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Comment by newacct583 | Hacker News Reader

I got fairly heavily downvoted last week for trying to point out that Facebook's "Suggested for you" stories were almost certainly paid content via some path (even if not "advertising"), given that they're uniformly awful clickbait garbage that Facebook knows I don't interact with. Folks really didn't want to hear that theory and insisted it was just random clustering or whatever.

Arguments like the linked article make it pretty clear that that's not the case. Facebook is either being scammed badly by players exploiting their algorithm to throw clickbait spam in front of their users...

... or they're on the take. I think it's pretty clear Facebook is too smart to be scammed like that.

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About half of my 'Activity Feed' is "unfollowing" this attention-grabbing crap. It's not even really clickbait, just a video to stare at for 45 seconds. I think Facebook just uses these to pump their time-spent-on-site metrics.

This week I've "unfollowed": Viral Hog, Crafty Panda, Crafty Panda How, Kids Crafts, 5 Minute Crafts, America's Funniest Home Videos, LAD Bible, and LAD Bible Australia.

I put unfollowed in quotes because that's what facebook calls it when I click "Stop seeing posts from this page" on suggested content.

It's amazing people keep using Facebook amidst such torrents of bullshit. Why do you?

tbh I Re-joined after a year because I needed to get rid of a bunch of furniture in a hurry and Facebook marketplace has a lot more traffic than Craigslist.

Now moving to a new city, the neighborhood classifieds and meet up groups are pretty compelling

It happens on instagram too of course. Start scrolling then its just suggested reels and posts are all major accounts with with thousands of followers which comes with some commercial angle.

Not sure if it is just me or if it gets harder and harder to curate my IG "recommendations".

I get presented an unreasonable amount of crap every day and always mark this stuff as uninteresting. Nonetheless I often see that same s*t again the next time I open the app.

I stopped FB and for IG I nearly only use my freelancer profile to keep in contact with some parts of the networks I am in. And to put out (hopefully interesting) material for my network of small organic food producers and farmers.

So… they are selling ads, and correctly labeling them, and we’ve all seen that system, including the backend..

But then there’s another, shadowy market, where they sell far cheaper ads to really lowbrow content that people are more likely to click on, but that just doesn’t have an obvious way t monetize these eyeballs?

Getting less money, diminishing their platform with bad content, breaking laws by not disclosing it, and keeping it all secret?

What I’m saying is there may have been a reason why you were downvoted.

"Uniformly awful clickbait garbage" has its own kind of potency. When it's trying to pad your feed, Facebook might not know that "give yourself one point for each one of these you've done" has any specific relevance to you, but it does know that a lot of people seem to engage with it and you're a person. It's basically guessing when it's out of ideas. To infer any kind of malice, you'd have to define some sort of threshold for how much "uniformly awful clickbait garbage" you would expect to see just because of this guessing, and observe that the threshold is being exceeded. Have you done that?

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