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Similar experience, I think my problem with the algorithm is similar to slowing down to look at the car wreck on the side of the road.

I have a few a"friends" that post horrible stuff. Conspiracy theories, rants, and other posts that are just symptoms of poor mental health.

At first I stopped to read these in HORROR and disgust, because they stood out so much from the rest of my feed. Facebook takes that as a signal that this is the content I enjoy, and begins to feature it more and more heavily.

Looking back, if I had understood what was happening, I could have used Facebook correctly and worked WITH the algorithm. You have to think about the long term consequences of your viewing activity, and think of using your attention like farming to grow a good feed.

Facebook eventually needs to introduce a self-curation tool, so that people can promote the things/people they want, and remove the elements they dislike without Unfriending Grandma. For me it's probably to late. At 34 the college friends that I would like to keep up with haven't interacted with me in 5+ years, and the social awkwardness of rekindling those relationships isn't worth it.

On an unrelated note, I think many social networks will continue to die this way. As people move from PEAK FRIENDS in colleges to having lives where immediate family takes priority, I think the social presence will fade. The networks will take the blame, like MYSPACE, and FRIENDSHIP just are not good tools anymore, when really it was the person who went from having 100+ active relationships to 20.

There is (or at least used to be) a menu next to people's posts that lets you stop following similar posts (or unfollow the person completely while remaining friends).

Still there, still works.

At least on the Android app, this is incredibly broken. Not only does it often not actually hide the item you try to hide, but most of the options that are available for this menu on the desktop web app are missing, so you can't actually unfollow the person 7 out of 10 times.

https://www.fbpurity.com extension

Seconded. I'm kind of surprised people use facebook without it. Bit like surfing the web without an ad blocker.

Facebook's algorithm almost seems like a quintessential example of why you need to choose good metrics in optimization problems. Maximizing user engagement sounds great - it means people are using your website and enjoying it more, right? Turns out people weren't enjoying it more, they were using it more because Facebook was shoving controversial content (e.g. dubious-quality news, debates, crazy people) down people's throats and they couldn't keep their eyes away.

You know how Facebook tries to get me engaged? It puts photos of my ex-girlfriend and her friends on the top of my feed. Sure you're going to get me to look, but I'm not going to leave the website feeling as good as when I logged on. You bring up a good point about how you have to think about the long term consequences of your viewing, but then I feel that you don't get a genuine experience when you use the platform, and if Facebook wants this, they seem to really over-estimate users' mindfulness wrt what they're actually doing.

If Facebook never figures things out, I hope whatever network comes next doesn't get greedy like they did. In particular, they need to focus on driving engagement with positive interactions and content.

Facebook's algorithm almost seems like a quintessential example of why you need to choose good metrics in optimization problems.

IMHO Facebook gave the golden goose (algo) enough feed to gorge itself on and now it is unhealthy and only lays rusty iron eggs.

Yes, they optimized for engagement, and it destroyed the platform. This is like a parable or something. Truly.

In business school 10 years from now I fully expect people to write case studies on the business effects of algo optimization and local minima, etc, etc...

But they get paid per eyeball, not by the enjoyment level of the people using the system. They don't care WHY you can't keep your eyes away, as long as you can't keep your eyes away.

From their end, their metric was perfect.

Perfect in the short-term, sure, but if people are leaving the platform then their long-term eyeballs might be suffering for the sake of short-term eyeballs

It's worse that that. Not only does FB as a company get paid per eyeball, the individual managers get paid per eyeball. Inside the org, the incentives are perverse.

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-...

> Looking back, if I had understood what was happening, I could have used Facebook correctly and worked WITH the algorithm.

I wholly disagree. You used Facebook correctly. It's Facebook's fault for poorly interpreting how you used it. Anyone who's ever been stuck in traffic behind rubberneckers creeping past an accident should understand that bursts of attention don't at all mean that you have long term interest in something.

> Facebook eventually needs to introduce a self-curation tool, so that people can promote the things/people they want

A million times this. Facebook desperately needs matched like and dislike buttons, not for the purposes of voting content up or down, but so that it can learn what you actually want to see. Most music services grok this concept.

This.

Facebook was really useful for keeping up with life events. I could stay connected and updated even with more distant friends and relatives. As soon as the algorithm "knew best" what I looked at I no longer got the occasional, but wanted, updates from those more distant. I would see what FB told me was popular - and some would play to that popularity. It would downplay to the point of censorship updates from someone if I didn't interact enough - whatever "enough" was. The feed is now almost completely beyond my control - no matter how I try to mess with groups and liking random posts to stop people being forgotten.

Once when you got a message and weren't around it would mail you the message. Now you get "Fred sent you a message log in to messenger to see it".

Now it's worse than useless for the reason I signed up in the first place.

Worse because, like a needy ex, it keeps pleading and whining for me to come back by email. I log in maybe 2-4x a year to organise with the few people that still prefer it as main point of contact.

If you don't already have an email address for all your spam, get one, then change your email address in Facebook to that one.

While the annoying emails still get send, you are at least no longer bothered with it in your day to day email use. Not ideal, but slightly better.

Of course you can also use email filtering rules, but seperating it physically makes it more likely you do not burn time on it by accident.

Why jump through all those hoops, just disable notification mails in the FB preferences?!

Because you might want to see some emails, but not the selection that FB deems important.

> But when Facebook introduced the algorithmic newsfeed, the usefulness ended.

What I find funny is that probably according to FB your "engagement" increased with that change. Beforehand, you would check the feed, and then hit something that you already saw and then stop: you saw everything that there was to see. After the change instead, you found yourself seeing again and again the same content, and you would keep scrolling that feed hoping to see something new.

Instead of 5 minutes it takes you 10 (and you still are not sure you saw everything you wanted), you're spending double time on FB, big win ! Who cares if the "productivity" (as in total enjoyment / time spent) decreased , more time = more ads = more money.

Lather, rinse, repeat, until the garbage is so much that one stop using it and the "engagement" drops completely.

Based on my own experience and the fact that I hear similar complaints often, FB’s News Feed team is seriously out of touch with users and what we actually want to see on there. I can only assume that they’re chasing tiny abstract metrics of engagement, and focusing more on the experience for advertisers than users.

I agree that the algo sucks. I want a LinearBook. I want a time-series database for my social network updates.

Isn’t that what Twitter is?

It’s quickly not becoming this, unfortunately.

It already is. Twitter is not sorted in chronological order.

The main reason I only us Twitter via Fenix on my phone, I loathe non-chronological and "curated" timelines.

Add to that the fact that the people who are most likely to think that they're shaping world opinions by arguing with their crazy aunt about Donald Trump on Facebook are also the most active... and therefore the highest-ranking elements of the feed algorithm.

Exactly right. I've gotten around this by using "Facebook Purity" a chrome extension which let's me filter what is shown on the news feed in detail: I only really want to see posts and photos the friends I haven't hidden from the news feed post - not their likes, the events they're going to etc. This is addition to "hide trending" and ublock makes facebook a bit broken but overall usable, not really worth checking in more than once a week though.

Instagram works better for getting a feel for your friends, especially with the temporary "snaps" people post and actually fun creative overlays.

Instagram stories also have become my primary social media "tool" these days.

I have friends scattered all over the world. Through Insta stories I can keep up with what they're doing and feel closer to them. All my friends have stopped posting on Facebook except for life events. Now everything is on Snapchat or Instagram stories.

I've also done the unfollow-everyone thing about a year ago and I thought I was a pretty rare case, your post leads me to believe that it might not be that rare.

As it stands, I only "follow" brands/pages as sources of news (predominantly non-political) and Facebook is actually moderately useful in that way. My news feed is now just topics I'm interested in and I cut out the friend-filtering algorithm portion, which makes Facebook a lot more pleasant to use. The onus is more on me to follow up with friends on what they've been up to and I'll probably lose touch with some along the way. However, it feels more genuine when I can talk about those things on a more personal level a few weeks/months after the event is posted online and I'm not just contributing another comment/like on a post.

I rarely visit Facebook because of this reason, even when I do return the feed is populated with ads and other garbage that you need to scroll through to "catch up"

I had the exact same issues with Quora. Both websites I used to hang out frequently. Facebook to see what was going on within my social circles (not content consumption) and Quora to learn new things from the people I followed.

Both websites became unbearingly bad after they updated their feed algorithm. To this day, this remains for me the quintessential case of bad product thinking meets over-engineering.

I think another factor is also that the internet has lost some of its novelty and innocence that it had back then.

In those early days people were still used to web pages being static lifeless documents. It was magical to be able to interact with it.

It was some time after and in the middle of the Web 2.0 hype and the rush for "web based everything".

Now people have app and internet fatigue. It has become a chore.

Same thing. Removed my facebook now I'm looking for a cryptocurrency backed one that rewards people for contributions.

Maybe like https://steemit.com/?

steemit is great, I want something similar but just a social graph to keep up with friends

I do this too. It's really eye-opening when you go to 'new posts', see some 'friends' have new posts, and don't bother clicking through to read their posts.

Same here. And now they're running Instagram in the same way.

> I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer

Why?

If you need to support Facebook oauth, you need an account.

Exactly. I was removing my account yesterday and they pulled this trick. After some careful analysis it turned out that of all my integrations (Github, Twitter, Facebook) Facebook was rarely used, so I removed support for it in my site, removed the app at developers.facebook.com and the account.

In order to use some developer products and tooling you need a facebook account.

https://developers.facebook.com/

It's a huge waste of resources, IMO.

I've setup Raspberry Pi's that sync photos between myself, parents, siblings, and some friends that care.

We can, from our phones, drop them on the local Pi, and SyncThing powers the sharing.

But of course to share cat pictures, we should fire up thousands of machines running 24/7 in data-centers, and rely on tricks of psychology to keep people coming back as justification for keeping those computers on.

Services like FB are akin to a TV show -- not a broadcaster -- novel at first, but the story/characters don't change much (or for the worse in more cases than not), it grows stale for the masses, loses ratings, and eventually it'll end and only die hards will care.

And their real contributions, large scale compute cluster knowledge, is relatively well known and copied by others.