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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

The degree to which the main FB product rotted during the last few years was extreme. Scrolling FB was still a daily activity for me until the medium was overtaken by outrage.

It seems like FB goosed conflict on the platform until everyone decided they’d had enough and left or stopped posting. There is nothing in the newsfeed from my contacts at this point, the feed is either entirely ads or bottom barrel MLM scams. Instagram is going the same direction with everyone growing exhausted from competition for likes. TikTok seems successful in part because the primary purpose isn't to engage with your friends.

So where does that leave social networking amongst your peers? SMS seems to be making a comeback.

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I think the strong disagreement in these threads are indicative of the new sub-culturing of social networks. I have friends who basically live in facebook, they are parents who spend most of their time looking for deals on marketplace. Meanwhile, most of my child-free friends have ditched facebook nearly a decade ago, and have either doubled down on reddit or have moved to tik tok.

Whether or not the metaverse is anything but marking would require me to look at a balance sheet, but facebook seems to be moving through the business life-cycle at a much more rapid pace than i expected it to. They are wringing the value out of the product for revenue growth at the expense of long term adoption. Always a mixed bag but I'm sure an MBA could explain it better.

Suffices to say. I have no idea whether or not their products have are long-run competitive, because I'm very much not the target demo.

>Scrolling FB was still a daily activity for me until the medium was overtaken by outrage.

i wonder if FB as result of all its A/B testing and engagement maximization has built a "faster horse".

have you considered that maybe facebook is giving you content based on other datapoints about you?

Aside from the occasional scam ad, I mostly get animal videos from facebook.

Possible, but what does that say about their algorithm that they only give me stuff I don't want? At this point I login to FB maybe once a month to check community groups for my neighborhood.

Animals could be a similar “no fill” response reflecting that your network doesn't have much going on.

>what does that say about their algorithm that they only give me stuff I don't want?

Do you engage with political content on facebook or other platforms where facebook has tracking agreements? they're maximizing engagement. facebook knows I'm way more likely to click on a "we rescued a dog" video than political stuff, so doesn't show me political stuff. Their data points don't just come from the facebook website.

Possible, but that wouldn't explain the lack of posts from anyone else. I checked once or twice, but at most I see folks organically posting once every 6 months or less - at this point I think I'd be surprised if anyone saw those posts.

They do this kind of profile targeting so aggressively it’s absurd. I also almost only get animal content and the occasional post from an ace group I joined, because I generally only post pics of my pup and peak at said group once in a while. Every so often I get lured into looking at something I find politically awful, and just instantly I get inundated with even more awful productized distillation of it. If I so much as slow my scroll for ADHD content, I’m smothered in ads for really horrifying scams trying to sell me miracle cures or shady guaranteed diagnosis. Yeah, FB serves content which it thinks targets your brain as audience. But it does so in a really astonishingly stupid and toxic way.

It is astonishing. I generally enjoy Facebook and while there are ads and click bait a lot of my feed is just my friends talking nicely, but it's a strange subset of friends.

I tried clicking on a few profiles I hadn't seen in a while and a lot of them had nice posts too. I saw everything from them for about a month then it disappeared again.

I am very worried about what will become of all the very private stuff in their database as they begin to decay.

Right now I assume it would take very sophisticated effort to steal all that messenger data, but what about if/when Facebook is a zombie company with a skeleton crew or an unloved subsidiary of a conglomerate?

It's such a shame. I would LOVE to keep in touch with news from friends and family with a simple chronological feed, but every social media company insists on shoveling trash down my throat with an algorithm.

A week or so ago a new tab appeared in my Facebook app that gives chronological timeline of people and groups I follow. I don't know if it's in Europe only: https://imgur.com/a/xMb2VWG

They did the same with Instagram. Click Instagram logo and select "Following" to get a chronological timeline. Possibly also only in Europe.

Back when I had Facebook, I had a contact who posted quite a lot. Often quite interesting stuff so I would read it when his stuff appeared in my newsfeed.

So Facebook just made his posts my... uh entire newsfeed. Like my newsfeed would just be 5-10 posts from this guy, some political bullshit and then another 5-10 posts from the same guy.

Even if that were the stuff I was engaging with, surely it is obvious that I don't want it in that quantity.

I'd love to hear from Facebook newsfeed product managers as it really seems like no humans actually contributed to decisions.

Oh yeah you got the pornhub experience. “You liked one thing so this must be your kink and you must have no other interests.”

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