I remember when you could go on Facebook and look through your feed at what your friends are saying, catch up with them, and browse posts that they have made. Now, it’s just completely random and chaotic, almost nonsensical. There’s no logical sense to my Facebook feed at all. As you can see in the image, they are showing me stuff that I’m not even following. This is not even something that I am actively a part of! It’s some random group. So what’s the point of following a group or liking a page, if they’re just going to show you random stuff anyway?
Like, wtf happened to this website?
You know what sucks about Facebook? The fact that it took the reigns from Craigslist and you can’t buy local used stuff without having a Facebook account. I hate hate hate that. I want to sell my used shit without a Facebook account. It’s all fucking tire kickers anyway.
Just use craigslist. I do. Even in low pop areas it works.
It’s all fucking tire kickers anyway.
I had an instance recently where it was faster and easier to literally make an item with my bare hands than to coordinate a purchase of one via marketplace.
Was it a dildo made of starburst? No one will buy mine
I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.
I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.
People use it because that’s where the sellers are at. I also liked Craigslist before but Facebook ate their lunch plus one slight advantage from marketplace is seeing who you’re buying from beforehand. It makes it a lot easier to weed out fake listings when you see someone just created their account this year or if they have bad ratings.
Vehicle listings are absolute garbage though as the filtering options are super basic or ridiculous like you can filter by the color of a car but not engine size. I don’t know of a single person who searches for cars/trucks based on their color.
Nextdoor is also good for selling stuff. But you need to verify your address through either an ID or they send you a post card. Keeps the bots off though.
They figured out that this kind of feed makes the most money from the most users. They don’t care if you like it, they care what the majority of users will stick around for. The longer total scrolling time they can get from their user base, the more ads they can cram in there. Ads make money.
Algorithm leads to more scroll time per person leads to more ads per user leads to more income
So, because money
I suspect it’s not an optimization to make every post you see interesting. For one thing, we tend to find intermittent rewards more fascinating and addictive than reliable ones. For another, if you have to scroll further you’ll see more ads. But if you make it too boring people won’t scroll at all. So the algorithm probably tries to make it just interesting enough to keep people scrolling, but no more.
For the same reasons that everything else is “enshittified” – It’s produced by people seeking maximum profits for minimum effort, and consumed by people who aren’t discerning enough to care.
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It may be what you say, the algorithm being dumb. Or it may be deliberate: you’ve shown yourself willing to categorize these annoying ads so you will be sent more so that fb can collect more data on them.
Abandoning is the only option. It’s a dopamine casino now, full of flashing lights.
example if you see an ad you hate, for like a slot machine game app, and you click ‘see less ads like this
You engaged with that ad. It’s worth slightly more than if you scrolled by it.
The answer is obviously as everyone has pointed out already is enshittification.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification. (Cory Doctorow)
Profit = enshittification. It’s guaranteed as long as profit is a motive.
An interesting concept is the idea of a distributed social web. It was the concept me, and probably a LOT of other redditors, were looking at last year, but it seems no such thing really exists. The idea that everyone’s home computer (or mobile device nowadays) could act as the client and the server. Perhaps using a firefox addon of some sort.
Do any software devs (ok that’s like 90% of lemmy, lol) know if any existing projects are trying to do this? It does not seem like an unfeasible thing, and it wouldn’t have to grow overnight, it could possibly just be a feature in an existing addon that allows communication directly between users. No centralized servers of any sort. Distributed communication without central control. Is this possible?
The existing social media companies own the world (literally), and they can maintain this control because they can buy out competitors. You can’t buy out 5 billion people though, so if people had the tools available to host their own web; and it was as easy as installing a firefox browser addon, a true democracy could exist like the world has never seen.
sorry, but I think what you are looking for is platforms like Lemmy. it is not centralized, it is distributed. not peer to peer, sure, but
- since a lot of devices are not being online at the same time, mobile phones but even desktop PCs always go offline for some period of time, the direct communication wouldn’t really work with a lot of other users
- you would need to store much more dataon each of your devices, unless you’re the kind who doesn’t care about mindlessly deleting past conversations
distributed social web
…ActivityPub?
I do know of a project that does what you are looking for, decentralized (100%), FOSS, easy to set up, encrypted…
I built a very basic chat program on top of it quite easily, a “FB clone” is not far away IMO.
So what’s the project? It’s my Tenfingers protocol & implementation (http://tenfingers.org) and it’s just waiting for adoption!
I’m in the process of making the documentation and installation guide, but you can check it out right now.
I’d love showcasing it somewhere, getting feedback, help out with problems etc.
sounds interesting, is the source code on somewhere like codeberg or GitHub?
How does it work?
You can download the python code, or frozen executables for Linux and Windows on http://tenfingers.org
Or the whole project, which I admit is kind of messy, on codeberg: https://codeberg.org/Valmond/Tenfingers
I posted a more detailed description just below in this theead, please do say if you don’t find it or if you have any kind of questions!
Very cool. 100% over my technical knowledge level but I’ll take a look at the code and give it a whirl when I get a chance.
I think it would be awesome if it worked. Power to the people! ;)
Hey thank you!
I finally have some free time ahead, I’ll put together a first ‘real’ documentation that covers installation and basic use cases so that people actually can have a chance of testing it for real. I’ll swap the cringy 1990 web page for it on tenfingers.org
Do tell if you try it out 👍🏻
Valmond
I did do a test install (on a virtual machine), and everything seemed to install/configure fine using the python source code and instructions in your repo, but I wasn’t able to see any connections being made in the listener log. Brain is too tired, but I tried all of the addresses/ports listed (Debian/bash/ip addr) and created port exceptions with ufw per the instructions file. Can this work with a virtual box?
Nice!
You do need a link to some data as a bootstrap to node adresses, there is a test link on tenfingers.org you can try using, it downloads a small text file but also adds my live nodes address to your known addresses when you use it.
Or you can just set up two local nodes on 127.0.0.1 with two different ports, run their listeners, add data to them, extract the links and, download from the ‘other’ node to see how things hook up and so on.
The links as tenfingers.db are sqlite databases, so they are easily inspected.
Reddit is like this too on the app. Some of the worst algorithm recommendations I’ve ever seen. “You like (your local city subreddit), you might also like (some city you don’t live in subreddit).” Why?
The worst is that is has ruined my porn account because it doesn’t recommend NSFW subs so I have to scrape past random unrelated garbage like the Pokémon card valuation subreddit and /r/cement, I counted and it went 40 posts between NSFW posts once. On my account that is exclusively subscribed to NSFW subs.
Thank you for reminding me why I stopped using the reddit app. Almost considered re-downloading it.
I’m pretty sure people in general stopped posting there, so they just shove this crap on there because otherwise it’d be an elephant graveyard
Empty Internet Theory but its just the “Recommended For You” stuff that Facebook shoehorns in between the pictures of my nieces that I occasionally drop in to look at.
Its funny. When you go into some of the early Facebook history, Zuckerberg is exploring monitization options. He floats the idea of turning it into the kind of intrusive, obnoxious, ads-everywhere experience that had shown up on local news websites and the worst kinds of forum spaces. He (supposedly) rejects it, in pursuit of a more sophisticated kind of mass marketing. The theory being that this kind of invasive content scares away users, and what we really want is to maximize the user base rather than to maximize the monetary value of each user.
But ten years later, we’re right back to a website that’s indistinguishable from eye-ball gouging Geocities crap. The “put ads everywhere to maximize revenue” folks won out in the end. Zuckerberg’s genius move was to simply hold them back until the website started hitting the post-one-billion user base load. But then this was always the end game. Just clickbait across everything, with a periodic pop-over ad demanding that you give the site money to save it from itself.
It’s been a long, long time since facebook has been like you are describing.
It’s been ads, and old uncle facebook fox news memes for a while. Lately they’ve been filling it with AI pictures and bot farmed memes. Gotta admit the memes have gotten slightly better, or at least slightly more targeted as of late.
Anyway, my point was, it’s been shit for a decade
When I quit Facebook over 10 years ago it was because it stopped showing me my friends’ posts and pushed random crap instead. I literally had to go friends’ profiles to see their posts even when checking the feed several times a day.
Looks like nothing changed?
It’s non just Facebook either. Every big tech social media platform has headed in this direction of showing you stuff you don’t really want to see based on maximizing profit. For-profit social media seems to mostly be doomed to this outcome because it makes more money.
I thought it has been this way for like… a decade?
Not really. There were plenty of random pages, but you really had to seek it out to see it. Now an overwhelming majority of non-ad posts are stuff like this (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pay to have this stuff seen, basically making it an ad)
I guess I’ve been away from Facebook long before this started showing up.
When I saw this post I tried to block the profile
Two years ago, I quit FB for six months. Then I checked my feed, and counted six friends’ updates and zero group posts in the first 100 items. 94% of posts were ads or “suggested” content. So, I closed FB and never went back again. Whatsap statuses is where I find my friends’ updates these days.
facebook keeps pushing ‘vegans are evil’ and ‘lets make milk mean raw milk again’ posts on me.
Just… stop. let me enjoy my friends and groups
The default is an enshittified feed that shows you algorithm-chosen content. To see the old version of facebook, tap the menu in the upper right corner, then select feeds, then select friends.
I’ve been going there less and less lately. They started putting ads in the notifications section as well.
