From my personal experience as a Facebook and Instagram user for over 10 years; the experience has become more and more mundane every year, exponentially. I see the same pattern among most of my peers; everyone posts less and less or nothing at all anymore. Whenever you engage and comment on a public post/page/group that you follow, Facebook will blast it to all of your friends' feeds including people on your friends who you really don't care for or barely know like a former co-worker or someone you met briefly at a networking event 5 years ago. Nobody wants to share that with everyone. This is why posting and engagement is vanishing. Instagram has a similar version of this idiotic setup where the scroll will show your friends content that you liked or commented on and highlight your profile name, so there goes engaging on a controversial post or simping on a fitness influencer (which is probably a huge driver of engagement on Instagram). The point is that the disregard for privacy is also a disregard for a good-quality user experience. It actually discourages engagement.
On both facebook and Instagram, business profiles are ghost towns even if you waste some money on ads for additional exposure. This is exacerbated for small businesses which largely outnumber large businesses.
While facebook may have replaced myspace, it never accommodated an adequate space for bands/musicians. The amount of engagement that can be created between artists and fans has completely been neglected and abandoned by the platform.
The facebook marketplace is an absolute frustration for both buyers and sellers.
Facebook groups have become safe heavens for scammers because no matter how many times you report them and the nigerian admins pretending to be sweet old ladies from the midwest selling puppies, and facebook's automated reporting system will tell you that they found nothing wrong that violated the community guidelines. Meanwhile, actual sweet old ladies keep getting scammed and sending deposits for puppies that don't exist. It doesn't matter how many times you report the group or the fake profiles, facebook's automated system says it's all good. When the scammer's group finally gets too much heat or finally gets shut down, they simply start new fake profiles and a new group in an hour, and it's rinse and repeat all over again.
Facebook Watch is nowhere near as practical as Youtube, and the algorithm pushes the most toxic content possible for the sake of clickbait and engagement. You start by watching a sports clip or a video of a cute dog posted by a page that you actually follow, and the algorithm will immediately start playing an infinite auto-scroll of car crashes, fights, burglaries, and other violent/toxic content. Comment on any of those videos posted by pages that you don't follow, and all your friends will see your outburst or your stance on a controversial topic.
Instagram has completely abandoned its original purpose to become a hybrid of snapchat and tiktok. You can say that social media is ever-evolfing and fluid, but the most egregious aspect of this is that Instagram does not support content creators. Without content creators, there is no Instagram! Instead, Instagram rewards spammers and content thieves that lift popular content from original creators and compile it under soulless pages that the algorithm reward with all the exposure. Seriously, go into the explore tab and start scrolling through reels and take note of how many of those are from either content creators or content thieves.
Have you seen the profile page for facebook on Instagram? This is how delusional the company is. It completely ignores and underrepresents the core of the facebook userbase. Do you think that most of the poeple that actually use facebook are the cool kind of people shown in that facebook profile on instagram? They are actually the kind of people that use facebook the least, if they even have a facebook profile.
When facebook started, it had a clear vision to connect college students. Expanding beyond college students was reasonable and welcomed, it made sense to grow beyond that, but where is it heading now? Where has it been heading for the past 7 years? It seems like it's way off course and without a direction, just drifting away. What's the point of trying to be a generic one-size-fits-all version of snapchat, tiktok, youtube, craigslist, tinder, instagram, discord, myspace, zoom, periscope, etc.
If the stock depends on ad revenue, if ad revenue depends on engagement, if engagement depends on user experience; how is ad revenue going to grow if the user experience is declining and management seems delusional about it?
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