Would it also be possible to get the thirst traps and booty models off my feed too? Just like I get some control over my ad preferences and tags, it'd be very handy to get some feed controls in place.
Not being active on social media has meant a lot of old friends have drifted out of my life so I'm trying to force myself to be more active on it but sadly there are no enjoyable (or usable) platforms left.
TikTok is almost purely algorithmic, stranger-generated content consumption with the novelty factor cranked to 11. Discord has no algorithmic curation, voting, etc, and is just people talking that you have to curate yourself.
Facebook is trying to pivot in the TikTok direction. Problem is there are a lot of people who want to use it to connect with actual people (because that's kinda how it worked in the past), which is orthogonal to their mission of pumping the maximal possible amount of garbage into your brain.
I use discord mostly for keeping up with friends and am very glad those chats aren't on the open internet
Are they? I'm sure there are people who use Discord like that, but I am on dozens of servers and all of them are public, i.e. anyone can join anytime. That's not private that's just hiding from Google.
> If the server owners want public discourse, there are many options for that.
Chat/video/audio as good and popular as Discord? Where? IRC? Matrix?
> Are these same people upset that there aren’t microphones at every table in restaurants so that those conversations aren’t “walled off” from anyone not in the restaurant?
Fair enough but nobody is asking direct messages or the servers for people who actually know each other and want privacy to be on the open web. Just the ones that are closer to being public squares for discussing specific topics.
> In fact I think scraping website content by third parties for their own indexing should be opt-in, not opt-out, it’s pretty obnoxious in my opinion that you can put up a website intended only for friends and family but then large entities all over the world crawl your content and broadcast it on their own platforms without your consent.
Eh, I get what you're saying but don't you think the Internet as a whole loses a lot of its value if this happens? Wasn't Google and good indexing one of the crucial things that led to the Internet revolution?
If an open source project chose to track issues using a series of private conversations in restaurants, most of us would recognise how ephemeral and fleeting that is.
They're irritated by all the open-source projects replacing their mailing list, forum, or wiki with "Just ask on the Slack or Discord". It's the most god-awful mode of community support imaginable.
I love the old bulletin boards and IRC channels where you get to know people, talk about projects, asking for help, etc.
Discord fills that role in a much more accessible way than posting on a forum or googling a stack overflow answer.
Both hae value. Apparently you much prefer a less real-time interactive approach to solving those problems.
For those of us who came of age during the "RTFM before bothering anybody, dammit!" attitude toward supporting engineers, looking for already posted answers to a problem that likely someone else has already solved is vastly superior to bothering someone about a problem they might well be tired of talking about for the 100th time.
I've never been good at "conversation" in real life or online; some of us simply aren't and have/find our strengths elsewhere, and increasingly it seems all online discussions about, say, issues around a game published by a small indie vendor are being pushed to Discord and in some cases even shutting down other online communication channels in favor of that. A vendor who keeps its online discussion forums available and supported is always going to get a lot more interest from me than what I see younger companies doing.
Maybe it's just a big cultural shift, and I am no longer relevant. Not ready to "go away" just yet...
Annoying that that's not the default, sure. But at least it exists.
I thought sk=h_chr was unimportant so I trimmed it off the URL before sharing. Turns out it's necessary.
Facebook is a ghost town. There’s just three people of the 125 “friends” who appears in the first 20 odd.
Yeah, I could force my friends to call me every time they want to grab dinner, but that would be annoying for everyone involved and not respectful of how they want to communicate.
Sounds like they’re “forcing” you on to a platform and aren’t prepared to be friends with you if you’re not on it.
I agree that it would be possible if I cared enough. I don't agree that refusing to use a glorified messaging app with an integrated calendar, just because it comes with a feed that some people get addicted to but none of us ever look at, is a good recommendation that will make life better for me and the people around me.
The disconnect here is that this is an innacurate conception of Facebook, which is a privacy-destroying, propaganda-spewing advertising platform with some addictive social features to bait the lure.
Think of it this way: I don't like the smell of cigarette smoke. No matter how much I like someone, I won't be around them if they're smoking. If they insist on smoking while I'm around, I'll find somebody else to socialize with. And to me, Facebook is just as unpalatable as smoking.
You’re making some huge assumptions here, as if people are on some kind of wild protest.
I don’t use Facebook just like I don’t own a boat or go to church. It’s not valuable to me, so I don’t do it.
You absolutely do not have control over the content you're shown. Why would they give you that power?
> YouTube’s ‘dislike’ and ‘not interested’ buttons barely work, study finds.
> A Mozilla report found feedback buttons didn’t stop the majority of similar recommendations
https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23356434/youtube-dislike-...
Well, they work great for skipping ads..
Here's a direct link to the Mozilla study: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-investigation...
[1] See the correction in https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/19/23880111/microsoft-xbox-s...
Reporting obvious scam ads also ends up not being against policy everywhere.
> The algorithm just gives you more of what you asked for.
It doesn't matter whether you asked for more because you hate it or love it. The algorithm prioritizes identifying the content with which you will engage.
And even "engaged with" is bullshit. What the hell does "engage with" even mean? What you really should be saying is it gives you more of what you pause scrolling on. That is neither asking for something, nor "engaging".
For every category, there will be someone doing a sexualized version of it. Those get lots of eyeballs and likes, and hence get boosted into suggestions for that category. And it's not like I get every post like that. But often enough that I no longer scroll in public for fear of what NSFW things will show up.
I first got a bit shocked. Did I accidentally post these to Facebook?? But no, it was just a suggestion from Facebook, "share these photos". But I was on the bus, I didn't expect these photos to suddenly be on my screen for those around me to see (pictures of a medical condition). And it creeped me out that Facebook was looking through my phone's gallery when I'm not explicitly doing it to upload an image.
I ended up blocking file access for Facebook. Which now makes it impossible for me to post pictures. Which in turn of course means I barely post anymore. Great thinking, PMs.
With other apps I can easily select photos even if they aren't locally available on my device. With Facebook I need to manually download the files from Google Photos, paste them into a local device folder, and only then will they actually show up in Facebook's weird, poorly-designed photo picker UI. Not exactly the best user experience.
if you looked for a few seconds longer = engagement
if you read the comments in disgust = engagement
if you commented in disagreement, even to reply to another comment = engagement