Social Media – Crappy Software

ATTN content creators: Here’s today’s illustration that when you use free services you are at their mercy of their bean counters.

Facebook announced that 30-day-old live-stream videos will be deleted.

If you are a musician, video gamer, or other performer who has live-streamed on Facebook to present your work and assumed that Meta would archive it forever, you are now officially screwed.

Meta’s official information about this drastic change contains no explanation of WHY they are doing this, as far as I can tell. But one must only assume that a bean-counting executive decided there’d be no more free ride. The only surprising thing about this change is that Meta seems to have NOT provided a way to preserve older live-streams through some enormous cost to the content creators.

Perhaps archive . org can pick up the slack?

E.g., I assume that the hundreds of live shows that Meredith Axelrod and Craig Ventresco live-streamed and stored on Facebook will be summarily deleted on May 22st. If this is the case, it will make inaccessible a treasure trove of live musical performance and a valuable record of musicians’ response to the pandemic.

My Instagram newsfeed has recently become gunked up with “because you watched…” crap. That is, I am being shown videos that I have not selected, but which are inserted into my newsfeed and labeled “Because you watched”. For example, “Because you watched a reel from automateconstruction” we are going to show you a video from forgottenfossils. Thing is, I have never watched a reel from automateconstruction.

I can only assume that this is Instagram’s new way of shoving suggested material down my throat.

Today I counted 100 posts in my newsfeed and found the following instances:

20 actual human posts
19 posts from persons/things I chose to follow
29 “because you watch…” posts
26 Sponsored posts
6 Suggested posts

The statisticians will tell you that this is a Gunk Quotient (GQ, a statistical term) of 61% and that the “because you watched” (BYW) posts are currently my newsfeed’s statistical “mode”–the most common posts. And most of those BYW posts are bogus references to videos that I did NOT watch, as above.

The odd thing is that this is only in the mobile app’s newsfeed. When I view Instagram in a browser, the GQ is much lower.

I’ve searched in vain to find a way to turn off BYW posts. Does anyone know how to shut them down? Or must I delete the Instagram app from my phone, as I have already done for Facebook?