Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

> For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.

Bingo, that's what's doing it for me.

Before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was fun. It was also a great way to get news.

But now, what I'm finding is that a lot of people on Facebook just don't know how to behave in a public forum. It makes it painful, because someone always knows someone who's a jerk online.

I really don't know what changed, to be honest. Did Facebook change, or did too many people come to the party?

View on HN

Lots of things changed.

Facebook began as an exclusive social network for upper-class students. Gradually it grew to encompass not just all of America, but the entire world. It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people. Police started monitoring our activities, so the events all but disappeared.

The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we read books and the newspaper, not 25 reasons to be an idiot on Buzzfeed. Truth used to matter; less of the nation was as polarized. It was easier to get along without people shoving their ignorant political ideas in your face. Then 2016 happened, with the Russian trolls and other psyops used against us, and some of us realized we'd fucked up by buying into and encouraging others to join this network and others like it.

I could probably go on for a lot longer, but that's the gist of it.

> The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we read books and the newspaper, not 25 reasons to be an idiot on Buzzfeed.

https://iandanielstewart.com/2017/06/16/the-golden-age-falla...

If facebook had any notion that their users are also still customers and important in that regard, despite revenue coming from their data consumers, they may have been inclined to care about state-based psyops campaigns victimizing their users. Instead, I think a corporate philosophy of exploitation prevailed.

I'm not even sure how to properly characterize how condescendingly out of touch your comment is.

I was on Facebook before it opened to the general public, and it wasn't some ivory tower of intelligent thought where the educated could avoid mingling with the dumb. It was full of stupid social media stuff then too.

After Facebook opened up, my "poorly educated" uncle was content using Facebook to simply socialize with family and friends in 2012 when today he does nothing but share right-wing memes.

In the first year or two of Facebook, it was basically just students from the highest ranked / most expensive schools in the US. Part of the allure was the way they rolled that out, like an exclusive club. At the time, I don’t believe features like content previews existed - people weren’t sharing news articles much. It was more “social” and less “media”.

Is it condescending to acknowledge that it was a network for a fairly elite group of young people to start, and that it lost appeal when it became for everyone? Of course there wasn’t much intelligent discussion, everyone was under 25. But it was part tinder, part aim / livejournal, part social calendar; I don’t think it’s been those things for many years now.

What changed is FB had to make money - and they discovered "outrage" sells. That's the full answer. It has nothing to do with the lower-class crowding up your social network lol.

All of these complaints about the various superficial reasons for Facebook's decline I think are missing the forest for the trees.

The "grow fast monetize later" model that social media companies use, along with the user being the product, inevitably acts as a template for bait and switch.

All degradation of user experience stems from that. Of course using a social media platform during its "growth phase" is going to be a lot more of a pleasant experience than using that same platform when it's trying to maximize revenue.

It really does have to do with that. It ceased being useful as a networking and socializing tool. It was a slow descent, but that’s the truth of it.

Outrage only goes so far though. Using Brexit as an example, when the vote first went through, everyone devoured every bit of content they could regarding it, and the media followed. Then they started printing nothing but outrage until people just gave up and quit following the news. Anecdotal evidence sure, but everyone I know seems to only follow the news in passing now. Every headline. Every article. Every political interview. It all now revolves around this one completely divisive topic. If it's not Brexit it's Trump. It's exhausting.

It's no surprise that Facebook also seemed to chase the golden goose, but now that the main page is nothing but outrage or divisive news people are leaving in droves because they're fed up with seeing the same, day after day.

The lower-class people are the ones who are hooked on outrage and are still using the site. The upper-class people got sick of all the MAGA posts and left.

> It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people.

Are you speaking for yourself here?

Do you want to spend your free time reading through a bunch of right-wing MAGA memes? I sure don't.

No, but I'm not ignorant or hostile enough to believe that everyone who didn't go to college is a Trump supporter.

I feel like the major change was who started using Facebook: people who had never "interneted" before. When it first launched and was limited to .edu emails everyone on the platform had grown up online. Before we had Facebook we said and shared a whole lot of dumb stuff anonymously and figured out the real-world consequences of our online actions. We "trolled" a wikipedia article about elephants with John Stewart and learned about "fake news" from Bonsai Kittens and pop-up ads promising we'd just become millionares. We "socialized" on AIM, LiveJournal, Xanaga and MySpace. For early Facebook users, Facebook was just one of many destinations on the internet.

But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.

I'm not sure if I buy that. I would say for most young folks today "The Internet" is YouTube, not Facebook.

Sorry if I was unclear as I was trying not to malign baby boomers but I was referring to the 50+/not tech savvy crowd on Facebook, not the young internet users of today.

Ah, I misunderstood.

Please be careful with the "50+" comments, ha! Not there yet but closer than I'd like to admit, and I grew up during the sweet spot of modern computing. My biased opinion is that Gen X had it best in this regard.

Yes I was trying not to specifically say baby boomers because I know even the oldest user on HN is very much not the type I was trying to refer to.

I meant the users like my 60 year old father who was recently "Facebook hacked" when he accidentally hit the "insert" button on his keyboard.

Same bingo. My hypothesis (at least for the Facebook I see, that is of course a minuscule fraction) is that FB is mostly used now by people with an agenda (self promotion, spreading of an ideology, marketing, political campaign, whatever). Therefore, any disagreement is immediately treated as a threat. Ultimately FB has become a dark forest for casual users. The fun is gone.

I haven't noticed any change whatsoever since 2016 and Facebook continues to work great for me. But then I don't live in US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com