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Posted by npilk 10 hours ago

Facebook is cooked(pilk.website)
798 points | 473 commentspage 5
nomilk 7 hours ago|
Fb deserves huge credit for their 'reels' algorithm. I follow a bunch of science influencers, and their content frequently blows my mind, and it's just one great vid after another.

Something I would love is 'social media dotfiles', so I could export my list and share it with others. And vice-versa.

Octoth0rpe 10 hours ago||
The current leader for me for worst questions suggested by Meta's AI was on a photo someone took of some conspiracy theorist's van with the spraypainted message "THEY EAT BABIES IN DENVER". The suggested questions from their AI were:

- Baby-eating restaurants in Denver

- Denver's unique food scene

wtaf meta.

Beyond that, I simply don't see how Meta can possibly ever monetize their investment in AI. People are and will continue to be willing to pay OpenAI, Anthropic, google, microsoft. No one will pay Meta for their AI. And if their investment was only a couple million and they got some useless suggested questions out of it, whatever. But the size of their investment sure makes it look like someone thinks they'll make money off of it.

HWR_14 9 hours ago||
Meta doesn't need to monetize their investment in AI. They need to their eyeballs and not lose them to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. If they give away AI and people use it to make content for FB/IG that's all they need.
Octoth0rpe 8 hours ago||
> They need to their eyeballs and not lose them to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.

At this point I'm not sure how they could 'lose eyeballs' to those 3. There doesn't seem to be any kind of market overlap. Unless we're talking about the very abstract sense of doing _anything_ other than use a meta product is a potential lost eyeball in which case you might as well add the national park system to the list of people they can't lose to, and I don't think that's a useful way to talk about the cost/benefit of Meta's ai spending spree.

HWR_14 1 hour ago||
They are all "things I do on a cellphone" and more precisely "things with infinite ability to absorb free time on a cellphone" (as opposed to things like Uber which exist to get something done).

It scales in a way that national parks do not and national parks are not competing for the time you spend in the bathroom at work.

mv4 10 hours ago|||
Meta doesn't need to monetize their AI directly the way OpenAI or Anthropic would do. Meta runs ads, and they can use AI to help advertisers create content, target people, engage, etc.
Octoth0rpe 8 hours ago||
> Meta runs ads, and they can use AI to help advertisers create content, target people, engage, etc.

It is hard to imagine the level of spending they are doing if that is the sum total of their use case: shoring up a moat for which there really aren't any significant competitors in the first place. It seems like it can only be justified by eventually rolling out some kind of subscription service for... something, but for the life of me I can't think of what they might be able to actually sell to people or corps.

alex1138 9 hours ago||
Yeah, it's incredibly ham fisted. I do not understand Zuckerberg's brain. The man is incapable of coming up with a good product or it was some product engineer given absolutely free reign to do whatever they wanted. AI summaries do not go with a product made for posts of friends
littlekey 9 hours ago||
I agree with the people saying that the product is a lot better once you're actively engaging with pages that align with your interests, so that the algorithm can feed you better content.

That being said, it's still sad that this is the default new/returning user experience. Imagine a world where a new user was met with real posts about a variety of interests, rather than a psychic barrage of insane AI posts.

ddtaylor 8 hours ago|
I think even for someone who logs in daily and uses it a bit, it still shovels weird content and even if you repeatedly skip or don't engage with AI slop, you still get a lot of it.

I almost think we are seeing something similar to a CAPTCHA where the engagement is being used to tune which videos slip under the uncanny valley radar.

ossa-ma 10 hours ago||
Evidently there is such little real human content and engagement on these platforms yet how does the big number keep going up? Genuine question.

Do we need a way to audit usage stats in addition to financial numbers?

fullshark 10 hours ago||
My guess is every metric is just getting diluted by bot activity but there's enough real users buying crap to give their advertising positive returns.
michelb 10 hours ago||
Engagement is great if you target a specific group. Don't need human content. It's ridiculously easy to start a Facebook page in a niche targeting a specific demographic, connect a site to it, unleash AI generated content, post it on FB and run ads. With enough traction, Facebook will pay you for making more content, while you extract money from your page followers. You're separating easy-to-influence boomers and conspiracy theorists from their money. It's disgusting, but it is ridiculously easy to make heaps of money with whatever content on Facebook.
numbers 9 hours ago||
Yeah, I have a Facebook that's about 2-3 years old now, and I use it mainly from Marketplace. But man, if I just accidentally go to the feed, it's just a bunch of spam and some sort of bait, whether it's rage bait or thirst traps or anything like that. Facebook is maybe trying to see if I'll engage with it, but mainly because I use the app for Marketplace, it just continues to recommend garbage.
kurthr 9 hours ago|
Next time someone is confused about the meaning of the word "Enshitification" just pull up Facebook.
krick 5 hours ago||
Well, if it's true it's the first instance of good news I've heard in a while. But as far as I've checked, all local hobby groups still were defaulting to Facebook as the main (an often only) source of updates, events and general coordination. At least, it was a major source of friction for me until quite recently, as I never joined that thing and could only participate if somebody told me personally.
qq66 10 hours ago||
Facebook doesn't care about Facebook.com anymore. The value of their business is almost entirely in Instagram, with some future potential in WhatsApp.
giobox 9 hours ago||
While I mostly agree, Meta cares a great deal about facebook.com/marketplace, which has been hugely successful.
qq66 8 hours ago||
Do they make any money from Marketplace?
reddalo 10 hours ago||
I mean, if they cared about Facebook they wouldn't have launched Threads.
dlev_pika 8 hours ago||
I remember Zuckzuck saying out loud that his vision for the platform was that people wouldn’t need actual humans to interact with, and bots is what you’d mostly get.

I’ve used it enough to understand this is happening now. Literally impossible to distinguish, unless you know the person.

nickla 10 hours ago||
I deleted my account in 2005 when I noticed that it wasn't just for getting to know local groups. Before I deleted it I was contacted by a pretty woman who had 100 friends who were all the same last name as me. That's all she wanted to do is contact people who were "related". I had the suspicion she was a bot. People call me stupid for doing so, but now it is just bots?
ASalazarMX 9 hours ago|
There were some fun things like that back then. One of my early Facebook accounts was a videogame alias than included the work "clown", and I received invitations from other users that had "clown" in their names, its circle of friends became a virtual circus.
cantalopes 5 hours ago|
I don't advicate for faceook but my feed does not look like that at all
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