mitchipedia:

TikTok won: Meta Is Making Product Decisions For An Internet That Doesn’t Exist Anymore

Nobody creates original content for Facebook anymore, and Facebook does nothing to support content creators, says Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:

… unlike, say, YouTube which plastered their community’s biggest faces all over billboards and subway ads or TikTok, which was already hosting panels with their top creators at VidCons before the pandemic, Meta seems to actively despise the people who make content on their platforms. Unless they’re already celebrities, their creators don’t appear in Facebook’s ads, they don’t do panels together at conferences, and they don’t pop up in press releases or demo new features.

At best Meta seems embarrassed of the people who make the content that keeps users on their apps. Or, at worst, they seem to hate them. There’s really no other explanation. Creators I’ve spoken to have described a deeply precarious existence in which they have to constantly adjust how they create content by trying to divine what each new algorithmic tweak might mean for how their posts show up in other people’s feeds. They live in constant fear of their pages being “disappeared” for some weird infraction. It sounds like a nightmare. The women eating out of toilets on Facebook aren’t eating out toilets because they like doing it. They’re eating out of toilets because Facebook’s insanely aggressive recommendation engine has pushed their content to ludicrous extremes because it’s constantly over-optimizing its own users. And because TikTok has redefined how social media works and left Meta completely unprepared for a future that’s quickly approaching, they want you eating out of toilets, but, now, it has to be in a Reel.

Also, if you remove all the news from Facebook, there’s nothing left.

The Horrors of No-News Facebook: Bible quotes and teddy bears forever

Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic:

I’m far from the first person to point out that Facebook has been largely overrun with garbage content. Now [a study by Jean-Hugues Roy, at the University of Quebec in Montreal] suggests that, without news links, many users will find almost nothing of value.

Roy’s study found if you take the news out of Facebook, what you’re left with is mainly insipid viral content about teddy bears and kittens, as well as Bible quotes.

Not true for me—my friends post many interesting photos and discussion. And that’s what I’m there for.

Facebook recently announced it’s pivoting—yet again—this time to focus on algorithmically generated viral content. Depending on how far Facebook takes that pivot, that could drive me off Facebook entirely, simply because I am not interested in that kind of thing from Facebook. It’s not what I’m on Facebook for.