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When did this happen? I’ve still been seeing your posts as of the last time I logged onto Facebook.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
When did this happen? I’ve still been seeing your posts as of the last time I logged onto Facebook.

The Ken Kyoto account is fine, which is weird since he's a lot shadier than my real account.

I wonder what did you do to make Daddy Mark sad? Are you some kind of instigator? A trouble maker? A space cowboy? Some might call you Maurice?

Instagram has gone downhill. At least on iPad.

See, between reels, it’s increased from one ad every two or three, to two ads after every reel. Oh. And if you tap to skip? Sorry. That just takes you to the ad’s webpage.

They have accepted that ads with fake skip buttons are ok. I noticed this last few months is getting way more common. It’s unpleasant for sure.

I refuse to watch reels, and have similarly avoided their counterparts on every other social media platform.

Instagram's search also fell apart - used to be searching a tag showed you everything once on the tag. Now it grabs an assortment and repeats them over and over.

They've also never let you sort search results by time so if you wanted the choice of seeing just newly tagged things you can't.

Remember: on social media, users are the product, not the customers.

I found a Feeds button on the lower left side (desktop, not mobile.)

Default feed view is only friends and pages I follow. I can be narrowed down to just friends. Really, really improves my experience on the site as it gets rid of 99% of the garbage.

The one hiccup is that most of my friends are not on Facebook anymore. :(

All Meta products are infested with Bots.

Almost as bad as Twitter.

On a D&D FB group we got a question from the AI "helper"

What's the spell in Dungeons and Dragons that turns the caster invisible?

I swear to G-D. This is the technology that's going to diagnose cancer?

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
On a D&D FB group we got a question from the AI "helper"

What's the spell in Dungeons and Dragons that turns the caster invisible?

I swear to G-D. This is the technology that's going to diagnose cancer?

And the American Military has been forced to double down on.



Short Rant about Invisibility and D&D:

Just want to say I wish I could exalt this entire cathartic thread. Well said all of you, and highly entertaining to boot. I've learned a lot, too; I had no idea that "bramble" had sexual connotations in British English.

Regarding FB, I currently only have a pseudonymous account which I occasionally use to follow miniature-related things. I keep family / friend related stuff to emails, forums, and offline communications. (Speaking of emails, as of a few months ago, you now have to "opt out" to prevent Google from automatically scraping all your gmail emails and attachments to train their rapacious A.I. beast. Google that and you'll find plenty of articles about it, but Google somehow managed not to publicly announce the change to their gmail users. Whether or not you should care that Google is doing this I leave entirely up to you. I myself think it's just about the best thing that ever happened anywhere.)

Anyhow, I've stayed off FB for months now as my miniature fixation has waned as it periodically does according to the waxing and waning of the moon or somesuch. I'm starting to feel the old miniatures itch to see what my favorite sculptors, painters, and companies are up to again (which brought me here,) but I'm really loathe to go back to Facebook again. Unfortunately, as great as Dakka is, if I want to see what's happening lately with a bunch of smaller companies like Star Schlock, Diehard Miniatures, Bad Squiddo, Satyr Art Studio, and Crooked Dice without going to all of their individual company websites and looking for "what's new" headings, Facebook still seems like my only one-stop option. (Fortunately I can always count on Dakka to keep me well informed about Maelstrom's Edge for some strange reason that I've never been able to put my finger on. )

My family is very screen addicted, myself very much included, so we recently started a nightly one-hour "family time / no screen time" period to start trying to become human again. Going in my daughter was dead set against it, but it immediately worked wonders for all of us in ways that aren't supposed to happen outside of lame Hallmark movies. I'm strongly reminded of a South Park episode where Stan visits a Mormon kid's home (not Butters) and sees the whole family having an anachronistically pleasant time playing boardgames together. Last night me and my kids had a great game of Settlers of Catan (which had been gathering dust on the shelf for years) which wasn't livestreamed, tracked, overloaded with advertisements and bot comments, or sullied with A.I. slop. Incredible.

While I presume many of you already have healthier offline lives with your families - after all, if you're here, you're probably into tabletop games - if any of you and yours are suffering from excessive screen zombification like me and mine, I highly recommend giving a nightly shared no-screen hour a go.

I have an hour or so in my Hobby Grotto painting teeny tiny tanks at the moment. Whilst my iPad goes with me for tunes and videos? It’s mostly background noise. Can’t stand and can’t concentrated in silence.

But the hobbying definitely does me the power of good.

Revisiting previous complaints about the Facebook News feed being completely useless at showing you the things you're actually following these days...

I follow both of my kids' schools' FB accounts, as they use them to post news and updates. So Facebook's algorithm has decided that I'm interested in posts from schools and started inserting posts from random other schools from all over the country into my feed.

Which, I gotta say, feels a little creepy.

Oh, and the gambling ads have hit a new low. Often embedded within general tripe and gibberish? There are those proudly proclaiming “Not On GamStop”.

GamStop is an online programme and tool to help problem gamblers with their compulsions, by blocking access to gambling websites.

Therefore? Advertising, specifically, that you’re not on GamStop is deliberately targetting problem gamblers.

And. You guessed it. Those ads/posts are apparently not against terms of service.

feth Meta and its naked greed.

Also?

Imagine being a smelly hooman. Imagine having free will. Imagine a world of opportunity in which to exercise that free will.

Then imagine choosing to become an internet “prankster”, and use said free will to simply annoy other people who are just going about their day.

And so, so many. The vast, staggering majority, are to comedy as Bam “hurr hurr I am hit my dad” Margera was to Jackass.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh, and the gambling ads have hit a new low. Often embedded within general tripe and gibberish? There are those proudly proclaiming “Not On GamStop”.

GamStop is an online programme and tool to help problem gamblers with their compulsions, by blocking access to gambling websites.

Therefore? Advertising, specifically, that you’re not on GamStop is deliberately targetting problem gamblers.

And. You guessed it. Those ads/posts are apparently not against terms of service.

feth Meta and its naked greed.

Oh man...
Switzerland allowed local swiss gambling companies to advertise again some time back........ Online that is, to maintain anti gamlbing addiction issues... (yeah sure...)

Since last year i am bombarded by Gambling Ads, and as an old school gamer, that hates lootboxes you can imagine what my opinion is on that. Oh and then there's also the AI goonerbait ads that make the other 3rd ? Half? of my ads up.

Ohh new thing - FB is now wanting to charge £2.99 for "ad free use"

The funny thing is that they say "your data won't be used for ads" if you subscribe to that.

Meanwhile you can opt to use the site for free so long as "we can use your data for ads"

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh, and the gambling ads have hit a new low. Often embedded within general tripe and gibberish? There are those proudly proclaiming “Not On GamStop”.

GamStop is an online programme and tool to help problem gamblers with their compulsions, by blocking access to gambling websites.

Therefore? Advertising, specifically, that you’re not on GamStop is deliberately targetting problem gamblers.

And. You guessed it. Those ads/posts are apparently not against terms of service.

feth Meta and its naked greed.

Oh man...
Switzerland allowed local swiss gambling companies to advertise again some time back........ Online that is, to maintain anti gamlbing addiction issues... (yeah sure...)

Since last year i am bombarded by Gambling Ads, and as an old school gamer, that hates lootboxes you can imagine what my opinion is on that. Oh and then there's also the AI goonerbait ads that make the other 3rd ? Half? of my ads up.

I'm convinced FB, Google et al, conflate tabletop gaming, video gaming, board gaming and gambling. I get sooo many ads for gambling sites, despite literally never visiting one in my life, never mind setting up an account. Other than a general age thing, the only correlation I can see is I am interested in "gaming".

As an outsider to the whole industry, it's pretty shocking seeing just how insidious much of the marketing is. Also, grimly amusing seeing all the FOMO advertising over new games and amazing increases in prizes (available only this week!) alongside the probably-mandatory "gamble responsibly" adverts from the same companies.

The problem is they often restrict the ad slots. Eg 3D printing used to have its own slot; but now its lumped in with gaming. The result is that different brands of interest end up with a lot of overlapping key terms to tag under the system because they are so broad.

Of course this means that the ad power gets diluted because someone looking for and responding to ads for X is now getting Z and Y results too.
It reduces the ad targeting power for those advertising, but likely makes Meta get more clicks overall cause of the broader appeal of the ads in general.

 Overread wrote:
The problem is they often restrict the ad slots. Eg 3D printing used to have its own slot; but now its lumped in with gaming. The result is that different brands of interest end up with a lot of overlapping key terms to tag under the system because they are so broad.

Of course this means that the ad power gets diluted because someone looking for and responding to ads for X is now getting Z and Y results too.
It reduces the ad targeting power for those advertising, but likely makes Meta get more clicks overall cause of the broader appeal of the ads in general.

Frankly i don't care about how they run things. I care about the fact that i and others get bombarded with ads designed more by psychologists and psychiatrists in combination with marketing agitprop to get me hooked on either Gambling or porn, rather then an actual product, service, etc i could want.

F.e. two years ago i got a decent advert that actually lead me to a FLGS that has discounts, now i only get Gambling or like i said AI of the implied explicit variant.

Oh and also the sitting ads that are really just scams in youtube nowadays.

Further youtube started to implement pause button ads, end eds, dual unskipable ads....

Yeah I agree, the more they shove ads in our face the worse it gets. Honestly a good many "professional" Websites now look like scam ad sites from the 90s-00s. Esp if you turn off adblocks.


And yeah it also baffles me that they more data they harvest the worse ads seem to get. I put it down to the fact that they've gone from pooling data to show you things you're already interested in to using tricks to get you interested in more profitable things that other people with "similarish" interests to you also click on ads for.

Couple that with some blunt "the gambling firm pays us more so we push their ads more" kind of approach.

Youtube is almost unuseable without adblock of some kind now; if you ever view videos on discord now where adbocks aren't functional the number of yellow ad stops in some videos is insane.

 Overread wrote:
Yeah I agree, the more they shove ads in our face the worse it gets. Honestly a good many "professional" Websites now look like scam ad sites from the 90s-00s. Esp if you turn off adblocks.

So i am not just going insane.

And yeah it also baffles me that they more data they harvest the worse ads seem to get. I put it down to the fact that they've gone from pooling data to show you things you're already interested in to using tricks to get you interested in more profitable things that other people with "similarish" interests to you also click on ads for.

Couple that with some blunt "the gambling firm pays us more so we push their ads more" kind of approach.

Youtube is almost unuseable without adblock of some kind now; if you ever view videos on discord now where adbocks aren't functional the number of yellow ad stops in some videos is insane.

Probably because they outsourced the Algo work to an probability algo... sorry AI... which then halucinates guaranteed with such large numbers of data points, because that is what it is fundamentally, which then leads to adaptaion, which fethed the Algo for ads, which got screwed with anyways with what you pointed out. The corresponding result is then that the next data for "improvement" for the Algo is worse than the last batch, which just reinforces itself. And funnily enough you can track that behaviour to end of 24 and most of 25 with 26 just pushing it sofar into high gear.

Youtube without adblock is just suffering. When an 1 Hour podcast about philosophy stretches to 1H 20 inclusive the youtubers sponsor i start to get a tiny bit annoyed.

AAAAND update: I now got scam AI ads for free money now in adreel form... great, thanks youtube.

I don’t tend to get gambling ads, but I get a ton of porn-adjacent reels shoved at me (farm girl wearing the least overalls, woman shopping in butt leggings, redhead in wet sundress driving over bumpy roads), and I have no idea why since I don’t watch porn on my phone. I do have some personal photos, though, so now I have to worry if the algorithm is scraping my most private data.

YouTube on my phone is still not too bad. YouTube on my TV is more ad than tube.

And they called me a madman for not using Facebook or YouTube...

Now, I have my revenge!

No AI ads in my life! Just the sweet smell of the ocean and the sound of the waves.... and a nice cool 77° degree temperature with a soft breeze.

Sure, I miss out on a bunch of painting videos... but, maybe this is a sign to switch off the nightmare.

clicking on hide advert for whatever reason is often taken as you having an interest in a subject because you've interacted with it

so trying to avoid the occasional 'random' advert the advetiser has sent out on a too broad a feed (eg males, 20-50) can give you months of followups from other companies in the same field youd normally never see

There is an upside. I’ve found various and sundry niche companies which are right up my street.

Sometimes? It’s via Obvious Sweatshop Temu Knock Off. Which leads to a fairly mild application of relatively basic Google-Fu to find the original. And depending on desire, price and underlying budget? May lead to a purchase from the original creator.

Sometimes it’s the original creator themselves, where again Desire/Price/Budget comes into play.

Other times? It’s for an arts and crafts fayre. The last of which I spent an outrageous amount of dosh on to help furnish my home.

Other other times? It leads me to clothes not just in my style (Goth/Punk/Metalhead) but…miracles of miracles) my size (chunky).

So I don’t want to widely criticise social media adverts.

It’s just when I’m being offered Islamic/Jewish/Christian dating (atheist), sports betting (don’t care), sports in general (really don’t care), different genres of music (I of course know my tastes and they’re admittedly fairly broad. But stuff your dubstep and your grime and your drill somewhere someone more appreciative of such genres might be).

Oh. And proper proper Get Tae Feth advertising any kind of reality tv involving vacuous brain donors.

I just fired off this anatomy of a facebook / youtube post and thought you folks might appreciate it. (Note: I did this independently of the current FB advertising discussion and this is not intended as some sort of oblique commentary on preceding posts here.)



I consider this the !!!! school of graphic design.

General rule of thumb: the more exclamation points, the less sincere.

Slop content is a plague on YouTube, I started a new game last week.
And the amount of “5 things I wish I knew before I started playing” or “10 tips for starting.” Videos I see that are the most useless beginner information is feeling endless. And it’s not even the biggest game in the genre.
It doesn’t help that people I have trying to say I don’t want to see content from. Still get up the top of searches.
Meanwhile an actual channel with useful information gets 1/4 the views since he labels his videos accurately to what specific task you want, and doesn’t hit the YouTube 10 mins mark for consistency.