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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   3967 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 30, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Has Facebook radically increased the amount of ads you're exposed to?

I don't really use Facebook anymore, I log in maybe once every other month or so to check it out.

I have blocked the people using it to advertise and those just posting about politics but I still have some 600 "friends" or so there is usually some kind of activity. However, when I logged in yesterday maybe less than 1/20 posts were from my friends and the rest were ads. Most weren't literally ads but rather posts from groups I wasn't a member from, the content usually being some kind of bottom of the barrel pop culture memes feeling like a poorly disguised ad for the subject matter but could just be bad posts I suppose.

I was a bit confused and thought maybe I got some kind of bug or something so I reloaded the site and finally got some posts from people I actually know but it was still only maybe 1/6.

Is Facebook like this nowadays or have almost all of my friends finally stopped using it and Facebook is trying to fill my feed with anything it can find?

The literal ads don't bother me; they've got to pay the bills somehow. The "Suggested For You" garbage annoyed me to no end, until I discovered that you can avoid it by switching from "Home" to the "Feeds" tab they added ... and now I log back in, and it looks like "Feeds" has just been removed again?

have almost all of my friends finally stopped using it

I guess if they're smart, they have. It's clearly gone full user-hostile death-spiral at this point.

Not really. Facebook.com 0.0.0.0 in your hosts file will clear that problem right up.

Im in my thirties and it's been very low activity among my friends as well but I use it to check in on older family members and a few groups and organisations I'm part of.

Its worked relatively fine for that but now it's become completely unusable due to the amount of suggested content, ads or no.

How are there so many people out there browsing without an adblocker?

Mobile. Can't really have adblocker when you use the native FB app.

Firefox mobile on Android supports adblock.

You're welcome.

Unless you're an iPhone Peasant.

I am browsing with an ad-blocker. I turned it off and it made almost no difference.

The vast majority of the posts are things that are "suggested for you", not explicitly sponsored links.

Are you using FB Purity? My normal ad-blocker doesn't do much on FB.

I deleted FB ages ago, but I'm pretty sure there has to be a CSS selector you can zap these things with.

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