Facebook is absolutely cooked
And I don't just mean that nobody uses it anymore. Like, I knew everyone under 50 had moved on, but I didn't realize the extent of the slop conveyor belt that's replaced us.
I logged on for the first time in ~8 years to see if there was a group for my neighborhood (there wasn't). Out of curiosity I thought I'd scroll a bit down the main feed.
The first post was the latest xkcd (a page I follow). The next ten posts were not by friends or pages I follow. They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-generated, with generic captions. Here's a sampler — mildly NSFW, but I did leave out a couple of the lewder ones:
Click to show mildly sensitive content (revealing clothing)
Yikes. Again, I don't follow any of these pages. This is all just what Facebook is pushing on me.
I know Twitter/X has worse problems with spam bots in the replies, but this is the News Feed! It's the main page of the site! It's the product that defined modern social media!
It wasn't all like that, though. There was also an AI video of a policeman confiscating a little boy's bike, only to bring him a brand new one:
And there were some sloppy memes and jokes, mostly about relationships, like this (admittedly not AI) video sketch where a woman decides to intentionally start a fight with her boyfriend because she's on her period:
Maybe that isn't literally about sex, but I'd classify it as the same sort of lizard-brain-rot engagement bait as those selfies. Meta even gives us some helpful ideas for sexist questions we can ask their AI about the video:
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