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Personally, I don't use FB anymore even though I still have an account. I use Messenger to keep up with my closest friends and I use Instagram for photo sharing

Personally, I don't use FB anymore even though I still have an account. I use Messenger to keep up with my closest friends and I use Instagram for photo sharing and general life updates. I don't follow anyone who I don't actually consider a friend and my profile is on private. I further restrict my circle with Instagram's "Close Friends" feature when I want to share something on my story with only a select few. Prior to that, though, I just made extensive use of Facebook's unfollow feature and a few key uBlock Origin filters (that block out any posts containing the words "____ was tagged in a post" or such). Also, for what it's worth, I only follow ~200 people on Instagram so maybe I don't have enough feed content to generate any, but I have NEVER seen an advertisement on Instagram and all of the posts also appear in chronological order for me. I get the feeling that most of the people who have a bad time with FB or Instagram are the people who don't use the unfollow feature for their uncle that spends all day posting inflammatory political rants or who follow spammy Instagram accounts that are just promotion bots. If you use FB and FB's apps and services to keep up with your friends, your real friends, I think they're pretty great. Edit: For those interested, these are my uBlock filters for facebook.com: https://pastebin.com/GHwpM9bY https://pastebin.com/GHwpM9bY If you're tired of the noise in your feed I recommend trying these out. They aren't particularly well organized, when I first started using uBlock Origin I wasn't all too familiar with the syntax, but they do a pretty good job (for me).

rconti 8y ago
I'm not sure what "[having] enough feed content to generate [ads]" on Instagram even means. I suspect you must browse on desktop with some filtering? I think I follow fewer than 200 people, and 0 brands/"influencers"/"celebrities" ... and i get PLENTY of ads. maybe every 5th post. Using the app, that is.
- o10449366 8y ago
  No, 99% of my time spent on Instagram is on my phone. I have never seen an advertisement on there or on the desktop site. My hypothesis is that they have some threshold that "every N posts we insert M ads" and because my feed doesn't meet that N-post threshold I've never seen any ads. That's only a guess, though.
  - saberience 8y ago
    That doesn't make any sense. Instagram shows ads no matter who you are or how many friends/posts you have. I use Insta less than anyone I know. I only have 179 friends on there and barely get any posts showing up but I still see ads. I just checked the feed now and the second "post" was an ad for "Quickbooks". So you're either deliberately lying or can't tell the difference between an ad or a real post.
    - o10449366 8y ago
      It seems unlikely you'd be convinced even if I sent a censored video of my feed, but anecdotally it seems I'm not the only one: https://www.fastcompany.com/90166955/i-have-a-secret-ad-free-instagram-account-and-its-bliss https://www.fastcompany.com/90166955/i-have-a-secret-ad-free...
tenebrisalietum 8y ago
I notice a lot of junk from Facebook comes from "re-shares"; people sharing stuff from these crappy third-party groups that exist simply to make things viral. I tend to block on sight, but wish there was a way to say "Automatically block shared posts containing videos/photos that don't originate from the poster or people in my Friends." I'm sure there are people that save these meme/viral pictures on their phone and re-post it, rather than just blindly share from these stupid groups, but not very many from what I've seen.
- o10449366 8y ago
  I agree. That's why I specifically implemented the uBlock filter for any posts containing "your friend was tagged in ___" or "your friend commented on ____". 99.9% of those posts were meme posts I had no interest in. I recommend you look at my filter list and see if that one helps, if you happen to use uBlock Origin. It did wonders for my feed.

rconti 8y ago

I'm not sure what "[having] enough feed content to generate [ads]" on Instagram even means. I suspect you must browse on desktop with some filtering? I think I follow fewer than 200 people, and 0 brands/"influencers"/"celebrities" ... and i get PLENTY of ads. maybe every 5th post. Using the app, that is.

o10449366 8y ago
No, 99% of my time spent on Instagram is on my phone. I have never seen an advertisement on there or on the desktop site. My hypothesis is that they have some threshold that "every N posts we insert M ads" and because my feed doesn't meet that N-post threshold I've never seen any ads. That's only a guess, though.
- saberience 8y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. Instagram shows ads no matter who you are or how many friends/posts you have. I use Insta less than anyone I know. I only have 179 friends on there and barely get any posts showing up but I still see ads. I just checked the feed now and the second "post" was an ad for "Quickbooks". So you're either deliberately lying or can't tell the difference between an ad or a real post.
  - o10449366 8y ago
    It seems unlikely you'd be convinced even if I sent a censored video of my feed, but anecdotally it seems I'm not the only one: https://www.fastcompany.com/90166955/i-have-a-secret-ad-free-instagram-account-and-its-bliss https://www.fastcompany.com/90166955/i-have-a-secret-ad-free...

tenebrisalietum 8y ago

I notice a lot of junk from Facebook comes from "re-shares"; people sharing stuff from these crappy third-party groups that exist simply to make things viral. I tend to block on sight, but wish there was a way to say "Automatically block shared posts containing videos/photos that don't originate from the poster or people in my Friends." I'm sure there are people that save these meme/viral pictures on their phone and re-post it, rather than just blindly share from these stupid groups, but not very many from what I've seen.

o10449366 8y ago
I agree. That's why I specifically implemented the uBlock filter for any posts containing "your friend was tagged in ___" or "your friend commented on ____". 99.9% of those posts were meme posts I had no interest in. I recommend you look at my filter list and see if that one helps, if you happen to use uBlock Origin. It did wonders for my feed.