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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

#391

Post by AOsborn »

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…

Anecdotally, I don't think this reflects reality.

A 'strategic shift' to present suggested content may be what Facebook wants to do (or would like to tell investors it is doing).

However, the amount of real content being posted appears to have fallen off a cliff. This is obviously very subjective but holds true for both my own experience and friends/family who have commented.

So there isn't just a similar level of content but the algorithm is displaying less - but literally everyone I know no longer posts to Facebook in remotely the same way.

The only time I see regular updates are 'happy birthday' posts.

Everything else has moved to other apps - mostly Instagram stories.

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

#392

Post by midoridensha »

alistairSH wrote: post #283
yamrzou wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, here is a chronology of key events: 2020 — Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels: https://www.axios.com/2020/08/05/facebook-launches-its-tikto... 2021 — TikTok overtakes Facebook as world's most downloaded app: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/TikTok-overtakes... Feb. 2022 — Facebook loses users for the first time in its history — https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/02/face…

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.

>Mid-2021, I stop using FB for anything beyond Marketplace.

The only things I find FB useful for are Marketplace and Messenger. Marketplace is an OK way to sell your junk locally (it basically took over from Craigslist because CL was taken over by scammers and CL never bothered to do anything about it), and Messenger is a convenient glorified phone book and chat app which has a video chat feature that actually works quite well through any browser and doesn't require a local client application like Zoom. It's also really convenient that it works through both my phone and through a browser on my PC, so it's easy to switch back and forth (much easier to type messages on a PC, for instance).

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

#393

Post by midoridensha »

birdyrooster wrote: post #297
alistairSH wrote: post #283

Earlier 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.

Discord is completely useless for socializing with anyone who isn't in the IT industry. My mom, for instance, is NOT going to use Discord, but I can get her to use Facebook Messenger.

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

#395

Post by smileysteve »

alkonaut wrote: post #357

Facebook has lots of good corners of their products. Marketplace is ok-ish. Events is OK. Even Messenger is an ok sub-app of Facebook. The one app that’s unusably bad is the “feed” (or whatever it’s called these days). I use Facebook almost daily but can’t understand why anyone would use the feed bit. Even back when it was friends’ posts it was bad. Now that it’s half commercial half TikTok rabbit hole why does anyon…

Market place, through messenger has significant fraud for sim/phone hijacking. Things Facebook's controls are supposed to achieve that Craigslist suffered from

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

#396

Post by dyd8djrfyf »

birdyrooster wrote: post #297
alistairSH wrote: post #283

Earlier 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.

People focusing on the winning model are missing that none of the platforms fill identical social roles imo even if they copy features from eachother and that digitally immersed users seem to prefer it this way. I strongly doubt that TikTok would have been improved with the full feature set of Facebook even if it might benefit from integrative features for example. Discord in a similar fashion is where I go for real-ish time talk with friends or gamemates. Both of these are very different than Instagram which has largely become what my wall once was on Facebook but not to be confused for Facebook itself where I go to talk with people who aren't very cyber savvy and by extension join Groups targeted at non-cyber savvy demographics (like my HoA's group)

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

#397

Post by phendrenad2 »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #253
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'm glad to find a like-minded person. I unfollowed all my friends years ago. If I want to see them, I peek into events we have in common, groups or I go to their feed directly. My feed is mostly content from pages I enjoy along groups and communities that cover topics which interest me. I have a handful of friends who post about technology or hobbies that are not blocked from my feed. I have an older account that ha…

Same here. I see two things on my FB feed: meme pages (cat is c h o n k as stated above), and memes shared by friends from the same meme pages.

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

#398

Post by [deleted] »

in3d wrote: post #195
voisin wrote: post #50

Earlier 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.

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…

[deleted]

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

#399

Post by phendrenad2 »

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…

LinkedIn (or is it LInkedIn?) still serves one purpose: you can sign up for a free month of lInkedLn premium and drop a priority one chat message in someone's inbox. Much better than getting lost in someone's spam folder.

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

#400

Post by Liquix »

JohnFen wrote: post #319
jpalomaki wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

> uses the Google index behind the scenes Does it give better results than Google? I find Google's results to be pretty horrible, and worry that if Kagi is using Google's index, then I wouldn't get better results with them.

It does give better results. The filters can also be quite powerful.

The problem is paying a steep fee to proxy Google's index... It benefits you and Kagi in the short term, but strengthens the Google/Bing/Yandex index oligopoly [0] long term. Bad search results are the symptom - scarcity and opaqueness of viable indices is the root cause

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

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