I used to browse through my instagram feed a few times per month. Just to keep updated about those friends who often posted there. Now it's mostly crappy shorts and I can't even find the "friend feed" anymore. No idea if it's just well hidden or completely gone. Now I don't use it anymore at all.

The attention economy is real, your eyes have value that is surprisingly high, and buying out that attention so you can have a pure you-centered experience would just be too expensive for most people.

Instagram gets ~$27/mo/user from advertisers. Would you spend $27/mo for Instagram? Probably not. Hence the financial void is filled with ads.

I think I'm on an A/B test on the Facebook app, now whenever I open the app it goes straight to reels and starts playing videos with sound enabled. I looked through all settings to try to disable this but couldn't, so I finally just gave up and uninstalled it

I open the app to keep up with what my friends are doing, and also check the dating portion of the app for new matches. I purposely always avoid reels on any app, because I hate them and what they do to people. So when I open the app and it immediately starts playing reels with sound on and no way to disable it, it feels like a slap in the face

I (mostly) stopped looking at Facebook around 2016. It just wasn't fun anymore; and at least for me, my feed was all political nonsense trying to manipulate me.

Maybe I'm in the minority here (early 30s, married + kids), but my social media feed is primarily my friends. Though, if we go into the Reels tab, my friends and I share videos back and forth through DMs.

I have an alt account for business / lifestyle content that I like consuming. That's the only place I actually follow content creators. And even then, I check the account once or twice a day and rarely view/engage with Instagram stories.

Back to my personal account - I have 2-3 people out of the 198 that I follow that are trying to hop on trends and become influencers. Rest just do photo dumps + daily stories. But the reality is only 20-30% of my friends actually share something (post or story), rest are just silent observers.

While I partly agree, I also disagree. I still use Instagram a lot to keep in touch with friends I've made in different places. Generally as long as they are making posts then my feeds have those posts. It's only when they do not and supposedly IG "runs out" that I don't.

Personally what I hate more is that there are some content creators I've been happy to support over the years and now instead of doing regular content posts they now do the "collab post" thing as an ad that looks like a regular post. Some of them may do but many do not.

It's so frustrating when this is brought up as if this hasn't been the case for almost 10 years now.

This is usually why I collapse the 2-3 top-most ranked comment threads. They’re very often gamed and calibrated for engagement. Every so often anecdotes/stories that completely ignore the subject matter (sometimes dangerous if medical). I wish there were other ways to organize comments (rip slashdot) but this usually helps to make HN less social media-y.

I'm bored when I see how inactive platforms like Discord and forums have become

snobs used to be thought on users who liked popular culture or "jejemons", "kikoolols", "eternal september,... posters who used to be actually active, experimental and creative, but at least newcommers were still posting

nowadays the creative part is gone. Forums are dead. You're encouraged to use your actual identity everywhere on social media and to sign apps. You're indeed not guided to post and be creative. The internet became just passive :/

I remember trying bluesky and realizing it isn't just the services I don't like. I don't like ... what all the social media users like. The heavy memeification / gamification for attention. Trite posts, posts that seem like the middle of a conversation ... really all negative bits about internet discourse.

But most everyone there likes it that way...