I quit Facebook when I realized I was mostly seeing things I didn't want to see and it was making me like the people I knew less. That was like 15 years ago

Probably because it's been overtaken by exhausting far right narratives pushed by the companies themselves.

My Facebook page doesn't even show me stuff from people I actually know any more. One of my cousins had a baby, it didn't even show me that. Instead what it thinks I want to see are badly written posts about immigrants and "lefties" being to blame for everything, as if the UK government is left wing in any way at all...

Dude they filled my timeline with a bunch of ads and AI generated nonsense. We stopped posting because no one ever saw it thanks to all of the filler.

When social media started it focuses on friends. You add someone as a friend and you could see what they were up to.

Then Facebook came along and made it competitive, it became less about seeing what friends were doing and more about posting things that people liked.

As Facebook grew, it changed. One day you didn’t see the stuff your friends posted unless you constantly interacted with their posts or a lot of other people did.

It’s gotten worse and worse since then. They have added more and more ads and posts from people and pages you might know that you no longer see stuff from people you do know.

It’s absolutely worthless.

Not just America. It's a trend worldwide thanks to the abundance of AI slop taking over any 'social network'.

Because no one fing cares about your hourly updates and you're just advertising your insecurities.

Social media is 75% ads, 15% shared content (more ads), and 10% people you know creating actual posts. You're a gluten for punishment if you hang out there.

It was all over when Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline. It's just taken a while for people to notice how awful it's made everything.

I just signed up for my local Nextdoor; holy crap, it’s 75% commercial ads, about 10% personal ads, about 10% dogs/cats/kittens, and 5% misc. Utterly useless.

I mean, I still post to social media every day, but it's pixelfed. It's not toxic, it's just me throwing in my art on the pile with everyone else's art that I also get to flip through and enjoy, in chronological posting order, with no advertisements or other subject matter present.

The really shitty part is that I used to post my art on Instagram app the time and started to get a lot of followers, then they changed their system. Now I didn't get hardly any views.

Because it's stupid, you get nothing out of it and you lose time on top

Only 45% more to go. We can do this guys!

Back in the day, I posted on Instagram to share things with my friends and scrolled to see their updates. The chronological feed with no suggested posts was the only way it worked, and now that's impossible. There are no "people" on Instagram anymore.

The algorithm ruined it for me. Insta was once so great to keep up and share updates with friends; I've no interest in interacting with strangers shoved down my throat unprompted.

I'm not.an American, but I'm sure the sentiment is universal!

That explains the bots.

Dead Internet theory is real.

They're already trying to track everything I do. Why would I help them?

Social media used to be mostly about keeping up with friends. Now it’s about competing with everyone for money and views.

Big change.

Social media has also done its hardest to try and push people away from using it. Between the culture being awful, and there being an increasing number of roadblocks to using it, that ironically ruins discoverability for anyone who might want to use social media.

For example, if you want to use Reddit, and see a link, there's a lot of posts that you can't see without having an account and logging in. That's a big ask for something that you're not even sure that you want to sign up for, which would only be worse since you couldn't sidestep that using the old reddit interface.

Meanwhile, Twitter not only makes it so that you can't see much of anything without being logged in, but they're trying some new scheme where if you have an account, you need to download the app and give them your biometrics to confirm that you're human before you can use your account.

If you've scarcely used either site, why would you start now? Everything wants you to jump through more and more hoops to verify that you're actually a human, and if you don't have an account, the content that you can see doesn't seem to much of anything interesting. When not logged in, some subreddit and posts are completely inaccessible, and on Twitter, you can only see the tweet, but not the replies, or recent user posts.

Both of those were the main draws for each site. Why would any new user want to use them now? The only thing that they have is their reputation, and that will slowly go away with time.

Once upon a time, for example, Twitter was once the haven for beginner programmers, because they had a nice, free easy-to-use API that anyone could use to make bots and learn how to use APIs in general. Reddit was not far behind that. But that's mostly gone now. Reddit no longer approves API keys for the most part, and is working to shut down the public APIs that it has left, and Twitter has locked theirs behind a paywall.

For me it's the idea that by interacting with social media I'm working to generate profit for a billionaire-led company.

Most of my microblogging stuff has been just shouting in the void about stuff I've been doing. And random brainfarts. I follow cool people on social media so I can see them shout in the void about what they're doing. And their random brainfarts.

I'm happy Mastodon still lets me do just that. Perfect platform for that sort of stuff.

The Algo Lords decided people don't actually want to see that, they want "popular" things and engagement bait. Yeah no, not what I want.

And I still use social media the way many people originally imagined it: as a way to stay connected. My feeds have always been a mix of far-flung relatives, old friends, and high school band chums (because, let’s be honest, band buddies are the best buddies). Most days, I carve out a little time after work to catch up with the people who matter.

The last thing I’d want is for doing so to be...just more work. And yet, more than half of respondents agreed with the statement “Maintaining an online presence feels like work,” with about a third of those checking the “strongly agree” box. Only 16% disagreed, with the rest remaining neutral.

A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer?

I don't really care about the following-people form of social media, the Twitter family. I'm more interested in the forum sort, the Reddit family. There, I don't need to singlehandedly maintain a flow of content, because people aren't coming to see @tal@lemmy.today, but because they're coming to see what's going on in some community that I only incidentally participate in.

AFAIK, these companies are making record revenue.

I’ve now realizing that these Tech giants have poisoned their entire well:

• Want to make AR glasses? Cool! Oh… Uh, I guess we run a platform that handsomely pays pervs for engagement, so that’s not going to work.

• Let’s start gaming services. Oh… why does no one want to make an account with us, or trust we will keep it running?

• Generative models for creative media. Oh, uh… back to the AR glasses issue. And some others.

• Ah, so our LLMs need to reference the web to be at their best which…. We… Kind of killed for a quick buck? Oops.

There are hundreds of examples of this.

And now? The whole reason people use these platforms is being consumed by cancer. Rapidly, from the feel of things.

I’m a cynic. I believe companies like Meta can carry on destroying people and getting away with it, no matter what, and users will be indifferent.

But now I’m starting to suspect they they have nowhere to pivot to, because they’ve burned the forest down.

Let's get it to 85%

I have 1200 "friends" on Facebook.

Less than a 10th of them "follow" me.

Therefore it is and was a literal waste of time to spend any time on their site.

No mention of centralised versus decentralised social media. The thing that makes the biggest difference. No ads. No algorithm. No lock in, swap networks keeping friends and followers. Tune your timeline to suit you. Calling everything social media is trash journalism when those issues are already solved. Clearly he has no clue about the topic.