I remember when you could go on Facebook and look through your feed at what your friends are saying, catch up with them, and browse posts that they have made. Now, it’s just completely random and chaotic, almost nonsensical. There’s no logical sense to my Facebook feed at all. As you can see in the image, they are showing me stuff that I’m not even following. This is not even something that I am actively a part of! It’s some random group. So what’s the point of following a group or liking a page, if they’re just going to show you random stuff anyway?
Like, wtf happened to this website?
For the same reasons that everything else is “enshittified” – It’s produced by people seeking maximum profits for minimum effort, and consumed by people who aren’t discerning enough to care.
When I saw this post I tried to block the profile
Facebook still has that but they obscured it in favor of their dumb algorithm whipping up totally random things and ads.
To get to it click the 3 lines or ‘more’, then find ‘feeds’ and select that, then choose groups or friends or whatnot, and it’ll show you those posts sorted by most recent. No way to make this default.
But the algorithm is so dumb because it takes into account how long you pause on a post and seems to weigh that higher than other things - for example if you see an ad you hate, for like a slot machine game app, and you click ‘see less ads like this’, the amount of time you spend clicking through menu options while on that ad will make the algorithm give you more ads tangentially related to slot machine apps, despite you basically saying “I hate these kind of ads”. Really dumb algorithm. Even reporting some fly-by-night obvious scam ad impersonating a brand will lead you to see only those type of scam ads. Really really dumb.
Even you pausing over the post you did in order to take a screenshot, that’ll make you see more of those types of things
I hear you saying that the only way to win is to not play the game.
That isn’t a win either. I have a number of distance friends that I wouldn’t hear about outside of facebook. I don’t live near my old high school, but it is nice to see what is going on. I wouldn’t have found out about that Ed died in a motercycle accident if it wasn’t for facebook, but it is nice to know. I wouldn’t see all those cute back to school pictures - they would be happy to show me over lunch but we don’t live close enough to have lunch together. Facebook has much usefulness for keeping connected to distant friends/family (close friends/family I will call)
example if you see an ad you hate, for like a slot machine game app, and you click ‘see less ads like this
You engaged with that ad. It’s worth slightly more than if you scrolled by it.
It may be what you say, the algorithm being dumb. Or it may be deliberate: you’ve shown yourself willing to categorize these annoying ads so you will be sent more so that fb can collect more data on them.
Abandoning is the only option. It’s a dopamine casino now, full of flashing lights.
To get to it click the 3 lines or ‘more’, then find ‘feeds’ and select that
Oh, wow… I recently opened fb again and was just irritated that it didn’t show any posts by my friends. Turns out they weren’t inactive, fb just doesn’t show them by default. What a dumb waste of a platform… I mean, what is it good for if not that? Why would I watch an endless stream of ads and clickbait?
It’s because you’re still supporting them. That crap you see puts money in Zucker’s pocket. Delete your account and it will stop.
The goal was always that the user would be the product. It was less clear at the beginning, because the advertising was far less intrusive (if you even saw an ad at all, in the early days), and the service was “free” at a time when the internet was comparatively young. So it gained a lot of popularity from novelty and being an actually useful communication tool.
But the communication tool portion was always a side effect of data collection. Any “free” service is ultimately just getting value from you in different ways. In the case of Facebook, once it had amalgamated enough data, the flood gates opened and the enshittification was extremely rapid. It will never go back to the way it was for many reasons, not the least of which being: it was designed to be the cesspool it is now.
Ultimately, all these seemingly random posts are an attempt to get you to continue to interact with the platform. If you read through comments on such posts, they do tend to drive engagement, even if it is just a user going “why is this in my feed?”
Deleted it years ago
It’s still there.
facebook keeps pushing ‘vegans are evil’ and ‘lets make milk mean raw milk again’ posts on me.
Just… stop. let me enjoy my friends and groups
They keep feeding me astronomy-related videos, but only the ones with flat-earthers and Jesus-botherers in the comments.
High interaction is all that matters.
I thought it has been this way for like… a decade?
Not really. There were plenty of random pages, but you really had to seek it out to see it. Now an overwhelming majority of non-ad posts are stuff like this (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pay to have this stuff seen, basically making it an ad)
I guess I’ve been away from Facebook long before this started showing up.
When I quit Facebook over 10 years ago it was because it stopped showing me my friends’ posts and pushed random crap instead. I literally had to go friends’ profiles to see their posts even when checking the feed several times a day.
Looks like nothing changed?
I’m pretty sure people in general stopped posting there, so they just shove this crap on there because otherwise it’d be an elephant graveyard
Empty Internet Theory but its just the “Recommended For You” stuff that Facebook shoehorns in between the pictures of my nieces that I occasionally drop in to look at.
Its funny. When you go into some of the early Facebook history, Zuckerberg is exploring monitization options. He floats the idea of turning it into the kind of intrusive, obnoxious, ads-everywhere experience that had shown up on local news websites and the worst kinds of forum spaces. He (supposedly) rejects it, in pursuit of a more sophisticated kind of mass marketing. The theory being that this kind of invasive content scares away users, and what we really want is to maximize the user base rather than to maximize the monetary value of each user.
But ten years later, we’re right back to a website that’s indistinguishable from eye-ball gouging Geocities crap. The “put ads everywhere to maximize revenue” folks won out in the end. Zuckerberg’s genius move was to simply hold them back until the website started hitting the post-one-billion user base load. But then this was always the end game. Just clickbait across everything, with a periodic pop-over ad demanding that you give the site money to save it from itself.
@Raiderkev @UnderpantsWeevil Is it genius or is it capitalism’s end game, where any square inches of potential profit has to be seized in order to satisfy the “forever growth” mantra leading companies to shitify their products with ads/subscriptions/… .
Now?
The default is an enshittified feed that shows you algorithm-chosen content. To see the old version of facebook, tap the menu in the upper right corner, then select feeds, then select friends.
I’ve been going there less and less lately. They started putting ads in the notifications section as well.
lol “now.”
It wasn’t that bad several years ago, I remember during the pandemic, lots of people were interacting with each other. It gets progressively worse every year.
Aw, I remember Facebook.
It’s been a long, long time since facebook has been like you are describing.
It’s been ads, and old uncle facebook fox news memes for a while. Lately they’ve been filling it with AI pictures and bot farmed memes. Gotta admit the memes have gotten slightly better, or at least slightly more targeted as of late.
Anyway, my point was, it’s been shit for a decade
