I was able to do this by aggressively curating my feed. It worked, but it was already too late. ~50% of my friends had already ditched Facebook, and the rest rarely posted.

The news articles really killed the social aspect of Facebook, and the social parts that were left are just infuriating and upsetting. You end up "socializing" more with strangers who hate you than with your friends.

Facebook could've been a fantastic business (though still a cancer on privacy) by being the "identity layer" of the web. Instead it decided to become the worst news aggregator combined with the comments sections of old YouTube videos. Truly some of the worst product decisions ever made.

There is a lot to read into this as I think many service’s social element is some form of fostering conflict.

I posted this link as another response. The average user spends 58 minutes a day.

I don't think I miss anything much

Maybe group chat was always destined to kill the better side of FB, I don't know. I just know that FB uses extreme negative emotion to engage, and that's not a sustainable strategy.

I think Instagram still often has the feeling of being mostly posts from people you follow, but they could easily ruin that if they're not careful. Instagram comment sections are pretty gross.

They have pretty much every app, website, device manufacturer in their pocket.

It's sick what VC funded diarrhea can accomplish. The fake liberal crap that these companies put out is at odds with their business model that eat away at the societal fabric in a meaningless manner.

The Facebook feed is their largest advertising and revenue stream. They do advertise elsewhere, but the stream is where a huge chunk of their money comes from.

> but you have already given enough data that they can carry it through all these "properties" without much loss.

The value of fresh users is much higher than stale years old data. This is why google has agreed to start dumping people's data after 18 months by default. Also, if you cut ties cleanly enough, they can't monetize the information they have on you regardless because they can't tie your account to your browsing. (That last bit is arguably the toughest part).

Yes, almost exclusively. To the point where I made a list of my favorite two hundred publishers as an interest list and used that as my FB link in my browser toolbar. It makes a great link aggregator.

I also had separate topic lists, one just for recipes (17 follows), one just for tech news (60 follows), science (33 follows), entertainment (29 follows), art (24 follows), business (26 follows), and world news (58 follows). For some reason none of those lists work anymore, they all had to be recreated after a certain date, as a "custom list" instead of an "interest list". The basic workaround is, follow a page, add it to your list, unfollow it.

Conversely, I can have a list of just close friends, same thing applies, I only see their posts, not anything else.

The thing about lists is I could have multiple feeds instead of one news feed, and I can pick the feed I want.

FB is killing the list feature over time, I'm surprised it works in any capacity. It's not in the new redesign, and it's not in mobile.

I liked the idea of prismatic, but it surfaced mostly clickbait. Feedlys popular didn't feel as dynamic. Have you tried using Fb this way, or are you just telling me I should use something else? Why do you think I would find rss to be an improvement (I migrated from rss to Fb lists.)

I just quit FB. I realized that it ceased adding value to my life some time ago. Turns out you can get a feed of what's interesting in people's lives just by texting them and sharing with them via text and email.

Australia's IM is dominated by Messenger too.

A fair number of my friends use Messenger because it's essentially the only thing other than SMS most everyone has. I use SMS and iMessage for a fairly decent sized group of friends.

I believe that if FB asked users to pay even a dollar a year more than half of the users would disappear.

But I don't actually have a problem with the ads. Ads targeted at me on Facebook are pretty good - they're often things I actually want to know about (like upcoming gigs in my area). I don't mind them and don't have a problem with their inclusion in my feed - it's the algorithmic content tangentially related to my friends which I detest.

WhatsApp used to require a small payment many years ago but would extend the free trial period if one did not pay. Maybe they were A/B testing the willingness of people to pay. They even blocked the app for a few days sometimes, then invariably unblocked it after a few days. Somebody paid, almost everybody didn't.

About Events, I didn't even know they have an app for that. I looked for it on Google Play and didn't find it. Is it part of the Facebook app? I saw people using Eventbrite when showing up at events. No in person events yet after the end of the lockdown.

If you just divide FB's revenue by users you'll get, say $20/year (no idea, someone look it up).

But if FB were to offer an ad-free experience for $20, the users willing to pay will be the most valuable. If you're willing to pay $20, you are probably worth $40 in advertising. Maybe you'd be willing to pay $40? Turns out those people are worth $80.

https://investor.fb.com/financials/?section=quarterlyearning...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-...

I think the idea has merit, a paid social media platform that fosters engagement with people you care about rather than driving "engagement" with the goal of more ad revenue.

Because I believe that Facebook is such an utterly untrustworthy company that they would still sell me out to the highest bidder.

Note that I ditched my FB account in 2014 and never used any of their other properties, including WhatsApp.

One of the simpler ways to fix social ills and misallocated resources is to utilize the price mechanism.

They seem to be very good at categorizing things. After all, it's the foundation of their entire business model: placing people into a giant ontology of subjects and then selling access to that ontology to advertisers.

It's hard for me to believe that they can't notice that I basically hide every single political post no matter the subject that appears on my timeline. You'd think it would be easy for them to de-prioritize these and it would make the whole experience more appealing.

I even logged in using incognito mode, using both Firefox and Chromium without any adblocker and I still didn't see anything except for posts by friends (and a few ads of course).

Perhaps I'm not getting anything else because I rarely log in, so they are hoping to get me back in by showing me stuff that I'm more likely to want?

This doesn't do what you think it does.

When you go to facebook.com incognito means you wont give them any of your normal cookies so facebook will be all like "Who is this guy???"

But then you log in, so facebook goes "oh I see it's lokedhs! welcome back!"

Incognito mode is designed to be undetectable. So from Facebook's point of view it looks like you signed in just like normal, and they will give you content just like normal.

Sorry for not being clear about that.

I bet yes. People like seeing more content.

>just what they've posted

I bet your feed would be nearly empty. Not much people like to put effort in creating content. But everyone like to consume content.