Well, if it's true it's the first instance of good news I've heard in a while. But as far as I've checked, all local hobby groups still were defaulting to Facebook as the main (an often only) source of updates, events and general coordination. At least, it was a major source of friction for me until quite recently, as I never joined that thing and could only participate if somebody told me personally.
Facebook is cooked
371–380 of 890 posts
Re: Facebook is cooked
#372Mine is just bizarre. I logged in a few months ago just to peek and it was AI generated conspiritainment brain rot about aliens and the Illuminati and Nazi UFOs. I found it kind of hilarious but also horrifying. Lots of fake archaeology pics, very obviously AI.
Different people seem to get different forms of brain rot. Last my wife checked it was political rage bait. My mom gets AI cat video slop.
Re: Facebook is cooked
#373My mother is an international flight attendant in her 60s. I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in her most frequented cities. But I di…
My Facebook is honestly nice, it’s the most relaxing social media for me.
The promoted posts are books and artists and occasional gym content. Ads are relevant or at least not annoying (SuitSupply seems to think I’m their ideal customer, and I don’t mind looking at their handsome models in this season’s knitwear). The people I know post mostly about meaningful or harmless stuff.
But it’s probably like this because I joined over ten years after everyone else did. I didn’t activate my Facebook account until 2018 when I got a job at FB and it was mandatory. Then I found out that it was actually a good way to curate a set of people from my youth that I genuinely wanted to reconnect with.
That’s probably what made the difference compared to many whose FB social graphs were built up early and never pruned.
Re: Facebook is cooked
#374If you're part of a particular subculture, like sailboat cruising, nearly all of international sailboat cruising takes place on Facebook. There are pages for every town, anchorage, marina, etc that you will encounter. Often that is paired with a WhatsApp group where people have conversations and coordinate activities. When you sail from city X to city Y, you join that Facebook group and you learn where to do laundry,…
This is how I use it too. News feed is basically garbage, but the groups and marketplace is worth keeping my freemium subscription. I never heard of your use case, but I'm impressed that the specific point A to B groups exist!
Re: Facebook is cooked
#375"They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-generated, with generic captions."
Don't mean to be rude but..might that have something to do with your search history?
Re: Facebook is cooked
#376A counter-intuitive take: Facebook may actually do better as a business as high-resistance users leave (for the same reason spammers keep their messages intentionally faulty).
From an optimization standpoint, knowledgable, hard-to-rile-up users are mostly noise. As they churn, the remaining user base becomes more homogeneous and easier to optimize for engagement and ads. Churn effectively acts as a filtering mechanism.
So what looks like decline from the outside may just be the system converging on the segment it extracts the most value from. From Facebook’s perspective, that’s not collapse - it’s specialization.
Re: Facebook is cooked
#377It’s intentional and facebook is allowing it, for one, it brings traffic, second, how else can you distract the public from questioning what matters? Thirst traps!
Same issue in other social media btw, it’s probably too obvious in FB since it’s an old site with old audience, but if you go to instagram and the likes it’s all about thirst traps, which is a result of having a hypersexual society plus monetization.
Re: Facebook is cooked
#378I've often wondered, is there no metric for how popular a brand is?
After everyone makes an account it shouldn't be difficult to retain users. For years non of my friends saw any of my postings and I didn't see any of theirs. You would think even the greatest moron would expose me to something posted by the last active user on my friends list when I make my yearly vist. In stead I scroll down for 15 seconds, laugh and close the page.
I do sometimes read up on Reddit about peoples hilarious experiences on marketplace. FB is always the bad guy in every story. Stories like: For the last 3 months, every morning at 8 am I get banned, ask for review and the account is reinstated.
Re: Facebook is cooked
#379All social media is like this though. It’s all garbage.
It’s humorous to me that people criticise the Australian government social media ban for kids. Sure they will get around it. But at least they are looking at various avenues to get rid of this shit. Might fail, but good they had a go.
Re: Facebook is cooked
#380I use Facebook a lot, but not for the social feed - Marketplace, business pages, and ads. I’ve never interacted with their “shorts” feature, and it’s all young women and girls in as little clothing as they can manage. It’s to the point that I don’t open the Facebook app in public. Ridiculous.
I think the trick to making the "shorts" feature stop showing scantily clad women is to use it actively a bit, and only watch the videos that are decidedly something else. I did that for awhile and now my videos are like "let's see what happens when you pour lava on some soda bottles" which I'm not sure I care that much about but at least it isn't embarrassing.