alt Hacker News"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. "
It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.
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While number of active users still grows, one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.
It's not complicated. That random garbage increases advertising revenues. Maybe not from every user, but certainly in the aggregate.
Everyone wants to be TikTok. The generated feed is much better than following "creators"/influencers.
Twitter followed the same way ad well. All political rubbish now
hey you know there is a feed on mobile, built into the app that only shows you your friends feed? not a fb employee or defending them just relaying info.
> These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone
They clearly work for advertisers, and that's all that matters.
It's literally what got me off Facebook for good. I used it less and less over the years, but would still log in once every couple weeks or so. At least it was always 100% content posted by friends or friends of friends, or at least something that was interacted with by someone I know. Then it seems like overnight they flipped a switch and it was 10% content from people I know and 90% completely irrelevant slop. I logged in one more time after that, and then never again.
For many people, the alternative would be that their feeds are completely empty since a lot of folks don’t post any updates on Facebook really.
People seek novelty. Real social networks do not change as fast as that.
It’s funny how everyone experiences their own Eternal September. Remember that there are 1.5 billion Indians. They’re on FB too and influencing the algorithm with what they want to see.
Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me. For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years.
Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.
It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.