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

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191–200 of 458 posts

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

#191

Facebook is a fantastic product, as long as you use it properly and not remotely as Facebook wants you to. - Most important step: Unfollow every single person and page - Follow entertaining groups like 'This cat is c h o n k y' - Keep facebook messenger - Use FB events for party planning That's it, and it's easy: you get all the social graph functionality, all the event planning and chat stuff. The feed (if you even…

Following friends is the sole reason to even have a Facebook account. Installing Messenger is nothing but a sign of sheer ignorance or apathy.

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

#192
post #133

Yes it’s a negative feedback loop created by the very bad product decisions they made to optimize for local maxima of getting more ads revenue. You inject more and more ads followed by more and more suggested content, thereby reducing the in network content. The in network content doesn’t get as much of traction, therefore people stop posting. This in turn forces the feed to have more and more suggestions and a few s…

It's an interesting exercise to think about: suppose you're in the meeting room and you're the product guy and you'll make this case. Indeed let us not optimize for the presently advantageous local maxima lest it come back to swallow and end us. How is this communicated? And what does it take to convincingly persuade people, or investors of this -- to even bear through a temporary downward period with the understandi…

>And what does it take to convincingly persuade people, or investors of this

As long as their top priority is next quarter's result, you can't. You may get small wins here and there, but nothing fundamental will change unless they have a long term vision. When I say "long term", I'm talking 10 - 20 years, not 1 year.

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

#193
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ordinary people put up with a lot of inconvenience just to stay connected (in some way). This is why fb has not collapsed yet. I left it years ago when I realized it was just annoying me.

I made the conscious effort before leaving Facebook to trade phone numbers, addresses and birthday dates from the people I wanted to really wanted stay in touch with, and put them in my phone. This was all within the last three years. I’ve sent birthday gifts in the mail, and I’ve gotten gifts in mail from these very people. Sometimes, when I wonder where the convenience that gets talked about in the context of Faceb…

The art of deliberately staying in touch has been lost, and taking the time and effort to do so makes one stand out.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it for groups. Many of our local clubs do great on facebook

The problem is that FB has changed groups as well. Groups seem to be redesigned to become more like open billboards than private enclaves with a limited membership. They haven’t gone all the way there, so the groups are still useful, but I’m worried that’s the direction they’re taking.

Private groups mean less people and less engagement. So they'll try to trick you into opening.

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

#195
post #50

Yes it’s a negative feedback loop created by the very bad product decisions they made to optimize for local maxima of getting more ads revenue. You inject more and more ads followed by more and more suggested content, thereby reducing the in network content. The in network content doesn’t get as much of traction, therefore people stop posting. This in turn forces the feed to have more and more suggestions and a few s…

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

Exactly. By adding more and more ads, their own widgets, and pushing down smaller sites in the search results to favor brands, Google made it very hard for smaller sites with user-generated content to grow and profit organically. And then fewer people searched for them or expected to find them.

I’m kind of enjoying the fact that newer sites and apps like Discord don’t let Google index them after Google killed off a large part of the independent Internet. We’re missing out on a lot of good content that would be put up in an alternate universe with a less greedy and shortsighted Google.

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

#197
post #51

Same here. Not only that, but the random suggested pages are completely irrelevant to me. Facebook knows where I live and at least a few details of what I'm into, and the suggested pages have no connection to any of those whatsoever.

It's ok. Having used facebook, everybody knows where you live, and what you're into.

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

#199

Facebook is a fantastic product, as long as you use it properly and not remotely as Facebook wants you to. - Most important step: Unfollow every single person and page - Follow entertaining groups like 'This cat is c h o n k y' - Keep facebook messenger - Use FB events for party planning That's it, and it's easy: you get all the social graph functionality, all the event planning and chat stuff. The feed (if you even…

The thing about "X is a fantastic tool as long as you use it in a way the developers never intended", is that sooner or later, some interaction you rely on will break because the devs either don't care about or actively want to remove your use-case. Which is a problem if you've invested a lot into it at that point.

This is one of the major reasons why I try to limit my use of websites for anything important and prefer to use normal, local applications that don't rely heavily on someone else's servers. It's a lot harder for other people to stop you from using the applications and also helps prevent things from changing/breaking all the sudden.

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

#200

Yes it’s a negative feedback loop created by the very bad product decisions they made to optimize for local maxima of getting more ads revenue. You inject more and more ads followed by more and more suggested content, thereby reducing the in network content. The in network content doesn’t get as much of traction, therefore people stop posting. This in turn forces the feed to have more and more suggestions and a few s…

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