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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

#231

Post by legitster »

ok123456 wrote: post #83
ineptech wrote: post #61

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…

Marketplace is the only reason a lot of people still use the site. This is since especially true for people looking for beater cars since Craigslist started charging $5 to post ads for cars. If Apple or someone else with an ax to grind with Facebook really wanted to bust Meta's kneecaps, they could off to subsidize this charge. Maybe also help them out with fraud and spam detection, since that's where most of the ove…

FB is also actively making Marketplace worse.

They keep relegating their local pickup products and trying to turn it into a generic online marketplace.

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

#232

Post by max51 »

SamvitJ wrote: post #208

In my experience, what happened is that young people eventually stopped posting personal updates (this was a multi-year process), either because the novelty of it declined or because they entered a life phase change (e.g. leaving college) that made social updates less frequent or less shareable. In my friend group, this happened around 2018, about a year after we left college and entered the working world. I'd guess…

For most people I know, they stopped posting when the feed started being filled with suggested crap. We didn't want to post on a feed we hated and where our friends would likely miss it anyway amongst all the garbage.

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

#233

Post by ok123456 »

yojo wrote: post #180
nradov wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People gave Google a ton of crap for buying YouTube for 1.6 billion (~16% of annual revenue at the time). That $10B FB spent is more like 8.5% of their revenue. I’m skeptical of the metaverse, but I was also pretty skeptical of user-generated video. And given their current ad take, $10B is not a crazy bet.

Everyone wanted to watch and share video clips on their computer directly on the web without and without having to care about codecs, file formats, and hosting.

No one wants to have business meetings wearing VR headsets or give NFTs to virtual panhandlers or any of the other silly usecases for a modernized version of Lawnmower Man.

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

#234

Post by jpalomaki »

voisin wrote: post #50
darth_avocado wrote: post #37

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.

For those annyoyed with ads on Google search, Kagi [1] is worth trying. It's not free, but does not show ads and uses the Google index behind the scenes. I've been using it on desktop for few months and have no complaints.

[1] https://kagi.com/

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

#237

Post by BbzzbB »

ok123456 wrote: post #190
elcomet wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be the reason for you, but there are many other reasons why people still use the site. For example, coordinating events with friends, discover local events, discussing on messenger, sharing photos, discussing in groups...

The people using Marketplace are the people who wouldn't be using the site otherwise, and who are there for the express purpose of doing commerce. No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.

It's funny how much projection people do when speaking of FB, as if their personal experience offers some deep insight into a platform of 3.5 billion users whose usage varies by user, demography and geography.

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

#238

Post by ipqk »

Tao3300 wrote: 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'm a relatively old person that still has lots of friends that use FB (and not instagram or tiktok) and 100% of my feed (except for ads) was stuff from my friends.

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

#239

Post by nostromo »

danudey wrote: post #218
nostromo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon seems to have taken a different route. Keep margins low and don’t make too much money in order to starve any potential competitors of capital. Of course - you still need to grow revenue for this to work - just not profits.

Doesn't help that their recommendations are always "Oh, you bought an air conditioner? Come look at this wide variety of other air conditioners we have!" rather than, say, adapters for connecting air conditioners to different window types or home electricity usage monitoring or something.

This is a common complaint. The reason they do it is because... it works!

It can be counter-intuitive but this is often seen in recommendation systems. In music for example, the song most likely to be played after a song is... that same song again.

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

#240

Post by ok123456 »

BbzzbB wrote: post #237
ok123456 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people using Marketplace are the people who wouldn't be using the site otherwise, and who are there for the express purpose of doing commerce. No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.

It's funny how much projection people do when speaking of FB, as if their personal experience offers some deep insight into a platform of 3.5 billion users whose usage varies by user, demography and geography.

It's funny how people try to deny the simple truth that the site hasn't been fun to use in 15 years.
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