Jokes aside that this is how FB started, I wonder if this is a reaction to recent claims that FB has a general political slant, and that this might be a way to isolate and segregate people associated with colleges.
I don't want to generalize too much from my own window into Facebook, but it does look like they may be in a feedback loop. As more and more toxic conservative garbage gets reshared, progressives start ditching Facebook. That means the remaining userbase likes that stuff more, so the feed gets tuned to make it more prominent. That turns off more progressives, who drop out. Rinse, lather, repeat.
When I go on Facebook now, it looks like Internet Fox News, and that's despite trying very hard to unfollow the people who reshare that stuff.
Even the left-leaning content on Facebook has gotten more extreme and virulent. It's just a miserable hellhole now of two tribes screaming at each other while the feed AI fans the flames.
I think you misspelled "Twitter" :)
I miss the days when Facebook was about sharing personal connections, stupid and fun stuff, as a shy kid in high school who didn't speak very good English, facebook has helped me made friends and connect with kids in my school as I was more comfortable talking to them online. Hard to imagine that would ever take place with the way Facebook is today, where you log on to scream at other people's political opinions which are different from yours.
If they really wanted to maximize "engagement" they would actually hide all of the political posts and rage inducing comments and show nothing but cat pictures.
This should end well.
I think this is a function of the friends you have, and what Facebook assumes you like to see based on the pages your friends like (lookalike audience targeting). When I was more active on Facebook, there was a lot of left-wing direct action, and zero Fox News stuff.
Maybe find different friends :)
Has anyone actually ever taken this advice when receiving it in the context of frustrating social media content? I see people throwing this advice around a LOT in these discussions and have always tried to find someone who actually went and did it just because someone on the internet said to.
Curious how well it worked. It sounds about as useful advice as telling someone to “just” get another job after mildly venting about a rough day at the office (or on zoom, given the state of things here recently), which is something we’ve all done just to decompress I would imagine.
Personal curation is a thing, which I think will solve the case for a non-trivial amount of people, if more were intentional and deliberate about it, but it stops short personally of getting 'better' friends.
Which...I just think is unhelpful advice unless an individual is truly and consistently harming the friendship with their actions and behaviors.
You can also 'snooze' a person for up to 30 days. Problem I noticed with that was once that 30 days is up, the news feed algorithm SEEMINGLY overcorrects and tends to show you nothing BUT posts from that individual with a higher weight against everything else once their snooze period is over.
As someone who had a number of friends that posted content that was just annoying and boring (not so much incendiary or vitriolic-although they get snoozed too), I used snooze quite a bit. They're great friends, we just have very different tastes and tolerances for what happens on social media. So I used the tools given to me to see less of it, but maintained the friendship.
I saw a good mix of both, given I have friends and family that span the political spectrum. In any case, I've suspended my account and given up on FB because it has become just too toxic. Maintaining a diverse circle of FB friends requires refraining from saying or responding to anything even remotely political and that just became too damn tedious for me. I'm off twitter as well (not that I was ever really into that one).
Social Media is a cancer and needs to DIAF.
That reminds me, I have yet another email from a FB recruiter sitting in my inbox, guess I wasn't quite rude enough the last time.
There is a lot of that too, but I also find that fairly toxic. I'm not interested in angry tribal signaling even when it's for my own tribe.
> Maybe find different friends :)
We don't all have the luxury of replacing our family and personal history.
The sad part is that I don't really have real life friends, so seeing what people are up to on Facebook was kind of cool. Until it turned into just a big political echo chamber.