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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

#301

Post by bobo_legos »

TrackerFF wrote: post #111

Youtube is also turning into garbage. First 10 or so results are relevant vids, then it becomes a mishmash of "people also watched" , "for you" , shorts, and similar suggested vids. EDIT: As for FB. The other day I watched three Studio Ghibli movies on Netflix. The last time I watched anything anime related, was Akira some 30 years ago. Now the feed is being bombarded with anime and manga meme content. I click "hide…

Youtube is a traiwreck anymore. Thankfully when this came up here a few weeks ago a users pointed out that the subscriptions tab is there to just show you what you're subscribed to.

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

#302

Post by yojo »

ok123456 wrote: post #233
yojo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe? I generally agree with you, but playing devils advocate:

What does the generation raised on Minecraft and Roboblox do when they grow up? They spent their adolescence in virtual worlds. Do they grow out of that? Or does it start to bleed into other parts of daily life?

VR still seems clunky as hell, but if the tech gets less obtrusive I can imagine a world where a sizable chunk of daily life is mediated through a headset.

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

#303

Post by martin_a »

Gud wrote: post #299

What I'm wondering is why an alternative social network has not gained more wide spread adoption, at least in the nerd community(looking at you, HN reader). It seems to me social media is ripe for disruption.

> It seems to me social media is ripe for disruption.

I think what we see is that every social media site goes down pretty much the same way at some point.

FB was great until they started that whole recommended post stuff which fucked up the feed.

Instagram was great until they were bought by Facebook and had to get some metrics straight, too.

TikTok will be the next one to go down as influencers and other parasitic users tear it down, flood it with low quality content etc.

There will be something after TikTok. And TikTok will copy their features and FB will (try to) buy them and ruin them that way, too. It all goes down eventually.

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

#304

Post by Animats »

Facebook has a declining user count and a market cap which assumes growth. (Although the stock is down 60% from peak.) So, they've tried to increase revenue per user by adding more ads and promotional content. User count declined further.

This is sometimes called "pulling a Myspace".

Facebook/Meta is now on metaverse failure #3 (Oculus, Facebook Spaces, Horizon), has lost $10 billion in that space, and investors are not happy. They're not getting out that way. Facebook remains a viable business for now, but not a growth business.

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

#305

Post by tenebrisalietum »

thehappypm wrote: post #291
ok123456 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough people don't have or won't use facebook in 2022. Email is still the lowest common denominator.

Source? This sounds like conjecture at its finest.

Can you sign up with Facebook without an email? I know it asks for your phone number but not sure if it still requires an email.

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

#306

Post by mrtesthah »

fullsend wrote: post #295
in3d wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Users click more on big brands. The average internet user doesn’t want to browse hobby websites, they use the top 10 sites and never leave them. Accept it. Some of them never leave only Reddit or TikTok.

Cynical proclamations tend to sound authoritative, but that’s not the same as being true. Sources?

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

#307

Post by dwringer »

kelsolaar wrote: post #273

I just spent 20 mins hiding all the Ad, Sponsored and Sugges content and now my feed is clean upon refresh. I do that from time to time and it stays fine for a bit but that type of content starts creeping up again. Lately it has been insane though, for example this morning after seeing this post my feed was everything but content I follow.

I expect they algorithmically tailor this sort of thing so when they detect a spike in "hide" activity they temporarily scale it back so you think it had an effect, making you more likely to methodically spend 20 minutes poring over all their Ad, Sponsored, and Suggested content again in the future.

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

#308

Post by derefr »

fairity wrote: post #258
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…

No, this isn't a consequence of the status quo newsfeed algorithm. This is a consequence of Facebook making a purposeful strategic shift away from in-network content to suggested content. This strategic shift was highlighted in their last earnings call as a way to compete with TikTok, whose success is partly explained by their focus on suggested content. On the earnings call, they signaled that they were shifting mor…

> but the OP is likely enrolled in some sort of test that is giving them 98%.

Couldn't it just be that suggested content is not only placed "between" in-network posts to achieve a certain minimum ratio, but also some small number of suggested-content posts are inserted at a constant drip into your feed (e.g. every N minutes in the feed's timeline) to ensure a certain minimum absolute amount of advertising happens per day per account?

Which would mean that, if all your friends are people who don't post very much on FB any more, there could be 50 dripped in suggested-content posts (to achieve the minimum absolute suggested posts per day) for each one in-network post.

Even without "ensuring a minimum absolute amount of advertising", I presume this would have to be happening on some level, to ensure that anyone who tries to use Facebook "like TikTok" (effectively an RSS reader for suggested content), ends up with a non-empty feed.

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

#309

Post by Infinitesimus »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #281
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...

I hear this all the time but SMS/MMS/iMessage/whatever Android has does this just as well.

For cross-platform communication, Messenger/Whatsapp win over the above. (Telegram, Signal, etc in some circles).

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

#310

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

heliodor wrote: post #19

The current FB is great for productivity! No need to mourn the former FB. It's gone. I've given up on FB as a social network a long time ago. I unfollowed all my friends and started following things that interest me. Followed the astronomical society so I can be informed when they have a public night. I get ads for everything I need for renovating my house: roof sealing services, AC repair, contractors, new windows,…

I actually concur with this. I largely abandoned the platform, but one thing that I actually got from it lately turned out to be... a fantastic local mechanic.

I went to a fan group for my car in my country and asked for a recommendation for someone in my city. Someone gave me a tip on a guy within 20 minutes.

This of course is something I would have found in a searchable public forum back in the day, but I think more people use the platform in this way than we think.

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