Comment by Ancapistani
6 days ago
I use Facebook a lot, but not for the social feed - Marketplace, business pages, and ads.
I’ve never interacted with their “shorts” feature, and it’s all young women and girls in as little clothing as they can manage. It’s to the point that I don’t open the Facebook app in public. Ridiculous.
Facebook owning the local classifieds section is often overlooked.
Offer up is dead in my area. Craigslist is a joke. Everything happens on FB marketplace. Vendors sell food, gyms liquidate old equipment, small furniture stores post their entire inventory.
FB isn't monetizing any of that beyond ads for related products, which I guess is how they monetize everything.
Whatsapp too, I only caught a glimpse of that fairly recently after we had some local political issue (an asylum seeker center to be built nearby, nothing gets people riled up than something like that). Now I'm in a "post stuff to pick up for free" group, lol.
They're selling me the life of a divorced dad as a goal of some kind. It is amusing to an extent.
It’s telling that targeting “men” has a markedly different effect than targeting “father”. In a real way TikTok has an opinionated viewpoint of what is important to men and being a father is not one of them
The reels section is ridiculous. It's definitely NSFW. Facebook doesn't support hiding it permanently.
Like what you experience, I cannot use Facebook at work anymore.
Any Facebook PM out there? Can you make it a setting to hide it permanently?
They can. They won’t.
I think the trick to making the "shorts" feature stop showing scantily clad women is to use it actively a bit, and only watch the videos that are decidedly something else. I did that for awhile and now my videos are like "let's see what happens when you pour lava on some soda bottles" which I'm not sure I care that much about but at least it isn't embarrassing.
Facebook is running the same kind of engagement-maximization algorithm on Marketplace postings, so half of my suggested postings when I open Marketplace is girls posing in the clothes they're selling.
This is one reason I'm really annoyed they are getting rid of messenger.com and requiring you to go to facebook.com to see your messages. I much prefer going to the specific site for chats and not having to see the feed...
I think you can still go directly to /messages/ and not see the feed.
Same, Facebook Marketplace is really good at my location because there is nothing else and never have been. It's not like Facebook destroyed something, no one else offered a classified sites like this
Craigslist.
There is a world outside of America
2 replies →
Same, I have never interacted with their Facebook reels/videos but all the video thumbnails are practically just videos of porn stars/OnlyFans style content. Instagram isn't as bad on the Reels side, you'll get good content there...but the feed itself is dreadful, I never see anything from friends. It's all just slop from bigger brands/publishers. At this point, there are just chat services to me and my friends.
> Same, I have never interacted with their Facebook reels/videos but all the video thumbnails are practically just videos of porn stars/OnlyFans style content
For me it fluctuates between animals and thirst traps. It's a really odd recommender system.
> Instagram isn't as bad on the Reels side, you'll get good content there...
Seems to depend how far you scroll, the first dozen will usually be good, clean recommendations. After that it goes downhill.
My FB reels are educational content , music and artists.
It is pretty much identical to my YT shorts feed, which means two algorithms have settled on almost identical content.