Comment by munificent
6 days ago
I just tried to repro this.
On my Facebook account, I scrolled through 30 posts without seeing anything thirsty. Mostly synthesizer stuff, stuff for my kids' schools, and a few posts from friends. It definitely knows I'm male because the ads are for men's apparel.
Instagram was the same.
I never ever watch reels or other short form video, so maybe that has something to do with it.
You didn’t try hard to repro it.
Facebook uses your likes / groups / searches to customize your feed. If are active and don’t delete your old content, you have already trained FB to avoid the thirst traps for your account.
The article author said he was off-site site for 8 years, so FB was offering him random high engagement content to stuff his feed so he didn’t reach the end.
he is replying to
> 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.
if meta identifies him as guy and he don't get a thirst trap after a minute then it's totally not "almost exclusively thirst trap".
Though OC also said:
> 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.
So I guess it depends how active you are? My speculation would be (that would match the article) - if facebook figures out you’re a man, but you don’t actively like and engage with specific topics - it will default to AI thirst trap slop.
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It's happens in the reels. I don't really see thirsty posts in my feed either, just people I follow for the most part.
Yet another reason to avoid attention-span-destroying short form video. :)
If you click Search in Instagram, what's it show you by default, before you enter a search term?
I have scrubbed my account completely clean years ago and never use it for anything. When I log in once a quarter or so, just to check if someone sent me a message via the Messenger, all I see is soft-porn on my timeline.