I remember when you could go on Facebook and look through your feed at what your friends are saying, catch up with them, and browse posts that they have made. Now, it’s just completely random and chaotic, almost nonsensical. There’s no logical sense to my Facebook feed at all. As you can see in the image, they are showing me stuff that I’m not even following. This is not even something that I am actively a part of! It’s some random group. So what’s the point of following a group or liking a page, if they’re just going to show you random stuff anyway?
Like, wtf happened to this website?
I’ve been assuming that their user engagement is down. Fifteen years ago when I was fresh out of university I had several hundred friends and could spend hours every day going through posts from dozens of different people. Now it feels like I can spend ten or fifteen minutes to see everything and mostly it’s from the same half-dozen people, and I’ve realized most of them are people I don’t really know as well and frankly am not as interested in seeing. At first I thought it was because they were the most prolific posters and I’d inadvertently trained the algorithm to show me more from them by interacting with them the most.
But over the past year I’ve noticed if I actually click on someone else’s profile, maybe having seen their name on a memory or just randomly think of an old friend, most of them only make a few posts a year or haven’t posted anything at all in years. Their accounts still exist, but they’re not using them.
If your feed was only this, a few posts a day from a few people, you’d have no reason to be on Facebook much. So they fill it in with junk from other places that will hopefully engage you. If it doesn’t they’ll try other posts. Whatever it takes to keep you browsing longer.