Facebook is cooked

My mother is an international flight attendant in her 60s.

I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in her most frequented cities. But I discovered that my mum was also a frequent "poster" of the photos of her various trips around the world, and the comments sections were filled with with some beautiful messages from her many many friends and family.

From this I learned that there is a subset of the population that Facebook works perfectly for and meaningfully improves their real-world social relationships. And perhaps Facebook has been hyper-optimized for that kind of use case through relentless A/B testing. But I fear my mum is quite privileged to have this kind of experience.

> So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm?

No, it's not. 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.

Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed. No matter what she did she couldn't fix it. She asked other women about this, and they all said their partner's feeds were the same.

This is not a problem for women. At least not one I've ever talked to or read about on the internet.

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.

I got a whole bunch of thirst traps again.

It doesn't bother me anymore, I just tune it out and scroll past it because my feed still has the parenting and pottery too, and my friend's updates, which is what I'm there for.

But it would be good for more people to learn about this so they don't get angry when they see their male-identified partners/friends feeds.

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.

I'm a parent in my 50's. "Peak Facebook" is years in the past for me. But it was great for a while. My spouse, friends, friends' spouses, and I were all sharing stories and pictures of our kids, travels, and experiences, such as dining experiences or hikes. There was so much joyous sharing. And it wasn't done for clicks, views, or monetization. It was just friends, sharing their experiences, encouraging each other, etc. It all just went away, starting with the husbands.

This is the tech version of "nobody I know voted for Nixon": FB's position in the US & Europe is very misleading from a global perspective.

In the Philippines, say, Facebook is the internet. Every business runs on it. People use it instead of news. Everybody uses Messenger to chat. You get free minutes with your phone that are specifically for FB/IG/Messenger.

Huh. I thought perhaps it was the usual "why are all the recommendation algorithms showing me gay porn?" class of complaint, but I went and logged in and it seems that he's not wrong though the degree seems to vary. I've got a bunch of these but also a bunch of outrage bait and generic general stuff. I think if you don't use the platform you get the undifferentiated high-engagement stuff which is likely the same as those Taboola chumboxes that people have on their websites.

EDIT: Hilariously, I went there 45 minutes later and I must have interacted with something because now everything is posts about football (along with the "i want an argument with my husband" post!). I'm in the Bay Area Gooners group but that's been over a decade, so presumably what happens is they don't run recommendations until someone shows activity. Just logging and browsing the feed must have triggered it because I didn't see any football stuff last time except BAG.

One theory I have for the degradation of facebook and just internet content/discussion/comments in general in the past 25 years have been the rapid change in the cultural demographic of global internet users.

late 90s to early 2000s, only highly developed economies made up most of the internet but as more emerging markets joined the ranks, they ultimately surpassed those that reached peak internet penetration much earlier.

A lot of these new dominant markets also happen to speak English well enough and in far greater numbers and with it carries the cultural/taste shifts.

Without naming specific countries, few social networks are eclipsed by just a few countries that joined the internet much later than the Western hemisphere (+non-English speaking developed economies).

Cultural norms, values, habits permeate through the internet simply put and the social media platforms are incentivized to reflect it even if the $/country is not aligned but through the sheer power of number and the increasingly unhealthy attachments to what is largely just an ephemeral digital number in a database inside air conditioned facility while the users complain about the heat.

I use Facebook a lot, but not for the social feed - Marketplace, business pages, and ads.

I’ve never interacted with their “shorts” feature, and it’s all young women and girls in as little clothing as they can manage. It’s to the point that I don’t open the Facebook app in public. Ridiculous.

This is not unique to Facebook. Reddit has seen a large uptick in AI-generated posts, or repeated posts from the past.

I think we need to recognize that social media of 2026 is not the same as what we had in 2006. AI generated content, regardless of if it is image, video, or text, is here to stay. And it will only get better and more convincing as the technology improves.

What people really need to ask is this - what do they want to get out of social media? Is it personal relationships and status updates? Is it entertainment? Is it something in between?

The harsh truth is most people at this point use social media for entertainment, and AI content is entertaining, or at least engaging, to most people. Remember that 54% of USA adults read below a 6th grade reading level [1]. It is not perfect, but it is convincing enough that a large enough number of people are beginning to accept it as "real".

[1]: https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...

The interface... Oh.. the terrible terrible UI on desktop...

Switch tabs, come back.. it refreshes everything and you can never go back.

Comment threads with 100+ comments with only a "show more" link, which again.. se previous paragraph.

See a video, click fullscreen icon. Doesn't go fullscreen, goes to some weird modal window, muted. Click fullscreen again..

And I'm sure I could go on... It's really a sad shell of the simplicity it once was.

I barely use facebook.com but I don't have this issue at all. I just checked - my news feed is filled with extended family posts, posts in groups I'm in and related things. TFA looks completely alien to me. I guess this is kind of an absurd local maxima you get with algorithms for rarely used accounts.

(disclaimer: I work at Meta)

My feed has devolved into AI generated propaganda with a scary amount of genuine support. Police brutality against minorities and other politically relevant groups; all fake but with hundreds of seemingly real replies cheering them on.

> (I dunno, maybe those are all bots too.)

I wish,

but from personal experience I'm afraid quite a bunch of them are creepy old guys which have no idea how creepy they have become(1), because they are in a bubble with mostly only other creepy old guys

(1): Like I don't mean people which always have been creepy or "secret/hidden" creepy. But people which through increasingly more "not caring" and echo champers/ad bubbles and similar twisting their world perception/social feedback loop have become increasingly more creepy in the last 10-20 years.

You are just not the target audience. Meta is a trillion dollar company and their algos are extremely optimized.

It probably detected your gender (male), age, location, social graph, as a combination of all these that you would be interested in AI-generated softcore pornography. And for the average user with your stats, they absolutely are.

Of course, nobody at Meta hardcoded their algorithm to do this: it’s just naturally found out the kind of content a person with your specs loves. Sorry, OP

Facebook messenger is so annoying to use too! My extended family group chat is there, but I had to turn off notifications because Facebook realized I only engage there and started serving me stories and updates from the messenger app as notifications! Right this second opening messenger it shows a “4” in the upper right, assumably with garbage notifications about things I don’t care about “happening” on Facebook. Luckily if something important actually happens my family knows to text me, so I read the group chatter at my leisure rather than being interrupted randomly.

This sounds like the feed of a single male. Facebook showing sleazy content/ads to single guys predates AI by a lot. Try removing your single relationship status from your profile and see what changes.

I login for the groups. Some private groups have a ton of useful info that's well organized, plus helpful folks that are eager to answer questions.

My aunt is in her late 70s. She is a retired public school teacher who taught for over 30 years. Over the years she spends a majority of her leisure her time glued to Facebook on her iPad, consuming whatever content is delivered by their algorithm. She's become MAGA and will not tolerate any criticism of any moral wrongdoing by the current president or members of his administration. It's unbelievable the turn.

> So long Facebook, see you never, until one day I inexplicably need to use your platform to get updates from my kid's school.

This part here kills me. I’ve also been forced to engage in the Zuckerverse. I hate WhatsApp.

Social media is mostly about what you make of it and how you interact to find value. This is the same in Twitter, TikTok, FB, Instagram, even LinkedIn.

If you don't interact with the product, you get lowest denominator crap.

We lost the Internet to AI. Just accept it. It's bots talking to bots about bots.

I think author goes on porn sites and it skews algo towards crap like that (no cookies/incognito/etc doesn't save you from them tracking where you move), especially if he's not active on fb then that's the only signal they get.

Instagram is gone as well. Everything is fake in different ways. If the video isn't ai generated, then it's influencers acting out a scenario they think will get engagement. I realized that when it's a real video, there is a caption that says some scenario is happening, but there is nothing in the video that shows that is real. I think people are just reposting videos with different captions and testing out whatever invented scenario make the video have the most views.

The first half of the last paragraph is a warning: Get schools to stop using Facebook. If they are showing that kind of content to a grown hetero-woman, I'd hate to wonder what they show to everyone else.

I never signed up to that site because I thought sooner or later Google or some startup would just clone it, lower the ad count, improve censorship, and run it at near break-even. Especially since you don't have to save every single post created for eternity.

I started laugh reacting at Russian propaganda and now all I get is Russian propaganda, literally half of my posts are third worlders falling for the Russia stronk west evil meme, and Russian embassies and consulates non-stop DARVOing. But before that it was indeed a constant flurry of thirst traps, ragebait, etc. I only keep using it for a couple of well moderated groups.

You just have to click on "Feeds" then you can filter to friends, groups, or pages you follow. That said they have been slowly burying where you can click on "feeds" to get there, so I just bookmark them. I never look at the main page it's just pure garbage.

I will say facebook ads are the most relevant ads ever for me. I click on them all the time because they're actually interesting to me. But at the same time all the products/clothing is so expensive I never convert.

What I dont like is Alerts becoming just another feed to fill with spam and not real notifications.

I don't know if author coined the term, but "Meta's Gooniverse" is a better descriptor of its properties than "Family of apps" they use in quarterly reporting.

Also something that frustrated me a lot is that when browsing with the web browser on a computer, there is absolutely no way to share a link to a post.

For exemple there is a post with details about an event that will happen, when you look at available options: you can't click on it to go to a dedicated page like on LinkedIn, there is no option in the menu to have a shareable link. You can share with: someone on fb message, a group, your wall, things like that but no link.

But on the phone is it possible.

I haven't used Facebook in probably a decade or so. I've missed out on Facebook Marketplace apparently - at least 5 people in this thread mention using Facebook for that specifically, and I have heard numerous friends talk about snagging good stuff person-to-person like I used to do with Craigslist. OTOH, I haven't heard anything especially good about Facebook Marketplace's UI or features, just that "everyone is on Facebook", so it reaches a lot of people.

I wonder what will be next after Facebook Marketplace dwindles (assuming eventually "everyone" is no longer on Facebook). Going back to Craigslist? Something new?

I remember Zuckzuck saying out loud that his vision for the platform was that people wouldn’t need actual humans to interact with, and bots is what you’d mostly get.

I’ve used it enough to understand this is happening now. Literally impossible to distinguish, unless you know the person.

Fb deserves huge credit for their 'reels' algorithm. I follow a bunch of science influencers, and their content frequently blows my mind, and it's just one great vid after another.

Something I would love is 'social media dotfiles', so I could export my list and share it with others. And vice-versa.

Also came across this today about how Meta is allotting 5% of ad spend on AI testing for Gen AI. Which leads to unintentional Gen AI promotions across Instagram and Facebook - mind you for companies who paid for the promotion.

https://bsky.app/profile/bexsaltsman.bsky.social/post/3me4yb...

> And I don't just mean that nobody uses it anymore. Like, I knew everyone under 50 had moved on

It will probably surprise a lot of people to learn that this isn't true.

A higher percentage of 30-49 year olds report using Facebook than in 50+ age groups

The bias toward younger generations is even higher when you include Instagram

One source https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media...

I think many in the Hacker News bubble stopped using it and assume everyone else did, too. It's not too surprising when you read articles like this that paint a completely different picture of the platform than what your friends and family are actually seeing when they use it, as evidenced by the multitude of reports in this comment section from people whose family and friends are still getting value out of the site.

Yeah, I have a Facebook that's about 2-3 years old now, and I use it mainly from Marketplace. But man, if I just accidentally go to the feed, it's just a bunch of spam and some sort of bait, whether it's rage bait or thirst traps or anything like that. Facebook is maybe trying to see if I'll engage with it, but mainly because I use the app for Marketplace, it just continues to recommend garbage.

Facebook is nothing but trash. Stopped using it way back in 2012

The current leader for me for worst questions suggested by Meta's AI was on a photo someone took of some conspiracy theorist's van with the spraypainted message "THEY EAT BABIES IN DENVER". The suggested questions from their AI were:

- Baby-eating restaurants in Denver

- Denver's unique food scene

wtaf meta.

Beyond that, I simply don't see how Meta can possibly ever monetize their investment in AI. People are and will continue to be willing to pay OpenAI, Anthropic, google, microsoft. No one will pay Meta for their AI. And if their investment was only a couple million and they got some useless suggested questions out of it, whatever. But the size of their investment sure makes it look like someone thinks they'll make money off of it.

Evidently there is such little real human content and engagement on these platforms yet how does the big number keep going up? Genuine question.

Do we need a way to audit usage stats in addition to financial numbers?

Facebook doesn't care about Facebook.com anymore. The value of their business is almost entirely in Instagram, with some future potential in WhatsApp.

I deleted my account in 2005 when I noticed that it wasn't just for getting to know local groups. Before I deleted it I was contacted by a pretty woman who had 100 friends who were all the same last name as me. That's all she wanted to do is contact people who were "related". I had the suspicion she was a bot. People call me stupid for doing so, but now it is just bots?

It's definitely cooked in the sense that the content is garbage, but whenever was that not true?

I'm hoping they're cooked because they're putting all of their eggs in the AGI basket instead of making useful AI products, and they probably won't figure out AGI.

I log into Facebook website a couple of times a week to browse Marketplace. I very rarely check the feed (once a month?) since almost no human I know posts there. But my feed has 0 thirst traps when I just checked. It was some musicians I follow, one or two pictures posted by friends, the workout routines from a distant family member, local news and then a whole bunch of comedy skits and old comic strips turned into reels.

It is 60% garbage but actually the 40% that is there is completely different and valuable compared even to YouTube (where I spend the lions share of my social media time). But I actually think that only looking at it once a month is the best way since if I look at the feed more often I notice it slowly skews more to 90% garbage and 10% value.

logged in after years away and had basically the same experience. the feed is just AI slop and engagement bait now, none of it from people I actually followed.

I agree with the people saying that the product is a lot better once you're actively engaging with pages that align with your interests, so that the algorithm can feed you better content.

That being said, it's still sad that this is the default new/returning user experience. Imagine a world where a new user was met with real posts about a variety of interests, rather than a psychic barrage of insane AI posts.

I was also surprised to find that Facebook feed ads are now ai chumbox quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox

I agree with most of this, but complaining about Yoleendadong is some "Old man yells at cloud" stuff.

My wife is a big fan, as she has a lot of funny content specific to Asian cultures. Yes, she has some relationship stuff too. You may not like her content, but she's got a few hundred thousand subscribers on Youtube, and 17 million on TikTok.

Change to chronologic timeline, and you'll be cured for your addiction superfast

Every so often my YouTube logs out and I’m exposed to the view a “random visitor” would see. Instantly visible because it’s filled with stupid content and sexual provocation.

I manage the shit out of FB and YouTube. You need to block a few things so it stops testing a few segment ideas.

My FB feed is filled with slag that's got nothing to do with anything I'm interested in, my friends or family. I have wade through 85-90% of that crap just to see a post from a friend inviting everybody to a BBQ they are having which is already 2 weeks past the event. Oh, and every time I log in I have 10+ unread notifications that again are more desperate attempts at getting me to engage with the platform and not actually something that should have ever been sent as a notification.

FUCK THAT.

So I don't use Facebook. I cannot wait for this house of cards to collapse in on itself.

The original moltbook. Just bots talking to each other.

I'm 70. Most of my high school and college friends are on Facebook, and some other friends. So I use it (including its Messenger component) a lot to keep in touch! I know it's a generational thing. Just thought I'd mention it.

See I don’t scroll; not scrolling means not seeing the junk. I just post and log off.

It's not just facebook. Every social network under Meta is infected with bot. Facebook look worse because there are so few real users.

Facebook IS just veiled ads to OF pron subscriptions.

I stopped when it started showing propaganda from the CCP (at least it was clearly labelled as such). https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/chinese-state-... https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1i67ja9/whats_going_...

It was already slop before that.

I recently joined back to Facebook to follow some local groups. I barely see anyone I know posting on Facebook anymore. Even the local group seems kind of dead considering how many people live here.

So where are people now? If I want to get informed on local events, etc., where should I go?

The AI slop problem is not going away, unfortunately. Its surprising that the social media companies don't see AI slop as an existential threat to their platform? I guess its an indicator of how low we've sunk that 'any' engagement is good engagement.

If it was up to me, I think AI content should be OPT IN. I must choose to view AI content and not be force fed from the conveyor of slop. This is where governments should legislate but we'll never see this happen.

Why do people still complain about fb. FB has been this way for years..

I think the key here is engagement is based a lot on content quantity, not quality. If your feed doesn't have a lot of natural quantity associated with it then FB will find something to stuff in there. The reality is that most people don't have a lot of quantity on their feeds from their friends so that means they get the AI slop to fill the void. At least that is my complete guess on a root cause of (some) of the FB slop. I haven't logged in for 6 months and I am now checking it 1-2 times a year because the last few times I logged on it was pushing hate content at me.

I still use Groups and Marketplace but my home feed is blocked thanks to News Feed Eradicator. Check it out if you haven't heard of it. It's a browser extension that can block the home feed (and more) for a number of social sites.

I'm definitely not a "fan" of Facebook or anything, though I do use it and make a few interactions per day -- based on this blog post I think the reason why his dashboard was full of trash & slop was simply because he hasn't logged in for 8 years. If you have no interactions in 8 years (and people you friend/follow are also gone from the platform) they will resort to showing you this crap.

I honestly do not care if Facebook is cooked or goes away -- but I doubt the situation is that bad.

You guys are lucky most of mine are scam ads and ragebait

Great post, it's not just you, my feed is exactly the same. Short FCBK stocks.

What I don't understand is how FB and Insta are just full of spam (from spammers, not Meta AI) now. It used to be that FB was the absolute best at getting rid of spam and now they appear to be overcome by it?

Very predictable: If Facebook (or any other social media site) showed you what you wanted to see --- stuff from your friends --- you would be satisfied and leave.

... but Facebook makes money off ads. They don't want you leaving. They want you to stay online all day.

Instead, they show you brainrot: content interesting enough to keep you on the site, but shallow enough that you are always thirsty for more. However, making this content is still a lot of work, and isn't what most people want to do: It takes a lot of brainrot to keep you trapped 24/7.

Slop requires no effort, costs next to nothing, and fills the "brainrot" niche perfectly. Facebook doesn't care that people are posting bot content, because it's the perfect thing to make them money.

I use Facebook for marketplace and when I logged in the first post I saw was the half time score for a football game that happened 3 weeks ago.

They are not sending their best.

AI slop has me very worried for the future of the Internet at large. I was toying around with the idea of a "new Internet" that is devoid of AI generated content, but enforcing that would be borderline impossible. Sadly, it seems like the genie is out of the bottle; I feel like I see AI generated content everywhere I go.

It's a complete mystery to me how Facebook operates. Like, they need money to keep the lights on, right? Where is the money coming from if no humans are using the platform?

The default experience probably sucks, but I aggressively block anything even mildly annoying on my Facebook newsfeed, and I like what's left:

Mostly Simpsons memes, Seinfeld memes, Pro Wrestling memes, Sopranos memes, and then intersections of those memes (Seinfeld Pro Wrestling, Simpsons Pro Wrestling, etc.). Some nerd shit. Stuff from the handful of friends of mine and local groups I interact with who still post on Facebook. Maybe <1% total garbage like what the article describes but I immediately block any groups or users who post anything even slightly annoying. I almost never watch any video content at all. It's unironically better passive content than anywhere else left on the web, probably because all the people trying to be hip have gone somewhere else lol

However whatever their UI is sluggish as hell and I'm surprised this wasn't discussed. You'll click block user/group and it will respond multiple seconds later (on my symmetric 1Gbps FIOS connection) and UI elements will jump around. FB messenger is slow as shit and occasionally will fail to decrypt/load messages entirely, even though it works fine on my phone (don't have regular FB on my phone so can't make that comparison). There's an anti-performance cargo-cult among web devs. Perhaps their metrics only show what it saves them on server costs. But if I did not already use the site it would be impossible to convince me to start.

I have a similar experience on both FB and IG.

I only log in to see what friends/family are doing, and I have fewer than 100 friends on both added together, but I have to scroll and scroll to see anything by those I am interested in.

Whether it's AI or not, it's all irrelevant slop to me.

This dynamic carries into Threads, where Meta AI slop is aggressively pushed in the feed.

There's also a significant amount of viral content that is clearly an older person's Facebook post which was intended for only friends but got pushed to the public feed of a Threads account that may have been created by accident -- or default -- when Facebook blitz-scaled user numbers after launch. The posts are always hundreds of people piling on about someone posting a photo of their teenager in an embarrassing situation, with the original poster probably blissfully unaware that they're getting publicly dragged on Threads.

Check your parents' phones to see if they're publicly cross-posting on accident!

My main use case for FB is a group related to reviewing restaurants in the area. I have no FB friends/connections. I use messenger for my one friend who insists on using it. It is mostly slop (and strangely I get posts from that same relationship account), I scroll for about 5 minutes at a time before I realize it is not worth looking at. And truthfully, that is what I want from social media: a few minutes worth of distraction followed by the feeling that I had just wasted my time and then on to something more meaningful.

My facebook feed is mostly low-effort reposted memes from tumblr/twitter/reddit, political ragebait, and screenshots of jokes from TV shows.

It's usually not AI (at least not obviously) but it's still slop.

Fb purity browser addon helps, though its ui is quite cryptic.

One thing I've noticed is a large difference between what's served on Facebook's desktop site and what's served on their mobile version. I don't use the app, I just log into facebook.com on my phone, but the mobile version is serving 100% more of this AI slop than on desktop.

I think it's obvious why given the way users interact with sites/apps on their devices vs on desktop (they want to make FB mobile as TikTok-like as possible), but it's really striking how much of Facebook on mobile is just a bunch of AI slop at this point. I see some creep in on desktop too, mostly within the Reels/Shorts section (same creators/videos on both platforms, that is), but to see my recommended feed content be so vastly different indicates a lot to me about how the algorithm interprets user behavior and a lot of Meta's thinking about mobile audiences.

EDIT: mind you I don't follow a single topic or favorite anything on the platform, the content being served/recommended to me is purely based (as far as I can tell) on gender/demographic info they know about me and user behavior.

Hating on Facebook had always been cool. It's like "not even owning a tv". Is it cooked though? I'm over 50 and it has a lot of value for me. Marketplace, local happenings and keeping in touch with family are all well served.

Could this also be related to Facebook killing messenger.com (i.e. they are no longer running a charity so they need all users to be on the main site now to consume the slop)?

They're crushing it with anyone over 45

Facebook is still has excellent marketplace

Only that keeps me going back.

Instagram is serving me literal porn when I browse shorts (for instance women showing their private parts). It's amazing that they are unable or maybe don't want to block it.

Facebook basically has sexual content spam as in the OP article all the way.

It's to the point I'd never open either app when in public.

I declined when "facesmash", whatever, was invitation only, and am only now considering how to set up an advertising presence there, sortof, as I am overwhelmed with customers wanting things made, so may just stay on page 7 of search, and just keep answering the phone

>But on the other hand, I hadn't logged in in nearly a decade!

This is the cause. With a long dormant account, facebook has no real content to show you. Your friends will almost all be dormant as well, even the facebook pages and groups you were part of are likely to have fallen silent. Facebook will feed you directly from the slop firehose rather than show you a blank feed.

I have a theory about facebook (and youtube!) showing absolute garbage recommendations.

Somewhere, there's an algorithm designed to increase engagement. And it doesn't care what kind of engagement, so clicking the "I'm not interested in this garbage" button is just as engaging as liking or watching or commenting.

Holy crap. What a dystopia. Guess some of this blood money went into free Llama models and the react.js ecosystem (dubious gift to the world).

Is it possible to make money these days without being ethically bankrupt?

This is exactly the same experience I've had. I recently re-installed the app to use marketplace after moving to the US. My feed is mostly AI generated half naked women and AI generated conservative rage bait. It is so obvious that it's AI slop, but none of the comments ever mention it. I too assumed they were bots.

This could be true, and/or a large percentage of the people who spend a large amount in the economy are on these platforms.

The surprising effectiveness of Meta Ads for certain audiences as counter-intuitive as it seems is one example.

What happens when you log on to Facebook with uBlock Origin (not lite), plus EFF Privacy Badger, with appropriate settings, enabled? Is it possible to get to a state where some/most of these Facebook-suggested items are not visible? Or is there no separation between the promoted/artificial and organic (if I can use that term) content?

I wouldn't know myself; I tried Facebook in... I think 2010 or so, but found it to be highly addictive and not worth it, so I quit after several weeks. Since then, while I knew that I occassionaly missed some useful group to be in, I've not regretted the decision.

Another aspect of FB's decline: it's increasingly buggy. Too many issues to list, but curious if others have noticed this as well? Last week I got stuck trying to login via mobile web, kept approving the login via the mobile app but the web never seemed to receive that approval and I just had to give up.

I just logged in to mine to see, I also can't remember the last time I looked at my news feed. My experience isn't quite as bad as OPs, but certainly plenty of AI slop and lots and lots of accounts that I don't follow and have never heard of.

I would really like to see the daus for Facebook that primarily interact with their feed. Not marketplace or messenger just the core of the platform.

> I know Twitter/X has worse problems with spam bots in the replies, but this is the News Feed!

Probably not using it from ages.

beautiful

I can sympathize with this take, but I think it misses the point: the platform is not broken. It's delivering people precisely what they want. If you look at the version of this for young people - TikTok, Snapchat stories - it's the same thing. Busty models, increasingly AI generated, and various made-up "heartwarming stories" or rage bait. Go to YouTube, and you have more of the same.

This is not even an internet-era thing. Before that, some of the best-selling magazines were basically celebrity gossip. Facebook just found a way to scale it and make more money off of it.

The only thing that surprises me now is that people don't actually mind it if you point out that they're liking, commenting, or resharing AI slop. It doesn't even matter that the story wasn't real. It's enough that the kitten is cute, or whatever.

> I logged on for the first time in ~8 years

That's the problem. Your friends and liked pages have all moved on and aren't posting anymore. The algorithm has no idea what to show you.

FWIW I don't use Facebook actively but do log in once in a while, mainly for marketplace and neighborhood groups. And a ton of my friends are still active there (might be giving away my age). The first post on my feed not from a friend is at #14, and it's a clip from a comedian, so content I don't mind. Then one at #18, which is an article posted by a local newspaper. Further down at #25 or so from the onion. Keep scrolling I see New York Times, Gothamist, Subway Takes, Cracked (that's still around?), WTA. Overall my feed is almost entirely posts from my friends from the last week or relevant news, and I see zero AI slop or other posts of the kind that are in the article.

So basically - it's all about the algorithm and your connections. A "cooked" product doesn't make a trillion dollars every quarter.

I never opened an account. For me facebook was like this from day 1. I thought it was cooked in 2009. I guess I was somewhat wrong.

what comes after facebook?

I nuked my fb account years ago. I wasn't sure at the time if I was craving more substance or if it was becoming more vapid. Looking back not... definitely both.

They capitulated to TikTok by adding thirst content and suggested content based on activity.

This amounts to an anecdote and an opinion. What are the actual engagement numbers? I suspect Facebook is doing just fine.

My own anecdotes are that Facebook Groups tend to be the nexus of legacy social features and that Marketplace has overtaken Craigslist for person to person sales.

But the feed is now more akin to TikTok than friend feed 1.0 from the late 2000s.

Again, I’d love to see actual Facebook engagement data, not some guy’s opinion.

I mean... I've been a Facebook user since 2006 and I don't see much spam at all in my feed. So I guess like PaulHoule said, it's a cold start problem and the defaults are terrible.

If you want to see your friends posts, you have to click the icon of people. I agree that the default feed has become absolute garbage.

My feed isn't as bad as this one, mostly current events, tech, music, politics which are my interests. Trolls/ai/bots are everywhere, but so are people callling it out, so if anything I would guess engagement is up. To be fair, my politics seems to be around 60/40 agree/disagree with my political preference which I actually think is a massive improvement over what it used to be which was 90% agreeable to me. I enjoy engaging on pages of the opposing view.

I can't understand how such AI slop ca make money on FB or TikTok. I mean hardly anything gets viral.

Anything like that faces a "cold start" problem when they don't have data about you.

I got a lot of that kind of stuff when I started a new Facebook account but once I got my friends and family on and joined some sports photography groups I am usually greeted by (1) photos of varying quality that people took of a high school basketball game, (2) something family members are doing, (3) some friends outraged about the Trump administration... With helpings of AI slop cat videos and other trash.

Meta obviously believes that those kind of images of women will get engagement and I know I get DMs that appear to be from women like that every time I get on a new platform -- usually I don't respond, or lead them out until they reveal what they are, though I am tempted to say "I am only interested in 2.5-d girls"

Instagram has those blonde women too, but I was impressed with the "cold start" experience on Instagram where my feed was filled with some really incredible videos that must have been hand selected. After a few days of engagement farming though I wound up connected to a lot of South Asians including rather modest Muslim and Hindu women who project a fashionable image without showing a lot of skin. I didn't have a lot of success connecting with people in my immediate area until I started going out as-a-fox and handing out tokens with QR codes.

> Why do women feel refreshed after arguments

This sort of thing is perfect ragebait that Facebook et al love to serve to their products.

The only problem for FB is that there's nowhere to angrily contradict. I suppose their algo feed shunted this author into the young male to incel radicalization pipeline? They must serve differently enraging suggested questions once they have more data on the viewer.

"Facebook is just clickbait slop and is making billions" is more the opposite of cooked. They managed to turn garbage into dollars, and people are eating it up for as long as they're allowed to do exploit their market position.

Just reminder that when Meta stock went to ~90 in late 2022 we had non-stop “Facebook is dead I don’t know anyone that uses it lol” posts on reddit, hackernews, etc. The stock is ~650 today.

We are not the target audience.

Zuckerberg is what I might refer to as "forced" network effects. And I don't mean the natural network effects that result from people using a good and hence popular product (or network effects building on itself). Facebook replaced people's emails in their profiles with fb.com addresses, the company lied to people about privacy forever but especially with the former it's the site that actively tries to take you over. I despise Google, but Gmail wasn't like this (and supposedly Facebook would actively delete posts linking to its competition, in the early days - and maybe not so early days)

My point in this somewhat rambly post is it's always been a spammy mess and Zuck's never had an interest in making a good product. For him it's literally about domination

And PS: yeah, I know. With Chrome Google is apparently trying to dictate standards in a similarly cynical way

Unfortunately there's still two things bringing me back to Facebook: Marketplace and the neighbourhood group (populated by mostly boomers)

I sometimes use marketplace, it works better than craigslist for finding cheap firewood logs, used car parts, and other random shit. I made a burner account for that. It worked fine and I was able to ignore the rest of their garbage products. However, I had to delete the app from my phone because the fucking thing wouldn't stop with the notifications. BTW if any of you assholes work at Uber or Lyft--same problem. My new pattern for using this garbage, and only when I absolutely must, is:

(1) download the app (2) use it for whatever i need to get done (3) delete it

TBH this article is interesting, I haven't actually looked at fb since I last had an account ca. 2009. It was headed that way then, and I'm not surprised it got there.

But back to the usage pattern above, if someone at Apple is listening please build a sandbox for these malicious apps that just fucking silences them unless I choose to run it by which I mean literally not a single CPU instruction of their code runs unless I explicitly tell it to. Thanks.

It's garbage now it's main purpose is to confuse older people with ai slop or ragebait them with politics.

It's really unfortunate that these people don't know, don't understand or even don't believe that this is algoritmic feed tailored specifically for you.

I have people in my family which basically believe that there is a pride march every Tuesday in cities around or country.

For me Facebook is no longer relevant for friend stuff. But I find it pretty good in group stuff. For example their are groups about my town where I live. Historical groups or modern ones. Or a group about a specific car model I own. I just have to filter out all the ai / porn slop that goes into my feed.

Facebook in particular, and social media in general, is an excellent example of making short-term decisions ultimately leading to your doom.

FB of course started as a way for college kids to follow each other and see what's going on. Then rather than a chronological feed we got the newsfeed. This was hugely controversial, actually. Apparently ~10% of the user base threatened to quit over it [1].

But why did they do it? Because it increased engagement. And every social media platform since has followed the newsfeed model.

But the big thing (IMHO) that led to FB's destruction was sharing links. I bet this too increased engagement but it ultimately leads to your feed being flooded with your weird uncle posting conspiracy theories.

All social media platforms have moved away from this idea of following your friends and family. They're all now a way of disseminating "news" and following celebrities. How social groups keep in touch now is group chats.

I firmly believe this recommendation model is headed for a reckoning with governments around the world. We have the Meta trial going on now, the EU investigating platforms for addictive practices (where is this same smoke for sports betting and crypto gambling I wonder?) and so on.

In the US, this comes back to Section 230, a law established in the 1990s that created legal cover for user generated content because it shielded platforms from legal liability as long as they met certain requirements (eg moderation, legal takedowns). The alternative is to be a publisher (eg a newspaper) who are responsible for their content.

I believe that the algorithmic newsfeed has created a way to let social media platforms act as publishers but enjoy thei protections of being a platform.

Let me put it this way: if, for example, you as a publisher make endless posts about the evils of Cuba, how is that different from having user-generated content where you promote anti-Cuba content and suppress pro-Cuba content? In my opinion, it isn't, functionally. This will ultimately come to a head.

Anyway, back to Facebook, I know some still use groups but really who uses FB anymore? For awhile, Meta had the golden goose with IG but even that seems to be in decline. Twitter has declined way from its peak and was never mainstream. Snapchat enjoyed a very young audience for ephemeral messaging. I have no idea what the current state is. It seems like Tiktok is the only platform still enjoying growth.

[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/4018352/facebooks-news-feed-just...

I'm on FB primarily because my local buy-nothing group is on it, so I am logging in multiple times a day. I'm so used to this slop it's pretty funny at this point, but as is the case with all social media, you tune your algorithm as you engage. At this point it pushes things like cooking videos and hockey clips more than the AI slop for me.

Sometimes I'll go down a rabbit hole of clicking AI generated videos just because my curiosity is piqued, and then I'll be stuck getting that slop fed to me for the next week. I have to make a mental note to actively disengage with it as quickly as possible to tip the algo in the other direction.

all the AI / crap shown in this post is the not awful part of facebook.

the awful part is the intense swarm of hateful bigots that arrive at any post that shows any kind of misfortune on the part of people who are not white and republican. I'm pretty sure that a large number of these accounts are not bots; they're real people living around the country, seething in bigoted hatred who can now post with impunity the most vile and disgusting crap I've ever seen.

Example: A local news post shows three boys who have been reported missing (yes, people's children missing, and no, this is not about immigration - for those posts, the hate and racism is vastly worse). The three boys happen to be Black. Only one comment is actually displayed beneath the photo: "They all look the same to me!" - then more (I'm cutting and pasting these from the actual post just now): "Tell them by their hair??? No???" "How can you tell one from another?" "Did'n do nuffin man" "Missing or escaped!?" comments flooded by revolting, actual racism, against innocent children who are potentially in severe danger. Moderation is not an option at all here, there's thousands of these people swarming any such post, the posts are from some local news source that comes from an aggregator of some kind that does no moderation of any kind, nobody cares, it's just a huge platform for vast mobs of the most deplorable people you ever hoped didn't exist.

This site needs to be closed down like yesterday.

It's your feed.

Everyones feed is different.

It depends on how much you train the algorithm.

Yours is untrained, therefore slop.

Man who remembers when a big Mac was a wholesome and tasty meal option now shocked to find that, under capitalism, the wrapper is actually more nutritious than the meal itself.

Facebook is just fine.

This is mostly about OP, not Facebook. The reason he sees tons of AI images of AI girls is because that's the kind of content he consumes on various Meta platforms. When I login to Facebook, I see none of that. So...

I am in a couple dozen active groups across a variety of topics - guitar, tech, TV shows, history, tabletop gaming, etc. - and 99% of posts are on-topic chatter by humans.

I prefer Reddit because it's longer-form content but with communities, it's about where there's a center of gravity - a subreddit, a FB group, a Discord, a traditional forum, etc. I go where the people are. And a lot of those people are on FB for some niches.

The "FB is nothing but AI slop and ads" is a myth. I have interesting conversations with people I don't personally know (in a real life sense) on FB every day.

>Click to show mildly sensitive content (revealing clothing)

Those warnings are stupid.