Facebook only made sense in the context of living on a college campus… I think it doesn’t quite fit this pattern because realistically users were rarely in the “good fit” case for only ~4 years. Then, for each user, it becomes this sort of awkward slowly decaying network as people move on.
replyI agree with everything else you said though.
Facebook was once a friend network and they added more and more advertising and slop to it. If you were the frog in the pot as it heated, it feels normal to you that your feed is entirely made of spam. If you're still out of the pot now, it seems foolish to jump in, unlike when it was lukewarm.
replyPeople are on <insert social network here> because their family & friends are. Once on, it's hard to un-glue because it keeps zucking you in.
replyMaybe. I joined fairly early, still have an account, but did become pretty disengaged from it after graduation. So maybe I didn’t get the proper gradual boiling experience.
replyI still have a Facebook account, and will occasionally log in (most recently attempting to sell something on their craigslist equivalent). The default content shown in your "feed" or dashboard is more than 50% engagement bait and/or slop. I attempted to start flagging those posts as "never show me again," but it soon became apparent that it was a Sisyphean task, and I just logged out again.
replyThere’s the “friends feed” in the app that has less garbage in it. I mean, these days it is just full of my friends posting pictures of their kids or reposting political things. But I can’t really blame Facebook for the fact that we got old and boring, and it doesn’t have the “suggested content” nonsense.
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