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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

#331

Post by JohnFen »

nradov wrote: post #266
ok123456 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At one point no one wanted to have business meetings on Zoom, but the technology improved and the culture changed such that it's now ubiquitous. Metaverse technology is still really clunky today and used only by a few early adopters, but it's entirely possible that the experience will improve a lot in 10 years. Who knows?

> no one wanted to have business meetings on Zoom, but the technology improved and the culture changed such that it's now ubiquitous.

No one wants to use Zoom now. It's either required or the lesser of two evils (the other evil being working in an office).

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

#332

Post by BeFlatXIII »

londons_explore wrote: post #27
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.

This. Most people have ~300 friends. Most of those friends never post, and the 10% that do probably only post a couple of times a year now. That means whenever you log in, there is no content from your friends to see.

And the 1% daily posters would actively drive you away from Facebook if their spam of posts showed up in your newsfeed.

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

#333

Post by warner25 »

martin_a wrote: post #320

Another anecdotal data point: I loved Facebook around 2010-2015. I was in university, had lots of "friends" that I had met in person, was a user of the groups, events, everything. It was great to stay in touch with old and new people I knew. As people finished university, they had less time for FB, posted less and so FB probably decided to fill up the blanks they had left with "XY liked this", ads, and "you could lik…

This is an interesting explanation of things. So it's not just that Facebook was better in 20XX-20YY, it's the stage of life a person was in. I started college in the fall of 2004 (in Boston back when "TheFacebook" was limited to college students there and at a handful other prestigious schools across the country). It was indeed great fun in those days. By 2010, just a couple years out of college, I already thought that Facebook had turned to garbage, so it's interesting to hear that you had a good experience starting in 2010. Your theory makes sense.

Now that I'm a parent in my mid-30s, Facebook is just a utility for getting information from local officials (who've all but abandoned their legitimate public-facing websites) and buying / selling through Marketplace. It has nothing to do with fun.

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

#334

Post by danaris »

nostromo wrote: post #239
danudey wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may work in the general case.

However, it is painfully clear that there are very obvious categories of products that it does not work on. 99% of the time, if someone buys a refrigerator, they will not be interested in buying another refrigerator.

It would not be that difficult for Amazon to detect these product types and give other kinds of recommendations for them. Unless their algorithms and the data that drive them are much, much less comprehensive than they want us to believe.

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

#335

Post by BeFlatXIII »

mullingitover wrote: post #75

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…

I don't know if I discovered this plan independently or if some like-minded person shared this strategy years ago and I copied it from them, but it 100% works. I miss the page "Memes so deep and dank they make you commit suicide". It was 100% the name that got it banned: the content was pretty much all reposts from /r/ComedyBuddhism (a.k.a. non-humor or, occasionally, anti-humor).

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

#336

Post by BeFlatXIII »

munchler wrote: post #132
mullingitover wrote: post #75

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…

Why would you want to unfollow your own friends? To me, that's always been the one useful feature of Facebook.

So you don't see the opinions that make you hate them and end the friendship over thoughts that would never be uttered if it were just the two of you.

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

#338

Post by [deleted] »

ok123456 wrote: post #225
max51 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise. Until their HOA or their sports club start using Facebook as their official platform for announcements and communication. I know there are other free platform that could fill the same role, but you will never find one where literally more than half the adult population already has an account and is familiar with the interface/features. Lots of groups use it…

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

[deleted]

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

#339

Post by foobarbecue »

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.

Agree, but I think this is an effect rather than a cause. They made the feed un-friendly and un-cool, and as a result, Real People stopped posting.

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

#340

Post by ok123456 »

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.

It's not conjecture. Just look at any form your fill out, from taxes, to medical, to employment. They all ask for your email address and not for your facebook url.
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