Interesting to see posts like this where people speculate on specific factual things, but they don't have any information about the specific factual thing.<p>This post is factually wrong about how Facebook works and what the goals are. Facebook does not "uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling".<p>I worked on the feed algorithm for Instagram and know how the Facebook feed algorithm worked in 2020. I read all the code. The #1 goal of the Facebook feed algorithm is to get users to post more. The #2 goal is to get you to engage in interactions like commenting and liking. Facebook cares about how much you scroll and would like you to do more of it, but posting and interacting is way more important. Facebook optimizes for more posting at the measured cost of less scrolling.<p>Instagram does the same thing but at the time was less successful at it.
Not to criticize but the post would be most appropriate 5-7yrs ago. Nowadays this is a known secret. TikTok abandoned all posturing and came out as a purely ad driven network to make you scroll. What facebook and others say is mostly moot. They already have a diminishing user retention problem to deal with. The overall perception of these services have changed over the last five years and particularly facebook only has the volume but not the momentum anymore.
I feel like "I only use Facebook to keep up with family and friends" is the 21st century equivalent of "I only drink socially" - True for some people, less true for many others.
Disclaimer: positive sentiment towards Meta app<p>I'm a millennial and I use Instagram (mainly stories) as the primary tool for keeping in touch with people. It's easier to share an image, maybe with a short caption, rather than composing a post, and consuming friend's stories are quicker than text posts since you don't need to read. It's a more efficient/faster way to know what my friends and family are up to and it prompts me to communicate with them more.<p>I may be an outlier but I'm very bad at remembering to text/call/email friends if I don't see them regularly, so following them on IG helps a lot.
Personally I'm just becoming more private about what I say online as well as what I want to share about the family. I just think Facebook reached a tipping point where it became stale, I got sick of political arguments, I started to distrust my "friends", and I just switched to directly texting people photos.
If you unfollow everyone you don't see ads ever again.
You just have to visit your friend's profiles one by one (or whatever group of friends you have created) to see their unaltered feeds with no ads.
Seems like nothing new, classic "attention economy" stuff we've all known for years now. I wondered why they wrote the article, but then I saw the plug at the bottom -<p>This article is an ad.
I tried the demo of Haven that this site is advocating for and found it was a perfect storm of a bad demo. (I'd be very happy to talk w/ the Havenites about the details) I like what they are trying to accomplish but from a marketing perspective it's going nowhere. Someone who is unhappy with the current state of feeds may or may not be interested in publishing a blog for instance, and they ought to offer people an easy way to set up a feed and see how it works, or get some idea of what it looks like w/o having to create an instance and log in (even a video would be good)<p>Also for as long as RSS feeds have been around the UIs have been something only a mother could love, particularly they don't address the problem of overloading, particularly the spamming with "me-too" articles (I have seen so many articles about "the nearest black hole to the Earth" being discovered for such a long time that I'm starting to wonder if they discovered another one, not to mention the breathless clickbait articles from <i>The Atlantic</i> about the Twitter collapse that are 72 hours out of date)<p>Text analysis technology was good enough in 2005 to filter articles from a feed that you'd like, I know because I used old technology to do it<p><a href="https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/" rel="nofollow">https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/</a><p>I'm pretty sure that some kind of dimensional reduction on the data (say Latent Dirichlet Allocation) would cut the error rate in half and slightly less sure that spending $1500 on a GPU and using currently fashionable language models would cost you $1500 and a few months of time and not make much of a difference <i>if</i> you ever get it to work.<p>I also know the "twisty little articles that all look alike" problem (a.k.a. "me-too") was solved by Google when they developed Google News because whenever <i>The New York Times</i> publishes an article 300 other papers write an article that says "<i>The New York Times</i> reported that..." and Google News would be completely unusable, the same way that RSS feed readers are completely unusable.<p>I'd guess some kind of clustering is the answer to that but I'm not so sure what kind of clustering. (I think the language model <i>might</i> help with that)
Why can't there be a social media site that lives in locally optimal minima? One where there is enough ad revenue to cover costs but not so much that it leads to bloat. One where instead of trying to compete with the likes of TikTok and YouTube by maximizing time spent on the site, the goal is "can catch up with friends in X amount of time".
as a person that works for a healthcare startup that relies on facebook ads, while I agree with how much it sucks as a consumer, as a business offering there is nothing like it.<p>There is no add network that reaches more people, and gets more clicks, than the facebook add network. We felt it hard when Apple mucked with them, as well did a lot of other startups. So while I understand the "privacy risks", I think it's equally foolhardy to ignore the positive impact it has for many businesses. It accounts for more than 1/2 of total revenue, for sure. If it went away, something would fill it's shoes for us <i>eventually</i>, and quite frankly I don't think that replacement would be any better for humanity.
> This leaves an open question: how do you keep in touch with your friends online?<p>That implies that one must keep in touch with friends online. The question I asked myself is "Do I need this to keep in touch with my friends?" The answer was obviously no. I wasn't using Facebook to "keep in touch" with friends as I was primarily passively consuming whatever was being put out. That's not keeping in touch in any meaningful way, and it's highly selective for specific friends.<p>Email, telephone, and text messaging are far superior for keeping in touch as far as I'm concerned.<p>My mother uses Facebook now, and from what I can tell she's primarily using it as Facebook intends. Endless scrolling through nonsense.
I should have more sympathy for all of these addicts, but I don't. I sympathize w/ a herion addiction because it's physically addictive, etc etc. Addicted to Facebook, to other people's baby pictures??<p>Consider this: everything you learn about your friends through Facebook, you weren't important enough to be reached out to personally about. THEREFORE! You shouldn't even know those things.
I think most people have figured out by now the pitfalls associated with using Facebook and have devised strategies for mitigating the worst of them. If they haven't, then they soon will.
> Over the last quarter of 2021, Facebook made over $60 per user In the US and Canada.<p>Wow. I guess it's clear why they would never move away from an ad-based model, to an ad-free paywall for example. No way anyone is paying $20/mo (maybe $5/mo in the US, and much less than that in most of the world).
> That’s the lie that gets you in the door, and then Facebook uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling.<p>I get to the bottom of my feed pretty quickly. Yes, you can have an end to your feed! It says this:<p>> No More Posts<p>> Add more friends to see more posts in your Feed.<p>> Find Friends [button]
The whole article is: FB optimizes for user retention so Booo! evil. Use RSS instead. Yeah, these kind of posts are out of touch IMO.<p>This is very much like the food industry where sugar drinks give you instant gratification but isn't good for your health long term. Same should be true in the digital realm.<p>The current solution is implementing screen time usage limitation on mobile OSes. Even though that's good but it works at the app level. I'd like a more high tech solution that works at the content level. Something that can limit how much pet videos or comedy I watch across apps.