This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Probably because it's been overtaken by exhausting far right narratives pushed by the companies themselves.
My Facebook page doesn't even show me stuff from people I actually know any more. One of my cousins had a baby, it didn't even show me that. Instead what it thinks I want to see are badly written posts about immigrants and "lefties" being to blame for everything, as if the UK government is left wing in any way at all...
Yes the far-right astroturfing is becoming very blatant lately. I've noticed a recent worsening trend
I may be wrong (I left the algorithmic social medias when they abandoned linear timelines [kept reddit until about a year before the exodus, since only fedi]) but:
Is that not because that is the content you interact with (argumentatively, likely, but still) or hover over longer with their eye movement sensors, or all the other ways they track you, and so they think "ahh he 'likes' (hate engages with) this content so send more!" in a loop to keep you engaged and keep making money for them through advertisements?
Like, if you ignored that shit (and iirc there's often a way to "reset" your algorithm in some settings, after all, they want the data they sell to be accurate, it's more valuable to sell...) and started only liking/lingering on family shit and cats (how can you ignore the kitties after all), they'd send primarily that, yes?
I could be wrong about that, this is my understanding as an outsider, but I'm curious. At the end of the day I'll forever advocate for the end of such algorithmic practices entirely long term, and the end of one's individual involvement with it in the present moment: "Bruh get off that shit it is rotting your brain. Like actually, by design, and it wants to keep you locked in. Don't look at the Basilisk."
I quit Facebook when I realized I was mostly seeing things I didn't want to see and it was making me like the people I knew less. That was like 15 years ago
There's a (possibly apocryphal) story about Zuckerberg originally being very resistant to turning Facebook into another Yahoo or MySpace or similar ad-swamped interface, on the grounds that it would scare people away and create a drag on growth. It even got a send-up in The Social Network movie.
Whether this was an intentional business strategy or a second order effect, Facebook was originally one of the cleanest Web 2.0 sites. They did a genuinely pretty good job of focusing on media you were flagged as caring about and showing you activity of friends and family who you wanted to follow. More savvy early users even commented on how creepy Facebook could get, precisely because it could find your friends better than you could and bait you with interactions that drew people together.
The modern iteration of the company is so far away from what it was originally designed to be. The Shrimp Jesus clickbait era Facebook might as well make it a different website. I cannot imagine anyone seeing this site coming into college Freshman year and finding anything that makes it appealing.
Yeah, but there's still this:
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
Instant messages sent by Zuckerberg during Facebook's early days, reported by Business Insider (May 13, 2010)
As soon as posts were no longer ordered by post date and time it was over for me.
SAME. Seeing posts from a week later it because a certain friend is shadow banned just ruined the whole experience.
Only 45% more to go. We can do this guys!
The algorithm ruined it for me. Insta was once so great to keep up and share updates with friends; I've no interest in interacting with strangers shoved down my throat unprompted.
I'm not.an American, but I'm sure the sentiment is universal!
Dude they filled my timeline with a bunch of ads and AI generated nonsense. We stopped posting because no one ever saw it thanks to all of the filler.
For me, it's the death of the chronological view. That's when I stopped using social media. I'd see random, irrelevant stuff from weeks ago instead of what my friends were up to today.
When social media started it focuses on friends. You add someone as a friend and you could see what they were up to.
Then Facebook came along and made it competitive, it became less about seeing what friends were doing and more about posting things that people liked.
As Facebook grew, it changed. One day you didn’t see the stuff your friends posted unless you constantly interacted with their posts or a lot of other people did.
It’s gotten worse and worse since then. They have added more and more ads and posts from people and pages you might know that you no longer see stuff from people you do know.
It’s absolutely worthless.
Facebook died to me when the timeline was no longer linear
Yeah, that was the moment it changed from a social media platform to an advertising platform.
when instagram changed the algorithm a decade ago to no longer show your friends' recent posts, that's when they lost me. prior to that, it was actually useful for sharing trips and events with friends.
now it and Facebook are entirely ads / sponsored posts, and random shit fb thinks I'll hate
The really shitty part is that I used to post my art on Instagram app the time and started to get a lot of followers, then they changed their system. Now I didn't get hardly any views.
Oh hey, you can still get views! You just need to open an advertising account with them, and them pay them anywhere between $50-$1000 and they'll then show your one sponsored post to anywhere between 2 and 50 percent of people who like that kind of thing, for anywhere between 3 days and two weeks. Just select how much you want to spend to get that sweet exposure!
What's that? You want to reach all your friends and followers? All of them? For free? Sorry, they don't do that kind of thing anymore.
I’ve now realizing that these Tech giants have poisoned their entire well:
Want to make AR glasses? Cool! Oh… Uh, I guess we run a platform that handsomely pays pervs for engagement, so that’s not going to work.
Let’s start gaming services. Oh… why does no one want to make an account with us, or trust we will keep it running?
Generative models for creative media. Oh, uh… back to the AR glasses issue. And some others.
Ah, so our LLMs need to reference the web to be at their best which…. We… Kind of killed for a quick buck? Oops.
There are hundreds of examples of this.
And now? The whole reason people use these platforms is being consumed by cancer. Rapidly, from the feel of things.
I’m a cynic. I believe companies like Meta can carry on destroying people and getting away with it, no matter what, and users will be indifferent.
But now I’m starting to suspect they they have nowhere to pivot to, because they’ve burned the forest down.
Because no one fing cares about your hourly updates and you're just advertising your insecurities.
Social media is 75% ads, 15% shared content (more ads), and 10% people you know creating actual posts. You're a gluten for punishment if you hang out there.
"gluten for punishment", thanks autocorrect for another genius coinage
Most of my microblogging stuff has been just shouting in the void about stuff I've been doing. And random brainfarts. I follow cool people on social media so I can see them shout in the void about what they're doing. And their random brainfarts.
I'm happy Mastodon still lets me do just that. Perfect platform for that sort of stuff.
The Algo Lords decided people don't actually want to see that, they want "popular" things and engagement bait. Yeah no, not what I want.
To be fair, engagement bait works.
Look how much Twitter ragebait gets upvoted here on Lemmy.
Whenever I go to check the source for the posts, they aren't even real; it's a bot account posting 24/7, or at the very least a dedicated engagement farmer. But people don't care, they just want that feeling.
I just signed up for my local Nextdoor; holy crap, it’s 75% commercial ads, about 10% personal ads, about 10% dogs/cats/kittens, and 5% misc. Utterly useless.
You're lucky then. For me there was at least a double digit percentage of just plain racism.
Photo of black man walking: "ANYBODY KNOW WHO THIS IS?!"
Car broken into: "I BET IT WAS THAT MEXICAN".
Absolutely vile place. Boomers talking to other boomers with no filter, an HOA board given a social platform.
Mine was 75% commercial ads and 15% DOES ANYONE KNOW WHO THIS IS PARKED ON THE PUBLIC STREET IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE I NEED TO BE ABLE TO PART THERE ITS TOO FAR TO WALK
And let's not forget the racist curtain-twitchers. "I saw a brown person walking down the street near my house this morning. Should I report it?"
But I hate Nextdoor even more because I don't see any reason to put my real name and address into any social-media app.
I've heard enough about Nextdoor that I never want to have an account for their site
Not just America. It's a trend worldwide thanks to the abundance of AI slop taking over any 'social network'.
See also the privacy-invading aggressiveness of most platforms, and the political ads and propaganda inundating people’s feeds. If social media had just remained a way to keep in touch with friends and post pictures, it would probably have remained popular.
That explains the bots.
Dead Internet theory is real.
It was all over when Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline. It's just taken a while for people to notice how awful it's made everything.
Because it's stupid, you get nothing out of it and you lose time on top
Social media used to be mostly about keeping up with friends. Now it’s about competing with everyone for money and views.
Big change.
They're already trying to track everything I do. Why would I help them?
I mean, I still post to social media every day, but it's pixelfed. It's not toxic, it's just me throwing in my art on the pile with everyone else's art that I also get to flip through and enjoy, in chronological posting order, with no advertisements or other subject matter present.
Back in the day, I posted on Instagram to share things with my friends and scrolled to see their updates. The chronological feed with no suggested posts was the only way it worked, and now that's impossible. There are no "people" on Instagram anymore.
For me it's the idea that by interacting with social media I'm working to generate profit for a billionaire-led company.
Social media has also done its hardest to try and push people away from using it. Between the culture being awful, and there being an increasing number of roadblocks to using it, that ironically ruins discoverability for anyone who might want to use social media.
For example, if you want to use Reddit, and see a link, there's a lot of posts that you can't see without having an account and logging in. That's a big ask for something that you're not even sure that you want to sign up for, which would only be worse since you couldn't sidestep that using the old reddit interface.
Meanwhile, Twitter not only makes it so that you can't see much of anything without being logged in, but they're trying some new scheme where if you have an account, you need to download the app and give them your biometrics to confirm that you're human before you can use your account.
If you've scarcely used either site, why would you start now? Everything wants you to jump through more and more hoops to verify that you're actually a human, and if you don't have an account, the content that you can see doesn't seem to much of anything interesting. When not logged in, some subreddit and posts are completely inaccessible, and on Twitter, you can only see the tweet, but not the replies, or recent user posts.
Both of those were the main draws for each site. Why would any new user want to use them now? The only thing that they have is their reputation, and that will slowly go away with time.
Once upon a time, for example, Twitter was once the haven for beginner programmers, because they had a nice, free easy-to-use API that anyone could use to make bots and learn how to use APIs in general. Reddit was not far behind that. But that's mostly gone now. Reddit no longer approves API keys for the most part, and is working to shut down the public APIs that it has left, and Twitter has locked theirs behind a paywall.
