There are many browser add-ons that completely removes feed from FB. Since I use FB exclusively for adding links to my personal portfolio, thise plugins are handy and keep me away from distraction everytime I need to share anything.
FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
361–370 of 458 posts
Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mid-2021, I stop using FB for anything beyond Marketplace. Mid-2022, I find Instagram to be just as useless as FB. I find I'm spending far less time on big social platforms. And a little more time in niche web forums. And I mostly feel better (sanity-wise) for it.
Discord has completely displaced the need for other social media in my experience. And they get hundreds of dollars per year from me. If this isn’t a winning model, I don’t know what is.
It's a failure out of the box for me, as it silo's information and once a server is gone so is that info.
The gatekeepers on some of the more popular gaming servers (where they know they are more necessary than usual) are reddit levels.
Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
#363and it's all crap. Very low quality content... especially on video. Terrible recommendations. YouTube has the same problem. Whoever is leading recs is doing a terrible job.
The recommendation system was really addictive for me for a while. I was wasting a ton of time on YouTube. Then I switched off recommendations based on my watch history and it suddenly got abysmally bad. And hallelujah, that worked like a charm. I spend almost no time on YouTube at all now. Whoever thinks that recommendations aren't predatory time sinks probably hasn't experienced both sides of that.
They can be both addictive and bad.... I find myself clicking clickbait nonsense all the time. With annoying titles like "Funniest NFL celebration fails" or "Best cheeseburger in NYC" It's inane worthless content, that my brain is addicted to. I feel utterly unsatisfied after watching this terrible content, yet I still click more often than I would like.
Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
#364Earlier 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…
Same. I've been pretty happy with Clay (https://clay.earth). They just rolled out a Facebook birthdays integration and between that and Linkedin / iMessage it has most of the people I care about seeing.
Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
#365and it's all crap. Very low quality content... especially on video. Terrible recommendations. YouTube has the same problem. Whoever is leading recs is doing a terrible job.
The recommendation system was really addictive for me for a while. I was wasting a ton of time on YouTube. Then I switched off recommendations based on my watch history and it suddenly got abysmally bad. And hallelujah, that worked like a charm. I spend almost no time on YouTube at all now. Whoever thinks that recommendations aren't predatory time sinks probably hasn't experienced both sides of that.
how did you disable recommendations based off watch history?
Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
#366Yes 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…
Slightly pedantic - this is a POSITIVE feedback loop, with an unwanted outcome. A negative feedback loop would be self correcting.
Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
#367Yes 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…
Facebook is the fax machine.
The real danger FB finds themselves in is that the initial value prop (make and maintain your friendships with less friction) is LONG gone.
Instead, they are relying almost entirely on the network effect now. You have to be on Facebook because your grandma is on Facebook. This is not sustainable long-term, for obvious and perhaps morbid reasons.
Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
#368Earlier 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.
Never thought I’d see the day, but I actually use Yandex for image search now because they basically deliver the google image search experience of a decade ago. While Google Images has had no one with Vision in charge and been tweaked, buffed and downgraded to the point of uselessness. And you can tell no one on the team actually uses it. Google Search could honestly be dethroned if someone really wanted to. The usag…
I still weekly make the mistake to try to find something that I know to exist. Sometimes I know there are hundreds of pages on the topic. I type query after query, again and again, nothing shows up. It's like in the 90's, I tell stories about.. I forget his name and the place, when it happened but it was something like this and that. pfft!
edit: I just attempted to look up what kind of taxes on has to pay if one receives donations. I cant carve out a query that gives me anything other than tax deductible donations. The "receiving" part is completely ignored.
Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
#369Ugh, I detest that I have to use Facebook for anything at all.
Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
#370Another 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 t…
I started using TheFacebook in 2005 (A Mark Zuckerberg Production. Too Close for Missiles, Switching to Guns).
It had expanded beyond the prestigious colleges, but each college still had to be "on boarded" individually. I was on the first day TheFacebook was available at my mountain-west university, although all my friends were still on MySpace at the time. As much as I can't stand Facebook (or Meta) these days (the products, the company, the impact on society), I do look back on 2005-206 Facebook with great fondness. It waned on me as we entered the 2010's... But back then, tt was novel, new, fun, quirky but polished (unlike MySpace). It was a great way to easily share photos and tag people - and I was at that stage in life where that sort of thing was also really fun. It was a magical time.