Biochemist, mass spectrometry witch, caretaker for the nanoflow liquid chromatographs. Trans woman, lesbian. Recumbent cyclist. Wisconsin, USA


places I can be found:
mspland.com/links.html

lutz
@lutz

so i don't exactly know what has happened to facebook, or what i have done specifically somehow to the part of the algorithm that controls my feed, but after several years of ignoring it i am now semi-regularly popping in to communicate with family for whom that is the entire internet. if you haven't used facebook what you need to know is that it inserts suggested posts into your feed constantly and there is no way to dismiss them. i would say a good 60% of my timeline is suggested bullshit i do not want to see and never asked to see. when i first started using it again this past summer, all of these suggested posts tended toward weird body horror imagery and were from various countries that are not the one i live in, such as the Phillipines and Ghana. since i've been using facebook more regularly, these posts have leveled out, so to speak, in that they are now all in English and not so centered on body horror, but the actual content is just totally untethered from me personally yet seems to be inducted from people in my family or hometown (eg, videos of pickup trucks "rolling coal") or things i cannot tie to anything at all in my life or the lives of people i know (eg, a woman cosplaying as a World War I medic riding a bicycle around France). and that's my facebook story for today


micolithe
@micolithe

I think their Algorithm has been broken for a long time because of how few people are actively using facebook anymore. It thinks I want to live in a shipping container.


beige-alert
@beige-alert

The thing it tends to do for me is just show me the same couple posts, often from people I actually know, at the top of the feed, for weeks. Makes the site look totally dead even though people are posting stuff and plain chronological would look quite lively, very algorithm, much wow.


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in reply to @lutz's post:

I have a similar experience, just occasionally checking in and the timeline is buckets of garbage. Like, barely anything I actually followed or have a connection to. I keep a bookmark to the chronological feed, which they've hidden away even harder in the last year or two, but I still check the regular timeline in case I missed some commotion and if I did, I'm not even sure I could find it among the noise anymore.

Then there's been the nightmare of seeing just how much midjourney sludge clickbait my friends and family actually do fall for lately...

I have severely reduced my activity on Facebook and I also am now inundated with ads and sponsored posts. The algorithm has no idea what I want. One day it’s high tech trackable basketballs, the next it’s pills that make you poop good.