Open your Facebook app’s home feed and scroll through the latest news. Try counting the ads between posts. You’ll likely find an ad between every three posts, or maybe even every two! Watch a video? There’s an ad. Check out a short reel? You guessed it—another ad. Open the Messenger app? Brace yourself for a bombardment of ads.
But that’s not all. Most of the posts in the news feed are now irrelevant to what users want to see.
It seems that Meta is trying to imitate TikTok in a primitive and feeble attempt. The home feed’s news feed has been dedicated to showing ads and trending content only. However, there’s a crucial difference between TikTok and Facebook content.
On TikTok, users don’t mind watching trending videos from anywhere in the world because they can usually understand and interact with them. On Facebook, you might see a post about a political figure in Morocco while you’re living in Germany! Or you might see a post about using public transportation in Zimbabwe while you’re living in Saudi Arabia! Yes, it seems that Facebook’s algorithm is lost in directing users to what they actually want to see.
Years ago, Facebook was a landmark and a great app for users worldwide. Each user had their own community consisting of family and friends who shared photos, opinions, and videos. Today, you can barely reach your old friends’ posts!
To be honest, Meta allows you to customize your home feed, but the feature doesn’t work. It lets you browse only your friends’ posts, page posts, and favorites separately. But how many users want things to be so difficult, like solving a school assignment? I bet no one has used these customizations, and those who have probably didn’t have a positive impression of them! In short, what’s happening in the app can only be described in one word: chaos.
Apart from Instagram, which still partially retains its position as a platform for sharing photos and diaries, Meta launched Threads. It’s also a primitive imitation of the X platform (formerly Twitter) in an attempt to attract users who are tired of Elon Musk’s policies and updates. However, things didn’t go as planned, and the app’s user base gradually dwindled to the point where it’s no longer a competitor.
So, where does Facebook stand between Instagram and Threads? Facebook has lost its identity among different social media platforms. It no longer has a clear definition or identity, and recent statistics show that most new social media users don’t create a Facebook account, preferring accounts on other platforms instead.
Notifications
Facebook’s notification window has become a community in itself, and customizing it has become more challenging than before. Some notifications appear, while others don’t. It’s a mix of page notifications, personal account notifications, and message notifications, and each development in this area leaves behind radical changes in the notification interface.
Community Standards
Since the accusations against Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg regarding data usage policies, Facebook has tried to be more stringent and strict with its community standards. However, this has led to a massive accumulation of data in the app’s algorithm and caused a direct conflict between some of it. You might get banned for a word in a post that’s not offensive or doesn’t violate any app’s usage policy. Your account might even be banned entirely based on user reports, while Facebook itself is riddled with a massive number of offensive posts that haven’t been successfully reported. The whole thing is a matter of luck, with no clear policy for Facebook’s community standards!
Technical Support
In all countries worldwide, customers have the right to receive direct support from the service provider. However, on Facebook, support isn’t available to everyone. It’s partially available to some content creators and Meta Verified subscribers. If you encounter any problem or want to report an offensive post, all that awaits you is a few pages to read in your free time!
Page Reach
You might have a page with a million followers on Facebook, but the reach of your posts on the page doesn’t exceed 200 users! This isn’t unusual, and there are no criteria or methods for restoring reach. You might only be able to regain some reach by paying money, even if you’re providing entertainment content and not commercial content.
Technical Errors
Despite the app being over 15 years old, you can still see many ongoing technical and software errors, especially in Meta’s page manager program. Searching for old posts, editing privacy settings for some posts, publishing a new video, seeing all comments, cropping images, and more.
In short, is Facebook dying?
It is important to note that Facebook still enjoys a global audience, not because it is successful in attracting new users or because it has unique advantages. In short, it has a strong foundation, and most users who find their families or friends using Facebook are encouraged to use it.
So far, we cannot judge or predict the future of Facebook. As mentioned earlier, every day there is a new development. The chaos of development on Facebook makes it difficult to predict what will happen next. These developments could lead to an improvement in the user experience or could lead to users abandoning the app altogether.