Facebook is cooked

https://pilk.website/3/facebook-is-absolutely-cooked

by npilk • 5 months ago

1513 821 5 months ago

I'm a parent in my 50's. "Peak Facebook" is years in the past for me. But it was great for a while. My spouse, friends, friends' spouses, and I were all sharing stories and pictures of our kids, travels, and experiences, such as dining experiences or hikes. There was so much joyous sharing. And it wasn't done for clicks, views, or monetization. It was just friends, sharing their experiences, encouraging each other, etc. It all just went away, starting with the husbands.

da022• 5 months ago

What do your social groups use nowadays?

wincy2• 5 months ago

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.

throwway120385• 5 months ago

Can't speak for OP but my spouse has set up a private GroupMe for posting events for a group, but otherwise everyone shares pictures using text messages. We don't post any pictures of our kid where strangers can easily get access to them and we've read the privacy policy of every service we've ever used.

I was considering self-hosting something for a while but she found it more sensible to do it this way.

Every once in a while she logs into Facebook to post something on Marketplace and immediately gets completely sidetracked by their algorithm and design. Then she gets frustrated and we just put the thing she wanted to sell on the corner instead.

hu3• 5 months ago

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

Zuck is always one step ahead.

bojanz• 5 months ago

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

snovymgodym• 5 months ago

Group chats on various apps

yabones• 5 months ago

I'm probably a bit younger than the gp, but I can confidently say that all socializing has moved almost entirely off "social media" and onto group chats. Most people have a dozen or more combinations of friends and families on multiple apps, all trying to replace what was once easy.

I'd love if somebody would make a site based on the ~2010 expectations (not reality) of facebook. Ban any commercial activity and make people pay for it. I just want to talk to my friends and say "happy birthday" to somebody I haven't seen in years, not look at ads and slop posts.

toomuchtodo2• 5 months ago

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

(early 40s)

etrautmann• 5 months ago

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

mattfrommars2• 5 months ago

Personally, it’s all through WhatsApp

sbrother• 5 months ago

Similar experience for me and at this point it's just a collection of private chats. Different groups use different platforms (mine are on iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Slack, and.. actually Messenger although apparently Facebook is taking that away soon). It kind of feels like real-name social media is a failed experiment at this point.

SoftTalker• 5 months ago

Text messages, email. Same as ever.

mikepurvis3• 5 months ago

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

Distant friends and extended family: email threads

prmoustache• 5 months ago

I am in my mid forties and most people around me seem to use instagram to share memes and stuff + keep contact with rarely seen friends and whatsapp groups for closest more tightknit circles.

I am still on whatsapp but I am planning on nuking my account in september after a large event involving people from various continents. I have no idea if I will be able to stay directly in touch with those people after that, probably not.

I am still unsure if I'll send a message to most of my contacts or if I'll just tell my nuclear family, in laws and closest friends.

JeremyNT• 5 months ago

Not parent, but, depressingly:

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

This list is presented in order of preference, and in reverse order of prevalence.

HoldOnAMinute4• 5 months ago

Nothing, the sharing has stopped.

insane_dreamer4• 5 months ago

IG, though I didn't bring my FB list over and lost contact with a bunch of people.

I keep my follow list small and regularly unfollow people (not because I don't like them or what they post, but because I've seen enough of that).

Being able to unfollow without drama was something that was problematic in FB.

My siblings and parents have a private WhatsApp group - that's what's used for actual communication.

sparky_z• 5 months ago

It all just went away, starting with the husbands.

I honestly can't tell whether I'm supposed to interpret this as "The dads lost interest in Facebook before anyone else", or "Everybody got divorced."

RobinL• 5 months ago

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

bentcorner• 5 months ago

Personally I stopped using Facebook because even in the before-AI days it started becoming a glamour photo book of everyone you ever knew (and probably lots of people you only kind of sorta know), and while people certainly deserve to do and see great things, seeing it all shoved in your face every day becomes exhausting in a keeping-up-with-the-joneses kind of way.

I totally get that not everybody is like that, but I am, and so I stopped going to Facebook.

These days I'm in private Whatsapp groups for my direct family and so I learn about what they do, and not the random stuff that my neighbors and 20-years-past classmates did.

My wife is still active on Facebook and I actually do still visit occasionally to boost her posts but that's about it.

98codes• 5 months ago

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

HoldOnAMinute4• 5 months ago

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

drnick13• 5 months ago

There was so much joyous sharing. And it wasn't done for clicks, views, or monetization.

All along, Meta was vacuuming that data to build profiles of you, your family and friends, to be sold to third parties. You have been duped.

Hnrobert42• 5 months ago

What do you mean it all just went away starting with the husbands? Like people drifted away from the platform? Husbands started drifting away from it first?

12_throw_away• 5 months ago

There was so much joyous sharing.

I'm sorry, but describing using a social advertising network as "joyous sharing" is blowing my mind. This is, like, what marketing people think normal people talk like.

b65e8bee43c2ed02• 5 months ago

bro, facebook was the first internet thing for a lot of people. with it, millions of *oomers got in touch with people they didn't see in years/decades. it was unironically good before the enshittification, and we still don't have a mainstream replacement. we probably can't ever have one, really.

insane_dreamer4• 5 months ago

Similar experience; it was good 15 years ago. I left* and closed my account ~10 years ago.

* because 1) I found it sucked up time I needed for more productive things and I was getting "hooked" on social media, and 2) it wasn't good for my mental health -- if all you see is the glamour side, even if they're people you know, it was easy for me to feel that my life sucked in comparison. It didn't make me happy.

itomato• 5 months ago

Naive, good natured, exploitable. Perfection.

mgiampapa3• 5 months ago

Social media is mostly about what you make of it and how you interact to find value. This is the same in Twitter, TikTok, FB, Instagram, even LinkedIn.

If you don't interact with the product, you get lowest denominator crap.

AceJohnny22• 5 months ago

This is not true for the major social media sites that control the algorithmic feeds. (Facebook, Xitter, Reddit, YouTube...)

While you may be able to add a small bend to the feed, it's really 90% in their power, not yours.

I'm looking at Facebook "Home" feed. Funny how they added a separate "Friends" feed, the original purpose of the site, that's not the default.

mgiampapa3• 5 months ago

IDK, I still find my Facebook and Instagram feeds very topical and useful to me, so I keep using them. I also curate aggressively, have a wide variety of interests and a few hundred close connections. It could be that I am just fitting into what the algo is steering to, but I don't get the low quality stuff that OP is complaining about.

Dr_Birdbrain• 5 months ago

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

zadikian3• 5 months ago

Was curious what my abandoned FB shows if I log in now. Mostly posts from groups I joined ages ago that are surprisingly still active, some random local news articles, and ads for restaurants.

HoldOnAMinute4• 5 months ago

I used to run the Facebook page for a church-affiliated children's summer program associated with a minority group.

I accidentally switched to that account the other day.

The feed was the most right-wing, Fox News crap you could imagine!

morkalork• 5 months ago

Unfortunately there's still two things bringing me back to Facebook: Marketplace and the neighbourhood group (populated by mostly boomers)

nubg• 5 months ago

Great post, it's not just you, my feed is exactly the same. Short FCBK stocks.

BoredPositron• 5 months ago

I would really like to see the daus for Facebook that primarily interact with their feed. Not marketplace or messenger just the core of the platform.

j16sdiz• 5 months ago

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

calvinmorrison• 5 months ago

Twitter was for, almost ever, infected with basically spam and 'fake user counts'. These fake user counts were of course included in the numbers told to investors and it drove sales price of stock. Did you think facebook would ever be immune to that?

sunir• 5 months ago

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

fullshark4• 5 months ago

You just need to find a smaller walled garden that can be tended, and not care deeply about having a massive audience and you can still find interesting conversation.

jjulius• 5 months ago

The gardens that need the most tending, and that will have the most impactful rewards for individuals and communities as a result of said tending, exist in meatspace. Stop searching for walled gardens on the internet and focus on whatever is around you wherever you are. Stop using "More social media but different this time!" as the solution to broken social media.

ASalazarMX3• 5 months ago

I've seen many Lemmy communities die because their creators abandoned then when they didn't grow fast into thousands of members. This fast growth fixation is so pernicious, if anything web forums and Reddit showed us, is that small communities are higher quality than big ones. Communities in the thousands require a lot of moderation effort to remain high quality.

Enjoy your small circle of internet strangers sharing a common interest, you don't need to become viral.

weregiraffe2• 5 months ago

Facebook is not the Internet.

ASalazarMX3• 5 months ago

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

cat5e• 5 months ago

I will never roll over for the lizard man

chistev2• 5 months ago

Don't you use WhatsApp?

amatecha2• 5 months ago

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

AlexandrB3• 5 months ago

If anything the open internet seems worse. Every google search for some anodyne home maintenance task returns hundreds of AI-generated slop "guides" with affiliate links. YouTube is the last refuge for real information on this kind of thing. Coming across a human-written guide on the open web is increasingly rare.

smrtinsert• 5 months ago

My feed isn't as bad as this one, mostly current events, tech, music, politics which are my interests. Trolls/ai/bots are everywhere, but so are people callling it out, so if anything I would guess engagement is up. To be fair, my politics seems to be around 60/40 agree/disagree with my political preference which I actually think is a massive improvement over what it used to be which was 90% agreeable to me. I enjoy engaging on pages of the opposing view.

alex11384• 5 months ago

Zuckerberg is what I might refer to as "forced" network effects. And I don't mean the natural network effects that result from people using a good and hence popular product (or network effects building on itself). Facebook replaced people's emails in their profiles with fb.com addresses, the company lied to people about privacy forever but especially with the former it's the site that actively tries to take you over. I despise Google, but Gmail wasn't like this (and supposedly Facebook would actively delete posts linking to its competition, in the early days - and maybe not so early days)

My point in this somewhat rambly post is it's always been a spammy mess and Zuck's never had an interest in making a good product. For him it's literally about domination

And PS: yeah, I know. With Chrome Google is apparently trying to dictate standards in a similarly cynical way

downboots• 5 months ago

Maybe. But you can't deny their strategy worked. Seizing most with FB, IG, WA for the average people

wincy2• 5 months ago

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

PaulHoule• 5 months ago

Anything like that faces a "cold start" problem when they don't have data about you.

I got a lot of that kind of stuff when I started a new Facebook account but once I got my friends and family on and joined some sports photography groups I am usually greeted by (1) photos of varying quality that people took of a high school basketball game, (2) something family members are doing, (3) some friends outraged about the Trump administration... With helpings of AI slop cat videos and other trash.

Meta obviously believes that those kind of images of women will get engagement and I know I get DMs that appear to be from women like that every time I get on a new platform -- usually I don't respond, or lead them out until they reveal what they are, though I am tempted to say "I am only interested in 2.5-d girls"

Instagram has those blonde women too, but I was impressed with the "cold start" experience on Instagram where my feed was filled with some really incredible videos that must have been hand selected. After a few days of engagement farming though I wound up connected to a lot of South Asians including rather modest Muslim and Hindu women who project a fashionable image without showing a lot of skin. I didn't have a lot of success connecting with people in my immediate area until I started going out as-a-fox and handing out tokens with QR codes.

operatingthetan• 5 months ago

What I don't understand is how FB and Insta are just full of spam (from spammers, not Meta AI) now. It used to be that FB was the absolute best at getting rid of spam and now they appear to be overcome by it?

nephihaha8• 5 months ago

Because if you report something they do nothing about it. I have seen complete scams on there and they do nothing about it. At the same time the site wants to control your worldview so lose lose on both scores.

ossa-ma• 5 months ago

Evidently there is such little real human content and engagement on these platforms yet how does the big number keep going up? Genuine question.

Do we need a way to audit usage stats in addition to financial numbers?

michelb• 5 months ago

Engagement is great if you target a specific group. Don't need human content. It's ridiculously easy to start a Facebook page in a niche targeting a specific demographic, connect a site to it, unleash AI generated content, post it on FB and run ads. With enough traction, Facebook will pay you for making more content, while you extract money from your page followers. You're separating easy-to-influence boomers and conspiracy theorists from their money. It's disgusting, but it is ridiculously easy to make heaps of money with whatever content on Facebook.

fullshark4• 5 months ago

My guess is every metric is just getting diluted by bot activity but there's enough real users buying crap to give their advertising positive returns.

euleriancon• 5 months ago

I had a similar experience recently, where I logged in to Facebook after not using it for years and was shocked by how much garbage was there. My spouse does use Facebook somewhat regularly so I looked at her feed and it was much more reasonable.

I wonder if for those of us that haven't used Facebook in years the recommendation algorithm is essentially default. Which much like the default youtube algorithm, is completely garbage. But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.

npilk4• 5 months ago

Yeah, this makes sense. It does sort of imply that new users would just see a bunch of garbage, which you'd think isn't ideal. On the other hand, how many new users could possibly still be signing up for Facebook? So maybe it's not a problem as they just manage the decline.

bmurphy19762• 5 months ago

It's nonsensical rage/click baiting garbage. You are the product, not the user.

Anybody who hasn't used FB in a long time almost certainly has 100s if not 1000s of posts from friends and family that they missed. Instead of this garbage it should be "Hey, we haven't seen you in awhile! Here's all the fun and important stuff you missed out on."

That might actually get me to engage with the platform because that would be putting my needs first and foremost. But that's not what FB does and not what FB ever did. Zuck never had our best interests in mind, so why would it put our interests first?

speckx• 5 months ago

Same here, I use it once every year or so. I get AI slop when I log in that is mostly like this blog post.

My wife, who uses it maybe once or twice a month, does not AI slop, she showed me her feed. Nor does my friend who uses it daily. It's definitely based on usage or lack of usage.

ge964• 5 months ago

YT is like this too, if you're not logged in, thirst trap, crazy stuff until you build up a search history (even not logged in)

nephihaha8• 5 months ago

Now and then it gets things right, but I find a lot of YT recs to be pretty dubious, and find it is trying to bias me in this direction or that direction. It's pretty pathetic.

The search function is also useless. About the only Scottish history content I ever get rec'd is Scotland History Tours. While I like his channel, it is not the only show in town and it doesn't go very deep.

When I got my last YT account I could see it was trying to access which news I should see. It was trying to link me to one American party or the other. I just clicked "not interested" into most of the partisan bait content. Not my circus, not my clowns.

MattGrommes• 5 months ago

Not sure why people are downvoting this, it's absolutely true. I watch a lot of youtube on my TV and I can tell in milliseconds if it's logged me out and I'm seeing the default feed. It's fully insane and inane.

KellyCriterion• 5 months ago

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

tencentshill• 5 months ago

I would assume inactive accounts get "sold" to the algorithm's lowest bidders. If you're not generating new information, there's nothing to scrape or sell. You must be pretty locked down outside of Facebook as well (you've actually toggled privacy settings, ever).

toomuchtodo2• 5 months ago

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

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

rhyperior• 5 months ago

The only way you can use FB imo.

ForHackernews• 5 months ago

https://socialfixer.com/ is another

Maxion2• 5 months ago

I logged in to instagram after like 5 years and my whole feed is literally just thots and AI generated content, even though I follow a crapload of accounts.

ryandrake4• 5 months ago

Not just thots but thots with inevitable links to their OnlyFans pages. It seems that FB and Instagram's primary purpose has become funneling people into OnlyFans. I wonder if Zucc has caught on to this and is at least getting some revenue share from OF.

dlev_pika2• 5 months ago

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

davio• 5 months ago

I did "not interested" & "This post makes me uncomfortable" for a solid month and now have a reliable feed of comedians, tacos, golden retrievers, classic jazz drummers, etc. The algorithm thought I turned Mexican and gave me exclusively Spanish content for a month but I just kind of went along with it.

mieko• 5 months ago

I wonder this too about X: when I sundowned my Twitter account when I started seeing 80% "no question literal nazi-posting" by bluechecks on my feed, I unfollowed everyone and kept the account just to prevent someone posting on what was my username for over a decade.

So now that I follow no one, when I click a link from Reddit or HN to X, my "For You" page is:

- Asian pornography; AI generated "vibes" videos of machines doing "oddly satisfying" things; Elon Musk; American right-wing politicians and pundits screaming about "woke" or jerking off ICE videos; AI or real public sex outdoors at festivals?

Of course, I don't use X, and don't seek this stuff out, and only see it there.

idunno246• 5 months ago

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

Spooky23• 5 months ago

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

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

mkehrt• 5 months ago

My facebook page, which is where I have friended everyone I met between like 2004 and 2017 is absolute garbage.

But I have a secondary account where I follow a few specific niche groups on a specific topic that are only on facebook. This page is actually fine, and is pretty good at suggesting related pages.

Not sure what the takeaway is for facebook though.

Groxx• 5 months ago

From seeing the feeds of a few categories of people near me (some using it semi-professionally, some just personally, some like me that avoid it unless strictly necessary)... it really does seem to be all of them. Absolute garbage is a majority, and they all complain about missing things they actually care about (though to be fair this has been true ever since it left colleges).

Facebook is truly awful to everyone. I can't believe people don't try harder to leave.

georgemcbay• 5 months ago

But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.

It would start being more "relevant" but not necessarily more reasonable.

I hadn't used Facebook regularly in many years but recently posted a story about the passing of my 18 year old cat. I did this as a way of informing friends and family I don't communicate with on a constant basis that I was going through a bad time (I was very fond of my cat).

My Facebook algorithm is now just almost entirely a solid wall of people I don't know announcing the death of their cat. A non-stop parade of personal tragedies.

I can see the connection of how one thing led to the other but it also highlights how clumsy and soulless these algorithmic systems are.

conductr• 5 months ago

I think it just throws the most engaging content at you hoping you get lured into using it more then the algo will update once it sees how you behave.

For me, it's almost all thirst traps for several years. More recently it learned that I like 90s/00s rock, which is a fad again, so it started showing me some of that. Also, I am a sucker for stand up comedy clips and it feeds me that now. So that was a hint that it does start to become more reasonable. But, if I start to scroll it only goes 3-5 posts deep before thirst gets put back in the rotation no matter what I do.

I've been using it more than ever in the last ~2 years, just because my old friends started sending me videos to the music related stuff so I click it and it opens in FB. We chat on messenger and I guess that little DM airplane logo is how they found a way to get me into it on occasion. Granted, my friends send me like 5-10 videos a day and I only watch them about once a month to get caught up, I can tell it's trying really hard to make a DAU out of me.

steve-atx-7600• 5 months ago

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

socalgal24• 5 months ago

It does make me wonder if that system is a net positive or a net negative. For me, I go, see suggested stuff which is all trash, and never want to engage with FB ever again. I stay only because of friends but only check once a week or so. Where as, if they got rid of all suggested stuff and instead it was 100% friends and family and every 5 posts, an ad. I'd engage with it far more often.

veunes5• 5 months ago

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

Octoth0rpe3• 5 months ago

The current leader for me for worst questions suggested by Meta's AI was on a photo someone took of some conspiracy theorist's van with the spraypainted message "THEY EAT BABIES IN DENVER". The suggested questions from their AI were:

- Baby-eating restaurants in Denver

- Denver's unique food scene

wtaf meta.

Beyond that, I simply don't see how Meta can possibly ever monetize their investment in AI. People are and will continue to be willing to pay OpenAI, Anthropic, google, microsoft. No one will pay Meta for their AI. And if their investment was only a couple million and they got some useless suggested questions out of it, whatever. But the size of their investment sure makes it look like someone thinks they'll make money off of it.

mv4• 5 months ago

Meta doesn't need to monetize their AI directly the way OpenAI or Anthropic would do. Meta runs ads, and they can use AI to help advertisers create content, target people, engage, etc.

Octoth0rpe3• 5 months ago

Meta runs ads, and they can use AI to help advertisers create content, target people, engage, etc.

It is hard to imagine the level of spending they are doing if that is the sum total of their use case: shoring up a moat for which there really aren't any significant competitors in the first place. It seems like it can only be justified by eventually rolling out some kind of subscription service for... something, but for the life of me I can't think of what they might be able to actually sell to people or corps.

alex11384• 5 months ago

Yeah, it's incredibly ham fisted. I do not understand Zuckerberg's brain. The man is incapable of coming up with a good product or it was some product engineer given absolutely free reign to do whatever they wanted. AI summaries do not go with a product made for posts of friends

HWR_142• 5 months ago

Meta doesn't need to monetize their investment in AI. They need to their eyeballs and not lose them to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. If they give away AI and people use it to make content for FB/IG that's all they need.

Octoth0rpe3• 5 months ago

They need to their eyeballs and not lose them to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.

At this point I'm not sure how they could 'lose eyeballs' to those 3. There doesn't seem to be any kind of market overlap. Unless we're talking about the very abstract sense of doing _anything_ other than use a meta product is a potential lost eyeball in which case you might as well add the national park system to the list of people they can't lose to, and I don't think that's a useful way to talk about the cost/benefit of Meta's ai spending spree.

sgt• 5 months ago

I mean... I've been a Facebook user since 2006 and I don't see much spam at all in my feed. So I guess like PaulHoule said, it's a cold start problem and the defaults are terrible.

paxys• 5 months ago

I logged on for the first time in ~8 years

That's the problem. Your friends and liked pages have all moved on and aren't posting anymore. The algorithm has no idea what to show you.

FWIW I don't use Facebook actively but do log in once in a while, mainly for marketplace and neighborhood groups. And a ton of my friends are still active there (might be giving away my age). The first post on my feed not from a friend is at #14, and it's a clip from a comedian, so content I don't mind. Then one at #18, which is an article posted by a local newspaper. Further down at #25 or so from the onion. Keep scrolling I see New York Times, Gothamist, Subway Takes, Cracked (that's still around?), WTA. Overall my feed is almost entirely posts from my friends from the last week or relevant news, and I see zero AI slop or other posts of the kind that are in the article.

So basically - it's all about the algorithm and your connections. A "cooked" product doesn't make a trillion dollars every quarter.

alex11384• 5 months ago

This could be, but the complaint about Facebook has always been people are posting but the feed won't show them posts from friends

criddell• 5 months ago

The algorithm has no idea what to show you.

If you run into somebody you don't know, your first instinct shouldn't be to start showing them porn.

I don't use Facebook but I do use YouTube and their recommendations are horrendously bad for me. So many AI videos.

For some reason last night it thought I wanted to see bogus videos of porch pirates stealing a package that's actually a glitter bomb. I clicked through to the comments and the top comment was something like "Who are these AI videos for?" and the response was something like "Me. I know they are fake but I like seeing thieves get what's coming to them."

Mike Judge is a prophet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWfOMeLk6m0

StilesCrisis• 5 months ago

Facebook still knows what websites you've been visiting, even if you haven't logged in for eight years. The Facebook Pixel tracks page visits, and it's easy to join your Facebook account to your browsing history if you ever log into any website using your email address. Assuming you are usually using the same computer or IP, the user profile could be pretty detailed. It's actually surprising they don't do better here.

brycethornton• 5 months ago

I still use Groups and Marketplace but my home feed is blocked thanks to News Feed Eradicator. Check it out if you haven't heard of it. It's a browser extension that can block the home feed (and more) for a number of social sites.

arjie• 5 months ago

Huh. I thought perhaps it was the usual "why are all the recommendation algorithms showing me gay porn?" class of complaint, but I went and logged in and it seems that he's not wrong though the degree seems to vary. I've got a bunch of these but also a bunch of outrage bait and generic general stuff. I think if you don't use the platform you get the undifferentiated high-engagement stuff which is likely the same as those Taboola chumboxes that people have on their websites.

EDIT: Hilariously, I went there 45 minutes later and I must have interacted with something because now everything is posts about football (along with the "i want an argument with my husband" post!). I'm in the Bay Area Gooners group but that's been over a decade, so presumably what happens is they don't run recommendations until someone shows activity. Just logging and browsing the feed must have triggered it because I didn't see any football stuff last time except BAG.

jalapenos4• 5 months ago

Bay Area Gooners group

Just searched this and was not what expected

ngruhn• 5 months ago

unfortunate naming in retrospect

goatsi• 5 months ago

But on the other hand, I hadn't logged in in nearly a decade!

This is the cause. With a long dormant account, facebook has no real content to show you. Your friends will almost all be dormant as well, even the facebook pages and groups you were part of are likely to have fallen silent. Facebook will feed you directly from the slop firehose rather than show you a blank feed.

davesque• 5 months ago

It's a complete mystery to me how Facebook operates. Like, they need money to keep the lights on, right? Where is the money coming from if no humans are using the platform?

smt88• 5 months ago

An astonishing number of people use Facebook daily, and Instagram is also a huge revenue generator. The company itself is thriving despite terrible products.

jjtheblunt• 5 months ago

isn't the money coming from advertisers placing ads, even if no one is really paying the placed ads attention?

sylos• 5 months ago

Government funded!

nephihaha8• 5 months ago

Yes, erm, why do you think they get the tax breaks!

wcfrobert• 5 months ago

Ad duopoly with Google.

Half of all humans on Earth uses Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Threads). These products are free for you to use. But for Meta, your attention is the product which they sell to advertisers.

99% of their revenue comes from ads, and 1% comes from VR stuff.

gniv• 5 months ago

I login for the groups. Some private groups have a ton of useful info that's well organized, plus helpful folks that are eager to answer questions.

fusslo• 5 months ago

local town offices mostly use facebook for news and events.

I signed up in 2023 after not using it since 2008. I can't believe how bad the marketplace feature is compared to craigslist. It's trying to get me to keep coming back and serve me different ads. I just want to see all the local ads that match my search!

reddalo2• 5 months ago

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

unsharted• 5 months ago

On a positive note, posts from groups I was interested in have been targeted at my feed by the algorithm. Still not public, but least there is some sort of exposure to "passers-by"

JKCalhoun2• 5 months ago

(I know, frying pans and fires) I started a Google Group as an alternative to a Meta group that I don't want to need Mata to participate in.

ks2048• 5 months ago

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

nimbius• 5 months ago

Man who remembers when a big Mac was a wholesome and tasty meal option now shocked to find that, under capitalism, the wrapper is actually more nutritious than the meal itself.

bananamogul• 5 months ago

Facebook is just fine.

This is mostly about OP, not Facebook. The reason he sees tons of AI images of AI girls is because that's the kind of content he consumes on various Meta platforms. When I login to Facebook, I see none of that. So...

I am in a couple dozen active groups across a variety of topics - guitar, tech, TV shows, history, tabletop gaming, etc. - and 99% of posts are on-topic chatter by humans.

I prefer Reddit because it's longer-form content but with communities, it's about where there's a center of gravity - a subreddit, a FB group, a Discord, a traditional forum, etc. I go where the people are. And a lot of those people are on FB for some niches.

The "FB is nothing but AI slop and ads" is a myth. I have interesting conversations with people I don't personally know (in a real life sense) on FB every day.

artemonster• 5 months ago

I read a RARE friend-made post, close tab, decide to react/support/comment/like on it, reopen FB and this post is buried forever in the feed, findable only if you search this person again. fuck them for fucking with my feed. Forget if this was a post from some group, since they can be shown to you out of order, good luck finding it

npilk4• 5 months ago

Well, I haven't really used any Meta platforms for at least 5 years, so I don't think that's how they're deciding what to serve me.

I could definitely believe that I used to click on more pictures of girls than boys back in high school and college when I actually used Facebook. But they would have been real pictures of people I was friends with.

To your point, I'm sure if I used the product more, the algorithm would get "better" according to what I engaged with.

da022• 5 months ago

The first half of the last paragraph is a warning: Get schools to stop using Facebook. If they are showing that kind of content to a grown hetero-woman, I'd hate to wonder what they show to everyone else.

I never signed up to that site because I thought sooner or later Google or some startup would just clone it, lower the ad count, improve censorship, and run it at near break-even. Especially since you don't have to save every single post created for eternity.

bmurphy19762• 5 months ago

My FB feed is filled with slag that's got nothing to do with anything I'm interested in, my friends or family. I have wade through 85-90% of that crap just to see a post from a friend inviting everybody to a BBQ they are having which is already 2 weeks past the event. Oh, and every time I log in I have 10+ unread notifications that again are more desperate attempts at getting me to engage with the platform and not actually something that should have ever been sent as a notification.

FUCK THAT.

So I don't use Facebook. I cannot wait for this house of cards to collapse in on itself.

boredtofears• 5 months ago

I'm on FB primarily because my local buy-nothing group is on it, so I am logging in multiple times a day. I'm so used to this slop it's pretty funny at this point, but as is the case with all social media, you tune your algorithm as you engage. At this point it pushes things like cooking videos and hockey clips more than the AI slop for me.

Sometimes I'll go down a rabbit hole of clicking AI generated videos just because my curiosity is piqued, and then I'll be stuck getting that slop fed to me for the next week. I have to make a mental note to actively disengage with it as quickly as possible to tip the algo in the other direction.

bramhaag2• 5 months 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.

ge964• 5 months ago

Maybe the replies are also fake to drive the narrative

It is interesting where you go on (eg. echo chambers) but like 9gag for example is super racist and doesn't seem to be moderated.

Like TruthSocial do real people actually use that? Crazy

efilife• 5 months ago

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

jalapenos4• 5 months ago

I just searched "TruthSocial".

First result is Trump's page, which I could access without a login.

There is the same ad "Featured Ad. Must See Video. This Video Will Soon Be Banned. Watch Before It's Deleted" repeated about a dozen times on the page, showing a woman wearing booty shorts approaching a private jet.

Looks very highbrow

ddtaylor2• 5 months ago

It's mostly all ICE engagement bait on both sides. In the same way we are all guilty of upvoting an article without reading it, they will amplify their ideas or viewpoints by signal boosting a video. The same way an echo chamber forms around a questionable news site that is often proven wrong or lying. The source doesn't matter anymore only the numbers.

dekhn2• 5 months ago

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

It was already slop before that.

esseph• 5 months ago

I stopped when it started showing propaganda from the CCP

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

dekhn2• 5 months ago

Well, I'm in the US, I already know how to recognize US propaganda and ignore it :)

I don't think I was shown anything that was clearly labelled as "state-sponsored-media" from any other country and I don't think I saw anything that was propaganda, but not labelled as such, although I typically scrolled past the obvious ads and AI slop so I might have missed something.

vjk800• 5 months ago

I recently joined back to Facebook to follow some local groups. I barely see anyone I know posting on Facebook anymore. Even the local group seems kind of dead considering how many people live here.

So where are people now? If I want to get informed on local events, etc., where should I go?

tomstockmail• 5 months ago

Your local library? Mine has a bulletin board where anyone can pin something (like Pinterest, but in real life) and numerous events. If yours doesn't, start one?

qq662• 5 months ago

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

reddalo2• 5 months ago

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

giobox• 5 months ago

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

qq662• 5 months ago

Do they make any money from Marketplace?

dathinab• 5 months ago

(I dunno, maybe those are all bots too.)

I wish,

but from personal experience I'm afraid quite a bunch of them are creepy old guys which have no idea how creepy they have become(1), because they are in a bubble with mostly only other creepy old guys

(1): Like I don't mean people which always have been creepy or "secret/hidden" creepy. But people which through increasingly more "not caring" and echo champers/ad bubbles and similar twisting their world perception/social feedback loop have become increasingly more creepy in the last 10-20 years.

sva_• 5 months ago

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

jmyeet• 5 months ago

Facebook in particular, and social media in general, is an excellent example of making short-term decisions ultimately leading to your doom.

FB of course started as a way for college kids to follow each other and see what's going on. Then rather than a chronological feed we got the newsfeed. This was hugely controversial, actually. Apparently ~10% of the user base threatened to quit over it [1].

But why did they do it? Because it increased engagement. And every social media platform since has followed the newsfeed model.

But the big thing (IMHO) that led to FB's destruction was sharing links. I bet this too increased engagement but it ultimately leads to your feed being flooded with your weird uncle posting conspiracy theories.

All social media platforms have moved away from this idea of following your friends and family. They're all now a way of disseminating "news" and following celebrities. How social groups keep in touch now is group chats.

I firmly believe this recommendation model is headed for a reckoning with governments around the world. We have the Meta trial going on now, the EU investigating platforms for addictive practices (where is this same smoke for sports betting and crypto gambling I wonder?) and so on.

In the US, this comes back to Section 230, a law established in the 1990s that created legal cover for user generated content because it shielded platforms from legal liability as long as they met certain requirements (eg moderation, legal takedowns). The alternative is to be a publisher (eg a newspaper) who are responsible for their content.

I believe that the algorithmic newsfeed has created a way to let social media platforms act as publishers but enjoy thei protections of being a platform.

Let me put it this way: if, for example, you as a publisher make endless posts about the evils of Cuba, how is that different from having user-generated content where you promote anti-Cuba content and suppress pro-Cuba content? In my opinion, it isn't, functionally. This will ultimately come to a head.

Anyway, back to Facebook, I know some still use groups but really who uses FB anymore? For awhile, Meta had the golden goose with IG but even that seems to be in decline. Twitter has declined way from its peak and was never mainstream. Snapchat enjoyed a very young audience for ephemeral messaging. I have no idea what the current state is. It seems like Tiktok is the only platform still enjoying growth.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/4018352/facebooks-news-feed-just...

nickla• 5 months ago

I deleted my account in 2005 when I noticed that it wasn't just for getting to know local groups. Before I deleted it I was contacted by a pretty woman who had 100 friends who were all the same last name as me. That's all she wanted to do is contact people who were "related". I had the suspicion she was a bot. People call me stupid for doing so, but now it is just bots?

ASalazarMX3• 5 months ago

There were some fun things like that back then. One of my early Facebook accounts was a videogame alias than included the work "clown", and I received invitations from other users that had "clown" in their names, its circle of friends became a virtual circus.

varispeed2• 5 months ago

Instagram is serving me literal porn when I browse shorts (for instance women showing their private parts). It's amazing that they are unable or maybe don't want to block it.

Facebook basically has sexual content spam as in the OP article all the way.

It's to the point I'd never open either app when in public.

gs172• 5 months ago

It's amazing that they are unable or maybe don't want to block it.

I'm not convinced they care about moderation outside of legal necessity.

varispeed2• 5 months ago

This is illegal in the UK, as they have to do age check for adult content. Also showing person porn without consent constitutes some form of sexual assault.

zoogeny• 5 months ago

I log into Facebook website a couple of times a week to browse Marketplace. I very rarely check the feed (once a month?) since almost no human I know posts there. But my feed has 0 thirst traps when I just checked. It was some musicians I follow, one or two pictures posted by friends, the workout routines from a distant family member, local news and then a whole bunch of comedy skits and old comic strips turned into reels.

It is 60% garbage but actually the 40% that is there is completely different and valuable compared even to YouTube (where I spend the lions share of my social media time). But I actually think that only looking at it once a month is the best way since if I look at the feed more often I notice it slowly skews more to 90% garbage and 10% value.

h05sz487b• 5 months ago

The original moltbook. Just bots talking to each other.

mirekrusin2• 5 months ago

I think author goes on porn sites and it skews algo towards crap like that (no cookies/incognito/etc doesn't save you from them tracking where you move), especially if he's not active on fb then that's the only signal they get.

hmokiguess2• 5 months ago

Takes one to know one? Could you elaborate

mirekrusin2• 5 months ago

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

Instagram is estimated to generate half of ad revenue.

WhatsApp and Messenger contribute relatively little to ad revenue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why not just serve engagement from friends network or even "wish happy birthday to X tomorrow" instead – 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?

TheRealPomax• 5 months ago

"Facebook is just clickbait slop and is making billions" is more the opposite of cooked. They managed to turn garbage into dollars, and people are eating it up for as long as they're allowed to do exploit their market position.

lgl• 5 months ago

The interface... Oh.. the terrible terrible UI on desktop...

Switch tabs, come back.. it refreshes everything and you can never go back.

Comment threads with 100+ comments with only a "show more" link, which again.. se previous paragraph.

See a video, click fullscreen icon. Doesn't go fullscreen, goes to some weird modal window, muted. Click fullscreen again..

And I'm sure I could go on... It's really a sad shell of the simplicity it once was.

grishka2• 5 months ago

That's what metrics-driven development gets you.

QuadrupleA• 5 months ago

Holy crap. What a dystopia. Guess some of this blood money went into free Llama models and the react.js ecosystem (dubious gift to the world).

Is it possible to make money these days without being ethically bankrupt?

dash2• 5 months ago

This is the tech version of "nobody I know voted for Nixon": FB's position in the US & Europe is very misleading from a global perspective.

In the Philippines, say, Facebook is the internet. Every business runs on it. People use it instead of news. Everybody uses Messenger to chat. You get free minutes with your phone that are specifically for FB/IG/Messenger.

nathanaldensr• 5 months ago

As someone with a Filipina wife and who's traveled many times to the Philippines, your characterization is exactly correct. Facebook is the option, not just one option.

Interesting side fact: The Philippines is #1 in social media usage in the world.

nojs• 5 months ago

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

By what metric?

michaelbuckbee• 5 months ago

Addendum to this: my filipina aunt is elderly and I was absolutely shocked at the amount of highly specific AI generated content seemingly targeted directly at her on Facebook.

Except instead of thirst traps it was a weird mix of outrage porn, religious imagery, and kids + pets being cute, singing or rescued from odd situations.

I asked a few questions of her to try and figure out if she like really grasped that it was AI, and she knew the general idea, but there's already so many filters and choppy edits of things it was honestly just too hard for her to make the distinction.

ryandrake4• 5 months ago

I had a similar revulsion watching older folks in my family scroll and scroll through obvious AI slop and AI ragebait. They can't even really tell it's AI, and they just sit there gobbling it all up, even though it's 100% nonsense. I mean, on one hand, who am I to tell people what media to like and consume, but on the other hand, I kind of fear for their grip on reality.

halapro• 5 months ago

The Filipino Facebook world is absolutely atrocious. You can't go 5 minutes in a public place without hearing a barrage of asinine sound effects and enhanced laughter emanating from these loud phones.

dlisboa• 5 months ago

I don't see it as misleading at all. You're leaving out half the world and implying it's doing fine. Regular Facebook usage in Brazil is also non-existent and it's the 5th or so biggest Internet market. China doesn't have it. I'm not sure about India usage. So if FB isn't popular in the US, EU, China, Brazil, etc, that's an extreme amount of market loss.

underlipton4• 5 months ago

WhatsApp covers a lot of the remainder. When I worked at a job with frequent contact with international guests, the vast majority of people from Africa and SEA, and a good portion of those from Latin American and MENA, were on it. In fact, the first time I'd heard of the app was from them. This was about 10 or 11 years ago. It might have changed since then, as Facebook has for us, but Zuck's empire (read: illegal monopoly) has been dominant globally.

testing223212• 5 months ago

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

dguest• 5 months ago

Does FB data count against your data quota in these countries? I've been quite a few places where it's impossible to buy a sim card that doesn't give you free facebook and WhatsApp.

You can't use the real internet without asking your friends to pay for it.

Legend2440• 5 months ago

My facebook feed is mostly low-effort reposted memes from tumblr/twitter/reddit, political ragebait, and screenshots of jokes from TV shows.

It's usually not AI (at least not obviously) but it's still slop.

plagiarist• 5 months ago

Why do women feel refreshed after arguments

This sort of thing is perfect ragebait that Facebook et al love to serve to their products.

The only problem for FB is that there's nowhere to angrily contradict. I suppose their algo feed shunted this author into the young male to incel radicalization pipeline? They must serve differently enraging suggested questions once they have more data on the viewer.

next_xibalba• 5 months ago

This amounts to an anecdote and an opinion. What are the actual engagement numbers? I suspect Facebook is doing just fine.

My own anecdotes are that Facebook Groups tend to be the nexus of legacy social features and that Marketplace has overtaken Craigslist for person to person sales.

But the feed is now more akin to TikTok than friend feed 1.0 from the late 2000s.

Again, I’d love to see actual Facebook engagement data, not some guy’s opinion.

phkahler• 5 months ago

If you want to see your friends posts, you have to click the icon of people. I agree that the default feed has become absolute garbage.

AJRF• 5 months ago

I use Facebook for marketplace and when I logged in the first post I saw was the half time score for a football game that happened 3 weeks ago.

They are not sending their best.

CrzyLngPwd• 5 months ago

I have a similar experience on both FB and IG.

I only log in to see what friends/family are doing, and I have fewer than 100 friends on both added together, but I have to scroll and scroll to see anything by those I am interested in.

Whether it's AI or not, it's all irrelevant slop to me.

xnx• 5 months ago

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

radpanda• 5 months ago

I haven't used Facebook in probably a decade or so. I've missed out on Facebook Marketplace apparently - at least 5 people in this thread mention using Facebook for that specifically, and I have heard numerous friends talk about snagging good stuff person-to-person like I used to do with Craigslist. OTOH, I haven't heard anything especially good about Facebook Marketplace's UI or features, just that "everyone is on Facebook", so it reaches a lot of people.

I wonder what will be next after Facebook Marketplace dwindles (assuming eventually "everyone" is no longer on Facebook). Going back to Craigslist? Something new?

chistev2• 5 months ago

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

lich_king• 5 months ago

I can sympathize with this take, but I think it misses the point: the platform is not broken. It's delivering people precisely what they want. If you look at the version of this for young people - TikTok, Snapchat stories - it's the same thing. Busty models, increasingly AI generated, and various made-up "heartwarming stories" or rage bait. Go to YouTube, and you have more of the same.

This is not even an internet-era thing. Before that, some of the best-selling magazines were basically celebrity gossip. Facebook just found a way to scale it and make more money off of it.

The only thing that surprises me now is that people don't actually mind it if you point out that they're liking, commenting, or resharing AI slop. It doesn't even matter that the story wasn't real. It's enough that the kitten is cute, or whatever.

zzzeek• 5 months ago

all the AI / crap shown in this post is the not awful part of facebook.

the awful part is the intense swarm of hateful bigots that arrive at any post that shows any kind of misfortune on the part of people who are not white and republican. I'm pretty sure that a large number of these accounts are not bots; they're real people living around the country, seething in bigoted hatred who can now post with impunity the most vile and disgusting crap I've ever seen.

Example: A local news post shows three boys who have been reported missing (yes, people's children missing, and no, this is not about immigration - for those posts, the hate and racism is vastly worse). The three boys happen to be Black. Only one comment is actually displayed beneath the photo: "They all look the same to me!" - then more (I'm cutting and pasting these from the actual post just now): "Tell them by their hair??? No???" "How can you tell one from another?" "Did'n do nuffin man" "Missing or escaped!?" comments flooded by revolting, actual racism, against innocent children who are potentially in severe danger. Moderation is not an option at all here, there's thousands of these people swarming any such post, the posts are from some local news source that comes from an aggregator of some kind that does no moderation of any kind, nobody cares, it's just a huge platform for vast mobs of the most deplorable people you ever hoped didn't exist.

This site needs to be closed down like yesterday.

rmoriz• 5 months ago

I can't understand how such AI slop ca make money on FB or TikTok. I mean hardly anything gets viral.

29athrowaway• 5 months ago

They capitulated to TikTok by adding thirst content and suggested content based on activity.

josefritzishere• 5 months ago

I nuked my fb account years ago. I wasn't sure at the time if I was craving more substance or if it was becoming more vapid. Looking back not... definitely both.

hexage1814• 5 months ago

Click to show mildly sensitive content (revealing clothing)

Those warnings are stupid.

mattfrommars2• 5 months ago

Facebook is still has excellent marketplace

Only that keeps me going back.

tartoran• 5 months ago

I stopped using Facebook for a while but I agree that their marketplace used to be pretty good for a while, that until it started to be spammed with scams. It became really unusable IMO.

holoduke• 5 months ago

For me Facebook is no longer relevant for friend stuff. But I find it pretty good in group stuff. For example their are groups about my town where I live. Historical groups or modern ones. Or a group about a specific car model I own. I just have to filter out all the ai / porn slop that goes into my feed.

joninous• 5 months ago

a group about a specific car model I own

This is basically the only reason why I occasionally log in to Facebook these days. Facebook groups seems to be the place where car owners gather to share information regarding their vehicles, at least here in Finland. I have found discussions in these groups very valuable e.g. when I'm diagnosing a problem or evaluating whether some defect will be covered by warranty or not.

cwoolfe• 5 months ago

what comes after facebook?

dmschulman• 5 months ago

One thing I've noticed is a large difference between what's served on Facebook's desktop site and what's served on their mobile version. I don't use the app, I just log into facebook.com on my phone, but the mobile version is serving 100% more of this AI slop than on desktop.

I think it's obvious why given the way users interact with sites/apps on their devices vs on desktop (they want to make FB mobile as TikTok-like as possible), but it's really striking how much of Facebook on mobile is just a bunch of AI slop at this point. I see some creep in on desktop too, mostly within the Reels/Shorts section (same creators/videos on both platforms, that is), but to see my recommended feed content be so vastly different indicates a lot to me about how the algorithm interprets user behavior and a lot of Meta's thinking about mobile audiences.

EDIT: mind you I don't follow a single topic or favorite anything on the platform, the content being served/recommended to me is purely based (as far as I can tell) on gender/demographic info they know about me and user behavior.

hsuduebc2• 5 months ago

It's garbage now it's main purpose is to confuse older people with ai slop or ragebait them with politics.

It's really unfortunate that these people don't know, don't understand or even don't believe that this is algoritmic feed tailored specifically for you.

I have people in my family which basically believe that there is a pride march every Tuesday in cities around or country.

numbers• 5 months ago

Yeah, I have a Facebook that's about 2-3 years old now, and I use it mainly from Marketplace. But man, if I just accidentally go to the feed, it's just a bunch of spam and some sort of bait, whether it's rage bait or thirst traps or anything like that. Facebook is maybe trying to see if I'll engage with it, but mainly because I use the app for Marketplace, it just continues to recommend garbage.

kurthr• 5 months ago

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

d--b• 5 months ago

I never opened an account. For me facebook was like this from day 1. I thought it was cooked in 2009. I guess I was somewhat wrong.

varenc• 5 months ago

Another aspect of FB's decline: it's increasingly buggy. Too many issues to list, but curious if others have noticed this as well? Last week I got stuck trying to login via mobile web, kept approving the login via the mobile app but the web never seemed to receive that approval and I just had to give up.

jcgrillo4• 5 months ago

I sometimes use marketplace, it works better than craigslist for finding cheap firewood logs, used car parts, and other random shit. I made a burner account for that. It worked fine and I was able to ignore the rest of their garbage products. However, I had to delete the app from my phone because the fucking thing wouldn't stop with the notifications. BTW if any of you assholes work at Uber or Lyft--same problem. My new pattern for using this garbage, and only when I absolutely must, is:

(1) download the app (2) use it for whatever i need to get done (3) delete it

TBH this article is interesting, I haven't actually looked at fb since I last had an account ca. 2009. It was headed that way then, and I'm not surprised it got there.

But back to the usage pattern above, if someone at Apple is listening please build a sandbox for these malicious apps that just fucking silences them unless I choose to run it by which I mean literally not a single CPU instruction of their code runs unless I explicitly tell it to. Thanks.

Ancapistani• 5 months ago

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

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

karmakurtisaani• 5 months ago

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

justonceokay2• 5 months ago

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

partiallypro• 5 months ago

Same, I have never interacted with their Facebook reels/videos but all the video thumbnails are practically just videos of porn stars/OnlyFans style content. Instagram isn't as bad on the Reels side, you'll get good content there...but the feed itself is dreadful, I never see anything from friends. It's all just slop from bigger brands/publishers. At this point, there are just chat services to me and my friends.

com2kid2• 5 months ago

My FB reels are educational content , music and artists.

It is pretty much identical to my YT shorts feed, which means two algorithms have settled on almost identical content.

gs172• 5 months ago

Same, I have never interacted with their Facebook reels/videos but all the video thumbnails are practically just videos of porn stars/OnlyFans style content

For me it fluctuates between animals and thirst traps. It's a really odd recommender system.

Instagram isn't as bad on the Reels side, you'll get good content there...

Seems to depend how far you scroll, the first dozen will usually be good, clean recommendations. After that it goes downhill.

com2kid2• 5 months ago

Facebook owning the local classifieds section is often overlooked.

Offer up is dead in my area. Craigslist is a joke. Everything happens on FB marketplace. Vendors sell food, gyms liquidate old equipment, small furniture stores post their entire inventory.

FB isn't monetizing any of that beyond ads for related products, which I guess is how they monetize everything.

Cthulhu_3• 5 months ago

Whatsapp too, I only caught a glimpse of that fairly recently after we had some local political issue (an asylum seeker center to be built nearby, nothing gets people riled up than something like that). Now I'm in a "post stuff to pick up for free" group, lol.

jhaile• 5 months ago

This is one reason I'm really annoyed they are getting rid of messenger.com and requiring you to go to facebook.com to see your messages. I much prefer going to the specific site for chats and not having to see the feed...

skobes• 5 months ago

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

haunter2• 5 months ago

Same, Facebook Marketplace is really good at my location because there is nothing else and never have been. It's not like Facebook destroyed something, no one else offered a classified sites like this

ok123456• 5 months ago

Craigslist.

ergocoder• 5 months ago

The reels section is ridiculous. It's definitely NSFW. Facebook doesn't support hiding it permanently.

Like what you experience, I cannot use Facebook at work anymore.

Any Facebook PM out there? Can you make it a setting to hide it permanently?

ceejayoz• 5 months ago

They can. They won’t.

shpx• 5 months ago

Facebook is running the same kind of engagement-maximization algorithm on Marketplace postings, so half of my suggested postings when I open Marketplace is girls posing in the clothes they're selling.

mccr8• 5 months ago

I think the trick to making the "shorts" feature stop showing scantily clad women is to use it actively a bit, and only watch the videos that are decidedly something else. I did that for awhile and now my videos are like "let's see what happens when you pour lava on some soda bottles" which I'm not sure I care that much about but at least it isn't embarrassing.

thepaulmcbride• 5 months ago

This is exactly the same experience I've had. I recently re-installed the app to use marketplace after moving to the US. My feed is mostly AI generated half naked women and AI generated conservative rage bait. It is so obvious that it's AI slop, but none of the comments ever mention it. I too assumed they were bots.

nc• 5 months ago

It's your feed.

Everyones feed is different.

It depends on how much you train the algorithm.

Yours is untrained, therefore slop.

overfeed• 5 months ago

I don't know if author coined the term, but "Meta's Gooniverse" is a better descriptor of its properties than "Family of apps" they use in quarterly reporting.

savolai• 5 months ago

Fb purity browser addon helps, though its ui is quite cryptic.

rco8786• 5 months ago

I just logged in to mine to see, I also can't remember the last time I looked at my news feed. My experience isn't quite as bad as OPs, but certainly plenty of AI slop and lots and lots of accounts that I don't follow and have never heard of.

greatgib• 5 months ago

Also something that frustrated me a lot is that when browsing with the web browser on a computer, there is absolutely no way to share a link to a post.

For exemple there is a post with details about an event that will happen, when you look at available options: you can't click on it to go to a dedicated page like on LinkedIn, there is no option in the menu to have a shareable link. You can share with: someone on fb message, a group, your wall, things like that but no link.

But on the phone is it possible.

mtmail• 5 months ago

There's a perma-link when you click on the date of the post. But you're right, on the 'Share' button they have 5+ options, none of them is "copy link" or similar.

garyrob• 5 months ago

I'm 70. Most of my high school and college friends are on Facebook, and some other friends. So I use it (including its Messenger component) a lot to keep in touch! I know it's a generational thing. Just thought I'd mention it.

ieie3366• 5 months ago

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

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

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

cogman10• 5 months ago

yup.

I get a couple of thirst traps in my feed, but not many. I definitely get a metric ton of AI shit.

The stuff I'm actually following, friends, etc is pretty diluted.

ndarray• 5 months ago

They're clearly not that optimized when the user ends up complaining publicly. Don't tell others what they're supposed to like because some algo said so. Very cringe.

goldkey• 5 months ago

They're crushing it with anyone over 45

beeflet• 5 months ago

beautiful

MiddleEndian• 5 months ago

The default experience probably sucks, but I aggressively block anything even mildly annoying on my Facebook newsfeed, and I like what's left:

Mostly Simpsons memes, Seinfeld memes, Pro Wrestling memes, Sopranos memes, and then intersections of those memes (Seinfeld Pro Wrestling, Simpsons Pro Wrestling, etc.). Some nerd shit. Stuff from the handful of friends of mine and local groups I interact with who still post on Facebook. Maybe <1% total garbage like what the article describes but I immediately block any groups or users who post anything even slightly annoying. I almost never watch any video content at all. It's unironically better passive content than anywhere else left on the web, probably because all the people trying to be hip have gone somewhere else lol

However whatever their UI is sluggish as hell and I'm surprised this wasn't discussed. You'll click block user/group and it will respond multiple seconds later (on my symmetric 1Gbps FIOS connection) and UI elements will jump around. FB messenger is slow as shit and occasionally will fail to decrypt/load messages entirely, even though it works fine on my phone (don't have regular FB on my phone so can't make that comparison). There's an anti-performance cargo-cult among web devs. Perhaps their metrics only show what it saves them on server costs. But if I did not already use the site it would be impossible to convince me to start.

littlekey• 5 months ago

I agree with the people saying that the product is a lot better once you're actively engaging with pages that align with your interests, so that the algorithm can feed you better content.

That being said, it's still sad that this is the default new/returning user experience. Imagine a world where a new user was met with real posts about a variety of interests, rather than a psychic barrage of insane AI posts.

ddtaylor2• 5 months ago

I think even for someone who logs in daily and uses it a bit, it still shovels weird content and even if you repeatedly skip or don't engage with AI slop, you still get a lot of it.

I almost think we are seeing something similar to a CAPTCHA where the engagement is being used to tune which videos slip under the uncanny valley radar.

SamuelAdams• 5 months ago

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

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

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

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

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

strangattractor2• 5 months ago

Coining HNs Law

Any mode of communication that depends on advertising for funding will over time t monotonically approach total BullShit Grifting as t increases.

munificent4• 5 months ago

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

monero-xmr2• 5 months ago

Reddit is so insufferably political now it's insane. Like why do 3d printing subreddits need to stand with (insert leftist outrage of Gaza / Israel / Ice / Canada / on and on)

jmye• 5 months ago

Why do you think? Enragement = engagement. You could generously assume that it's users optimizing for posts that get them likes/karma/whatever, or ungenerously assume that the platform itself is gaming engagement via AI or bots, but the effect is the same and it's pervasive. The only out is finding tiny communities that are still communities, and praying they don't grow.

Everyone saw the Facebook model and adopted it. It's why Reddit has the valuation it does (and why it's still insane to me people intentionally use it as a recommendation or information tool).

thrance• 5 months ago

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.

fullshark4• 5 months ago

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

__lain__• 5 months ago

The reddit bots are quite nefarious. Even in technical communities where no advertisement is happening there are so many posts made by bots either recycling old posts or masquerading as humans doing banal things like complaining about end users or something. Hundreds of bots that do nothing more than pretend to be people complaining about work, really curious what the goal of the operators is with these ones. Makes me wonder if they are bots supplied by reddit to artificially boost engagement.

themafia• 5 months ago

Points are often presented as a proxy for trustworthiness. They're even implicit on sites like HN where certain features only become available once you've crossed a threshold.

It's a bad tool. I always think of the Bill Bur joke talking about Netflix going from 1-5 stars to thumbs up/down. "It's like.. stubbed my toe.. thumbs down. Hitler.. thumbs down. There's too big of a gap in 'thumbs down.'"

boelboel• 5 months ago

Reddit has made it impossible to check the history of accounts this past week. They certainly want to make it as difficult as possible to see if someone is 'real'.

jcgrillo4• 5 months ago

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

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

Zak• 5 months ago

It's not about what users want. It's about what's profitable for the company.

What I want from Facebook is to see what original words, images, or videos my friends and family thought was worth sharing with the world today, and I want to see clearly when I've reached the end of that. I probably don't need to spend more than ten minutes once a day on that.

It's profitable for Facebook to show me as many ads as possible. If I wasn't an aggressive adblock user, the thing I want would have much less potential profit than all the third-party content they want to show me.

overgard3• 5 months ago

I don't really think that's how this plays out. Facebook can squeeze people a little longer, but if all you want is entertainment other options seem better. End of the day Facebook's moat is your network, but if it's not useful for keeping up with the people you care about, what's special about it? I see a lot of AI generated stuff on youtube, but the view counts are pretty low, so I don't think most of it is getting much traction (and frankly it's very obvious that it's AI just from thumbnails 99% of the time).

Cthulhu_3• 5 months ago

The reposts and crossposts are popular because while you may have seen it before, millions haven't.

I think I'm almost at the point of letting it go already. If AI becomes more egregious / apparent, I'm out. I was caught by one already - scrolled for too long, came across some manufacturing video (I love those), but as it went on it became less and less realistic. By the end I was like "huh, TIL robots can make jeans out of banana fiber end to end", but that wasn't true.

InMice• 5 months ago

You just have to click on "Feeds" then you can filter to friends, groups, or pages you follow. That said they have been slowly burying where you can click on "feeds" to get there, so I just bookmark them. I never look at the main page it's just pure garbage.

I will say facebook ads are the most relevant ads ever for me. I click on them all the time because they're actually interesting to me. But at the same time all the products/clothing is so expensive I never convert.

What I dont like is Alerts becoming just another feed to fill with spam and not real notifications.

mbo• 5 months ago

My mother is an international flight attendant in her 60s.

I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in her most frequented cities. But I discovered that my mum was also a frequent "poster" of the photos of her various trips around the world, and the comments sections were filled with with some beautiful messages from her many many friends and family.

From this I learned that there is a subset of the population that Facebook works perfectly for and meaningfully improves their real-world social relationships. And perhaps Facebook has been hyper-optimized for that kind of use case through relentless A/B testing. But I fear my mum is quite privileged to have this kind of experience.

AlexandrB3• 5 months ago

all the Facebook PMs intended

That's being awfully generous. I think Facebook PMs intend your feed to be filled with valuable commercial offers that can be monetized by Meta.

moduspol2• 5 months ago

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

cameldrv• 5 months ago

The problem is that your friends probably don't post much to facebook, and so they'd show you that, and you'd get to the end and find something else to do, so they have to bulk it up. There is a "friends" feed that's buried under a couple of menus that does this though.

Aurornis6• 5 months ago

You don't need to pay anything. That's just how Facebook works when you have active friends on it and you engage with their content.

I do find it interesting that tech people are so baffled when other people enjoy Facebook and derive value from it. I think we see so many exaggerated headlines about algorithms and feeds that people who don't use the site have a very different idea of what people who do actually use the site are seeing.

jasondigitized• 5 months ago

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

bdangubic3• 5 months ago

This is regular feed. I have another friend that is like OP's Mom, basically posts 4-10x per day. her main feed is basically just her and her friend's stuff, comments etc etc (few ads here and there of course but basically her feed looks like OG Facebook)

krn1p4n1c• 5 months ago

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

fullstop• 5 months ago

I unfollowed everyone except for a few family members. It really wants to give you the infinite scroll and started showing me some really bizarre stuff. So much AI slop, and random content.

For about a week it kept showing me nursing mothers, no matter how many times I said "I don't want to see this" and blocking. I have no problem with women nursing, but these were done in a way to be sexually provocative.

After that it started showing me AI houses and kitchens, with kitchen taps but no sink basin.

I just gave up at that point.

curious_af• 5 months ago

International flight attendant. So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary. If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political power (international travel might be the best proxy for that)

What you're referring to may also be part of their XCheck program which came to light back in 2021

Aurornis6• 5 months ago

So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary.

I can confirm the same experience as the parent commenter for my family who still use Facebook even though most of them don't travel internationally.

If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political power (international travel might be the best proxy for that)

I think the much simpler explanation is more likely: People who use Facebook for engaging with friends and family content will see more friends and family content. I don't think this is Facebook playing 4D chess trying to hide content from politicians by detecting who is traveling internationally. I mean, if Facebook did want to have a separate algorithm for politicians, don't you think they could come up with something better than triggering on international travel?

bko• 5 months ago

I think you're overthinking it. She probably just has a lot of real people connections and drives the algo to meaningful interactions. When a ghost logs in, they don't know what to show so default to "general" spam which is just AI generated woman.

0x457• 5 months ago

Could it be due to someone actually using facebook so algorithm works in their favor. When I worked in REDACTED when you not frequent user you'd get generic "what is popular for everyone" feed because empty-feed = bad-feed.

underlipton4• 5 months ago

I've been convinced for some time that access to some resource component that determines the quality of search/AI results is divvied up likewise. Why waste resources on users who have no audience or influence? If they're frustrated, who cares? Instead, identify the people who people already listen to, and make sure their experience with the platform is optimal. Even if the service is horrible for the vast majority of users, the gatekeepers and tastemakers will insist that they're just imagining things.

nindalf• 5 months ago

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

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

duskwuff• 5 months ago

I have a feeling it might be less "avoid negative publicity"; more "give a premium experience to influencers" (for a broad definition of that term).

A user - like mbo's mother - who posts a lot of content which generates a lot of reposts and other positive interactions is basically a gold mine for Facebook. It's in their interest to treat that user with kid gloves to get them to keep posting, even if it means foregoing some revenue opportunities.

pyreko• 5 months ago

I have this with Twitter surprisingly.

I only use it for animal pictures, art, and to follow artists. I usually just use the Following page, but my FYP is always just... animal pictures and art, exactly what I want. No weird right wing shit, no weird crypto shit, no drama or ragebait shit, etc... somehow.

I know some day it'll break though.

Aurornis6• 5 months ago

Same here. The trick is to unfollow people who start posting things you don't want to see in your feed any more. It sounds so simple, but many people treat their following list as an append-only log.

I've followed accounts for hobbies that later spiral off into the deep end of Twitter's topics of the day, which is always my sign to unfollow them.

Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make them angry, though. These websites continue serving up more of what you click on.

raincole• 5 months ago

I have an account to follow artists on X. Surprisingly, it never pushes even one single blatant AI artist to my feed (not saying I'm an expert to recognize AI-generate artworks, but I've done digital painting as a side gig and.) There might be some paintover or more subtle ones that eluded my radar, but I've never seen the typical AI styles on my timeline.

However, if you check posts remotely related to the US politics the reply section is out of control.

I honestly believe out of Reddit, Facebook, Bsky and X, X is the one with the most reasonable timeline algorithm[0]. Reddit and Facebook are unusable except for very specific reasons (asking questions in certain apps' subs/groups). Most people I know irl moved to instagram though.

[0]: Bsky is the worst, but interestingly if you use a third-party feed like 'For You' it's on par with X, just less traffic.

numpad0• 5 months ago

Same. It feels like the real trick is to get platforms to think you're some kind of important person that could hurt the platform if served too much ragebaits.

And it also feels like they're compelled to maximize ragebaits for some reason - maybe the Web2 is running out of "advertiser friendly" contents.

xeonmc• 5 months ago

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

On Bluesky your feed will also have animal pictures and art, just not the kind you wanted.

suzzer992• 5 months ago

For twitter I have a sports list that I stick to 99% of the time. A little politics filters through, but I've found that to be just the right amount.

When major events happen, I switch over to my full feed, where I follow a bunch of political posters, and go into a blind rage in minutes.

Aurornis6• 5 months ago

This is how my parents' Facebook feeds look, too. And my wife's. And my friends who still use it.

I log in a couple times per year and see the same thing. It's nice to catch up with the friends who still use it.

One thing I've noticed over the years on HN is that many of the people talking confidently about Facebook also start their posts with "I'm glad I deleted my Facebook account 8 years ago, but..." and then go on to describe what they imagine Facebook is like for everyone else, as pieced together through the type of sensational headlines that hit the Hacker News front page every day.

There's another failure mode where someone tries to use Facebook but doesn't have any active friends on the site. They might scroll past photos from friends and family to click on ragebait links or engage with someone debating politics because they can't resist an internet argument. The algorithm takes note that this is what they engage with and gives them more of it, while showing less of the content they're scrolling past. Then they wonder why their feeds are full of topics that make them angry.

There's even an explicit feature to tell the algorithm what you want to see less of: You click the three dots and click "Hide post". They even have useful tools to unfollow people without unfriending them, which is highly useful for those people can't politely disconnect from but whose content you don't want to see. Using these tools even a little bit goes a long way to cleaning up your feed.

Meanwhile, people like my parents and extended family treat Facebook like a friendly gathering where everyone knows discussions of politics and religion are off the table. They click "Like" on things they want to see more of. They leave nice comments under photos of their friends and family. Their feeds adapt and give them what they want.

nephihaha8• 5 months ago

I did delete a previous Facebook account, but got forced back into it due to work. I don't really use it for friends much now. It is much better as a result although I still see it trying to pull me one direction or another. I would happily delete the entire lot because I don't find it functional.

"There's even an explicit feature to tell the algorithm what you want to see less of: You click the three dots and click "Hide post". They even have useful tools to unfollow people without unfriending them, which is highly useful for those people can't politely disconnect from but whose content you don't want to see. Using these tools even a little bit goes a long way to cleaning up your feed."

I've really never liked that feature. It is what creates echo chambers, because you just get infinite agreemtn. For some reason, Faecebook only tends to show me one individual's posts over others. We're not unfriendly but not good mates. On the other hand thanks to the features you seem to be talking about, I get to hear about bereavements, birthdays, engagements etc days or weeks after they happened which is no use to me.

newsclues• 5 months ago

You keep the content creators happy.

dawnerd• 5 months ago

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

cyanydeez• 5 months ago

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

tgma• 5 months ago

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

SecretDreams• 5 months ago

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

duxup• 5 months ago

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

It’s certainly the social hub for some groups.

npodbielski4• 5 months ago

People with those kind of arguments always get from response that if you were not trying to keep in touch with this friend personally then it was not truly a friend. Facebook friends does not equal real life friend.

_2d30• 5 months ago

Yeah I just logged in to see if it was really this bad an all I got were:

(1) extremely, impressively relevant ads. (2) posts from people I know that were mostly nice except for my uncle who seemed to be posting nonsense.

wvenable• 5 months ago

My Facebook feed (I visit just for marketplace) is also not quite like the author's feed. I don't have a lot of AI content or thirst traps. I wonder if he's got some sort of the default young male algorithm experience.

I wouldn't say my Facebook is good -- I don't interact with it enough for it to be anything.

pavlov• 5 months ago

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.

jcgrillo4• 5 months ago

Wow they make you use facebook at facebook? That's twisted. That would be like.. idk.. Phillip Morris making you smoke a pack a day.

actionfromafar• 5 months ago

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

whyenot• 5 months ago

As a middle aged (gen x) woman, my facebook feed is pretty good. It's filled with posts from friends and interest groups that I am a part of. The reason I no longer use FB has nothing to do with the feed, it's because Mark Zuckerberg is an awful person, and I refuse to use his product. The cognitive dissonance is great here, because I still use WhatsApp; it's the best way to stay in contact with my relatives in Europe, and I still use IG, albeit mostly for work, and sparingly.

dboreham• 5 months ago

I'm still a FB user even though most friends and relatives have disengaged due to toxicity. But what I've noticed consistently is that any group on FB that has more than 1000 members will end up surfacing so much toxic sentiment that I have to unsubstantiated. I'm talking about innocuous fields such as the local road conditions. That one became full of rants about out of state drivers, drivers who don't understand English, people posting license plates of bad drivers, etc. This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave nicely beyond some threshold group size.

DeathArrow5• 5 months ago

My Facebook feed is great, my X feed is great. I don't use Facebook and X because I like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk but because I genuinely read interesting things and I interact with people I like.

That being said, I don't spend too much time on social networks because I have lots of other things to do.

keyle• 5 months ago

And yet, every 3-4 posts, Facebook will start interjecting posts that are outrageous, meant to create response. If she interacts with any of those, e.g. even open it wide, or stay on it a long time, BAM, more of those posts next visits.

And the cycle continues and grinds your account down to a complete hellish nightmare where you hate your city, your local councils etc. It's all a rigged platform for creating divide and hate. It drives clicks, it drives ads, it drives agendas.

SpicyLemonZest• 5 months ago

I don't think that's true. I just scrolled my feed really quick, and I had to get 23 posts down before I got an even mildly controversial post. The post wasn't even anything mean, it was a screenshot of an analysis showing that the richest Americans and the Americans who donate the most money don't overlap as much as you might think.

dingaling• 5 months ago

Nope, I've just opened FB in a tab. Top posts:

- Chris Hadfield using a fire extinguisher to show how rockets work

- A friend's trip to a gig

- Video of a restored TWA flight engineer training simulator

- Mountain weather for my region tomorrow

- A rare colour photo of a 1930s biplane

rconti3• 5 months ago

I always really enjoyed Facebook -- much more so than any other social media network. It was all friends, friends' content, and groups I was interested in and cared about. Sure it had ads, and a bit of suggested stuff, but mostly it was interesting content, no ragebait, no politics.

But as those friends use it less and less, I use it less and less. And the less I use it, the more "suggested" crap I get. If I don't use it for a week, the site is absolute garbage.

pants2• 5 months ago

To think I used to log in to Facebook every day, scroll friends' posts until it said "You're caught up!" then leave.

That's almost unimaginable now, but I deeply wish I could return to that experience. Unfortunately as the suggested content got turned up, friends stopped posting, so even with all the browser extensions in the world I can't get that same experience back.

suzzer992• 5 months ago

I have my Facebook feed curated enough that it shows me reels I like (landslides, dance-offs, kids or animals doing cute things - nothing salacious). Of course, AI crap filters in, but a majority are still good.

Even the sponsored posts are very often interesting summaries of historical events or scientific wonders. They're AI most of the time, which goes on and on. So I read the first part and then go to wikipedia if I'm more interested.

I'm also in a bunch of private groups that are spam-free. Some travel-related groups have turned out to be invaluable resources.

So it does work if you train it on what you like.

harrall• 5 months ago

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

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

wolvoleo• 5 months ago

Facebook was this to me. Because I lived in many countries. Just seeing what my friends in other countries were experiencing <3

But they blocked the old timeline where I could just see the updates from everyone I follow and nothing else. And replaced it with this feed with stupid influencer crap. Now I had to weed through all the shit to see what the people I care about were doing. It wasn't worth it for me so I left soon after, like a decade ago.

Maybe they've rolled some of the crap back but it's too little too late for me.

drnick13• 5 months ago

The privacy cost of Facebook is too high. Even if you have "nothing to hide" today, sooner or later you will post something you wish you had not posted, or someone else will do it for you. Once data about you is out there, it is impossible to remove, and the only recourse is to wait for that information to become irrelevant or outdated (if ever). For example, some employers have been known to spy on their employees through Facebook. Others have been harmed when searching for jobs because of things they posted on FB or other antisocial media, often long ago.

Facebook should not have multiple high quality photos of 1/2 of the planet, their children, pets, friends and family, in addition to their real-time location obtained through the spyware companion app. Not even governments used to have this kind of insight into people's lives not so long ago, and it is certainly very alarming that a spyware/adtech firm now does.

randomNumber72• 5 months ago

Facebook should not have multiple high quality photos of 1/2 of the planet, their children, pets, friends and family, in addition to their real-time location obtained through the spyware companion app.

If adults decide to give them all this information aren't they the ones that should be blamed?

KPGv2• 5 months ago

For the longest time, that was my feed, well after most Millennials had moved on. It was spectacular.

But I finally decided I didn't want to doom scroll so much, and when I changed phones, I declined to install the app on my new one, and I logged out on my laptop.

So I almost never am on anymore, and it's always complete trash. Zuck's Trump turn helped the inertia, and now with the revelations that he was trying to party with Epstein how can I even log in anymore?

I think I'm going to reach out to the people who matter and get their email addresses, then hang my FB shoes up for good, twenty-one years after I joined.

DeathArrow5• 5 months ago

I live in an European country where Facebook is used often and I can say I have my wall mostly filled with posts from people that interest me and that I interact with.

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

Right. But who fits into that niche? I in general prefer privacy so I don't share fotos of whenever I take a du.. I mean do something semi-interesting to a grand selection of three or four other people out there (or more; but these are already reallife associations). Remote "relationships" rarely work in my experience, excluding a few that are important. But I don't see how that is any business of CIAbook to keep track of.

harel• 5 months ago

That's almost me. I've always used Facebook as a tool to keep in touch with friends around the world. My friend list is 95% people I know in real life. A small fraction of them still posts. I also get a lot of slop in between. The filler posts. I am waiting for a Facebook resurgence or a Friendster comeback.

Sharlin2• 5 months ago

My FB experience is still fine after all these years. I can't find anything in my feed that isn't either a post a) to a group I'm in, b) by a page I follow, or c) by a friend. These days, a) and b) make up the majority of posts – 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.

nephihaha8• 5 months ago

I think you are very lucky. I get constant political messaging (not from one side of the room either) which is very unsubtle and biased. I get a lot of slop suggested.

I have never used Instagram and don't plan too. Twitter has always been a disaster and a mob mentality, and now it barely shows me stuff I want to look at.

scotty793• 5 months ago

At one point I subscribed to groups on Satisfactory, Factorio and RimWorld and while I don't play much anymore it's always nice to see posts on my feed made by people engaged with these games.

When algorithm doesn't have a handle on you it puts you at the bottom of the barrel that's filled with slop.

I think the problem is Meta doesn't moderate algorithm enough so a lot of users have terrible experience becausd they don't moderate their feeds themselves.

Most people are not self-aware enough to decide that maybe political rants is not the healthiest content to consume. And even if they do, tools for moderation are not easily accessible enough. There should be a huge "Yeah, I hated that." button on each post.

vanjajaja1• 5 months ago

a common complaint about instagram is that you can no longer see your friends, just creators. i assume creators don't have this problem though, since they're having fun seeing all their creator friends

nephihaha8• 5 months ago

I have a Facebook friend similar to your mother. A solicitor (so makes a lot of money), off travelling to beautiful places much of the time.

However, there is an element of one upmanship about social media. You see pictures of nice holidays abroad, nice cars and happy families... And then you find out some of the same folk are about to divorce or go bankrupt.

The algo keeps showing me one person's feed but not others. I don't mind said person, but we are not close. Facebook tells me about birthdays, bereavements etc often two or three weeks after they happen which is no good.

firesteelrain• 5 months ago

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

Marketplace has supplanted Craigslist near me.

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

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

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

troupo• 5 months ago

I don't use Facebook much, and my feed is filled with algorithmic bullshit and almost no posts from friends, family, or groups I'm a part of.

BorisMelnik• 5 months ago

came here to say this also...also on mobile there is a feed that only shows your friends, no "algo." my parents are both on FB and pretty much only interact with their freinds. it is quit beautiful.

kmeisthax• 5 months ago

I would love to know what kind of ascetic mental training you have to do to get your Facebook feed to just send you actual people you know and not... well, the slop trough.

hackernewds• 5 months ago

Maybe you are too young to have noticed, but this is how Facebook used to be for every one. Until some a/b testing likely led to short term engagement boosts for news content and that's all you could see - especially during the 2016 news cycle with (allegedly Russian) political ads. Then people stopped posting, and others stopped posting, feedback loop and here we are.

mgraczyk2• 5 months ago

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

nradov4• 5 months ago

My Facebook feed is also like that (although with more underwater pictures of fish). It seems fine. I don't think I'm particularly privileged. I honestly don't understand the hate that FB gets here on HN. Maybe some users are just following the wrong accounts?

magicalist2• 5 months ago

I honestly don't understand the hate that FB gets here on HN. Maybe some users are just following the wrong accounts?

Sounds like you do understand the hate but you don't understand how their feeds ended up different than yours?

veunes5• 5 months ago

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

derefr3• 5 months ago

Interesting.

So the presumption, then, would be that Facebook only turns on the slop-content hose to "fill the void" on many people's dashboards from a lack of organic content from people they follow? I.e. that if you were personal friends with enough other frequently-posting Facebook users, the slop-content would disappear?

motbus3• 5 months ago

Makes sense to me. Seems to be using as it was supposed to be.

RoyTyrell• 5 months ago

My FB is generally like that. However I have noticed I see more more delayed posts from friends, and it's starting to recycle posts from friends I've seen already. I'll see a friend post pics of a vacation they took but I won't see that post for 3-5 days, and in the mean time I'll see some other old posts from them that were from 1-3 weeks ago come up multiple times.

Occasionally I do get blasted with AI slop and random accounts for a few days. When that happens I keep selecting to stop showing me that because I'm not interested.

I join groups for my interests. I never interact with random groups that pop up. I'm pretty diligent about scrolling past ads and I report a ton of them that are AI bs or selling lies (like "tonics" that cure cancer).

shufflerofrocks• 5 months ago

I'm a 30 year old and I have a similar experience. Facebook has almost always been a pleasant experience for me - not just updates from friends but also the new stuff that comes in the feed, which is why I kept getting confused about the reports of fb being a hell hole, until I understood the rabidity & variability of their algorithm.

FB Groups are one of the best corners of the internet imo.

ksec• 5 months ago

I am glad something great about Facebook is being voted on top on HN. Along with another day on post about OpenAI adopting Ads as revenue solution to problem.

It shows the world is healing.

sMarsIntruder• 5 months ago

I know Twitter/X has worse problems with spam bots in the replies, but this is the News Feed!

Probably not using it from ages.

jedberg7• 5 months ago

So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm?

No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed. No matter what she did she couldn't fix it. She asked other women about this, and they all said their partner's feeds were the same.

This is not a problem for women. At least not one I've ever talked to or read about on the internet.

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

I got a whole bunch of thirst traps again.

It doesn't bother me anymore, I just tune it out and scroll past it because my feed still has the parenting and pottery too, and my friend's updates, which is what I'm there for.

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

AlexandrB3• 5 months ago

Meta rediscovering the age-old adage that "sex sells". The core concept is little different than old car commercials featuring scantily clad women but with the plausible deniability of an algorithm so Meta can wash their hands of any negative consequences.

bityard2• 5 months ago

Can confirm. For as long as I've been on facebook (way over a decade now), I've only used it to share pics of my kids/pets to family/friends. I unfollow people who post political and other garbage content. And yet, my feed is nothing but ads and Reels of young women bouncing on trampolines in bikinis.

mrweasel2• 5 months ago

One thought I've had is that it has to do with your level of engangement. If like me you doesn't really use social media for more than a few minutes a day (in my case I count Snapchat and YouTube Shorts, because that's what I have), then you start seeing some a lot of boobs.

It seems like the algorithm panics, because you don't engange with anything much, or because your interests shifts to often and it can't deal with it. So it falls back to boobs.

There's also a sad trend of assuming that because you're into lifting, your also misogynistic. The more you engange with fitness content, even if it's training programs or how to correctly do certain exercises, platforms like YouTube will start flinging misogynistic content at you and it's incredibly hard to remove.

elAhmo• 5 months ago

I get similar ads in Youtube Shorts. It was appearing only when I was abroad, and I was curious to see what is triggering it, it was mostly: male, 18+, location in country X. Same happens now in a country where I live.

Most of the reported ads don't get taken down by Google, although they are very obviously AI porn ads.

brational• 5 months ago

ha.. I was about to type this exact paragraph. my instagram has no human connections, I only follow local business (food, bars, museums/gardens, non profits, etc) so I can be aware of specials & things. I have no followers. I don't really like anything but clearly engage with cooking stuff, funny animal videos, comedy in general. Multiple languages. lots of crossover.

Honestly it's a pretty great instagram experience.

And yes I'm a middle aged male so no matter what the smut comes back (at least I get it in multiple languages too?)

chasd00• 5 months ago

i rarely log into facebook too but i do use marketplace. I just pulled it up on my phone, the "reels" thing was all AI + thirst traps just like you described but the rest of my feed was pretty plain vanilla posts from friends/family i follow + some ads.

munificent4• 5 months ago

I just tried to repro this.

On my Facebook account, I scrolled through 30 posts without seeing anything thirsty. Mostly synthesizer stuff, stuff for my kids' schools, and a few posts from friends. It definitely knows I'm male because the ads are for men's apparel.

Instagram was the same.

I never ever watch reels or other short form video, so maybe that has something to do with it.

jedberg7• 5 months ago

It's happens in the reels. I don't really see thirsty posts in my feed either, just people I follow for the most part.

disillusioned2• 5 months ago

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

thephyber2• 5 months ago

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.

martin82• 5 months ago

I have scrubbed my account completely clean years ago and never use it for anything. When I log in once a quarter or so, just to check if someone sent me a message via the Messenger, all I see is soft-porn on my timeline.

pwrsysengineer2• 5 months ago

I created a Facebook account a few years ago to get in on the local marketplace deals. After opening the website a few times and seeing very suggestive content, I had the idea of tailoring my feed to the most racy things I could find. Eventually, my feed was filled images of children wearing bathing suits and in suggestive positions, censored images of sexual acts, and AI generated images of elderly women with large breasts and little clothing. I was taking screenshots for a while but one time I opened my photo gallery while on the train and realized how embarrassing it looked to have a phone filled with this crap. Edit: Used more respectful language

someotherperson• 5 months ago

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

xethos2• 5 months ago

my feed was filled images of children wearing bathing suits and in suggestive positions
I was taking screenshots for a while

More than a little surprised this seemed like a good idea at the time, let alone that you did so for a while without thinking "There is no scenario this ends well"

dagurp2• 5 months ago

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

jedberg7• 5 months ago

Are you looking at your feed or the reels? It happens in the reels (and on Instagram if you go the search page, most of the suggested items are thirsty)

htrp• 5 months ago

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

dom96• 5 months ago

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

disantlor• 5 months ago

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

jedberg7• 5 months ago

Many many times. It works for about an hour. I gave up. I've been on the internet long enough to have a pretty strong mental ad blocker. :)

eek21212• 5 months ago

Are we using 2 different versions of Facebook? I get nothing except content from my friends. None of it is AI generated. I just logged in because the article was a bit disturbing. The only AI content I found was the small amount a couple of my friends generated, and it was clearly marked as such.

jedberg7• 5 months ago

Based on the upvotes my comment got and the replies, it looks like most people get the experience in the article, and a lucky few don't. Looks like you're one of the lucky few!

rconti3• 5 months ago

I've been a male (it's in my profile!) for all 22 years (yikes) I've been using facebook. I don't get that stuff.

eek21212• 5 months ago

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.

dunham• 5 months ago

I commented on a relatives post about a giant zucchini, and started getting posts about zucchinis in my feed. A couple of years ago, Facebook noticed that I stopped scrolling for calvin and hobbes comics and started showing me a bunch of those for a while.

I finally got the deletion thing to not error out and am almost at the end of the 30 day deletion period.

the_af3• 5 months ago

No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

This isn't my experience at all. I get "sexy girls" reels, but infrequently and that's it. No other "thirst traps" at all, most of my feed is relevant to my interests too. Been on fb for many years now.

sershe• 5 months ago

I feel like for me (a man) algorithm is super sensitive to engagement. If I er I mean my friend would look at these thirst traps, I er I mean my friend would have feed 90% full of them. On the other hand if I watch anything else I get none, and instead it's 90% epoxy table making, home inspection fails, rats solving puzzles, climbing videos or whatever it is I watched. Seems like mixing it up would be better, I can only watch so many rats solving puzzles.

chupchap• 5 months ago

I was able to tame it on Instagram by actively blocking 3-4 accounts every day and then engaging with accounts of just one topic; I picked Cricket. That said, I don't use the discovery section much so when I revisit after a few weeks it resets to filth. So the way it works is if I go to the discovery tab and like a couple of random cricket videos. It keeps it sane to an extent. Facebook is a different story though

kccqzy• 5 months ago

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

Nursie• 5 months ago

no matter what you do

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

neoromantique• 5 months ago

I don't know, just an anecdote:

I populated my Instagram/FB Account with my interests (I mainly have the accounts to follow local racing leagues / marketplaces), and feeds are mostly cars and tech stuff, seldom do I see any thirst traps in it (including reels).

boxedemp3• 5 months ago

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

GorbachevyChase• 5 months ago

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

steezeburger2• 5 months ago

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

kwanbix• 5 months ago

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

thephyber2• 5 months ago

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

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

And despite your confident statement that “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.

disillusioned2• 5 months ago

Just click search on Instagram and BAM, thirst trap central. Don't have to have ever interacted with ANY of them, liked any of them, or follow anything CLOSE to that content, it's coming for you if you're a male between the ages of 18-99 that, presumably, the algo thinks is straight-leaning.

My _feed_ on Instagram is a bit more curated and sticks closer to that curation: weird music stuff, weird instrument stuff, and because I show my daughter a lot of it, Broadway musical stuff/BTS content/other actually interesting/cool stuff. So generally speaking my IG feed is curated and good. My FB feed is still trash; it feels like it casts a much wider net, but I've also been proactively following accounts that interest me on IG and don't do that much at all on FB (except some stand up comedians, since the format is actually really good for casual bite-sized scrolling).

But IG search... woooooo boy, it's _wild_. I have to hide my phone away from my daughter when I'm trying to pull up a specific account because the search interface is completely bikini-clad crazy thirst content. And again, I've literally never engaged or interacted or even really _lingered_ on any of those posts. It just goes for it.

wedog64• 5 months ago

One of the creepiest aspects of this is that the 'thirsty content' is mainly mainly AI-generated pictures by spammers who know what they are doing, but also includes 'correlated' posts by normal users.

Eg you have a 15-year-old daughter and post a picture of her smiling in school uniform on Instagram because it's her birthday or something. The algorithm takes that post and shows it to randomly selected men who often interact with pictures of attractive female teenagers, even though none of your other posts get shared like this outside of your connections.

throwaway2903• 5 months ago

This is really false. I will join the chorus of others and say i don't get that stuff in my feeds. Although maybe meta doesn't identify me as guy

3RTB2972• 5 months ago

Also can confirm. From the first moment I started an IG account (at my wife's request), the default algorithm was to give me almost exclusively thirst trap posts with zero geographic or other relevance to me. I had to weed through thirst trap accounts that were brought up before hers - when searching by user name.

I took a few minutes a day to search for cat pictures and cooking videos, and sharing cat videos with my spouse (her reason for using IG). It was a fight, but after a few days the thirst trap suggestions immediately flipped to giving me stuff I can look at in public and not feel like a massive creep. There was a long tail, with occasional "....are you sure?" suggestions, but at this point a couple years of carefully reinforcing the same stuff seems to have overwhelmed the thirst trap suggestions.

npodbielski4• 5 months ago

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

djmips• 5 months ago

I don't have them... :/

alecco• 5 months ago

I just tried this: browse YouTube with incognito and watching 3 engineering vids only (Veritasium, Real Engineering, and Practical Engineering).

The home page shorts are about 50% thirst traps. There is creepy stuff, click-bait, and American politics/news (for and against Trump).

The worst one is a short "this is why ram costs $900" by "discord memes" showing a young girl with revealing clothing. Almost 1 million views.

I closed my YouTube account years ago because it was just pissing me off.

me4502• 5 months ago

I feel this issue has started to slowly become worse and worse as we've been able to build better "preference profiles" based on small amounts of data. I notice it often when watching a single YouTube video in incognito mode, the sidebar is usually full of fairly racist Australian content (I am Australian). This is something I would never normally see, and not something that's likely coming from whatever video I've decided to watch in incognito. It's likely just assuming based on what's a common trend in my location.

If an algorithm knows you well, it's usually pretty okay, but until that point you're being bombarded with lowest common denominator content based on your demographic. Shorts seems to be even worse; mine is mostly science facts and comedy skits, I didn't understand the "brainrot" descriptions until I looked at a few in incognito mode.

guerrilla• 5 months ago

No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

Bullshit. This happens because you engaged. I never engaged with it in the slightest and it disappeared. I mostly just get snakes and local stuff now.

Sxubas• 5 months ago

I can second this. The app basically shows more of what is proven to keep you in the app. It's kinda revealing to be frank: instead of getting mad with it just do some introspection.

grishka2• 5 months ago

Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do.

What if you're gay though. They have to be able to detect that somehow too

Xenoamorphous• 5 months ago

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

alsetmusic3• 5 months ago

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

jalapenos4• 5 months ago

Algorithm has discovered dudes like boobs.

More news at ten.

andai2• 5 months ago

I have the same thing on YouTube. I usually use adblock but I used youtube without adblock recently and was startled by the ads. It's either "AI girlfriend", or video games, or video games about AI girlfriends. (I don't play video games, and I'm not interested in AI girlfriend. At least Meta shows me ads about stuff I actually find interesting!)

But my experience is constantly interrupted by images of scantily clad AI generated women. I'm no prude but it seems more than a little inappropriate to me.

Oh yeah and the other 10% of the ads are about exploding children.

I think I am going to install Adblock again...

Footprint0521• 5 months ago

This is why I gave up on social media

asveikau• 5 months ago

Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do.

I don't know what I did, but this has not been true of my account. A few years ago I did notice a sharp increase of AI slop filled with comments thinking it was real, which I found hilarious, but it wasn't thirst traps. It was more like "this person has a hidden talent and they are sad because they aren't recognized. Show them some love." And the person is obviously fake. I saw the same fake AI people in multiple languages.

Anyway, after a while that stuff lessened a lot, and the feed is a bit more reasonable. Mainly I get stuff that was posted on TikTok a few months ago. Lately there are a lot of quotations from the Epstein files.

slibhb• 5 months ago

Is it because "Meta identifies you as a male" or because men look longer at sexy pictures of women? I assume Meta has some heuristic to determine how long you look at items in their feed even if you don't click anything.

gcanyon• 5 months ago

Facebook knows I'm male, and I see things like this very rarely -- on the order of one or two a month. Maybe that's FB ('s algorithm) testing my "defenses": they/it show me something like that as an experiment, and if I ever clicked on it, the floodgates would open.

But I don't, so it doesn't. Or maybe FB knows I'm happily married and that won't work on me in the first place.

Or maybe FB knows I'm a sucker for chess and go puzzles, so they're my equivalent of this?

is_true• 5 months ago

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

basch• 5 months ago

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

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

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

grogenaut• 5 months ago

Mine started as women with ample posteriors at hockey games but quickly switched to police arguing with people and really sick ski and snowboarding videos. The police stuff is trailing off.

I do ski patrol, guess it thought, a ski cop, I liked cops and skiing. Oh I was also getting a lot of ai generated bane videos. Felt sorry for that guy, judge was real inhumane to him.

tallanvor• 5 months ago

I don't. Instead Facebook tries to shove right-wing crap down my throat. I'd rather see the thirst trap posts, to be honest.

Snapchat, on the other hand, I had to uninstall because the stuff they tried to make me view was completely and utterly disgusting (think pimple-popping vids and worse). There was only one person left that I communicated with through their app, so it wasn't a real loss for me.

veunes5• 5 months ago

The part I really agree with is the social impact

ksherlock• 5 months ago

I have a theory about facebook (and youtube!) showing absolute garbage recommendations.

Somewhere, there's an algorithm designed to increase engagement. And it doesn't care what kind of engagement, so clicking the "I'm not interested in this garbage" button is just as engaging as liking or watching or commenting.

aero142• 5 months ago

Instagram is gone as well. Everything is fake in different ways. If the video isn't ai generated, then it's influencers acting out a scenario they think will get engagement. I realized that when it's a real video, there is a caption that says some scenario is happening, but there is nothing in the video that shows that is real. I think people are just reposting videos with different captions and testing out whatever invented scenario make the video have the most views.

AnotherGoodName• 5 months ago

Just reminder that when Meta stock went to ~90 in late 2022 we had non-stop “Facebook is dead I don’t know anyone that uses it lol” posts on reddit, hackernews, etc. The stock is ~650 today.

We are not the target audience.

drivebyhooting• 5 months ago

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

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

dlev_pika2• 5 months ago

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

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

einpoklum• 5 months ago

What happens when you log on to Facebook with uBlock Origin (not lite), plus EFF Privacy Badger, with appropriate settings, enabled? Is it possible to get to a state where some/most of these Facebook-suggested items are not visible? Or is there no separation between the promoted/artificial and organic (if I can use that term) content?

I wouldn't know myself; I tried Facebook in... I think 2010 or so, but found it to be highly addictive and not worth it, so I quit after several weeks. Since then, while I knew that I occassionaly missed some useful group to be in, I've not regretted the decision.

j45• 5 months ago

This could be true, and/or a large percentage of the people who spend a large amount in the economy are on these platforms.

The surprising effectiveness of Meta Ads for certain audiences as counter-intuitive as it seems is one example.

eastbayjake• 5 months ago

This dynamic carries into Threads, where Meta AI slop is aggressively pushed in the feed.

There's also a significant amount of viral content that is clearly an older person's Facebook post which was intended for only friends but got pushed to the public feed of a Threads account that may have been created by accident -- or default -- when Facebook blitz-scaled user numbers after launch. The posts are always hundreds of people piling on about someone posting a photo of their teenager in an embarrassing situation, with the original poster probably blissfully unaware that they're getting publicly dragged on Threads.

Check your parents' phones to see if they're publicly cross-posting on accident!

neo_doom• 5 months ago

The AI slop problem is not going away, unfortunately. Its surprising that the social media companies don't see AI slop as an existential threat to their platform? I guess its an indicator of how low we've sunk that 'any' engagement is good engagement.

If it was up to me, I think AI content should be OPT IN. I must choose to view AI content and not be force fed from the conveyor of slop. This is where governments should legislate but we'll never see this happen.

yfw• 5 months ago

You guys are lucky most of mine are scam ads and ragebait

mortsnort• 5 months ago

It's definitely cooked in the sense that the content is garbage, but whenever was that not true?

I'm hoping they're cooked because they're putting all of their eggs in the AGI basket instead of making useful AI products, and they probably won't figure out AGI.

scaredreally• 5 months ago

My main use case for FB is a group related to reviewing restaurants in the area. I have no FB friends/connections. I use messenger for my one friend who insists on using it. It is mostly slop (and strangely I get posts from that same relationship account), I scroll for about 5 minutes at a time before I realize it is not worth looking at. And truthfully, that is what I want from social media: a few minutes worth of distraction followed by the feeling that I had just wasted my time and then on to something more meaningful.

kmfrk• 5 months ago

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

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

maurycyz• 5 months ago

Very predictable: If Facebook (or any other social media site) showed you what you wanted to see --- stuff from your friends --- you would be satisfied and leave.

... but Facebook makes money off ads. They don't want you leaving. They want you to stay online all day.

Instead, they show you brainrot: content interesting enough to keep you on the site, but shallow enough that you are always thirsty for more. However, making this content is still a lot of work, and isn't what most people want to do: It takes a lot of brainrot to keep you trapped 24/7.

Slop requires no effort, costs next to nothing, and fills the "brainrot" niche perfectly. Facebook doesn't care that people are posting bot content, because it's the perfect thing to make them money.

morissette• 5 months ago

See I don’t scroll; not scrolling means not seeing the junk. I just post and log off.

jbverschoor• 5 months ago

Change to chronologic timeline, and you'll be cured for your addiction superfast

nomilk• 5 months ago

Fb deserves huge credit for their 'reels' algorithm. I follow a bunch of science influencers, and their content frequently blows my mind, and it's just one great vid after another.

Something I would love is 'social media dotfiles', so I could export my list and share it with others. And vice-versa.

metalman• 5 months ago

I declined when "facesmash", whatever, was invitation only, and am only now considering how to set up an advertising presence there, sortof, as I am overwhelmed with customers wanting things made, so may just stay on page 7 of search, and just keep answering the phone

SubiculumCode• 5 months ago

Facebook IS just veiled ads to OF pron subscriptions.

jmward01• 5 months ago

I think the key here is engagement is based a lot on content quantity, not quality. If your feed doesn't have a lot of natural quantity associated with it then FB will find something to stuff in there. The reality is that most people don't have a lot of quantity on their feeds from their friends so that means they get the AI slop to fill the void. At least that is my complete guess on a root cause of (some) of the FB slop. I haven't logged in for 6 months and I am now checking it 1-2 times a year because the last few times I logged on it was pushing hate content at me.

progforlyfe• 5 months ago

I'm definitely not a "fan" of Facebook or anything, though I do use it and make a few interactions per day -- based on this blog post I think the reason why his dashboard was full of trash & slop was simply because he hasn't logged in for 8 years. If you have no interactions in 8 years (and people you friend/follow are also gone from the platform) they will resort to showing you this crap.

I honestly do not care if Facebook is cooked or goes away -- but I doubt the situation is that bad.

umvi• 5 months ago

Could this also be related to Facebook killing messenger.com (i.e. they are no longer running a charity so they need all users to be on the main site now to consume the slop)?

Anamon3• 5 months ago

That's ironic. I remember when they removed Messenger from facebook.com in order to force people to use the app.

agentifysh• 5 months ago

One theory I have for the degradation of facebook and just internet content/discussion/comments in general in the past 25 years have been the rapid change in the cultural demographic of global internet users.

late 90s to early 2000s, only highly developed economies made up most of the internet but as more emerging markets joined the ranks, they ultimately surpassed those that reached peak internet penetration much earlier.

A lot of these new dominant markets also happen to speak English well enough and in far greater numbers and with it carries the cultural/taste shifts.

Without naming specific countries, few social networks are eclipsed by just a few countries that joined the internet much later than the Western hemisphere (+non-English speaking developed economies).

Cultural norms, values, habits permeate through the internet simply put and the social media platforms are incentivized to reflect it even if the $/country is not aligned but through the sheer power of number and the increasingly unhealthy attachments to what is largely just an ephemeral digital number in a database inside air conditioned facility while the users complain about the heat.

fjsifjasf• 5 months ago

why don't you just name the countries lol?

willturman• 5 months ago

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

According to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy [1] 130 million Americans — 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

0xDEAFBEAD2• 5 months ago

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

This entire planet is full of idiots

nickvec• 5 months ago

AI slop has me very worried for the future of the Internet at large. I was toying around with the idea of a "new Internet" that is devoid of AI generated content, but enforcing that would be borderline impossible. Sadly, it seems like the genie is out of the bottle; I feel like I see AI generated content everywhere I go.

fer• 5 months ago

I started laugh reacting at Russian propaganda and now all I get is Russian propaganda, literally half of my posts are boomers, shills and people from "non-aligned" countries falling for the Russia stronk/based west evil/gay meme, and Russian embassies and consulates non-stop DARVOing. But before that it was indeed a constant flurry of thirst traps, ragebait, etc. I only keep using it for a couple of well moderated groups.

TrackerFF• 5 months ago

Yeah, this is a major FB trap.

If you interact in any way with propaganda accounts, even just look too long at the posts when they first randomly pop up, they've target locked you.

I'm a liberal dude. 90% of the political content I get on both FB and Insta is far-right propaganda, sprinkled in with some typical brocasters.

No amount of "Not interested" will make it go away, either.

justinhj2• 5 months ago

Hating on Facebook had always been cool. It's like "not even owning a tv". Is it cooked though? I'm over 50 and it has a lot of value for me. Marketplace, local happenings and keeping in touch with family are all well served.

dj_gitmo• 5 months ago

You are not responding to the content of the article. Did you read it? The FB feed has changed dramatically since the adoption of genAI and the experience of using it can be pretty unpleasant. Do you disagree?

justinhj2• 5 months ago

The article is so far removed from personal experience it sounds like another site entirely. Maybe this is what you see if you log out for a long time and all Facebook knows about you is you are a young man, hence the content.

zer0zzz• 5 months ago

Why do people still complain about fb. FB has been this way for years..

richardw• 5 months ago

Every so often my YouTube logs out and I’m exposed to the view a “random visitor” would see. Instantly visible because it’s filled with stupid content and sexual provocation.

I manage the shit out of FB and YouTube. You need to block a few things so it stops testing a few segment ideas.

RajT883• 5 months ago

I agree with most of this, but complaining about Yoleendadong is some "Old man yells at cloud" stuff.

My wife is a big fan, as she has a lot of funny content specific to Asian cultures. Yes, she has some relationship stuff too. You may not like her content, but she's got a few hundred thousand subscribers on Youtube, and 17 million on TikTok.

taysix• 5 months ago

Agreed, author missed the mark on that one! But makes sense if you haven't seen her content before. Definitely wouldn't call her content "slop".

thot_experiment• 5 months ago

Yeah, she's great. I don't know if I would say she's not slop, but it's the sort of slop that serves as a foundational block of the lexicon of memes I use to communicate with my friends. I don't think this is new, imagemacros/memes are also slop. Maybe I'm using the word wrong?

I guess to me it's kind of synonymous with "content" [mildly derogatory] as to differentiate it from effortposting. She primarily makes content, it's not always art but it doesn't have to be.

kube-system2• 5 months ago

This is actually the scariest part of the article for me.

It's clear we've got to the point where at a glance it is hard for those who are otherwise unaware to tell the difference between AI slop and organic content.

If nerds on HN can't tell the difference between an AI slop influencer and a fairly well-regarded human influencer... how can we expect the rest of the public to tell the difference when it comes to science, health, civics, politics, etc???

We're at the cusp of a distrust and misinformation cliff that is going to be terrifying in magnitude.

hobom• 5 months ago

The article didn't suggest that the video mentioned was AI slop, it correctly recognised it as human generated.

dangus2• 5 months ago

I was about to point out two things:

1. This bit you just pointed out. Facebook suggesting Yoleendadong, that’s not weird, she’s wildly popular. Her inclusion in this piece discredits OP as someone who basically has no idea how social media works - which makes the article less insightful, like asking David Attenborough to work the play by play commentary of an NBA game.

2. I don’t think OP realizes how much he should not be admitting that this is what his feed looks like.

Facebook/Instagram pretty much show you exactly what you want to see. I deleted my Meta accounts about 6 months ago but when I used it regularly before that I never saw thirst slop like this.

I had a beautiful algorithm, a mix of mostly hilarious brain rot and actual high effort content involving my interests.

OP is basically accidentally admitting that he’s browsing this kind of stuff in a browser with set Facebook cookies. That’s why you can’t use Meta products without Facebook container.

OP is seeing AI titties because other websites that utilize Facebook’s analytics/marketing products are seeing OP search for AI titties.

Finally, it is very easy to guide Meta algorithms into showing you other stuff if you are seeing things you don’t like. It even has a button for you to tell it what you don’t like.

RajT883• 5 months ago

thirst slop like this.

Buddy, I wish the thirst slop on Facebook was like this.

I told my wife quite openly how I went through a 6 week period where I just couldn't get rid of AI generated booby photos of Salma Hayek. Why her? Who knows? I tried everything. Eventually it fixed itself.

Occasionally, FB ads churn up straight up porn which is pretending to be something else. I'm not talking about OF girls - I actually think comparatively they are pretty noble - they pay for ads, and don't bullshit you what it's about. A lot of them are less risque than the people pushing their Insta or whatever.

throwaway876345• 5 months ago

My aunt is in her late 70s. She is a retired public school teacher who taught for over 30 years. Over the years she spends a majority of her leisure her time glued to Facebook on her iPad, consuming whatever content is delivered by their algorithm. She's become MAGA and will not tolerate any criticism of any moral wrongdoing by the current president or members of his administration. It's unbelievable the turn.

fluder• 5 months ago

Firstly, people have the right to believe in aliens if they want to. It is their legal right to support any political movement, or are you a Nazi?

Secondly, what does Facebook have to do with it? It's not as if there is no propaganda outside this social network.

Aurornis6• 5 months ago

And I don't just mean that nobody uses it anymore. Like, I knew everyone under 50 had moved on

It will probably surprise a lot of people to learn that this isn't true.

A higher percentage of 30-49 year olds report using Facebook than in 50+ age groups

The bias toward younger generations is even higher when you include Instagram

One source https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media...

I think many in the Hacker News bubble stopped using it and assume everyone else did, too. It's not too surprising when you read articles like this that paint a completely different picture of the platform than what your friends and family are actually seeing when they use it, as evidenced by the multitude of reports in this comment section from people whose family and friends are still getting value out of the site.

npilk4• 5 months ago

Interesting. I wonder if the phrasing as "do you ever use this platform" leads to this result. I could definitely believe more 30-49 year olds log in every so often for Marketplace etc., but would expect DAU to be lower than 50+. But maybe that's just more of the same bias you describe.

dchristian• 5 months ago

This sounds like the feed of a single male. Facebook showing sleazy content/ads to single guys predates AI by a lot. Try removing your single relationship status from your profile and see what changes.

fbistrash• 5 months ago

Facebook is nothing but trash. Stopped using it way back in 2012

shirro• 5 months ago

The algorithm has been given a job todo. First priority on any platform is engagement and a well functioning, complete human being is not going to be engaged by rage bait and hate. They are rare, precious jewels. The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out. It is relentless and escalates until their brains cook. Algorithmic social media is a massive social harm. The people who are in deep likely need years of deprogramming and therapy to recover which they will never get.

These platforms need to be shut down and people with a conscience need to stop using them, regardless of their own positive experiences, to deny them the power of network effects and their impact on the vulnerable.

flir7• 5 months ago

My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers turning up in her feed. I assume the algorithm was shovelling more of them at her because she was rubbernecking. I told her to try a "block every time" approach. It took about two weeks until her feed was (mostly) free of them but it still throws one at her now and again.

I offer this as a data point about how hard it is to turn a polluted feed around. But I'm now wondering if "feed cleaning" is a service that could be automated, via LLM.

idiotsecant2• 5 months ago

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

ipaddr• 5 months ago

How can we complain that everyone is siloed and no one talks to each other and complian that their feed is full of ideas outside of the silo.

DeathArrow5• 5 months ago

I think the feeds depends on the posts you read, even accidentally.

My feed is free from extreme left content but I didn't have to block anything. Simply by not reading that kind of content, the algorithm knows I am not interested.

jjav• 5 months ago

My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers turning up in her feed.

This is what is so difficult in facebook vs. HN. Here if people post angry insulting rants, it gets collectively downvoted to oblivion. That is effective.

On facebook there is no equivalent. All I can do is block an individual, but I personally have to do it for every offensive person, which is for practical purposes impossible. Facebooks needs a downvote button and an option to hide any comments which have N downvotes.

mlrtime2• 5 months ago

I did this on reddit to try and get a useful /r/all and it ended up being mostly cats. I never look or vote on cat pictures but by just removing political serial posters, thats what I got.

DANmode4• 5 months ago

They offer controls in the three-dots menu that say:

+ Interested Show more this like this in my feed

and

- Not Interested Show less things like this in my feed

They even allow clicking those repeatedly on the same post.

javascriptfan69• 5 months ago

I genuinely think we will look back at the algorithmic content feed as being on par with leaded gasoline or cigarettes in terms of societal harm.

Maybe worse since it is engineered to be as addictive as possible down to an individual level.

Then again maybe I'm being too optimistic that it will be fixed before it destroys us.

idiotsecant2• 5 months ago

If anything the algorithmic dopamine drip is just getting started. We haven't even entered the era of intensely personalized ai-driven individual influence campaigns. The billboard is just a billboard right now, but it won't be long before the billboard knows the most effective way to emotionally influence you and executes it perfectly. The algorithm is mostly still in your phone.

That's not where it stops.

blibble• 5 months ago

I think it's worse, cigarettes never threatened democracy

the solution is real easy, section 230 should not apply if there's an recommendation algorithm involved

treat the company as a traditional publisher

because they are, they're editorialising by selecting the content

vs, say, the old style facebook wall (a raw feed from user's friends), which should qualify for section 230

timacles• 5 months ago

Yeah might not ever get fixed. It is the perfect tool for mass influence and surveillance of the people. The powers that he would never let it go

aix12• 5 months ago

we will look back at the algorithmic content feed as being on par with leaded gasoline or cigarettes in terms of societal harm

I agree 100%.

However, I think the core issue is not the use of an algorithm to recommend or even to show stuff.

I think the issue is that the algorithm is optimized for the interests of a platform (max engagement => max ad revenue) and not for the interests of a user (happiness, delight, however you want to frame it).

And there's way too much of this, everywhere.

alfiedotwtf• 5 months ago

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

decimalenough• 5 months ago

The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out.

No, it gets dumped on pretty much everybody.

My Insta consists of travel and food pictures, and the people I follow are friends IRL and a very few travel/food influencers. So my feed consists of friends, travel/food content, dirty jokes thanks to my buddy who keeps sending them, and an ever increasing proportion of ads.

But both my "suggested reels" and the search view are exactly what the OP was complaining about: a non-stop parade of thirst traps by "content creators" pitching their OnlyFans accounts.

foxglacier• 5 months ago

I mostly use Facebook by clicking on email notifications which are always real posts or comments by my real life friends. Some of them are a bit political but I just ignore those.

I just tried scrolling down the homepage and mine doesn't have any extreme political crap. However, it does have local political crap about the popular local issues (mostly bike lanes). Most of it is just harmless stuff like dashcam videos of bad local drivers, historic photos of my city, local issues like city infrastructure problems, curiosities like rare animals or space photos, and ads - tons and tons of ads.

I think it probably depends what you've engaged with indeed.

jamincan4• 5 months ago

I find Facebook and Instagram are both completely polluted by that type of content. Facebook used to be trying to feed me right-wing rage bait and I think actively blocking finally cleared my feed of most of it and now it's all thirst-trap stuff. At least it's figured out I'm gay compared to Instagram.

socalgal24• 5 months ago

Does FB have a "following only" option like Instagram?

If it did I'd use it more. As it is, I check FB once a week-ish, see a few too many suggested posts and leave.

rolodexter20234• 5 months ago

escalation is often profitable before it is visibly catastrophic

vasco2• 5 months ago

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

DeathArrow5• 5 months ago

These platforms need to be shut down and people with a conscience need to stop using them, regardless of their own positive experiences, to deny them the power of network effects and their impact on the vulnerable.

In places where media is very biased to one political idea, online platforms like Facebook can be a breath of fresh air, people can share their ideas, voice their thoughts and concerns and express their opinions.

This is invaluable for democracy and it does have effect in the real life as it shapes the elections.

People don't depend just on the media anymore to have an informed opinion and the propaganda is much less effective.

dzikimarian• 5 months ago

They could be, but they aren't. When they catch your political bias, they will push your flavor of propaganda to you as heavily as classical media.

elevatortrim• 5 months ago

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

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

shaky-carrousel• 5 months ago

The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out.

Like teenagers.

The people who are in deep likely need years of deprogramming and therapy to recover which they will never get.

Like a cult. Current social media is like a cult that preys on teenagers. No wonder they want to ban it for young people. American government trying to forcefully spread its cult via the freedom.gov proxy is the vile cherry on top.

This is a quantitative change for Trump. He went from preying on a few kids to preying on all the kids in the world. He must feel ecstatic.

LogicFailsMe• 5 months ago

Facebook sucks but Reddit's algorithm is even worse. The only positive thing I will say in favor of Reddit is you can turn their algorithm off as Facebook has consistently denied its users a chronological feed of their friends.

jamincan4• 5 months ago

How do other people use reddit? I'm subscribed to a bunch of subreddits and that's the content I see. Reddit is honestly one of the more positive parts of the web for me.

doginasuit• 5 months ago

I think it is a mistake to think about people as being helpless consumers of the algorithm. The OP's mom no doubt makes some intentional choices in her life that make a difference. It just doesn't help that the algorithm will lean into whatever will get the most engagement.

0xDEAFBEAD2• 5 months ago

People will engage with and promote that stuff even without a recommendation algorithm. Lots of subreddits are full of ragebait if you look at the most-upvoted posts.

quantified• 5 months ago

And yet the algorithm has spent the last 3 or more weeks pumping MAGA, county and state Republican party, conservative Christian pages. There's a hand on the dials of "the algorithm"

nvarsj• 5 months ago

I barely use facebook.com but I don't have this issue at all. I just checked - my news feed is filled with extended family posts, posts in groups I'm in and related things. TFA looks completely alien to me. I guess this is kind of an absurd local maxima you get with algorithms for rarely used accounts.

(disclaimer: I work at Meta)

Quitschquat• 5 months ago

I’m there for the T’n’A too

r0m4n0• 5 months ago

I can't quite relate. Over the past few years I have been using facebook more and more. I use it almost solely for Marketplace and Groups. You can buy literally anything on marketplace for a fraction of the price new. You can sell things on marketplace for more than you bought it for from the store. It's actually quite amazing.

Groups are also really great. I have a lot of hobbies and you can join local groups where people trade stuff or just chat about things related to the topic. I have met some really cool people in real life from facebook groups. Into overlanding in your region? There is a group for that. Into rare Trichocereus or trading rare fig cuttings? There are groups for those. It feels much more personal than reddit because it's connected to a profile that actually has real information/photos associated with it.

Occasionally I end up scrolling videos on fb which appear to just be extensions of reels on Instagram. Doesn't appear to be any different, literally crossover comments even. OP is probably seeing the chum because facebook is going off of nothing.

Anyway, facebook is not cooked :)

rimeice• 5 months ago

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

MaintenanceMode• 5 months ago

If you're part of a particular subculture, like sailboat cruising, nearly all of international sailboat cruising takes place on Facebook. There are pages for every town, anchorage, marina, etc that you will encounter. Often that is paired with a WhatsApp group where people have conversations and coordinate activities. When you sail from city X to city Y, you join that Facebook group and you learn where to do laundry, where to get groceries, etc. You stay on these groups and the whole community interacts there for many years. There are other places this happens but Facebook is the main source of this type of information sharing.

ct0• 5 months ago

This is how I use it too. News feed is basically garbage, but the groups and marketplace is worth keeping my freemium subscription. I never heard of your use case, but I'm impressed that the specific point A to B groups exist!

krick• 5 months ago

Well, if it's true it's the first instance of good news I've heard in a while. But as far as I've checked, all local hobby groups still were defaulting to Facebook as the main (an often only) source of updates, events and general coordination. At least, it was a major source of friction for me until quite recently, as I never joined that thing and could only participate if somebody told me personally.

api• 5 months ago

Mine is just bizarre. I logged in a few months ago just to peek and it was AI generated conspiritainment brain rot about aliens and the Illuminati and Nazi UFOs. I found it kind of hilarious but also horrifying. Lots of fake archaeology pics, very obviously AI.

Different people seem to get different forms of brain rot. Last my wife checked it was political rage bait. My mom gets AI cat video slop.

Cyclone_• 5 months ago

"They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-generated, with generic captions." Don't mean to be rude but..might that have something to do with your search history?

hedayet• 5 months ago

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

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

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

tamimio• 5 months ago

It’s intentional and facebook is allowing it, for one, it brings traffic, second, how else can you distract the public from questioning what matters? Thirst traps!

Same issue in other social media btw, it’s probably too obvious in FB since it’s an old site with old audience, but if you go to instagram and the likes it’s all about thirst traps, which is a result of having a hypersexual society plus monetization.

econ• 5 months ago

I've often wondered, is there no metric for how popular a brand is?

After everyone makes an account it shouldn't be difficult to retain users. For years non of my friends saw any of my postings and I didn't see any of theirs. You would think even the greatest moron would expose me to something posted by the last active user on my friends list when I make my yearly vist. In stead I scroll down for 15 seconds, laugh and close the page.

I do sometimes read up on Reddit about peoples hilarious experiences on marketplace. FB is always the bad guy in every story. Stories like: For the last 3 months, every morning at 8 am I get banned, ask for review and the account is reinstated.

2muchcoffeeman• 5 months ago

All social media is like this though. It’s all garbage.

It’s humorous to me that people criticise the Australian government social media ban for kids. Sure they will get around it. But at least they are looking at various avenues to get rid of this shit. Might fail, but good they had a go.

avalys• 5 months ago

Yeah, if you haven't used a social network for years, and nor do your friends, and you log in to the social network, you get pretty trash content. This shouldn't be surprising.

mrighele• 5 months ago

I still use Facebook. Not often, let say once or twice a month, but I live abroad and FB is the only way to contact some people.

My feed is far from good, but not horrible. Once you interact a minimum with it (like in clicking on some posts, not even putting a like), FB will adjust the content appropriately. Right now for some reason I regularly get problems from International Mathematical Olympiad, chess, and nerd stuff about engineering.

I am not surprised that those that access FB after many years find the timeline full of half-naked women, pseudo-porn and the like: it's probably what men (those still on FB at least) on average crave for.

rant incoming

It is sad. I think that the original FB, the one from middle 00's, was really peak social media: you see stuff from people you know, you interact with them, even playing games with them. You would get in contact with old classmates that you couldn't speak with for 20 years... wonderful.

The point of original FB was to use it as an aggregator for your RL; go to a party, meet some gal, and the following day you would have a new contact on FB that you could contact to go out together again. Think about getting their phone number, but one order of magnitute better.

Heck I remember somehow waking up with a terrible hangover after a party and having a number of new girls as a contact on FB and asking myself "who the heck are they?". Fun times.

Current social media (Tiktok, Instagram, etc) is about seeing how people that you don't know get a life much better than yours. Not necessarily true, but it gets under your skin. How do youngsters use social media without going mad?

cleandreams2• 5 months ago

My son -- early 30's -- is impacted by how everyone's life seems much better than his. I think it's a real issue for young people.

skybrian• 5 months ago

The main feed is terrible, but Menu -> Feeds -> Friends will show just friend updates (and ads). Make a bookmark.

cantalopes• 5 months ago

I don't advicate for faceook but my feed does not look like that at all

achenatx• 5 months ago

mine is great, it is all posts from my groups and a few from my friends.

bitdeep• 5 months ago

I think that I logged on it few years ago, noted the forced feed suggestion that I cant disable and give up.

By curiosity, I just logged now, and hooooo, just ai boobs, wtf.

b65e8bee43c2ed02• 5 months ago

I dunno, maybe those are all bots too.

no, they're thirsty thirdworlders. that's 90%+ of any thot's followers, with the remaining 10% being children.

(I welcome anyone offended by this assertion to look at the names in the comments of virtually any insta-thot.)

_3u103• 5 months ago

I would highly suggest moving to the third world, eat some natural foods, and watch your T levels sky rocket. Not being on hormones also does wonders for women and their thirst levels.

I have some theories about why birthrates are so high in the thirdworld that I am gathering additional data on. Stay thirsty my friends.

weregiraffe2• 5 months ago

would highly suggest moving to the third world, eat some natural foods

Get diarrhea, drink some water, get parasites, breath the air and get cancer. Ah, third world....

insane_dreamer4• 5 months ago

I closed my FB account about 10 years ago - it wasn't even that the feed was so bad back then, but I found social media mentally unhealthy and wanted to break the habit. I closed my Twitter account a few years later.

But recently I had to re-open by FB account (surprisingly the platform still had some knowledge of me as I didn't have to start from scratch; maybe I hadn't fully deleted my account, I can't remember) just to access FB Marketplace (I prefer local second-hand stuff rather than buying new when possible). I mostly use Craigslist, but FB Marketplace has unfortunately become more popular, and so I have to have a FB account just for that. I don't post, I don't visit the feed (I couldn't tell you whether I'm getting the same treatment as the OP) or anywhere but Marketplace, but I still don't like the fact that my account is there.

I wish I could use FB Marketplace without FB, or that people would just stop using FB Marketplace and go back to Craigslist :/

overgard3• 5 months ago

Every couple of months or so I log in, and it's just depressing. I basically see zero posts from friends, it's just a lot of weird content I never signed up for. The weird thing is they send me a ton of emails saying "So and so posted such and such", so presumably people still exist in my network that post things, but Facebook conspires to prevent me from seeing it once I'm actually on the site.

PopAlongKid• 5 months ago

Similar here. I get emails almost every day that someone I know has posted something new, but if I click on the "view post" button in the email, it always opens a tab saying "we can't show you this content right now".

egonschiele• 5 months ago

So much of Reddit is brain rot now, it's unbelievable. A sample of subreddits: /r/memzy, /r/evilwhenthe, /r/JustMemesForUs.

Seriously, if I was in charge of these companies, I'd shut this shit down. I know it drives clicks, but do we want to live in a world where people consume this garbage? And not just a few people!

rcpt• 5 months ago

Marketplace is pretty good. I never use Craigslist anymore.

Otherwise yeah.

random3• 5 months ago

I guess they moved fast

LarsDu886• 5 months ago

The poster here doesn't seem to grasp how Facebook's algorithms work. He didn't use it for a very long time. The algorithm defaulted to content that appeals what little it knows about him... probably a middle aged man who hasn't clicked on facebook in a very long time. Maybe the first thing he actually did click on was a notification with a picture of an attractive young woman.

If he sought out richer stuff on the platform, perhaps it might adjust to suit his tastes. If he pretended to be a middle aged woman looking up knitting content, it might stop shooting him thirst traps and start giving him croquet

This is the "cold start" problem in machine learning.

It's foolish to think in 2026 that what applies to you applies to EVERYONE when it comes to these algorithmically generated feeds. The whole point is that its custom tailored to your demographics and id.

jrmg2• 5 months ago

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?

_3u103• 5 months ago

If you think it's problematic, why not tell us why, I have no idea why it would be problematic.

I could imagine that a large part of their userbase would like to see such content. I would actually bet that it generates a lot of clicks and ad rev.

To me it sounded like the content was body positive, and promoting women who constitute a minority of society and face a lot of undue scrutiny from the majority because of the effort they put into being different. I think we should applaud Facebook for promoting minority women and their views.

LarsDu886• 5 months ago

Lets imagine you work at Coca Cola and your job is to sell soda. Soda causes diabetes and tooth decay. Don't you think that's problematic?

Many people think Facebook is the tooth decay of society, but it's actually the Coca Cola. And Coca Cola makes a lot of money

barrkel• 5 months ago

I got the impression the author is female.

LarsDu886• 5 months ago

Have you ever noticed that magazines which target women also tend to have pictures of beautiful women on the cover? Same thing could be at play here.

justonceokay2• 5 months ago

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

overgard3• 5 months ago

The poster here doesn't seem to grasp how Facebook's algorithms work.

Since when do customers need to grok the algorithm? If it doesn't work it's not on us.

dakolli2• 5 months ago

Deleted mine in 2013 :flex:

I mainly didn't like people being able to stalk me after high school, but I find that I have a very different world view than people that did continue to use it (usually), I also find it really easy to tell if someone is a heavy facebook user by the psyops/weird narratives they end up repeating. They seem much more susceptible to "fake news" and advertising in general. I encourage pretty much everyone to get away from it.

Aldipower2• 5 months ago

Hey, me to, in 2013. :-) I had over 300 "friends" on facebook. I deleted them all. :-D 2010-2012 were funny times on FB though, I even was a FB app developer. Do FB apps still exists? Or a MCP apps the new FB apps now?

dakolli2• 5 months ago

I don't think I've ever used a facebook app, but yeah 2010-2012 seemed like there was actually community, but I wouldn't say it was as "magical" as early myspace. I feel like 2013 was the year where toxicity began to spread its wings on the internet, and facebook was the nest.

kinnth• 5 months ago

Why wont they actually allow users to control their own algorithms? Why can't we switch off "thirst" or "cat videos"?

I don't social media much but to not be on it, is FOMO for your social life. Someone out there needs to open up the algo to your own CHOSEN bias' not the ones they know get clicks.

I hate the whole damn thing!

fma• 5 months ago

There's is a button at the top of the app you can hit to just show posts from your friends...try using it.

ahallock• 5 months ago

This is just clickbait. Yeah there is brain rot on there, and what he was presented with is questionable, but he hadn't used it in 8 years. If he started using it, he would see more of what he's interested in. It's not a mind reader.

thenthenthen• 5 months ago

Yeah, some local ads but mostly for games, rest are all posts by friends and groups I follow? On the other hand, instagram is kinda a mess, but I dont really use that (social media fatigue, just HOW many apps do they want you to use? I guess the answer is: yes)

wrxd• 5 months ago

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

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

goalieca• 5 months ago

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

mvdtnz• 5 months ago

Don't know why Linda Dong (yoleendadong) has to catch strays from this post. Her videos are legitimately funny, absolutely not sloppy or bait. Her content is brilliant.

npilk4• 5 months ago

Fair enough - I didn’t turn the sound on for the video. The premise of the sketch seemed to fit the rest of the slimy stuff in the feed, which is why I figured that video in particular got recommended.

I mostly included it because of the absurd question Meta suggested I ask their AI.

t1234s• 5 months ago

Facebook is the original moltbook

revicon• 5 months ago

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.

replwoacause2• 5 months ago

I sometimes have to login to the Facebook app to use the marketplace, and my experience is the same as what is written in the article.

I see ragebait, clickbait, AI slop, tons of half-naked young looking girls (some AI, some real), and the marketplace is filled with what looks like obvious prostitution (e.g. beautiful girls selling clothes for like $3, but the clothes seemingly NEVER sell and get posted over and over and over again to the point where it's obvious its just a front for escort services).

It's a veritable cess pool. It should be illegal for any child to use IMO, nothing but pure brainrot.

sodafountan• 5 months ago

I'm an adult male; my feed is littered with thirst-trap-like posts. I don't even know how or when it got so bad. Instagram is somewhat off, too.

I find myself doomscrolling quite often just out of bad habit.

Wish things were different.

0x38B• 5 months ago

Some of the ads I was seeing on Facebook and Instagram were why I left them both for good. Losing Messenger and Marketplace hurt, but posts like these remind that I left for good reasons.

Why tolerate a network full of junk? Worse, it's junk that's calculated to draw me in whether I want it or no. Social media's biggest appeal, judging by Nathan's post, is to my lizard brain. My antidote to an internet gone mad is reading good, maybe old, books that reward the intellectual effort I put in to understand them.

compounding_it• 5 months ago

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

jfvinueza• 5 months ago

Why do we put up with this. It's not onlyfans: it's facebook.com. For an user to register and then by default receive this content it's treacherous and inmoral.

CodeBit26• 5 months ago

It's interesting to see the platform's decline in real-time. The pivot to AI-generated content in the feed seems like a desperate move to keep engagement high, but it's destroying the 'social' aspect that made it relevant in the first place

rolodexter20234• 5 months ago

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

tabs_or_spaces• 5 months ago

It's kind of sad what social media has become and I'm more frustrated with myself for not noticing until it was too late

I deleted all my social media profiles, but then at my current job I needed to add them back because my work used these and you need accounts to get access to developer accounts.

Anyway, my Facebook feed starts showing me Japanese and Korean nsfw videos. Instagram reels starts showing me increasing racist dark humour reels. I actually have to manage this feed to avoid these types of posts from popping up.

Then there's bots, there's so many bots that you don't even know who's real anymore. Like threads will have a bunch of new accounts posting for the first time. For me, this happens a lot on reddit

Then there's the ai content. There's so much slop in the posts as well as the comments. Increasingly more text seems to be ai generated these days for me

I also feel like I'm being "programmed" by social media. Like using claude is a good example, many folks seems to have started using claude fully in November. Another example is reddit, many times what is upvoted seems "programmed" to appear on the main feed.

In terms of mental wellbeing, I also see my mental wellness being affected. If I look at specific things related to relationships or financially successful people, then I'll eventually go through waves of depression symptoms just because I'm not good enough to be that person.

I initially joined social media looking to improve my quality of life. But these days, these sites feel like they just want my attention instead of wanting to make people's lives better.

Maybe that's naive of me to think this way, but at one point these sites did feel "good for me". It's just that I didn't catch on to the algorithm changes and their effects on my well being until it was too late.

mixmastamyk• 5 months ago

My feed isn't as bad as some mentioned here. Mostly geeky stuff, 80s nostalgia, and some mildly funny comics. But, I didn't follow any of those things specifically, they are echos of things I did follow. And my friends have been relegated to perhaps 1/4 of the feed.

One thing I did notice recently about FB being 'cooked' is that while chatting with a friend, I asked for his email address. Believe it or not FB deleted my question, twice! I knew they were sleazy, but this is a new low.

rolodexter20234• 5 months ago

Facebook manipulated attention. AI platforms will manipulate narratives. Action models and VR systems will manipulate lived experiences.

rolodexter20234• 5 months ago

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.

DeathArrow5• 5 months ago

And I don't just mean that nobody uses it anymore.

It depends on country. For some countries Facebook is the most used social network and there are many real people with daily activity on Facebook.

The same is true for WhatsApp. It might not be used in US but it's very successful elsewhere.

Glyptodon• 5 months ago

It's interesting and very annoying. I use FB basically to follow a couple groups that I've followed for like 15 years and a couple family members. Most of what it shows me seems to be related to interests I have or anything I slow down for even 5 seconds to process. Like "slow down when scrolling to see if I really am seeing the insane thing I think" and it'll show me more. Sometime I report stuff. Like a real (I think) thirst trap holding up a sexual innuendo/come on with the writing reversed. But they never actually take action on anything I report no matter how fake, false, or innaproproate it is. I also routinely block everything it ever shows me with AI (photorealistic AI images of history with a chapter of writing seem common).

It's all a big joke of spam and scam.

...but engaging even slightly in a few specific topics or interests seems to make the worst of it go away for more of those topics.

tempodox• 5 months ago

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

ChicagoDave• 5 months ago

IG has been doing this crap for years. I just wanted swing dance and poker videos. Around 1am they start pumping thirst traps at you.

Not on any meta.

andrepd• 5 months ago

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

This really is what makes everything worse isn't it? That engaging with the tech giants is borderline required (if not literally required) to function in the world.

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-generated, with generic captions.

I never seriously used Facebook; only once when a reallife buddy wanted means to communicate and I did not have a smartphone. But it was already really awful back then.

Now that AI spams down and eliminates real human beings, I guess many of these anti-social websites will die. Or at the least be in serious decline from where they can not easily escape anymore. Because which real human being wants all that AI slop?

nobodywillobsrv• 5 months ago

I noticed this a while ago. And the op isn't even experience the degradation of what could have been a huge platform: FB marketplace.

I thought during the pandemic FB marketplace was going to go somewhere. I thought they would try to solve physical delivery with like an Uber service and credit network for financials etc. it would be huge.

But no. What has happened is that primary dealers are now flooding marketplace with fake low ball posts to make it unusable and destroy the secondary market.

I recently was shopping for bunk beds and lo and behind there were hundreds of not thousands of posts just for my local area all from maybe a dozen or so accounts created around 2023.

This is somebody's business (spam order flow as a service) and I assume that they pay fb enough for some API they fb literally doesn't care.

My theory is that every single feature on FB is a/b tested to be as bad as it can be if it maximizes screen time. Search doesn't work. You can't find your profile settings or feeds easily. All on purpose to maximize the time you spend there.

The feed has been dead for me for ages. I would recommend many users simply use it as a storage log book and increase FB costs by requesting all your data occasionally.

It's one of the worst companies out there for explicit bad behaviour IMO.

Sparkyte2• 5 months ago

I don't use Facebook except for messenger. Not for me but for family. I keep getting sussy videos on my feed, I can keep blocking or saying I don't want them. They still pop up. Facebook is just full bait videos to try and get engagement.

Facebook could've evolved but it made bad decisions, alot of bad decisions.

sneak2• 5 months ago

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

Sparkyte2• 5 months ago

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

locallost• 5 months ago

The conclusion doesn't follow from the content. Facebook is not cooked, humans are cooked.

weatherlite• 5 months ago

The title is silly. Facebook "family of apps" have 3 billions users and still growing. Usage per user still going up. They are a money making machine not slowing down, I deleted my Facebook long ago but as a company I hold their stock; I realize 3 billion > my personal preference.

bdangubic3• 5 months ago

Company is Meta and post is not talking about Meta as a company but Facebook.

Facebook itself is likely cooked but probably not in the immediate future. for younger generation Facebook is like AOL for us ;)

jwr• 5 months ago

This is country-dependent, I think. In Poland, for example, schools and kindgergartens still pressure parents to sign consent forms allowing them to post images of kids on Facebook. "For promotional purposes".

Everybody signs. Well, not everybody, but I am one of the very few lone outliers.

maipen• 5 months ago

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

Aldipower2• 5 months ago

I have a similar experience with OpenAI. Just want to apply with my MCP App, but the application process, a multi step automated form submission, is totally flawed, buggy and broken, so that the form for apps submissions is simply not working. Trying to report this bug just results in an AI response black hole on their support address. No real humans there. The whole OpenAI back end platform is unbelievably buggy, nothing works. No wonder, if you cannot report _their_ bugs. I cannot advertise a MCP App for ChatGPT to the users of my platform, if there isn't a minimum level of trust, between OpenAI and me. If I cannot talk to a real human I simply do not take the brand of my platform, where I put countless years of effort in, and throw it in some out-of-control venture company maelstrom.

jeandejean• 5 months ago

The author seems to think his personal defunct and bloated feed is representative of what other users are experiencing... Come on!

firtoz2• 5 months ago

I checked mine, and it's still got family news, and some friends etc. There were 1-2 items of slop but not that bad...

I was more surprised by how I didn't even realise or hear about one of my cousins getting pregnant, another cousin of mine getting married, and another one passing away. I have been living abroad for 18 years though so fair enough but still feels a little bit odd.

tim333• 5 months ago

If you are on the web, the fbpurity extension helps a lot. I just checked my feed and no junk. Trying the iphone app instead it's just a head wrecking steam of garbage.

donatj• 5 months ago

My Facebook is bad, but I still see a bunch of posts by friends. Instagram on the other hand went from a stream of artsy photos my friends posted of their vacations to a literal river of AI generated garbage.

Until about a year ago I really liked Instagram because it had been the last bastion of content by friends.

Now my feed goes

    - maybe one post from friends if I am lucky
    - 1-2 posts from content creators or local stores I like but don't follow 
    - endless stream of rage bait / slop / thirst traps

I just don't feel compelled to even open instagram anymore.

latexr• 5 months ago

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.

m0002• 5 months ago

We all acknowledge the AI slop posts. The question is what fraction of the comments under the posts is also AI slop. And how long until we see AI-targetted ads, to manifest the Dead Internet Theory in its fullest.

fHr• 5 months ago

Good hope it dies.

bradley13• 5 months ago

I haven't logged into Facebook for many years, but this made me curious. I'm a guy, in my 60s. Looking at my feed, the first two posts are family/friends, the third is some video about a guy I never heard of, the next three f/f, then a political post, etc..

Overall, about 2:1 family/friends vs. crap. That's still too much crap, but no "thirst posts" at all. Maybe those only target younger guys?

Logging out now. I just have no interest in how a cousin I haven't seen in decades has redecorated her bedroom.

bilekas2• 5 months ago

What's more concerning is that this is not Facebook that is cooked, it's the users who are cooked. Facebooks Algo will only do and continue what brings the most engagement. More and more we are seeing people, mostly younger it seems, be fine with Ai content filling their feeds. It's becoming normalized now so that it can continue to be monetized.

Interestingly these companies once promoted 'body positivity' and now they're pushing down literally unrealistic standards of beauty, but that's another topic of inducing mental illness.

Dumblydorr• 5 months ago

If users were the problem, why does it immediately show garbage content to new users or males, with zero evidence they want it, as written by other comments here?

bilekas2• 5 months ago

Because without enough usage data on the OP, then the algo will revert to what is most successful to those with the info they DO have on him.

i.e : Thirst traps and bait videos.

Ecozz• 5 months ago

One could argue fox news was the original algorithmic content provider. Quite easily. 30+ years of it now. If those folks don't need deprogramming no one does.

kranke155• 5 months ago

The Internet is now a hipnotic experience that learns how to hypnotise you. And whoever controls the AI controls it

christkv• 5 months ago

Just ban algorithms on feeds. It seems to do nothing but harm. Keep it on pages and put those in their own tab.

synergy20• 5 months ago

if it's so off and out of fashion,why does it have such a huge profit from selling ads? even tiktok uses it for ads. looks like its daily active user is still huge and even growing?

andai2• 5 months ago

So there's a strange situation with the incentives here.

The whole point of the AI posts with the AI bots in the comments section is they're waiting for the one clueless actual human to show up so they can scam them.

But here, the obviousness of the scam is a feature. Just like, obvious scams in the spam are actually a feature because they select for the most gullible people to scam.

So this is funny because, the shittiness of the AI images is actually a feature in the same way. The continued improvement of image generation models will actually worsen the situation from the scammers point of view, because they won't effectively filter for dummies anymore.

eel• 5 months ago

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

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

CamelCaseName• 5 months ago

Reading through these comments, I really miss Reddit's old default homepage.

Sure, you could have your own curated feed, but there was also r/all and everyone seemed to use it, so everyone saw relatively the same thing.

It would sadly never work today, but it was great back then.

tetris11• 5 months 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

fullshark4• 5 months ago

This sounds like you miss the sense of community reddit used to have, I don't think that would have lasted forever, we were all so naive re: social media 10+ years ago.

gorfian_robot• 5 months ago

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

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

cush• 5 months ago

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

DANmode4• 5 months ago

is this just something wacky with my algorithm?

Yes.

Your training data for algorithmically answering the question of “what will they engage habitually with next?” is ten years old.

They’re almost certainly not resting on this usecase,

coasting on you adding a new friend, or replying to some messages, or doing SOMETHING to steer the “recent context” part of the algorithm.

Which you’re probably not doing, right?

Anyway: coolest blog of the month award. Love the different-design-per-post trend!

DANmode4• 5 months ago

almost certainly not testing*

ddmma• 5 months ago

Ideally your mind will be uploaded to META cloud and then live in that simulation as long there is electricity on this planet. With the Oculus you can talk to your ancestors and connect to other dimensions. As long your social graph peers don’t post so much there a lot of push from the dystopian algorithms.

willangelo• 5 months ago

Very nice to see this post and realize like I'm not the only one seeing things like this. Two quick stories:

I have always been a late mover to social networks, started using Facebook after many years of everybody around me using it and the same happened with Instagram. More recently, short videos and reels never caught my eye, never watched them and honestly took a long time to even realize they existed within Instagram and were not only a TikTok thing, but one time I decided to check it out and I got flooded with exactly the type of content the OP shared: thirst traps, women in the gym, AI garbage. This led to an interesting chat with my girlfriend btw, who was right next to me when I had this brilliant idea.

Took no more than 5 interactions in a course of a week or so of "open reels -> scroll down 3 or 4 videos -> exit" for the algorithm to be 100% more in tune with pages I follow on Instagram and content that appears in my feed (sports, tech, travel)

Also, similar thing for YouTube: if you watch a video in an anonymous tab, the home page will start empty, with no recommendations. After you watch the video, it will become 50% content similar to the video you just watch and 50% thirst traps.

Ylpertnodi• 5 months ago

Deleting/ turning off history = nothing on the home page.

davecrawley2• 5 months ago

In the beginning there was a simple idea. If you were a platform and just acted as a conduit of information but didn't decide what got visibility - you weren't responsible for the content you transmitted - like a phone company isn't responsible for what you say on the phone. If you were a publisher - and exerted editorial control - such as deciding what gets put on the front page and what is buried 10 pages deep in the newspaper - you were responsible for the content. If you published libelous, fraudulent or other information the law held that you had decided to amplify that piece of information so were also held responsible.

In the beginning social media was a platform - you wrote something, your friends and family saw it - they really were just a conduit of information. Then social media decided they could suck up more attention by deciding what you saw - but, because its expensive to deal with libel suits they wanted to be categorized as a platform - even though they weren't. They succeeded - the good platform / publisher principle failed.

Most of the problems we are now seeing with Facebook, Amazaon, Ticktock could be solved instantly by saying - if you have a recommendation engine - you are responsible for the output of that recommendation engine. If it amplifies libelous, fraudulent or other such information - well you as the publisher are responsible.

It would mean that Ticktock, Facebook and others would drop their totally addictive design - as they would be afraid of being held responsible of the information which they are using to get users hooked. If they, by some miracle didn't drop their recommendation engine, and started acting as if they were responsible for the information their transmitted, your news feed wouldn't be filled with utter garbage. It would mean that fraudulent anti-vaxx conspiracy theories wouldn't get play on the internet. It would mean that libelous statements wouldn't get play. The list goes on and on.

Its simple, consistent with pre-existing law, and effective.

paprikanotfound• 5 months ago

Wireheading is getting close to some of us.

MisterTea• 5 months ago

Good place to buy and sell used shit though.

smusamashah• 5 months ago

I have two twitter accounts. On one I like indie games, ai stuff, Gaussian Splats etc and some other things and that is what my feed is filled. I discover so many good games here. I keep it that way by not watching and liking randomly recommended things. My second twitter account is full of crappy videos (fights, accidents and sometimes very horrific).

I have never seen things of my interest on Facebook ever. It is full male focused staged thirst crap. I log in to that account may be once or twice a year.

I think Facebook should be steerable like Twitter. I haven't tried because it's super clingy.

yasonk• 5 months ago

I have a solution to this(and I've been talking about issues with the algorithmic social media for some years now). A POC I created during a hackathon populates your social media feed, but you define the algorithm using English language. Basically you can say, "I want to see more electricity related posts from Neil deGrasse Tyson. Show only family related posts from Bob Smith, but hide everything that is political". (Got second place out of 200+ participants)

The solutions leverages a social network with over 40 million users, so the network effect is already solved to a degree. If anyone has the means to spin this up into a business, let me know.

giancarlostoro2• 5 months ago

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

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

arnvald• 5 months ago

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

giancarlostoro2• 5 months ago

I'm a millennial too, and I log into Facebook like once or twice every 3 months. I don't use it as much as I used to.

bjornnn2• 5 months ago

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

bjornnn2• 5 months ago

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

veunes5• 5 months ago

The depressing part is that generative slop is a perfect match for the incentive structure: infinite supply, tuned to trigger comments, and you don't need real creators. If your product metric is time-on-site, this is what you get

kornork• 5 months ago

What's stopping someone from literally cloning the minimal feature-set we loved, and so many people here seem to be pining for?

I scrolled down a fair bit and didn't see anyone posting an alternative.

Cthulhu_3• 5 months ago

Spam and abuse. That is, assuming you get critical mass to begin with, but as soon as people find out another service where they can upload files to and the like, the abuse will begin. Facebook employs (tens of?) thousands of people for content moderation, and that's after their well-trained automated systems filter out the worst / well known stuff.

I don't know how other, newer social media (e.g. bluesky) handle it. I suppose there's off the shelf software / services for something like that?

bearjaws• 5 months ago

Network effects.

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

TuringNYC• 5 months ago

My FB feed is also people I dont follow. Not sure which brilliant PM came up with this idea, but if I wanted to see random content I could just go to a magazine or newspaper. I used to go to FB to actually see photos/updates from my friends and most people recognize we lost that several years ago. The second problem is just every third post being an ad. I deleted the app several years ago.

realaaa• 5 months ago

let's go to Mastodon ! err.. or other thing

shit, let's just go outside

jonrandy• 5 months ago

I don't spend much time on FB, but almost all (95%+) of the stuff in my feed is from people and pages I follow... and there are no ads whatsoever, or thirst trap posts. This is on both the app and the website. The other >5% is posts from suggested groups/pages that are generally pretty relevant.

cowboylowrez• 5 months ago

I like facebook but its got some irritating features. I view the feed a little bit, but I also have specific folks bookmarked. If facebook breaks bookmarks then yeah I doubt I could use it, I already can't bookmark conversations I've participated in unless I explicitely use a facebook feature (share, save or something) and if comments get beyond a few dozen I forget the "thread" as it becomes unusable. Things like telegram and signal (?) need apps apparently, never bothered with those.

I suspect the monetary incentives are at cross purposes to my personal incentives. Reddit really has a much nicer experience if you have good internet and several hundred cores but I don't have either, if the "old" reddit goes away I would need some serious upgrades to use it, wierd that they're worse than facebook with their new ui.

Imgur, instagram has no usable interface for me, x is now exclusively the realm of degenerates and whackjobs, I have never once sucessfully loaded a discord page so won't even be affected by their id grab.

there are still a few cool places here and there. I think some smaller sites with similar interfaces to old reddit, hacker news (but with subs) have potential.

TrailingArbutus• 5 months ago

What isn't cooked?

THE MUCH SCARIER cooked state is that of wikipedia and anything noting down history, if we ever uncover something from the past, how the HELL can we know for sure it wasn't AI generated? we are absolutely cooked as a species.

cirelli94• 5 months ago

Am I wrong or nobody is talking about mastodon as a viable feed alternative with only contents from friends?

geldedus• 5 months ago

I don't have any content like you've described. So yea, it's FB's algo response to that profile's views, comments and reactions. Don't generalize

paride5745• 5 months ago

I am keeping Facebook just because of a couple of Groups.

My timeline is completely useless, I have an endless stream of suggested post and ads, nothing relevant to me.

Meta is supposed to know me, I use Instagram quite a bit (following F1 teams, some comedians and a bunch of tiktok-style content creators), but somehow this does not translate in targeting on FB, just generic targeting for my population type.

I tried Threads and it was the same. Pretty useless.

Say what you want about X, but at least there I can curate my Following tab and Lists, and have an informative experience.

Except for Instagram due to my F1 passion, Meta is completely useless for me. And once I move those followings on X and Youtube, I guess I'll have no use for Meta software at all. Kind of a shame.

Facebook is cooked

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