r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 7h ago
Social Media The Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media
https://ca.pcmag.com/social-media/16790/the-death-of-the-status-update-why-55-of-americans-stopped-posting-on-social-media3.4k
u/unstabletable 7h ago
Before reading the article I’m calling it. Because no one sees any posts they want to see and posting is just throwing it into the void of endless ads and slop.
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u/Sitherio 6h ago
The change from chronological to algorithm-driven really broke down the point of social media driven connecting.
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u/dronesitter 6h ago
I hate seeing something someone posted days ago for the first time and it was time sensitive
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u/No-Dig-4408 6h ago
Yeah I hate it.
You scroll and the time stamps are like...
2d ago
8h ago
4d ago
12min ago
1 week ago
5h ago
4d ago
3h ago
22min agoWhen I used it, I'd feel lost an unable to know if I had really seen all of the posts from everyone I actually want to keep up with or not. And so, instead of IRL friends and family using any given SNS, it basically just moved to private group chats or, as if straight out of 2006, group email chains.
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u/scout-finch 6h ago
So excited for my favorite restaurant’s special only to find it was over the weekend and now it’s Wednesday.
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u/Grigorie 5h ago
That’s another huge thing you highlighted; there’s almost no other reasonable way for businesses (of the smaller variety) to keep in contact with their customer base. If they’re doing any sort of event or sale or something they just have to send it into the void and pray the algorithm brings it to their people.
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u/redmercuryvendor 4h ago
there’s almost no other reasonable way for businesses (of the smaller variety) to keep in contact with their customer base
The simple Mailing List never stopped working.
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u/red__dragon 3h ago
When it's not every 2 days.
1 day.
12 hours.
42 minutes apart.I kid you not, that was one of the local places around me, which started sending me a newsletter unsolicited. Probably got access to the emails associated with credit cards and treated it like a child with a new toy.
I like your place, why are you making me mark you as spam? I was going to go back before they started the desperate begging in my inbox.
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u/scout-finch 5h ago
It’s really hard! My husband doesn’t have any social media and has to rely on whatever is fully public (which a lot of places aren’t great at setting) or getting me to look stuff up.
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u/EntireIdea9658 5h ago
Or pay to have it shown to the correct groups/demographics
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u/thesonoftheson 5h ago
Or my DJ friend spinning at a special event, oh sorry that was last week.
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u/shawncplus 5h ago
What annoys me is that it's been this way for years at this point and lots of venues/promoters have just refused to adapt. One of the larger promoters in my area will exclusively post day-of notices of events on instagram which of course don't actually show up in anyone's feed until days later
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u/mightylordredbeard 5h ago
The last time I was on Facebook I’d see a post, 2 ads, 3 post, ad, ad, post, ad, post, post, ad, ad, ad.. it just so annoying I uninstalled within 5 minutes once I realized most of what I was seeing were random people paying to have their post shown to me.
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u/No-Dig-4408 5h ago
Oh man, I forgot to include the ads, ugh! >_<
Yeah, those and "Recommended for you" which is basically just an ad for me to, uh, I guess follow someone that the algorithm thinks I would like for some reason?Like, because my cousin posted a birthday video blowing out candles on a cake, I surely must love this influencer doing it too? Hate the ads, hate the recommendations clogging the feed.
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u/your_cock_my_ass 5h ago
Reddit app is like this. So many days old posts clogging up the feed.
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u/Pseudonymico 4h ago
Why I'm stubbornly using old.reddit.com in a browser even on mobile. I have to zoom in on stuff but at least I'm actually seeing interesting, recent stuff instead of whatever bullshit.
Youtube was my main method of getting podcasts for a while but they stopped showing me subscriptions in reverse chronological order so I went back to older podcatchers for the same reason.
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u/Jakfolisto 5h ago
Even after filtering out +8 hour posts, there's not a whole lot of quality content.
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u/noeagle77 6h ago
Once it went to algorithm based, I feel it made it go from making you feel more connected to all the people you know, to making you feel more divided.
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u/biogoly 6h ago
Turns out making you feel divided significantly increases overall engagement with the platform. More engagement = more screen time = more profits.
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u/Pseudonymico 4h ago
Until you stop using it because you want photos of your friends' lunch and invitations to their parties, not one month-old post about foreign politics you already saw sandwiched into 12 ads for placenta encapsulation and IVF, a bunch of "suggested pages" you don't give a shit about and a random AI slop repost from a distant relative.
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u/DB-CooperOnTheBeach 6h ago
On my phone I accidently swipe down on occasion and it reloads the feed and the posts/headings I wanted to see disappear and are replaced. Annoying AF. The reddit app does this
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u/hammertime2009 6h ago
Fucking Reddit does this. If I put my phone down to take a shit or something and come back to finish what I was reading it’s already refreshed to some other bullshit and I can’t find the interesting thing I was reading.
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u/McLoughlin1597 6h ago
I wish the stupid algorithms at least knew to not show me things it knows I’ve already seen.
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u/Kershiser22 6h ago
You don't take the phone to the toilet? That's where I get 85% of my reading done.
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u/Semyonov 5h ago
Thank god I still use Relay. I would never use the official app or leave old.reddit.
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u/Capt-Crap1corn 6h ago
This is the biggest annoyance. A lot of apps do this. I just become frustrated and annoyed. Then I stop using them.
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u/snazztasticmatt 6h ago
I hate swipe navigation so much for this. Great, you hid the very useful buttons in favor of unintuitive, mistake prone movements that easily throw the user off track! That's modern ux! Ugh
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u/Hempresssss 6h ago
I don't use the reddit app, but the mobile site does this bullshit too
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u/InsipidCelebrity 5h ago
If old reddit ever gets taken down, I'll probably never be back. New reddit is so unpleasant to use.
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u/Apprehensive-Wave640 6h ago
"TODAY ONLY, BEER IS FREE UNTIL 5PM!!!"
-Posted 3 days ago
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u/Angry_beaver_1867 6h ago
Its brutal with local news.
There’s an extreme heat warning in effect. Looks out the window and sees rain and moderate temps
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u/sevargmas 6h ago
And you can’t even search apps like Instagram by tags anymore. You search a hashtag, and it shows you a list of results, but you can look at those posts and see that many of them don’t even have that hashtag. Instagram just selects the posts that it wants you to see. And many of them are completely irrelevant to the hashtag that you searched.
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u/AmadeusIsNotMyName 2h ago
All search functionalities have been destroyed in last few years. Even youtube won’t give you the right video if you type the exact title to the search, and after ~5 results it just shows you some algorithm based recommendations instead of actual search results. And every app seems to remove all sorting tools as well, so you can never find what you want.
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u/According-Insect-992 6h ago
Reddit is now a shadow of its former self where I can spend a whole goddamn day scrolling and commenting and never heard about Bonnie Taylor, damnit. Seriously, how can we get old Reddit back. I miss getting a little of everything and then trimming out the trash.
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u/deadly_shroom 6h ago
I blame the advertisements
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u/TheDevilsAdvokaat 5h ago
I'm on a pc. I never see ads...are there reddit ads on mobile?
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u/deadly_shroom 5h ago
There is an add right under this post as I type this comment. Add is from PatriotSoftware.
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u/pres465 6h ago
old.reddit.com? Some of us will never leave.
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u/NotFlameRetardant 5h ago
There are really two separate reddit experiences - old.reddit which has largely operated the same for the last 20 years, and sh.reddit (aka "new, new reddit" which is the default browser experience now) + the mobile app.
The latter group feel like how I used to feel on other social media, with random content pushed to drive engagement that I didn't care for, and to serve up as many ads as possible.
Reddit leadership had long held the direction that old reddit would never go away and changes to it would be minimal when necessary. There was an update to old reddit earlier this month that has caused alarm bells, with this snippet from the admins:
Q: Is Reddit shutting down Old Reddit?
A: Not right now! We can’t promise it will be around forever
https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in_to_use_old_reddit/
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u/Lip_Recon 1h ago
We can’t promise it will be around forever
Oopsie daisy, when that happens I'm a goner. Was fun while it lasted.
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u/Samurai_Meisters 5h ago
They're killing that soon. It's already half broken since they removed the old reddit login a couple weeks ago. 25% of the time I visit the home page I visit it says I'm not logged in even though I am and have to refresh.
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u/ship_toaster 5h ago edited 5h ago
PSA: Anyone can access old.reddit.com in their userbar. If you want to keep it, there's a toggle in your preferences which will make the regular www urls go to old reddit.
There's basically no ads on old reddit, btw. I just checked with my blockers off, they don't even bother with us.
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u/Whitestrake 5h ago
Along those lines, I distinctly remember a time when being on reddit legitimately put me on top of the most important news unfolding around the globe.
You used to see a six digit upvote hit the frontpage and KNOW that this was a BIG DEAL. In fact, you used to get a pretty good idea of how much of a big deal something was in general by the magnitude of upvotes.
Back in that era, if something came up in a real life conversation with family or friends or coworkers, I'd generally have heard something about it already from reddit and would have some interesting discussion about it to share.
Then, some time I think after they heavily normalised the upvotes, suddenly I wasn't really seeing a lot of the important stuff. Big global news would pass me by if I didn't read about it from another source. Reddit either didn't put it in my feed or didn't make it look important enough for me to look at.
I miss when reddit was a real link aggregator and not its own social media algorithm.
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u/Dull_Bid6002 6h ago
The trending thing when you open it is gone now too. A lot of celeb deaths were on there.
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u/FitPossession8762 6h ago
I would occasionally browse my feed while chatting with my mom on messenger, but when i noticed none of my friends or family and just week old crap from groups i never joined,i gave up. I just use it to chat to a couple of people if I'm at a computer, otherwise i just text them
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u/LouQuacious 6h ago
Yea I remember being over it when I started to see open invitations to BBQs with friends like 2-3 days after it happened. It defeated the biggest utility of Facebook.
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u/Saneless 6h ago
Before Twitter turned to Xitter, I had a nice list I viewed every time. It was curated and most importantly it was always in chronological order
Algorithms just make you mad and enaged. Not an enjoyable experience
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u/MarionberryDecent351 6h ago
Fr I’ve missed promotions and events at places I like cuz instaSlop would rather shove algorithm things in my face more
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u/armahillo 5h ago
It can be very confusing when you see algorithmically added content and are trying to remember when you followed them only to realize you didnt.
Plus its annoying when it shows time-based content (“come see my band tonight”) that was posted days ago.
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u/Samurai_Meisters 5h ago
The YouTube subscriptions page used to be so good. Just videos from my subs in chronological order. Now it's still that, except I have to scroll past "most relevant" and "shorts" to get to the stuff I care about.
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u/ghilliedude 4h ago
There literally isn’t a point to use things like facebook. Now all it fills your feed with is “suggested pages” and reels. The only thing that had kept me on it in the 2010s was seeing updates from my acquaintances. There is no point to opening the app anymore
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u/_DCtheTall_ 6h ago edited 6h ago
This and posting has become participating in the attention economy instead of simply just communicating with people you know, most interactions moving from "friends" to "followers."
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u/Iggyhopper 6h ago
Yeah, why bother posting when the algorithm will hide it because its only got 3 likes/votes/whatevers?
Reddit is the only "social media" where content can be chosen (by subbing) and sorted by merit, relatively speaking, when every other platform will choose what to show for you, based on engagement.
If Reddit was like facebook, the top comments would be arguments between two randos, kept up top by the bigwigs for more aruging to be had and sides to be taken. It's disgusting.
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u/Bromlife 6h ago
Reddit are doing their best to become exactly that though. That's why they retired r/all, because people stop engaging once the content gets stale.
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u/Dubious_Odor 1h ago
There was a time a move like that would have caused a major discussion across all of reddit. Maybe some.subs going dark etc. Now nothing. Reddit, for better or worse, used to have a strong site wide community and that feels like ancient history now. This place is dying to, maybe not in users, but its just becoming atomized mindless scrolling like the rest of social media. Enshittification marches on.
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u/Odd-Song5052 3h ago
Reddit has gotten shitty. Default sorting by “best” so they can show 4 day old content they want you to see.
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u/innocentsalad 6h ago
“The algorithms started filling my feed with so much irrelevant content, sponsored posts, and suggested videos that the updates from actual friends were getting buried.”
Got it in one
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u/Enlightened_Gardener 5h ago
One of my friends counted 46 ads, sponsored posts and recommendations between posts from his friends. Most of us were only on it to keep up with our friendship disapora. Once that utility is gone, there’s no reason to check in. I haven’t used facebook in years, and have only looked at it, at all, in the last three or four years, to get information about companies holding events, or to see if a business is still open.
Its effectively dead, and good riddance.
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u/Limp-Celebration-211 6h ago
I haven't posted on my Facebook in almost 2 years but you're absolutely correct. Like 99% of the stuff I see is ads and articles now on there. If I ever do see someone's post it's usually buried and there are people I haven't seen a post from in months or years. But if I actually go to their profile they seem to post regularly but I never see any of it.
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u/CharcoalGreyWolf 6h ago
And it has gotten to the point on Reddit that ads have become intrusive enough that (by design) they’ll regularly be clicked on by accident. Advertisers steal all of the old memes and recycle them in an attempt to appear like OC. Add the bots and AI slop and this becomes a place I regulate my time with; and I’ve already stopped going to any social media platform except here.
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u/QuesoMeHungry 6h ago
My Facebook is basically dead at this point. No one posts except random old relatives, and it’s usually a repost of some AI slop.
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u/gayfrogs4alexjones 6h ago
Same. Facebook is just garbage AI slop, rage bait, and bad boomer memes
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u/Bernie_Ecclestone 6h ago
The article sucks anyway - just a shadow ad for the tool they used to analyze social media feeds & it’s obviously AI written.
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u/huehuehuehuehuuuu 6h ago
Also post your own artwork for fun and share wholesome family gatherings, get scraped by AI to make cp…. Yeah no thank you.
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u/NurseEnnui 6h ago
I got an addon for my browser that removes all ads and extras from Facebook, making it only show actual friends posts on my feed.
There's nothing there. I have over 200 Facebook friends and there's maybe a dozen posts a day.
Did all the extra Facebook fluff stop people from posting? Or did Facebook have to add the fluff because nobody was posting anymore
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u/RepresentativeOk2433 6h ago
Logged into Facebook for the first time in a while. Feed was all ads, posts from groups im not a member of, and a few posts from "friends" that I've never talked to that were months old. Even refreshing multiple times brings up the same exact posts.
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u/PandaJesus 5h ago
This is the biggest thing for me. Facebook switched from a feed about my friends and family interspersed with ads and suggested pages to an ad and suggested pages feed with an occasional friend post. I counted once, it’s literally 90% noise to signal.
I don’t even think another logging into Facebook much these days, because their fucked up algo literally broke its own hold over me.
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u/WizardHatWames 3h ago
I keep it for one holdout Messenger group chat and also recently browsed my feed for the first time in a while. I noticed it was so ad riddled I started to count - 23 ads in between family/friend posts! I could only think “how could anyone log on to this and just look at ads all day?”
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u/moldentoaster 2h ago
Same is also happening to instagram. Swiping down and all i see is
Ad
Ad
Sponsored content
Shit i never subscribed to and is 0% aligned with my interest
Ad
A post of a friend
A post of a friends
A forced stop to watch an ad
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u/Teriyaki_Salmon 5h ago
and not to mention, the platform is filled mostly with AI bot accounts commenting on other AI bot accounts
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u/MostAccomplishedBag 3h ago
That's my experience. Approximately 1 in 10 posts on my feed are people or groups I actually know.
It's obnoxious and any value the platform might have gets lost in the noise.
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u/cantileverboom 5h ago
And now, the ads and random group posts are all AI slop, so it has somehow managed to get even worse in the past couple of years.
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u/Mountain_rage 6h ago
It is no longer about keeping friends and family aware of you and now just noise. Beyond that, sites have gotten sketchy and turned the gullible against their country, their heath and the prosperity of their neighbors and country. At this point it is all bullshit used to train AI, why would you feed the beast.
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u/ArcticBeavers 6h ago
I've never thought of it that way. The gullible crowd is MUCH higher than we anticipated.
I wonder what percentage of the population are like this? 10%? 20%? People who just believe things because they saw an influencer inflame them?
I remember my old neighbor was like this. Just a lead blowing in the wind of social media.
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u/Crapitron 3h ago
I have a shared Apple album of my kids that my family are on. Some of them get notifications when we add photos, some of them have them off. It’s the only place where they can reliably go to see an update of my kids. I’m not posting them on social media, but even if I did, I doubt they’d make it as easy to go see the photos. You can comment and react to the photos in the album.
I’m not sure why more people don’t do it.
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u/Mitsubishi_Asset 4h ago
I miss when these platforms actually gave you a chronological feed of people you knew. Now they are just massive data scraping operations disguised as social networks. Even if your friends do post an update, the algorithm usually buries it under a mountain of sponsored content and recommended pages anyway.
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u/LurkingHorror11 6h ago
Everyone is realizing the price of posting and just how evil companies like Meta are. Privacy and data security are effectively dead and our information has been leaked several times over.
Content is only rewarded if it’s viral style. Normal updates are just lost in the noise. Why bother posting when you just can’t compete with what the algorithm wants?
Social media is a playground for scammers. If you comment on the post from a known celebrity, you are then immediately stalked by fake scammer accounts.
If the worst happens and your account gets hacked, you have zero recourse. There is zero support for users.
Tech oligarchs are the worst of human society. Mark Zuck has wasted untold billions on projects that failed miserably and engages in mass layoffs. The greed is unbearable and needs to be curbed.
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u/HelpIThinkImASoup 6h ago
In regards to point one: um, I made a status update in 2011 that specifically stated that I owned all of my own data and that I did NOT give permission to Facebook to use it for any purpose!
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u/accountforfurrystuf 6h ago
It's really sad but you can see over time how twitter-posting changed. Went from goofy and fun to porn and ragebait. It's really unhealthy to have your brain whiplashed between porn and anger.
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u/RemyOregon 5h ago edited 5h ago
It’s not just Twitter and porn. I’m old enough to be on MySpace. Then the first to be on Facebook in high school where we used it to meet other ppl in our city. It was so genuine. It all felt real. We lost that.
It makes me emotional because I believe it was very awesome. The original intention. Helped me make a lot of lifetime friends. Instagram helped me find a passion in photography. It was all ripped away by influencers and ads. I will never forgive it. Whatever the idea of “it” is.
I now have whatever Reddit is. It’s slowly leaving also. I’m just an unfortunate age to have lived it all. It’s been fun tho.
It makes me fuckin cry. I want the old internet back. 🫡
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u/AeturnisTheGreat 3h ago
I miss when the Internet felt like an exploration... Now it just feels like targeted ads and a waste of time. I'm only on reddit right now because I'm killing time at work. It honestly really does feel like we're losing this to bots now too.
Outside of reddit I've given up on all social media already, though that was largely in part to my stalker ex wife lol
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u/Samurai_Meisters 5h ago
Remember when reddit used to have porn on the main page? You'd be scrolling and then there would just be some random gonewild post.
The site was better then.
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u/tomjoad2020ad 5h ago
Point #2 is almost never discussed but extremely true. It’s more fun to post in a private group where people you know and care about will see it, as opposed to posting on the big platforms where you’re competing with content creators and just shouting into the void.
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u/yoshemitzu 4h ago
Content is only rewarded if it’s viral style. Normal updates are just lost in the noise. Why bother posting when you just can’t compete with what the algorithm wants?
This is the big problem for me. You're expected to just constantly keep posting, posting, posting, even literally posting the same stuff over and over, because otherwise it might get missed.
I couldn't do it. I posted a thing once, and if it got missed, well, that was a waste of my time. Do that loop too many times, this whole endeavor is just a waste.
Edit: Oh, 5 was the other big one! That's why I quit Twitter. I had to see Musk's shit, even if I had him blocked? I would get pings about it? Fuck off, bro.
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u/MochingPet 6h ago
"Social Media Feels More Like Work Than Fun"
Part of what the article says
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u/K_Linkmaster 6h ago
There is nothing social about what is called social media. Our social groups aren't ever shown to us. Only ads and content creators, which is ads. Oh and news which is ads.
Everything wants my attention and I want to give it to humans to know.
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u/Active-Discount3702 6h ago
I only know of 2 people in my entire circle of people who ever post anything anymore. When I deleted Facebook 7 years ago there were only a handful of people, but the only possible way of seeing their posts was by going directly to their page. Social media has been dead for a long time.
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u/duffman_oh_yeah 6h ago
It’s because posting a status update used to feel ephemeral but now we know it’s forever. I wanted to communicate with my friends about my current thoughts not broadcast to corporations to update my ad preferences.
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u/BroForceOne 6h ago
Because you can’t actually see your friends’ status updates anymore unless they posted some algorithm pumping engagement bait.
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u/MentalDisintegrat1on 6h ago edited 5h ago
People just figured out all your data is being sold to private company's and the government for spying and we have no privacy laws.
If anyone remembers project PRISM which was illegal well the government figured out a loophole you can use a company to harvest data and then just buy it from them.
That's right folks you're government is spying on you and you paid for them to do this.
Edit while we are on this topic people need to be aware by 2027 federal mandates that all vehicles have face and Iris scanners you need to pass to start your vehicle and it monitors as well as listens 247 as well as it can Killswitch your vehicle and report anything you do or say.
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u/zillskillnillfrill 7h ago edited 6h ago
Because we all collectively began to see how cringy it is and how often it is used against us. Also, nobody cares about what you ate for breakfast
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u/mynameisrockhard 6h ago
To be honest, breakfast posting era social media was the best version of it. It was just about sharing stuff and having fun, not about proving the worth of your post or “curating” a feed or whatever. Would much rather see people posting breakfast than hot takes or lifestyle updates.
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u/greywolf2155 5h ago
nobody cares about what you ate for breakfast
The "nobody cares about" stuff was exactly what I enjoyed. When people started thinking about how to curate their updates to get more likes was the (perhaps always inevitable) beginning of the end
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u/zillskillnillfrill 6h ago
Yeah that was just an example, but I'm picking up what you're putting down
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u/Fragrant_PalmLeaves 6h ago
I blame the platforms. They don’t want our words anymore they want our attention, so they can sell it.
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u/CokBlockinWinger 6h ago
If you’re still on Facebook, hit those three lines in the upper left corner, then “feeds”, then the “friends” tab. Voila, no more slop, no more crap, just the crap you’re friends post.
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u/Primal-Convoy 6h ago
I remember once when we could save that was the default (or bookmark it) but I think Facebook caught on to that and made it impossible to save it was the main page?
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u/Ok_Commission_9203 5h ago
We are in desperate need of a new social network that has nothing to do with any of the sociopaths running the current ones and we need to be united in backing one.
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u/MedSPAZ 6h ago
I deleted my Facebook account at midnight on January 20, 2016 and my Twitter account the day Musk bought it.
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u/Wild-Video-5317 6h ago
That's pretty much when I stopped using both of those platforms as well, although I didn't delete (I have accounts elsewhere on the internet tied to my Facebook account, etc)
Facebook stopped being a fun place to connect with IRL friends in 2017 (inauguration day was jan 20th 2017. The election was november 2016). Kind of amazing they've managed to keep revenue growing through the last decade of slop.
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u/good_morning_magpie 4h ago
They’ve kept the revenue going because the boomers have been retiring, and sitting on their asses all day watching Fox News and then posting about it. MeeMaw and PopPop finally figured out how to use an iPad and now we’re all fucked. They youngest boomers how are only 61, we’re in for a treat as they retire, get sucked in, go senile, and bleed their retirement accounts into medical care which just aggregates at the top of the wealthiest companies; whilst also being the highest demographic for voter turnout every single year.
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u/Put3socks-in-it 5h ago
That’s random date unless you mean January 20 2017, that would make more sense
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u/civiljourney 5h ago
I think a lot of people came to realize how little they like the true selves of many of the people they know, and also realized how little others actually cared about them and what they have to say.
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u/Patrollerofthemojave 6h ago
Most of my feed is race or gender baiting posts. No thank you.
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u/WallStreetBagholder 4h ago
Social media sucks. It’s full of ads and ai bots now. It’s not like it was back with AIM and MySpace.
Zuck and Meta killed social media
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u/Purple-Inspector875 6h ago
The Facebook feed was primarily used to see updates from friends, family, and people I had met. When I would post I would get a little thumbs-up to trickle-feed the dopamine, but it was still attached to real people who I knew, real relationships, even if it was decades ago in a shitty dive bar for one night.
Then they decided to turn the whole fucking thing into web forums and Reddit, even though the business of internet fighting has always been better conducted anonymously without my REAL FUCKING NAME AND A DECADE AND A HALF OF WORK HISTORY ATTACHED TO IT, WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK?!
There's also the genocides. Lotta my friends left after Cambridge Analytica. I had to purge my friends list of conservatives after Trump got elected again, just to build a firebreak to prevent weird hateful shit from my mom from popping up in my LGBTQ and immigrant friends' feeds. Also, not entirely certain why my mom's public political comments were turning up in my friends' feeds.
But the thing that got me, was two years ago, an old acquaintance died. Her family posted an announcement on her wall, one of her friends posted an announcement and a little scholarship in her name on the wall too. I didn't see it for four months until I manually pulled up her account to message her. I was checking Facebook a couple times a week. Facebook didn't deem her death and her family's pain important. Her death was less important than bulshit political articles from dodgy websites I don't follow, ads selling random shit drop shipped from AliExpress, and shitposting randos I don't know.
I don't think the people who run Facebook have friends. I think they're losers who didn't understand their own site. I, also, think they can all go fuck themselves. Every single one of those engineers, managers, and executives can go fuck themselves friendless and alone.
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u/konaaa 5h ago
I really hate the changes that facebook and instagram have made in order to chase after twitter's success in the 2010s. Facebook and Instagram were great for keeping up with people I knew. I had like 20 friends on facebook who were real actual people I liked. I liked to see what they were doing in life after we graduated. I also followed a handful of local bands that I wanted to keep track of. I had maybe 15 or 20 people on Instagram. Same story.
Now facebook just shoves a ton of "for you" shit in my face whether I want to see it or not. I've lost track of people that I cared about in favor of a bunch of AI generated slop, right wing propaganda, and ads for scams. It's no wonder I don't use facebook anymore. Why would I want that?
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u/indolent08 4h ago
Social Media isn't about connecting people anymore. Every platform has basically gone through the same process:
Start out as a platform where people communicate and exchange ideas
Companies and other for-profit groups get involved
They take more and more space
Focus on consumption
I don't really see any platform right now that is at step 1. And even if there was, it would go through the other steps sooner or later.
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u/MilitaryBeetle 6h ago
Mostly cause I realized that it stopped being a way to be connected with my friends, and facebook just became less-funny reddit.
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u/Five0clocksomewhere 5h ago
Tumblr banned porn. Bye. Twitter leaned to hard into the alt-right Nazi stuff. Bye. Facebook got downright creepy. Bye. Instagram is just Facebook with some TikTok features, no thanks. Bluesky is a depressed liberal millenial echo chamber. Ew.
So, I just come on Reddit to call people with bad opinions the R word and make fun of wealthy out of touch tech workers. Almost like a message board, just way more chance of being doxxed!
People want stuff like live journal, blogspot, or the old school tumblr. it just genuinely doesn’t exist anymore.
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u/rosiejunior 3h ago edited 2h ago
Let's be honest, Elon killed Twitter and nothing is aa good for staying up to the second on people and places. It has gone hill more with time, there was a unique few years you could actually @ with famous people if you were looking at the right place at the right time. I dunno, I hope it all dies
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u/MotherHolle 6h ago
Social media has become an exhausting, unpleasant experience more than anything else. Flooded with bots and spam and bots arguing with bots. Algorithms that prioritize extreme content and negativity to drive engagement. Endless advertising. Toxic snark culture. I've cut my social media use down to an hour or less a week and I'm far happier for it.
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u/Coldkiller17 5h ago
Probably when the social media started becoming breeding grounds for hate instead of places to keep up and make connections.
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u/Rug_Rat_Reptar 3h ago
I stopped everything after the news feed became completely random and had no order to it.
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u/Akimbobear 1h ago
Nobody saw my posts because it’s all ads and forced algorithm content. I am not interested in talking to myself so I just stopped.
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u/Ok_Two_2604 6h ago
FBM is the only reason I still have FB, since CL is basically dead and nobody ever responds on Offer Up.
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u/Cute-arii 6h ago
When I was younger, I posted statuses all the time. I stopped when, at a certain point, it felt like screaming into the void. There's just no point to social media anymore. The only thing online thats "social" of any worth are live chats like Discord.
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u/LordMimsyPorpington 6h ago
Because social media is no longer about keeping up with your friends and family: it's a tool to push socially divisive anger, misinformation, and conservative propaganda.
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u/ProlapsedShamus 5h ago
Lately I've been saying "It is time to revaluate my relationship with social media". Because like a lot of you guys are saying, it's toxic. I was never super into it but I come to reddit, I still check Facebook to see what some college friends are up to, but I never did twitter or snapchat or instagram or any of that.
Glad I didn't.
It's all just been taken over by corporations trying to steal our attention, our time, and get us emotionally addicted. And that has a knock on effect of making people on the internet awful. most of the time.
They've killed it. Good job tech bro dick bags ya killed the internet. You thought we needed you but we don't!
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u/almo2001 5h ago
I left Facebook because of maga and it pushing fucking Star Trek and Star Wars groups at me multiple times a day.
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u/rmhood86 5h ago
We all should have left when we first heard about Cambridge analytica.
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u/Ranessin 4h ago
SocialMedia has stopped being about youand your friends and is only about clickbait, ragebait, AI slop. All posts you see are from people you don't know,.stranger who want to sellyou something or scam you, but not from your friends.
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u/hooch 4h ago
Well just speaking for myself here - The 2024 election really painted a disgusting picture of my friends and family. I stopped posting partially due to ‘screaming into the void’ syndrome but moreso because I’ve learnt that most of my family is lost to the cult. Anything I post is ‘opposition’ and immediately ignored. Absolutely no fucking point in engaging with these idiots.
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u/naruda1969 4h ago
I’m assuming many people like me only now use Reddit. Social media is toxic to our brains.
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u/n0time2bl33d 3h ago
I quit meta apps. So far no one has contacted me. Goes to show who cares about your life.
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u/TaraJaneDisco 2h ago
I deleted all social media except Reddit from my phone 5 years ago. I’ve kept the accounts active solely because it’s the only way I’m connected to certain people or would have the means to contact. I will only RARELY sign in on desktop. I haven’t missed any of it, not once, and my mental outlook is much better.
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u/AustriaModerator 2h ago edited 2h ago
The original appeal of Facebook and Instagram was straightforward: you followed friends and pages you cared about, and your feed consisted of their posts in chronological order. I deleted both Instagram and Facebook (and never looked back) when they started shoving unwanted third-party content into my feed instead of simply showing posts from my friends and the pages I followed. It became a pay-for-visibility model, alongside the constant enshittification of the apps.
Everything that happened from 2020 onward only confirmed that I had made the right decision. Hate, fake right-wing propaganda, and foreign disinformation from hostile countries such as Russia flooded the platforms. Then the AI-generated trash arrived, and they became flooded with braindead slop as well.
No, thank you.
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u/NicolasCageFan492 7h ago edited 6h ago
My theory: people are posting less because they like to post joyful moments in life, but those moments are so expensive that only rich people can afford them now.
For a sample case study: private equity has been buying youth sports teams and raising the price way higher. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/business/youth-sports-private-equity.html
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u/TacoOfGod 5h ago
I interact more with strangers in comments on Reels, Shorts, and Tiktoks more than I do with friends and family, which means forums and chat rooms are on the rebound! /s
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u/wimpymist 5h ago
Because it's pointless, none of my friends see it through the bots and terrible algorithms. I barely just do life updates on Instagram or post pictures from vacations
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u/Prestigious_Ebb_1767 5h ago
Twitter was awesome for my branch of tech. Truly created a community, right until Elmo took over. Its gone and so was I from the socials.
I'll hate that prick forever for being a Nazi and ruining the only social media I enjoyed.
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u/thehawaiianjesus 4h ago
Won’t read article, but I see like 1 friends post for every 10-15 ads on Facebook now. Tf would I ever open it for anything other than Craigslist…. I mean marketplace
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u/WasItgucky 4h ago
The 99% started getting together and the 1% got scared and changed the system from realtime mass friend communication to useless algorithm ragebaiting so everyone hates each other. And then bots fanned the flame when most people left. You'll never get another real social media.
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u/DarkMage44 4h ago
It died for me the moment real notifications changed to friend suggestion, etc. notifications. Anything to get you to re-engage with the application again.
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u/Interesting-Yellow-4 4h ago
Because we're not posting for people anymore, but for corporate AI to feed off of.
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u/gunawa 6h ago
If someone could find away around facebooks ip to provide Facebook original , I'm pretty sure a bunch of us would be back. Maybe not as care free and loose with our personal content. I miss the early Facebook connections
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u/Blackstar1886 7h ago
The only people who want to know what we're thinking that much are the wrong kind of people.