praise for refusing to be | bought by Microsoft). | | It seems like a market failure thing perfect for an open | source solution, but alas. | [deleted] | [deleted] | paulcole wrote: | > With Messenger specifically, I absolutely don't want to... | | The big issues with a proclamation like this are: | | 1. You're 1 person and you have to recognize you don't speak | for anyone other than yourself. | | 2. The things people say they don't want to do and what they | actually don't do are often surprisingly different. | bozhark wrote: | Found the FB dev | | edit: take your own advice | neodymiumphish wrote: | That's nonsense. First, he never spoke for anyone else. | Second, ask any expert in econometrics; they'll tell you | he's correct. | | Also, it's obvious he's right just based on Facebook's | interest in Messenger. Otherwise, they'd just work on | implementing functionality to manage scheduling and meeting | with friends in person and never develop all their | extraneous Messenger features to begin with. | Firmwarrior wrote: | I know you don't realize this, and you think you're a | legitimately good person. But you're basically saying "We | know you better than you know yourself, and we're going to | manipulate you into pissing away as much time and energy on | our platform as possible because we can" | reaperducer wrote: | I hate Facebook as much as the next guy, but this part is | correct: | | _The things people say they don't want to do and what they | actually don't do are often surprisingly different_ | | When television ratings measurement started moving from | people writing down their viewing habits in a diary to | automated system measuring what they were actually | watching, suddenly "PBS" ratings tanked, and have stayed | down in automated measurements. | | The same thing happened in radio. People would write down | that they listen to whatever station was trendy, or cool, | or advertised the most. But when Portable People Meters | became a thing, we found out that people listen to a little | bit from all different kinds of radio stations. | | People are sometimes untruthful. Even when they're assured | of anonymity. | kelseyfrog wrote: | There is a third interpretation I'd like to posit starting | from the oft-quoted phrase "Know thyself." One, it implies | that knowing thyself isn't a guaranteed ability - it takes | effort for example. Furthermore, we can without difficulty | agree that knowing thyself has degrees, dimension, and | quality. | | So what then, if someone does not know thyself in some way? | They leave open the possibility to have others define them, | take advantage of them, and influence one's agency. This | doesn't exclude the possibly of someone knowing something | about you better than you know, only to say that maligned | agents can capitalize on one's lack of self-knowing. | | We can then extend the original quote in this specific | content to "Know yourself so that you alone can define your | agency." This extension allows for nuance in | epistemological introspection and accounts for inter- | subjective manipulation. | civilized wrote: | What people ideally want to do and what they actually do are | different, yes, but that doesn't mean it's moral or good to | disregard what they ideally want. | | If a heroin user wants to get clean, and you are the dealer, | it is not okay to say "sure, you say that, but you keep | coming back to me". It is morally monstrous. | baisq wrote: | >2. The things people say they don't want to do and what they | actually don't do are often surprisingly different. | | Personally I find recommendation engines abhorrent. And | still, when a recommendation engine works well for me, I am | pleasantly surprised and happy with the product. | bozhark wrote: | Market utilization. We must change the rules to change the | game. | Lammy wrote: | The WhatsApp situation was a huge driver behind Facebook's 2013 | acquisition of Onavo. | | FB first positioned Onavo as an "Opera Mini"-like data- | compressing VPN for people with mobile data caps, later as "Onavo | Protect" so they could scare people into installing it with the | threat of the big bad open Internet, and lastly as "Facebook | Research". | | It gave FB five years of passive market research data so they | could identify and acquire (or clone) popular new apps before | they could grow into WhatsApp-sized competitors. Think of all the | Snapchat-like features that appeared in Instagram around this | time, for example, after they failed to directly clone Snapchat | as "Slingshot". | | The data from Onavo was so strategically-important that FB were | willing to pay teenagers to install it and burned their | Enterprise iOS cert doing so: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo | | https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-acquires-onavo-for-... | | https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/facebook-removes-onavo/ | snowwrestler wrote: | It's funny to read this now; I remember a big surge of excitement | about Facebook chat bots among organizations. It was going to be | a cool new way to engage followers on Facebook: they could | message your org as if it were a person, and a bot would | immediately handle the most common requests. FB even started | putting a little score near the message button on pages for how | fast replies happened. (Still there, last I checked.) | | The excitement faded pretty quickly once folks realized that it | was just a FB chat version of an automated phone menu. We know | how popular those are. I don't think it ever caught on with | users, at least among the orgs I'm aware of. | pull_my_finger wrote: | They may be more popular outside the US. Where I am a lot of | big businesses still use facebook for their online presence, | and use those very annoying chat bots as their support | gateways. Really frustrating as a user, but that's the state of | things where I am. | mjr00 wrote: | Chat bots are definitely still a big thing, but the value | proposition has completely flipped. | | Zuckerberg (and others) were pushing an experience for _the | user_ , where they'd be delighted by interacting with a | humanlike support bot that could interpret their human | request. The value would come from additional user engagement | with the platform, and therefore ad revenue. | | In reality, chat bots are a cost optimization technique for | _businesses_ , where they save money by paying support bot | services in exchange for reduced support staff. Still making | money for someone, but they're nearly universally a worse | experience for the end user, and certainly not a reason why | users would engage with the FB platform. | xmprt wrote: | On the contrary, I've had much better experiences with chat | bots than I have had speaking with customer support on the | phone. With a chat bot, I can wait for a response and be | notified immediately. I wouldn't even mind if they took | multiple hours to fulfill my request. Staying on hold on | the phone for even 5 minutes feels like hell. | azinman2 wrote: | But why not just an app that isn't confined to just text? | akyu wrote: | Interesting to get an more raw insight into Mark's thinking. In | some ways its insightful and prescient, but also feels like there | is desperation and a kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and | seeing what sticks. I suppose Facebook has/had the resources to | do plenty of spaghetti throwing though. | | Another observation is that this would have been the moment for | Facebook to lean into short video content a la TikTok. But it | seems like the video content is just an after thought for Zuck. | Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose, but its interesting that they | almost got there. Vine already existed at this point and I guess | Zuck did not view it as a threat. Perhaps that's one downside of | the "defensibility" mindset that seems to pervade this writing | and most of the ideas. I get the sense that this is Zuck | responding to competitors, and not really crafting a unique | vision for Facebook as its own entity. | DLay wrote: | He didn't launch a competitor, but Zuckerberg approved the | blocking of Vine's API access to find Facebook friends a few | days after it launched. | | TikTok must have paid a pretty penny to have access to it | today. | AceJohnny2 wrote: | > "[...] if we had gotten the quality balance right _and not | repeatedly thrashed our ecosystem_ [...] " | | I'm choosing to believe even in 2013 this was referring to | Google's messaging strategy. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-21 23:00 UTC)