Agent Swarms feel like Facebook culture circa 2008.
Agent Swarms feel like Facebook culture circa 2008. Hire a swarm of driven but inexperienced 20-somethings, give them a very general target to sight off, and let it go. It's expensi...
Topic: Facebook
33 mentions · 31 chunks · 28 episodes
13.3× distinctiveness vs baseline
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How much more common this term is here than in ordinary English. Higher values mean the topic is more characteristic of this corpus.
2.6x burst in 2025 Q3
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- Facebook appears in 31 chunks across 28 episodes, from 2024-01-16 to 2026-05-04.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 5/26/25 (2025-05-26), with 2 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with OpenAI, memory feature, and revealed preference, while by chunk count it sits between load bearing and consistent bias; its yearly rank moved from #80 in 2024 to #33 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
In the 90's it was hard to imagine a world of infinite content.
...he 90's it was hard to imagine a world of infinite[bl] content. Twitter, blogs, Facebook, all only make sense in that world. Very hard to imagine ahead of time. Now we have infinite thinking. Infinite cognitive labor. What kinds of weird ...
This week in the Wild West roundup:
This week in the Wild West roundup: A Facebook Alignment exec watched OpenClaw delete her email and couldn't stop it. Bloomberg: OpenClaw might be a security nightmare for Sam Altman. OpenAI Dev's...
An NYT OpEd: OpenAI Is Making the Mistakes Facebook Made.
An NYT OpEd: OpenAI Is Making the Mistakes Facebook Made. I Quit.
Facebook left a desert of local community organizing use cases.
Facebook left a desert of local community organizing use cases.
A tweet analyzing what Google is trying to do to OpenAI:
...g what Google is trying to do to OpenAI: "google is trying to do to openai what facebook ended up doing to snap which is to first decelerate growth substantially (which kills a lot of momentum & morale) & then unleashing integrations at s...
Facebook is testing $14.99 monthly subscription fee to post links.
Facebook is testing $14.99 monthly subscription fee to post links. The aggregator endstate.
It's probably comforting for employees at Meta to believe that revealed preferences are all that matter.
...for employees at Meta to believe that revealed preferences are all that matter. Facebook should admit that, of course, there's some parts of global optimized social media that's bad for society. If you're the lead of the thing you need to...
I disagree with Stratechery's take that OpenAI has a Windows Play.
...undamentally different kind of thing. So ChatGPT is not like Windows, it's like Facebook, but turbocharged. Because even on Facebook, it's only valuable if other people and other content is on it. ChatGPT is 99.999% of the value of the in...
A Newsfeed Betrayal: it's not about changing visibility, it's about changing prominence.
... context of data accumulation changes, like when the Newsfeed was introduced in Facebook.
Facebook's stats say we all love doomscrolling.
Facebook's stats say we all love doomscrolling. But every one of us hates doomscrolling. Our revealed preferences can only show what we want,[n] not our highe...
There's a massive gap in social ephemeral organizing software today.
There's a massive gap in social ephemeral organizing software today. Facebook slurped up all of the social-adjacent use cases and then said, "nah, screw it, we're just going to optimize for engagement in an infinite feed." The ...
One of TikTok's innovations was self-distributing content.
...g content. Originally in social, feeds were manually curated by each user. Then Facebook and others switched to algorithmically sorted feeds to focus attention on the stuff that was most engaging. TikTok went a step further and didn't eve...
We're missing authentic social software.
...or an audience, which pulls everything into the engagement-maxing gravity well. Facebook started as a contact list (primary use case) with a content mill on the side (secondary use case)—but it metastasized into the latter and abandoned t...
Facebook and any ranking problem is often modeled as a 'multi armed bandit' optimization.
Facebook and any ranking problem is often modeled as a 'multi armed bandit' optimization. 'Bandit' here is based on 'one-armed bandit' referring to a slot mac...
The News Feed betrayal effect: the dissonance that happens where sensitive data users added in one context is now used in another context.
...a users added in one context is now used in another context. This happened when Facebook enabled the News Feed for the first time. It didn't make any new data shared; it just made previously shared data significantly more visible. It felt...
A HackerNews comment that stuck with me: "From the very beginning Facebook has been an AI wearing your friends as a skinsuit."
A HackerNews comment that stuck with me: "From the very beginning Facebook has been an AI wearing your friends as a skinsuit."
Last week I told the story of someone who had an inappropriate thing come up when he asked ChatGPT "tell me something embarrassing about me" in front of his coworkers.
...erived from all past conversations, changing the context. It reminds me of when Facebook's newsfeed feature came out. Technically it didn't change what people could see. But it changed the context of what people would actually see; change...
Someone told me this week they sometimes scroll LinkedIn to get their infinite feed fix.
...rolling infinite feeds, so they configured their phone to not allow them to use Facebook or Twitter. But the addiction to infinite feeds is so strong that he ended up scrolling LinkedIn. That's how you know you've got an addiction!
People decide what information to put into a system based on the context of its use.
...s. ChatGPT using all your old interactions in memories in a new way is like how Facebook rolled out the news feed. The same information in a different context can feel wrong, even like a betrayal.[mj]