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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

I just tried to repro this.

On my Facebook account, I scrolled through 30 posts without seeing anything thirsty. Mostly synthesizer stuff, stuff for my kids' schools, and a few posts from friends. It definitely knows I'm male because the ads are for men's apparel.

Instagram was the same.

I never ever watch reels or other short form video, so maybe that has something to do with it.

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You didn’t try hard to repro it.

Facebook uses your likes / groups / searches to customize your feed. If are active and don’t delete your old content, you have already trained FB to avoid the thirst traps for your account.

The article author said he was off-site site for 8 years, so FB was offering him random high engagement content to stuff his feed so he didn’t reach the end.

he is replying to

> Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

if meta identifies him as guy and he don't get a thirst trap after a minute then it's totally not "almost exclusively thirst trap".

Though OC also said:

> Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted.

So I guess it depends how active you are? My speculation would be (that would match the article) - if facebook figures out you’re a man, but you don’t actively like and engage with specific topics - it will default to AI thirst trap slop.

No, if he's been looking at material that indicates an interest in thirst trap stuff for years, then looks at pottery for a couple of weeks, the algorithm correctly identifies that he isn't really into pottery and corrects back.

Yep. It's far from "it knows you're male => it gives you thirst traps non stop"

But also I will say that curating algo feed to show what you want is annoying and ultra frustrating, whenever it goes off the rails it makes me want to quit.

> he's been looking at material that indicates an interest in thirst trap stuff for years

N is obviously too small to get anything meaningful, though article was about the same problem and article’s author haven’t visited facebook for 8 years…

Cannot say about FB or IG, but on Youtube I get way too many “AI girlfriend” ads or video recommendations. I report as many as I can and my subscription channels are as far away from such topics as it can be. Thus I totally understand OC and article’s author.

Except that I am into pottery, and I'm a parent into parenting stuff. But instead of just liking the stuff it was showing me, I made the extra effort to seek out that content and like more of it in an attempt to train the algo.

Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, this problem only started about two years ago, and I've had instagram for 15 years. So either they did something differently, or suddenly there was a lot more of that content, but I didn't change my habits.

Also, as a funny side note, scrolling my feed this morning was suddenly thirst-trap free for the first time in years.

I don't have an Instagram, so maybe they did change their algorithm recently. However, remember that the whole concept of "training the algorithm" and "not wanting to mess up your algorithm" has been a common saying for years at this point. Unfortunately, this is against what the social media companies actually want, which is more engagement. So they start to look at other factors that are more difficult to game. For instance, it may have noticed that you linger at images of thirst traps more than other images it shows. In fact, it may notice that while you are purposely liking pictures of pottery and parenting, the actual pictures that you are liking have both thirst trap qualities and pottery/parenting qualities. Not accusing you of anything, just saying that that is the pattern they use because they know that overtly liking thirst trap pictures may be frowned upon.

It's happens in the reels. I don't really see thirsty posts in my feed either, just people I follow for the most part.

Yet another reason to avoid attention-span-destroying short form video. :)

If you click Search in Instagram, what's it show you by default, before you enter a search term?

I have scrubbed my account completely clean years ago and never use it for anything. When I log in once a quarter or so, just to check if someone sent me a message via the Messenger, all I see is soft-porn on my timeline.

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