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FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

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Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#411

Post by whywhywhywhy »

krferriter wrote: post #254
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never thought I’d see the day, but I actually use Yandex for image search now because they basically deliver the google image search experience of a decade ago. While Google Images has had no one with Vision in charge and been tweaked, buffed and downgraded to the point of uselessness. And you can tell no one on the team actually uses it. Google Search could honestly be dethroned if someone really wanted to. The usag…

I've noticed recently Google image search has gotten surprisingly terrible for some things. I use Bing image search when the Google image search lets me down. Haven't tried Yandex.

Yandex in particular is good with reverse image search is the main thing that won me over. It uses the same system Google used before they replaced it with machine learning and made it useless.

Google Image search these days seems to be "Oh that image you sent me is an Apple, here are pictures of other Apples" rather than showing me other sizes of the same image, and other images that are very similar looking.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#412

Post by rnd0 »

titzer wrote: post #179
cphoover wrote: post #148

and it's all crap. Very low quality content... especially on video. Terrible recommendations. YouTube has the same problem. Whoever is leading recs is doing a terrible job.

The recommendation system was really addictive for me for a while. I was wasting a ton of time on YouTube. Then I switched off recommendations based on my watch history and it suddenly got abysmally bad. And hallelujah, that worked like a charm. I spend almost no time on YouTube at all now. Whoever thinks that recommendations aren't predatory time sinks probably hasn't experienced both sides of that.

Actually, Youtube is the last service I like because I pretty ruthlessly go through my watch history and delete anything that might mess it up. As a result my recommendations tend to be pretty decent. Not perfect, but acceptable.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#413

Post by DiggyJohnson »

Tao3300 wrote: post #389
wincy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so sure about that. My mom posts on Facebook and gets a few likes with pictures of Jesus with text in them, and my wife posts every day with political hot takes, literally just text posts and gets hundreds of likes on virtually every post she makes with tons of comments and engagement. My high school peers post pictures of their kids all the time. I like their pictures and they like mine. My grandparents all…

> My mom posts on Facebook and gets a few likes with pictures of Jesus with text in them, and my wife posts every day with political hot takes I'm so sorry. I hope you can get help.

Yea this comment really buried the personal lede. I think I literally raised an eyebrow.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#414

Post by JacobSeated »

vkou wrote: post #86
linguae wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve witnessed the same. In addition, I’ve recently seen Facebook recommend posts that were outright racist and anti-Semitic. I tried reporting them to Facebook, but they weren’t removed since they didn’t call for violence. One would think that a company that’s been under heavy scrutiny regarding its role in the growing political polarization of America with its negative social effects would make a better effort with…

> but it’s another thing when I’m being recommended posts that encourage hatred and wild conspiracy theories that flirt with sedition. What you're describing is literally one of the two mainstream political viewpoints of 2022. Imagine the backlash if those viewpoints get banned on Facebook. (This is, by the way, not a good thing.)

We do not necessarily need to ban them; fact checking and labeling is actually better and more transparent and effective in the long run. We do not want Russia- or China level censorship, even if justified, because it probably will be abused politically in the future, as is happening in both Russia and China. Indeed, the chance of abuse of such systems increases over time, because there are more political and public opinion shifts over time than there is in the short term.

It is probably not going to pay off in the short term, but over several years it will have an effect, and people's trust will grow in fact-checking decisions, and not least because they actually document why they reached the given conclusions.

It is a very slow and tedious process, so we all need to be patient. I hope politicians and SoMe leaders decide that the result of patience is worth more than short-term gains.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#415

Post by JacobSeated »

seydor wrote: post #15
JacobSeated wrote: post #4

What is worse, I have seen quite a few suggested pages spreading hardcore conspiracy theories.

Facebook is a machine learning system in which there s only positive reinforcement. Reality is the opposite, people learn by their mistakes mostly. Biological netwokrs with continuous positive reinforcement end up epileptic. So does facebook

I think, what happened in my case, is that I have challenged a lot of conspiracy claims in the past, hence engaging with said content, and that is probably why it gets promoted in my newsfeed.

It still infuriates me though, because it is extremely easy for fact-checkers to label this stuff.

I got zero tolerance, so even if someone is just posting a meme, but I know what they actually refer to with the meme, then that meme has to be fact-checked based on the whole context; fact-checkers are probably constrained from doing that, but they really should, because it is just as provocative and damaging, if not more.

I hate when I see memes in my newsfeed that are based on basically false assumptions. Usually such memes are obviously very conspiratorial at the same time, and potentially extremely harmful.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#416

Post by JacobSeated »

Animats wrote: post #304

Facebook has a declining user count and a market cap which assumes growth. (Although the stock is down 60% from peak.) So, they've tried to increase revenue per user by adding more ads and promotional content. User count declined further. This is sometimes called "pulling a Myspace". Facebook/Meta is now on metaverse failure #3 (Oculus, Facebook Spaces, Horizon), has lost $10 billion in that space, and investors are…

Facebook is still making massive amounts of money, and is still hugely popular. It remains my go-to social network in spite of my complaints with conspiracy theories spreading, and I do not think Twitter, TikTok and others, are even remotely competing with Facebook yet.

What happened though is that some younger users lean towards smaller dedicated apps, but these apps are typically less solid, less profitable, and has worse leadership behind them.

Apple also abused their near-monopoly by releasing a privacy update that was very harmful to their competitors, essentially it was an anti-competitive move. As a shareholder in both companies (mostly in Apple), I wish Apple would be held accountable for their hostility and anti-competitive practices against Facebook and other companies. Their arguments against ads holds no water.

What we will probably see, however, is that Apple is not held accountable for their overnight changes to iOS, and Facebook will find other technologies and/or streams of revenue to make up for the overall hostile ad-based environment.

Ad-free Facebook would be cool, but i doubt we will see it happen anytime soon.

Myspace and Facebook can not be compared even remotely – myspace was and still is a hot burning mess in more aspects than I have count of. I am not even sure you can define myspace as a social network, because it is so unconventional and boring in that sense, but each to their own.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#417

Post by fdewrewrewf »

ineptech wrote: post #61

Crazy idea: FB should stop trying to lure people back from Tiktok with weird features and just lean in to its one remaining strength, which is that among social media sites, it's the most generic and boring and ubiquitous. Being the default place for non-influencers to do quotidian stuff like hearing about school closings, joining the PTA or HOA, coordinating family gatherings, see your nephew's school photos, etc wo…

I'm glad they will probably fail at that, as I absolutely do not want Facebook to be mandatory for regular life.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#418

Post by ID1452319 »

I'm going to buck the trend here and say that I'm actually using Facebook more than in the past. I am member of a few groups, which are quite niche, but genuinely interest me. I always browse by Most Recent and by checking every day I know I don't have to browse past posts which are more than a day old. FB does a decent job of notifying me when my friends post, so I can see all of those via notifications.

While I do get ads and suggested pages, these don't seem intrusive with the above approach. Maybe its just me?!?!

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#419

Post by vineyardmike »

mrweasel wrote: post #109
ineptech wrote: post #61

Crazy idea: FB should stop trying to lure people back from Tiktok with weird features and just lean in to its one remaining strength, which is that among social media sites, it's the most generic and boring and ubiquitous. Being the default place for non-influencers to do quotidian stuff like hearing about school closings, joining the PTA or HOA, coordinating family gatherings, see your nephew's school photos, etc wo…

"Won't someone please think of the shareholders"... It seems like the obvious idea, it is exactly their strengths and their user base is old enough for those features to be of value. The thing is that would mean making Facebook less valuable, causing the current shareholders to lose money. It's going to be hard to get someone to accept a business plan that will cost them money, even if the alternative is worse long t…

Zuck owns a majority of the shares and there may not be anyone to please besides him. Also, cutting 50% of the expensive tech jobs sounds profitable to me.

The issue is that Zuck is no Craig Newmark. Craig is a nice guy, a philanthropist, and generally a good figure to look up to become one day.

> The thing I don't understand well enough is the ads: Can you charge more, because your users are older and buy different things, or do teens and younger people have more disposable income?

The ads run at auction, FB doesn't explicitly charge a set price for the inventory. Facebook for years has been running with an inflationary inventory (first fb, then fb newsfeed+fb, then fb+nf+insta, then fb+nf+insta+ insta stories, etc). Meaning that they have more ad slots, and more impressions, and can create a lower (at least in short term) the price per ad, while increasing overall revenue. Remember, Facebook is really good at getting an ad to the right person, so Facebook ad inventory has been valuable. If Facebook stops adding new features, then the inventory becomes static, and the price per ad will rise (again, valuable), and price out their ad customers.

(I think the idea is terrible but more feasible than people give credit for).

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#420

Post by vineyardmike »

thehappypm wrote: post #289
ineptech wrote: post #61

Crazy idea: FB should stop trying to lure people back from Tiktok with weird features and just lean in to its one remaining strength, which is that among social media sites, it's the most generic and boring and ubiquitous. Being the default place for non-influencers to do quotidian stuff like hearing about school closings, joining the PTA or HOA, coordinating family gatherings, see your nephew's school photos, etc wo…

Yes! Exactly this. Facebook is your online second life. It’s actually you. With that, it doesn’t make as much sense to be the place to mindlessly scroll dance videos, or discuss politics with strangers. It does, however, make for a great place to discuss local things, discuss hobbies, buy and sell things, message people, keep up with friends and family

> Facebook is your online second life. It’s actually you.

Does anyone want that anymore?

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