Speaking only of the Facebook site/app below. FB Messenger is not included.
For a long while, Facebook hasn’t been a platform to connect people or to connect people meaningfully. It’s either useless and random stuff while your close ones’ posts don’t appear on your timeline and vice versa, or sensational posts that cause anger, anxiety, worry, and despair.
The “algorithm” tuned itself quite well to induce and increase addiction. It’s focused. It’s intelligent. It’s purposeful. None of those aspects may help you become happier or more satisfied or more connected.
I don’t think the “algorithm” can be corrected or made better either. It’s too big, too influential, too profitable and likely too complex (due to ML). Short of getting rid of it completely and going back to a chronological feed only from people and pages you follow, nothing can be humanly done about this decline.
Find another platform and focus on smaller groups if you need or value connectedness or relevant/useful content.
The TikTokification of Facebook is giving Meta brainworms.
The entire model of Facebook, until recently, was the social graph. It seems now that they're terrified of getting their lunch eaten, they are trying to combine algorithmic selection of what random users like the most but have no relationship to the user (Reels) with the social graph, but it's not a good fit and doesn't gel.
I don't understand why people / Meta believes all social networking needs to compete or does compete?
TikTok and Facebook in my mind have very different use cases. It may be true that if people spend more time on TikTok they'll spend less on Facebook, but that doesn't mean these are comparable services. TikTok seems to be more of an video entertainment app and less a social app - more like YouTube with social features imo. Facebook is primarily a service to network with friends, family and businesses - TikTok doesn't really work well for this.
Admittedly I haven't used Facebook for 10+ years now so I have no idea how the Reels integration works, but it seems shoving short-form videos down users necks is probably a bad idea. Surely this isn't what the average Facebook user goes to Facebook for?
It would be like Netflix deciding YouTube was a competitor because "videos" and then adding a load of user uploaded videos to their video library.
> I don't understand why people / Meta believes all social networking needs to compete or does compete?
They are competing with each other over people’s time and attention. The more time someone spends on Facebook the more ads Facebook can show them, and the more data Facebook can collect. The more time someone spends on TikTok the less time they have to spend on Facebook.
The implication is that the “connections” on FB are not that deep, or perhaps more accurately, they don’t offer as entertaining an experience.
It is like being at a party with friends, family, and acquaintances but you’re bored and would rather be reading a book, playing a game, watching TV, painting, etc.
I don't understand why people / Meta believes all social networking needs to compete or does compete?
You’re right - there are still people using MySpace. But I bet people at MySpace wish they would’ve reacted to the rise of Facebook differently.
Similarly, in the five months I was on TikTok it seemed like women especially were proud they made it to TikTok and made fun of women “still on Facebook”.
I think Zuckerberg is rightly afraid of becoming the next MySpace. I don’t know if there’s a way to prevent it though.
The average Facebook user goes to Facebook because they have nothing else to occupy themselves with for 15 seconds, and Reels are the perfect functionality for this
Their real users are advertisers. The advertising budgets are limited. So are people's attentions span (which, again, is what they are selling to their real customers.)
I think most people recognise that, from a user perspective, the product is getting objectively worse.
My usage pattern is typically 5 minutes a day, via browser with uBO, on a desktop computer. I don't/won't use or install any FB-suite apps on my phone.
I have tried to use ?sk=h_chr to force a chronology rather than 'top stories' <sic> but that doesn't seem to make any difference any longer.
Since the 'Reels' push started I've had that section appear every time I've logged in, usually within the top half dozen entries.
Every time I hamburger menu / 'Hide this type', but Hide doesn't actually hide of course -- it just promises to 'show less', which is also clearly a lie.
The product's increasingly user-hostile. The phrase 'death throes' seems appropriate.
The irony in the social graph is that it is an insufficient approximation of people's interest. Initially in 2003 this might have made sense. I.e., I like what my friends like. Yet 20 years later TikTok claims to have cracked the holy grail of what interests me by focusing only on the swipes / behaviour of the individual. Personally, I think TikTok is quite stupid, but I can see the power of the algorithm. Yet the next generation of "social" might be more of a content pull that a content push.
Maybe, but the social graph still fills an important function, and that is missing. I want to know what my friends are doing. If I want to see a cute cat tiktok is better, but in general I'm bored with such things now (which tiktok can probably figure out - I don't actually use tiktok so I don't know), but one in a while one of the cats that live with someone I actually know does something cute and I want to see this. This is about the social connection, not about the cat. I go to facebook to keep track of people. It is more important to me to find out if my actual real life friends have done something than to see something engaging.
I might well spend more time on TikTok which looks for content I'd enjoy, but FaceBook's social network still takes priority to check regularly even when I don't have time.
Did anyone at Meta consider that medium has a part to play in the success of TikTok's algorithm? Something which optimizes engagement for video content isn't necessarily going to work for text and images.
Yes, so they push video harder. e.g. add an option for receiving notifications when a page you follow posts a video - then enabling it by default for every page you follow.
OT, is there any way to get an actual chronological, "friends only" newsfeed from the FB API? If yes, is there any third-parts app that would offer this?
TBH I think the network effect that helped Facebook boom is now working in reverse: FB full of crap -> people post less updates from their personal lives -> there's less to read for their friends -> people visit less/update their feed less.
So even if what you want is possible, it'll probably be quite barren in there.
Yeah, it might very well be that they flood the timeline with crap to hide how little actual content there is left by now.
Still, this might or might not be the case. It would be really interesting to see some kind of study that would analyse how much non-commercial content is still posted on Facebook - but I guess Facebook would fight tooth and nail against anyone actually attempting that.
+1, I have been looking for this as well. I'm keeping FB because I'm member of a few groups that really post interesting content.
However my feed is flooded with random crap that FB hopes I might like better.
The fact is that the instance it went public, it ceased being a platform for ‘connecting people’ and became a financial vehicle.
By failing to tweak algorithms and enhance engagement through psychosocial means and addictive patterns, the company will be failing to serve the demands of its shareholders.
The company is the poster child of the Friedman Doctrine [1], which was paces shareholder value above social responsibility.
For a long while, Facebook hasn’t been a platform to connect people or to connect people meaningfully. It’s either useless and random stuff while your close ones’ posts don’t appear on your timeline and vice versa, or sensational posts that cause anger, anxiety, worry, and despair.
The “algorithm” tuned itself quite well to induce and increase addiction. It’s focused. It’s intelligent. It’s purposeful. None of those aspects may help you become happier or more satisfied or more connected.
I don’t think the “algorithm” can be corrected or made better either. It’s too big, too influential, too profitable and likely too complex (due to ML). Short of getting rid of it completely and going back to a chronological feed only from people and pages you follow, nothing can be humanly done about this decline.
Find another platform and focus on smaller groups if you need or value connectedness or relevant/useful content.