With no communication from the company, publishers relying on Facebook traffic are at the mercy of the inscrutable algorithm. Data shows an apparent change at Facebook in May caused website traffic to tank at some news sites.
One quote that jumps out: “It’s difficult to say with certainty what the causes are, but Facebook has made no secret about its intention to deprioritize news on its platform and give greater precedence to video content, which by nature results in less clickthrough traffic."
It does feel like my Facebook "algorithm" is constantly trying to push "shorts" on me...annoying little videos clearly meant to imitate, I assume, Youtube Shorts, Tiktok, Instagram short videos, etc...
Broadly speaking, with all that's happening in the social media world, it feels like some sort of reckoning or change is coming, but where exactly things are heading is hard to say...
I honestly am not sure why we had become so tolerant of advertisements in our face.
Perhaps we had reasoned it was just the way these companies make money, a necessary evil.
Its getting to the point though, where the more I see a company advertise and put out meaningless and ambiguous statements the less I trust that company.
Isn't there some old adage about don't trust what someone tells you about themselves, rather than the way they act?
I wouldn't mind as much if half the websites out there didn't have the trashiest ads I've ever seen in my life. I've got an ad blocker on my desktop but not on my phone. Amazing that supposedly "professional" businesses are filling their sites with sleazy ads that look like they'll lead you directly to installing a bunch of viruses.
Aggressive advertising isn't anything new, remember when a 30 minute TV slot was 8 minutes of advertising? Or when every site in the 00s had at least 3 banners of malware ads with sound that played obnoxiously loud on load?
yes, social media keeps proving why a profit-driven society really doesn't have the interests of individuals in mind, companies will just do whatever they can get away with to extract as much money as possible from ordinary people.
It's fucking annoying. The amount of times I turned off autoplay and sound in my settings only to have it blasted in my face. It just makes me not want to use Facebook, it's become like a whiney annoying baby whenever I go on it.
We need a new MySpace/Facebook esque platform that isn't corporate, I highly doubt we will get that, and even if their was an option, most people wouldn't even migrate.
Facebook already went through enshittification and should be dead but somehow it isn’t, it just survives off boomers and conspiracy theorists or something.
Similar to how Reddit will survive even if it‘s all just bots talking to each other and reposting into infinity.
Weird to think some text or image I contributed could be reposted long after my death and written about by AI bots.
I was using Facebook as a means to see whats up in my area, everytime I go on now I scroll till I see something interesting, I get a few mins in and decide it's dead and close out of it.
Facebook once was a great tool for local postings, it's now gone to shit. I am really hoping to see another platform, preferably in the fediverse take it's place.
dot com is coming to an end, and people are seeking alternatives, I just hope it isn't a total fragmentation of the masses.
The last time I scrolled through my Facebook feed, I saw more ads than actual posts from people I'm friends with. I couldn't spend more than a few minutes on there considering it was like 1 in 8 posts was by someone I follow or am friends with and the rest were ads.
Not the first time, won't be the least. GET AWAY FROM THE ASSHOLES! Stop giving them your attention and power by building around them. You owe them NOTHING!
Now that Facebook has signed up about everyone in the planet that’s willing to sign up, they’re going to double down on growing by milking the folks they already have.
That means more short form crack content and less stuff of substance.
Let's be real here though, has anyone clicked on a digital news site in the last few years and been happy with the result? Half of them are paywalled and the ones that aren't are absolutely filled to the brim with obnoxious auto play ads, it's no wonder people don't click news site links anymore. I've got no sympathy for them.
Not only that, but a vast majority of them you can tell were never proof read or edited in any way and read horribly. I stopped clicking on news sites mainly because of that. I would get so annoyed reading an article that it was clear not even the author decided to take a moment and read back to themselves.
Aren't the news site complaining that Facebook are stealing their content and want to be compensated for it? Probably why Facebook is putting less emphasis on content from news site.
They apparently messed up the Marketplace Algo at the same time. Sellers are reporting that they have had almost zero non local sales in the past month or so.