My Facebook feed has been nearly entirely taken over by ads and slop, which overwhelms the updates from people I care about.
I don’t know if the slop is AI-generated – I suspect much of it is.
And yet I find myself scrolling the feed when I’m very very tired and in need of mindless distraction. Which is far too often. So I am part of the problem.
We hear about “enshittification.” There is an older, related phenomenon where an aging company has an installed base that’s locked in because the cost of switching is too high, and the company’s goal becomes extracting as much value from the customers as they can without any thought of customer loyalty or providing value. We’ve seen this in enterprise software – that was basically Computer Associates' business model. That’s where the blue Facebook app is now.
The cost of switching for leaving Facebook is losing contact with friends, family and social groups – but Facebook is already making it harder to stay in touch with the people we care about, as it pushes slop and ads into our feeds. And I’ve noticed that people who used to like and comment on my posts just don’t do it as much anymore, so I think people are just wandering away from Facebook without making a conscious decision to quit.
I know people who’ve left Facebook who still use and enjoy Instagram and I don’t see how they manage that because every time I go on Instagram it’s all ads and slop.
Facebook is making it harder for people to post links. The platform is losing relevance and their strategy is … to make it harder for people to post content people might like and get value from? Maybe if I were a centibillionaire like Zuck this strategy would make sense to me but to me it seems entirely ass-backwards.
Then again, much Internet consumer strategy seems ass-backwards to me. Why is it when I go on Amazon Video, I have to scroll down to several screens to continue watching shows we’re already watching? Why do I have to sit through ads for other video content before watching the video I selected? Amazon, you want me to watch video, I want to watch video – show me the video already!
I have become the “old man yells at cloud” meme. I’ll stop now.