Comment by AJ007

But that's a bullshit excuse, just like with email the answer to spam posting is the person gets un-followed/unsubbed.

When its an algorithm, the user is incentivized to produce content in order to increase their chances of getting a hit. Secondarily the loss of visibility increases value of advertising on the platform. It's a lose-lose for users, first they are forced to use the platform more for fear of missing something, second the user has to post more to get any reach. The platform wins on increased engagement, overall content depth, ad revenue, and the ability to sneak in a whole lot of shit the user never was interested in or followed. Facebook & Instagram now are functionally high powered spam engines.

Interestingly the FT has an article today about a drop in social media usage ( https://www.ft.com/content/a0724dd9-0346-4df3-80f5-d6572c93a... ) - one chart titled "Social media has become less social" shows a 40% decline since 2014 of people using social media to "share my opinion" and "to keep up with my friends" In many ways, what is being referred to as social media has become anti-social media.

An algorithmic email feed would be useless, as would any sort of instant messenger, yet that's exactly what social media turned in to. Twitter/X is teetering in that direction. The chronological feed still works and is great. Anyone who posts a lot and doesn't balance out the noise with signal I just unfollow.

I might be wrong about this one, but one outcome of generative AI might be an engagement cliff. Some users will be very susceptible to viewing fake photos and videos for hours (the ones still heavily using FB likely are), but others may just choose to mentally disengage and view everything they see on FB, IG, Tiktok as fake.