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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I read that quote in befuddlement.

The only things I _want_ to see are my family and friends, but Zuck keeps shoving softcore porn into my feed.

IG has slowly become a gateway to OF hasn't it?

My recommendations are _full_ of girls with very few clothes on doing sports, showcasing outfits and whatnot. IG is just broken at this point.

But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it? ;-)

I get what you're getting too, also wall-of-texts multi-image posts, often content reposted from reddit, I guess the algorithm thinks "Oh, user is engaged for many seconds with all the images on posts like this, gotta serve them more of them!".

I've programmed Tasker to kill Instagram after a minute of me opening it and I've made another Tasker script that asks me to input a 9-digit random number, makes me wait between 5-45 seconds and then allows me 10 minutes of the app before making me do the whole process again.

Women with few clothes (sadly) always grab my attention, yes. But I think that content is also being pushed despite my attention to other things because it works in general.

But you get the point, the recommendations are just a stream of nonsense-content, screenshots of screenshots of Reddit posts...

I don't get it. Either there's no good, original content available out there or the algorithm just doesn't want to show it.

> But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it?

I'm reasonably certain clicking into a piece of content to block the account still counts as more engagement for that type of content. They don't seem to have a "clicked, then immediately blocked" sort of signal.

There is a workaround to clean up IG: I only use the browser to view it, even on mobile, and I use Firefox + uBlock Origin and the following filter:

www.instagram.com##article:has-text(Suggested for you):style(visibility: hidden !important; height: 300px !important; overflow: hidden !important)

Whenever using a Meta product I have to be hyper-aware of what i stop scrolling on or click on, because Meta is all about "revealed preference" instead of what I explicitly tell them I follow and like.

IE: Don't let your eyes linger on eyecandy on Meta's platforms or they will feed you a firehose of horny slop.

If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty quickly.

Flagging them will clean it up for a while, but I find eventually it will show you a few more here and there. If you stop scrolling and ogle for a little bit then it starts feeding you more again.

>If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty quickly.

this is broken, I get stupid posts with same image, about body parts and english words for them, I marked it as not interested at least 3 times, but it appears again and again from other poster . So FB is incapable to now show me the exact same thing over and over again despite me telling them 3 times I am not interested.

Also I doing some math stuff with my son so now I am getting images with math in them, tracking really works

> IG is just broken at this point.

It's all broken because the incentives are all broken. Everything is optimized for maximum profit through maximum screen time and maximum ad impressions.

If anything the online advertisement industry has shown that it cannot be trusted as a means to support businesses while having those businesses provide a healthy, no addictive, worth having product.

Would it truly hurt Facebook, Google or YouTube to make less money. Many companies could provide better solutions, if they where happy with less profit.

you could just delete your accounts. i find that my family and friends still seek out connection and interactions with me, as i do them, even without some sort of computational facilitator like instagram.

Easy Asian countries still appear to be heavy FB users even among Millennials. Most of my family is there so it is how I keep tabs on them.

Don’t be surprised if your family gets radicalized with some idea they were against just a generation ago. Facebook and social media is so many bad things at the same time: propaganda, surveilance, consumerism, deception, addiction, and complete isolation from one another. I find social media responsible for a lot of modern ills in our society.

Net neutrality is not a thing there and telcos usually offer free GBs of FB/TikTok access.

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