Would it also be possible to get the thirst traps and booty models off my feed too? Just like I get some control over my ad preferences and tags, it'd be very handy to get some feed controls in place.
My Facebook is completely useless due to all the suggested posts that appear in my feed. They're all memes that are of no interest to me and they cover up any posts from the few friends that still use Facebook.
Not being active on social media has meant a lot of old friends have drifted out of my life so I'm trying to force myself to be more active on it but sadly there are no enjoyable (or usable) platforms left.
Social media has effectively split in two directions, and the ends of the spectrum are Discord and TikTok.
TikTok is almost purely algorithmic, stranger-generated content consumption with the novelty factor cranked to 11. Discord has no algorithmic curation, voting, etc, and is just people talking that you have to curate yourself.
Facebook is trying to pivot in the TikTok direction. Problem is there are a lot of people who want to use it to connect with actual people (because that's kinda how it worked in the past), which is orthogonal to their mission of pumping the maximal possible amount of garbage into your brain.
Discord isn't social media, it's an instant messaging app and a terrible one at that. A messaging app can't fully replace early-Facebook-like social network, because it just works so much differently and is optimized for different use cases. There's strangely nothing at all to fill this particular niche, although I'm working on one fediverse project that tries.
I find it hard to believe that there are no products out there trying to fill the 'early-Facebook-like social network' niche. People are discovering that a true social network, between actual people in the physical world, is not a scalable thing...and it should not be. On top of that, these same products trying to create social networks eventually run into a monetization problem.
I love discord. It is the only social media I regularly use. There seems to be a sentiment that pops up every now and again that it’s a shame that content in discord communities is getting “walled off” and inaccessible by google and others from the rest of the internet. That is a strange sentiment to me. Discord communities are private by design. If the server owners want public discourse, there are many options for that. Are these same people upset that there aren’t microphones at every table in restaurants so that those conversations aren’t “walled off” from anyone not in the restaurant? In fact I think scraping website content by third parties for their own indexing should be opt-in, not opt-out, it’s pretty obnoxious in my opinion that you can put up a website intended only for friends and family but then large entities all over the world crawl your content and broadcast it on their own platforms without your consent.
I think most people complaining about that are talking about support discords for software projects - where the default used to be that you contributions were permanent and searchable. Walling it off makes it less useful.
I use discord mostly for keeping up with friends and am very glad those chats aren't on the open internet
I don't think anyone wants to read you and your buddies' discussion of Cities: Skylines II and Super Mario Wonder.
They're irritated by all the open-source projects replacing their mailing list, forum, or wiki with "Just ask on the Slack or Discord". It's the most god-awful mode of community support imaginable.
I don’t see how that’s discord’s fault though, blame the project leaders. They must have their reasons. Maybe for projects in active development, content from years ago just isn’t relevant anymore anyway.
Are they? I'm sure there are people who use Discord like that, but I am on dozens of servers and all of them are public, i.e. anyone can join anytime. That's not private that's just hiding from Google.
> If the server owners want public discourse, there are many options for that.
Chat/video/audio as good and popular as Discord? Where? IRC? Matrix?
> Are these same people upset that there aren’t microphones at every table in restaurants so that those conversations aren’t “walled off” from anyone not in the restaurant?
Fair enough but nobody is asking direct messages or the servers for people who actually know each other and want privacy to be on the open web. Just the ones that are closer to being public squares for discussing specific topics.
> In fact I think scraping website content by third parties for their own indexing should be opt-in, not opt-out, it’s pretty obnoxious in my opinion that you can put up a website intended only for friends and family but then large entities all over the world crawl your content and broadcast it on their own platforms without your consent.
Eh, I get what you're saying but don't you think the Internet as a whole loses a lot of its value if this happens? Wasn't Google and good indexing one of the crucial things that led to the Internet revolution?
I’m sure the vast majority of sites would still opt-in to the indexing, considering the lengths people go to with SEO crap to get to the front page of google.
It's not strange to me at all. People use Discord for things that should be publicly searchable, like FAQs or issue tracking. This is usually what drives complaints.
If an open source project chose to track issues using a series of private conversations in restaurants, most of us would recognise how ephemeral and fleeting that is.
Mine was like that too. I started using the "I don't want to see this" flag pretty aggressively, and outright blocked a lot of accounts I had no interest in. It has worked pretty well - aside from some ads, my feed is from people I follow. I thought they weren't posting, but it turns out the algorithm was prioritizing NBA memes and other crap.
I did that for a year or two, but it didn't work. Facebook always found new kinds of garbage to recommend. If anything, FB started showing more algorithmic content and fewer posts from my friends. I eventually stopped posting on Facebook, because it had become a wasteland almost devoid of people.
I randomly have the whole Feeds menu option disappear entirely, "see more" doesn't reveal it when that happens either, so I just book marked the different versions of it I found useful to use directly.
That's Instagram for me. There is one or two posts of people I know. Then the bold and always wrong claim that I now have seen all new posts followed by stupid meme & travel content I have zero interest or engagement with.
Also recommend not visiting Facebook altogether. It strips your life of nonsense you don’t care about in a very pleasant way. Your true friends will still be there through messaging, phone, or in person.
But what about acquaintances that I want to keep hearing about? People really whine about FB having negative utility but I think it’s kinda awesome that there are people who I kinda know for a decade that post, and we can interact once a year or whatever.
People say this shit all the time without considering that others might not use Facebook in the same way they do.
Yeah, I could force my friends to call me every time they want to grab dinner, but that would be annoying for everyone involved and not respectful of how they want to communicate.
That's absolutely not true. There are many inconveniences that I don't inflict on the people around me in order to make an obscure point which only tech nerds care about. That's not being "forced" to use Facebook, it's being considerate.
I agree that it would be possible if I cared enough. I don't agree that refusing to use a glorified messaging app with an integrated calendar, just because it comes with a feed that some people get addicted to but none of us ever look at, is a good recommendation that will make life better for me and the people around me.
> glorified messaging app with an integrated calendar
The disconnect here is that this is an innacurate conception of Facebook, which is a privacy-destroying, propaganda-spewing advertising platform with some addictive social features to bait the lure.
Think of it this way: I don't like the smell of cigarette smoke. No matter how much I like someone, I won't be around them if they're smoking. If they insist on smoking while I'm around, I'll find somebody else to socialize with. And to me, Facebook is just as unpalatable as smoking.
This was effective for me around a decade ago. These days it feels like most algorithmic content generation sites don't care when you express negative interest in something.
That's not true. My only Instagram engagement is blocking obvious scam content should I accidently open the app and it still shoes me nothing else but that.
No, it gives you what's trending for the categories you're into. I like biking. What kind of biking content does get the most likes and is therefore suggested on Instagram? Woman in tight clothes with unzipped tops. I'm into skiing, what kind of content do I get? Girls skiing in bikinis. I'm following some coaches for a sport I participate in, what kind of content do I get? Girls in yoga pants doing exercises at the gym.
For every category, there will be someone doing a sexualized version of it. Those get lots of eyeballs and likes, and hence get boosted into suggestions for that category. And it's not like I get every post like that. But often enough that I no longer scroll in public for fear of what NSFW things will show up.
But this reminded me of another thing once popping up in my feed: my own private pictures.
I first got a bit shocked. Did I accidentally post these to Facebook?? But no, it was just a suggestion from Facebook, "share these photos". But I was on the bus, I didn't expect these photos to suddenly be on my screen for those around me to see (pictures of a medical condition). And it creeped me out that Facebook was looking through my phone's gallery when I'm not explicitly doing it to upload an image.
I ended up blocking file access for Facebook. Which now makes it impossible for me to post pictures. Which in turn of course means I barely post anymore. Great thinking, PMs.
I find it obnoxious that Facebook doesn't use the default system file picker (which doesn't require filesystem access permissions to use).
With other apps I can easily select photos even if they aren't locally available on my device. With Facebook I need to manually download the files from Google Photos, paste them into a local device folder, and only then will they actually show up in Facebook's weird, poorly-designed photo picker UI. Not exactly the best user experience.
Yeah, the same with Messenger. Want to send someone a photo from last year? Good luck scrolling through their clunky interface a thousand pictures back, vs just using the jump-to-month in my native gallery app.
This kind of content used to never show up on my Instagram feed but one day I tapped a few too many profiles deep and now I have the same issue. Pure trash
This feels a bit like saying that the opioid epidemic is due to drug users buying more. Sure, all of them made a decision at some point to start using. But that doesn't remove the responsibility of those pushing the product to at least allow users to say "please stop" and then actually stop.
It’s always funny to make a tongue-in-cheek joke about this, but asking for fewer thirst traps is still a legitimate request from people who click them.
Imagine a gambling addict or an alcoholic asking to see fewer casino and booze ads and being told stop complaining because "the algorithm just shows you what you want"
Is this true? I'm under the impression that social media platforms can't tell the difference between looking at some content because you enjoyed it versus looking at some content because you don't like it and you're confused why it's being served to you.
> The algorithm just gives you more of what you asked for.
It doesn't matter whether you asked for more because you hate it or love it. The algorithm prioritizes identifying the content with which you will engage.
No. "What you asked for" is a bold faced lie. By your account it shows you what you engaged with, even though you literally didn't ask for it.
And even "engaged with" is bullshit. What the hell does "engage with" even mean? What you really should be saying is it gives you more of what you pause scrolling on. That is neither asking for something, nor "engaging".
That's BS. You haven’t seen their their algorithm and neither have I. Tech companies are far too quick to refer to their little opaque boxes as having supernatural powers to "show me what I want".
Not being active on social media has meant a lot of old friends have drifted out of my life so I'm trying to force myself to be more active on it but sadly there are no enjoyable (or usable) platforms left.