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Comment by r0fl | Hacker News Reader

Instagram is borderline a porn/gore website if you open a new account and spend one day doom scrolling

The amount of nsfw content including women “breastfeeding” fake babies, wild accidents, weird ultra graphic shock videos is insane.

I have a few accounts that I use to post for work. My explore pages are wild compared to my personal account which is mostly tech, cars and architecture

I don’t “like” anything on my work accounts, ever, the algorithm just knows what to feed me because of what I click on the most (impossible not to click on those thumbnails)

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You can say the same thing about Snapchat. My kid had this on their phone last year. I check the phone from time (12 yo) to time to make sure there is no weird stuff or message in there. I open Snapchat and saw the "recommend feed" with very "strange" thumbnails. I deleted the app and told them not to install again. I put the restrictions to their apple account to explicitly forbid apps for 4 year+. Somehow Snapchat is for 10+. Am I crazy?

You are not crazy.

I recommend you look up Eric Sadin's "The Injuctive Turn of Technology".

It provides a succinct (and disconcertingly accurate) framework for looking at the trajectory of technology vis-a-vis ordinary people / end-users.

On the "Threads" app I got very similar experience, a lot of breastfeeding erotica and other weird adult content that made me feel I'm doing something illegal.

Also, their algorithm must be assessing human features too because at some point Instagram started showing me women with ever largest breasts. I get that they try to understand what I'm into but it's utterly ridiculous to push for the more and more extreme.

I wonder how large is the cohort for all these weird stuff, considering that Instagram itself works as "not a creep" credit score when you meet someone new.

Recently I gave in, started following some of those weird accounts and bookmarking deep fake scam ads out of fascination, probably adding fuel to the fire. It's just immensely weird.

I don't use Instagram or any social media apps--I do use webapps. For Youtube if I'm tempted to click something I wouldn't have searched for myself I use open in private. I mark watched videos with a Like. I also actively click "Not Interested" and even "Do not recommend channel". My recommendations are narrowly curated. I even got Youtube to 'run out' of recommendations showing me the same set on reloads.

Same here. I had to create a custom uBlock filter for YouTube because it ran out of recommendations and half of the suggested videos in my home page were from my Watch Later playlist.

> For Youtube if I'm tempted to click something I wouldn't have searched for myself I use open in private.

Private browsing? I think that's not this kind of private.

We're talking about recommended content. I can't tell if you're trying to be pedantic.

X is similar now for new accounts now. Except it's not just the timeline content, it is the advertisers too. My active account gets regular advertisers but my inactive one has all X rated and scam advertisements. And tons of "18+" bots that will go around auto-liking people's posts.

I have the complete opposite X experience

I have a new account, I only follow ai, coding and tech accounts

My following page is amazing! Not one dumb thing in my face. The for you feed is garbage but I never go there

I have no doubt that is your experience and it's good to hear some people are having good experiences with it.

My main account is fine but I have an account that follows very few other accounts (it's for a product I was building that never really took off) and I just signed in and scrolled until I hit 8 ads. The ads were in this order (completely unedited list... I'm not editorializing here):

- Robinhood

- A very explicit "male enhancement" ad

- A movie ad for a movie I've never heard of until now

- A "bedroom aid" (blue pill)

- A marijuana dispensary

- A scammy looking mobile app

- Another ad for a pill for men who are having trouble in the bedroom

- An affiliate marketing scam

... I stopped scrolling at that point because it felt like enough.

this is why instagram is so fun. a lot of people have their friend group chats in imessage, wechat, fb msg etc... but the best group chats i've ever belonged to are on insta and the unhinged meme feed is glorious.

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