7 ms·

I'm 34 and Facebook lost me as well. I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer, but I unfollowed everyone and my newsfeed is empty. It's a bliss

by f055 9y ago

I'm 34 and Facebook lost me as well. I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer, but I unfollowed everyone and my newsfeed is empty. It's a bliss. Funny thing is, it's all Facebook's fault. Back in the days, the service was simply brilliant to see what's going on at your friends, at home and abroad. But when Facebook introduced the algorithmic newsfeed, the usefulness ended. I could no longer see all the photos and posts my friends' published. Now I had to rely on some weird algo - some friends were on my news feed, some others that I wanted to see, were not. I saw many more posts from pages that were irrelevant to me, much more reaction posts of my friends on stories that I don't care about, and finally - lots and lots of sponsored stories. Last year I got fed up with this mess, unfollowed everyone and now, if I want to see what's up at my friends, I go to my profile > friends > new posts and go to individual friends' profiles that I'm interested in. It's not a nice experience, but it's better than the algo news feed. Another benefit is that I use Facebook less and less. Interestingly, Twitter feed nowadays became much more interesting for me to read - although I had to unfollow plenty of mass-twitterers as well.

djhworld 9y ago
I rarely visit Facebook because of this reason, even when I do return the feed is populated with ads and other garbage that you need to scroll through to "catch up"
jacquesm 9y ago
> I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer Why?
- sergiotapia 9y ago
  If you need to support Facebook oauth, you need an account.
  - Promarged 9y ago
    Exactly. I was removing my account yesterday and they pulled this trick. After some careful analysis it turned out that of all my integrations (Github, Twitter, Facebook) Facebook was rarely used, so I removed support for it in my site, removed the app at developers.facebook.com and the account.
- azemetre 9y ago
  In order to use some developer products and tooling you need a facebook account. https://developers.facebook.com/ https://developers.facebook.com/
beamatronic 9y ago
I agree that the algo sucks. I want a LinearBook. I want a time-series database for my social network updates.
- asymmetric 9y ago
  Isn’t that what Twitter is?
  - Quenty 9y ago
    It’s quickly not becoming this, unfortunately.
    - ship_it 9y ago
      It already is. Twitter is not sorted in chronological order.
      - danielbln 9y ago
        The main reason I only us Twitter via Fenix on my phone, I loathe non-chronological and "curated" timelines.
oldcynic 9y ago
This. Facebook was really useful for keeping up with life events. I could stay connected and updated even with more distant friends and relatives. As soon as the algorithm "knew best" what I looked at I no longer got the occasional, but wanted, updates from those more distant. I would see what FB told me was popular - and some would play to that popularity. It would downplay to the point of censorship updates from someone if I didn't interact enough - whatever "enough" was. The feed is now almost completely beyond my control - no matter how I try to mess with groups and liking random posts to stop people being forgotten. Once when you got a message and weren't around it would mail you the message. Now you get "Fred sent you a message log in to messenger to see it". Now it's worse than useless for the reason I signed up in the first place. Worse because, like a needy ex, it keeps pleading and whining for me to come back by email. I log in maybe 2-4x a year to organise with the few people that still prefer it as main point of contact.
- wila 9y ago
  If you don't already have an email address for all your spam, get one, then change your email address in Facebook to that one. While the annoying emails still get send, you are at least no longer bothered with it in your day to day email use. Not ideal, but slightly better. Of course you can also use email filtering rules, but seperating it physically makes it more likely you do not burn time on it by accident.
  - danielbln 9y ago
    Why jump through all those hoops, just disable notification mails in the FB preferences?!
    - wila 9y ago
      Because you might want to see some emails, but not the selection that FB deems important.
commandlinefan 9y ago
Add to that the fact that the people who are most likely to think that they're shaping world opinions by arguing with their crazy aunt about Donald Trump on Facebook are also the most active... and therefore the highest-ranking elements of the feed algorithm.
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
Similar experience, I think my problem with the algorithm is similar to slowing down to look at the car wreck on the side of the road. I have a few a"friends" that post horrible stuff. Conspiracy theories, rants, and other posts that are just symptoms of poor mental health. At first I stopped to read these in HORROR and disgust, because they stood out so much from the rest of my feed. Facebook takes that as a signal that this is the content I enjoy, and begins to feature it more and more heavily. Looking back, if I had understood what was happening, I could have used Facebook correctly and worked WITH the algorithm. You have to think about the long term consequences of your viewing activity, and think of using your attention like farming to grow a good feed. Facebook eventually needs to introduce a self-curation tool, so that people can promote the things/people they want, and remove the elements they dislike without Unfriending Grandma. For me it's probably to late. At 34 the college friends that I would like to keep up with haven't interacted with me in 5+ years, and the social awkwardness of rekindling those relationships isn't worth it. On an unrelated note, I think many social networks will continue to die this way. As people move from PEAK FRIENDS in colleges to having lives where immediate family takes priority, I think the social presence will fade. The networks will take the blame, like MYSPACE, and FRIENDSHIP just are not good tools anymore, when really it was the person who went from having 100+ active relationships to 20.
- workthrowaway27 9y ago
  There is (or at least used to be) a menu next to people's posts that lets you stop following similar posts (or unfollow the person completely while remaining friends).
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    Still there, still works.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    At least on the Android app, this is incredibly broken. Not only does it often not actually hide the item you try to hide, but most of the options that are available for this menu on the desktop web app are missing, so you can't actually unfollow the person 7 out of 10 times.
alpha_squared 9y ago
I've also done the unfollow-everyone thing about a year ago and I thought I was a pretty rare case, your post leads me to believe that it might not be that rare. As it stands, I only "follow" brands/pages as sources of news (predominantly non-political) and Facebook is actually moderately useful in that way. My news feed is now just topics I'm interested in and I cut out the friend-filtering algorithm portion, which makes Facebook a lot more pleasant to use. The onus is more on me to follow up with friends on what they've been up to and I'll probably lose touch with some along the way. However, it feels more genuine when I can talk about those things on a more personal level a few weeks/months after the event is posted online and I'm not just contributing another comment/like on a post.
borplk 9y ago
I think another factor is also that the internet has lost some of its novelty and innocence that it had back then. In those early days people were still used to web pages being static lifeless documents. It was magical to be able to interact with it. It was some time after and in the middle of the Web 2.0 hype and the rush for "web based everything". Now people have app and internet fatigue. It has become a chore.
e32u3g42 9y ago
It's a huge waste of resources, IMO. I've setup Raspberry Pi's that sync photos between myself, parents, siblings, and some friends that care. We can, from our phones, drop them on the local Pi, and SyncThing powers the sharing. But of course to share cat pictures, we should fire up thousands of machines running 24/7 in data-centers, and rely on tricks of psychology to keep people coming back as justification for keeping those computers on. Services like FB are akin to a TV show -- not a broadcaster -- novel at first, but the story/characters don't change much (or for the worse in more cases than not), it grows stale for the masses, loses ratings, and eventually it'll end and only die hards will care. And their real contributions, large scale compute cluster knowledge, is relatively well known and copied by others.
whataretensors 9y ago
Same thing. Removed my facebook now I'm looking for a cryptocurrency backed one that rewards people for contributions.
- sosuke 9y ago
  Maybe like https://steemit.com/ https://steemit.com/?
  - whataretensors 9y ago
    steemit is great, I want something similar but just a social graph to keep up with friends
mrighele 9y ago
> But when Facebook introduced the algorithmic newsfeed, the usefulness ended. What I find funny is that probably according to FB your "engagement" increased with that change. Beforehand, you would check the feed, and then hit something that you already saw and then stop: you saw everything that there was to see. After the change instead, you found yourself seeing again and again the same content, and you would keep scrolling that feed hoping to see something new. Instead of 5 minutes it takes you 10 (and you still are not sure you saw everything you wanted), you're spending double time on FB, big win ! Who cares if the "productivity" (as in total enjoyment / time spent) decreased , more time = more ads = more money. Lather, rinse, repeat, until the garbage is so much that one stop using it and the "engagement" drops completely.
- code_duck 9y ago
  Based on my own experience and the fact that I hear similar complaints often, FB’s News Feed team is seriously out of touch with users and what we actually want to see on there. I can only assume that they’re chasing tiny abstract metrics of engagement, and focusing more on the experience for advertisers than users.
pombrand 9y ago
Exactly right. I've gotten around this by using "Facebook Purity" a chrome extension which let's me filter what is shown on the news feed in detail: I only really want to see posts and photos the friends I haven't hidden from the news feed post - not their likes, the events they're going to etc. This is addition to "hide trending" and ublock makes facebook a bit broken but overall usable, not really worth checking in more than once a week though. Instagram works better for getting a feel for your friends, especially with the temporary "snaps" people post and actually fun creative overlays.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Instagram stories also have become my primary social media "tool" these days. I have friends scattered all over the world. Through Insta stories I can keep up with what they're doing and feel closer to them. All my friends have stopped posting on Facebook except for life events. Now everything is on Snapchat or Instagram stories.
relyio 9y ago
I had the exact same issues with Quora. Both websites I used to hang out frequently. Facebook to see what was going on within my social circles (not content consumption) and Quora to learn new things from the people I followed. Both websites became unbearingly bad after they updated their feed algorithm. To this day, this remains for me the quintessential case of bad product thinking meets over-engineering.
Splendor 9y ago
Same here. And now they're running Instagram in the same way.
billysielu 9y ago
I do this too. It's really eye-opening when you go to 'new posts', see some 'friends' have new posts, and don't bother clicking through to read their posts.

by f055 9y ago

djhworld 9y ago

I rarely visit Facebook because of this reason, even when I do return the feed is populated with ads and other garbage that you need to scroll through to "catch up"

jacquesm 9y ago

> I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer Why?

sergiotapia 9y ago
If you need to support Facebook oauth, you need an account.
- Promarged 9y ago
  Exactly. I was removing my account yesterday and they pulled this trick. After some careful analysis it turned out that of all my integrations (Github, Twitter, Facebook) Facebook was rarely used, so I removed support for it in my site, removed the app at developers.facebook.com and the account.
azemetre 9y ago
In order to use some developer products and tooling you need a facebook account. https://developers.facebook.com/ https://developers.facebook.com/

beamatronic 9y ago

I agree that the algo sucks. I want a LinearBook. I want a time-series database for my social network updates.

asymmetric 9y ago
Isn’t that what Twitter is?
- Quenty 9y ago
  It’s quickly not becoming this, unfortunately.
  - ship_it 9y ago
    It already is. Twitter is not sorted in chronological order.
    - danielbln 9y ago
      The main reason I only us Twitter via Fenix on my phone, I loathe non-chronological and "curated" timelines.

oldcynic 9y ago

This. Facebook was really useful for keeping up with life events. I could stay connected and updated even with more distant friends and relatives. As soon as the algorithm "knew best" what I looked at I no longer got the occasional, but wanted, updates from those more distant. I would see what FB told me was popular - and some would play to that popularity. It would downplay to the point of censorship updates from someone if I didn't interact enough - whatever "enough" was. The feed is now almost completely beyond my control - no matter how I try to mess with groups and liking random posts to stop people being forgotten. Once when you got a message and weren't around it would mail you the message. Now you get "Fred sent you a message log in to messenger to see it". Now it's worse than useless for the reason I signed up in the first place. Worse because, like a needy ex, it keeps pleading and whining for me to come back by email. I log in maybe 2-4x a year to organise with the few people that still prefer it as main point of contact.

wila 9y ago
If you don't already have an email address for all your spam, get one, then change your email address in Facebook to that one. While the annoying emails still get send, you are at least no longer bothered with it in your day to day email use. Not ideal, but slightly better. Of course you can also use email filtering rules, but seperating it physically makes it more likely you do not burn time on it by accident.
- danielbln 9y ago
  Why jump through all those hoops, just disable notification mails in the FB preferences?!
  - wila 9y ago
    Because you might want to see some emails, but not the selection that FB deems important.

commandlinefan 9y ago

Add to that the fact that the people who are most likely to think that they're shaping world opinions by arguing with their crazy aunt about Donald Trump on Facebook are also the most active... and therefore the highest-ranking elements of the feed algorithm.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago

Similar experience, I think my problem with the algorithm is similar to slowing down to look at the car wreck on the side of the road. I have a few a"friends" that post horrible stuff. Conspiracy theories, rants, and other posts that are just symptoms of poor mental health. At first I stopped to read these in HORROR and disgust, because they stood out so much from the rest of my feed. Facebook takes that as a signal that this is the content I enjoy, and begins to feature it more and more heavily. Looking back, if I had understood what was happening, I could have used Facebook correctly and worked WITH the algorithm. You have to think about the long term consequences of your viewing activity, and think of using your attention like farming to grow a good feed. Facebook eventually needs to introduce a self-curation tool, so that people can promote the things/people they want, and remove the elements they dislike without Unfriending Grandma. For me it's probably to late. At 34 the college friends that I would like to keep up with haven't interacted with me in 5+ years, and the social awkwardness of rekindling those relationships isn't worth it. On an unrelated note, I think many social networks will continue to die this way. As people move from PEAK FRIENDS in colleges to having lives where immediate family takes priority, I think the social presence will fade. The networks will take the blame, like MYSPACE, and FRIENDSHIP just are not good tools anymore, when really it was the person who went from having 100+ active relationships to 20.

workthrowaway27 9y ago
There is (or at least used to be) a menu next to people's posts that lets you stop following similar posts (or unfollow the person completely while remaining friends).
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Still there, still works.
- megaman22 9y ago
  At least on the Android app, this is incredibly broken. Not only does it often not actually hide the item you try to hide, but most of the options that are available for this menu on the desktop web app are missing, so you can't actually unfollow the person 7 out of 10 times.

alpha_squared 9y ago

I've also done the unfollow-everyone thing about a year ago and I thought I was a pretty rare case, your post leads me to believe that it might not be that rare. As it stands, I only "follow" brands/pages as sources of news (predominantly non-political) and Facebook is actually moderately useful in that way. My news feed is now just topics I'm interested in and I cut out the friend-filtering algorithm portion, which makes Facebook a lot more pleasant to use. The onus is more on me to follow up with friends on what they've been up to and I'll probably lose touch with some along the way. However, it feels more genuine when I can talk about those things on a more personal level a few weeks/months after the event is posted online and I'm not just contributing another comment/like on a post.

borplk 9y ago

I think another factor is also that the internet has lost some of its novelty and innocence that it had back then. In those early days people were still used to web pages being static lifeless documents. It was magical to be able to interact with it. It was some time after and in the middle of the Web 2.0 hype and the rush for "web based everything". Now people have app and internet fatigue. It has become a chore.

e32u3g42 9y ago

It's a huge waste of resources, IMO. I've setup Raspberry Pi's that sync photos between myself, parents, siblings, and some friends that care. We can, from our phones, drop them on the local Pi, and SyncThing powers the sharing. But of course to share cat pictures, we should fire up thousands of machines running 24/7 in data-centers, and rely on tricks of psychology to keep people coming back as justification for keeping those computers on. Services like FB are akin to a TV show -- not a broadcaster -- novel at first, but the story/characters don't change much (or for the worse in more cases than not), it grows stale for the masses, loses ratings, and eventually it'll end and only die hards will care. And their real contributions, large scale compute cluster knowledge, is relatively well known and copied by others.

whataretensors 9y ago

Same thing. Removed my facebook now I'm looking for a cryptocurrency backed one that rewards people for contributions.

sosuke 9y ago
Maybe like https://steemit.com/ https://steemit.com/?
- whataretensors 9y ago
  steemit is great, I want something similar but just a social graph to keep up with friends

mrighele 9y ago

> But when Facebook introduced the algorithmic newsfeed, the usefulness ended. What I find funny is that probably according to FB your "engagement" increased with that change. Beforehand, you would check the feed, and then hit something that you already saw and then stop: you saw everything that there was to see. After the change instead, you found yourself seeing again and again the same content, and you would keep scrolling that feed hoping to see something new. Instead of 5 minutes it takes you 10 (and you still are not sure you saw everything you wanted), you're spending double time on FB, big win ! Who cares if the "productivity" (as in total enjoyment / time spent) decreased , more time = more ads = more money. Lather, rinse, repeat, until the garbage is so much that one stop using it and the "engagement" drops completely.

code_duck 9y ago
Based on my own experience and the fact that I hear similar complaints often, FB’s News Feed team is seriously out of touch with users and what we actually want to see on there. I can only assume that they’re chasing tiny abstract metrics of engagement, and focusing more on the experience for advertisers than users.

pombrand 9y ago

Exactly right. I've gotten around this by using "Facebook Purity" a chrome extension which let's me filter what is shown on the news feed in detail: I only really want to see posts and photos the friends I haven't hidden from the news feed post - not their likes, the events they're going to etc. This is addition to "hide trending" and ublock makes facebook a bit broken but overall usable, not really worth checking in more than once a week though. Instagram works better for getting a feel for your friends, especially with the temporary "snaps" people post and actually fun creative overlays.

toomanybeersies 9y ago
Instagram stories also have become my primary social media "tool" these days. I have friends scattered all over the world. Through Insta stories I can keep up with what they're doing and feel closer to them. All my friends have stopped posting on Facebook except for life events. Now everything is on Snapchat or Instagram stories.

relyio 9y ago

I had the exact same issues with Quora. Both websites I used to hang out frequently. Facebook to see what was going on within my social circles (not content consumption) and Quora to learn new things from the people I followed. Both websites became unbearingly bad after they updated their feed algorithm. To this day, this remains for me the quintessential case of bad product thinking meets over-engineering.

Splendor 9y ago

Same here. And now they're running Instagram in the same way.

billysielu 9y ago

I do this too. It's really eye-opening when you go to 'new posts', see some 'friends' have new posts, and don't bother clicking through to read their posts.