U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

The crazy thing is, for me, Facebook was actually useful for following news ever since Google Reader died. I spent quite a bit of time following many pages (people and businesses) in order to stay up to date on news, and I was incredibly happy at the results. I even went the extra effort to unfollow "Friends" that I didn't want to offend by unfriending.

Facebook simply screwed up everything. They removed custom lists a few months ago, so instead of chronological posts that I could navigate with lists, it's now back to a single algorithm-based feed. Many of the people I spent time unfollowing continue to blast me with notifications for literal shit posts that I can't disable. Did you notice that when you swipe a notification in the feed, there's no way to "Hide all notifications like this" or "Hide notifications for Events from xxxx"? It's unbelievable what Facebook is doing to ruin the experience. It's now impossible to disable specific categories of notifications or from people, without just unfriending them.

I moved back to Twitter and barely touch Facebook now. The product decisions are just plain frustrating. It's now no longer an app for following news.

I still use it as a news feed: even with no sorted posts and all the weakness you pointed out, i found no other aggregator like FB. Notifications send no warning on my smartphone (i disabled them all), except the red dot inside the app: i click once in a while, just to "cleanse" it.

I believe they know that social media are subjected to fashion just like everything else: the best way to keep on riding the way is peraphs be the one who kill the old (fb) while nurturing the new (Instagram/whatsapp). In this manner, the numbers are always growing - and that's the only metric they care about.

Exactly. It feels very much like giant company syndrome. Some directors picked metrics like "frequency of fresh content on top of newsfeed," then that metric become a goal for some manager a few levels down, and when metrics become goals, they stop being good metrics. Nobody with the power to stop it would have been focused on "average value of content item," and everybody else had a motivation to get whatever content their group was in charge of some visibility, so it's more or less inevitable that it'd all go to shit.