Like I know this isn't a shock to anyone. But it's a super surprise to me. So since 2011 I was really busy with various educational or work stuff, and never had time to log in. When I did log in to post something random for family to see, I had that Fluffbusters extension that cuts out the extra shit that Meta adds to your feed.
So recently I was forced to use the FB app to do some IRL stuff related to Palestine. Holy shit the unfiltered site is garbage. You have to scroll through 10 or so unrelated pages to see your friends' posts. And the sheer volume of paid Israeli stuff is mind blowing, despite me trying to tell the algorithm that I don't like it. And despite me being friends with and liking shitloads of ML stuff, I keep getting Unilad level "let's save a bunch of puppies" content. Like I get why people who use traditional social media become liberals or worse, I even found myself becoming a bit more lib looking at it.
Everything on Facebook is like a chain email from 2002. I'm also mystified by how well generic AI images do over there. The average Facebook user doesn't seem aware of what an AI generated image is or that they're possible. It's a complete brain frying website.
My aunt on Facebook shares an AI Jesus several times a day. Each more horrifying than the last and yet she seems unaware of what they are. I wanna sit with her and ask if she truly believes a three handed child made a 20 foot tall Jesus out of sand. Or that a bus labeled "Shgoopl Baus" full of melty faced people all held up various incorrect versions of the American flag.
She simply doesn't see it. They look like real pictures to her
Facebook is a dinosaur. They've enabled monetization now and there's tons of pages automatically posting AI Content (with AI descriptions) hour after hour, with bot replies too. It's so bad. Definitely not the place to just talk to your IRL friends like it used to be. I also have to run ads for my job and TikTok has the best ROI, while Facebook charged me like 1$ per click lol, there's no way anybody is paying that much for a click. TikTok's was like 15 cents.
If you've seen the AI Jesus with cabin crew photos they're from facebook. I'm starting to think some AI (chatGPT) told someone that this was a winning combination to post on Facebook and that's why they started making those pictures specifically. Cause I don't know what Jesus has to do with flight attendants lol.
you've seen the AI Jesus with cabin crew photos they're from facebook. I'm starting to think some AI (chatGPT) told someone that this was a winning combination to post on Facebook and that's why they started making those pictures specifically. Cause I don't know what Jesus has to do with flight attendants lol.
I assumed the AIs were looking at which of their posts do better and doing more of those, and ones with Jesus and apparently airline crews were some of the most successful early on so it just keeps repeating and getting worse
Facebook's CPC is especially hilarious because their cross-site tracking basically does not work on the most marketable mobile devices, which is why they work so hard to keep you in the app at all times.
They also refused our products catalog on our page without giving us a reason, and we can't appeal it anymore, but we can run ads on their website of course lol
I have a friend who’s my age (early 40s) who just last week repeated the “cat litter boxes in school bathrooms are required now” myth. I asked where he saw that and of course it was Facebook…
It's absolutely unusable. Early Facebook's niche was actually really good and cool too: a service built around developing and maintaining the sort of relatively weak IRL social connections that would usually just decay. Like, something to keep up with and stay connected to your high school friends or college roommates or friendly acquaintance you met at the gym was actually really neat. A lot of people got a ton of value over that, and I think it did genuinely improve the world in some ways early on. But that shit isn't profitable, so it couldn't last.
Encrypted chats or a private fediverse service with carefully correlated list of federated instances.
I really don’t understand the incessant need to have constant connectivity to a large social media platform. Keep to yourself and the group of friends you actually care about, all the extra assholes you tangentially knew from school aren’t worth pretending to keep in touch with.
Unironically, Tiktok. If you're careful to make extensive use of the like button you can train the algorithm to be scary-accurate in just a few active hours of using it. And there's a lot of socialist and anticolonialist content on there.
I get this too and I think it’s because when you don’t use it regularly the algorithm just goes insane. I get just constant weird videos and pages that I’ve never interacted with, my ‘feed’ is unusable
I recently cut down on my time on facebook when I got logged out of it and didn't bother resetting my password. But even when I was using it it was such a fucking cesspool. I had made an effort to block out content from pages I didn't like, but I would still get a ton of right wing posts.
Yeah, I see loads of stuff I don’t want like fitness people that post bait, mostly anti vegan/veggie, or pages that have no point …stuff like “Johns Page” or “John Smith”, that constantly post early 2000s chain mail content. Its infuriating. I’m on FB cause there’s a small handful of people I’d like to remain up to date with. I don’t need the other crap.
The algo for the front page feed got cranked up to Maximum Monetization, and it's just a bizarre hodgepodge of content nowadays. There was actually a sort of golden age many years ago when a lot of my friends and family posted pictures and updates about their lives, and so scrolling my feed was a way to keep up with them.
I still use Facebook a lot for scheduling local public events, as I've found there's a reasonable level of discoverability for local stuff. The groups feature works okay for small groups, but that's getting swallowed by discord. Social media is a shitshow.
Marketers buy accounts and pages with largish followings and then repurpose them to push garbage. They often delete the old content and change the name etc so it's unrecognizable as to what it was when you followed it originally.
I haven't been on in years but checked recently to see if anyone was speaking on the genocide, of course they weren't, and 90% of my feed was things I "may" be interested in and 10% updates from friends and family. I only keep an account for messenger.
/gen this part isn't a bit
NSFW
The things I "may" be interested in were AI images of asian women with big titties in military uniforms???? I don't know what info Facebook collected on me while I was gone( and I turned off most tracking that I could) but they were far off. Why just casually throw porn on the timeline too? Trash site
I mainly use Facebook for one particular hobby, most of my friends are from that hobby, most of my content there is from that hobby. So autistic hyperfixations saved me!
I moved towns a while back, and it feels like everyone in this town is still on facebook, and organizing stuff via facebook. It's odd to return to a platform I hadn't been on in like a decade.
Am I imagining this? Is social media use real regional within the US, where one town is on insta, another is on facebook, and another is on twitter?
I think a lot of it depends on where you live and how often you use it, since moving somewhere where 99% of community information/news/events is shared on facebook my feed has gotten dramatically more relevant than it has been pretty much any time in the last 10 years when I barely ever logged in. It's still mostly brainwormed boomers but at least its my friendly neighborhood brainwormed boomers...