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Comment by kevstev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

I totally get what he says. If your feed no longer feels like it's your feed, more like some bazar on your phone, than why post anything private?

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.

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.

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.

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