To think facebook is dying out?

[Middleagednbored]

Been on it for years, have a couple of hundred friends on there. Over the past few years, I've noticed that only a handful post regularly now, the rest post rarely, if ever. I've realised some haven't posted for years! There are a few who until a year or so ago posted regularly and I liked keeping up with their lives but now seem to have stopped. I have definitely cut down on my posts too. A year ago, I would average twice a week, now it's twice a month if that. What's the point if no one is reading? I do actually like seeing the memories come up and how people I don't see much anymore are getting on but these days it's so boring. Mostly ads. I'm in a few groups (hobbies, interests, local community) which are useful but otherwise it's so dead!

Do we think Facebook will fizzle put altogether over the next few years? I don't do Instagram or twitter and don't understand tik tok etc (too old 🤣).

Menu > Feeds > Friends
You’re welcome!

My entire feed is adverts, groups I might like, content I might like and nothing from the 300 friends I have.
The time I spend on it is spent trying to get rid of pointless adverts and hiding things.

I loved it, before it became a giant walking advert

I always thought it was just that, so always said I wasn't interested when people said I should get on-board.

Then just before the first lockdown, I was finding FB quite toxic so, I took a wander over to Insta and it was like a breath of fresh air. I follow style pages, cooking, comedy, celebs (some really engage with their followers on IG), interior design, life coaches, business mentors and I've discovered tons of new places of interest, gigs, restaurants, holiday resorts etc (by way of interesting content not ads!).

If you find content that interests you and like/share that, the algorithm will show you more of that and you can choose to follow or not.

I don't create many posts (it's a bit more technical than FB) but I use IG story feature a lot. It's fun - what social media should be.

The friends posting has definitely declined and I myself have restricted access to acquaintances too and those I’ve not been in touch with for a long time.

I use the groups facility for a variety of hobbies and they are buzzing. I’m on it several times a day when my hobby groups have activities running. In fact it’s a lifeline for me due to some aspects of my life.

How you are 'fed' what content there is has changed a lot and a lot of what you're fed is advertising.

Whilst personal use of peoples own feeds is dropping, groups are still growing (despite how hard FB make it to run a group). One of mine is nearly 400K users and likely will hit that by the end of the year if not sooner.

You realise that some of your Facebook friends are sadly deceased?

I only use it for various hobby groups I belong to and local pubs have pages with useful info re bands or special offers.

But as a personal social media page, I agree it's dying.

It's occasionally useful for local community groups and selling pages but other than that I don't see the point in the site anymore. It's full of spam, scammers and nonsense videos that you can't remove from your feed, the amount of adverts is ridiculous, the UI changes so frequently that it's impossible to keep up with and it goes down so often that I've started to wonder if servers are even being maintained anymore.

But the friends feed is still an ad every other post. It’s better but still a lot of ads

Ah, thank you! They've still managed to get some ads in though and it has highlighted even more how few of my friends post!

I only use it for groups now.

Whilst I detest Meta, local (and some national) papers have been doing a pretty good job of ruining themselves without help. The shit majority of them fired anyone who could string a sentence together years ago and filled their rags with press releases rebranded as news.

I still use it mainly for groups.
Friends have gone quiet, but we're getting to the teenagers life-stage, so not the rock and roll of our 20s and empty-nesters, and not much to say about family life, plus people became more circumspect over time anyway.

The relentless adverts and suggested posts are annoying and at a level where they will defeat their own objective.

I like a few local parkrun pages. I want to see their updates in a timely fashion, not 5 days late after fb filled in with random parkruns from around the world.

I've never found instagram very user friendly.

@Jumpingthruhoops they're the exact reasons I love insta. Style, thrifting, travel, food, celebs. Pretty much every celebrity has an instagram page these days to connect with their fans. I love the story feature, means you can upload something that interests you or somewhere you are but it's only there for 24 hours so isn't clogging up your page, or your friends feeds

Deleted my original profile after a painful break up in 2016 - didn't feel comfortable with the tendency for certain details to be so public. A year or two later created a basic profile and had one friend on it - my ex! We were back in touch, sorting things out between us and getting on beautifully as friends. There was a word game you could only play if you had a facebook account. We had played it a lot when we were together (very long distance relationship) and at that point it became a way for the two of us to have some contact on a daily basis for a while, hence my creating a new profile. But I really took umbrage at Meta's insistence that you download a separate app for FB messaging, so never bothered with that. Over time the ex and I drifted apart to a great extent. We're still in touch but have moved on significantly. I stopped using the profile to keep in touch with him (whatsapp serves that purpose) and belonged to a couple of charity groups and interest pages on there until I realised just how cynical Meta had become with the exploitative algorithms they use and that depressing "infinite scroll" thing it does - an endless feed of advertising and attempts to get you to join group after group after group, along with mind numbing clusters of so-called "relevant" posts about the latest dead celebrity. Grim as. So I ditched that profile last year and will never go back. Don't use any of the other social media sites or apps (other than WhatsApp, which I can tolerate because it actually feels purposeful in terms of communication value).

Like a previous poster, I get irritated at times by the businesses and councils and charities that make so much of their online presence/access revolve around a facebook page or group. I no. longer follow their links, and I tell friends who send me FB links on WhatsApp that I don't click on them.

The damage to the global social fabric Zuckerberg and his henchmen have done is chilling, and I note that he shows no remorse whatsoever, and even now challenges governments and the like to make him stop various practices which exploit children and other vulnerable groups. That all costs money that comes out of budgets and it's disgusting. I shudder to think I was a user for as long as I was.

Facebook died as a social media platform 8 years ago once instagram and snapchat (and later tik tok) took over. The only people that still posted regularly back then were my mum’s friends or friends my age when there was a big life update (I.e. wedding, babies, moving country). None of my friends post now. I only still use it for marketplace but would otherwise delete.

I stopped using it completely a couple of years ago, I go on occasionally to look at specific groups or business pages.
DH still uses his a lot and posts very regularly, but he doesn't really have IRL friends. He gets a lot of support from his online ones and they've helped him through difficulties.

Doesn’t look like you’re right about that, generally it is still far more used than any other.

I think all the advertising is killing Facebook off. I still find it an excellent resource for finding local tradesmen and services as well as useful information about road closures and train cancellations.

I use it as photo storage. It clears the photos off my phone. Some recipe sites. That's about it

I've had fb years, since it became open and not the Facebook as it once was. I used to keep up with friends posts and post myself. Since it has become predominantly ads and groups you may like, rather than friends posts. I've found I've posted less. Now I generally post at Xmas, birthdays, a few life events, occasionally every couple of months. My friends are also doing the same. I now use it to keep up with community groups, baby groups in the area and what's on.

I think it depends how you use it.

Personally, i love it for the groups function. I'm a big sewist, and will sew all the time if I could - being part of the fabric and pattern groups gives so much more inspiration. If I get stuck on something, I can always post a question in a group and generally get a response within half an hour.

Similarly, our village FB page is a great way of getting recommendations for tradesmen, finding out what's going on in the village bar, supporting local activities etc.

But in general, I do think that social media firms have ruined the way people use them. They are far too intrusive with adds/suggested content/irrelevant algorithms which has moved it away from what it was originally for. Instagram, I'm looking at you - my feed is constantly "suggested content" rather than people I follow. If I wanted to look at suggested content, I would look at the explore page!

I use it to keep in touch with the localities we visit regularly on holiday and the one where I grew up.Our own local FB page is just full of requests for plumbers and window cleaners and that sort of thing and doesn't really contain a lot of actual community information.Other than that,I'm using it less and less.I rarely post myself these days,and I'm noticing fewer posts from other friends.

I post on the odd private group but very rarely on general update site. The main reason is I just think it's naff posting updates.