How does this help me (or anyone) socialize? It doesn't help bring people together, it drives them apart into their own little silos with the AI being their only gateway outside of that silo.

Yeah, I'm having trouble wondering what's wrong with the universe if a judge thinks that Facebook hasn't basically obliterated all competition in social media.

YouTube is not really social media. YouTube shorts tries to be Tik Tok, and Facebook Reels tries to be Tik Tok, but they're fundamentally different things, because short-form video targets an entirely different category of people than social media and largely serves a different purpose — to entertain, not to inform.

Google/Alphabet's social media site was called Google+, and it died because everybody was on Facebook and Instagram, so nobody used it.

YouTube sharing is too public (and hard to use in any other way now that Google+ circles no longer exist), so it's not really a place to share pictures of your family and share stories with your friends. If it competes with anything in the pseudo-social space, it would be Twitter/X, which I would argue is a microblogging site, nota social media site. They have a fundamentally different kind of target audience.

Apple Messages isn't social media at all. It competes only with SMS. Same with WhatsApp. I can maybe understand a judge concluding that buying WhatsApp didn't meaningfully stifle competition, because no platform for basic point-to-point communication is ever going to prevent competition by apps that come on your phone (e.g. Messages).

But saying that Instagram didn't stifle competition is a cop out. Instagram (3 billion) and Facebook (3 billion) are the only two sites left standing that I would consider to be social media sites, with the sad exceptions of Truth Social (6.3 million), and Mastodon (1.8 million).

If you're in an industry where you have somewhere between three and six billion users and your next largest competitor has one fewer zeros in its user count, and all of the other competitors have three fewer zeros in their user count, you haven't just stifled competition. You've effectively eliminated it.

And Facebook/Instagram have incredible amounts of power when it comes to breaking the open web, hiding content behind a login wall that makes it basically impossible to share things with the public unless they are Facebook/Instagram users themselves, which makes it even harder for competitors to break into the space, because everyone has to be a FB/Insta user if they want to see the content that people create on those site. You can't just casually discover FB/Insta content. So that aspect also strongly leans towards Facebook/Instagram being a monopoly.

The only way you can realistically conclude that Facebook and Instagram aren't a monopoly is if you ignore all of the actual social use of social media and treat them as nothing more than a platform for influencers and bulls**t peddlers to make themselves seen by the whole world. And yes, for that narrow space, all of those platforms compete. But for social media itself — sharing of semi-private information with a close circle of friends and family — none of those other sites actually compete with Facebook and Instagram in any meaningful way, which makes this decision downright appallling.

But congratulations, Facebook, on amassing so much power that the government can't rein you in. I weep for the future of our world, because this really should have been open and shut, and Instagram should have been broken off years ago, the second Google+ proved that competing with that behemoth was infeasible.

But if that wasn't enough proof, the abject failure of Truth Social, where even Donald Trump's enormous influence wasn't enough to make a second traditional social media site become large enough to be viable, should be absolute inarguable proof that the Facebook/Instagram combination stifles competition. It does. Massively. Its very existence makes competition almost impossible, ensuring that the only even semi-social sites that can ever exist are those that focus on largely non-overlapping markets like microblogging.

And I really can't imagine how anyone could look at the evidence and conclude otherwise, because it is so incredibly obvious to me.

A "Disable all AI crap and stop pushing this shit already" switch would be more desirable.

Higher quality slop and approaching pink slip.

That tech is not even remotely ready for use outside of a carefully isolated lab setting.

Fortunately, I will likely not even have to turn it off. The data-collection makes this illegal without informed consent in Europe. And they will not want to tell the world what they are collecting and what they are doing with it.

Reminds me of war dialing, looking for modems to connect to a network.

... not enough baskets. Not the only place in tech where this is going massively wrong.

Someone's gotta communicate with the aliens when they show up and start ionizing our atmosphere.

The change in light trucks in the US may also have to do with emission standards.

It's still dumping wherever it's happening. It's a direct attack on every major automaker around the world, with the goal of destroying them and making foreign markets dependent on another Chinese export.

You can still buy gas burners for ~$20k. They may be small sedans and people may not want those things, but they exist, and some of them in that range are actually pretty good cars.

How is Venezuela successful? They've been a basket case for years.

It wouldn't matter, when you're dead-ass broke, you're going to lie/cheat/steal to get your fix whether it's $1/gram or $1000.