Just hide every content farm I find, and my feed is my old school friends day to day lives, local marketplace ads, and DnD Mini-painting groups. The worst thing I see are ads that are irrelevant, or my uncles deranged rants about his local politics.

Took me about 2 weeks of hitting hide from content farms to train the algo to steer me away from that junk.

Hmm, I wonder if Facebook could do that automatically? Like, write an algorithm to detect content farms and automatically hide them from your newsfeed.

I wonder why they’ve never done that…

They have that kind of algorithm, but most people want, or at least behave as though they want, outrage bait, and cute content farm affirmations. The moment you take a moment to be proactive and have ownership over your experience the algorithm happily shows you less crap and more people.

Just like the spam filter, “algorithm” won’t be 100% effective.

Unlike spam, the content farm spreads organically.

They optimise for engagement. I engage with content farms.

I've been doing this for a few days and things are getting better. However I still spend a lot of time hitting hide all from...

This is 99% of my Facebook use too.

I'd argue that the only meaningful benefit (to me at least) of Facebook is as a contact list and finder. I would delete my Facebook instantly if I felt fairly confident that I wouldn't lose out on any outreach from less-than-weekly acquaintances.

"Reply to this post" things only exist because if lots of people reply, the algorithm thinks you're popular, and thus will show your posts more often without you having to pay.

I’d argue that’s not really Facebook anymore than Instagram or WhatsApp are.

Yeah Messenger is OK. Another WhatsApp. But really, these are small, self-contained apps. They don't need the rest of Facebook attached to them.