If I may offer: Because they have become fiendishly adept at exploiting an addictive behaviour/weakness in our brains WHILE masquerading as some sort of social utility (AND perhaps vestigially retaining some semblance of that) - which, incidentally, is what (some) originally might have been, before encrappification.-
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I suspect the OP understands this. Since few of those on HN (I am assuming) no longer have a FB presence, the question is why hasn't everyone arrived at this same conclusion and walked away from that addiction?
Meta should really have gone the way of MySpace a long, long time ago.
People educated in math and probability are actually still prone to gambling addiction and things.
It doesn't matter what your high level brain knows, there is a structure and organization of your brain that only changes on geologic timescales, and that structure has serious, easily attackable flaws.
I like your use of "attackable" (and of flaws, obviously).-
PS. F'book commoditized social interaction to their ends while abusing these attackable surfaces. Kalshi and that ilk have now done away with the whole pretense of communication itself and are abusing the same addiction mechanisms to commoditize OPINION to their ends. Opinions: Everybody has one.-
PS. At some point somebody is going to commoditize mere bodily movement wrapped into such an addictive mechanism and we will get people with "weird" performative "palsies" walking about.-
Nobody expects… the Ministry of Silly Walks?
Breaking any type of addiction is hard. For some people it requires intentional and deliberate help from others.
Social media is a habit more than an addiction. It's easy to stop if you engage in other social activities. The trouble for many people who grew up online is that they don't have much experience doing that.
Facebook is intentionally designed to be as addictive as possible. It's not "a habit more than an addiction", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498
People always say this and so I decided to go look at my Facebook feed and it’s entirely people with their families posting completely innocuous photographs. The one exception is that Sadiq Khan the mayor of London is inexplicably on my feed eating at the restaurant Darjeeling Express. Did I follow him accidentally? Who knows.
In any case, the reason I haven’t bothered is that the Facebook feed is entirely harmless. I wish I could show you guys.
Is this entire phenomenon one of those things that people believe is happening to others and not them? Having scrolled that feed, I am confident that an unfiltered HN read would have more outrage porn than that.
this sounds like you have some form of adblock installed that is removing half or more of the posts?
the fundamental issue is that the user has no actual control over what ends up on the feed, and everyone's experience is based on what facebook decides you should see.
i manipulated mine to show only leatherwork, but it'll never ever show me stuff from my friends. instead of showing me what my friends are up to - deletig any likes and telling it to never show me suggested junk - it shows an error for "add more friends" rather than show content from my friends which they definitely do have.
i get the sense that facebook has marked my friends as not worth having their posts seen, so it cant add their stuff to my feed even when i dont have anything else on my feed.
That's a fair complaint. I use the chronological feed on Twitter/X as well because the algo feed is kind of meaningless. I just want to know what people I follow are saying.
It is different for different users and different at different times. It is probably especially bad with few contacts that write on FB or if you log in like twice a year.
Similar confusion on HN comments about SaaS UX arise when there is AB testing and some are victims and some are not.
And/or MySpace should have gone the way of F'book :)
Though I hear it might make a comeback.-
PS. To your point, I am guessing: For one thing it takes the ability to thus conclude, to begin with. THAT, in turn takes intellect and time AND evidence such as has been accruing. AND third, probably, because addictions are by definition hard to quit. ALSO: I think few times in the history of addictive behaviours has the enabling agent had such a low low low entry threshold, such presumptive innocuousness, and such assumed and granted "utility". It began by hijacking human communication, "socialization". It is devious.-
People may believe they need facebook to maintain their relationships.
As many have pointed out, a lot of daily community activities are conducted primarily through Meta-owned platforms. Quite annoying, but maybe there wasn't enough effort earlier to get all these schools and other community groups using other tools to get the word out?
However, companies could en masse decide to start filtering resumes containing Meta employment history. This already happens with some other questionable industries when reviewing applications. I know I'd be hard pressed to hire anyone with a Meta background.
> This already happens with some other questionable industries when reviewing applications. I know I'd be hard pressed to hire anyone with a Meta background.
Nice thought. Sure as heck will consider it now.-
Exactly. Same reason we eat junk food that also isnt good for us.
Most people that I know who use it basically only use it for Marketplace and one or two groups. (It would be better to not use it at all, but that seems fine.) Someone showed me their feed and it’s all slop, worse than Twitter.
Many people understand that it’s a waste of time, but people with low impulse control get sucked in. Same as with gambling and Candy Crush style games. And substances, for that matter. This isn’t their fault, some people are wired that way.
We really need a revival of Craigslist to eliminate the Marketplace hold on local P2P commerce.