Yes, here is a chronology of key events:

2020 — Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels: https://www.axios.com/2020/08/05/facebook-launches-its-tikto...

2021 — TikTok overtakes Facebook as world's most downloaded app: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/TikTok-overtakes...

Feb. 2022 — Facebook loses users for the first time in its history — https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/02/faceboo...

July 2022 — Facebook and Instagram are going to show even more posts from accounts you don’t follow — https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23281451/facebook-instagr...

July 2022 — Instagram knows you don’t like its changes. It doesn’t care. — https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/instagr...

Mid-2021, I stop using FB for anything beyond Marketplace.

Mid-2022, I find Instagram to be just as useless as FB.

I find I'm spending far less time on big social platforms. And a little more time in niche web forums. And I mostly feel better (sanity-wise) for it.

>Mid-2021, I stop using FB for anything beyond Marketplace.

The only things I find FB useful for are Marketplace and Messenger. Marketplace is an OK way to sell your junk locally (it basically took over from Craigslist because CL was taken over by scammers and CL never bothered to do anything about it), and Messenger is a convenient glorified phone book and chat app which has a video chat feature that actually works quite well through any browser and doesn't require a local client application like Zoom. It's also really convenient that it works through both my phone and through a browser on my PC, so it's easy to switch back and forth (much easier to type messages on a PC, for instance).

Discord has completely displaced the need for other social media in my experience. And they get hundreds of dollars per year from me. If this isn’t a winning model, I don’t know what is.

It's a winning model.

Who would have thought that paying for something is correlated with positive expectation of outcome?

Someone should formalise this business model.

I'm just spitballing, but I might call it: Doing business.

I'm not sure what's going on with internet ads.

I've blocked them everywhere I can.

It's a failure out of the box for me, as it silo's information and once a server is gone so is that info.

The gatekeepers on some of the more popular gaming servers (where they know they are more necessary than usual) are reddit levels.

People focusing on the winning model are missing that none of the platforms fill identical social roles imo even if they copy features from eachother and that digitally immersed users seem to prefer it this way. I strongly doubt that TikTok would have been improved with the full feature set of Facebook even if it might benefit from integrative features for example. Discord in a similar fashion is where I go for real-ish time talk with friends or gamemates. Both of these are very different than Instagram which has largely become what my wall once was on Facebook but not to be confused for Facebook itself where I go to talk with people who aren't very cyber savvy and by extension join Groups targeted at non-cyber savvy demographics (like my HoA's group)

Discord is completely useless for socializing with anyone who isn't in the IT industry. My mom, for instance, is NOT going to use Discord, but I can get her to use Facebook Messenger.

Not just older folks, young people who don't game regularly don't bother to check it either. The UI makes it quite hard to find people on there, nobody uses real names, profile pictures are random game/anime characters...

I have 50% success. Mom is on discord in our family channel, but dad isn't.

A few things that make Discord unfeasible for general purpose messaging...

The need to host a server somewhere. It silos info, makes that info less permanent and less findable. I've gone to all iDevices at home, so can't self-host.

It also doesn't have great visibility outside the tech worker and gaming worlds. I'm happy to use it if somebody sends me a link, but it's not the default for most people I know (except for those that game). Slack is a bit more common, mostly because of broad adoption at workplaces.

Maybe? Beuller?

> This is a consequence of Facebook making a purposeful strategic shift away from in-network content to suggested content.

In an ironic twist these changes has made it much easier for me to stop using Facebook and Instagram. My usage was never high to begin with but some people in my life only used those apps and I wanted to stay connected. Now every single time I visit either of those apps and I see suggested content I close the app and move on with my day.

Bad strategy, imo. Sounds like they should have tried to answer why people used their product in the first place. “A competitor does it” isn’t a valid excuse—its like suggesting The French Laundry switch to fast food because McDonald’s is a competitor.

I think your analogy is too generous. It’s more like putting an engine on your stapler because people buy cars more often than staplers at a higher margin despite having a monopoly in the stapler market.

They also need to be honest with themselves about whether TikTok is a competitor, or if TT has simply won a completely different business that happens to take customers' finite resources (time) from Facebook.

I think it's pretty cleat cut. They're competing attention farms. How we the product perceive them doesn't matter.

When you're an ads-funded social media company, is there a difference?

The French Laundry is a very niche product, which Facebook is not. I think a more apt analogy is suggesting McDonald's to include more "healthy" options or a coffee bar because the competitors do it and it's a successful business strategy.

More liking pushing "healthy" options in your face in the menu and hiding the BigMac & Co in some obscure small print somewhere.

"Do you want plus sized carrots with your meal?"

Not saying either is a good strategy, I'd rather see more posts from my friends than random pages. Just pointing out the analogy.

Facebook is the fax machine.

The real danger FB finds themselves in is that the initial value prop (make and maintain your friendships with less friction) is LONG gone.

Instead, they are relying almost entirely on the network effect now. You have to be on Facebook because your grandma is on Facebook. This is not sustainable long-term, for obvious and perhaps morbid reasons.

Since 2012, when I "deleted" my Facebook account grandma - or anybody else for that manner - needs to either call me, text me or send email.

This suits me just fine and it works well for friends who actually deserve this moniker.

Anecdotally, I don't think this reflects reality.

A 'strategic shift' to present suggested content may be what Facebook wants to do (or would like to tell investors it is doing).

However, the amount of real content being posted appears to have fallen off a cliff. This is obviously very subjective but holds true for both my own experience and friends/family who have commented.

So there isn't just a similar level of content but the algorithm is displaying less - but literally everyone I know no longer posts to Facebook in remotely the same way.

The only time I see regular updates are 'happy birthday' posts.

Everything else has moved to other apps - mostly Instagram stories.

The drop in real content is astounding. It used to be the case that I’d never ever come close to the end of the content from people I actually follow when I checked Instagram, and 5-6 years ago I interacted with the app daily. (Note: I deleted my FB account 7 years ago but kept insta).

Now I’m in my early thirties and I maybe open it two or three times a week — I hit the “you’ve run out of content from your friends” message in less than five minutes (and I follow ~400 people). It’s even worse because half of that five minutes is spent scrolling past the INSANE number of ads and suggested posts (most of which are terrible ads as well).

My friends are still actively posting “stories,” but I can’t imagine that will last forever (stories are also littered with ads, it’s insane).

Facebook has been out of ideas for a while, but it wasn’t so apparent until recently since they faced relatively soft competition, and they either acquired popular social media start ups or if they couldn’t, stole from them wholesale (snapchat). They now have a real competitor in TikTok and on the last earnings call it became clear they have no plan for regaining users / organic engagement, so they’ve decided to pump the short term financials by serving everyone a shit load of ads. Facebook’s long term prospects are bleak imo.

Has anyone kept track of the number of times they shifted the Facebook newsfeed algorithm?

At different point in time, the feed prioritized: posts from friends, posts from games from your friends, friends' sharing of links to compete with Twitter, videos to compete with Youtube, moments to compete with Snapchat, comments that friends made, posts from friends again as growth slows down

I wonder what percentage of users drift off every time they shifted the algorithm.

The difference of course is that TikTok's suggested content is generally relevant.

My entire suggested feed relates to US politics. I keep getting suggestions for Second Amendment groups, "Stand your Ground" groups, pro life groups, "Isn't she beautiful" (a gun lobby group), "Texans for God" and so on. I'm Australian. I guess this is what I get for doing an occasional checkin at a place named Texas BBQ.

> but the OP is likely enrolled in some sort of test that is giving them 98%.

Couldn't it just be that suggested content is not only placed "between" in-network posts to achieve a certain minimum ratio, but also some small number of suggested-content posts are inserted at a constant drip into your feed (e.g. every N minutes in the feed's timeline) to ensure a certain minimum absolute amount of advertising happens per day per account?

Which would mean that, if all your friends are people who don't post very much on FB any more, there could be 50 dripped in suggested-content posts (to achieve the minimum absolute suggested posts per day) for each one in-network post.

Even without "ensuring a minimum absolute amount of advertising", I presume this would have to be happening on some level, to ensure that anyone who tries to use Facebook "like TikTok" (effectively an RSS reader for suggested content), ends up with a non-empty feed.

It makes sense tho for them to go for suggested content, because the can make you like stuff. That's their thing. It's no random thing they've been hiring psyops veterans of the afghanistan war. They can push things

I think the crux is do users want to see in-network or out-of-network posts?

FB's bet (that tiktok user behavior validates) is high quality out-of-network creates higher engagement than in-network content.