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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?

_bcron ,

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

Githyanki ,

I hear you saying that the only way to win is to not play the game.

bluGill ,

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)

_bcron ,

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

FourPacketsOfPeanuts ,

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.

Asetru ,

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?

chakan2 ,
@chakan2@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Ilandar ,

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.

cdf12345 ,

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.

Poayjay ,

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 :(

Usernameblankface ,
@Usernameblankface@lemmy.world avatar

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

floofloof ,

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.

Stern ,
@Stern@lemmy.world avatar

I use an extension called FB Purity and the amount of bullshit it filters out is insane.

jqubed ,
@jqubed@lemmy.world avatar

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.

NineMileTower ,

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.

bluGill ,

The solution is to keep using craigslist - it still exists and gets some activity. Ensure that it gets more.

BearOfaTime ,

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.

bluGill ,

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.

Takumidesh ,

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

NineMileTower ,

Ok. Will do! Thanks!

TheFeatureCreature ,
@TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Telorand ,

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.

desertdruid ,

Craiglist doesn’t even have my city listed

DarkThoughts ,

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.

Glitch ,

I totally agree here, on both points

evasive_chimpanzee ,

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.

Rai ,

hugs my index

WordBox ,

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

evasive_chimpanzee ,

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.

ShepherdPie ,

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.

Raiderkev ,

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.

badelf ,

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.

Magister ,
@Magister@lemmy.world avatar

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.

bluGill ,

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.

friend_of_satan ,

Not only is it random, it’s nearly impossible to find something you have seen before. Awful all around.

HootinNHollerin ,

Don’t use meta products if you have respect for yourself

Telorand ,

Don’t use Meta products.

Ftfy. 😁

2pt_perversion ,

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.

circuitfarmer ,
@circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

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?”

Smokeless7048 ,

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

SuiXi3D ,
@SuiXi3D@fedia.io avatar

They keep feeding me astronomy-related videos, but only the ones with flat-earthers and Jesus-botherers in the comments.

XeroxCool ,

High interaction is all that matters.

oldfart ,

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?

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