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Comment by rimeice | Hacker News Reader

2015 for me too. I wonder if there was some early day over juicing of the attention mechanism that put people off in that year, before they tuned it to reduce churn…

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It was a big year for the culture war. People who had previously been cordial suddenly needed to fight each other over politics and other controversies of the day. The rest of us watched this happen, then slowly backed away.

It wasn’t even that for me. No one was posting anything political right or left back then. Just one day the newsfeed went from chronological posts of friends to littered with the bs you see today. Why even post when no one is going to see it. And then of course the natural march of life where people have less time to bother with that and no longer care if Stacy from English class liked the homecoming photos or not.

2014-15 was when the news feed switched from static, human-written code to machine learning models optimized to maximize ad revenue[1], the models discovering "user attention time" was a far better metric to optimize for than clicks, likes or shares[2]. And what people spent the most "attention time" on was content that triggered raw moral outrage, fear and tribal hostility[3].

This switch does appear to have put off a lot of smart, thinking people as the newsfeed degenerated into a torrent of dopamine-spiking diarrhea. But those people don't tend to be the ones that click on ads.

[1] https://time.com/collections/the-cloud/3950525/facebook-news... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/facebook-... [3] https://www.supersummary.com/the-chaos-machine/summary/ - the whole "Chaos Machine" book is excellent

Yeah but I think it just took some year for ppl to notice.

2013-2014 the algorithm got more foused on non-friend posts aswell as making the prioritzation less about "likes" from friends and instead some opaque engagement metrics. Groups had to "promote" post to get their prior reach to subscribers.

Also videos started to be posted around that time?

I remember I left around that time too because they started aggressively trying to defeat adbockers. I'd rather just leave the platform completely than see a single ad.

Tinfoil hat time but I think they definitely did _something_ at that time that "changed" the system. It's the Cambridge Analytica/Trump time and I believe that FB definitely "changed" at the same time.

After Cambridge Analytica, my "intelligent" friends basically abandoned the platform, while my distant conspiracy inclined uncles started posting baseless slop.

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