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.
On reddit you can sort by “new”…
Can’t do shit on reddit anymore without being signed in with an account.
Jesus, that’s a form of psychological abuse.
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
I may be wrong (I left the algorithmic social medias when they abandoned linear timelines [kept reddit until about a year before the exodus, since only fedi]) but:
Is that not because that is the content you interact with (argumentatively, likely, but still) or hover over longer with their eye movement sensors, or all the other ways they track you, and so they think “ahh he ‘likes’ (hate engages with) this content so send more!” in a loop to keep you engaged and keep making money for them through advertisements?
Like, if you ignored that shit (and iirc there’s often a way to “reset” your algorithm in some settings, after all, they want the data they sell to be accurate, it’s more valuable to sell…) and started only liking/lingering on family shit and cats (how can you ignore the kitties after all), they’d send primarily that, yes?
I could be wrong about that, this is my understanding as an outsider, but I’m curious. At the end of the day I’ll forever advocate for the end of such algorithmic practices entirely long term, and the end of one’s individual involvement with it in the present moment: “Bruh get off that shit it is rotting your brain. Like actually, by design, and it wants to keep you locked in. Don’t look at the Basilisk.”
It’s some of that, on some platforms. Other platforms also get paid to promote posts or advertisement. Depending on who pays the most, you can see different things based on your demographics.
An important thing to remember is that they will show you something in the money making category. If they know what you want, they make more if they show you something that’s likely to be effective. If they don’t know what you want, they make more if they show you something targeting your demographic. If they’re fuzzy on everything, they show you something.Which political geographic is more likely to target Facebook? Which one is more likely to spend demographic money to try to court younger white men from a low to middle income bracket?
Good to know.
Second question,
Which one is more likely to spend demographic money to try to court younger white men from a low to middle income bracket?
Are young people still on Facebook? I thought it was just “for boomers” now.
Absolutely no idea. I almost logged on when typing the previous reply to see if they were still offering me the “thin blue line commemorative gun holster” they were the last time I was on, but I realized I really didn’t want to.
I feel like I see it being used as a common enough way for events to share details though, so it probably isn’t just older demographics.
Idk, I don’t use any of them, but I’ve definitely heard people say facebook is for the olds. I thought the kids had all moved to TikTok tbh.
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.
Facebook died to me when the timeline was no longer linear
Yeah, that was the moment it changed from a social media platform to an advertising platform.
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
That explains the bots.
Dead Internet theory is real.
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.
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
Only 45% more to go. We can do this guys!
I’ve now realizing that these Tech giants have poisoned their entire well:
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Want to make AR glasses? Cool! Oh… Uh, I guess we run a platform that handsomely pays pervs for engagement, so that’s not going to work.
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Let’s start gaming services. Oh… why does no one want to make an account with us, or trust we will keep it running?
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Generative models for creative media. Oh, uh… back to the AR glasses issue. And some others.
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Ah, so our LLMs need to reference the web to be at their best which…. We… Kind of killed for a quick buck? Oops.
There are hundreds of examples of this.
And now? The whole reason people use these platforms is being consumed by cancer. Rapidly, from the feel of things.
I’m a cynic. I believe companies like Meta can carry on destroying people and getting away with it, no matter what, and users will be indifferent.
But now I’m starting to suspect they they have nowhere to pivot to, because they’ve burned the forest down.
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Most of my microblogging stuff has been just shouting in the void about stuff I’ve been doing. And random brainfarts. I follow cool people on social media so I can see them shout in the void about what they’re doing. And their random brainfarts.
I’m happy Mastodon still lets me do just that. Perfect platform for that sort of stuff.
The Algo Lords decided people don’t actually want to see that, they want “popular” things and engagement bait. Yeah no, not what I want.
To be fair, engagement bait works.
Look how much Twitter ragebait gets upvoted here on Lemmy.
Whenever I go to check the source for the posts, they aren’t even real; it’s a bot account posting 24/7, or at the very least a dedicated engagement farmer. But people don’t care, they just want that feeling.
Let’s get it to 85%
the sooner we all start calling it fakebook, the sooner it will die
Status update: I am pooping
Is it out yet?
Nearly there!
It died when it went beyond dial up and ASCII. The vibe of BBS culture in the 1980s and early '90s was so much more social than the dogshit people do now.
Not just America. It’s a trend worldwide thanks to the abundance of AI slop taking over any ‘social network’.
More like “no thanks”. It’s so bad that Greasemonkey scripts are needed to fix.
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.
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 are so right - early social media was kind of magical. Your friends posted when they went to a cool new restaurant or did cook something awesome. I discovered so many new restaurants and food styles because of that. Your friends are all going to that new syrian restaurant near the lake and like it? Let’s try it ourselves! They are also your friends, so you can talk about that. They are posting pictures of some cool thing they cooked? You can ask for the receipe! You might even be invited for dinner the next time they are cooking that!
And then Facebook killed it. They started to hide the posts of your friends. They showed you some shit from some “page” or shoveled rage-baiting news in your face. They pushed Farmville everywhere. But that short little moment in time? That was awesome
You have an @lemmy.world account We already know what you ate.
Beans.
What about your shit after lunch?
You think I’m just gonna give that away for free?
Yeah! You could even make like a business model out of… nevermind.
If you have a Dutch shelf toilet, it’s there in all splendor.
Ah the famous lay and admire toilet.
Wait, have I been sitting on it the wrong way around?
Do the Dutch sit facing the other way or something?
What do you mean? They sit the correct way, where they have a little shelf for their chocolate milk.
Its to allow inspection of faeces prior to flush, I believe. For health purposes.
I can examine my turds equally well in a regular toilet.
What if you didn’t have solid turds, generally?
Germans call them “Flachspüler” (flat washer). I appreciate that the falling dookie doesn’t splash water onto your ass. A fine feat of engineering and VERY off-topic. 🤣
Now that’s an odd design. Is there some reason they made it wrong?
There are toilets with AI that will make measurements and will check the health of your shit etc. Etc. Where do you think that data goes ;)
Now we are talking, go on…
What did you eat for breakfast?
My man spiting facta! Preach!
