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I don't mind the ads, I mean I know that's how FB pays the bills.

It's the suggested pages, 3 or 4 at a time, taking up half my feed. And yeah are some pages I might like but thank you I have enough Star Trek stuff in my feed. And while I am of the right age and demographic I will pass on Lion-O's Dank Thunder Meme Stash if you don't mind.

They're all just party crashers in my mind.

I don't mind the people you might know or pages you might like bits, but adding strangers to my stream is just not acceptable!

MARG!

Does your feed also loop the same 10 comments over and over again for days while ignoring new and relevant posts by friends and family?

I keep getting the same post (from a trading group) at the top of my feed, and the rest of it posts from days ago...

It’s gotten worse since they stopped letting us default to Latest Posts.

You can still do it, but it’s a one-off thing.

I tell you, if it wasn’t for my Loot Group and the gaming club I joined the other day, I’m not sure I’d bother.

Its terrible content, terrible search, terrible to actually get to what its alerts are referring to. If my wargame club wasn't on it I wouldn't use it.

It's the clickbait stories I hate the most. The (insert outrageous story here) with pic. Even if you want to read it it's NEVER in the article.

I have FB primarily for messenger for some friends and family. One time it had a story about a pro wrestler from the 80s and I was trying to remember who it was so I looked at the story. The next three months were constant stream of pro-wrestling pages filling up the site.

It seems to have replaced forums for wargaming communication, so sadly stuck with it. Aside from all the complaints above, I also get irritated by the algorithm giving me sports posts and articles 3-5 days after the match in question has occurred.

Reject modernity, embrace forums.

I do not use it at all, I just use messenger to talk to family. It's awful, the suggested posts just take over everything, it's the worst part of social media these days. The entire idea was that you could essentially curate your feed so that you could see the things you wanted to see, no have an algorithm suggest utter dross.

As the user experience declines I wondered how the company is doing, a worse user experience is usually a sign of a struggling company trying to monetize every inch of its property.

So I checked, FB made $39 billion last year, so you can see why they're pushing to make more money.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Does your feed also loop the same 10 comments over and over again for days while ignoring new and relevant posts by friends and family?

Hah yeah mine keeps doing that!

And yes I hate having to constantly go to the comments to tell it to show me everything instead of the few that it "thinks" I want to read.


Honestly it seems Google/Youtube and FB have all turned a corner ni the last 5-10 years that has progressively made their search and display worse and worse. Personally I'm convinced its a combination of bots, a desperation to maximise ad revenue and a shift in human behaviour that has resulted in people just following what the algorithms show, which causes the algorithms to show the same type of thing more and more. The result of which is a positive feedback loop where designers think they are giving people more of what they want because people engage with it more; but that's because its all they are giving people to engage with and a LOT of people are too lazy to search for more (which is then heavily hindered by the search systems not showing many results).
Layered on top I'm willing to bet various blocks of "human behaviour data" is actually bot behaviour as bot detection and bot creation constantly battle each other. So it wouldn't shock me if a huge chunk of the data is based on bots doing bot things to boost channels and so forth with abnormal patterns of behaviour.


Ergo its gone from following and aiding human behaviour to defining human behaviour whilst patting itself on the back that its still doing the former.

i'm fairly certain banishing an item from my feed is counted as 'interacting' with it, thus making more and more of the same annoying nonsense show up

but hey, at least FB is more usable than X/Twitter

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
i'm fairly certain banishing an item from my feed is counted as 'interacting' with it, thus making more and more of the same annoying nonsense show up

but hey, at least FB is more usable than X/Twitter

Banishing/ignoring things either tends to make the system think you love it or (more often) makes it think you HATE that content. Thus it doesn't just remove it from your feed, it wants to remove all other instances of that content/creator from your feed (esp on youtube). So suddenly you go from ignoring one thing from someone one time to never getting any updates from them ever.



Steam "kind of" does this with their library news reel in that if you've a game you don't interact with for a while, Steam stops telling you news regarding it. So a game can have a semi-major update and you have no clue its happened.

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
i'm fairly certain banishing an item from my feed is counted as 'interacting' with it, thus making more and more of the same annoying nonsense show up

but hey, at least FB is more usable than X/Twitter

Sort of. . . If you use any of the reaction buttons prior to banishing, yes, FB will push that crap even more.

What I've noticed is, every few weeks they'll reset or redo the algorithm. . . Basically, I'll go from having almost no sponsored/forced ads inside my feed (a particular thing I fething loathe, I get you "need" ads, but put them off to the side or something), to at the beginning of a week it will be 30+% of my entire feed. Seemingly every other post will be some sponsored ad or sponsored page. My personal tactic is to report every single one of them. Every. Single. One. its either spam/scam, sexually explicit, or just offensive if I can't be bothered. In my mind its a case of "you waste my time with this gak, I waste your time"


When I got some of the megachurches in the US as "sponsored ads" I made the mistake of leaving the angry react. . . . which then flooded my feed with more gakky megachurch bs. So, if you truly want stuff gone, you just report it/banish it, but DO NOT HIT A REACT BUTTON!!!!

I keep getting religious stuff in my feed. I think it’s getting info from YouTube, as I have an interest in apologetics and the discussion there on, but am otherwise happily atheist.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I keep getting religious stuff in my feed. I think it’s getting info from YouTube, as I have an interest in apologetics and the discussion there on, but am otherwise happily atheist.

It will pull from youtube, google, your search history - anything it can get its hands on.
Also even if you turn things off you can bet its a whole rafter of settings that turn themselves on again next time something gets a refresh/update

Yeah. Given the stuff I sometimes need to Google for my job, I’m bound to be on someone’s watch list.

Still, it means I’m a prime target for Obvious Crypto Scam, which I report to FB.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I keep getting religious stuff in my feed. I think it’s getting info from YouTube, as I have an interest in apologetics and the discussion there on, but am otherwise happily atheist.

It could also be your interest in wargaming. I started getting ads for far right “anti-tyranny” tactical gear and Norse rune jewelry shortly after joining a couple of wargaming groups. Those are definitely not things I looked at on YouTube.


Edit: and no, Dreamforge wasn’t one of them.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I keep getting religious stuff in my feed. I think it’s getting info from YouTube, as I have an interest in apologetics and the discussion there on, but am otherwise happily atheist.

It could also be your interest in wargaming. I started getting ads for far right “anti-tyranny” tactical gear and Norse rune jewelry shortly after joining a couple of wargaming groups. Those are definitely not things I looked at on YouTube.


Edit: and no, Dreamforge wasn’t one of them.

I mean, YouTube (and Google in general, by extension) has a pretty well documented history of quickly dumping hard right content on people after doing, well, pretty much anything on the website. Doesn't surprise me that Facebook does the same, especially given they're all buying your info from each other to refine their advertising algorithms.

The more social media spirals out if control, the more I miss the old Internet, before social media platforms had really started. Back when it was forums and people's own random Web pages. Those where the equivalent of the Wild West period in USA. Short lived, but very energetic. Now it is sguffinf lore and more to a sanitised corporate medium.

I've been getting 'content exhaustion' issues on my phone. After a couple of refreshes or FB, and scrolling down 20-30 pages, it stops and gives an error, and doesn't show any more. Once that happens, it'll take hours before it lets me scroll more than that 20+ pages down.
This is just since the start of this year.

This is course a perfect example of “engakification”. Which is a proper word now.

What used to be a fun and useful way to keep up with friends and family, is now a corporate hellhole devoted solely to making a ridiculously wealthy man even wealthier.

We’re kind of seeing the same thing with Streaming. Amazon now carries ads (nowt too annoying thus far, but if it could figure out I Don’t Care About Sport, that’d be great), and prices are only going up, ads or not.

I quit facebook a decade ago, and I don't miss it at all. I'd hardly been using it before that.

But lots of the stuff I used to find on forums and blogs seems to have moved onto it sadly. I recently decided to make "burner" account to join some of those groups, but I realised that making an email nowadays pretty much REQUIRES your phone number. I went with Protonmail but then they had a go at me for using it to try to sign up to Facebook and wouldn't show me the confirmation email.

Honestly pretty shocked at how restrictive and invasive the major services have gotten, it's much worse than I thought.

 Da Boss wrote:
I quit facebook a decade ago, and I don't miss it at all. I'd hardly been using it before that.

I shadow quit. I couldn't delete my account because (believe it or not) Uncle Sam is a heavy user in military accounts. When I got mobilized for the covid, I had to have access to it.

That being said, I deleted just about everything in my profile, including the photos, etc. I used to get notifications to entice me to log back in, but that stopped after a while.

Recently, though, I got a notification of a password reset, and that caused me to want to log in. I put in my password and then facebook demanded I give them a copy of my current photo ID for "verification." Um, no. I got another notification, and this time clicked on the button saying "No, I didn't authorize this," and facebook's response was "okay, no problem."

But now the notifications are starting back up, hot and heavy.

They're literally phishing their users, using threats of unauthorized access to get users to change their password. My wife deleted her account long ago and when they phished her she said they needed to stop or she would contact law enforcement, so they did.

I don't think that's FB fishing as I've had those emails and didn't require any ID or anything. It's more likely scammers trying to get into your FB by just hitting as many accounts as they can

 Overread wrote:
I don't think that's FB fishing as I've had those emails and didn't require any ID or anything. It's more likely scammers trying to get into your FB by just hitting as many accounts as they can

I think both are likely, but it was strange that facebook - the actual site, not an email - said that they needed to confirm my ID so could I kindly send them an image of my photo ID.

The site makes its money from selling people's private information, and no other site asks me for that kind of stuff. At most they'll ping your phone and email of record. Actually saying "hey, photograph your gov't ID and send it to us! We're totes trusthworthy" is weird.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I don't think that's FB fishing as I've had those emails and didn't require any ID or anything. It's more likely scammers trying to get into your FB by just hitting as many accounts as they can

I think both are likely, but it was strange that facebook - the actual site, not an email - said that they needed to confirm my ID so could I kindly send them an image of my photo ID.

The site makes its money from selling people's private information, and no other site asks me for that kind of stuff. At most they'll ping your phone and email of record. Actually saying "hey, photograph your gov't ID and send it to us! We're totes trusthworthy" is weird.

Yeah but at the same time you do get clone accounts created of actual real people that scammers then use for all kinds of nefarious purposes. FB thus probably does need to sometimes verify that you really are who you say you are because there's two people registered with the same name in the system and they need to make sure they ban the right one.

Another layer might also be if your activity suggests that your email might be compromised and thus they want ID proof to verify that you are you and that its not someone has gained access to your email and then used that to gain access to everything else that you have through "oh send me a reminder".


There are certainly risky parts and even these verification elements, which could be totally developed for the end-user benefit ; could be twisted by staffers or management into something else for another use.

It's layers of the onion sadly that make things complicated.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
I think both are likely, but it was strange that facebook - the actual site, not an email - said that they needed to confirm my ID so could I kindly send them an image of my photo ID..

If it's been a while since you logged in, and scammers have been trying to access your account in the interim, it's not really that strange that they wanted to confirm you were actually you before giving you access to the account.

I would agree that asking for photo id is not the best way to go about that, and that photo id isn't something to trust to any social media site... but the idea behind it is reasonable.

Reading all above I am really happy that I decided to delete my account years ago.