Why is Facebook filled with so much random junk now?
Why is Facebook filled with so much random junk now?
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?
It is unbelievably awful, isn't it? The worst bit is knowing that many of our older relatives use that shit for hours a day. This is the same generation that mocked millennials when we were using it 10 - 15 years ago but has since gotten themselves hooked on a far, far worse version. What a depressing thought.
And they don’t even realize that original Facebook experience that was useful for keeping friends closer when physically apart has slowly gone by the wayside.
I remember when Facebook changed everyone’s feeds from chronological to whatever they were calling their algorithm at the time. The use experience completely went to shit. Things friends posted would sometimes never show up, and you’d have to manually change your settings back to chronological sorting every few days or it would default back to their “smart feed”.
Now it’s just people reposting things they’re into or reposting echo chamber links to stuff they agree with no real target.
Pretty depressing how we’ve lost twitter and Facebook to this crap.
As much as everyone loves to shit on Facebook, it was an incredible service. When I was in the military I was able to keep up with my old friends and their lives. When I got out I was able to simply keep in touch with my old military buddies. Now it’s just dead. I’m genuinely sad that this has happened :(
They figured out that this kind of feed makes the most money from the most users. They don't care if you like it, they care what the majority of users will stick around for. The longer total scrolling time they can get from their user base, the more ads they can cram in there. Ads make money.
Algorithm leads to more scroll time per person leads to more ads per user leads to more income
So, because money
I suspect it's not an optimization to make every post you see interesting. For one thing, we tend to find intermittent rewards more fascinating and addictive than reliable ones. For another, if you have to scroll further you'll see more ads. But if you make it too boring people won't scroll at all. So the algorithm probably tries to make it just interesting enough to keep people scrolling, but no more.
You know what sucks about Facebook? The fact that it took the reigns from Craigslist and you can't buy local used stuff without having a Facebook account. I hate hate hate that. I want to sell my used shit without a Facebook account. It's all fucking tire kickers anyway.
The solution is to keep using craigslist - it still exists and gets some activity. Ensure that it gets more.
Fortunately, my area has a popular classifieds section at a local newspaper website that everyone seems to have standardized on. I guess people probably also use Facebook, but the local classifieds has a ton of listings.
So if Craigslist is essentially dead in your area, check the classifieds in whatever newspapers are popular in your area, maybe there's another relatively popular option. And regardless of what you do, it's totally fine to make posts in multiple places, so make a Craigslist post and updated it alongside whatever one you end up using.
Ok. Will do! Thanks!
As a non American I'm more salty about Oculus. lol Although at its height it was also severely annoying that every freaking company used FB pages instead of their own websites, including for support requests. So without FB you literally could not contact them. Luckily that trend only held up for a few years but it was still annoying as hell.
I totally agree here, on both points
Just use craigslist. I do. Even in low pop areas it works.
It's all fucking tire kickers anyway.
I had an instance recently where it was faster and easier to literally make an item with my bare hands than to coordinate a purchase of one via marketplace.
Was it a dildo made of starburst? No one will buy mine
I don't understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It's so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it's too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.
I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I'm selling something that I've used, it's cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.
People use it because that's where the sellers are at. I also liked Craigslist before but Facebook ate their lunch plus one slight advantage from marketplace is seeing who you're buying from beforehand. It makes it a lot easier to weed out fake listings when you see someone just created their account this year or if they have bad ratings.
Vehicle listings are absolute garbage though as the filtering options are super basic or ridiculous like you can filter by the color of a car but not engine size. I don't know of a single person who searches for cars/trucks based on their color.
Nextdoor is also good for selling stuff. But you need to verify your address through either an ID or they send you a post card. Keeps the bots off though.
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.
The answer is obviously as everyone has pointed out already is enshittification.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification. (Cory Doctorow)
Profit = enshittification. It's guaranteed as long as profit is a motive.
An interesting concept is the idea of a distributed social web. It was the concept me, and probably a LOT of other redditors, were looking at last year, but it seems no such thing really exists. The idea that everyone's home computer (or mobile device nowadays) could act as the client and the server. Perhaps using a firefox addon of some sort.
Do any software devs (ok that's like 90% of lemmy, lol) know if any existing projects are trying to do this? It does not seem like an unfeasible thing, and it wouldn't have to grow overnight, it could possibly just be a feature in an existing addon that allows communication directly between users. No centralized servers of any sort. Distributed communication without central control. Is this possible?
The existing social media companies own the world (literally), and they can maintain this control because they can buy out competitors. You can't buy out 5 billion people though, so if people had the tools available to host their own web; and it was as easy as installing a firefox browser addon, a true democracy could exist like the world has never seen.
sorry, but I think what you are looking for is platforms like Lemmy. it is not centralized, it is distributed. not peer to peer, sure, but
- since a lot of devices are not being online at the same time, mobile phones but even desktop PCs always go offline for some period of time, the direct communication wouldn't really work with a lot of other users
- you would need to store much more dataon each of your devices, unless you're the kind who doesn't care about mindlessly deleting past conversations
distributed social web
...ActivityPub?
I do know of a project that does what you are looking for, decentralized (100%), FOSS, easy to set up, encrypted...
I built a very basic chat program on top of it quite easily, a "FB clone" is not far away IMO.
So what's the project? It's my Tenfingers protocol & implementation (http://tenfingers.org) and it's just waiting for adoption!
I'm in the process of making the documentation and installation guide, but you can check it out right now.
I'd love showcasing it somewhere, getting feedback, help out with problems etc.
Reddit is like this too on the app. Some of the worst algorithm recommendations I've ever seen. "You like (your local city subreddit), you might also like (some city you don't live in subreddit)." Why?
The worst is that is has ruined my porn account because it doesn't recommend NSFW subs so I have to scrape past random unrelated garbage like the Pokémon card valuation subreddit and /r/cement, I counted and it went 40 posts between NSFW posts once. On my account that is exclusively subscribed to NSFW subs.
Thank you for reminding me why I stopped using the reddit app. Almost considered re-downloading it.
💥✨ e n s h i t t i f i c a t i o n ✨💥
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/... .
It's non just Facebook either. Every big tech social media platform has headed in this direction of showing you stuff you don't really want to see based on maximizing profit. For-profit social media seems to mostly be doomed to this outcome because it makes more money.
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
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?
Everyone who will leave has left. So at this point they're just slamming all ads down.
When I saw this post I tried to block the profile
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’ve been assuming that their user engagement is down. Fifteen years ago when I was fresh out of university I had several hundred friends and could spend hours every day going through posts from dozens of different people. Now it feels like I can spend ten or fifteen minutes to see everything and mostly it’s from the same half-dozen people, and I’ve realized most of them are people I don’t really know as well and frankly am not as interested in seeing. At first I thought it was because they were the most prolific posters and I’d inadvertently trained the algorithm to show me more from them by interacting with them the most.
But over the past year I’ve noticed if I actually click on someone else’s profile, maybe having seen their name on a memory or just randomly think of an old friend, most of them only make a few posts a year or haven’t posted anything at all in years. Their accounts still exist, but they’re not using them.
If your feed was only this, a few posts a day from a few people, you’d have no reason to be on Facebook much. So they fill it in with junk from other places that will hopefully engage you. If it doesn’t they’ll try other posts. Whatever it takes to keep you browsing longer.
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?"
Shareholders are demanding more time spent in app in average and this is what they pushed: if there's not enough content, dilute it with some shit
Two years ago, I quit FB for six months. Then I checked my feed, and counted six friends' updates and zero group posts in the first 100 items. 94% of posts were ads or "suggested" content. So, I closed FB and never went back again. Whatsap statuses is where I find my friends' updates these days.
Just ask yourself, who is still posting on Facebook? Your friends? I hope not. The last time I hung out on that site, the groups seemed to be the only valuable section to participate in. But it's ultimately just a circlejerk and you're feeding content into a garbage platform stuffed with ads. Not a great way to spend time.
I make it a point of blocking all groups and anything shared. The only cat pictures I want to see on Facebook are your cat, so if you share a meme I'm blocking all from whoever created it. Then I have a rule after blocking 2 facebook is done for this session and so I close the window. I have cleaned up my feed a bit by doing that, but I alone am not enough data to show up - I need the rest of you to commit to only using Facebook for sharing friends and family. Block all groups, marketplace, politics, memes, just share your life with the people who know you well enough to care about your personal life. IF enough of us do that we can maybe show up in data that there are people who don't want that and so they will make an algorithm for us that shows more of our friends and less of the other garbage. I'm sure there is a lot more I'd like to see on facebook but I never do because I stop scrolling too soon - which hurts them.
Why are you still on it though?
I personally fucking hate it. But my whole friends group use it for events (bad, birthdays), and messenger chat.
How do you convince ~30 people to switch to something else?
What app do they switch to?
This video is about SMS, but should apply to Facebook or any other service.
Basically, the advice is to announce that you're primarily using something else with other groups, so you'll be slow to respond on the other platform. Then be proactive about using the new platform and trying to get individuals to switch to it.
Here are a couple options:
- Signal - great as a Messenger replacement
- Matrix - great as a general chat/event posting platform; make a room for each subgroup
You'd probably need to be pretty aggressive about pushing the new platform, and confident in being able to resolve any concerns, but that seems to be the best way to get people to switch.
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.
Well, less and less people post stuff like their vacation pic or food pic etc. Then more and more companies pay to be in your feed, so now your feed is only non-sense stuff like yours, or mine, it does not make sense, I often see posts from stuff not in my country or sometimes not in my language.
I only use FB for Marketplace (really big here), and for some FB hobby groups that replace good old forums. I never publish anything, and only one of my friend still post pictures of their journey, that's it.
In Canada it is way worst, because every sources deemed news media cannot post/share articles, imagine in the USA if your feed had no news like cnn, abc, nbc, cbs, npr, nyt, etc. but in your feed you see all the alternatives news (read: far-right, conspiracy, pro-russian, pro-musk, anti-ev, etc).
This is our reality in Canada, our facebook feed looks like twitter, full of hate and fake news. I always block them, but there are certainly thousands and thousands of bots posting those kind of thing.
FB is dead.
Not only is it random, it's nearly impossible to find something you have seen before. Awful all around.
Why do you think the vast majority of us are here? That would be one good reason.
Don’t use meta products if you have respect for yourself
Don't use Meta products.
Ftfy. 😁
I use an extension called FB Purity and the amount of bullshit it filters out is insane.
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.
Deleted it years ago
It's still there.
More things clicked means more good. Here's some slop you may like. Click it.
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.
Now?
Aw, I remember Facebook.
Was great when it was just for organizing college parties and finding hookups.
The user base has changed. Before it used to be used by young people willing to share their parts of lives, exchanging f.e. studying material Now it is used by mostly older people (over 30) having family not willing that much to share anything from their lives except from talking to their relatives over the messanger.
So who creates the information today? I guess bots and sometimes some facebook groups but I noticed that facebook shares your group posts to absolutely not related people to that group.
Including your mum and sister, the posts related on smoking weed and going to techno parties.
Young people (Gen-Z) don't use facebook pretty much at all. Sometimes maybe messanger because of their family
Older people, over 30
😭
Yes, different generation. I didn't write OLD or ELDERLY. Yes, we grow older - accept it or not :-)
It's a centralised network. They need to make maximum profit and don't need to care about users, because they won't leave whatever nasty thing happens. Being on there encourages friends and family to stay and suffer too. And keeps people off of decentralized networks.
I'm surprised people stay on Facebook, then grizzle about how bad they've helped it become.
Complains about the crap on Facebook by re-posting that same crap to lemmy...
.
I manage to avoid all that crap on Facebook by... not using Facebook.
If it's so full of garbage, what's the attraction? Why keep going there?
