I was actually going to post vacation photos a few months ago, after my first real trip post Covid. But... it just felt really awkard to do so all of a sudden. My feed is just stuffed with shared content and other crap, it no longer felt like something I would be welcome doing.

Its been making me wonder if its time to sell my shares, which I have held since the IPO. It just feels like FB errr "Meta" is really losing its way, and this Metaverse stuff just seems like its going to be a furnace into which billions of dollars are going to be thrown into. My gut says its time, but I just can't quite pull the trigger yet.

I don't understand your hesitation to share your photos (or at least, not based on that criteria). "[wouldn't] be welcome"? By whom? Facebook? Or your friends? Would that imply they'd rather see ads and shared crap content than original content?

IMO Facebook needs an "original content only" setting. I block every single page that some idiot shares, but I'm not sure how much it helps. I will literally never want to see something shared from another page.

It seems like this would be a good thing for FB too. Keep engagement up, keep inserting ads. Hell, they could insert MORE ads if the content I saw from my friends had a greater signal:noise ratio.

Anyway, I recently shared some vacation pictures and quite enjoyed it. So much better than a bullshit "story" that lasts 24h and nobody can engage with except via DM. Such a weird impulse for an app. (okay, I get that they want you to use it constantly so you have FOMO about missing content that disappears after 24h, but I don't get why they don't want any real user engagement on the content).

I totally get what he says. If your feed no longer feels like it's your feed, more like some bazar on your phone, than why post anything private?

Exactly this, it's gone from a something like a yahoo listserve with your friends to nextdoor with the whole world. And this repositioning happened completely behind the scenes seemingly as a side effect of pushing monetization too hard.

No I get it. Today it feels less like posting them on a microblog and more like hanging them in the middle of a mall and telling your friends they can look there. It also fits a little too close to the toxic "just the good parts" narrative of social media.

This was what led me to quit Facebook as well. I just got a real sketchy feeling sharing photos of my family knowing that other people would see them intermingled with all sorts of awful content.

This makes absolutely no sense, and is totally your own mental trip. Your friends (at least some of them) want to see stuff from their friends. Now, Facebook might not show your photos in their feeds, but most people would rather have that than more ads.

My FB feed no longer feels like walking down a hall with my friends in it, it feels a lot more like walking through a mall with advertisements constantly in my face and strangers screaming from every store front with their "content." It just feels like a very different place than even a few years ago- and showing your vacation photos in the mall is the wrong place to do it (I know the analogy isn't perfect, but its the best I can do to reflect on why it felt weird to me).

They are pretty much at the tipping point where the signal to noise ratio has gotten so low that it seems futile to add more signal. There is also a component to it as well where is it really worth it to give FB even more data about my life?- what am I even getting in return for it these days? And even more recently, I woke up one morning recently and the feed felt really stale, I was seeing posts from the previous day. I tried to look at just my friends, and then sort by most recent, and you could see that just the number of people actually posting what they are up to is just way down.

Instagram is better for this these days, but its headed in the same direction it seems.

I think it makes a great deal of sense. The concern (I assume) is that his posts will be surrounded by all the nonsense that FB is filling people's feeds with.

The context in which you share stuff is incredibly important. If the platform will bookend your posts with crap, it reduces the value of your own post.

This.

Most people have ~300 friends. Most of those friends never post, and the 10% that do probably only post a couple of times a year now.

That means whenever you log in, there is no content from your friends to see.

I’m not so sure about that. My mom posts on Facebook and gets a few likes with pictures of Jesus with text in them, and my wife posts every day with political hot takes, literally just text posts and gets hundreds of likes on virtually every post she makes with tons of comments and engagement.

My high school peers post pictures of their kids all the time. I like their pictures and they like mine. My grandparents all like my posts too, except grandpa who told me not to curse on Facebook so I blocked her. I’ll curse on Facebook if I want, damn it!

Edit: You know, I haven’t even posted this but just to verify I went to Facebook and… 90% was suggested pages and barely any of my friends posts. I swear it wasn’t like this yesterday. Did someone push an algorithm change and screw everything up in prod for Facebook?

I have also noticed a lot more suggested pages recently, I think they pushed a junk algorithm change.

> My mom posts on Facebook and gets a few likes with pictures of Jesus with text in them, and my wife posts every day with political hot takes

I'm so sorry. I hope you can get help.

Yea this comment really buried the personal lede. I think I literally raised an eyebrow.

And the 1% daily posters would actively drive you away from Facebook if their spam of posts showed up in your newsfeed.

You can see this by going to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

This temporarily forces chronological feed by most recently posted. My feed of actual people turned into a ghost town.

People post liberally to private Groups you're a member of, and you don't need to be their friends. Group posts should be the majority of your newsfeed.

That's an extremely liberal use of the word friend.

A more accurate way to state it would be to say 'facebook connections'. If you don't regularly communicate with them, they aren't your friends.

If they won't help you move a couch, they're not a friend.

If they are only your friend because you talked to them recently they probably aren't your friend either.

That’s nitpicking. These people are called "friends" on FB, not "connections".

It's not nitpicking. It's the correct use of a word with its established definitions.

If you want to use the FB corporate meaning, go ahead, but label it appropriately.

Can we all agree to call them FB friends, not friends.

> 'facebook connections'

This is called an acquaintance.

By comparison, Instagram - the other part of Facebook - still puts a "no new posts" item in the feed, so there's a clear indicator that you can put Instagram away and you won't miss out on anything.

However, Facebook has been slowly chipping away at it, by putting suggested posts afterwards (instead of accounts you actually follow) so if you're not paying attention, you'll still get ads / engagement. I expect the "no new posts" indicator will be made smaller and smaller, and eventually disappear.

Funny, I see the opposite on Instagram - it's loaded with "suggested posts" based on things you liked, other accounts you follow, or apparently just things that you stopped scrolling for a second or two on, which I guess it detects. It even switches you to an endless list of suggested posts to scroll through once you have seen all of the posts from people you actually follow since the last time you opened the app - you have to click to an alternate screen/feed if you want to see an "old" post again.

That's a really important consideration. I post virtually nothing and neither do the majority of my old friends from school. Maybe it is due to being older and generally less interesting, but I suspect it is also because my friends who are inclined to post prolifically have moved on to Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter.

Nah. People are posting, and then it doesn't show up in their friends' feeds, sometimes not for days. You can see this easily if you talk to people IRL. "I posted those photos two days ago, didn't you see?" and then the photos show up in your feed a few days later. Or never.

Only 3-5 people I knew posted on Facebook, and it still hid those posts from me. If I can't see my own mother's content, that website is worthless to me.

So ~3B people are now willingly going to Facebook to be served ads and (probably) bot farms that just repost/share junk articles (some of which are or will be computer generated). Can't wait for the metaverse /s

I gave up visiting Facebook a long time ago, so can't speak to whatever current algorithm, but even a few years ago, my feed was already flooded with outside content while only presenting a small fraction of my friends' content.

If I wanted to see most of the friend-content I had "subscribed" to, I had to do a manual tour of their profiles.

I'm sure people do post even less now, but I'm skeptical that's the root cause of what's being reported. The explicit bias towards political/commercial/promoted/engagementbait content over "subscribed" content has been there for years.

Yup, it's in a death spiral. As each feed gets less real content, that person disengaged and posts less. So their friends' feeds get less real content.

I still log into Facebook pretty often, but most of my posts are no longer actually shared with friends, so I hardly ever make them anymore. What's the point of posting something almost no one will see?

I don't know. There's plenty of posts from my friends. I just don't see them because I'm not willing to wade through all of the junk ads and sponsored stuff.

When they changed things to make it so businesses had to pay for "sponsored posts" to get their followers to see them, you could see the writing on the wall.

If normal people's posts get seen by their friends and followers, what would a business be paying for? And so it starts a loop that ends in nothing but AI generated content for doomscrollers.

If the average person's feed has less engagement from their friends, then they are probably less likely to post.

There's probably a threshold where this problem starts feeding itself, and a threshold where it stops.

I'm a relatively old person that still has lots of friends that use FB (and not instagram or tiktok) and 100% of my feed (except for ads) was stuff from my friends.

Agree, but I think this is an effect rather than a cause. They made the feed un-friendly and un-cool, and as a result, Real People stopped posting.