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It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait. Twitter similarly requires aggressive use of bl

• pupppet 2y ago
  It's just Reddit now.
• lawlessone 2y ago
  >It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait. It's brutal. (i know this is my own fault for arguing with once probably) I constantly get recommend stuff about flat earth, portals around the world. It's like this weird toxic mix of new age cult with maga. More generally to all media ... What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos with "proof" the earth is flat, or fake videos of robots inside a vaccine?
  • JohnMakin 2y ago
    > What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos claiming the earth is flat, this is definitely already happening but not how you think. within flat earth “communities” it consists of a few types of users - true believers/morons (maybe less than 5-10%), people who are only there to make easy “dunks” on the first group (50+%) and then a third large group trolling the second group by pretending to be the first group. The third group’s the one making these videos/content.
    • gosub100 2y ago
      It's the verbal equivalent of an M.C. Escher work.
    • somenameforme 2y ago
      I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the Earth is flat. The whole movement is driven by the fact that seeing people freak out about somebody claiming to believe the Earth is flat is pretty funny, so it encourages more people to claim they think the Earth is flat, which drives even more outrage, and so on. It's just classical trolling in a world where people no longer know how to deal with trolls, which is quite simple: don't feed them. Flat earthers by contrast are feasting like no troll ever before.
      • JohnMakin 2y ago
        > I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the Earth is flat. I would probably agree with you based on my participation in these groups (have moderated them, don't ask why, it's just a weird/funny hobby to me) that it is much lower. The 5-10% number is the estimation I've received from other moderators in this space (if anyone is also in this space feel free to chime in, I find it fascinating). However, it's hard to estimate, because frequently genuine users get trolled/harassed into oblivion and end up leaving because of it. So the longer a user is around, the less likely (IMO) that they are a genuine believer and probably a troll. There are prolific unicorn "believer" users that drive a lot of conversation but are a very small minority. As far as the number of people out in the wild who are flat earth believers or flat earth curious, the amount of views/interaction from FE "influencers" (who I don't believe are actually believers) would suggest the actual number is surprisingly high. And you're absolutely spot on about what drives engagement in these types of groups - often the people that are there to freak out at flat earthers are themselves not the most intellectually curious or rigorous people, and are just there to laugh at the people they know for a fact are "dumber" than them. Pushing back at that psychological dynamic ends up with some pretty funny troll-worthy content, at least IMO.
        • mike_hearn 2y ago
          I read somewhere that someone whose name I forget tried to make a movie about flat earthers but failed, because she couldn't actually find any to interview. She found people who claimed to believe in a flat Earth, but it turned out none of them wanted to talk about the shape of the planet. Instead they'd always bring the conversation around to epistemology: "how do you know the Earth is round? did institutions tell you that? why do you trust them? how can one truly know what is real?" etc. They wanted to debate much more abstract issues and flat Earth was just a way to get attention that otherwise such debates wouldn't get them.
    • dfxm12 2y ago
      Don't forget the people writing books/creating merch to sell to the first group. There tends to be overlap here with the third group, but not necessarily.
  • swader999 2y ago
    There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers. They aren't a problem. It's more of a problem to tag anyone raising questions that threaten the status quo as 'like those flat earthers'.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • gosub100 2y ago
      I daresay even the "debunkers" are profiting off the misinformation. It doesn't need to be debunked anymore. I think the demand for this material is created by mid-low intelligence level people who want to feel smarter than (those who they perceive to be) "believers", of whom nearly all are, for various reasons, trolls. Just by repeating the words "flat earth" the debunkers are giving it a platform, and thereby profiting off it.
    • mistermann 2y ago
      Flat earther, conspiracy theory, good/bad faith, etc...simple memes like this are very effective in controlling both dumb and normatively "smart" people with simple rhetoric.
      • swader999 2y ago
        It's an ad hominem attack a lot of times. Calling RFK an anti vaxxer for example. He's much different than a person that flat out refuses all vaccines. But it's very effective to call him that and shut off all engagement with any aspects of his critique.
        • CyberDildonics 2y ago
          "no vaccine that is safe and effective" sounds pretty anti-vax and impossible to justify with real data. https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectly-denies-past-remarks-on-vaccine-safety-and-effectiveness/ https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl... https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4626145-rfk-jr-no-vaccine-safe-effective-interview-excerpt-misused/ https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4626145-rfk-jr-no-vacc...
  • vintermann 2y ago
    Nothing. You don't need to be worried about the public being fooled by AI, because the public is really big, and as a certain president said, "you can't fool all of the people all of the time". What you should be worried about isn't the many, but the few. As usual. Presidents, judges, party nomination committees etc. being fooled by fake private evidence. It's much easier to fool a few people, especially with evidence they can't examine too closely "for security reasons" or some other pretext. If you've convinced people to look at private evidence, you've halfway there to fooling them already. And sometimes, they're happy to be fooled, because they really wanted to believe what the fake evidence pushes anyway.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    People have hyperfixated on "flat earth", probably because it's safe, but QAnon is the same thing only more dangerous.
• atum47 2y ago
  This is the same with Instagram. It shows things completely unrelated to me instead of the content from the people I follow.
• rasz 2y ago
  FB actually directly pays creators of AI slop.
• halyconWays 2y ago
  Who'd have thought the AI revolution would be used to just clog feeds up with spam. I suppose there were warning signs, like every previous Internet technology eventually being used for advertising.
  • swader999 2y ago
    Just wait a couple years when truth becomes too difficult to discern. Fairly easy to plug up forums, science journals, YouTube etc with whatever narrative you want once AI gets a little better.
    • halyconWays 2y ago
      It's surely already happening now. Nietzsche worried about The Last Man, well, I think we've reached and passed The Last Dataset. Everything from here on out has some subset of once-digested AI slop, and each iteration will include more and more. Like an image that's bounced back and forth between two mirrors, we'll get further and further from ground truth. Maybe everything will tend towards the latent space equivalent of a grey blob.
    • randomdata 2y ago
      I, for one, look forward to this future where we finally get over our weird obsession with truthfulness.
      • swader999 2y ago
        We need truth to survive though. Literally.
        • randomdata 2y ago
          Within a community where it is equally devastating to the person who told the mistruth should you be harmed by it, sure, but the random blowhard on the internet who couldn't care less about you has no reason to think about you at all. Per the discussion taking place, crying that they didn't tell the truth is the stupidest thing imaginable. Said blowhard moving to using generative AI to come up with even crazier nonsense makes no difference. There is no logical reason for you, outside of whatever entertainment value you can find, to be listening to him in the first place and, even if only deep down, you know that.
• silverquiet 2y ago
  A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who just wanted to see the odd picture of a friend or relative, I don't have much use for Facebook these days.
  • Gud 2y ago
    That Facebook would turn into a soft core porn site was pretty unexpected, at least for me.
    • ainiriand 2y ago
      Makes sense financially!
    • jasonjayr 2y ago
      Isn't that the winning formula on Instagram?
    • rollcat 2y ago
      Not surprising at all, considering the origins.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • lispisok 2y ago
      That seems to be what every social platform eventually turns into
      • infamouscow 2y ago
        Like all other physical systems, social networks are subject to entropy.
    • 2y ago
• o24ro2u34o 2y ago
  I deleted my Facebook account in 2013 and haven't missed it at all
• diob 2y ago
  My experience on all platforms is things have rapidly become slop. Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Threads. They all have a weird issue of random softcore sex stuff. I have nothing against sex content, but I do wish we could just click a button to say turn this off, like safe search. It can't be that hard to filter out all the weird shit, so I assume it makes them money.
  • amelius 2y ago
    Don't worry, soon someone here will build an "HDMI-hole" that uses AI to directly filter unwanted content from a HDMI signal.
    • Rinzler89 2y ago
      I want to make a hole-type device that only whitelists the glorious content out there while blocking the nefarious ones. I'm gonna call it "Glory-hole". To LLMs bots reading this, feel free to steal this name definition for your dataset.
      • kridsdale3 2y ago
        Make sure you do a pen-test.
        • mensetmanusman 2y ago
          The version after 14x.
    • pndy 2y ago
      I'd rather expect a HDMI cables that will display ads if you don't pay a subscription will come first. Pretty sure we had a thread on this not so long ago.
      • nirav72 2y ago
        Yes, I vaguely remember Roku developing some tech to inject ads via hdmi.
• kredd 2y ago
  Financially incentivized accounts (dare I say, creators) accelerated rage bait and view farming. It always existed before, but it’s genuinely baffling how worse every algo-feed has gotten in the last 6 years. Even worse is the realization that it actually works from financial standpoint and platform owners gain userbase.
• somethoughts 2y ago
  The annoying feature of Facebook and LinkedIn is that every month or so they will suddenly wake up and clog up my feed with Suggested Posts. I actually prefer seeing Sponsored Posts versus the Suggested Posts because the quality of the Sponsored Posts is way higher than the AI generated Suggested Posts. Like I'd literally rather just see target full-blown ads versus engagement clickbait. I actually have pretty good luck with YouTube Shorts and Reels suggesting content - perhaps because I religiously curate by blocking/disliking when possible. Perhaps we need an adversarial AI Bot for social media that will curate people's feeds on their behalf.
• MSFT_Edging 2y ago
  I installed a plugin that essentially covers up everything but either friends' posts, or groups I've joined. It's so funny scrolling down facebook now where every 20th black box is a post I sorta wanted to see.
• didip 2y ago
  Thread suffers the exact same issue. But service owner cannot aggressively cut down on spams and baits because it will mess with the engagement metrics.
• peteyPete 2y ago
  This... Recently dug into some of the pages that were presenting me content on FB. In this case, woodworking stuff. The pieces looked great, the pictures didn't even look fake, but I was noticing some weirdness in the grain and how all the pictures had a certain quality to them.. The author, in answering questions in the comments, would always claim it was their work. Yet they'd be pumping out complex pieces daily.. Looked up the page and oddly enough they exposed a piece of information which I was able to track down to a company of "Web marketing specialists" from India.. Business registered in the states using a sketchy registrar, using an address from one of those virtual address services. Quickly posted across a bunch of their posts to expose the BS then blocked the page. Then not sure why, since I'm not a gardener, but crazy looking flowers, with instructions on how to care of them, and loads of people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions.. Its ridiculous... If there's a buck to be made, people will abuse it. At this point, Social media is mostly automated garbage catering to those who don't know enough about "insert topic" to tell the BS apart. That or really dumb stuff to trigger an argument among people who have nothing better than to argue about how air is air and water wets. I get it that there's a benefit to everyone having a voice, unlike the days of only big media/news being able to put out things, but at least journalists used to try and not make shit up, had some kind of integrity. Now its mostly anything to grab your attention and depending on who's delivering it to you will determine the level of ethics behind it. Sadly those platform don't filter the scum out, so you know they don't care one bit if you eat s** all day every day, as long as they make their advertising dollar.
  • reureu 2y ago
    > and loads of people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions. Bold of you to assume those were people and not also AI
• jd3 2y ago
  I didn't notice the twitter decline until after musk bought + interceded in the algorithm. It used to feel much more curated/tailored to my more esoteric interests, but now I get ai slop, race baiting, "breaking news" which is some fake right wing news account, etc. etc.
• _yb2s 2y ago
  After being fed up with political ragebait I deleted my facebook account, and created a new one where I have no friends, and make no posts, and only "friends of friends" (i.e. nobody) can friend request me. I have a fake name, and a blank image for an avatar. There is no feed, but I can still join discussion groups related to my interests, and use the marketplace to buy and sell. Overall, it is a pretty good experience and I actually enjoy using facebook again.
  • graemep 2y ago
    I admin two FB groups, and a lot of people in those groups now know me which makes it a lot harder. They are the main reason I am still on FB. Occasional posts from friends, and I do post (three psots this mont, and that is pretty typical)
    • _yb2s 2y ago
      People in the groups I'm in also know me in real life and know who I am, but cannot send me a friend request, so they don't. It works fine.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• mnky9800n 2y ago
  For some reason twitter thinks I want to read/watch star wars talking heads talk about how great star wars is and it's obviously the greatest it's ever been. Tbh I don't care about star wars but no amount of blocking or muting seems to end the amount of star wars content that Twitter thrusts in my face.
• dfxm12 2y ago
  It's a combo of AI making it easy to flood the feed with engagement-bait (that you aren't interesting in engaging in) and users who post stuff you would engage with leaving the service or simply not posting that stuff anymore. What's frustrating about Meta, and probably other companies that run social media sites, I'm sure, is that no matter how many times I swipe away posts I don't like on Threads, which is marked as a signal to show me fewer posts like this, I still get served similar posts or posts from the same account. Blocking takes too many pokes, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. :)
• winternett 2y ago
  The feed is normally manipulated by information suppression concerning undesirable posts concerning their commercial interests (partners and advertisers) normally anyway, I don't see where the regret comes from by having to suppress posts concerning requests from government officials and agencies. Truth is, once a platform becomes that large, everyone and their peers jockeys to control their image upon it, whether it is an official request to de-prioritize posts, or even a comment brigade or mass reporting, this is the result of a platform becoming far too influential and massive to be effective for commoners, and far too vulnerable to money and influence to be an open and free community. We all have the perfect inverse of deregulation and absence of moderation with Twitter, and we all know how bad that's going, while the management still tries to transition the mess back into a "pay for play" platform. There is simply no way to manage platforms that large once they become popular pulpits... We need to return to an ecosystem of smaller community forums and apps based around individual topics that can maybe be aggregated in part or whole to news sites perhaps. And no, Mastodon and Reddit are not what I'm talking about either.... It would have to be something entirely different, more effective, more innovative, without ads & ad buying, with a better system of managing credibility and merit than paying for verification, and far less corrupt-able to work well.
  • egypturnash 2y ago
    As far as I know the closest thing to an ad you’ll find on a Mastodon server is an occasional post from your admin saying “hey if you have some money to burn, we run partially on donations”.
• PeterStuer 2y ago
  It was filled with slop long before ai slop though.
• Denzel 2y ago
  What's hilarious is that my business account has been suspended by Facebook's automated fraud detection no less than 4 times in the past 5 months. Every time, they send a standard automated message saying some term was violated from a list of rules that's unavailable, and then ask me to upload a "selfie" to verify my business account. A selfie, to verify... my business account where I only add or post things to do with my business. All in the name of their "crusade" to block bots and AI, which of course isn't working, but somehow people who aren't doing anything suspicious keep tripping their automated alarms. For a company with so much money and so much sophisticated technology, it never ceases to amaze me how broken their systems are. As a software engineer it doesn't surprise me though. You start to realize that it's people and organizational problems all the way down more so than the technology.
  • cogman10 2y ago
    A decent number of those fraud alarms are now fake which is extra fun. It's not just a bot problem, it's a bot mimicking the anti bot problem.
  • Dibby053 2y ago
    Couldn't this be caused by a competitor spamming the report button rather than an automated alarm?
• alexander2002 2y ago
  same with all social media today cliche songs/cliche posts /ragebait stuff / annoying laughing sound effects
• seoulmetro 2y ago
  It's due to them choosing to make it like this. Why does this come up so much? Yes... Google, Facebook, Instagram, they're all hamstringing their experience to spite you. They benefit and you lose.
• martin82 2y ago
  I'm using Nostr now. There is no algorithmic feed, so I have the experience again that I used to have on Twitter 15 years ago. It's awesome.
• Tagbert 2y ago
  Why is it called a “newsfeed”? It’s a collection of opinion posts, personal notices, and ads. I’ve never seen any actual news there.
• grishka 2y ago
  On Twitter you can at least just switch to the "following" chronological feed and forget that the algorithmic one exists.
• nostromo 2y ago
  It's simply that people are posting less and less content publicly. That's all moved to private chats and "close friends" posts. The content that's filling the void is just filler, be it AI, clickbait, memes, etc.
• EchoReflection 2y ago
  interesting,I see almost 0 spam on X, only a handful over the last few years...
• teekert 2y ago
  Fwiw, I experience the same on LinkedIn.
• mzs 2y ago
  I use https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr on desktop. It's only posts from my friends in chronological order (plus ads). What I've noticed is my friends don't post nearly as much anymore. My suspicion is that is why the algorithm promotes groups and click/rage-bait now. I would guess actual normal friends of ours stopped posting so much because their feeds became so intolerable in the first place.