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Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Slop

A select bunch of Facebook and Instagram users around the world are opening the app and finding themselves dunked straight into an autoplaying video - no news feed, no new message notifications catching the eye, just one video after another. This is a recent AB test Meta are running in certain countries.

What started as a bold, new way to connect with our friends and make new ones has now reached its final form - an endless stream of short form slop you have no control over. Yes, this is an AB test, but if you’ve ridden public transport or have older relatives who have been completely one-shotted by Reels, you know how insidious it is, and how likely it is to trap those already struggling with screen time. I have no doubts this will spike engagement and become commonplace within these apps.

On the surface it’s obviously a grotesque decision, but not a particularly surprising one. Meta has repeatedly shown chasing engagement is their number one priority, but still I can’t help but feel dejected by this. No matter how clogged and slop-ridden their apps have become, there are those that still get useful, everyday information from them. Facebook still has around 2 billion daily active users. Some of these users rely on the community architecture built around features like Facebook Groups. Meta’s first mover advantage meant they were able to retain a massive user base that is now completely entrenched within their ecosystem. Now, the tiniest bit of useful product (think local community outreach groups, hobbyist groups) will probably be hidden behind the least useful, most addictive one. Those most vulnerable to these algorithmic attention sucking hellholes will be those most easily forced into them.

Most people I know left Facebook a while ago. It became bloated and any sort of utility was hidden under a never ending list of new features, the layout would change, groups would move, it was a platform constantly in flux, trying to be your friend hub, your marketplace, your local area, your source of news. It collapsed under the weight of a million features haphazardly placed on top of one another. This forced a lot of users away from the site, never to return. But in becoming ‘the everything app’ it became indispensable to a much larger group. Facebook users had a one stop shop for their news and social lives, and all those insane ads and unrelated slop served alongside was just accepted. That became the price you paid to be on the site. If you haven’t been on Facebook recently, it is worth explaining how terrible it’s become. I reactivated a while back to have a look at the marketplace. I moved fairly recently and was told it was useful for picking up cheap furniture. There was nothing about my actual friends, or groups, I had to dig around, and even then, most of the accounts I was getting updates from had a follow button on them, or were just random ads. I looked into this a little and found this insane statistic from a FTC ruling from last year.

"By any accounting, content posted by friends has become a small fraction of the content that users see on Facebook and Instagram — less than 15% of posts in Facebook's news feed and 5% on Instagram's feed."

I knew it was bad, but this is crazy right? The whole reason this was even disclosed is that Meta used this statistic to explain that they aren’t actually a social media company anymore, but an entertainment one. This was to beat a monopoly case. But the stats are coming from the company itself, they’re saying ‘We’re not a social media business anymore, and what we serve to users reflects that.’

I can’t think of a clearer death knell for our view of social media than the traditional feed being replaced with endless short videos. Think back to platforms like MySpace or Friendster and they seem almost idyllic compared to the deformed, lumbering colossus of slop that is Facebook today.

I think there’s a silver lining to this change. It may be a wakeup call to a lot of people still doomscrolling Instagram. That app at least had a lot of the social focus at the forefront, you could feasibly open it, see your friend post something funny, give it a like and then leave the app and go on with your day. But having the Reels experience shoved into your face whenever you open the app—being exposed to so much you didn’t ask for—may force certain users to just say ‘I’ve had enough’. It’s obvious Meta don’t value your time, it’s been clear the goal is just to scroll incessantly until you either reshare content made to infuriate you, or buy something you don't need; at least the facade they were ever anything else will gone soon too.

-P

Ephemera

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