I don't log in to Facebook very often, but when I do it's not bad at all. I scroll through a few updates from friends and family and catch up with a few people, then I close it for another week or two.
There isn't just one "Facebook" that we all see, obviously. Your feed is going to be a reflection of the groups you've joined and the friends you keep (and haven't muted). If you've just accumulated groups and connections for a decade without doing anything to shape your feed, I could see how it wouldn't be very interesting.
But if you take a few seconds here and there to "like" things you want to see more of, hide things you want to see less of, mute the obnoxious people you don't want to hear from at all, and leave groups you're not interested in, it's not bad at all.
Overall not bad to be honest. Still not much I'm actually interested in but far from cancerous.
I removed the feed completely, but still kept my account so I can still engage with groups, which is the only thing keeping me there. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...
The local expat group for my city
Vegan recipes
Updates from robot teams
Lame jokes / skits that I enjoy
Birthday posts
Cat pictures
Travel restrictions group (support group for those wanting to come to country X, which is difficult because for the last 2 years it been only charter flights and you need approval from 5 government agencies)
When a friend posts, I want to see it. Simple. Sometime, years ago, FB decided to pick and choose what to show me from my friend's feeds. That's when I skipped out of FB, deleted my account.
Facebook turned everyone into bulk junk mailers. They pay the postage and then slap ads on the flyers everyone sends out. People get to spam their friends with basically zero effort.
If Facebook can weed out zero effort, low value posts from my friends with a high degree of accuracy that at least blunts some of the damage the platform itself has done.
So, yeah, if we're going with anecdata, then my experience doesn't match yours, even with this approach of trying to highly curate it.
If you're not interested in content from people in your social network, then I don't understand what you're expecting to get out of a social network anyway. Facebook isn't a bad way to keep up with friends and family, but if you don't like your friends on any platform then you're probably not going to have a good time.
In other words: You're not their target customer. As with any business, trying to extrapolate your own use case on to the general public is going to be very misleading.
> I really hope the marketing via outrage culture doesn’t make its way there...
Reddit has been unusable for at least the past five years owing to how they tailor the homepage and r/all to be a wasteland of outrage designed to keep users seething at others. It's basically become the two minutes hate.
Especially during pandemic when I get to see update from my friends. Their new born, or kids finally going to school. I have a suspicious feeling many of the negative and politics went somewhere else like Twitter. And the rest are there you could easily filter out. The place is now a lot more calm than it used to be. Although this may be confined to US and UK? My AUS friends are still on Facebook for political battle for some reason.
I am actually grateful b/c I was addicted to FB. I broke that addiction and the reintroduction hasn't been anywhere close to where it was. Now twitter has seemed to become better... but maybe I've changed.
HN is still well, still here, maybe I should leave and see what I think in 6 months.
I’ve unfollowed almost everyone from my past and when I add someone new I unfollow them as soon as they post anything publicly that I don’t care about.
