A young man, a contractor, was hired to do some freelance work. He'd done the work and then been subject to borderline psychopathic behaviour from the man who hired him. Unconstructive criticism. Exclusion. Isolation. Threats of no payment. Three months later he was still trying to get paid.

Someone else, a woman. Her experience was also shocking. She and her partner were battling over custody of their school-age kids. In the course of an online conversation, she revealed the depth of loathing for her partner and made serious accusations about him.

I don't know either of these people in real life but I read about them on Facebook; and their disclosures frightened me, for good reason.

In just a few days, the targets of their criticism had been sent screenshots or had phone calls about the revelations. The fallout was huge. In the first case, the young man is now being painted as difficult. Maybe but that does not excuse the behaviour of the person who contracted him. In the second case, what looked like it would end in mediation now looks to be headed for a bitter battle in the Family Court.

Both were utterly devastated by the betrayal.

For years now, when we looked at our social media feeds, we'd see the outside world. Maybe flawed or false but also plenty of the real thing. My own phone buzzes with news notifications, alerting me to earthquakes and tsunamis, eclipses and the eclipsed. Thanks to Barnaby Joyce in the last couple of days, also hatches and matches. And dispatches.

This is all set to change as Facebook tinkers with the way it shows us what we think is important. Its return to what it calls Meaningful Social Interaction (or MSI) will change the way we think and feel about the second most ubiquitous social platform on the planet (if you call texting a social platform, which it is for me). Instead of news reports about the bigger world appearing at the top of our news feeds, posts from our friends are once more going to return to prominence – all that grumbling and sorrow and even worse, fake happiness, which only makes us feel more miserable about our own lives (remember those stories from years ago about not believing those rosy pictures your friends painted on Facebook?).

Through our daily journals, our daily disclosures, we all work for Facebook; and its financial success has always been built on our labour as we post into the night. Now, it will be built once more on our emotional labour. We've always provided a use value for social media but now with changes to news feeds, what we get in exchange may be misery once more. The social media giant always commodified our hopes and fears but those products were lower on the buy list. Now our misery will drive the market and, as Harvard University's Michael Sandel puts it in his book, What Money Can't Buy, "Markets leave their mark."

To reclaim our privacy – and to prevent yet another market leaving its mark on consumers – we could consider a postsharing world; how we might operate in that and resist the commodification of our feelings. Catalina Toma's research over the past five years is clear. We share and we have always shared socially – it's a fundamental condition of human nature. And, joyfully if we share good events online, we feel even better.

The increase in emotion goes both ways. Toma's research shows that when we share a negative event, we feel even more negative. If you are going to share your unhappiness and hurt about relationship breakdowns in real time, you will benefit most by disclosing face-to-face.

Toma, an associate professor of communications science at the University of Wisconsin, has this terrifying prediction based on the meaningful social interaction algorithm: "Facebook will have an even greater impact on our mood."

How do we combat that?

The University of Sydney's Brad Ridout from the Cyberpsychology Research Group, says what harms us most is the social comparison on social media and the kinds of meaningless interactions he calls "social snacking". He believes there will be a move to more moderated groups, particularly for those seeking support. Postsharing – or less public sharing at least – would take the pressure off. You'd feel less compulsion to attach little teary icons and pulsing hearts, the angry faces, at a time when self-worth depends on that social validation.

We spend so much of our time online. When the R U OK campaign released time use figures for social media in 2016, I thought the estimate of 46 hours a week was ridiculous. Then I started to track my own consumption. Easily that much. It's always on in the background, an open tab. SENSIS reported last year that Facebook is nearly universal among social media users; but we access it less than we used to. The MSI is a way to draw us back to our old ways.

The University of Melbourne's Peggy Kern says most of us underestimate our social media use anyway; and we don't apply the rules we might apply in real life. We don't even apply social norms to gossip – what we used to be able to say, one-to-one in real life, is now used as screenshot evidence against us.

"Gossip used to occur in little tiny groups but now it's instant and on a broad scale. What I say is going to change when you have a screen capture and it's taken out of context."

The drama that provokes that mean-spirited social interaction will drive those encounters straight into our newsfeeds and worse, into our hearts. Not for the benefit of meaningful serious interaction but to ensure Facebook's longevity, and as far from Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's stated intent about wellbeing as it is algorithmically possible to be.

If you are desperate for affirmation of your feelings, either negative or positive, invent a brand new social media profile, as far distant from the real you as possible; and count your angry icons and your tears, as Facebook counts its profits.

In the meantime, keep your friends close and your Facebook friends even closer.