Comment by throwaway290
5 days ago
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.
No, if he's been looking at material that indicates an interest in thirst trap stuff for years, then looks at pottery for a couple of weeks, the algorithm correctly identifies that he isn't really into pottery and corrects back.
Yep. It's far from "it knows you're male => it gives you thirst traps non stop"
But also I will say that curating algo feed to show what you want is annoying and ultra frustrating, whenever it goes off the rails it makes me want to quit.
> he's been looking at material that indicates an interest in thirst trap stuff for years
N is obviously too small to get anything meaningful, though article was about the same problem and article’s author haven’t visited facebook for 8 years…
Cannot say about FB or IG, but on Youtube I get way too many “AI girlfriend” ads or video recommendations. I report as many as I can and my subscription channels are as far away from such topics as it can be. Thus I totally understand OC and article’s author.
Except that I am into pottery, and I'm a parent into parenting stuff. But instead of just liking the stuff it was showing me, I made the extra effort to seek out that content and like more of it in an attempt to train the algo.
Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, this problem only started about two years ago, and I've had instagram for 15 years. So either they did something differently, or suddenly there was a lot more of that content, but I didn't change my habits.
Also, as a funny side note, scrolling my feed this morning was suddenly thirst-trap free for the first time in years.
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