The problem with Facebook these days is you don’t know what to expect anymore when you open your newsfeed.

Silly memes, serious essays about life events, cute photos of your friends kids, links to random articles, etc.

Then people don’t know what to post anymore, so they post less often. That is, people who think twice before posting. Not everyone is like that, unfortunately. Yet it’s precisely these unfortunate posts that, then, make up an increasing portion of what you see on Facebook.

But you have to keep checking Facebook all day, because it is very likely to be the only way you learn about your old roommate’s cancer diagnosis, or your church closing on Sunday morning due to a power outage, or the time of your kid’s next soccer game, or your great aunt’s untimely death (posted right there under that meme of nude Kim Kardashian).

It’s become one big trash forum.

But it’s precisely by lumping everything together like this that Facebook finds ways to get more content in front of us. If we get one very serious, informative post every few days (like the news of your great aunt’s untimely death), we’ll put up with the trash. We may even click on the trash every so often, which helps fund the effort to find better ways of keeping us hooked.

Now, whether it’s bad to be “hooked” on Facebook is a very personal determination. But based on what I see from people who post and scroll the most often, I’d literally bet it’s bad for most people most of the time. And really bad for some people pretty much all of the time.

Think about whether that’s you — whether you’re hooked on Facebook, or social media generally, and how that’s affected you. Whether you know, somewhere inside you, that you should probably, definitely, be doing something else right now.

(More of my thoughts on Facebook here.)