Comment by corobo

I would argue that social media’s positive-feedback engine contributed to its own demise. Anec-data:

After being terminally online on Instagram, I decided to took a two-week break because I was noticed I was mindlessly scrolling through content that I enjoyed. After the two weeks, it was striking to note that almost all videos followed a pattern- a jarring hook in the first two seconds, a provocative question, rapid-fire cuts and a soundtrack. Most videos have to follow this proven formula, but in doing so, they'll be like all the other videos and will then have to take the next step to engage users, so videos become more aggressive and formulaic, which for me, gets in the way of the content.

This is completely omitting the fact that quickly scrolling past accounts you follow will trigger Instagram to suggest clips that are more provocative in an effort to capture one's attention. Even if you're intentional about what you consume, the app is adversarial to your own intentions.

> Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.

No, it wasn't conscious, they just incrementally and iteratively optimized the site to maximize page views and ad revenue. Turns out that ends up eventually killing it - without ever having the intention of doing so. But you can rest assured that every decision on that long, slippery slope optimized some metric toward a local maxima.

It's been 8 years since my last post on Facebook and I visit less than 10 mins a year (only because I have one friend who uses FB messenger to communicate with me when he's traveling).

I use SM very seldom. But IG was my fav for a long time. I only had about 50 friends, all real people that I knew, they didn't post daily, it was roughly 1:1 ratio of follower:following, so - I could open it up about once a month, scroll through a dozen or so images and see the "you're all caught up" notice and bounce. At some point, I remember it saying my account wasn't showing me Ads because I had low follower count / low engagement - which I thought was great and it went on that way for a few years. Then at some point it became clear it changed. At first, it wasn't Ads, just posts from random people inserted into my feed. I never engage with anything overtly - no likes, comments, etc. But, I think I do spend more time on things that I "like" and do swipe through if there are multiple images if I find something interesting. So that was all the training that it needed. Soon after that, all I see on IG are half naked women in form fitting attire and construction content. Turns out I'm a hetero male that has a hobby of building stuff/home improvement, but I already knew that. I stopped using it all together.

The funny part is because of my construction hobby & interest in building science; I started seeing Ads in Spanish which I don't speak. I get this on YT too as that's where most my "how to build a ...." stuff ends up.

I feel it's all a side effect of chasing numbers. They show us a bunch of junk, which is addictive for a while but eventually we quit it for good. If they had decided "ok, Facebook is just going to be the place for friend updates" many of us would have stayed.

Meta made the decision to take control of what users see via the feed, and to show them mostly content which is NOT from friends. Content that "performs well".

The testimony is disingenuous, but true. People see less of their friends because they are show less of their friends. Friends post less becuase no one sees it.

It's not so much dead as resembling a mangy, depressed tiger stuck in a cage at a discount-tier circus

I'm no Meta apologist, but I don't know if we can blame them on this one. Unfortunately in the digital age, everything reverts to the mean so quickly. It probably turns out that the most effective way to capture user attention is to give them an algo feed of addictive slop.

Unfortunately capturing user attention is also the best way to sell advertising, so it makes sense that all their products converged on algo feeds.

Facebook groups are like the new Internet forums. There’s tons of stuff that’s moved to Facebook groups like Fishing and Car forums. For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums.

Marketplace seems to be the new Craigslist and much better IMHO.

Posting is probably dead or dying. I haven’t done it in a decade or so.

Ooh speaking of birthday reminders - if Facebook is browsing this thread looking for things to fix: bring back the birthday iCal feed!

You literally had notifications via my calendar bringing me back to your site every few days/weeks to say happy birthday and maybe have a bit of a browse. Now the reminders are in my todo list and I say happy birthday via text or call instead. Path of least pain in the backside.

Absolutely bizarre they ditched the birthdays and events iCal feeds.

> Facebook is now a birthday-reminder

It isn't even good at that. I'll often see “it was [whoever]'s birthday yesterday” when I did login on the last couple of days, and it didn't bother to mention the fact then. Too many ads and pointless reals to show me on those days, to have space to insert the now/upcoming birthday reminder, presumably.

"mbasic.facebook.com" was a vastly simpler UI, and had notably less noise content. Sometimes "back" navigation even worked properly. They killed that last year :/

Were it not for distant family using it, I would almost certainly download my content and nuke my account.

> Messaging and group chats are the only real social media now

This is accurate as far as I'm concerned. Interacting directly with actual friends; no ads or clickbait content injected.

I was thrilled to find out that I can block facebook.com in my etc/hosts and still have access to messenger. Hard limiting the time I spend being "social" with robots and hostile outsiders has gone from being a good idea to being a survival strategy as we got further into the industrialization of the attention economy.

Anybody worth keeping in contact with, I have their phone number.

The only use for Facebook is for the marketplace.

> Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content consumption

Huh? They were explicitly built for that purpose, not "trending towards". Without content consumption, those platforms are nothing.

Actually it's biggest value is marketplace though the scammers know that too.

(now as in 10 years ago)

Discord are where the kids are at. But with them going public it's going to enshittify quickly and it's only a matter of time before they move onto something new.

The thing that always surprised me about this when I still used FB was that they clearly had the expertise available in Meta to do it right because my Instagram ads/recommended content was almost stunningly well-tailored: events I actually wanted to buy tickets to, products that actually interested me, even down to reels from new comedians I find genuinely funny...

My FB feed, by comparison, was almost exactly like yours - not just irrelevant interests, but geographically crazy irrelevant interests.

I think the main Facebook product is basically running on autopilot now- the folks who wrote the pipelines got promoted and went to work on other stuff.

(note that if you click Friends or Feeds you will see somewhat more personal content, but basically, the main stream is just a list of irrelevant garbage)

My girlfriend also gets the same stuff over and over, most of it AI-generated garbage she's absolutely not interested in. No matter how often she selects "not interested", they always come back. Strangely, this started only recently on her account and mine is still comparatively okay. From what I've heard, it's much worse for US users.

One thing that amazes me is that Facebook thinks I'm interested in content I was interested in more than 25 years ago before Facebook even existed. It's mysterious.

I spent over one year being served sponsored content advertising sales of firearms, cloned credit cards and drugs. Last time I logged in, I’ve noticed that I was being served content based on interests of my close friends. For example, a close friend got really into rock climbing, so I got tons of rock climbing meme accounts.

I have now grown tired of all of that and, when I realised that it had been ages since I had seen someone I actually know post anything, I deactivated it all.

I haven’t had a Facebook account in about a decade at this point, and I recall continually discussing already how useless it was without chronological sorting and recommending you random crap (and I’m not just talking about the ads).

I thought it was being insulting for a while but I guess I did pause on it to screenshot and make a witty post but I'm constantly getting Dull Men's Club, and more recently the knockoff versions haha

Facebook, I'm not into these, and I've told you so! It was just that "Suggested for you: Dull Men's Club" was funny the first time!

YouTube has lots and lots of bot comments as well.

can we really measure whether they're bad at something they don't actually earnestly try to do?

I've also done this and my record count was 120. 120 sponsored or suggested posts about things I don't care about in between the posts from people I'm actually interested in.

I'll echo what others have said - if social media is dead, it's because they killed it themselves.

Fun game. I just had 7, then 3, then I gave up after 30. And those 2 friend “posts” were 1. someone sharing a page’s post, and 2. a friend posting what appears to be an automated happy birthday on someone else’s wall. I did not see any actual content from friends at all.

Most stuff on FB seems to be 1. pages I don’t follow 2. ads 3. posts from groups I no longer care about 4. random people who are not my friends but somehow I still get to see their posts in my feed (not even popular posts) 5. sometimes, some uninteresting activity by an actual friend (commented on something, shared something) 6. occasionally a friend’s IG story pops up (I guess these are automatically cross-posted to FB or something)

I've been on Instagram for less than a year for a photography and now my feed regularly includes what people are now calling "rage bait". which I found are people purposefully posting things to get people to engage with their content and are rewarded when more people comment on that content.

I 100% agree that I cannot see a future where people think this is healthy and can continue.

On my feed I get AI-generated pictures of castles and houses in the woods. There are enough real places where we don't need to make stuff up. Makes me feel bad, actually.

I'm British living in Berlin, and it's almost that dead to me. 1/3rd irrelevant ads, 1/3rd irrelevant suggested content, 1/6th one single poster who mostly shares political messages that other people created, 1/6th everyone else combined.

> In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media.

That seems accurate to me, and it makes me think of the old-media saying, "If it bleeds, it leads." In other words, anything to get eyeballs/clicks.

Meet the new-media. Same as the old-media.

Enshitification. Investors want their ever increasing return on their investment, even if it means plastering the product with ads

Oh wow I actually forgot about this.

I used to have a bookmark that took me directly to the friends feed but it would seem it just redirects to the homepage now, and the navigating to the feeds fresh just loads within the page rather than via URL (at least on mobile web, m.facebook.com, not checked desktop)

Honestly it feels like a hostage situation

Like some engineer in the company begged Mark like, "Please, people are going to drop your product completely unless you give them some control" (remember Top Stories vs Most Recent?)

And Mark's like "yeah, ok, cool" (it'll be removed in 2 years when said engineer quits/is fired)

This is the right answer, and it's something I believe Meta has also said publicly, that messaging apps have become the family and friends connection machine as people shifted to using mobile phones and messaging became free and able to handle multimedia.

Yes this is the key point, and I really don't think Zuckerberg is to blame for this. It's just how the market moved. Before tiktok Zuck did actually try and move facebook back to friend territory, but tiktok became such a threat to time spent online they had to shift to "engaging content"

And everyone is in whatsapp groups anyway for personal content...

When Elon bought twitter he bought back the "following" tab on twitter, and frankly, I used it a few times then stopped. It was just boring. Shifting through pages and pages of random content from people I follow is just too much energy.

The fact is, personalised feeds do just work. We hate this, but it works.

It's a bit like sugar, I know it has zero benefit in 2025 eating sugar, but I just do it, because its nice and it works, and it feels good. My brain knows its bad for me, but I just can't resist.

Now you can blame restaurants and ice cream shops for this, but the fact is, if the particular ice cream shop I buy ice cream at closed, or offered less sugar alternatives, it would in fact lose market share. And of course, there are sugar free ice cream shops, but their market share will never be that big.

If facebook wanted to actually stay on top, they were forced into this.

> Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and, soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly discussion.

I sometimes have the feeling that most HN commenters are also unemployed or in academia and most non-commenting readers are employed.

That creeps me out, and probably everyone who realizes it. But, and it's not a tongue in cheek question, why not try to use it to your advantage ?

I see posts from my friends all the time. Most of the post in my feed are from friends or groups I follow.

It’s odd that in the iPad version, the friends button at the bottom doesn’t take you to the same feed, but rather lists of people to add.

And why would some one continue to use it if all it does is show ads? You have to put some cheese on a rattrap if you want the rat to stick his head in it.

Pretty sure the next target IS gonna be WhatsApp. Ads inserted at random intervals into groups. Give that whole cycle enough shit iterations and we are back to mailing lists and IRC channels.

Unfortunately not on mobile web, just takes me to the homepage (even if I replace the www with m to rule out a blanket redirect to mobile)

I guess I could restrict my Facebooking to desktop if it still works there but then I'll visit even less haha

On desktop - left sidebar, Feeds > Friends (not Friends at the top level). On mobile (or at least iOS, which I have) the bottom sidebar, second left button Friends are not perfect for me but cut out 90% of the garbage.

Yeah, this experience could really vary from person to person. I wonder if this person has anyone in their "friends" actually regularly posting? If nobody in their network is posting anything, there's not posts from their network to appear.

I tried the same a while back. I am now pretty sure it's part of the algorithm. If you stay away long enough, it reels you back in to scrolling by showing you some important updates first and before you know it, it draws you back into the abyss of AI generated content and ads and influencers.

edit: s/tells/reels

you can't. they don't give you a filter to show just friends. you have to slog through all the "recommended" posts

On web site - https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

They have a friends feed which will also include some adds