Facebook fucks up again

[Aqua Letifer]

Social media is crumbling right now.

Youtube's getting more hardcore about demonetizations, removed their process for handling disputes, and is going to destroy Canadian channels thanks to their interpretation of C-11. Not to mention the fact that updates for channel subscriptions—that's subscriptions, channels you actually want to get notified about—are getting ghosted. A lot of content creators are seeing the writing on the wall here.

Instagram's an interesting one. Brands, influencers, heck even everyday folk now have 90% of their audience (90%!) oblivious to their own updates, because they're chasing TikTok and the discovery model. There's absolutely no way to get noticed, interact with your customers or build a following on this platform anymore. If you're not willing to dance and point to things, you ain't gettin' found. And if you do dance and point to things, you might go a little viral but you ain't bringing in no business.

Facebook does... this shit.

The way TikTok works is that followers don't matter. This is great for engagement and going viral but obliterates community building. It's literally impossible on a platform like this.

Twitter's dabbling with a mix of Reddit innovations, Clubhouse-esque "spaces" and tweaking their algo to better match the discovery model. In other words, they're eroding their communities, too.

People are trying alternatives—Twitch and Discord are kinda working, as is Reddit to some extent—but nothing's really been figured out.

Guaranteed these platforms will either have to change for the better, or their agency in the world is going to tank once we get to whatever comes next.

[LuFins Dad]

Anyway to disable? The article doesn't address that.

[Aqua Letifer]

@LuFins-Dad said in Facebook fucks up again:

Anyway to disable? The article doesn't address that.

Yeah. Don't use it.

[Jolly]

Did the decline of YouTube occur before or after Google?

[Doctor Phibes]

@Jolly said in Facebook fucks up again:

Did the decline of YouTube occur before or after Google?

Large companies generally make a mess of things when they buy really successful smaller companies. They just can't leave things the hell alone.

I used to work for a company that was bought by Siemens. God, it was a miserable experience.

This German guy lectured all the Canadians on why they just needed to do what they were told and conform to the new way of doing things. Then he didn't understand why everybody left.

[Axtremus]

@Doctor-Phibes said in Facebook fucks up again:

Large companies generally make a mess of things when they buy really successful smaller companies.

In the case of Google buying YouTune, it’s hard to imagine YouTube being as successful without Google. Google’s operational capability to scale the then fledgling new service seemed rather critical. Maybe the OG YouTube employees felt differently, but the meteoric rise in Google’s stock price and consequently the values of their stock options probably salved all wounds.

Ditto Apple Inc. buying Siri, Inc.

I was tempted to also cite Microsoft buying QDOS, but in that case Microsoft bought only a product, not an entire company.

[Aqua Letifer]

@Jolly said in Facebook fucks up again:

Did the decline of YouTube occur before or after Google?

I'd say it started right after.

[LuFins Dad]

@Aqua-Letifer said in Facebook fucks up again:

@Jolly said in Facebook fucks up again:

Did the decline of YouTube occur before or after Google?

I'd say it started right after.

Generally, most people think the big mess started in 2013 with Google+ accounts being necessary to comment on videos and post.

[Catseye3]

I'm kind of blown away with how alien this whole arena is to me. It's like a parallel universe where the trees grow upside down.

I wonder how many others like me there are.

[Doctor Phibes]

@Axtremus said in Facebook fucks up again:

In the case of Google buying YouTune, it’s hard to imagine YouTube being as successful without Google.

'Successful' isn't necessarily the same as 'doesn't suck'.

[Aqua Letifer]

@LuFins-Dad said in Facebook fucks up again:

@Aqua-Letifer said in Facebook fucks up again:

@Jolly said in Facebook fucks up again:

Did the decline of YouTube occur before or after Google?

I'd say it started right after.

Generally, most people think the big mess started in 2013 with Google+ accounts being necessary to comment on videos and post.

That's primarily a viewer's perspective. The drop in engagement for uploaders, subscribers not being notified, and other algo shenanigans started to really hit around 2020.

Used to be, you could make around $2500 a month from a total monthly viewership of around 200,000. These days it's much closer to 800,000.

But it's not just a linear increase.

• Screw your subscribers, it's all about the discovery page. You can no longer grow an audience, because they're not necessarily going to know that you've even uploaded—YouTube is starting to follow the TikTok model. So there's much less community building, which means every video is treated as a one-off.
• About that discovery page: if your video doesn't do gangbusters in the first several hours after it's uploaded, it gets buried. Many, many UK YouTubers learned the hard way that if you upload videos on Sundays during American football season, you might as well have eaten a cookie and called it a day.
• Only certain kinds of content work anymore. They talk a big game about creators being in the driver's seat, but they're so not. You better make videos that are very compatible with the ad placements or you have no hope of monetizing.
• The real money is found in brand partnerships: companies paying you to (positively) review one of their products as a "video." That and affiliate links, if you've got the views to make those profitable. But companies are only going to want to deal with channels that already have that strong following, so if you're trying to grow, good luck to you. If your channel can't be attached to any products to sell, you might as well pick up fishing instead.

And it's just getting worse.

It should be noted that this isn't at all where YouTube started. It actually was pretty favorable to videomakers. Their platform relies solely on these people to function, but they figure that because there's no other game in town, they can placate the advertisers and treat the uploaders like shit. Which is fine until something else gets figured out. Guaranteed as soon as that happens, YouTube will tank, and dramatically fast.

[Jolly]

It needs to.

You used to be able to find quirky and original content. That's harder and harder to do.

And man, are there algorithms zeroed in...Every now and then I wipe my history, kill my cookies and not log back into the Googlesphere. When you open up YT, you get the usual popular pap, but after I pick about three videos, stuff starts to look very familiar. By about three more, it's like I never logged out.

[Axtremus]

@Jolly said in Facebook fucks up again:

You used to be able to find quirky and original content. That's harder and harder to do.

What would you consider “quirky” original content that you’d like to see more of?