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 :(
I agree. It just sucks now
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.
This. If people really want to buy something they will check all available websites for the item(s) they’re looking for. I still use CL exclusively and refuse to touch FB Marketplace even with a burner account because it requires a phone number.
Absolutely this. In the town I moved from, Craigslist was the defacto town market. In this one, it’s FB Marketplace.
FB doesn’t have a stranglehold because they’re better; these spaces can and do evolve organically.
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.
Fair, but you can do a lot to limit what data it has, like using extensions like “Facebook Container” on Firefox to block tracking across various sites. It’s not going to prevent your grandma from adding you as a grandchild and your parents from linking you to themselves, but it can do a lot to limit how bad the tracking is.
It is a privacy nightmare. However if you only use it for keeping up with distance friends it is a useful tradeoff. However because they must have so much private information to be useful for that purpose you need to ensure they never have any other purpose. Which is why I won’t use marketplace or groups - there are alternatives that don’t already have private information.
Craiglist doesn’t even have my city listed
Pick the nearest one that is.
Ok. Will do! Thanks!
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.
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.
hugs my index
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.
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.
To get to it click the 3 lines or ‘more’, then find ‘feeds’ and select that
Oh, wow… I recently opened fb again and was just irritated that it didn’t show any posts by my friends. Turns out they weren’t inactive, fb just doesn’t show them by default. What a dumb waste of a platform… I mean, what is it good for if not that? Why would I watch an endless stream of ads and clickbait?
I hear you saying that the only way to win is to not play the game.
That isn’t a win either. I have a number of distance friends that I wouldn’t hear about outside of facebook. I don’t live near my old high school, but it is nice to see what is going on. I wouldn’t have found out about that Ed died in a motercycle accident if it wasn’t for facebook, but it is nice to know. I wouldn’t see all those cute back to school pictures - they would be happy to show me over lunch but we don’t live close enough to have lunch together. Facebook has much usefulness for keeping connected to distant friends/family (close friends/family I will call)
I think the way to win is to understand the algorithm and juke it for good stuff. I saw an ad for THC gummies a while back, free sample, so I started reading the comments, clicked through to the site, backed out, read the comments again, then clicked back in and got a free sample. I spent so much time messing around with this random ad that the next thing I knew, every ad was for free THC gummies (just pay shipping but cheaper than actually buying from Cycling Frog or wherever). Eventually it reverts back towards a mean but if you see something cool you can def trick the whole algorithm to only hand you that cool stuff
example if you see an ad you hate, for like a slot machine game app, and you click ‘see less ads like this
You engaged with that ad. It’s worth slightly more than if you scrolled by it.
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.
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.
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 ✨💥
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.
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 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
