Facebook's timeline just shows random things for some users | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's timeline just shows random things for some users

107 pointszinekeller110 comments

(attempted to submit as URL, query stripped)

https://twitter.com/search?q=facebook+until%3A2022-08-25+since%3A2022-08-24

Edit:

Reddit users complaining of this: https://old.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/wwbfm5/news_feed_showing_people_writing_to_other_people/

Downdetector (a third-party service that asks users if they're down): https://downdetector.com/status/facebook/

Business-oriented status page (all green): https://metastatus.com/

View on HN

Facebook is the former home of 'move fast and break things'. Now it's falling apart. Barely useable. My friends are moving to other platforms because it's simply not consistently capable of sending a message. The CEO is bored of it and wants to play around with more interesting domains. I can't even scroll down my feed without being catapulted randomly around the page by broken javascript. The only user-facing developments are around copying another, less-buggy, equally-closed social network.

So how did the break-things experiment go? Is it a success because the stock was at one point worth an inconceivable amount of money? Or is it a failure because it can't stand up under its own weight and will never catch up to its inevitable successor?

If a $500b company with a product used by 1/3 of the human population isnt a success, i dont know what is.

As for whether its beneficial to society is another question.

> If a $500b company with a product used by 1/3 of the human population isnt a success, i dont know what is.

It's not exactly a success (except from the most selfish and financial perspectives), it's more like proof you can abuse your users and get away with it.

This take reduces the idea too much. If everyone was just "Abused", they'd stop using it. Clearly, many people see benefit despite the abuses.

I used facebook messenger to keep in touch with my family across the world. My family is incapable of using signal, whatsapp, sms, email, telegram, phone calls, or anything else.

I also use facebook to buy stuff on the classifieds. It's like craigslist except there's at least a picture of someone and a paper trail if they decide to murder me.

My neighborhood organizes events using a facebook group and we've been able to have festivals and organize groups to go fight against companies that want to industrialize the area.

Facebook is trash at what it was initially built to be, but it is still very useful.

But the point is about the quality of the product, not the financial size or userbase of the company. Isn't it possible to have the (impressive) attribute of size while simultaneously making a bad product?

What about Myspace? $800m in revenue from 115m users. The classic 'good product' story, right?

People that are calling it a failure because of quality are missing the point.

Facebook makes its money by leaving the feed an unorganized mess of random posts, leaving the user disoriented so that more eyeball time can be harvested for advertisements while the user searches for the content they want (or gets stuck mindlessly scrolling the infinite reel of videos and other content for that dopamine hit).

It's not lost on the army of six figure salaried engineers that a lot could be done easily to make the experience better. But that isn't in the interest of the shareholders. The quality is a feature, not a bug.

It's used regularly by over 1/3 of the human population. I think that by itself tells you it's an useful product. It might have some flaws (as do many other products), but it seems the vast majority of users overlook those flaws. I'm definitely not a regular FB user, and even hate it, but I can't deny many many people find it useful in their daily lives, flaws and all.

The break things experiment was a roaring success. But they ditched "break things" a long time ago, and arguably it's the new phase of stability they're struggling with.

I completely agree. The current codebase, a rebuild on React called FB5, is very broken at the best of times.

In fact, it's sometimes unusable on Firefox on an M1 MacBook Air.

For one thing, the "report a bug" tool doesn't work in my browser but it works perfectly fine in Chrome. I can't click the dropdown boxes— they're empty. I also can't submit my report in the rare instance the drop downs work.

I also get weird trouble where my news feed will just start randomly loading crap and go into a rapid endless scroll loading new stories. The only way I can stop it is to do a hard refresh.

There are so many problems with posts not updating... You get a notification about some new comment like and when you click the notification, it just shows how it looked the last time you loaded it.

Again, the only way to see the update is CMD + R.

It's so broken and the latest interface doesn't even feel good, new, fresh, or like you want to explore.

> move fast and break things

This is basically the same philosophy as "Worse is Better" (in contrast to "Do the Right Thing") and it's how UNIX and C took over "like a computer virus".

I'd say Facebook has succeeded in that "viral" aspect, unfortunately for society. Apparently, their broken interface is good enough for a lot of people.

Their software development philosophy is not the reason why Facebook is falling apart. It's their lack of vision, lack of respect, decency, human values, care and social responsibility.

My biggest piss off with Facebook is they refuse to mod their site. The reporting function is useless and no matter how many times I’ve reported profiles they do nothing. Also the reporting options are a joke and have a limited number of options to which you can report something. I had an old acquaintance say hi. A week later I say hey how is it going. He replies how are you. 2 days later his picture changes to some random guy and his info is completely changed and it’s obvious his account was taken over. I tried to report this to Facebook but there is no obvious report section to describe what I saw but picked the one that best fit and later get a response back that they have decided to keep the account active. Also dozens of times reported spam accounts and scam accounts and nothing ever happens. What is wrong with you Facebook?

Surely there are trivial ways for them to detect when a name changes drastically (ie. not just the surname), or when the biometric features of the new profile photo don’t match the old one?

They could even extend their biometric capabilities could even step into the ‘slightly unethical’ realm, by perhaps detecting a flirtatious message from a profile with a cute Japanese girl, via somewhere in Northern Africa. Even just putting basic controls around messages from complete strangers.

This feels like something that would annoy the trans community quite a bit.

Speaking only of the Facebook site/app below. FB Messenger is not included.

For a long while, Facebook hasn’t been a platform to connect people or to connect people meaningfully. It’s either useless and random stuff while your close ones’ posts don’t appear on your timeline and vice versa, or sensational posts that cause anger, anxiety, worry, and despair.

The “algorithm” tuned itself quite well to induce and increase addiction. It’s focused. It’s intelligent. It’s purposeful. None of those aspects may help you become happier or more satisfied or more connected.

I don’t think the “algorithm” can be corrected or made better either. It’s too big, too influential, too profitable and likely too complex (due to ML). Short of getting rid of it completely and going back to a chronological feed only from people and pages you follow, nothing can be humanly done about this decline.

Find another platform and focus on smaller groups if you need or value connectedness or relevant/useful content.

The TikTokification of Facebook is giving Meta brainworms.

The entire model of Facebook, until recently, was the social graph. It seems now that they're terrified of getting their lunch eaten, they are trying to combine algorithmic selection of what random users like the most but have no relationship to the user (Reels) with the social graph, but it's not a good fit and doesn't gel.

I don't understand why people / Meta believes all social networking needs to compete or does compete?

TikTok and Facebook in my mind have very different use cases. It may be true that if people spend more time on TikTok they'll spend less on Facebook, but that doesn't mean these are comparable services. TikTok seems to be more of an video entertainment app and less a social app - more like YouTube with social features imo. Facebook is primarily a service to network with friends, family and businesses - TikTok doesn't really work well for this.

Admittedly I haven't used Facebook for 10+ years now so I have no idea how the Reels integration works, but it seems shoving short-form videos down users necks is probably a bad idea. Surely this isn't what the average Facebook user goes to Facebook for?

It would be like Netflix deciding YouTube was a competitor because "videos" and then adding a load of user uploaded videos to their video library.

> I don't understand why people / Meta believes all social networking needs to compete or does compete?

They are competing with each other over people’s time and attention. The more time someone spends on Facebook the more ads Facebook can show them, and the more data Facebook can collect. The more time someone spends on TikTok the less time they have to spend on Facebook.

The implication is that the “connections” on FB are not that deep, or perhaps more accurately, they don’t offer as entertaining an experience.

It is like being at a party with friends, family, and acquaintances but you’re bored and would rather be reading a book, playing a game, watching TV, painting, etc.

I don't understand why people / Meta believes all social networking needs to compete or does compete?

You’re right - there are still people using MySpace. But I bet people at MySpace wish they would’ve reacted to the rise of Facebook differently.

Similarly, in the five months I was on TikTok it seemed like women especially were proud they made it to TikTok and made fun of women “still on Facebook”.

I think Zuckerberg is rightly afraid of becoming the next MySpace. I don’t know if there’s a way to prevent it though.

The average Facebook user goes to Facebook because they have nothing else to occupy themselves with for 15 seconds, and Reels are the perfect functionality for this

>TikTok and Facebook in my mind have very different use cases

No - they're both data scavengers

Their real users are advertisers. The advertising budgets are limited. So are people's attentions span (which, again, is what they are selling to their real customers.)

Therefore SNs _are_ competing with each other.

I think most people recognise that, from a user perspective, the product is getting objectively worse.

My usage pattern is typically 5 minutes a day, via browser with uBO, on a desktop computer. I don't/won't use or install any FB-suite apps on my phone.

I have tried to use ?sk=h_chr to force a chronology rather than 'top stories' <sic> but that doesn't seem to make any difference any longer.

Since the 'Reels' push started I've had that section appear every time I've logged in, usually within the top half dozen entries.

Every time I hamburger menu / 'Hide this type', but Hide doesn't actually hide of course -- it just promises to 'show less', which is also clearly a lie.

The product's increasingly user-hostile. The phrase 'death throes' seems appropriate.

The irony in the social graph is that it is an insufficient approximation of people's interest. Initially in 2003 this might have made sense. I.e., I like what my friends like. Yet 20 years later TikTok claims to have cracked the holy grail of what interests me by focusing only on the swipes / behaviour of the individual. Personally, I think TikTok is quite stupid, but I can see the power of the algorithm. Yet the next generation of "social" might be more of a content pull that a content push.

Maybe, but the social graph still fills an important function, and that is missing. I want to know what my friends are doing. If I want to see a cute cat tiktok is better, but in general I'm bored with such things now (which tiktok can probably figure out - I don't actually use tiktok so I don't know), but one in a while one of the cats that live with someone I actually know does something cute and I want to see this. This is about the social connection, not about the cat. I go to facebook to keep track of people. It is more important to me to find out if my actual real life friends have done something than to see something engaging.

I might well spend more time on TikTok which looks for content I'd enjoy, but FaceBook's social network still takes priority to check regularly even when I don't have time.

Did anyone at Meta consider that medium has a part to play in the success of TikTok's algorithm? Something which optimizes engagement for video content isn't necessarily going to work for text and images.

Yes, so they push video harder. e.g. add an option for receiving notifications when a page you follow posts a video - then enabling it by default for every page you follow.

I've found Reels as addictive as TikTok.

OT, is there any way to get an actual chronological, "friends only" newsfeed from the FB API? If yes, is there any third-parts app that would offer this?

TBH I think the network effect that helped Facebook boom is now working in reverse: FB full of crap -> people post less updates from their personal lives -> there's less to read for their friends -> people visit less/update their feed less.

So even if what you want is possible, it'll probably be quite barren in there.

Yeah, it might very well be that they flood the timeline with crap to hide how little actual content there is left by now.

Still, this might or might not be the case. It would be really interesting to see some kind of study that would analyse how much non-commercial content is still posted on Facebook - but I guess Facebook would fight tooth and nail against anyone actually attempting that.

+1, I have been looking for this as well. I'm keeping FB because I'm member of a few groups that really post interesting content. However my feed is flooded with random crap that FB hopes I might like better.

The fact is that the instance it went public, it ceased being a platform for ‘connecting people’ and became a financial vehicle.

By failing to tweak algorithms and enhance engagement through psychosocial means and addictive patterns, the company will be failing to serve the demands of its shareholders.

The company is the poster child of the Friedman Doctrine [1], which was paces shareholder value above social responsibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

There's a permanent fix for bugs like these:

1. log out of Facebook.

2. Delete the app from your phone.

3. That's it.

"Delete Facebook, The New Virtue Signaling", by every HN commentor ever.

How it is virtue signalling?

Is advising people not to smoke "virtue signalling" or just good advice?

"Delete Facebook"

If you could delete your Facebook profile, congratulations! However, you should realize that not all people can do this. If your society is not reliant to Facebook, then good for you, I also hate Facebook and Gualdrapo seems to hate it too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32576061). However, giving incomplete replacements (especially the infamous "migrate them to another messaging app!") would just result in backfiring and further entrenchment of Meta products. Worse, if that other service really improved a lot they will no longer try it due to past experience. Short of a) Facebook being no longer tolerable to a majority of your friends and b) there's a viable replacement for Facebook's features (especially it's group features - a phpBB-like forum is not good for this), it'll be hard to fully remove Facebook.

You have a problem with autodiallers calling you to talk about auto insurances? Just throw away your phones, problem solved.

If the autodialers were part of the phone company AND the makers of your phone, yeah throw away your phone would be sound advice. Yes, Facebook is that.

Are you telling me that it would be impossible for the phone companies to do away with this problem? That they're not making any money from it?

The keyword here is network effect.

I don't live in the USA, I live in Europe and we don't have anymore a robo-call issue (if we ever had it at all), heck I would say we don't almost even have a cold-call from call-centers issue anymore (it was totally an issue a few years ago).Probably because it was... regulated?

Oh, the Europe Country. I live in a country in Europe too and we do have a problem with cold calls. There was an attempt at regulating it, there's also a service you can subscribe to that supposedly hinders this.

Doesn't work though because there are lists of phone numbers and addresses that can be bought that still give you access. And if you're considered a customer, which is extremely loosely defined, they can call you.

Sure, it's far from as bad as it seems to be in the US but my personal threshold is 0.

It's about as helpful as telling someone to delete their Google account or their Apple account. If someone is actually invested in either of these services, they're not going to want to walk away even if they're harmful to their security/privacy/personal wellbeing. The average person really doesn't care, so begging HN users to leave Facebook is almost comedically useless advice. All it serves to do is farm karma and make you feel better for posting it, really.

Personally I despise Facebook as a company and a service, but the amount of flak HN gives them is straight-up ridiculous. Facebook is indeed bad, but is this site really going to forget the military contract work Microsoft does, or the religious manhunt Apple aids China in? And yet, when people here about these war crimes they don't suggest throwing away their computer or finding a new replacement service. They just... keep using it. Same as Facebook users. Same as Macbook users. Same as Windows users.

And all of this is fine!

The overall goal shouldn't be to dictate how other people use the internet. Facebook has a right to exist, and we have a right to hold it in check with relevent litigation. If people think that Facebook violates the law, then let's hold them accountable! Otherwise, your complaints are genuinely useless in the context of discussing healthy browsing habits on HN.

No one is dictating anything, you have a choice to not buy an Apple (which I admit isn't easy because you just need some apps), you more easily can just get rid of Facebook. That's all.

Very interesting question.

I think that's a nuanced distinction that very much comes down to exactly how the other person suggests getting off facebook. If I get the impression that the commenter cares about the well-being of somebody and suggests it as a solution, I tent to categorize it as "good advice". Example: "I had the same problem / know of people who had the same problem, getting off facebook seems to help".

On the other hand, when it's a barely related topic (nothing about mental health, only related to the company) + there's no actual person to care about + the comment is very standoff-ish, I jump to virtue signaling.

Unsolicited advice, especially when given in a tone like this, is often much more about the giver of the advice than anyone else imo.

Because believe it or not, there are millions of people who do see some value in using facebook to stay in touch with family/friends etc. Yes, we can argue it is not needed and all but making a blanket statement like "Delete Facebook" doesn't help anything.

I did it and it helped me.

I have a "fake" account to talk to one or two people who refuse to use anything else, so I have to use messenger to get their attention. I never actually "use facebook".

I just stopped talking to the people who refused to communicate with me any other way. Problem solved.

One of them is my pretty technologically illiterate business partner, so that leaves me in a bit of a bind, slowly getting them onto other things.

What I hear: “I don’t have friends, so do it like me delete your facebook!”

But I have friends

Facebook for actual one on one friendships sounds like overkill. Facebook for a small business to have a website sounds fine. And keeping in touch with large swaths of people who live far from you can be tricky, I guess you can use Facebook for that. I’d rather just not deal with anything beyond a few people on a group chat, and text messages seem fine for that.

> text messages seem fine for that

You’re proving my point. If you travel you can’t use txt message to keep in touch with anyone

I once made a person startled by just saying "oh because I don't have a Facebook" after being asked why they can't seem to find me by name there, so I guess it is a signal to its users.

It is called disincentive. In this particular case spamming would be akin to the negative externality in the Economics because spammers are hurting the whole system and the whole userbase by their toxic behaviour(activity).

Spending less time with Facebook is a positive step towards better mental health, not a virtue signal.

Virtue signaling is explicitly not taking any real action, such as deleting your Facebook account and removing their apps.

If you have a pebble in your shoe and it's bothering you, is it not good advice to remove the pebble and go about your day (as opposed to trying to make the pebble become less uncomfortable)?

Because in this case your analogy is not perfect. There are many reasons why a user is forced to use Facebook. As a user pointed out, if your society has basically mandated using Facebook to interact with basic life, the suggestion to remove Facebook without sugesting replacements for the whole society is just being plainly obtuse.

Why is anyone forced to use Facebook? I, for one, get along great without it.

Your anecdote, while I presume is true, doesn't address the main point. You should probably read Gualdrapo's experience (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32576061), and I find it true on large swaths of Latin America and Asia.

I, for one, would lose contact to a lot of my friends if I deleted facebook (and already have lost contact with some of them because they selfishly deleted their fb)

You've commented twice here to the effect that there are many reasons why a person might be forced to use Facebook. Care to elaborate? I can't think of any.

If the society in which one lives is backwards to the point of mandating a Facebook account to interact on a basic level... it might be time to turn on, tune in, drop out.

Gualdrapo's post doesn't actually say anything about why he _needs_ to use Facebook. Neighboorhood groups and FB marketplace are not necessary to live. I think we might be conflating needs and wants here.

Being accustomed to doing things in specific ways is not a need.

> If the society in which you live is backwards to the point of mandating a Facebook account to interact on a basic level... it might be time to turn on, tune in, drop out.

That's why it's de facto forced on to you. Ministries (Americans: Departments, not religious ministries) are usually only reachable either on Facebook or by physically traveling hours to their office. Facebook groups are the communication platform for any community point-of-contact, and most are set to only be accessible by having a Facebook account.

As a society, is it avoidable? Yes. As an individual? Good luck convincing others. It might be hard to wrap your head around it if you were not living in such an area, so thank your government that you have a say on your communication.

> Ministries (Americans: Departments, not religious ministries) are usually only reachable either on Facebook or by physically traveling hours to their office.

Can you give one example? A link to their website or FB page would suffice.

I understand this. It seems like this situation would be avoidable by an individual, but not by society at large because most individuals would take the path of least resistance.

Could you send mail through the post? Call on a telephone?

> Could you send mail through the post?

Technically? But in my experience as a foreigner that have lived in Thailand, mail services are atrocious. It's unlike in Singapore or UK where it's excellent. It's even weirder considering parcels on the Amazon-equivalent (Lazada and Shopee) are faster on this one.

> Call on a telephone?

Mobile-to-telephone charges are obscene to the point that it's cheaper to use an international VoIP service to call (just to remind you that most people here are those who would skip and never experienced any telephones altogether) and unsurprisingly these are the kinds of government to ban unapproved VoIP to its citizens.

I have used Thailand here, but it's the same in Brazil (or from what I heard nowadays, was, but they still apparently used Meta's services extensively) except for the citizen-legal VoIP loophole.

Because family members use it and they don't want to use alternative communication methods, because groups you are involved in use it for organization and if you want to stay involved in said groups then you have to use it, because the country you live in has a large amount of its social web woven through facebook.

There are lots of reasons. Yes they aren't literal needs as in you are going to die, but sometimes the cost of not using facebook is significantly greater than the cost of using it.

They’d need to have used facebook at some point in their lives

Saying something is virtue signalling, the ultimate virtue signalling.

Its up there with people that get triggered by how "people get triggered by the most insignificant things these days".

I second the 'deleting the app' part, even if you want to keep using it.

The mobile web page works fine (and actually seemed to have a different front page algo - at least some time ago)

I did this a couple of years ago. Nothing bad happened.

4. Use Instagram (and pretend they're not the same company)

Bonus round: Use WhatsApp and get everyone you know off Facebook Messenger (and pretend they're not the same company)

Overtime bonus: Buy an Oculus device f****k, sign up for a Meta account again.

You want to delete your account too.

You'll note I didn't say that, as for some people deleting their FB account is not an option.

I do heed my own advice; I do not have the FB app installed on my phone.

In these a lot of people seem to be trying to "talk" to Eminem, who prominently happens to have made a song highlighting the insanity of such parasocial relationships.

This probably shouldn't be funny to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt14c7sYTFA

Great song and great music video, too:

- Eminem - Stan (Long Version) ft. Dido: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOMhN-hfMtY

I recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqUpe6QeBTk. The "clean" version censors a ton of stuff from the video that made it so impactful.

Verge article on this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319552/facebook-bug-cel...

For those who don't know, people have their news feed filled with posts made by followers of pages on the page.

I'm seeing some on my feed. Lots of posts to the bags "Fleet Foxes" which I only have had a passing interest.

Article here at ABC -

Facebook 'down', users report bizarre glitches and feeds flooded with random comments to celebrities https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/social-media-users-re...

Just checked on Android, it's still bugged in the sense that it shows hundreds of posts by people on pages and groups, and sponsored posts. Pretty much nothing else.

I don't think this is a bug, I think it's a feature consciously deployed by FB.

Facebook's timeline has already been getting much worse since it started forcing reels from people I don't know everywhere.

Facebook can scale because no correctness is needed. No QA needed actually !

won't scale, or scale as fast, with irrelevant content

Is it possible that very popular posts are served by a different backend/cache system than regular/long tail posts?

And the regular/long tail post backend is down, so you only see very popular posts?

Someone introduced a sign error and now the lowest-scored content has highest priority on the newsfeed? :)

>Facebook's timeline just shows random things for some users

Sounds like your modern ranking algorithms e.g. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google etc.

When I use Facebook, it's through a web interface, with this (spaces removed) URL

h t t p s : / / w w w . f a c e b o o k . c o m / ? s k = h _ c h r

That last part puts things in reverse chronological order. Thus denying the algorithm the chance to mess with my brain.

Alas it is still much used here in Latin America. I still have one account because neighborhood groups and marketplace (both can't be seen without an account, afaik), though I have 0 "friends" in there and disabled all sponsored posts from news media.

The latter keep coming back from time to time, though. It is true that now it is filled with random posts of things I am not interested even in the slightest but it seems like it think I'd do because they're "trending" or "popular" (celebrities, politicians, shopping, that kind of stuff)

Formatted with the URL protected with <url>

Twitter : <https://twitter.com/search?q=facebook+until:2022-08-25+since...>

Nitter : <https://nitter.net/search?q=facebook+until:2022-08-25+since:...>

It's a bug, now fixed: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319552/facebook-bug-cel...

Twitter is a bit like that, it tends to drown out tweets of people you know with celebrity tweets.

You can switch to "Latest Tweets" with that "stars" button on the top.

My latest evil advertising industry thought was for all of these infinite-scrolling social media feeds to force the scrolling to stop to watch a (10 second) ad, before you can keep scrolling.

Kind of like the commercial breaks of old, except for doom scrollers.

That would open the door for paid subscriptions, which can go either way in the eyes of the consumer. Paid social media hasn’t ever really played out well.

It's not an ad, but the Social Fixer[0] plugin (I use it on Firefox, pretty sure there's one for Chrome) will stop after X-many items and force you to click to load more

It also forces the feed to load in chronological order, if you like

---------------

[0] https://socialfixer.com/

Just checked mine and honestly not sure. It’s got more market stuff on there than normal. But beyond that it seems about normal level of broken - lots of ads and very bad AI guesses on what I may be interested in

That's what happens when your hiring process optimized for hiring people who just grinded leetcode questions.

Has been like this for me since 2006

Can confirm.

Main feed completely broken.

Given it's a fundamentally broken medium, that's a given even if they restore it back to normal.

yeah, I noticed that. For some reason, it shows a lot of shit about soccer, but I was never genuinely interested in soccer.

Seems to be back to normal.

That's an upgrade

Facebook shows matching articles: Echo chamber!

Facebook shows other things: Bug!

Well, it’s either echo chamber or garbage. Some nuance would be nice.

Such as?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com