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Comment by nox101 | Hacker News Reader

My feed in the mobile app is

    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - people you might know
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from frien
    - loops
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from a non-friend about a friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend

I can only guess the reason mine isn't filled with spam is because I click the ... and pick "don't show me this" whenever it shows me something I don't care about.

I wish I could tell it never show me loops, never recommend friends, never show me posts of friends of friends. While annoying, it's not so bad ATM that I've felt the need to quit

On the other hand I check it less than once a week, maybe once every 2 weeks.

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> "don't show me this"

I have tried this with bizarre results.

Any kind of booby hot chick type post, I will do this. Sometimes I go so far as blocking the account. There was a week it was all AI-generated booby photos of Salma Hayek - no matter how many accounts I un-followed or blocked, there was a never-ending stream of accounts with AI generated Salma Hayek photos being posted. I gave up after a week, and took some time of Facebook.

A month later, I returned, and the Salma Hayek stuff is all gone. Periodically it goes back into some sort of booby photo trend, and I can't get it to stop, so I just quit browsing facebook for a while and when I return it's done. On the time order of a couple weeks, unfollowing and/or blocking makes no difference.

I should mention - I am part of a couple groups for car stuff, and a couple groups for fishing stuff. It's not like the content I am interacting with is particularly boob-rich.

As far as friends, I only see stuff from friends who post a lot. That's the trend. They aren't people I comment on their posts, or even really talk to in real life anymore.

My (youtube) hack is pretty simple: when I see an ad that has really terrible targeting, I click it. Not only that I go into the settings and I click "show me more like this" (incidentally this is a great way to see that 90% of ads are completely miscategorized, kindof makes you doubt the whole system). In periods where I'm more diligent about this I've successfully reached a point where over half of my ads are Chinese-language.

I think when you click on the offending profile to block it, Facebook must decide that’s what you like to see. Or something.

Because some moron has 1000 profiles for “cars under $2500” and the more of them I clicked and blocked , the more of them would show up in my feed.

I hate that I can’t opt out of the “for you” stuff and don’t actually see anything from family or friends anymore . And I hate that the more I try to block a certain type of content (say: “Salma Hayek boobies”) the more I’m spammed with it.

So much that I have not even logged on in about a year.

This is probably it. They do not discriminate types of engagement - blocking or unfollowing is still engagement, and some team is probably gaming their numbers by intentionally not discriminating.

Meta is a rotten company.

I would presume the fishing and car groups are male heavy, and those men who have similar likes as you, like the booby photos.

They are profiling your likes.

Plausible - sort of. I have never 'liked' a booby photo, and it's true probably lots of those guys have.

FWIW, booby photos are verboten in those groups/group chats. The owners try hard to keep things topically relevant.

What matters is that the other guys in the group who like cars and fishing also with high probability engage with boob posts.

All this recommendation algorithm horseshit is just showing you the exact same stuff that trended with the least common denominator that you also are part of, no matter how much YOU PERSONALLY do not engage with it.

That many posts from friends would represent months worth of my friends posts. For most people facebook doesnt show friends posts because no one posts anymore.

I can't recall the last time I saw a post by a friend. No one posts there anymore, except if they get married or a kid. I think you may be in a particularly active bubble, while the rest of us just get fake engagement thrown in our faces.

how have you managed this? mine is full of thirdparty shit even though I have been actively saying "I don't like this"

I wish I knew the precise steps. I've certainly wanted to rage quit FB in the past but I'd be socially isolating myself since I have friends that post there. Also, FB Messenger is my most used communication tool though I could use that without using FB.

I'd love to know what A-B testing, if any, FB has done here and if their methodologies for ascertaining results are actually correct. For example, it's obvious that the success of TikTok has them pushing "loops", one of their TikTok clone efforts. I'd personally like to completely block "loops" from my life except maybe if a friend recommends one, and I'd have a better opinion of FB if they let me. I can guess that might not translate to better metrics on 1 billion people but I can also imagine not annoying people would lead to more engagement.

I quit Instagram because it was ~1 relevant post (a friend) to 5+ irrelevant posts (non-friends) and their redesign to try to push me to follow non-friends by only showing non-seen friend posts and then filling my feed with non-friend spam. So, I quit. Is that a loss for them? No idea. I only know I'd have stayed if they let me opt out of the push to be TikTok.

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