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FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

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Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#161
post #144

Crazy idea: FB should stop trying to lure people back from Tiktok with weird features and just lean in to its one remaining strength, which is that among social media sites, it's the most generic and boring and ubiquitous. Being the default place for non-influencers to do quotidian stuff like hearing about school closings, joining the PTA or HOA, coordinating family gatherings, see your nephew's school photos, etc wo…

That would be the low risk strategy. Just run it as a cash cow value business and extract as much profit as possible until it dies. However, Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to bet the company on AR/VR and is investing $10B into that area. If they get it wrong then he'll look like an idiot. If they get it right by building the next major platform for humans to communicate then he'll look like a visionary genius. We won't k…

Why do we need to wait ten years? He's building Second Life with a higher-resolution mesh. Is that visionary?

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#162
I absolutely hate the unwanted recommendations and Reels, but I currently still find FB useful for staying in contact with extended family and friends, so I use this "Facebook Hide Recommendations and Reels" browser extension to keep FB useable:

https://github.com/mrinc/Facebook-Hide-Recommendations-and-R...

Even with recommendations and Reels disabled, other aspects of FB have also degraded significantly:

- Friends don't share original content there as much as they used to, a sign that FB's relevance is dwindling. I suspect people have also grown wary of Facebook's privacy practices like I have.

- FB's features lack taste. For example, its knock-off of Bitmoji looks terrible.

- Increasing prevalence of scammers. I tried to sell some things on FB Marketplace last week and was contacted by a dozen fake profiles trying to scam me with fake emails from Zelle. I also frequently get friend requests from profiles where scammers created a duplicate of a friend's profile, copying their exact name and pictures.

Taken together, my feeling is that facebook.com is (and has been) on a downward spiral toward irrelevance.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#164
post #23

I suspect part of it is that Real People are posting less. Since the feed doesn't have a bottom anymore it makes up the difference with sponsored and suggested junk rather than going empty.

Nah. People are posting, and then it doesn't show up in their friends' feeds, sometimes not for days. You can see this easily if you talk to people IRL. "I posted those photos two days ago, didn't you see?" and then the photos show up in your feed a few days later. Or never.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#165
post #62
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a lot like Google Search results. It’s almost as if advertising dollars are an addictive drug that ultimately kills the company.

It actively makes the product worse. E.g. from yesterday, if I search for "high tc record," I'm not looking for the set of bedsheets with the greatest number of threads.

My next single, High TC, doesn't come out for another month. You'll be able to search for it then.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users of FB have migrated to Instagram and WhatsApp (all owned by Meta) ... FB is now for old people / those who don't like new tech.

Instagram and Facebook don't have the functionality that Facebook has, that's the problem. Instagram is for photo sharing. Hell, it's not even for that... it's a dating app for women, that doesn't advertise itself as a dating app for women. WhatsApp is just another telephone and messaging app, there's not much special about it as far as I can tell. It's ICQ on a smartphone and I guess, maybe, a better interface. I wa…

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Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#168
post #23

I suspect part of it is that Real People are posting less. Since the feed doesn't have a bottom anymore it makes up the difference with sponsored and suggested junk rather than going empty.

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…

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.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#169

Crazy idea: FB should stop trying to lure people back from Tiktok with weird features and just lean in to its one remaining strength, which is that among social media sites, it's the most generic and boring and ubiquitous. Being the default place for non-influencers to do quotidian stuff like hearing about school closings, joining the PTA or HOA, coordinating family gatherings, see your nephew's school photos, etc wo…

FB is also the only popular platform where you can do actual "miniblogging" as in record and share your actual thoughts and experiences in a few-paragraphs textual format. But that’s pretty much the opposite of trendy right now.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#170
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works fine in DDG: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22high+tc%22+record Edit: and also Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22high%20tc%22%20record

What are we looking for here? The results seem equally as confusing as the query

Tc is the high temperature for superconductivity. I noticed this about google a long time ago - they started "dumbing" down their search results. Don't blame them because that's where the money is, but it is annoying when you're searching for something and the results are full of celebrities because someone famous happened to say something like your search term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...

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