During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial, the Facebook founder’s argument was, in so many words, that platforms like his are not what they used to be.
Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
Yeah. By their design. If they would allow user control over what shows up in their feed, mine would prioritize friends' content. I'm not the one choosing to turn my feed jnto AI slop based on my alleged interest in the topic.
The technical complexity of showing a chronological feed of posts from subscribed accounts? Are you asking for one to scoff at thou peasant? You might as well request a toaster without bluetooth BAHAHAHA! BEGONE!
I just scrolled Facebook, and out of the 44 posts I came across 10 were from friends or pages I had liked. The rest was sponsored slop, or "you should follow this person" type posts.
No wonder the social interaction is down, when less than a quarter of posts I come across are from the reason to have Facebook.
I'm not friends with corporations, so don't push me their shit.
Prime Facebook was 2007 - 2011/12. When they started algorithm-ing friends posts, that heralded the end. I don't care that I haven't interacted with friend XYZ for a long while, I'm still interested in seeing their stuff equally as much as friend ABC who I interact with daily
This is ironic because all the 40 year old chicks who are career users of FB since college, all cite the same justification for continuing to use it: "But all my photos and the current happenings of my friends".
If you showed them epirical data that only 17% of what they consume on the platform is actually even tangentially related to their friends and family, maybe they'd finally decouple themselves from FB.
It’s worse with instagram. I debated switching to Pixelfed at first because no one I know is on it. But then I realized I barely see friends content on insta, so it’s not really different, at least on Pixelfed I don’t see adds and only see posts from people I follow.
It's not even new stuff. Last I had looked (a couple years ago) it would show me friendss posts from last week with no sign of anything new, and I knew they had posted newer things than that. It was completely unusable. I'd see the same stale old posts for days
Right. They got greedy and made it more shitty for profit. Users left and now its one of these free weekly papers with ads and classified ads. Now they are considering filling the gap of missing user content with AI so it will be a circular system without humans at one point.
I wonder if a fediverse version of that would resonate with any of my friends and family. Seems like we are where we started with forums, just strangers respectfully taking about their common interests. Social media is indeed dead.
You actually can nearly do that. Facebook inexplicably showed me how a few weeks ago. If a friend reshares something, you'll see it, but it removes all groups, etc. It was stunning how little content actually comes from friends.
On the Facebook site (I'm sure it can be done via app, too, but I didn't look), click on the menu near the top right, then click Feeds (under Social). Then click on Friends on the left.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?"
Exactly this. "We have maxed out the amount of money we can extract from people and have reached diminishing returns on profitability."
Why can't anyone just create a billion dollar company that makes something people like and then be happy they can consistently earn $200m per year? Maybe ask the people what kinds of features they want and improve the service to increase the value to users once you need something for your staff to do when the product is complete.
Because modest returns don't attract investment, so whoever set it up would have to fund the startup out of pocket and never go public or sell the company off. Not quite impossible, but very unlikely (unless the world changes and investors start getting more sensible about profits).
Yeah, if I was Zuck, I would've left it more or less as it was in the 2010s, and then moved on to making adjunct services to create a Google/Yahoo-like ecosystem. Oh, and open the API so interesting services could be built on it. Instead, they maximized profitability and bought their way to an ecosystem.
Has been for a while. If you look at most recent marketing analysis, numbers weren’t like they were peak pandemic and 2016. It was declining since then, you just chilling with bots mostly.