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.
One common trick that I occasionally do for friends and pages I follow, and that seems to work, is to unfollow and re-follow.
Others suggest not using "bad" reactions like Angry and Sad on posts from accounts you want to keep seeing, and use Wow instead (that doesn't help given I follow some LGBTQIA+/feminist/leftist pages reporting the clusterfuck that is most of the world)
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