This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Online. Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as much as Facebook and Instagram.

What used to be apps for like catching up with your friends and family and seeing things from

bands you might like, and now pretty much algorithmic nightmares, and they interrupt

you constantly with suggested content and advertisements that far outweigh the stuff you

actually logged onto the platform to see.

Conversely, those running Facebook groups or pages routinely find that their content isn't

even being shown to people that follow them, and that's all thanks to Meta's basically abusive approach to social media.

The customer is not only always wrong, but they ideally will have little to no control

over the things that they see on the platform that you monetize them on.

It's all very frustrating.

And in the next two episodes, I'm going to walk you

through the decline of these platforms, in particular Facebook, and meta, of course, as a company.

And I'm going to start today with the events that led to its decay, and those I believe are

responsible for turning the world's most popular consumer apps into Skinner Boxer advertising agencies.

In this episode, I want to frame Facebook's decline around two specific features.

People you may know, which is an innocent yet kind of horrible feature that really explains itself,

and the news feed, which is the central hub of information on the platform,

one that's become so algorithmically charged that it's far more about what Facebook wants to show you

...