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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Once a group gets big enough...

I think after a certain group size people feel immune or that their alternative thought might have a better chance of landing with someone.

> This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave nicely beyond some threshold group size.

I think you're generalizing far too broadly. The problem you're describing is more-or-less exclusively a problem with online, open-membership groups.

Consider: if the groups you describe were in-person groups, these ranters would constantly be getting disengaged/off-put/disgusted reactions from the "silent majority" of the people in the group. And just these reactions — together with a lack of any positive engagement — would, almost always, be enough to make them stop or go somewhere else.

(Or, to put a finer point on that: "annoyed, judgemental silence, and then turning away / back to the person you were talking to" would always put off the vast majority of people, with just a few — people who have trouble understanding non-verbal signals — persisting because they aren't "getting the message." And in an in-person context, these few would still eventually be taken aside and given a talking-to, because if they're butting into other in-person conversations with this behavior, they're being far more disruptive than "random new conversation threads" tend to be felt as. Even though "random new conversation threads" can kill a group just as dead.)

The problem with decorum / respect-for-purpose in unmoderated online open-membership groups seems to mostly stem from the fact that people underestimate the importance of non-verbal signals in moderating/regulating behavior. And so there is a dearth of such signals available in such groups. Our brains didn't evolve to play the game of socializing without these signals, any more than ants evolved to coordinate without pheremones. So many people's brains begin to play the game in degenerate / anti-social ways.

From what I've been able to gather, from personal interactions with many people who admit to being "Internet trolls" at some point in their lives... their behavior was almost never intentional maliciousness/active-disregard-for-others on their part. It's rather an emergent behavior — something they "just ended up doing" — given a lack of (non-verbal-signal-alike) calibrating feedback.

And why is there so little non-verbal-signal-alike communication online?

Well, for one thing, we often aren't even aware we're giving off such signals; and so, if we need to consciously choose to communicate them (as we do in online contexts), then we simply fail to do so, because the majority of these signals never even rise to our conscious attention as something to be communicated.

And even when we do become aware of them, we often don't feel them to be important enough to be "worth" going to the effort of translating into some more conscious/explicit/non-subtextual form of communication.

And then, even when a strong desire to communicate a nonverbal signal does bubble up within us... most online chat/forum systems are horrible at transmitting such signals with any degree of fidelity, when they transmit them at all. Especially the kinds of signals used for intra-group behavior regulation.

Facebook, for example, has reaction emojis on both posts and comments — but no reaction emoji that transmits a sentiment like "I disapprove of you saying this; please stop" (e.g. U+1F611 EXPRESSIONLESS FACE or U+1FAE4 FACE WITH DIAGONAL MOUTH). Rather, the only reaction emoji available are those meant to react sympathetically to the emotive content of the post/comment — e.g. with anger, sadness, etc. (People do try to use the "anger" reaction to express disapproval of posts; but when the content itself is often "ragebait" / meant to evoke anger, the poster won't necessarily understand that these reactions are being directed at them, rather than at their post.)

Further, no chat system or forum I'm aware of has participant-visible signals of "detach rate" — i.e. there's no way for people to know when others are clicking on their posts, reading one line, doing a 180 and running away as fast as they can. (YouTube videos expose this metric to their creators; I think it's actually very helpful for them. It could do with being implemented far more widely.)

(And, to be a conspiracy theorist for a moment: I think, in both cases, this is probably intentional. The explicit purpose of signals that "regulate behavior", after all, is to make people engage less in certain anti-social behaviors. Making available any such tools, will therefore inevitably make any kind of platform-aggregate "engagement metrics" go down! If they were ever temporarily introduced, they'd have been quickly removed again with this justification.)

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.

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Sometimes you have to stand for something even if it’s inconvenient.

It's working too. All my friends stopped using Facebook for similar reasons. My feed went from a 24/7 pleasant reunion to a fetid swamp and now I also have stopped using it.

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> You also don’t systematically evaluate all CEOs of all products to use.

We certainly evaluate companies on their CEOs if their CEOs make themselves high profile enough.

You are certainly judged here if you have a Tesla because of Musk hence why sales have dropped 50%.

Other companies that don't have as high profile CEOs can get away with terrible points of view.

Oh yeah? How is the ceo of your power company? Your refrigerator? Your garage door?

I just am very skeptical any of this is based on a harm based model of morality. Instead it smells like concern about perception or status:

> You are certainly judged here if you have a Tesla

> Other companies that don't have as high profile CEOs can get away with terrible points of view.

> > Oh yeah? How is the ceo of your power company? Your refrigerator? Your garage door?

If they hide their terrible opinions then its hard to made judgements.

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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

> 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?

I'd be shocked if international travel was the algorithmic tell, but in the book Careless People, the author discusses extensively that they (Facebook's political team) did a lot of manually curating the experience for politicians across the world to help push for Facebook's side in whatever issue was important on a given day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People

> 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.

I do think it’s that but with a dangerous slippery slope embedded within. FB will optimize for engagement no matter what so if you linger on one political post they put among 99 friends and family posts they’ll immediately amp up the ratio. You need to somehow maintain a perfect ratio of time spent on FB to fresh family and friends content, otherwise FB will fill the space for you.

My mother in law is an example of this. She’s always been “mildly” political, e.g. she liked Planned Parenthood’s FB page. Now her feed is a mess of anti-Trump stuff. I’m anti-Trump myself but a lot of these posts are barely coherent and she’s mentioned before now when she meets someone new her first thought is whether they voted for Trump or not. To my mind it’s a direct result of her slipping down that slope. She frequently has interactions (“fights” is too strong really) with friends and neighbors on her feed who are clearly off piste in the other political direction.

I even had an example of it on my own profile. For some reason I had a post from a local (NY) radio station in my feed, about Mamdani. Curious to click into the comments I saw a cesspit of vitriol by boomer age users, attached to their real names, sometimes with smiling photos with their grandchildren… for weeks after whenever I logged in there would be a new post by a different conservative leaning radio station, ready to make me angry. Engagement > user happiness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

Do your friends and family interact on facebook? Could run an experiment to see if it adapts.

> 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.

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.

Lol! "Facebook's not bad, you're just a loser"

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.

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.

The XCheck program has nothing to do with anything you’re thinking of. You read some old misinformation and didn’t read the post debunking the misinformation.

Source: me. https://nindalf.com/posts/xcheck/

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.

I logged out of facebook years ago only to find out an old friend / former coworker had died. Everyone knew, because of facebook, but not me :(

It’s certainly the social hub for some groups.

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.

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.

My feed is like this too. I rarely use FB now, but I’ve aggressively pruned and blocked anything that becomes political or negative.

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.

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.

I can recommend using Social Fixer addon [1] on your laptop. On my phone, I use Nobook [2] which isn't quite as effective. They both do a good job though of removing loads of the useless stuff on Facebook.

1. https://socialfixer.com/

2. https://github.com/ycngmn/Nobook

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.

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.

People say the same about Instagram but my feed is like all about making clothes, welding, construction stuff, funny memes, snowboarding, etc. It’s all good stuff.

I just don’t interact with political content on social media — not because I’m apolitical but I don’t want to hear random people’s takes on matters.

If it wasn’t for groups, events, and marketplace, I wouldn’t use FB.

Marketplace has supplanted Craigslist near me.

Events - no good replacement. Meetup isn’t as ubiquitous.

Groups - nothing as good except maybe groups.io. But, that doesn’t have the same common folk. It’s still more niche.

It could be that middle America is catching up where big city America has moved on. And maybe that’s the demographic that FB is serving now.

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.

This is lie, I was there and this is not at all what happened

I appreciate the voice of experience but if you're going to post a comment like this, could you please share some of that experience so we know at least some of what did happen?

Otherwise it comes across as a drive-by swipe, which is a human reaction when you know that something on the internet is wrong, but which badly degrades the threads, partly because of the example it sets for others. The life of this community depends on knowledgeable people sharing some of what they know, so the rest of us can learn.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

Your mum's experience is probably what FB is best at: high-trust network, lots of original photos, lots of comments from real friends

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?

> 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?

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.

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

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.

> 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?

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.

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Facebook automatically tags people in photos

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.

My Facebook is honestly nice, it’s the most relaxing social media for me.

The promoted posts are books and artists and occasional gym content. Ads are relevant or at least not annoying (SuitSupply seems to think I’m their ideal customer, and I don’t mind looking at their handsome models in this season’s knitwear). The people I know post mostly about meaningful or harmless stuff.

But it’s probably like this because I joined over ten years after everyone else did. I didn’t activate my Facebook account until 2018 when I got a job at FB and it was mandatory. Then I found out that it was actually a good way to curate a set of people from my youth that I genuinely wanted to reconnect with.

That’s probably what made the difference compared to many whose FB social graphs were built up early and never pruned.

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.

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.

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! :-)

I laughed out loud. "I found that I loved Big Brother from my youth." Genuinely no offense meant, it was just funny.

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?

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.

Was she using the 'Friends' tab? Anything else is complete trash.

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)

Could it be that the problem is users’ own interest in being outraged? A reflection of their mental state and anxiety that they then project to Facebook as if that’s the root cause.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yup. And unfortunately, I realized I've benefitted from the algo too. I tried the friends feed, and I ended up with MORE politics!

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.

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

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.

I only use it for cruise groups and it’s been useful but once you scroll the main feed it’s baaad. Slop after slop. And what isn’t slop is rage bait short form content or bad takes or stolen videos from the vine days it feels.

My FB experience is still fine after all these years. I can't find anything in my feed that isn't either a post a) to a group I'm in, b) by a page I follow, or c) by a friend. These days, a) and b) make up the majority of posts – many of the groups have no equivalent elsewhere and are a major reason why I still use FB. Even the reels/shorts/whatever that FB suggests are mostly nice and relevant – cats, trains, music. No slop, no thirst traps, no politics beyond what I choose to follow, not even ads because those are blocked.

Honestly, I've been wondering what other relevant social media there even is for someone like me, an early 40s millennial. Twitter I refuse to use, and nobody's on Bluesky. Instagram is… fine, I guess, and more lively and "feel-good" in some sense, and also used by the younger folk, but there's less "engagement" beyond liking something and scrolling on. On Facebook comments and actual conversation are in a much bigger role, at least for me. Reddit is great, assuming you curate your subreddits, but I don't have friends there.

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.

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.

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.

They should offer that privilege to the rest of us for a few bucks a month. I'd probably pay.

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.

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.

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.

Go to the "feeds" page and select "friends".

You wouldn't mind, but Facebook would mind though.

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.

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.

> 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?

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).

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.

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.

> 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."

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.

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.

    > my FYP is always just... animal pictures and art, exactly what I want.

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.

Why do you call it X?

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.

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.

The skeptical observer would suggest because her demograph votes, serving ads which benefit Facebook shareholders is good for business.

You keep the content creators happy.

> 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.

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.

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.

Facebook used to be like this when it was only for college students. That was the last time Facebook was good.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

You didn’t try hard to repro it.

Facebook uses your likes / groups / searches to customize your feed. If are active and don’t delete your old content, you have already trained FB to avoid the thirst traps for your account.

The article author said he was off-site site for 8 years, so FB was offering him random high engagement content to stuff his feed so he didn’t reach the end.

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".

Though OC also said:

> Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted.

So I guess it depends how active you are? My speculation would be (that would match the article) - if facebook figures out you’re a man, but you don’t actively like and engage with specific topics - it will default to AI thirst trap slop.

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.

> he's been looking at material that indicates an interest in thirst trap stuff for years

N is obviously too small to get anything meaningful, though article was about the same problem and article’s author haven’t visited facebook for 8 years…

Cannot say about FB or IG, but on Youtube I get way too many “AI girlfriend” ads or video recommendations. I report as many as I can and my subscription channels are as far away from such topics as it can be. Thus I totally understand OC and article’s author.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yet another reason to avoid attention-span-destroying short form video. :)

If you click Search in Instagram, what's it show you by default, before you enter a search term?

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.

The sole reason for not using those sites is the whole knowledge that you have to do this crap.

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.

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.

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.

This is it - you’ve got to be deliberate in scrolling immediately past anything remotely thirst-trappy, otherwise the algorithm hyperfixates. And then overstay your welcome at the type of content you want to see.

In my experience, it has worked (my discover page is an amalgamation of classic Simpsons, Dropout.tv, and Whose Line Is It Anyway?, while my Reels feed is unhinged in the right way.) But also I’ve stopped using it because my brain was melting.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

There is definitely more to this. I’ve been on Facebook since it opened up to the public, and they know for a fact that I am a guy.

I literally only use it to communicate with family. I logged in today on both desktop and iOS, and the only thing I saw were updates from friends/family that I personally know.The only AI things were from a nerdy friend that created/shared/disclosed of it being AI, the rest was real stuff that I already knew about.

If users are seeing this, it is more likely something to do with settings, Facebook not knowing anything about you, or some other mechanism.

I am absolutely not holding them blameless, I am saying: compare notes and identify the actual problem, because I know a lot of folks using Facebook, and from conversations I had in the past hour or two, none of them see any of that, so there is likely something else going on.

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.

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.

Yeah it's an optimized skinner box. Any reaction above baseline is sure to be registered and reinforced.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

Then they'd undoubtedly show you hot guys. I don't know why this wouldn't be the obvious answer.

Probably still a relatively small percentage of the total for them to care.

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.

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.

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...

They might have multiple types of men because it only shows me all kind of outdoor activities + construction tips

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.

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

> 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"

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.

[flagged]

Notify of what?

Yeah you should probably delete those photos. Nobody is going to believe your story (myself included).

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.

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?)

The part I really agree with is the social impact

I don't get anything like that. Just memes and people complaining about dog poo

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)

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.

My Facebook account is 21 years old and my Instagram is probably 15 years old.

This problem only started about two years ago. I didn’t change my behavior.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I don’t understand. What you describe is foreign to me. My Instagram only has posts from people I follow, as well as generic ads like newspapers. I have not seen any of these thirst trap posts (not that I would find these posts appealing; they aren’t my type anyways).

> But it would be good for more people to learn about this so they don't get angry when they see their male-identified partners/friends feeds.

You seem to be assuming that none of them fall for the thirst traps. The reason thirst traps exist is because they work a good percentage of the time.

And despite your confident statement that “it doesn’t bother me anymore”, you only become “banner blind” to some content. The more authentic the content appears or the closer the topic is to something you are interested in, the more likely you are to engage with it.

I try to avoid BookFace with a passion, but I struggle with these issues on YouTube. My solution is to never browse YouTube while logged in, always use Incognito Mode, depend on browser bookmarks (instead of like/subscribe), and to close the browser as soon as I realize The Algo is pushing content I don’t care for.

it's unfortunately not just your algorithm, but the views and likes of people who match your demographic specs....

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.

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!

Interestingly enough when you tell Facebook you’re not interested in a post you can answer why: doesn’t match interests, spam, sexual, insult, don’t like creator. One of those isn’t like the other.

There’s a couple other pseudo-erudite slop holes you can fall into. One is scientific breakthroughs, one is psychedelic philosophical ramblings, and one is historical summarizations. They all kind of fall into a Ripley’s Believe it or Not style of trying to be mind blowing.

If you say not interested to every suggested post of something you don’t follow, it’ll try a couple topics and then revert for a bit to exclusively things you do follow.

> 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.

This is one of the reasons I always identify as non-binary when asked.

That is a pretty clever algorithm hack. I wonder if you get bombarded with pharmaceutical ads as a consequence.

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...

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.

I block pretty much all ads, but that's an interesting question.

I don't have them... :/

This is why I gave up on social media

Facebook changes to be more like TikTok. Content to generate addiction so they can sell more adds.

> 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.

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.

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

Algorithm has discovered dudes like boobs.

More news at ten.

> no matter what you do

I made them go down markedly by setting my age to be over 100. Doesn’t stop some of the thirst trap ‘reels’, but all the “Asian women would like to get to know middle aged guys like you!” bullshit went away.

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.

I don't like anything even slightly thirst trappy, and my fyp is clean.

Have you tried clicking "Show me less like this" on those thirst trap posts?

yes i deleted facebook eventually because they would not stop showing me this stuff despite clicking “show me less” many times

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. :)

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

He has testified to congress that IG/meta does not promote sexual content, which is nuts, because anyone who’s spent 5 mins on the platform knows this absolutely not the case

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.

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...

In my experience it’s mostly sexual adjacent content with just enough plausible deniability that you could say it’s a comedic sketch or something. They’re not funny, and the punchline is usually tits, but it has the cosmetic structure of a joke.

Same with mine - all thirst traps in the search, which I have never really searched for.

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)

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.

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.

Everywhere I go I see parents letting their kids scroll short form video. The brain rot starts early.

True: You have to curate your feed / search history a little bit to get much better results

Or, just search for the thing you’re looking for directly, and otherwise don’t rely on the feed to feed you because it only knows to feed you crap?

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.

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.

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.

I still log in fairly regularly and get a bunch of reasonably targeted content, but also a ton of ragebait ai shit like protestors attacking cops. So it’s a bit of both, they’re just flooded with bad ai posts. It’s changed drastically in the past year, from a bunch of posts you could argue make sense, to mostly posts of rage. But the number of actual friends posts is basically zero

The problem is you have to be defensive. If you mess up once and click some AI reading Reddit posts or hawk-tua style street interview, you’re cooked.

You used to be able to reset by watching stupid financial content with high value like gold coin stuff and cleanse, but Meta is smarter now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Active account with real interactions = more normal. Which is a pretty telling product story in itself

Try https://www.fbpurity.com/ I'm using it for Facebook interface needs until I can get something more agentic in my browser operational.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

The only way you can use FB imo.

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.

https://socialfixer.com/ is another

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.

> 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.

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.

Same. F|_|cking wasteland. Immediately logged out. Won’t go back.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> She is convinced they were eating babies

There are indeed allegations of that, so it's not impossible. You can read it yourself here:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA001476...

> On the yacht he witnessed babies being dismembered, their intestines removed, and individuals eating the feces from these intestines

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.

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.

Which is exactly the point of the parent. Before Epstein files you would probably rate the rumour at 0/10 credibility.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Sure, but WhatsApp and FB are really completely different things, despite both being owned by Meta.

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.

> The Philippines is #1 in social media usage in the world.

By what metric?

[dead]

Yup. I spent time in 35 countries in Africa. FB is the internet.

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.

That was common, as was the FB lite app

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.

> 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."

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.

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.

I would say their priorities changed. They spent less time with social media and just did other things.

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.

I'm a dad that stopped using facebook when I got divorced, so there's a bit of anecdata for you

Or possibly 'men find the algorithmic/consumption based platforms relatively more appealing' and so were quicker to leave

> 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.

What do your social groups use nowadays?

Similar experience for me and it’s just been replaced with… nothing. My gaming buddies talk on Discord but I just don’t really hear from my aunts and uncles and cousins anymore. It’d be a hassle to even figure out how to contact them. Only 13 people showed up to my high school reunion last year from a graduating class of ~400.

It’s returned to nothing. Losing touch with people you didn’t contact regularly was the norm until the mid 2000s.

For someone who grew up in the ‘golden years’ of social media, it’s kinda weird to see.

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.

Exactly.. you’d only really see them on Christmas or Easter.. Maybe some special event like Wedding.

Once in a while they would come over but that was it. You never knew what your uncle had for lunch.

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.

"…I just don’t really hear from my aunts and uncles and cousins anymore…"

Yeah, actually why I left Facebook a decade ago: finding out what horrible people my relatives were.

This applies to “friends” also. And discovering how many of them are actual idiots. Oh, these people can’t put 5 words together to form a coherent sentence and their spelling grammar suck to top it off? I don’t miss it at all.

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.

> I started a few text group chats to stay in touch.

This is the space that WhatsApp fills, for better or worse.

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.

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.

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.

Folks around me use mostly Instagram which ironically is also from Meta.

Zuck is always one step ahead.

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.

And as a sibling comment says, also WhatsApp. The guy is always two steps ahead.

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.

100%. Whatsapp is still zuck, but it doesn't have a "feed" and that's the most important thing about it for me.

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

Sería 'sponsored posts.' Como angloparlante nativo, tenía que comprobar que fuese una palabra de verdad 'patrocinate' (como 'patrocinado').

Yes, my bad. Hi from Argentina!

¡Mucho gusto!, desde los EE.UU.

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).

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.

In my part of Europe it’s all in private WhatsApp groups (one for inner family, one for friends, etc)

Unfortunately, those are also being surveilled by Meta, so the exodus from Facebook did not help. Consider Signal or a private XMPP server.

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.)

Got my entire family on Signals (sisters, brothers, in-laws, parents, nephews…). We're very happy but could extend that to second degrees(?), to cousins and uncles. We're were close to succeed but we needed help (media, mostly).

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.

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.

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.

Almost all chat threads in messages, signal, or occasionally in slack or discord or something else.

Close friends and family: group chats (whatsapp, signal)

Distant friends and extended family: email threads

Not parent, but, depressingly:

  1. Signal
  2. BlueSky
  3. Discord
  4. WhatsApp
  5. SMS

Nothing, the sharing has stopped.

Personally, it’s all through WhatsApp

Text messages, email. Same as ever.

Group chats on various apps

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.

iMessages (which supports groups well with RCS), Signal, Telegram, GroupMe. Slack, IRC, and Zulip for online groups.

(early 40s)

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.

Several people have tried over the years. We all failed, because it doesn’t work.

The economics don’t work because no one is willing to pay.

The network effect doesn’t exist, because real people don’t post enough to get the flywheel started.

All the dark patterns exist because that is what users reward.

Sucks but it’s true.

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?

Naive, good natured, exploitable. Perfection.

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.

> 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.

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.

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I think it's more like the husbands left the platform first.

Yes

Probably mean that their husbands were the first to quit Facebook.

Yes

The implication is that they got divorced.

My wife still uses Facebook sometimes but I have it blocked on my phone and laptop, I’d have to get on my desktop to even check it.

Not always

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Is there a problem with my name being green?

New user. To see replies THAT fast on a new user reply which generally isn't pushed to the top of the feed, I find that very interesting.

Idk. It was at the top for me, so I saw it.

>Is there a problem with my name being green?

Not as such, no. However, new accounts (which show up as green) tend to get less attention and more downvotes. When I first joined that annoyed and confused me, but after a while (when my name was no longer green), folks seemed more accepting of my comments and submissions.

As the eminent philosopher opined, "It Ain't Easy Being Green"[0]. Although I believe their ruminations predate HN.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRZ-IxZ46ng

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.

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.

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

> 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!

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!)

Distinguishing between the economic and politics seems impossible—hence the term "political economy". Splitting the two was a bad decision.

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).

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.

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...

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.

Clearly you are unfamiliar with his work and influence.

You could easily fix that with a bit of effort.

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.

Something like The Prize for the tobacco industry could be very interesting!

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.

Moderation and recommendation are not the same thing.

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.

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.

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?

"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.

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.

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.

The way modern social media platforms are designed, yes they are.

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.

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.

Sweet best back-and-forth All-sides on this topic. It’s very complex. On what rules ought we regulate, if any? Probably some somehow.

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.

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.

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.

That's because we / our (USA) country is owned. As Carlin said, "It's a big club. And you ain't in it."[0]

But what isn't properly addressed when people link to this is that the real issue he's discussing is our failing educational system. It's not a coincidence that the Right attacks public schools and the orange man appointed a wrestling lady to dismantle the dept of education.[1]

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNXHSMmaq_s

1. The Trump Administration Plot to Destroy Public Education - https://prospect.org/2026/01/13/trump-mcmahon-department-edu...

Aside: I was in the audience for this show (his last TV special). Didn't know it'd be shot for TV. Kind of sucked, actually, cause they had lights on the audience for the cameras and one was right in my eyes. Anyway, a toast to George Carlin who was ahead of his time and would hate how right he's been.

They fought a civil war over the labor required to produce tobacco.

> 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.

I think the point is a significant number of human beings were not participating in democracy at the time because their forced labor was critical to propping up the tobacco (and other) industries.

It’s hard to claim it’s actually democracy when it only exists after stripping the rights from a large section of people who would disagree with you, if they had the power to do so.

> never threatened democracy

The beautiful part is how non-partisan this is. It cooks all minds regardless of tribe.

> As interpreted by some courts, this language preserves immunity for some editorial changes to third-party content but does not allow a service provider to "materially contribute" to the unlawful information underlying a legal claim. Under the material contribution test, a provider loses immunity if it is responsible for what makes the displayed content illegal.[1]

I'm not a lawyer, but idk that seems pretty clear cut. If you, the provider, run some program which does illegal shit then 230 don't cover your ass.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12584

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.

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.

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!

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.

The breeze is more like a 2 ton harvester expertly engineered to knock your tree down.

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.

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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?

230 is an obvious place to say “if you decide something is relevant to the user (based on criteria they have not explicitly expressed to you), then you are a publisher of that material and are therefore not a protected carriage service.

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.

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?

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.

Just because something is potentially harmful doesn't mean it should be illegal or otherwise prohibited.

> 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.

We live in a society that only values money so why should anyone optimise for s.th. else?

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

It's literally why Leon bought Twitter. A Mass influence vehicle.

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.

It’s crazy (but true) to think that by slowly manipulating someone’s feed, Zuck and Musk could convert people’s religions, political leanings, personal values, etc with little work. In fact, I would be surprised if there was NOT some part of Facebook and Twitter’s admin or support page where a user’s “preferences” could be modified i.e “over the next 8 months, convert the user to a staunch evangelical Christian” etc

FB was always conversion as a service

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.

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.

What next? The intellectual dark web? I think we can have a free market of ideas or whatever you’re fetishising without it meaning that I can’t sit on the couch and open an app to see some family photos without it being intermingled with some loser saying that trans people should be hanged on the street.

And you know for a fact that I am not exaggerating. This is where the current political discourse is at.

Can I please have the freedom to do that without the lecture?

Your family photos should be on the Photos app and you'd have no problems.

Do you really need political commentary in your family photos?

(Apparently the answer is "yes", but the commentary must be of the partisan approved kind.)

That sort of rage bait is literally targeted to rile up people sitting on the opposite side of the kind of people watching that other media site that rhymes with socks. It’s all fake bullshit algorithmically optimized to divide.

Everybody thinks their tribe is immune to this sort of stuff but it isn’t. It’s all the same nonsense packaged for different echo chambers.

At the end of the day, everybody is human. It isn’t us vs them, it’s just us.

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.

"don't agree with them" is carrying a lot of weight here, isn't it?

It's a month-old account.

It’s HN. People create new accounts here all the time to protect their anonymity.

The other side sees you the same way, congrats on being enlightened.

Do you think you should have full control over the web browser on the computer you own?

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”

Having the right to choose what you see doesn't mean you should choose to build yourself an ideological bubble.

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.

Assuming that everyone in the other tribe is "hateful people and pub bores" is kind of the problem.

what the poster mentioned did not sound like a balanced exchange of ideas was about to happen...

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I mainly want to clean other people's feeds. There are an enormous amount of people that I need to undergo an algorithm detox.

Yeah, there's always someone saying "Just delete your Facebook account" as if that solves the underlying "Facebook is actively encouraging divisiveness" problem.

My mother-in-laws Facebook feed is full of fake news - from the left, politically. My own mom doesn’t have a Facebook, but she still manages to balance out the universe with fake news from the right on her YouTube feed.

The internet is a mistake for a lot of people and I don’t think we can fix that.

It is sad to think some of the world’s smartest brains developed these incredibly successful algorithms.

They are equally capable of developing something to lift people up.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Should I stop using my phone because some people do crime through the phone so I'm protecting children by not calling anyone?

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"

> 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.

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.

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.

“right-wing rage bait”

Assuming you mean crap like “school book bans”, climate change denialism, or some dude coal rolling… You realize that is actually bait targeted at you specifically right? It wouldn’t work as bait if it was shit you agreed with! It’s actually left-wing rage bait!

If you were immersed in the “right wing echo chamber” your flavor of rage bait would be about a school introducing a neutral bathroom policy, or some college student struggling to define what a woman is. Every Christmas you’d see articles about cities banning Christmas lights in town hall and Starbucks no longer using Christmas themed cups. It’s all fucking made up nonsense. No real human acts the way these algorithms portray us.

Honestly even ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ are part of the trick. Real people don’t exist on a binary axis. We’re all a weird mess of values and experiences that don’t fit neatly into two boxes. But the algorithm needs two teams, because you can’t sell outrage without an enemy.

The first step to detox is seeing everyone as human not as a contrived label.

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.

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.

escalation is often profitable before it is visibly catastrophic

>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.

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.

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> 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.

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.

> Bay Area Gooners group

Just searched this and was not what expected

unfortunate naming in retrospect

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.

That's what metrics-driven development gets you.

I use Facebook for a specific automotive model group. All the forums that used to host content have either shut down or gone inactive, and it's the literally the only active online community for the car platform. I've learned to scroll slowly over the car posts, and never to engage or linger on other content.

I found even if I am interested in other content (e.g., NFL football) nearly all other interests are flooded with false AI content. A common pattern is pages will paste "BREAKING NEWS" then describe a trade of players between two teams that never happened. Another pattern is "<most popular player on team X> does something <positive or negative> towards the LGBTQ community." These generate tons of engagement with people either for, against, or upset that it's fake. Fortunately the car community I follow is obscure enough to not have engagebait.

This is not unique to Facebook. Reddit has seen a large uptick in AI-generated posts, or repeated posts from the past.

I think we need to recognize that social media of 2026 is not the same as what we had in 2006. AI generated content, regardless of if it is image, video, or text, is here to stay. And it will only get better and more convincing as the technology improves.

What people really need to ask is this - what do they want to get out of social media? Is it personal relationships and status updates? Is it entertainment? Is it something in between?

The harsh truth is most people at this point use social media for entertainment, and AI content is entertaining, or at least engaging, to most people. Remember that 54% of USA adults read below a 6th grade reading level [1]. It is not perfect, but it is convincing enough that a large enough number of people are beginning to accept it as "real".

[1]: https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...

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.

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.

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'.

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.'"

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.

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).

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.

It already has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

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)

Reddit runs on unpaid labor in the form of moderation, in exchange for this unpaid labor mods want to have cultural influence.

Weren't you the one telling us X.com should replace legacy media? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891442

As a reminder, a glimpse at X's front page a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504404

I think it's very telling how you went to Reddit first when complaining about politics on social media, one of the only big ones that still hasn't been completely invaded by MAGA sycophants. Just admit you take no issues with politics on social media, you just want them to align with your views.

X is the most mainstream online community for free speech. It has wildly free speech

Sure it does. https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/on-elons-whim-x-now-treats...

> If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and could be used in a harmful manner in violation of our rules,” the warning says. You can continue to publish the post or delete it.

“There are two types of freedom: freedom to and freedom from.”

Margret Atwood, the Handmaids Tale.

Is a two year old article the only thing you have?

Nope!

Looooong list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Twitter.

Like when they banned posting the word Substack or linking to websites in your profile under Musk for a while. And @elonjet is still banned, despite an explicit promise not to.

No online platform has free speech. No online platform should have free speech. Besides, free speech is a constitutional / legal thing, a platform does not need to host it.

Claiming Twitter has free speech (as in absolutist, as in you can say what you want and won't get banned) means you've drunk the kool-aid / accepted the propaganda.

It's pretty funny how you tried to completely sidestep the accusation, but still managed to confirm it

Have you opened the second link? It's mind-boggling how anyone can still claim that.

All of those topics can be found other places if you look, then it updates your algorithm. I mean vaccine skepticism? Youtube and instagram have a million videos

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).

I actually think it's because reddit is supported by a vast group of unpaid labor (moderators) and conspiratorially I believe they (actually) get paid by NGOs and governments to push narratives and suppress others. Although denied (poorly) it is very likely ghislaine maxwell was one of the most powerful moderators of reddit, modding hundreds of subreddits including r/worldnews, up until the day she was arrested

Last comment June 28, 2020 https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/comments/

Arrested July 2 2020 https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/ghislaine-maxwell-charg...

One of the most powerful accounts suddenly stops activity, never to return

It doesn't matter to any of these companies what their users get out of it so long as those "dumb fucks[1]" keep coming back to the trough and slurping up the slop. Eat your rage bait and like it, piggy. Keep that attention economy roaring!

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/

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.

You appear to be saying that this is the content it will just serve to a middle age man who hasn’t used it in a long time by default.

You don’t think that’s problematic?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Found a clanker

Holy shit you're right. Meta is operating LLM bots on Hacker News.

I can't explain why it's problematic without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.

Maybe I should reevaluate my perspective.

> 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.

“Your algorithm is bad because you are bad” is the 2026 version of Double Predestination.

I got the impression the author is female.

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.

I use Facebook a lot, but not for the social feed - Marketplace, business pages, and ads.

I’ve never interacted with their “shorts” feature, and it’s all young women and girls in as little clothing as they can manage. It’s to the point that I don’t open the Facebook app in public. Ridiculous.

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.

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.

They're selling me the life of a divorced dad as a goal of some kind. It is amusing to an extent.

It’s telling that targeting “men” has a markedly different effect than targeting “father”. In a real way TikTok has an opinionated viewpoint of what is important to men and being a father is not one of them

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?

They can. They won’t.

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.

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.

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...

I think you can still go directly to /messages/ and not see the feed.

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

Craigslist.

There is a world outside of America

What does this mean here? The first several cities outside the US that I tried on craigslist were direct hits, with postings. People could use craigslist, they just don’t.

Kijiji

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

They are not fake. I've also seen these and checked commenters' profiles. Real people, in the 35-50 age range.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wonder if these are the people that cause a ruckus at protests ha

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Remember MySpace? It was a platform full of millennials mostly. Facebook became the next thing but if you note teens dont want to be where their parents are, it takes away from their ability to express themselves. Then as they grow they might adopt platforms like Facebook, but Facebook might not find the adoption they are hoping for.

I think there will be a follow up to Tik Tok in the future that will have the next generation as the Zoomers and younger become adults, and their kids want a platform where they fan be “free” on.

IMO Facebook has a bigger problem - I’m a millennial, far closer to a middle aged man than to a teenager, and I don’t want to be on Facebook because it’s so full of garbage. There’s just nothing interesting except for Market.

Surely there’ll be a follow up to TikTok and other trendy apps, but Facebook is where I should want to be, and I don’t

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.

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.

I'll name a specific highly developed country in the western hemisphere: The United States. There's no need to bend over backward trying to blame some perceived degradation in quality of discussion on international adoption of the internet.

According to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy [1] 130 million Americans — 54% of adults between the ages of 16 and 74 years old—lack proficiency in literacy, essentially reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

[1]https://map.barbarabush.org

What's more, the United States has some of the highest reading test scores in the world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/academic-performance?subj...

This entire planet is full of idiots

why don't you just name the countries lol?

Facebook messenger is so annoying to use too! My extended family group chat is there, but I had to turn off notifications because Facebook realized I only engage there and started serving me stories and updates from the messenger app as notifications! Right this second opening messenger it shows a “4” in the upper right, assumably with garbage notifications about things I don’t care about “happening” on Facebook. Luckily if something important actually happens my family knows to text me, so I read the group chatter at my leisure rather than being interrupted randomly.

> (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.

In German we have a word for old people who post with their real name under such posts: Klarnamensexboomer ('real name sex boomer')

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 :)

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.

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.

And that's almost as sad as Discord "forums". It's useful information that's completely siloed out from the public web.

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"

(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.

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!

Groups and Marketplace seem to be the main genuine uses in many non-US countries.

Young men and women have such unrealistic expectations from relationships that it’s trashing their mental health when reality doesn’t match what is thrown at them by social media. Social media is the real culprit no doubt but the number of people actually doing anything about it is scary low.

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.

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?

Network effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

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.

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.

We lost the Internet to AI. Just accept it. It's bots talking to bots about bots.

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.

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.

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.

Facebook is not the Internet.

But AI slop is not limited to Facebook. It really is all over the Internet, it dominates entire topics in search engines.

I will never roll over for the lizard man

Don't you use WhatsApp?

maybe the centralized, corporate-owned web, but not the internet... at least, not yet...

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.

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.

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.

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".

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

For Reddit, you can select an option so that it only shows you things from subs you follow. Dramatically improves the experience!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You are just not the target audience. Meta is a trillion dollar company and their algos are extremely optimized.

It probably detected your gender (male), age, location, social graph, as a combination of all these that you would be interested in AI-generated softcore pornography. And for the average user with your stats, they absolutely are.

Of course, nobody at Meta hardcoded their algorithm to do this: it’s just naturally found out the kind of content a person with your specs loves. Sorry, OP

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Their decisions couldn’t have been that bad, as you are still an active user.

No. I would say they got my family hooked using it. If someone could produce a facebook alternative I would be satisfied.

A counter-intuitive take: Facebook may actually do better as a business as high-resistance users leave (for the same reason spammers keep their messages intentionally faulty).

From an optimization standpoint, knowledgable, hard-to-rile-up users are mostly noise. As they churn, the remaining user base becomes more homogeneous and easier to optimize for engagement and ads. Churn effectively acts as a filtering mechanism.

So what looks like decline from the outside may just be the system converging on the segment it extracts the most value from. From Facebook’s perspective, that’s not collapse - it’s specialization.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

Takes one to know one? Could you elaborate

Meta is $201B total revenue business, virtually all advertising.

Instagram is estimated to generate half of ad revenue.

WhatsApp and Messenger contribute relatively little to ad revenue.

So facebook.com alone must be generating around $100B revenue annually.

It's impossible that something generating this revenue is serving AI generated NSFW teens pics with botnets commenting on those pictures only.

Real humans must be engaging with real ads at massive scale to make this money.

Failure mode for people reporting "I didn't use fb for a while, then I come back and see adult-like dominated content" sounds like plausible explanation of ad revenue optimized algo with weak, singular signal.

It could also be just cold start problem where algo has zero engagement signal and yields thirst traps for { gender: male, age: ~30s, engagement_history: [] } state.

But it's hard for me to believe that - frankly it doesn't sound like the best output if you want to capture somebody who has real friends and family in their network, did the algo really learned that people with this input state click likes on pics like that?

Why not just serve engagement from friends network or even "wish happy birthday to X tomorrow" instead – sounds like better way to engage to me.

ps. I also don't use fb but I do login maybe once a year / every two years to double check I'm not hacked, can still login etc. When I do it I may spend few minutes scrolling and I can see just posts from my network (double checked again now, lgtm).

Whatever issue OP has, they probably should spend few minutes engaging, maybe just dismiss/click don't like/hide/whatever it is to signal they're not interested - algo should pick it up and their feed should look more like what they expect.

What's your explanation?

I took the OP post at face value and that they preach what they say. If OP said he’s disgusted by those things then wouldn’t the ads be doing a bad match against the target demographic? I would expect ads, the largest revenue machine as you mentioned, to work really well. So to accept your statement would mean OP is sort of lying, that that content is a good match for OP and they are just trying to avoid it and hide that.

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?

I've never seen "OTOH" used before but I understood what it meant from context. Lol.

> So long Facebook, see you never, until one day I inexplicably need to use your platform to get updates from my kid's school.

This part here kills me. I’ve also been forced to engage in the Zuckerverse. I hate WhatsApp.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yeh I think there’s an issue with being off the platform for a long time. Almost exactly same thing happened to me after not logging in for about 10 years. The algorithm just doesn’t know what to do with you. But then I almost immediately go banned for breaching community guidelines after doing nothing but scrolling. So from my experience I can confirm, it’s a total bin fire.

was it really necessary to blur the image of the "mildly revealing clothing" i.e. women wearing crop tops? is this saudi arabia?

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.

Next time someone is confused about the meaning of the word "Enshitification" just pull up Facebook.

Facebook doesn't care about Facebook.com anymore. The value of their business is almost entirely in Instagram, with some future potential in WhatsApp.

While I mostly agree, Meta cares a great deal about facebook.com/marketplace, which has been hugely successful.

Do they make any money from Marketplace?

I mean, if they cared about Facebook they wouldn't have launched Threads.

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.

Why bombarding him with a single kind of posts instead of showing him various things he might be interested in? That would give the algorithm a chance to learn faster and be more effective.

Besides that, with all the tracking Meta does around the web it’s fair to assume they have a more precise profile of the author they could have used

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)

Facebook 1.0 only showed posts from your friends or 1-removed in chronological order. It was great!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wonder if Facebook is even 2% of Meta’s business

>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.)

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.

>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....

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.

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.

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.

No, it’s not. This is a real issue everywhere. The algos don’t discriminate anymore.

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.

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!

was it really necessary to blur the image of ai women wearing crop tops? is this saudi arabia?

I remember Zuckzuck saying out loud that his vision for the platform was that people wouldn’t need actual humans to interact with, and bots is what you’d mostly get.

I’ve used it enough to understand this is happening now. Literally impossible to distinguish, unless you know the person.

In the comments I’m seeing a lot of people saying they either can or cannot reproduce, but no one is sharing a location. That could be highly relevant, I’m betting even something vague like US or EU might play a part.

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.

With OpenAI leading the way with ads in their chatbots, that’s where all the money will be made. There are no ad blockers in chatbots. That’s why Zuck is frantically trying to catch up in the “AI” race. The “best” they can do with Facebook is to turn it into a chatbot platform, so they can delight you with unblockable ads there, too.

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.

use this to just see friend's stuff in chronological order. block any algo stuff FB inserts. limit use to once a day (or week).

"https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr"

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.

I was also surprised to find that Facebook feed ads are now ai chumbox quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox

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.

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.

Also came across this today about how Meta is allotting 5% of ad spend on AI testing for Gen AI. Which leads to unintentional Gen AI promotions across Instagram and Facebook - mind you for companies who paid for the promotion.

https://bsky.app/profile/bexsaltsman.bsky.social/post/3me4yb...

When feeds were mostly friends and pages you chose, the algorithm felt like a helper. Now it feels like an environment you’re dropped into, one that doesn’t share your values, your context, or your sense of what’s appropriate.

Bookmark this page...

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

its a filter to just show you posts from your friends, no groups, nothing else.

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)

The original moltbook. Just bots talking to each other.

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

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?

Wireheading is getting close to some of us.

It's not just facebook. Every social network under Meta is infected with bot. Facebook look worse because there are so few real users.

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?

Social media didn’t start as a psychological experiment. It started as a tool to connect friends. Then it became a business. Then it became an attention refinery.

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.

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.

I stopped when it started showing propaganda from the CCP (at least it was clearly labelled as such). https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/chinese-state-... https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1i67ja9/whats_going_...

It was already slop before that.

> I stopped when it started showing propaganda from the CCP

What did you do when it showed you propaganda from other countries?

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.

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.