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0 pointsreliefcrew6mo ago0 comments

> I would genuinely like to know why I'm wrong and these decisions aren't as bad as they seem.

Because it's not a $1.6 trillion dollar hobby or charity. They need to make money, full stop. This can't be emphasized enough.

As such, they view users more as a hybrid of volunteers and products. Then they monetize generally by selling the engaged users to advertisers. At this point I'm pretty sure they have financial models customized to individuals and they probably determined you're not worth providing service to unless you view more adverts... thus forcing you to engage more with the feed system.

They did what they had to do and you went ahead and accepted it; that's a good design. If you stop using them or switch to another service; then it would be a bad design.

What's the alternative? Put together some aesthetically beautiful design that lets users walk all over them while Meta foots the bill? That won't work because they'd go out of business. It's a matter of give and take.

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Desafinado6mo ago· 2 in thread

Right, I think everyone gets that, but clearly treating the actual users of their applications as products isn't working and hasn't worked, as evidenced by most people abandoning those applications

But maybe it's too late in the game for them anyway. Even if they tried to build a more engaging product the trust the public has in them has vanished, and few tech savvy users would care.

The alternative I'm suggesting though would be a design that attracts people to and sustains the product. But they likely needed to do this fifteen years ago while also avoiding all of their scandals.

Every minor dehumanizing decision they make chips away at their credibility among all but the dumbest people. Those people may stay because Meta has their contact list, but after a while absolutely nobody is going to be loyal to them. Being human sometimes goes a long way.

reliefcrewOP6mo ago

Forget the speculation and aesthetic/subjective judgments for a moment. My point is they have to do something with users who free ride on their system. They decided to give them an ultimatum. And, this sounds like a reasonable design decision to me.

What else do you do with those users... let them free ride ad infinitum? Do you have a better solution? After all, you can only woo those users for so long before it's a sunken cost.

Desafinado6mo ago

I don't see how, in the scenario I mentioned, that just allowing a user to click away from a modal is a problem, though. Are they not losing value from alienating users who they do stuff like this to? Are they really gaining any value by forcing them to follow accounts they don't want to follow?

It just sounds like they have no better ideas to me. Why not just make the feature human and build a little bit of customer loyalty? That's kind of my point. After a while people get so tired of this crap this might be why these users provide Meta no value.

And I guess, if they're already making ridiculous profits, why not just accept that some of your users are low value monetarily but do provide value by being on the network at all.

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