I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in her most frequented cities. But I discovered that my mum was also a frequent "poster" of the photos of her various trips around the world, and the comments sections were filled with with some beautiful messages from her many many friends and family.

From this I learned that there is a subset of the population that Facebook works perfectly for and meaningfully improves their real-world social relationships. And perhaps Facebook has been hyper-optimized for that kind of use case through relentless A/B testing. But I fear my mum is quite privileged to have this kind of experience.

No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed. No matter what she did she couldn't fix it. She asked other women about this, and they all said their partner's feeds were the same.

This is not a problem for women. At least not one I've ever talked to or read about on the internet.

Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted.

I got a whole bunch of thirst traps again.

It doesn't bother me anymore, I just tune it out and scroll past it because my feed still has the parenting and pottery too, and my friend's updates, which is what I'm there for.

But it would be good for more people to learn about this so they don't get angry when they see their male-identified partners/friends feeds.

I wonder if for those of us that haven't used Facebook in years the recommendation algorithm is essentially default. Which much like the default youtube algorithm, is completely garbage. But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.

In the Philippines, say, Facebook is the internet. Every business runs on it. People use it instead of news. Everybody uses Messenger to chat. You get free minutes with your phone that are specifically for FB/IG/Messenger.

EDIT: Hilariously, I went there 45 minutes later and I must have interacted with something because now everything is posts about football (along with the "i want an argument with my husband" post!). I'm in the Bay Area Gooners group but that's been over a decade, so presumably what happens is they don't run recommendations until someone shows activity. Just logging and browsing the feed must have triggered it because I didn't see any football stuff last time except BAG.

late 90s to early 2000s, only highly developed economies made up most of the internet but as more emerging markets joined the ranks, they ultimately surpassed those that reached peak internet penetration much earlier.

A lot of these new dominant markets also happen to speak English well enough and in far greater numbers and with it carries the cultural/taste shifts.

Without naming specific countries, few social networks are eclipsed by just a few countries that joined the internet much later than the Western hemisphere (+non-English speaking developed economies).

Cultural norms, values, habits permeate through the internet simply put and the social media platforms are incentivized to reflect it even if the $/country is not aligned but through the sheer power of number and the increasingly unhealthy attachments to what is largely just an ephemeral digital number in a database inside air conditioned facility while the users complain about the heat.

I’ve never interacted with their “shorts” feature, and it’s all young women and girls in as little clothing as they can manage. It’s to the point that I don’t open the Facebook app in public. Ridiculous.

I think we need to recognize that social media of 2026 is not the same as what we had in 2006. AI generated content, regardless of if it is image, video, or text, is here to stay. And it will only get better and more convincing as the technology improves.

What people really need to ask is this - what do they want to get out of social media? Is it personal relationships and status updates? Is it entertainment? Is it something in between?

The harsh truth is most people at this point use social media for entertainment, and AI content is entertaining, or at least engaging, to most people. Remember that 54% of USA adults read below a 6th grade reading level [1]. It is not perfect, but it is convincing enough that a large enough number of people are beginning to accept it as "real".

[1]: https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...

Switch tabs, come back.. it refreshes everything and you can never go back.

Comment threads with 100+ comments with only a "show more" link, which again.. se previous paragraph.

See a video, click fullscreen icon. Doesn't go fullscreen, goes to some weird modal window, muted. Click fullscreen again..

And I'm sure I could go on... It's really a sad shell of the simplicity it once was.

I wish,

but from personal experience I'm afraid quite a bunch of them are creepy old guys which have no idea how creepy they have become(1), because they are in a bubble with mostly only other creepy old guys

(1): Like I don't mean people which always have been creepy or "secret/hidden" creepy. But people which through increasingly more "not caring" and echo champers/ad bubbles and similar twisting their world perception/social feedback loop have become increasingly more creepy in the last 10-20 years.

It probably detected your gender (male), age, location, social graph, as a combination of all these that you would be interested in AI-generated softcore pornography. And for the average user with your stats, they absolutely are.

Of course, nobody at Meta hardcoded their algorithm to do this: it’s just naturally found out the kind of content a person with your specs loves. Sorry, OP

This part here kills me. I’ve also been forced to engage in the Zuckerverse. I hate WhatsApp.

It will probably surprise a lot of people to learn that this isn't true.

A higher percentage of 30-49 year olds report using Facebook than in 50+ age groups

The bias toward younger generations is even higher when you include Instagram

One source https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media...

I think many in the Hacker News bubble stopped using it and assume everyone else did, too. It's not too surprising when you read articles like this that paint a completely different picture of the platform than what your friends and family are actually seeing when they use it, as evidenced by the multitude of reports in this comment section from people whose family and friends are still getting value out of the site.

If you don't interact with the product, you get lowest denominator crap.

I never signed up to that site because I thought sooner or later Google or some startup would just clone it, lower the ad count, improve censorship, and run it at near break-even. Especially since you don't have to save every single post created for eternity.

I will say facebook ads are the most relevant ads ever for me. I click on them all the time because they're actually interesting to me. But at the same time all the products/clothing is so expensive I never convert.

What I dont like is Alerts becoming just another feed to fill with spam and not real notifications.

For exemple there is a post with details about an event that will happen, when you look at available options: you can't click on it to go to a dedicated page like on LinkedIn, there is no option in the menu to have a shareable link. You can share with: someone on fb message, a group, your wall, things like that but no link.

But on the phone is it possible.

I’ve used it enough to understand this is happening now. Literally impossible to distinguish, unless you know the person.

I wonder what will be next after Facebook Marketplace dwindles (assuming eventually "everyone" is no longer on Facebook). Going back to Craigslist? Something new?

Something I would love is 'social media dotfiles', so I could export my list and share it with others. And vice-versa.

https://bsky.app/profile/bexsaltsman.bsky.social/post/3me4yb...

- Baby-eating restaurants in Denver

- Denver's unique food scene

wtaf meta.

Beyond that, I simply don't see how Meta can possibly ever monetize their investment in AI. People are and will continue to be willing to pay OpenAI, Anthropic, google, microsoft. No one will pay Meta for their AI. And if their investment was only a couple million and they got some useless suggested questions out of it, whatever. But the size of their investment sure makes it look like someone thinks they'll make money off of it.

Do we need a way to audit usage stats in addition to financial numbers?

My wife is a big fan, as she has a lot of funny content specific to Asian cultures. Yes, she has some relationship stuff too. You may not like her content, but she's got a few hundred thousand subscribers on Youtube, and 17 million on TikTok.

I'm hoping they're cooked because they're putting all of their eggs in the AGI basket instead of making useful AI products, and they probably won't figure out AGI.

It is 60% garbage but actually the 40% that is there is completely different and valuable compared even to YouTube (where I spend the lions share of my social media time). But I actually think that only looking at it once a month is the best way since if I look at the feed more often I notice it slowly skews more to 90% garbage and 10% value.

That being said, it's still sad that this is the default new/returning user experience. Imagine a world where a new user was met with real posts about a variety of interests, rather than a psychic barrage of insane AI posts.

I manage the shit out of FB and YouTube. You need to block a few things so it stops testing a few segment ideas.

FUCK THAT.

So I don't use Facebook. I cannot wait for this house of cards to collapse in on itself.

It was already slop before that.

If it was up to me, I think AI content should be OPT IN. I must choose to view AI content and not be force fed from the conveyor of slop. This is where governments should legislate but we'll never see this happen.

So where are people now? If I want to get informed on local events, etc., where should I go?

I honestly do not care if Facebook is cooked or goes away -- but I doubt the situation is that bad.

... but Facebook makes money off ads. They don't want you leaving. They want you to stay online all day.

Instead, they show you brainrot: content interesting enough to keep you on the site, but shallow enough that you are always thirsty for more. However, making this content is still a lot of work, and isn't what most people want to do: It takes a lot of brainrot to keep you trapped 24/7.

Slop requires no effort, costs next to nothing, and fills the "brainrot" niche perfectly. Facebook doesn't care that people are posting bot content, because it's the perfect thing to make them money.

They are not sending their best.

Mostly Simpsons memes, Seinfeld memes, Pro Wrestling memes, Sopranos memes, and then intersections of those memes (Seinfeld Pro Wrestling, Simpsons Pro Wrestling, etc.). Some nerd shit. Stuff from the handful of friends of mine and local groups I interact with who still post on Facebook. Maybe <1% total garbage like what the article describes but I immediately block any groups or users who post anything even slightly annoying. I almost never watch any video content at all. It's unironically better passive content than anywhere else left on the web, probably because all the people trying to be hip have gone somewhere else lol

However whatever their UI is sluggish as hell and I'm surprised this wasn't discussed. You'll click block user/group and it will respond multiple seconds later (on my symmetric 1Gbps FIOS connection) and UI elements will jump around. FB messenger is slow as shit and occasionally will fail to decrypt/load messages entirely, even though it works fine on my phone (don't have regular FB on my phone so can't make that comparison). There's an anti-performance cargo-cult among web devs. Perhaps their metrics only show what it saves them on server costs. But if I did not already use the site it would be impossible to convince me to start.

There's also a significant amount of viral content that is clearly an older person's Facebook post which was intended for only friends but got pushed to the public feed of a Threads account that may have been created by accident -- or default -- when Facebook blitz-scaled user numbers after launch. The posts are always hundreds of people piling on about someone posting a photo of their teenager in an embarrassing situation, with the original poster probably blissfully unaware that they're getting publicly dragged on Threads.

Check your parents' phones to see if they're publicly cross-posting on accident!

I only log in to see what friends/family are doing, and I have fewer than 100 friends on both added together, but I have to scroll and scroll to see anything by those I am interested in.

Whether it's AI or not, it's all irrelevant slop to me.

It's usually not AI (at least not obviously) but it's still slop.

I think it's obvious why given the way users interact with sites/apps on their devices vs on desktop (they want to make FB mobile as TikTok-like as possible), but it's really striking how much of Facebook on mobile is just a bunch of AI slop at this point. I see some creep in on desktop too, mostly within the Reels/Shorts section (same creators/videos on both platforms, that is), but to see my recommended feed content be so vastly different indicates a lot to me about how the algorithm interprets user behavior and a lot of Meta's thinking about mobile audiences.

EDIT: mind you I don't follow a single topic or favorite anything on the platform, the content being served/recommended to me is purely based (as far as I can tell) on gender/demographic info they know about me and user behavior.

Only that keeps me going back.

Facebook basically has sexual content spam as in the OP article all the way.

It's to the point I'd never open either app when in public.

This is the cause. With a long dormant account, facebook has no real content to show you. Your friends will almost all be dormant as well, even the facebook pages and groups you were part of are likely to have fallen silent. Facebook will feed you directly from the slop firehose rather than show you a blank feed.

Somewhere, there's an algorithm designed to increase engagement. And it doesn't care what kind of engagement, so clicking the "I'm not interested in this garbage" button is just as engaging as liking or watching or commenting.

Is it possible to make money these days without being ethically bankrupt?

The surprising effectiveness of Meta Ads for certain audiences as counter-intuitive as it seems is one example.

I wouldn't know myself; I tried Facebook in... I think 2010 or so, but found it to be highly addictive and not worth it, so I quit after several weeks. Since then, while I knew that I occassionaly missed some useful group to be in, I've not regretted the decision.

Probably not using it from ages.

This is not even an internet-era thing. Before that, some of the best-selling magazines were basically celebrity gossip. Facebook just found a way to scale it and make more money off of it.

The only thing that surprises me now is that people don't actually mind it if you point out that they're liking, commenting, or resharing AI slop. It doesn't even matter that the story wasn't real. It's enough that the kitten is cute, or whatever.

That's the problem. Your friends and liked pages have all moved on and aren't posting anymore. The algorithm has no idea what to show you.

FWIW I don't use Facebook actively but do log in once in a while, mainly for marketplace and neighborhood groups. And a ton of my friends are still active there (might be giving away my age). The first post on my feed not from a friend is at #14, and it's a clip from a comedian, so content I don't mind. Then one at #18, which is an article posted by a local newspaper. Further down at #25 or so from the onion. Keep scrolling I see New York Times, Gothamist, Subway Takes, Cracked (that's still around?), WTA. Overall my feed is almost entirely posts from my friends from the last week or relevant news, and I see zero AI slop or other posts of the kind that are in the article.

So basically - it's all about the algorithm and your connections. A "cooked" product doesn't make a trillion dollars every quarter.

My own anecdotes are that Facebook Groups tend to be the nexus of legacy social features and that Marketplace has overtaken Craigslist for person to person sales.

But the feed is now more akin to TikTok than friend feed 1.0 from the late 2000s.

Again, I’d love to see actual Facebook engagement data, not some guy’s opinion.

I got a lot of that kind of stuff when I started a new Facebook account but once I got my friends and family on and joined some sports photography groups I am usually greeted by (1) photos of varying quality that people took of a high school basketball game, (2) something family members are doing, (3) some friends outraged about the Trump administration... With helpings of AI slop cat videos and other trash.

Meta obviously believes that those kind of images of women will get engagement and I know I get DMs that appear to be from women like that every time I get on a new platform -- usually I don't respond, or lead them out until they reveal what they are, though I am tempted to say "I am only interested in 2.5-d girls"

Instagram has those blonde women too, but I was impressed with the "cold start" experience on Instagram where my feed was filled with some really incredible videos that must have been hand selected. After a few days of engagement farming though I wound up connected to a lot of South Asians including rather modest Muslim and Hindu women who project a fashionable image without showing a lot of skin. I didn't have a lot of success connecting with people in my immediate area until I started going out as-a-fox and handing out tokens with QR codes.

This sort of thing is perfect ragebait that Facebook et al love to serve to their products.

The only problem for FB is that there's nowhere to angrily contradict. I suppose their algo feed shunted this author into the young male to incel radicalization pipeline? They must serve differently enraging suggested questions once they have more data on the viewer.

We are not the target audience.

My point in this somewhat rambly post is it's always been a spammy mess and Zuck's never had an interest in making a good product. For him it's literally about domination

And PS: yeah, I know. With Chrome Google is apparently trying to dictate standards in a similarly cynical way

(1) download the app (2) use it for whatever i need to get done (3) delete it

TBH this article is interesting, I haven't actually looked at fb since I last had an account ca. 2009. It was headed that way then, and I'm not surprised it got there.

But back to the usage pattern above, if someone at Apple is listening please build a sandbox for these malicious apps that just fucking silences them unless I choose to run it by which I mean literally not a single CPU instruction of their code runs unless I explicitly tell it to. Thanks.

It's really unfortunate that these people don't know, don't understand or even don't believe that this is algoritmic feed tailored specifically for you.

I have people in my family which basically believe that there is a pride march every Tuesday in cities around or country.

FB of course started as a way for college kids to follow each other and see what's going on. Then rather than a chronological feed we got the newsfeed. This was hugely controversial, actually. Apparently ~10% of the user base threatened to quit over it [1].

But why did they do it? Because it increased engagement. And every social media platform since has followed the newsfeed model.

But the big thing (IMHO) that led to FB's destruction was sharing links. I bet this too increased engagement but it ultimately leads to your feed being flooded with your weird uncle posting conspiracy theories.

All social media platforms have moved away from this idea of following your friends and family. They're all now a way of disseminating "news" and following celebrities. How social groups keep in touch now is group chats.

I firmly believe this recommendation model is headed for a reckoning with governments around the world. We have the Meta trial going on now, the EU investigating platforms for addictive practices (where is this same smoke for sports betting and crypto gambling I wonder?) and so on.

In the US, this comes back to Section 230, a law established in the 1990s that created legal cover for user generated content because it shielded platforms from legal liability as long as they met certain requirements (eg moderation, legal takedowns). The alternative is to be a publisher (eg a newspaper) who are responsible for their content.

I believe that the algorithmic newsfeed has created a way to let social media platforms act as publishers but enjoy thei protections of being a platform.

Let me put it this way: if, for example, you as a publisher make endless posts about the evils of Cuba, how is that different from having user-generated content where you promote anti-Cuba content and suppress pro-Cuba content? In my opinion, it isn't, functionally. This will ultimately come to a head.

Anyway, back to Facebook, I know some still use groups but really who uses FB anymore? For awhile, Meta had the golden goose with IG but even that seems to be in decline. Twitter has declined way from its peak and was never mainstream. Snapchat enjoyed a very young audience for ephemeral messaging. I have no idea what the current state is. It seems like Tiktok is the only platform still enjoying growth.

[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/4018352/facebooks-news-feed-just...

Sometimes I'll go down a rabbit hole of clicking AI generated videos just because my curiosity is piqued, and then I'll be stuck getting that slop fed to me for the next week. I have to make a mental note to actively disengage with it as quickly as possible to tip the algo in the other direction.

the awful part is the intense swarm of hateful bigots that arrive at any post that shows any kind of misfortune on the part of people who are not white and republican. I'm pretty sure that a large number of these accounts are not bots; they're real people living around the country, seething in bigoted hatred who can now post with impunity the most vile and disgusting crap I've ever seen.

Example: A local news post shows three boys who have been reported missing (yes, people's children missing, and no, this is not about immigration - for those posts, the hate and racism is vastly worse). The three boys happen to be Black. Only one comment is actually displayed beneath the photo: "They all look the same to me!" - then more (I'm cutting and pasting these from the actual post just now): "Tell them by their hair??? No???" "How can you tell one from another?" "Did'n do nuffin man" "Missing or escaped!?" comments flooded by revolting, actual racism, against innocent children who are potentially in severe danger. Moderation is not an option at all here, there's thousands of these people swarming any such post, the posts are from some local news source that comes from an aggregator of some kind that does no moderation of any kind, nobody cares, it's just a huge platform for vast mobs of the most deplorable people you ever hoped didn't exist.

This site needs to be closed down like yesterday.

Everyones feed is different.

It depends on how much you train the algorithm.

Yours is untrained, therefore slop.

This is mostly about OP, not Facebook. The reason he sees tons of AI images of AI girls is because that's the kind of content he consumes on various Meta platforms. When I login to Facebook, I see none of that. So...

I am in a couple dozen active groups across a variety of topics - guitar, tech, TV shows, history, tabletop gaming, etc. - and 99% of posts are on-topic chatter by humans.

I prefer Reddit because it's longer-form content but with communities, it's about where there's a center of gravity - a subreddit, a FB group, a Discord, a traditional forum, etc. I go where the people are. And a lot of those people are on FB for some niches.

The "FB is nothing but AI slop and ads" is a myth. I have interesting conversations with people I don't personally know (in a real life sense) on FB every day.

Those warnings are stupid.