3 ms·

Facebook is fundamentally a dead platform, as far as I can tell. I've got over 500 "friends" and I see almost nothing on the news feed, to the point where it r

Facebook is fundamentally a dead platform, as far as I can tell. I've got over 500 "friends" and I see almost nothing on the news feed, to the point where it remains static aside from the shifting ads, for days at a time. There's a chilling effect at some level with the way that Facebook has a defacto "real name" policy, combined with the fact that it's your real-life family and friends and normies that you are connected with. Only the most disagreeable bother posting outside of the realm of baby pictures and recipes and small-business self-promotion.

mandevil 5y ago
Facebook agrees with you, per the article. The article places a lot of the blame on the changes to the algorithms in January 2018, which at the time Zuck portrayed as a sacrifice: "Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down," he wrote on Facebook. "But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too." "Facebook training videos and internal memos show another reason for the change -- the company's growing concern about a decline in user engagement, which typically refers to actions like commenting on or sharing posts.Comments, likes and reshares declined through 2017, while "original broadcast" posts -- the paragraph and photo a person might post when a dog dies -- continued a yearslong decline that no intervention seemed able to stop, according to the internal memos. The fear was that eventually users might stop using Facebook altogether." So they made changes to the algorithm and ended up making things worse, by emphasizing politics, hate-clicks, and arguments. This shows the limits of algorithms: there is a reason that actual news organizations rely on humans to decide on what information to present to you, not some machine learning black-box.

mandevil 5y ago

Facebook agrees with you, per the article. The article places a lot of the blame on the changes to the algorithms in January 2018, which at the time Zuck portrayed as a sacrifice: "Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down," he wrote on Facebook. "But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too." "Facebook training videos and internal memos show another reason for the change -- the company's growing concern about a decline in user engagement, which typically refers to actions like commenting on or sharing posts.Comments, likes and reshares declined through 2017, while "original broadcast" posts -- the paragraph and photo a person might post when a dog dies -- continued a yearslong decline that no intervention seemed able to stop, according to the internal memos. The fear was that eventually users might stop using Facebook altogether." So they made changes to the algorithm and ended up making things worse, by emphasizing politics, hate-clicks, and arguments. This shows the limits of algorithms: there is a reason that actual news organizations rely on humans to decide on what information to present to you, not some machine learning black-box.