Facebook is cooked

I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in her most frequented cities. But I discovered that my mum was also a frequent "poster" of the photos of her various trips around the world, and the comments sections were filled with with some beautiful messages from her many many friends and family.

From this I learned that there is a subset of the population that Facebook works perfectly for and meaningfully improves their real-world social relationships. And perhaps Facebook has been hyper-optimized for that kind of use case through relentless A/B testing. But I fear my mum is quite privileged to have this kind of experience.

No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed. No matter what she did she couldn't fix it. She asked other women about this, and they all said their partner's feeds were the same.

This is not a problem for women. At least not one I've ever talked to or read about on the internet.

Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted.

I got a whole bunch of thirst traps again.

It doesn't bother me anymore, I just tune it out and scroll past it because my feed still has the parenting and pottery too, and my friend's updates, which is what I'm there for.

But it would be good for more people to learn about this so they don't get angry when they see their male-identified partners/friends feeds.

Somewhere, there's an algorithm designed to increase engagement. And it doesn't care what kind of engagement, so clicking the "I'm not interested in this garbage" button is just as engaging as liking or watching or commenting.