No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.
Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed. No matter what she did she couldn't fix it. She asked other women about this, and they all said their partner's feeds were the same.
This is not a problem for women. At least not one I've ever talked to or read about on the internet.
Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted.
I got a whole bunch of thirst traps again.
It doesn't bother me anymore, I just tune it out and scroll past it because my feed still has the parenting and pottery too, and my friend's updates, which is what I'm there for.
But it would be good for more people to learn about this so they don't get angry when they see their male-identified partners/friends feeds.
> I 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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most of the reported ads don't get taken down by Google, although they are very obviously AI porn ads.
The search and reels page just shows you what you interact with, and in my experience it tends to overreact to recent input. Look at a couple cat reels for example, and the very next or so refresh will have more cat reels.
I finally got the deletion thing to not error out and am almost at the end of the 30 day deletion period.
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?)
I made them go down markedly by setting my age to be over 100. Doesn’t stop some of the thirst trap ‘reels’, but all the “Asian women would like to get to know middle aged guys like you!” bullshit went away.
I 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).
This isn't my experience at all. I get "sexy girls" reels, but infrequently and that's it. No other "thirst traps" at all, most of my feed is relevant to my interests too. Been on fb for many years now.
I 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.
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.
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.
Logged out, YouTube is of course a complete mess.
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?
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.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
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.
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.
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.
Facebook is truly awful to everyone. I can't believe people don't try harder to leave.
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.
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."
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.
Over the next five years though, content gradually shifted to mainly image crafting. Over-processed photos, highlight reel curated trip photos, major life updates, etc. It felt like the bar was higher on what people would share, but unfortunately that removed a lot of the things that made FB fun in the first place.
I don't know whether it was a more universal shift or whether it had more to do with the age of my peers.
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.
For someone who grew up in the ‘golden years’ of social media, it’s kinda weird to see.
I joke, but the internet I knew as a youth going the way of the dinosaurs really has had a deep impact on me. End of an epoch.
Yeah, actually why I left Facebook a decade ago: finding out what horrible people my relatives were.
For friends, I started a few text group chats to stay in touch. It's really annoying because someone has Android and RCS is broken on someone's end. Some also use FB Messenger, but nobody 2 years younger or older than me is on that.
Zuck is always one step ahead.
But interestingly my experience of IG when I do occasionally go on it is similar to what TFA describes: lots of engagement-bait / thirst trap content that I never asked to see but also haven't been around to hide, so I guess the baseline algorithm is just matching me to what others in my demographic bracket have found, um, engaging.
One is "I don't want to use Meta products as a matter of principle", and WhatsApp's a no-go if that's your posture.
The other is "I don't want to drown in horrible, algorithm-curated junk content". Instagram is just as bad as Facebook there, but WhatsApp is definitely not the same.
Updates are broadcasted, but they disappear after 24 hours.
Step 1) Keep updates for a week, later forever
Step 2) Mix Chats and Updates
Step 3) Add a few relevant patrocinated posts
Step 4) Change the css from green to blue
Step 5) Profit
They all use iMessage primarily, but that's a whole other can-of-worms conversation. (Screw Apple.)
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.
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.
1. Signal
2. BlueSky
3. Discord
4. WhatsApp
5. SMS
Distant friends and extended family: email threads
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.
The economics don’t work because no one is willing to pay.
The network effect doesn’t exist, because real people don’t post enough to get the flywheel started.
All the dark patterns exist because that is what users reward.
Sucks but it’s true.
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.
(early 40s)
* 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.
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.
Not as such, no. However, new accounts (which show up as green) tend to get less attention and more downvotes. When I first joined that annoyed and confused me, but after a while (when my name was no longer green), folks seemed more accepting of my comments and submissions.
As the eminent philosopher opined, "It Ain't Easy Being Green"[0]. Although I believe their ruminations predate HN.
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.
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.
Interesting side fact: The Philippines is #1 in social media usage in the world.
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.
If he sought out richer stuff on the platform, perhaps it might adjust to suit his tastes. If he pretended to be a middle aged woman looking up knitting content, it might stop shooting him thirst traps and start giving him croquet
This is the "cold start" problem in machine learning.
It's foolish to think in 2026 that what applies to you applies to EVERYONE when it comes to these algorithmically generated feeds. The whole point is that its custom tailored to your demographics and id.
You don’t think that’s 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.'"
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.
Any mode of communication that depends on advertising for funding will over time t monotonically approach total BullShit Grifting as t increases.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
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.
> If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and could be used in a harmful manner in violation of our rules,” the warning says. You can continue to publish the post or delete it.
Margret Atwood, the Handmaids Tale.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
theres entire marketing companies that provide what is effectively a botnet of social media activity to generate buzz, promising packages with "social media engagement". disney uses these to try and hype movie trailers, when the recent tron trailer came out it took 1 minute for a bunch of comments that looked like seemingly real enough accounts to be in there posting "im not ready for this" "omg" etc. and yes, these networks of fake accounts on all social media platforms do have non-vacant profiles meaning theyve got comments and stuff all over each others pages. there was a recent smaller production that is suing their marketing agency which promised this deceptive engagement and their implementation shit the bed and all the bots just interacted amongst themselves on the movies instagram page. the movie completely tanked at the box office because they never got their fake accounts to start engaging outside of the movies instagram account.
everyone focuses on the actual content itself as the subject of AI platform abuse, but are we really so naive to think that the companies pouring millions of dollars into these efforts are too stupid to understand that controlling the narrative involves requires simulating human feedback?
its in our nature to want to "go to the comments" to "get the real tea" and. im just going to say right now that yeah, the entities deploying these types of accounts are well aware that that is how many of us look for perspective. they're not stupid, and it's easier than it's ever been to game commentary in 2026.
I notice more and more accounts use it, particularly the spicy commenters. Which is whatever, I try to stay away from social media now, this is SM here but at least it's more technically oriented/useful.
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 :)
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
Enjoy your small circle of internet strangers sharing a common interest, you don't need to become viral.
If you don't interact with the product, you get lowest denominator crap.
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.
I accidentally switched to that account the other day.
The feed was the most right-wing, Fox News crap you could imagine!
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
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.
By curiosity, I just logged now, and hooooo, just ai boobs, wtf.
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
its a filter to just show you posts from your friends, no groups, nothing else.
This part here kills me. I’ve also been forced to engage in the Zuckerverse. I hate WhatsApp.
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.
I wonder what will be next after Facebook Marketplace dwindles (assuming eventually "everyone" is no longer on Facebook). Going back to Craigslist? Something new?
Instagram is estimated to generate half of ad revenue.
WhatsApp and Messenger contribute relatively little to ad revenue.
So facebook.com alone must be generating around $100B revenue annually.
It's impossible that something generating this revenue is serving AI generated NSFW teens pics with botnets commenting on those pictures only.
Real humans must be engaging with real ads at massive scale to make this money.
Failure mode for people reporting "I didn't use fb for a while, then I come back and see adult-like dominated content" sounds like plausible explanation of ad revenue optimized algo with weak, singular signal.
It could also be just cold start problem where algo has zero engagement signal and yields thirst traps for { gender: male, age: ~30s, engagement_history: [] } state.
But it's hard for me to believe that - frankly it doesn't sound like the best output if you want to capture somebody who has real friends and family in their network, did the algo really learned that people with this input state click likes on pics like that?
Why not just serve engagement from friends network or even "wish happy birthday to X tomorrow" instead – sounds like better way to engage to me.
ps. I also don't use fb but I do login maybe once a year / every two years to double check I'm not hacked, can still login etc. When I do it I may spend few minutes scrolling and I can see just posts from my network (double checked again now, lgtm).
Whatever issue OP has, they probably should spend few minutes engaging, maybe just dismiss/click don't like/hide/whatever it is to signal they're not interested - algo should pick it up and their feed should look more like what they expect.
What's your explanation?
I 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.
no, they're thirsty thirdworlders. that's 90%+ of any thot's followers, with the remaining 10% being children.
(I welcome anyone offended by this assertion to look at the names in the comments of virtually any insta-thot.)
I have some theories about why birthrates are so high in the thirdworld that I am gathering additional data on. Stay thirsty my friends.
Get diarrhea, drink some water, get parasites, breath the air and get cancer. Ah, third world....
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.
- 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.
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.
It scales in a way that national parks do not and national parks are not competing for the time you spend in the bathroom at work.
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.
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.
Do we need a way to audit usage stats in addition to financial numbers?
That being said, it's still sad that this is the default new/returning user experience. Imagine a world where a new user was met with real posts about a variety of interests, rather than a psychic barrage of insane AI posts.
I 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.
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.
Something I would love is 'social media dotfiles', so I could export my list and share it with others. And vice-versa.
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.
I’ve used it enough to understand this is happening now. Literally impossible to distinguish, unless you know the person.
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.
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.
https://bsky.app/profile/bexsaltsman.bsky.social/post/3me4yb...
(disclaimer: I work at Meta)
FUCK THAT.
So I don't use Facebook. I cannot wait for this house of cards to collapse in on itself.
I'm hoping they're cooked because they're putting all of their eggs in the AGI basket instead of making useful AI products, and they probably won't figure out AGI.
I find myself doomscrolling quite often just out of bad habit.
Wish things were different.
It was already slop before that.
What did you do when it showed you propaganda from other countries?
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.
So where are people now? If I want to get informed on local events, etc., where should I go?
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.
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.
They are not sending their best.
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.
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.
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.
It's usually not AI (at least not obviously) but it's still slop.
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!
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.
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.
I mostly included it because of the absurd question Meta suggested I ask their AI.
... 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.
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!
Only that keeps me going back.
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.
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!
I honestly do not care if Facebook is cooked or goes away -- but I doubt the situation is that bad.
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.
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.
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.
My point here isn’t simply that “people can’t differentiate between AI and not AI” (although that is an issue for some) but that the prevalence of AI slop lowers the trust of ALL content even when they know it isn’t AI generated. This author was so fed up with the content they were being served that they were quick to dismiss other content along with it at a cursory glance.
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.
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.
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.
Is it possible to make money these days without being ethically bankrupt?
I manage the shit out of FB and YouTube. You need to block a few things so it stops testing a few segment ideas.
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The surprising effectiveness of Meta Ads for certain audiences as counter-intuitive as it seems is one example.
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.
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.
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.
Probably not using it from ages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Everyones feed is different.
It depends on how much you train the algorithm.
Yours is untrained, therefore slop.
(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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
We are not the target audience.
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.
Those warnings are stupid.
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.
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.
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.
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
In other words, that filter that keeps Nazis, child predators, doxing, etc. off your favorite platform only exists because of section 230.
Now, one could argue that the biggest platforms (Meta, Youtube, etc.) can, at this point, afford the cost of full editorial responsibility, but repealing section 230 under this logic only serves to put up a barrier to entry to any smaller competitor that might dislodge these platforms from their high, and lucrative, perch. I used to believe that the better fix would be to amend section 230 to shield filtering/removal, but not selective promotion, but TikTok has shown (rather cleverly) that selective filtering/removal can be just as effective as selective promotion of content.
T&S is markedly more capable in the dominant languages (English is ahead by far).
Platforms make absurd margins when compared to any other category of enterprise known to man.
They operate at scales where a 0.001% error rate is still far beyond human capability to manually review.
Customer support remains a cost center.
Firms should be profitable and have a job to do.
We do not owe them that job. Firms are vehicles to find the best strategies and tactics given societal resources and goals.
If rules to address harms result in current business models becoming unviable, then this is not a defense of the current business model.
Currently we are socializing costs and privatizing profit.
Having more customer support, more transparency, and more moderation will be a cost of doing business.
Our societies have more historical experience thinking about government capture than flooding the zone style private capture of speech.
America developed the FDA and every country has rules on how hygiene should be maintained in food.
People still can start small, and then create medium or large businesses. Regulation is framed for the size of the org.
Many firms fail - but failure and recreation are natural parts of the business cycle.
I am kind of rooting for the AI slop because the status quo is horrific, maybe the AI slop cancer will put social media out of its misery.
I'm not a lawyer, but idk that seems pretty clear cut. If you, the provider, run some program which does illegal shit then 230 don't cover your ass.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12584
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.
That's not where it stops.
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.
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.
And you know for a fact that I am not exaggerating. This is where the current political discourse is at.
Can I please have the freedom to do that without the lecture?
(Apparently the answer is "yes", but the commentary must be of the partisan approved kind.)
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.
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.
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.
That being said, I don't spend too much time on social networks because I have lots of other things to do.
Enemy centered mindset. You forgoe things that benefit you because they might help the enemy.
Enemy centered mindset is precisely unprincipled. You stop looking at what you care about and start mirroring the enemy.
In this case the impact on mark is even imagined, as he personifies the product. And mark only comes to mind because he’s famous. You also don’t systematically evaluate all CEOs of all products to use.
We certainly evaluate companies on their CEOs if their CEOs make themselves high profile enough.
You are certainly judged here if you have a Tesla because of Musk hence why sales have dropped 50%.
Other companies that don't have as high profile CEOs can get away with terrible points of view.
What you're referring to may also be part of their XCheck program which came to light back in 2021
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
I do agree with your general sentiment, though: Many complaints about Facebook come from people who don't want to invest time into finding their friends online and engaging with friend content. They log in, see what the article sees, assume that's all there is, and abandon it. Most people just move on, but a few will complain about Facebook based on their limited experience from 10 years ago.
My mother in law is an example of this. She’s always been “mildly” political, e.g. she liked Planned Parenthood’s FB page. Now her feed is a mess of anti-Trump stuff. I’m anti-Trump myself but a lot of these posts are barely coherent and she’s mentioned before now when she meets someone new her first thought is whether they voted for Trump or not. To my mind it’s a direct result of her slipping down that slope. She frequently has interactions (“fights” is too strong really) with friends and neighbors on her feed who are clearly off piste in the other political direction.
I even had an example of it on my own profile. For some reason I had a post from a local (NY) radio station in my feed, about Mamdani. Curious to click into the comments I saw a cesspit of vitriol by boomer age users, attached to their real names, sometimes with smiling photos with their grandchildren… for weeks after whenever I logged in there would be a new post by a different conservative leaning radio station, ready to make me angry. Engagement > user happiness.
Unfortunately, clicking on the ad alerts the algorithm, which then shows you MORE of that type of ad that if you had not clicked at all.
It reminds me of people who browse YouTube logged off: they see garbage, spam, rage bait, and sexy girls doing sexy stuff.
But I browse logged in and my carefully curated subscriptions mean I mostly get good quality, relevant recommendations, and almost zero rage bait or outrageous stuff.
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.
Source: me. https://nindalf.com/posts/xcheck/
It’s certainly the social hub for some groups.
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.
Being paranoid, I ran a VM just for Facebook. The browser never went to any other sites, so as far as I know there is no way it could track me or get any actual information about me, other than maybe a very rough location based on my IP. I also setup a burner email just for this and used a fake name/picture.
On a fresh account with no info, my feed was much like that of the linked article. A bunch of thirst traps and various "news" and memes. Occasionally it would tell me to follow stuff so it could actually populate the feed, but when it wasn't doing that, it was giving me this kind of garbage. This was before the advent of generative AI, so I assume these were mostly real photos, but who knows who was actually behind those accounts.
Twitter was fairly similar, but would show a lot of high school kids fighting or general street fights... along side the thirst traps.
1. https://socialfixer.com/
2. https://github.com/ycngmn/Nobook
(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.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't say my Facebook is good -- I don't interact with it enough for it to be anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But if I were paying them, even a little bit, then maybe they could. But I didn't know there was a friends-only feed so I'll check that out.
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.
Surely she could just bookmark those pages and check periodically, or subscribe to a newsletter or something?
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.
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.
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.
And it also feels like they're compelled to maximize ragebaits for some reason - maybe the Web2 is running out of "advertiser friendly" contents.
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.
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.
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.