Technology

I'm glad i ran into this article, because it spells out something I've been suspecting for some time. Back in 2016 i got a sour taste from Facebook, mostly because it helped expose how shitty a disappointing amount of my acquaintances were.

In addition to that though, i was finding less of my feed was posts from friends and were more from 'Liked' groups and suggested groups etc. I gradually found myself stopping there less and less and eventually stopped going at all. Years later, i finally decided to come back and see what I've been missing and it's an absolute shitshow now.

Just the other day i went on and started scrolling on my Facebook feed and after several pages, it occurred to me that i hadn't seen a single post by any of the friends. I don't have a lot of friends/family/acquaintances on there to begin with (~150 i think) so it wouldn't surprise me if they aren't sharing that much anyway. Still, I became determined to see how many posts i would have to scroll past before they inject one of my friends posts into the feed. It was the first time i reached the 'end' of my feed--I actually reached 250 posts (given my count was correct) when it told me i reached the end...and by that point i didn't see a single post or anything pertaining to any of my friends in that session...just liked groups and suggested groups.

So when i read this article, i perked up when I caught this particular part.

"And then we went into this era where we added in creator content too, where now a very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from your friends. It may not even be from people that you’re following directly. It could just be recommended content from creators that we can algorithmically determine is going to be interesting and engaging and valuable to you.”

Unsurprisingly, Facebook is trying to do what every social media company is trying to do these days--create an endless feed of content... They're just trying to make it "curated" by AI so that the user has to do little/nothing to find stuff that's speaks directly to them, get hooked and begin endlessly scrolling (sounds like paradise, right?)...

It gets worse though! Many of the groups i was suggested (and some I had chosen to follow) were simply posting AI-generated garbage. One thing i kept seeing is Art-focused groups misattributing works to famous artists. How many times I've seen a work supposedly by Monet and it was stupidly obvious that it wasn't. The comments will be in the hundreds or even thousands, and 99% of them will be one-word praises like "beautiful" or "wow" or other useless stuff like that, and the 1% remaining are people appalled that their favorite artist is being mis-credited and that the group should know better being dedicated to that very artist.

Don't even get me started on the AI-artists suddenly becoming Facebook-famous like "Juan Brufal" who i strongly suspect isn't even a person at all, but a company/schemer/who tf knows. Bonus points to that fucker for posting their works captioned with something to the effect of "Juan Brufal 1976" as though that's when it was painted (surprise! it's not a real painting)... After a bit of googling it turns out 1976 is when the AI "artist" was born. None of that is openly shared though, and the name/year format is the same as many others use when attributing other artists works, so it's easy to convolute the meaning. Hardly anyone even send to care though, and the few that do are drowned out by the "beautiful" comments flooding every post. You can't even avoid some of these fuckers because Juan Brufal et al are in all the popular art groups -- and in many of the groups that the algorithm is going to recommend to me as well. Can't avoid these assholes, so the play is not to go there anymore---which is all the easier knowing I'm not likely to see anything my friends are posting there in the first place. Maybe they're already as tired of this shit as i am ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The bottom of the barrel is a distant memory at this point, Facebook is becoming shit on a primordial level lol