Comment by juancroldan 5 days ago
Facebook is now a birthday-reminder and old-connection-keeper tool loaded with empty content to feel less sad. Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content consumption. Messaging and group chats are the only real social media now
They could be huge in this, but sadly they'll continue to ruin it because (IMHO) they are rotten at the core. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a question posted on a relevant topic, switched tabs to consult the manual to verify my memory, and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question.
Once people get sufficiently frustrated and the ad revenue declines below the cost of running the servers, we will immediately lose all of the information shared there. None of it will be archived like the old forums. It's a genuinely sad situation.
> and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question
Does anyone know why facebook does this? It's the most infuriating thing, like it's assuming the poor user doesn't know how to "refresh" a page so it does it for them, because clearly they got stuck on an old crusty piece of content.
>For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums
Facebook groups are very disjointed and the algo does a bad job and keeping the good bits floating to the top.
In my experience the Facebook groups always turn to crap, especially if it's a group that attracts more than about 500 users. Abusive posts, scam posts, fake groups with the same name created by bots. I've reverted to old school forums for all my special interests. Marketplace is still the best classifieds product though.
> For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums.
How so? I find FB groups strictly worse than old-school forums.
I don't even enjoy FB Groups any more because of the way they filter comments to “most relevant” so I have to click twice to change it to “all comments” on every single post, over and over and over. Tiresome.
It's embarrassingly dumb sometimes, too, like a post can show “3 comments”, I click it, and the “most relevant” will just be two of them with a bunch of empty space left over in the UI. Just show me all of the fucking comments omfg!!!
Only reason I caved and joined Facebook a few years ago was to get access to a group dedicated to Boston Whaler boats. There were two previously-thriving forums that were slowly dying. The forums were great. The Facebook group was not better, just alive.
That's interesting. In what sense would you say FB groups are much better than forums?
But yeah I agree, groups and marketplace are the only things keeping FB alive.
They’re better in the sense that people actually use them
Probably true with most successful things. Marketplace is just a low barrier to entry for people already using Facebook. I find it generally terrible, but that's where people are selling.
would rather use reddit for foruming than facebook groups
I would rather have ol' good forums. I would rather have years long posts in the frontpage and the ability to bump a long burried post when new info is up, and not missing the opportunity to engage with a topic just because 1-2 days passed without me logging in and thus the post, being more than 1-2 days old, is not in the frontpage anymore.
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.
Funny that you think they’d prioritize something that’d be useful, good for you.
Remember when they told us that capitalism would cause people to trip over themselves to give us what we want and need because that would naturally be where most of the profit could be had? Why do you think it didn't do that in this case? The answer of course is that facebook does serve it's customers. It serves the people who can afford to buy ads, and what it serves them is you.
Honestly, everything would be much better if either a.) people just paid for stuff or b.) governments decided ad-tech in its present form should not be a thing, and regulated the retention of personal data as a liability, to make targeted advertising less-personalized/unprofitable.
As a system for discovering price, free markets work really well. The downsides comes from politicians not understanding/caring the limitations of free markets and what kinds of problems they're simply not intended to solve. These are the economic factors beyond price. More broadly, they're our values.
If we outsource the need for philosophy/wisdom to the free markets then there is no reason why the market will not demand child labor, 7 day work weeks, single use everything, and privatized security forces. We failed to take action earlier, and the same kind of stuff has already happened to the environment. Not to mention that gambling and security fraud are making a comeback.
The missing ingredient is usually "competition"
Same thing with the "private sector is always better" religion - if there's no meaningful competition, you end up no choice coupled with a profit motive, vs. no choice but I can at least nominally vote and be represented
ISPs are usually a good example in the US. My old apartment had one provider, and wouldn't you know it, at my new apartment with multiple providers, I got five times the bandwidth for half the price.
See also: enshittification
We don't pay them, so really why would they? I don't do work for people who don't pay me either.
iCal feeds don't bring you into the site. The whole point of Facebook is to be a walled garden that discourages you from going elsewhere. You're lucky they are not like X and deprioritize external links. Or maybe they do, I have not tested it myself.
The popular wisdom is that FB has deprioritized external links -- some accounts on FB are now posting an image with a blurb and then saying "link in comments." I don't know if they're doing it on rumor, official communication, or having tested clickthru rates themselves, but several of these have large enough media operations that all of those sources are plausible.
Sounds like you use iOS? Add the birthday to the friend’s contact and it’ll appear in your calendar automatically. You’re welcome in advance.
> 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.
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.
Sadly for me, there's another use case for Facebook: special interest groups (as in niche groups for hobbies).
When the Great Migration away from phpbb forums and bulletin boards happened, lots of these groups moved to Facebook. I loathed it, but joining the migration was the only way of keeping up with stuff that interested me.
Now there's another Great Migration to Discord, which I won't follow. Real-time chat simply triggers my FOMO and is stressful to me. So any community that moves primarily to Discord will lose me as a member. I suppose nobody will miss me though.
I guess he meant content produced by "professional" content creators with the only goal of earning money instead of interesting pictures from your friends' life.
At least that's how I experience Instagram these days. It's a chat app where people send each other content made by others in the DMs.
Very few of the people I know personally have posted in the last few years, but most of them seem to casually use the app to explore whatever the algorithm shows them.
Marketplace is the absolute worst UX I could imagine.
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.
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.