WTF happened to Facebook?

[Eric]

I'll admit that I've been away for a while but I decided to login and check it out and wow, first of all there's almost no real engagement anymore. It seems like the only posts are memes with no individual thoughts or contextual posts, you can see why FB (or whatever they're calling it now) is flailing, they're obviously tanking.

 

[Joe]

Getting rid of facebook was the best thing I ever did. It's trash.

 

[Yoused]

It is possible to establish a nominally non-vile environment for yourself of FB. Just be judicious with your friendset and what you follow. The ads, though, those are quite the suck.

 

[Eric]

It is possible to establish a nominally non-vile environment for yourself of FB. Just be judicious with your friendset and what you follow. The ads, though, those are quite the suck.

It's not really vile, it's just non-existent at this point. All of my friends that have remained have all but stopped posting and the ones who do are basically sharing innocuous memes, after signing off for a few years and checking back in it's like day and night. It's basically a shell of what it once was.

 

[User.45]

It's not really vile, it's just non-existent at this point. All of my friends that have remained have all but stopped posting and the ones who do are basically sharing innocuous memes, after signing off for a few years and checking back in it's like day and night. It's basically a shell of what it once was.

It was downhill since you couldn't sort by time of posting and that was like 10 years ago. By now facebook is trying to control every single interaction and post you're exposed to and for some reason it consistently manages to pull up just shit. For example, simple text only status updates were the single most interesting content from my friends, now I see none of it, either because they don't post such anymore or because everything else is prioritized over it. At one point I could set up a filter and just see status updates, but I think that option is gone too.

So sometimes I wonder, just like with netflix, the AI is pulling shit because it's trying to keep engagement while hiding lack of content, or it's just really this bad at what it's supposed to do.

 

[Eric]

It was downhill since you couldn't sort by time of posting and that was like 10 years ago. By now facebook is trying to control every single interaction and post you're exposed to and for some reason it consistently manages to pull up just shit. For example, simple text only status updates were the single most interesting content from my friends, now I see none of it, either because they don't post such anymore or because everything else is prioritized over it. At one point I could set up a filter and just see status updates, but I think that option is gone too.

So sometimes I wonder, just like with netflix, the AI is pulling shit because it's trying to keep engagement while hiding lack of content, or it's just really this bad at what it's supposed to do.

So it sounds like they're essentially trying to utilize AI and throwing everything but the kitchen sink into trying to get users engaged again. TBH I was really surprised at how much it has gone down hill, this smacks of the final throes of MySpace in every way.

 

[MEJHarrison]

I'll admit that I've been away for a while but I decided to login and check it out and wow, first of all there's almost no real engagement anymore.

I think that's the main thing that drove me away. It was like watching Saturday morning cartoons. I get more thoughtful conversation here, and this place is 50% clowns. Pointing at a picture and saying "that says it all" only works once or twice before I start thinking there's not much going on upstairs if you need to communicate in funny cat photos. I like humor. But if there's nothing behind the funny photos, I'm going to get bored real quick.

I also got tired of anti-common sense, whether it be Covid, vaccines, masks, the election, election fraud, etc. Stupid people in the headlines are funny. Stupid people in the wild are generally far less amusing unless you're in the right place at the right time. If the thing I hate doing in the first place (I'm not the most social person out there) is going to make me mad, cause frustration or anger or any other negative thing, why do it? I can fill in that time with more of something that does make me happy.

 

[The-Real-Deal82]

I avoid most of the political stuff on Facebook, for me it’s for staying in touch with family. I think they’ve clamped down a lot because of the misinformation being spread about Covid. Twitter is still full of that nonsense though.

 

[Apple fanboy]

I'll admit that I've been away for a while but I decided to login and check it out and wow, first of all there's almost no real engagement anymore. It seems like the only posts are memes with no individual thoughts or contextual posts, you can see why FB (or whatever they're calling it now) is flailing, they're obviously tanking.

Never joined. Never been on it. No regrets.

 

[Renzatic]

Never joined. Never been on it. No regrets.

I've been banned for 30 days for saying someone was being stupid, and honestly, it's something of a relief.

 

[User.45]

I've been banned for 30 days for saying someone was being stupid, and honestly, it's something of a relief.

How do you get banned? you go on an insult tour?

Just looked at my FB today, of the video status updates, FB had more suggested content than content from my friends. Suggesting content from, Ellen DeGeneres? Like really, this is all FB has on me to think I would ever click that? It's clearly promoted content, but when all the recommendations are off, you again wonder that me posting about 2x a year in english is sufficient to break the algorithm this much? One thing's for sure, FB is really trying to dictate how I interact with my friends and if your reality is shaped around their algorithm it will all be just shite.

 

[Renzatic]

How do you get banned? you go on an insult tour?

All you have to do is run afoul of The Algorithm. It looks for certain phrases and keywords. If you happen to use the right combination thereof in a reply, you get timed out. It doesn't take any nuance into its decision, nor how these phrases were used. If it sees them, you're instantly booted.

My favorite was that time I replied with something like "You mean to say there are other Matts on Facebook besides me? I'LL KICK ALL THEIR ASSES," and was banned for threatening violence.

In a lot of ways, it's not vastly different than how the MR moderators function.

 

[User.45]

All you have to do is run afoul of The Algorithm. It looks for certain phrases and keywords. If you happen to use the right combination thereof in a reply, you get timed out. It doesn't take any nuance into its decision, nor how these phrases were used. If it sees them, you're instantly booted.

My favorite was that time I replied with something like "You mean to say there are other Matts on Facebook besides me? I'LL KICK ALL THEIR ASSES," and was banned for threatening violence.

In a lot of ways, it's not vastly different than how the MR moderators function.

Gotcha. 99% of my FB interactions are non-english and natural language recognition doesn't work very well. As some FB researchers stated, non-english FB is not moderated at all, but still driven for clicks and engagement.

 

[Eric]

All you have to do is run afoul of The Algorithm. It looks for certain phrases and keywords. If you happen to use the right combination thereof in a reply, you get timed out. It doesn't take any nuance into its decision, nor how these phrases were used. If it sees them, you're instantly booted.

My favorite was that time I replied with something like "You mean to say there are other Matts on Facebook besides me? I'LL KICK ALL THEIR ASSES," and was banned for threatening violence.

In a lot of ways, it's not vastly different than how the MR moderators function.

Yet you can spew all the antivaxxer bullshit you want all day long and it's never an issue. Yes, very much like MR.

 

[User.45]

Yet you can spew all the antivaxxer bullshit you want all day long and it's never an issue. Yes, very much like MR.

For a very good reason. It keeps the most impressionable people engaged. I think that since 2016, grifting became a mainstream industry.
I think nobody likes these people, but they are just so easy to make money off of that tycoons like Zuckerberg just cannot resist.
I think Musk too had realized relatively recently that there's just much better monetary return with catering to these people, instead of to the sane.

 

[Herdfan]

The screwed over a lot of groups, which is mainly the reason I go there, with their recent policy change.

It used to be that a group could be seen by all, but you had to be a member to post. They changed it to if it is a public group, anyone can post (ie, lots of SPAM). So all my groups went totally private. Which is fine for my since I am already a member, but new people looking for a related group can't see it.

 

[Eric]

The screwed over a lot of groups, which is mainly the reason I go there, with their recent policy change.

It used to be that a group could be seen by all, but you had to be a member to post. They changed it to if it is a public group, anyone can post (ie, lots of SPAM). So all my groups went totally private. Which is fine for my since I am already a member, but new people looking for a related group can't see it.

This was the number one reason I quit them years back, for example if you responded to a news article it would post that to your feed for all of your friends to see. There was no way to make that private, their entire existence was rooted in spreading every move you make to everyone you know, much like a trojan horse virus.

 

[rdrr]

I have to admit that I got sucked into one of those DIY videos of someone posting "wait until the end", and I have seen they have been the trend since the pandemic. The synopsis is that someone is going to show you how to do something that will save you money to DIY and they spend 20 - 30 minutes setting up and repeating themselves. Spoiler alert! When it actually comes to them executing the actual task the video cuts out.

Meanwhile everyone is posting "just get on with it", "they don't know what they are talking about". If you stick with it until the end, you feel stupid and realized you have just wasted 20 minutes of your life you can never get back. I really can't explain how I got sucked into it one late night, but I must admit I did.

 

[User.45]

I have to admit that I got sucked into one of those DIY videos of someone posting "wait until the end", and I have seen they have been the trend since the pandemic. The synopsis is that someone is going to show you how to do something that will save you money to DIY and they spend 20 - 30 minutes setting up and repeating themselves. Spoiler alert! When it actually comes to them executing the actual task the video cuts out.

Meanwhile everyone is posting "just get on with it", "they don't know what they are talking about". If you stick with it until the end, you feel stupid and realized you have just wasted 20 minutes of your life you can never get back. I really can't explain how I got sucked into it one late night, but I must admit I did.

Don't people normally start with checking the key frames for the end of videos?!

 

[DT]

I haven't been on FB for a few years now, but my initial use was almost exclusively within very controlled groups, almost like having a bunch of forums in one place. I rarely looked at the noise on my timeline/feed, but when I did, it was at least sort of pleasant. Mostly, I spent time in family groups to share pics, various special interest groups (cars, surfing) which were mostly pretty focused on events, sharing surf reports, etc. But eventually even those started getting polluted, and the feeds just became insane, it just got hard to look away, I'll admit to getting sucked into commenting on something, that then gets commented on, and then it's a quick into the shitpool at the bottom.