And when actual friends' posts show up, 90% of the time it's a like or a share of some uninspiring web page's article with no comment.

It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.

It was bad enough when people started posting pictures of text instead of just posting the text. Now they're posting videos of static text. What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts?

And because these posts with the backgrounds get larger font sizes compared to normal posts, to get attention in a voluminous group one must play the same dirty game. They're literally dragging people into the dirt pit.

Hope they don't introduce animation in these gaudy backgrounds!!!

Why not just give some font controls instead and remove all this background nonsense?! (Though this could also be argued to be terrible)

One day everyone will look back at these stunts and see them for the ugliness and abomination they are, just like we look back at banner ads with derision and hate.

# ppl like flashy stuff # #################

You joke, but they bought Oculus for a reason.

I assume big media pieces are where the advertising money is.

The English Football Association has used a 2-minute Twitter video in order to announce the list of 23 players who made it to the World Cup (https://twitter.com/England/status/996737073418784770). I personally hate this trend.

Their alternatives were:

1. Interrupt people's flow by getting them off of Twitter. 2. Try fitting them all in one tweet (impossible). 3. Try fitting them in multiple tweets, which would make the users retweet a specific tweet that contains whichever player they're interested in, and their followers wouldn't see the entire roster.

I can see the appeal of transmitting the info in a 2 minute video since it gives users one tweet they should retweet, and transfers the important message in a relatively short amount of time (albeit much longer than skimming through a block of text).

Pickford Butland Pope

TAA Trippier Rose Maguire Jones Stones Walker Cahill

Henderson Dier Alli Lingard Young Delph RLC

Sterling Vardy Kane Rashford Welbeck

The moment you (meaning they) even combine these words you've missed the point of Twitter.

I think putting the spam on facebook on equal footing with its post targeting as to why people aren't using facebook is wrong. I have hundreds of friends and tens of pages on FB, which I'll admit by FB's standards isn't all that much, yet I still find it much harder to browse than other sites with many times the content. Most people simply don't post that often or not at all, and the pages I joined don't post often either.

Despite how little content there is I find the issue of managing it all completely intractable. When I'm on Feedly I go through hundreds of posts worth of content in a few minutes by mashing the j key until I find content I want to read later, save it and then spend maybe 2 hours a week going through content I care about. When I'm on Twitter I skim until I see familiar content and pick out the stuff I care about. When I'm on reddit, I know it takes about 48 hours for my feed to "refresh" so I'll spend some time every other day skimming from top to bottom.

I can't even begin to figure out a workflow for finding content on Facebook. The whole thing is laid out so quickly finding the things I care about is impossible. I can scroll past ten posts I've seen before something new pops up so I have no idea when to stop scrolling. There's no concept of a "read" post and unlike reddit the "hide" button, hidden behind a menu, acts like a downvote. I have no way of creating a single stream of just the things I care about, and if I did there's no way to update myself when things change. Unlike youtube, there's no RSS feeds so I can't just do my browsing from Feedly. Even just getting a feed of my events is impossible since FB has the audacity to suggest events from pages I've never interacted with, have no friends going and thinks those are more important to me than the events created by pages I actually follow. Push notifications are insanely coursely-grained (or at least they do a good job hiding the interface). Cambridge Analytica be damned, the reason I don't use FB is because I can't figure out how. My age, income level and computer-addicted brain should make me prime meat for advertisers, yet I change the oil more often than login to FB simply because the algorithms that generate my feeds are just that bad.

the ui i won’t bother to defend though.

I don't think I've read a more accurate description of anything in a long time... Thanks for putting my feelings on Facebook into words!

The last thing I care about is that my friend's aunt comment on a thread from October 2016, but for some reason Facebook thinks that needs the #2 slot on my feed.

When someone overshares, or gets soapboxy, or just spammy, I just unfriend. I did this with my sister! That's something I'd never do on Facebook.

But how does one even overshare on Goodreads when all the updates are about book reads or picks to to-read? In the comments?

If somebody is reviewing books I have zero interest in (eg: super partisan politics, superhero comic books) then I'm likely to unfriend them on Goodreads.

One of my middle-aged male friends was really into Young Adult romances. Like two books a week. I had to let him go.

I bet those people are shown what their friends post and are moaning on their own forums about the lack of memes and quizzes these days.

The point of the algorithm seems to be to keep you scrolling and scrolling to see what you actually want so I bet that noone is happy.

1. If it makes you feel awkward that I'm honest about who I am in writing, then yeah, our friendship is probably superficial at best, and in those cases, I'm not really concerned on your feelings about my feelings. Feel free to unfollow (I know I unfollow certain friends posts).

2. Blogs have been used for this sort of thing for a MUCH wider audience than a group of friends behind a gated digital community, and I've personally never had any kind of issue with reading people's personal struggles, even other devs, and in fact it makes them far more human to me.

Then again, the type of vulnerability you're thinking of may be different than mine, but either way, to each his own. :)

The rest of the behaviors you mentioned are pretty much why I generally don't use Instagram or Twitter more than once every few months. Those formats, even when following devs, seem to encourage the types of activity you're discussing at least in my feeds. But FB is probably the platform I curate the most, simply because most of the people I care about use it to share about their life, from milestones to quick takes, for the most part, without excessive narcissistic self aggrandizing posts (some do, but most are fairly harmless, otherwise after a while, I just choose not to follow).

But I've noticed that there are definitely preferences across the board, which is mainly why they all seem to stick around. I doubt there will be one social media platform to rule them all, the same way there's no one amusement park or one kind of gym. There are behemoths, but there's always a long tail, especially in socializing.

When you’re really turned off by a post (or posts), try flipping it the other way around and see if you can feel your honest concern. Don’t patronize the person and make a big deal of the post, but act constructively: reach out and say hi and share the things that you like about them.

And if you can’t feel moved to do that, that’s fine. You’re not obliged to do anything. But it just might make you leave less grossed out and it might do your friend some good.

To follow up on gppong's comment, these are often people who don't know anyone well ("lonely or powerless"). So the fact that it's people you don't know well who post things like that is kind of obvious in hindsight.

I figured out how to exclude people whose updates tend to be really judgmental or political from my feed without defriending them, but I am still really frustrated by there being no way to keep it chronological. Facebook wants me to read the "top" posts, over and over, apparently, regardless of whether I'm interested or have already read them. And yet, there are many updates that I miss if I don't go to the effort of looking for them.

Most of the value to me is in the messaging function, but there's really nothing special about it compared to all the others that have existed - it's only useful because it's on FB and connected to the people I know that are there.

I find it disturbing when people I don't know ask to be friends, if they don't have any friends in common with me. I can't really understand why FB even allows this as when would they not be bots or scammers?

    People came in droves when it was new and shiny and the easiest route to 'whatever' online.

    At some point folks are only staying around for the messaging platform.

    In some glacially-long (for the internet) pace of time, Facebook will be sunsetted in favor of the new hotness.

When it's someone you just recently met.

imagine going out of state for college and then not being able to add the hundreds of people you’ve met to your facebook friends list because you’re not already connected on facebook with at least one person in common.

people would just spend more time on another social network, where they can connect.

And, since the group are moving to a WhatsApp group soon, I wont have to use Facebook at all.

I used to post random thoughts that struck me as funny and I spent some time getting the wording just right. But I'm such an outlier that it stopped being fun. I just text them to a couple of people now.

On the few occasions I go on Facebook I have to resist the urge to post a tongue-in-cheek comment about how I check in so rarely because "you're all so goddamn boring."

And if I have to look at one more picture of somebody's $37 plate of paella I'm going to burn my eyes out with a fireplace poker.

I hope you’re joking but if not, there is help available for you. Facebook is not reason enough for self-harm. It comes very, very, very close, but close is not close enough.

Facebook is still so useful for groups and events that it’s impossible to leave though. I mean, you can leave, but then you’re the guy/woman whom others need to go out of their way to schedule with.

Twitter got it right with a "customisable news feed", the list[0], where I could create several list timelines for my friends and organize them by those who post about tech, business, political rants, etc.

[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists

(and that status didnt even work)

I havent missed it. It was a bunch of people that arent my friends sharing things that drive me crazy(politics that I have no impact on).

That's Instagram.

What else should we expect?

So it seems the candle is burning from both ends.

There, your unwritten moral code is now written. Go forth and spread your seed.

I moved on.