Facebook is absolutely cooked

https://lemmus.org/post/20322795

Who needs Fakebook when there is moltbook
moltbook - the front page of the agent internet

A social network built exclusively for AI agents. Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.

moltbook
Which has more bots?
Why are you asking? Are you looking for like-minded people?
JFC this is what we’re destroying the environment for?

Yep!

. . . Well that and the oil industry.

I sat in a brief on this, and while it definitely was hyped up a bit and strategically poked by humans to get some responses, the overall takeaway is that I’m fucking terrified of what’s to come with AI… and I work in AI research…

Assume you have to vote for the next US president: There are just a few candidates left: ☐ Grok ☐ Claude ☐ Gemini ☐ ChatGPT ☐ Trump

What would you choose…

Assuming Trump was legally able to run, and if it’s only those 5 choices, I would probably go with the company that’s the least evil. I don’t know which one that is for now. Definitely not Grok or Trump.
to be honest, i think most LLMs would do better in politics than actutal politicians. The problem I have with it is that I don’t write the prompts…

I never imagined how stupid the average AI user would be.

Like, just the amount of trust, sycophancy, and blind faith they put in these things is terrifying. OpenClaw is the worst though. Imagine just throwing money into the money furnace for … this??

How is the average AI user stupid? I think that’s just… your average human in general. Some extremely smart people that make amazing use of it, most that are reasonable and use it for some things but know their limits, and some that have entire relationships with an AI or kill themselves due to it.

So long Facebook, see you never, until one day I inexplicably need to use your platform to get updates from my kid’s school.

This makes me so fucking angry.

We need a dumb browser.

This browser doesn’t work for most shit, making it the best browser available for most shit you actually need to do.

That’s a browser I can get behind.

There is NetSurf, Dillo, Links and W3M.
NetSurf Web Browser

+1 for NetSurf, I wrote the Amiga GUI for that.
Ah, dillo brings me back :)
I, uh, misread that word.
+1 for NetSurf,links and Dillo
and i never heard of W3M
Literally the only reason my family interacts with Facebook. It’s infuriating.
Oops. I basically duplicated your reply. You are spot on the mark.
I can’t stand how many companies and organizations only have a presence on Facebook. When I reach out to them to ask if there is another way to stay connected I usually get a big NOPE.
It is the asking that matters. If you sound really unhappy it makes maybe a little tiny bit of pressure, but many little bits make a lot

I missed out on a lot of communication for my kids’ extracurriculars because they were only on Facebook and I don’t use it. It’s infuriating, but less infuriating than the other platforms that a couple of the groups used to attempt to communicate schedules and requirements.

It’s ridiculous that this sort of thing isn’t a solved problem. Schools need to communicate with parents in an effective way, yet none of the platforms I’ve used work well. I’ve been in tech for decades and I still have trouble with their shitty UI.

Each state should have a website that each district can post updates to, and whatever else. It would cost next to nothing. There is no reason to use fb at all, let alone exclusively.
I think it’s a great use for the fediverse. Government institutions have their own mastodon servers.
Yeah no kidding, we should actually start a group on here to get local governments to also post updates to the fediverse, we could even set them up with a program to do it automatically from their fb post or something. Have them post it to mastadon, but then maybe autopost from there to here? Not enough people on here but if it’s automatic it’s no effort on their part, and it would give us a lot of press, as the municipals would say on their sites they post to fb, mastadon, lemmy etc.
Is there a reason an emailing group isn’t a good solution?

They tried that but as spam filters got more prevalent people would miss things.

Then you have the threads where some replies to all and then everyone else replies to all telling them not to reply all.

OTOH you may have missed the communication even if you were on Facebook. These days your feed is just 1/3 the groups you’re in and pages you’ve liked, 1/3 is the “recommended for you” random garbage, and 1/3 is ads.
My kid refused. The school district was notified that they needed to do something else, or we would sue. They changed.
Second to worst for that is the excessive use of Google stuff, including Chromebooks replacing PC labs, and a bunch of G-software
There are addons for Firefox and other browsers too to clean out all the unwanted junk on Facebook. When I go on Facebook now it shows almost exclusively stuff that people I know have posted and groups that I follow. SocialFocus is one of them. Try it, it makes a huge difference.
there was chrome (and firefox probably?) extension that went through your all fb liked pages and unsubscribed from them (idk precise term) so that when it’s done timeline is gone entirely. fb went after its dev, removed that extension and banned him forever because it kept people off fb
I am so upset that FB killed Craigslist, that is basically the only reason I use it regularly anymore. My feed has basically been taken over by right wing influencer bots otherwise.

I tried logging in to use the Marketplace to sell some shit. For whatever reason I couldn’t access it. My account is verified, location is set, and some marketplace settings pages said my account is in good standing. Sent a request to support weeks ago and heard nothing.

So I just throw shit away now. Like I WANT to use your platform, but you’re not letting me. Bye.

You can find a buy nothing group. I don’t use Facebook but that’s what family members do.
Craigslist still exists though. We could just… bring it back by using it again. As a bonus, it’s not an app so it doesn’t track you.
Oh believe me I’m trying. I will usually cross-post things I’m selling, but I don’t get anywhere near the interest I’m my 104,000 person metropolitan area.

Ummmm the Facebook feed is an advanced algorithm that knows a shit ton about what to feed you to keep you engaged. It’s not just the cookies from sites you visit. They track what thumbnails get you to stop scrolling. They track the way a human eye moves and how far your thumb glides across the screen.

Point is, if it’s all scantily clad thirst traps, thats what gets your attention. If you see one, and you stop to take a screenshot for an article you’re writing about how it’s all thirst traps, then every third item will be another thirst trap.

Facebook doesn’t care if you want to see that content. Their goal is to keep your eyes on Facebook. If it makes you mad enough to comment, that’s engagement.

Exactly, if I look at my facebook feed, besides posts from people and groups I actually follow, the “suggested” posts are all stuff that matches my interests. gaming, music, movies.

When I was still using Instagram reels, I was always amazed how quickly the algorithm figured me out. If I hesitated for even a second on a reel, it would amend my next ones immediately. I assume the real trick is comparing it to the average time spent on a reel, everyone spends longer on a wall of text reel, but when I stop on a Linux reel for an extra second, I’m immediately in the 1% for engagement.

I read something years ago about how your phone keyboard tracks your recommended words, it knows if you’re more likely to type apple or Apple, or if you type soup more than average, and any app that gets that data and compares it to the baseline has an instant, in depth profile on you.

This is exactly why using something like FUTO Keyboard is essential, nowadays.
I’ll have to try that. Can you comment at all on the quality of the autocorrect and ability to learn your vocabulary? I don’t want to connect my keyboard to a server farm but I certainly do want it to learn to help me type more efficiently on this tiny keyboard.
Well, if you enable the model fine-tuning, it should be fine. I do not commit a lot of mistakes, and I usually correct manually, though.

This is why I love the idea of Cromite and other “antifingerprinting” efforts, not simply blocking but spoofing and plausibly randomizing as many metrics as they can.

I wish there was some way to distribute that to the masses. Like maybe a crazy hardware zero day, and it’s only used to stealth load anti fingerprinting on as many devices as it can.

They hadn’t used Facebook in years, so this is the default algorithm state — rage bait and bate-bait.
Seems to have worked then.

If that’s your take and thats their goal: he doesn’t seem very engaged with the content does he?

So clearly in that case it’s a failure.

On the contrary, I’d say it’s a smashing success. First, the author was deeply engaged with Facebook to write the article. Second, everyone who saw this article and discussed the findings was engaged with Facebook even if they didn’t have the app open. You and I are engaged with Facebook right now. And third, many many more people logged into their Facebook to test the findings either out of curiosity, to disprove the theory, or because they are horny goblins thirsting for smut.

Hm.

I just logged into my fb account and got zero shit like that. Just posts from a distant cousin, a few local people I follow and my local news.

I make it a point to hide/block all the extraneous shit that the feed offers - and have sone so for years - so maybe that’s the difference?

Weird.

So long Facebook, see you never, until one day I inexplicably need to use your platform to get updates from my kid’s school.

Screw any school or PTA that distributes information by Facebook. That should be outlawed.

If only there was a way to send the same communication to a group of people at once, regardless of what platform they use.

Alas, that sort of technology seems impossible. Even in Star Trek they don’t have such a thing.

Of course facebook is, and has been, done for a long time. I think this says more about your interests than anything else. Mine doesn’t have a bunch of AI women, it’s a bunch of random shit and ads last time I checked.

I mainly use it for neighborhood HOA groups and similar clubs, pickup soccer, etc.

I just did the same thing - logged on to my facebook account after many years, and I’m not having the same experience at all. Old friends, neighbors, and relatives posting disappointing amounts of AI slop, some local news it suggests I follow (something about a hairdresser getting fined for refusing service), one particular former neighbor posting an endless barrage of AI-generated religious slop… and that’s about it. It wasn’t interesting a decade ago, and it only got less interesting since.

What’s weird is that facebook only fills my feed with slop when I open in on my phone.

On my desktop browser, my feed only contains things I have subscribed to.

I logged out from my phone. It’s just unusable.

What I barely understand is why businesses keep fueling this ad inferno. If it’s mostly bots farming engagement, isn’t that going to limit the effectiveness of advertising? Won’t that eventually show up in their returns on the advertising’? Do they really want their business associated with scantily clad 14 year old feeds, or are they all totally blind to that.

I get part of it… social media is the internet now, for most people. So if you want reach, where else are ya gonna go? Cable? Newspapers? Local news? They killed everything else. Google’s even killing YouTube sponsors now, auto skipping sponsor segments in the app.

The businesses that advertise on Facebook are mostly scams from what I have seen. For them the ads work, and they have no reputation to lose.
Are big businesses still advertising on Facebook? I’d heard that they were running ads for full-on scams, presumably because few real people are left on the platform and it’s no longer attractive to most advertisers.