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
I largely agree with everything you said. One minor correction, algorithms and AI are not the same thing.
Duly noted, i appreciate the feedback 👍
Are you sure your Facebook friends have posted anything at all lately? Most of my contacts have left Facebook long ago (so have I) but a lot of them never deleted their accounts.
That’s certainly a possibility. I’ll have to ask around my friends and see if anyone else is getting similar results from their feeds.
Weird looking bastard, isn’t he?
The curly hair, the silver chain, the Bjj… appears more on camera with his wife and daughter… going to podcasts… Etc…
They’re trying really hard to humanize him, but we all can see through the lies…
You have been marked for elimination by the Zuckbot.
Here’s an interesting video about Zuckerberg’s rebranding:
Dude looks like an AI generated human.
My favorite comment to date is; “Zuckerberg looks like someone who is constantly resisting the urge to blink sideways.”
He still need some improvement on the nose and the head proportion, but his human-masks are improving.
The skin tones are getting a lot better. Maybe the next major revision will include lifelike body motions. They’re so close.
What does “Until Morale Improves” mean? I read the rest of the article but can’t find what this is about.
I’m aware of what morale means in etymological and historical context. The article fails to elucidate what Zuckerberg meant with it.
The morale of who? The general populace? The owners of social media? LLM? And how will the improvement of morale stop ai slop?
Neither of those are explained yet are important for the article, as, you know, they put that in the title.
It’s a joke (from the author of the article and not a quote from Zuckerberg). Usually in the format of “xyz will continue until morale improves”, where xyz is something that is likely to reduce morale, thus implying that xyz will continue indefinitely.
In this case the morale is of those forced to consume meta’s ai slop, i.e facebook users.
An alternate worded headline would be: “AI content will continue on Facebook regardless of whether users like it”.
Aha ok, well that eluded me. Thanks for the explanation!
Says the AI slopper
Me, 404media or Zuckerberg?
404media is one of the few outlet doing journalism in the sea of fake news.
Zuck, obviously
