Comment by nyarlathotep_ 5 days ago
Facebook has devolved to the realm of the unreal now.
I signed-in a few weeks back and the whole thing was just bizarre clickbait, ads, and bizarre clickbait generated image spam.
I really don't see how there's a future for this.
Is this (the abandonment and subsequent mass-sloppification) an American thing?
Is there a user base in other countries? It seems like a relic of a previous era.
> I cannot see a future where people think this is healthy and can continue.
The first is not a prerequisite for the second. See: fast-food, car-optimized cities, Electron apps, microplastics, AI-controlled drone warfare, trap music, etc.
Yes. I also got fake airplanes and way too long Wikipedia summaries of random things. It seems to me that there are really only a handful of outfits that really have the Facebook algorithm over their knee. It seems like the sort of thing that content moderators should be able to combat, but Facebook has just sort of given up.
> 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
There are limits to this--at some point it reaches a tipping point, and the people leave.
We've broadly seen this on FB with American Millenials (the "core" original FB demographic, there's only so much people can take or so much "value" they get from sinking their time there.
It's shit even with an ad blocker. The problem is that there's just very little organic content anymore, because the fad of posting all the time on social media passed. A social media site can't subsist on birthdays, wedding and babies, but that's all people post about these days. The interesting stuff has moved (back) to topic-based groups or pseudonymous forums (like this one).
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.