My mother is an international flight attendant in her 60s.
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.
International flight attendant. So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary. If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political power (international travel might be the best proxy for that)
What you're referring to may also be part of their XCheck program which came to light back in 2021
> So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary.
I can confirm the same experience as the parent commenter for my family who still use Facebook even though most of them don't travel internationally.
> If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political power (international travel might be the best proxy for that)
I think the much simpler explanation is more likely: People who use Facebook for engaging with friends and family content will see more friends and family content. I don't think this is Facebook playing 4D chess trying to hide content from politicians by detecting who is traveling internationally. I mean, if Facebook did want to have a separate algorithm for politicians, don't you think they could come up with something better than triggering on international travel?
I think you're overthinking it. She probably just has a lot of real people connections and drives the algo to meaningful interactions. When a ghost logs in, they don't know what to show so default to "general" spam which is just AI generated woman.
Could it be that the problem is users’ own interest in being outraged? A reflection of their mental state and anxiety that they then project to Facebook as if that’s the root cause.
My feed is like this too. I rarely use FB now, but I’ve aggressively pruned and blocked anything that becomes political or negative.
I unfollowed everyone except for a few family members. It really wants to give you the infinite scroll and started showing me some really bizarre stuff. So much AI slop, and random content.
For about a week it kept showing me nursing mothers, no matter how many times I said "I don't want to see this" and blocking. I have no problem with women nursing, but these were done in a way to be sexually provocative.
After that it started showing me AI houses and kitchens, with kitchen taps but no sink basin.
I just gave up at that point.
I made a Facebook account a few years ago for a private group related to a class I was taking. I didn't want to do this, but it is what it is.
Being paranoid, I ran a VM just for Facebook. The browser never went to any other sites, so as far as I know there is no way it could track me or get any actual information about me, other than maybe a very rough location based on my IP. I also setup a burner email just for this and used a fake name/picture.
On a fresh account with no info, my feed was much like that of the linked article. A bunch of thirst traps and various "news" and memes. Occasionally it would tell me to follow stuff so it could actually populate the feed, but when it wasn't doing that, it was giving me this kind of garbage. This was before the advent of generative AI, so I assume these were mostly real photos, but who knows who was actually behind those accounts.
Twitter was fairly similar, but would show a lot of high school kids fighting or general street fights... along side the thirst traps.
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I only use it for cruise groups and it’s been useful but once you scroll the main feed it’s baaad. Slop after slop. And what isn’t slop is rage bait short form content or bad takes or stolen videos from the vine days it feels.
I have this with Twitter surprisingly.
I only use it for animal pictures, art, and to follow artists. I usually just use the Following page, but my FYP is always just... animal pictures and art, exactly what I want. No weird right wing shit, no weird crypto shit, no drama or ragebait shit, etc... somehow.
I know some day it'll break though.
Same here. The trick is to unfollow people who start posting things you don't want to see in your feed any more. It sounds so simple, but many people treat their following list as an append-only log.
I've followed accounts for hobbies that later spiral off into the deep end of Twitter's topics of the day, which is always my sign to unfollow them.
Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make them angry, though. These websites continue serving up more of what you click on.
Same. It feels like the real trick is to get platforms to think you're some kind of important person that could hurt the platform if served too much ragebaits.
And it also feels like they're compelled to maximize ragebaits for some reason - maybe the Web2 is running out of "advertiser friendly" contents.
I have an account to follow artists on X. Surprisingly, it never pushes even one single blatant AI artist to my feed (not saying I'm an expert to recognize AI-generate artworks, but I've done digital painting as a side gig and.) There might be some paintover or more subtle ones that eluded my radar, but I've never seen the typical AI styles on my timeline.
However, if you check posts remotely related to the US politics the reply section is out of control.
I honestly believe out of Reddit, Facebook, Bsky and X, X is the one with the most reasonable timeline algorithm[0]. Reddit and Facebook are unusable except for very specific reasons (asking questions in certain apps' subs/groups). Most people I know irl moved to instagram though.
[0]: Bsky is the worst, but interestingly if you use a third-party feed like 'For You' it's on par with X, just less traffic.
Was she using the 'Friends' tab? Anything else is complete trash.
This is regular feed. I have another friend that is like OP's Mom, basically posts 4-10x per day. her main feed is basically just her and her friend's stuff, comments etc etc (few ads here and there of course but basically her feed looks like OG Facebook)
The skeptical observer would suggest because her demograph votes, serving ads which benefit Facebook shareholders is good for business.
This is how my parents' Facebook feeds look, too. And my wife's. And my friends who still use it.
I log in a couple times per year and see the same thing. It's nice to catch up with the friends who still use it.
One thing I've noticed over the years on HN is that many of the people talking confidently about Facebook also start their posts with "I'm glad I deleted my Facebook account 8 years ago, but..." and then go on to describe what they imagine Facebook is like for everyone else, as pieced together through the type of sensational headlines that hit the Hacker News front page every day.
There's another failure mode where someone tries to use Facebook but doesn't have any active friends on the site. They might scroll past photos from friends and family to click on ragebait links or engage with someone debating politics because they can't resist an internet argument. The algorithm takes note that this is what they engage with and gives them more of it, while showing less of the content they're scrolling past. Then they wonder why their feeds are full of topics that make them angry.
There's even an explicit feature to tell the algorithm what you want to see less of: You click the three dots and click "Hide post". They even have useful tools to unfollow people without unfriending them, which is highly useful for those people can't politely disconnect from but whose content you don't want to see. Using these tools even a little bit goes a long way to cleaning up your feed.
Meanwhile, people like my parents and extended family treat Facebook like a friendly gathering where everyone knows discussions of politics and religion are off the table. They click "Like" on things they want to see more of. They leave nice comments under photos of their friends and family. Their feeds adapt and give them what they want.
You keep the content creators happy.
> all the Facebook PMs intended
That's being awfully generous. I think Facebook PMs intend your feed to be filled with valuable commercial offers that can be monetized by Meta.
They should offer that privilege to the rest of us for a few bucks a month. I'd probably pay.
The problem is that your friends probably don't post much to facebook, and so they'd show you that, and you'd get to the end and find something else to do, so they have to bulk it up. There is a "friends" feed that's buried under a couple of menus that does this though.
I wouldn't mind seeing an empty feed that says, "your friends didn't post today," or whatever. They have to fill the feed because I'm not paying them and they need the engagement.
But if I were paying them, even a little bit, then maybe they could. But I didn't know there was a friends-only feed so I'll check that out.
If you are on the mobile app, click on the burger menu and select "Feeds". You will then have a page that has tabs at the top. "All" will be selected by default, but if you select "Friends" you will see only posts from your friends. If you have completely caught up it will be empty and will say that you have caught up and seen everything your friends have posted. There are still ads, but you don't get all the reels, and crap posted by people you don't know.
Go to the "feeds" page and select "friends".
You don't need to pay anything. That's just how Facebook works when you have active friends on it and you engage with their content.
I do find it interesting that tech people are so baffled when other people enjoy Facebook and derive value from it. I think we see so many exaggerated headlines about algorithms and feeds that people who don't use the site have a very different idea of what people who do actually use the site are seeing.
Yet my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs open to people and bands she wants updates from because Facebook refuses to put them on her feed, despite her commenting on every post and story from them; she instead gets all these random shitty "suggested" posts from things that she would never have interest in or actively hates and FB should know that. She constantly mutes and reports shit. I get the same thing, but I don't use FB nearly as much. Those same bands have to spam repeatedly because despite having tens of thousands of fans they show everyone that their posts are only shown to 16 people. It's a shit site that maybe works for some folks, but not at all for us active or not.