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My FB timeline is already a complete mess with most irrelevant garbage as it stands. Not exactly sure what adding additional 'noise' is going to achieve outside

My FB timeline is already a complete mess with most irrelevant garbage as it stands. Not exactly sure what adding additional 'noise' is going to achieve outside of boosting numbers (which I guess is what they want). A current snapshot my feed: - Group post (from one I follow) - Ad - Post (from company I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from one I follow) - Ad - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Post (from person I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Post (from person I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from one I follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from one I follow) I gave up writing the above, but it was about 9 more posts before I saw a post from a person I actually know.

the__alchemist 2y ago
Read this post to yourself aloud. Why are you still checking Facebook? Keep the messenger app on your phone if people you know still use it.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Not OP, but my global friend network still has folks who post life updates on Facebook, making it a requirement.
  - freehorse 2y ago
    "Requirement" is a quite strong term. A requirement as to what? Keeping in touch with people can happen in many different ways. I do not see how if some of my friends posted in facebook (maybe they do? I never check) that would necessitate me to connect with them through their posts there.
  - asdff 2y ago
    Or you can reach out to people you are interested in, and ask what is new with them.
0xEF 2y ago
Why are you still using it? I dropped FB about 12 years ago, have not looked back since. I ask people this question who still use FB and complain about terrible it is. They answer with some generic "to stay in touch with such and such" which is easier and less invasive to do with SMS or email. So, why are you still using it?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- prinny_ 2y ago
  The answer is network effect and friction . It is hard to communicate to everyone on your friends list that moving forward they can reach you via email or text only. It’s going to work with close friends and family but other people that want to reach out will not be able to find you. And there are always cases when you want to connect (or be easy to find) with someone who is not a close acquaintance.
  - 0xEF 2y ago
    I'm not trying to be combative, but that still seems like a very weak reason. And it's one that I used to use, not just with FB, but Twitter, IG and LinkedIn. They all held the same promise and failed to deliver it. The idea that we need to be constantly networking is overblown, to say the least. When you step back and have an honest conversation with yourself about how much having access to these people you occasionally talk to benefits your life, it seems to be negligible at best. Certainly not something worth sticking around for, encouraging more and more privacy encroachment, targeted advertising, etc, adding undo stress and annoyance to your experience online and off. Are we sure that we are not using the "stay connected" excuse to hide the fact that these things were designed to be addictive and we got sucked in by it? The only people benefiting from continued use are not users, but the advertisers and platform owners? Is there really anyone on that list where your life would be worse off for not ever interacting with them again? Are there other ways of making yourself just as accessible on the off chance a stranger wants to collaborate with you on something, such as a contact email in a GitHub profile or personal webpage that would satisfy whatever net positive you think you are getting from doing the same on FB? These are not easy questions to answer, but when we start drilling down, our excuses for sticking around start to fall apart and our control for being their gets exposed in ways that we maybe don't like. edit: fixed some autocorrect errors from mobile
manfre 2y ago
Any time I see a post with the "Follow" link, I click the X or triple dot to hide or signify disinterest. They appear as a flood, but the system gives up and I get a several week reprieve from unwanted suggestions.
iib 2y ago
I don't want to make you use it more, but I found a thing that actually works for me, to restore some of the previous feed behavior. I saved a bookmark that directly goes to the "Friends" feed. It seems to have surprisingly few (I think zero or one) ads and recommended things this way. The funny thing is that the "You read all the posts" thing still appears if used in this way, telling you to go outside. I do the same for instagram [2], and there was also a post of setting "Google web" as the default search engine, showing you actual web results, not stuff recommended by Google. https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr [1] https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following [2]
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  This is it. My feed is fine too. If you don't tell FB what you do and don't want to see, it's just going to spray random shit at you.
- freehorse 2y ago
  Thanks! The "friends" filter with facebook does not really work from me (I have unfollowed all my fb friends and follow only pages/groups mostly for events and such) but realised that replacing "friends" with "following" in the url actually provides a feed with anything I am following, so really thanks! I used to use the FBP extension but it still takes so long to load and filter out stuff that facebook floods my feed, so this is much better. https://www.facebook.com/?filter=following&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=following&sk=h_chr
- gibspaulding 2y ago
  Interestingly for me on iOS, that instagram link just takes me to the main feed in the app. For anyone else getting this, you have to tap the instagram logo on the top left, then select “following” from there.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  The second param on the FB url seems to control the sidebar. Better without the &sk=...
nox101 2y ago
My feed in the mobile app is - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - people you might know - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from frien - loops - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from a non-friend about a friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend I can only guess the reason mine isn't filled with spam is because I click the ... and pick "don't show me this" whenever it shows me something I don't care about. I wish I could tell it never show me loops, never recommend friends, never show me posts of friends of friends. While annoying, it's not so bad ATM that I've felt the need to quit On the other hand I check it less than once a week, maybe once every 2 weeks.
- kraftman 2y ago
  That many posts from friends would represent months worth of my friends posts. For most people facebook doesnt show friends posts because no one posts anymore.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- RajT88 2y ago
  > "don't show me this" I have tried this with bizarre results. Any kind of booby hot chick type post, I will do this. Sometimes I go so far as blocking the account. There was a week it was all AI-generated booby photos of Salma Hayek - no matter how many accounts I un-followed or blocked, there was a never-ending stream of accounts with AI generated Salma Hayek photos being posted. I gave up after a week, and took some time of Facebook. A month later, I returned, and the Salma Hayek stuff is all gone. Periodically it goes back into some sort of booby photo trend, and I can't get it to stop, so I just quit browsing facebook for a while and when I return it's done. On the time order of a couple weeks, unfollowing and/or blocking makes no difference. I should mention - I am part of a couple groups for car stuff, and a couple groups for fishing stuff. It's not like the content I am interacting with is particularly boob-rich. As far as friends, I only see stuff from friends who post a lot. That's the trend. They aren't people I comment on their posts, or even really talk to in real life anymore.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
I want an app that uses the accessibility API to plug into Meta, Snap, etc and gives you full control over your socials ala Recall using LLMs. I feel like Gen AI is the countermeasure to closed social ecosystems trying to treat you as the product. Ingest everything my social users have access to, and let me control the experience (Recall meets Buffer?). Scraping is old and busted, consuming the firehose available to you and controlling consumption of it on your own terms is the new hotness. https://www.recall.ai/ https://www.recall.ai/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/recall https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/recall
Finnucane 2y ago
It's really become unusable. Most of my friends have stopped posting. There's very little incentive to log in now.
jameshart 2y ago
The original value proposition of Facebook - keep people you don’t see in person very often up to date on what’s happening in your life, and keep up with what’s going on with them - still feels like something people actually want, but it’s been clear for a long time that no service that tries to offer that can sustain it. Facebook got too excited with its ability to leverage the ‘friend graph’ and broke the very reason people wanted to ‘friend’ people on FB in the first place. Feels like people have generally decided that WhatsApp group chats are the preferred model for keeping in touch.
elboru 2y ago
Wow, the amount of ads I get is insane. For every three posts, one is an ad: - Post (from a friend) - Ad - Post (from a random page I don't follow) - People you may know (I don't know any of those people) - Ad - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Post (from a random page I don't follow) - Ad - Post (from a friend) - Post (from a page I follow) - Ad
BeFlatXIII 2y ago
> it was about 9 more posts before I saw a post from a person I actually know. At least for me, it's because the people I care about have long ago stopped posting, and those who are useful to keep as friends post garbage, so they've long ago been muted. I wish there were more posts from groups I follow instead of nonsense from groups they recommend.
- lkramer 2y ago
  It has become taboo to say we don't have any more content for you. I was searching for tech jobs in Copenhagen in my fairly (but not overly) specialised field that is not overly common here on LinkedIn. After 4-5 results that was relevant to what I was looking for it had obviously exhausted the available options, however rather than admit defeat it started showing me truly bizarre results, including unskilled student jobs in supermarkets and jobs as cleaners.
asdff 2y ago
No one makes posts like they did in 2011. Fb has to do this or the site looks dead.

the__alchemist 2y ago

Read this post to yourself aloud. Why are you still checking Facebook? Keep the messenger app on your phone if people you know still use it.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Not OP, but my global friend network still has folks who post life updates on Facebook, making it a requirement.
- freehorse 2y ago
  "Requirement" is a quite strong term. A requirement as to what? Keeping in touch with people can happen in many different ways. I do not see how if some of my friends posted in facebook (maybe they do? I never check) that would necessitate me to connect with them through their posts there.
- asdff 2y ago
  Or you can reach out to people you are interested in, and ask what is new with them.

0xEF 2y ago

Why are you still using it? I dropped FB about 12 years ago, have not looked back since. I ask people this question who still use FB and complain about terrible it is. They answer with some generic "to stay in touch with such and such" which is easier and less invasive to do with SMS or email. So, why are you still using it?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
prinny_ 2y ago
The answer is network effect and friction . It is hard to communicate to everyone on your friends list that moving forward they can reach you via email or text only. It’s going to work with close friends and family but other people that want to reach out will not be able to find you. And there are always cases when you want to connect (or be easy to find) with someone who is not a close acquaintance.
- 0xEF 2y ago
  I'm not trying to be combative, but that still seems like a very weak reason. And it's one that I used to use, not just with FB, but Twitter, IG and LinkedIn. They all held the same promise and failed to deliver it. The idea that we need to be constantly networking is overblown, to say the least. When you step back and have an honest conversation with yourself about how much having access to these people you occasionally talk to benefits your life, it seems to be negligible at best. Certainly not something worth sticking around for, encouraging more and more privacy encroachment, targeted advertising, etc, adding undo stress and annoyance to your experience online and off. Are we sure that we are not using the "stay connected" excuse to hide the fact that these things were designed to be addictive and we got sucked in by it? The only people benefiting from continued use are not users, but the advertisers and platform owners? Is there really anyone on that list where your life would be worse off for not ever interacting with them again? Are there other ways of making yourself just as accessible on the off chance a stranger wants to collaborate with you on something, such as a contact email in a GitHub profile or personal webpage that would satisfy whatever net positive you think you are getting from doing the same on FB? These are not easy questions to answer, but when we start drilling down, our excuses for sticking around start to fall apart and our control for being their gets exposed in ways that we maybe don't like. edit: fixed some autocorrect errors from mobile

manfre 2y ago

Any time I see a post with the "Follow" link, I click the X or triple dot to hide or signify disinterest. They appear as a flood, but the system gives up and I get a several week reprieve from unwanted suggestions.

iib 2y ago

I don't want to make you use it more, but I found a thing that actually works for me, to restore some of the previous feed behavior. I saved a bookmark that directly goes to the "Friends" feed. It seems to have surprisingly few (I think zero or one) ads and recommended things this way. The funny thing is that the "You read all the posts" thing still appears if used in this way, telling you to go outside. I do the same for instagram [2], and there was also a post of setting "Google web" as the default search engine, showing you actual web results, not stuff recommended by Google. https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr [1] https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following [2]

bongodongobob 2y ago
This is it. My feed is fine too. If you don't tell FB what you do and don't want to see, it's just going to spray random shit at you.
freehorse 2y ago
Thanks! The "friends" filter with facebook does not really work from me (I have unfollowed all my fb friends and follow only pages/groups mostly for events and such) but realised that replacing "friends" with "following" in the url actually provides a feed with anything I am following, so really thanks! I used to use the FBP extension but it still takes so long to load and filter out stuff that facebook floods my feed, so this is much better. https://www.facebook.com/?filter=following&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=following&sk=h_chr
gibspaulding 2y ago
Interestingly for me on iOS, that instagram link just takes me to the main feed in the app. For anyone else getting this, you have to tap the instagram logo on the top left, then select “following” from there.
mixmastamyk 2y ago
The second param on the FB url seems to control the sidebar. Better without the &sk=...

nox101 2y ago

My feed in the mobile app is - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - people you might know - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from frien - loops - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from a non-friend about a friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend - post from friend I can only guess the reason mine isn't filled with spam is because I click the ... and pick "don't show me this" whenever it shows me something I don't care about. I wish I could tell it never show me loops, never recommend friends, never show me posts of friends of friends. While annoying, it's not so bad ATM that I've felt the need to quit On the other hand I check it less than once a week, maybe once every 2 weeks.

kraftman 2y ago
That many posts from friends would represent months worth of my friends posts. For most people facebook doesnt show friends posts because no one posts anymore.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
RajT88 2y ago
> "don't show me this" I have tried this with bizarre results. Any kind of booby hot chick type post, I will do this. Sometimes I go so far as blocking the account. There was a week it was all AI-generated booby photos of Salma Hayek - no matter how many accounts I un-followed or blocked, there was a never-ending stream of accounts with AI generated Salma Hayek photos being posted. I gave up after a week, and took some time of Facebook. A month later, I returned, and the Salma Hayek stuff is all gone. Periodically it goes back into some sort of booby photo trend, and I can't get it to stop, so I just quit browsing facebook for a while and when I return it's done. On the time order of a couple weeks, unfollowing and/or blocking makes no difference. I should mention - I am part of a couple groups for car stuff, and a couple groups for fishing stuff. It's not like the content I am interacting with is particularly boob-rich. As far as friends, I only see stuff from friends who post a lot. That's the trend. They aren't people I comment on their posts, or even really talk to in real life anymore.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

I want an app that uses the accessibility API to plug into Meta, Snap, etc and gives you full control over your socials ala Recall using LLMs. I feel like Gen AI is the countermeasure to closed social ecosystems trying to treat you as the product. Ingest everything my social users have access to, and let me control the experience (Recall meets Buffer?). Scraping is old and busted, consuming the firehose available to you and controlling consumption of it on your own terms is the new hotness. https://www.recall.ai/ https://www.recall.ai/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/recall https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/recall

Finnucane 2y ago

It's really become unusable. Most of my friends have stopped posting. There's very little incentive to log in now.

jameshart 2y ago

The original value proposition of Facebook - keep people you don’t see in person very often up to date on what’s happening in your life, and keep up with what’s going on with them - still feels like something people actually want, but it’s been clear for a long time that no service that tries to offer that can sustain it. Facebook got too excited with its ability to leverage the ‘friend graph’ and broke the very reason people wanted to ‘friend’ people on FB in the first place. Feels like people have generally decided that WhatsApp group chats are the preferred model for keeping in touch.

elboru 2y ago

Wow, the amount of ads I get is insane. For every three posts, one is an ad: - Post (from a friend) - Ad - Post (from a random page I don't follow) - People you may know (I don't know any of those people) - Ad - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Post (from a random page I don't follow) - Ad - Post (from a friend) - Post (from a page I follow) - Ad

BeFlatXIII 2y ago

> it was about 9 more posts before I saw a post from a person I actually know. At least for me, it's because the people I care about have long ago stopped posting, and those who are useful to keep as friends post garbage, so they've long ago been muted. I wish there were more posts from groups I follow instead of nonsense from groups they recommend.

lkramer 2y ago
It has become taboo to say we don't have any more content for you. I was searching for tech jobs in Copenhagen in my fairly (but not overly) specialised field that is not overly common here on LinkedIn. After 4-5 results that was relevant to what I was looking for it had obviously exhausted the available options, however rather than admit defeat it started showing me truly bizarre results, including unskilled student jobs in supermarkets and jobs as cleaners.

asdff 2y ago

No one makes posts like they did in 2011. Fb has to do this or the site looks dead.