Technology

SAME. Seeing posts from a week later it because a certain friend is shadow banned just ruined the whole experience.

Yup, I fought it for a while by clicking the appropriate tab or sort button, but they kept changing where it lives until I gave up and never logged on again.

Now it's just here for the community, and youtube for the consumption - at least they let you just look at your subscription by new without any junk mixed in (yet).

There's a certain merit to posts with high interactions getting a higher priority to posts that were sent more recently. I didn't enjoy the Facebook spam that started popping up as people gamed the system. 10,000 "Your friend is playing Fart Hospital! Your friend just pooped himself in Fart Hospital! Your friend has made an Epic Fart at Fart Hospital!" posts because someone didn't realize the game they were playing was posting to their feed.

But they got the Reddit disease, where engagement was everything. And then you started losing sight of media you cared about under a pile of Shrimp Jesus clickbait.

I think, at the end of the day, the Facebook internal metrics changed from "Are our users happy?" to "Are our users meth addicts?"

Yes the far-right astroturfing is becoming very blatant lately. I've noticed a recent worsening trend

I may be wrong (I left the algorithmic social medias when they abandoned linear timelines [kept reddit until about a year before the exodus, since only fedi]) but:

Is that not because that is the content you interact with (argumentatively, likely, but still) or hover over longer with their eye movement sensors, or all the other ways they track you, and so they think "ahh he 'likes' (hate engages with) this content so send more!" in a loop to keep you engaged and keep making money for them through advertisements?

Like, if you ignored that shit (and iirc there's often a way to "reset" your algorithm in some settings, after all, they want the data they sell to be accurate, it's more valuable to sell...) and started only liking/lingering on family shit and cats (how can you ignore the kitties after all), they'd send primarily that, yes?

I could be wrong about that, this is my understanding as an outsider, but I'm curious. At the end of the day I'll forever advocate for the end of such algorithmic practices entirely long term, and the end of one's individual involvement with it in the present moment: "Bruh get off that shit it is rotting your brain. Like actually, by design, and it wants to keep you locked in. Don't look at the Basilisk."

There's a (possibly apocryphal) story about Zuckerberg originally being very resistant to turning Facebook into another Yahoo or MySpace or similar ad-swamped interface, on the grounds that it would scare people away and create a drag on growth. It even got a send-up in The Social Network movie.

Whether this was an intentional business strategy or a second order effect, Facebook was originally one of the cleanest Web 2.0 sites. They did a genuinely pretty good job of focusing on media you were flagged as caring about and showing you activity of friends and family who you wanted to follow. More savvy early users even commented on how creepy Facebook could get, precisely because it could find your friends better than you could and bait you with interactions that drew people together.

The modern iteration of the company is so far away from what it was originally designed to be. The Shrimp Jesus clickbait era Facebook might as well make it a different website. I cannot imagine anyone seeing this site coming into college Freshman year and finding anything that makes it appealing.

Oh hey, you can still get views! You just need to open an advertising account with them, and them pay them anywhere between $50-$1000 and they'll then show your one sponsored post to anywhere between 2 and 50 percent of people who like that kind of thing, for anywhere between 3 days and two weeks. Just select how much you want to spend to get that sweet exposure!

What's that? You want to reach all your friends and followers? All of them? For free? Sorry, they don't do that kind of thing anymore.

You can unfollow everyone but your friends

To be fair, engagement bait works.

Look how much Twitter ragebait gets upvoted here on Lemmy.

Whenever I go to check the source for the posts, they aren't even real; it's a bot account posting 24/7, or at the very least a dedicated engagement farmer. But people don't care, they just want that feeling.

Is it out yet?

See also the privacy-invading aggressiveness of most platforms, and the political ads and propaganda inundating people’s feeds. If social media had just remained a way to keep in touch with friends and post pictures, it would probably have remained popular.

You can still get chronological posts on there if you tape the “Instagram” button at the top and tap followers instead of recommended. Not well labeled but still possible