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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

It is grim.

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

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.

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.

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.

1. https://socialfixer.com/

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

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"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.

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.

It’s certainly the social hub for some groups.

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.

These platforms need to be shut down and people with a conscience need to stop using them, regardless of their own positive experiences, to deny them the power of network effects and their impact on the vulnerable.

Maybe worse since it is engineered to be as addictive as possible down to an individual level.

Then again maybe I'm being too optimistic that it will be fixed before it destroys us.

That's not where it stops.

the solution is real easy, section 230 should not apply if there's an recommendation algorithm involved

treat the company as a traditional publisher

because they are, they're editorialising by selecting the content

vs, say, the old style facebook wall (a raw feed from user's friends), which should qualify for section 230

In other words, that filter that keeps Nazis, child predators, doxing, etc. off your favorite platform only exists because of section 230.

Now, one could argue that the biggest platforms (Meta, Youtube, etc.) can, at this point, afford the cost of full editorial responsibility, but repealing section 230 under this logic only serves to put up a barrier to entry to any smaller competitor that might dislodge these platforms from their high, and lucrative, perch. I used to believe that the better fix would be to amend section 230 to shield filtering/removal, but not selective promotion, but TikTok has shown (rather cleverly) that selective filtering/removal can be just as effective as selective promotion of content.

Likewise, if you have a feed at all, it has to be in some order. Should it show everyone's posts or only people you follow? Should it show posts by popularity or something else? Is "popularity" global, regional, only among people you follow, or using some statistics based on things you yourself have previously liked?

There is no intrinsic default. Everything is a choice.

Of course, Facebook started doing the same.

The thing is, anything from people not explicitly subscribed to should be considered advertorial and the platform should be responsible for all of that content.

Not being allowed to use the "feed" pattern to shovel content into users' willing gullets based on maximum predicted engagement is the kind of friction that might result in healthier patterns of engagement.

> Should it show everyone's posts or only people you follow?

Only people (well, accounts) you follow, obviously.

That's what I always thought "following" is *for*, until it became clear that the people running the algorithms had different ideas because they collectively decided both that I must surely want to see other content I didn't ask for and also not see the content I did ask for.

> Should it show posts by popularity or something else? Is "popularity" global, regional, only among people you follow, or using some statistics based on things you yourself have previously liked?

If they want to supply a feed of "Trending in your area", IMO that would be fine, if you ask for it. Choice (user choice) is key.

I can tell you it was a real p**r when they decided to do an algorithmic recommendation engine - as the experience became way worse. Before I could follow what my buddies were doing, as soon as they made this change the feed became garbage.

T&S is markedly more capable in the dominant languages (English is ahead by far).

Platforms make absurd margins when compared to any other category of enterprise known to man.

They operate at scales where a 0.001% error rate is still far beyond human capability to manually review.

Customer support remains a cost center.

Firms should be profitable and have a job to do.

We do not owe them that job. Firms are vehicles to find the best strategies and tactics given societal resources and goals.

If rules to address harms result in current business models becoming unviable, then this is not a defense of the current business model.

Currently we are socializing costs and privatizing profit.

Having more customer support, more transparency, and more moderation will be a cost of doing business.

Our societies have more historical experience thinking about government capture than flooding the zone style private capture of speech.

America developed the FDA and every country has rules on how hygiene should be maintained in food.

People still can start small, and then create medium or large businesses. Regulation is framed for the size of the org.

Many firms fail - but failure and recreation are natural parts of the business cycle.

I am kind of rooting for the AI slop because the status quo is horrific, maybe the AI slop cancer will put social media out of its misery.

That argument is of course nonsense. If the platform is aware of apparent violations including enticement, grooming etc. they are obligated to report this under federal statute, specifically 18 USC 2258A. Now if you think that statute doesn't go far enough then the right thing to do is amend it, or more broadly, establish stronger obligations on platforms to report evidence of criminal behavior to the authorities. Either way Section 230 is not needed for this purpose and deterring crime is not a justification for how it currently exists.

The final proof of how nonsensical this argument is, is that even if the intent you claim was true, it failed. Facebook and Instagram are the largest platforms for groomers online. Nazi and white supremacy content are everywhere on these websites as well. So clearly Section 230 didn't work for this purpose. Zuck was happy to open the Nazi floodgates on his platforms the moment a conservative President got elected. That was all it took.

The actual problem is that Meta is a lawless criminal entity. The mergers which created the modern Meta should have been blocked in the first place. When they weren't, Zuck figured he could go ahead and open the floodgates and become the largest enabler of CSAM, smut and fraud on earth. He was right. The United States government has become weak. It doesn't protect its people. It allows criminal perverts like the board of Meta and the rest of the Epstein class to prey on its people.

Ergo if you start to moderate speech which is offensive from one point of view, it will inevitably be inoffensive to others, and you've now established that you're a publisher, not a platform, because you're making opinionated decisions about which content to publish and to whom. At that point the remedy lies in reclassifying said platform as a publisher, and revisiting how we regulate publishers.

They can be publishers. They can censor material they object to. That's fine. But they don't need special exemptions from the rules other publishers follow.

I think it's good to have publishers in the world who are opinionated. There are opinions I don't like and don't want to see very often. Where we get into trouble is when these publishers get classified as platforms by the law, claim to be politically neutral entities, and enjoy the various legal privileges assigned to platforms by Section 230 of the CDA. The purpose of that section was to encourage a nascent tech industry by assigning special privileges to the companies in it. That purpose is now obsolete, those companies are now behaving like publishers, and reform of our laws is necessary.

Algorithmic feeds are, prima facie, not moderation, not user-created content and do not fall under the purview of section 230.

We all know why they're really doing it, though.

I'm not a lawyer, but idk that seems pretty clear cut. If you, the provider, run some program which does illegal shit then 230 don't cover your ass.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12584

We aren't going to be able to turn off the AI content spigot or write laws that control media format and content and withstand (in the US) 1st amendment review. But we can change the cultural perception.

Social communities aren't nimble. There a ton of inertia in a social media platform. People have their whole network, all their friends, on the platform; and all friends have their friends on the platform; etc. So in order to switch from one platform to another, you need everyone to switch at the same time, which is extremely hard.

Facebook started out pretty nice. You saw what your friends posted and what pages you follow posted, in chronological order. It had privacy issues, but it worked more or less how we'd want to, with no algorithmic timeline. But they moved towards being more and more algorithmic over time. Luckily, Facebook was bad enough that it has gotten way less popular, but that has taken a long time.

Twitter is the same. It started out being the social media platform we want: you saw what your followers posted or boosted, chronologically. No algorithmic feed. But look where it is now. Thankfully, Musk's involvement has made plenty of people leave, but there were a lot of years where everyone, regardless of political leaning, were on Twitter with an algorithmic timeline. Even though a lot of people complained about the algorithmic timeline when it was introduced, they stayed on Twitter because that's where everyone they knew were.

YouTube too. For a long time, the only thing you saw on YouTube was what people you've subscribed to posted. It built up a huge community and became the de facto video sharing platform as a nice non-algorithmic site, and then they turned the key and went all in on replacing the subscription feed with the algorithmic feed. Now they've even adopted short-form video where you aren't even supposed to pick which video you wanna watch, you're just supposed to scroll. And replacing YouTube is hard due to its momentum.

So even if everyone agrees that algorithmic feeds are terrible and move to a non-algorithmic platform over the next few decades, what do you propose we do when that new platform inevitably shifts towards being an algorithmic platform? Do we start a new multi-decade long transition to yet another platform?

Off topic, but I bet a book on tobacco cultivation/history would be fascinating. Tobacco cultivation relied on the slave labor of millions and the global tobacco market influenced Jefferson and other American revolutionaries (who were seeing their wealth threatened). I've also read that Spain treated sharing seeds as punishable by death? The rare contrast that makes Monsanto look enlightened!

Central America, the Balkans, the Levant. The Iroquois and Algonquians. Cuba. The Medicis and the Stuarts. And, as you say, revolutionary Virginia and Maryland. Lots of potential there for a grand narrative covering 600 years or more!

(And, to gp: yes, it absolutely did threaten governments, empires, and entire political systems!)

Before that, the term "economy" was only used as a synonym for thrift or a system of management or control (and "economist" tended to mean someone who wanted to reduce spending or increase restrictions on something).

Reactionary liberalism, e.g. neoliberalism, Austrian school, that kind of thing, discards the 'mess' of interdisciplinary approaches and seek a return of a protestant worldview, riffing off of their use of the New Testament verses about "render unto Caesar". This puts them in harsh ideological conflict with the political economists and elevates their 'theology' above the work of previous scientists.

Historically some trace political economy to ibn Khaldun, but in the Occident it's Ricardo, Mill, Marx and so on that create a (to us) recognisable science out of it.

You could easily fix that with a bit of effort.

> He didn't follow the scientific method.

Science is not the only legitimate form of gaining knowledge. What you write applies to every philosopher. And economics is not generally known for being the most scientific of all sciences. This is all the more true of neoclassical economists, who are probably closer to your worldview if Marx triggers such a knee-jerk reaction in you. Whether you like it or not, Marx was a gifted systematic and analytical thinker. Even his ideological opponents admit this. At least if they can hold a candle to him intellectually...

"Democracy" itself was not at stake in the American Civil War because both sides practiced it. The Confederacy was/would have been a democracy analogous to ancient Athens--one where slaves (and women) were excluded from political participation. The vast majority of Confederate politicians, including Jefferson Davis, came from the "Democratic Party"--which, true to its name, championed enfranchisement for the "common (white) man" as opposed to control by elites.

Perhaps a better example is the "Tobacco War" of 1780 in the American Revolution, where Cornwallis and Benedict Arnold destroyed massive quantities of cured tobacco to try to cripple the war financing of the colonies.

Control of tobacco in Latin/South America since the 1700s (Spain's second-largest source of imperial revenue after precious metals) also had a directly stifling effect on democratic self-governance.

It’s hard to claim it’s actually democracy when it only exists after stripping the rights from a large section of people who would disagree with you, if they had the power to do so.

There's nothing more anti-democratic than deciding that some votes don't count because the people casting them heard words you didn't like.

The kind of person to whom the concept of feed ranking threatening democracy is even a logical thought believes the role of the public is to rubber stamp policies a small group decides are best. If the public hears unapproved words, it might have unapproved thoughts, vote for unapproved parties, and set unapproved policy. Can't have that.

Most established definitions of democracy goes something like, heavily simplified:

1. Free media

2. Independent judicial system

3. Peaceful system for the transfer of power

The most popular model for implementing (3) is free and open elections, which has yielded pretty good results in the past century where it has been practiced.

Considering social media pretty much is media for most, it is a heavily concentrated power, and if there can any suspicions of being in cahoots with established political power and thus non-free, surely that is a threat to democracy almost by definition.

Let's be real here: It has been conclusively shown again and again that social media does influence elections. That much should be obvious without too much in the way of academic rigor.

How can you say you believe in democracy when you want to control what people hear so they don't vote the wrong way? In a democracy there is no such thing as voting the wrong way.

Who are you to decide which perspectives get heard? You can object to algorithmic feed ranking only because it might make people vote wrong --- but as we established, the concept of "voting wrong" in a legitimate democracy doesn't even type check. In a legitimate democracy, it's the voting that decides what's right and wrong!

You don't get to decide a priori certain electoral outcomes are bad and work backwards to banning information flows to preclude those outcomes.

The beautiful part is how non-partisan this is. It cooks all minds regardless of tribe.

The Republicans are basically a coalition of corporate interests that want to get you addicted to stuff that will make you poor and unhealthy, and underling any collective attempt to help.

The previous vice-president claimed cigarettes don't give you cancer and the current president thinks wind turbine and the health problems caused by asbestos are both hoaxes. This is not a coincidence.

The two big times the Supreme Court flexed their powers were to shut down cigarette regulation by the FDA and Obama's Clean Power plan. Again, not a coincidence.

But what isn't properly addressed when people link to this is that the real issue he's discussing is our failing educational system. It's not a coincidence that the Right attacks public schools and the orange man appointed a wrestling lady to dismantle the dept of education.[1]

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNXHSMmaq_s

1. The Trump Administration Plot to Destroy Public Education - https://prospect.org/2026/01/13/trump-mcmahon-department-edu...

Aside: I was in the audience for this show (his last TV special). Didn't know it'd be shot for TV. Kind of sucked, actually, cause they had lights on the audience for the cameras and one was right in my eyes. Anyway, a toast to George Carlin who was ahead of his time and would hate how right he's been.

If there is an algorithm, the social media platform is exactly as responsible for the content as any publisher

If it is only a straight chronological feed of posts by actually followed accts, the social media platform gets Section 230 protections.

The social media platforms have gamed the law, gotten legitimate protections for/from what their users post, but then they manipulate it to their advantage more than any publisher.

>>the solution is real easy, section 230 should not apply if there's an recommendation algorithm involved

>>treat the company as a traditional publisher

>>because they are, they're editorialising by selecting the content

>>vs, say, the old style facebook wall (a raw feed from user's friends), which should qualify for section 230

I agree 100%.

However, I think the core issue is not the use of an algorithm to recommend or even to show stuff.

I think the issue is that the algorithm is optimized for the interests of a platform (max engagement => max ad revenue) and not for the interests of a user (happiness, delight, however you want to frame it).

And there's way too much of this, everywhere.

It also assumes that the society is homogenous, in the sense that everyone cares about the same thing. I don't think that's true at all.

I offer this as a data point about how hard it is to turn a polluted feed around. But I'm now wondering if "feed cleaning" is a service that could be automated, via LLM.

The internet is a mistake for a lot of people and I don’t think we can fix that.

And you know for a fact that I am not exaggerating. This is where the current political discourse is at.

Can I please have the freedom to do that without the lecture?

(Apparently the answer is "yes", but the commentary must be of the partisan approved kind.)

Everybody thinks their tribe is immune to this sort of stuff but it isn’t. It’s all the same nonsense packaged for different echo chambers.

At the end of the day, everybody is human. It isn’t us vs them, it’s just us.

Having the right to choose what you see doesn't mean you should choose to build yourself an ideological bubble.

The other side politically doesn't just have different views, they are barely human knuckle draggers. Basically neanderthals, so who cares if they go extinct.

One side: this group of people shouldn't even exist. The other side: no, let them exist actually.

My feed is free from extreme left content but I didn't have to block anything. Simply by not reading that kind of content, the algorithm knows I am not interested.

This is what is so difficult in facebook vs. HN. Here if people post angry insulting rants, it gets collectively downvoted to oblivion. That is effective.

On facebook there is no equivalent. All I can do is block an individual, but I personally have to do it for every offensive person, which is for practical purposes impossible. Facebooks needs a downvote button and an option to hide any comments which have N downvotes.

Whereas on Facebook style algorithmic feeds, you have to "use those functions liberally" and the result is only "pretty" clean.

I don't trust "facebook users" as a group to provide a signal I consider useful.

In more universal platform such as Facebook you need to indicate who you are by subscribing to specific groups or downvoting some of the content yourself. Just visiting. Facebook is not enoug. Once you signal who you are you also benefit from other people just like you downvoting content you wouldn't like, for you.

+ Interested Show more this like this in my feed

and

- Not Interested Show less things like this in my feed

They even allow clicking those repeatedly on the same post.

No, it gets dumped on pretty much everybody.

My Insta consists of travel and food pictures, and the people I follow are friends IRL and a very few travel/food influencers. So my feed consists of friends, travel/food content, dirty jokes thanks to my buddy who keeps sending them, and an ever increasing proportion of ads.

But both my "suggested reels" and the search view are exactly what the OP was complaining about: a non-stop parade of thirst traps by "content creators" pitching their OnlyFans accounts.

I just tried scrolling down the homepage and mine doesn't have any extreme political crap. However, it does have local political crap about the popular local issues (mostly bike lanes). Most of it is just harmless stuff like dashcam videos of bad local drivers, historic photos of my city, local issues like city infrastructure problems, curiosities like rare animals or space photos, and ads - tons and tons of ads.

I think it probably depends what you've engaged with indeed.

Assuming you mean crap like “school book bans”, climate change denialism, or some dude coal rolling… You realize that is actually bait targeted at you specifically right? It wouldn’t work as bait if it was shit you agreed with! It’s actually left-wing rage bait!

If you were immersed in the “right wing echo chamber” your flavor of rage bait would be about a school introducing a neutral bathroom policy, or some college student struggling to define what a woman is. Every Christmas you’d see articles about cities banning Christmas lights in town hall and Starbucks no longer using Christmas themed cups. It’s all fucking made up nonsense. No real human acts the way these algorithms portray us.

Honestly even ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ are part of the trick. Real people don’t exist on a binary axis. We’re all a weird mess of values and experiences that don’t fit neatly into two boxes. But the algorithm needs two teams, because you can’t sell outrage without an enemy.

The first step to detox is seeing everyone as human not as a contrived label.

If it did I'd use it more. As it is, I check FB once a week-ish, see a few too many suggested posts and leave.

In places where media is very biased to one political idea, online platforms like Facebook can be a breath of fresh air, people can share their ideas, voice their thoughts and concerns and express their opinions.

This is invaluable for democracy and it does have effect in the real life as it shapes the elections.

People don't depend just on the media anymore to have an informed opinion and the propaganda is much less effective.

However, I’ve had multiple people in my friends list say they would defriend anyone that would defend ICE or deportations in any way.

Here’s one direct quote: “I'll keep this simple. If you support any of this, get the fuck out of here and remove me from your friends list. I don't care who you are or who you were to me. I wont miss you and you wont miss me.”

Another, different friend: “All ICE agents are Evil and or Cowards. ALL.

<Shortened>

And if you are defending ICE and a giant part of your identity is "Right good, Left bad. Republican good, Democrat bad." Like some inbred caveman, please evolve and or wake up from your brain washing. Otherwise I don't care to hear anything you have to say. You can't reason with stupidity. Stupid is as stupid does.”

I have never seen anyone that I know is on the right in my feed ever say anything like that. When one side feels morally superior and is so..rabid, for lack of a better word, the other side can’t say anything.

I’m not a Twitter/X consumer but from what little I’ve seen that seems like a better place for that sort of thing now. You don’t need to worry about your real life friends unfriending you as much there.

Personally, anyone who talks about politics too much on my Facebook gets unfollowed, no matter if I agree with them or not.

I would instantly defriend anyone that is so narrow minded.

They are equally capable of developing something to lift people up.

Like teenagers.

> The people who are in deep likely need years of deprogramming and therapy to recover which they will never get.

Like a cult. Current social media is like a cult that preys on teenagers. No wonder they want to ban it for young people. American government trying to forcefully spread its cult via the freedom.gov proxy is the vile cherry on top.

This is a quantitative change for Trump. He went from preying on a few kids to preying on all the kids in the world. He must feel ecstatic.

I do have a few programming subreddits, rust, sveltekit, and adventofcode, which mostly seem more newsy or avenues to help or learn about developments in that area. /r/rust does have an annoying tendency to get posts of some person new to rust telling people who are presumably already familiar with rust about what an amazing and transformative language it is, but those are pretty easy to identify and skip by.

(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.

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

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.

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.

Enemy centered mindset. You forgoe things that benefit you because they might help the enemy.

We certainly evaluate companies on their CEOs if their CEOs make themselves high profile enough.

You are certainly judged here if you have a Tesla because of Musk hence why sales have dropped 50%.

Other companies that don't have as high profile CEOs can get away with terrible points of view.

I just am very skeptical any of this is based on a harm based model of morality. Instead it smells like concern about perception or status:

> You are certainly judged here if you have a Tesla

> > Oh yeah? How is the ceo of your power company? Your refrigerator? Your garage door?

If they hide their terrible opinions then its hard to made judgements.

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.

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.

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 silence 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 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. We often aren't even aware we're giving off such signals. And even when we are aware of them, we often don't feel any strong desire or need to communicate those signals in an online conversation.

(That, and most online chat/forum systems are bad at transmitting such signals with any degree of fidelity, when they transmit them at all. Facebook, for example, has no reaction emoji to transmit disapproving-of-you-saying-this (e.g. ":|"), rather only positively-incensed-by-the-subject-matter (anger emoji.) And 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.)

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.

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. 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 an online group with 1000 "members" has 100 regular posters. (It's probably less, actually.) And that a (geographically-based) in-person group with 150 "members", has events attended by on average 100 people. 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 think we agree that an in-person group where events regularly see about 100 attendees, tends to do just fine without rules of behavior / explicit moderation / etc. You drew the line in your GGP post at "above 1000."

And yet, it seems to me that an online group with "just" 1000 members (i.e. <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.

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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.

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).

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

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.

- 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 badly 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

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.

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

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?

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).

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

It shows the world is healing.