And they don’t even realize that original Facebook experience that was useful for keeping friends closer when physically apart has slowly gone by the wayside.

I remember when Facebook changed everyone’s feeds from chronological to whatever they were calling their algorithm at the time. The use experience completely went to shit. Things friends posted would sometimes never show up, and you’d have to manually change your settings back to chronological sorting every few days or it would default back to their “smart feed”.

Now it’s just people reposting things they’re into or reposting echo chamber links to stuff they agree with no real target.

Pretty depressing how we’ve lost twitter and Facebook to this crap.

I suspect it’s not an optimization to make every post you see interesting. For one thing, we tend to find intermittent rewards more fascinating and addictive than reliable ones. For another, if you have to scroll further you’ll see more ads. But if you make it too boring people won’t scroll at all. So the algorithm probably tries to make it just interesting enough to keep people scrolling, but no more.

The solution is to keep using craigslist - it still exists and gets some activity. Ensure that it gets more.

As a non American I’m more salty about Oculus. lol Although at its height it was also severely annoying that every freaking company used FB pages instead of their own websites, including for support requests. So without FB you literally could not contact them. Luckily that trend only held up for a few years but it was still annoying as hell.

Just use craigslist. I do. Even in low pop areas it works.

It’s all fucking tire kickers anyway.

I had an instance recently where it was faster and easier to literally make an item with my bare hands than to coordinate a purchase of one via marketplace.

I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.

I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.

Nextdoor is also good for selling stuff. But you need to verify your address through either an ID or they send you a post card. Keeps the bots off though.

It may be what you say, the algorithm being dumb. Or it may be deliberate: you’ve shown yourself willing to categorize these annoying ads so you will be sent more so that fb can collect more data on them.

Abandoning is the only option. It’s a dopamine casino now, full of flashing lights.

To get to it click the 3 lines or ‘more’, then find ‘feeds’ and select that

Oh, wow… I recently opened fb again and was just irritated that it didn’t show any posts by my friends. Turns out they weren’t inactive, fb just doesn’t show them by default. What a dumb waste of a platform… I mean, what is it good for if not that? Why would I watch an endless stream of ads and clickbait?

I hear you saying that the only way to win is to not play the game.

example if you see an ad you hate, for like a slot machine game app, and you click ‘see less ads like this

You engaged with that ad. It’s worth slightly more than if you scrolled by it.

sorry, but I think what you are looking for is platforms like Lemmy. it is not centralized, it is distributed. not peer to peer, sure, but

• since a lot of devices are not being online at the same time, mobile phones but even desktop PCs always go offline for some period of time, the direct communication wouldn’t really work with a lot of other users
• you would need to store much more dataon each of your devices, unless you’re the kind who doesn’t care about mindlessly deleting past conversations

distributed social web

…ActivityPub?

I do know of a project that does what you are looking for, decentralized (100%), FOSS, easy to set up, encrypted…

I built a very basic chat program on top of it quite easily, a “FB clone” is not far away IMO.

So what’s the project? It’s my Tenfingers protocol & implementation (http://tenfingers.org) and it’s just waiting for adoption!

I’m in the process of making the documentation and installation guide, but you can check it out right now.

I’d love showcasing it somewhere, getting feedback, help out with problems etc.

Thank you for reminding me why I stopped using the reddit app. Almost considered re-downloading it.

Empty Internet Theory but its just the “Recommended For You” stuff that Facebook shoehorns in between the pictures of my nieces that I occasionally drop in to look at.

Its funny. When you go into some of the early Facebook history, Zuckerberg is exploring monitization options. He floats the idea of turning it into the kind of intrusive, obnoxious, ads-everywhere experience that had shown up on local news websites and the worst kinds of forum spaces. He (supposedly) rejects it, in pursuit of a more sophisticated kind of mass marketing. The theory being that this kind of invasive content scares away users, and what we really want is to maximize the user base rather than to maximize the monetary value of each user.

But ten years later, we’re right back to a website that’s indistinguishable from eye-ball gouging Geocities crap. The “put ads everywhere to maximize revenue” folks won out in the end. Zuckerberg’s genius move was to simply hold them back until the website started hitting the post-one-billion user base load. But then this was always the end game. Just clickbait across everything, with a periodic pop-over ad demanding that you give the site money to save it from itself.

Not really. There were plenty of random pages, but you really had to seek it out to see it. Now an overwhelming majority of non-ad posts are stuff like this (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pay to have this stuff seen, basically making it an ad)