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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   3946 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?

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

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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