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Comment by euleriancon | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar experience recently, where I logged in to Facebook after not using it for years and was shocked by how much garbage was there. My spouse does use Facebook somewhat regularly so I looked at her feed and it was much more reasonable.

I wonder if for those of us that haven't used Facebook in years the recommendation algorithm is essentially default. Which much like the default youtube algorithm, is completely garbage. But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.

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I would assume inactive accounts get "sold" to the algorithm's lowest bidders. If you're not generating new information, there's nothing to scrape or sell. You must be pretty locked down outside of Facebook as well (you've actually toggled privacy settings, ever).

I logged in to instagram after like 5 years and my whole feed is literally just thots and AI generated content, even though I follow a crapload of accounts.

Not just thots but thots with inevitable links to their OnlyFans pages. It seems that FB and Instagram's primary purpose has become funneling people into OnlyFans. I wonder if Zucc has caught on to this and is at least getting some revenue share from OF.

He has testified to congress that IG/meta does not promote sexual content, which is nuts, because anyone who’s spent 5 mins on the platform knows this absolutely not the case

In my experience it’s mostly sexual adjacent content with just enough plausible deniability that you could say it’s a comedic sketch or something. They’re not funny, and the punchline is usually tits, but it has the cosmetic structure of a joke.

Yeah linktr.ee links instead of OF links.

I think its just by nature very engaging, as dudes will go look at other posts and comment (at least the older ones) about their looks etc...

Both can be true. IG/Meta does not promote sexual content. Users promote sexual content. That might be subtle but there is a real distinction.

> That might be subtle but there is a real distinction.

A distinction without a difference, as the expression goes

And who controls what user content goes into user feeds?

Same with mine - all thirst traps in the search, which I have never really searched for.

I did "not interested" & "This post makes me uncomfortable" for a solid month and now have a reliable feed of comedians, tacos, golden retrievers, classic jazz drummers, etc. The algorithm thought I turned Mexican and gave me exclusively Spanish content for a month but I just kind of went along with it.

I found that "not interested" didn't work for me, that I had to explicitly state what I was interested in and only then did my suggestions become relevant. It will at times revert to slop and then I have to go through the process all over again.

Try https://www.fbpurity.com/ I'm using it for Facebook interface needs until I can get something more agentic in my browser operational.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

The only way you can use FB imo.

Agreed. I'm over 50, so I'm 'allowed' to use FB ;-), for those few posts of the last remaining family and friends there. Using FBP, I only see new posts of friends in chronological order. But FB still f*cks you, because it does not show all updates of everyone. When the algo decides you've had enough, you simply reach the 'end' of your feed. Well when FB, sessions keep getting shorter and shorter... There are some EU laws in the making that might change things, though.

https://socialfixer.com/ is another

YT is like this too, if you're not logged in, thirst trap, crazy stuff until you build up a search history (even not logged in)

Now and then it gets things right, but I find a lot of YT recs to be pretty dubious, and find it is trying to bias me in this direction or that direction. It's pretty pathetic.

The search function is also useless. About the only Scottish history content I ever get rec'd is Scotland History Tours. While I like his channel, it is not the only show in town and it doesn't go very deep.

When I got my last YT account I could see it was trying to access which news I should see. It was trying to link me to one American party or the other. I just clicked "not interested" into most of the partisan bait content. Not my circus, not my clowns.

Interesting. I have a very different experience with YouTube, to the point I consider it my favorite social network thingy. My search history and subscriptions are carefully curated, and I mostly get "more of the same", with pretty good recommendations for stuff that usually interests me. Also, zero "thirsty" stuff.

Logged out, YouTube is of course a complete mess.

Logged out, YouTube suggests me endless videos about MMA fighting or trash for children. I only use the YouTube app for commenting. I use Brave to avoid constant adverts.

I do notice though that YouTube is always trying to bias me in one direction or another. I have a friend whose feed is full of Trumpbait and stuff about how Putin is about to die and the Ukraine war is about to end. (Sounds fine except these videos have been saying that for four or five years.) Whatever one things about these things, the videos he gets are very propagandistic and have ridiculous AI thumbnails and titles. Usually of Putin or Trump scowling at something. He also gets suggested a lot of food videos (okay, I suppose) and often ones about Nazis and WW2 (a bit fetishistic, but to be fair he did history at university).

My non-political YouTube suggestions tend to be about popular music from decades ago. I emphasise "about". I notice the algo more rarely suggests actual music itself. I suspect this is because YT has to pay out money for music but not videos about it. I get some local history stuff (which is interesting but usually not about areas I know well). I very rarely get suggested much in the way of Scottish, Irish or Welsh content, in spite of viewing a lot of it. Never anything about what's happening with Scottish politics (always from a London perspective) or the parliament here.

Not sure why people are downvoting this, it's absolutely true. I watch a lot of youtube on my TV and I can tell in milliseconds if it's logged me out and I'm seeing the default feed. It's fully insane and inane.

It only takes me a few seconds of scrolling in a private window to hit an AI-generated cat head on pregnant human woman barfing rainbows on the floor: 63M views. Really makes you believe in the dead internet theory, just that they're all in their own little slop algorithm world. Or maybe it's ipad babies after all.

Everywhere I go I see parents letting their kids scroll short form video. The brain rot starts early.

True: You have to curate your feed / search history a little bit to get much better results

Or, just search for the thing you’re looking for directly, and otherwise don’t rely on the feed to feed you because it only knows to feed you crap?

I still log in fairly regularly and get a bunch of reasonably targeted content, but also a ton of ragebait ai shit like protestors attacking cops. So it’s a bit of both, they’re just flooded with bad ai posts. It’s changed drastically in the past year, from a bunch of posts you could argue make sense, to mostly posts of rage. But the number of actual friends posts is basically zero

The problem is you have to be defensive. If you mess up once and click some AI reading Reddit posts or hawk-tua style street interview, you’re cooked.

You used to be able to reset by watching stupid financial content with high value like gold coin stuff and cleanse, but Meta is smarter now.

Every social media algorithm is like this now. Accidentally viewing certain types of videos are like dropping a nuclear bomb in your carefully nursed algorithm.

> But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.

It would start being more "relevant" but not necessarily more reasonable.

I hadn't used Facebook regularly in many years but recently posted a story about the passing of my 18 year old cat. I did this as a way of informing friends and family I don't communicate with on a constant basis that I was going through a bad time (I was very fond of my cat).

My Facebook algorithm is now just almost entirely a solid wall of people I don't know announcing the death of their cat. A non-stop parade of personal tragedies.

I can see the connection of how one thing led to the other but it also highlights how clumsy and soulless these algorithmic systems are.

I think it just throws the most engaging content at you hoping you get lured into using it more then the algo will update once it sees how you behave.

For me, it's almost all thirst traps for several years. More recently it learned that I like 90s/00s rock, which is a fad again, so it started showing me some of that. Also, I am a sucker for stand up comedy clips and it feeds me that now. So that was a hint that it does start to become more reasonable. But, if I start to scroll it only goes 3-5 posts deep before thirst gets put back in the rotation no matter what I do.

I've been using it more than ever in the last ~2 years, just because my old friends started sending me videos to the music related stuff so I click it and it opens in FB. We chat on messenger and I guess that little DM airplane logo is how they found a way to get me into it on occasion. Granted, my friends send me like 5-10 videos a day and I only watch them about once a month to get caught up, I can tell it's trying really hard to make a DAU out of me.

Yeah, this makes sense. It does sort of imply that new users would just see a bunch of garbage, which you'd think isn't ideal. On the other hand, how many new users could possibly still be signing up for Facebook? So maybe it's not a problem as they just manage the decline.

It's nonsensical rage/click baiting garbage. You are the product, not the user.

Anybody who hasn't used FB in a long time almost certainly has 100s if not 1000s of posts from friends and family that they missed. Instead of this garbage it should be "Hey, we haven't seen you in awhile! Here's all the fun and important stuff you missed out on."

That might actually get me to engage with the platform because that would be putting my needs first and foremost. But that's not what FB does and not what FB ever did. Zuck never had our best interests in mind, so why would it put our interests first?

It does make me wonder if that system is a net positive or a net negative. For me, I go, see suggested stuff which is all trash, and never want to engage with FB ever again. I stay only because of friends but only check once a week or so. Where as, if they got rid of all suggested stuff and instead it was 100% friends and family and every 5 posts, an ad. I'd engage with it far more often.

My facebook page, which is where I have friended everyone I met between like 2004 and 2017 is absolute garbage.

But I have a secondary account where I follow a few specific niche groups on a specific topic that are only on facebook. This page is actually fine, and is pretty good at suggesting related pages.

Not sure what the takeaway is for facebook though.

Same here, I use it once every year or so. I get AI slop when I log in that is mostly like this blog post.

My wife, who uses it maybe once or twice a month, does not AI slop, she showed me her feed. Nor does my friend who uses it daily. It's definitely based on usage or lack of usage.

Active account with real interactions = more normal. Which is a pretty telling product story in itself

From seeing the feeds of a few categories of people near me (some using it semi-professionally, some just personally, some like me that avoid it unless strictly necessary)... it really does seem to be all of them. Absolute garbage is a majority, and they all complain about missing things they actually care about (though to be fair this has been true ever since it left colleges).

Facebook is truly awful to everyone. I can't believe people don't try harder to leave.

Same. F|_|cking wasteland. Immediately logged out. Won’t go back.

I wonder this too about X: when I sundowned my Twitter account when I started seeing 80% "no question literal nazi-posting" by bluechecks on my feed, I unfollowed everyone and kept the account just to prevent someone posting on what was my username for over a decade.

So now that I follow no one, when I click a link from Reddit or HN to X, my "For You" page is:

- Asian pornography; AI generated "vibes" videos of machines doing "oddly satisfying" things; Elon Musk; American right-wing politicians and pundits screaming about "woke" or jerking off ICE videos; AI or real public sex outdoors at festivals?

Of course, I don't use X, and don't seek this stuff out, and only see it there.

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