First Apple, Then the Google, and Now a Young Person: Facebook Faces Phrastic Fault Finding
February 21, 2022
I am not sure I fully understand “What Does A Platform Look Like When It’s Dying?” The write up strikes me as somewhat mean spirited. Name a bad thing Facebook has done? Used corrosive information flows to rip apart social structures? Hey, what about the tweeter thing?
Created a marketplace for contraband? Hey, the Dark Web has been in that game for a decade.
Fostered human trafficking and child sex crime? Definitely not a pioneer in this area.
Overall the Facebook or Zuckbook is a manifestation of what’s possible online: Monopolies, ecosystems of idiosyncratic behavior like “No, you can’t change your icons”, and getting paid anytime a user or an advertiser clicks. Online is a fine, tidy, well-lit place (sorry, Ernest, I can’t do the “lighted” word form).
The write up states:
Well, two days ago, Meta, which is what Facebook calls itself now for some reason, tried to hold a post-Super Bowl Foo Fighters concert in its new VR platform that no one wants, but users couldn’t figure out how to actually access it and the ones that did said it looked like shit and sucked. Also, yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s corporate values now include the bizarre tagline “Meta, metamates, me.” And over on Instagram, Reels, the video feed on Meta’s once-cool photo app, is filling up with silent auto-playing one-second video memes everyone hates. Meanwhile, TikTok’s owner ByteDance reported last month that their 2021 sales grew by 70%. So, you know, you connect the dots there.
I think this means that the China-linked TikTok is the big dog of social media and video now.
Bad for Facebook? Yep. Bad for YouTube? Yep. Bad for identifying susceptible individuals who can be coerced to cooperate with a foreign power? Nope.
Stephen E Arnold, February 21, 2022
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