[PaulKeeble]

"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. "

It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.

[steveBK123]

Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me. For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years.

Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.

It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.

[Aurornis]

> Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form

Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.

If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.

However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.

[sylos]

You can say porn. It's an adult website

[lizknope]

10 years ago Instagram was great. I would see 10 posts from friends, 1 ad, and 0 posts from people I didn't know.

I gave up about 4 years ago as I was seeing 1 post from a friend, 3 ads, and then lots of random stranger posts.

My friends gave up too.

I have tons of private groups chats and share stuff with people I care about there.

[Brog_io]

You might like Foto https://fotoapp.co/

[throwaway270925]

For anyone who doesnt know: unlike in Facebook you can switch off/pause random strangers posts in your feed by going to "content preferences" in your settings. Of course being Meta this reenables every 30 days, but makes for a way cleaner feed in between.

[Zak]

I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.

It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.

[keyraycheck]

While number of active users still grows, one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.

The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.

[ericmay]

“Who is left on Facebook besides dopamine junkies and bots?”

“I only use it in this limited circumstance”

You are on Facebook. That’s who. It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while. Sure you’re not an addict (probably) but you still drink.

[ben_w]

> who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.

Political activists, like a former partner of mine.

… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …

… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …

… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).

[loloquwowndueo]

Plot twist: all old folks were also on Facebook only to chat with other old folks. Once this fact was spotted, they all just moved to Discord.

[grvdrm]

Around me I see this usage:

- Older folks.

- People using marketplace

- People exchanging inter-personal tips and info: best stroller, contractor, etc.

Not saying FB is best for those things but it doesn’t seem dead at all.

[Aurornis]

The cognitive dissonance in some of these posts is strange.

> one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.

> The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.

How are you confused about who still uses Facebook in one sentence and then immediately in the next sentence you describe yourself as a user and explain why it’s useful to you and the people you know.

[CraigRood]

The growth is across the family of products (inc Instagram and WhatsApp) not Facebook itself. Facebook itself is a zombie, and I don't believe they have a way to innovate out of it. I'm not going to predict the end of Meta, they have more than enough products, but agreed that it's actually quite difficult to understand who's really left.

[bjelkeman-again]

There are some apparent niche communities both on Facebook and Instagram. Heavy metal and hardrock music fans is one group that hasn’t migrated anywhere else yet. I both play in a band and promote events, and both are still required in my geographic area to reach out.

[skirge]

it's like wondering why pubs or restaurants exists if I'm not visiting them everyday, but they do because they have other businesses (birthday parties, company events etc.). Look at Facebook for business.

[hippo22]

Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.

[a123b456c]

It's not complicated. That random garbage increases advertising revenues. Maybe not from every user, but certainly in the aggregate.

[baby]

Twitter followed the same way ad well. All political rubbish now

[atmosx]

It’s the worse. The algo will feed anything that makes you cheer or infuriates you. No middle ground. And God forbid if you dig to some disunion and you “like” something or stop scrolling in the “wrong” tweet… you’ll be getting similar content for months.

It’s crazy how bad it has become.

[BorisMelnik]

hey you know there is a feed on mobile, built into the app that only shows you your friends feed? not a fb employee or defending them just relaying info.

[JKCalhoun]

Too late. (And I don't do mobile anyway.)

I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.

[magicmicah85]

The funny thing about the friends feed is that it highlights for me who is extremely active on the platform. People resharing stuff all the time. And, it's one of the few feeds you can't endlessly scroll through. It will tell you to "check back later" once you get to 3-4 days of updates. No money in showing people their friends feeds, so why let them endlessly scroll.

[Xiol]

The amount of shady stuff Facebook has tried with their app over the years has resulted in it, and other Meta apps, being banned from my devices.

[dyauspitr]

For many people, the alternative would be that their feeds are completely empty since a lot of folks don’t post any updates on Facebook really.

[xnx]

Everyone wants to be TikTok. The generated feed is much better than following "creators"/influencers.

[bad_username]

> These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone

They clearly work for advertisers, and that's all that matters.

[cyanydeez]

People seek novelty. Real social networks do not change as fast as that.

[terminalshort]

It's literally what got me off Facebook for good. I used it less and less over the years, but would still log in once every couple weeks or so. At least it was always 100% content posted by friends or friends of friends, or at least something that was interacted with by someone I know. Then it seems like overnight they flipped a switch and it was 10% content from people I know and 90% completely irrelevant slop. I logged in one more time after that, and then never again.

[renewiltord]

It’s funny how everyone experiences their own Eternal September. Remember that there are 1.5 billion Indians. They’re on FB too and influencing the algorithm with what they want to see.