Yes it’s a negative feedback loop created by the very bad product decisions they made to optimize for local maxima of getting more ads revenue. You inject more and more ads followed by more and more suggested content, thereby reducing the in network content. The in network content doesn’t get as much of traction, therefore people stop posting. This in turn forces the feed to have more and more suggestions and a few stale in network posts from days ago. This drives engagement down from people who want to see in network content and they leave. So what is left is people who do engage with suggested content, pushing the product to make decisions to push even more suggested content. All of this continues till eventually fatigue sets in and a sudden rapid drop in engagement kicks in because your global maxima of a quality product was lost long time ago and your product dies.
No, this isn't a consequence of the status quo newsfeed algorithm. This is a consequence of Facebook making a purposeful strategic shift away from in-network content to suggested content. This strategic shift was highlighted in their last earnings call as a way to compete with TikTok, whose success is partly explained by their focus on suggested content. On the earnings call, they signaled that they were shifting more to a mix of the two content styles in the coming quarters, but the OP is likely enrolled in some sort of test that is giving them 98%.
See the below excerpt from Meta's Q2 earnings call:
"One of the main transformations in our business right now is that social feeds are going from being driven primarily by the people and accounts you follow to increasingly also being driven by AI recommending content that you'll find interesting from across Facebook or Instagram, even if you don't follow those creators. Social content from people you know is going to remain an important part of the experience and some of our most differentiated content. But increasingly, we'll also be able to supplement that with other interesting content from across our networks. Reels is one part of this trend that focuses on the growth of short-form video as a content format."
>Mid-2021, I stop using FB for anything beyond Marketplace.
The only things I find FB useful for are Marketplace and Messenger. Marketplace is an OK way to sell your junk locally (it basically took over from Craigslist because CL was taken over by scammers and CL never bothered to do anything about it), and Messenger is a convenient glorified phone book and chat app which has a video chat feature that actually works quite well through any browser and doesn't require a local client application like Zoom. It's also really convenient that it works through both my phone and through a browser on my PC, so it's easy to switch back and forth (much easier to type messages on a PC, for instance).
Discord has completely displaced the need for other social media in my experience. And they get hundreds of dollars per year from me. If this isn’t a winning model, I don’t know what is.
People focusing on the winning model are missing that none of the platforms fill identical social roles imo even if they copy features from eachother and that digitally immersed users seem to prefer it this way. I strongly doubt that TikTok would have been improved with the full feature set of Facebook even if it might benefit from integrative features for example. Discord in a similar fashion is where I go for real-ish time talk with friends or gamemates. Both of these are very different than Instagram which has largely become what my wall once was on Facebook but not to be confused for Facebook itself where I go to talk with people who aren't very cyber savvy and by extension join Groups targeted at non-cyber savvy demographics (like my HoA's group)
Discord is completely useless for socializing with anyone who isn't in the IT industry. My mom, for instance, is NOT going to use Discord, but I can get her to use Facebook Messenger.
Not just older folks, young people who don't game regularly don't bother to check it either. The UI makes it quite hard to find people on there, nobody uses real names, profile pictures are random game/anime characters...
A few things that make Discord unfeasible for general purpose messaging...
The need to host a server somewhere. It silos info, makes that info less permanent and less findable. I've gone to all iDevices at home, so can't self-host.
It also doesn't have great visibility outside the tech worker and gaming worlds. I'm happy to use it if somebody sends me a link, but it's not the default for most people I know (except for those that game). Slack is a bit more common, mostly because of broad adoption at workplaces.
> This is a consequence of Facebook making a purposeful strategic shift away from in-network content to suggested content.
In an ironic twist these changes has made it much easier for me to stop using Facebook and Instagram. My usage was never high to begin with but some people in my life only used those apps and I wanted to stay connected. Now every single time I visit either of those apps and I see suggested content I close the app and move on with my day.
Bad strategy, imo. Sounds like they should have tried to answer why people used their product in the first place. “A competitor does it” isn’t a valid excuse—its like suggesting The French Laundry switch to fast food because McDonald’s is a competitor.
I think your analogy is too generous. It’s more like putting an engine on your stapler because people buy cars more often than staplers at a higher margin despite having a monopoly in the stapler market.
They also need to be honest with themselves about whether TikTok is a competitor, or if TT has simply won a completely different business that happens to take customers' finite resources (time) from Facebook.
The French Laundry is a very niche product, which Facebook is not. I think a more apt analogy is suggesting McDonald's to include more "healthy" options or a coffee bar because the competitors do it and it's a successful business strategy.
The real danger FB finds themselves in is that the initial value prop (make and maintain your friendships with less friction) is LONG gone.
Instead, they are relying almost entirely on the network effect now. You have to be on Facebook because your grandma is on Facebook. This is not sustainable long-term, for obvious and perhaps morbid reasons.
A 'strategic shift' to present suggested content may be what Facebook wants to do (or would like to tell investors it is doing).
However, the amount of real content being posted appears to have fallen off a cliff. This is obviously very subjective but holds true for both my own experience and friends/family who have commented.
So there isn't just a similar level of content but the algorithm is displaying less - but literally everyone I know no longer posts to Facebook in remotely the same way.
The only time I see regular updates are 'happy birthday' posts.
Everything else has moved to other apps - mostly Instagram stories.
The drop in real content is astounding. It used to be the case that I’d never ever come close to the end of the content from people I actually follow when I checked Instagram, and 5-6 years ago I interacted with the app daily. (Note: I deleted my FB account 7 years ago but kept insta).
Now I’m in my early thirties and I maybe open it two or three times a week — I hit the “you’ve run out of content from your friends” message in less than five minutes (and I follow ~400 people). It’s even worse because half of that five minutes is spent scrolling past the INSANE number of ads and suggested posts (most of which are terrible ads as well).
My friends are still actively posting “stories,” but I can’t imagine that will last forever (stories are also littered with ads, it’s insane).
Facebook has been out of ideas for a while, but it wasn’t so apparent until recently since they faced relatively soft competition, and they either acquired popular social media start ups or if they couldn’t, stole from them wholesale (snapchat). They now have a real competitor in TikTok and on the last earnings call it became clear they have no plan for regaining users / organic engagement, so they’ve decided to pump the short term financials by serving everyone a shit load of ads. Facebook’s long term prospects are bleak imo.
Has anyone kept track of the number of times they shifted the Facebook newsfeed algorithm?
At different point in time, the feed prioritized:
posts from friends, posts from games from your friends, friends' sharing of links to compete with Twitter, videos to compete with Youtube, moments to compete with Snapchat, comments that friends made, posts from friends again as growth slows down
I wonder what percentage of users drift off every time they shifted the algorithm.
The difference of course is that TikTok's suggested content is generally relevant.
My entire suggested feed relates to US politics. I keep getting suggestions for Second Amendment groups, "Stand your Ground" groups, pro life groups, "Isn't she beautiful" (a gun lobby group), "Texans for God" and so on. I'm Australian. I guess this is what I get for doing an occasional checkin at a place named Texas BBQ.
> but the OP is likely enrolled in some sort of test that is giving them 98%.
Couldn't it just be that suggested content is not only placed "between" in-network posts to achieve a certain minimum ratio, but also some small number of suggested-content posts are inserted at a constant drip into your feed (e.g. every N minutes in the feed's timeline) to ensure a certain minimum absolute amount of advertising happens per day per account?
Which would mean that, if all your friends are people who don't post very much on FB any more, there could be 50 dripped in suggested-content posts (to achieve the minimum absolute suggested posts per day) for each one in-network post.
Even without "ensuring a minimum absolute amount of advertising", I presume this would have to be happening on some level, to ensure that anyone who tries to use Facebook "like TikTok" (effectively an RSS reader for suggested content), ends up with a non-empty feed.
It makes sense tho for them to go for suggested content, because the can make you like stuff. That's their thing. It's no random thing they've been hiring psyops veterans of the afghanistan war. They can push things
I'm not sure it's the advertising dollars that are addictive as much as it is "growth". To keep the stock price up you have sustain a PE that reflects revenue growth, and once you are done signing up new users... Well... Something's got to give.
I see the ads as a lot like cutting timber out of a finite forest - it's profitable, but potentially harmful to the ecosystem in a way that can make it unsustainable. As long as you don't cut too much, replant aggressively, then you can make a sustainable business out of it - but it doesn't scale past the point where your harm to the ecosystem causes collapse. Once people exit FB because it's all ads, then the network benefits begin to evaporate, a little bit at first, then all at once...
Then again I don't run a social media company, so what do I know. ;-)
>Then again I don't run a social media company, so what do I know. ;-)
Maybe not a little as you think. Just because the social media companies are "runing", running into the ground is still running. They just have so much momentum that the ship is going to keep moving along.
> To keep the stock price up you have sustain a PE that reflects revenue growth, and once you are done signing up new users... Well... Something's got to give.
Facebook need to just settle back and offer dividends. It's over.
Doesn't help that their recommendations are always "Oh, you bought an air conditioner? Come look at this wide variety of other air conditioners we have!" rather than, say, adapters for connecting air conditioners to different window types or home electricity usage monitoring or something.
This is a common complaint. The reason they do it is because... it works!
It can be counter-intuitive but this is often seen in recommendation systems. In music for example, the song most likely to be played after a song is... that same song again.
However, it is painfully clear that there are very obvious categories of products that it does not work on. 99% of the time, if someone buys a refrigerator, they will not be interested in buying another refrigerator.
It would not be that difficult for Amazon to detect these product types and give other kinds of recommendations for them. Unless their algorithms and the data that drive them are much, much less comprehensive than they want us to believe.
Nope, even with items like fridges it's intentional.
Most people have not bought a fridge in the last month. Most people will not buy one in the next month. Taking your estimated 99%, that leaves 1% who just bought a fridge but it doesn't work, or didn't fit their room, or for whatever other reason they've sent it for a refund... and are about to want a fridge again!
1% might sound low, but if you look at the group of people who haven't just bought a fridge... maybe only 0.1% of them will buy one in the next year, vs. that suddenly huge-seeming 1% of recent fridge buyers. Suddenly, not such a bad idea to advertise to them :)
But if I've bought a fridge from Amazon, and it doesn't work, surely the first thing I'm going to do is try to return it to Amazon?
Most people, after all, don't really have the spare money to buy two fridges at once, so they're going to want their money back from the first one before they buy the second.
Once they've started the return process, then Amazon can start recommending new fridges to them.
Again: this is all data Amazon totally has access to. Whether they are failing to gather it, failing to recognize its value, or simply choosing not to use it when they know it's creating a lot of bad recommendations, is unclear.
I'd guess fridges are annoying enough to be without one that many people who can afford, either through having cash or access to a credit card, would indeed be willing to pay for the second fridge while waiting a few days for the first fridge to ship back and be processed before they get the refund.
Or maybe by the time they've fully made up their mind to return the fridge, it's often after they've first decided there is indeed a better fridge out there, and already chosen where to buy it in the day or two before they start a return. In which case the time to advertise to them would be the window after purchase and before initiating a return.
Maybe... etc.
I don't know for sure, having neither worked at Amazon nor tried to market fridges. But I have seen many examples of this sort of retargeting of people who've just bought something with ads of the same type of thing, where general intuition, even that of experienced marketers yet alone normal shoppers, made it seem like a dumb idea and yet the data actually did prove it was a great use of advertising.
So maybe your gut instinct is better than the ad conversion predictions Amazon's code is making, with all their data. But I'd be surprised.
>Again: this is all data Amazon totally has access to. Whether they are failing to gather it, failing to recognize its value, or simply choosing not to use it when they know it's creating a lot of bad recommendations, is unclear.
I'm not sure as to their reasoning. But maybe this decision is in fact based on their data? They're a pretty data driven company
Or the random notifications I get on my phone from Amazon: "We thought you'd like a new air fryer." I bought one 6 months ago from you, I don't need a new one.
Somehow it's always about some big appliance that lasts years and I just bought. It's never about "you might be running out of toilet paper."
It seems to me that Amazon has the same problem, but with their physical products instead of ads. Cheap junk, fakes, and scams pushed up sales for a while, but then people give up on the site and go to other sources that are perceived to be more reputable.
If the logging analogy holds, then I don't think this is purely an issue of profits above all - it's more an issue of short-termism. If you are Facebook, you could reasonably stay relevant, focus on content quality, and shift to a profit model that looks a lot more like Morton Salt's - steady as she goes. In the long run, sans other goals, that might be the rational thing to do.
On the other hand, if you are looking to preserve stock price in the short-term you need to at least create the illusion of sustainable revenue growth. And there is a lot to be said for this later strategy if you don't really want to run Facebook in maintenance phase. Seems that Mark and Co. might not be all that concerned about "deforesting" Facebook with ads because the end game here is the Metaverse...?...
Exactly. By adding more and more ads, their own widgets, and pushing down smaller sites in the search results to favor brands, Google made it very hard for smaller sites with user-generated content to grow and profit organically. And then fewer people searched for them or expected to find them.
I’m kind of enjoying the fact that newer sites and apps like Discord don’t let Google index them after Google killed off a large part of the independent Internet. We’re missing out on a lot of good content that would be put up in an alternate universe with a less greedy and shortsighted Google.
Users click more on big brands. The average internet user doesn’t want to browse hobby websites, they use the top 10 sites and never leave them. Accept it. Some of them never leave only Reddit or TikTok.
I was interested as well, but couldn't find anything specifically answering the question. According to the link below social media, email and watching videos counts for about three-quarters of most people's internet usage, which could easily mean they spend most time on just three or four sites. The two smallest categories - searching and shopping - could also just mean Google and Amazon for the most part, so it's the "Surfing content (19%)" that's ambiguous... although even then I assume that Google is a big part of that, and otherwise surfing for content is pretty much the opposite of visiting a site regularly, although I guess it probably includes news websites, which probably are a regular visit.
I'd guess that it is possible most people visit a dozen or fewer websites regularly, of which half a dozen or so are in the Top 10, and the rest include things like news/media sites that are most likely to be popular (if only nationally). Seems likely the older the person the narrower range of things they do online, apparently the most common activities for the over-60s are email and checking the weather lol.
Never thought I’d see the day, but I actually use Yandex for image search now because they basically deliver the google image search experience of a decade ago. While Google Images has had no one with Vision in charge and been tweaked, buffed and downgraded to the point of uselessness. And you can tell no one on the team actually uses it.
Google Search could honestly be dethroned if someone really wanted to. The usage at this point is habit, not because it’s still a good search engine.
I've noticed recently Google image search has gotten surprisingly terrible for some things. I use Bing image search when the Google image search lets me down. Haven't tried Yandex.
Yandex in particular is good with reverse image search is the main thing that won me over. It uses the same system Google used before they replaced it with machine learning and made it useless.
Google Image search these days seems to be "Oh that image you sent me is an Apple, here are pictures of other Apples" rather than showing me other sizes of the same image, and other images that are very similar looking.
I still weekly make the mistake to try to find something that I know to exist. Sometimes I know there are hundreds of pages on the topic. I type query after query, again and again, nothing shows up. It's like in the 90's, I tell stories about.. I forget his name and the place, when it happened but it was something like this and that. pfft!
edit: I just attempted to look up what kind of taxes on has to pay if one receives donations. I cant carve out a query that gives me anything other than tax deductible donations. The "receiving" part is completely ignored.
I agree. More generally, any business model where your users and your customers are disjoint sets will cause a misalignment of interests that generates an ever-increasing negative feedback loop. It seems like it can take a long time to play out though.
For those annyoyed with ads on Google search, Kagi [1] is worth trying. It's not free, but does not show ads and uses the Google index behind the scenes. I've been using it on desktop for few months and have no complaints.
Does it give better results than Google? I find Google's results to be pretty horrible, and worry that if Kagi is using Google's index, then I wouldn't get better results with them.
It does give better results. The filters can also be quite powerful.
The problem is paying a steep fee to proxy Google's index... It benefits you and Kagi in the short term, but strengthens the Google/Bing/Yandex index oligopoly [0] long term. Bad search results are the symptom - scarcity and opaqueness of viable indices is the root cause
> but strengthens the Google/Bing/Yandex index oligopoly
The way we look at it as that it gives Google a non-ad based source of revenue, which is a good thing for the future of the web. If one day that revenue could displace all ad-based revenue, by Google selling data to providers like Kagi, we would reverse the current state of the web.
--that coupled with inability to realize that blasting ads at people doesnt make your product look better, it makes your product a source of frustration, and a daily/hourly annoyance, your product is associated with bad, and is avoided.
the answer to the problem includes the concept of less is more.
It actively makes the product worse. E.g. from yesterday, if I search for "high tc record," I'm not looking for the set of bedsheets with the greatest number of threads.
In fairness, reading your search term, I had no idea what you were talking about so it's not entirely surprising the organic content producers don't match those terms well. Looks like the SEO folks do though.
Pretty sure at least 80% (probably 95%+) of low-quality SEO content is generated by computers, or at least by very low-skill outsourced labor in a machine-assisted way.
It then makes sense that the mature Internet can probably match any search query in a manner that leads to a site that sells something vaguely matching the query, through sheer quantity of available content.
In other words - there is enough SEO content generated and indexed that most queries will be able to be monetized by a search engine like Google.
Tc is the high temperature for superconductivity.
I noticed this about google a long time ago - they started "dumbing" down their search results. Don't blame them because that's where the money is, but it is annoying when you're searching for something and the results are full of celebrities because someone famous happened to say something like your search term.
Then again, Tc means different things in different fields. E.g. critical temperatures for all kinds of critical phase transitions. Note that the google search you posted above gives results for various phase transitions many of which are not superconducting phase transitions. I also was lost when I saw the original query.
Perhaps there are multiple groups searching with the same terms, but expecting completely different results. Google takes its best guess at which group you're in. To get better at that they have to gather more info about you personally. I'd prefer to change my search query than give lots of extra personal data to Google.
But you don't have a 20-year dossier of almost every web site he's visited; a list of 90% of his credit card purchases; an AI scrutinizing every photo he's ever been in that's been in, or in the background of, on the internet; a list of his previous searches; and a list of the places he's brought his cell phone.
Google says it spends about 0.3Wh per search, of which roughly one third is for scraping and two thirds for the search. I think you may be overestimating how much processing they could do with that budget (assuming they want to do that significant user-based tweaking, which is IMO not a given).
I don't know what you are trying to search for. A record for total compensation? Something related to Tesla coils? Turing Complete? Thread Count is a totally valid interpretation.
I have no idea what you are expecting from "high tc record"
I'm getting links about the highest temperature on earth and it is listing it in Fahrenheit so if the "tc" means "temperature celsius" it is failing for me.
All the other links are about high temperature superconductors.
Tumblr - banned 18+ content in 2018(?) in an attempt to make their site more advertiser-friendly and lost most of their userbase within a couple of months. Site was thriving before that.
We are talking about platforms where the ads themselves caused users to leave. This is not what happened with Tumblr and it is not a good faith view to say so.
I only see you attempting to constrain the topic that far, rather than just the ways that advertising based models in general can pervert a company's incentives by turning away their core user base. Sometimes it's just changing the UX until your userbase no longer wants to show up. Sometimes it's literally just banning a huge chunk of your userbase for some reason.
LinkedIn went through the same algorithm led spiral of decline.
Initially, they seemed to stop pushing out good on topic content. Instead, they rewarded and promoted Facebook style posts and made up stories probably due to metrics and A/B tests.
The good authentic posters then either stopped posting or had to feed the beast by pushing out the same crappy content in the house style which the algorithm rewards.
Almost everyone on there now is writing purely for the algorithm and not their industry peers whether they realise that or not. They are just chasing the doamine hit of likes.
The product is worse for it and I’m sure it ultimately kills the golden goose for social platforms despite a short term uplift. They become much less engaging and sticky when the social element is lost.
When LinkedIn arrived, it seemed like a good idea -- sort of a way for people who aren't great at networking to see how to expand their network. Then, like any dating site, you needed to buy credits to participate, and only "players" are willing to do that. Then, they erased any additional value brought by their thought leaders by promoting third-rate content with catchy headlines like you mentioned. Now, why would I trust them with my resume? And if I have no interest in them, likely anything else on there is either out of date or some sort of lie.
Friendster, Myspace, Orkut, Facebook.... Similar things for social. Use the network to find more people to hang out with, feel less alone. But then, again, that is not actually a business and people aren't paying for it. So, you either show generic ads (not a bad idea) or you get people to pay to get their content in front of you. But then people stop caring about what they see there and move on.
I agree with other posters -- I used to keep Facebook around because my family was there. Now I don't even see their posts when I'm on it. So, there's no value anymore.
I treat LinkedIn as I treated Facebook: a way to keep in touch with people you know or once knew, as a way to keep track of a list of these people, and as an easily findable public handle. For Facebook, it was of course less oriented towards money making.
Now LinkedIn still does the same job. As far as I’m concerned, while “thought leaders” and other spam is more prominent, dealing with egos is the price to pay for making it easier to find a job, and to be found as a candidate. It’s not materially different to IRL corporate world.
I'd also add that the optimizing the timeline for engagement (including negative engagement & arguments) wound up making me quit the platform entirely. There were no positive interactions, just deeply unpleasant arguments with people spewing vitriol.
Like ... why would I stay on a platform that was so deeply unpleasant to interact with all the time?
suppose you're in the meeting room and you're the product guy and you'll make this case. Indeed let us not optimize for the presently advantageous local maxima lest it come back to swallow and end us. How is this communicated? And what does it take to convincingly persuade people, or investors of this -- to even bear through a temporary downward period with the understanding that fundamentals must be respected?
>And what does it take to convincingly persuade people, or investors of this
As long as their top priority is next quarter's result, you can't. You may get small wins here and there, but nothing fundamental will change unless they have a long term vision. When I say "long term", I'm talking 10 - 20 years, not 1 year.
They didn’t build the iPhone or even like Google Maps and Google Images by walking into the meeting room with data. They instead said “what if maps were as easy as we’ve made search”
Of course it becomes a problem when no one even to the CEO level has lost vision. Never put the numbers guy in charge.
From my comprehension of Mad Men? You hire a PR firm to convince those investors and decision people, to sell them an idea instead of KPIs.
It can go both ways, of course: Mad Men is full of examples of stupid business ideas that went spectacularly wrong. And while it wasn’t the focus of Mad Men, the real world is full of examples of business that went the metrics way and were successful.
But IMHO, if I was the CEO of a social media company, I sure wouldn’t focus on A/B testing and engagement metrics.
It's not just the ad revenue or suggested content. FB's most sticky offerings are groups and pages. Well, FB actively hides posts in these to their own followers. You end up having to pay just sponsor messages to your own group.
I quit FB a few years ago when I realized the suggested posts were just way more interesting than anything my friends posted. Idk what that says about their algorithm. Or my friends.
Almost like building a business around “engagement” is a model that leads to a death spiral. Social media sites are basically giant MLM schemes that sell the idea that become real companies before the scheme runs out.
I was going to disagree with the GP for the same reason you pointed out. I liked all the page and group posts because they were funny and not someone I haven't spoken to eight years planning their wedding in public. There aren't as many organic posts from my friends to share anymore.
Crazy idea: FB should stop trying to lure people back from Tiktok with weird features and just lean in to its one remaining strength, which is that among social media sites, it's the most generic and boring and ubiquitous. Being the default place for non-influencers to do quotidian stuff like hearing about school closings, joining the PTA or HOA, coordinating family gatherings, see your nephew's school photos, etc would be a pretty good little business. And they already have all of that functionality built, so they could run significantly leaner, and hence not have to drive their remaining users away with excessive ads.
This seems like a good idea to me. But I also think it's about as likely to happen as President Stallman.
Marketplace is the only reason a lot of people still use the site. This is since especially true for people looking for beater cars since Craigslist started charging $5 to post ads for cars.
If Apple or someone else with an ax to grind with Facebook really wanted to bust Meta's kneecaps, they could off to subsidize this charge. Maybe also help them out with fraud and spam detection, since that's where most of the overhead on that section is going to come from.
That might be the reason for you, but there are many other reasons why people still use the site. For example, coordinating events with friends, discover local events, discussing on messenger, sharing photos, discussing in groups...
The people using Marketplace are the people who wouldn't be using the site otherwise, and who are there for the express purpose of doing commerce. No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.
>No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.
Until their HOA or their sports club start using Facebook as their official platform for announcements and communication.
I know there are other free platform that could fill the same role, but you will never find one where literally more than half the adult population already has an account and is familiar with the interface/features. Lots of groups use it because it's the path of least resistance.
It's not conjecture. Just look at any form your fill out, from taxes, to medical, to employment. They all ask for your email address and not for your facebook url.
Taking an average of the various reports about Facbook usage in the US, about 70% of internet users use Facebook at least once per month.
Somewhere near 100% of internet users use email.
As ok123456 points out, there's a reason that you get asked for your email address and not your Facebook ID. Asking for Facebook leaves out a huge chunk of people.
It's funny how much projection people do when speaking of FB, as if their personal experience offers some deep insight into a platform of 3.5 billion users whose usage varies by user, demography and geography.
Whether or not it's fun doesn't isn't the primary driving factor in its continued popularity. People use it because other people use it. It got big and now has a network effect of inertia holding it in place until something else takes off and replaces it.
Because there's a certain group of people who feel the same way as you do. And maybe people who read HN are more likely to belong in this group. But HN is not representative of the world.
Huh? In my experience, no one under 40 uses the site much anymore for its original purposes. The only status updates and memes being posted are from the older crowd.
Might be true for you. But this is so not true for a lot of the world still. Lots and lots of young people (late 20s, early 30s) still use FB. Anecdotally, quite a few of my friends still do, if not mostly for the groups.
The problem is that FB has changed groups as well. Groups seem to be redesigned to become more like open billboards than private enclaves with a limited membership.
They haven’t gone all the way there, so the groups are still useful, but I’m worried that’s the direction they’re taking.
That seems to be getting the same Zuckerberg death-spiral: Facebook has lots of users so it’s tempting but everyone I know who’s tried it was deluged with blatant scam attempts & Google MFA phishing attacks. Skimping on abuse just seems to be the corporate default.
"Won't someone please think of the shareholders"... It seems like the obvious idea, it is exactly their strengths and their user base is old enough for those features to be of value.
The thing is that would mean making Facebook less valuable, causing the current shareholders to lose money. It's going to be hard to get someone to accept a business plan that will cost them money, even if the alternative is worse long term. Perhaps because you're betting that you can of load our shares before the whole thing goes belly up (whenever that may be).
I think your idea makes a lot of sense, it would be cheaper to run, there's less fancy features to develop, might be cheaper to run andless use for moderation. The thing I don't understand well enough is the ads: Can you charge more, because your users are older and buy different things, or do teens and younger people have more disposable income?
Zuck owns a majority of the shares and there may not be anyone to please besides him. Also, cutting 50% of the expensive tech jobs sounds profitable to me.
The issue is that Zuck is no Craig Newmark. Craig is a nice guy, a philanthropist, and generally a good figure to look up to become one day.
> The thing I don't understand well enough is the ads: Can you charge more, because your users are older and buy different things, or do teens and younger people have more disposable income?
The ads run at auction, FB doesn't explicitly charge a set price for the inventory. Facebook for years has been running with an inflationary inventory (first fb, then fb newsfeed+fb, then fb+nf+insta, then fb+nf+insta+ insta stories, etc). Meaning that they have more ad slots, and more impressions, and can create a lower (at least in short term) the price per ad, while increasing overall revenue. Remember, Facebook is really good at getting an ad to the right person, so Facebook ad inventory has been valuable. If Facebook stops adding new features, then the inventory becomes static, and the price per ad will rise (again, valuable), and price out their ad customers.
(I think the idea is terrible but more feasible than people give credit for).
FB is also the only popular platform where you can do actual "miniblogging" as in record and share your actual thoughts and experiences in a few-paragraphs textual format. But that’s pretty much the opposite of trendy right now.
Facebook is your online second life. It’s actually you.
With that, it doesn’t make as much sense to be the place to mindlessly scroll dance videos, or discuss politics with strangers.
It does, however, make for a great place to discuss local things, discuss hobbies, buy and sell things, message people, keep up with friends and family
I think there are plenty of cases! Groups, especially. There are lots of local community groups where your real identity is useful. Like “I need a dog walker, any recommendations” or “anyone a math tutor?” Or “looking to buy a car”.
FB's core strength today is the boomer market. Definitely something I did NOT see coming 10 years ago. The 60+ crowd practically lives in Facebook Groups now and they will buy basically anything that they see in an ad on FB. You can sell people who are 60+ basically anything on FB if you target them. The pandemic really solidified this, and now the conversion rates are higher than anything I have ever seen anywhere.
It's interesting to me because many older FB users barely know how to use the platform and they have invented their own tricks and conventions—my favorite of which is commenting "Following" because they don't know how to follow something, but know that if they leave a comment they will get notifications about responses. I see that every day and I always find it interesting. Every now and then someone calls them out on it and they just don't care. They have developed their own memes and are probably the only group that uses those Bitmoji-esque "What's on your mind" cards.
FB can lean into the boomer market and basically print money. FB is going to replace QVC. Hell, they should just buy QVC.
That would be the low risk strategy. Just run it as a cash cow value business and extract as much profit as possible until it dies.
However, Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to bet the company on AR/VR and is investing $10B into that area. If they get it wrong then he'll look like an idiot. If they get it right by building the next major platform for humans to communicate then he'll look like a visionary genius. We won't know which for at least 10 years.
People gave Google a ton of crap for buying YouTube for 1.6 billion (~16% of annual revenue at the time). That $10B FB spent is more like 8.5% of their revenue.
I’m skeptical of the metaverse, but I was also pretty skeptical of user-generated video. And given their current ad take, $10B is not a crazy bet.
Everyone wanted to watch and share video clips on their computer directly on the web without and without having to care about codecs, file formats, and hosting.
No one wants to have business meetings wearing VR headsets or give NFTs to virtual panhandlers or any of the other silly usecases for a modernized version of Lawnmower Man.
Maybe? I generally agree with you, but playing devils advocate:
What does the generation raised on Minecraft and Roboblox do when they grow up? They spent their adolescence in virtual worlds. Do they grow out of that? Or does it start to bleed into other parts of daily life?
VR still seems clunky as hell, but if the tech gets less obtrusive I can imagine a world where a sizable chunk of daily life is mediated through a headset.
Find a new form of escapism? A large driver of kids and teens seeking out escapism like this is that compulsory education is unsatisfying and they have very little self-determination generally. This isn't new to Minecraft and Robolox. A generation ago, it was watching way too much TV. What are those kids who watched 6 hours a night of TV doing now?
At one point no one wanted to have business meetings on Zoom, but the technology improved and the culture changed such that it's now ubiquitous. Metaverse technology is still really clunky today and used only by a few early adopters, but it's entirely possible that the experience will improve a lot in 10 years. Who knows?
Yeah, no. Zoom had a product that worked good enough (send out invite email and join a video conference) at the right time (global pandemic).
Step one of the metaverse is everyone invests in a VR headset. This is a complete non-starter. There is no counter-factual where this becomes a success.
I still can't believe this is the "A Game" of a public company worth $550bn. If this is the best they can come up with, whatever of "Meta" that is left in 10 years won't be worth 1/20 of that.
> Zoom had a product that worked good enough (send out invite email and join a video conference) at the right time
They also had a product that worked terribly at the wrong time [0].
> Step one of the metaverse is everyone invests in a VR headset. This is a complete non-starter.
Subsidizing it seemed to get a lot more people to buy it over the last few years. I 100% see a world where you don't buy a monitor, you buy a headset to use your computer. Monitors are big, ugly and fragile, and not portable. In 2-5 years when the screen tech is better and I can use a virtual monitor instead of a real one, I will 100% do that, and I think many will. Lots of younger people never buy traditional desktop or laptops.
Also, a lot of "meta verse" dialog came from not-meta, eg web3 NFT shit, so I wouldn't place too much into that being their vision. Part of a strategy for attention is certainly to get people excited, and attaching "meta verse" to random trend du jour seems like a solid way to get attention. There are crypto pumps related to the queens recent death, but that doesn't mean the queen would have wanted anything to do with crypto.
> I still can't believe this is the "A Game" of a public company worth $550bn.
TBF they started to back out of making this their only thing, and they still sell a crap ton of valuable ad space to lots of people. Its not like they abandoned their existing cash cow.
A significant factor to consider with that situation is that the recent widespread use of teleconferencing software wasn't organic.
Many people and organizations that started using it frequently during the last three years only did so because they were forced to, mainly due to absurd and unjustifiable government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions. Otherwise, the remaining adoption was mainly driven by paranoia, and only occasionally by convenience.
We've seen a tendency for such people and organizations to return to in-person interactions as soon as they can, which usually starts the moment that government stops interfering.
While the adoption may have been rapid and widespread, we also see the reverse happening as soon as it's possible to.
Isn't user-generated video mostly dead though? The vast majority of videos on Youtube, at least by viewership hours, seems to be produced by professional youtube creators. These range in scale from the "web content" branch of large media corporations to one person doing research, presenting and editing, but all are effectively just companies. There seem to be very few videos from regular people sharing something interesting. These videos can mostly be found on Facebook, Telegram, imgur gifs, Twitter, etc.
Knowing the beast firsthand, there's no trace of doubt in my mind that the convergence to a junk product outcome involved a monotonous increase in ad revenue and likely, engagement metrics.
There's a tragic dimension that a system which connected so much of humanity to itself so well would be rendered so toxic as a product and as a community in just a few years.
> There's a tragic dimension that a system which connected so much of humanity to itself
How would you say Facebook connected humanity differently from what MySpace was doing before Facebook ate their lunch with a more consistent UI?
I also am increasingly of the opinion that humanity is not wired to connect globally. Our local social networks give us a buffer against centralized bad actors. When everyone was connected directly to everyone else, what we used to call "chain letters" before social media took off won the information war because they could bypass fact checkers that would refuse to pass them to their network back when social networks were more separated.
I recall a 4chan post where the author pointed out how before the internet, if you were a person that wanted to have sex with toasters you'd never bring it up and live a better life for it, whereas now you go to Google and find a community with 1000+ members of people who have sex with toasters and inevitably ruin your life.
Hmm no I think that's not quite it. I think it's more likely that you would be a fan of toasters and then, via exposure to the toaster community and various group identity salience maneuvers, find yourself aligning with the sexual subniche; and then failing to recognize that you were just falling into a new social role and instead concluding you joined this group due to an independently and organically formed attraction to toasters.
I'm relatively certain this is how the porny subculture of the brony community occurred. I'd wager that it's largely responsible for the furry community as well.
The thing is, people are extremely malleable and subconsciously willing to change if they see an opportunity to join a warm and welcoming group. I don't think there is any malice or even intentional manipulation in it from any party. But it'd be nice if people could do the attribution analysis a bit better than the post truth "I have always been this way" kind of thing.
You probably got removed from the list because it cost someone a stamp to mail you the letter. These days if you respond to anything, that just puts you on the 'real person' list that gets distributed to all the spammers. Email and robocalls are essentially free so there is no incentive to take dead ends off the lists anymore.
> When everyone was connected directly to everyone else, what we used to call "chain letters" before social media took off won the information war because they could bypass fact checkers that would refuse to pass them to their network
But chain letters didn't spread any information and therefore couldn't participate in information wars.
A chain letter is just a letter that tells you to send it out to two or more new recipients.
> I also am increasingly of the opinion that humanity is not wired to connect globally
I view it as similar to the health hazards of widespread cheap calories – it’s not a new problem but we’ve cranked it up to 11 and put a large fraction people on the planet at risk, and approaches which tell people to exercise willpower are basically pointless.
I think the fixes have to be regulatory but seriously question the political will. Facebook was able to avoid any real consequences for their role supporting the Rohingya genocide and if that’s not enough, what will be?
I made the conscious effort before leaving Facebook to trade phone numbers, addresses and birthday dates from the people I wanted to really wanted stay in touch with, and put them in my phone. This was all within the last three years.
I’ve sent birthday gifts in the mail, and I’ve gotten gifts in mail from these very people.
Sometimes, when I wonder where the convenience that gets talked about in the context of Facebook and “staying in touch” ends and a more delicate form of “you’re probably not as close to some of the people on your friends list as you think” (which was absolutely the case for me) begins.
It took really minimal effort on my part to find other ways of staying in touch, but I think maybe the key is you have to WANT to stay in touch with people?
I'm doing this too and it has been great for me in general.
I looked at my fb friends and thought to myself which people I really liked and would like to reconnect with. I messaged "facebook friends" I have not talked to in a while and told them it may seem weird but I really would like to reconnect. I have never done anything like this, as I am extremely prone to losing touch with people.
I ended up reconnecting with a few people in real life and it has been great. I also plan on sending cards and stuff.
Same. I've been pretty happy with Clay (https://clay.earth). They just rolled out a Facebook birthdays integration and between that and Linkedin / iMessage it has most of the people I care about seeing.
Instagram and Facebook don't have the functionality that Facebook has, that's the problem.
Instagram is for photo sharing. Hell, it's not even for that... it's a dating app for women, that doesn't advertise itself as a dating app for women.
WhatsApp is just another telephone and messaging app, there's not much special about it as far as I can tell. It's ICQ on a smartphone and I guess, maybe, a better interface.
I was more connected back in the email / ICQ / Skype / forums age than I am in the so-called "social" media age.
in what respect is Instagram a dating app for women or anyone? Because it's a social media site primarily used by younger-ish people? by that metric any site that features young people is just an over-glorified dating platform. (not to say that this is a negative implication, dating websites are great to some extent)
Do you believe that young people are capable of using social media platforms for things other than base urges or is that something only middle aged people are able to accomplish?
This wasn't meant for you, but the other guy deleted his question, so here we go.
Instagram is a photo-sharing application at it's core.
So when you share photos, you're sharing your lifestyle. You're advertising. This is especially prevalent down here in Miami. So much so that people oftentimes at clubs don't exchange phone numbers; they exchange Instagrams. The women can see by your Instagram posts what kind of life you live and whether or not they're interested. You can see by their Instagram who and what they are. If you go to it and you're inundated with a ton of booty pics in string bikinis and a little string barely covering her titties, hanging on for dear life, you know she's advertising, "I am a hoe and I do hoe things." If you go to her Instagram and you see a lot of landscape photos, ancient monuments, etc., you know she's advertising, "I like to travel and have a genuine interest in culture."
If you go to a man's Instagram and he's got photos of himself stepping off a private jet, photos of him on a sailboat or a yacht smoking a cigar with a label that clearly reads Arturo Fuente Opus X and holding a glass of amber liquid with a bottle that says Louis XIII on it, photos of himself in a sharp suit leaned up against his Aston Martin DB11, he's advertising, "I am a successful, wealthy man who lives a life of luxury." If you go a man's Instagram and there's pictures of his woodshop, some photos of a new chest of drawers he crafted, a picture of him sitting by the lake with his trusty Labrador retriever lovingly sitting by his side, he's advertising, "I'm a down-to-Earth craftsman who enjoys the serenity of nature."
And then all these people go sliding into one another's DMs, as the cool kids say...
If you don't believe that, start listening to the podcast Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal. I've been listening since episode 29. They're on episode 131. They report on Internet ridiculousness and culture-at-large. A shocking amount of stories eventually have the phrase "slid into the DMs" in them.
It's clear to me that Instagram is being used as a dating platform as much as it is a storytelling or photo-sharing platform. And I don't think Meta should do anything about that at all. It's a dating platform on the down-low. I think that might be a good thing.
In addition to that, it's pretty common on other dating platforms to say something along the lines of "don't use this much, it's better to reach me on instagram".
Part of that is looking for new followers, part of that is using IG as the primary social portal for their lives.
I can see your argument, and it's certainly an interesting way of looking at it, but this just explains the "dating app" part of your assertion ("... it's a dating app for women,"). It's missing the explanation on why it's a "dating app for women".
Because even now in our so-called "sexually liberated" world, men make the overwhelming amount of approaches that indicate sexual interest. Put simply, "Men make the first move."
In a way, Instagram is the digital / technological pinnacle of the "Personals" ads from newspapers of yesteryear.
I wonder if Rupert Holmes will update "Escape" with the line, "There was this post that I saw... on my Instagram feed..."
I almost never log in to Facebook anymore, but the feed was hilariously bad the last time I checked it out. Almost entirely ads for random crap, eyecandy videos, exotic Asian street food videos, etc. Nothing even remotely related to my interests.
At least Facebook seems to have figured out that I'm not a Star Wars fan. For years, their algorithm somehow decided that I liked Star Wars and that I wanted my feed to be full of lame ass Star Wars memes. I haven't been even remotely interested in Star Wars since I was a boy, and as an adult I hardly even watch Star Trek or have an interest in any other sci-fi. Perhaps Disnay was paying Facebook to just blast their product at random people.
I suspect the even greater amount of suggested content in the FB feed is another symptom of the TikTokification of the internet. Facebook was already kind of doing this, but the feed becoming almost entirely suggested content definitely seems like a response to the fact that the 68th percentile of the public seems to have no problem scrolling through random eye-catching bullshit.
For years Facebook fed me interesting local pages and national news from (usually) reputable sources. About six months ago Facebook decided that what I really need to see is an endless stream of lingerie and female-focused sex toys; I've never clicked on these things, or lingered long over them, as far as I am aware.
Coincidentally, it was around six months ago that I disabled the browser from my phone; so perhaps they no longer have location information to lean on?
And, of course, I haven't seen a post from a friend or family member in recent memory.
It happened right as they started deprioritizing news, which included every legitimate media outlet that adults tend to read—including non-political publications.
Also my friends basically all stopped posting anything in 2020.
So what's left is nothing but dumb memes. Half are about dogs (okay, I do like dogs, but these are just stupid). The other half are Lord of the Rings, which I have never expressed interest in, but must be in a lookalike audience for people who do.
I actually really enjoyed the second movie of the new trilogy because it seemed to be a shockingly self-aware deconstruction of some of the Star Wars tropes and its place in culture in general. How it ever got greenlit by Disney of all entities is an enduring mystery.
The second one's the only one of the new trilogy worth saving from a fire. Though I also can't really recommend it to anyone because it doesn't stand very well on its own, and I sure wouldn't want to recommend either of the others to most people (IX has some "so bad it's good" qualities that make it fun for a certain kind of viewer, but I wouldn't say it's any kind of major hit even in that respect)
Man. That trilogy. Good actors, excellent in some cases, and they sure did try. But it wasn't enough.
> I actually really enjoyed the second movie of the new trilogy because it seemed to be a shockingly self-aware deconstruction of some of the Star Wars tropes and its place in culture in general.
Congratulations, you also figured out why it was so polarizing and why more than half the audience hated it... assuming you believe Rotten Tomatoes. It's Star Wars. People don't want a goddamned political deconstruction of all the objectively bullshit and overblown worries of the current culture. They want an escapist fantasy about another galaxy thousands of years ago.
> How it ever got greenlit by Disney of all entities is an enduring mystery.
Is it? Really? You legitimately can't figure out how that meeting went?
"Ohmigod, feeemale protagonist... so hot right now..."
"I know, right?? And she's a BOSS BITCH so she can use all the Force powers better than experienced Jedi from day one, hashtag grrlpwr!"
"Angsty Luke... fab idea, fam!"
There's not enough evidence on Planet Earth to make me believe they sat around in meetings thoroughly discussing what would be a logical story arc for the original cast, whilst simultaneously passing the baton over to a new generation to start exploring their own stories.
I understand exactly why fans hated it and the mediocrity of the corporate choices the Mouse made. What I'm saying is that there were elements (such as the green milk scenes) that made it appear like the director was speaking to us like an old man coming to terms with his childhood dreams and understanding the futility of escapism. I found it remarkable to find this in a mass-market, focus-group devised children's movie.
I suspect part of it is that Real People are posting less. Since the feed doesn't have a bottom anymore it makes up the difference with sponsored and suggested junk rather than going empty.
I was actually going to post vacation photos a few months ago, after my first real trip post Covid. But... it just felt really awkard to do so all of a sudden. My feed is just stuffed with shared content and other crap, it no longer felt like something I would be welcome doing.
Its been making me wonder if its time to sell my shares, which I have held since the IPO. It just feels like FB errr "Meta" is really losing its way, and this Metaverse stuff just seems like its going to be a furnace into which billions of dollars are going to be thrown into. My gut says its time, but I just can't quite pull the trigger yet.
I don't understand your hesitation to share your photos (or at least, not based on that criteria). "[wouldn't] be welcome"? By whom? Facebook? Or your friends? Would that imply they'd rather see ads and shared crap content than original content?
IMO Facebook needs an "original content only" setting. I block every single page that some idiot shares, but I'm not sure how much it helps. I will literally never want to see something shared from another page.
It seems like this would be a good thing for FB too. Keep engagement up, keep inserting ads. Hell, they could insert MORE ads if the content I saw from my friends had a greater signal:noise ratio.
Anyway, I recently shared some vacation pictures and quite enjoyed it. So much better than a bullshit "story" that lasts 24h and nobody can engage with except via DM. Such a weird impulse for an app. (okay, I get that they want you to use it constantly so you have FOMO about missing content that disappears after 24h, but I don't get why they don't want any real user engagement on the content).
Exactly this, it's gone from a something like a yahoo listserve with your friends to nextdoor with the whole world. And this repositioning happened completely behind the scenes seemingly as a side effect of pushing monetization too hard.
No I get it. Today it feels less like posting them on a microblog and more like hanging them in the middle of a mall and telling your friends they can look there. It also fits a little too close to the toxic "just the good parts" narrative of social media.
This was what led me to quit Facebook as well. I just got a real sketchy feeling sharing photos of my family knowing that other people would see them intermingled with all sorts of awful content.
This makes absolutely no sense, and is totally your own mental trip. Your friends (at least some of them) want to see stuff from their friends. Now, Facebook might not show your photos in their feeds, but most people would rather have that than more ads.
My FB feed no longer feels like walking down a hall with my friends in it, it feels a lot more like walking through a mall with advertisements constantly in my face and strangers screaming from every store front with their "content." It just feels like a very different place than even a few years ago- and showing your vacation photos in the mall is the wrong place to do it (I know the analogy isn't perfect, but its the best I can do to reflect on why it felt weird to me).
They are pretty much at the tipping point where the signal to noise ratio has gotten so low that it seems futile to add more signal. There is also a component to it as well where is it really worth it to give FB even more data about my life?- what am I even getting in return for it these days? And even more recently, I woke up one morning recently and the feed felt really stale, I was seeing posts from the previous day. I tried to look at just my friends, and then sort by most recent, and you could see that just the number of people actually posting what they are up to is just way down.
Instagram is better for this these days, but its headed in the same direction it seems.
I think it makes a great deal of sense. The concern (I assume) is that his posts will be surrounded by all the nonsense that FB is filling people's feeds with.
The context in which you share stuff is incredibly important. If the platform will bookend your posts with crap, it reduces the value of your own post.
I’m not so sure about that. My mom posts on Facebook and gets a few likes with pictures of Jesus with text in them, and my wife posts every day with political hot takes, literally just text posts and gets hundreds of likes on virtually every post she makes with tons of comments and engagement.
My high school peers post pictures of their kids all the time. I like their pictures and they like mine. My grandparents all like my posts too, except grandpa who told me not to curse on Facebook so I blocked her. I’ll curse on Facebook if I want, damn it!
Edit: You know, I haven’t even posted this but just to verify I went to Facebook and… 90% was suggested pages and barely any of my friends posts. I swear it wasn’t like this yesterday. Did someone push an algorithm change and screw everything up in prod for Facebook?
People post liberally to private Groups you're a member of, and you don't need to be their friends. Group posts should be the majority of your newsfeed.
By comparison, Instagram - the other part of Facebook - still puts a "no new posts" item in the feed, so there's a clear indicator that you can put Instagram away and you won't miss out on anything.
However, Facebook has been slowly chipping away at it, by putting suggested posts afterwards (instead of accounts you actually follow) so if you're not paying attention, you'll still get ads / engagement. I expect the "no new posts" indicator will be made smaller and smaller, and eventually disappear.
Funny, I see the opposite on Instagram - it's loaded with "suggested posts" based on things you liked, other accounts you follow, or apparently just things that you stopped scrolling for a second or two on, which I guess it detects. It even switches you to an endless list of suggested posts to scroll through once you have seen all of the posts from people you actually follow since the last time you opened the app - you have to click to an alternate screen/feed if you want to see an "old" post again.
That's a really important consideration. I post virtually nothing and neither do the majority of my old friends from school. Maybe it is due to being older and generally less interesting, but I suspect it is also because my friends who are inclined to post prolifically have moved on to Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter.
Nah. People are posting, and then it doesn't show up in their friends' feeds, sometimes not for days. You can see this easily if you talk to people IRL. "I posted those photos two days ago, didn't you see?" and then the photos show up in your feed a few days later. Or never.
Only 3-5 people I knew posted on Facebook, and it still hid those posts from me. If I can't see my own mother's content, that website is worthless to me.
So ~3B people are now willingly going to Facebook to be served ads and (probably) bot farms that just repost/share junk articles (some of which are or will be computer generated). Can't wait for the metaverse /s
I gave up visiting Facebook a long time ago, so can't speak to whatever current algorithm, but even a few years ago, my feed was already flooded with outside content while only presenting a small fraction of my friends' content.
If I wanted to see most of the friend-content I had "subscribed" to, I had to do a manual tour of their profiles.
I'm sure people do post even less now, but I'm skeptical that's the root cause of what's being reported. The explicit bias towards political/commercial/promoted/engagementbait content over "subscribed" content has been there for years.
Yup, it's in a death spiral. As each feed gets less real content, that person disengaged and posts less. So their friends' feeds get less real content.
I still log into Facebook pretty often, but most of my posts are no longer actually shared with friends, so I hardly ever make them anymore. What's the point of posting something almost no one will see?
I don't know. There's plenty of posts from my friends. I just don't see them because I'm not willing to wade through all of the junk ads and sponsored stuff.
When they changed things to make it so businesses had to pay for "sponsored posts" to get their followers to see them, you could see the writing on the wall.
If normal people's posts get seen by their friends and followers, what would a business be paying for? And so it starts a loop that ends in nothing but AI generated content for doomscrollers.
I'm a relatively old person that still has lots of friends that use FB (and not instagram or tiktok) and 100% of my feed (except for ads) was stuff from my friends.
Use this URL[1] to open it in a browser with adblock. It gives your feed in reverse chronological order, with a 90%+ ratio of friends posts. (Just verified)
[Update] If you click anything it takes you away from that feed... that's why I have it in my Bookmarks toolbar. If I find myself going "wait.. this feels different"... I look up and see the URL is now the generic one, and I've fallen off the path.
Also: I have 141 friends... not sure if that's a high or low number relative to others.. but there's always someone posting. I just read until I've seen it before, twice. (Some people repost other people's stuff)
This has been broken for me for the better part of the last 5 years. It would show me posts from several days prior, when I had just seen that there were posts from a few hours prior. It's almost as if FB didn't care to fix the chronological feed, since they wanted you to use The Algorithm instead...
I've been using and recommending this for years. They've broken it twice that I can recall, but both times only briefly. It's the only thing that makes the site tolerable for me. I don't know why other people are reporting that it doesn't work for them. Usually the explanation for such differences would be that they're on the other side of a gatekeeper setting (gatekeeper being the system that FB uses for gradual rollouts) but that doesn't seem likely in this case. Maybe some sort of caching artifact, or something broken about their configs, or HNers just lying because they have an axe to grind, but it does still work at least for some of us.
With h_chr + SocialFixer + uBlock Origin (but, note, FB have been messing with their HTML in ways that currently break SocialFixer's sponsored-post detection filters, so this is a bit worse than usual) the top 50 items in my feed are:
34 posts from friends, 9 of which are vapid feel-good glurge (I have a couple of friends who post, or rather share, a lot of this)
1 birthday message from one friend to another
5 posts in groups I belong to
10 sponsored posts, of which 8 are completely 100% uninteresting to me and two are only 90% uninteresting (e.g., one of them is an ad for a play I might conceivably be interested in seeing, if I lived anywhere near the place it's running).
The SNR is definitely worse than "90%+ friends" but also much better than "98% suggested pages and barely any friends".
(I am using "friends" in the Facebook sense, but I am fairly discriminating about this and all my Facebook "friends" are people I have actually met in the physical world and would enjoy spending some time with.)
I absolutely hate the unwanted recommendations and Reels, but I currently still find FB useful for staying in contact with extended family and friends, so I use this "Facebook Hide Recommendations and Reels" browser extension to keep FB useable:
Even with recommendations and Reels disabled, other aspects of FB have also degraded significantly:
- Friends don't share original content there as much as they used to, a sign that FB's relevance is dwindling. I suspect people have also grown wary of Facebook's privacy practices like I have.
- FB's features lack taste. For example, its knock-off of Bitmoji looks terrible.
- Increasing prevalence of scammers. I tried to sell some things on FB Marketplace last week and was contacted by a dozen fake profiles trying to scam me with fake emails from Zelle. I also frequently get friend requests from profiles where scammers created a duplicate of a friend's profile, copying their exact name and pictures.
Taken together, my feeling is that facebook.com is (and has been) on a downward spiral toward irrelevance.
> I suspect people have also grown wary of Facebook's privacy practices like I have
I do not think this really tracks for the average user. Most people use social media because they a) want to be seen or b) want content tailored to their interest.
Ironically, FB now offers neither. So even my wife, who will gladly give out her info for any sweepstakes she can doesn't really find anything particularly interesting anymore.
I've given up on FB as a social network a long time ago. I unfollowed all my friends and started following things that interest me. Followed the astronomical society so I can be informed when they have a public night. I get ads for everything I need for renovating my house: roof sealing services, AC repair, contractors, new windows, cabinets, countertops, tiles, custom woodworkers, and more! The comments teach you a thing or two too.
The other great things on FB are events, the marketplace, and groups. So much useful information out there if you tailor the platform to your needs.
The point of FB is to make profit for shareholders. The platform can evolve into something new and profitable. There's no need to salvage the old. That's why the poor guy is driving his VR vision so hard!
I actually concur with this. I largely abandoned the platform, but one thing that I actually got from it lately turned out to be... a fantastic local mechanic.
I went to a fan group for my car in my country and asked for a recommendation for someone in my city. Someone gave me a tip on a guy within 20 minutes.
This of course is something I would have found in a searchable public forum back in the day, but I think more people use the platform in this way than we think.
Facebook is a fantastic product, as long as you use it properly and not remotely as Facebook wants you to.
- Most important step: Unfollow every single person and page
- Follow entertaining groups like 'This cat is c h o n k y'
- Keep facebook messenger
- Use FB events for party planning
That's it, and it's easy: you get all the social graph functionality, all the event planning and chat stuff. The feed (if you even visit it, personally I might spend five minutes a week there) is fun and doesn't make you feel disappointed with your elderly family members.
I unfollowed all my friends years ago. If I want to see them, I peek into events we have in common, groups or I go to their feed directly.
My feed is mostly content from pages I enjoy along groups and communities that cover topics which interest me. I have a handful of friends who post about technology or hobbies that are not blocked from my feed.
I have an older account that has a lot of friends in common with my main one but without the blocks. I find its feed to be very painful to use. Photos of people's food, people's pets, people sharing "inspirational" quotes on stock photos, a lot of selfies and people's children. It takes forever to find information about topics I actually enjoy reading about.
I would unfriend those people if it did not come with the social problem of them coming back disappointed asking why I am no longer friend with them. As if social network contacts were actually friends and as if unfriending someone on a social network meant you are no longer friend with them. I also enjoy being able to check up on them every now and them, which I could not do if I were not connected with them due the their privacy settings.
The thing about "X is a fantastic tool as long as you use it in a way the developers never intended", is that sooner or later, some interaction you rely on will break because the devs either don't care about or actively want to remove your use-case. Which is a problem if you've invested a lot into it at that point.
This is one of the major reasons why I try to limit my use of websites for anything important and prefer to use normal, local applications that don't rely heavily on someone else's servers. It's a lot harder for other people to stop you from using the applications and also helps prevent things from changing/breaking all the sudden.
I'm willing to roll the dice for a while. Chat and events planning are pretty basic features, if Facebook screw those up then it probably means that someone else has come along and does them better.
If I'm interacting with my friends on facebook, it means I'm spending irreplaceable moments of my life looking at a screen and not spending it with them in the real world.
Even worse, I'm helping Facebook make money that they'll use to further harm society. It's a lose-lose.
I don't know if I discovered this plan independently or if some like-minded person shared this strategy years ago and I copied it from them, but it 100% works. I miss the page "Memes so deep and dank they make you commit suicide". It was 100% the name that got it banned: the content was pretty much all reposts from /r/ComedyBuddhism (a.k.a. non-humor or, occasionally, anti-humor).
The stickiest feature for me is Facebook groups. I go to Facebook to see what the people who share my interests are up to, where the next group bike ride is, etc. The recommended content (read: auto-playing reels) just distracts from that and literally any other content / media I'd rather be consuming. I'm really bummed that the platform is trending towards being a Tik-tok clone.
I remember at some point there were a bunch of Facebook ads about how it was a great platform for groups. What happened to that focus?
Didn't things like that become a problem once they switched the feed to not be chronological? LinkedIn has this problem. Top posts: Some meet up from two weeks ago that I am interested in... but it was two weeks ago, so, MEH.
Yeah, I was bored and spend too much time on LinkedIn. Now all they can show me is events and promotions from three weeks ago. Not sure I should interact with that content anymore.
This is just an extreme form of my problem with both Facebook and Linkedin, both of which have become utterly unusable over the last year.
Linkedin is particularly aggressive with the "someone you know liked a comment by someone you don't know on a post by someone else you don't know, from three months ago about an even that has alredy happened...". Utterly irrelevant crap that it is convinced will get me to come back.
I actually like the basic idea of social media, I want to know what my friends and family have been up to, or the people I'm professionally connected with, it's a nice way to stay connected to people you might not get to see regularly.
The SM companies have all managed to utterly ruin their own products to the point where I don't/won't/can't use them.
I would love it if someone could make a site that helped me stay in contact with my wider social circle without trashing it in the deperate pursuit of ad dollars. Sadly I can't see something like that happening and not then being ruined.
Youtube is also turning into garbage. First 10 or so results are relevant vids, then it becomes a mishmash of "people also watched", "for you", shorts, and similar suggested vids.
EDIT: As for FB. The other day I watched three Studio Ghibli movies on Netflix. The last time I watched anything anime related, was Akira some 30 years ago.
Now the feed is being bombarded with anime and manga meme content. I click "hide all" from these random pages, but they just keep popping up.
Youtube is a traiwreck anymore. Thankfully when this came up here a few weeks ago a users pointed out that the subscriptions tab is there to just show you what you're subscribed to.
Another anecdotal data point: I loved Facebook around 2010-2015.
I was in university, had lots of "friends" that I had met in person, was a user of the groups, events, everything. It was great to stay in touch with old and new people I knew.
As people finished university, they had less time for FB, posted less and so FB probably decided to fill up the blanks they had left with "XY liked this", ads, and "you could like this" posts.
As all our lives moved on, FB became worse and worse because we didn't feed it with our own content anymore.
At some point I just deleted it and didn't really look back.
Now I see the same thing happening with Instagram, where I see less and less content of old friends and more and more reels and "engaging" content.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I'd just love to see how my former classmates are doing with their children and families and jobs etc.
This is an interesting explanation of things. So it's not just that Facebook was better in 20XX-20YY, it's the stage of life a person was in. I started college in the fall of 2004 (in Boston back when "TheFacebook" was limited to college students there and at a handful other prestigious schools across the country). It was indeed great fun in those days. By 2010, just a couple years out of college, I already thought that Facebook had turned to garbage, so it's interesting to hear that you had a good experience starting in 2010. Your theory makes sense.
Now that I'm a parent in my mid-30s, Facebook is just a utility for getting information from local officials (who've all but abandoned their legitimate public-facing websites) and buying / selling through Marketplace. It has nothing to do with fun.
I started using TheFacebook in 2005 (A Mark Zuckerberg Production. Too Close for Missiles, Switching to Guns).
It had expanded beyond the prestigious colleges, but each college still had to be "on boarded" individually. I was on the first day TheFacebook was available at my mountain-west university, although all my friends were still on MySpace at the time. As much as I can't stand Facebook (or Meta) these days (the products, the company, the impact on society), I do look back on 2005-206 Facebook with great fondness. It waned on me as we entered the 2010's... But back then, tt was novel, new, fun, quirky but polished (unlike MySpace). It was a great way to easily share photos and tag people - and I was at that stage in life where that sort of thing was also really fun. It was a magical time.
I have a similar experience, but when it comes to:
people posting less --> "XY liked this", ads, and "you could like this" posts
I'm pretty sure the cause and effect is reversed. Facebook decided to prioritize BS over friend content on the feed, and suddenly it became lame because nobody was interacting. A bit chicken-and-egg / feedback cycle I suppose, but I really think FB started it by adding "sponsored content" and even likes (remember when you had to actually type out a response if you wanted to reply?).
In my experience, what happened is that young people eventually stopped posting personal updates (this was a multi-year process), either because the novelty of it declined or because they entered a life phase change (e.g. leaving college) that made social updates less frequent or less shareable.
In my friend group, this happened around 2018, about a year after we left college and entered the working world. I'd guess something similar happened with many cohorts.
For most people I know, they stopped posting when the feed started being filled with suggested crap. We didn't want to post on a feed we hated and where our friends would likely miss it anyway amongst all the garbage.
LinkedIn (or is it LInkedIn?) still serves one purpose: you can sign up for a free month of lInkedLn premium and drop a priority one chat message in someone's inbox. Much better than getting lost in someone's spam folder.
Mind you, communities/groups, obviously imitating subreddits, as well as the marketplace are saving it quite well from ending up like MySpace/Hi5. It's also evident that there has been a significant boomer infestation to the userbase the past 10 years.
The communities/groups are significantly higher quality than the average subreddit, especially for niche subjects.
Frankly they're the only thing I use Facebook for, because the people on hobby groups are way more knowledgeable than those on reddit and they largely don't tolerate meme posts.
yeah, 90% of what I use it for is my internal group from my work friends about who's taking what shift on my side job, and Volkswagen repair groups - which are an absolute gold mine of experience and info.
"death" in this case will likely be quite slow, they're still a 100+ billion dollar company and are still the largest social network by quite a large number (hundreds of millions)
There might be some other people out there like me with school age kids. I find that my kids schools and the various PAC (parents advisory committee) groups all use Facebook to communicate. So I have to be on there if want info and to be connected with other parents. I hate Facebook but for this purpose it is actually quite useful. Similarly, I am in a neighbourhood group and there is a certain amount of nimby/busybody type posts but it can also be great for knowing what is going on in the neighbourhood. The main page feed is all junk posts/ads but if I stick to these group pages it's useful.
Facebook is a machine learning system in which there s only positive reinforcement. Reality is the opposite, people learn by their mistakes mostly. Biological netwokrs with continuous positive reinforcement end up epileptic. So does facebook
I think, what happened in my case, is that I have challenged a lot of conspiracy claims in the past, hence engaging with said content, and that is probably why it gets promoted in my newsfeed.
It still infuriates me though, because it is extremely easy for fact-checkers to label this stuff.
I got zero tolerance, so even if someone is just posting a meme, but I know what they actually refer to with the meme, then that meme has to be fact-checked based on the whole context; fact-checkers are probably constrained from doing that, but they really should, because it is just as provocative and damaging, if not more.
I hate when I see memes in my newsfeed that are based on basically false assumptions. Usually such memes are obviously very conspiratorial at the same time, and potentially extremely harmful.
I’ve witnessed the same. In addition, I’ve recently seen Facebook recommend posts that were outright racist and anti-Semitic. I tried reporting them to Facebook, but they weren’t removed since they didn’t call for violence.
One would think that a company that’s been under heavy scrutiny regarding its role in the growing political polarization of America with its negative social effects would make a better effort with its News Feed. It’s one thing to have a lenient policy regarding what people can post, but it’s another thing when I’m being recommended posts that encourage hatred and wild conspiracy theories that flirt with sedition.
> but it’s another thing when I’m being recommended posts that encourage hatred and wild conspiracy theories that flirt with sedition.
What you're describing is literally one of the two mainstream political viewpoints of 2022. Imagine the backlash if those viewpoints get banned on Facebook.
We do not necessarily need to ban them; fact checking and labeling is actually better and more transparent and effective in the long run. We do not want Russia- or China level censorship, even if justified, because it probably will be abused politically in the future, as is happening in both Russia and China. Indeed, the chance of abuse of such systems increases over time, because there are more political and public opinion shifts over time than there is in the short term.
It is probably not going to pay off in the short term, but over several years it will have an effect, and people's trust will grow in fact-checking decisions, and not least because they actually document why they reached the given conclusions.
It is a very slow and tedious process, so we all need to be patient. I hope politicians and SoMe leaders decide that the result of patience is worth more than short-term gains.
I first created a FB account in 2008. I amassed a huge number of so-called "friends", I posted a lot, I was active, and it was detrimental to my mental health, so I destroyed that account.
I crept back on last year or so with a blank slate. My "friends" list now consists of an eclectic mix of 100% people I will never meet in person. It's small and selective, so my actual feed is likewise small and runs out quickly. As a consequence, it's not possible for me to waste much time there. I like it that way.
I post very little and don't get too personal or dramatic. I had a good series of photos and blurbs about my home cooking projects for awhile, but it's always been sporadic output from here.
Facebook has a declining user count and a market cap which assumes growth. (Although the stock is down 60% from peak.) So, they've tried to increase revenue per user by adding more ads and promotional content. User count declined further.
This is sometimes called "pulling a Myspace".
Facebook/Meta is now on metaverse failure #3 (Oculus, Facebook Spaces, Horizon), has lost $10 billion in that space, and investors are not happy. They're not getting out that way. Facebook remains a viable business for now, but not a growth business.
Facebook is still making massive amounts of money, and is still hugely popular. It remains my go-to social network in spite of my complaints with conspiracy theories spreading, and I do not think Twitter, TikTok and others, are even remotely competing with Facebook yet.
What happened though is that some younger users lean towards smaller dedicated apps, but these apps are typically less solid, less profitable, and has worse leadership behind them.
Apple also abused their near-monopoly by releasing a privacy update that was very harmful to their competitors, essentially it was an anti-competitive move. As a shareholder in both companies (mostly in Apple), I wish Apple would be held accountable for their hostility and anti-competitive practices against Facebook and other companies. Their arguments against ads holds no water.
What we will probably see, however, is that Apple is not held accountable for their overnight changes to iOS, and Facebook will find other technologies and/or streams of revenue to make up for the overall hostile ad-based environment.
Ad-free Facebook would be cool, but i doubt we will see it happen anytime soon.
Myspace and Facebook can not be compared even remotely – myspace was and still is a hot burning mess in more aspects than I have count of. I am not even sure you can define myspace as a social network, because it is so unconventional and boring in that sense, but each to their own.
My feeling/understanding: Because of the culture wars and privacy concerns, many regular people who used to be quite active on FB stopped posting things altogether on Facebook. The risk outweighed the benefit. So most people were left with a handful of people in their network who would crank out generally quite uninteresting posts.
This combined with FB's agenda to monetize the service... here we are.
I now only use FB to check in to a few very local groups (population of 7k) once in a while. The signal-to-noise ratio is really bad, even there.
It's called signal-to-noise ratio and it affects everything these days. We stopped reading newspapers and magazines when it became harder to find articles in-between all the ads. We stop watching broadcast TV when a typical 30 minute show has 18 minutes of commercials. We stop visiting websites when pop-up and flashing ads overwhelm the site.
Social media sites are no different. The question is will they wake up before all their users flee.
I didn't stop reading newspapers because of ads. I stopped reading newspapers because a handful of large companies bought them all and turned them into crap.
Sort of not related at all, but I decided to try FB marketplace for selling a couple of extra laptops. And oh-my-gawd, it's even worse than Craigslist. In first 24 hours this pattern with semi obvious fake accounts trying to buy the laptop has repeated already 3 times (and come on FB, I refuse to believe you cannot detect this crap if you actually wanted to, and at minimum WARN the seller that you're likely dealing with oredatory buyer):
Me: <lists the laptop at marketplace; pick up only>
Daryl: Is this still available?
Me: It's still available
Daryl: okay good. did you have an idea if what the shipment cost to Scotland?? I want to get it for my Scottish girlfriend. I'm currently in Scotland
Me: No dice. If you want it, come pick it up from Santana Row. I'll sell for cash only.
I don't know what's the actual scam here, but all these guys ask (in Spanish too btw) Is it available? If yes, they have some excuse for wanting it NOW, but not being able to pick it up, and then ask me to use a courier etc. Suckers!
What I'm wondering is why an alternative social network has not gained more wide spread adoption, at least in the nerd community(looking at you, HN reader).
It seems to me social media is ripe for disruption.
> It seems to me social media is ripe for disruption.
I think what we see is that every social media site goes down pretty much the same way at some point.
FB was great until they started that whole recommended post stuff which fucked up the feed.
Instagram was great until they were bought by Facebook and had to get some metrics straight, too.
TikTok will be the next one to go down as influencers and other parasitic users tear it down, flood it with low quality content etc.
There will be something after TikTok. And TikTok will copy their features and FB will (try to) buy them and ruin them that way, too. It all goes down eventually.
I agree! But what I've learnt from being on HN for a fairly long time is that online communities can be built to last. Maybe not forever, but for a long time. I think _community_ is the important part, as soon as the site builder tries to cater to everyone it eventually just becomes another ad platform.
I think we might have had something like that community when we were all hanging around in bulletin boards something like... 15 to 20 years ago.
I remember that I had a very dark time and some moderator (I was one, too) managed to find out my phone number (I think he dailed every number with my family name in our town till he found mine) and called me, after I had posted in a moderator-only group that I would take some time off and wasn't sure about returning because everything was shit.
That really touched me, although we had and have never met. It was human and very unexpected and I don't think you'd find something like that in modern day communities, build on Facebook.
Also: FB Groups probably killed bulletin boards because it was just very easy. What a loss.
The way I use FB these days is to logon at most once per week or every other week. It gives your friends/groups some time to post. Most people aren't posting on a regular basis and oftentimes the ones who are you don't need to read 90% of their posts.
I have issues seeing older FB comments. The UI doesn't work properly on my safari browser. Fb freezes, images fail to load. It is an extremely frustrating experience on safari on my phone.
The platform is dying and it cannot come soon enough.
I really miss having a way to talk to my friends online.
It was possible in the early 2000s with multi-network instant messaging clients, and then in the late 2000s to a few years ago with Facebook.
And then Facebook destroyed itself (as described in this thread) and now I honestly can't find a frictionless way to get in touch with people.
My most common use case was posting "hey I'm going climbing / surfing / caving, anyone want to join"? or "I'm in town X, anyone want to hang out" or "BBQ at mine." Facebook is useless for that now and there isn't a replacement. Hopefully, something with critical mass will rise from the ashes.
But there are a ton of replacements for the use case you describe. Telegram and the like (even WhatsApp), or just plain old email are useful for what you're describing.
What products are poised to pick up if and when FB nosedives?
Craigslist is a clear fallback for marketplace (although there was evidently a reason people started using markplace in favor of craigslist).
Nextdoor/Reddit are just as much cesspools as FB groups...is there room for an oldster friendly groups replacement that somehow solves the cesspool problem? At least in my area these fill the void of not having local news - but instead it's a local bitchy gossip stream.
Social feed is the big one. Obviously insta for photos, if they don't screw it up. Do whatsapp/telegram/signal fill the void otherwise?
I'm going to buck the trend here and say that I'm actually using Facebook more than in the past. I am member of a few groups, which are quite niche, but genuinely interest me. I always browse by Most Recent and by checking every day I know I don't have to browse past posts which are more than a day old. FB does a decent job of notifying me when my friends post, so I can see all of those via notifications.
While I do get ads and suggested pages, these don't seem intrusive with the above approach. Maybe its just me?!?!
This period is best understood as a brutal hangover from several years of market subsidized growth. We had cheap Ubers, cheap meal delivery, and free web services all paid for by a speculative bubble which is in the process of popping.
Meta can't just admit that they don't have a viable business model or their stocks will truly crash, so they have no choice but to cannibalize their remaining customers, like how phone and cable companies screw the remaining people with landline phone service and traditional cable packages.
Same. This also stems from the fact that no one I know (outside of my Boomer parents) even uses Facebook anymore, so Facebook has next to no "real" data to use like they used to. I've even started noticing this on Instagram, as well. Back in the prime of Facebook there was so much content to use from friends they could fill a feed and even "curate" it, but now I think majority of my friends post AT MOST 1 time a YEAR on Facebook. With the lack of data, they have to just fill it with nonsense to make it look "interesting", but my guess is that it fools very little people.
Very true. There was a segment where the news asked a bunch of kids (like actual kids - not 25 year olds people just want to shit talk about) and hilariously this one little boy just yells "FACEBOOK?!?! THATS FOR OLD PEOPLE!!!"
Facebook has lots of good corners of their products. Marketplace is ok-ish. Events is OK. Even Messenger is an ok sub-app of Facebook.
The one app that’s unusably bad is the “feed” (or whatever it’s called these days). I use Facebook almost daily but can’t understand why anyone would use the feed bit. Even back when it was friends’ posts it was bad. Now that it’s half commercial half TikTok rabbit hole why does anyone even use it?
Market place, through messenger has significant fraud for sim/phone hijacking. Things Facebook's controls are supposed to achieve that Craigslist suffered from
What's that fraud? To me all it does is let me send a FB messenger to someone on my block who's selling some used gadget, and I walk over there and buy it. How does fraud or phone numbers even enter into it?
Pretty much same here, and that's why I don't log on as my much anymore. Most of my active social network is primarily on Instagram. However there is an aspect of growing out of social networks, especially when you have kids.
The more surprising thing is that Facebook still has a lot of current information on me with out me ever logging on with off_facebook_activity. And of course there were a few HN posts on it.
I noticed I saw way less information about shows in my area, the only thing I used facebook for. I missed nearly two months of shows at my local venues due to relying on facebook before I realized something had changed. Maybe they increased how much you had to pay to advertise or increase reach? No idea!
Looks like I'll be writing my own scraper, fun times are here.
Facebook does make changes from time to time which makes it a bit of a cat and mouse game to keep these things working and that can easily get tiresome for people. Also some people might find the initial time investment to create these things to be too much.
There is another post in this thread where someone mentioned that for many people (but apparently not all???) including myself, browsing to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr tends to show your friends' posts in chronological order like many of us prefer. There are also several people who mention that using ad blockers like uBlock Origin do seem to be fairly effective at blocking most ads and other unwanted suggestions in Facebook and it does seem to work for me.
Everyone knows FB is dying (including FB). Doesn't mean a dying product can't make money. They'll squeeze it until it bleeds, then do the same with Instagram while they figure out the next big thing.
It's a very similar business as malls and amusement parks, you can't just keep doing the same stuff cause people's taste change.
Not really related, but the last time I was on Facebook, its ads were so wrong I actually tried to improve it. It targeted me for endless hip hop ads. I don't like hip hop; nothing I've ever liked on FB had anything to do with hip hop. So, I told it I don't like these ads. Instead of trying to show me things that I might actually be even mildly interested in, it fed ever more hip hop ads to me. It was so aggravating, that I just closed FB out and I don't think I've ever logged in again.
If you use FB on a computer instead of a phone, the FB Purity browser extension will let you block whatever you like. I haven't seen an ad or suggested post in years. I came here because today FB started putting posts from the groups I belong to in my feed, even though I had notifications off for all of them. So I was able to filter them back out by blocking posts containing the full name of each group (you can block by any string), so my feed is back to only posts from my friends.
Deleted Facebook years ago and turns out if you have actual friends who you care about, you'll just send each other life/status updates via direct messages (whatsapp, sadly also owned by Meta).
I noticed this as well and as a result I use Facebook a whole lot less. one big problem that I've encountered is that it's suggesting borderline NSFW content from the plague of OnlyFans "creators" that have flooded onto literally every social media platform out there.
I've tried the "suggest less" and liking literally everything else I can but I continue to get a flood of borderline content. You click "Like" on one reel by accident and IG thinks that's all you want to see.
I did this on purpose. I muted almost every actual person from my feed and all that remained were a handful of pages I chose to follow. Mostly tv/media related pages and retro video game groups, plus some local groups. Now, instead of looking at the random crap people I barely know decide to post, including their ample complaints about anything and everything, I mostly just see relevant content I'm actually happy to see! This change got me checking FB again regularly for the first time in years.
Yeah, but the original FB did not even have a "feed". Hence these complaints are about an uncontrollable "feature" (a so-called "feed") that no one asked for.
The idea that someone starts using some software or website because it looks useful (original FB had no advertising) and then later the software or website unilaterally decides to morph into something else (FB did this very early on with the addition of a "feed") reminds me of the phrase "bait and switch".
Yeah I'm seeing this happen on Instagram also, which I used to actually use but every 3rd post is an ad followed by a sponsored post and some account I don't follow.
I'm seeing a few posts here that basically they have to do this because it's an ad service, it's for shareholders, etc. When are we going to blame Zuck and his unique brand of dishonesty and lying to everyone? They've misled their own investors and advertisers, at what point do we stop saying "with anyone else at the helm it would be the same" and recognize his character issues?
I pitched to an engineer that worked on Facebook newsfeed ranking that they make a setting to let me hide all reposts because my feed was entirely political links and meme images. He didn’t buy that life updates from friends was what I wanted to see, very adamant that if I used the “I don’t like this” button, eventually it would find content I liked.
Agree, FB is trashing the place. But will say that, currently, putting feed in chronological order (https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr) reduces the number of suggesteds considerably; usually there is some (non-obvious) way to organize the feed in one of the menus too.
I just spent 20 mins hiding all the Ad, Sponsored and Sugges content and now my feed is clean upon refresh. I do that from time to time and it stays fine for a bit but that type of content starts creeping up again. Lately it has been insane though, for example this morning after seeing this post my feed was everything but content I follow.
I expect they algorithmically tailor this sort of thing so when they detect a spike in "hide" activity they temporarily scale it back so you think it had an effect, making you more likely to methodically spend 20 minutes poring over all their Ad, Sponsored, and Suggested content again in the future.
I wish FB had a way for me to disable posts from companies, pages, "shared" content etc.. I only want to see photos and status updates from friends. That is all. I don't want memes or reels. It's sad that in the first 10 items on my FB Home, only 1 is from a friend and its just a shared meme.
I never use FB but checked it just now and the mix seems fine. Out of the first 10 panels on my page 7 were friends or pages I follow. Remaining were 2 ads and one suggested post. I'm guessing it's worse if you use FB frequently and have seen all of your friends recent content already.
FBPurity is a web browser plugin that will hide whatever you don't want to see in your FB feed. If a sponsored post shows up you can click the 3 dots menu to flag it.
I have it set to not show Likes or Comments my friends make on other people's posts or shares. All I see is what my friends post.
I go on Facebook once a week and browse the 'bell'. My family and friends' posts are generally there. Facebook seems to only show the joke feeds and such when I browse 'home'. So if I really want to be focused I begin and end with the bell.
Same for me. I checked in a few times this year, and it's utterly unusable. If I want to argue about clickbait on the internet, Facebook is the last place I want to do that.
But I'm sure some PM's really proud of the engagement metrics they've generated.
My extended family has been the major reason I've held onto my facebook account. Nieces, nephews, cousins. Baby & puppy pics. Weddings, funerals, milestones, well wishes.
Apple's Messages now largely serves that role.
Feature Req: Make Messages savvy about Contact groups.
FB is dinosaur, it's where yahoo was 15 years ago. Taking into account how horrible the product is, and all the studies that show how unhappy and polarized it makes you, it's surprising to me people are not leaving in mass at this point.
For FB's entire existence the economy has only gone up. Now we're going to see if social media as a business can survive a crash. The 2008 mortgage crisis killed MySpace, so I'm not optimistic. At least they have VR.
There are many browser add-ons that completely removes feed from FB. Since I use FB exclusively for adding links to my personal portfolio, thise plugins are handy and keep me away from distraction everytime I need to share anything.
I recall discussions of this problem years ago. I did a measure of what percentage of my feed was actual content with friends and it was roughly the same as this current measure. I'll have to go through my comments and find it.
I’ve found the same thing but for Instagram, though I think it might be similar on Facebook too. It’s just that when I’m on Facebook it’s only to check out some things in a few hobby related groups I’m in so I’m never on home feed.
Not only that, but the random suggested pages are completely irrelevant to me. Facebook knows where I live and at least a few details of what I'm into, and the suggested pages have no connection to any of those whatsoever.
I just thought I’d point out this Reddit post is from nearly six months ago. I’d imagine there have been numerous tweaks to what users are shown since then.
I have noticed this also, I got around it by clicking “feeds” instead of browsing my default feed via “home”. The “feeds” tab doesn’t seem to give me any of these suggested pages.
I wish I could delete my FB account. I only keep it around to manage app social logins and keep in touch with a few family members who haven't gone to Telegram yet.
Is this because no one is using Facebook anymore besides updating their profile picture every year or so?
Everyone I know only uses Facebook for messenger
I deleted my 15 year old account because of that.....it was tough, but it was so far gone from what it was that it wasn't really a loss to say goodbye.....
From the Reddit thread: In the app, click on the Feeds icon (top for Android, bottom for iOS) then select Friends. I’m now seeing a lot more relevant stuff.
i also keep getting the "you broke reddit" screen (even though it's a 503 so actually reddit broke it, but blaming it on the users?) on old.reddit.com but works on new.reddit.com
is this reddit's not-so-subtle way to stop people from using old.reddit?
and it's all crap. Very low quality content... especially on video. Terrible recommendations. YouTube has the same problem. Whoever is leading recs is doing a terrible job.
>Terrible recommendations. YouTube has the same problem. Whoever is leading recs is doing a terrible job.
This is exactly why I am working on a team to build alternative YouTube recommendations.
Search a channel to get a list of smaller channels making content focused on similar interests. Our algorithm is designed to surface more obscure, but relevant, content that YouTube generally doesn't recommend.
Here is our list of relevant similar channels for SpaceX's channel:
The recommendation system was really addictive for me for a while. I was wasting a ton of time on YouTube. Then I switched off recommendations based on my watch history and it suddenly got abysmally bad. And hallelujah, that worked like a charm. I spend almost no time on YouTube at all now. Whoever thinks that recommendations aren't predatory time sinks probably hasn't experienced both sides of that.
They can be both addictive and bad.... I find myself clicking clickbait nonsense all the time. With annoying titles like "Funniest NFL celebration fails" or "Best cheeseburger in NYC" It's inane worthless content, that my brain is addicted to. I feel utterly unsatisfied after watching this terrible content, yet I still click more often than I would like.
Actually, Youtube is the last service I like because I pretty ruthlessly go through my watch history and delete anything that might mess it up. As a result my recommendations tend to be pretty decent. Not perfect, but acceptable.
Why do you? Just stop. Delete your account. Unless there's something genuinely work related, there are other (and better!) ways to talk to your friends and family.
This is a good opportunity to reflect on how irrelevant and vacuous is the omnipresent "It's a private company, they can do whatever they want." We also have a right to criticize them for whatever reason.
I got back on FB after having given up on it for years and now my feed is nearly all leftist memes (not exaggerating - super left-wing pro-marxist/pro-communist stuff), no matter how many times I try to "hide post", they just keep coming. I'm starting to remember why I left Facebook in the first place.
My FB feed absolutely sucks. All I get anymore are Disney memes and low effort socialist propaganda - content I have no interest in no matter how much I try to hide it.
I used to keep a fairly curated feed of news and groups and businesses I followed, for some reason FB has decided to throw out all of that out to feed me this garbage.
The word "meme" was created by Dawkins to be similar to "gene", because they spread similarly. Cancer is, in a certain sense, a genetic disease, the result of the malfunction of genes caused by mutation. So, to continue the analogy, a badly mutated meme can be like cancer, and can spread like one.
Certain unhealthy ideas throughout history seem to metastasize and cause great harm to their host societies until they are eventually discarded or defeated.
What do you have in mind? I can think of few modern examples that resulted in failed states and losers in wars, but many other bad ideas persist (but identifying them as such can be socially and politically sensitive) without dying off.
Memes aren't cancer, but I agree that they can be pathogenic.
