[HN Gopher] Facebook is cooked
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook is cooked
Author : npilk
Score : 507 points
Date : 2026-02-20 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pilk.website)
(TXT) w3m dump (pilk.website)
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| I'm a parent in my 50's. "Peak Facebook" is years in the past for
| me. But it was great for a while. My spouse, friends, friends'
| spouses, and I were all sharing stories and pictures of our kids,
| travels, and experiences, such as dining experiences or hikes.
| There was so much joyous sharing. And it wasn't done for clicks,
| views, or monetization. It was just friends, sharing their
| experiences, encouraging each other, etc. It all just went away,
| starting with the husbands.
| da02 wrote:
| What do your social groups use nowadays?
| wincy wrote:
| Similar experience for me and it's just been replaced with...
| nothing. My gaming buddies talk on Discord but I just don't
| really hear from my aunts and uncles and cousins anymore.
| It'd be a hassle to even figure out how to contact them. Only
| 13 people showed up to my high school reunion last year from
| a graduating class of ~400.
| zadikian wrote:
| Same. Idk how college communication work now; we had class
| groups and planned everything over FB events/pages back
| then.
|
| For friends, I started a few text group chats to stay in
| touch. It's really annoying because someone has Android and
| RCS is broken on someone's end. Some also use FB Messenger,
| but nobody 2 years younger or older than me is on that.
| Mixtape wrote:
| When I finished my undergrad a few years ago, we were
| relying heavily on GroupMe chats, with the occasional
| Slack and one or two LinkedIn groups mixed in. Discord
| was just starting to exit the gaming sphere and hit the
| mainstream though. I'm willing to bet it's absolutely
| dominating the space now.
| zadikian wrote:
| How long ago was that if you don't mind me asking? I was
| in college 2014-2016, and GroupMe existed but was on its
| way out. I asked our college interns around 2022 what
| people use for class groups, and I think they weren't
| sure what I even meant, but the answer wasn't Discord.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "...I just don't really hear from my aunts and uncles and
| cousins anymore..."
|
| Yeah, actually why I left Facebook a decade ago: finding
| out what horrible people my relatives were.
| jrmg wrote:
| It's _returned_ to nothing. Losing touch with people you
| didn't contact regularly was the norm until the mid 2000s.
|
| For someone who grew up in the 'golden years' of social
| media, it's kinda weird to see.
| munificent wrote:
| The thing is, before social media, we did have a culture
| of periodically reaching out and _calling_ people. Those
| muscles completely atrophied though, so when we fall off
| social media, the result is even less connection than we
| had before Facebook et al existed.
| underlipton wrote:
| It just keeps tumblring down, tumblring down, tumblring
| down. I just keep logging me out, logging me out, logging
| me out.
|
| I joke, but the internet I knew as a youth going the way
| of the dinosaurs really has had a deep impact on me. End
| of an epoch.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Can't speak for OP but my spouse has set up a private GroupMe
| for posting events for a group, but otherwise everyone shares
| pictures using text messages. We don't post any pictures of
| our kid where strangers can easily get access to them and
| we've read the privacy policy of every service we've ever
| used.
|
| I was considering self-hosting something for a while but she
| found it more sensible to do it this way.
|
| Every once in a while she logs into Facebook to post
| something on Marketplace and immediately gets completely
| sidetracked by their algorithm and design. Then she gets
| frustrated and we just put the thing she wanted to sell on
| the corner instead.
| hu3 wrote:
| Folks around me use mostly Instagram which ironically is also
| from Meta.
|
| Zuck is always one step ahead.
| gus_massa wrote:
| And as a sibling comment says, also WhatsApp. The guy is
| always two steps ahead.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I'm waiting for Whatsapp to go down the toilet too. I
| notice it is already advising me to beware of
| misinformation on forwarded posts and only to use
| official and trusted sources (the government and their
| mates basically).
| pdpi wrote:
| There's two separate things at play here.
|
| One is "I don't want to use Meta products as a matter of
| principle", and WhatsApp's a no-go if that's your
| posture.
|
| The other is "I don't want to drown in horrible,
| algorithm-curated junk content". Instagram is just as bad
| as Facebook there, but WhatsApp is definitely not the
| same.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 100%. Whatsapp is still zuck, but it doesn't have a
| "feed" and that's the most important thing about it for
| me.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Now at the bottom it has a few tabs: Chats, Updates, ...
|
| Updates are broadcasted, but they disappear after 24
| hours.
|
| Step 1) Keep updates for a week, later forever
|
| Step 2) Mix Chats and Updates
|
| Step 3) Add a few relevant patrocinated posts
|
| Step 4) Change the css from green to blue
|
| Step 5) Profit
| ghywertelling wrote:
| You only ever need a Meta account. The next content format
| will be brought to your door by Zuck even before you know
| you need it.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I have an IG account that I barely use, whereas my Facebook
| account I do (regrettably) still spend time on, and have
| put in the effort to silence/hide the worst of the baity
| type content that it wants to throw at me.
|
| But interestingly my experience of IG when I do
| occasionally go on it is similar to what TFA describes:
| lots of engagement-bait / thirst trap content that I never
| asked to see but also haven't been around to hide, so I
| guess the baseline algorithm is just matching me to what
| others in my demographic bracket have found, um, engaging.
| bojanz wrote:
| In my part of Europe it's all in private WhatsApp groups (one
| for inner family, one for friends, etc)
| drnick1 wrote:
| Unfortunately, those are also being surveilled by Meta, so
| the exodus from Facebook did not help. Consider Signal or a
| private XMPP server.
| snovymgodym wrote:
| Group chats on various apps
| yabones wrote:
| I'm probably a bit younger than the gp, but I can confidently
| say that all socializing has moved almost entirely off
| "social media" and onto group chats. Most people have a dozen
| or more combinations of friends and families on multiple
| apps, all trying to replace what was once easy.
|
| I'd love if somebody would make a site based on the ~2010
| expectations (not reality) of facebook. Ban any commercial
| activity and make people pay for it. I just want to talk to
| my friends and say "happy birthday" to somebody I haven't
| seen in years, not look at ads and slop posts.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| iMessages (which supports groups well with RCS), Signal,
| Telegram, GroupMe. Slack, IRC, and Zulip for online groups.
|
| (early 40s)
| etrautmann wrote:
| Almost all chat threads in messages, signal, or occasionally
| in slack or discord or something else.
| mattfrommars wrote:
| Personally, it's all through WhatsApp
| sbrother wrote:
| Similar experience for me and at this point it's just a
| collection of private chats. Different groups use different
| platforms (mine are on iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Slack,
| and.. actually Messenger although apparently Facebook is
| taking that away soon). It kind of feels like real-name
| social media is a failed experiment at this point.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Text messages, email. Same as ever.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Close friends and family: group chats (whatsapp, signal)
|
| Distant friends and extended family: email threads
| prmoustache wrote:
| I am in my mid forties and most people around me seem to use
| instagram to share memes and stuff + keep contact with rarely
| seen friends and whatsapp groups for closest more tightknit
| circles.
|
| I am still on whatsapp but I am planning on nuking my account
| in september after a large event involving people from
| various continents. I have no idea if I will be able to stay
| directly in touch with those people after that, probably not.
|
| I am still unsure if I'll send a message to most of my
| contacts or if I'll just tell my nuclear family, in laws and
| closest friends.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Not parent, but, depressingly: 1. Signal
| 2. BlueSky 3. Discord 4. WhatsApp 5. SMS
|
| This list is presented in order of preference, and in reverse
| order of prevalence.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| Nothing, the sharing has stopped.
| sparky_z wrote:
| > It all just went away, starting with the husbands.
|
| I honestly can't tell whether I'm supposed to interpret this as
| "The dads lost interest in Facebook before anyone else", or
| "Everybody got divorced."
| RobinL wrote:
| Or possibly 'men find the algorithmic/consumption based
| platforms relatively more appealing' and so were quicker to
| leave
| bentcorner wrote:
| Personally I stopped using Facebook because even in the
| before-AI days it started becoming a glamour photo book of
| everyone you ever knew (and probably lots of people you only
| kind of sorta know), and while people certainly deserve to do
| and see great things, seeing it all shoved in your face every
| day becomes exhausting in a keeping-up-with-the-joneses kind
| of way.
|
| I totally get that not everybody is like that, but I am, and
| so I stopped going to Facebook.
|
| These days I'm in private Whatsapp groups for my direct
| family and so I learn about what they do, and not the random
| stuff that my neighbors and 20-years-past classmates did.
|
| My wife is still active on Facebook and I actually do still
| visit occasionally to boost her posts but that's about it.
| 98codes wrote:
| I'm a dad that stopped using facebook when I got divorced, so
| there's a bit of anecdata for you
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| I would say their priorities changed. They spent less time
| with social media and just did other things.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > There was so much joyous sharing. And it wasn't done for
| clicks, views, or monetization.
|
| All along, Meta was vacuuming that data to build profiles of
| you, your family and friends, to be sold to third parties. You
| have been duped.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| What do you mean it all just went away starting with the
| husbands? Like people drifted away from the platform? Husbands
| started drifting away from it first?
| mgiampapa wrote:
| Social media is mostly about what you make of it and how you
| interact to find value. This is the same in Twitter, TikTok, FB,
| Instagram, even LinkedIn.
|
| If you don't interact with the product, you get lowest
| denominator crap.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| This is not true for the major social media sites that control
| the algorithmic feeds. (Facebook, Xitter, Reddit, YouTube...)
|
| While you may be able to add a small bend to the feed, it's
| really 90% in their power, not yours.
|
| I'm looking at Facebook "Home" feed. Funny how they added a
| separate "Friends" feed, the original purpose of the site,
| that's not the default.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| IDK, I still find my Facebook and Instagram feeds very
| topical and useful to me, so I keep using them. I also curate
| aggressively, have a wide variety of interests and a few
| hundred close connections. It could be that I am just fitting
| into what the algo is steering to, but I don't get the low
| quality stuff that OP is complaining about.
| Dr_Birdbrain wrote:
| For Reddit, you can select an option so that it only shows
| you things from subs you follow. Dramatically improves the
| experience!
| zadikian wrote:
| Was curious what my abandoned FB shows if I log in now. Mostly
| posts from groups I joined ages ago that are surprisingly still
| active, some random local news articles, and ads for
| restaurants.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| I used to run the Facebook page for a church-affiliated
| children's summer program associated with a minority group.
|
| I accidentally switched to that account the other day.
|
| The feed was the most right-wing, Fox News crap you could
| imagine!
| ryandrake wrote:
| I have a very sweet elderly friend of the family who only
| uses Facebook for church-related stuff, and since I'm "the
| tech guy" she asked me to look at her facebook and help her
| understand why she sees so much Trump, right-wing, hateful,
| violent, "Nazi-adjacent" (interestingly never -overtly-
| Nazi) stuff in her feed. I didn't have the heart to try to
| explain to her demographic bias, revealed preferences, and
| overlapping group interests, so I just said it's probably a
| software glitch in Facebook.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| I am both strongly pro 2A, and extremely liberal. Sometimes
| it gets things wrong, but I just use the feedback buttons
| and snooze content I don't agree with and it remarkably
| stays mostly on track for me.
| morkalork wrote:
| Unfortunately there's still two things bringing me back to
| Facebook: Marketplace and the neighbourhood group (populated by
| mostly boomers)
| nubg wrote:
| Great post, it's not just you, my feed is exactly the same. Short
| FCBK stocks.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I would really like to see the daus for Facebook that primarily
| interact with their feed. Not marketplace or messenger just the
| core of the platform.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| It's not just facebook. Every social network under Meta is
| infected with bot. Facebook look worse because there are so few
| real users.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Twitter was for, almost ever, infected with basically spam and
| 'fake user counts'. These fake user counts were of course
| included in the numbers told to investors and it drove sales
| price of stock. Did you think facebook would ever be immune to
| that?
| sunir wrote:
| We lost the Internet to AI. Just accept it. It's bots talking to
| bots about bots.
| fullshark wrote:
| You just need to find a smaller walled garden that can be
| tended, and not care deeply about having a massive audience and
| you can still find interesting conversation.
| jjulius wrote:
| The gardens that need the most tending, and that will have
| the most impactful rewards for individuals and communities as
| a result of said tending, exist in meatspace. Stop searching
| for walled gardens on the internet and focus on whatever is
| around you wherever you are. Stop using "More social media
| but different this time!" as the solution to broken social
| media.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I've seen many Lemmy communities die because their creators
| abandoned then when they didn't grow fast into thousands of
| members. This fast growth fixation is so pernicious, if
| anything web forums and Reddit showed us, is that small
| communities are higher quality than big ones. Communities in
| the thousands require a lot of moderation effort to remain
| high quality.
|
| Enjoy your small circle of internet strangers sharing a
| common interest, you don't need to become viral.
| weregiraffe wrote:
| Facebook is not the Internet.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| But AI slop is not limited to Facebook. It really is all over
| the Internet, it dominates entire topics in search engines.
| cat5e wrote:
| I will never roll over for the lizard man
| chistev wrote:
| Don't you use WhatsApp?
| amatecha wrote:
| maybe the centralized, corporate-owned web, but not the
| internet... at least, not yet...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| If anything the open internet seems _worse_. Every google
| search for some anodyne home maintenance task returns
| hundreds of AI-generated slop "guides" with affiliate links.
| YouTube is the last refuge for real information on this kind
| of thing. Coming across a human-written guide on the open web
| is increasingly rare.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| My feed isn't as bad as this one, mostly current events, tech,
| music, politics which are my interests. Trolls/ai/bots are
| everywhere, but so are people callling it out, so if anything I
| would guess engagement is up. To be fair, my politics seems to be
| around 60/40 agree/disagree with my political preference which I
| actually think is a massive improvement over what it used to be
| which was 90% agreeable to me. I enjoy engaging on pages of the
| opposing view.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Zuckerberg is what I might refer to as "forced" network effects.
| And I don't mean the natural network effects that result from
| people using a good and hence popular product (or network effects
| building on itself). Facebook replaced people's emails in their
| profiles with fb.com addresses, the company lied to people about
| privacy forever but especially with the former it's the site that
| actively tries to take you over. I despise Google, but Gmail
| wasn't like this (and supposedly Facebook would actively delete
| posts linking to its competition, in the early days - and maybe
| not so early days)
|
| My point in this somewhat rambly post is it's always been a
| spammy mess and Zuck's never had an interest in making a good
| product. For him it's literally about domination
|
| And PS: yeah, I know. With Chrome Google is apparently trying to
| dictate standards in a similarly cynical way
| downboots wrote:
| Maybe. But you can't deny their strategy worked. Seizing most
| with FB, IG, WA for the average people
| wincy wrote:
| Facebook messenger is so annoying to use too! My extended family
| group chat is there, but I had to turn off notifications because
| Facebook realized I only engage there and started serving me
| stories and updates from the messenger app as notifications!
| Right this second opening messenger it shows a "4" in the upper
| right, assumably with garbage notifications about things I don't
| care about "happening" on Facebook. Luckily if something
| important actually happens my family knows to text me, so I read
| the group chatter at my leisure rather than being interrupted
| randomly.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Anything like that faces a "cold start" problem when they don't
| have data about you.
|
| I got a lot of that kind of stuff when I started a new Facebook
| account but once I got my friends and family on and joined some
| sports photography groups I am usually greeted by (1) photos of
| varying quality that people took of a high school basketball
| game, (2) something family members are doing, (3) some friends
| outraged about the Trump administration... With helpings of AI
| slop cat videos and other trash.
|
| Meta obviously believes that those kind of images of women will
| get engagement and I know I get DMs that appear to be from women
| like that every time I get on a new platform -- usually I don't
| respond, or lead them out until they reveal what they are, though
| I am tempted to say "I am only interested in 2.5-d girls"
|
| Instagram has those blonde women too, but I was impressed with
| the "cold start" experience on Instagram where my feed was filled
| with some really incredible videos that must have been hand
| selected. After a few days of engagement farming though I wound
| up connected to a lot of South Asians including rather modest
| Muslim and Hindu women who project a fashionable image without
| showing a lot of skin. I didn't have a lot of success connecting
| with people in my immediate area until I started going out as-a-
| fox and handing out tokens with QR codes.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| What I don't understand is how FB and Insta are just full of spam
| (from spammers, not Meta AI) now. It used to be that FB was the
| absolute best at getting rid of spam and now they appear to be
| overcome by it?
| nephihaha wrote:
| Because if you report something they do nothing about it. I
| have seen complete scams on there and they do nothing about it.
| At the same time the site wants to control your worldview so
| lose lose on both scores.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| Evidently there is such little real human content and engagement
| on these platforms yet how does the big number keep going up?
| Genuine question.
|
| Do we need a way to audit usage stats in addition to financial
| numbers?
| michelb wrote:
| Engagement is great if you target a specific group. Don't need
| human content. It's ridiculously easy to start a Facebook page
| in a niche targeting a specific demographic, connect a site to
| it, unleash AI generated content, post it on FB and run ads.
| With enough traction, Facebook will pay you for making more
| content, while you extract money from your page followers.
| You're separating easy-to-influence boomers and conspiracy
| theorists from their money. It's disgusting, but it is
| ridiculously easy to make heaps of money with whatever content
| on Facebook.
| fullshark wrote:
| My guess is every metric is just getting diluted by bot
| activity but there's enough real users buying crap to give
| their advertising positive returns.
| euleriancon wrote:
| I had a similar experience recently, where I logged in to
| Facebook after not using it for years and was shocked by how much
| garbage was there. My spouse does use Facebook somewhat regularly
| so I looked at her feed and it was much more reasonable.
|
| I wonder if for those of us that haven't used Facebook in years
| the recommendation algorithm is essentially default. Which much
| like the default youtube algorithm, is completely garbage. But if
| we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would
| start being more reasonable.
| npilk wrote:
| Yeah, this makes sense. It does sort of imply that new users
| would just see a bunch of garbage, which you'd think isn't
| ideal. On the other hand, how many new users could possibly
| still be signing up for Facebook? So maybe it's not a problem
| as they just manage the decline.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| It's nonsensical rage/click baiting garbage. You are the
| product, not the user.
|
| Anybody who hasn't used FB in a long time almost certainly
| has 100s if not 1000s of posts from friends and family that
| they missed. Instead of this garbage it should be "Hey, we
| haven't seen you in awhile! Here's all the fun and important
| stuff you missed out on."
|
| That might actually get me to engage with the platform
| because that would be putting my needs first and foremost.
| But that's not what FB does and not what FB ever did. Zuck
| never had our best interests in mind, so why would it put our
| interests first?
| speckx wrote:
| Same here, I use it once every year or so. I get AI slop when I
| log in that is mostly like this blog post.
|
| My wife, who uses it maybe once or twice a month, does not AI
| slop, she showed me her feed. Nor does my friend who uses it
| daily. It's definitely based on usage or lack of usage.
| ge96 wrote:
| YT is like this too, if you're not logged in, thirst trap,
| crazy stuff until you build up a search history (even not
| logged in)
| nephihaha wrote:
| Now and then it gets things right, but I find a lot of YT
| recs to be pretty dubious, and find it is trying to bias me
| in this direction or that direction. It's pretty pathetic.
|
| The search function is also useless. About the only Scottish
| history content I ever get rec'd is Scotland History Tours.
| While I like his channel, it is not the only show in town and
| it doesn't go very deep.
|
| When I got my last YT account I could see it was trying to
| access which news I should see. It was trying to link me to
| one American party or the other. I just clicked "not
| interested" into most of the partisan bait content. Not my
| circus, not my clowns.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| Not sure why people are downvoting this, it's absolutely
| true. I watch a lot of youtube on my TV and I can tell in
| milliseconds if it's logged me out and I'm seeing the default
| feed. It's fully insane and inane.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| It only takes me a few seconds of scrolling in a private
| window to hit an AI-generated cat head on pregnant human
| woman barfing rainbows on the floor: 63M views. Really
| makes you believe in the dead internet theory, just that
| they're all in their own little slop algorithm world. Or
| maybe it's ipad babies after all.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| True: You have to curate your feed / search history a little
| bit to get much better results
| tencentshill wrote:
| I would assume inactive accounts get "sold" to the algorithm's
| lowest bidders. If you're not generating new information,
| there's nothing to scrape or sell. You must be pretty locked
| down outside of Facebook as well (you've actually toggled
| privacy settings, ever).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Try https://www.fbpurity.com/ I'm using it for Facebook
| interface needs until I can get something more agentic in my
| browser operational.
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
| rhyperior wrote:
| The only way you can use FB imo.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| https://socialfixer.com/ is another
| Maxion wrote:
| I logged in to instagram after like 5 years and my whole feed
| is literally just thots and AI generated content, even though I
| follow a crapload of accounts.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not just thots but thots with inevitable links to their
| OnlyFans pages. It seems that FB and Instagram's primary
| purpose has become funneling people into OnlyFans. I wonder
| if Zucc has caught on to this and is at least getting some
| revenue share from OF.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| He has testified to congress that IG/meta does not promote
| sexual content, which is nuts, because anyone who's spent 5
| mins on the platform knows this absolutely not the case
| naravara wrote:
| In my experience it's mostly sexual adjacent content with
| just enough plausible deniability that you could say it's
| a comedic sketch or something. They're not funny, and the
| punchline is usually tits, but it has the cosmetic
| structure of a joke.
| r_lee wrote:
| I think its just by nature very engaging, as dudes will
| go look at other posts and comment (at least the older
| ones) about their looks etc...
| dlev_pika wrote:
| Same with mine - all thirst traps in the search, which I have
| never really searched for.
| davio wrote:
| I did "not interested" & "This post makes me uncomfortable"
| for a solid month and now have a reliable feed of comedians,
| tacos, golden retrievers, classic jazz drummers, etc. The
| algorithm thought I turned Mexican and gave me exclusively
| Spanish content for a month but I just kind of went along
| with it.
| mieko wrote:
| I wonder this too about X: when I sundowned my Twitter account
| when I started seeing 80% "no question literal nazi-posting" by
| bluechecks on my feed, I unfollowed everyone and kept the
| account just to prevent someone posting on what was my username
| for over a decade.
|
| So now that I follow no one, when I click a link from Reddit or
| HN to X, my "For You" page is:
|
| - Asian pornography; AI generated "vibes" videos of machines
| doing "oddly satisfying" things; Elon Musk; American right-wing
| politicians and pundits screaming about "woke" or jerking off
| ICE videos; AI or real public sex outdoors at festivals?
|
| Of course, I don't use X, and don't seek this stuff out, and
| only see it there.
| idunno246 wrote:
| I still log in fairly regularly and get a bunch of reasonably
| targeted content, but also a ton of ragebait ai shit like
| protestors attacking cops. So it's a bit of both, they're just
| flooded with bad ai posts. It's changed drastically in the past
| year, from a bunch of posts you could argue make sense, to
| mostly posts of rage. But the number of actual friends posts is
| basically zero
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The problem is you have to be defensive. If you mess up once
| and click some AI reading Reddit posts or hawk-tua style
| street interview, you're cooked.
|
| You used to be able to reset by watching stupid financial
| content with high value like gold coin stuff and cleanse, but
| Meta is smarter now.
| mkehrt wrote:
| My facebook page, which is where I have friended everyone I met
| between like 2004 and 2017 is absolute garbage.
|
| But I have a secondary account where I follow a few specific
| niche groups on a specific topic that are only on facebook.
| This page is actually fine, and is pretty good at suggesting
| related pages.
|
| Not sure what the takeaway is for facebook though.
| Groxx wrote:
| From seeing the feeds of a few categories of people near me
| (some using it semi-professionally, some just personally, some
| like me that avoid it unless strictly necessary)... it really
| does seem to be all of them. Absolute garbage is a majority,
| and they all complain about missing things they actually care
| about (though to be fair this has been true ever since it left
| colleges).
|
| Facebook is truly awful to everyone. I can't believe people
| don't try harder to leave.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it
| would start being more reasonable.
|
| It would start being more "relevant" but not necessarily more
| reasonable.
|
| I hadn't used Facebook regularly in many years but recently
| posted a story about the passing of my 18 year old cat. I did
| this as a way of informing friends and family I don't
| communicate with on a constant basis that I was going through a
| bad time (I was very fond of my cat).
|
| My Facebook algorithm is now just almost entirely a solid wall
| of people I don't know announcing the death of their cat. A
| non-stop parade of personal tragedies.
|
| I can see the connection of how one thing led to the other but
| it also highlights how clumsy and soulless these algorithmic
| systems are.
| conductr wrote:
| I think it just throws the most engaging content at you hoping
| you get lured into using it more then the algo will update once
| it sees how you behave.
|
| For me, it's almost all thirst traps for several years. More
| recently it learned that I like 90s/00s rock, which is a fad
| again, so it started showing me some of that. Also, I am a
| sucker for stand up comedy clips and it feeds me that now. So
| that was a hint that it does start to become more reasonable.
| But, if I start to scroll it only goes 3-5 posts deep before
| thirst gets put back in the rotation no matter what I do.
|
| I've been using it more than ever in the last ~2 years, just
| because my old friends started sending me videos to the music
| related stuff so I click it and it opens in FB. We chat on
| messenger and I guess that little DM airplane logo is how they
| found a way to get me into it on occasion. Granted, my friends
| send me like 5-10 videos a day and I only watch them about once
| a month to get caught up, I can tell it's trying really hard to
| make a DAU out of me.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| The current leader for me for worst questions suggested by Meta's
| AI was on a photo someone took of some conspiracy theorist's van
| with the spraypainted message "THEY EAT BABIES IN DENVER". The
| suggested questions from their AI were:
|
| - Baby-eating restaurants in Denver
|
| - Denver's unique food scene
|
| wtaf meta.
|
| Beyond that, I simply don't see how Meta can possibly ever
| monetize their investment in AI. People are and will continue to
| be willing to pay OpenAI, Anthropic, google, microsoft. No one
| will pay Meta for their AI. And if their investment was only a
| couple million and they got some useless suggested questions out
| of it, whatever. But the size of their investment sure makes it
| look like someone thinks they'll make money off of it.
| mv4 wrote:
| Meta doesn't need to monetize their AI directly the way OpenAI
| or Anthropic would do. Meta runs ads, and they can use AI to
| help advertisers create content, target people, engage, etc.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > Meta runs ads, and they can use AI to help advertisers
| create content, target people, engage, etc.
|
| It is hard to imagine the level of spending they are doing if
| that is the sum total of their use case: shoring up a moat
| for which there really aren't any significant competitors in
| the first place. It seems like it can only be justified by
| eventually rolling out some kind of subscription service
| for... something, but for the life of me I can't think of
| what they might be able to actually sell to people or corps.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Yeah, it's incredibly ham fisted. I do not understand
| Zuckerberg's brain. The man is incapable of coming up with a
| good product or it was some product engineer given absolutely
| free reign to do whatever they wanted. AI summaries do not go
| with a product made for posts of friends
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Meta doesn't need to monetize their investment in AI. They need
| to their eyeballs and not lose them to OpenAI, Anthropic or
| Google. If they give away AI and people use it to make content
| for FB/IG that's all they need.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > They need to their eyeballs and not lose them to OpenAI,
| Anthropic or Google.
|
| At this point I'm not sure how they could 'lose eyeballs' to
| those 3. There doesn't seem to be any kind of market overlap.
| Unless we're talking about the very abstract sense of doing
| _anything_ other than use a meta product is a potential lost
| eyeball in which case you might as well add the national park
| system to the list of people they can't lose to, and I don't
| think that's a useful way to talk about the cost/benefit of
| Meta's ai spending spree.
| sgt wrote:
| I mean... I've been a Facebook user since 2006 and I don't see
| much spam at all in my feed. So I guess like PaulHoule said, it's
| a cold start problem and the defaults are terrible.
| paxys wrote:
| > I logged on for the first time in ~8 years
|
| That's the problem. Your friends and liked pages have all moved
| on and aren't posting anymore. The algorithm has no idea what to
| show you.
|
| FWIW I don't use Facebook actively but do log in once in a while,
| mainly for marketplace and neighborhood groups. And a ton of my
| friends are still active there (might be giving away my age). The
| first post on my feed _not_ from a friend is at #14, and it 's a
| clip from a comedian, so content I don't mind. Then one at #18,
| which is an article posted by a local newspaper. Further down at
| #25 or so from the onion. Keep scrolling I see New York Times,
| Gothamist, Subway Takes, Cracked (that's still around?), WTA.
| Overall my feed is almost entirely posts from my friends from the
| last week or relevant news, and I see zero AI slop or other posts
| of the kind that are in the article.
|
| So basically - it's all about the algorithm and your connections.
| A "cooked" product doesn't make a trillion dollars every quarter.
| alex1138 wrote:
| This could be, but the complaint about Facebook has always been
| people are posting but the feed won't show them posts from
| friends
| criddell wrote:
| > The algorithm has no idea what to show you.
|
| If you run into somebody you don't know, your first instinct
| shouldn't be to start showing them porn.
|
| I don't use Facebook but I do use YouTube and their
| recommendations are horrendously bad for me. So many AI videos.
|
| For some reason last night it thought I wanted to see bogus
| videos of porch pirates stealing a package that's actually a
| glitter bomb. I clicked through to the comments and the top
| comment was something like "Who are these AI videos for?" and
| the response was something like "Me. I know they are fake but I
| like seeing thieves get what's coming to them."
|
| Mike Judge is a prophet.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWfOMeLk6m0
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| Facebook still knows what websites you've been visiting, even
| if you haven't logged in for eight years. The Facebook Pixel
| tracks page visits, and it's easy to join your Facebook
| account to your browsing history if you ever log into any
| website using your email address. Assuming you are usually
| using the same computer or IP, the user profile could be
| pretty detailed. It's actually surprising they don't do
| better here.
| brycethornton wrote:
| I still use Groups and Marketplace but my home feed is blocked
| thanks to News Feed Eradicator. Check it out if you haven't heard
| of it. It's a browser extension that can block the home feed (and
| more) for a number of social sites.
| arjie wrote:
| Huh. I thought perhaps it was the usual "why are all the
| recommendation algorithms showing _me_ gay porn? " class of
| complaint, but I went and logged in and it seems that he's not
| wrong though the degree seems to vary. I've got a bunch of these
| but also a bunch of outrage bait and generic general stuff. I
| think if you don't use the platform you get the undifferentiated
| high-engagement stuff which is likely the same as those Taboola
| chumboxes that people have on their websites.
|
| EDIT: Hilariously, I went there 45 minutes later and I must have
| interacted with something because now everything is posts about
| football (along with the "i want an argument with my husband"
| post!). I'm in the Bay Area Gooners group but that's been over a
| decade, so presumably what happens is they don't run
| recommendations until someone shows activity. Just logging and
| browsing the feed must have triggered it because I didn't see any
| football stuff last time except BAG.
| goatsi wrote:
| >But on the other hand, I hadn't logged in in nearly a decade!
|
| This is the cause. With a long dormant account, facebook has no
| real content to show you. Your friends will almost all be dormant
| as well, even the facebook pages and groups you were part of are
| likely to have fallen silent. Facebook will feed you directly
| from the slop firehose rather than show you a blank feed.
| davesque wrote:
| It's a complete mystery to me how Facebook operates. Like, they
| need money to keep the lights on, right? Where is the money
| coming from if no humans are using the platform?
| smt88 wrote:
| An astonishing number of people use Facebook daily, and
| Instagram is also a huge revenue generator. The company itself
| is thriving despite terrible products.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| isn't the money coming from advertisers placing ads, even if no
| one is really paying the placed ads attention?
| sylos wrote:
| Government funded!
| nephihaha wrote:
| Yes, erm, why do you think they get the tax breaks!
| wcfrobert wrote:
| Ad duopoly with Google.
|
| Half of all humans on Earth uses Meta products (Facebook,
| Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Threads). These products are
| free for you to use. But for Meta, your attention is the
| product which they sell to advertisers.
|
| 99% of their revenue comes from ads, and 1% comes from VR
| stuff.
| gniv wrote:
| I login for the groups. Some private groups have a ton of useful
| info that's well organized, plus helpful folks that are eager to
| answer questions.
| fusslo wrote:
| local town offices mostly use facebook for news and events.
|
| I signed up in 2023 after not using it since 2008. I can't
| believe how bad the marketplace feature is compared to
| craigslist. It's trying to get me to keep coming back and serve
| me different ads. I just want to see all the local ads that
| match my search!
| reddalo wrote:
| And that's almost as sad as Discord "forums". It's useful
| information that's completely siloed out from the public web.
| unsharted wrote:
| On a positive note, posts from groups I was interested in
| have been targeted at my feed by the algorithm. Still not
| public, but least there is some sort of exposure to "passers-
| by"
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| (I know, frying pans and fires) I started a Google Group as an
| alternative to a Meta group that I don't want to need Mata to
| participate in.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Groups and Marketplace seem to be the main genuine uses in many
| non-US countries.
| nimbius wrote:
| Man who remembers when a big Mac was a wholesome and tasty meal
| option now shocked to find that, under capitalism, the wrapper is
| actually more nutritious than the meal itself.
| bananamogul wrote:
| Facebook is just fine.
|
| This is mostly about OP, not Facebook. The reason he sees tons of
| AI images of AI girls is because that's the kind of content he
| consumes on various Meta platforms. When I login to Facebook, I
| see none of that. So...
|
| I am in a couple dozen active groups across a variety of topics -
| guitar, tech, TV shows, history, tabletop gaming, etc. - and 99%
| of posts are on-topic chatter by humans.
|
| I prefer Reddit because it's longer-form content but with
| communities, it's about where there's a center of gravity - a
| subreddit, a FB group, a Discord, a traditional forum, etc. I go
| where the people are. And a lot of those people are on FB for
| some niches.
|
| The "FB is nothing but AI slop and ads" is a myth. I have
| interesting conversations with people I don't personally know (in
| a real life sense) on FB every day.
| artemonster wrote:
| I read a RARE friend-made post, close tab, decide to
| react/support/comment/like on it, reopen FB and this post is
| buried forever in the feed, findable only if you search this
| person again. fuck them for fucking with my feed. Forget if
| this was a post from some group, since they can be shown to you
| out of order, good luck finding it
| npilk wrote:
| Well, I haven't really used any Meta platforms for at least 5
| years, so I don't think that's how they're deciding what to
| serve me.
|
| I could definitely believe that I used to click on more
| pictures of girls than boys back in high school and college
| when I actually used Facebook. But they would have been real
| pictures of people I was friends with.
|
| To your point, I'm sure if I used the product more, the
| algorithm would get "better" according to what I engaged with.
| da02 wrote:
| The first half of the last paragraph is a warning: Get schools to
| stop using Facebook. If they are showing that kind of content to
| a grown hetero-woman, I'd hate to wonder what they show to
| everyone else.
|
| I never signed up to that site because I thought sooner or later
| Google or some startup would just clone it, lower the ad count,
| improve censorship, and run it at near break-even. Especially
| since you don't have to save every single post created for
| eternity.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| My FB feed is filled with slag that's got nothing to do with
| anything I'm interested in, my friends or family. I have wade
| through 85-90% of that crap just to see a post from a friend
| inviting everybody to a BBQ they are having which is already 2
| weeks past the event. Oh, and every time I log in I have 10+
| unread notifications that again are more desperate attempts at
| getting me to engage with the platform and not actually something
| that should have ever been sent as a notification.
|
| FUCK THAT.
|
| So I don't use Facebook. I cannot wait for this house of cards to
| collapse in on itself.
| boredtofears wrote:
| I'm on FB primarily because my local buy-nothing group is on it,
| so I am logging in multiple times a day. I'm so used to this slop
| it's pretty funny at this point, but as is the case with all
| social media, you tune your algorithm as you engage. At this
| point it pushes things like cooking videos and hockey clips more
| than the AI slop for me.
|
| Sometimes I'll go down a rabbit hole of clicking AI generated
| videos just because my curiosity is piqued, and then I'll be
| stuck getting that slop fed to me for the next week. I have to
| make a mental note to actively disengage with it as quickly as
| possible to tip the algo in the other direction.
| bramhaag wrote:
| My feed has devolved into AI generated propaganda with a scary
| amount of genuine support. Police brutality against minorities
| and other politically relevant groups; all fake but with hundreds
| of seemingly real replies cheering them on.
| ge96 wrote:
| Maybe the replies are also fake to drive the narrative
|
| It is interesting where you go on (eg. echo chambers) but like
| 9gag for example is super racist and doesn't seem to be
| moderated.
|
| Like TruthSocial do real people actually use that? Crazy
| efilife wrote:
| They are not fake. I've also seen these and checked
| commenters' profiles. Real people, in the 35-50 age range.
| ge96 wrote:
| I wonder if these are the people that cause a ruckus at
| protests ha
| ryandrake wrote:
| How can you tell by just looking at their profile? Bots
| have for over a decade been able to generate a profile with
| a real looking picture (usually just scraped from the web)
| and a realistic sounding bio.
| ge96 wrote:
| Tangent but reddit allows people to hide their
| post/comment history which is fine I guess but it's not
| great for that reason, trying to see if an account is a
| bot or not. Other than age can't tell anything about that
| account.
|
| I notice more and more accounts use it, particularly the
| spicy commenters. Which is whatever, I try to stay away
| from social media now, this is SM here but at least it's
| more technically oriented/useful.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| It's mostly all ICE engagement bait on both sides. In the same
| way we are all guilty of upvoting an article without reading
| it, they will amplify their ideas or viewpoints by signal
| boosting a video. The same way an echo chamber forms around a
| questionable news site that is often proven wrong or lying. The
| source doesn't matter anymore only the numbers.
| dekhn wrote:
| I stopped when it started showing propaganda from the CCP (at
| least it was clearly labelled as such).
| https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/chinese-state-...
| https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1i67ja9/whats_going_...
|
| It was already slop before that.
| esseph wrote:
| > I stopped when it started showing propaganda from the CCP
|
| What did you do when it showed you propaganda from other
| countries?
| dekhn wrote:
| Well, I'm in the US, I already know how to recognize US
| propaganda and ignore it :)
|
| I don't think I was shown anything that was clearly labelled
| as "state-sponsored-media" from any other country and I don't
| think I saw anything that was propaganda, but not labelled as
| such, although I typically scrolled past the obvious ads and
| AI slop so I might have missed something.
| vjk800 wrote:
| I recently joined back to Facebook to follow some local groups. I
| barely see anyone I know posting on Facebook anymore. Even the
| local group seems kind of dead considering how many people live
| here.
|
| So where are people now? If I want to get informed on local
| events, etc., where should I go?
| tomstockmail wrote:
| Your local library? Mine has a bulletin board where anyone can
| pin something (like Pinterest, but in real life) and numerous
| events. If yours doesn't, start one?
| qq66 wrote:
| Facebook doesn't care about Facebook.com anymore. The value of
| their business is almost entirely in Instagram, with some future
| potential in WhatsApp.
| reddalo wrote:
| I mean, if they cared about Facebook they wouldn't have
| launched Threads.
| giobox wrote:
| While I mostly agree, Meta cares a great deal about
| facebook.com/marketplace, which has been hugely successful.
| qq66 wrote:
| Do they make any money from Marketplace?
| dathinab wrote:
| > (I dunno, maybe those are all bots too.)
|
| I wish,
|
| but from personal experience I'm afraid quite a bunch of them are
| creepy old guys which have no idea how creepy they have
| become(1), because they are in a bubble with mostly only other
| creepy old guys
|
| (1): Like I don't mean people which always have been creepy or
| "secret/hidden" creepy. But people which through increasingly
| more "not caring" and echo champers/ad bubbles and similar
| twisting their world perception/social feedback loop have become
| increasingly more creepy in the last 10-20 years.
| sva_ wrote:
| In German we have a word for old people who post with their
| real name under such posts: Klarnamensexboomer ('real name sex
| boomer')
| jmyeet wrote:
| Facebook in particular, and social media in general, is an
| excellent example of making short-term decisions ultimately
| leading to your doom.
|
| FB of course started as a way for college kids to follow each
| other and see what's going on. Then rather than a chronological
| feed we got the newsfeed. This was hugely controversial,
| actually. Apparently ~10% of the user base threatened to quit
| over it [1].
|
| But why did they do it? Because it increased engagement. And
| every social media platform since has followed the newsfeed
| model.
|
| But the big thing (IMHO) that led to FB's destruction was sharing
| links. I bet this too increased engagement but it ultimately
| leads to your feed being flooded with your weird uncle posting
| conspiracy theories.
|
| All social media platforms have moved away from this idea of
| following your friends and family. They're all now a way of
| disseminating "news" and following celebrities. How social groups
| keep in touch now is group chats.
|
| I firmly believe this recommendation model is headed for a
| reckoning with governments around the world. We have the Meta
| trial going on now, the EU investigating platforms for addictive
| practices (where is this same smoke for sports betting and crypto
| gambling I wonder?) and so on.
|
| In the US, this comes back to Section 230, a law established in
| the 1990s that created legal cover for user generated content
| because it shielded platforms from legal liability as long as
| they met certain requirements (eg moderation, legal takedowns).
| The alternative is to be a publisher (eg a newspaper) who are
| responsible for their content.
|
| I believe that the algorithmic newsfeed has created a way to let
| social media platforms act as publishers but enjoy thei
| protections of being a platform.
|
| Let me put it this way: if, for example, you as a publisher make
| endless posts about the evils of Cuba, how is that different from
| having user-generated content where you promote anti-Cuba content
| and suppress pro-Cuba content? In my opinion, it isn't,
| functionally. This will ultimately come to a head.
|
| Anyway, back to Facebook, I know some still use groups but really
| who uses FB anymore? For awhile, Meta had the golden goose with
| IG but even that seems to be in decline. Twitter has declined way
| from its peak and was never mainstream. Snapchat enjoyed a very
| young audience for ephemeral messaging. I have no idea what the
| current state is. It seems like Tiktok is the only platform still
| enjoying growth.
|
| [1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/4018352/facebooks-news-feed-
| just...
| nickla wrote:
| I deleted my account in 2005 when I noticed that it wasn't just
| for getting to know local groups. Before I deleted it I was
| contacted by a pretty woman who had 100 friends who were all the
| same last name as me. That's all she wanted to do is contact
| people who were "related". I had the suspicion she was a bot.
| People call me stupid for doing so, but now it is just bots?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| There were some fun things like that back then. One of my early
| Facebook accounts was a videogame alias than included the work
| "clown", and I received invitations from other users that had
| "clown" in their names, its circle of friends became a virtual
| circus.
| varispeed wrote:
| Instagram is serving me literal porn when I browse shorts (for
| instance women showing their private parts). It's amazing that
| they are unable or maybe don't want to block it.
|
| Facebook basically has sexual content spam as in the OP article
| all the way.
|
| It's to the point I'd never open either app when in public.
| gs17 wrote:
| > It's amazing that they are unable or maybe don't want to
| block it.
|
| I'm not convinced they care about moderation outside of legal
| necessity.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I log into Facebook website a couple of times a week to browse
| Marketplace. I very rarely check the feed (once a month?) since
| almost no human I know posts there. But my feed has 0 thirst
| traps when I just checked. It was some musicians I follow, one or
| two pictures posted by friends, the workout routines from a
| distant family member, local news and then a whole bunch of
| comedy skits and old comic strips turned into reels.
|
| It is 60% garbage but actually the 40% that is there is
| completely different and valuable compared even to YouTube (where
| I spend the lions share of my social media time). But I actually
| think that only looking at it once a month is the best way since
| if I look at the feed more often I notice it slowly skews more to
| 90% garbage and 10% value.
| h05sz487b wrote:
| The original moltbook. Just bots talking to each other.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I think author goes on porn sites and it skews algo towards crap
| like that (no cookies/incognito/etc doesn't save you from them
| tracking where you move), especially if he's not active on fb
| then that's the only signal they get.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Takes one to know one? Could you elaborate
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| "Facebook is just clickbait slop and is making billions" is more
| the opposite of cooked. They managed to turn garbage into
| dollars, and people are eating it up for as long as they're
| allowed to do exploit their market position.
| lgl wrote:
| The interface... Oh.. the terrible terrible UI on desktop...
|
| Switch tabs, come back.. it refreshes everything and you can
| never go back.
|
| Comment threads with 100+ comments with only a "show more" link,
| which again.. se previous paragraph.
|
| See a video, click fullscreen icon. Doesn't go fullscreen, goes
| to some weird modal window, muted. Click fullscreen again..
|
| And I'm sure I could go on... It's really a sad shell of the
| simplicity it once was.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Holy crap. What a dystopia. Guess some of this blood money went
| into free Llama models and the react.js ecosystem (dubious gift
| to the world).
|
| Is it possible to make money these days without being ethically
| bankrupt?
| dash2 wrote:
| This is the tech version of "nobody I know voted for Nixon": FB's
| position in the US & Europe is very misleading from a global
| perspective.
|
| In the Philippines, say, Facebook _is_ the internet. Every
| business runs on it. People use it instead of news. Everybody
| uses Messenger to chat. You get free minutes with your phone that
| are specifically for FB /IG/Messenger.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| As someone with a Filipina wife and who's traveled many times
| to the Philippines, your characterization is exactly correct.
| Facebook is _the_ option, not just one option.
|
| Interesting side fact: The Philippines is #1 in social media
| usage in the world.
| nojs wrote:
| > The Philippines is #1 in social media usage in the world.
|
| By what metric?
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Addendum to this: my filipina aunt is elderly and I was
| absolutely shocked at the amount of highly specific AI
| generated content seemingly targeted directly at her on
| Facebook.
|
| Except instead of thirst traps it was a weird mix of outrage
| porn, religious imagery, and kids + pets being cute, singing or
| rescued from odd situations.
|
| I asked a few questions of her to try and figure out if she
| like really grasped that it was AI, and she knew the general
| idea, but there's already so many filters and choppy edits of
| things it was honestly just too hard for her to make the
| distinction.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I had a similar revulsion watching older folks in my family
| scroll and scroll through obvious AI slop and AI ragebait.
| They can't even really tell it's AI, and they just sit there
| gobbling it all up, even though it's 100% nonsense. I mean,
| on one hand, who am I to tell people what media to like and
| consume, but on the other hand, I kind of fear for their grip
| on reality.
| dlisboa wrote:
| I don't see it as misleading at all. You're leaving out half
| the world and implying it's doing fine. Regular Facebook usage
| in Brazil is also non-existent and it's the 5th or so biggest
| Internet market. China doesn't have it. I'm not sure about
| India usage. So if FB isn't popular in the US, EU, China,
| Brazil, etc, that's an extreme amount of market loss.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| My facebook feed is mostly low-effort reposted memes from
| tumblr/twitter/reddit, political ragebait, and screenshots of
| jokes from TV shows.
|
| It's usually not AI (at least not obviously) but it's still slop.
| plagiarist wrote:
| > Why do women feel refreshed after arguments
|
| This sort of thing is perfect ragebait that Facebook et al love
| to serve to their products.
|
| The only problem for FB is that there's nowhere to angrily
| contradict. I suppose their algo feed shunted this author into
| the young male to incel radicalization pipeline? They must serve
| differently enraging suggested questions once they have more data
| on the viewer.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| This amounts to an anecdote and an opinion. What are the actual
| engagement numbers? I suspect Facebook is doing just fine.
|
| My own anecdotes are that Facebook Groups tend to be the nexus of
| legacy social features and that Marketplace has overtaken
| Craigslist for person to person sales.
|
| But the feed is now more akin to TikTok than friend feed 1.0 from
| the late 2000s.
|
| Again, I'd love to see actual Facebook engagement data, not some
| guy's opinion.
| phkahler wrote:
| If you want to see your friends posts, you have to click the icon
| of people. I agree that the default feed has become absolute
| garbage.
| AJRF wrote:
| I use Facebook for marketplace and when I logged in the first
| post I saw was the half time score for a football game that
| happened 3 weeks ago.
|
| They are not sending their best.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| I have a similar experience on both FB and IG.
|
| I only log in to see what friends/family are doing, and I have
| fewer than 100 friends on both added together, but I have to
| scroll and scroll to see anything by those I am interested in.
|
| Whether it's AI or not, it's all irrelevant slop to me.
| xnx wrote:
| I was also surprised to find that Facebook feed ads are now ai
| chumbox quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox
| radpanda wrote:
| I haven't used Facebook in probably a decade or so. I've missed
| out on Facebook Marketplace apparently - at least 5 people in
| this thread mention using Facebook for that specifically, and I
| have heard numerous friends talk about snagging good stuff
| person-to-person like I used to do with Craigslist. OTOH, I
| haven't heard anything especially good about Facebook
| Marketplace's UI or features, just that "everyone is on
| Facebook", so it reaches a lot of people.
|
| I wonder what will be next after Facebook Marketplace dwindles
| (assuming eventually "everyone" is no longer on Facebook). Going
| back to Craigslist? Something new?
| chistev wrote:
| I've never seen "OTOH" used before but I understood what it
| meant from context. Lol.
| lich_king wrote:
| I can sympathize with this take, but I think it misses the point:
| the platform is _not_ broken. It 's delivering people precisely
| what they want. If you look at the version of this for young
| people - TikTok, Snapchat stories - it's the same thing. Busty
| models, increasingly AI generated, and various made-up
| "heartwarming stories" or rage bait. Go to YouTube, and you have
| more of the same.
|
| This is not even an internet-era thing. Before that, some of the
| best-selling magazines were basically celebrity gossip. Facebook
| just found a way to scale it and make more money off of it.
|
| The only thing that surprises me now is that people _don 't
| actually mind it_ if you point out that they're liking,
| commenting, or resharing AI slop. It doesn't even matter that the
| story wasn't real. It's enough that the kitten is cute, or
| whatever.
| zzzeek wrote:
| all the AI / crap shown in this post is the _not awful_ part of
| facebook.
|
| the awful part is the intense swarm of hateful bigots that arrive
| at any post that shows any kind of misfortune on the part of
| people who are not white and republican. I'm pretty sure that a
| large number of these accounts are not bots; they're real people
| living around the country, seething in bigoted hatred who can now
| post with impunity the most vile and disgusting crap I've ever
| seen.
|
| Example: A local news post shows three boys who have been
| reported missing (yes, people's children missing, and no, this is
| not about immigration - for those posts, the hate and racism is
| vastly worse). The three boys happen to be Black. Only one
| comment is actually displayed beneath the photo: "They all look
| the same to me!" - then more (I'm cutting and pasting these from
| the actual post just now): "Tell them by their hair??? No???"
| "How can you tell one from another?" "Did'n do nuffin man"
| "Missing or escaped!?" comments flooded by revolting, actual
| racism, against innocent children who are potentially in severe
| danger. Moderation is not an option at all here, there's
| thousands of these people swarming any such post, the posts are
| from some local news source that comes from an aggregator of some
| kind that does no moderation of any kind, nobody cares, it's just
| a huge platform for vast mobs of the most deplorable people you
| ever hoped didn't exist.
|
| This site needs to be closed down like yesterday.
| rmoriz wrote:
| I can't understand how such AI slop ca make money on FB or
| TikTok. I mean hardly anything gets viral.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| They capitulated to TikTok by adding thirst content and suggested
| content based on activity.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| I nuked my fb account years ago. I wasn't sure at the time if I
| was craving more substance or if it was becoming more vapid.
| Looking back not... definitely both.
| hexage1814 wrote:
| >Click to show mildly sensitive content (revealing clothing)
|
| Those warnings are stupid.
| mattfrommars wrote:
| Facebook is still has excellent marketplace
|
| Only that keeps me going back.
| tartoran wrote:
| I stopped using Facebook for a while but I agree that their
| marketplace used to be pretty good for a while, that until it
| started to be spammed with scams. It became really unusable
| IMO.
| holoduke wrote:
| For me Facebook is no longer relevant for friend stuff. But I
| find it pretty good in group stuff. For example their are groups
| about my town where I live. Historical groups or modern ones. Or
| a group about a specific car model I own. I just have to filter
| out all the ai / porn slop that goes into my feed.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| what comes after facebook?
| dmschulman wrote:
| One thing I've noticed is a large difference between what's
| served on Facebook's desktop site and what's served on their
| mobile version. I don't use the app, I just log into facebook.com
| on my phone, but the mobile version is serving 100% more of this
| AI slop than on desktop.
|
| I think it's obvious why given the way users interact with
| sites/apps on their devices vs on desktop (they want to make FB
| mobile as TikTok-like as possible), but it's really striking how
| much of Facebook on mobile is just a bunch of AI slop at this
| point. I see some creep in on desktop too, mostly within the
| Reels/Shorts section (same creators/videos on both platforms,
| that is), but to see my recommended feed content be so vastly
| different indicates a lot to me about how the algorithm
| interprets user behavior and a lot of Meta's thinking about
| mobile audiences.
|
| EDIT: mind you I don't follow a single topic or favorite anything
| on the platform, the content being served/recommended to me is
| purely based (as far as I can tell) on gender/demographic info
| they know about me and user behavior.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| It's garbage now it's main purpose is to confuse older people
| with ai slop or ragebait them with politics.
|
| It's really unfortunate that these people don't know, don't
| understand or even don't believe that this is algoritmic feed
| tailored specifically for you.
|
| I have people in my family which basically believe that there is
| a pride march every Tuesday in cities around or country.
| numbers wrote:
| Yeah, I have a Facebook that's about 2-3 years old now, and I use
| it mainly from Marketplace. But man, if I just accidentally go to
| the feed, it's just a bunch of spam and some sort of bait,
| whether it's rage bait or thirst traps or anything like that.
| Facebook is maybe trying to see if I'll engage with it, but
| mainly because I use the app for Marketplace, it just continues
| to recommend garbage.
| kurthr wrote:
| Next time someone is confused about the meaning of the word
| "Enshitification" just pull up Facebook.
| d--b wrote:
| I never opened an account. For me facebook was like this from day
| 1. I thought it was cooked in 2009. I guess I was somewhat wrong.
| varenc wrote:
| Another aspect of FB's decline: it's increasingly buggy. Too many
| issues to list, but curious if others have noticed this as well?
| Last week I got stuck trying to login via mobile web, kept
| approving the login via the mobile app but the web never seemed
| to receive that approval and I just had to give up.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I sometimes use marketplace, it works better than craigslist for
| finding cheap firewood logs, used car parts, and other random
| shit. I made a burner account for that. It worked fine and I was
| able to ignore the rest of their garbage products. However, I had
| to delete the app from my phone because the fucking thing
| wouldn't stop with the notifications. BTW if any of you assholes
| work at Uber or Lyft--same problem. My new pattern for using this
| garbage, and only when I absolutely must, is:
|
| (1) download the app (2) use it for whatever i need to get done
| (3) delete it
|
| TBH this article is interesting, I haven't actually looked at fb
| since I last had an account ca. 2009. It was headed that way
| then, and I'm not surprised it got there.
|
| But back to the usage pattern above, if someone at Apple is
| listening please build a sandbox for these malicious apps that
| just fucking silences them _unless I choose to run it_ by which I
| mean literally not a single CPU instruction of their code runs
| unless I explicitly tell it to. Thanks.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I use Facebook a lot, but not for the social feed - Marketplace,
| business pages, and ads.
|
| I've never interacted with their "shorts" feature, and it's _all_
| young women and girls in as little clothing as they can manage.
| It's to the point that I don't open the Facebook app in public.
| Ridiculous.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| They're selling me the life of a divorced dad as a goal of some
| kind. It is amusing to an extent.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Same, I have never interacted with their Facebook reels/videos
| but all the video thumbnails are practically just videos of
| porn stars/OnlyFans style content. Instagram isn't as bad on
| the Reels side, you'll get good content there...but the feed
| itself is dreadful, I never see anything from friends. It's all
| just slop from bigger brands/publishers. At this point, there
| are just chat services to me and my friends.
| com2kid wrote:
| My FB reels are educational content , music and artists.
|
| It is pretty much identical to my YT shorts feed, which means
| two algorithms have settled on almost identical content.
| gs17 wrote:
| > Same, I have never interacted with their Facebook
| reels/videos but all the video thumbnails are practically
| just videos of porn stars/OnlyFans style content
|
| For me it fluctuates between animals and thirst traps. It's a
| really odd recommender system.
|
| > Instagram isn't as bad on the Reels side, you'll get good
| content there...
|
| Seems to depend how far you scroll, the first dozen will
| usually be good, clean recommendations. After that it goes
| downhill.
| com2kid wrote:
| Facebook owning the local classifieds section is often
| overlooked.
|
| Offer up is dead in my area. Craigslist is a joke. Everything
| happens on FB marketplace. Vendors sell food, gyms liquidate
| old equipment, small furniture stores post their entire
| inventory.
|
| FB isn't monetizing any of that beyond ads for related
| products, which I guess is how they monetize everything.
| jhaile wrote:
| This is one reason I'm really annoyed they are getting rid of
| messenger.com and requiring you to go to facebook.com to see
| your messages. I much prefer going to the specific site for
| chats and not having to see the feed...
| haunter wrote:
| Same, Facebook Marketplace is really good at my location
| because there is nothing else and never have been. It's not
| like Facebook destroyed something, no one else offered a
| classified sites like this
| ok123456 wrote:
| Craigslist.
| haunter wrote:
| There is a world outside of America
| ergocoder wrote:
| The reels section is ridiculous. It's definitely NSFW. Facebook
| doesn't support hiding it permanently.
|
| Like what you experience, I cannot use Facebook at work
| anymore.
|
| Any Facebook PM out there? Can you make it a setting to hide it
| permanently?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They can. They won't.
| shpx wrote:
| Facebook is running the same kind of engagement-maximization
| algorithm on Marketplace postings, so half of my suggested
| postings when I open Marketplace is girls posing in the clothes
| they're selling.
| thepaulmcbride wrote:
| This is exactly the same experience I've had. I recently re-
| installed the app to use marketplace after moving to the US. My
| feed is mostly AI generated half naked women and AI generated
| conservative rage bait. It is so obvious that it's AI slop, but
| none of the comments ever mention it. I too assumed they were
| bots.
| nc wrote:
| It's your feed.
|
| Everyones feed is different.
|
| It depends on how much you train the algorithm.
|
| Yours is untrained, therefore slop.
| overfeed wrote:
| I don't know if author coined the term, but "Meta's Gooniverse"
| is a better descriptor of its properties than "Family of apps"
| they use in quarterly reporting.
| savolai wrote:
| Fb purity browser addon helps, though its ui is quite cryptic.
| rco8786 wrote:
| I just logged in to mine to see, I also can't remember the last
| time I looked at my news feed. My experience isn't _quite_ as bad
| as OPs, but certainly plenty of AI slop and lots and lots of
| accounts that I don 't follow and have never heard of.
| greatgib wrote:
| Also something that frustrated me a lot is that when browsing
| with the web browser on a computer, there is absolutely no way to
| share a link to a post.
|
| For exemple there is a post with details about an event that will
| happen, when you look at available options: you can't click on it
| to go to a dedicated page like on LinkedIn, there is no option in
| the menu to have a shareable link. You can share with: someone on
| fb message, a group, your wall, things like that but no link.
|
| But on the phone is it possible.
| mtmail wrote:
| There's a perma-link when you click on the date of the post.
| But you're right, on the 'Share' button they have 5+ options,
| none of them is "copy link" or similar.
| garyrob wrote:
| I'm 70. Most of my high school and college friends are on
| Facebook, and some other friends. So I use it (including its
| Messenger component) a lot to keep in touch! I know it's a
| generational thing. Just thought I'd mention it.
| ieie3366 wrote:
| You are just not the target audience. Meta is a trillion dollar
| company and their algos are extremely optimized.
|
| It probably detected your gender (male), age, location, social
| graph, as a combination of all these that you would be interested
| in AI-generated softcore pornography. And for the average user
| with your stats, they absolutely are.
|
| Of course, nobody at Meta hardcoded their algorithm to do this:
| it's just naturally found out the kind of content a person with
| your specs loves. Sorry, OP
| cogman10 wrote:
| yup.
|
| I get a couple of thirst traps in my feed, but not many. I
| definitely get a metric ton of AI shit.
|
| The stuff I'm actually following, friends, etc is pretty
| diluted.
| goldkey wrote:
| They're crushing it with anyone over 45
| beeflet wrote:
| beautiful
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| The default experience probably sucks, but I aggressively block
| anything even mildly annoying on my Facebook newsfeed, and I like
| what's left:
|
| Mostly Simpsons memes, Seinfeld memes, Pro Wrestling memes,
| Sopranos memes, and then intersections of those memes (Seinfeld
| Pro Wrestling, Simpsons Pro Wrestling, etc.). Some nerd shit.
| Stuff from the handful of friends of mine and local groups I
| interact with who still post on Facebook. Maybe <1% total garbage
| like what the article describes but I immediately block any
| groups or users who post anything even slightly annoying. I
| almost never watch any video content at all. It's unironically
| better passive content than anywhere else left on the web,
| probably because all the people trying to be hip have gone
| somewhere else lol
|
| However whatever their UI is sluggish as hell and I'm surprised
| this wasn't discussed. You'll click block user/group and it will
| respond multiple seconds later (on my symmetric 1Gbps FIOS
| connection) and UI elements will jump around. FB messenger is
| slow as shit and occasionally will fail to decrypt/load messages
| entirely, even though it works fine on my phone (don't have
| regular FB on my phone so can't make that comparison). There's an
| anti-performance cargo-cult among web devs. Perhaps their metrics
| only show what it saves them on server costs. But if I did not
| already use the site it would be impossible to convince me to
| start.
| littlekey wrote:
| I agree with the people saying that the product is a lot better
| once you're actively engaging with pages that align with your
| interests, so that the algorithm can feed you better content.
|
| That being said, it's still sad that this is the default
| new/returning user experience. Imagine a world where a new user
| was met with real posts about a variety of interests, rather than
| a psychic barrage of insane AI posts.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I think even for someone who logs in daily and uses it a bit,
| it still shovels weird content and even if you repeatedly skip
| or don't engage with AI slop, you still get a lot of it.
|
| I almost think we are seeing something similar to a CAPTCHA
| where the engagement is being used to tune which videos slip
| under the uncanny valley radar.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| This is not unique to Facebook. Reddit has seen a large uptick in
| AI-generated posts, or repeated posts from the past.
|
| I think we need to recognize that social media of 2026 is not the
| same as what we had in 2006. AI generated content, regardless of
| if it is image, video, or text, is here to stay. And it will only
| get better and more convincing as the technology improves.
|
| What people really need to ask is this - what do they want to get
| out of social media? Is it personal relationships and status
| updates? Is it entertainment? Is it something in between?
|
| The harsh truth is most people at this point use social media for
| entertainment, and AI content is entertaining, or at least
| engaging, to most people. Remember that 54% of USA adults read
| below a 6th grade reading level [1]. It is not perfect, but it is
| convincing enough that a large enough number of people are
| beginning to accept it as "real".
|
| [1]: https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-
| fac...
| strangattractor wrote:
| Coining HNs Law
|
| Any mode of communication that depends on advertising for
| funding will over time t monotonically approach total BullShit
| Grifting as t increases.
| munificent wrote:
| It already has a name:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| __lain__ wrote:
| The reddit bots are quite nefarious. Even in technical
| communities where no advertisement is happening there are so
| many posts made by bots either recycling old posts or
| masquerading as humans doing banal things like complaining
| about end users or something. Hundreds of bots that do nothing
| more than pretend to be people complaining about work, really
| curious what the goal of the operators is with these ones.
| Makes me wonder if they are bots supplied by reddit to
| artificially boost engagement.
| themafia wrote:
| Points are often presented as a proxy for trustworthiness.
| They're even implicit on sites like HN where certain features
| only become available once you've crossed a threshold.
|
| It's a bad tool. I always think of the Bill Bur joke talking
| about Netflix going from 1-5 stars to thumbs up/down. "It's
| like.. stubbed my toe.. thumbs down. Hitler.. thumbs down.
| There's too big of a gap in 'thumbs down.'"
| jcgrillo wrote:
| It doesn't matter to any of these companies what their users
| get out of it so long as those "dumb fucks[1]" keep coming back
| to the trough and slurping up the slop. Eat your rage bait and
| like it, piggy. Keep that attention economy roaring!
|
| [1] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
| Zak wrote:
| It's not about what users want. It's about what's profitable
| for the company.
|
| What I want from Facebook is to see what original words,
| images, or videos my friends and family thought was worth
| sharing with the world today, and I want to see clearly when
| I've reached the end of that. I probably don't need to spend
| more than ten minutes once a day on that.
|
| It's profitable for Facebook to show me as many ads as
| possible. If I wasn't an aggressive adblock user, the thing I
| want would have much less potential profit than all the third-
| party content they want to show me.
| InMice wrote:
| You just have to click on "Feeds" then you can filter to friends,
| groups, or pages you follow. That said they have been slowly
| burying where you can click on "feeds" to get there, so I just
| bookmark them. I never look at the main page it's just pure
| garbage.
|
| I will say facebook ads are the most relevant ads ever for me. I
| click on them all the time because they're actually interesting
| to me. But at the same time all the products/clothing is so
| expensive I never convert.
|
| What I dont like is Alerts becoming just another feed to fill
| with spam and not real notifications.
| mbo wrote:
| My mother is an international flight attendant in her 60s.
|
| I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to
| discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic
| ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was
| filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international
| trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in
| her most frequented cities. But I discovered that my mum was also
| a frequent "poster" of the photos of her various trips around the
| world, and the comments sections were filled with with some
| beautiful messages from her many many friends and family.
|
| From this I learned that there is a subset of the population that
| Facebook works perfectly for and meaningfully improves their
| real-world social relationships. And perhaps Facebook has been
| hyper-optimized for that kind of use case through relentless A/B
| testing. But I fear my mum is quite privileged to have this kind
| of experience.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > all the Facebook PMs intended
|
| That's being awfully generous. I think Facebook PMs intend your
| feed to be filled with valuable commercial offers that can be
| monetized by Meta.
| moduspol wrote:
| They should offer that privilege to the rest of us for a few
| bucks a month. I'd probably pay.
| cameldrv wrote:
| The problem is that your friends probably don't post much to
| facebook, and so they'd show you that, and you'd get to the
| end and find something else to do, so they have to bulk it
| up. There is a "friends" feed that's buried under a couple of
| menus that does this though.
| moduspol wrote:
| I wouldn't mind seeing an empty feed that says, "your
| friends didn't post today," or whatever. They have to fill
| the feed because I'm not paying them and they need the
| engagement.
|
| But if I were paying them, even a little bit, then maybe
| they could. But I didn't know there was a friends-only feed
| so I'll check that out.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Go to the "feeds" page and select "friends".
| Digit-Al wrote:
| If you are on the mobile app, click on the burger menu
| and select "Feeds". You will then have a page that has
| tabs at the top. "All" will be selected by default, but
| if you select "Friends" you will see only posts from your
| friends. If you have completely caught up it will be
| empty and will say that you have caught up and seen
| everything your friends have posted. There are still ads,
| but you don't get all the reels, and crap posted by
| people you don't know.
| Aurornis wrote:
| You don't need to pay anything. That's just how Facebook
| works when you have active friends on it and you engage with
| their content.
|
| I do find it interesting that tech people are so baffled when
| other people enjoy Facebook and derive value from it. I think
| we see so many exaggerated headlines about algorithms and
| feeds that people who don't use the site have a very
| different idea of what people who do actually use the site
| are seeing.
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| Yet my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs
| open to people and bands she wants updates from because
| Facebook refuses to put them on her feed, despite her
| commenting on every post and story from them; she instead
| gets all these random shitty "suggested" posts from things
| that she would never have interest in or actively hates and
| FB should know that. She constantly mutes and reports shit.
| I get the same thing, but I don't use FB nearly as much.
| Those same bands have to spam repeatedly because despite
| having tens of thousands of fans they show everyone that
| their posts are only shown to 16 people. It's a shit site
| that maybe works for some folks, but not at all for us
| active or not.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Was she using the 'Friends' tab? Anything else is complete
| trash.
| bdangubic wrote:
| This is regular feed. I have another friend that is like OP's
| Mom, basically posts 4-10x per day. her main feed is
| basically just her and her friend's stuff, comments etc etc
| (few ads here and there of course but basically her feed
| looks like OG Facebook)
| krn1p4n1c wrote:
| My feed is like this too. I rarely use FB now, but I've
| aggressively pruned and blocked anything that becomes political
| or negative.
| fullstop wrote:
| I unfollowed everyone except for a few family members. It
| really wants to give you the infinite scroll and started
| showing me some really bizarre stuff. So much AI slop, and
| random content.
|
| For about a week it kept showing me nursing mothers, no
| matter how many times I said "I don't want to see this" and
| blocking. I have no problem with women nursing, but these
| were done in a way to be sexually provocative.
|
| After that it started showing me AI houses and kitchens, with
| kitchen taps but no sink basin.
|
| I just gave up at that point.
| al_borland wrote:
| I made a Facebook account a few years ago for a private
| group related to a class I was taking. I didn't want to do
| this, but it is what it is.
|
| Being paranoid, I ran a VM just for Facebook. The browser
| never went to any other sites, so as far as I know there is
| no way it could track me or get any actual information
| about me, other than maybe a very rough location based on
| my IP. I also setup a burner email just for this and used a
| fake name/picture.
|
| On a fresh account with no info, my feed was much like that
| of the linked article. A bunch of thirst traps and various
| "news" and memes. Occasionally it would tell me to follow
| stuff so it could actually populate the feed, but when it
| wasn't doing that, it was giving me this kind of garbage.
| This was before the advent of generative AI, so I assume
| these were mostly real photos, but who knows who was
| actually behind those accounts.
|
| Twitter was fairly similar, but would show a lot of high
| school kids fighting or general street fights... along side
| the thirst traps.
| curious_af wrote:
| International flight attendant. So the algorithms for people
| that travel internationally a lot are drastically different
| from the people who remain stationary. If Facebook wanted to
| prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a
| different experience for the people who have political power
| (international travel might be the best proxy for that)
|
| What you're referring to may also be part of their XCheck
| program which came to light back in 2021
| Aurornis wrote:
| > So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a
| lot are drastically different from the people who remain
| stationary.
|
| I can confirm the same experience as the parent commenter for
| my family who still use Facebook even though most of them
| don't travel internationally.
|
| > If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative
| publicity, they might have a different experience for the
| people who have political power (international travel might
| be the best proxy for that)
|
| I think the much simpler explanation is more likely: People
| who use Facebook for engaging with friends and family content
| will see more friends and family content. I don't think this
| is Facebook playing 4D chess trying to hide content from
| politicians by detecting who is traveling internationally. I
| mean, if Facebook did want to have a separate algorithm for
| politicians, don't you think they could come up with
| something better than triggering on international travel?
| afavour wrote:
| I do think it's that but with a dangerous slippery slope
| embedded within. FB will optimize for engagement no matter
| what so if you linger on one political post they put among
| 99 friends and family posts they'll immediately amp up the
| ratio.
|
| My mother in law is an example of this. She's always been
| "mildly" political, e.g. she liked Planned Parenthood's FB
| page. Now her feed is a mess of anti-Trump stuff. I'm anti-
| Trump myself but a lot of these posts are barely coherent
| and she's mentioned before now when she meets someone new
| her first thought is whether they voted for Trump or not.
| To my mind it's a direct result of her slipping down that
| slope. She frequently has interactions ("fights" is too
| strong really) with friends and neighbors on her feed who
| are clearly off piste in the other political direction.
|
| I even had an example of it on my own profile. For some
| reason I had a post from a local (NY) radio station in my
| feed, about Mamdani. Curious to click into the comments I
| saw a cesspit of vitriol by boomer age users, attached to
| their real names, sometimes with smiling photos with their
| grandchildren... for weeks after whenever I logged in there
| would be a new post by a different conservative leaning
| radio station, ready to make me angry. Engagement > user
| happiness.
| bko wrote:
| I think you're overthinking it. She probably just has a lot
| of real people connections and drives the algo to meaningful
| interactions. When a ghost logs in, they don't know what to
| show so default to "general" spam which is just AI generated
| woman.
| twelvedogs wrote:
| The algorithm is not optimised for meaningful interactions,
| even 10 years ago i couldn't get it to even mostly show
| friends and family after fighting it for a week
| 0x457 wrote:
| Could it be due to someone actually using facebook so
| algorithm works in their favor. When I worked in REDACTED
| when you not frequent user you'd get generic "what is popular
| for everyone" feed because empty-feed = bad-feed.
| underlipton wrote:
| I've been convinced for some time that access to some
| resource component that determines the quality of search/AI
| results is divvied up likewise. Why waste resources on users
| who have no audience or influence? If they're frustrated, who
| cares? Instead, identify the people who people already listen
| to, and make sure their experience with the platform is
| optimal. Even if the service is _horrible_ for the vast
| majority of users, the gatekeepers and tastemakers will
| insist that they 're just imagining things.
| pyreko wrote:
| I have this with Twitter surprisingly.
|
| I only use it for animal pictures, art, and to follow artists.
| I usually just use the Following page, but my FYP is always
| just... animal pictures and art, exactly what I want. No weird
| right wing shit, no weird crypto shit, no drama or ragebait
| shit, etc... somehow.
|
| I know some day it'll break though.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Same here. The trick is to unfollow people who start posting
| things you don't want to see in your feed any more. It sounds
| so simple, but many people treat their following list as an
| append-only log.
|
| I've followed accounts for hobbies that later spiral off into
| the deep end of Twitter's topics of the day, which is always
| my sign to unfollow them.
|
| Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make them
| angry, though. These websites continue serving up more of
| what you click on.
| raincole wrote:
| I have an account to follow artists on X. Surprisingly, it
| never pushes even one single blatant AI artist to my feed
| (not saying I'm an expert to recognize AI-generate artworks,
| but I've done digital painting as a side gig and.) There
| might be some paintover or more subtle ones that eluded my
| radar, but I've never seen the typical AI styles on my
| timeline.
|
| However, if you check posts remotely related to the US
| politics the reply section is out of control.
|
| I honestly believe out of Reddit, Facebook, Bsky and X, X is
| the one with the most reasonable timeline algorithm[0].
| Reddit and Facebook are unusable except for very specific
| reasons (asking questions in certain apps' subs/groups). Most
| people I know irl moved to instagram though.
|
| [0]: Bsky is the worst, but interestingly if you use a third-
| party feed like 'For You' it's on par with X, just less
| traffic.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Same. It feels like the real trick is to get platforms to
| think you're some kind of important person that could hurt
| the platform if served too much ragebaits.
|
| And it also feels like they're compelled to maximize
| ragebaits for some reason - maybe the Web2 is running out of
| "advertiser friendly" contents.
| Aurornis wrote:
| This is how my parents' Facebook feeds look, too. And my
| wife's. And my friends who still use it.
|
| I log in a couple times per year and see the same thing. It's
| nice to catch up with the friends who still use it.
|
| One thing I've noticed over the years on HN is that many of the
| people talking confidently about Facebook also start their
| posts with "I'm glad I deleted my Facebook account 8 years ago,
| but..." and then go on to describe what they imagine Facebook
| is like for everyone else, as pieced together through the type
| of sensational headlines that hit the Hacker News front page
| every day.
|
| There's another failure mode where someone tries to use
| Facebook but doesn't have any active friends on the site. They
| might scroll past photos from friends and family to click on
| ragebait links or engage with someone debating politics because
| they can't resist an internet argument. The algorithm takes
| note that this is what they engage with and gives them more of
| it, while showing less of the content they're scrolling past.
| Then they wonder why their feeds are full of topics that make
| them angry.
|
| There's even an explicit feature to tell the algorithm what you
| want to see less of: You click the three dots and click "Hide
| post". They even have useful tools to unfollow people without
| unfriending them, which is highly useful for those people can't
| politely disconnect from but whose content you don't want to
| see. Using these tools even a little bit goes a long way to
| cleaning up your feed.
|
| Meanwhile, people like my parents and extended family treat
| Facebook like a friendly gathering where everyone knows
| discussions of politics and religion are off the table. They
| click "Like" on things they want to see more of. They leave
| nice comments under photos of their friends and family. Their
| feeds adapt and give them what they want.
| newsclues wrote:
| You keep the content creators happy.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I only use it for cruise groups and it's been useful but once
| you scroll the main feed it's baaad. Slop after slop. And what
| isn't slop is rage bait short form content or bad takes or
| stolen videos from the vine days it feels.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| The skeptical observer would suggest because her demograph
| votes, serving ads which benefit Facebook shareholders is good
| for business.
| tgma wrote:
| Could it be that the problem is users' own interest in being
| outraged? A reflection of their mental state and anxiety that
| they then project to Facebook as if that's the root cause.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Facebook used to be like this when it was only for college
| students. That was the last time Facebook was good.
| duxup wrote:
| I logged out of facebook years ago only to find out an old
| friend / former coworker had died. Everyone knew, because of
| facebook, but not me :(
|
| It's certainly the social hub for some groups.
| shirro wrote:
| The algorithm has been given a job todo. First priority on any
| platform is engagement and a well functioning, complete human
| being is not going to be engaged by rage bait and hate. They
| are rare, precious jewels. The shit gets dumped on people who
| are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out. It is relentless and
| escalates until their brains cook. Algorithmic social media is
| a massive social harm. The people who are in deep likely need
| years of deprogramming and therapy to recover which they will
| never get.
|
| These platforms need to be shut down and people with a
| conscience need to stop using them, regardless of their own
| positive experiences, to deny them the power of network effects
| and their impact on the vulnerable.
| sMarsIntruder wrote:
| > I know Twitter/X has worse problems with spam bots in the
| replies, but this is the News Feed!
|
| Probably not using it from ages.
| jedberg wrote:
| > So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm?
|
| No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get
| almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It
| started about two years ago.
|
| Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently
| saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so
| she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and
| had the same feed. No matter what she did she couldn't fix it.
| She asked other women about this, and they all said their
| partner's feeds were the same.
|
| This is not a problem for women. At least not one I've ever
| talked to or read about on the internet.
|
| Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went
| through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and
| parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like
| my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted.
|
| I got a whole bunch of thirst traps again.
|
| It doesn't bother me anymore, I just tune it out and scroll past
| it because my feed still has the parenting and pottery too, and
| my friend's updates, which is what I'm there for.
|
| But it would be good for more people to learn about this so they
| don't get angry when they see their male-identified
| partners/friends feeds.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Meta rediscovering the age-old adage that "sex sells". The core
| concept is little different than old car commercials featuring
| scantily clad women but with the plausible deniability of an
| algorithm so Meta can wash their hands of any negative
| consequences.
| bityard wrote:
| Can confirm. For as long as I've been on facebook (way over a
| decade now), I've only used it to share pics of my kids/pets to
| family/friends. I unfollow people who post political and other
| garbage content. And yet, my feed is nothing but ads and Reels
| of young women bouncing on trampolines in bikinis.
| elAhmo wrote:
| I get similar ads in Youtube Shorts. It was appearing only when
| I was abroad, and I was curious to see what is triggering it,
| it was mostly: male, 18+, location in country X. Same happens
| now in a country where I live.
|
| Most of the reported ads don't get taken down by Google,
| although they are very obviously AI porn ads.
| brational wrote:
| ha.. I was about to type this exact paragraph. my instagram has
| no human connections, I only follow local business (food, bars,
| museums/gardens, non profits, etc) so I can be aware of
| specials & things. I have no followers. I don't really like
| anything but clearly engage with cooking stuff, funny animal
| videos, comedy in general. Multiple languages. lots of
| crossover.
|
| Honestly it's a pretty great instagram experience.
|
| And yes I'm a middle aged male so no matter what the smut comes
| back (at least I get it in multiple languages too?)
| chasd00 wrote:
| i rarely log into facebook too but i do use marketplace. I just
| pulled it up on my phone, the "reels" thing was all AI + thirst
| traps just like you described but the rest of my feed was
| pretty plain vanilla posts from friends/family i follow + some
| ads.
| munificent wrote:
| I just tried to repro this.
|
| On my Facebook account, I scrolled through 30 posts without
| seeing anything thirsty. Mostly synthesizer stuff, stuff for my
| kids' schools, and a few posts from friends. It definitely
| knows I'm male because the ads are for men's apparel.
|
| Instagram was the same.
|
| I never ever watch reels or other short form video, so maybe
| that has something to do with it.
| pwrsysengineer wrote:
| I created a Facebook account a few years ago to get in on the
| local marketplace deals. After opening the website a few times
| and seeing very suggestive content, I had the idea of tailoring
| my feed to the most racy things I could find. Eventually, my
| feed was filled images of children wearing bathing suits and in
| suggestive positions, censored images of sexual acts, and AI
| generated images of grannies with large breasts and little
| clothing. I was taking screenshots for a while but one time I
| opened my photo gallery while on the train and realized how
| embarrassing it looked to have a phone filled with this crap.
| ksherlock wrote:
| I have a theory about facebook (and youtube!) showing absolute
| garbage recommendations.
|
| Somewhere, there's an algorithm designed to increase engagement.
| And it doesn't care what kind of engagement, so clicking the "I'm
| not interested in this garbage" button is just as engaging as
| liking or watching or commenting.
| aero142 wrote:
| Instagram is gone as well. Everything is fake in different ways.
| If the video isn't ai generated, then it's influencers acting out
| a scenario they think will get engagement. I realized that when
| it's a real video, there is a caption that says some scenario is
| happening, but there is nothing in the video that shows that is
| real. I think people are just reposting videos with different
| captions and testing out whatever invented scenario make the
| video have the most views.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Just reminder that when Meta stock went to ~90 in late 2022 we
| had non-stop "Facebook is dead I don't know anyone that uses it
| lol" posts on reddit, hackernews, etc. The stock is ~650 today.
|
| We are not the target audience.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| > So long Facebook, see you never, until one day I inexplicably
| need to use your platform to get updates from my kid's school.
|
| This part here kills me. I've also been forced to engage in the
| Zuckerverse. I hate WhatsApp.
| dlev_pika wrote:
| I remember Zuckzuck saying out loud that his vision for the
| platform was that people wouldn't need actual humans to interact
| with, and bots is what you'd mostly get.
|
| I've used it enough to understand this is happening now.
| Literally impossible to distinguish, unless you know the person.
| einpoklum wrote:
| What happens when you log on to Facebook with uBlock Origin (not
| lite), plus EFF Privacy Badger, with appropriate settings,
| enabled? Is it possible to get to a state where some/most of
| these Facebook-suggested items are not visible? Or is there no
| separation between the promoted/artificial and organic (if I can
| use that term) content?
|
| I wouldn't know myself; I tried Facebook in... I think 2010 or
| so, but found it to be highly addictive and not worth it, so I
| quit after several weeks. Since then, while I knew that I
| occassionaly missed some useful group to be in, I've not
| regretted the decision.
| j45 wrote:
| This could be true, and/or a large percentage of the people who
| spend a large amount in the economy are on these platforms.
|
| The surprising effectiveness of Meta Ads for certain audiences as
| counter-intuitive as it seems is one example.
| eastbayjake wrote:
| This dynamic carries into Threads, where Meta AI slop is
| aggressively pushed in the feed.
|
| There's also a significant amount of viral content that is
| clearly an older person's Facebook post which was intended for
| only friends but got pushed to the public feed of a Threads
| account that may have been created by accident -- or default --
| when Facebook blitz-scaled user numbers after launch. The posts
| are always hundreds of people piling on about someone posting a
| photo of their teenager in an embarrassing situation, with the
| original poster probably blissfully unaware that they're getting
| publicly dragged on Threads.
|
| Check your parents' phones to see if they're publicly cross-
| posting on accident!
| neo_doom wrote:
| The AI slop problem is not going away, unfortunately. Its
| surprising that the social media companies don't see AI slop as
| an existential threat to their platform? I guess its an indicator
| of how low we've sunk that 'any' engagement is good engagement.
|
| If it was up to me, I think AI content should be OPT IN. I must
| choose to view AI content and not be force fed from the conveyor
| of slop. This is where governments should legislate but we'll
| never see this happen.
| yfw wrote:
| You guys are lucky most of mine are scam ads and ragebait
| mortsnort wrote:
| It's definitely cooked in the sense that the content is garbage,
| but whenever was that not true?
|
| I'm hoping they're cooked because they're putting all of their
| eggs in the AGI basket instead of making useful AI products, and
| they probably won't figure out AGI.
| scaredreally wrote:
| My main use case for FB is a group related to reviewing
| restaurants in the area. I have no FB friends/connections. I use
| messenger for my one friend who insists on using it. It is mostly
| slop (and strangely I get posts from that same relationship
| account), I scroll for about 5 minutes at a time before I realize
| it is not worth looking at. And truthfully, that is what I want
| from social media: a few minutes worth of distraction followed by
| the feeling that I had just wasted my time and then on to
| something more meaningful.
| kmfrk wrote:
| Also came across this today about how Meta is allotting 5% of ad
| spend on AI testing for Gen AI. Which leads to unintentional Gen
| AI promotions across Instagram and Facebook - mind you for
| companies who _paid_ for the promotion.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/bexsaltsman.bsky.social/post/3me4yb...
| maurycyz wrote:
| Very predictable: If Facebook (or any other social media site)
| showed you what you wanted to see --- stuff from your friends ---
| you would be satisfied and leave.
|
| ... but Facebook makes money off ads. They don't want you
| leaving. They want you to stay online all day.
|
| Instead, they show you brainrot: content interesting enough to
| keep you on the site, but shallow enough that you are always
| thirsty for more. However, making this content is still a lot of
| work, and isn't what most people want to do: It takes a lot of
| brainrot to keep you trapped 24/7.
|
| Slop requires no effort, costs next to nothing, and fills the
| "brainrot" niche perfectly. Facebook doesn't care that people are
| posting bot content, because it's the perfect thing to make them
| money.
| morissette wrote:
| See I don't scroll; not scrolling means not seeing the junk. I
| just post and log off.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Change to chronologic timeline, and you'll be cured for your
| addiction superfast
| nomilk wrote:
| Fb deserves huge credit for their 'reels' algorithm. I follow a
| bunch of science influencers, and their content frequently blows
| my mind, and it's just one great vid after another.
|
| Something I would love is 'social media dotfiles', so I could
| export my list and share it with others. And vice-versa.
| metalman wrote:
| I declined when "facesmash", whatever, was invitation only, and
| am only now considering how to set up an advertising presence
| there, sortof, as I am overwhelmed with customers wanting things
| made, so may just stay on page 7 of search, and just keep
| answering the phone
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Facebook IS just veiled ads to OF pron subscriptions.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I think the key here is engagement is based a lot on content
| quantity, not quality. If your feed doesn't have a lot of natural
| quantity associated with it then FB will find something to stuff
| in there. The reality is that most people don't have a lot of
| quantity on their feeds from their friends so that means they get
| the AI slop to fill the void. At least that is my complete guess
| on a root cause of (some) of the FB slop. I haven't logged in for
| 6 months and I am now checking it 1-2 times a year because the
| last few times I logged on it was pushing hate content at me.
| progforlyfe wrote:
| I'm definitely not a "fan" of Facebook or anything, though I do
| use it and make a few interactions per day -- based on this blog
| post I think the reason why his dashboard was full of trash &
| slop was simply because he hasn't logged in for 8 years. If you
| have no interactions in 8 years (and people you friend/follow are
| also gone from the platform) they will resort to showing you this
| crap.
|
| I honestly do not care if Facebook is cooked or goes away -- but
| I doubt the situation is that bad.
| umvi wrote:
| Could this also be related to Facebook killing messenger.com
| (i.e. they are no longer running a charity so they need all users
| to be on the main site now to consume the slop)?
| agentifysh wrote:
| One theory I have for the degradation of facebook and just
| internet content/discussion/comments in general in the past 25
| years have been the rapid change in the cultural demographic of
| global internet users.
|
| late 90s to early 2000s, only highly developed economies made up
| most of the internet but as more emerging markets joined the
| ranks, they ultimately surpassed those that reached peak internet
| penetration much earlier.
|
| A lot of these new dominant markets also happen to speak English
| well enough and in far greater numbers and with it carries the
| cultural/taste shifts.
|
| Without naming specific countries, few social networks are
| eclipsed by just a few countries that joined the internet much
| later than the Western hemisphere (+non-English speaking
| developed economies).
|
| Cultural norms, values, habits permeate through the internet
| simply put and the social media platforms are incentivized to
| reflect it even if the $/country is not aligned but through the
| sheer power of number and the increasingly unhealthy attachments
| to what is largely just an ephemeral digital number in a database
| inside air conditioned facility while the users complain about
| the heat.
| fjsifjasf wrote:
| why don't you just name the countries lol?
| willturman wrote:
| I'll name a specific highly developed country in the western
| hemisphere: The United States. There's no need to bend over
| backward trying to blame some perceived degradation in quality
| of discussion on international adoption of the internet.
|
| According to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy
| [1] 130 million Americans -- 54% of adults between the ages of
| 16 and 74 years old--lack proficiency in literacy, essentially
| reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
|
| [1]https://map.barbarabush.org
| nickvec wrote:
| AI slop has me very worried for the future of the Internet at
| large. I was toying around with the idea of a "new Internet" that
| is devoid of AI generated content, but enforcing that would be
| borderline impossible. Sadly, it seems like the genie is out of
| the bottle; I feel like I see AI generated content everywhere I
| go.
| fer wrote:
| I started laugh reacting at Russian propaganda and now all I get
| is Russian propaganda, literally half of my posts are third
| worlders falling for the Russia stronk west evil meme, and
| Russian embassies and consulates non-stop DARVOing. But before
| that it was indeed a constant flurry of thirst traps, ragebait,
| etc. I only keep using it for a couple of well moderated groups.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Yeah, this is a major FB trap.
|
| If you interact in _any_ way with propaganda accounts, even
| just look too long at the posts when they first randomly pop
| up, they 've target locked you.
|
| I'm a liberal dude. 90% of the political content I get on both
| FB and Insta is far-right propaganda, sprinkled in with some
| typical brocasters.
|
| No amount of "Not interested" will make it go away, either.
| justinhj wrote:
| Hating on Facebook had always been cool. It's like "not even
| owning a tv". Is it cooked though? I'm over 50 and it has a lot
| of value for me. Marketplace, local happenings and keeping in
| touch with family are all well served.
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| You are not responding to the content of the article. Did you
| read it? The FB feed has changed dramatically since the
| adoption of genAI and the experience of using it can be pretty
| unpleasant. Do you disagree?
| zer0zzz wrote:
| Why do people still complain about fb. FB has been this way for
| years..
| richardw wrote:
| Every so often my YouTube logs out and I'm exposed to the view a
| "random visitor" would see. Instantly visible because it's filled
| with stupid content and sexual provocation.
|
| I manage the shit out of FB and YouTube. You need to block a few
| things so it stops testing a few segment ideas.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I agree with most of this, but complaining about Yoleendadong is
| some "Old man yells at cloud" stuff.
|
| My wife is a big fan, as she has a lot of funny content specific
| to Asian cultures. Yes, she has some relationship stuff too. You
| may not like her content, but she's got a few hundred thousand
| subscribers on Youtube, and _17 million_ on TikTok.
| throwaway876345 wrote:
| My aunt is in her late 70s. She is a retired public school
| teacher who taught for over 30 years. Over the years she spends a
| majority of her leisure her time glued to Facebook on her iPad,
| consuming whatever content is delivered by their algorithm. She's
| become MAGA and will not tolerate any criticism of any moral
| wrongdoing by the current president or members of his
| administration. It's unbelievable the turn.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > And I don't just mean that nobody uses it anymore. Like, I knew
| everyone under 50 had moved on
|
| It will probably surprise a lot of people to learn that this
| isn't true.
|
| A higher percentage of 30-49 year olds report using Facebook than
| in 50+ age groups
|
| The bias toward younger generations is even higher when you
| include Instagram
|
| One source https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-
| sheet/social-media...
|
| I think many in the Hacker News bubble stopped using it and
| assume everyone else did, too. It's not too surprising when you
| read articles like this that paint a completely different picture
| of the platform than what your friends and family are actually
| seeing when they use it, as evidenced by the multitude of reports
| in this comment section from people whose family and friends are
| still getting value out of the site.
| dchristian wrote:
| This sounds like the feed of a single male. Facebook showing
| sleazy content/ads to single guys predates AI by a lot. Try
| removing your single relationship status from your profile and
| see what changes.
| fbistrash wrote:
| Facebook is nothing but trash. Stopped using it way back in 2012
| nvarsj wrote:
| I barely use facebook.com but I don't have this issue at all. I
| just checked - my news feed is filled with extended family posts,
| posts in groups I'm in and related things. TFA looks completely
| alien to me. I guess this is kind of an absurd local maxima you
| get with algorithms for rarely used accounts.
|
| (disclaimer: I work at Meta)
| snowhale wrote:
| logged in after years away and had basically the same experience.
| the feed is just AI slop and engagement bait now, none of it from
| people I actually followed.
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