Anecdotally, I’ve heard for a very long time that Facebook and Instagram users are increasingly dissatisfied with their social media feeds, and there now appears to be some hard data to support this hypothesis.
Meta admitted that its daily active users fell by 20 million this quarter, and the company is taking steps to try to improve the quality of Facebook and Instagram feeds…
I’m of the Facebook generation, and while the presence of most of my family and friends on the platform keeps me from really abandoning it, I’ve seen a ridiculous level of enshittification of my feed. About one in three messages is an ad, and much of the rest is “X is interested in Y.”
Other Facebook friends tell me the same thing, and I hear the exact same story from those who are more of the Instagram generation.
Until now, Meta has seemed to take its user base for granted, but The edge reports that the company has now received a wake-up call.
Meta reported that the numbers for “daily family active people” – the term Meta coined for all the collective users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger – fell by 20 million this quarter compared to the previous three months.
Although the company attributes this to internet disruptions in Iran as well as WhatsApp restrictions in Russia, I find this as unconvincing as The edge Jess Weatherbed, given how the company failed to release the numbers.
Engadget reports that Meta is also revamping Instagram’s recommendation algorithm again in a late attempt to improve quality.
The company is updating its guidelines to prioritize “original content” for photo and carousel posts on Instagram. With this change, accounts that share photos or carousels without “hard” edits could see their reach limited. “If your account primarily posts unoriginal Reels, Photos, or Carousels that you did not create or materially modify, your account may not be seen in recommendations to new audiences,” says Meta.
The site claims that the social network does much the same thing on Facebook. Whether either measure makes a discernible difference remains to be seen.
Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash
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