| There was a time when Facebook was a way to express personal photos with family and friends, people would uploaded vacation photos, older teens would document awkward school years, and friends shared everyday moments without thinking too much about. Looking back now opening Facebook and seeing posts from the late 2000s and early 2010s is like stepping into a digital scrapbook from a moment in time when people shared everything. That feeling has now more than faded. |
Today, a increasing number of users of Facebook only occasionally, scroll for a few minutes, and leave feeling disconnected rather than connected, or they have uninstalled the application or down visit the website at all. Facebook still boasts billions of users globally, but culturally it no longer occupies the same emotional space it once did. The reasons are complicated, but several themes appear again and again: serious privacy fears, AI-generated content overwhelming feeds, aggressive advertising, and the sense that authentic human sharing has quietly disappeared.
The largest shift is how people think about sharing photos. Ten or so years ago, uploading personal photo felt reasonably harmless. However there is now a hesitation before posting images of themselves, especially their children, or homes. AI has changed the relationship people have with online content. Photos uploaded publicly can potentially be scraped, analyzed, copied, or used in machine learning systems. Whether those fears are always technically accurate is beside the point just the perception alone has changed user behavior.
People have become more cautious. Some have stopped uploading family photos completely. Others moved private sharing into smaller group chats, encrypted messaging apps, or temporary stories that disappear. The internet no longer feels temporary, and Facebook feels less private than ever.
The content that does appear in the facebook feed is cluttered with advertising, AI generated slop, autoplay videos of promoted artists. This alone angers people to no end. The AI itself isn’t the problem, it is the quality of it appearing. People want to feel a connection with other people not a computer generated images and video.
For many people like myself facebook is no longer a place where I want to share. I might still use I occasionally to connect with someone through messenger but that is as far as I am willing to go.
