Facebook is totally worthless now that they force content on you and fill 99% of your feed with it. But I still go there sometimes to view “memories” from earlier times when the site was a vibrant space, full of discussions with friends and family.
Today I decided to browse the feed a little bit, hoping to see some updates from friends. Of course that is impossible now, and instead my feed is full of pictures of celebrities I don’t care about from 20 years ago, MMA crap, and pictures of Miley Cyrus. But one of those pictures was kind of interesting and I clicked it to see if there’s any discussion on these posts like there is here or on Reddit. Nope! There was thousands of comments all saying the exact same thing. Everyone was commenting “legend!” or “absolute legend!”.
What drives people to be the 4432nd person to reply with the same word as everyone else? I checked another random post and it was more of the same type of comments. I just flat-out don’t get that platform anymore. It used to be really useful for keeping in touch with people, and sometimes even really enjoyable. Now it’s pure garbage. I don’t understand why they have made the changes they’ve made and more importantly, I don’t understand why people comment the same things over and over.
Back when I was still using Facebook, the only “solution” I found was to only use it on my laptop browser, and to make a browser bookmark for every friend, organization, whatever I wanted to follow. So, my family, a few work friends, some hobby organizations that had events, etc. I never bookmarked more than a few dozen. Then I put all those bookmarks into a folder.
Then when I wanted to check in on everyone, I would right-click “Open All Bookmarks” on that folder, and check everyone out one by one.
It was stupid, but it was the only way I could really see what was going on in everyone’s lives (that they were posting, anyway), without it all being hidden by the FB algo. After several months of this, I finally said the heck with it and just stopped using FB at all. Now I use text, emails, phone calls, RSS feeds, and the like to keep in touch. If one of these methods doesn’t work, then I figure the “friend”/whatever relationship isn’t real anyway.