Facebook is cooked

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.

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)?

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

Mine is just bizarre. I logged in a few months ago just to peek and it was AI generated conspiritainment brain rot about aliens and the Illuminati and Nazi UFOs. I found it kind of hilarious but also horrifying. Lots of fake archaeology pics, very obviously AI.

Different people seem to get different forms of brain rot. Last my wife checked it was political rage bait. My mom gets AI cat video slop.

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.