Yep. It's far from "it knows you're male => it gives you thirst traps non stop"

But also I will say that curating algo feed to show what you want is annoying and ultra frustrating, whenever it goes off the rails it makes me want to quit.

> he's been looking at material that indicates an interest in thirst trap stuff for years

N is obviously too small to get anything meaningful, though article was about the same problem and article’s author haven’t visited facebook for 8 years…

Cannot say about FB or IG, but on Youtube I get way too many “AI girlfriend” ads or video recommendations. I report as many as I can and my subscription channels are as far away from such topics as it can be. Thus I totally understand OC and article’s author.

Except that I am into pottery, and I'm a parent into parenting stuff. But instead of just liking the stuff it was showing me, I made the extra effort to seek out that content and like more of it in an attempt to train the algo.

Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, this problem only started about two years ago, and I've had instagram for 15 years. So either they did something differently, or suddenly there was a lot more of that content, but I didn't change my habits.

Also, as a funny side note, scrolling my feed this morning was suddenly thirst-trap free for the first time in years.

I don't have an Instagram, so maybe they did change their algorithm recently. However, remember that the whole concept of "training the algorithm" and "not wanting to mess up your algorithm" has been a common saying for years at this point. Unfortunately, this is against what the social media companies actually want, which is more engagement. So they start to look at other factors that are more difficult to game. For instance, it may have noticed that you linger at images of thirst traps more than other images it shows. In fact, it may notice that while you are purposely liking pictures of pottery and parenting, the actual pictures that you are liking have both thirst trap qualities and pottery/parenting qualities. Not accusing you of anything, just saying that that is the pattern they use because they know that overtly liking thirst trap pictures may be frowned upon.