Ask HN: Why has Facebook stopped improving?

Facebook is a dying platform. It's not exactly a secret. It's why Meta is acquiring other companies and investing in things like the Metaverse.

It's a publicly traded company with a fiduciary duty to increase shareholder value every quarter. For Facebook specifically that means a jumbled mess of a feed of ads, random notifications, and clutter that keeps users as engaged as possible. Any feature you can think of that would improve the service would probably go against the dark patterns that entice a drip feed of dopamine hits to max eye ball time. The system is working as intended.

They reached domination by network effects. Without any real current competition they are a de facto monopoly in their space. Monopolies have zero incentive to improve things for their customers much beyond the original value proposition that keeps you coming back.

Cynically, I would say there's no incentive. FB's real customer is the advertiser, for whom the platform is a tax. I don't think anyone advertises on FB because they want to, more because they feel they have to. These kind of businesses don't need to improve things for either the real customer or the end user.

If FB were an honest and ethical company, it would probably have to vastly change its business model and/or go out of business. Instead, it seems to be doubling down on monetizing creepy anti-social interactions. And this will probably, in the end, lead to its demise. The company is already in decline but has lots of money to shed before it dies off.

For Facebook, the hard work ahead is algorithmic and mostly about what users don’t see…improving the what-users-won’t-see features.

As a trivial example with much more serious implications, if Facebook would stop showing me Wordle posts by my friends, that’s an improvement that won’t get a press release.

To put it another way, the 90% of the iceberg below the surface is where the important changes need to happen.

I logged in for the first time in many months via my browser. I have messages but can’t check them without having to download messenger. This seems to me the height of brokenness.

Given the original purpose roughly of bring together geographically dispersed people who can actively follow each other's lives and stay friends with info gathered into a single feed, it was effectively feature complete 15 years ago. Every "improvement" made since then was either to deal with the larger scale or to increase engagement, neither of which improves the user experience.

The mission expanded at some point to include being a content platform and marketplace, but it's not great at either of those things. Rather than improve in those areas, it could probably improve most as an application by just abandoning what it isn't good at and focusing on what it is good at. That would involve divesting, though, which might be good for investors overall, but not for Zuck specifically and he still has veto power.

Every time they tried something new like with the redesigned feed and desktop site most of their users didn’t like it. Their user flow is so ingrained that they have to take losses if they want to objectively improve something. People adopt something new way easier than adapting to change of something they used for a long time. That’s one of the points why they stagnated onboarding younger people because their apps and sites feel old in regards to tiktok or discord. Facebook is the Volvo or Toyota of social networks does the job but doesn’t excite.

Facebook's user base is older millennials and gen-X who don't want flashy new features. All of the company's innovation is going into Instagram, WhatsApp, VR and new product lines.

Meta is the new Yahoo, just give it 5 more years.

I think they're OK with Facebook losing popularity as long as they're able to maintain relevance through other properties (currently, Whatsapp + Instagram). The pivot to "Meta" is part of that strategy as they try to push more into VR/AR.

They have been adding things like crypto and marketplace improvements. There have been ui redesigns.

They have been in trouble over content and election influence by foreign actors. Major media has been another thorn. These areas they areas staying out of.

Honestly, I think it's a natural decline like human body. As you get older (40s), you have to work twice as hard to maintain your fitness. You can buy better clothes, get nicer haircut, better diets etc., but you can't buy 4-5 hours in a gym every week.

Facebook is like all the companies I worked for. They all have a great core product, but they need to add features to maintain its prices, so they focus on the features with marketing values, while its core products pretty much stay the same.

Instagram is their social media platform of choice.

Facebook core probably doesn't have the user base they need to build a new product. Based on the user base of Facebook, what could they possibly launch that would be a "hot" product.

Why have they stopped improving?

Because they don't have to

Between it being a dying platform and it working well enough for their purposes while they try to branch elsewhere, there's no need to "improve"

I was sort of under the impression it's a combination of

- paying back technical debt

- scaling the product

- handling abuse (whether it's effective or not...)

- pivoting to enterprise products?

Because the elderly use it. It's why even on our smart phone the dial pad is the same as it was on a wired phone back in the day.

I found their web app has greatly improved in the last year or two, especially the mobile version.

If it's broke why fix it?

It’s not at all obvious that they’ve made any great acquisitions

They're too busy picking partisan political fights and pissing off a big chunk of possible customers.

Once you get distracted with that sort of ideation, there's no end to the distractions from legitimate business goals.

apparently their embedded comments iframe does not work for anyone, at least in europe, and it doesnt seem like they are ever going to fix it.

I think Facebook has too many features now as compared years ago. Before, it's easier for users to navigate the app or the site. Some people are also migrating to other platforms.