My use of Facebook had really dropped for many reasons, and a big one was the quality of the News Feed. I was just getting spammed by Sponsored Ads, Recommended Pages, and corporate accounts that I liked once upon a time.

Rarely interspersed throughout were posts by actual people who I knew. So I found an ad blocker for Facebook, went through my friends list and made sure to follow north of 99% of people to see what would happen.

After manhandling Facebook to try to get it to work the way it used to, it works. Sort of. Mostly. There’s a clear hierarchy in what it wants me to consume:

Sponsored Ads

Corporate Accounts

Recommended Pages

Groups (that I am in)

People

Since I blocked or removed the first three, Facebook desperately wants me to engage in Groups, giving me multiple posts from the same group in a row.

And when it comes to people, it’s not quite sure what to do. After spinning its wheels for an unusually long period of time for a website (10-15 seconds), it finally loads People. However, whatever clever social graph it used to use has broken down, as there does not seem to be a rhyme or reason as to what activity it is showing me.

There are a few explanations for this, and all possible at the same time. First, I’ve stopped using Facebook and engaging with content as much as I used to, so it doesn’t have a sense of who I have a strong connection with.

Second, people are simply not posting as much. A casual perusal of my friends list shows a remarkable amount of people with no postings of their own within the last year, and quite a few where the only post is a birthday call out.

Third, Facebook’s social graph has been turned largely towards the first three categories (Ads, Corp, Pages), and the human network has been left to languish.

I am curious enough that I might run a slightly deeper analysis into how active my social network is, but I understand Zuckerberg’s VR obsession a little bit better. Yeah, Facebook is still printing money, and probably has a healthy financial outlook for a traditional company. But the stock market demands incessant, unreasonable growth. And in the pursuit of this, Zuckerberg has shoved in as many ads as possible, to the point that it is making his core product incredibly unappealing to a (potentially) large chunk of his userbase.

This has gotten him so far, but I don’t think it can get him any further. So he needs a new frontier that can generate those outsized growth numbers while his previous cash cow’s growth stalls out.

Anyways, TL;DR Facebook sucks because Zuckerberg shoved in so many ads in order to appease Wall Street, and he is obsessed with VR because he is slowly strangling his golden goose.