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Comment by trowawee | Hacker News Reader

The Facebook aside was interesting. I've been back on FB periodically this year to try to sell some stuff after years off it and it cannot be overstated how terrible the basic experience of browsing the feed is, at least on mobile. It's a minimum of 3-4 ads per actual post from a human I chose to friend, and the ads are just the stupidest, trashiest stuff imaginable.

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Just wait until your account gets hacked and you realize there's a bug with the "click here if you didn't make this change" links in the security email making it impossible to get your account back.

Then navigate to Facebook.com/hacked as directed by the help docs and have it reject any attempt to recover your account because it only works with currently used email addresses and phone numbers which the hacker has removed and updated to a value which you cannot know.

Does anyone work at FB or knows if they have a public facing bug tracker or ability to contact their developers? This is a pretty bad bug.

This, on top of how frustrating it is to report the hacked account to Facebook. Several family members have had their profiles compromised, including the email and phone number updates you mentioned.

Myself and many many other people attempt to help the situation by reporting the old profile as a hacked impersonator, only to be promptly closed by Facebook, as they cite they see no rule breaking. They reach this opinion despite the profile being massively changed, from an English speaking father of two, to a woman persona now posting obvious scam links and new family photos in a different language (and country) entirely.

Even as we admit defeat on recovering the old account, often tied to a small business page, and eat the cost of starting over, the old profile still masquerades under the old name, but with reputation damaging and clearly fake content.

I wonder if the BBB can be leveraged. I can't find Meta on there but I did find an Instagram entry and they have a rating of F [1] Maybe we should post the BBB page for Meta to the front page of HN and let people voice their frustrations?

[1] https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/menlo-park/profile/internet-servic...

While I definitely am in favor of having businesses listed there if nothing else to let other people with the same issue feel some solidarity, doesn't the fact that Instagram already has such a low rating not motivating any changes make it unlikely that anything would change if the parent company were listed as well?

Hasn't Yelp mostly replaced the BBB as the standard company that aggregates reviews of businesses? You could try leaving Facebook a 1-star Yelp review.

What would that do? Facebook doesn't sell anything to users. They sell marketing tools to marketers.

I use the web interface and it's also surprisingly bad, e.g. basic HTML bugs that interfere with engagement, e.g. text editor selection and editing bugs.

I got back on Facebook just to use Marketspace and it was the worst experience I've ever had. Nothing but scams and idiots.

FB marketplace has zero authentication for sellers. No point in buying anything from there.

If you must buy something from Facebook, use specialist groups that are moderated and preferably private.

I'd say Craigslist has even less authentication for sellers and it's pretty solid most of the time. I've sold a ton of things on there and honestly never run into scammers at all.

Also, I quit Facebook before they added marketplace so I can't make a comparison. I'm just going off of this thread mostly. I also know people who sell things on marketplace fairly regularly / successfully.

Weird, I've had lots of success with Marketplace as both a buyer and seller. I only do local transactions, which is the same I would have done in the past with Craigslist, but I think Marketplace is miles-better than Craigslist.

If you're willing to go local and meet the seller and check the stuff, Marketplace might work.

It's still filled with obvious scams and reporting them does nothing. Meanwhile FB's AI Algorithm bans legit posts for selling prohibited items :D

What was so infuriating was how, if buying, I could limit my search to a local radius, but you can't do that when selling.

Exact same thing here. Had to sell some stuff, hadn't done it in years, and was told Marketplace is the thing these days. Within 5 mins I have half a dozen messages all following the same format and all saying they would send x relative to collect. Took all my ads down and went back to Gumtree which has been flawless so far.

>Marketspace

Marketplace

That aside it's funny because I have the exact opposite experience. It's the best place to buy and sell locally. Not every place has Craigslist (for better or worse) so it's good to have at least an OK digital alternative. I use it pretty much every day.

Yeah here in Baltimore Marketplace is definitely the place to buy and sell used stuff. It's like a mildly less annoying Craigslist. Except for the peppering of ads to buy shit online. No, Facebook. I came to you because you're Craigslist now, if I wanted Amazon I would have gone to fucking Amazon, you lost this fight, surrender, please for the love of God. Just show me shit I can drive and exchange cash for today!

Fwiw, I think this is somewhat of a self-reinforcing phenomenon. I go through periods of actual interaction with others on Facebook (for various reasons) and the feed seems to improve when I’m interacting with posts I actually want to see. But, when I’m not using it all that much, the feed devolves back into noise.

Also the ease with which you can get banned from the marketplace is ridiculous, with no way to appeal. We ordered some new kitchen cabinets a year ago and due to some very annoying shipping hijinks the shipment got lost. They made a second batch and sent them to us, and the initial shipment got miraculously found, so we had a second set of kitchen cabinets.

I made a Facebook account solely for the purpose of selling this extra set of cabinets on the marketplace, made no other posts about anything anywhere on Facebook, and my account got banned within a week. They asked me to send them a scan of my id to get it unbanned, which I did and they unbanned me. It was then permanently banned a week later with no explanation and no option to appeal.

You created an account and immediately posted a high priced item for sale on the marketplace, with no other indication that you're a real person?

That's classic scam-bot behavior right there.

This isn't a criticism of you - what you did makes perfect sense. But I'm not surprised at all that you got caught by a ban algo.

The only surprise is that you were ever unbanned.

Without siding with Facebook here, that was extremely suspicious behavior.

How about the fact that most ads have better content than your FB friends? Thats more sad to me.

Are those ads?

I think there are 3 things on Facebook: friend posts, short videos from content farms, and actual ads. The first are what I want to see, the third… well, obviously I don’t like them, but they pay the bills, right? The second are, I guess, like things Facebook puts there to hide the fact that nobody posts anything to Facebook anymore.

The more you accurately describe Facebook, the more their ultimate demise seems inevitable.

I mean, at this point it has been bad enough for long enough that… how do you predict its demise?

Just checked my own feed, and it was

[friend post, promoted/ad, friend post, recommended group, friend post, promoted/ad, group post, friend post]

So not quite as bad as your experience.

At first I didn't see any ads, but that was because of adblock.

Yeah, on web with extensive adblocking it's not as miserable (or routing my phone back through my pihole install). But most people aren't adblocking, and the "normal" user experience was jarring.

FB on the web is basically unusable without Social Fixer - a browser extension.

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