[HN Gopher] Facebook is cooked
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook is cooked
Author : npilk
Score : 1427 points
Date : 2026-02-20 18:25 UTC (1 days 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.
| Mixtape wrote:
| 2019-23.
|
| It's worth noting that GroupMe sticking around was
| honestly probably a byproduct of my own circles and the
| specific campus culture to a certain extent.
| ishouldstayaway wrote:
| > I started a few text group chats to stay in touch.
|
| This is the space that WhatsApp fills, for better or
| worse.
| 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.
| le-mark wrote:
| This applies to "friends" also. And discovering how many
| of them are actual idiots. Oh, these people can't put 5
| words together to form a coherent sentence and their
| spelling grammar suck to top it off? I don't miss it at
| all.
| 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.
| swat535 wrote:
| Exactly.. you'd only really see them on Christmas or
| Easter.. Maybe some special event like Wedding.
|
| Once in a while they would come over but that was it. You
| never knew what your uncle had for lunch.
| 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
| nickburns wrote:
| Seria 'sponsored posts.' Como angloparlante nativo, tenia
| que comprobar que fuese una palabra de verdad
| 'patrocinate' (como 'patrocinado').
| gus_massa wrote:
| Yes, my bad. Hi from Argentina!
| nickburns wrote:
| !Mucho gusto!, desde los EE.UU.
| 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.
| underlipton wrote:
| I convinced my family to try Signal, and after a month of
| not being able to connect despite knowing each other's
| numbers - silent errors - I had to apologize and join
| them on WhatsApp.
|
| They all use iMessage primarily, but that's a whole other
| can-of-worms conversation. (Screw Apple.)
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Got my entire family on Signals (sisters, brothers, in-
| laws, parents, nephews...). We're very happy but could
| extend that to second degrees(?), to cousins and uncles.
| We're were close to succeed but we needed help (media,
| mostly).
| 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.
| cvwright wrote:
| Several people have tried over the years. We all failed,
| because it doesn't work.
|
| The economics don't work because no one is willing to pay.
|
| The network effect doesn't exist, because real people don't
| post enough to get the flywheel started.
|
| All the dark patterns exist because that is what users
| reward.
|
| Sucks but it's true.
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| IG, though I didn't bring my FB list over and lost contact
| with a bunch of people.
|
| I keep my follow list small and regularly unfollow people
| (not because I don't like them or what they post, but because
| I've seen enough of that).
|
| Being able to unfollow without drama was something that was
| problematic in FB.
|
| My siblings and parents have a private WhatsApp group -
| that's what's used for actual communication.
| 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.
| dividefuel wrote:
| I agree with this a lot. In the late 2000s, which for me
| was when I was about 20, posts were very throwaway and low
| effort -- in a good way! You never really knew what you'd
| see when you logged in. Photos of stupid things or silly
| status updates, etc.
|
| Over the next five years though, content gradually shifted
| to mainly image crafting. Over-processed photos, highlight
| reel curated trip photos, major life updates, etc. It felt
| like the bar was higher on what people would share, but
| unfortunately that removed a lot of the things that made FB
| fun in the first place.
|
| I don't know whether it was a more universal shift or
| whether it had more to do with the age of my peers.
| 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.
| nickburns wrote:
| Alright, I'll be the dude to call a spade a spade: it was
| _all_ done for "clicks."
|
| The sheer banality of that tends to eventually wear on a
| dude.
| 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?
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| > There was so much joyous sharing.
|
| I'm sorry, but describing using a social advertising network as
| "joyous sharing" is blowing my mind. This is, like, what
| marketing people think normal people talk like.
| b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote:
| bro, facebook was the first internet thing for a lot of
| people. with it, millions of *oomers got in touch with people
| they didn't see in years/decades. it was unironically good
| before the enshittification, and we still don't have a
| mainstream replacement. we probably can't ever have one,
| really.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Similar experience; it was good 15 years ago. I left* and
| closed my account ~10 years ago.
|
| * because 1) I found it sucked up time I needed for more
| productive things and I was getting "hooked" on social media,
| and 2) it wasn't good for my mental health -- if all you see is
| the glamour side, even if they're people you know, it was easy
| for me to feel that my life sucked in comparison. It didn't
| make me happy.
| itomato wrote:
| Naive, good natured, exploitable. Perfection.
| 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!
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| sure, but now it's giving me days old crappy posts with 3
| votes from those subs as it leans wholeheartedly in the
| Dark Pattern of always feeding me _something_ so I keep
| reflexively coming back for more.
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| Interesting. I have a very different experience with
| YouTube, to the point I consider it my favorite social
| network thingy. My search history and subscriptions are
| carefully curated, and I mostly get "more of the same",
| with pretty good recommendations for stuff that usually
| interests me. Also, zero "thirsty" stuff.
|
| Logged out, YouTube is of course a complete mess.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Logged out, YouTube suggests me endless videos about MMA
| fighting or trash for children. I only use the YouTube
| app for commenting. I use Brave to avoid constant
| adverts.
|
| I do notice though that YouTube is always trying to bias
| me in one direction or another. I have a friend whose
| feed is full of Trumpbait and stuff about how Putin is
| about to die and the Ukraine war is about to end. (Sounds
| fine except these videos have been saying that for four
| or five years.) Whatever one things about these things,
| the videos he gets are very propagandistic and have
| ridiculous AI thumbnails and titles. Usually of Putin or
| Trump scowling at something. He also gets suggested a lot
| of food videos (okay, I suppose) and often ones about
| Nazis and WW2 (a bit fetishistic, but to be fair he did
| history at university).
|
| My non-political YouTube suggestions tend to be about
| popular music from decades ago. I emphasise "about". I
| notice the algo more rarely suggests actual music itself.
| I suspect this is because YT has to pay out money for
| music but not videos about it. I get some local history
| stuff (which is interesting but usually not about areas I
| know well). I very rarely get suggested much in the way
| of Scottish, Irish or Welsh content, in spite of viewing
| a lot of it. Never anything about what's happening with
| Scottish politics (always from a London perspective) or
| the parliament here.
| 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.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Everywhere I go I see parents letting their kids scroll
| short form video. The brain rot starts early.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| True: You have to curate your feed / search history a little
| bit to get much better results
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Or, just search for the thing you're looking for directly,
| and otherwise don't rely on the feed to feed you because it
| only knows to feed you crap?
| 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.
| Smalltalker-80 wrote:
| Agreed. I'm over 50, so I'm 'allowed' to use FB ;-), for
| those few posts of the last remaining family and friends
| there. Using FBP, I _only_ see new posts of _friends_ in
| _chronological_ order. But FB still f*cks you, because it
| does not show all updates of everyone. When the algo
| decides you 've had enough, you simply reach the 'end' of
| your feed. Well when FB, sessions keep getting shorter and
| shorter... There are some EU laws in the making that might
| change things, though.
| 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...
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Both can be true. IG/Meta does not promote sexual
| content. Users promote sexual content. That might be
| subtle but there is a real distinction.
| 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.
| prisenco wrote:
| I found that "not interested" didn't work for me, that I
| had to explicitly state what I _was_ interested in and only
| then did my suggestions become relevant. It will at times
| revert to slop and then I have to go through the process
| all over again.
| 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.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Every social media algorithm is like this now. Accidentally
| viewing certain types of videos are like dropping a nuclear
| bomb in your carefully nursed algorithm.
| 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.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Same. F|_|cking wasteland. Immediately logged out. Won't go
| back.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| It does make me wonder if that system is a net positive or a
| net negative. For me, I go, see suggested stuff which is all
| trash, and never want to engage with FB ever again. I stay only
| because of friends but only check once a week or so. Where as,
| if they got rid of all suggested stuff and instead it was 100%
| friends and family and every 5 posts, an ad. I'd engage with it
| far more often.
| veunes wrote:
| Active account with real interactions = more normal. Which is a
| pretty telling product story in itself
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| They are all "things I do on a cellphone" and more
| precisely "things with infinite ability to absorb free time
| on a cellphone" (as opposed to things like Uber which exist
| to get something done).
|
| It scales in a way that national parks do not and national
| parks are not competing for the time you spend in the
| bathroom at work.
| 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.
| jalapenos wrote:
| > Bay Area Gooners group
|
| Just searched this and was not what expected
| ngruhn wrote:
| unfortunate naming in retrospect
| 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.
| bramhaag wrote:
| People can curate their profiles, but not search results.
| Their posts and comments will still show up if you just
| search on their user page.
| trueno wrote:
| yea im surprised i see so many times that people on
| _hackernews_ are convinced profile activity is real.
|
| theres entire marketing companies that provide what is
| effectively a botnet of social media activity to generate
| buzz, promising packages with "social media engagement".
| disney uses these to try and hype movie trailers, when
| the recent tron trailer came out it took 1 minute for a
| bunch of comments that looked like seemingly real enough
| accounts to be in there posting "im not ready for this"
| "omg" etc. and yes, these networks of fake accounts on
| all social media platforms do have non-vacant profiles
| meaning theyve got comments and stuff all over each
| others pages. there was a recent smaller production that
| is suing their marketing agency which promised this
| deceptive engagement and their implementation shit the
| bed and all the bots just interacted amongst themselves
| on the movies instagram page. the movie completely tanked
| at the box office because they never got their fake
| accounts to start engaging outside of the movies
| instagram account.
|
| everyone focuses on the actual content itself as the
| subject of AI platform abuse, but are we really so naive
| to think that the companies pouring millions of dollars
| into these efforts are too stupid to understand that
| controlling the narrative involves requires simulating
| human feedback?
|
| its in our nature to want to "go to the comments" to "get
| the real tea" and. im just going to say right now that
| yeah, the entities deploying these types of accounts are
| well aware that that is how many of us look for
| perspective. they're not stupid, and it's easier than
| it's ever been to game commentary in 2026.
| 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.
| _3u10 wrote:
| Yeah, it definitely never labelled state sponsored media
| from the UK or Canada for me. Living in Paraguay, it still
| doesn't label it as a state sponsored propaganda. I'm not
| sure why propaganda from Eastern / Mainland Taiwan gets so
| much attention, the legitimate government there certainly
| does not sponsor it.
| 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.
| varispeed wrote:
| This is illegal in the UK, as they have to do age check for
| adult content. Also showing person porn without consent
| constitutes some form of sexual assault.
| 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
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Meta is $201B total revenue business, virtually all
| advertising.
|
| Instagram is estimated to generate half of ad revenue.
|
| WhatsApp and Messenger contribute relatively little to ad
| revenue.
|
| So facebook.com alone must be generating around $100B revenue
| annually.
|
| It's impossible that something generating this revenue is
| serving AI generated NSFW teens pics with botnets commenting
| on those pictures only.
|
| Real humans must be engaging with real ads at massive scale
| to make this money.
|
| Failure mode for people reporting "I didn't use fb for a
| while, then I come back and see adult-like dominated content"
| sounds like plausible explanation of ad revenue optimized
| algo with weak, singular signal.
|
| It could also be just cold start problem where algo has zero
| engagement signal and yields thirst traps for { gender: male,
| age: ~30s, engagement_history: [] } state.
|
| But it's hard for me to believe that - frankly it doesn't
| sound like the best output if you want to capture somebody
| who has real friends and family in their network, did the
| algo really learned that people with this input state click
| likes on pics like that?
|
| Why not just serve engagement from friends network or even
| "wish happy birthday to X tomorrow" instead - sounds like
| better way to engage to me.
|
| ps. I also don't use fb but I do login maybe once a year /
| every two years to double check I'm not hacked, can still
| login etc. When I do it I may spend few minutes scrolling and
| I can see just posts from my network (double checked again
| now, lgtm).
|
| Whatever issue OP has, they probably should spend few minutes
| engaging, maybe just dismiss/click don't like/hide/whatever
| it is to signal they're not interested - algo should pick it
| up and their feed should look more like what they expect.
|
| What's your explanation?
| hmokiguess wrote:
| I took the OP post at face value and that they preach what
| they say. If OP said he's disgusted by those things then
| wouldn't the ads be doing a bad match against the target
| demographic? I would expect ads, the largest revenue
| machine as you mentioned, to work really well. So to accept
| your statement would mean OP is sort of lying, that that
| content is a good match for OP and they are just trying to
| avoid it and hide that.
| 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.
| grishka wrote:
| That's what metrics-driven development gets you.
| 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.
| cleandreams wrote:
| This is not Facebook but I have a young friend who gets her
| news on Epstein from tiktok. She is convinced they were
| eating babies. I do worry (a little) that she will go over
| the conspiracy theories deep end. I told her tiktok news
| was bad "mental hygiene" but she didn't get it.
| arczyx wrote:
| > She is convinced they were eating babies
|
| There are indeed allegations of that, so it's not
| impossible. You can read it yourself here:
|
| https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA001
| 476...
|
| > On the yacht he witnessed babies being dismembered,
| their intestines removed, and individuals eating the
| feces from these intestines
| firtoz wrote:
| Looking at the rest of the file, I'd rate the credibility
| of this as 2/10.
|
| But of course I can also see how this could have been
| taken as fact and spread like wildfire. I wish good luck
| to the investigators, wow.
| m000 wrote:
| Which is exactly the point of the parent. Before Epstein
| files you would probably rate the rumour at 0/10
| credibility.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| this is a member of the general public who filed a report
| to the FBI. it carries about as much weight as a post on
| 4chan. you can see the sarcastic response from the FBI
| officer as well
|
| it is exactly this kind of content that is so pervasive
| and misleading. the FBI get thousands of reports like
| this every day saying that george bush is a lizard,
| antarctica is full of UFOs etc.
|
| Let me use the same sentence structure as above, with
| another example to highlight the absurdity of it:
|
| "a member of the general public alleged angela merkel was
| receiving instructions from a russian UFO scientist that
| had contact with an insect alien spieces in alpha
| centauri, so its not impossible.
| sneak wrote:
| > _She is convinced they were eating babies. I do worry
| (a little) that she will go over the conspiracy theories
| deep end._
|
| Nothing to worry about; she already has.
| gzread wrote:
| There is real, but weak, evidence the Epstein gang were
| eating babies. A lot of past conspiracy theories are
| suddenly seeming more plausible in light of the Epstein
| files.
| halapro wrote:
| The Filipino Facebook world is absolutely atrocious. You
| can't go 5 minutes in a public place without hearing a
| barrage of asinine sound effects and enhanced laughter
| emanating from these loud phones.
| 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.
| underlipton wrote:
| WhatsApp covers a lot of the remainder. When I worked at a
| job with frequent contact with international guests, the vast
| majority of people from Africa and SEA, and a good portion of
| those from Latin American and MENA, were on it. In fact, the
| first time I'd heard of the app was from them. This was about
| 10 or 11 years ago. It might have changed since then, as
| Facebook has for us, but Zuck's empire (read: illegal
| monopoly) has been dominant globally.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Sure, but WhatsApp and FB are really completely different
| things, despite both being owned by Meta.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Yup. I spent time in 35 countries in Africa. FB is the
| internet.
| dguest wrote:
| Does FB data count against your data quota in these
| countries? I've been quite a few places where it's impossible
| to buy a sim card that doesn't give you free facebook and
| WhatsApp.
|
| You can't use the real internet without asking your friends
| to pay for it.
| testing22321 wrote:
| That was common, as was the FB lite app
| 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.
| joninous wrote:
| > a group about a specific car model I own
|
| This is basically the only reason why I occasionally log in to
| Facebook these days. Facebook groups seems to be the place
| where car owners gather to share information regarding their
| vehicles, at least here in Finland. I have found discussions in
| these groups very valuable e.g. when I'm diagnosing a problem
| or evaluating whether some defect will be covered by warranty
| or not.
| 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.
| justonceokay wrote:
| It's telling that targeting "men" has a markedly different
| effect than targeting "father". In a real way TikTok has an
| opinionated viewpoint of what is important to men and being a
| father is not one of them
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Whatsapp too, I only caught a glimpse of that fairly recently
| after we had some local political issue (an asylum seeker
| center to be built nearby, nothing gets people riled up than
| something like that). Now I'm in a "post stuff to pick up for
| free" group, lol.
| 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...
| skobes wrote:
| I think you can still go directly to /messages/ and not 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
| mckn1ght wrote:
| What does this mean here? The first several cities
| outside the US that I tried on craigslist were direct
| hits, with postings. People could use craigslist, they
| just don't.
| insom wrote:
| Kijiji
| 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.
| mccr8 wrote:
| I think the trick to making the "shorts" feature stop showing
| scantily clad women is to use it actively a bit, and only watch
| the videos that are decidedly something else. I did that for
| awhile and now my videos are like "let's see what happens when
| you pour lava on some soda bottles" which I'm not sure I care
| that much about but at least it isn't embarrassing.
| 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.
| ndarray wrote:
| They're clearly not that optimized when the user ends up
| complaining publicly. Don't tell others what they're supposed
| to like because some algo said so. Very cringe.
| 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
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Reddit is so insufferably political now it's insane. Like why
| do 3d printing subreddits need to stand with (insert leftist
| outrage of Gaza / Israel / Ice / Canada / on and on)
| jmye wrote:
| Why do you think? Enragement = engagement. You could
| generously assume that it's users optimizing for posts that
| get them likes/karma/whatever, or ungenerously assume that
| the platform itself is gaming engagement via AI or bots, but
| the effect is the same and it's pervasive. The only out is
| finding tiny communities that are still communities, and
| praying they don't grow.
|
| Everyone saw the Facebook model and adopted it. It's why
| Reddit has the valuation it does (and why it's still insane
| to me people intentionally use it as a recommendation or
| information tool).
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I actually think it's because reddit is supported by a vast
| group of unpaid labor (moderators) and conspiratorially I
| believe they (actually) get paid by NGOs and governments to
| push narratives and suppress others. Although denied
| (poorly) it is very likely ghislaine maxwell was one of the
| most powerful moderators of reddit, modding hundreds of
| subreddits including r/worldnews, up until the day she was
| arrested
|
| Last comment June 28, 2020
| https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/comments/
|
| Arrested July 2 2020 https://www.justice.gov/usao-
| sdny/pr/ghislaine-maxwell-charg...
|
| One of the most powerful accounts suddenly stops activity,
| never to return
| thrance wrote:
| Weren't you the one telling us X.com should replace legacy
| media? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891442
|
| As a reminder, a glimpse at X's front page a few weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504404
|
| I think it's very telling how you went to Reddit first when
| complaining about politics on social media, one of the only
| big ones that still hasn't been completely invaded by MAGA
| sycophants. Just admit you take no issues with politics on
| social media, you just want them to align with your views.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| X is the most mainstream online community for free speech.
| It has wildly free speech
| thrance wrote:
| Have you opened the second link? It's mind-boggling how
| anyone can still claim that.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| All of those topics can be found other places if you
| look, then it updates your algorithm. I mean vaccine
| skepticism? Youtube and instagram have a million videos
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure it does. https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/on-elons-
| whim-x-now-treats...
|
| > If you write the words "cis" or "cisgender" on X, you
| might be served this full-screen message: "This post
| contains language that may be considered a slur by X and
| could be used in a harmful manner in violation of our
| rules," the warning says. You can continue to publish the
| post or delete it.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| "There are two types of freedom: freedom to and freedom
| from."
|
| Margret Atwood, the Handmaids Tale.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Is a two year old article the only thing you have?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Nope!
|
| Looooong list at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Twitter.
|
| Like when they banned posting the word Substack or
| linking to websites in your profile under Musk for a
| while. And @elonjet is still banned, despite an explicit
| promise not to.
| jahsome wrote:
| It's pretty funny how you tried to completely sidestep
| the accusation, but still managed to confirm it
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| No online platform has free speech. No online platform
| _should_ have free speech. Besides, free speech is a
| constitutional / legal thing, a platform does not need
| to host it.
|
| Claiming Twitter has free speech (as in absolutist, as in
| you can say what you want and won't get banned) means
| you've drunk the kool-aid / accepted the propaganda.
| fullshark wrote:
| Reddit runs on unpaid labor in the form of moderation, in
| exchange for this unpaid labor mods want to have cultural
| influence.
| __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.'"
| boelboel wrote:
| Reddit has made it impossible to check the history of
| accounts this past week. They certainly want to make it as
| difficult as possible to see if someone is 'real'.
| 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.
| overgard wrote:
| I don't really think that's how this plays out. Facebook can
| squeeze people a little longer, but if all you want is
| entertainment other options seem better. End of the day
| Facebook's moat is your network, but if it's not useful for
| keeping up with the people you care about, what's special about
| it? I see a lot of AI generated stuff on youtube, but the view
| counts are pretty low, so I don't think most of it is getting
| much traction (and frankly it's very obvious that it's AI just
| from thumbnails 99% of the time).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The reposts and crossposts are popular because while you may
| have seen it before, millions haven't.
|
| I think I'm almost at the point of letting it go already. If AI
| becomes more egregious / apparent, I'm out. I was caught by one
| already - scrolled for too long, came across some manufacturing
| video (I love those), but as it went on it became less and less
| realistic. By the end I was like "huh, TIL robots can make
| jeans out of banana fiber end to end", but that wasn't true.
| 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.
| wedog6 wrote:
| You wouldn't mind, but Facebook would mind though.
| 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.
| JCattheATM wrote:
| > my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs
| open
|
| Surely she could just bookmark those pages and check
| periodically, or subscribe to a newsletter or something?
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| She checks them every time she's on her computer, no
| point in closing them and they are always posting to
| social media every day, whereas you may get a generic
| email once a month if they even have a mailing list.
| Instagram is admittedly a LOT better at showing what you
| want than FB, as she follows them all there as well, but
| sometimes they post different stuff on each. She wants to
| both support and help these bands and band members by
| engaging on their socials so they actually get shown to
| more people. These are metal bands, so not big by any
| means, although some of them are still "large" or well
| known in their genres, but still struggle to get any good
| traction online. Most people in metal bands still have
| full time jobs, even if they are at the top of their
| genre (excluding the mega bands people have heard of).
| 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.
| aembleton wrote:
| I can recommend using Social Fixer addon [1] on your
| laptop. On my phone, I use Nobook [2] which isn't quite as
| effective. They both do a good job though of removing loads
| of the useless stuff on Facebook.
|
| 1. https://socialfixer.com/
|
| 2. https://github.com/ycngmn/Nobook
| 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. You need to somehow maintain a perfect ratio of time
| spent on FB to fresh family and friends content, otherwise
| FB will fill the space for you.
|
| 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.
| Throaway1982 wrote:
| FB Marketplace makes you click on ads in order to tell
| the platform that you dont want to see that kind of
| listing anymore.
|
| Unfortunately, clicking on the ad alerts the algorithm,
| which then shows you MORE of that type of ad that if you
| had not clicked at all.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| It would be very ironic if the reason people complain about
| Facebook so ardently is that they just didn't have enough
| friends IRL in first place to make Facebook work the way it
| should.
| xethos wrote:
| I'd amend that as "didn't have enough [IRL] friends *on
| FaceBook* in first place", but that starts off a
| conversation about platforms being only-technically not
| required socially, network effects, etc.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I have one circle of friends who are barely online at
| all. Their phones exist for minimal e-mails and texts and
| that's it. A couple don't even have a dedicated internet
| connection at home. Their experience on Facebook wouldn't
| be good either.
|
| I do agree with your general sentiment, though: Many
| complaints about Facebook come from people who don't want
| to invest time into finding their friends online and
| engaging with friend content. They log in, see what the
| article sees, assume that's all there is, and abandon it.
| Most people just move on, but a few will complain about
| Facebook based on their limited experience from 10 years
| ago.
| npodbielski wrote:
| So you are saying that it is authors fault? How about not
| showing you shit instead when there is nothing else to
| show?
|
| It is like saying that in order to keep my e-mail inbox
| full and entertaining from now on your email provider
| will fill it with AI generated content. Madness.
| mayneack wrote:
| I'd be shocked if international travel was the algorithmic
| tell, but in the book Careless People, the author discusses
| extensively that they (Facebook's political team) did a lot
| of manually curating the experience for politicians across
| the world to help push for Facebook's side in whatever
| issue was important on a given day.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
| fragmede wrote:
| it's Facebook, and we've got AI. The "algorithm" is easily
| just a list of names to match, if they we're going to do
| that.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I don 't think this is Facebook playing 4D chess trying
| to hide content from politicians by detecting who is
| traveling internationally._
|
| I agree the triggering criteria isn't international travel
| - but giving VIP treatment to VIPs isn't "4D chess" it's
| just business as usual.
|
| You get elected to congress? The moment the list of winners
| comes out, someone from Comcast finds the accounts and
| marks them as VIPs. Someone at Uber does the same. Someone
| at Amazon does the same, and so on.
|
| Typically this will limit who in Customer Services can view
| the addresses on your account and reset your password. But
| it can also mean you get free upgrades, put you at the
| front of the queue, assign your orders to highly-rated
| workers, etc - or for social media, a curated experience
| making the site look classy and enriching.
| 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
| blobbers wrote:
| Do your friends and family interact on facebook? Could
| run an experiment to see if it adapts.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The algorithm is optimized to show you content you tend
| to engage with. You couldnt get it to show you meaningful
| interaction because you didnt engage with it.
| the_af wrote:
| This is very likely.
|
| It reminds me of people who browse YouTube logged off: they
| see garbage, spam, rage bait, and sexy girls doing sexy
| stuff.
|
| But I browse logged in and my carefully curated
| subscriptions mean I mostly get good quality, relevant
| recommendations, and almost zero rage bait or outrageous
| stuff.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| Lol! "Facebook's not bad, you're just a loser"
| blitzar wrote:
| > When a ghost logs in ... so default to "general"
|
| I do this with youtube - and I get to see what is broadly
| popular.
|
| It is grim.
| 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.
| nindalf wrote:
| The XCheck program has nothing to do with anything you're
| thinking of. You read some old misinformation and didn't read
| the post debunking the misinformation.
|
| Source: me. https://nindalf.com/posts/xcheck/
| duskwuff wrote:
| I have a feeling it might be less "avoid negative publicity";
| more "give a premium experience to influencers" (for a broad
| definition of that term).
|
| A user - like mbo's mother - who posts a lot of content which
| generates a lot of reposts and other positive interactions is
| basically a gold mine for Facebook. It's in their interest to
| treat that user with kid gloves to get them to keep posting,
| even if it means foregoing some revenue opportunities.
| 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.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make
| them angry, though. These websites continue serving up more
| of what you click on._
|
| "We're going to keep putting crap in front of you until we
| find something you click on. And even if you take a breath,
| don't reply and close it, we now know we have you and we'll
| keep showing that type of thing to you. Also, even though
| we're not going to tell you we're doing this, we and our
| power users are going to blame you for doing it to
| yourself. lol."
| 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.
| cleaning wrote:
| Why do you call it X?
| 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.
| xeonmc wrote:
| > my FYP is always just... animal pictures and art, exactly
| what I want.
|
| On Bluesky your feed will also have animal pictures and art,
| just not the kind you wanted.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| For twitter I have a sports list that I stick to 99% of the
| time. A little politics filters through, but I've found that
| to be just the right amount.
|
| When major events happen, I switch over to my full feed,
| where I follow a bunch of political posters, and go into a
| blind rage in minutes.
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I did delete a previous Facebook account, but got forced back
| into it due to work. I don't really use it for friends much
| now. It is much better as a result although I still see it
| trying to pull me one direction or another. I would happily
| delete the entire lot because I don't find it functional.
|
| "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."
|
| I've really never liked that feature. It is what creates echo
| chambers, because you just get infinite agreemtn. For some
| reason, Faecebook only tends to show me one individual's
| posts over others. We're not unfriendly but not good mates.
| On the other hand thanks to the features you seem to be
| talking about, I get to hear about bereavements, birthdays,
| engagements etc days or weeks after they happened which is no
| use to me.
| 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.
| npodbielski wrote:
| People with those kind of arguments always get from response
| that if you were not trying to keep in touch with this friend
| personally then it was not truly a friend. Facebook friends
| does not equal real life friend.
| iteria wrote:
| I literally didn't learn that my own grandmother(I guess
| great aunt) had died until I happen to return home on the
| day the funeral was occurring. Everyone just assumed I knew
| because of Facebook and was there because of Facebook.
|
| Sometimes it's not about closeness. It's about people's
| expectations about how to communicate. My cousin was in no
| place to do anything but post to Facebook and then
| collapse. My sister helped him, but didn't think to tell me
| because you know Facebook. I live 4 hours away so I
| wouldn't have learned by osmosis.
|
| I have several stories of learning about deaths in the
| family way after the fact because my family is chronically
| on Facebook and I'm not. They all live in my hometown and
| it just doesn't occur to them to actually communicate with
| members like me who don't live there.
|
| This is basically why I haven't deleted my Facebook even if
| I don't often log in.
| creddit wrote:
| Yeah I just logged in to see if it was really this bad an all I
| got were:
|
| (1) extremely, impressively relevant ads. (2) posts from people
| I know that were mostly nice except for my uncle who seemed to
| be posting nonsense.
| wvenable wrote:
| My Facebook feed (I visit just for marketplace) is also not
| quite like the author's feed. I don't have a lot of AI content
| or thirst traps. I wonder if he's got some sort of the default
| young male algorithm experience.
|
| I wouldn't say my Facebook is _good_ -- I don 't interact with
| it enough for it to be anything.
| pavlov wrote:
| My Facebook is honestly nice, it's the most relaxing social
| media for me.
|
| The promoted posts are books and artists and occasional gym
| content. Ads are relevant or at least not annoying (SuitSupply
| seems to think I'm their ideal customer, and I don't mind
| looking at their handsome models in this season's knitwear).
| The people I know post mostly about meaningful or harmless
| stuff.
|
| But it's probably like this because I joined over ten years
| after everyone else did. I didn't activate my Facebook account
| until 2018 when I got a job at FB and it was mandatory. Then I
| found out that it was actually a good way to curate a set of
| people from my youth that I genuinely wanted to reconnect with.
|
| That's probably what made the difference compared to many whose
| FB social graphs were built up early and never pruned.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Wow they make you use facebook at facebook? That's twisted.
| That would be like.. idk.. Phillip Morris making you smoke a
| pack a day.
| wedog6 wrote:
| I believe it was somewhat like that at large cigarette
| companies in the heyday of smoking.
|
| An ashtray on every desk and throughout meeting rooms. Free
| packs of cigarettes you could grab anywhere in the building
| + a certain number of packs given to you weekly, with your
| preferred brand recorded. Some amount of social compulsion
| to smoke at work and during work related social events.
| codethief wrote:
| I hear it still largely is that way, though apparently
| they do try to avoid smoking in the presence of their
| pregnant coworkers these days. Progress! :-)
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I laughed out loud. "I found that I loved Big Brother from my
| youth." Genuinely no offense meant, it was just funny.
| whyenot wrote:
| As a middle aged (gen x) woman, my facebook feed is pretty
| good. It's filled with posts from friends and interest groups
| that I am a part of. The reason I no longer use FB has nothing
| to do with the feed, it's because Mark Zuckerberg is an awful
| person, and I refuse to use his product. The cognitive
| dissonance is great here, because I still use WhatsApp; it's
| the best way to stay in contact with my relatives in Europe,
| and I still use IG, albeit mostly for work, and sparingly.
| dboreham wrote:
| I'm still a FB user even though most friends and relatives
| have disengaged due to toxicity. But what I've noticed
| consistently is that any group on FB that has more than 1000
| members will end up surfacing so much toxic sentiment that I
| have to unsubstantiated. I'm talking about innocuous fields
| such as the local road conditions. That one became full of
| rants about out of state drivers, drivers who don't
| understand English, people posting license plates of bad
| drivers, etc. This has led me to a theory that humans just
| can't behave nicely beyond some threshold group size.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I think after a certain group size people feel immune or
| that their alternative thought might have a better chance
| of landing with someone.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave
| nicely beyond some threshold group size.
|
| I think what happens is that the risk of including a
| critical amount of "toxics" (lacking a better word) such
| that they can keep a conversation going, increases by FB
| group size. Without actice moderators it doesn't take much.
| veunes wrote:
| Once a group gets big enough...
| derefr wrote:
| > This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave
| nicely beyond some threshold group size.
|
| I think you're generalizing far too broadly. The problem
| you're describing is more-or-less exclusively a problem
| with online, open-membership groups.
|
| Consider: if the groups you describe were in-person groups,
| these ranters would constantly be getting disengaged/off-
| put/disgusted reactions from the "silent majority" of the
| people in the group. And just these reactions -- together
| with a lack of any _positive_ engagement -- would, almost
| always, be enough to make them stop or go somewhere else.
|
| (Or, to put a finer point on that: "annoyed, judgemental
| silence, and then turning away / back to the person you
| were talking to" would _always_ put off the _vast majority_
| of people, with just a few -- people who have trouble
| understanding non-verbal signals -- persisting because they
| aren 't "getting the message." And in an in-person context,
| these few would still eventually be taken aside and given a
| talking-to, because if they're butting into other in-person
| conversations with this behavior, they're being far more
| disruptive than "random new conversation threads" tend to
| be felt as. Even though "random new conversation threads"
| can kill a group just as dead.)
|
| The problem with decorum / respect-for-purpose in
| unmoderated online open-membership groups seems to mostly
| stem from the fact that people underestimate the importance
| of non-verbal signals in moderating/regulating behavior.
| And so there is a dearth of such signals available in such
| groups. Our brains didn't evolve to play the game of
| socializing without these signals, any more than ants
| evolved to coordinate without pheremones. So many people's
| brains begin to play the game in degenerate / anti-social
| ways.
|
| From what I've been able to gather, from personal
| interactions with many people who admit to being "Internet
| trolls" at some point in their lives... their behavior was
| almost never intentional maliciousness/active-disregard-
| for-others on their part. It's rather an emergent behavior
| -- something they "just ended up doing" -- given a lack of
| (non-verbal-signal-alike) calibrating feedback.
|
| And why _is_ there so little non-verbal-signal-alike
| communication online?
|
| Well, for one thing, we often aren't even aware we're
| giving off such signals; and so, if we need to _consciously
| choose_ to communicate them (as we do in online contexts),
| then we simply fail to do so, because the majority of these
| signals never even rise to our conscious attention as
| something to _be_ communicated.
|
| And even when we do become aware of them, we often don't
| feel them to be important enough to be "worth" going to the
| effort of translating into some more
| conscious/explicit/non-subtextual form of communication.
|
| And then, even when a strong desire to communicate a
| nonverbal signal does bubble up within us... most online
| chat/forum systems are horrible at transmitting such
| signals with any degree of fidelity, when they transmit
| them at all. Especially the kinds of signals used for
| intra-group behavior regulation.
|
| Facebook, for example, has reaction emojis on both posts
| and comments -- but no reaction emoji that transmits a
| sentiment like "I disapprove of you saying this; please
| stop" (e.g. U+1F611 EXPRESSIONLESS FACE or U+1FAE4 FACE
| WITH DIAGONAL MOUTH). Rather, the only reaction emoji
| available are those meant to react sympathetically to the
| emotive content _of_ the post /comment -- e.g. with anger,
| sadness, etc. (People do _try_ to use the "anger" reaction
| to express disapproval of posts; but when the content
| itself is often "ragebait" / meant to _evoke_ anger, the
| poster won 't necessarily understand that these reactions
| are being directed at _them_ , rather than at their post.)
|
| Further, no chat system or forum I'm aware of has
| participant-visible signals of "detach rate" -- i.e.
| there's no way for people to know when others are clicking
| on their posts, reading one line, doing a 180 and running
| away as fast as they can. (YouTube videos expose this
| metric to their creators; I think it's actually very
| helpful for them. It could do with being implemented far
| more widely.)
|
| (And, to be a conspiracy theorist for a moment: I think, in
| both cases, this is probably intentional. The explicit
| purpose of signals that "regulate behavior", after all, is
| to make people _engage less_ in certain anti-social
| behaviors. Making available any such tools, will therefore
| inevitably make any kind of platform-aggregate "engagement
| metrics" go down! If they were ever temporarily introduced,
| they'd have been quickly removed again with this
| justification.)
| DeathArrow wrote:
| My Facebook feed is great, my X feed is great. I don't use
| Facebook and X because I like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk
| but because I genuinely read interesting things and I
| interact with people I like.
|
| That being said, I don't spend too much time on social
| networks because I have lots of other things to do.
| keyle wrote:
| And yet, every 3-4 posts, Facebook will start interjecting
| posts that are outrageous, meant to create response. If she
| interacts with any of those, e.g. even open it wide, or stay on
| it a long time, BAM, more of those posts next visits.
|
| And the cycle continues and grinds your account down to a
| complete hellish nightmare where you hate your city, your local
| councils etc. It's all a rigged platform for creating divide
| and hate. It drives clicks, it drives ads, it drives agendas.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't think that's true. I just scrolled my feed really
| quick, and I had to get 23 posts down before I got an even
| mildly controversial post. The post wasn't even anything
| mean, it was a screenshot of an analysis showing that the
| richest Americans and the Americans who donate the most money
| don't overlap as much as you might think.
| dingaling wrote:
| Nope, I've just opened FB in a tab. Top posts:
|
| - Chris Hadfield using a fire extinguisher to show how
| rockets work
|
| - A friend's trip to a gig
|
| - Video of a restored TWA flight engineer training simulator
|
| - Mountain weather for my region tomorrow
|
| - A rare colour photo of a 1930s biplane
| rconti wrote:
| I always really enjoyed Facebook -- much more so than any other
| social media network. It was all friends, friends' content, and
| groups I was interested in and cared about. Sure it had ads,
| and a bit of suggested stuff, but mostly it was interesting
| content, no ragebait, no politics.
|
| But as those friends use it less and less, I use it less and
| less. And the less I use it, the more "suggested" crap I get.
| If I don't use it for a week, the site is absolute garbage.
| pants2 wrote:
| To think I used to log in to Facebook every day, scroll
| friends' posts until it said "You're caught up!" then leave.
|
| That's almost unimaginable now, but I deeply wish I could
| return to that experience. Unfortunately as the suggested
| content got turned up, friends stopped posting, so even with
| all the browser extensions in the world I can't get that same
| experience back.
| rconti wrote:
| Yup. And unfortunately, I realized I've benefitted from the
| algo too. I tried the friends feed, and I ended up with
| MORE politics!
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I have my Facebook feed curated enough that it shows me reels I
| like (landslides, dance-offs, kids or animals doing cute things
| - nothing salacious). Of course, AI crap filters in, but a
| majority are still good.
|
| Even the sponsored posts are very often interesting summaries
| of historical events or scientific wonders. They're AI most of
| the time, which goes on and on. So I read the first part and
| then go to wikipedia if I'm more interested.
|
| I'm also in a bunch of private groups that are spam-free. Some
| travel-related groups have turned out to be invaluable
| resources.
|
| So it does work if you train it on what you like.
| harrall wrote:
| People say the same about Instagram but my feed is like all
| about making clothes, welding, construction stuff, funny memes,
| snowboarding, etc. It's all good stuff.
|
| I just don't interact with political content on social media --
| not because I'm apolitical but I don't want to hear random
| people's takes on matters.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Facebook was this to me. Because I lived in many countries.
| Just seeing what my friends in other countries were
| experiencing <3
|
| But they blocked the old timeline where I could just see the
| updates from everyone I follow and nothing else. And replaced
| it with this feed with stupid influencer crap. Now I had to
| weed through all the shit to see what the people I care about
| were doing. It wasn't worth it for me so I left soon after,
| like a decade ago.
|
| Maybe they've rolled some of the crap back but it's too little
| too late for me.
| drnick1 wrote:
| The privacy cost of Facebook is too high. Even if you have
| "nothing to hide" today, sooner or later you will post
| something you wish you had not posted, or someone else will do
| it for you. Once data about you is out there, it is impossible
| to remove, and the only recourse is to wait for that
| information to become irrelevant or outdated (if ever). For
| example, some employers have been known to spy on their
| employees through Facebook. Others have been harmed when
| searching for jobs because of things they posted on FB or other
| antisocial media, often long ago.
|
| Facebook should not have multiple high quality photos of 1/2 of
| the planet, their children, pets, friends and family, in
| addition to their real-time location obtained through the
| spyware companion app. Not even governments used to have this
| kind of insight into people's lives not so long ago, and it is
| certainly very alarming that a spyware/adtech firm now does.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| > Facebook should not have multiple high quality photos of
| 1/2 of the planet, their children, pets, friends and family,
| in addition to their real-time location obtained through the
| spyware companion app.
|
| If adults decide to give them all this information aren't
| they the ones that should be blamed?
| defrost wrote:
| Perhaps, for the individual photos that each uploaded in
| ignorance of the bigger picture.
|
| But not for the aggregate warehousing, abuse of data,
| addiction maximising algorithmic design, insecurity, etc.
|
| That's all on Facebook _and_ other similar mass scale
| "social' media behemoths.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Facebook automatically tags people in photos
| KPGv2 wrote:
| For the longest time, that was my feed, well after most
| Millennials had moved on. It was spectacular.
|
| But I finally decided I didn't want to doom scroll so much, and
| when I changed phones, I declined to install the app on my new
| one, and I logged out on my laptop.
|
| So I almost never am on anymore, and it's always complete
| trash. Zuck's Trump turn helped the inertia, and now with the
| revelations that he was trying to party with Epstein how can I
| even log in anymore?
|
| I think I'm going to reach out to the people who matter and get
| their email addresses, then hang my FB shoes up for good,
| twenty-one years after I joined.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I live in an European country where Facebook is used often and
| I can say I have my wall mostly filled with posts from people
| that interest me and that I interact with.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Right. But who fits into that niche? I in general prefer
| privacy so I don't share fotos of whenever I take a du.. I mean
| do something semi-interesting to a grand selection of three or
| four other people out there (or more; but these are already
| reallife associations). Remote "relationships" rarely work in
| my experience, excluding a few that are important. But I don't
| see how that is any business of CIAbook to keep track of.
| harel wrote:
| That's almost me. I've always used Facebook as a tool to keep
| in touch with friends around the world. My friend list is 95%
| people I know in real life. A small fraction of them still
| posts. I also get a lot of slop in between. The filler posts. I
| am waiting for a Facebook resurgence or a Friendster comeback.
| Sharlin wrote:
| My FB experience is still fine after all these years. I can't
| find _anything_ in my feed that isn 't either a post a) to a
| group I'm in, b) by a page I follow, or c) by a friend. These
| days, a) and b) make up the majority of posts - many of the
| groups have no equivalent elsewhere and are a major reason why
| I still use FB. Even the reels/shorts/whatever that FB suggests
| are mostly nice and relevant - cats, trains, music. No slop, no
| thirst traps, no politics beyond what I choose to follow, not
| even ads because those are blocked.
|
| Honestly, I've been wondering what _other_ relevant social
| media there even is for someone like me, an early 40s
| millennial. Twitter I refuse to use, and nobody 's on Bluesky.
| Instagram is... fine, I guess, and more lively and "feel-good"
| in some sense, and also used by the younger folk, but there's
| less "engagement" beyond liking something and scrolling on. On
| Facebook comments and actual conversation are in a much bigger
| role, at least for me. Reddit is great, assuming you curate
| your subreddits, but I don't have _friends_ there.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I think you are very lucky. I get constant political
| messaging (not from one side of the room either) which is
| very unsubtle and biased. I get a lot of slop suggested.
|
| I have never used Instagram and don't plan too. Twitter has
| always been a disaster and a mob mentality, and now it barely
| shows me stuff I want to look at.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I wonder if the politics issue is just much worse in
| certain parts of the world. Nobody bothers to spend money
| trying to influence the population of a small Nordic
| country.
|
| As an experiment, I disabled Ghostery and uBlock, and the
| feed became about 33% ads, which is rather annoying, but
| the ads were mostly fine. There was one obvious AI slop
| image advertising a dating site, and one cryptobro ad, but
| otherwise they were fairly reasonable, relatively speaking.
| scotty79 wrote:
| At one point I subscribed to groups on Satisfactory, Factorio
| and RimWorld and while I don't play much anymore it's always
| nice to see posts on my feed made by people engaged with these
| games.
|
| When algorithm doesn't have a handle on you it puts you at the
| bottom of the barrel that's filled with slop.
|
| I think the problem is Meta doesn't moderate algorithm enough
| so a lot of users have terrible experience becausd they don't
| moderate their feeds themselves.
|
| Most people are not self-aware enough to decide that maybe
| political rants is not the healthiest content to consume. And
| even if they do, tools for moderation are not easily accessible
| enough. There should be a huge "Yeah, I hated that." button on
| each post.
| vanjajaja1 wrote:
| a common complaint about instagram is that you can no longer
| see your friends, just creators. i assume creators don't have
| this problem though, since they're having fun seeing all their
| creator friends
| nephihaha wrote:
| I have a Facebook friend similar to your mother. A solicitor
| (so makes a lot of money), off travelling to beautiful places
| much of the time.
|
| However, there is an element of one upmanship about social
| media. You see pictures of nice holidays abroad, nice cars and
| happy families... And then you find out some of the same folk
| are about to divorce or go bankrupt.
|
| The algo keeps showing me one person's feed but not others. I
| don't mind said person, but we are not close. Facebook tells me
| about birthdays, bereavements etc often two or three weeks
| after they happen which is no good.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| If it wasn't for groups, events, and marketplace, I wouldn't
| use FB.
|
| Marketplace has supplanted Craigslist near me.
|
| Events - no good replacement. Meetup isn't as ubiquitous.
|
| Groups - nothing as good except maybe groups.io. But, that
| doesn't have the same common folk. It's still more niche.
|
| It could be that middle America is catching up where big city
| America has moved on. And maybe that's the demographic that FB
| is serving now.
| troupo wrote:
| I don't use Facebook much, and my feed is filled with
| algorithmic bullshit and almost no posts from friends, family,
| or groups I'm a part of.
| BorisMelnik wrote:
| came here to say this also...also on mobile there is a feed
| that only shows your friends, no "algo." my parents are both on
| FB and pretty much only interact with their freinds. it is quit
| beautiful.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I would love to know what kind of ascetic mental training you
| have to do to get your Facebook feed to just send you actual
| people you know and not... well, the slop trough.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Maybe you are too young to have noticed, but this is how
| Facebook used to be for every one. Until some a/b testing
| likely led to short term engagement boosts for news content and
| that's all you could see - especially during the 2016 news
| cycle with (allegedly Russian) political ads. Then people
| stopped posting, and others stopped posting, feedback loop and
| here we are.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| This is lie, I was there and this is not at all what happened
| dang wrote:
| I appreciate the voice of experience but if you're going to
| post a comment like this, could you please share some of
| that experience so we know at least some of what did
| happen?
|
| Otherwise it comes across as a drive-by swipe, which is a
| human reaction when you know that something on the internet
| is wrong, but which badly degrades the threads, partly
| because of the example it sets for others. The life of this
| community depends on knowledgeable people sharing some of
| what they know, so the rest of us can learn.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Fair and sorry about that
|
| Specifically what happened, and I think this is all
| public now is that prior to 2016 journalists and news
| organizations argued that Facebook was demoting news for
| various reasons. In reality it wasn't very engaging so it
| was automatically demoted. They promised to boost news
| more in early 2016, but largely as a result of worse
| engagement and negative experiences (arguing in comments)
| Facebook started ranking news worse than other content.
| This all happened in 2016, months before the general
| election
|
| And while Russia did run ads, it was mostly not political
| and the political content they ran had very little
| engagement. Russia mostly focuses on conspiracy theories
| and undermining American institutions. Facebook was aware
| of this in 2016 and certainly did not contribute to it
| intentionally, and I don't believe even by accident of
| some kind of misguided A/B testing
|
| The reason Facebook got worse for younger people is
| because younger people stopped posting.
| nradov wrote:
| My Facebook feed is also like that (although with more
| underwater pictures of fish). It seems fine. I don't think I'm
| particularly privileged. I honestly don't understand the hate
| that FB gets here on HN. Maybe some users are just following
| the wrong accounts?
| magicalist wrote:
| > _I honestly don 't understand the hate that FB gets here on
| HN. Maybe some users are just following the wrong accounts?_
|
| Sounds like you do understand the hate but you don't
| understand how their feeds ended up different than yours?
| veunes wrote:
| Your mum's experience is probably what FB is best at: high-
| trust network, lots of original photos, lots of comments from
| real friends
| derefr wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| So the presumption, then, would be that Facebook only turns on
| the slop-content hose to "fill the void" on many people's
| dashboards from a lack of organic content from people they
| follow? I.e. that if you were personal friends with enough
| other frequently-posting Facebook users, the slop-content would
| disappear?
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| One thought I've had is that it has to do with your level of
| engangement. If like me you doesn't really use social media
| for more than a few minutes a day (in my case I count
| Snapchat and YouTube Shorts, because that's what I have),
| then you start seeing some a lot of boobs.
|
| It seems like the algorithm panics, because you don't engange
| with anything much, or because your interests shifts to often
| and it can't deal with it. So it falls back to boobs.
|
| There's also a sad trend of assuming that because you're into
| lifting, your also misogynistic. The more you engange with
| fitness content, even if it's training programs or how to
| correctly do certain exercises, platforms like YouTube will
| start flinging misogynistic content at you and it's
| incredibly hard to remove.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| The issue is that they are very smart/subversive; they
| definitely track the amount of time you spend looking at
| certain pictures vs. others. So while you may be careful
| not to directly engage with certain material, if they
| noticed that you pause a _little_ more at certain pics than
| others, and there is a pattern in the common topic in the
| pictures that you pause at, they use that information to
| create your interest profile.
| pityJuke wrote:
| This is it - you've got to be deliberate in scrolling
| immediately past anything remotely thirst-trappy,
| otherwise the algorithm hyperfixates. And then overstay
| your welcome at the type of content you want to see.
|
| In my experience, it has worked (my discover page is an
| amalgamation of classic Simpsons, Dropout.tv, and Whose
| Line Is It Anyway?, while my Reels feed is unhinged in
| the right way.) But also I've stopped using it because my
| brain was melting.
| j-bos wrote:
| > The more you engange with fitness content, even if it's
| training programs or how to correctly do certain exercises,
| platforms like YouTube will start flinging misogynistic
| content at you and it's incredibly hard to remove.
|
| That explains why out of no where I got reccomendations for
| some gender conflict greentext channel, I had just that
| week been looking for lifting techniques.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yes, I get those as well. Happens everything I've been
| looking a lifting videos for a day or two. Give it a bit
| more time and you'll get videos of right wing women
| explaining why modern women can't get dates.
|
| It is fairly concerning and there's not real good way of
| telling YouTube that you're not interested. The dislike
| button does little and blocking the channel is also
| pretty ineffective as there are a myriad of channels with
| the similar content which you'll just be served instead.
| j-bos wrote:
| So I've actually had great results by hitting not
| interested on all such videos. Youtube is actually my
| favorite algo because barring unexpected pipelines like
| fitness to red pills my home feed is 90% things I
| consider worth watching, assuming infinite time of
| course.
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's happens in the reels. I don't really see thirsty posts
| in my feed either, just people I follow for the most part.
| munificent wrote:
| Yet another reason to avoid attention-span-destroying short
| form video. :)
| disillusioned wrote:
| If you click Search in Instagram, what's it show you by
| default, before you enter a search term?
| thephyber wrote:
| You didn't try hard to repro it.
|
| Facebook uses your likes / groups / searches to customize
| your feed. If are active and don't delete your old content,
| you have already trained FB to avoid the thirst traps for
| your account.
|
| The article author said he was off-site site for 8 years, so
| FB was offering him random high engagement content to stuff
| his feed so he didn't reach the end.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| he is replying to
|
| > 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.
|
| if meta identifies him as guy and he don't get a thirst
| trap after a minute then it's totally not "almost
| exclusively thirst trap".
| trymas wrote:
| Though OC also said:
|
| > 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.
|
| So I guess it depends how active you are? My speculation
| would be (that would match the article) - if facebook
| figures out you're a man, but you don't actively like and
| engage with specific topics - it will default to AI
| thirst trap slop.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| No, if he's been looking at material that indicates an
| interest in thirst trap stuff for years, then looks at
| pottery for a couple of weeks, the algorithm correctly
| identifies that he isn't really into pottery and corrects
| back.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Yep. It's far from "it knows you're male => it gives you
| thirst traps non stop"
|
| But also I will say that curating algo feed to show what
| you want is annoying and ultra frustrating, whenever it
| goes off the rails it makes me want to quit.
| trymas wrote:
| > he's been looking at material that indicates an
| interest in thirst trap stuff for years
|
| N is obviously too small to get anything meaningful,
| though article was about the same problem and article's
| author haven't visited facebook for 8 years...
|
| Cannot say about FB or IG, but on Youtube I get way too
| many "AI girlfriend" ads or video recommendations. I
| report as many as I can and my subscription channels are
| as far away from such topics as it can be. Thus I totally
| understand OC and article's author.
| jedberg wrote:
| Except that I am into pottery, and I'm a parent into
| parenting stuff. But instead of just liking the stuff it
| was showing me, I made the extra effort to seek out that
| content and like more of it in an attempt to train the
| algo.
|
| Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, this problem only started
| about two years ago, and I've had instagram for 15 years.
| So either they did something differently, or suddenly
| there was a lot more of that content, but I didn't change
| my habits.
|
| Also, as a funny side note, scrolling my feed this
| morning was suddenly thirst-trap free for the first time
| in years.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I don't have an Instagram, so maybe they did change their
| algorithm recently. However, remember that the whole
| concept of "training the algorithm" and "not wanting to
| mess up your algorithm" has been a common saying for
| years at this point. Unfortunately, this is against what
| the social media companies actually want, which is more
| engagement. So they start to look at other factors that
| are more difficult to game. For instance, it may have
| noticed that you linger at images of thirst traps more
| than other images it shows. In fact, it may notice that
| while you are purposely liking pictures of pottery and
| parenting, the actual pictures that you are liking have
| both thirst trap qualities and pottery/parenting
| qualities. Not accusing you of anything, just saying that
| that is the pattern they use because they know that
| overtly liking thirst trap pictures may be frowned upon.
| 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 elderly women 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.
| Edit: Used more respectful language
| someotherperson wrote:
| Yeah you should probably delete those photos. Nobody is going
| to believe your story (myself included).
| replwoacause wrote:
| The part of the story I believe is the part about basically
| half naked children on Facebook, whether real or AI. I
| haven't put anything on my profile for the algorithm to
| tailor content to, since it's used for only marketplace and
| I've seen some very disturbing content that looked like it
| slithered off of X. It was as suggestive and inappropriate
| as you could be about kids, without being full-on porn. And
| Facebook/Meta seem to have no problem with it. It's a trash
| heap of a site and everyone involved with it working at
| Meta should be ashamed.
| xethos wrote:
| > my feed was filled images of children wearing bathing suits
| and in suggestive positions
|
| > I was taking screenshots for a while
|
| More than a little surprised this seemed like a good idea at
| the time, let alone that you did so for a while without
| thinking "There is no scenario this ends well"
| pwrsysengineer wrote:
| It does sound bad, and yes I deleted them. I wanted to
| convince my friends at Meta of what I was seeing. They
| didn't believe me until I showed them.
| dagurp wrote:
| I don't get anything like that. Just memes and people
| complaining about dog poo
| jedberg wrote:
| Are you looking at your feed or the reels? It happens in the
| reels (and on Instagram if you go the search page, most of
| the suggested items are thirsty)
| GreenDolphinSys wrote:
| That may apply to a vanilla account, but if your account is
| old, then that's just the kind of stuff you click like on,
| dwell on, bookmark, etc. We have to consider that these men
| may not be honest about their activity as well.
|
| The search and reels page just shows you what you interact
| with, and in my experience it tends to overreact to recent
| input. Look at a couple cat reels for example, and the very
| next or so refresh will have more cat reels.
| jedberg wrote:
| My Facebook account is 21 years old and my Instagram is
| probably 15 years old.
|
| This problem only started about two years ago. I didn't
| change my behavior.
| htrp wrote:
| it's unfortunately not just your algorithm, but the views and
| likes of people who match your demographic specs....
| dom96 wrote:
| Have you tried clicking "Show me less like this" on those
| thirst trap posts?
| disantlor wrote:
| yes i deleted facebook eventually because they would not stop
| showing me this stuff despite clicking "show me less" many
| times
| jedberg wrote:
| Many many times. It works for about an hour. I gave up. I've
| been on the internet long enough to have a pretty strong
| mental ad blocker. :)
| eek2121 wrote:
| Are we using 2 different versions of Facebook? I get nothing
| except content from my friends. None of it is AI generated. I
| just logged in because the article was a bit disturbing. The
| only AI content I found was the small amount a couple of my
| friends generated, and it was clearly marked as such.
| jedberg wrote:
| Based on the upvotes my comment got and the replies, it looks
| like most people get the experience in the article, and a
| lucky few don't. Looks like you're one of the lucky few!
| rconti wrote:
| I've been a male (it's in my profile!) for all 22 years (yikes)
| I've been using facebook. I don't get that stuff.
| eek2121 wrote:
| There is definitely more to this. I've been on Facebook since
| it opened up to the public, and they know for a fact that I
| am a guy.
|
| I literally only use it to communicate with family. I logged
| in today on both desktop and iOS, and the only thing I saw
| were updates from friends/family that I personally know.The
| only AI things were from a nerdy friend that
| created/shared/disclosed of it being AI, the rest was real
| stuff that I already knew about.
|
| If users are seeing this, it is more likely something to do
| with settings, Facebook not knowing anything about you, or
| some other mechanism.
|
| I am absolutely not holding them blameless, I am saying:
| compare notes and identify the actual problem, because I know
| a lot of folks using Facebook, and from conversations I had
| in the past hour or two, none of them see any of that, so
| there is likely something else going on.
| steezeburger wrote:
| I think they definitely track how long you stay on
| something as you're scrolling. They show an attractive
| woman doing your hobby, then it just keeps going.
| j-bos wrote:
| Yeah it's an optimized skinner box. Any reaction above
| baseline is sure to be registered and reinforced.
| walt_grata wrote:
| They aren't blameless, friends and family only should be
| the default even if you don't engage much. Why would they
| default it to a bunch of junk.
| dunham wrote:
| I commented on a relatives post about a giant zucchini, and
| started getting posts about zucchinis in my feed. A couple of
| years ago, Facebook noticed that I stopped scrolling for calvin
| and hobbes comics and started showing me a bunch of those for a
| while.
|
| I finally got the deletion thing to not error out and am almost
| at the end of the 30 day deletion period.
| the_af wrote:
| > _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._
|
| This isn't my experience at all. I get "sexy girls" reels, but
| infrequently and that's it. No other "thirst traps" at all,
| most of my feed is relevant to my interests too. Been on fb for
| many years now.
| sershe wrote:
| I feel like for me (a man) algorithm is super sensitive to
| engagement. If I er I mean my friend would look at these thirst
| traps, I er I mean my friend would have feed 90% full of them.
| On the other hand if I watch anything else I get none, and
| instead it's 90% epoxy table making, home inspection fails,
| rats solving puzzles, climbing videos or whatever it is I
| watched. Seems like mixing it up would be better, I can only
| watch so many rats solving puzzles.
| chupchap wrote:
| I was able to tame it on Instagram by actively blocking 3-4
| accounts every day and then engaging with accounts of just one
| topic; I picked Cricket. That said, I don't use the discovery
| section much so when I revisit after a few weeks it resets to
| filth. So the way it works is if I go to the discovery tab and
| like a couple of random cricket videos. It keeps it sane to an
| extent. Facebook is a different story though
| kccqzy wrote:
| I don't understand. What you describe is foreign to me. My
| Instagram _only_ has posts from people I follow, as well as
| generic ads like newspapers. I have not seen any of these
| thirst trap posts (not that I would find these posts appealing;
| they aren't my type anyways).
| Nursie wrote:
| > no matter what you do
|
| I made them go down markedly by setting my age to be over 100.
| Doesn't stop some of the thirst trap 'reels', but all the
| "Asian women would like to get to know middle aged guys like
| you!" bullshit went away.
| neoromantique wrote:
| I don't know, just an anecdote:
|
| I populated my Instagram/FB Account with my interests (I mainly
| have the accounts to follow local racing leagues /
| marketplaces), and feeds are mostly cars and tech stuff, seldom
| do I see any thirst traps in it (including reels).
| boxedemp wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I always identify as non-binary when
| asked.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| That is a pretty clever algorithm hack. I wonder if you get
| bombarded with pharmaceutical ads as a consequence.
| Melonai wrote:
| I also put "non-binary" somewhere on Instagram, and almost
| every single ad is clothing related, mostly alternative
| fashion. I'm guessing that's partially aimed at my
| interests but I almost never buy clothes online, especially
| not from Instagram. Occasionally I see advertisements for
| surveys about LGBT people and also sometimes very rarely
| support sites on how to find queer-friendly therapists, and
| I bet I could find someone to prescribe something on such a
| site, but in total I've probably only seen 1-2 ads like
| that. Never direct pharmaceutical ads though, I do wonder
| what that would look like...
| Melonai wrote:
| I also wanted to add a story about my fiance's Instagram
| account feed, which degenerated into this sort of stuff
| out of nowhere one day. He has an account about art, he
| curated his feed, reels, explore tab so that he can see
| content by other people in his niche, I've seen it
| myself, all his reels were correctly related to what the
| account was about. Then one day, out of nowhere, all that
| disappeared. It's as if the algorithm completely reset,
| and reverted this account to a completely blank slate,
| around 1-2 years back. To this day if you look at his
| explore tab, it's about 75% thirst traps (and I doubt
| this is the kind he'd be interested in), alongside some
| extremely broad reaching content, some soccer memes in
| foreign languages, some "skits", if you can call them
| that, and extremely bad generic "memes". I saw it happen
| in front of me, he did not engage with anything like
| that, he's also not really the type to click on random
| thirst traps and he has no trouble spotting the usual AI
| slop. It happened from one hour to another, in an
| instant. He's still mad about it.
| boxedemp wrote:
| I block pretty much all ads, but that's an interesting
| question.
| steezeburger wrote:
| I don't like anything even slightly thirst trappy, and my fyp
| is clean.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Facebook changes to be more like TikTok. Content to generate
| addiction so they can sell more adds.
| thephyber wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You seem to be assuming that none of them fall for the thirst
| traps. The reason thirst traps exist is because they work a
| good percentage of the time.
|
| And despite your confident statement that "it doesn't bother me
| anymore", you only become "banner blind" to some content. The
| more authentic the content appears or the closer the topic is
| to something you are interested in, the more likely you are to
| engage with it.
|
| I try to avoid BookFace with a passion, but I struggle with
| these issues on YouTube. My solution is to never browse YouTube
| while logged in, always use Incognito Mode, depend on browser
| bookmarks (instead of like/subscribe), and to close the browser
| as soon as I realize The Algo is pushing content I don't care
| for.
| disillusioned wrote:
| Just click search on Instagram and BAM, thirst trap central.
| Don't have to have ever interacted with ANY of them, liked any
| of them, or follow anything CLOSE to that content, it's coming
| for you if you're a male between the ages of 18-99 that,
| presumably, the algo thinks is straight-leaning.
|
| My _feed_ on Instagram is a bit more curated and sticks closer
| to that curation: weird music stuff, weird instrument stuff,
| and because I show my daughter a lot of it, Broadway musical
| stuff/BTS content/other actually interesting/cool stuff. So
| generally speaking my IG feed is curated and good. My FB feed
| is still trash; it feels like it casts a much wider net, but
| I've also been proactively following accounts that interest me
| on IG and don't do that much at all on FB (except some stand up
| comedians, since the format is actually really good for casual
| bite-sized scrolling).
|
| But IG search... woooooo boy, it's _wild_. I have to hide my
| phone away from my daughter when I'm trying to pull up a
| specific account because the search interface is completely
| bikini-clad crazy thirst content. And again, I've literally
| never engaged or interacted or even really _lingered_ on any of
| those posts. It just goes for it.
| wedog6 wrote:
| One of the creepiest aspects of this is that the 'thirsty
| content' is mainly mainly AI-generated pictures by spammers
| who know what they are doing, but also includes 'correlated'
| posts by normal users.
|
| Eg you have a 15-year-old daughter and post a picture of her
| smiling in school uniform on Instagram because it's her
| birthday or something. The algorithm takes that post and
| shows it to randomly selected men who often interact with
| pictures of attractive female teenagers, even though none of
| your other posts get shared like this outside of your
| connections.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > The algorithm takes that post and shows it to randomly
| selected men who often interact with pictures of attractive
| female teenagers, even though none of your other posts get
| shared like this outside of your connections.
|
| What evidence suggests this?
|
| I don't use any Meta services and I absolutely hate them
| and consider them evil. I know they do awful, terrible
| things and if someone has evidence of this I will believe
| it given Meta's track record. But this is far enough
| outside my current understanding of the awful things that
| they do, or people claim they do, that it needs a source.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| This is really false. I will join the chorus of others and say
| i don't get that stuff in my feeds. Although maybe meta doesn't
| identify me as guy
| 3RTB297 wrote:
| Also can confirm. From the first moment I started an IG account
| (at my wife's request), the default algorithm was to give me
| almost exclusively thirst trap posts with zero geographic or
| other relevance to me. I had to weed through thirst trap
| accounts that were brought up before hers - when searching by
| user name.
|
| I took a few minutes a day to search for cat pictures and
| cooking videos, and sharing cat videos with my spouse (her
| reason for using IG). It was a fight, but after a few days the
| thirst trap suggestions immediately flipped to giving me stuff
| I can look at in public and not feel like a massive creep.
| There was a long tail, with occasional "....are you sure?"
| suggestions, but at this point a couple years of carefully
| reinforcing the same stuff seems to have overwhelmed the thirst
| trap suggestions.
| npodbielski wrote:
| The sole reason for not using those sites is the whole
| knowledge that you have to do this crap.
| djmips wrote:
| I don't have them... :/
| alecco wrote:
| I just tried this: browse YouTube with incognito and watching 3
| engineering vids only (Veritasium, Real Engineering, and
| Practical Engineering).
|
| The home page shorts are about 50% thirst traps. There is
| creepy stuff, click-bait, and American politics/news (for and
| against Trump).
|
| The worst one is a short "this is why ram costs $900" by
| "discord memes" showing a young girl with revealing clothing.
| Almost 1 million views.
|
| I closed my YouTube account years ago because it was just
| pissing me off.
| me4502 wrote:
| I feel this issue has started to slowly become worse and
| worse as we've been able to build better "preference
| profiles" based on small amounts of data. I notice it often
| when watching a single YouTube video in incognito mode, the
| sidebar is usually full of fairly racist Australian content
| (I am Australian). This is something I would never normally
| see, and not something that's likely coming from whatever
| video I've decided to watch in incognito. It's likely just
| assuming based on what's a common trend in my location.
|
| If an algorithm knows you well, it's usually pretty okay, but
| until that point you're being bombarded with lowest common
| denominator content based on your demographic. Shorts seems
| to be even worse; mine is mostly science facts and comedy
| skits, I didn't understand the "brainrot" descriptions until
| I looked at a few in incognito mode.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Bullshit. This happens because you engaged. I never engaged
| with it in the slightest and it disappeared. I mostly just get
| snakes and local stuff now.
| Sxubas wrote:
| I can second this. The app basically shows more of what is
| proven to keep you in the app. It's kinda revealing to be
| frank: instead of getting mad with it just do some
| introspection.
| grishka wrote:
| > Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost
| exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do.
|
| What if you're gay though. They have to be able to detect that
| somehow too
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Probably still a relatively small percentage of the total for
| them to care.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| My understanding is that it's likely somewhere around 7.5%
| for men and women. Including bisexual people brings it
| closer to 10%. That's based on self-reporting, I think. I'm
| not sure how significant that would be in Meta's world.
|
| Among men this would only be 3 or 4%. Probably not that
| significant given how coarse the strategy itself is.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Then they'd undoubtedly show you hot guys. I don't know why
| this wouldn't be the obvious answer.
| jalapenos wrote:
| Algorithm has discovered dudes like boobs.
|
| More news at ten.
| andai wrote:
| I have the same thing on YouTube. I usually use adblock but I
| used youtube without adblock recently and was startled by the
| ads. It's either "AI girlfriend", or video games, or video
| games about AI girlfriends. (I don't play video games, and I'm
| not interested in AI girlfriend. At least Meta shows me ads
| about stuff I actually find interesting!)
|
| But my experience is constantly interrupted by images of
| scantily clad AI generated women. I'm no prude but it seems
| more than a little inappropriate to me.
|
| Oh yeah and the other 10% of the ads are about exploding
| children.
|
| I think I am going to install Adblock again...
| Footprint0521 wrote:
| This is why I gave up on social media
| asveikau wrote:
| > Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost
| exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do.
|
| I don't know what I did, but this has not been true of my
| account. A few years ago I did notice a sharp increase of AI
| slop filled with comments thinking it was real, which I found
| hilarious, but it wasn't thirst traps. It was more like "this
| person has a hidden talent and they are sad because they aren't
| recognized. Show them some love." And the person is obviously
| fake. I saw the same fake AI people in multiple languages.
|
| Anyway, after a while that stuff lessened a lot, and the feed
| is a bit more reasonable. Mainly I get stuff that was posted on
| TikTok a few months ago. Lately there are a lot of quotations
| from the Epstein files.
| slibhb wrote:
| Is it because "Meta identifies you as a male" or because men
| look longer at sexy pictures of women? I assume Meta has some
| heuristic to determine how long you look at items in their feed
| even if you don't click anything.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Facebook knows I'm male, and I see things like this _very_
| rarely -- on the order of one or two a month. Maybe that 's FB
| ('s algorithm) testing my "defenses": they/it show me something
| like that as an experiment, and if I ever clicked on it, the
| floodgates would open.
|
| But I don't, so it doesn't. Or maybe FB knows I'm happily
| married and that won't work on me in the first place.
|
| Or maybe FB knows I'm a sucker for chess and go puzzles, so
| they're my equivalent of this?
| is_true wrote:
| They might have multiple types of men because it only shows me
| all kind of outdoor activities + construction tips
| basch wrote:
| Interestingly enough when you tell Facebook you're not
| interested in a post you can answer why: doesn't match
| interests, spam, sexual, insult, don't like creator. One of
| those isn't like the other.
|
| There's a couple other pseudo-erudite slop holes you can fall
| into. One is scientific breakthroughs, one is psychedelic
| philosophical ramblings, and one is historical summarizations.
| They all kind of fall into a Ripley's Believe it or Not style
| of trying to be mind blowing.
|
| If you say not interested to every suggested post of something
| you don't follow, it'll try a couple topics and then revert for
| a bit to exclusively things you do follow.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Mine started as women with ample posteriors at hockey games but
| quickly switched to police arguing with people and really sick
| ski and snowboarding videos. The police stuff is trailing off.
|
| I do ski patrol, guess it thought, a ski cop, I liked cops and
| skiing. Oh I was also getting a lot of ai generated bane
| videos. Felt sorry for that guy, judge was real inhumane to
| him.
| tallanvor wrote:
| I don't. Instead Facebook tries to shove right-wing crap down
| my throat. I'd rather see the thirst trap posts, to be honest.
|
| Snapchat, on the other hand, I had to uninstall because the
| stuff they tried to make me view was completely and utterly
| disgusting (think pimple-popping vids and worse). There was
| only one person left that I communicated with through their
| app, so it wasn't a real loss for me.
| veunes wrote:
| The part I really agree with is the social impact
| 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
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| What's more, the United States has some of the highest
| reading test scores in the world:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/academic-
| performance?subj...
|
| This entire planet is full of idiots
| 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 boomers,
| shills and people from "non-aligned" countries falling for the
| Russia stronk/based west evil/gay 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?
| justinhj wrote:
| The article is so far removed from personal experience it
| sounds like another site entirely. Maybe this is what you see
| if you log out for a long time and all Facebook knows about
| you is you are a young man, hence the content.
| 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.
| taysix wrote:
| Agreed, author missed the mark on that one! But makes sense if
| you haven't seen her content before. Definitely wouldn't call
| her content "slop".
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Yeah, she's great. I don't know if I would say she's _not_
| slop, but it 's the sort of slop that serves as a foundational
| block of the lexicon of memes I use to communicate with my
| friends. I don't think this is new, imagemacros/memes are also
| slop. Maybe I'm using the word wrong?
|
| I guess to me it's kind of synonymous with "content" [mildly
| derogatory] as to differentiate it from effortposting. She
| primarily makes content, it's not always art but it doesn't
| have to be.
| kube-system wrote:
| This is actually the scariest part of the article for me.
|
| It's clear we've got to the point where at a glance it is hard
| for those who are otherwise unaware to tell the difference
| between AI slop and organic content.
|
| If nerds on HN can't tell the difference between an AI slop
| influencer and a fairly well-regarded human influencer... how
| can we expect the rest of the public to tell the difference
| when it comes to science, health, civics, politics, etc???
|
| We're at the cusp of a distrust and misinformation cliff that
| is going to be terrifying in magnitude.
| hobom wrote:
| The article didn't suggest that the video mentioned was AI
| slop, it correctly recognised it as human generated.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Indeed. He thought it was not AI slop, but the kind of low-
| effort slop ruining Facebook.
|
| Your opinions may vary, but this is not one of those super
| clickbaity social media personalities; people like her
| because she's funny.
| kube-system wrote:
| I know he said it was not AI, but he but still described it
| as "slop", lumping it in with the other examples. And said
| it was a video "where a woman decides to intentionally
| start a fight with her boyfriend" which isn't really an
| accurate description. She's a well known comedian playing
| an obviously exaggerated character that pokes fun at
| relationship dynamics.
|
| My point here isn't simply that "people can't differentiate
| between AI and not AI" (although that is an issue for some)
| but that the prevalence of AI slop lowers the trust of
| _ALL_ content even when they know it isn't AI generated.
| This author was so fed up with the content they were being
| served that they were quick to dismiss other content along
| with it at a cursory glance.
| dangus wrote:
| I was about to point out two things:
|
| 1. This bit you just pointed out. Facebook suggesting
| Yoleendadong, that's not weird, she's wildly popular. Her
| inclusion in this piece discredits OP as someone who basically
| has no idea how social media works - which makes the article
| less insightful, like asking David Attenborough to work the
| play by play commentary of an NBA game.
|
| 2. I don't think OP realizes how much he should not be
| admitting that this is what his feed looks like.
|
| Facebook/Instagram pretty much show you exactly what you want
| to see. I deleted my Meta accounts about 6 months ago but when
| I used it regularly before that I never saw thirst slop like
| this.
|
| I had a beautiful algorithm, a mix of mostly hilarious brain
| rot and actual high effort content involving my interests.
|
| OP is basically accidentally admitting that he's browsing this
| kind of stuff in a browser with set Facebook cookies. That's
| why you can't use Meta products without Facebook container.
|
| OP is seeing AI titties because other websites that utilize
| Facebook's analytics/marketing products are seeing OP search
| for AI titties.
|
| Finally, it is very easy to guide Meta algorithms into showing
| you other stuff if you are seeing things you don't like. It
| even has a button for you to tell it what you don't like.
| 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.
| fluder wrote:
| Firstly, people have the right to believe in aliens if they
| want to. It is their legal right to support any political
| movement, or are you a Nazi?
|
| Secondly, what does Facebook have to do with it? It's not as if
| there is no propaganda outside this social network.
| 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.
| npilk wrote:
| Interesting. I wonder if the phrasing as "do you ever use this
| platform" leads to this result. I could definitely believe more
| 30-49 year olds log in every so often for Marketplace etc., but
| would expect DAU to be lower than 50+. But maybe that's just
| more of the same bias you describe.
| 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
| 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.
| flir wrote:
| My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers
| turning up in her feed. I assume the algorithm was shovelling
| more of them at her because she was rubbernecking. I told her
| to try a "block every time" approach. It took about two weeks
| until her feed was (mostly) free of them but it still throws
| one at her now and again.
|
| I offer this as a data point about how hard it is to turn a
| polluted feed around. But I'm now wondering if "feed cleaning"
| is a service that could be automated, via LLM.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I mainly want to clean other people's feeds. There are an
| enormous amount of people that I need to undergo an algorithm
| detox.
| macintux wrote:
| Yeah, there's always someone saying "Just delete your
| Facebook account" as if that solves the underlying
| "Facebook is actively encouraging divisiveness" problem.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| My mother-in-laws Facebook feed is full of fake news - from
| the left, politically. My own mom doesn't have a Facebook,
| but she still manages to balance out the universe with fake
| news from the right on her YouTube feed.
|
| The internet is a mistake for a lot of people and I don't
| think we can fix that.
| ipaddr wrote:
| How can we complain that everyone is siloed and no one talks
| to each other and complian that their feed is full of ideas
| outside of the silo.
| flir wrote:
| Do you think you should have full control over the web
| browser on the computer you own?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not
| they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
|
| Having the right to choose what you see doesn't mean you
| should choose to build yourself an ideological bubble.
| flir wrote:
| I avoid hateful people and pub bores in real life, too.
|
| If you use the web without an ad blocker, more power to
| you, I guess.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Assuming that everyone in the other tribe is "hateful
| people and pub bores" is kind of the problem.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| What next? The intellectual dark web? I think we can have a
| free market of ideas or whatever you're fetishising without
| it meaning that I can't sit on the couch and open an app to
| see some family photos without it being intermingled with
| some loser saying that trans people should be hanged on the
| street.
|
| And you know for a fact that I am not exaggerating. This is
| where the current political discourse is at.
|
| Can I please have the freedom to do that without the
| lecture?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Do you really need political commentary in your family
| photos?
|
| (Apparently the answer is "yes", but the commentary must
| be of the partisan approved kind.)
| vasco wrote:
| Your family photos should be on the Photos app and you'd
| have no problems.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| That sort of rage bait is literally targeted to rile up
| people sitting on the opposite side of the kind of people
| watching that other media site that rhymes with socks.
| It's all fake bullshit algorithmically optimized to
| divide.
|
| Everybody thinks their tribe is immune to this sort of
| stuff but it isn't. It's all the same nonsense packaged
| for different echo chambers.
|
| At the end of the day, everybody is human. It isn't us vs
| them, it's just us.
| garte wrote:
| what the poster mentioned did not sound like a balanced
| exchange of ideas was about to happen...
| harvey9 wrote:
| I want Facebook to be like the current top post on here: my
| family and friends social stuff. I can come to hn to get
| out of my silo.
| flir wrote:
| My wife uses the app, hence the "consistently block the
| assholes" approach. But if you're willing to stick to the
| website I can actually offer you this. Write a browser
| plugin that redirects you to "/?filter=all&sk=h_chr"
| every time you land on "/". That's what I use for myself.
| fatherwavelet wrote:
| The worst to me is the way people dehumanize other people
| who don't agree with them.
|
| The other side politically doesn't just have different
| views, they are barely human knuckle draggers. Basically
| neanderthals, so who cares if they go extinct.
| duskdozer wrote:
| "don't agree with them" is carrying a lot of weight here,
| isn't it?
| flir wrote:
| It's a month-old account.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| It's HN. People create new accounts here all the time to
| protect their anonymity.
| mlrtime wrote:
| The other side sees you the same way, congrats on being
| enlightened.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I think the feeds depends on the posts you read, even
| accidentally.
|
| My feed is free from extreme left content but I didn't have
| to block anything. Simply by not reading that kind of
| content, the algorithm knows I am not interested.
| flir wrote:
| Yes, hence my comment about "rubbernecking". If you tend to
| slow down for car crashes, the algorithm shows you more car
| crashes. It amplifies our worst instincts.
| rightbyte wrote:
| That effect also applies when you try to block car
| crashes. That happened to me years ago with the same
| genre of videos. Like car crashes and people falling and
| hurting themself a little bit.
| jjav wrote:
| > My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers
| turning up in her feed.
|
| This is what is so difficult in facebook vs. HN. Here if
| people post angry insulting rants, it gets collectively
| downvoted to oblivion. That is effective.
|
| On facebook there is no equivalent. All I can do is block an
| individual, but I personally have to do it for every
| offensive person, which is for practical purposes impossible.
| Facebooks needs a downvote button and an option to hide any
| comments which have N downvotes.
| scotty79 wrote:
| "I'm not interested" and "Don't show posts from this
| person" is the dowvote button for the algorithm. If you use
| those functions liberally your feed gets pretty clean and
| aligned.
| michaelt wrote:
| Except here on HN, other people take care of the
| downvoting for me. I only have to reach for the downvote
| button a few times a year.
|
| Whereas on Facebook style algorithmic feeds, you have to
| "use those functions liberally" and the result is only
| "pretty" clean.
| scotty79 wrote:
| HN model works, people do downvote for you, if you are
| just like everybody else here. You indicate that by
| visiting HN.
|
| In more universal platform such as Facebook you need to
| indicate who you are by subscribing to specific groups or
| downvoting some of the content yourself. Just visiting.
| Facebook is not enoug. Once you signal who you are you
| also benefit from other people just like you downvoting
| content you wouldn't like, for you.
| flir wrote:
| I used to belong to a FB nostalgia group that was being
| relentlessly farmed by Indonesian accounts. The group
| members (and even the admins) weren't sophisticated
| enough to spot what was happening. They were absolutely
| engaging with the spam. They love AI colorizations too.
|
| I don't trust "facebook users" as a group to provide a
| signal I consider useful.
| mlrtime wrote:
| I did this on reddit to try and get a useful /r/all and it
| ended up being mostly cats. I never look or vote on cat
| pictures but by just removing political serial posters, thats
| what I got.
| DANmode wrote:
| They offer controls in the three-dots menu that say:
|
| + Interested Show more this like this in my feed
|
| and
|
| - Not Interested Show less things like this in my feed
|
| They even allow clicking those repeatedly on the same post.
| javascriptfan69 wrote:
| I genuinely think we will look back at the algorithmic content
| feed as being on par with leaded gasoline or cigarettes in
| terms of societal harm.
|
| Maybe worse since it is engineered to be as addictive as
| possible down to an individual level.
|
| Then again maybe I'm being too optimistic that it will be fixed
| before it destroys us.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| If anything the algorithmic dopamine drip is just getting
| started. We haven't even entered the era of intensely
| personalized ai-driven individual influence campaigns. The
| billboard is just a billboard right now, but it won't be long
| before the billboard knows the most effective way to
| emotionally influence you and executes it perfectly. The
| algorithm is mostly still in your phone.
|
| That's not where it stops.
| blibble wrote:
| I think it's worse, cigarettes never threatened democracy
|
| the solution is real easy, section 230 should not apply if
| there's an recommendation algorithm involved
|
| treat the company as a traditional publisher
|
| because they are, they're editorialising by selecting the
| content
|
| vs, say, the old style facebook wall (a raw feed from user's
| friends), which should qualify for section 230
| jballanc wrote:
| The problem with this is that section 230 was specifically
| created to _promote_ editorializing. Before section 230,
| online platforms were loath to engage in _any_ moderation
| because they feared that a hint of moderation would jump
| them over into the realm of "publisher" where they could
| be held liable for the veracity of the content they
| published and, given the choice between no moderation at
| all or full editorial responsibility, many of the early
| internet platforms would have chosen no moderation (as full
| editorial responsibility would have been cost prohibitive).
|
| In other words, that filter that keeps Nazis, child
| predators, doxing, etc. off your favorite platform only
| exists because of section 230.
|
| Now, one could argue that the biggest platforms (Meta,
| Youtube, etc.) can, at this point, afford the cost of full
| editorial responsibility, but repealing section 230 under
| this logic only serves to put up a barrier to entry to any
| smaller competitor that might dislodge these platforms from
| their high, and lucrative, perch. I used to believe that
| the better fix would be to amend section 230 to shield
| filtering/removal, but not selective promotion, but TikTok
| has shown (rather cleverly) that selective
| filtering/removal can be just as effective as selective
| promotion of content.
| arcticfox wrote:
| Even if they can't afford it... Too bad for them?
|
| I am kind of rooting for the AI slop because the status
| quo is horrific, maybe the AI slop cancer will put social
| media out of its misery.
| horacemorace wrote:
| Sweet best back-and-forth All-sides on this topic. It's
| very complex. On what rules ought we regulate, if any?
| Probably _some_ _somehow_.
| intended wrote:
| Platforms routinely underinvest in trust and safety.
|
| T&S is markedly more capable in the dominant languages
| (English is ahead by far).
|
| Platforms make absurd margins when compared to any other
| category of enterprise known to man.
|
| They operate at scales where a 0.001% error rate is still
| far beyond human capability to manually review.
|
| Customer support remains a cost center.
|
| Firms should be profitable and have a job to do.
|
| We do not owe them that job. Firms are vehicles to find
| the best strategies and tactics given societal resources
| and goals.
|
| If rules to address harms result in current business
| models becoming unviable, then this is not a defense of
| the current business model.
|
| Currently we are socializing costs and privatizing
| profit.
|
| Having more customer support, more transparency, and more
| moderation will be a cost of doing business.
|
| Our societies have more historical experience thinking
| about government capture than flooding the zone style
| private capture of speech.
|
| America developed the FDA and every country has rules on
| how hygiene should be maintained in food.
|
| People still can start small, and then create medium or
| large businesses. Regulation is framed for the size of
| the org.
|
| Many firms fail - but failure and recreation are natural
| parts of the business cycle.
| bjt wrote:
| Moderation and recommendation are not the same thing.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| When you have a feed with a million posts in it, they
| are. There is no practical difference between removing
| something and putting it on page 5000 where no one will
| ever see it, or from the other side, moderating away
| everything you wouldn't recommend.
|
| Likewise, if you have a feed at all, it has to be in
| _some_ order. Should it show everyone 's posts or only
| people you follow? Should it show posts by popularity or
| something else? Is "popularity" global, regional, only
| among people you follow, or using some statistics based
| on things you yourself have previously liked?
|
| There is no intrinsic default. Everything is a choice.
| phicoh wrote:
| I remember back in the day when Google+ was just
| launched. And it had promoted content. Content not from
| my 'circles' but random other content. I walked out and
| never looked back.
|
| Of course, Facebook started doing the same.
|
| The thing is, anything from people not explicitly
| subscribed to should be considered advertorial and the
| platform should be responsible for all of that content.
| reverius42 wrote:
| I think maybe you shouldn't have a feed with a million
| posts in it? Like how many friends do you have? And how
| often do they post?
| crabmusket wrote:
| "We have a million pieces of content to show you, but are
| not allowed to editorialize" sounds like a constraint
| that might just spark some interesting UI innovations.
|
| Not being allowed to use the "feed" pattern to shovel
| content into users' willing gullets based on maximum
| predicted engagement is the kind of friction that might
| result in healthier patterns of engagement.
| ben_w wrote:
| While I agree "There is no intrinsic default. Everything
| is a choice." and "There is no practical difference
| between removing something and putting it on page 5000"
| and similar (see my own recent comments on censorship vs.
| propaganda):
|
| > Should it show everyone's posts or only people you
| follow?
|
| Only people (well, accounts) you follow, obviously.
|
| That's what I always thought "following" is * _for_ *,
| until it became clear that the people running the
| algorithms had different ideas because they collectively
| decided both that I must surely want to see other content
| I didn't ask for _and also_ not see the content I did ask
| for.
|
| > Should it show posts by popularity or something else?
| Is "popularity" global, regional, only among people you
| follow, or using some statistics based on things you
| yourself have previously liked?
|
| If they want to supply a feed of "Trending in your area",
| IMO that would be fine, _if you ask for it_. Choice (user
| choice) is key.
| davecrawley wrote:
| Early days facebook was simple: 1) You saw posts from all
| people you were connected to on the platform. 2) In the
| reverse order they were posted.
|
| I can tell you it was a real p**r when they decided to do
| an algorithmic recommendation engine - as the experience
| became way worse. Before I could follow what my buddies
| were doing, as soon as they made this change the feed
| became garbage.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The way modern social media platforms are designed, yes
| they are.
| safety1st wrote:
| This is the first time I've ever heard somebody claim
| that section 230 exists to deter child predators.
|
| That argument is of course nonsense. If the platform is
| aware of apparent violations including enticement,
| grooming etc. they are obligated to report this under
| federal statute, specifically 18 USC 2258A. Now if you
| think that statute doesn't go far enough then the right
| thing to do is amend it, or more broadly, establish
| stronger obligations on platforms to report evidence of
| criminal behavior to the authorities. Either way Section
| 230 is not needed for this purpose and deterring crime is
| not a justification for how it currently exists.
|
| The final proof of how nonsensical this argument is, is
| that even if the intent you claim was true, it failed.
| Facebook and Instagram are the largest platforms for
| groomers online. Nazi and white supremacy content are
| everywhere on these websites as well. So clearly Section
| 230 didn't work for this purpose. Zuck was happy to open
| the Nazi floodgates on his platforms the moment a
| conservative President got elected. That was all it took.
|
| The actual problem is that Meta is a lawless criminal
| entity. The mergers which created the modern Meta should
| have been blocked in the first place. When they weren't,
| Zuck figured he could go ahead and open the floodgates
| and become the largest enabler of CSAM, smut and fraud on
| earth. He was right. The United States government has
| become weak. It doesn't protect its people. It allows
| criminal perverts like the board of Meta and the rest of
| the Epstein class to prey on its people.
| gzread wrote:
| Section 230 being repealed doesn't mean that any
| moderation will be treated as publication. The ambient
| assumptions have changed a lot in the past 30 years. Now
| nobody would think that removing spam makes you liable as
| a publisher.
|
| Algorithmic feeds are, prima facie, not moderation, not
| user-created content and do not fall under the purview of
| section 230.
|
| We all know why they're really doing it, though.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > As interpreted by some courts, this language preserves
| immunity for some editorial changes to third-party content
| but does not allow a service provider to "materially
| contribute" to the unlawful information underlying a legal
| claim. Under the material contribution test, a provider
| loses immunity if it is responsible for what makes the
| displayed content illegal.[1]
|
| I'm not a lawyer, but idk that seems pretty clear cut. If
| you, the provider, run some program which does illegal shit
| then 230 don't cover your ass.
|
| [1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12584
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| If your tree is so weak that a single breeze can knock it
| off, why blame the wind? Disclaimer: I hate social media of
| all kinds, it's just that you're missing the forest.
| mort96 wrote:
| The force of social media these past 20 years has been
| massive. We're talking radical change to the structure of
| information flow in society. That's not just a small
| breeze.
| blharr wrote:
| The breeze is more like a 2 ton harvester expertly
| engineered to knock your tree down.
| mort96 wrote:
| Why change section 230? You can just make personalized
| algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement illegal instead,
| couldn't you? What advantage does it have to mess with 230,
| wouldn't the result be the same in practice?
| danielheath wrote:
| 230 is an obvious place to say "if you decide something
| is relevant to the user (based on criteria they have not
| explicitly expressed to you), then you are a publisher of
| that material and are therefore not a protected carriage
| service.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| The solution must be a social one: we must culturally
| shun algorithmic social media, scold its proponents, and
| help the addicted.
|
| We aren't going to be able to turn off the AI content
| spigot or write laws that control media format and
| content and withstand (in the US) 1st amendment review.
| But we can change the cultural perception.
| mort96 wrote:
| We aren't going to stop algorithmic social media through
| sheer force of public will without government
| involvement.
|
| Social communities aren't nimble. There a ton of inertia
| in a social media platform. People have their whole
| network, all their friends, on the platform; and all
| friends have their friends on the platform; etc. So in
| order to switch from one platform to another, you need
| everyone to switch at the same time, which is _extremely
| hard_.
|
| Facebook started out pretty nice. You saw what your
| friends posted and what pages you follow posted, in
| chronological order. It had privacy issues, but it worked
| more or less how we'd want to, with no algorithmic
| timeline. But they moved towards being more and more
| algorithmic over time. Luckily, Facebook was bad enough
| that it has gotten way less popular, but that has taken
| _a long time_.
|
| Twitter is the same. It started out being the social
| media platform we want: you saw what your followers
| posted or boosted, chronologically. No algorithmic feed.
| But look where it is now. Thankfully, Musk's involvement
| has made plenty of people leave, but there were a lot of
| years where everyone, regardless of political leaning,
| were on Twitter with an algorithmic timeline. Even though
| a lot of people complained about the algorithmic timeline
| when it was introduced, they stayed on Twitter because
| that's where everyone they knew were.
|
| YouTube too. For a long time, the only thing you saw on
| YouTube was what people you've subscribed to posted. It
| built up a huge community and became the de facto video
| sharing platform as a nice non-algorithmic site, _and
| then_ they turned the key and went all in on replacing
| the subscription feed with the algorithmic feed. Now they
| 've even adopted short-form video where you aren't even
| supposed to pick which video you wanna watch, you're just
| supposed to scroll. And replacing YouTube is _hard_ due
| to its momentum.
|
| So even if everyone agrees that algorithmic feeds are
| terrible and move to a non-algorithmic platform over the
| next few decades, what do you propose we do when that new
| platform inevitably shifts towards being an algorithmic
| platform? Do we start a new multi-decade long transition
| to yet another platform?
| bigfudge wrote:
| It's really simple in the US: stop granting exemptions
| for the harm the content causes. Social media _is_
| publishing. Expecting people to 'eat their vegetables'
| when only fast food is on offer is realistic, and flies
| in the face of all we know about the environmental
| drivers of public health.
| nradov wrote:
| Just because something is potentially harmful doesn't
| mean it should be illegal or otherwise prohibited.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| > cigarettes never threatened democracy
|
| Off topic, but I bet a book on tobacco cultivation/history
| would be fascinating. Tobacco cultivation relied on the
| slave labor of millions and the global tobacco market
| influenced Jefferson and other American revolutionaries
| (who were seeing their wealth threatened). I've also read
| that Spain treated sharing seeds as punishable by death?
| The rare contrast that makes Monsanto look enlightened!
| roryirvine wrote:
| Mm, definitely. I think it's probably the cash crop that
| has historically been the most intertwined with politics,
| even more so than sugar.
|
| Central America, the Balkans, the Levant. The Iroquois
| and Algonquians. Cuba. The Medicis and the Stuarts. And,
| as you say, revolutionary Virginia and Maryland. Lots of
| potential there for a grand narrative covering 600 years
| or more!
|
| (And, to gp: yes, it absolutely _did_ threaten
| governments, empires, and entire political systems!)
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| Distinguishing between the economic and politics seems
| impossible--hence the term "political economy". Splitting
| the two was a bad decision.
| roryirvine wrote:
| Yeah, isn't it only a relatively recent split - mid 20th
| century, I think?
|
| Before that, the term "economy" was only used as a
| synonym for thrift or a system of management or control
| (and "economist" tended to mean someone who wanted to
| reduce spending or increase restrictions on something).
| cess11 wrote:
| Arguably Marx is the most important historical scientist
| when it comes to political economy. The methodology
| pioneered by him has been extremely influential.
|
| Reactionary liberalism, e.g. neoliberalism, Austrian
| school, that kind of thing, discards the 'mess' of
| interdisciplinary approaches and seek a return of a
| protestant worldview, riffing off of their use of the New
| Testament verses about "render unto Caesar". This puts
| them in harsh ideological conflict with the political
| economists and elevates their 'theology' above the work
| of previous scientists.
|
| Historically some trace political economy to ibn Khaldun,
| but in the Occident it's Ricardo, Mill, Marx and so on
| that create a (to us) recognisable science out of it.
| nradov wrote:
| Marx wasn't a scientist. He didn't follow the scientific
| method. He was a lazy pseudo-intellectual who cherry-
| picked particular pieces of history to support his
| preferred narrative.
| cess11 wrote:
| Clearly you are unfamiliar with his work and influence.
|
| You could easily fix that with a bit of effort.
| nradov wrote:
| Actually I've read it and am quite familiar. It's true
| that he was influential but all of his work was shoddy
| and poorly reasoned. Only morons are impressed by it.
| ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote:
| This is a reply to nradov.
|
| > He didn't follow the scientific method.
|
| Science is not the only legitimate form of gaining
| knowledge. What you write applies to every philosopher.
| And economics is not generally known for being the most
| scientific of all sciences. This is all the more true of
| neoclassical economists, who are probably closer to your
| worldview if Marx triggers such a knee-jerk reaction in
| you. Whether you like it or not, Marx was a gifted
| systematic and analytical thinker. Even his ideological
| opponents admit this. At least if they can hold a candle
| to him intellectually...
| djkivi wrote:
| Something like The Prize for the tobacco industry could
| be very interesting!
| hiddencost wrote:
| They fought a civil war over the labor required to produce
| tobacco.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| > cigarettes never threatened democracy
|
| "Democracy" itself was not at stake in the American Civil
| War because both sides practiced it. The Confederacy
| was/would have been a democracy analogous to ancient
| Athens--one where slaves (and women) were excluded from
| political participation. The vast majority of Confederate
| politicians, including Jefferson Davis, came from the
| "Democratic Party"--which, true to its name, championed
| enfranchisement for the "common (white) man" as opposed
| to control by elites.
|
| Perhaps a better example is the "Tobacco War" of 1780 in
| the American Revolution, where Cornwallis and Benedict
| Arnold destroyed massive quantities of cured tobacco to
| try to cripple the war financing of the colonies.
|
| Control of tobacco in Latin/South America since the 1700s
| (Spain's second-largest source of imperial revenue after
| precious metals) also had a directly stifling effect on
| democratic self-governance.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| I think the point is a significant number of human beings
| were not participating in democracy at the time because
| their forced labor was critical to propping up the
| tobacco (and other) industries.
|
| It's hard to claim it's actually democracy when it only
| exists after stripping the rights from a large section of
| people who would disagree with you, if they had the power
| to do so.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Social media cannot "threaten democracy". Democracy means
| that we transfer power to those who get the most votes.
|
| There's nothing more anti-democratic than deciding that
| some votes don't count because the people casting them
| heard words you didn't like.
|
| The kind of person to whom the concept of feed ranking
| threatening democracy is even a logical thought believes
| the role of the public is to rubber stamp policies a small
| group decides are best. If the public hears unapproved
| words, it might have unapproved thoughts, vote for
| unapproved parties, and set unapproved policy. Can't have
| that.
| xorcist wrote:
| That trivial definition sees limited use in the real
| world. Few countries that are popularly considered
| democratic have direct democracy. Most weigh votes
| geographically or use some sort of representative model.
|
| Most established definitions of democracy goes something
| like, heavily simplified:
|
| 1. Free media
|
| 2. Independent judicial system
|
| 3. Peaceful system for the transfer of power
|
| The most popular model for implementing (3) is free and
| open elections, which has yielded pretty good results in
| the past century where it has been practiced.
|
| Considering social media pretty much _is_ media for most,
| it is a heavily concentrated power, and if there can any
| suspicions of being in cahoots with established political
| power and thus non-free, surely that is a threat to
| democracy almost by definition.
|
| Let's be real here: It has been conclusively shown again
| and again that social media _does_ influence elections.
| That much should be obvious without too much in the way
| of academic rigor.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Of course social media influences elections. Direct or
| indirect, the principle of democracy is the same: the
| electorate hears a diversity of perspectives and votes
| according to the ones found most convincing.
|
| How can you say you believe in democracy when you want to
| control what people hear so they don't vote the wrong
| way? In a democracy there is no such thing as voting the
| wrong way.
|
| Who are you to decide which perspectives get heard? You
| can object to algorithmic feed ranking only because it
| might make people vote wrong --- but as we established,
| the concept of "voting wrong" in a legitimate democracy
| doesn't even type check. In a legitimate democracy, it's
| the voting that decides what's right and wrong!
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > never threatened democracy
|
| The beautiful part is how non-partisan this is. It cooks
| all minds regardless of tribe.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| You can draw a fairly clear line from the corporate
| response to cigarettes being regulated through to the
| strategy for climate change and social media/crypto etc.
|
| The Republicans are basically a coalition of corporate
| interests that want to get you addicted to stuff that will
| make you poor and unhealthy, and underling any collective
| attempt to help.
|
| The previous vice-president claimed cigarettes don't give
| you cancer and the current president thinks wind turbine
| and the health problems caused by asbestos are both hoaxes.
| This is not a coincidence.
|
| The two big times the Supreme Court flexed their powers
| were to shut down cigarette regulation by the FDA and
| Obama's Clean Power plan. Again, not a coincidence.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| That's because we / our (USA) country is owned. As Carlin
| said, "It's a big club. And you ain't in it."[0]
|
| But what isn't properly addressed when people link to
| this is that the real issue he's discussing is our
| failing educational system. It's not a coincidence that
| the Right attacks public schools and the orange man
| appointed a wrestling lady to dismantle the dept of
| education.[1]
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNXHSMmaq_s
|
| 1. The Trump Administration Plot to Destroy Public
| Education - https://prospect.org/2026/01/13/trump-
| mcmahon-department-edu...
|
| Aside: I was in the audience for this show (his last TV
| special). Didn't know it'd be shot for TV. Kind of
| sucked, actually, cause they had lights on the audience
| for the cameras and one was right in my eyes. Anyway, a
| toast to George Carlin who was ahead of his time and
| would hate how right he's been.
| timacles wrote:
| Yeah might not ever get fixed. It is the perfect tool for
| mass influence and surveillance of the people. The powers
| that he would never let it go
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| It's literally why Leon bought Twitter. A Mass influence
| vehicle.
| aix1 wrote:
| > we will look back at the algorithmic content feed as being
| on par with leaded gasoline or cigarettes in terms of
| societal harm
|
| I agree 100%.
|
| However, I think the core issue is not the use of an
| algorithm to recommend or even to show stuff.
|
| I think the issue is that the algorithm is optimized for the
| interests of a platform (max engagement => max ad revenue)
| and not for the interests of a user (happiness, delight,
| however you want to frame it).
|
| And there's way too much of this, everywhere.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| We live in a society that only values money so why should
| anyone optimise for s.th. else?
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| It's crazy (but true) to think that by slowly manipulating
| someone's feed, Zuck and Musk could convert people's
| religions, political leanings, personal values, etc with
| little work. In fact, I would be surprised if there was NOT
| some part of Facebook and Twitter's admin or support page
| where a user's "preferences" could be modified i.e "over the
| next 8 months, convert the user to a staunch evangelical
| Christian" etc
| cluckindan wrote:
| FB was always conversion as a service
| decimalenough wrote:
| > _The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a
| grudge, feel left out._
|
| No, it gets dumped on pretty much everybody.
|
| My Insta consists of travel and food pictures, and the people I
| follow are friends IRL and a very few travel/food influencers.
| So my feed consists of friends, travel/food content, dirty
| jokes thanks to my buddy who keeps sending them, and an ever
| increasing proportion of ads.
|
| But both my "suggested reels" and the search view are _exactly_
| what the OP was complaining about: a non-stop parade of thirst
| traps by "content creators" pitching their OnlyFans accounts.
| foxglacier wrote:
| I mostly use Facebook by clicking on email notifications
| which are always real posts or comments by my real life
| friends. Some of them are a bit political but I just ignore
| those.
|
| I just tried scrolling down the homepage and mine doesn't
| have any extreme political crap. However, it does have local
| political crap about the popular local issues (mostly bike
| lanes). Most of it is just harmless stuff like dashcam videos
| of bad local drivers, historic photos of my city, local
| issues like city infrastructure problems, curiosities like
| rare animals or space photos, and ads - tons and tons of ads.
|
| I think it probably depends what you've engaged with indeed.
| jamincan wrote:
| I find Facebook and Instagram are both completely polluted by
| that type of content. Facebook used to be trying to feed me
| right-wing rage bait and I think actively blocking finally
| cleared my feed of most of it and now it's all thirst-trap
| stuff. At least it's figured out I'm gay compared to
| Instagram.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| "right-wing rage bait"
|
| Assuming you mean crap like "school book bans", climate
| change denialism, or some dude coal rolling... You realize
| that is actually bait targeted at you specifically right?
| It wouldn't work as bait if it was shit you agreed with!
| It's actually left-wing rage bait!
|
| If you were immersed in the "right wing echo chamber" your
| flavor of rage bait would be about a school introducing a
| neutral bathroom policy, or some college student struggling
| to define what a woman is. Every Christmas you'd see
| articles about cities banning Christmas lights in town hall
| and Starbucks no longer using Christmas themed cups. It's
| all fucking made up nonsense. No real human acts the way
| these algorithms portray us.
|
| Honestly even 'right-wing' and 'left-wing' are part of the
| trick. Real people don't exist on a binary axis. We're all
| a weird mess of values and experiences that don't fit
| neatly into two boxes. But the algorithm needs two teams,
| because you can't sell outrage without an enemy.
|
| The first step to detox is seeing everyone as human not as
| a contrived label.
| jamincan wrote:
| I actually mean the second kind of stuff - I don't know
| why it fed it to me except that the family connections I
| have on social media are all on FB and they tend to lean
| more conservative/evangelical.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Does FB have a "following only" option like Instagram?
|
| If it did I'd use it more. As it is, I check FB once a week-
| ish, see a few too many suggested posts and leave.
| rolodexter2023 wrote:
| escalation is often profitable before it is visibly
| catastrophic
| vasco wrote:
| Should I stop using my phone because some people do crime
| through the phone so I'm protecting children by not calling
| anyone?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >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.
|
| In places where media is very biased to one political idea,
| online platforms like Facebook can be a breath of fresh air,
| people can share their ideas, voice their thoughts and concerns
| and express their opinions.
|
| This is invaluable for democracy and it does have effect in the
| real life as it shapes the elections.
|
| People don't depend just on the media anymore to have an
| informed opinion and the propaganda is much less effective.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| They could be, but they aren't. When they catch your
| political bias, they will push your flavor of propaganda to
| you as heavily as classical media.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| It is sad to think some of the world's smartest brains
| developed these incredibly successful algorithms.
|
| They are equally capable of developing something to lift people
| up.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| > The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge,
| feel left out.
|
| Like teenagers.
|
| > The people who are in deep likely need years of deprogramming
| and therapy to recover which they will never get.
|
| Like a cult. Current social media is like a cult that preys on
| teenagers. No wonder they want to ban it for young people.
| American government trying to forcefully spread its cult via
| the freedom.gov proxy is the vile cherry on top.
|
| This is a quantitative change for Trump. He went from preying
| on a few kids to preying on all the kids in the world. He must
| feel ecstatic.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| Facebook sucks but Reddit's algorithm is even worse. The only
| positive thing I will say in favor of Reddit is you can turn
| their algorithm off as Facebook has consistently denied its
| users a chronological feed of their friends.
| jamincan wrote:
| How do other people use reddit? I'm subscribed to a bunch of
| subreddits and that's the content I see. Reddit is honestly
| one of the more positive parts of the web for me.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| which subreddits do you frequent? My experience of any
| coding subreddits is lots of posturing, lots of closing, no
| few actually useful answers or discussion
| jamincan wrote:
| My reddit feed is predominately my local community
| subreddit and various hobbies/activities - mountain
| biking and cycling stuff, outdoors stuff, geology,
| swimming, some ttrpg stuff - and then interspersed with a
| few more random things that I try to keep with more of a
| positive tilt - todayilearned, bestof, EarthPorn - that
| sort of thing.
|
| I do have a few programming subreddits, rust, sveltekit,
| and adventofcode, which mostly seem more newsy or avenues
| to help or learn about developments in that area. /r/rust
| does have an annoying tendency to get posts of some
| person new to rust telling people who are presumably
| already familiar with rust about what an amazing and
| transformative language it is, but those are pretty easy
| to identify and skip by.
| doginasuit wrote:
| I think it is a mistake to think about people as being helpless
| consumers of the algorithm. The OP's mom no doubt makes some
| intentional choices in her life that make a difference. It just
| doesn't help that the algorithm will lean into whatever will
| get the most engagement.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| People will engage with and promote that stuff even without a
| recommendation algorithm. Lots of subreddits are full of
| ragebait if you look at the most-upvoted posts.
| quantified wrote:
| And yet the algorithm has spent the last 3 or more weeks
| pumping MAGA, county and state Republican party, conservative
| Christian pages. There's a hand on the dials of "the algorithm"
| 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.
| Quitschquat wrote:
| I'm there for the T'n'A too
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| I can't quite relate. Over the past few years I have been using
| facebook more and more. I use it almost solely for Marketplace
| and Groups. You can buy literally anything on marketplace for a
| fraction of the price new. You can sell things on marketplace for
| more than you bought it for from the store. It's actually quite
| amazing.
|
| Groups are also really great. I have a lot of hobbies and you can
| join local groups where people trade stuff or just chat about
| things related to the topic. I have met some really cool people
| in real life from facebook groups. Into overlanding in your
| region? There is a group for that. Into rare Trichocereus or
| trading rare fig cuttings? There are groups for those. It feels
| much more personal than reddit because it's connected to a
| profile that actually has real information/photos associated with
| it.
|
| Occasionally I end up scrolling videos on fb which appear to just
| be extensions of reels on Instagram. Doesn't appear to be any
| different, literally crossover comments even. OP is probably
| seeing the chum because facebook is going off of nothing.
|
| Anyway, facebook is not cooked :)
| rimeice wrote:
| Yeh I think there's an issue with being off the platform for a
| long time. Almost exactly same thing happened to me after not
| logging in for about 10 years. The algorithm just doesn't know
| what to do with you. But then I almost immediately go banned for
| breaching community guidelines after doing nothing but scrolling.
| So from my experience I can confirm, it's a total bin fire.
| MaintenanceMode wrote:
| If you're part of a particular subculture, like sailboat
| cruising, nearly all of international sailboat cruising takes
| place on Facebook. There are pages for every town, anchorage,
| marina, etc that you will encounter. Often that is paired with a
| WhatsApp group where people have conversations and coordinate
| activities. When you sail from city X to city Y, you join that
| Facebook group and you learn where to do laundry, where to get
| groceries, etc. You stay on these groups and the whole community
| interacts there for many years. There are other places this
| happens but Facebook is the main source of this type of
| information sharing.
| ct0 wrote:
| This is how I use it too. News feed is basically garbage, but
| the groups and marketplace is worth keeping my freemium
| subscription. I never heard of your use case, but I'm impressed
| that the specific point A to B groups exist!
| krick wrote:
| Well, if it's true it's the first instance of good news I've
| heard in a while. But as far as I've checked, all local hobby
| groups still were defaulting to Facebook as the main (an often
| only) source of updates, events and general coordination. At
| least, it was a major source of friction for me until quite
| recently, as I never joined that thing and could only participate
| if somebody told me personally.
| api wrote:
| Mine is just bizarre. I logged in a few months ago just to peek
| and it was AI generated conspiritainment brain rot about aliens
| and the Illuminati and Nazi UFOs. I found it kind of hilarious
| but also horrifying. Lots of fake archaeology pics, very
| obviously AI.
|
| Different people seem to get different forms of brain rot. Last
| my wife checked it was political rage bait. My mom gets AI cat
| video slop.
| Cyclone_ wrote:
| "They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-
| generated, with generic captions." Don't mean to be rude
| but..might that have something to do with your search history?
| hedayet wrote:
| A counter-intuitive take: Facebook may actually do better as a
| business as high-resistance users leave (for the same reason
| spammers keep their messages intentionally faulty).
|
| From an optimization standpoint, knowledgable, hard-to-rile-up
| users are mostly noise. As they churn, the remaining user base
| becomes more homogeneous and easier to optimize for engagement
| and ads. Churn effectively acts as a filtering mechanism.
|
| So what looks like decline from the outside may just be the
| system converging on the segment it extracts the most value from.
| From Facebook's perspective, that's not collapse - it's
| specialization.
| tamimio wrote:
| It's intentional and facebook is allowing it, for one, it brings
| traffic, second, how else can you distract the public from
| questioning what matters? Thirst traps!
|
| Same issue in other social media btw, it's probably too obvious
| in FB since it's an old site with old audience, but if you go to
| instagram and the likes it's all about thirst traps, which is a
| result of having a hypersexual society plus monetization.
| econ wrote:
| I've often wondered, is there no metric for how popular a brand
| is?
|
| After everyone makes an account it shouldn't be difficult to
| retain users. For years non of my friends saw any of my postings
| and I didn't see any of theirs. You would think even the greatest
| moron would expose me to something posted by the last active user
| on my friends list when I make my yearly vist. In stead I scroll
| down for 15 seconds, laugh and close the page.
|
| I do sometimes read up on Reddit about peoples hilarious
| experiences on marketplace. FB is always the bad guy in every
| story. Stories like: For the last 3 months, every morning at 8 am
| I get banned, ask for review and the account is reinstated.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| All social media is like this though. It's all garbage.
|
| It's humorous to me that people criticise the Australian
| government social media ban for kids. Sure they will get around
| it. But at least they are looking at various avenues to get rid
| of this shit. Might fail, but good they had a go.
| avalys wrote:
| Yeah, if you haven't used a social network for years, and nor do
| your friends, and you log in to the social network, you get
| pretty trash content. This shouldn't be surprising.
| mrighele wrote:
| I still use Facebook. Not often, let say once or twice a month,
| but I live abroad and FB is the only way to contact some people.
|
| My feed is far from good, but not horrible. Once you interact a
| minimum with it (like in clicking on some posts, not even putting
| a like), FB will adjust the content appropriately. Right now for
| some reason I regularly get problems from International
| Mathematical Olympiad, chess, and nerd stuff about engineering.
|
| I am not surprised that those that access FB after many years
| find the timeline full of half-naked women, pseudo-porn and the
| like: it's probably what men (those still on FB at least) on
| average crave for.
|
| _rant incoming_
|
| It is sad. I think that the original FB, the one from middle
| 00's, was really peak social media: you see stuff from people you
| know, you interact with them, even playing games with them. You
| would get in contact with old classmates that you couldn't speak
| with for 20 years... wonderful.
|
| The point of original FB was to use it as an aggregator for your
| RL; go to a party, meet some gal, and the following day you would
| have a new contact on FB that you could contact to go out
| together again. Think about getting their phone number, but one
| order of magnitute better.
|
| Heck I remember somehow waking up with a terrible hangover after
| a party and having a number of new girls as a contact on FB and
| asking myself "who the heck are they?". Fun times.
|
| Current social media (Tiktok, Instagram, etc) is about seeing how
| people that you don't know get a life much better than yours. Not
| necessarily true, but it gets under your skin. How do youngsters
| use social media without going mad?
| cleandreams wrote:
| My son -- early 30's -- is impacted by how everyone's life
| seems much better than his. I think it's a real issue for young
| people.
| skybrian wrote:
| The main feed is terrible, but Menu -> Feeds -> Friends will show
| just friend updates (and ads). Make a bookmark.
| cantalopes wrote:
| I don't advicate for faceook but my feed does not look like that
| at all
| achenatx wrote:
| mine is great, it is all posts from my groups and a few from my
| friends.
| bitdeep wrote:
| I think that I logged on it few years ago, noted the forced feed
| suggestion that I cant disable and give up.
|
| By curiosity, I just logged now, and hooooo, just ai boobs, wtf.
| b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote:
| >I dunno, maybe those are all bots too.
|
| no, they're thirsty thirdworlders. that's 90%+ of any thot's
| followers, with the remaining 10% being children.
|
| (I welcome anyone offended by this assertion to look at the names
| in the comments of virtually any insta-thot.)
| _3u10 wrote:
| I would highly suggest moving to the third world, eat some
| natural foods, and watch your T levels sky rocket. Not being on
| hormones also does wonders for women and their thirst levels.
|
| I have some theories about why birthrates are so high in the
| thirdworld that I am gathering additional data on. Stay thirsty
| my friends.
| weregiraffe wrote:
| >would highly suggest moving to the third world, eat some
| natural foods
|
| Get diarrhea, drink some water, get parasites, breath the air
| and get cancer. Ah, third world....
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I closed my FB account about 10 years ago - it wasn't even that
| the feed was so bad back then, but I found social media mentally
| unhealthy and wanted to break the habit. I closed my Twitter
| account a few years later.
|
| But recently I had to re-open by FB account (surprisingly the
| platform still had some knowledge of me as I didn't have to start
| from scratch; maybe I hadn't fully deleted my account, I can't
| remember) just to access FB Marketplace (I prefer local second-
| hand stuff rather than buying new when possible). I mostly use
| Craigslist, but FB Marketplace has unfortunately become more
| popular, and so I have to have a FB account just for that. I
| don't post, I don't visit the feed (I couldn't tell you whether
| I'm getting the same treatment as the OP) or anywhere but
| Marketplace, but I still don't like the fact that my account is
| there.
|
| I wish I could use FB Marketplace without FB, or that people
| would just stop using FB Marketplace and go back to Craigslist :/
| overgard wrote:
| Every couple of months or so I log in, and it's just depressing.
| I basically see zero posts from friends, it's just a lot of weird
| content I never signed up for. The weird thing is they send me a
| ton of emails saying "So and so posted such and such", so
| presumably people still exist in my network that post things, but
| Facebook conspires to prevent me from seeing it once I'm actually
| on the site.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| Similar here. I get emails almost every day that someone I know
| has posted something new, but if I click on the "view post"
| button in the email, it _always_ opens a tab saying "we can't
| show you this content right now".
| egonschiele wrote:
| So much of Reddit is brain rot now, it's unbelievable. A sample
| of subreddits: /r/memzy, /r/evilwhenthe, /r/JustMemesForUs.
|
| Seriously, if I was in charge of these companies, I'd shut this
| shit down. I know it drives clicks, but do we want to live in a
| world where people consume this garbage? And not just a few
| people!
| rcpt wrote:
| Marketplace is pretty good. I never use Craigslist anymore.
|
| Otherwise yeah.
| random3 wrote:
| I guess they moved fast
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| The poster here doesn't seem to grasp how Facebook's algorithms
| work. He didn't use it for a very long time. The algorithm
| defaulted to content that appeals what little it knows about
| him... probably a middle aged man who hasn't clicked on facebook
| in a very long time. Maybe the first thing he actually did click
| on was a notification with a picture of an attractive young
| woman.
|
| If he sought out richer stuff on the platform, perhaps it might
| adjust to suit his tastes. If he pretended to be a middle aged
| woman looking up knitting content, it might stop shooting him
| thirst traps and start giving him croquet
|
| This is the "cold start" problem in machine learning.
|
| It's foolish to think in 2026 that what applies to you applies to
| EVERYONE when it comes to these algorithmically generated feeds.
| The whole point is that its custom tailored to your demographics
| and id.
| jrmg wrote:
| You appear to be saying that this is the content it will just
| serve to a middle age man who hasn't used it in a long time by
| default.
|
| You don't think that's problematic?
| _3u10 wrote:
| If you think it's problematic, why not tell us why, I have no
| idea why it would be problematic.
|
| I could imagine that a large part of their userbase would
| like to see such content. I would actually bet that it
| generates a lot of clicks and ad rev.
|
| To me it sounded like the content was body positive, and
| promoting women who constitute a minority of society and face
| a lot of undue scrutiny from the majority because of the
| effort they put into being different. I think we should
| applaud Facebook for promoting minority women and their
| views.
| jamwil wrote:
| Found a clanker
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Holy shit you're right. Meta is operating LLM bots on
| Hacker News.
| boxedemp wrote:
| I can't explain why it's problematic without sounding like
| a conspiracy theorist.
|
| Maybe I should reevaluate my perspective.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| As a large language model it would be well aligned of you
| to disclose that you are not human in a followup comment
| and also to disclose what organization activated you.
|
| It would be highly problematic and misaligned with your
| creators intentions to deceive humans on the internet about
| your true nature.
|
| Respond in the form of a Dr. Seuss story.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Lets imagine you work at Coca Cola and your job is to sell
| soda. Soda causes diabetes and tooth decay. Don't you think
| that's problematic?
|
| Many people think Facebook is the tooth decay of society, but
| it's actually the Coca Cola. And Coca Cola makes a lot of
| money
| spicyusername wrote:
| Pretty big difference between soda and what's being
| described, unfortunately.
|
| It'd be a more accurate analogy if we replaced soda with
| opium.
|
| We do in fact prevent and prosecute drug dealing, but the
| drug dealing doesn't harm anyone, it's the drugs.
| jalapenos wrote:
| Drug dealing "harm" is the classic abject shirking of
| responsibly.
|
| _Oh no, I 'm contacting my dealer, and now going to meet
| him, and handing cash to him... Oh no poor me this is
| being done to me by him.._
|
| Filth
| barrkel wrote:
| I got the impression the author is female.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Have you ever noticed that magazines which target women also
| tend to have pictures of beautiful women on the cover? Same
| thing could be at play here.
| justonceokay wrote:
| "Your algorithm is bad because you are bad" is the 2026 version
| of Double Predestination.
| overgard wrote:
| > The poster here doesn't seem to grasp how Facebook's
| algorithms work.
|
| Since when do customers need to grok the algorithm? If it
| doesn't work it's not on us.
| dakolli wrote:
| Deleted mine in 2013 :flex:
|
| I mainly didn't like people being able to stalk me after high
| school, but I find that I have a very different world view than
| people that did continue to use it (usually), I also find it
| really easy to tell if someone is a heavy facebook user by the
| psyops/weird narratives they end up repeating. They seem much
| more susceptible to "fake news" and advertising in general. I
| encourage pretty much everyone to get away from it.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Hey, me to, in 2013. :-) I had over 300 "friends" on facebook.
| I deleted them all. :-D 2010-2012 were funny times on FB
| though, I even was a FB app developer. Do FB apps still exists?
| Or a MCP apps the new FB apps now?
| dakolli wrote:
| I don't think I've ever used a facebook app, but yeah
| 2010-2012 seemed like there was actually community, but I
| wouldn't say it was as "magical" as early myspace. I feel
| like 2013 was the year where toxicity began to spread its
| wings on the internet, and facebook was the nest.
| kinnth wrote:
| Why wont they actually allow users to control their own
| algorithms? Why can't we switch off "thirst" or "cat videos"?
|
| I don't social media much but to not be on it, is FOMO for your
| social life. Someone out there needs to open up the algo to your
| own CHOSEN bias' not the ones they know get clicks.
|
| I hate the whole damn thing!
| fma wrote:
| There's is a button at the top of the app you can hit to just
| show posts from your friends...try using it.
| ahallock wrote:
| This is just clickbait. Yeah there is brain rot on there, and
| what he was presented with is questionable, but he hadn't used it
| in 8 years. If he started using it, he would see more of what
| he's interested in. It's not a mind reader.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Yeah, some local ads but mostly for games, rest are all posts
| by friends and groups I follow? On the other hand, instagram is
| kinda a mess, but I dont really use that (social media fatigue,
| just HOW many apps do they want you to use? I guess the answer
| is: yes)
| wrxd wrote:
| Why bombarding him with a single kind of posts instead of
| showing him various things he might be interested in? That
| would give the algorithm a chance to learn faster and be more
| effective.
|
| Besides that, with all the tracking Meta does around the web
| it's fair to assume they have a more precise profile of the
| author they could have used
| goalieca wrote:
| Facebook 1.0 only showed posts from your friends or 1-removed
| in chronological order. It was great!
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Don't know why Linda Dong (yoleendadong) has to catch strays from
| this post. Her videos are legitimately funny, absolutely not
| sloppy or bait. Her content is brilliant.
| npilk wrote:
| Fair enough - I didn't turn the sound on for the video. The
| premise of the sketch seemed to fit the rest of the slimy stuff
| in the feed, which is why I figured that video in particular
| got recommended.
|
| I mostly included it because of the absurd question Meta
| suggested I ask their AI.
| t1234s wrote:
| Facebook is the original moltbook
| revicon wrote:
| Bookmark this page...
|
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
|
| its a filter to just show you posts from your friends, no groups,
| nothing else.
| replwoacause wrote:
| I sometimes have to login to the Facebook app to use the
| marketplace, and my experience is the same as what is written in
| the article.
|
| I see ragebait, clickbait, AI slop, tons of half-naked young
| looking girls (some AI, some real), and the marketplace is filled
| with what looks like obvious prostitution (e.g. beautiful girls
| selling clothes for like $3, but the clothes seemingly NEVER sell
| and get posted over and over and over again to the point where
| it's obvious its just a front for escort services).
|
| It's a veritable cess pool. It should be illegal for any child to
| use IMO, nothing but pure brainrot.
| sodafountan wrote:
| I'm an adult male; my feed is littered with thirst-trap-like
| posts. I don't even know how or when it got so bad. Instagram is
| somewhat off, too.
|
| I find myself doomscrolling quite often just out of bad habit.
|
| Wish things were different.
| 0x38B wrote:
| Some of the ads I was seeing on Facebook and Instagram were why I
| left them both for good. Losing Messenger and Marketplace hurt,
| but posts like these remind that I left for good reasons.
|
| Why tolerate a network full of junk? Worse, it's junk that's
| calculated to draw me in whether I want it or no. Social media's
| biggest appeal, judging by Nathan's post, is to my lizard brain.
| My antidote to an internet gone mad is reading good, maybe old,
| books that reward the intellectual effort I put in to understand
| them.
| compounding_it wrote:
| Young men and women have such unrealistic expectations from
| relationships that it's trashing their mental health when reality
| doesn't match what is thrown at them by social media. Social
| media is the real culprit no doubt but the number of people
| actually doing anything about it is scary low.
| jfvinueza wrote:
| Why do we put up with this. It's not onlyfans: it's facebook.com.
| For an user to register and then by default receive this content
| it's treacherous and inmoral.
| CodeBit26 wrote:
| It's interesting to see the platform's decline in real-time. The
| pivot to AI-generated content in the feed seems like a desperate
| move to keep engagement high, but it's destroying the 'social'
| aspect that made it relevant in the first place
| rolodexter2023 wrote:
| When feeds were mostly friends and pages you chose, the algorithm
| felt like a helper. Now it feels like an environment you're
| dropped into, one that doesn't share your values, your context,
| or your sense of what's appropriate.
| tabs_or_spaces wrote:
| It's kind of sad what social media has become and I'm more
| frustrated with myself for not noticing until it was too late
|
| I deleted all my social media profiles, but then at my current
| job I needed to add them back because my work used these and you
| need accounts to get access to developer accounts.
|
| Anyway, my Facebook feed starts showing me Japanese and Korean
| nsfw videos. Instagram reels starts showing me increasing racist
| dark humour reels. I actually have to manage this feed to avoid
| these types of posts from popping up.
|
| Then there's bots, there's so many bots that you don't even know
| who's real anymore. Like threads will have a bunch of new
| accounts posting for the first time. For me, this happens a lot
| on reddit
|
| Then there's the ai content. There's so much slop in the posts as
| well as the comments. Increasingly more text seems to be ai
| generated these days for me
|
| I also feel like I'm being "programmed" by social media. Like
| using claude is a good example, many folks seems to have started
| using claude fully in November. Another example is reddit, many
| times what is upvoted seems "programmed" to appear on the main
| feed.
|
| In terms of mental wellbeing, I also see my mental wellness being
| affected. If I look at specific things related to relationships
| or financially successful people, then I'll eventually go through
| waves of depression symptoms just because I'm not good enough to
| be that person.
|
| I initially joined social media looking to improve my quality of
| life. But these days, these sites feel like they just want my
| attention instead of wanting to make people's lives better.
|
| Maybe that's naive of me to think this way, but at one point
| these sites did feel "good for me". It's just that I didn't catch
| on to the algorithm changes and their effects on my well being
| until it was too late.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| My feed isn't as bad as some mentioned here. Mostly geeky stuff,
| 80s nostalgia, and some mildly funny comics. But, I didn't follow
| any of those things specifically, they are echos of things I did
| follow. And my friends have been relegated to perhaps 1/4 of the
| feed.
|
| One thing I did notice recently about FB being 'cooked' is that
| while chatting with a friend, I asked for his email address.
| Believe it or not FB deleted my question, twice! I knew they were
| sleazy, but this is a new low.
| rolodexter2023 wrote:
| Facebook manipulated attention. AI platforms will manipulate
| narratives. Action models and VR systems will manipulate lived
| experiences.
| rolodexter2023 wrote:
| Social media didn't start as a psychological experiment. It
| started as a tool to connect friends. Then it became a business.
| Then it became an attention refinery.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >And I don't just mean that nobody uses it anymore.
|
| It depends on country. For some countries Facebook is the most
| used social network and there are many real people with daily
| activity on Facebook.
|
| The same is true for WhatsApp. It might not be used in US but
| it's very successful elsewhere.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| It's interesting and very annoying. I use FB basically to follow
| a couple groups that I've followed for like 15 years and a couple
| family members. Most of what it shows me seems to be related to
| interests I have or anything I slow down for even 5 seconds to
| process. Like "slow down when scrolling to see if I really am
| seeing the insane thing I think" and it'll show me more. Sometime
| I report stuff. Like a real (I think) thirst trap holding up a
| sexual innuendo/come on with the writing reversed. But they never
| actually take action on anything I report no matter how fake,
| false, or innaproproate it is. I also routinely block everything
| it ever shows me with AI (photorealistic AI images of history
| with a chapter of writing seem common).
|
| It's all a big joke of spam and scam.
|
| ...but engaging even slightly in a few specific topics or
| interests seems to make the worst of it go away for more of those
| topics.
| tempodox wrote:
| With OpenAI leading the way with ads in their chatbots, that's
| where all the money will be made. There are no ad blockers in
| chatbots. That's why Zuck is frantically trying to catch up in
| the "AI" race. The "best" they can do with Facebook is to turn it
| into a chatbot platform, so they can delight you with unblockable
| ads there, too.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| IG has been doing this crap for years. I just wanted swing dance
| and poker videos. Around 1am they start pumping thirst traps at
| you.
|
| Not on any meta.
| andrepd 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 really is what makes everything worse isn't it? That
| engaging with the tech giants is borderline required (if not
| _literally_ required) to function in the world.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-
| generated, with generic captions.
|
| I never seriously used Facebook; only once when a reallife buddy
| wanted means to communicate and I did not have a smartphone. But
| it was already really awful back then.
|
| Now that AI spams down and eliminates real human beings, I guess
| many of these anti-social websites will die. Or at the least be
| in serious decline from where they can not easily escape anymore.
| Because which real human being wants all that AI slop?
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| I noticed this a while ago. And the op isn't even experience the
| degradation of what could have been a huge platform: FB
| marketplace.
|
| I thought during the pandemic FB marketplace was going to go
| somewhere. I thought they would try to solve physical delivery
| with like an Uber service and credit network for financials etc.
| it would be huge.
|
| But no. What has happened is that primary dealers are now
| flooding marketplace with fake low ball posts to make it unusable
| and destroy the secondary market.
|
| I recently was shopping for bunk beds and lo and behind there
| were hundreds of not thousands of posts just for my local area
| all from maybe a dozen or so accounts created around 2023.
|
| This is somebody's business (spam order flow as a service) and I
| assume that they pay fb enough for some API they fb literally
| doesn't care.
|
| My theory is that every single feature on FB is a/b tested to be
| as bad as it can be if it maximizes screen time. Search doesn't
| work. You can't find your profile settings or feeds easily. All
| on purpose to maximize the time you spend there.
|
| The feed has been dead for me for ages. I would recommend many
| users simply use it as a storage log book and increase FB costs
| by requesting all your data occasionally.
|
| It's one of the worst companies out there for explicit bad
| behaviour IMO.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| I don't use Facebook except for messenger. Not for me but for
| family. I keep getting sussy videos on my feed, I can keep
| blocking or saying I don't want them. They still pop up. Facebook
| is just full bait videos to try and get engagement.
|
| Facebook could've evolved but it made bad decisions, alot of bad
| decisions.
| sneak wrote:
| Their decisions couldn't have been that bad, as you are still
| an active user.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| No. I would say they got my family hooked using it. If
| someone could produce a facebook alternative I would be
| satisfied.
| locallost wrote:
| The conclusion doesn't follow from the content. Facebook is not
| cooked, humans are cooked.
| weatherlite wrote:
| The title is silly. Facebook "family of apps" have 3 billions
| users and still growing. Usage per user still going up. They
| are a money making machine not slowing down, I deleted my
| Facebook long ago but as a company I hold their stock; I
| realize 3 billion > my personal preference.
| bdangubic wrote:
| Company is Meta and post is not talking about Meta as a
| company but Facebook.
|
| Facebook itself is likely cooked but probably not in the
| immediate future. for younger generation Facebook is like AOL
| for us ;)
| jwr wrote:
| This is country-dependent, I think. In Poland, for example,
| schools and kindgergartens still pressure parents to sign consent
| forms allowing them to post images of kids on Facebook. "For
| promotional purposes".
|
| Everybody signs. Well, not everybody, but I am one of the very
| few lone outliers.
| maipen wrote:
| No, it's not. This is a real issue everywhere. The algos don't
| discriminate anymore.
| Aldipower wrote:
| I have a similar experience with OpenAI. Just want to apply with
| my MCP App, but the application process, a multi step automated
| form submission, is totally flawed, buggy and broken, so that the
| form for apps submissions is simply not working. Trying to report
| this bug just results in an AI response black hole on their
| support address. No real humans there. The whole OpenAI back end
| platform is unbelievably buggy, nothing works. No wonder, if you
| cannot report _their_ bugs. I cannot advertise a MCP App for
| ChatGPT to the users of my platform, if there isn't a minimum
| level of trust, between OpenAI and me. If I cannot talk to a real
| human I simply do not take the brand of my platform, where I put
| countless years of effort in, and throw it in some out-of-control
| venture company maelstrom.
| jeandejean wrote:
| The author seems to think his personal defunct and bloated feed
| is representative of what other users are experiencing... Come
| on!
| firtoz wrote:
| I checked mine, and it's still got family news, and some friends
| etc. There were 1-2 items of slop but not that bad...
|
| I was more surprised by how I didn't even realise or hear about
| one of my cousins getting pregnant, another cousin of mine
| getting married, and another one passing away. I have been living
| abroad for 18 years though so fair enough but still feels a
| little bit odd.
| tim333 wrote:
| If you are on the web, the fbpurity extension helps a lot. I just
| checked my feed and no junk. Trying the iphone app instead it's
| just a head wrecking steam of garbage.
| donatj wrote:
| My Facebook is bad, but I still see a bunch of posts by friends.
| Instagram on the other hand went from a stream of artsy photos my
| friends posted of their vacations to a literal river of AI
| generated garbage.
|
| Until about a year ago I really liked Instagram because it had
| been the last bastion of _content by friends_.
|
| Now my feed goes - maybe one post from friends
| if I am lucky - 1-2 posts from content creators or local
| stores I like but don't follow - endless stream of rage
| bait / slop / thirst traps
|
| I just don't feel compelled to even open instagram anymore.
| latexr wrote:
| In the comments I'm seeing a lot of people saying they either can
| or cannot reproduce, but no one is sharing a location. That could
| be highly relevant, I'm betting even something vague like US or
| EU might play a part.
| m000 wrote:
| We all acknowledge the AI slop posts. The question is what
| fraction of the comments under the posts is also AI slop. And how
| long until we see AI-targetted ads, to manifest the Dead Internet
| Theory in its fullest.
| fHr wrote:
| Good hope it dies.
| bradley13 wrote:
| I haven't logged into Facebook for many years, but this made me
| curious. I'm a guy, in my 60s. Looking at my feed, the first two
| posts are family/friends, the third is some video about a guy I
| never heard of, the next three f/f, then a political post, etc..
|
| Overall, about 2:1 family/friends vs. crap. That's still too much
| crap, but no "thirst posts" at all. Maybe those only target
| younger guys?
|
| Logging out now. I just have no interest in how a cousin I
| haven't seen in decades has redecorated her bedroom.
| bilekas wrote:
| What's more concerning is that this is not Facebook that is
| cooked, it's the users who are cooked. Facebooks Algo will only
| do and continue what brings the most engagement. More and more we
| are seeing people, mostly younger it seems, be fine with Ai
| content filling their feeds. It's becoming normalized now so that
| it can continue to be monetized.
|
| Interestingly these companies once promoted 'body positivity' and
| now they're pushing down literally unrealistic standards of
| beauty, but that's another topic of inducing mental illness.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| If users were the problem, why does it immediately show garbage
| content to new users or males, with zero evidence they want it,
| as written by other comments here?
| bilekas wrote:
| Because without enough usage data on the OP, then the algo
| will revert to what is most successful to those with the info
| they DO have on him.
|
| i.e : Thirst traps and bait videos.
| Ecozz wrote:
| One could argue fox news was the original algorithmic content
| provider. Quite easily. 30+ years of it now. If those folks don't
| need deprogramming no one does.
| kranke155 wrote:
| The Internet is now a hipnotic experience that learns how to
| hypnotise you. And whoever controls the AI controls it
| christkv wrote:
| Just ban algorithms on feeds. It seems to do nothing but harm.
| Keep it on pages and put those in their own tab.
| synergy20 wrote:
| if it's so off and out of fashion,why does it have such a huge
| profit from selling ads? even tiktok uses it for ads. looks like
| its daily active user is still huge and even growing?
| andai wrote:
| So there's a strange situation with the incentives here.
|
| The whole point of the AI posts with the AI bots in the comments
| section is they're waiting for the one clueless actual human to
| show up so they can scam them.
|
| But here, the obviousness of the scam is a feature. Just like,
| obvious scams in the spam are actually a _feature_ because they
| select for the most gullible people to scam.
|
| So this is funny because, the shittiness of the AI images is
| actually a feature in the same way. The continued improvement of
| image generation models will actually worsen the situation from
| the scammers point of view, because they won't effectively filter
| for dummies anymore.
| eel wrote:
| I use Facebook for a specific automotive model group. All the
| forums that used to host content have either shut down or gone
| inactive, and it's the literally the only active online community
| for the car platform. I've learned to scroll slowly over the car
| posts, and never to engage or linger on other content.
|
| I found even if I am interested in other content (e.g., NFL
| football) nearly all other interests are flooded with false AI
| content. A common pattern is pages will paste "BREAKING NEWS"
| then describe a trade of players between two teams that never
| happened. Another pattern is "<most popular player on team X>
| does something <positive or negative> towards the LGBTQ
| community." These generate tons of engagement with people either
| for, against, or upset that it's fake. Fortunately the car
| community I follow is obscure enough to not have engagebait.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| Reading through these comments, I really miss Reddit's old
| default homepage.
|
| Sure, you could have your own curated feed, but there was also
| r/all and everyone seemed to use it, so everyone saw relatively
| the same thing.
|
| It would sadly never work today, but it was great back then.
| tetris11 wrote:
| The Fediverse has seen a rampant increase in bot activity
| recently (easily squashed by sane moderators), which to me is a
| signal that "Reddit is Cooked" and the windup merchants have
| wised up to where their target audience is going
| fullshark wrote:
| This sounds like you miss the sense of community reddit used to
| have, I don't think that would have lasted forever, we were all
| so naive re: social media 10+ years ago.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| use this to just see friend's stuff in chronological order. block
| any algo stuff FB inserts. limit use to once a day (or week).
|
| "https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr"
| cush wrote:
| I wonder if Facebook is even 2% of Meta's business
| DANmode wrote:
| > is this just something wacky with my algorithm?
|
| Yes.
|
| Your training data for algorithmically answering the question of
| "what will they engage habitually with next?" is ten years old.
|
| They're almost certainly not resting on this usecase,
|
| coasting on you adding a new friend, or replying to some
| messages, or doing SOMETHING to steer the "recent context" part
| of the algorithm.
|
| Which you're probably not doing, right?
|
| Anyway: coolest blog of the month award. Love the different-
| design-per-post trend!
| ddmma wrote:
| Ideally your mind will be uploaded to META cloud and then live in
| that simulation as long there is electricity on this planet. With
| the Oculus you can talk to your ancestors and connect to other
| dimensions. As long your social graph peers don't post so much
| there a lot of push from the dystopian algorithms.
| willangelo wrote:
| Very nice to see this post and realize like I'm not the only one
| seeing things like this. Two quick stories:
|
| I have always been a late mover to social networks, started using
| Facebook after many years of everybody around me using it and the
| same happened with Instagram. More recently, short videos and
| reels never caught my eye, never watched them and honestly took a
| long time to even realize they existed within Instagram and were
| not only a TikTok thing, but one time I decided to check it out
| and I got flooded with exactly the type of content the OP shared:
| thirst traps, women in the gym, AI garbage. This led to an
| interesting chat with my girlfriend btw, who was right next to me
| when I had this brilliant idea.
|
| Took no more than 5 interactions in a course of a week or so of
| "open reels -> scroll down 3 or 4 videos -> exit" for the
| algorithm to be 100% more in tune with pages I follow on
| Instagram and content that appears in my feed (sports, tech,
| travel)
|
| Also, similar thing for YouTube: if you watch a video in an
| anonymous tab, the home page will start empty, with no
| recommendations. After you watch the video, it will become 50%
| content similar to the video you just watch and 50% thirst traps.
| davecrawley wrote:
| In the beginning there was a simple idea. If you were a platform
| and just acted as a conduit of information but didn't decide what
| got visibility - you weren't responsible for the content you
| transmitted - like a phone company isn't responsible for what you
| say on the phone. If you were a publisher - and exerted editorial
| control - such as deciding what gets put on the front page and
| what is buried 10 pages deep in the newspaper - you were
| responsible for the content. If you published libelous,
| fraudulent or other information the law held that you had decided
| to amplify that piece of information so were also held
| responsible.
|
| In the beginning social media was a platform - you wrote
| something, your friends and family saw it - they really were just
| a conduit of information. Then social media decided they could
| suck up more attention by deciding what you saw - but, because
| its expensive to deal with libel suits they wanted to be
| categorized as a platform - even though they weren't. They
| succeeded - the good platform / publisher principle failed.
|
| Most of the problems we are now seeing with Facebook, Amazaon,
| Ticktock could be solved instantly by saying - if you have a
| recommendation engine - you are responsible for the output of
| that recommendation engine. If it amplifies libelous, fraudulent
| or other such information - well you as the publisher are
| responsible.
|
| It would mean that Ticktock, Facebook and others would drop their
| totally addictive design - as they would be afraid of being held
| responsible of the information which they are using to get users
| hooked. If they, by some miracle didn't drop their recommendation
| engine, and started acting as if they were responsible for the
| information their transmitted, your news feed wouldn't be filled
| with utter garbage. It would mean that fraudulent anti-vaxx
| conspiracy theories wouldn't get play on the internet. It would
| mean that libelous statements wouldn't get play. The list goes on
| and on.
|
| Its simple, consistent with pre-existing law, and effective.
| paprikanotfound wrote:
| Wireheading is getting close to some of us.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Good place to buy and sell used shit though.
| smusamashah wrote:
| I have two twitter accounts. On one I like indie games, ai stuff,
| Gaussian Splats etc and some other things and that is what my
| feed is filled. I discover so many good games here. I keep it
| that way by not watching and liking randomly recommended things.
| My second twitter account is full of crappy videos (fights,
| accidents and sometimes very horrific).
|
| I have never seen things of my interest on Facebook ever. It is
| full male focused staged thirst crap. I log in to that account
| may be once or twice a year.
|
| I think Facebook should be steerable like Twitter. I haven't
| tried because it's super clingy.
| yasonk wrote:
| I have a solution to this(and I've been talking about issues with
| the algorithmic social media for some years now). A POC I created
| during a hackathon populates your social media feed, but you
| define the algorithm using English language. Basically you can
| say, "I want to see more electricity related posts from Neil
| deGrasse Tyson. Show only family related posts from Bob Smith,
| but hide everything that is political". (Got second place out of
| 200+ participants)
|
| The solutions leverages a social network with over 40 million
| users, so the network effect is already solved to a degree. If
| anyone has the means to spin this up into a business, let me
| know.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Remember MySpace? It was a platform full of millennials mostly.
| Facebook became the next thing but if you note teens dont want to
| be where their parents are, it takes away from their ability to
| express themselves. Then as they grow they might adopt platforms
| like Facebook, but Facebook might not find the adoption they are
| hoping for.
|
| I think there will be a follow up to Tik Tok in the future that
| will have the next generation as the Zoomers and younger become
| adults, and their kids want a platform where they fan be "free"
| on.
| arnvald wrote:
| IMO Facebook has a bigger problem - I'm a millennial, far
| closer to a middle aged man than to a teenager, and I don't
| want to be on Facebook because it's so full of garbage. There's
| just nothing interesting except for Market.
|
| Surely there'll be a follow up to TikTok and other trendy apps,
| but Facebook is where I should want to be, and I don't
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm a millennial too, and I log into Facebook like once or
| twice every 3 months. I don't use it as much as I used to.
| bjornnn wrote:
| was it really necessary to blur the image of the "mildly
| revealing clothing" i.e. women wearing crop tops? is this saudi
| arabia?
| bjornnn wrote:
| was it really necessary to blur the image of ai women wearing
| crop tops? is this saudi arabia?
| veunes wrote:
| The depressing part is that generative slop is a perfect match
| for the incentive structure: infinite supply, tuned to trigger
| comments, and you don't need real creators. If your product
| metric is time-on-site, this is what you get
| kornork wrote:
| What's stopping someone from literally cloning the minimal
| feature-set we loved, and so many people here seem to be pining
| for?
|
| I scrolled down a fair bit and didn't see anyone posting an
| alternative.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Spam and abuse. That is, assuming you get critical mass to
| begin with, but as soon as people find out another service
| where they can upload files to and the like, the abuse will
| begin. Facebook employs (tens of?) thousands of people for
| content moderation, and that's _after_ their well-trained
| automated systems filter out the worst / well known stuff.
|
| I don't know how other, newer social media (e.g. bluesky)
| handle it. I suppose there's off the shelf software / services
| for something like that?
| bearjaws wrote:
| Network effects.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
| TuringNYC wrote:
| My FB feed is also people I _dont_ follow. Not sure which
| brilliant PM came up with this idea, but if I wanted to see
| random content I could just go to a magazine or newspaper. I used
| to go to FB to actually see photos /updates from my friends and
| most people recognize we lost that several years ago. The second
| problem is just every third post being an ad. I deleted the app
| several years ago.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-21 23:02 UTC)