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on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Facebook is cooked
jonrandy wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
I don't spend much time on FB, but almost all (95%+) of the stuff in my
feed is from people and pages I follow... and there are no ads
whatsoever, or thirst trap posts. This is on both the app and the
website. The other >5% is posts from suggested groups/pages that are
generally pretty relevant.
realaaa wrote 15 hours 56 min ago:
let's go to Mastodon ! err.. or other thing
shit, let's just go outside
TuringNYC wrote 21 hours 28 min ago:
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.
kornork wrote 22 hours 21 min ago:
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.
bearjaws wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
Network effects.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Cthulhu_ wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
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?
veunes wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
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
bjornnn wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
was it really necessary to blur the image of ai women wearing crop
tops? is this saudi arabia?
bjornnn wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
was it really necessary to blur the image of the "mildly revealing
clothing" i.e. women wearing crop tops? is this saudi arabia?
giancarlostoro wrote 1 day ago:
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 âfreeâ on.
arnvald wrote 1 day ago:
IMO Facebook has a bigger problem - Iâm a millennial, far closer
to a middle aged man than to a teenager, and I donât want to be on
Facebook because itâs so full of garbage. Thereâs just nothing
interesting except for Market.
Surely thereâll be a follow up to TikTok and other trendy apps, but
Facebook is where I should want to be, and I donât
giancarlostoro wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
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.
yasonk wrote 1 day ago:
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.
smusamashah wrote 1 day ago:
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.
MisterTea wrote 1 day ago:
Good place to buy and sell used shit though.
paprikanotfound wrote 1 day ago:
Wireheading is getting close to some of us.
davecrawley wrote 1 day ago:
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.
willangelo wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Ylpertnodi wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
Deleting/ turning off history = nothing on the home page.
ddmma wrote 1 day ago:
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 donât post so much there a lot of push from
the dystopian algorithms.
DANmode wrote 1 day ago:
> is this just something wacky with my algorithm?
Yes.
Your training data for algorithmically answering the question of
âwhat will they engage habitually with next?â is ten years old.
Theyâre 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 ârecent contextâ part of the
algorithm.
Which youâre probably not doing, right?
Anyway: coolest blog of the month award.
Love the different-design-per-post trend!
DANmode wrote 18 hours 15 min ago:
almost certainly not testing*
cush wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder if Facebook is even 2% of Metaâs business
gorfian_robot wrote 1 day ago:
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).
" [1] "
HTML [1]: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
CamelCaseName wrote 1 day ago:
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.
fullshark wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tetris11 wrote 1 day ago:
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
eel wrote 1 day ago:
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 "
does something 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.
andai wrote 1 day ago:
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.
synergy20 wrote 1 day ago:
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?
christkv wrote 1 day ago:
Just ban algorithms on feeds. It seems to do nothing but harm. Keep it
on pages and put those in their own tab.
kranke155 wrote 1 day ago:
The Internet is now a hipnotic experience that learns how to hypnotise
you. And whoever controls the AI controls it
Ecozz wrote 1 day ago:
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.
bilekas wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
bradley13 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
fHr wrote 1 day ago:
Good hope it dies.
m000 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
latexr wrote 1 day ago:
In the comments Iâm seeing a lot of people saying they either can or
cannot reproduce, but no one is sharing a location. That could be
highly relevant, Iâm betting even something vague like US or EU might
play a part.
donatj wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tim333 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
firtoz wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jeandejean wrote 1 day ago:
The author seems to think his personal defunct and bloated feed is
representative of what other users are experiencing... Come on!
Aldipower wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jwr wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
No, itâs not. This is a real issue everywhere. The algos donât
discriminate anymore.
locallost wrote 1 day ago:
The conclusion doesn't follow from the content. Facebook is not cooked,
humans are cooked.
weatherlite wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 ;)
Sparkyte wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Their decisions couldnât have been that bad, as you are still an
active user.
Sparkyte wrote 1 day ago:
No. I would say they got my family hooked using it. If someone
could produce a facebook alternative I would be satisfied.
nobodywillobsrv wrote 1 day ago:
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.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
andrepd wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
ChicagoDave wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tempodox wrote 1 day ago:
With OpenAI leading the way with ads in their chatbots, thatâs where
all the money will be made. There are no ad blockers in chatbots.
Thatâs why Zuck is frantically trying to catch up in the âAIâ
race. The âbestâ they can do with Facebook is to turn it into a
chatbot platform, so they can delight you with unblockable ads there,
too.
Glyptodon wrote 1 day ago:
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.
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
>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.
rolodexter2023 wrote 1 day ago:
Social media didnât start as a psychological experiment. It started
as a tool to connect friends. Then it became a business. Then it became
an attention refinery.
rolodexter2023 wrote 1 day ago:
Facebook manipulated attention. AI platforms will manipulate
narratives. Action models and VR systems will manipulate lived
experiences.
mixmastamyk wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tabs_or_spaces wrote 1 day ago:
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.
rolodexter2023 wrote 1 day ago:
When feeds were mostly friends and pages you chose, the algorithm felt
like a helper. Now it feels like an environment youâre dropped into,
one that doesnât share your values, your context, or your sense of
whatâs appropriate.
CodeBit26 wrote 1 day ago:
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
jfvinueza wrote 1 day ago:
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.
compounding_it wrote 1 day ago:
Young men and women have such unrealistic expectations from
relationships that itâs trashing their mental health when reality
doesnât 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.
0x38B wrote 1 day ago:
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.
sodafountan wrote 1 day ago:
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.
replwoacause wrote 1 day ago:
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.
revicon wrote 1 day ago:
Bookmark this page... [1] its a filter to just show you posts from your
friends, no groups, nothing else.
HTML [1]: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
t1234s wrote 1 day ago:
Facebook is the original moltbook
mvdtnz wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Fair enough - I didnât 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.
ahallock wrote 1 day ago:
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.
goalieca wrote 1 day ago:
Facebook 1.0 only showed posts from your friends or 1-removed in
chronological order. It was great!
wrxd wrote 1 day ago:
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 itâs
fair to assume they have a more precise profile of the author they
could have used
thenthenthen wrote 1 day ago:
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)
fma wrote 1 day ago:
There's is a button at the top of the app you can hit to just show
posts from your friends...try using it.
kinnth wrote 1 day ago:
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!
dakolli wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
LarsDu88 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
overgard wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
> 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.
justonceokay wrote 1 day ago:
âYour algorithm is bad because you are badâ is the 2026 version
of Double Predestination.
barrkel wrote 1 day ago:
I got the impression the author is female.
LarsDu88 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jrmg wrote 1 day ago:
You appear to be saying that this is the content it will just serve
to a middle age man who hasnât used it in a long time by default.
You donât think thatâs problematic?
LarsDu88 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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
_3u10 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
LarsDu88 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
boxedemp wrote 1 day ago:
I can't explain why it's problematic without sounding like a
conspiracy theorist.
Maybe I should reevaluate my perspective.
jamwil wrote 1 day ago:
Found a clanker
LarsDu88 wrote 1 day ago:
Holy shit you're right. Meta is operating LLM bots on Hacker
News.
random3 wrote 1 day ago:
I guess they moved fast
rcpt wrote 1 day ago:
Marketplace is pretty good. I never use Craigslist anymore.
Otherwise yeah.
egonschiele wrote 1 day ago:
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!
overgard wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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".
insane_dreamer wrote 1 day ago:
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 :/
b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote 1 day ago:
>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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
>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....
bitdeep wrote 1 day ago:
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.
achenatx wrote 1 day ago:
mine is great, it is all posts from my groups and a few from my
friends.
cantalopes wrote 1 day ago:
I don't advicate for faceook but my feed does not look like that at all
skybrian wrote 1 day ago:
The main feed is terrible, but Menu -> Feeds -> Friends will show just
friend updates (and ads). Make a bookmark.
mrighele wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
avalys wrote 1 day ago:
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.
2muchcoffeeman wrote 1 day ago:
All social media is like this though. Itâs all garbage.
Itâs 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.
econ wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tamimio wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs 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, itâs probably too obvious in FB
since itâs an old site with old audience, but if you go to instagram
and the likes itâs all about thirst traps, which is a result of
having a hypersexual society plus monetization.
hedayet wrote 1 day ago:
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
Facebookâs perspective, thatâs not collapse - itâs
specialization.
Cyclone_ wrote 1 day ago:
"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?
api wrote 1 day ago:
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.
krick wrote 1 day ago:
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.
MaintenanceMode wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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!
rimeice wrote 1 day ago:
Yeh I think thereâs 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 doesnât 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, itâs a total bin fire.
r0m4n0 wrote 1 day ago:
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 :)
Quitschquat wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm there for the TânâA too
snowhale wrote 1 day ago:
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.
nvarsj wrote 1 day ago:
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)
shirro wrote 1 day ago:
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.
quantified wrote 1 day ago:
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"
0xDEAFBEAD wrote 1 day ago:
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.
doginasuit wrote 1 day ago:
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.
LogicFailsMe wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 23 hours 39 min ago:
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.
shaky-carrousel wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
elevatortrim wrote 1 day ago:
It is sad to think some
of the worldâs smartest brains developed these incredibly
successful algorithms.
They are equally capable of developing something to lift people up.
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
>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 1 day ago:
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.
vasco wrote 1 day ago:
Should I stop using my phone because some people do crime through the
phone so I'm protecting children by not calling anyone?
rolodexter2023 wrote 1 day ago:
escalation is often profitable before it is visibly catastrophic
decimalenough wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
socalgal2 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jamincan wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
âright-wing rage baitâ
Assuming you mean crap like âschool book bansâ, climate
change denialism, or some dude coal rolling⦠You realize that
is actually bait targeted at you specifically right? It
wouldnât work as bait if it was shit you agreed with! Itâs
actually left-wing rage bait!
If you were immersed in the âright wing echo chamberâ 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 youâd see articles about
cities banning Christmas lights in town hall and Starbucks no
longer using Christmas themed cups. Itâs all fucking made up
nonsense. No real human acts the way these algorithms portray us.
Honestly even âright-wingâ and âleft-wingâ are part of
the trick. Real people donât exist on a binary axis. Weâre
all a weird mess of values and experiences that donât fit
neatly into two boxes. But the algorithm needs two teams, because
you canât sell outrage without an enemy.
The first step to detox is seeing everyone as human not as a
contrived label.
jamincan wrote 1 day ago:
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.
foxglacier wrote 1 day ago:
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.
javascriptfan69 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
alfiedotwtf wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs crazy (but true) to think that by slowly manipulating
someoneâs feed, Zuck and Musk could convert peopleâs religions,
political leanings, personal values, etc with little work. In fact,
I would be surprised if there was NOT some part of Facebook and
Twitterâs admin or support page where a userâs
âpreferencesâ could be modified i.e âover the next 8 months,
convert the user to a staunch evangelical Christianâ etc
cluckindan wrote 1 day ago:
FB was always conversion as a service
aix1 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
We live in a society that only values money so why should anyone
optimise for s.th. else?
aix1 wrote 12 hours 40 min ago:
This frames society as some exogenous entity that we have no
influence over.
It also assumes that the society is homogenous, in the sense
that everyone cares about the same thing. I don't think that's
true at all.
bigfudge wrote 10 hours 42 min ago:
But the people with control of mechanisms of power like
social influence do only care about money, so the voices of
people who have other values become irrelevant.
timacles wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
It's literally why Leon bought Twitter. A Mass influence vehicle.
blibble wrote 1 day ago:
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
toss1 wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
THIS, EXACTLY!
If there is an algorithm, the social media platform is exactly as
responsible for the content as any publisher
If it is only a straight chronological feed of posts by actually
followed accts, the social media platform gets Section 230
protections.
The social media platforms have gamed the law, gotten legitimate
protections for/from what their users post, but then they
manipulate it to their advantage more than any publisher.
>>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
ZeroGravitas wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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. [1] 1. The Trump Administration Plot to Destroy Public
Education - [2] 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.
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNXHSMmaq_s
HTML [2]: https://prospect.org/2026/01/13/trump-mcmahon-departme...
cruffle_duffle wrote 1 day ago:
> never threatened democracy
The beautiful part is how non-partisan this is. It cooks all
minds regardless of tribe.
quotemstr wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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!
bigfudge wrote 10 hours 45 min ago:
You write as though the selection of information by
algorithmic feeds is a politically neutral act, which comes
about by free actions of the people. But this is
demonstrably not the case. Selecting hard for
misinformation which enrages (because it increases
engagement) means that social media are pushing populations
further and further to the right. And this serves the
interest of the literal handful of billionaires who control
those sites. This is the unhealthy concentration of power
the OP writes about, and it is a threat to democracy as
we've known it.
hiddencost wrote 1 day ago:
They fought a civil war over the labor required to produce
tobacco.
dudeinjapan wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
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.
Itâs hard to claim itâs 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.
carefulfungi wrote 1 day ago:
> 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!
djkivi wrote 1 day ago:
Something like The Prize for the tobacco industry could be very
interesting!
roryirvine wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Distinguishing between the economic and politics seems
impossibleâhence the term "political economy". Splitting
the two was a bad decision.
roryirvine wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote 1 day ago:
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...
nradov wrote 1 day ago:
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 21 hours 29 min ago:
Clearly you are unfamiliar with his work and
influence.
You could easily fix that with a bit of effort.
nradov wrote 20 hours 15 min ago:
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.
cess11 wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
OK, show some examples.
mort96 wrote 1 day ago:
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?
carefulfungi wrote 1 day ago:
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.
bigfudge wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Just because something is potentially harmful doesn't mean
it should be illegal or otherwise prohibited.
mort96 wrote 1 day ago:
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?
danielheath wrote 1 day ago:
230 is an obvious place to say âif 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.
BoingBoomTschak wrote 1 day ago:
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.
blharr wrote 1 day ago:
The breeze is more like a 2 ton harvester expertly engineered
to knock your tree down.
mort96 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jcgrillo wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
HTML [1]: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12584
jballanc wrote 1 day ago:
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.
gzread wrote 1 day ago:
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.
safety1st wrote 1 day ago:
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.
bjt wrote 1 day ago:
Moderation and recommendation are not the same thing.
jimbokun wrote 1 day ago:
The way modern social media platforms are designed, yes they
are.
bjt wrote 15 hours 12 min ago:
The point is that they don't have to be. You can moderate
(scan for inappropriate content, copyrighted content, etc)
without needing to have an algorithmic recommendation feed.
AnthonyMouse wrote 1 day ago:
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.
davecrawley wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ben_w wrote 1 day ago:
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.
reverius42 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
"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.
phicoh wrote 1 day ago:
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.
intended wrote 1 day ago:
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.
arcticfox wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Sweet best back-and-forth All-sides on this topic. Itâs
very complex. On what rules ought we regulate, if any?
Probably some somehow.
idiotsecant wrote 1 day ago:
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.
flir wrote 1 day ago:
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.
DANmode wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
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.
mlrtime wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jjav wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
"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 1 day ago:
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.
flir wrote 1 day ago:
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.
scotty79 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
ipaddr wrote 1 day ago:
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.
fatherwavelet wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mlrtime wrote 1 day ago:
The other side sees you the same way, congrats on being
enlightened.
duskdozer wrote 1 day ago:
"don't agree with them" is carrying a lot of weight here, isn't
it?
AlexeyBelov wrote 8 hours 50 min ago:
It does.
One side: this group of people shouldn't even exist.
The other side: no, let them exist actually.
flir wrote 1 day ago:
It's a month-old account.
cruffle_duffle wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs HN. People create new accounts here all the time to
protect their anonymity.
AlexeyBelov wrote 8 hours 51 min ago:
Trolls do as well. Very often if a comment is "bad", it
comes from a relatively new account. Then it gets banned
and a new account is created. Technically it's ban
evasion, but dang doesn't really want to change anything
at this point.
harvey9 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
garte wrote 1 day ago:
what the poster mentioned did not sound like a balanced exchange
of ideas was about to happen...
UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote 1 day ago:
What next? The intellectual dark web?
I think we can have a free market of ideas or whatever youâre
fetishising without it meaning that I canât 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?
cruffle_duffle wrote 1 day ago:
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. Itâs all fake
bullshit algorithmically optimized to divide.
Everybody thinks their tribe is immune to this sort of stuff
but it isnât. Itâs all the same nonsense packaged for
different echo chambers.
At the end of the day, everybody is human. It isnât us vs
them, itâs just us.
vasco wrote 1 day ago:
Your family photos should be on the Photos app and you'd have
no problems.
flir wrote 1 day ago:
Do you think you should have full control over the web browser on
the computer you own?
AnthonyMouse wrote 1 day ago:
âYour scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they
could, they didn't stop to think if they should.â
Having the right to choose what you see doesn't mean you should
choose to build yourself an ideological bubble.
flir wrote 1 day ago:
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 23 hours 45 min ago:
Assuming that everyone in the other tribe is "hateful
people and pub bores" is kind of the problem.
idiotsecant wrote 1 day ago:
I mainly want to clean other people's feeds. There are an enormous
amount of people that I need to undergo an algorithm detox.
AuryGlenz wrote 1 day ago:
My mother-in-laws Facebook feed is full of fake news - from the
left, politically. My own mom doesnât 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 donât think
we can fix that.
macintux wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, there's always someone saying "Just delete your Facebook
account" as if that solves the underlying "Facebook is actively
encouraging divisiveness" problem.
fbistrash wrote 1 day ago:
Facebook is nothing but trash. Stopped using it way back in 2012
dchristian wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Aurornis wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 [1] 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.
HTML [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/
npilk wrote 1 day ago:
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.
throwaway876345 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
RajT88 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dangus wrote 1 day ago:
I was about to point out two things:
1. This bit you just pointed out. Facebook suggesting Yoleendadong,
thatâs not weird, sheâs 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 donât 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 heâs browsing this kind
of stuff in a browser with set Facebook cookies. Thatâs why you
canât use Meta products without Facebook container.
OP is seeing AI titties because other websites that utilize
Facebookâs 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 donât like. It even has a
button for you to tell it what you donât like.
RajT88 wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
> thirst slop like this.
Buddy, I wish the thirst slop on Facebook was like this.
I told my wife quite openly how I went through a 6 week period
where I just couldn't get rid of AI generated booby photos of Salma
Hayek. Why her? Who knows? I tried everything. Eventually it
fixed itself.
Occasionally, FB ads churn up straight up porn which is pretending
to be something else. I'm not talking about OF girls - I actually
think comparatively they are pretty noble - they pay for ads, and
don't bullshit you what it's about. A lot of them are less risque
than the people pushing their Insta or whatever.
dangus wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
Well, ads versus algorithmic content recommendations are two very
different things.
If FB wants to have low standards for their advertisers, thatâs
on them. Itâs not illegal or even inherently immoral to
advertise porn, especially if FB already knows youâre over 18.
But, in general, the algorithmic content recommendations do
follow what you want. Ads are different because advertisers pay
for the users they want, not the other way around.
And more reminders for this discussion: Facebook isnât a
necessary utility, it has competitors, it is not a monopoly, you
can delete your account without any downside to your life. This
is very much unlike services like the Apple App Store or Google
Play where itâs difficult to function in modern society without
using them.
Of course, Iâm not saying social media shouldnât have more
regulation and Iâm not trying to defend them as a corporation.
Itâs just that at some point the best way to complain about
products is to stop using them.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
The article didn't suggest that the video mentioned was AI slop, it
correctly recognised it as human generated.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
I know he said it was not AI, but he but still described it as
âslopâ, lumping it in with the other examples. And said it
was a video âwhere a woman decides to intentionally start a
fight with her boyfriendâ which isnât really an accurate
description. Sheâs a well known comedian playing an obviously
exaggerated character that pokes fun at relationship dynamics.
My point here isnât simply that âpeople canât differentiate
between AI and not AIâ (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 isnât 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.
RajT88 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
thot_experiment wrote 1 day ago:
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.
taysix wrote 1 day ago:
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".
richardw wrote 1 day ago:
Every so often my YouTube logs out and Iâm exposed to the view a
ârandom visitorâ would see. Instantly visible because itâs 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.
zer0zzz wrote 1 day ago:
Why do people still complain about fb. FB has been this way for years..
justinhj wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
fer wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
nickvec wrote 1 day ago:
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.
agentifysh wrote 1 day ago:
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.
willturman wrote 1 day ago:
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 â 54% of adults between the ages of 16 and 74
years oldâlack proficiency in literacy, essentially reading below
the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
HTML [1]: https://map.barbarabush.org
0xDEAFBEAD wrote 1 day ago:
What's more, the United States has some of the highest reading test
scores in the world: [1] This entire planet is full of idiots
HTML [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/academic-performance?su...
fjsifjasf wrote 1 day ago:
why don't you just name the countries lol?
umvi wrote 1 day ago:
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)?
progforlyfe wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jmward01 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
SubiculumCode wrote 1 day ago:
Facebook IS just veiled ads to OF pron subscriptions.
metalman wrote 1 day ago:
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
nomilk wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jbverschoor wrote 1 day ago:
Change to chronologic timeline, and you'll be cured for your addiction
superfast
morissette wrote 1 day ago:
See I donât scroll; not scrolling means not seeing the junk. I just
post and log off.
maurycyz wrote 1 day ago:
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.
kmfrk wrote 1 day ago:
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.
HTML [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/bexsaltsman.bsky.social/post/3me4ybay...
scaredreally wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mortsnort wrote 1 day ago:
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.
yfw wrote 1 day ago:
You guys are lucky most of mine are scam ads and ragebait
neo_doom wrote 1 day ago:
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.
eastbayjake wrote 1 day ago:
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!
j45 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
einpoklum wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dlev_pika wrote 1 day ago:
I remember Zuckzuck saying out loud that his vision for the platform
was that people wouldnât need actual humans to interact with, and
bots is what youâd mostly get.
Iâve used it enough to understand this is happening now. Literally
impossible to distinguish, unless you know the person.
drivebyhooting wrote 1 day ago:
> 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. Iâve also been forced to engage in the
Zuckerverse. I hate WhatsApp.
AnotherGoodName wrote 1 day ago:
Just reminder that when Meta stock went to ~90 in late 2022 we had
non-stop âFacebook is dead I donât know anyone that uses it lolâ
posts on reddit, hackernews, etc. The stock is ~650 today.
We are not the target audience.
aero142 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ksherlock wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
veunes wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
The part I really agree with is the social impact
tallanvor wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
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.
grogenaut wrote 1 day ago:
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.
basch wrote 1 day ago:
Interestingly enough when you tell Facebook youâre not interested
in a post you can answer why: doesnât match interests, spam,
sexual, insult, donât like creator. One of those isnât like the
other.
Thereâs 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 Ripleyâs Believe it or Not style of trying to be mind
blowing.
If you say not interested to every suggested post of something you
donât follow, itâll try a couple topics and then revert for a bit
to exclusively things you do follow.
is_true wrote 1 day ago:
They might have multiple types of men because it only shows me all
kind of outdoor activities + construction tips
gcanyon wrote 1 day ago:
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?
slibhb wrote 1 day ago:
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.
asveikau wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
Footprint0521 wrote 1 day ago:
This is why I gave up on social media
andai wrote 1 day ago:
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...
jalapenos wrote 1 day ago:
Algorithm has discovered dudes like boobs.
More news at ten.
grishka wrote 1 day ago:
> 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
alsetmusic wrote 1 day ago:
Then they'd undoubtedly show you hot guys. I don't know why this
wouldn't be the obvious answer.
Xenoamorphous wrote 1 day ago:
Probably still a relatively small percentage of the total for them
to care.
steve_adams_86 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
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.
alecco wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
djmips wrote 1 day ago:
I don't have them... :/
3RTB297 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
The sole reason for not using those sites is the whole knowledge
that you have to do this crap.
throwaway290 wrote 1 day ago:
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
disillusioned wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
> 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.
wedog6 wrote 18 hours 15 min ago:
Source:
HTML [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/20/par...
bdangubic wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
that is nothing compared to this: [1] Meta is beyond evil,
like waaaaay beyond evil. In a normal society (that ship has
said for us a while ago) the company would be shut down and
everyone running it at the top level would be in prison for
life
HTML [1]: https://futurism.com/facebook-beauty-targeted-ads
thephyber wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 âit doesnât bother me
anymoreâ, you only become âbanner blindâ 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 donât care for.
kwanbix wrote 1 day ago:
Facebook changes to be more like TikTok. Content to generate
addiction so they can sell more adds.
steezeburger wrote 1 day ago:
I don't like anything even slightly thirst trappy, and my fyp is
clean.
boxedemp wrote 1 day ago:
This is one of the reasons I always identify as non-binary when
asked.
GorbachevyChase wrote 1 day ago:
That is a pretty clever algorithm hack. I wonder if you get
bombarded with pharmaceutical ads as a consequence.
boxedemp wrote 1 day ago:
I block pretty much all ads, but that's an interesting question.
Melonai wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
I also wanted to add a story about my fiancé'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.
neoromantique wrote 1 day ago:
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).
Nursie wrote 1 day ago:
> no matter what you do
I made them go down markedly by setting my age to be over 100.
Doesnât stop some of the thirst trap âreelsâ, but all the
âAsian women would like to get to know middle aged guys like
you!â bullshit went away.
kccqzy wrote 1 day ago:
I donât 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 arenât my type
anyways).
chupchap wrote 1 day ago:
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
sershe wrote 1 day ago:
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.
the_af wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
dunham wrote 1 day ago:
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.
rconti wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
There is definitely more to this. Iâve 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.
walt_grata wrote 20 hours 8 min ago:
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.
steezeburger wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Yeah it's an optimized skinner box. Any reaction above baseline
is sure to be registered and reinforced.
eek2121 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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!
dom96 wrote 1 day ago:
Have you tried clicking "Show me less like this" on those thirst trap
posts?
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
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. :)
disantlor wrote 1 day ago:
yes i deleted facebook eventually because they would not stop
showing me this stuff despite clicking âshow me lessâ many
times
htrp wrote 1 day ago:
it's unfortunately not just your algorithm, but the views and likes
of people who match your demographic specs....
dagurp wrote 1 day ago:
I don't get anything like that. Just memes and people complaining
about dog poo
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
My Facebook account is 21 years old and my Instagram is
probably 15 years old.
This problem only started about two years ago. I didnât
change my behavior.
pwrsysengineer wrote 1 day ago:
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
xethos wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
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.
DANmode wrote 18 hours 16 min ago:
Meanwhile, the algorithm is noticing you paused there, âThis
guy canât get enough of this stuff!â.
someotherperson wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah you should probably delete those photos. Nobody is going to
believe your story (myself included).
replwoacause wrote 1 day ago:
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.
munificent wrote 1 day ago:
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.
thephyber wrote 1 day ago:
You didnât try hard to repro it.
Facebook uses your likes / groups / searches to customize your
feed. If are active and donât 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
didnât reach the end.
throwaway290 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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
youâre a man, but you donât actively like and engage with
specific topics - it will default to AI thirst trap slop.
NewsaHackO wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
trymas wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 articleâs author
havenât visited facebook for 8 yearsâ¦
Cannot say about FB or IG, but on Youtube I get way too
many âAI girlfriendâ 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 articleâs author.
throwaway290 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
disillusioned wrote 1 day ago:
If you click Search in Instagram, what's it show you by default,
before you enter a search term?
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Yet another reason to avoid attention-span-destroying short form
video. :)
chasd00 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
brational wrote 1 day ago:
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?)
elAhmo wrote 1 day ago:
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.
bityard wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
j-bos wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
NewsaHackO wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
This is it - youâve 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 Iâve stopped using it because my brain was melting.
AlexandrB wrote 1 day ago:
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.
sMarsIntruder wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
mbo wrote 1 day ago:
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.
derefr wrote 22 hours 5 min ago:
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?
veunes wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
Your mum's experience is probably what FB is best at: high-trust
network, lots of original photos, lots of comments from real friends
nradov wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
> 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?
hackernewds wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
This is lie, I was there and this is not at all what happened
dang wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
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 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.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mgraczyk wrote 21 hours 12 min ago:
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.
dang wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
Thank you! both for the kind response and the informative
reply :)
kmeisthax wrote 1 day ago:
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.
BorisMelnik wrote 1 day ago:
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.
troupo wrote 1 day ago:
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.
firesteelrain wrote 1 day ago:
If it wasnât for groups, events, and marketplace, I wouldnât use
FB.
Marketplace has supplanted Craigslist near me.
Events - no good replacement. Meetup isnât as ubiquitous.
Groups - nothing as good except maybe groups.io. But, that doesnât
have the same common folk. Itâs still more niche.
It could be that middle America is catching up where big city America
has moved on. And maybe thatâs the demographic that FB is serving
now.
nephihaha wrote 1 day ago:
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.
vanjajaja1 wrote 1 day ago:
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
scotty79 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Sharlin wrote 1 day ago:
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 â 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
â 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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
harel wrote 1 day ago:
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.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
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.
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
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.
KPGv2 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
drnick1 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day 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.
If adults decide to give them all this information aren't they the
ones that should be blamed?
alex1138 wrote 1 day ago:
Facebook automatically tags people in photos
defrost wrote 1 day ago:
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.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
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.
harrall wrote 1 day ago:
People say the same about Instagram but my feed is like all about
making clothes, welding, construction stuff, funny memes,
snowboarding, etc. Itâs all good stuff.
I just donât interact with political content on social media â
not because Iâm apolitical but I donât want to hear random
peopleâs takes on matters.
suzzer99 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
rconti wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 23 hours 13 min ago:
Yup. And unfortunately, I realized I've benefitted from the algo
too. I tried the friends feed, and I ended up with MORE politics!
keyle wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dingaling wrote 1 day ago:
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
SpicyLemonZest wrote 1 day ago:
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.
whyenot wrote 1 day ago:
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.
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dboreham wrote 1 day ago:
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.
graemep wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
> 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.
It depends on the group and how well it is moderated.
I live in an area where everything depends on Facebook. There are
multiple FB groups for the town, the largest of which has 80k
members. Not perfect, but not toxic. The same in other similar
groups.
I am an admin of another with 30k members. It has a tight focus
(exams and qualifications for home ed kids in the UK -
GCSEs/IGCSEs mostly, but other things too), membership is only
for parents of such kids (there are membership questions), the
group is private, posts require approval, irrelevant comments get
deleted, repeat offenders get kicked out. We do not have a lot of
problems (some attempts at spam by tutors, but they get kicked
out).
derefr wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
> 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 â together with a lack of any positive
engagement â 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
â people who have trouble understanding non-verbal signals â
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 â something they "just
ended up doing" â 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 â 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 â
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" â 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.)
graemep wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
Great analysis. I do not think its conspiracy theorist to
believe it to be intentional, or at least a result of KPIs.
One thing I think you are missing is that in person groups are
usually far smaller. Anything with 1,000 people would be
organised and there would be rules of behaviour, moderation of
discussion etc. Most often if something is that big, its mostly
an audience.
I think the other thing that happens in real life groups is
that there is no community or real relationships. If you annoy
people in real life it has consequences. In an FB group there
are none.
veunes wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
Once a group gets big enough...
rightbyte wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
stuaxo wrote 6 hours 56 min ago:
The Dunbar number is 150 for humans but that only measures
maintaining a group, maybe the behave nicely number is smaller.
cyberge99 wrote 1 day ago:
I think after a certain group size people feel immune or that
their alternative thought might have a better chance of landing
with someone.
pavlov wrote 1 day ago:
My Facebook is honestly nice, itâs 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
Iâm their ideal customer, and I donât mind looking at their
handsome models in this seasonâs knitwear). The people I know post
mostly about meaningful or harmless stuff.
But itâs probably like this because I joined over ten years after
everyone else did. I didnât 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.
Thatâs probably what made the difference compared to many whose FB
social graphs were built up early and never pruned.
actionfromafar wrote 1 day ago:
I laughed out loud. "I found that I loved Big Brother from my
youth." Genuinely no offense meant, it was just funny.
jcgrillo wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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! :-)
wvenable wrote 1 day ago:
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.
creddit wrote 1 day ago:
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.
duxup wrote 1 day ago:
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 :(
Itâs certainly the social hub for some groups.
npodbielski wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
npodbielski wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
I am sorry that it happened to you. Maybe I think that I have a
solution because my wife tells me everything worth while from
FB as the frequent user. Or maybe it is because I am not there
at all which forces people to notify me directly by other means
if necessary. Which is a problem for them but it is much a
problem for me to keep in touch. So maybe if they feel some
kind of symmetry in this it is fair to do it anyway to keep in
touch?
Anyway it is not like it is not solvable problem. People just
do what they do because it is easier. Take that away and they
will find another means.
SecretDreams wrote 1 day ago:
Facebook used to be like this when it was only for college students.
That was the last time Facebook was good.
tgma wrote 1 day ago:
Could it be that the problem is usersâ own interest in being
outraged? A reflection of their mental state and anxiety that they
then project to Facebook as if thatâs the root cause.
cyanydeez wrote 1 day ago:
The skeptical observer would suggest because her demograph votes,
serving ads which benefit Facebook shareholders is good for business.
dawnerd wrote 1 day ago:
I only use it for cruise groups and itâs been useful but once you
scroll the main feed itâs baaad. Slop after slop. And what isnât
slop is rage bait short form content or bad takes or stolen videos
from the vine days it feels.
newsclues wrote 1 day ago:
You keep the content creators happy.
Aurornis wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
pyreko wrote 1 day ago:
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.
suzzer99 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
xeonmc wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
numpad0 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
raincole wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Why do you call it X?
Aurornis wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
> 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."
curious_af wrote 1 day ago:
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
duskwuff wrote 1 day ago:
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.
nindalf wrote 1 day ago:
The XCheck program has nothing to do with anything youâre
thinking of. You read some old misinformation and didnât read the
post debunking the misinformation.
Source: me.
HTML [1]: https://nindalf.com/posts/xcheck/
underlipton wrote 1 day ago:
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.
0x457 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
bko wrote 1 day ago:
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.
blitzar wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
kryogen1c wrote 1 day ago:
Lol! "Facebook's not bad, you're just a loser"
the_af wrote 1 day ago:
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.
twelvedogs wrote 1 day ago:
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
HDThoreaun wrote 1 day ago:
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.
blobbers wrote 1 day ago:
Do your friends and family interact on facebook? Could run an
experiment to see if it adapts.
Aurornis wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
michaelt wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mayneack wrote 1 day ago:
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.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
AlienRobot wrote 1 day ago:
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.
npodbielski wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Aurornis wrote 1 day ago:
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.
xethos wrote 1 day ago:
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.
afavour wrote 1 day ago:
I do think itâs 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 theyâll 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. Sheâs always been
âmildlyâ political, e.g. she liked Planned Parenthoodâs FB
page. Now her feed is a mess of anti-Trump stuff. Iâm
anti-Trump myself but a lot of these posts are barely coherent
and sheâs mentioned before now when she meets someone new her
first thought is whether they voted for Trump or not. To my mind
itâs a direct result of her slipping down that slope. She
frequently has interactions (âfightsâ 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 1 day ago:
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.
krn1p4n1c wrote 1 day ago:
My feed is like this too. I rarely use FB now, but Iâve
aggressively pruned and blocked anything that becomes political or
negative.
fullstop wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ricardobayes wrote 9 hours 2 min ago:
I remember at some point which I think was a bug: it started
showing a specific type of food, I think some kind of barbeque,
prepared in various ways from across the globe. And by "started
showing" I mean the feed was pretty much that for an extended
period of time. Also at some point a large part of the feed was
reposts of random reddit posts in screenshot format.
aembleton wrote 1 day ago:
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. [1] 2.
HTML [1]: https://socialfixer.com/
HTML [2]: https://github.com/ycngmn/Nobook
Fogest wrote 16 hours 53 min ago:
Thanks for the suggestion, I just installed the socialfixer
userscript and am going to give it a try. I now just need to
start telling Facebook I'm not interested everytime I see an AI
post and hope it eventually gets better.
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jasondigitized wrote 1 day ago:
Was she using the 'Friends' tab? Anything else is complete trash.
bdangubic wrote 1 day ago:
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)
moduspol wrote 1 day ago:
They should offer that privilege to the rest of us for a few bucks a
month. I'd probably pay.
Aurornis wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
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).
cameldrv wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
wedog6 wrote 1 day ago:
You wouldn't mind, but Facebook would mind though.
Digit-Al wrote 1 day ago:
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.
AndrewDucker wrote 1 day ago:
Go to the "feeds" page and select "friends".
AlexandrB wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
InMice wrote 1 day ago:
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.
SamuelAdams wrote 1 day ago:
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]
HTML [1]: https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-facts...
Cthulhu_ wrote 22 hours 10 min ago:
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.
overgard wrote 1 day ago:
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).
Zak wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jcgrillo wrote 1 day ago:
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!
HTML [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
__lain__ wrote 1 day ago:
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.
boelboel wrote 1 day ago:
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'.
themafia wrote 1 day ago:
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.'"
monero-xmr wrote 1 day ago:
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)
fullshark wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
Reddit runs on unpaid labor in the form of moderation, in exchange
for this unpaid labor mods want to have cultural influence.
thrance wrote 1 day ago:
Weren't you the one telling us X.com should replace legacy media?
[1] As a reminder, a glimpse at X's front page a few weeks ago: [2]
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.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891442
HTML [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504404
AlexeyBelov wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
You shouldn't expect his position to make sense. "Leftist
outrage!"
jmye wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 [1] Arrested July 2 2020 [2] One of
the most powerful accounts suddenly stops activity, never to
return
HTML [1]: https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/comments/
HTML [2]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/ghislaine-maxwell-c...
strangattractor wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
It already has a name:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
littlekey wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
MiddleEndian wrote 1 day ago:
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.
beeflet wrote 1 day ago:
beautiful
goldkey wrote 1 day ago:
They're crushing it with anyone over 45
ieie3366 wrote 1 day ago:
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: itâs
just naturally found out the kind of content a person with your specs
loves. Sorry, OP
ndarray wrote 1 day ago:
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.
cogman10 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
garyrob wrote 1 day ago:
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.
greatgib wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
rco8786 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
savolai wrote 1 day ago:
Fb purity browser addon helps, though its ui is quite cryptic.
overfeed wrote 1 day ago:
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.
nc wrote 1 day ago:
It's your feed.
Everyones feed is different.
It depends on how much you train the algorithm.
Yours is untrained, therefore slop.
thepaulmcbride wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Ancapistani wrote 1 day ago:
I use Facebook a lot, but not for the social feed - Marketplace,
business pages, and ads.
Iâve never interacted with their âshortsâ feature, and itâs all
young women and girls in as little clothing as they can manage. Itâs
to the point that I donât open the Facebook app in public.
Ridiculous.
mccr8 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
shpx wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ergocoder wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
They can. They wonât.
haunter wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Craigslist.
haunter wrote 1 day ago:
There is a world outside of America
insom wrote 1 day ago:
Kijiji
mckn1ght wrote 1 day ago:
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 donât.
jhaile wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
I think you can still go directly to /messages/ and not see the
feed.
com2kid wrote 1 day ago:
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 22 hours 6 min ago:
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.
partiallypro wrote 1 day ago:
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.
gs17 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
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.
karmakurtisaani wrote 1 day ago:
They're selling me the life of a divorced dad as a goal of some kind.
It is amusing to an extent.
justonceokay wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs telling that targeting âmenâ has a markedly different
effect than targeting âfatherâ. In a real way TikTok has an
opinionated viewpoint of what is important to men and being a
father is not one of them
jcgrillo wrote 1 day ago:
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.
varenc wrote 1 day ago:
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.
d--b wrote 1 day ago:
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.
numbers wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Next time someone is confused about the meaning of the word
"Enshitification" just pull up Facebook.
hsuduebc2 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dmschulman wrote 1 day ago:
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.
cwoolfe wrote 1 day ago:
what comes after facebook?
holoduke wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
> 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.
mattfrommars wrote 1 day ago:
Facebook is still has excellent marketplace
Only that keeps me going back.
tartoran wrote 1 day ago:
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.
hexage1814 wrote 1 day ago:
>Click to show mildly sensitive content (revealing clothing)
Those warnings are stupid.
josefritzishere wrote 1 day ago:
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.
29athrowaway wrote 1 day ago:
They capitulated to TikTok by adding thirst content and suggested
content based on activity.
rmoriz wrote 1 day ago:
I can't understand how such AI slop ca make money on FB or TikTok. I
mean hardly anything gets viral.
zzzeek wrote 1 day ago:
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.
lich_king wrote 1 day ago:
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.
radpanda wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
I've never seen "OTOH" used before but I understood what it meant
from context. Lol.
xnx wrote 1 day ago:
I was also surprised to find that Facebook feed ads are now ai chumbox
quality.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox
CrzyLngPwd wrote 1 day ago:
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.
AJRF wrote 1 day ago:
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.
phkahler wrote 1 day ago:
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.
next_xibalba wrote 1 day ago:
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, Iâd love to see actual Facebook engagement data, not some
guyâs opinion.
plagiarist wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
Legend2440 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dash2 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
testing22321 wrote 1 day ago:
Yup. I spent time in 35 countries in Africa. FB is the internet.
dguest wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
That was common, as was the FB lite app
dlisboa wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Sure, but WhatsApp and FB are really completely different things,
despite both being owned by Meta.
michaelbuckbee wrote 1 day ago:
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.
halapro wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
gzread wrote 1 day ago:
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.
sneak wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
arczyx wrote 1 day ago:
> She is convinced they were eating babies
There are indeed allegations of that, so it's not impossible.
You can read it yourself here: [1] > On the yacht he witnessed
babies being dismembered, their intestines removed, and
individuals eating the
feces from these intestines
HTML [1]: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA...
DaedalusII wrote 1 day ago:
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.
firtoz wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Which is exactly the point of the parent. Before Epstein
files you would probably rate the rumour at 0/10
credibility.
nathanaldensr wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
> The Philippines is #1 in social media usage in the world.
By what metric?
QuadrupleA wrote 1 day ago:
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?
lgl wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
That's what metrics-driven development gets you.
TheRealPomax wrote 1 day ago:
"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.
mirekrusin wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Takes one to know one? Could you elaborate
mirekrusin wrote 1 day ago:
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 â 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 1 day ago:
I took the OP post at face value and that they preach what they
say. If OP said heâs disgusted by those things then wouldnât
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.
h05sz487b wrote 1 day ago:
The original moltbook. Just bots talking to each other.
zoogeny wrote 1 day ago:
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.
varispeed wrote 2 days ago:
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 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
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.
nickla wrote 2 days ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
jmyeet wrote 2 days ago:
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]
HTML [1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/4018352/facebooks-news-feed-just-t...
dathinab wrote 2 days ago:
> (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 1 day ago:
In German we have a word for old people who post with their real name
under such posts: Klarnamensexboomer ('real name sex boomer')
qq66 wrote 2 days ago:
Facebook doesn't care about Facebook.com anymore. The value of their
business is almost entirely in Instagram, with some future potential in
WhatsApp.
giobox wrote 1 day ago:
While I mostly agree, Meta cares a great deal about
facebook.com/marketplace, which has been hugely successful.
qq66 wrote 1 day ago:
Do they make any money from Marketplace?
reddalo wrote 2 days ago:
I mean, if they cared about Facebook they wouldn't have launched
Threads.
vjk800 wrote 2 days ago:
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 1 day ago:
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?
dekhn wrote 2 days ago:
I stopped when it started showing propaganda from the CCP (at least it
was clearly labelled as such). [1] [2] It was already slop before that.
HTML [1]: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/chinese-state-me...
HTML [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1i67ja9/whats_going_on...
esseph wrote 2 days ago:
> I stopped when it started showing propaganda from the CCP
What did you do when it showed you propaganda from other countries?
dekhn wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
bramhaag wrote 2 days ago:
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.
ddtaylor wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ge96 wrote 2 days ago:
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
jalapenos wrote 18 hours 23 min ago:
I just searched "TruthSocial".
First result is Trump's page, which I could access without a login.
There is the same ad "Featured Ad. Must See Video. This Video Will
Soon Be Banned. Watch Before It's Deleted" repeated about a dozen
times on the page, showing a woman wearing booty shorts approaching
a private jet.
Looks very highbrow
efilife wrote 1 day ago:
They are not fake. I've also seen these and checked commenters'
profiles. Real people, in the 35-50 age range.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
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.
trueno wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ge96 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
ge96 wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder if these are the people that cause a ruckus at protests
ha
boredtofears wrote 2 days ago:
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.
bmurphy1976 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
da02 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
bananamogul wrote 2 days ago:
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.
npilk wrote 2 days ago:
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.
artemonster wrote 2 days ago:
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
nimbius wrote 2 days ago:
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.
gniv wrote 2 days ago:
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.
ks2048 wrote 1 day ago:
Groups and Marketplace seem to be the main genuine uses in many
non-US countries.
JKCalhoun wrote 1 day ago:
(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.
reddalo wrote 2 days ago:
And that's almost as sad as Discord "forums". It's useful information
that's completely siloed out from the public web.
unsharted wrote 1 day ago:
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"
fusslo wrote 2 days ago:
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!
davesque wrote 2 days ago:
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?
wcfrobert wrote 2 days ago:
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.
sylos wrote 2 days ago:
Government funded!
nephihaha wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, erm, why do you think they get the tax breaks!
jjtheblunt wrote 2 days ago:
isn't the money coming from advertisers placing ads, even if no one
is really paying the placed ads attention?
smt88 wrote 2 days ago:
An astonishing number of people use Facebook daily, and Instagram is
also a huge revenue generator. The company itself is thriving despite
terrible products.
goatsi wrote 2 days ago:
>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.
arjie wrote 2 days ago:
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 1 day ago:
> Bay Area Gooners group
Just searched this and was not what expected
ngruhn wrote 1 day ago:
unfortunate naming in retrospect
brycethornton wrote 2 days ago:
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.
paxys wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
criddell wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWfOMeLk6m0
StilesCrisis wrote 1 day ago:
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.
alex1138 wrote 2 days ago:
This could be, but the complaint about Facebook has always been
people are posting but the feed won't show them posts from friends
sgt wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Octoth0rpe wrote 2 days ago:
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.
HWR_14 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
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.
alex1138 wrote 1 day ago:
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
mv4 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
> 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.
euleriancon wrote 2 days ago:
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.
veunes wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
Active account with real interactions = more normal. Which is a
pretty telling product story in itself
socalgal2 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
steve-atx-7600 wrote 1 day ago:
Same. F|_|cking wasteland. Immediately logged out. Wonât go
back.
conductr wrote 1 day ago:
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.
georgemcbay wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
Groxx wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mkehrt wrote 1 day ago:
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.
idunno246 wrote 1 day ago:
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 itâs a bit of both, theyâre just flooded with
bad ai posts. Itâs 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 1 day ago:
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, youâre 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 1 day ago:
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.
mieko wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Maxion wrote 1 day ago:
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.
davio wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
dlev_pika wrote 1 day ago:
Same with mine - all thirst traps in the search, which I have never
really searched for.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
He has testified to congress that IG/meta does not promote sexual
content, which is nuts, because anyone whoâs spent 5 mins on
the platform knows this absolutely not the case
socalgal2 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
JohnMakin wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
And who controls what user content goes into user feeds?
kirubakaran wrote 16 hours 52 min ago:
> That might be subtle but there is a real distinction.
A distinction without a difference, as the expression goes
r_lee wrote 1 day ago:
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...
naravara wrote 1 day ago:
In my experience itâs mostly sexual adjacent content with
just enough plausible deniability that you could say itâs a
comedic sketch or something. Theyâre not funny, and the
punchline is usually tits, but it has the cosmetic structure of
a joke.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
Try [1] I'm using it for Facebook interface needs until I can get
something more agentic in my browser operational.
HTML [1]: https://www.fbpurity.com/
HTML [2]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
ForHackernews wrote 1 day ago:
[1] is another
HTML [1]: https://socialfixer.com/
rhyperior wrote 1 day ago:
The only way you can use FB imo.
Smalltalker-80 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tencentshill wrote 1 day ago:
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).
ge96 wrote 2 days ago:
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)
KellyCriterion wrote 1 day ago:
True: You have to curate your feed / search history a little bit to
get much better results
loloquwowndueo wrote 1 day ago:
Or, just search for the thing youâre looking for directly, and
otherwise donât rely on the feed to feed you because it only
knows to feed you crap?
MattGrommes wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Everywhere I go I see parents letting their kids scroll short
form video. The brain rot starts early.
nephihaha wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
speckx wrote 2 days ago:
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.
npilk wrote 2 days ago:
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 2 days ago:
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?
ossa-ma wrote 2 days ago:
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?
fullshark wrote 2 days ago:
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.
michelb wrote 2 days ago:
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.
operatingthetan wrote 2 days ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
PaulHoule wrote 2 days ago:
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.
wincy wrote 2 days ago:
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 â4â in the upper right, assumably with garbage
notifications about things I donât care about âhappeningâ 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.
alex1138 wrote 2 days ago:
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 1 day ago:
Maybe. But you can't deny their strategy worked. Seizing most with
FB, IG, WA for the average people
smrtinsert wrote 2 days ago:
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.
sunir wrote 2 days ago:
We lost the Internet to AI. Just accept it. It's bots talking to bots
about bots.
amatecha wrote 1 day ago:
maybe the centralized, corporate-owned web, but not the internet...
at least, not yet...
AlexandrB wrote 1 day ago:
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.
amatecha wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
I almost clarified that - Google Search is definitely part of
that very centralized, corporate-owned web I was referring to.
Like what you're describing is exactly what I'm talking about.
But there are more and more niche obscure corners of the internet
that you don't easily find, where good stuff is happening.
People are still using IRC, Hotline, KDX, Gopher, and then
there's newer stuff like Gemini ( [1] ), and
potentially-invite-only close-knit communities on Mastodon and
Lemmy. Oh yeah and then there's the alternatives to corporate
stuff like Instagram -> PixelFed, YouTube -> PeerTube...
HTML [1]: https://geminiprotocol.net/
cat5e wrote 2 days ago:
I will never roll over for the lizard man
chistev wrote 1 day ago:
Don't you use WhatsApp?
weregiraffe wrote 2 days ago:
Facebook is not the Internet.
ASalazarMX wrote 1 day ago:
But AI slop is not limited to Facebook. It really is all over the
Internet, it dominates entire topics in search engines.
fullshark wrote 2 days ago:
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.
ASalazarMX wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jjulius wrote 1 day ago:
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.
j16sdiz wrote 2 days ago:
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 2 days ago:
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?
BoredPositron wrote 2 days ago:
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.
nubg wrote 2 days ago:
Great post, it's not just you, my feed is exactly the same. Short FCBK
stocks.
morkalork wrote 2 days ago:
Unfortunately there's still two things bringing me back to Facebook:
Marketplace and the neighbourhood group (populated by mostly boomers)
mgiampapa wrote 2 days ago:
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.
zadikian wrote 2 days ago:
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 2 days ago:
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!
mgiampapa wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
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.
AceJohnny2 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Dr_Birdbrain wrote 1 day ago:
For Reddit, you can select an option so that it only shows you
things from subs you follow. Dramatically improves the experience!
AceJohnny2 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mgiampapa wrote 1 day ago:
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.
HoldOnAMinute wrote 2 days ago:
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.
itomato wrote 1 day ago:
Naive, good natured, exploitable. Perfection.
insane_dreamer wrote 1 day ago:
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.
12_throw_away wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
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.
Hnrobert42 wrote 1 day ago:
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?
drnick1 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
sparky_z wrote 1 day ago:
> 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."
HoldOnAMinute wrote 1 day ago:
I would say their priorities changed. They spent less time with
social media and just did other things.
nickburns wrote 1 day ago:
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.
98codes wrote 1 day ago:
I'm a dad that stopped using facebook when I got divorced, so
there's a bit of anecdata for you
bentcorner wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
RobinL wrote 1 day ago:
Or possibly 'men find the algorithmic/consumption based platforms
relatively more appealing' and so were quicker to leave
da02 wrote 2 days ago:
What do your social groups use nowadays?
insane_dreamer wrote 1 day ago:
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.
HoldOnAMinute wrote 1 day ago:
Nothing, the sharing has stopped.
JeremyNT wrote 1 day ago:
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.
prmoustache wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mikepurvis wrote 1 day ago:
Close friends and family: group chats (whatsapp, signal)
Distant friends and extended family: email threads
SoftTalker wrote 1 day ago:
Text messages, email. Same as ever.
sbrother wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mattfrommars wrote 1 day ago:
Personally, itâs all through WhatsApp
etrautmann wrote 1 day ago:
Almost all chat threads in messages, signal, or occasionally in
slack or discord or something else.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
iMessages (which supports groups well with RCS), Signal, Telegram,
GroupMe. Slack, IRC, and Zulip for online groups.
(early 40s)
yabones wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Several people have tried over the years. We all failed, because
it doesnât work.
The economics donât work because no one is willing to pay.
The network effect doesnât exist, because real people donât
post enough to get the flywheel started.
All the dark patterns exist because that is what users reward.
Sucks but itâs true.
snovymgodym wrote 1 day ago:
Group chats on various apps
bojanz wrote 1 day ago:
In my part of Europe itâs all in private WhatsApp groups (one for
inner family, one for friends, etc)
drnick1 wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
Got my entire family on Signals (sisters, brothers, in-laws,
parents, nephewsâ¦). 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).
hu3 wrote 2 days ago:
Folks around me use mostly Instagram which ironically is also from
Meta.
Zuck is always one step ahead.
mikepurvis wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ghywertelling wrote 1 day ago:
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.
gus_massa wrote 1 day ago:
And as a sibling comment says, also WhatsApp. The guy is always
two steps ahead.
pdpi wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
SerÃa 'sponsored posts.' Como angloparlante nativo,
tenÃa que comprobar que fuese una palabra de verdad
'patrocinate' (como 'patrocinado').
gus_massa wrote 21 hours 48 min ago:
Yes, my bad. Hi from Argentina!
nickburns wrote 21 hours 32 min ago:
¡Mucho gusto!, desde los EE.UU.
nephihaha wrote 1 day ago:
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).
throwway120385 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
wincy wrote 2 days ago:
Similar experience for me and itâs just been replaced withâ¦
nothing. My gaming buddies talk on Discord but I just donât
really hear from my aunts and uncles and cousins anymore. Itâd 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.
jrmg wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs returned to nothing. Losing touch with people you didnât
contact regularly was the norm until the mid 2000s.
For someone who grew up in the âgolden yearsâ of social
media, itâs kinda weird to see.
swat535 wrote 1 day ago:
Exactly.. youâd 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.
underlipton wrote 1 day ago:
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.
munificent wrote 1 day ago:
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.
JKCalhoun wrote 1 day ago:
"â¦I just donât really hear from my aunts and uncles and
cousins anymoreâ¦"
Yeah, actually why I left Facebook a decade ago: finding out what
horrible people my relatives were.
le-mark wrote 1 day ago:
This applies to âfriendsâ also. And discovering how many of
them are actual idiots. Oh, these people canât put 5 words
together to form a coherent sentence and their spelling grammar
suck to top it off? I donât miss it at all.
zadikian wrote 2 days ago:
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.
ishouldstayaway wrote 22 hours 47 min ago:
> I started a few text group chats to stay in touch.
This is the space that WhatsApp fills, for better or worse.
Mixtape wrote 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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 1 day ago:
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.
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