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What I've noticed is that if I do not touch facebook for a month, when I come back ALL I see are personal mostly text, sometimes photos posts from people doing actual updates of their lives. Gone is the absolute DELUGE of clickspam, shared political links, quick videos and ads.

But spend more than a day on it and it all comes back. Its /r/all or imgur. Its unusable again for the prime reason I have a facebook account, keeping up with friends and family.

My suspicion is that since their feed algorithm tracks how long you look over things, and HIGHLY prefers videos and click links over text or photos. If you spend a few more seconds over a gif thats pretty much designed to grab your attention than grandma's witty comment about the old days you're doomed to never see grandma again, unless you comment, like or otherwise engage with the grandma post in a metric-capturable way.

This is the problem with social media - the more you try to monetize it via advertising the less you succeed at your core value proposition. If not for the network effect I suspect people would have moved on a long time ago.

>It's still Facebook's fault partially for laying out the groundwork for Facebook to become total garbage.

The moment I stopped using Facebook - hell, the moment I stopped enjoying Facebook - was when they published their findings that they could manipulate people's moods by what they show them.

Ever since I've felt like a rat in a cage, being prodded and tested not as a human being, but as a user. And so if that is Facebook's way of looking at me, then as far as I am concerned, Facebook is just a website. A website I barely use.

Don't you feel that way on most sites? I mean, conceivably, HN could be manipulating your feelings as well by fingerprinting your browser and using a different ranking algorithm.

Precisely. It is unnerving how many websites and corporations try to "play God", so to speak. Any instance of manipulation makes me feel used, and that lack of trust never really goes away.

I get that services want me to see stuff that is "most relevant" to me, but there is no room in relevance for serendipity, and it brings to mind the line from Equilibrium:

"..The comfort of knowing your life has been lived before."

Personally, I try and trust most of these sites until they prove that they can not be trusted. Granted, it gets harder and harder to provide any level of trust, given how intrusive web sites become (with ads, trackers, dark patterns, etc).

Why? Wouldn't a more informed view be to assume that the sites (and companies, politicians, etc) will behave in the way that economics favors them to behave?

In this case, you're not paying, so you're not a customer and they don't really care about your needs as long as you stick around.

They make their money from the companies that the article goes on about, and they will do whatever they can to make more.

In short, wouldn't it be better to assume that if the NSA can listen to you, they will? And if a company can make money from your data, they will? And if a politician could be taking bribes, they are?

I solve that by ruthlessly unfollowing people. Just briefly met at some random event and have't talked to you since? Unfollowed. Friend-ish I haven't seen in 4 years? Unfollowed (unless you're really close). Friend who posts too damn much? Unfollowed (or filtered with FBPurity). Group List (unfollowed or unjoined the list).

I've got 3x/4x more people on my friend list but I mostly only see stuff I want to see. I've also quite often picked "hide post" and then when it asks why I pick "see less of so-and-so".

It's too much effort & management. This is why Snapchat and similar things are taking off.

I think this is a lesson in how optimizing for short term metrics can hurt long term engagement when you forget your core product value. I signed up for FB in 2004 and would have been classified as a core user since I would check the site frequently to see what people were up to and would often post updates myself.

However over the past 5 years FB has been trying to drive up engagement off the News Feed through allowing apps to publish to timeline, and encouraging people to post links to articles and videos, etc. For me, Facebook today fundamentally is no longer fulfilling its core product value of helping me stay connected to what is going on in my friends lives. Apps like Snapchat have now taken that role because they are able to deliver on that value in a way Facebook is no longer able to.

Until of course they run out of investor provided runway and need to start making money...

It's the circle of life. It wouldn't need to be that way if the investors do not expect outsized returns for the runways.

> I've stopped scrolling through my timeline because it's mostly filled with bull crap that I don't care about from random pages that paid to be in my face or random pages that I liked 5 years ago

You can unlike things, you know. You can also mute things.

lol I was waiting for this. I probably should've thought of something to say in response.

Then, what would be on my feed?

No I'm clear that you can but it's still a lot of effort that isn't worth the lack luster content that still remains.

It really isn't worth the effort. You need to manually unlike each page individually. There is no way to unsubscribe from multiple sources individually.

Once you have unsubscribed, your newsfeed will be wonderfully straightforward. After a few days it will be cluttered with sponsored likes. I assume this is however long the batch process takes to catch up.

I only go on Facebook to respond to invites at this point. I stopped going on because their mobile app is literally the worst software I've ever installed on my phone though. It's huge and bloated, and it doesn't even include messaging, which they broke out to another app for god-knows-what reason.

I've found that as long as I go to "I don't want to see posts from this page" on every single sponsored link, they stopped appearing at all fairly quickly. No defence of the app though - I strictly use the mobile website. The separate chat app is actually pretty useful for that reason

Also the mobile app listens to what you say and targets ads appropriately (and who knows what else they do with the audio).

This is fascinating. Do you have a source for more information?

You get most of what's been described from social graph + location data + people pattern matching on positives & ignoring the vast number of negatives, so there's not much beyond conspiracy theories ATM.

Definitely possible. The ones I've heard about foreign languages heard in background seem easiest to test.

Sorry, no. I've just read a couple anecdotes about it online recently. One was about a TV show in a foreign language playing in the background causing ads in that language. Another was about a guy talking to a friend about an upcoming trip to Vegas, then getting ads for Vegas. I've never wanted to install the app on my phone so I haven't been able to test it myself.

I started getting ads in Spanish recently and I was totally confused. I've been watching soccer on Telemundo Deportes recently. I wonder if an app was listening in. I'll have to see which apps of mine are using the microphone. I'm guessing it would have to be the standard Google app though, since I don't have Facebook installed on my phone.

Experienced first hand when I said on a FB Messenger call that I was considering buying a Roomba.

Guess what was advertised in my feed later that day?

Note: I hadn't so much as googled Roombas before this - it was a totally off hand remark during a call.

Is this on Android or iOS? Their iOS mobile app does not even ask for permission for microphone. Messenger does, but then I did disable that. Also note that the moment an application on iOS starts using the microphone you have a huge flashing red banner on the top of your screen so they would get caught quite quickly.

If you're in any kind of a music/art type of scene, invites become completely useless as well. I originally joined FB just to promote my music and organize my contacts in the industry. Now I get 50-100 invites per week to events on continents I've never even visited.

Sounds like FB isn't the platform for the people you interact with, then. As per another poster's comments, I just keep people I actually give a shit about unhidden. I care about what they're up to, so their content matters to me. Your point feels like it boils down to "There's no one in my life that's also on facebook that makes a post that matters to me, nor are there any special interests or groups that are worth following".

And at that point I'm not really sure it's a problem with facebook, or a problem at all, but moreso you not being the target user.

It's not just one sided - it's not just him who isn't getting updates because of the spam, it's everybody else who also isn't getting his updates because of the spam.

I'm not sure how it's meant to work, but muting doesn't seem to work properly for me at all, which is really annoying because the huge amount of stuff I've muted in the past is the only reason my timeline is ever remotely usable.

But recently, crap app of the day pops up, a few people share it, I ask them to hide all from that app, and I see it again the next day or so. The cynic in me thinks they might be doing some kind of test to see how long they actually need to hide something before it can be dropped back into the timeline, instead of just hiding it like I asked.

Absolutely. I've gone as far as using extensions [1] to disable the timeline altogether so I'm not tempted to waste my life scrolling through mindless shared drivel.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

I counted almost 10% of my friends list posting either an update or a photo yesterday. Given that I have a few people hidden for prolific boring posts it's likely closer to 15%. There were also posts from half a dozen organizations I'm interested to hear about. On the other hand, I've very actively hidden/unliked pages I wasn't interested in, and shares from a whole bunch of viral "news" sources, and the interesting stuff was still less than half of the total. I'm still fighting the fight, but between the remaining boring shares, people clicking that they are attending events (which they probably won't go to), liking or commenting on stuff from people I don't know and whatever ads I haven't rejected yet it's really not a good hit rate.

I'm also annoyed by the nature of the ads on Facebook. A whole lot of them seem to be for quack medical products... I mean we're talking stuff that Deepak Chopra would roll his eyes at.

Facebook's main advertising niches seem to be "spammy" things.

You can control which pages (or people) can put content on your timeline. I felt the same way and actually deactivated account for nearly three years before I came back, cleaned house, and now actually enjoy my feed.