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Comment by philipwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years,

Yeah, because you filled the feed with garbage so obviously they don't get to see as much.

Has 'percentage of time viewing content' declined?

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Seriously, talk about self fulfilling. "We stopped showing people content from their friends, and people started spending less time viewing content from their friends. It's inexplicable, really."

The unspoken thing really is: We couldn't find a way to make mega-bux on showing people content from their friends, so we stopped being a social network almost entirely so we could make mega-bux showing them garbage ads and disinformation campaigns instead.

Instagram actually used to be quite nice when it was pics of friends. Now I find it scary.

IG was a social network that made me feel better after using it. It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.

It really sucks that every single platform is lured into the brain-attention hack of short form video and the optimization of attention quantity over interaction quality. All cycles repeat though - here’s hoping.

> “It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.”

Ha! This is the opposite of my experience. I feel Tumblr was superior platform for images and art on small phone for no other reason than you can easily pinch and zoom. I still prefer still images on the Tumblr platform, and my feed is filled with artists, designers, photographers and comic book covers.

I never liked the experience of viewing stills on Instagram and only when my friend started producing small videos and another friend started sending me fishing meme videos, did I start engaging. Now I do spend some time each week in Instagram (same as YouTube shorts). The platform is perfect for sharing small instructional videos. My feed is full of motorcycle mechanics hacks, fly fishing lessons, fitness instructions, and camping knots—all to my recreational interests—I’d rather be fishing.

It seems to largely be a mirror for tik-tok these days.

The last thing I want to see is what random people I don't know are posting. Maybe there's a stream where I can see that, but not in MY news feed. I want to only see what my friends are doing, and maybe what is going on in a group that I belong to. Nothing else. No AI prompts or responses, no suggested friends, videos, groups, etc. To make Facebook even tangentially useful to me I have to use FBuster or other extensions to remove all of that junk.

> The last thing I want to see is what random people I don't know are posting

Most of us right here?

I'd like to know how much that time spend viewing content posted by "friends" are down since 2012, because I bet it's more than in the past two years, by a lot.

There's also:

> "The F.T.C. is arguing, instead, that Meta’s purported monopoly has led to a lack of innovation and to reduced consumer choice."

Not really, because no one gave a shit about providing a good social media experience, everyone wants to copy Zuckerbergs homework.

If you want to blame Facebook/Meta for anything is it breaking the trust of people to the extend that no other social media can exist for a decade. Meta has burned the would be early adopters to the extend that they will NEVER sign up to a new social media platform ever again. Meta (and Google, Microsoft and so many others) have shown that spying on customers and selling their private data is business and now the tech savvy users that would be the first onboard and advocating are no longer signing up to anything that cannot guarantee absolute privacy.

Facebook also killed of pretty much any other marketplace, but I am interested in seeing how the newer generations are going to affect that, given that many of them doesn't have a Facebook account.

Yeah, how about improving Facebook (which has been neglected for years) instead of building out Threads (which nobody needs)?

Did FB chose to replace friends' posts with garbage, or was it that less and less people were posting, and FB had to replace the feed with _something_?

Looking for cause and effect in a feedback loop is a fool's errand

Those aren’t mutually exclusive options. Facebook wants to always have new things to show people so they stay on the site, but it was absolutely their choice to deprioritize your friends’ posts below advertisers and the “engaging” slop.

Visiting friends' profiles, they still seem to be posting but I rarely see them on my feed.

No I haven't got them muted or anything haha, and I can't speak for why the algorithm thinks I don't want to see the content. Maybe it's broken.

Some mid-level manager idiot's a/b test revealed that they could maximize engagement by showing more rage bait and less family. This increased revenue and nobody wants to suggest a change that lowers it.

They have relevance guardrails but they keep eroding.

This is why I left Facebook and I'm sure it drove away many others.

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