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> I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family I used to be a staunch defender of FB on that basis - while everyone else
by Nursie 3y ago
> I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family
I used to be a staunch defender of FB on that basis - while everyone else was complaining of having hundreds and thousands of not-really-real friends and not finding any value, I was finding it useful to keep up with my actual friends in small ways. Friends who are all over the world and who may not see each other for quite some time. In those situations you often lose track of each other's day to day lives and the friendship slowly feels more remote and fades.
But they killed that. Step 1 was to take away all options that would allow me to see a chronological feed of what my friends are up to in favour of their algorithm. Step 2 was to insert more third party stuff whether I wanted it or not. No, I don't want to see short videos of the girl with the cleavage or the guy with the car or whatever it is that dog is up to. Please stop trying to make me.
Step 3 seems to have been to just flood everything with bullshit.
How would you like to follow this? This local group is suggested for you! This group that is not local too! How about one for nostalgia of a band you've never liked? How about 1500 variations on star wars meme groups? OK, maybe now one friend post. Now how about a cat thing? Or something about conservation? Here's a fan group for an old movie!
The number of IRL friend posts is now much smaller because people have moved off the platform as it becomes less useful. And it's harder to find the content they do generate because they're buried in shit.
By trying to increase my levels of engagement with the platform, FB, you've utterly poisoned it. I presume it works for some portion of users as they must be reporting favourable engagement metrics. But I'm pretty close to just giving up and its network effect feels to me like it's just in a death spiral.
- 15457345234 3y ago> By trying to increase my levels of engagement with the platform, FB, you've utterly poisoned it. I presume it works for some portion of users I'm pretty sure 100% of their growth is coming from the developing world where they basically _are_ the internet.
- Nursie 3y agoI guess that does make some sense, if you use it for everything. It is still useful for one other thing - looking up opening times for local businesses that may not have their own website. But at that point it's not the social network part that's doing it, it's serving more like a geocities page...
- 15457345234 3y agoI won't use it on general principle; I've seen the way the frontpage will pour literal poison and mental damage on you. There was a time I had a relationship issue that was pretty stressful; I discussed it with a few people (my family members) via FB messenger, the way the frontpage immediately became wall to wall 'walk away bro' 'she's cheating bro' 'man up bro' type memes and stuff that served only to spread alarm and despondency was ridiculous and so obviously keyed off of private messenger conversations. I genuinely think it's a cyberweapon that should be destroyed and that anyone that works there has their hands literally dripping with blood, because I could easily see people who were less well grounded and less able to solve the problem directly (i.e. by talking face to face) being driven to severe levels of despair by such tricks.