Facebook is totally worthless now that they force content on you and fill 99% of your feed with it. But I still go there sometimes to view “memories” from earlier times when the site was a vibrant space, full of discussions with friends and family.
Today I decided to browse the feed a little bit, hoping to see some updates from friends. Of course that is impossible now, and instead my feed is full of pictures of celebrities I don’t care about from 20 years ago, MMA crap, and pictures of Miley Cyrus. But one of those pictures was kind of interesting and I clicked it to see if there’s any discussion on these posts like there is here or on Reddit. Nope! There was thousands of comments all saying the exact same thing. Everyone was commenting “legend!” or “absolute legend!”.
What drives people to be the 4432nd person to reply with the same word as everyone else? I checked another random post and it was more of the same type of comments. I just flat-out don’t get that platform anymore. It used to be really useful for keeping in touch with people, and sometimes even really enjoyable. Now it’s pure garbage. I don’t understand why they have made the changes they’ve made and more importantly, I don’t understand why people comment the same things over and over.
(IMO) It all started when they removed the ability to reliably have a chronological feed. That used to be useful to keep in touch with people. Now they have “engagement” content instead.
That’s ultimately why I stopped using it. I tried Facebook Purity for a while, but if none of your other friends and family use it, they’re not seeing the content in a proper way either, so it’s just a shitshow and not fun at all anymore. The best thing it had going for it was a chronological feed where you could see what other people posted in close to real time.
Yeah, I tried a few alternatives as well, but all I use it for nowadays, is keeping up with bands and generally local concerts.
Almost every community event where I live is still hosted on Facebook, so I technically have a profile to share stuff for work. I can’t remember the last time I did anything more except post something work-related. I think my mom thinks I’m weird for not using Facebook lol
Facebook is, as far as I can tell, a lot more user-centric which might lead to a ‘Everything is about you’ mentality. So commenters over there might be more prone to think that whatever they have to say is relevant and could add value. While lemmy-likes are a lot more content focused, not even highlighting the user name of authors a lot. So comments have to be able to exist on their own without a ‘face’ connected to it. Not sure if this makes sense.
Yes that makes sense.
What’s worse is tagging people to show them the post, instead of you know, sending/sharing it to them. I know it’s out of laziness, but that’s how you end up with a post that has just names of people on the comments.
Facebook is and has been trash for the better part of a decade.
One of the best things I’ve ever done is delete my Facebook account.
It sounds like now it can no longer even be used as an excuse to “follow old friends.” Which was always bullshit to begin with, as most people don’t connect with their friends lists after adding. Fuck Facebook. Time to wake up and delete that shit.
Which was always bullshit to begin with, as most people don’t connect with their friends lists after adding
I only have people I know in real life in my friends list. I managed to connect with people I hadn’t seen in ten years when Facebook came out. We all spent a lot of time connecting with each other, but like you said, that was a long time ago. The site engagement dropped off dramatically in 2016, I think because people realized how it was being used to manipulate them, and then dropped off further in 2021 after covid. This forced content crap finally killed what was left of it. There are definitely still people in my friends list who regularly post, but I would never know it without going directly to their pages since the posts don’t show up in the feed.
Imagine willfully putting identifiable information out to the world to see in 2023.
Delete it.
Back when I was still using Facebook, the only “solution” I found was to only use it on my laptop browser, and to make a browser bookmark for every friend, organization, whatever I wanted to follow. So, my family, a few work friends, some hobby organizations that had events, etc. I never bookmarked more than a few dozen. Then I put all those bookmarks into a folder.
Then when I wanted to check in on everyone, I would right-click “Open All Bookmarks” on that folder, and check everyone out one by one.
It was stupid, but it was the only way I could really see what was going on in everyone’s lives (that they were posting, anyway), without it all being hidden by the FB algo. After several months of this, I finally said the heck with it and just stopped using FB at all. Now I use text, emails, phone calls, RSS feeds, and the like to keep in touch. If one of these methods doesn’t work, then I figure the “friend”/whatever relationship isn’t real anyway.
