Why is Facebook filled with so much random junk now?

Buttflapper@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 13 points –

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?

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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 :(

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.

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.

Everyone who will leave has left. So at this point they're just slamming all ads down.

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.

I have never been on Facebook, never even been on the website.

The day it started I told my college-age family that it was a privacy nightmare. They called me paranoid.

Facebook's Shadow profile on you doesn't care whether you have an account or visited their site.

I'm not going to allow them to coerce me into making an account because they have a simulacrum of me.

Just use craigslist. I do. Even in low pop areas it works.

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.

Oculus was founded by a shitty person who sold to Facebook and then went on to help make a company to bring Big Tech into surveillance and autonomous weapon systems. Basically, he's trying to bring on an orwellian nightmare.

Oculus would have gone bad weather or not Facebook bought them.

Go to the sidebar on the left. Click on 'See More.' Click 'feeds' here:

There will be much less random junk.

Stupid, I know, but it does work.

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

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.

sounds interesting, is the source code on somewhere like codeberg or GitHub?

How does it work?

You can download the python code, or frozen executables for Linux and Windows on http://tenfingers.org

Or the whole project, which I admit is kind of messy, on codeberg: https://codeberg.org/Valmond/Tenfingers

I posted a more detailed description just below in this theead, please do say if you don't find it or if you have any kind of questions!

Very cool. 100% over my technical knowledge level but I'll take a look at the code and give it a whirl when I get a chance.

I think it would be awesome if it worked. Power to the people! ;)

Hey thank you!

I finally have some free time ahead, I'll put together a first 'real' documentation that covers installation and basic use cases so that people actually can have a chance of testing it for real. I'll swap the cringy 1990 web page for it on tenfingers.org

Do tell if you try it out 👍🏻

Valmond

I did do a test install (on a virtual machine), and everything seemed to install/configure fine using the python source code and instructions in your repo, but I wasn't able to see any connections being made in the listener log. Brain is too tired, but I tried all of the addresses/ports listed (Debian/bash/ip addr) and created port exceptions with ufw per the instructions file. Can this work with a virtual box?

Nice!

You do need a link to some data as a bootstrap to node adresses, there is a test link on tenfingers.org you can try using, it downloads a small text file but also adds my live nodes address to your known addresses when you use it.

Or you can just set up two local nodes on 127.0.0.1 with two different ports, run their listeners, add data to them, extract the links and, download from the 'other' node to see how things hook up and so on.

The links as tenfingers.db are sqlite databases, so they are easily inspected.

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.

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.

Why do you think the vast majority of us are here? That would be one good reason.

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 :-)

Facebook still has that but they obscured it in favor of their dumb algorithm whipping up totally random things and ads.

To get to it click the 3 lines or 'more', then find 'feeds' and select that, then choose groups or friends or whatnot, and it'll show you those posts sorted by most recent. No way to make this default.

But the algorithm is so dumb because it takes into account how long you pause on a post and seems to weigh that higher than other things - for example if you see an ad you hate, for like a slot machine game app, and you click 'see less ads like this', the amount of time you spend clicking through menu options while on that ad will make the algorithm give you more ads tangentially related to slot machine apps, despite you basically saying "I hate these kind of ads". Really dumb algorithm. Even reporting some fly-by-night obvious scam ad impersonating a brand will lead you to see only those type of scam ads. Really really dumb.

Even you pausing over the post you did in order to take a screenshot, that'll make you see more of those types of things

It may be what you say, the algorithm being dumb. Or it may be deliberate: you've shown yourself willing to categorize these annoying ads so you will be sent more so that fb can collect more data on them.

Abandoning is the only option. It's a dopamine casino now, full of flashing lights.