[torben-friis]

If you're on Android, you can use revanced to patch social network apps, to, among other things, remove content from non-friends (and ads).

It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.

[al_borland]

As people’s default shifts to consumption, they stop posting content themselves. They also stop living a life worth posting about… especially when they start comparing themselves with “influencers”, who have made a full time job out of pretending to live an interesting life.

The problem with filtering out all the junk as a solution is that it doesn’t fix the actual problem of those sites with perverse incentives having control. It seems like the real goal should be to get people off these platforms. That’s the only way to really stop it.

I wonder how long companies would keep paying for ads when a site is 100% bot traffic? They could keep the ruse up for a while, but likely not forever.

[testudovictoria]

The problem with some of (all of?) these is that it's becoming increasingly moot to bother posting. I posted back in the early days of social media to share with my friends. In response, my friends and acquaintances kept me up to date with their lives. Now the apps only bother to show me friend/following posts if they deem it matches my interests.

I understand that this sort of algorithmic feed likely matches the metrics to keep people scrolling. This would also track with every app moving away from "friend" verbiage to something like followers, subscribers, or members. Users are encouraged to post _to_ their audience rather than sharing _with_ their friends.

[projektfu]

Yes, I mostly stopped sharing because I don't want it to be used for creepy reasons. When Facebook was just a community of sorts, it was fine to share. People who cared would see it. Facebook wasn't doing too much content mining. But in the current world, people who care often don't see it, and if I told them to go looking there, they'd be bombarded by so much ragebait that I couldn't in good conscience recommend it.

[rich_sasha]

The article made me reminisce. I was a young adult when Facebook crept in. I felt the constant pressure to do cool stuff so I could put it on Facebook and get likes. I used to browse through friends walls, look at their carefully manicured photo albums, no doubt driven by similar anxieties.

Sad as it was, at least the incentives were somewhat aligned with a healthy social life. Seek out cool things in life, preferably with friends, share.

This has its own downsides of course too, but is a world away from going on Facebook today, full of people definitely shutting down thekr life businesses, turning wood into MacBook cases and incoherent AI generated videos of 300m waves. I seriously can't remember the last time I put something on Facebook, certainly not in this decade. Never mind any of the other ones...

[trumpdong]

I wish I felt that pressure. lcamtuf has an awesome blog with cool projects like homemade resin-cast gears and demos of AFL. I wanted a cool blog like that but I never felt motivated enough to do anything like it. I guess I was already stuck in consumption-mode by that time.

[jonaustin]

Probably use Morphe now: https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedextended/comments/1q20ga5/w...

[Ajedi32]

Interesting, I thought Revanced was just for YouTube, I didn't realize it worked with other social media sites too.

[marcod]

Look into Morphe as a revanced alternative, it's by the peeps who make the Youtube patches and I find it better to use and it can draw on the same patches.

[m463]

> It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this.

what if your friends used it too?

would there be more content (as they seek to connect to real peopl), or less (as they leave)?

[Nursie]

Most of my friends have already gone from fb, and I don't post there any more really either. Still check it most days in case I have messages.

If the "you might like" "why not follow" "reels" and other crap was gone, I guess there could be some sort of revival. But it might be too late.

Because instead we've splintered into various discords, and those sorta-aquaintanceships that old fb was quite good at keeping alive have basically fallen away.

[matheusmoreira]

> what if your friends used it too?

Let's not kid ourselves. They won't.

[Exoristos]

A deathly calm.