98% of my facebook timeline is pure shit. I once went to facebook to keep up with friends and family. Now, all I see is clickbait and memes.
Content from friends and family is rare to nonexistent these days.
For finding clickbait, memes, etc., reddit is pretty much strictly superior to FB.
If I want to follow the news, my FB feed is one of the most biased sources on the internet.
In short, FB has almost no purpose for me anymore.
Why don0t they simply move away to some alternatives that's designed with the user first.
A couple years ago I made a concerted effort to make better use of Twitter. I aggressively added any account that seemed to be producing interesting and informative tweets, and then pruned the ones that turned out to be bad.
Today my #1 source of news is Twitter. My feed is full of reporters, producers, experts, and commentators who are providing up to date info and analysis--and other points of view. I log into FB far more rarely than I used to.
Hah, thanks to my cousin I get the conservative clickbait pages. It's just weird how people just share that sort of junk. I prefer sharing the Babylon 5 memes and jokes (that mostly no one gets) which I have to wonder if I'm confusing her and the rest of the family yet (No one remembers Zathras...).
Only thing with any value to me is Twitter, and that's only reactively when i'm looking if there's an outage.
Twitter, on the other hand, is somewhat entertaining, given I have a decent amount of followers who may or may not be listening to my random rants. A minor ego boost, at best, but still probably a very large illusion on my part. It's fun to pretend though! ;)
Honestly, I have to say this place, HN, feels the closest to home. Or playing Rust, depending.
I have an account I opened a while ago and I just enter from time to time, or when someone asks to add me as a contact. Every single post is just mindless corporate self-help.
I know quite a few teenagers; they say FB is for "old people" like me.
It's been true since the days of suck.com: if you don't pay for the product you are the product. I'm sick of being product.
But facebook has already been replaced by other websites for a variety of thing, the most known examples are those built around neighborhood community with extra privacy.
I mean you get a third party that want to be a MitM for all your exchange with friends and family while making the biggest profit possible out of investor story time.
Then you get the worst possible internet users massively flocking to the site through antipatterns and use of all tricks in the black book.
I wonder what else you were expecting. Situation was way better when blogs + rss were the craze and could be federated.
I built it in response to the same frustrations you describe. The only catch is that it's paid :-) I want to explore if a noise-free social network can be built, and the only way I think it's sustainable is with a small subscription fee.
Please check it out, if the idea interests you.
Repeated about ten times, I no longer have any clickbait, and only about 5% memes.
The feed normally reflect the way you use it. So if you click and like that "pure shit" then you will get more of it.
However if you share and like the few nuggets there are you will start getting more of that.
This will auto-filter those who actually care and really are part of your circle from those who don't.
If everybody just schlep along then nothing will ever change and you will continue to go to Abilene.
Seriously if your social circle expands to more than 40 miles in every direction, Facebook is useful as hell. Even with the clickbait bullshit and invasive ads.
Of course I don't keep up on a daily basis, which is in line with the AFK way of interacting with people in my local circle. We catch up once in a while through interpersonal conversation intended for the other person.
Why would someone want a constant reminder of what happens in the daily life of every people they know in 40 miles radius is beyond comprehension to me. Do you even have anything to talk about when you actually see each other ? Do you even meet or talk to each other ?
Facebook seems to be only useful because it is a walled prison, where prisoners are forbidden from interacting with the outside, so prisoners find it useful that they can at least communicate with each other in filtered, censored and filled with advertisement way. To me the usefulness of facebook is that it keeps much of the eternal september crap contained inside itself, though it has a tendency to leak and spill in the rest of the web when the prisoners get the occasional interaction with the outside world and not understand that what is acceptable in a prison environment is not in the normal world.
If they don't contact you then they don't care enough and you're probably not losing anything of value.