11 ms·
Facebook's timeline just shows random things for some users
(attempted to submit as URL, query stripped)
https://twitter.com/search?q=facebook+until%3A2022-08-25+since%3A2022-08-24
Edit:
Reddit users complaining of this: https://old.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/wwbfm5/news_feed_showing_people_writing_to_other_people/
Downdetector (a third-party service that asks users if they're down): https://downdetector.com/status/facebook/
Business-oriented status page (all green): https://metastatus.com/
- Jaruzel 4y agoThere's a permanent fix for bugs like these: 1. log out of Facebook. 2. Delete the app from your phone. 3. That's it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xen2xen1 4y ago"Delete Facebook, The New Virtue Signaling", by every HN commentor ever.
- fritztastic 4y agoIf you have a pebble in your shoe and it's bothering you, is it not good advice to remove the pebble and go about your day (as opposed to trying to make the pebble become less uncomfortable)?
- zinekeller 4y agoBecause in this case your analogy is not perfect. There are many reasons why a user is forced to use Facebook. As a user pointed out, if your society has basically mandated using Facebook to interact with basic life, the suggestion to remove Facebook without sugesting replacements for the whole society is just being plainly obtuse.
- trombone5000 4y agoWhy is anyone forced to use Facebook? I, for one, get along great without it.
- zinekeller 4y agoYour anecdote, while I presume is true, doesn't address the main point. You should probably read Gualdrapo's experience (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32576061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32576061), and I find it true on large swaths of Latin America and Asia.
- baby 4y agoI, for one, would lose contact to a lot of my friends if I deleted facebook (and already have lost contact with some of them because they selfishly deleted their fb)
- branon 4y agoYou've commented twice here to the effect that there are many reasons why a person might be forced to use Facebook. Care to elaborate? I can't think of any. If the society in which one lives is backwards to the point of mandating a Facebook account to interact on a basic level... it might be time to turn on, tune in, drop out. Gualdrapo's post doesn't actually say anything about why he _needs_ to use Facebook. Neighboorhood groups and FB marketplace are not necessary to live. I think we might be conflating needs and wants here. Being accustomed to doing things in specific ways is not a need.
- zinekeller 4y ago> If the society in which you live is backwards to the point of mandating a Facebook account to interact on a basic level... it might be time to turn on, tune in, drop out. That's why it's de facto forced on to you. Ministries (Americans: Departments, not religious ministries) are usually only reachable either on Facebook or by physically traveling hours to their office. Facebook groups are the communication platform for any community point-of-contact, and most are set to only be accessible by having a Facebook account. As a society, is it avoidable? Yes. As an individual? Good luck convincing others. It might be hard to wrap your head around it if you were not living in such an area, so thank your government that you have a say on your communication.
- bamboozled 4y agoHow it is virtue signalling? Is advising people not to smoke "virtue signalling" or just good advice?
- hurril 4y agoYou have a problem with autodiallers calling you to talk about auto insurances? Just throw away your phones, problem solved.
- darkwater 4y agoIf the autodialers were part of the phone company AND the makers of your phone, yeah throw away your phone would be sound advice. Yes, Facebook is that.
- hurril 4y agoAre you telling me that it would be impossible for the phone companies to do away with this problem? That they're not making any money from it? The keyword here is network effect.
- darkwater 4y agoI don't live in the USA, I live in Europe and we don't have anymore a robo-call issue (if we ever had it at all), heck I would say we don't almost even have a cold-call from call-centers issue anymore (it was totally an issue a few years ago).Probably because it was... regulated?
- hurril 4y agoOh, the Europe Country. I live in a country in Europe too and we do have a problem with cold calls. There was an attempt at regulating it, there's also a service you can subscribe to that supposedly hinders this. Doesn't work though because there are lists of phone numbers and addresses that can be bought that still give you access. And if you're considered a customer, which is extremely loosely defined, they can call you. Sure, it's far from as bad as it seems to be in the US but my personal threshold is 0.
- nathanaldensr 4y agoVirtue signaling is explicitly not taking any real action, such as deleting your Facebook account and removing their apps.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blitzar 4y agoSaying something is virtue signalling, the ultimate virtue signalling. Its up there with people that get triggered by how "people get triggered by the most insignificant things these days".
- baby 4y agoThey’d need to have used facebook at some point in their lives
- indymike 4y agoSpending less time with Facebook is a positive step towards better mental health, not a virtue signal.
- raverbashing 4y agoI second the 'deleting the app' part, even if you want to keep using it. The mobile web page works fine (and actually seemed to have a different front page algo - at least some time ago)
- ipqk 4y ago4. Use Instagram (and pretend they're not the same company)
- andsoitis 4y agoYou want to delete your account too.
- Jaruzel 4y agoYou'll note I didn't say that, as for some people deleting their FB account is not an option. I do heed my own advice; I do not have the FB app installed on my phone.
- indymike 4y agoI did this a couple of years ago. Nothing bad happened.
- xg15 4y agoSomeone introduced a sign error and now the lowest-scored content has highest priority on the newsfeed? :)
- Trouble_007 4y agoFormatted with the URL protected with <url> Twitter : <https://twitter.com/search?q=facebook+until:2022-08-25+since:2022-08-24 https://twitter.com/search?q=facebook+until:2022-08-25+since...> Nitter : <https://nitter.net/search?q=facebook+until:2022-08-25+since:2022-08-24 https://nitter.net/search?q=facebook+until:2022-08-25+since:...>
- sparky4 4y agoFor those who don't know, people have their news feed filled with posts made by followers of pages on the page.
- newscracker 4y agoSpeaking only of the Facebook site/app below. FB Messenger is not included. For a long while, Facebook hasn’t been a platform to connect people or to connect people meaningfully. It’s either useless and random stuff while your close ones’ posts don’t appear on your timeline and vice versa, or sensational posts that cause anger, anxiety, worry, and despair. The “algorithm” tuned itself quite well to induce and increase addiction. It’s focused. It’s intelligent. It’s purposeful. None of those aspects may help you become happier or more satisfied or more connected. I don’t think the “algorithm” can be corrected or made better either. It’s too big, too influential, too profitable and likely too complex (due to ML). Short of getting rid of it completely and going back to a chronological feed only from people and pages you follow, nothing can be humanly done about this decline. Find another platform and focus on smaller groups if you need or value connectedness or relevant/useful content.
- wyclif 4y agoThe TikTokification of Facebook is giving Meta brainworms. The entire model of Facebook, until recently, was the social graph. It seems now that they're terrified of getting their lunch eaten, they are trying to combine algorithmic selection of what random users like the most but have no relationship to the user (Reels) with the social graph, but it's not a good fit and doesn't gel.
- Kiro 4y agoI've found Reels as addictive as TikTok.
- jsemrau 4y agoThe irony in the social graph is that it is an insufficient approximation of people's interest. Initially in 2003 this might have made sense. I.e., I like what my friends like. Yet 20 years later TikTok claims to have cracked the holy grail of what interests me by focusing only on the swipes / behaviour of the individual. Personally, I think TikTok is quite stupid, but I can see the power of the algorithm. Yet the next generation of "social" might be more of a content pull that a content push.
- mdrzn 4y agoJust checked on Android, it's still bugged in the sense that it shows hundreds of posts by people on pages and groups, and sponsored posts. Pretty much nothing else.
- AndyJames 4y agoI don't think this is a bug, I think it's a feature consciously deployed by FB.
- boffinism 4y agoVerge article on this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319552/facebook-bug-celebrity-spam-memes-carnage https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319552/facebook-bug-cel...
- jongjong 4y agoTwitter is a bit like that, it tends to drown out tweets of people you know with celebrity tweets.
- meijer 4y agoYou can switch to "Latest Tweets" with that "stars" button on the top.
- yamrzou 4y agoFacebook's timeline has already been getting much worse since it started forcing reels from people I don't know everywhere.
- chmod775 4y agoIn these a lot of people seem to be trying to "talk" to Eminem, who prominently happens to have made a song highlighting the insanity of such parasocial relationships. This probably shouldn't be funny to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt14c7sYTFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt14c7sYTFA
- commoner 4y agoGreat song and great music video, too: - Eminem - Stan (Long Version) ft. Dido: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOMhN-hfMtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOMhN-hfMtY
- _fat_santa 4y agoI recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqUpe6QeBTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqUpe6QeBTk. The "clean" version censors a ton of stuff from the video that made it so impactful.
- Gualdrapo 4y agoAlas it is still much used here in Latin America. I still have one account because neighborhood groups and marketplace (both can't be seen without an account, afaik), though I have 0 "friends" in there and disabled all sponsored posts from news media. The latter keep coming back from time to time, though. It is true that now it is filled with random posts of things I am not interested even in the slightest but it seems like it think I'd do because they're "trending" or "popular" (celebrities, politicians, shopping, that kind of stuff)
- martyvis 4y agoI'm seeing some on my feed. Lots of posts to the bags "Fleet Foxes" which I only have had a passing interest. Article here at ABC - Facebook 'down', users report bizarre glitches and feeds flooded with random comments to celebrities https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/social-media-users-report-facebook-glitches/101368700 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/social-media-users-re...
- palad1n 4y agoSeems to be back to normal.
- egorfine 4y agoCan confirm. Main feed completely broken.
- chris_wot 4y agoGiven it's a fundamentally broken medium, that's a given even if they restore it back to normal.
- londons_explore 4y agoIs it possible that very popular posts are served by a different backend/cache system than regular/long tail posts? And the regular/long tail post backend is down, so you only see very popular posts?
- seydor 4y agoThat's an upgrade
- revskill 4y agoFacebook can scale because no correctness is needed. No QA needed actually !
- hackernewds 4y agowon't scale, or scale as fast, with irrelevant content
- Havoc 4y agoJust checked mine and honestly not sure. It’s got more market stuff on there than normal. But beyond that it seems about normal level of broken - lots of ads and very bad AI guesses on what I may be interested in
- sAbakumoff 4y agoyeah, I noticed that. For some reason, it shows a lot of shit about soccer, but I was never genuinely interested in soccer.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoFacebook shows matching articles: Echo chamber! Facebook shows other things: Bug!
- thrwyoilarticle 4y agoFacebook is the former home of 'move fast and break things'. Now it's falling apart. Barely useable. My friends are moving to other platforms because it's simply not consistently capable of sending a message. The CEO is bored of it and wants to play around with more interesting domains. I can't even scroll down my feed without being catapulted randomly around the page by broken javascript. The only user-facing developments are around copying another, less-buggy, equally-closed social network. So how did the break-things experiment go? Is it a success because the stock was at one point worth an inconceivable amount of money? Or is it a failure because it can't stand up under its own weight and will never catch up to its inevitable successor?
- stevage 4y agoThe break things experiment was a roaring success. But they ditched "break things" a long time ago, and arguably it's the new phase of stability they're struggling with.
- 14 4y agoMy biggest piss off with Facebook is they refuse to mod their site. The reporting function is useless and no matter how many times I’ve reported profiles they do nothing. Also the reporting options are a joke and have a limited number of options to which you can report something. I had an old acquaintance say hi. A week later I say hey how is it going. He replies how are you. 2 days later his picture changes to some random guy and his info is completely changed and it’s obvious his account was taken over. I tried to report this to Facebook but there is no obvious report section to describe what I saw but picked the one that best fit and later get a response back that they have decided to keep the account active. Also dozens of times reported spam accounts and scam accounts and nothing ever happens. What is wrong with you Facebook?
- greggsy 4y agoSurely there are trivial ways for them to detect when a name changes drastically (ie. not just the surname), or when the biometric features of the new profile photo don’t match the old one? They could even extend their biometric capabilities could even step into the ‘slightly unethical’ realm, by perhaps detecting a flirtatious message from a profile with a cute Japanese girl, via somewhere in Northern Africa. Even just putting basic controls around messages from complete strangers.
- mrkramer 4y ago>Facebook's timeline just shows random things for some users Sounds like your modern ranking algorithms e.g. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google etc.
- TedShiller 4y agoHas been like this for me since 2006
- rotten 4y agoMy latest evil advertising industry thought was for all of these infinite-scrolling social media feeds to force the scrolling to stop to watch a (10 second) ad, before you can keep scrolling. Kind of like the commercial breaks of old, except for doom scrollers.
- greggsy 4y agoThat would open the door for paid subscriptions, which can go either way in the eyes of the consumer. Paid social media hasn’t ever really played out well.
- warrenm 4y agoIt's not an ad, but the Social Fixer[0] plugin (I use it on Firefox, pretty sure there's one for Chrome) will stop after X-many items and force you to click to load more It also forces the feed to load in chronological order, if you like --------------- [0] https://socialfixer.com/ https://socialfixer.com/
- myth_drannon 4y agoThat's what happens when your hiring process optimized for hiring people who just grinded leetcode questions.
- 04rob 4y agoIt's a bug, now fixed: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319552/facebook-bug-celebrity-spam-memes-carnage https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319552/facebook-bug-cel...
- mikewarot 4y agoWhen I use Facebook, it's through a web interface, with this (spaces removed) URL h t t p s : / / w w w . f a c e b o o k . c o m / ? s k = h _ c h r That last part puts things in reverse chronological order. Thus denying the algorithm the chance to mess with my brain.