Only 45% more to go. We can do this guys!
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…
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.”
It’s some of that, on some platforms. Other platforms also get paid to promote posts or advertisement. Depending on who pays the most, you can see different things based on your demographics.
An important thing to remember is that they will show you something in the money making category. If they know what you want, they make more if they show you something that’s likely to be effective. If they don’t know what you want, they make more if they show you something targeting your demographic. If they’re fuzzy on everything, they show you something.Which political geographic is more likely to target Facebook? Which one is more likely to spend demographic money to try to court younger white men from a low to middle income bracket?
Good to know.
Second question,
Which one is more likely to spend demographic money to try to court younger white men from a low to middle income bracket?
Are young people still on Facebook? I thought it was just “for boomers” now.
Absolutely no idea. I almost logged on when typing the previous reply to see if they were still offering me the “thin blue line commemorative gun holster” they were the last time I was on, but I realized I really didn’t want to.
I feel like I see it being used as a common enough way for events to share details though, so it probably isn’t just older demographics.
Yes the far-right astroturfing is becoming very blatant lately. I’ve noticed a recent worsening trend
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)
Status update: I am pooping
Is it out yet?
Nearly there!
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.
On reddit you can sort by “new”…
Can’t do shit on reddit anymore without being signed in with an account.
Jesus, that’s a form of psychological abuse.
Yup, I fought it for a while by clicking the appropriate tab or sort button, but they kept changing where it lives until I gave up and never logged on again.
Now it’s just here for the community, and youtube for the consumption - at least they let you just look at your subscription by new without any junk mixed in (yet).
There’s a certain merit to posts with high interactions getting a higher priority to posts that were sent more recently. I didn’t enjoy the Facebook spam that started popping up as people gamed the system. 10,000 “Your friend is playing Fart Hospital! Your friend just pooped himself in Fart Hospital! Your friend has made an Epic Fart at Fart Hospital!” posts because someone didn’t realize the game they were playing was posting to their feed.
But they got the Reddit disease, where engagement was everything. And then you started losing sight of media you cared about under a pile of Shrimp Jesus clickbait.
I think, at the end of the day, the Facebook internal metrics changed from “Are our users happy?” to “Are our users meth addicts?”
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!
You can unfollow everyone but your friends
I’ve now realizing that these Tech giants have poisoned their entire well:
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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.
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Let’s start gaming services. Oh… why does no one want to make an account with us, or trust we will keep it running?
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Generative models for creative media. Oh, uh… back to the AR glasses issue. And some others.
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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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
That explains the bots.
Dead Internet theory is real.
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.
I’ve heard enough about Nextdoor that I never want to have an account for their site
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.
Exactly—i used my initials and throwaway email and refused to give my phone number, so I can read but not participate. Which is fine.
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.
I think Nextdoor encourages it. I’m from a very liberal state (Maryland). Around here, people started posting on there complaining about a house right beside an elementary school always flying some garbage flag. For a while it was a Confederate flag, then a FJB flag, etc. So someone posted a picture of it asking if there was some kind of ordinance it was violating for which they could submit a complaint, and then people piled on about how much they hated it and how inappropriate they thought it was. The next thing I see is that the post was taken down and the poster was given some kind of warning for endangering the owner/ doxing them, even though the street address was not posted and the owner’s name was not mentioned. Everyone in the community knows which house that is and could look up the owner from the county records if they want to!!
but nextdoor is happy to keep racism alive, it’s the bread and butter
Yeah I’m originally from a very notorious southern state for racism and the nextdoor app was like that there too.
Hated it. I’ve not been in it ever since. Also, a lot of people being very nosy about weird stuff.
I thought it was going to be like a community app, a good way to meet people. How naive I was.
Too many people tell me they prefer small towns because people are “nice”. In my experience, absolutely not. They may say hello to you, but that does not mean they are nice people. My experience aligns with yours. Selfish, ignorant, nosy. After you leave they’ll immediately start talking about you, your family, and anything else gossipy. Not much else to do in a small town.
Say what you will about big cities but no one gives a damn about you and its great. Someone rude to you? You can literally never see them again. It’s wonderful.
I grew up in a town of 2500, and after having to spend 3 months there due to my father being in hospice and then dying in the last year, I would NEVER live there again. Holy shit. The only plus for my mom now is that like 25 family members live within a 2 mile radius.
I can honestly say I lived through that exact scenario (except not father, but another family member) recently. Fully agree, horrid experience. So many people come to you and act like they care, but they just want the latest gossip. I’m sorry about your father.
I grew up in the city because my parents couldn’t stand the gossip, conformism and backbiting of small-town life. I’ve been to where they came from (there are still relatives there), and getting the hell out of there was one of the best things they ever did for me.
I’m in a small city now. The neighbors are friendly but not over-curious and the crime rate is minimal. I live near the center so everything I need is within a 20-minute walking radius. And the last time there was a racist demonstration here, the counter-demo was five times larger and the fascists got back on their bus and fucked off: they weren’t even locals, they were a rent-a-mob. That matters greatly to me since we’re an ethnically diverse family. If those assholes get the upper hand, they’ll be coming for us.
It sounds like you found a very nice place to live! Congrats to you!
Say what you will about big cities but no one gives a damn about you and its great. Someone rude to you? You can literally never see them again. It’s wonderful.
Lol what, i have lived in a big city my entire life and had plenty of nosy weird neighbors who got up in my shit because they were old and bored. and just random strangers come up to me and start trying to start a fight or whatever because they are just weird and miserable.
my life in a small town, was relatively free of any of that. i remember in my hometown nobody ever bothered us. it was glorious.
You must have lived in a very different small town then I grew up in because everybody in the town knew what time you took a shit
a mean, a significant chunk of the pop was too drunk or strung out on opiates to really care about anything… so that helped.
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Fortunately I live in a pretty diverse area; a fair number of the posts are in spanish. Probably 5 or 6 non English languages spoken in my court alone.
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
Darn it! I’m not changing it. I shall live with my shame of not proof reading
For some, gluten could indeed be punishment.
looks with novautocrrect look of superiority
the article actually says the opposite - that it’s the random nature of pushing internet algorithm-chasing influencers that pushes people away instead of it being a way to keep in touch with people you know and love.
Yea, it was actually pretty great when there wasn’t an algorithm forcing-feeding us bullshit. It was just us and our friends keeping in touch with each other. It was a boon for many introverts.
Now though? Why post when we know the algorithm won’t show our posts to our friends unless they dig through mountains of grift, brain rot, and propaganda.
I stopped using sites like Facebook years ago when I noticed I was seeing posts from random meme pages I didn’t even follow that were days old yet I hadn’t seen any posts from my actual friends in days. So, went check their pages to see they had been posting daily and the algorithm just never showed them to me.
that’s the case for me and it seems like most of the people in my circle
yeah none of us care about the hourly updates. but our circle doesn’t do that, we generally would only share things other people actually want to see. but it’s been a long time since anyone did that. now the only sharing that happens is just Strava and in group chats
That’s how I felt when I tried bluesky. I missed the boat on Twitter and it’d already gone down the shitter so I never tried it. Figured bsky would be an opportunity to try the whole tweeting thing for myself.
And even still, it was just nothing but political bitching, navel gazing, and glorified (or actual) advertising. Like… what’s the point of it all? Deleted my account within the month.
Lemmy has its share of faults but at least people are willing to have actual discussions and conversations here. On bsky it felt like talking to a bot. People talking past each other instead of actually communicating.
Doesn’t it depend on who you follow? The only things I see on bsky are those I follow.
Let’s get it to 85%
the sooner we all start calling it fakebook, the sooner it will die
