i can’t believe i’m saying this, but i’m finding myself enjoying facebook more. the UI and design feels vintage early 2010s, the choice of reactions is nice vs just liking or upvoting something, you can sort the replies by chronology / recent / best instead of being forced to read blue-check morons, there’s an incredible depth of content, hobby groups, local interests, etc that simply couldn’t exist on twitter. it feels more like a forum.
it does also suck, of course, but it sucks in a slightly less grating way than reddit and twitter.
Absolutely not. I have to use it for two communities I am part of, and every time I open it I can’t believe how much promoted content I see. I also notice that whenever I post links to off-fb content very few people engage with it, likely because FB is deprioritizing those posts.
One thing I’ve noticed is that if I hide all the junk I see, it will clear my feed out and make it suck a lot less, but only for a few hours or a day, then it goes back to being inundated with promoted content.
Fuck shorts, fuck Instagram stories, fuck fb marketplace ads.
I did a test just a few days ago, and just scrolled to see how much of my feed was from people I followed, and how much of it was stuff I didn’t. 36 posts in a row of stuff I don’t, followed by 10 posts of people I follow, followed by another 27 targeted stuff, and then 1 post from a friend, and then another 35
It’s ridiculous, and this digital landscape is dystopic; It’s cyberpunk. I can’t believe, for example, that I can enter something in a search bar on youtube, and get results that are explicitly not my search results
I also have to maintain a profile for professional reasons, though I get someone else to manage our pages. I don’t even know what it is, but I get anxiety within seconds of interacting with my feed, and I am NOT an anxious person. My ex is addicted to it. Sometimes I feel I lost her to FB and it’s echo chambers if unaccountable validation.