Less people using and posting on Facebook or just my friend list? I ?

[Starbright885]

gone so quiet now. After pandemics it seems less and less people are using it or just not anymore. I've asked a couple of friends and they say it's just boring now.

The feed annoys me! To the point where I have bookmarks that take me straight to the groups I want to look at, and then I don't see the feed at all.

All I see is ads, sponsored misinformation posts or stupid AI photos. It's bloody awful. Use it for messenger but tapering off that even.

I agree with this!

Deffo over 70s, my mum and her brothers and sisters are all 75plus and use it all day to keep in touch

I left FB six years ago, having joined in 2007 and having been quite a prolific user and poster for many years. It was just becoming increasingly irrelevant and I started to realise that all this sharing my life stuff wasn’t for me anymore. I missed it slightly during lock down but it really doesn’t seem as if I’ve missed out on anything much at all! I did rejoin insta in 2020 having had a break from that for a few years and I must say I think it’s great so long as you’re very fussy about who you follow. I get loads of great ideas and tips on there.

The algorithm is so shit. It doesn’t seem to understand that because I like the local yarn shops in my area that doesn’t mean updates from yarn shops in Utah are any use to me.

I am in a number of groups for very specific crafts so it shows me stuff from loads of other crafts I don’t do and have no interest in. Why does it think I will use Facebook more if I am in MORE groups rather than spending more time in the ones I am already in, which I barely manage to keep up with?

I deactivated my facebook account in 2009 (same year I joined twitter) and haven't used it since.

Deleted Facebook 1 month ago and don’t miss it one bit , all you see it the happy fake family’s , and pointless statuses from people , oh I’m off to work , I’m having a shower , pointless things like that , nah not for me anymore , I like private life .

Just taking a scroll down my feed now, in order from the top I get:

1. post from a friend about her birthday
2. advert for football shirts (I have no interest in football)
3. animal video (I do quite like watching animal videos)
4. post from Dan Walker tv about strictly (which I did watch last night)
5. photo of Edinburgh from a random page (I did a Google search on Edinburgh last week)
6. one of those mildly amusing cartoons with the aliens
7. random video of some Ninja warrior type tv show (I don't watch that)
8. Yorkshire related tourist type video (I live in Yorkshire)
9. some strange comedy video, American
10. video from the wardrobe manager of Hampton Court Palace (no idea)

So out of the first 10 things, one is what I'd been used to seeing from Facebook.
If I keep scrolling down the next relevant things are at numbers 16 and 17, posts from groups I follow. Only one friends post in top 20.

I agree. Seems to be the same couple of people posting and then just full of ads and suggested groups which are of no interest,

You can click on Feeds and there is an option to click on Friends so that you don’t get all the suggested posts (of which there is a ridiculous amount) but it seems you have to do this every time and can’t just set it to this but it does help to some extent!

Half an hour ago about half the first 10 posts in my feed were either my friends or groups I am in. I looked again just now and the first and 30th things were my friends. Between that, NOTHING I am interested in.

The algorithm is so shit. It doesn’t seem to understand that because I like the local yarn shops in my area that doesn’t mean updates from yarn shops in Utah are any use to me.

They really are shit. I follow a couple of the police pages in my local area. So facebook automatically assumes I want to see police updates about traffic or missing people in Cardiff or Edinburgh or somewhere equally far away. Also, I made the mistake of googling a tv show and now every other post is a friggin fan site for it, even though I keep clicking the X in the top corner to say I'm not interested. I never even watched the show ffs!

It’s so bizarre, the thing of some things being location critical and others not ought to be ridiculously easy to fix.

My FB feed is overwhelmed by fan sites of Modern Family posting ridiculously pithy screenshots. I have never watched Modern Family and have zero interest in it. I believe my teen has been watching it on her profile on our family shared Netflix account, but she watches it on her own in her room. That is the only connection. I find it nonsensical that FB has scraped our Netflix data to find this connection, but why it is flooding me with this irrelevant content is beyond me, and just shows how shit the algorithm is

I don't get those types of posts because none of my friends post shit like this.

It's the random groups and advertising that is annoying, but I find the local groups and event information, motorway closures, local news etc invaluable.

Same as most here, hobby/support groups and marketplace are all that FB has going for it now. I do use those a lot and I think they're valuable.

I don't mind the ads as long as they're not overwhelming, it's the suggested pages/groups and influencers that make me shut down the FB app.

They're constant and too much. At best, most of them are boring, at worst, pretty offensive.

If I go on facebook on the computer I click on feeds, then on friends, and then I get posts from friends interspersed with some ads but at least no crap from random groups I'm not part of and pages I haven't liked or interacted with

I use Brave browser when on a computer rather than a mobile device. That is based on Chrome but built from the bottom up with ad blocking (that actually works) and with the presumption of privacy as default.

This cuts down on the ads factor considerably (Not 100% but you'll definitely notice the difference).

There's not much that can be done about them when using the mobile app unfortunately.

TikTok used to be great but not anymore. Just people trying to sell cheap tat from China. Facebook is still relevant to me, I use Instagram but again it's full of ads selling cheap tat from China. Facebook keeps me in touch with family and old friends.

Mine constantly shows posts days old. It's off putting.

A couple of months back nearly every post was that AI old lady who is 100 years old and made her own cake with all her extra fingers.
Still get lots of really dodgy shopping sites where they rip off photos from real sellers but if you buy you get cheap replicas from China or more likely nothing at all.

Agree. Think you have a quality of mates problem rather than a FB problem @Ilovebees 😂

I left years ago.

I have a private Instagram for invited family. I used the offshoot, Threads. I have an TwitterX account but rarely post, it's more for information these days. My work colleagues and I use WhatsApp. My older family members still use Fb but no-one I know of my generation (GenX) uses it anymore.

That’s useful to know but I think that most of my friends have already moved away from regular Facebook use