Facebook is cooked

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.

> So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm?

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

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

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

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

I got a whole bunch of thirst traps again.

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

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

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

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

I'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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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...

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

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

I have two twitter accounts. On one I like indie games, ai stuff, Gaussian Splats etc and some other things and that is what my feed is filled. I discover so many good games here. I keep it that way by not watching and liking randomly recommended things. My second twitter account is full of crappy videos (fights, accidents and sometimes very horrific).

I have never seen things of my interest on Facebook ever. It is full male focused staged thirst crap. I log in to that account may be once or twice a year.

I think Facebook should be steerable like Twitter. I haven't tried because it's super clingy.

Very nice to see this post and realize like I'm not the only one seeing things like this. Two quick stories:

I have always been a late mover to social networks, started using Facebook after many years of everybody around me using it and the same happened with Instagram. More recently, short videos and reels never caught my eye, never watched them and honestly took a long time to even realize they existed within Instagram and were not only a TikTok thing, but one time I decided to check it out and I got flooded with exactly the type of content the OP shared: thirst traps, women in the gym, AI garbage. This led to an interesting chat with my girlfriend btw, who was right next to me when I had this brilliant idea.

Took no more than 5 interactions in a course of a week or so of "open reels -> scroll down 3 or 4 videos -> exit" for the algorithm to be 100% more in tune with pages I follow on Instagram and content that appears in my feed (sports, tech, travel)

Also, similar thing for YouTube: if you watch a video in an anonymous tab, the home page will start empty, with no recommendations. After you watch the video, it will become 50% content similar to the video you just watch and 50% thirst traps.

I 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.

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

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

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

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

What's more concerning is that this is not Facebook that is cooked, it's the users who are cooked. Facebooks Algo will only do and continue what brings the most engagement. More and more we are seeing people, mostly younger it seems, be fine with Ai content filling their feeds. It's becoming normalized now so that it can continue to be monetized.

Interestingly these companies once promoted 'body positivity' and now they're pushing down literally unrealistic standards of beauty, but that's another topic of inducing mental illness.

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.

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.

So there's a strange situation with the incentives here.

The whole point of the AI posts with the AI bots in the comments section is they're waiting for the one clueless actual human to show up so they can scam them.

But here, the obviousness of the scam is a feature. Just like, obvious scams in the spam are actually a feature because they select for the most gullible people to scam.

So this is funny because, the shittiness of the AI images is actually a feature in the same way. The continued improvement of image generation models will actually worsen the situation from the scammers point of view, because they won't effectively filter for dummies anymore.

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

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

I wish,

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, facebook is not cooked :)

I have a solution to this(and I've been talking about issues with the algorithmic social media for some years now). A POC I created during a hackathon populates your social media feed, but you define the algorithm using English language. Basically you can say, "I want to see more electricity related posts from Neil deGrasse Tyson. Show only family related posts from Bob Smith, but hide everything that is political". (Got second place out of 200+ participants)

The solutions leverages a social network with over 40 million users, so the network effect is already solved to a degree. If anyone has the means to spin this up into a business, let me know.

I 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.

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

Reading through these comments, I really miss Reddit's old default homepage.

Sure, you could have your own curated feed, but there was also r/all and everyone seemed to use it, so everyone saw relatively the same thing.

It would sadly never work today, but it was great back then.

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

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

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

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

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

rant incoming

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I haven't logged into Facebook for many years, but this made me curious. I'm a guy, in my 60s. Looking at my feed, the first two posts are family/friends, the third is some video about a guy I never heard of, the next three f/f, then a political post, etc..

Overall, about 2:1 family/friends vs. crap. That's still too much crap, but no "thirst posts" at all. Maybe those only target younger guys?

Logging out now. I just have no interest in how a cousin I haven't seen in decades has redecorated her bedroom.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

My feed isn't as bad as some mentioned here. Mostly geeky stuff, 80s nostalgia, and some mildly funny comics. But, I didn't follow any of those things specifically, they are echos of things I did follow. And my friends have been relegated to perhaps 1/4 of the feed.

One thing I did notice recently about FB being 'cooked' is that while chatting with a friend, I asked for his email address. Believe it or not FB deleted my question, twice! I knew they were sleazy, but this is a new low.

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

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?

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

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

This is country-dependent, I think. In Poland, for example, schools and kindgergartens still pressure parents to sign consent forms allowing them to post images of kids on Facebook. "For promotional purposes".

Everybody signs. Well, not everybody, but I am one of the very few lone outliers.

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

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.

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

>I dunno, maybe those are all bots too.

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

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

I don't use Facebook except for messenger. Not for me but for family. I keep getting sussy videos on my feed, I can keep blocking or saying I don't want them. They still pop up. Facebook is just full bait videos to try and get engagement.

Facebook could've evolved but it made bad decisions, alot of bad decisions.

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

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

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

Wireheading is getting close to some of us.

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

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

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.

I have a similar experience with OpenAI. Just want to apply with my MCP App, but the application process, a multi step automated form submission, is totally flawed, buggy and broken, so that the form for apps submissions is simply not working. Trying to report this bug just results in an AI response black hole on their support address. No real humans there. The whole OpenAI back end platform is unbelievably buggy, nothing works. No wonder, if you cannot report _their_ bugs. I cannot advertise a MCP App for ChatGPT to the users of my platform, if there isn't a minimum level of trust, between OpenAI and me. If I cannot talk to a real human I simply do not take the brand of my platform, where I put countless years of effort in, and throw it in some out-of-control venture company maelstrom.

I 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.

If you are on the web, the fbpurity extension helps a lot. I just checked my feed and no junk. Trying the iphone app instead it's just a head wrecking steam of garbage.

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.

if it's so off and out of fashion,why does it have such a huge profit from selling ads? even tiktok uses it for ads. looks like its daily active user is still huge and even growing?

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

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

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

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...

Bookmark this page...

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

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

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

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

(disclaimer: I work at Meta)

One could argue fox news was the original algorithmic content provider. Quite easily. 30+ years of it now. If those folks don't need deprogramming no one does.

The original moltbook. Just bots talking to each other.

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

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

> is this just something wacky with my algorithm?

Yes.

Your training data for algorithmically answering the question of “what will they engage habitually with next?” is ten years old.

They’re almost certainly not resting on this usecase,

coasting on you adding a new friend, or replying to some messages, or doing SOMETHING to steer the “recent context” part of the algorithm.

Which you’re probably not doing, right?

Anyway: coolest blog of the month award. Love the different-design-per-post trend!

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

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

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

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

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

I also feel like I'm being "programmed" by social media. Like using claude is a good example, many folks seems to have started using claude fully in November. Another example is reddit, many times what is upvoted seems "programmed" to appear on the main feed.

In terms of mental wellbeing, I also see my mental wellness being affected. If I look at specific things related to relationships or financially successful people, then I'll eventually go through waves of depression symptoms just because I'm not good enough to be that person.

I initially joined social media looking to improve my quality of life. But these days, these sites feel like they just want my attention instead of wanting to make people's lives better.

Maybe that's naive of me to think this way, but at one point these sites did feel "good for me". It's just that I didn't catch on to the algorithm changes and their effects on my well being until it was too late.

IG has been doing this crap for years. I just wanted swing dance and poker videos. Around 1am they start pumping thirst traps at you.

Not on any meta.

Facebook manipulated attention. AI platforms will manipulate narratives. Action models and VR systems will manipulate lived experiences.

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

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

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

It was already slop before that.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Internet is now a hipnotic experience that learns how to hypnotise you. And whoever controls the AI controls it

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

> 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.

My Facebook is bad, but I still see a bunch of posts by friends. Instagram on the other hand went from a stream of artsy photos my friends posted of their vacations to a literal river of AI generated garbage.

Until about a year ago I really liked Instagram because it had been the last bastion of content by friends.

Now my feed goes

    - maybe one post from friends if I am lucky
    - 1-2 posts from content creators or local stores I like but don't follow 
    - endless stream of rage bait / slop / thirst traps 

It's interesting and very annoying. I use FB basically to follow a couple groups that I've followed for like 15 years and a couple family members. Most of what it shows me seems to be related to interests I have or anything I slow down for even 5 seconds to process. Like "slow down when scrolling to see if I really am seeing the insane thing I think" and it'll show me more. Sometime I report stuff. Like a real (I think) thirst trap holding up a sexual innuendo/come on with the writing reversed. But they never actually take action on anything I report no matter how fake, false, or innaproproate it is. I also routinely block everything it ever shows me with AI (photorealistic AI images of history with a chapter of writing seem common).

It's all a big joke of spam and scam.

...but engaging even slightly in a few specific topics or interests seems to make the worst of it go away for more of those topics.

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.

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.

Good place to buy and sell used shit though.

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.

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.

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 checked mine, and it's still got family news, and some friends etc. There were 1-2 items of slop but not that bad...

I was more surprised by how I didn't even realise or hear about one of my cousins getting pregnant, another cousin of mine getting married, and another one passing away. I have been living abroad for 18 years though so fair enough but still feels a little bit odd.

> They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-generated, with generic captions.

I never seriously used Facebook; only once when a reallife buddy wanted means to communicate and I did not have a smartphone. But it was already really awful back then.

Now that AI spams down and eliminates real human beings, I guess many of these anti-social websites will die. Or at the least be in serious decline from where they can not easily escape anymore. Because which real human being wants all that AI slop?

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.

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.

Just ban algorithms on feeds. It seems to do nothing but harm. Keep it on pages and put those in their own tab.

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

Facebook IS just veiled ads to OF pron subscriptions.

We all acknowledge the AI slop posts. The question is what fraction of the comments under the posts is also AI slop. And how long until we see AI-targetted ads, to manifest the Dead Internet Theory in its fullest.

Facebook is the original moltbook

>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.

Facebook is still has excellent marketplace

Only that keeps me going back.

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

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

Wish things were different.

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.

Good hope it dies.

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

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!

They're crushing it with anyone over 45

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.

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.

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

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.

The author seems to think his personal defunct and bloated feed is representative of what other users are experiencing... Come on!

I guess they moved fast

I’m there for the T’n’A too

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

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

I hate the whole damn thing!

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

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?

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

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

The conclusion doesn't follow from the content. Facebook is not cooked, humans are cooked.

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

I noticed this a while ago. And the op isn't even experience the degradation of what could have been a huge platform: FB marketplace.

I thought during the pandemic FB marketplace was going to go somewhere. I thought they would try to solve physical delivery with like an Uber service and credit network for financials etc. it would be huge.

But no. What has happened is that primary dealers are now flooding marketplace with fake low ball posts to make it unusable and destroy the secondary market.

I recently was shopping for bunk beds and lo and behind there were hundreds of not thousands of posts just for my local area all from maybe a dozen or so accounts created around 2023.

This is somebody's business (spam order flow as a service) and I assume that they pay fb enough for some API they fb literally doesn't care.

My theory is that every single feature on FB is a/b tested to be as bad as it can be if it maximizes screen time. Search doesn't work. You can't find your profile settings or feeds easily. All on purpose to maximize the time you spend there.

The feed has been dead for me for ages. I would recommend many users simply use it as a storage log book and increase FB costs by requesting all your data occasionally.

It's one of the worst companies out there for explicit bad behaviour IMO.

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

This really is what makes everything worse isn't it? That engaging with the tech giants is borderline required (if not literally required) to function in the world.

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.

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.

>And I don't just mean that nobody uses it anymore.

It depends on country. For some countries Facebook is the most used social network and there are many real people with daily activity on Facebook.

The same is true for WhatsApp. It might not be used in US but it's very successful elsewhere.

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

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

In the beginning there was a simple idea. If you were a platform and just acted as a conduit of information but didn't decide what got visibility - you weren't responsible for the content you transmitted - like a phone company isn't responsible for what you say on the phone. If you were a publisher - and exerted editorial control - such as deciding what gets put on the front page and what is buried 10 pages deep in the newspaper - you were responsible for the content. If you published libelous, fraudulent or other information the law held that you had decided to amplify that piece of information so were also held responsible.

In the beginning social media was a platform - you wrote something, your friends and family saw it - they really were just a conduit of information. Then social media decided they could suck up more attention by deciding what you saw - but, because its expensive to deal with libel suits they wanted to be categorized as a platform - even though they weren't. They succeeded - the good platform / publisher principle failed.

Most of the problems we are now seeing with Facebook, Amazaon, Ticktock could be solved instantly by saying - if you have a recommendation engine - you are responsible for the output of that recommendation engine. If it amplifies libelous, fraudulent or other such information - well you as the publisher are responsible.

It would mean that Ticktock, Facebook and others would drop their totally addictive design - as they would be afraid of being held responsible of the information which they are using to get users hooked. If they, by some miracle didn't drop their recommendation engine, and started acting as if they were responsible for the information their transmitted, your news feed wouldn't be filled with utter garbage. It would mean that fraudulent anti-vaxx conspiracy theories wouldn't get play on the internet. It would mean that libelous statements wouldn't get play. The list goes on and on.

Its simple, consistent with pre-existing law, and effective.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

Deleted mine in 2013 :flex:

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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)?

logged in after years away and had basically the same experience. the feed is just AI slop and engagement bait now, none of it from people I actually followed.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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

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.

what comes after facebook?

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.

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.

Ideally your mind will be uploaded to META cloud and then live in that simulation as long there is electricity on this planet. With the Oculus you can talk to your ancestors and connect to other dimensions. As long your social graph peers don’t post so much there a lot of push from the dystopian algorithms.

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.

Marketplace is pretty good. I never use Craigslist anymore.

Otherwise yeah.

It's your feed.

Everyones feed is different.

It depends on how much you train the algorithm.

Yours is untrained, therefore slop.

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.

> 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.

"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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

>Click to show mildly sensitive content (revealing clothing)

Those warnings are stupid.