I suspect part of it is that Real People are posting less. Since the feed doesn't have a bottom anymore it makes up the difference with sponsored and suggested junk rather than going empty.
Its been making me wonder if its time to sell my shares, which I have held since the IPO. It just feels like FB errr "Meta" is really losing its way, and this Metaverse stuff just seems like its going to be a furnace into which billions of dollars are going to be thrown into. My gut says its time, but I just can't quite pull the trigger yet.
IMO Facebook needs an "original content only" setting. I block every single page that some idiot shares, but I'm not sure how much it helps. I will literally never want to see something shared from another page.
It seems like this would be a good thing for FB too. Keep engagement up, keep inserting ads. Hell, they could insert MORE ads if the content I saw from my friends had a greater signal:noise ratio.
Anyway, I recently shared some vacation pictures and quite enjoyed it. So much better than a bullshit "story" that lasts 24h and nobody can engage with except via DM. Such a weird impulse for an app. (okay, I get that they want you to use it constantly so you have FOMO about missing content that disappears after 24h, but I don't get why they don't want any real user engagement on the content).
The context in which you share stuff is incredibly important. If the platform will bookend your posts with crap, it reduces the value of your own post.
They are pretty much at the tipping point where the signal to noise ratio has gotten so low that it seems futile to add more signal. There is also a component to it as well where is it really worth it to give FB even more data about my life?- what am I even getting in return for it these days? And even more recently, I woke up one morning recently and the feed felt really stale, I was seeing posts from the previous day. I tried to look at just my friends, and then sort by most recent, and you could see that just the number of people actually posting what they are up to is just way down.
Instagram is better for this these days, but its headed in the same direction it seems.
Most people have ~300 friends. Most of those friends never post, and the 10% that do probably only post a couple of times a year now.
That means whenever you log in, there is no content from your friends to see.
My high school peers post pictures of their kids all the time. I like their pictures and they like mine. My grandparents all like my posts too, except grandpa who told me not to curse on Facebook so I blocked her. I’ll curse on Facebook if I want, damn it!
Edit: You know, I haven’t even posted this but just to verify I went to Facebook and… 90% was suggested pages and barely any of my friends posts. I swear it wasn’t like this yesterday. Did someone push an algorithm change and screw everything up in prod for Facebook?
I'm so sorry. I hope you can get help.
A more accurate way to state it would be to say 'facebook connections'. If you don't regularly communicate with them, they aren't your friends.
This is called an acquaintance.
If you want to use the FB corporate meaning, go ahead, but label it appropriately.
This temporarily forces chronological feed by most recently posted. My feed of actual people turned into a ghost town.
However, Facebook has been slowly chipping away at it, by putting suggested posts afterwards (instead of accounts you actually follow) so if you're not paying attention, you'll still get ads / engagement. I expect the "no new posts" indicator will be made smaller and smaller, and eventually disappear.
If I wanted to see most of the friend-content I had "subscribed" to, I had to do a manual tour of their profiles.
I'm sure people do post even less now, but I'm skeptical that's the root cause of what's being reported. The explicit bias towards political/commercial/promoted/engagementbait content over "subscribed" content has been there for years.
If normal people's posts get seen by their friends and followers, what would a business be paying for? And so it starts a loop that ends in nothing but AI generated content for doomscrollers.
There's probably a threshold where this problem starts feeding itself, and a threshold where it stops.