Has anyone else gone back to Facebook recently? It’s rough out there.
So I’ve been spending more time on Facebook Marketplace lately, scoping things out, and it pulled me back into the main feed for the first time in a long time. Safe to say I was not prepared for what I found.
The algorithm is just… a lot. Mostly stuff from pages I never followed, a wall of ads, and content from groups I have zero interest in. Actually seeing posts from accounts I follow requires digging through menus like you’re looking for something buried in a junk drawer. I deleted the app ages ago and have just been using the browser version, so that probably makes it worse, but still.
The thing that really got me, though, was the AI imagery situation. Local small businesses running ads with obviously AI-generated visuals instead of just… photos of their actual work. I saw a computer repair shop’s page that was nothing but generated images. Not a single real photo of a customer’s build or a repair job. It made the whole thing feel like a spam page, which is probably the opposite of what they were going for.
There was also a car show ad with a misspelling front and center. Look, typos happen; I am absolutely not immune to that. But if you’re running a paid ad, maybe give it one more pass before it goes live?
Anyway, this all got me thinking about whether Facebook is still worth anything as a traffic channel in 2026 for independent creators. I’ve decided to run a little experiment and set up a page to see if organic reach is even a thing there anymore or if it’s truly pay-to-play all the way down.
I wrote up some more of my thoughts on it over on the blog https://themakerdad.com/is-this-thing-on/ if you want the full picture, but I wanted to bring it here too because I’m genuinely curious whether anyone in this community has had any luck with Facebook recently, for your own projects or businesses. Is it worth the time, or has it just become a graveyard for anyone not running ads?