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Facebook was a lot more fun when there was a chronological timeline of non-rich-text status updates and comments from friends. These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion. I know there are interesting posts by people on my friend list but they're simply being hidden. Maybe some fb developer was happy with increased engagement metrics merely caused by confused users forever scrolling up and down in desperate attempts to find out where all their friends whose posts used to show up have gone.

And when actual friends' posts show up, 90% of the time it's a like or a share of some uninspiring web page's article with no comment.

It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.

So... like twitter then?

Nah, my Twitter feed is curated by people I actually like but are complete strangers to me, with the odd speaker-I-met-once-at-a-meetup thrown in.

As the saying goes, Twitter is where you connect with the people you wish you knew, and facebook is where you connect with the people you wish you didn't.

twitter also has an annoying algorithm that thinks it knows what you really want to see. chronological newsfeeds are dearly missed.

I usually just reload the page a couple of times and tweets are put in chronological order again. Does this work only because I follow <100 people?

Twitter is falling in to same prey... About 30% of the tweets I see are what other people retweeted and liked. Just show me their own tweets damn it!

Also their stupid push to make each single-line shitpost bigger and flashier and more impactful has driven the information density way down.

It was bad enough when people started posting pictures of text instead of just posting the text. Now they're posting videos of static text. What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts?

I think the idea was to let single line shitposts compete with all the other shitposts, but they went the wrong direction. Should've made the media shitposts sized down to the text posts.

I assume big media pieces are where the advertising money is.

And video. You can tell every ad buy sells video at many times a text ad because google and Facebook are pushing them everywhere they can.

> What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts?

You joke, but they bought Oculus for a reason.

Ready Player One was a warning, not a manual!

It's like flashy banner ads from the 90s back again that people jumped to for grabbing attention. At that time it was ads, now it's people posting their thoughts in this fashion. Since Facebook provides these backgrounds only up to a certain message character length limit, many people curate their messages just so it would fit with these flashy backgrounds.

And because these posts with the backgrounds get larger font sizes compared to normal posts, to get attention in a voluminous group one must play the same dirty game. They're literally dragging people into the dirt pit.

Hope they don't introduce animation in these gaudy backgrounds!!!

Why not just give some font controls instead and remove all this background nonsense?! (Though this could also be argued to be terrible)

One day everyone will look back at these stunts and see them for the ugliness and abomination they are, just like we look back at banner ads with derision and hate.

#################

# ppl like flashy stuff # #################

Its becoming MySpace....

I actually don't think that's necessarily fair on MySpace. With facebook it's so low effort to post or share some garish random crap to your timeline that everyone (or at least most people) are doing it all the time. With MySpace, like Geocities, at least you had to put in a bit more effort. The results weren't necessarily better but the volume of crap was simply lower due to most people being too lazy to post it.

Wasn't the main selling point of Facebook originally that you couldn't do flashing animated geocities crap? I remember that being the reason I signed up, most of my HS friends had no business doing web design. Once they opened it up beyond ivy-league, it didn't seem to have any particular status, having a Gmail account was arguably harder (I had to get lucky getting an invite off /.).

I remember, around 2007, when facebook had started to be made more generally available outside of colleges in the US, that it seemed like a cleaner, easier, less cluttered version of MySpace. Sadly that version of the site is long since dead.

MySpace was often an assault on the senses, and disorienting. Reddit can be like that these days, perhaps worse since the interface elements also love around and can disappear. In the early days of FB, users had even less ability to customize the visual presentation of their pages than they do now. It’s about like the simplicity of HN vs a 10 highly customized subs on reddit - on one hand, users like to express their personalities. On the other, inconsistency can make for a terrible user experience.

(Sorry about the typos)

> Now they're posting videos of static text.

The English Football Association has used a 2-minute Twitter video in order to announce the list of 23 players who made it to the World Cup (https://twitter.com/England/status/996737073418784770). I personally hate this trend.

While I do understand your hate, and while I personally hate the problem of using video instead of text, I gotta say that this specific example you've mentioned can be blamed to the limitations of the platform (Twitter).

Their alternatives were:

1. Interrupt people's flow by getting them off of Twitter. 2. Try fitting them all in one tweet (impossible). 3. Try fitting them in multiple tweets, which would make the users retweet a specific tweet that contains whichever player they're interested in, and their followers wouldn't see the entire roster.

I can see the appeal of transmitting the info in a 2 minute video since it gives users one tweet they should retweet, and transfers the important message in a relatively short amount of time (albeit much longer than skimming through a block of text).

It fits easily into a 280-char tweet, with plenty of space left over for a link or explanations - the below is 160 bytes give or take:

Pickford Butland Pope

TAA Trippier Rose Maguire Jones Stones Walker Cahill

Henderson Dier Alli Lingard Young Delph RLC

Sterling Vardy Kane Rashford Welbeck

I don't see how option 1 (link to outside twitter) interrupts my flow more than a 2-minute video

> a 2-minute Twitter video

The moment you (meaning they) even combine these words you've missed the point of Twitter.

Snapchat has mostly replaced Facebook for my friends that like just sharing fun updates. I think it's a combination of the ease of sharing spur-of-the-moment updates, and the difficulty of using it for anything but that (e.g. political rants). I still use Facebook, but almost expressly to follow specific groups, friends who post typically about specific topics, or to ask/answer questions within my friend group.

I have zero idea how people are using snapchat. Even as a programmer, I find their UX extremely hard to understand, enjoy and use. It's the shittiest app that is on my phone and I have opened it only twice in a year.

you use it to signal that you’re paying attention to someone in a relatively passive/casual way via read receipts on one-to-many picture messages. it’s mostly useful for groups of friends, and (critically) interacting with someone you’re romantically or sexually interested in with plausible deniability.

the ui i won’t bother to defend though.

> These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion

I think putting the spam on facebook on equal footing with its post targeting as to why people aren't using facebook is wrong. I have hundreds of friends and tens of pages on FB, which I'll admit by FB's standards isn't all that much, yet I still find it much harder to browse than other sites with many times the content. Most people simply don't post that often or not at all, and the pages I joined don't post often either.

Despite how little content there is I find the issue of managing it all completely intractable. When I'm on Feedly I go through hundreds of posts worth of content in a few minutes by mashing the j key until I find content I want to read later, save it and then spend maybe 2 hours a week going through content I care about. When I'm on Twitter I skim until I see familiar content and pick out the stuff I care about. When I'm on reddit, I know it takes about 48 hours for my feed to "refresh" so I'll spend some time every other day skimming from top to bottom.

I can't even begin to figure out a workflow for finding content on Facebook. The whole thing is laid out so quickly finding the things I care about is impossible. I can scroll past ten posts I've seen before something new pops up so I have no idea when to stop scrolling. There's no concept of a "read" post and unlike reddit the "hide" button, hidden behind a menu, acts like a downvote. I have no way of creating a single stream of just the things I care about, and if I did there's no way to update myself when things change. Unlike youtube, there's no RSS feeds so I can't just do my browsing from Feedly. Even just getting a feed of my events is impossible since FB has the audacity to suggest events from pages I've never interacted with, have no friends going and thinks those are more important to me than the events created by pages I actually follow. Push notifications are insanely coursely-grained (or at least they do a good job hiding the interface). Cambridge Analytica be damned, the reason I don't use FB is because I can't figure out how. My age, income level and computer-addicted brain should make me prime meat for advertisers, yet I change the oil more often than login to FB simply because the algorithms that generate my feeds are just that bad.

“Tractable” is another way to say “I can finish what I came to the site to do, and then leave.” Of course they don’t want that! ;)

My experience is exactly the same. Looks like fb has failed it big time on mobile. Is there a method to their madness? I’d really like to know. Twitter is not a replacement as it’s totally public but it’s much more fun right now exactly for the lack of that silly algorithmic selection of posts.

> It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.

I don't think I've read a more accurate description of anything in a long time... Thanks for putting my feelings on Facebook into words!

> These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion.

The last thing I care about is that my friend's aunt comment on a thread from October 2016, but for some reason Facebook thinks that needs the #2 slot on my feed.

My favorite social network is the one I have on Goodreads. I love to see what my friends (who are readers) are reading. I also have found a bunch of people whose book tastes are similar to mine. Everyone is interested in the same goal: finding and reading good books.

When someone overshares, or gets soapboxy, or just spammy, I just unfriend. I did this with my sister! That's something I'd never do on Facebook.

I've also enjoyed Goodreads. It's almost a mirror image of FB in a sense: in Facebook, your friends often appear dumber than in real life. In Goodreads, only their reading is visible and that might make them appear smarter than you thought :)

But how does one even overshare on Goodreads when all the updates are about book reads or picks to to-read? In the comments?

Or the reviews.

If somebody is reviewing books I have zero interest in (eg: super partisan politics, superhero comic books) then I'm likely to unfriend them on Goodreads.

One of my middle-aged male friends was really into Young Adult romances. Like two books a week. I had to let him go.

I hope you realize most people on facebook are not there to find intellectual content. These are the same set of people who have made shows like Judge Judy and Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer famous. Vast majority of population loves cat videos and would click on "Top 30 reasons to see royal wedding". They are the one who will stay on FB for hours and contribute towards FB's impression goals. One time I was researching replies in twitter feed of Trump and other conservatives like Ann Coulter. It's purely fascinating how many people are out there with nothing else to do, hanging out there for hours on, posting stupid meme after meme for insignificant posts. You, me and crowd in general at HN is different. FB is not optimized for us and I highly doubt they would care about how we want FB to be.

Vast majority of population loves cat videos and would click on "Top 30 reasons to see royal wedding"

I bet those people are shown what their friends post and are moaning on their own forums about the lack of memes and quizzes these days.

The point of the algorithm seems to be to keep you scrolling and scrolling to see what you actually want so I bet that noone is happy.

I've definitely been guilty of #4 even recently (I'm not sure if they made anyone feel awkward, though; those that did probably just ignored it), but there are 2 reasons I don't mind it from the poster's point of view.

1. If it makes you feel awkward that I'm honest about who I am in writing, then yeah, our friendship is probably superficial at best, and in those cases, I'm not really concerned on your feelings about my feelings. Feel free to unfollow (I know I unfollow certain friends posts).

2. Blogs have been used for this sort of thing for a MUCH wider audience than a group of friends behind a gated digital community, and I've personally never had any kind of issue with reading people's personal struggles, even other devs, and in fact it makes them far more human to me.

Then again, the type of vulnerability you're thinking of may be different than mine, but either way, to each his own. :)

The rest of the behaviors you mentioned are pretty much why I generally don't use Instagram or Twitter more than once every few months. Those formats, even when following devs, seem to encourage the types of activity you're discussing at least in my feeds. But FB is probably the platform I curate the most, simply because most of the people I care about use it to share about their life, from milestones to quick takes, for the most part, without excessive narcissistic self aggrandizing posts (some do, but most are fairly harmless, otherwise after a while, I just choose not to follow).

But I've noticed that there are definitely preferences across the board, which is mainly why they all seem to stick around. I doubt there will be one social media platform to rule them all, the same way there's no one amusement park or one kind of gym. There are behemoths, but there's always a long tail, especially in socializing.

I guess it reads as a little gross or awkward on the surface but those are all signs of people who are feeling lonely or powerless.

When you’re really turned off by a post (or posts), try flipping it the other way around and see if you can feel your honest concern. Don’t patronize the person and make a big deal of the post, but act constructively: reach out and say hi and share the things that you like about them.

And if you can’t feel moved to do that, that’s fine. You’re not obliged to do anything. But it just might make you leave less grossed out and it might do your friend some good.

I think I would do this for my friends, even without Facebook. The problem is when I have to spend emotional labor tending to people I haven't seen since high school.

It's not that I'm not empathetic, but the kind of Real Speak you're sort of proposing feels out of place in a relatively public setting. I'd rather have a coffee or beer with them if I know them well, and if I don't, it's not like I call them on it, but it does slowly make me want to interact with facebook less. (I know I can unfollow people, but at a certain point it strikes me less about people misusing facebook, and more that facebook incentivizes these kind of behaviors)

> feels out of place in a relatively public setting. I'd rather have a coffee or beer with them if I know them well

To follow up on gppong's comment, these are often people who don't know anyone well ("lonely or powerless"). So the fact that it's people you don't know well who post things like that is kind of obvious in hindsight.

I'm probably one of the rare people who has avoided Facebook for many years and has been using it more recently, so I'm just discovering many things people complain about.

I figured out how to exclude people whose updates tend to be really judgmental or political from my feed without defriending them, but I am still really frustrated by there being no way to keep it chronological. Facebook wants me to read the "top" posts, over and over, apparently, regardless of whether I'm interested or have already read them. And yet, there are many updates that I miss if I don't go to the effort of looking for them.

Most of the value to me is in the messaging function, but there's really nothing special about it compared to all the others that have existed - it's only useful because it's on FB and connected to the people I know that are there.

I find it disturbing when people I don't know ask to be friends, if they don't have any friends in common with me. I can't really understand why FB even allows this as when would they not be bots or scammers?

Facebook is just the AOL of a younger generation...just global in scale and on a longer timeline.

    People came in droves when it was new and shiny and the easiest route to 'whatever' online.

    At some point folks are only staying around for the messaging platform.

    In some glacially-long (for the internet) pace of time, Facebook will be sunsetted in favor of the new hotness.

I think AOL is a good model of where Facebook is headed. It's happened to MySpace, it's happened to Digg, it's going to happen to Reddit, wtf were they thinking? Strangely enough, the worst site of them all, Twitter, will be the only one left alive as it is.

What cracks me up is reddit turned into blogspot with the redesign. So sad. At least there is still old.reddit for now.

Twitter is moving in on LinkedIn

Twitter needs to die just so I can... please, in the name of all that is good and holy... stop being fucking hounded on all other media at 26 second intervals by every Z-list celebrity, podcaster, radio clown, journalist and postal carrier begging me to follow them.

This has been the way people have been getting engagement since advertising started. Twitter is actually the most efficient form of it. It's not going away and it's better than the alternatives.

You can just use http://messenger.com. You don’t even need a Facebook account to use it.

I find it disturbing when people I don't know ask to be friends, if they don't have any friends in common with me. I can't really understand why FB even allows this as when would they not be bots or scammers?

When it's someone you just recently met.

yep I can imagine an alternate reality where you move into a new town and are socially outcast online by a facebook policy where you must have at least one facebook friend in common.

imagine going out of state for college and then not being able to add the hundreds of people you’ve met to your facebook friends list because you’re not already connected on facebook with at least one person in common.

people would just spend more time on another social network, where they can connect.

IIRC, last I used fb (some years ago), there was an option to only allow requests to be made by friends of friends. Faulty memory or option removed?

No, it is still there. I use it because I am only on Facebook for one group. By having no "friends" I can look at the group without the clutter and no "friend requests".

And, since the group are moving to a WhatsApp group soon, I wont have to use Facebook at all.

This. The feed algorithm appears to be designed by committee with the usual results. Fonzi stuck his landing a long time ago.

I used to post random thoughts that struck me as funny and I spent some time getting the wording just right. But I'm such an outlier that it stopped being fun. I just text them to a couple of people now.

On the few occasions I go on Facebook I have to resist the urge to post a tongue-in-cheek comment about how I check in so rarely because "you're all so goddamn boring."

And if I have to look at one more picture of somebody's $37 plate of paella I'm going to burn my eyes out with a fireplace poker.

> I'm going to burn my eyes out with a fireplace poker.

I hope you’re joking but if not, there is help available for you. Facebook is not reason enough for self-harm. It comes very, very, very close, but close is not close enough.

Instagram and others like it killed my Facebook feed, but because it was Instagram and others, it meant that people spread, and as a result the other feeds died out fairly quickly as well. I don’t miss it much, but it made me realize I missed blogs and personal geeky pages with actual substance and that I had been using the shallow Facebook feed as a replacement for the “real” internet.

Facebook is still so useful for groups and events that it’s impossible to leave though. I mean, you can leave, but then you’re the guy/woman whom others need to go out of their way to schedule with.

I have noticed the same thing, my news feed is full of people that I don't even message at facebook. Later I realised that it's because I unconsciously spend more time on their posts because of their clickbaity nature (ex. politics, humorous posts, attractive people, controversial topics) than I do with my real friends. I tried creating a few accounts to test this hypothesis and found out that even if I don't like or comment on their posts, just the act of hovering over their posts for a few seconds longer than other friends is enough for the news feed algo to prioritise these posts on my feed.

Twitter got it right with a "customisable news feed", the list[0], where I could create several list timelines for my friends and organize them by those who post about tech, business, political rants, etc.

[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists

I am fully sick of all the political, religious, and commercial posts on facebook. It used to be fun: it used to be about what my friends were doing, and organising events. Now it's just full of garbage, all of which is pushing some sort of agenda, and it feels extremely tired.

I havent used facebook in 3 months for anything other than a status asking for volunteers for an event.

(and that status didnt even work)

I havent missed it. It was a bunch of people that arent my friends sharing things that drive me crazy(politics that I have no impact on).

BTW, FB has this "See First" feature where you can mark your friends to show their posts first. That has improved FB's usability to me just to borderline. Unfortunately they don't let me chose more than 30 people. It's mind numbing what kind of morons FB has hired who makes these decisions. Why the fuck I don't want to see more than 30 friends post first? Even worse, why the fuck can't they figure this out from all the decade worth of data they have on me?

I’ve found that, much like reddit, it’s best experienced by tailoring your feed to what you actually want to see. In my case, I unfollowed all posts from anyone I don’t actually care about, and removed my interests section entirely (fan pages and such contributed at least 50% of the spam on my feed - random sports autoplay videos are not what I’m looking for when i go on facebook). Facebook is a tool for making sure I’m not out of the loop with my actual friends. I don’t need to keep up to date with some person from my calculus class halfway across the country - and if i do run into them again, i can simply ask.

> pretty girls posting selfies of themselves doing nothing interesting, or dudes with gym photos, that kind of thing

That's Instagram.

When your business is around a "original photo" sharing platform for the "mass" and you focus on maxing "views".

What else should we expect?

Agree. It pretty much has the feeling of a sugar shock. You enjoy it first, get a bit of a rush, and then feel exhausted and gross afterwards. Better avoid it

Facebook and Youtube both seem to obviously be optimising for the wrong metrics. It's really unfortunate, their original versions were much more fun to use and probably easier to code, but they have sufficient network effects that any disruptors will have to be not just a little but a lot better to replace them, even as their quality drops.

Honestly I left Facebook to get away from ppl like you who turn every post into a chance to judge me against some unwritten moral code. Who needs enemies when you have friends on Facebook?

So it seems the candle is burning from both ends.

Don't post ridiculous political rants. Don't post passive aggressive public posts targeted at one of your friends.

There, your unwritten moral code is now written. Go forth and spread your seed.

I find Facebook to be way more enjoyable after aggressively muting people whose posts I don't care for. Now it's really an RSS feed for friends and family, minus a lot of junk

I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to purge my friends list of thousands of people.

I moved on.

If it is any consolation, I am thinking you are actually a judgemental person.

you definitely don't sound like majority voice.