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I've long wished for an opportunity to filter my feed, so that I only see what people post themselves. But I guess fb force these things down my throat because no one actually posts anything anymore, except big life events like weddings or announcing a child. So people would realize fb is dead when it comes to keeping in touch with friends and family.

Facebook is dead as far as I'm concerned because I tested it. I quit all groups and unliked all pages. My feed just became ads and posts from friends. I have a couple of friends who like to post, but the vast majority don't post anything. It's a ghost town.

I shit down my Facebook recently after my interactions with it became unhealthy.

I agree that sounds unhealthy

It’s a pretty weird place these days. There are a few friends who get like 7 trillion likes if they post that their baby farted, but many many other friend posts have literally 0 or very few likes.

At some point I stopped commenting or Liking any post which already has more than ~10 Likes or comments. In some sense it feels really strange to me that people bother to engage with content where their engagement is essentially invisible within the crowd.

This is interesting.

Perhaps Facebook are partly encouraging the clickbait weirdness to give the continued impression to those that are still using it, that there is something to use.

Over the last 4 years I found Facebook an entirely useless vehicle for customer engagement, instagram was marginally better but after the change that got rid of the time based sorting, it became useless as well.

It wouldn't surprise me if Facebook has become a ghost town, inhabited only by those who have become addicted to the posts that feign engagement i.e. somebody is asking ME a question! I am important, I want to be heard. It might just be a complicated scheme to keep the share price high. It doesn't necessarily have to be something nefarious.

Train the algorithm! Just exit Facebook as soon as you encounter one of these.

You can also just click the X in the upper right corner and say "hide all from <page>"

I did that aggressively for at least months before I ultimately deleted my account (in 2017), because it didn't make any difference, there was just a new 'page' to hide that I never wanted to see or expressed any interest in seeing in the first place.

I hid every page, person and group on my Facebook except maybe 3 or 4 whom don't post much or are enjoyable.

It works. I can't even remember what normal Facebook looks like. I've lived like this for the last 5 years.

LAD Bible leaves, LAD Bible UK takes its place. Quizzes, Games, and Funnies leaves, Fun, Games, and Quizzes takes its place, world without end, amen.

Not that it would change FB's mess of an algo, but you probably can achieve some results with uBlock's custom filters, which are mostly written in CSS selectors. Find out the classes that shared posts get and slap them in the filters. There are also the ‘:has()’ selector and the search-by-text ‘has-text()’ selector to filter parent nodes by child nodes' content.

Try take a look at this browser extension [No affiliate]. I can filter out a lot of stuff. https://socialfixer.com/

> My FB feed is lousy with these sorts of things. My family & friends seem to enjoy answering questions like "What was the first concert you attended?" I don't think it's for advertising purposes because I have not noticed any improvement in the accuracy of targeted ads. I don't think it's for political purposes because that is much easier to figure out without these oblique questions.

Hyper dystopian take: Gathering data to be able to create real-seeming narratives for fictional profiles to push political agendas.

> "What was the first concert you attended?"

That's literally a security question for a bank password reset.

That's not a good example, which is why I added the DUI question. I've noticed most of my friends have stopped answering security type questions as they've been warned.

I’ve seen the DUI question in my feed in the past week, along with several other examples from the article.

And if your answer isn't a random string of three words, you're a good mark.

I've been snoozing those people for 30 days...not because I'm angry with them, but because it's the ONLY signal Facebook exposes to adjust things. Perhaps if they see a steep decline in my feed based on this stuff, they'll adjust (but I doubt it).

I've had a couple ofpoints int he past where I've broken my graf hard enough for the The Algorhythm to break down and it's kinda interesting. A combination of 'we don't know you well enough, we'll throw this synchronized knitting competition at you' and 'huh, you've reached the end of your endless feed...press refresh...please?'

"I don't think it's for political purposes because that is much easier to figure out without these oblique questions."

Personally, I cannot imagine a better way to build an in-depth profile of millions of voters.