But no family because they'd never figure out how to use the damned thing, amirite?
It's great because it's granular at the friend level. Some of my follows do legitimately act as curators, infrequently boosting cool content that I do want to see. Some are more noisy, and I can pick and choose and tailor my own feed accordingly. It's a nice happy medium, one I'd like to see other platforms emulate if possible, but I suspect they won't because the algorithmic feed is much easier for advertisers to pay to manipulate.
That said, you can post audio clips on Mastodon quite easily.
I may follow a software engineer that writes books on functional programming but I just don't care about his stupid dogs or his alt right political ideas.
"Turn off reposts"
Wait, you can do this?! I guess I wasn't paying attention. Time to give Mastodon another go.
In my opinion, people are bored out of their mind also on a chronological feed from their friends. Not because they dislike their friends, it's just all very repetitive and time-consuming with very little to show for it.
And it’s usually the most random things. Dragon Ball Z. Gangsta rap. NBA. Race cars. Marvel. None of these things interest me yet for WEEKS they only showed me those very specific things.
Deep into the ad topics I managed to find a place where I could search for topics and indicate that I would not like to be targeted for those, and that seemed to have done something. But it replaced one topic with another.
It's crazy how they managed to ruin their own product. They're rapidly bleeding real users and it's totally their own fault. Facebook used to thrive with close social interaction mixed with some suggested content that seemed to be actually relevant. Now it's just anonymous filler content and they don't even show relevant posts anymore.
The only reason I'm still on Facebook is because our local town's official communication is through Facebook (sad, I know) and the neighborhood is active there as well. Otherwise I would have happily deleted my account a long time ago.
But the next day they will show you something "Because you are interested in Topic Y". Where Y is very closely related to X.
I religiously indicated I didn't want to see X, Y or whatever, because I am just not interested in posts from strangers at all. It took two weeks. Then apparently they ran out of topics for me and started right back at the beginning and showed me something for X.
Because sharing personal stuff privately, on group chats, groups made up of close friends, family etc., is the normal thing to do, sharing our personal stuff on FB, IG and the like was the exception. No, it was definitely not ok to share photos of one's unborn baby on FB/IG for almost anyone to see, that was creepy.
Glad that things are returning to a sort of normal.
Reality check came and now we have cast of influencers whose lifestyle is “being influenced”.
Local Karen is left disappointed that she is not that funny/hot/interesting and she is left with watching pro influ stuff only.
But it seems impossible given the incentives you touch on. They can only come up from a startup apparently.
Personally if I and the rest of people like me could just get a nice Facebook circa 2010 somewhere to chill on while the rest of the internet burns these sites down over and over on the altar of wanting to stream video, that'd be lovely.
How'd we get here, well the inflection point was removing the timeline and putting algo feed instead, which was probably a response to dipping engagement as social media became less cool. The cool places nowadays are group chats.
- Part of that is age, of course 20's people will have less time to microblog than their teenage counterpart.
- Part of it is novelty. We're far past the point where sending messages to people everywhere is a hot new thing. So we simply won't talk as much once that wears off
- And lastly, part of it is societal. We are also far past the point where people WANT to post everything for the internet's view forever. Hearing about job opportunities lost because of FB posts made over a decade ago or being cancelled online over some twitter flame war means that talking is dangerous. You don't want to leave everything in your mind out to the public. So you either close down your privacy settings, or talk less. Why take unnecessary risk on stuff you may not even stand by later on?
Shareholders, product managers, business people. Unlimited growth.
That's how these companies become shells of their former selfs.
Optimization.
You've seen SEO, this is Social Media Optimization.
In one of my community groups; it's 90% business, but then someone decides to post an unrelated meme or political message (neither allowed by group rules) as if they don't have any actual friends to share that to.
If we could go back to the days when 80% of the stuff you see is from friends with the remaining being ads, I would happily use FB more frequently and I’m sure most of my friends would too. Surely FB would make more money this way.
How did we end up like this?
I think once engagement dipped a bit, they started adding filler content just to keep us scrolling and seeing more ads. But that made things worse so they had to add more filler. Which made things worse. Repeat until it’s all just filler and ads and people don’t use it anymore.