I just posted to my old page The Battle Of Most Recent v. Newsfeed for the first time in size years.
Take a moment to think about how cool it would be to subscribe to a feed of posts your smartest/coolest friend liked on Instagram. That was actually a thing you could do 15 years ago. In fact, it was extremely nuanced and had levels of various privacy settings. You could even create curated feeds of all of the public or private people you liked to follow and then bundle that into a feed that other people could follow like a super group band. I think Twitter lists on steroids. All that went away when Google killed Google Reader.
The entire time I’ve known Facebook, they’ve been working against all of us. They are probably the least customer-first company in the history of the world. Everything they’ve done that is good, they’ve purchased from some other company.
In May 2016, I started tracking how often Facebook reset my newsfeed from a chronological list of my friends’ activities (“most recent”) to a giant pile of nonsense (“top stories”). There was a button on Facebook where you could select the default between the two types of feeds. I started tracking how often I had to click the button to set it to “most recent.” One day I had to reset it 16 times. What is the point of a button if you have to hit it 16 times? I started a Facebook page to complain about it.
Later I gave up because clearly “most recent” was going to be a session-based variable. I don’t even try anymore. But I switched the Facebook page to track how often the popping noise showed up on my Facebook app. At one point I had to turn off the popping sound every morning, and it would reset every evening.
Now Facebook has become a giant discovery engine like a For You page. My newsfeed is probably 60% pure garbage. A mixture of lazy AI content, rage bait, politics, cheap meme clothing, ski hats, and manipulative stories about some animal getting saved using 16 composite videos that are clearly not the same animal.
I’m starting to hide every single content page that annoys me. Taking the time to block each page is absolutely insane. It’s a flashback to May 2016 when I tried to battle Facebook originally.
I wish we could go back to the days of an RSS reader when we could subscribe to any content we wanted from any platform and like and share it.
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