Out of curiosity, I went through my results on m.facebook.com. I really need to get ad blocking on mobile going again.

Post, ad, post, ad, reels (which I've never intentionally clicked), ad, 3 posts, (ad, 2 posts) repeated indefinitely.

My wife, through the Facebook app, had a roughly similar pattern, though with far more suggested groups.

What’s an effective way to block FB ads on a mobile browser?

Late reply, but Firefox allows the uBlock Origin extension to run.

Email is in profile; I'm happy to send you screenshots. I regularly get 2 ads back-to-back, and I recently got three in a row.

I typically bail when I see two in a row, in a vain attempt to send the message that multiple ads back-to-back is not cool.

edit: just logged in and of the first 20 timeline items, 9 were ads (including two cases of back-to-back ads). It's basically half of what I see.

I just checked and right now it looks like every other post in my feed is an ad, with some ads having 2-3 posts in between.

I wonder if you don't follow a lot of pages or something, so it's breaking the algorithm.

You’re right that I don’t follow many pages. But I have plenty of friends, with plenty of activity (and I don’t check FB often, so there’s a lot they could show me when I do).

I get a normal amount of ads on Instagram, but half of them are for tshirts with a video of a shirtless fat guy, and the other half are for Viagra. It ignores me every time I dismiss them.

Ads shown were up 21% last quarter on minimal user growth to make up for cost per ad going down 17% according to earnings report. Facebook is absolutely shoving as much ads in as they can at this point.

Interesting that cost per ad went down. I wonder what happened to the click-through-rate as users had so many more ads shoved in their faces.

It's possible that ads are now cheaper, but also less effective. I only ever did pay per click because impressions mean nothing to a startup that no one has ever heard of. But it was always hard to break out of the default settings that were pay per impression.

Commenting because I want to see this drama unfold in the future.

Update: today I was shown 8 ads in a row on FB. The first two ads were for the same storage company (but at different locations). I was shocked to see this pairing, as well as the sheer magnitude of the back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back ads. I took a screen capture video, if you want to see it.

Makes me wonder if the troubles at Meta run deeper than the current layoffs will solve.