Meta won't let you block its AI account on Threads | Hacker News Reader

Meta won't let you block its AI account on Threads

theverge.com

195 pointslogickkk184 comments

You can block all their content, just delete your account.

I deleted all my meta accounts a couple years ago (Facebook, Instagram). When I did it I was afraid I would miss out.

Nope: 5 years after I feel good about not being a dopamine-addicted sheep (At least to Meta). It makes me sick to my stomach whenever I go to a public place and see so many people mindlessly losing their life watching reels and stories full of ads. I Used to take the Caltrain and I estimate >50% of the people were mindlessly scrolling instagram during the 1 hour train ride.

The best time to delete * Meta was yesterday. The next best time is Today.

(To be honest I recreated a bogus account to sell things on MarketPlace and I cannot believe the amount of crap constantly pushed to me)

I deleted my Facebook account years ago. Recently I tried to make a new one in order to get access to the WhatsApp API to use it for my business, and I just get banned right after the account is created. I'm not sure why, but I guess they don't need my money.

What does your social life look like? Because the reality for me is that in any major city, a significant number of places - even if they technically have websites - post all of their events and happenings on Instagram/FB.

Sure, I can talk to my close friends on any number of IM platforms, but if I want to get out and have new experiences, join club meetups, be notified of events at venues I care about, etc. - it's Meta or miss out.

Go to clubs and check the events from ra.co. Go to concerts and art galleries they all have web pages.

Berlin, Germany

Or dice in NYC.

Most venues and places are slowly going away from closed gardens.

> Most venues and places are slowly going away from closed gardens.

They are? Honestly, first time hearing about this. I've noticed only big events get posted outside of the IG/etc. Even in Tokyo, a simple thing like checking if a place is open on a public holiday is to check their Instagram.

Sadly in Tokyo, most businesses post their info to twitter or instagram, but in both cases you're able to read without an account (not well, but it's possible).

Instagram makes it extremely frustrating without an account. Many times I have checked a small business's opening times on Google Maps only to arrive and find them closed... the only place they reliably post their times is on Instagram.

I gave up and got Instagram.

I guess we need a Nitter for Instagram?

Only way to go is to leave a 1 star review letting them know they need to publish things outside Instagram

That is insanely awful take. Why would anyone review something negatively without actually checking it out?

He did check it out, and it was closed, because they don't post their hours outside of a user-hostile social networking site people shouldn't use and they left their hours misrepresented elsewhere. Poor customer experiences result in poor reviews.

At least he did them the courtesy of telling them exactly what the problem was.

I had a similar experience in Osaka. Prettry frustrating. Actually, I didn't know that you can read the posts without an account! That's good to know!

It's funny because this should be a non-issue

Consider the grammar

Hey Alice, did you see the event for Chris's band?

It was on Facebook, publically posted (audience set to public)

I'm not on Facebook

Like... you post something public on FB/IG and people STILL CAN'T SEE IT because apparently 'public' means 'must make an account'. It's insanity

Well, the thing is, and people won’t like hearing it… almost everyone has a social media account outside of very small niche groups. Socially speaking, not having an account at all in any SNS (not saying an active poster, by the way!) would be negatively viewed. People don’t care about privacy, data and etc. as much as we would want them to.

or https://sydneygigguide.net/dl/893a15 in Sydney.

Yeah the instagram posting is such a complete BS. I have a bogus instagram account where I don't follow anyone for the couple times a year I need to find set times for an artist or that kind of stuff.

We need to shame artists/events/clubs that only post on Instagram

https://19hz.info/

Sure, for one category of music in some cities there's a resource. There are often community-curated lists that have some things, but if you want specific things or if you want everything/most things, it's the big platforms.

I'm part of some local photography groups. There's a Discord where members plan informal get togethers, but the big events are all posted on Instagram.

I follow a number of local bartenders, and their popup events are all on Instagram. Same for local performing artists.

My bike club coordinates through a Facebook page.

Honestly, none of my non-tech interests are viable (in a group setting) without Meta properties.

Get different interests then?

It’s like saying “none of my group interests are viable unless I smoke”.

I find a life surrounded only by people who already do the things I do unfulfilling. I also find that almost no one who works outside of tech cares enough about privacy or other issues to care to move off the big platforms.

I already spend my entire work day surrounded by tech workers, I'm not going to change my hobbies to spend more time around them.

“Just abandon your hobbies and interests!”

Be fucking serious

Maybe I'm just too old for the kinds of activities you're looking to get into, but I haven't had a Facebook since 2014, and had an IG account for just a month or two during the pandemic, and I've had zero qualms finding out information about what I wanted to do or see.

It's definitely not the size of the city that matters, as I was in NYC and only recently relocated to a smaller (but still major) city.

*issues, not qualms. Mea culpa on the wrong word.

The first thing I did when I quit social media was sign up for the newsletter of every concert venue in town. I never overlooked a show.

I can’t speak to your interests or city, but as a rule, the greatest trick the social apps ever pulled was convincing the world that they are the only way to receive information.

If all you need is to view the restaurant/event, imginn.com or kittygr.am works well enough for me. I also like libredirect because it blocks the network connections and is convenient, shame that it's a browser extension it could really be built into the browser or something.

I have been barely using FB, but I deactivate my account early 2025 and I never looked back. I never had Instagram or Twitter.

I thought I would miss out on many events, but then I just signed up to a few more newsletters and that's still more events than I have time to vist.

I still wish we had a proper replacement for FB events. At least we have a nice market place platform that everyone uses (willhaben.at). For a long time I didn't even know that FB MarketPlace exists.

"When I did it I was afraid I would miss out."

All the cool kids left FB a decade ago. You're not missing anything.

well yeah I know that now. But they engineer it so that you feel really bad about trying to leave.

If Zuckerberg is trying to make you feel guilty, take it as supporting evidence that you’re doing the right thing.

I follow traditional media/journalists. Everything important on social media still reaches me- just 24 hours later.

If you really hate a company, you won't delete your account. You'll run spam on that (verified human) account or sell it to some third party who wants an account for spamming.

They make money from your spam too, at least in the short term.

I mean, these companies are themselves providing the tools to mass produce what would be labelled “spam,” the topic of the OP itself.

Deleting your account may not make even a pixel of difference in their KPI graphs, but -in addition to the mental benefits- you get the moral one of not being a participant in this mess…

They only support spam when it aligns with their own incentives. They hate when other people come along and spam the platform for free.

Is there an easy way to delete all of your comments and likes and all of that first? Or at least to randomly alter them into garbage? They make it impossible to do bulk things.

I tried threads but had to leave it so quickly. All the posts I see are just baits, people trying to say controversial/stupid things just to seek attention and reaction. I don't know much about social media algorithms, but if the result is that I'm constantly fed with things I don't want to see, maybe it's not the platform I want to be in.

It's like someone tried to make 2020s Twitter without white supremacy but didn't understand that 2020s Twitter is worthless even without that.

X / Twitter has excellent published scientific (like actual scientific, not bologna) research paper content...BUT it's a chore tuning it to shunt all the rage baiting bullshit, i find.

I had assumed all the science moved elsewhere by now, like bluesky

there could be more there that i don't see

AI features are so good, you're forced to use them whether you chose to or not. I guess the reason is to justify all of this datacenter buildout because the "demand" is so high?

People seem unreasonably mad I don't believe in "AI" the way they do. Which is weird, because by their futuristic logic, they'll be miles ahead of me for it. Yet my Luddite citizenship somehow still really gets to them.

Just as I'm sure the number of people blocking the account got to some middle manager somewhere who made it that day's mission to "fix" it.

Facebook's whole conception of tagging is a disaster. It's pure noise. What do I gain by seeing you tag someone (or worse, a bot) in a post? Just share it with them privately.

I deleted Meta's products in 2009. I have never looked back. Explore alternatives and motivate others to do so.

You can block Meta surprisingly: just never join or close the current account.

I only re-activate Facebook when I want to buy something from Marketplace. Deleted the IG app again recently. Also figured out how to change settings on YouTube so I can't scroll through reels and turned off auto play. I'm banned from Reddit and Twitter. Never got into Tik Tok or Threads. Very happy about all of that

To add to this for youtube the unhook extension is great to block everything other than search and playing vids

Then I permanently block youtube and reddit on phone. I've explored quite a few blockers - AppBlock for android is the best I've used / has no bugs on my now older s21.

Engadget source: https://www.engadget.com/2171113/threads-users-are-pissed-th...

I like an AI that can answer questions with all information and context on a particular thread. It should not be visible to others in the thread / post.

You ask, it answers and that's it. It should not take over the feed.

I like the Grok Button at the side of Tweet, I dont like "@grok is this true"

One nice thing I heard about recently is you can block the Claude user on Github to create nice yellow banner on vibey repos. It doesn't stop you interacting with the repo if you want to anyway, but has still ended up being a very quick filter for me.

you cant block the AI, but if you start hatebanging it, i assume it will block you.

Tay.0

I got a multi week ban for breaking metas rules when I told its AI to uh fornicate with itself, go somewhere else and then cease living.

Try it without the death part. I bet that gets a pass.

Yup, on the internet these days it is fine to talk about the most vile and disgusting things you can imagine, to a point. And that point is if you say joke about apoptosis and an elected official or some billionaire in the same sentence, it is [ Removed by Reddit ]. It is amazing the era of censorship we find ourselves in today and no one seems to be complaining about it either.

Oh I see plenty of people complaining but only a few are willing to try another platform like nostr or mastodon or whatever else.

“I don’t want a solution, I want to be mad”

I have been a mastodon user for ages. Its a great platform.

But I haven't been able to recruit for it. And the app I used died and was removed from the play store. I use it to read interesting conversations between european hackers.

It certainly hasnt paid dividends to run my own masto server. I will be retiring it and moving my account somewhere else. I dont post anything there, because nobody I know is there, and so why care about owning my own data?

Metcalfe was right etc etc.

Mastodon might be better for corporate censorship, but I remember hearing that federated platforms can have problems with censorship from instances blocking each other.

I tried Nostr but there wasn't a great algorithim. All the interesting things are on twitter. I don't really see a huge point in having an account on twitter, though—it feels like all comments go into the void.

I just use xcancel.

Running isn't any long term solution. That is why people are mad. Censorship follows where the people are. If a critical mass of people goes to mastodon, that is where the advertising and censorship will go. Just like how it went to reddit after a critical mass went there.

The comparison doesn’t even make sense. Reddit is a centralized platform, not a protocol. I won’t say it’s impossible to censor something like nostr but good luck with that.

The best time to delete * Meta was yesterday. The next best time is Today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122

Desperation at the highest levels.

It seems like it's constant provocative news every time Meta hits the Front page. Lol

To be honest, none of this surprises me. It was to be expected.

Scrolling Facebook: Oh that looks interesting. Oh. It's on threads. Nope.

So it's not just Instagram that does this.

Er, I think I meant Instagram.

Facebook now has AI nonsense that look like reels, or whatever they call reels. So I nope out of those too.

Come on, obviously this is just because it's not a regular user because its some weird bot in their backend. You can still mute it.

Who uses threads? That’s on you, lol.

"The customers love our AI so much the DAU is 1:1 with the platform!"

It's only fair since I can't block their AI on WhatsApp either.

I feel like the suggestion to just delete your Meta account is unhelpful and even harmful in some situations. I know a lot of us in this field don't mind having a small social circle, but for us that struggle to even have that, or that the process of doing that, requires you to be as open and reachable as possible to make it easier to create or maintain friendships, this often requires having an account to use Messenger (I know regionally this may differ).

Being difficult in this way, when most other people, particularly non technical people, don't have a problem with this, in my experience significantly hurts your opportunities and limits the types of people you socialize with in real life, which I think can eventually be harmful.

If your friends won't use something other than messenger to talk to you, they aren't your friends.

I don’t think it is so binary.

If there is more friction to communicate with me I expect to hear from people less often.

As an example, my friends that only use Discord and not SMS or Signal definitely hear from me less frequently. It doesn’t mean we’re not friends, but we do communicate less frequently.

I am not a sparkly special pretty princess. My friends are where they are. In the trade off between meeting people where they're at or doing something unique to me with friction to them, I know which one wins.

(note - this is snarky and I don't actually fully disagree with you)

Why not just text people? Am I missing something?

That works when you already have an established connection with someone, but it doesn’t work so well for making new connections.

I’ve deleted all my Meta accounts and other social media accounts and have lost touch with many people and find it much harder to meet new people.

Personally, I accept that tradeoff but can see how others wouldn’t (or can’t).

There are a lot of group chats I'm not in because I'm not on messenger.

Messenger is the only thing I kept my Facebook account for. I don't use any of their other products.

I do some IRL activities where many of the participants use social media apps to coordinate and plan sessions. I don't have any of these accounts so while I do miss out on some of the casual things, I just show up and still get 80% or more of the interaction and all of thething I'm after in the first place: doing stuff.

You really can live without social media.

I don't know how old you are but I'm 44 and in my experience, you really should prefer quality over quantity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com