Facebook Is A Ghost Town With All The Lights Still On
This is an article with a simple thesis: the reason you’re seeing almost no actual content from your friends on Facebook isn’t because it’s being buried by junk. It’s because there is almost no actual content from your friends on Facebook anymore. There might be forwarded stories, or shared memes or clickbait, but you’re not actually missing what your friends are posting about their lives — because nobody is posting about their lives on Facebook.
A few months ago, I realised that I wasn’t happy with my user experience when using Facebook. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a horrible mess — clickbait sharing, awful ads, companies trying to make themselves seem more human, and increasingly little actual content from the people I knew. So I took a small first step: I deleted the Facebook app on my phone, and accessed it only on my laptop at home, where my browser’s adblocker tidied things up a little.
Very quickly, though, it became clear that I’d only solved part of the problem. I was still seeing mostly junk. Posts shared by friends that had only the barest actual relevance to me, terrible political memes that failed to make any kind of argument, and content from companies that I’d stupidly followed at some point. At this point, I resolved to get serious about cleaning things up.
What followed had three distinct phases:
- Unfollowing any page that wasn’t either a human person or an artist I wanted to see updates from;
- Blocking content from every page that popped up on my feed that wasn’t a person I knew or a local organisation I wanted to stay involved in;
- Downloading a plugin that allowed me to strip out extraneous junk from Facebook and revert to a chronological news feed.
The first was pretty simple: every time one appeared, I unfollowed it.
The second is something of an ongoing one — it took several weeks of clicking and unfollowing to clear the bulk of what was making it to my feed, and even now I still see one or two a day. Turns out that people share content from a lot of different sources, and this phase of cleaning up can take quite a while.
The third, a plugin called Fluff Busting Purity, was highly promising. It let me hide almost everything I didn’t want to see — sponsored posts, the Stories section, people I may know, and a host of others (including an option to hide shared posts, which could make step two a lot simpler.) And it let me force the news feed into chronological order, which turned out to be a bigger deal than I had expected.
It turns out that almost nobody is posting actual original content on Facebook. I have a little over five hundred friends, and in the last 24 hours, a dozen have posted something original (generally, photos and status updates.) This is actually slightly busier than usual. Half of them don’t even live in the same country as me, and I’ve seen one of these people in person in the last twelve months.
What’s even more damning is that of that dozen, I’d be confident that half will be posting again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next — a big chunk of the actual content I see is from a very, very small group of people. Of my 500+ friends, if I were to decide to unfollow perhaps the six most active, I’d have a decent shot at seeing no new original content for at least one full day a week.
Facebook has become, essentially, an empty social network — one where almost nobody actually creates anything new. It’s an email inbox with nothing but chain mails and spam, except the sheer volume of garbage and the move to a non-chronological news feed has hidden the extent of the problem from most of us.
What’s particularly unsettling about this is the fact that this is the flagship product of one of the biggest companies on earth, and it’s been progressively hollowed out and its original purpose abandoned entirely. When Facebook offers nothing of actual value other than a Skinner box that keeps people doomscrolling forever, how long does it have before legislators start asking awkward questions about the broader societal effects of its operations? How long before major investors start wondering if a social network with no actual social interaction can survive in the long term?
