Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boycott

Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by smt88 on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @11:05PM (#23709535)

> It'd be great if Facebook could just go back to showing me posts by my friends.

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.

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by bredren on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @11:57PM (#23709850)

> You end up "socializing" more with strangers who hate you than with your friends.

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

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by rahoulb on Thursday July 02, 2020 @09:32AM (#23712887)

I can't remember where I saw it, but someone described advertising driven social media as like a pub where they make their money from people having a fight by the front door rather than from selling beer.

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by sjtindell on Thursday July 02, 2020 @01:34AM (#23710322)

I like that observation. The times when I was the most invested in YouTube and Reddit were both when I was having lots of arguments on the platform. Great food for thought.

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by nicbou on Thursday July 02, 2020 @02:08AM (#23710480)

I have done the same. I only follow people I could have a beer with. I have reached the end of my feed so many times. Now there are maybe 1-5 new posts a day. Nobody uses Facebook anymore.

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by scarface74 on Thursday July 02, 2020 @08:21AM (#23712335)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by tonyedgecombe on Thursday July 02, 2020 @09:00AM (#23712653)

Nobody goes there anymore, it's too busy.

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by eppp on Thursday July 02, 2020 @11:48AM (#23714587)

Is 'logged in' a useful metric? You authenticated months or years ago and now every facebook widget on the internet counts as a 'logged in' event just because a cookie still exists?

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by scarface74 on Thursday July 02, 2020 @07:11PM (#23719134)

https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-statistics

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

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by SECProto on Thursday July 02, 2020 @11:40AM (#23714490)

I messed up my custom ublock filters and my fbook feed is literally blank (every post is blocked, autoloader is blocked).

I don't think I miss anything much

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by batiudrami on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @11:16PM (#23709610)

I tried doing this but it seemed to just make the algorithm look harder and harder for new things to show me, so the quality of content actually reduced.

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Re:Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boy... by smt88 on Thursday July 02, 2020 @12:58AM (#23710140)

Yeah, the news articles and non-friend interactions killed the friend-to-friend interactions. It went from being an amazing, private social network to being the shittiest newsreader.

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.

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