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Comment by parpfish | Hacker News Reader

I have a FB account with no friends and a pseudonym that I just use for being able to check the pages of local businesses (it’s usually the only way to see hours because nobody has normal websites anymore)

The garbage that they serve up on my feed is astounding. When they don’t have any info from “friends” to populate it, it looks exactly like a collection of chumbox ads

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At this point I think it’s less of an algorithm and more of a random number generator that picks out spam to show to people.

I feel like most companies would have a discussion about “what’s the new user experience? How do we make a cold start enticing so people want to give us more time and data?”

The Facebook experience when you have no connections is so horrid that I’m guessing they don’t put much thought into new users anymore. They already have everyone

In fact, Facebook is so sure they already have everyone that new users are often flagged as suspicious and banned by their automated tools without even doing anything. No other site could afford to do that.

Worse than that. I have a Facebook account that is at least 16 years old (yes, from the very first years of Facebook's existence) that I log in a few times a year when I have to use Facebook to do something. I don't post or read anybody's post -- a few years ago I unfollowed everybody (but still remain connected), just like what this article says. I might have actually used this tool but I am not sure. Guess what, my 2-factor auth enabled account got disabled for absolutely no reason. Same login location, same browser. I had to do a stupid video verification to reenable the account, something I refused to do for opening an Instagram account.

Same here for X. Extreme left/right propaganda and rage bait only interrupted by porn and crypto scams

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