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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

I go back and forth. It's useful to maintain certain social connections, which I find harder to do as I'm getting older (weird to say that, I am on the young xennial side).

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This is the issue that I run into. I got rid of my facebook, but still have an instagram (very curated, but I get to see and stay in touch with friend's nonsense).

So it is a little hard for me to let that go as everyone becomes more and more spread out in the world. It's a weird soft 'push' of information that I am able to keep up with and enjoy.

Still, I see the ugliness of The Attention Economy...

It's weird finding a balance.

Almost all of it is nonsense. Ten years ago I was at a funeral where I found out the relatives were all on Facebook. I never saw the need till then so I signed up. Turned into a constant barrage of kids photos and someone standing in front of a statue while on vacation. But that's all gone away, rarely does anyone post, and I'm tempted to just delete the account cause now ask I see is nonsense reels and advertising.

I kinda wonder if politics is what has killed Facebook. Between my choice to block anybody who posts the boring team politics soundbyte of the day, and my unwillingness to post something that might invite that same kind of response ... I don't see much in my feed. And I bet that's true for a lot of other people.

But ... I do notice a lot number of people who just sit there watching reels. So FB is probably doing just fine.

Facebook declined even in countries that don't have high levels of political polarization. Younger generations in the West and new internet users in the developing world favoured platforms that were designed as mobile-first (Facebook, even with an app developed later, was not), since they rarely use computers. Connected with that change of interface was a preference for image posts, not long text, so Instagram and then TikTok overtook FB.

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