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.

• curious_af

  today at 8:45 PM

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

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

  • Aurornis

    today at 9:07 PM

    > 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?

  • 0x457

    today at 10:36 PM

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

  • bko

    today at 9:31 PM

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

    • twelvedogs

      today at 10:04 PM

      The algorithm is not optimised for meaningful interactions, even 10 years ago i couldn't get it to even mostly show friends and family after fighting it for a week

• duxup

  today at 10:37 PM

  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.

• krn1p4n1c

  today at 8:44 PM

  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

    today at 9:38 PM

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

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

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

    I just gave up at that point.

    • al_borland

      today at 9:54 PM

      I made a Facebook account a few years ago for a private group related to a class I was taking. I didn't want to do this, but it is what it is.

      Being paranoid, I ran a VM just for Facebook. The browser never went to any other sites, so as far as I know there is no way it could track me or get any actual information about me, other than maybe a very rough location based on my IP. I also setup a burner email just for this and used a fake name/picture.

      On a fresh account with no info, my feed was much like that of the linked article. A bunch of thirst traps and various "news" and memes. Occasionally it would tell me to follow stuff so it could actually populate the feed, but when it wasn't doing that, it was giving me this kind of garbage. This was before the advent of generative AI, so I assume these were mostly real photos, but who knows who was actually behind those accounts.

      Twitter was fairly similar, but would show a lot of high school kids fighting or general street fights... along side the thirst traps.

• today at 9:42 PM

• SecretDreams

  today at 10:35 PM

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

• jasondigitized

  today at 8:37 PM

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

  • bdangubic

    today at 8:42 PM

    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)

• Aurornis

  today at 8:52 PM

  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.

• dawnerd

  today at 9:40 PM

  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.

• pyreko

  today at 8:46 PM

  I have this with Twitter surprisingly.

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

  I know some day it'll break though.

  • Aurornis

    today at 9:00 PM

    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.

  • numpad0

    today at 9:46 PM

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

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

  • raincole

    today at 9:20 PM

    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.

• cyanydeez

  today at 9:48 PM

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

• AlexandrB

  today at 8:31 PM

  > 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.

• newsclues

  today at 9:37 PM

  You keep the content creators happy.

• moduspol

  today at 8:33 PM

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

  • cameldrv

    today at 8:35 PM

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

    • moduspol

      today at 8:39 PM

      I wouldn't mind seeing an empty feed that says, "your friends didn't post today," or whatever. They have to fill the feed because I'm not paying them and they need the engagement.

      But if I were paying them, even a little bit, then maybe they could. But I didn't know there was a friends-only feed so I'll check that out.

      • Digit-Al

        today at 9:14 PM

        If you are on the mobile app, click on the burger menu and select "Feeds". You will then have a page that has tabs at the top. "All" will be selected by default, but if you select "Friends" you will see only posts from your friends. If you have completely caught up it will be empty and will say that you have caught up and seen everything your friends have posted. There are still ads, but you don't get all the reels, and crap posted by people you don't know.

      • AndrewDucker

        today at 9:08 PM

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

  • Aurornis

    today at 8:56 PM

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

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

    • CosmicShadow

      today at 9:32 PM

      Yet my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs open to people and bands she wants updates from because Facebook refuses to put them on her feed, despite her commenting on every post and story from them; she instead gets all these random shitty "suggested" posts from things that she would never have interest in or actively hates and FB should know that. She constantly mutes and reports shit. I get the same thing, but I don't use FB nearly as much. Those same bands have to spam repeatedly because despite having tens of thousands of fans they show everyone that their posts are only shown to 16 people. It's a shit site that maybe works for some folks, but not at all for us active or not.

• tgma

  today at 9:57 PM

  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.

> 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.

• bityard

  today at 9:38 PM

  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.

• chasd00

  today at 10:29 PM

  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.

• elAhmo

  today at 9:53 PM

  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

  today at 9:57 PM

  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?)

• AlexandrB

  today at 8:35 PM

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

I 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.

• tencentshill

  today at 7:00 PM

  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).

• Maxion

  today at 7:17 PM

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

  • davio

    today at 10:31 PM

    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.

  • ryandrake

    today at 7:37 PM

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

    • JohnMakin

      today at 8:16 PM

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

      • r_lee

        today at 9:07 PM

        I think its just by nature very engaging, as dudes will go look at other posts and comment (at least the older ones) about their looks etc...

      • naravara

        today at 8:56 PM

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

  • dlev_pika

    today at 8:59 PM

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

• idunno246

  today at 7:27 PM

  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

    today at 8:37 PM

    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.

• npilk

  today at 6:49 PM

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

  • bmurphy1976

    today at 6:55 PM

    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?

• conductr

  today at 8:51 PM

  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.

• ge96

  today at 6:59 PM

  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)

  • MattGrommes

    today at 7:58 PM

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

    • recursivecaveat

      today at 9:44 PM

      It only takes me a few seconds of scrolling in a private window to hit an AI-generated cat head on pregnant human woman barfing rainbows on the floor: 63M views. Really makes you believe in the dead internet theory, just that they're all in their own little slop algorithm world. Or maybe it's ipad babies after all.

  • KellyCriterion

    today at 8:23 PM

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

  • today at 8:52 PM

  • nephihaha

    today at 7:18 PM

    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.

    • today at 7:35 PM

• toomuchtodo

  today at 7:15 PM

  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

    today at 7:20 PM

    The only way you can use FB imo.

  • ForHackernews

    today at 10:00 PM

    https://socialfixer.com/ is another

• mkehrt

  today at 7:42 PM

  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

  today at 7:58 PM

  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.

• speckx

  today at 6:55 PM

  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.

• georgemcbay

  today at 8:24 PM

  > 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.

• mieko

  today at 7:19 PM

  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.

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.

• sparky_z

  today at 7:20 PM

  > 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."

  • bentcorner

    today at 8:21 PM

    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

    today at 9:09 PM

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

  • RobinL

    today at 7:54 PM

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

• Hnrobert42

  today at 10:08 PM

  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?

• da02

  today at 6:36 PM

  What do your social groups use nowadays?

  • wincy

    today at 6:41 PM

    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.

    • jrmg

      today at 8:44 PM

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

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

    • JKCalhoun

      today at 7:01 PM

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

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

    • zadikian

      today at 6:46 PM

      Same. Idk how college communication work now; we had class groups and planned everything over FB events/pages back then.

      For friends, I started a few text group chats to stay in touch. It's really annoying because someone has Android and RCS is broken on someone's end. Some also use FB Messenger, but nobody 2 years younger or older than me is on that.

      • Mixtape

        today at 7:17 PM

        When I finished my undergrad a few years ago, we were relying heavily on GroupMe chats, with the occasional Slack and one or two LinkedIn groups mixed in. Discord was just starting to exit the gaming sphere and hit the mainstream though. I'm willing to bet it's absolutely dominating the space now.

        • zadikian

          today at 10:14 PM

          How long ago was that if you don't mind me asking? I was in college 2014-2016, and GroupMe existed but was on its way out. I asked our college interns around 2022 what people use for class groups, and I think they weren't sure what I even meant, but the answer wasn't Discord.

  • bojanz

    today at 7:08 PM

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

    • drnick1

      today at 7:38 PM

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

  • hu3

    today at 6:56 PM

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

    Zuck is always one step ahead.

    • mikepurvis

      today at 8:17 PM

      I have an IG account that I barely use, whereas my Facebook account I do (regrettably) still spend time on, and have put in the effort to silence/hide the worst of the baity type content that it wants to throw at me.

      But interestingly my experience of IG when I do occasionally go on it is similar to what TFA describes: lots of engagement-bait / thirst trap content that I never asked to see but also haven't been around to hide, so I guess the baseline algorithm is just matching me to what others in my demographic bracket have found, um, engaging.

    • gus_massa

      today at 7:13 PM

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

      • pdpi

        today at 7:21 PM

        There's two separate things at play here.

        One is "I don't want to use Meta products as a matter of principle", and WhatsApp's a no-go if that's your posture.

        The other is "I don't want to drown in horrible, algorithm-curated junk content". Instagram is just as bad as Facebook there, but WhatsApp is definitely not the same.

        • mikepurvis

          today at 8:19 PM

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

          • gus_massa

            today at 9:28 PM

            Now at the bottom it has a few tabs: Chats, Updates, ...

            Updates are broadcasted, but they disappear after 24 hours.

            Step 1) Keep updates for a week, later forever

            Step 2) Mix Chats and Updates

            Step 3) Add a few relevant patrocinated posts

            Step 4) Change the css from green to blue

            Step 5) Profit

      • nephihaha

        today at 7:20 PM

        I'm waiting for Whatsapp to go down the toilet too. I notice it is already advising me to beware of misinformation on forwarded posts and only to use official and trusted sources (the government and their mates basically).

    • ghywertelling

      today at 8:13 PM

      You only ever need a Meta account. The next content format will be brought to your door by Zuck even before you know you need it.

  • JeremyNT

    today at 9:47 PM

    Not parent, but, depressingly:

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

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

  • prmoustache

    today at 8:39 PM

    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.

  • throwway120385

    today at 6:50 PM

    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.

  • sbrother

    today at 7:42 PM

    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.

  • mikepurvis

    today at 8:13 PM

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

    Distant friends and extended family: email threads

  • etrautmann

    today at 7:41 PM

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

  • SoftTalker

    today at 7:49 PM

    Text messages, email. Same as ever.

  • mattfrommars

    today at 7:41 PM

    Personally, it’s all through WhatsApp

  • yabones

    today at 7:15 PM

    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.

  • snovymgodym

    today at 7:12 PM

    Group chats on various apps

  • toomuchtodo

    today at 7:16 PM

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

    (early 40s)

• drnick1

  today at 7:36 PM

  > 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.

• catlover76

  today at 6:41 PM

  [dead]

• 0x1ch

  today at 6:36 PM

  [flagged]

  • jtbaker

    today at 6:38 PM

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

    • HoldOnAMinute

      today at 6:41 PM

      Yes

  • dtauzell

    today at 6:39 PM

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

    • HoldOnAMinute

      today at 6:40 PM

      Yes

  • _dain_

    today at 6:39 PM

    The implication is that they got divorced.

    • wincy

      today at 6:46 PM

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

    • HoldOnAMinute

      today at 6:41 PM

      Not always

  • 0x1ch

    today at 6:39 PM

    [flagged]

    • zadikian

      today at 6:44 PM

      Is there a problem with my name being green?

      • 0x1ch

        today at 6:47 PM

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

        • zadikian

          today at 9:30 PM

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

      • nobody9999

        today at 6:55 PM

        >Is there a problem with my name being green?

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

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

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

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.

• michaelbuckbee

  today at 7:18 PM

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

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

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

  • ryandrake

    today at 8:37 PM

    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.

• dlisboa

  today at 7:37 PM

  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.

• nathanaldensr

  today at 7:10 PM

  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.

  • OGEnthusiast

    today at 8:02 PM

    [dead]

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

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

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

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

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

• willturman

  today at 10:10 PM

  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

• fjsifjasf

  today at 10:06 PM

  why don't you just name the countries lol?

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.

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.

• com2kid

  today at 8:13 PM

  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.

• karmakurtisaani

  today at 8:05 PM

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

• shpx

  today at 9:52 PM

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

• ergocoder

  today at 9:07 PM

  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

    today at 9:21 PM

    They can. They won’t.

• jhaile

  today at 8:18 PM

  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...

• haunter

  today at 8:21 PM

  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

    today at 8:39 PM

    Craigslist.

    • haunter

      today at 10:06 PM

      There is a world outside of America

• partiallypro

  today at 8:10 PM

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

  • gs17

    today at 8:41 PM

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

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

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

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

  • com2kid

    today at 8:15 PM

    My FB reels are educational content , music and artists.

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

My 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.

> 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.

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...

• Zak

  today at 9:50 PM

  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.

• __lain__

  today at 8:53 PM

  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

    today at 9:43 PM

    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.'"

• strangattractor

  today at 8:38 PM

  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.

• jcgrillo

  today at 9:33 PM

  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/

• monero-xmr

  today at 8:42 PM

  [flagged]

  • thrance

    today at 8:54 PM

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

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

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

    • monero-xmr

      today at 8:59 PM

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

      • ceejayoz

        today at 9:05 PM

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

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

        • SamuelAdams

          today at 10:17 PM

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

          Margret Atwood, the Handmaids Tale.

      • jahsome

        today at 9:20 PM

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

      • thrance

        today at 9:03 PM

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

        • monero-xmr

          today at 9:08 PM

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

  • today at 8:49 PM

  • jmye

    today at 8:53 PM

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

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

    • monero-xmr

      today at 8:58 PM

      [flagged]

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.

My feed has devolved into AI generated propaganda with a scary amount of genuine support. Police brutality against minorities and other politically relevant groups; all fake but with hundreds of seemingly real replies cheering them on.

• ge96

  today at 6:58 PM

  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

    today at 8:07 PM

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

    • ryandrake

      today at 8:39 PM

      How can you tell by just looking at their profile? Bots have for over a decade been able to generate a profile with a real looking picture (usually just scraped from the web) and a realistic sounding bio.

      • ge96

        today at 9:43 PM

        Tangent but reddit allows people to hide their post/comment history which is fine I guess but it's not great for that reason, trying to see if an account is a bot or not. Other than age can't tell anything about that account.

        I notice more and more accounts use it, particularly the spicy commenters. Which is whatever, I try to stay away from social media now, this is SM here but at least it's more technically oriented/useful.

    • ge96

      today at 8:15 PM

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

• ddtaylor

  today at 8:32 PM

  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.

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

  today at 8:20 PM

  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.

> (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_

  today at 8:55 PM

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

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.

• reddalo

  today at 6:57 PM

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

  • unsharted

    today at 8:24 PM

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

• JKCalhoun

  today at 7:05 PM

  (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.

• fusslo

  today at 6:55 PM

  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!

• ks2048

  today at 7:30 PM

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

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

I started laugh reacting at Russian propaganda and now all I get is Russian propaganda, literally half of my posts are third worlders falling for the Russia stronk west evil 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

  today at 10:40 PM

  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.

> 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.

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

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

• AceJohnny2

  today at 6:38 PM

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

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

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

  • mgiampapa

    today at 9:36 PM

    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.

• zadikian

  today at 6:39 PM

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

  • HoldOnAMinute

    today at 6:44 PM

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

    I accidentally switched to that account the other day.

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

    • mgiampapa

      today at 9:38 PM

      I am both strongly pro 2A, and extremely liberal. Sometimes it gets things wrong, but I just use the feedback buttons and snooze content I don't agree with and it remarkably stays mostly on track for me.

    • ryandrake

      today at 8:47 PM

      I have a very sweet elderly friend of the family who only uses Facebook for church-related stuff, and since I'm "the tech guy" she asked me to look at her facebook and help her understand why she sees so much Trump, right-wing, hateful, violent, "Nazi-adjacent" (interestingly never -overtly- Nazi) stuff in her feed. I didn't have the heart to try to explain to her demographic bias, revealed preferences, and overlapping group interests, so I just said it's probably a software glitch in Facebook.

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.

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

• fullshark

  today at 6:38 PM

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

  • ASalazarMX

    today at 7:38 PM

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

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

  • jjulius

    today at 7:27 PM

    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.

• today at 6:41 PM

• weregiraffe

  today at 6:43 PM

  Facebook is not the Internet.

  • ASalazarMX

    today at 7:45 PM

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

• cat5e

  today at 6:52 PM

  I will never roll over for the lizard man

  • chistev

    today at 7:42 PM

    Don't you use WhatsApp?

• amatecha

  today at 8:31 PM

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

  • AlexandrB

    today at 8:42 PM

    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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

  today at 8:20 PM

  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.

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

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

• chistev

  today at 7:33 PM

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

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...

[delayed]

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

• hmokiguess

  today at 7:55 PM

  Takes one to know one? Could you elaborate

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

  today at 7:53 PM

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

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

- Baby-eating restaurants in Denver

- Denver's unique food scene

wtaf meta.

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

• HWR_14

  today at 8:13 PM

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

  • Octoth0rpe

    today at 9:06 PM

    > 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.

• mv4

  today at 7:18 PM

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

  • Octoth0rpe

    today at 9:09 PM

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

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

• alex1138

  today at 8:05 PM

  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

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

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

• fullshark

  today at 6:47 PM

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

• michelb

  today at 6:44 PM

  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.

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.

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

• giobox

  today at 7:35 PM

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

  • qq66

    today at 9:15 PM

    Do they make any money from Marketplace?

• reddalo

  today at 6:57 PM

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

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

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

• ASalazarMX

  today at 7:49 PM

  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.

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.

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

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

• ddtaylor

  today at 8:30 PM

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook IS just veiled ads to OF pron subscriptions.

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.

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.

The original moltbook. Just bots talking to each other.

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

  today at 6:39 PM

  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?

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.

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.

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

  today at 6:53 PM

  > I stopped when it started showing propaganda from the CCP

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

  • dekhn

    today at 7:15 PM

    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.

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.

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

  today at 7:09 PM

  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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

• nephihaha

  today at 7:25 PM

  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.

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.

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.

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

• wcfrobert

  today at 6:51 PM

  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.

• today at 8:51 PM

• sylos

  today at 6:48 PM

  Government funded!

  • nephihaha

    today at 7:25 PM

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

• jjtheblunt

  today at 6:45 PM

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

• smt88

  today at 6:43 PM

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

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!

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.

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

  today at 10:24 PM

  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?

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.

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)?

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.

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

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.

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

They're crushing it with anyone over 45

Facebook is still has excellent marketplace

Only that keeps me going back.

• tartoran

  today at 7:43 PM

  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.

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

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

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

• gs17

  today at 8:43 PM

  > 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.

>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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

beautiful

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.

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.

> I logged on for the first time in ~8 years

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

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

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

• criddell

  today at 6:54 PM

  > 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

    today at 8:16 PM

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

• alex1138

  today at 6:44 PM

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

what comes after facebook?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

"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.

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

  today at 9:32 PM

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

It's your feed.

Everyones feed is different.

It depends on how much you train the algorithm.

Yours is untrained, therefore slop.

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.

Facebook is just fine.

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

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

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

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

• npilk

  today at 6:53 PM

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

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

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

• artemonster

  today at 6:51 PM

  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

>Click to show mildly sensitive content (revealing clothing)

Those warnings are stupid.