As soon as posts were no longer ordered by post date and time it was over for me.
SAME. Seeing posts from a week later it because a certain friend is shadow banned just ruined the whole experience.
Yup, I fought it for a while by clicking the appropriate tab or sort button, but they kept changing where it lives until I gave up and never logged on again.
Now it’s just here for the community, and youtube for the consumption - at least they let you just look at your subscription by new without any junk mixed in (yet).
There’s a certain merit to posts with high interactions getting a higher priority to posts that were sent more recently. I didn’t enjoy the Facebook spam that started popping up as people gamed the system. 10,000 “Your friend is playing Fart Hospital! Your friend just pooped himself in Fart Hospital! Your friend has made an Epic Fart at Fart Hospital!” posts because someone didn’t realize the game they were playing was posting to their feed.
But they got the Reddit disease, where engagement was everything. And then you started losing sight of media you cared about under a pile of Shrimp Jesus clickbait.
I think, at the end of the day, the Facebook internal metrics changed from “Are our users happy?” to “Are our users meth addicts?”
I quit Facebook when I realized I was mostly seeing things I didn’t want to see and it was making me like the people I knew less. That was like 15 years ago
There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story about Zuckerberg originally being very resistant to turning Facebook into another Yahoo or MySpace or similar ad-swamped interface, on the grounds that it would scare people away and create a drag on growth. It even got a send-up in The Social Network movie.
Whether this was an intentional business strategy or a second order effect, Facebook was originally one of the cleanest Web 2.0 sites. They did a genuinely pretty good job of focusing on media you were flagged as caring about and showing you activity of friends and family who you wanted to follow. More savvy early users even commented on how creepy Facebook could get, precisely because it could find your friends better than you could and bait you with interactions that drew people together.
The modern iteration of the company is so far away from what it was originally designed to be. The Shrimp Jesus clickbait era Facebook might as well make it a different website. I cannot imagine anyone seeing this site coming into college Freshman year and finding anything that makes it appealing.
Yeah, but there’s still this:
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don’t know why.
Zuckerberg: They “trust me”
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
Instant messages sent by Zuckerberg during Facebook’s early days, reported by Business Insider (May 13, 2010)
Probably because it’s been overtaken by exhausting far right narratives pushed by the companies themselves.
My Facebook page doesn’t even show me stuff from people I actually know any more. One of my cousins had a baby, it didn’t even show me that. Instead what it thinks I want to see are badly written posts about immigrants and “lefties” being to blame for everything, as if the UK government is left wing in any way at all…
Yes the far-right astroturfing is becoming very blatant lately. I’ve noticed a recent worsening trend
Dude they filled my timeline with a bunch of ads and AI generated nonsense. We stopped posting because no one ever saw it thanks to all of the filler.
For me, it’s the death of the chronological view. That’s when I stopped using social media. I’d see random, irrelevant stuff from weeks ago instead of what my friends were up to today.
When social media started it focuses on friends. You add someone as a friend and you could see what they were up to.
Then Facebook came along and made it competitive, it became less about seeing what friends were doing and more about posting things that people liked.
As Facebook grew, it changed. One day you didn’t see the stuff your friends posted unless you constantly interacted with their posts or a lot of other people did.
It’s gotten worse and worse since then. They have added more and more ads and posts from people and pages you might know that you no longer see stuff from people you do know.
It’s absolutely worthless.
when instagram changed the algorithm a decade ago to no longer show your friends’ recent posts, that’s when they lost me. prior to that, it was actually useful for sharing trips and events with friends.
now it and Facebook are entirely ads / sponsored posts, and random shit fb thinks I’ll hate
Only 45% more to go. We can do this guys!
Not just America. It’s a trend worldwide thanks to the abundance of AI slop taking over any ‘social network’.
See also the privacy-invading aggressiveness of most platforms, and the political ads and propaganda inundating people’s feeds. If social media had just remained a way to keep in touch with friends and post pictures, it would probably have remained popular.
But unprofitable
No, just not as profitable.
They could have had guaranteed medium long term return, if they played nice. But now there’s backlash against both the brands and even the very concept of that form of social media.
So they’ve had high short term gain that could all come collapsing down relatively soon.
I thought all of the social medias were bleeding money until they had the customer base locked down enough to exploit with all of the aforementioned shit?
Bleeding money expanding as fast as they could so nobody else got there first.
Huge capital investment to capture the market, and as you rightly put it, exploit with all of the aforementioned shit.
But that doesn’t mean they had to go down that route. Income via vaguely targeted advertising has been a standard practice for decades by newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels. They could have improved upon that old model without turning to the evil manipulators and spyware companies they are now.
Take, for example, DuckDuckGo, this is their model:
It is a myth that search engines need to track you to make money. The majority of our revenue is from private ads on our search engine. On most other search engines, ads are based on profiles compiled from your personal information, such as search, browsing, and purchase history. Since we don’t have that information per our Privacy Policy, search ads on DuckDuckGo are based on the search results page you’re viewing instead of being based on who other companies and their tracking algorithms assume you are as a person. For example, if you search for cars, we’ll show you ads about cars. We’ve even created a way to show localized ads while still keeping you completely anonymous.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/how-duckduckgo-makes-money
Reminds me of royal road
Think about people asking for a feature to view ad history (what ads they have been served)
And at least some being willing to pay for such a feature
How long can you be profitable if users are leaving though?
It pretty exists ai. While it was novel and actually social, it was fun and a good way to keep up with friends that you see less often.
Then they started pushing influencers and people starting posting an idealised version of their life. Then the feeds all devolved into junk, even before AI slop.
Its because they took the joy and monetised it while making people trust them less and less. Post about an engagement, get wedding ads. Post holiday photos, then find out they were data mined. Wish someone happy birthday and find it’s just a stream of 100s of cookie cutter messages on their page.
So people moved on or became lurkers that don’t post. A lot of engagement moved from social onteractuin with people you know to Facebook community groups which became effectively ragebait and clickbait.
Essentially they pushed so much crap into your feed that your friends got pushed out.
So then what was the point of posting your current status when your circle might only see it two or three days later?
The immediacy was lost, and thus so was the usefulness.
I agree fully with the crap in the feed. The inmediacy though, not so much. I recall when they started that and people were still posting they tried to use it for engagement. A new post from a friend that had engagement would be repeatedly resurfaced in your feed.
It did mean less consequential posts from days earlier did feel stale and pointless when they were pushed through again, though, if that’s what you meant.
The problem is that an algorithm defines “less consequential posts” and it doesn’t have your best interests at heart, at all.
I did wonder if posts from friends were deliberately delayed so that you would be guilted into responding to their Big Thing that you didn’t see on your feed. Eventually, you’d be trained to keep scrolling to find posts from your friends, and they’d be trained to keep checking for replies days after their Big Thing, thus maximising user engagement and profit.
More like “no thanks”. It’s so bad that Greasemonkey scripts are needed to fix.
The really shitty part is that I used to post my art on Instagram app the time and started to get a lot of followers, then they changed their system. Now I didn’t get hardly any views.
Oh hey, you can still get views! You just need to open an advertising account with them, and them pay them anywhere between $50-$1000 and they’ll then show your one sponsored post to anywhere between 2 and 50 percent of people who like that kind of thing, for anywhere between 3 days and two weeks. Just select how much you want to spend to get that sweet exposure!
What’s that? You want to reach all your friends and followers? All of them? For free? Sorry, they don’t do that kind of thing anymore.
Because no one fing cares about your hourly updates and you’re just advertising your insecurities.
Social media is 75% ads, 15% shared content (more ads), and 10% people you know creating actual posts. You’re a gluten for punishment if you hang out there.
“gluten for punishment”, thanks autocorrect for another genius coinage
Darn it! I’m not changing it. I shall live with my shame of not proof reading
For some, gluten could indeed be punishment.
looks with novautocrrect look of superiority
the article actually says the opposite - that it’s the random nature of pushing internet algorithm-chasing influencers that pushes people away instead of it being a way to keep in touch with people you know and love.
Yea, it was actually pretty great when there wasn’t an algorithm forcing-feeding us bullshit. It was just us and our friends keeping in touch with each other. It was a boon for many introverts.
Now though? Why post when we know the algorithm won’t show our posts to our friends unless they dig through mountains of grift, brain rot, and propaganda.
I stopped using sites like Facebook years ago when I noticed I was seeing posts from random meme pages I didn’t even follow that were days old yet I hadn’t seen any posts from my actual friends in days. So, went check their pages to see they had been posting daily and the algorithm just never showed them to me.
that’s the case for me and it seems like most of the people in my circle
yeah none of us care about the hourly updates. but our circle doesn’t do that, we generally would only share things other people actually want to see. but it’s been a long time since anyone did that. now the only sharing that happens is just Strava and in group chats
That’s how I felt when I tried bluesky. I missed the boat on Twitter and it’d already gone down the shitter so I never tried it. Figured bsky would be an opportunity to try the whole tweeting thing for myself.
And even still, it was just nothing but political bitching, navel gazing, and glorified (or actual) advertising. Like… what’s the point of it all? Deleted my account within the month.
Lemmy has its share of faults but at least people are willing to have actual discussions and conversations here. On bsky it felt like talking to a bot. People talking past each other instead of actually communicating.
Doesn’t it depend on who you follow? The only things I see on bsky are those I follow.
The algorithm ruined it for me. Insta was once so great to keep up and share updates with friends; I’ve no interest in interacting with strangers shoved down my throat unprompted.
I’m not.an American, but I’m sure the sentiment is universal!
You can unfollow everyone but your friends
It was all over when Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline. It’s just taken a while for people to notice how awful it’s made everything.
That was what got me off - I kept feeling like I had to scroll much farther back to see the updates from friends I missed past what FB decided I should see, until I decided Facebook had made it no longer worth the effort
No one gives a shit what I ate for lunch.
If I ate something new or interesting, my friends actually cared. Unfortunately Facebook decided no one wants to interact with the people they know and started pushing news posts down everyone’s throat. It’s not a social network if you actively work against me interacting with my social network.
You have an @lemmy.world account We already know what you ate.
Beans.
What about your shit after lunch?
Now we are talking, go on…
What did you eat for breakfast?
My man spiting facta! Preach!
That explains the bots.
Dead Internet theory is real.
I mean, I still post to social media every day, but it’s pixelfed. It’s not toxic, it’s just me throwing in my art on the pile with everyone else’s art that I also get to flip through and enjoy, in chronological posting order, with no advertisements or other subject matter present.
No ads and no “algorithm”. That’s all I ask for
Mine is at https://pixelfed.social/tanisnikana, if you want to get an idea of what gets posted. There’s much better artists than me on that site too!
It’s a really interesting thing that happens, Pixelfed put me in touch with some amazing industry photographers like NatGeo dudes and such, and it’s actually got my photography career properly started.
Your work is beautiful. I’d heard of Pixelfed of course but never actually seen it before, and it’s blowing me away. I’m looking at the explore page right now:
https://pixelfed.social/web/explore
I’m a fan of landscape and nature photography anyway, and I absolutely love this. I crave beauty in these times, and there is plenty of it there. Many thanks.
It’s a really interesting thing that happens, Pixelfed put me in touch with some amazing industry photographers like NatGeo dudes and such, and it’s actually got my photography career properly started.
that sounds amazing!
I remember when Facebook used to just show your friends posts in reverse chronological order. You could react to stuff in real time and it felt great. People would do stuff like watch sporting events and TV shows live and then react with all your friends online.
Then it changed to just pure alogrithm garbage filled with ads.
I use vernissage rather than pixelfed, but yeah, it’s the only one I deliberately try and post to every day!
Because it’s stupid, you get nothing out of it and you lose time on top
