What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently outweigh the content of people that you choose to follow.
In the case of Facebook, the decline is either reflected in — or directly facilitated by — two specific features: People You May Know and the News Feed.
Yep. I was screaming to bring back the chronological timeline when they pushed out the "beta testing". I actually stopped using social media regularly because I was missing events that were happening in my neighborhood. There was no point once they chose what to show me. But, I'm not the target demographic for their platform.
Someone who wants to interact with their community and keep in touch with their friends and family is not what social media is for. It's for selling ads. It's for maintaining your attention. It's for engagement and making you feel a way they've determined will keep you scrolling.
And honestly, it's tough to complain. The more successful a platform becomes, the more content is uploaded and viewed. This doesn't cost them nothing. Without charging to use or upload to the platform, they have to sell ads. The more engaging the ads are, the more successful business are with posting those ads. So they double down and post more ads - they engage more with the audience the platform has directed towards them. It just keeps snowballing from there until the platform no longer represents what it did initially.
The actual problem is that no one is willing to pay for "social media". They'll pay out the butt for streaming services and two-day delivery but connecting with real people and getting unbiased investigative news, not so much.