[mbo]

My mother is an international flight attendant in her 60s.

I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in her most frequented cities. But I discovered that my mum was also a frequent "poster" of the photos of her various trips around the world, and the comments sections were filled with with some beautiful messages from her many many friends and family.

From this I learned that there is a subset of the population that Facebook works perfectly for and meaningfully improves their real-world social relationships. And perhaps Facebook has been hyper-optimized for that kind of use case through relentless A/B testing. But I fear my mum is quite privileged to have this kind of experience.

[whyenot]

As a middle aged (gen x) woman, my facebook feed is pretty good. It's filled with posts from friends and interest groups that I am a part of. The reason I no longer use FB has nothing to do with the feed, it's because Mark Zuckerberg is an awful person, and I refuse to use his product. The cognitive dissonance is great here, because I still use WhatsApp; it's the best way to stay in contact with my relatives in Europe, and I still use IG, albeit mostly for work, and sparingly.

[dboreham]

I'm still a FB user even though most friends and relatives have disengaged due to toxicity. But what I've noticed consistently is that any group on FB that has more than 1000 members will end up surfacing so much toxic sentiment that I have to unsubstantiated. I'm talking about innocuous fields such as the local road conditions. That one became full of rants about out of state drivers, drivers who don't understand English, people posting license plates of bad drivers, etc. This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave nicely beyond some threshold group size.

[rightbyte]

> This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave nicely beyond some threshold group size.

I think what happens is that the risk of including a critical amount of "toxics" (lacking a better word) such that they can keep a conversation going, increases by FB group size. Without actice moderators it doesn't take much.

[hogwasher]

I think it is important to remember that only a tiny, tiny fraction of most facebook groups is actually posting, commenting, or even viewing the group at any given moment. Most people who view don't post/comment. (True of reddit and other social media as well.)

And the thing about poorly moderated groups (especially on platforms with rage-boosting algorithms) that let assholes go off without consequences is: the people who both a) actually look at the group ever and b) aren't assholes either leave entirely, stop looking at the group, and stop posting/commenting to the group (if they ever did in the first place). They go find places to hang out where there aren't a bunch of assholes. Nobody wants to hang out with the assholes when they can easily just not.

And at the same time, the assholes all gravitate to the same few places because they get kicked out of all the other places. Or if they don't get kicked out outright, they get shouted down or ignored, which they hate. So instead they congregate where they can get away with or get praised for saying whatever vile things they want.

[stuaxo]

The Dunbar number is 150 for humans but that only measures maintaining a group, maybe the behave nicely number is smaller.

[graemep]

> But what I've noticed consistently is that any group on FB that has more than 1000 members will end up surfacing so much toxic sentiment that I have to unsubstantiated.

It depends on the group and how well it is moderated.

I live in an area where everything depends on Facebook. There are multiple FB groups for the town, the largest of which has 80k members. Not perfect, but not toxic. The same in other similar groups.

I am an admin of another with 30k members. It has a tight focus (exams and qualifications for home ed kids in the UK - GCSEs/IGCSEs mostly, but other things too), membership is only for parents of such kids (there are membership questions), the group is private, posts require approval, irrelevant comments get deleted, repeat offenders get kicked out. We do not have a lot of problems (some attempts at spam by tutors, but they get kicked out).

[cyberge99]

I think after a certain group size people feel immune or that their alternative thought might have a better chance of landing with someone.

[veunes]

Once a group gets big enough...

[derefr]

> This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave nicely beyond some threshold group size.

I think you're generalizing far too broadly. The problem you're describing is more-or-less exclusively a problem with online, open-membership groups.

Consider: if the groups you describe were in-person groups, these ranters would constantly be getting disengaged/off-put/disgusted reactions from the "silent majority" of the people in the group. And just these reactions — together with a lack of any positive engagement — would, almost always, be enough to make them stop or go somewhere else.

(Or, to put a finer point on that: "annoyed, judgemental silence, and then turning away / back to the person you were talking to" would always put off the vast majority of people, with just a few — people who have trouble understanding non-verbal signals — persisting because they aren't "getting the message." And in an in-person context, these few would still eventually be taken aside and given a talking-to, because if they're butting into other in-person conversations with this behavior, they're being far more disruptive than "random new conversation threads" tend to be felt as. Even though "random new conversation threads" can kill a group just as dead.)

The problem with decorum / respect-for-purpose in unmoderated online open-membership groups seems to mostly stem from the fact that people underestimate the importance of non-verbal signals in moderating/regulating behavior. And so there is a dearth of such signals available in such groups. Our brains didn't evolve to play the game of socializing without these signals, any more than ants evolved to coordinate without pheremones. So many people's brains begin to play the game in degenerate / anti-social ways.

From what I've been able to gather, from personal interactions with many people who admit to being "Internet trolls" at some point in their lives... their behavior was almost never intentional maliciousness/active-disregard-for-others on their part. It's rather an emergent behavior — something they "just ended up doing" — given a lack of (non-verbal-signal-alike) calibrating feedback.

And why is there so little non-verbal-signal-alike communication online?

Well, for one thing, we often aren't even aware we're giving off such signals; and so, if we need to consciously choose to communicate them (as we do in online contexts), then we simply fail to do so, because the majority of these signals never even rise to our conscious attention as something to be communicated.

And even when we do become aware of them, we often don't feel them to be important enough to be "worth" going to the effort of translating into some more conscious/explicit/non-subtextual form of communication.

And then, even when a strong desire to communicate a nonverbal signal does bubble up within us... most online chat/forum systems are horrible at transmitting such signals with any degree of fidelity, when they transmit them at all. Especially the kinds of signals used for intra-group behavior regulation.

Facebook, for example, has reaction emojis on both posts and comments — but no reaction emoji that transmits a sentiment like "I disapprove of you saying this; please stop" (e.g. U+1F611 EXPRESSIONLESS FACE or U+1FAE4 FACE WITH DIAGONAL MOUTH). Rather, the only reaction emoji available are those meant to react sympathetically to the emotive content of the post/comment — e.g. with anger, sadness, etc. (People do try to use the "anger" reaction to express disapproval of posts; but when the content itself is often "ragebait" / meant to evoke anger, the poster won't necessarily understand that these reactions are being directed at them, rather than at their post.)

Further, no chat system or forum I'm aware of has participant-visible signals of "detach rate" — i.e. there's no way for people to know when others are clicking on their posts, reading one line, doing a 180 and running away as fast as they can. (YouTube videos expose this metric to their creators; I think it's actually very helpful for them. It could do with being implemented far more widely.)

(And, to be a conspiracy theorist for a moment: I think, in both cases, this is probably intentional. The explicit purpose of signals that "regulate behavior", after all, is to make people engage less in certain anti-social behaviors. Making available any such tools, will therefore inevitably make any kind of platform-aggregate "engagement metrics" go down! If they were ever temporarily introduced, they'd have been quickly removed again with this justification.)

[graemep]

Great analysis. I do not think its conspiracy theorist to believe it to be intentional, or at least a result of KPIs.

One thing I think you are missing is that in person groups are usually far smaller. Anything with 1,000 people would be organised and there would be rules of behaviour, moderation of discussion etc. Most often if something is that big, its mostly an audience.

I think the other thing that happens in real life groups is that there is no community or real relationships. If you annoy people in real life it has consequences. In an FB group there are none.

[derefr]

> One thing I think you are missing is that in person groups are usually far smaller.

Yes, but — an online group with 1000 members isn't really equivalent to an in-person group with 1000 members. It's actually more equivalent in "activity" / "number of expected novel pairwise interactions" to an in-person group with, say, 150 members.

(Why? Because the "members" of an online group, as reported by most chat/forum systems, are just the number of people with access to the chatroom/forum, or who are subscribed to updates to the chatroom/forum, etc. Most of these people have never posted. Many more have only ever posted once. Whereas, in common parlance, you wouldn't really describe someone as a "member" of an in-person group, unless they actually regularly attend the group's in-person meetings. [And that goes double for formal in-person organizations, which often have membership fees or dues. Nobody bothers paying to maintain membership to these if they aren't intent on attending!] So the word "members" here really refers to two very different metrics: for online, the number of passive readers; for in-person, some upper bound on the number of people you might expect to encounter at the average in-person event. We need to do some unit conversions here in order to make valid comparisons!)

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the average online group with 1000 "members" might have ~100 regular posters. (It's probably less, actually.) And let's also say that the average (geographically-based) in-person group with 150 "members", has events attended by ~100 people. And let's assume "regular posters" and "regular event attendees" are roughly equivalent in how they cause interactions that drive (dis)affection / (dis)engagement within the group.

I believe we both already agree that an in-person group where events regularly see ~100 attendees, tends to do just fine without rules of behavior / explicit moderation / etc.

And yet, it seems to me that an online group with "just" ~100 regular posters, almost always tends toward falling apart, unless it does have such rules, and moderation to enforce those rules.

That's the more specific, apples-to-apples-ish distinction that I had in my head in my GP post: that it's weird that when we take basically the same "level of expected interactions" from in-person + synchronous, to online + asynchronous, that it tends toward a different equilibrium state.

---

I do also agree with the lack of community / real relationships being a major driving factor. If you take a bunch of people who are already in the same community, and give them a closed-membership unmoderated online forum to speak in, the resulting interactions don't seem to tend toward awfulness/collapse nearly as badly.

But I would argue that this isn't just due to "consequences" (i.e. posters knowing they're impacting their position in the equivalent real-world community.)

Rather, I think a large part of what makes online forums "backed by" shared pre-existing communities more robust, is that the community provides its members with an implicit shared context for "recovering" an assumed set of nonverbal signals that "would go along with" others' textual wording choices... which in turn regulates behavior exactly as if those nonverbal signals were being explicitly communicated. People don't need to actually convey that they're frowning at you, if everyone in the community (including the poster!) knows exactly what subtextual meaning is carried by a reply of e.g. "Well bless your heart."

This is a testable proposition: it implies that closed-membership forums "bound to" a community offer no benefit, if 1. the community itself is open-membership and 2. new people join the community itself frequently enough that few community resources are being invested per new member on giving them a thorough enculturation into the community (incl. awareness of the community's wording-subtext equivalences.)

- So you would expect that, if there's an online community forum for e.g. a small village, where the only way to move there is to marry into an existing household there — then that forum will be robust and self-moderating, because every newcomer to that community gets a thorough dose of community enculturation.

- Whereas, if there's an online community forum for e.g. the congregation of a church in a particular urban neighbourhood of a city, where anyone can just rent an apartment in the neighbourhood and start attending the church... then that forum might be quite awful, despite every member being aware that what they say there will impact how the congregation sees them. Because there's no enculturative "speed limit" preventing absolute newcomers from immediately posting in that forum.

[DeathArrow]

My Facebook feed is great, my X feed is great. I don't use Facebook and X because I like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk but because I genuinely read interesting things and I interact with people I like.

That being said, I don't spend too much time on social networks because I have lots of other things to do.

[curious_af]

International flight attendant. So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary. If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political power (international travel might be the best proxy for that)

What you're referring to may also be part of their XCheck program which came to light back in 2021

[Aurornis]

> So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary.

I can confirm the same experience as the parent commenter for my family who still use Facebook even though most of them don't travel internationally.

> If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political power (international travel might be the best proxy for that)

I think the much simpler explanation is more likely: People who use Facebook for engaging with friends and family content will see more friends and family content. I don't think this is Facebook playing 4D chess trying to hide content from politicians by detecting who is traveling internationally. I mean, if Facebook did want to have a separate algorithm for politicians, don't you think they could come up with something better than triggering on international travel?

[mayneack]

I'd be shocked if international travel was the algorithmic tell, but in the book Careless People, the author discusses extensively that they (Facebook's political team) did a lot of manually curating the experience for politicians across the world to help push for Facebook's side in whatever issue was important on a given day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People

[michaelt]

> I don't think this is Facebook playing 4D chess trying to hide content from politicians by detecting who is traveling internationally.

I agree the triggering criteria isn't international travel - but giving VIP treatment to VIPs isn't "4D chess" it's just business as usual.

You get elected to congress? The moment the list of winners comes out, someone from Comcast finds the accounts and marks them as VIPs. Someone at Uber does the same. Someone at Amazon does the same, and so on.

Typically this will limit who in Customer Services can view the addresses on your account and reset your password. But it can also mean you get free upgrades, put you at the front of the queue, assign your orders to highly-rated workers, etc - or for social media, a curated experience making the site look classy and enriching.

[AlienRobot]

It would be very ironic if the reason people complain about Facebook so ardently is that they just didn't have enough friends IRL in first place to make Facebook work the way it should.

[Aurornis]

I have one circle of friends who are barely online at all. Their phones exist for minimal e-mails and texts and that's it. A couple don't even have a dedicated internet connection at home. Their experience on Facebook wouldn't be good either.

I do agree with your general sentiment, though: Many complaints about Facebook come from people who don't want to invest time into finding their friends online and engaging with friend content. They log in, see what the article sees, assume that's all there is, and abandon it. Most people just move on, but a few will complain about Facebook based on their limited experience from 10 years ago.

[xethos]

I'd amend that as "didn't have enough [IRL] friends *on FaceBook* in first place", but that starts off a conversation about platforms being only-technically not required socially, network effects, etc.

[npodbielski]

So you are saying that it is authors fault? How about not showing you shit instead when there is nothing else to show?

It is like saying that in order to keep my e-mail inbox full and entertaining from now on your email provider will fill it with AI generated content. Madness.

[afavour]

I do think it’s that but with a dangerous slippery slope embedded within. FB will optimize for engagement no matter what so if you linger on one political post they put among 99 friends and family posts they’ll immediately amp up the ratio. You need to somehow maintain a perfect ratio of time spent on FB to fresh family and friends content, otherwise FB will fill the space for you.

My mother in law is an example of this. She’s always been “mildly” political, e.g. she liked Planned Parenthood’s FB page. Now her feed is a mess of anti-Trump stuff. I’m anti-Trump myself but a lot of these posts are barely coherent and she’s mentioned before now when she meets someone new her first thought is whether they voted for Trump or not. To my mind it’s a direct result of her slipping down that slope. She frequently has interactions (“fights” is too strong really) with friends and neighbors on her feed who are clearly off piste in the other political direction.

I even had an example of it on my own profile. For some reason I had a post from a local (NY) radio station in my feed, about Mamdani. Curious to click into the comments I saw a cesspit of vitriol by boomer age users, attached to their real names, sometimes with smiling photos with their grandchildren… for weeks after whenever I logged in there would be a new post by a different conservative leaning radio station, ready to make me angry. Engagement > user happiness.

[Throaway1982]

FB Marketplace makes you click on ads in order to tell the platform that you dont want to see that kind of listing anymore.

Unfortunately, clicking on the ad alerts the algorithm, which then shows you MORE of that type of ad that if you had not clicked at all.

[fragmede]

it's Facebook, and we've got AI. The "algorithm" is easily just a list of names to match, if they we're going to do that.

[bko]

I think you're overthinking it. She probably just has a lot of real people connections and drives the algo to meaningful interactions. When a ghost logs in, they don't know what to show so default to "general" spam which is just AI generated woman.

[the_af]

This is very likely.

It reminds me of people who browse YouTube logged off: they see garbage, spam, rage bait, and sexy girls doing sexy stuff.

But I browse logged in and my carefully curated subscriptions mean I mostly get good quality, relevant recommendations, and almost zero rage bait or outrageous stuff.

[twelvedogs]

The algorithm is not optimised for meaningful interactions, even 10 years ago i couldn't get it to even mostly show friends and family after fighting it for a week

[HDThoreaun]

The algorithm is optimized to show you content you tend to engage with. You couldnt get it to show you meaningful interaction because you didnt engage with it.

[blobbers]

Do your friends and family interact on facebook? Could run an experiment to see if it adapts.

[blitzar]

> When a ghost logs in ... so default to "general"

I do this with youtube - and I get to see what is broadly popular.

It is grim.

[kryogen1c]

Lol! "Facebook's not bad, you're just a loser"

[duskwuff]

I have a feeling it might be less "avoid negative publicity"; more "give a premium experience to influencers" (for a broad definition of that term).

A user - like mbo's mother - who posts a lot of content which generates a lot of reposts and other positive interactions is basically a gold mine for Facebook. It's in their interest to treat that user with kid gloves to get them to keep posting, even if it means foregoing some revenue opportunities.

[underlipton]

I've been convinced for some time that access to some resource component that determines the quality of search/AI results is divvied up likewise. Why waste resources on users who have no audience or influence? If they're frustrated, who cares? Instead, identify the people who people already listen to, and make sure their experience with the platform is optimal. Even if the service is horrible for the vast majority of users, the gatekeepers and tastemakers will insist that they're just imagining things.

[0x457]

Could it be due to someone actually using facebook so algorithm works in their favor. When I worked in REDACTED when you not frequent user you'd get generic "what is popular for everyone" feed because empty-feed = bad-feed.

[nindalf]

The XCheck program has nothing to do with anything you’re thinking of. You read some old misinformation and didn’t read the post debunking the misinformation.

Source: me. https://nindalf.com/posts/xcheck/

[duxup]

I logged out of facebook years ago only to find out an old friend / former coworker had died. Everyone knew, because of facebook, but not me :(

It’s certainly the social hub for some groups.

[npodbielski]

People with those kind of arguments always get from response that if you were not trying to keep in touch with this friend personally then it was not truly a friend. Facebook friends does not equal real life friend.

[iteria]

I literally didn't learn that my own grandmother(I guess great aunt) had died until I happen to return home on the day the funeral was occurring. Everyone just assumed I knew because of Facebook and was there because of Facebook.

Sometimes it's not about closeness. It's about people's expectations about how to communicate. My cousin was in no place to do anything but post to Facebook and then collapse. My sister helped him, but didn't think to tell me because you know Facebook. I live 4 hours away so I wouldn't have learned by osmosis.

I have several stories of learning about deaths in the family way after the fact because my family is chronically on Facebook and I'm not. They all live in my hometown and it just doesn't occur to them to actually communicate with members like me who don't live there.

This is basically why I haven't deleted my Facebook even if I don't often log in.

[npodbielski]

I am sorry that it happened to you. Maybe I think that I have a solution because my wife tells me everything worth while from FB as the frequent user. Or maybe it is because I am not there at all which forces people to notify me directly by other means if necessary. Which is a problem for them but it is much a problem for me to keep in touch. So maybe if they feel some kind of symmetry in this it is fair to do it anyway to keep in touch? Anyway it is not like it is not solvable problem. People just do what they do because it is easier. Take that away and they will find another means.

[krn1p4n1c]

My feed is like this too. I rarely use FB now, but I’ve aggressively pruned and blocked anything that becomes political or negative.

[fullstop]

I unfollowed everyone except for a few family members. It really wants to give you the infinite scroll and started showing me some really bizarre stuff. So much AI slop, and random content.

For about a week it kept showing me nursing mothers, no matter how many times I said "I don't want to see this" and blocking. I have no problem with women nursing, but these were done in a way to be sexually provocative.

After that it started showing me AI houses and kitchens, with kitchen taps but no sink basin.

I just gave up at that point.

[al_borland]

I made a Facebook account a few years ago for a private group related to a class I was taking. I didn't want to do this, but it is what it is.

Being paranoid, I ran a VM just for Facebook. The browser never went to any other sites, so as far as I know there is no way it could track me or get any actual information about me, other than maybe a very rough location based on my IP. I also setup a burner email just for this and used a fake name/picture.

On a fresh account with no info, my feed was much like that of the linked article. A bunch of thirst traps and various "news" and memes. Occasionally it would tell me to follow stuff so it could actually populate the feed, but when it wasn't doing that, it was giving me this kind of garbage. This was before the advent of generative AI, so I assume these were mostly real photos, but who knows who was actually behind those accounts.

Twitter was fairly similar, but would show a lot of high school kids fighting or general street fights... along side the thirst traps.

[aembleton]

I can recommend using Social Fixer addon [1] on your laptop. On my phone, I use Nobook [2] which isn't quite as effective. They both do a good job though of removing loads of the useless stuff on Facebook.

1. https://socialfixer.com/

2. https://github.com/ycngmn/Nobook

[Fogest]

Thanks for the suggestion, I just installed the socialfixer userscript and am going to give it a try. I now just need to start telling Facebook I'm not interested everytime I see an AI post and hope it eventually gets better.

[ricardobayes]

I remember at some point which I think was a bug: it started showing a specific type of food, I think some kind of barbeque, prepared in various ways from across the globe. And by "started showing" I mean the feed was pretty much that for an extended period of time. Also at some point a large part of the feed was reposts of random reddit posts in screenshot format.

[wolvoleo]

Facebook was this to me. Because I lived in many countries. Just seeing what my friends in other countries were experiencing <3

But they blocked the old timeline where I could just see the updates from everyone I follow and nothing else. And replaced it with this feed with stupid influencer crap. Now I had to weed through all the shit to see what the people I care about were doing. It wasn't worth it for me so I left soon after, like a decade ago.

Maybe they've rolled some of the crap back but it's too little too late for me.

[_2d30]

Yeah I just logged in to see if it was really this bad an all I got were:

(1) extremely, impressively relevant ads. (2) posts from people I know that were mostly nice except for my uncle who seemed to be posting nonsense.

[harrall]

People say the same about Instagram but my feed is like all about making clothes, welding, construction stuff, funny memes, snowboarding, etc. It’s all good stuff.

I just don’t interact with political content on social media — not because I’m apolitical but I don’t want to hear random people’s takes on matters.

[drnick1]

The privacy cost of Facebook is too high. Even if you have "nothing to hide" today, sooner or later you will post something you wish you had not posted, or someone else will do it for you. Once data about you is out there, it is impossible to remove, and the only recourse is to wait for that information to become irrelevant or outdated (if ever). For example, some employers have been known to spy on their employees through Facebook. Others have been harmed when searching for jobs because of things they posted on FB or other antisocial media, often long ago.

Facebook should not have multiple high quality photos of 1/2 of the planet, their children, pets, friends and family, in addition to their real-time location obtained through the spyware companion app. Not even governments used to have this kind of insight into people's lives not so long ago, and it is certainly very alarming that a spyware/adtech firm now does.

[randomNumber7]

> Facebook should not have multiple high quality photos of 1/2 of the planet, their children, pets, friends and family, in addition to their real-time location obtained through the spyware companion app.

If adults decide to give them all this information aren't they the ones that should be blamed?

[defrost]

Perhaps, for the individual photos that each uploaded in ignorance of the bigger picture.

But not for the aggregate warehousing, abuse of data, addiction maximising algorithmic design, insecurity, etc.

That's all on Facebook and other similar mass scale "social' media behemoths.

[alex1138]

Facebook automatically tags people in photos

[hackernewds]

Maybe you are too young to have noticed, but this is how Facebook used to be for every one. Until some a/b testing likely led to short term engagement boosts for news content and that's all you could see - especially during the 2016 news cycle with (allegedly Russian) political ads. Then people stopped posting, and others stopped posting, feedback loop and here we are.

[mgraczyk]

This is lie, I was there and this is not at all what happened

[dang]

I appreciate the voice of experience but if you're going to post a comment like this, could you please share some of that experience so we know at least some of what did happen?

Otherwise it comes across as a drive-by swipe, which is a human reaction when you know that something on the internet is wrong, but which degrades the threads, partly because of the example it sets for others. The life of this community depends on knowledgeable people sharing some of what they know, so the rest of us can learn.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[mgraczyk]

Fair and sorry about that

Specifically what happened, and I think this is all public now is that prior to 2016 journalists and news organizations argued that Facebook was demoting news for various reasons. In reality it wasn't very engaging so it was automatically demoted. They promised to boost news more in early 2016, but largely as a result of worse engagement and negative experiences (arguing in comments) Facebook started ranking news worse than other content. This all happened in 2016, months before the general election

And while Russia did run ads, it was mostly not political and the political content they ran had very little engagement. Russia mostly focuses on conspiracy theories and undermining American institutions. Facebook was aware of this in 2016 and certainly did not contribute to it intentionally, and I don't believe even by accident of some kind of misguided A/B testing

The reason Facebook got worse for younger people is because younger people stopped posting.

[dang]

Thank you! both for the kind response and the informative reply :)

[firesteelrain]

If it wasn’t for groups, events, and marketplace, I wouldn’t use FB.

Marketplace has supplanted Craigslist near me.

Events - no good replacement. Meetup isn’t as ubiquitous.

Groups - nothing as good except maybe groups.io. But, that doesn’t have the same common folk. It’s still more niche.

It could be that middle America is catching up where big city America has moved on. And maybe that’s the demographic that FB is serving now.

[wvenable]

My Facebook feed (I visit just for marketplace) is also not quite like the author's feed. I don't have a lot of AI content or thirst traps. I wonder if he's got some sort of the default young male algorithm experience.

I wouldn't say my Facebook is good -- I don't interact with it enough for it to be anything.

[pavlov]

My Facebook is honestly nice, it’s the most relaxing social media for me.

The promoted posts are books and artists and occasional gym content. Ads are relevant or at least not annoying (SuitSupply seems to think I’m their ideal customer, and I don’t mind looking at their handsome models in this season’s knitwear). The people I know post mostly about meaningful or harmless stuff.

But it’s probably like this because I joined over ten years after everyone else did. I didn’t activate my Facebook account until 2018 when I got a job at FB and it was mandatory. Then I found out that it was actually a good way to curate a set of people from my youth that I genuinely wanted to reconnect with.

That’s probably what made the difference compared to many whose FB social graphs were built up early and never pruned.

[jcgrillo]

Wow they make you use facebook at facebook? That's twisted. That would be like.. idk.. Phillip Morris making you smoke a pack a day.

[wedog6]

I believe it was somewhat like that at large cigarette companies in the heyday of smoking.

An ashtray on every desk and throughout meeting rooms. Free packs of cigarettes you could grab anywhere in the building + a certain number of packs given to you weekly, with your preferred brand recorded. Some amount of social compulsion to smoke at work and during work related social events.

[codethief]

I hear it still largely is that way, though apparently they do try to avoid smoking in the presence of their pregnant coworkers these days. Progress! :-)

[actionfromafar]

I laughed out loud. "I found that I loved Big Brother from my youth." Genuinely no offense meant, it was just funny.

[Aurornis]

This is how my parents' Facebook feeds look, too. And my wife's. And my friends who still use it.

I log in a couple times per year and see the same thing. It's nice to catch up with the friends who still use it.

One thing I've noticed over the years on HN is that many of the people talking confidently about Facebook also start their posts with "I'm glad I deleted my Facebook account 8 years ago, but..." and then go on to describe what they imagine Facebook is like for everyone else, as pieced together through the type of sensational headlines that hit the Hacker News front page every day.

There's another failure mode where someone tries to use Facebook but doesn't have any active friends on the site. They might scroll past photos from friends and family to click on ragebait links or engage with someone debating politics because they can't resist an internet argument. The algorithm takes note that this is what they engage with and gives them more of it, while showing less of the content they're scrolling past. Then they wonder why their feeds are full of topics that make them angry.

There's even an explicit feature to tell the algorithm what you want to see less of: You click the three dots and click "Hide post". They even have useful tools to unfollow people without unfriending them, which is highly useful for those people can't politely disconnect from but whose content you don't want to see. Using these tools even a little bit goes a long way to cleaning up your feed.

Meanwhile, people like my parents and extended family treat Facebook like a friendly gathering where everyone knows discussions of politics and religion are off the table. They click "Like" on things they want to see more of. They leave nice comments under photos of their friends and family. Their feeds adapt and give them what they want.

[nephihaha]

I did delete a previous Facebook account, but got forced back into it due to work. I don't really use it for friends much now. It is much better as a result although I still see it trying to pull me one direction or another. I would happily delete the entire lot because I don't find it functional.

"There's even an explicit feature to tell the algorithm what you want to see less of: You click the three dots and click "Hide post". They even have useful tools to unfollow people without unfriending them, which is highly useful for those people can't politely disconnect from but whose content you don't want to see. Using these tools even a little bit goes a long way to cleaning up your feed."

I've really never liked that feature. It is what creates echo chambers, because you just get infinite agreemtn. For some reason, Faecebook only tends to show me one individual's posts over others. We're not unfriendly but not good mates. On the other hand thanks to the features you seem to be talking about, I get to hear about bereavements, birthdays, engagements etc days or weeks after they happened which is no use to me.

[shufflerofrocks]

I'm a 30 year old and I have a similar experience. Facebook has almost always been a pleasant experience for me - not just updates from friends but also the new stuff that comes in the feed, which is why I kept getting confused about the reports of fb being a hell hole, until I understood the rabidity & variability of their algorithm.

FB Groups are one of the best corners of the internet imo.

[ksec]

I am glad something great about Facebook is being voted on top on HN. Along with another day on post about OpenAI adopting Ads as revenue solution to problem.

It shows the world is healing.

[vanjajaja1]

a common complaint about instagram is that you can no longer see your friends, just creators. i assume creators don't have this problem though, since they're having fun seeing all their creator friends

[nephihaha]

I have a Facebook friend similar to your mother. A solicitor (so makes a lot of money), off travelling to beautiful places much of the time.

However, there is an element of one upmanship about social media. You see pictures of nice holidays abroad, nice cars and happy families... And then you find out some of the same folk are about to divorce or go bankrupt.

The algo keeps showing me one person's feed but not others. I don't mind said person, but we are not close. Facebook tells me about birthdays, bereavements etc often two or three weeks after they happen which is no good.

[suzzer99]

I have my Facebook feed curated enough that it shows me reels I like (landslides, dance-offs, kids or animals doing cute things - nothing salacious). Of course, AI crap filters in, but a majority are still good.

Even the sponsored posts are very often interesting summaries of historical events or scientific wonders. They're AI most of the time, which goes on and on. So I read the first part and then go to wikipedia if I'm more interested.

I'm also in a bunch of private groups that are spam-free. Some travel-related groups have turned out to be invaluable resources.

So it does work if you train it on what you like.

[jasondigitized]

Was she using the 'Friends' tab? Anything else is complete trash.

[bdangubic]

This is regular feed. I have another friend that is like OP's Mom, basically posts 4-10x per day. her main feed is basically just her and her friend's stuff, comments etc etc (few ads here and there of course but basically her feed looks like OG Facebook)

[tgma]

Could it be that the problem is users’ own interest in being outraged? A reflection of their mental state and anxiety that they then project to Facebook as if that’s the root cause.

[DeathArrow]

I live in an European country where Facebook is used often and I can say I have my wall mostly filled with posts from people that interest me and that I interact with.

[shevy-java]

Right. But who fits into that niche? I in general prefer privacy so I don't share fotos of whenever I take a du.. I mean do something semi-interesting to a grand selection of three or four other people out there (or more; but these are already reallife associations). Remote "relationships" rarely work in my experience, excluding a few that are important. But I don't see how that is any business of CIAbook to keep track of.

[rconti]

I always really enjoyed Facebook -- much more so than any other social media network. It was all friends, friends' content, and groups I was interested in and cared about. Sure it had ads, and a bit of suggested stuff, but mostly it was interesting content, no ragebait, no politics.

But as those friends use it less and less, I use it less and less. And the less I use it, the more "suggested" crap I get. If I don't use it for a week, the site is absolute garbage.

[pants2]

To think I used to log in to Facebook every day, scroll friends' posts until it said "You're caught up!" then leave.

That's almost unimaginable now, but I deeply wish I could return to that experience. Unfortunately as the suggested content got turned up, friends stopped posting, so even with all the browser extensions in the world I can't get that same experience back.

[rconti]

Yup. And unfortunately, I realized I've benefitted from the algo too. I tried the friends feed, and I ended up with MORE politics!

[nradov]

My Facebook feed is also like that (although with more underwater pictures of fish). It seems fine. I don't think I'm particularly privileged. I honestly don't understand the hate that FB gets here on HN. Maybe some users are just following the wrong accounts?

[magicalist]

> I honestly don't understand the hate that FB gets here on HN. Maybe some users are just following the wrong accounts?

Sounds like you do understand the hate but you don't understand how their feeds ended up different than yours?

[keyle]

And yet, every 3-4 posts, Facebook will start interjecting posts that are outrageous, meant to create response. If she interacts with any of those, e.g. even open it wide, or stay on it a long time, BAM, more of those posts next visits.

And the cycle continues and grinds your account down to a complete hellish nightmare where you hate your city, your local councils etc. It's all a rigged platform for creating divide and hate. It drives clicks, it drives ads, it drives agendas.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don't think that's true. I just scrolled my feed really quick, and I had to get 23 posts down before I got an even mildly controversial post. The post wasn't even anything mean, it was a screenshot of an analysis showing that the richest Americans and the Americans who donate the most money don't overlap as much as you might think.

[dingaling]

Nope, I've just opened FB in a tab. Top posts:

- Chris Hadfield using a fire extinguisher to show how rockets work

- A friend's trip to a gig

- Video of a restored TWA flight engineer training simulator

- Mountain weather for my region tomorrow

- A rare colour photo of a 1930s biplane

[dawnerd]

I only use it for cruise groups and it’s been useful but once you scroll the main feed it’s baaad. Slop after slop. And what isn’t slop is rage bait short form content or bad takes or stolen videos from the vine days it feels.

[pyreko]

I have this with Twitter surprisingly.

I only use it for animal pictures, art, and to follow artists. I usually just use the Following page, but my FYP is always just... animal pictures and art, exactly what I want. No weird right wing shit, no weird crypto shit, no drama or ragebait shit, etc... somehow.

I know some day it'll break though.

[Aurornis]

Same here. The trick is to unfollow people who start posting things you don't want to see in your feed any more. It sounds so simple, but many people treat their following list as an append-only log.

I've followed accounts for hobbies that later spiral off into the deep end of Twitter's topics of the day, which is always my sign to unfollow them.

Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make them angry, though. These websites continue serving up more of what you click on.

[magicalist]

> Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make them angry, though. These websites continue serving up more of what you click on.

"We're going to keep putting crap in front of you until we find something you click on. And even if you take a breath, don't reply and close it, we now know we have you and we'll keep showing that type of thing to you. Also, even though we're not going to tell you we're doing this, we and our power users are going to blame you for doing it to yourself. lol."

[numpad0]

Same. It feels like the real trick is to get platforms to think you're some kind of important person that could hurt the platform if served too much ragebaits.

And it also feels like they're compelled to maximize ragebaits for some reason - maybe the Web2 is running out of "advertiser friendly" contents.

[suzzer99]

For twitter I have a sports list that I stick to 99% of the time. A little politics filters through, but I've found that to be just the right amount.

When major events happen, I switch over to my full feed, where I follow a bunch of political posters, and go into a blind rage in minutes.

[xeonmc]

    > my FYP is always just... animal pictures and art, exactly what I want.

On Bluesky your feed will also have animal pictures and art, just not the kind you wanted.

[raincole]

I have an account to follow artists on X. Surprisingly, it never pushes even one single blatant AI artist to my feed (not saying I'm an expert to recognize AI-generate artworks, but I've done digital painting as a side gig and.) There might be some paintover or more subtle ones that eluded my radar, but I've never seen the typical AI styles on my timeline.

However, if you check posts remotely related to the US politics the reply section is out of control.

I honestly believe out of Reddit, Facebook, Bsky and X, X is the one with the most reasonable timeline algorithm[0]. Reddit and Facebook are unusable except for very specific reasons (asking questions in certain apps' subs/groups). Most people I know irl moved to instagram though.

[0]: Bsky is the worst, but interestingly if you use a third-party feed like 'For You' it's on par with X, just less traffic.

[cleaning]

Why do you call it X?

[AlexandrB]

> all the Facebook PMs intended

That's being awfully generous. I think Facebook PMs intend your feed to be filled with valuable commercial offers that can be monetized by Meta.

[veunes]

Your mum's experience is probably what FB is best at: high-trust network, lots of original photos, lots of comments from real friends

[cyanydeez]

The skeptical observer would suggest because her demograph votes, serving ads which benefit Facebook shareholders is good for business.

[moduspol]

They should offer that privilege to the rest of us for a few bucks a month. I'd probably pay.

[Aurornis]

You don't need to pay anything. That's just how Facebook works when you have active friends on it and you engage with their content.

I do find it interesting that tech people are so baffled when other people enjoy Facebook and derive value from it. I think we see so many exaggerated headlines about algorithms and feeds that people who don't use the site have a very different idea of what people who do actually use the site are seeing.

[CosmicShadow]

Yet my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs open to people and bands she wants updates from because Facebook refuses to put them on her feed, despite her commenting on every post and story from them; she instead gets all these random shitty "suggested" posts from things that she would never have interest in or actively hates and FB should know that. She constantly mutes and reports shit. I get the same thing, but I don't use FB nearly as much. Those same bands have to spam repeatedly because despite having tens of thousands of fans they show everyone that their posts are only shown to 16 people. It's a shit site that maybe works for some folks, but not at all for us active or not.

[JCattheATM]

> my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs open

Surely she could just bookmark those pages and check periodically, or subscribe to a newsletter or something?

[CosmicShadow]

She checks them every time she's on her computer, no point in closing them and they are always posting to social media every day, whereas you may get a generic email once a month if they even have a mailing list. Instagram is admittedly a LOT better at showing what you want than FB, as she follows them all there as well, but sometimes they post different stuff on each. She wants to both support and help these bands and band members by engaging on their socials so they actually get shown to more people. These are metal bands, so not big by any means, although some of them are still "large" or well known in their genres, but still struggle to get any good traction online. Most people in metal bands still have full time jobs, even if they are at the top of their genre (excluding the mega bands people have heard of).

[cameldrv]

The problem is that your friends probably don't post much to facebook, and so they'd show you that, and you'd get to the end and find something else to do, so they have to bulk it up. There is a "friends" feed that's buried under a couple of menus that does this though.

[moduspol]

I wouldn't mind seeing an empty feed that says, "your friends didn't post today," or whatever. They have to fill the feed because I'm not paying them and they need the engagement.

But if I were paying them, even a little bit, then maybe they could. But I didn't know there was a friends-only feed so I'll check that out.

[Digit-Al]

If you are on the mobile app, click on the burger menu and select "Feeds". You will then have a page that has tabs at the top. "All" will be selected by default, but if you select "Friends" you will see only posts from your friends. If you have completely caught up it will be empty and will say that you have caught up and seen everything your friends have posted. There are still ads, but you don't get all the reels, and crap posted by people you don't know.

[AndrewDucker]

Go to the "feeds" page and select "friends".

[wedog6]

You wouldn't mind, but Facebook would mind though.

[motbus3]

Makes sense to me. Seems to be using as it was supposed to be.

[Sharlin]

My FB experience is still fine after all these years. I can't find anything in my feed that isn't either a post a) to a group I'm in, b) by a page I follow, or c) by a friend. These days, a) and b) make up the majority of posts – many of the groups have no equivalent elsewhere and are a major reason why I still use FB. Even the reels/shorts/whatever that FB suggests are mostly nice and relevant – cats, trains, music. No slop, no thirst traps, no politics beyond what I choose to follow, not even ads because those are blocked.

Honestly, I've been wondering what other relevant social media there even is for someone like me, an early 40s millennial. Twitter I refuse to use, and nobody's on Bluesky. Instagram is… fine, I guess, and more lively and "feel-good" in some sense, and also used by the younger folk, but there's less "engagement" beyond liking something and scrolling on. On Facebook comments and actual conversation are in a much bigger role, at least for me. Reddit is great, assuming you curate your subreddits, but I don't have friends there.

[nephihaha]

I think you are very lucky. I get constant political messaging (not from one side of the room either) which is very unsubtle and biased. I get a lot of slop suggested.

I have never used Instagram and don't plan too. Twitter has always been a disaster and a mob mentality, and now it barely shows me stuff I want to look at.

[Sharlin]

I wonder if the politics issue is just much worse in certain parts of the world. Nobody bothers to spend money trying to influence the population of a small Nordic country.

As an experiment, I disabled Ghostery and uBlock, and the feed became about 33% ads, which is rather annoying, but the ads were mostly fine. There was one obvious AI slop image advertising a dating site, and one cryptobro ad, but otherwise they were fairly reasonable, relatively speaking.

[RoyTyrell]

My FB is generally like that. However I have noticed I see more more delayed posts from friends, and it's starting to recycle posts from friends I've seen already. I'll see a friend post pics of a vacation they took but I won't see that post for 3-5 days, and in the mean time I'll see some other old posts from them that were from 1-3 weeks ago come up multiple times.

Occasionally I do get blasted with AI slop and random accounts for a few days. When that happens I keep selecting to stop showing me that because I'm not interested.

I join groups for my interests. I never interact with random groups that pop up. I'm pretty diligent about scrolling past ads and I report a ton of them that are AI bs or selling lies (like "tonics" that cure cancer).

[harel]

That's almost me. I've always used Facebook as a tool to keep in touch with friends around the world. My friend list is 95% people I know in real life. A small fraction of them still posts. I also get a lot of slop in between. The filler posts. I am waiting for a Facebook resurgence or a Friendster comeback.

[scotty79]

At one point I subscribed to groups on Satisfactory, Factorio and RimWorld and while I don't play much anymore it's always nice to see posts on my feed made by people engaged with these games.

When algorithm doesn't have a handle on you it puts you at the bottom of the barrel that's filled with slop.

I think the problem is Meta doesn't moderate algorithm enough so a lot of users have terrible experience becausd they don't moderate their feeds themselves.

Most people are not self-aware enough to decide that maybe political rants is not the healthiest content to consume. And even if they do, tools for moderation are not easily accessible enough. There should be a huge "Yeah, I hated that." button on each post.

[BorisMelnik]

came here to say this also...also on mobile there is a feed that only shows your friends, no "algo." my parents are both on FB and pretty much only interact with their freinds. it is quit beautiful.

[newsclues]

You keep the content creators happy.

[SecretDreams]

Facebook used to be like this when it was only for college students. That was the last time Facebook was good.

[derefr]

Interesting.

So the presumption, then, would be that Facebook only turns on the slop-content hose to "fill the void" on many people's dashboards from a lack of organic content from people they follow? I.e. that if you were personal friends with enough other frequently-posting Facebook users, the slop-content would disappear?

[kmeisthax]

I would love to know what kind of ascetic mental training you have to do to get your Facebook feed to just send you actual people you know and not... well, the slop trough.

[troupo]

I don't use Facebook much, and my feed is filled with algorithmic bullshit and almost no posts from friends, family, or groups I'm a part of.

[KPGv2]

For the longest time, that was my feed, well after most Millennials had moved on. It was spectacular.

But I finally decided I didn't want to doom scroll so much, and when I changed phones, I declined to install the app on my new one, and I logged out on my laptop.

So I almost never am on anymore, and it's always complete trash. Zuck's Trump turn helped the inertia, and now with the revelations that he was trying to party with Epstein how can I even log in anymore?

I think I'm going to reach out to the people who matter and get their email addresses, then hang my FB shoes up for good, twenty-one years after I joined.