Facebook Is a Freak Show Ghost Town
November 20, 2022 9:36 AM   Subscribe

Unlike the TikTok algorithm, which is creepily accurate, Facebook is an erratic pu-pu platter of things I never knew I wanted to see. For years, I have been unwittingly feeding it conflicting information about who I am. As a journalist, I have used Facebook casually for reporting purposes, joining divergent communities dedicated to everything from women in business to Airbnb hosts and polyamorists. After finding subjects for stories, I never bothered to leave these groups, and like creeping ivy, their posts began to overtake my feed, to delightful results.
posted by mecran01 (49 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
I loved this.

blackhead extraction videos that look like they were shot by Al Qaeda, influencers storing tampons in the fridge and a woman giving a foot job to a banana.

So accurate!
posted by latkes at 9:48 AM on November 20, 2022 [3 favorites]


This sort of lament is very end stage eulogy. I get it - I've seen a significant downturn in my peer group's use of Facebook and it is very much a ghost town. It's like Facebook hasn't sorted out how to handle being just a slow moving family re-union.
posted by zenon at 9:56 AM on November 20, 2022 [7 favorites]


My wife exclusively gets PJ Harvey videos so it’s not all bad. I have no idea how to sign up for this service. Admitedky I don’t curate my Facebook presence very mush - generally when I look at it all I see all the posts by one particular friend of mine and then maybe some other below that, so clearly it has decided they are the important one.
posted by Artw at 10:23 AM on November 20, 2022


My FB feed is just friends and the groups I belong too. I have no idea how people see things that they haven't signed up for on Facebook.
posted by octothorpe at 10:42 AM on November 20, 2022 [14 favorites]


Oddly enough I have sold a lot of art through Facebook; it's my primary outlet for showing my work online which is very odd to me. It has also allowed me to make friends with people I would have never met otherwise; and I quite like that.

As an atheist, a very progressive left wing type, and someone who has been very public on Facebook about giving up alcohol a year ago along with all the struggles that entails I get endless ads for extreme right wing christian organizations, booze, and extreme right wing groups. So yeah, erratic doesn't even begin to describe it.

It seems to have this weird internal logic that remains quite indecipherable to me as time goes on and it becomes more and more strange the longer I am part of it.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 10:49 AM on November 20, 2022 [5 favorites]


I get endless ads for extreme right wing christian organizations, booze, and extreme right wing groups

TBH this is what I would assume the default view is. Maybe not the booze.
posted by Artw at 11:20 AM on November 20, 2022 [3 favorites]


Most suprising omission here: Crypto and NFT garbage, which is what the struggling bird site will throw at you every available moment.
posted by Artw at 11:21 AM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]


This site (town) is coming like a ghost town
Brands won't post no more
Too much fighting made the Zuck sore
posted by credulous at 11:35 AM on November 20, 2022 [9 favorites]


My Facebook feed is dominated by my middle school girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. Come for the lose third hand connections, stay for the second hand drama. And Russian propaganda destabilizing western democracy.
posted by vorpal bunny at 12:08 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


My Facebook ads have suddenly gotten extremely horny over the past couple months. My engagement with the platform has never been higher.
posted by jordemort at 12:08 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


As long as we’re self-reporting my facebook is doing great. It’s mostly local (PNW) groups devoted to cycling kayaking and skiing. With ski season coming up it’ll be prime fb time for me. It’s mostly reports (conditions and trips), questions, events, meetups and pictures of places and equipment.

The video content that’s interspersed is exceedingly juvenile and weirdly off-topic though. I sometimes feel it may be a combination of a personal problem and instagram bleeding through. I’ve followed some ahem more basic content on insta.
posted by Wood at 12:20 PM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]


I use an ad blocker and don't see any ads on FB.
posted by octothorpe at 12:21 PM on November 20, 2022 [9 favorites]


I quit Facebook ten years ago but now that I'm off Twitter this article is making me consider going back. Sounds strange!
posted by potrzebie at 12:22 PM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]


Link to the original article (NYT, Isabel Slone)
posted by trig at 12:43 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


Remember the golden era of blogging when the latest post was at the top? There's something to be said for the chronological feed. Post something to Facebook, it appears at the top. Refresh the page, and it's nowhere to be seen, replaced by a post by someone from hours ago followed by an ad or two. The only way to see a chronological feed from friends is to go to their page. It's anti-social media.
posted by tommasz at 12:56 PM on November 20, 2022 [17 favorites]


Years ago, Facebook suggested I join a Facebook group devoted to a soil conditioner added to athletic fields. I thought it was an absolutely hilarious suggestion and joined. Nowadays, those posts are some of the most soothing and tranquil posts in my newsfeed. So many athletic fields now less compacted and better draining! The algorithm was correct at least (I buy that product for work) whereas the stuff thrown at me today seems completely random.

Unlike those of you who hate the ads, I kind of like them. They have a simple algorithm; if I click on something, they give me more of it. I clicked on an ad for Tiki statues, and now it's Tiki all the time! Someday Facebook will figure out that I'm never going to buy any Tiki merchandise.
posted by acrasis at 12:57 PM on November 20, 2022 [17 favorites]


Obviously all this will be better in VR.
posted by Artw at 1:11 PM on November 20, 2022 [13 favorites]


This is true for me! A ghost town with Wordle scores, and... PMCs? Invitations to go to Serbia and learn light infantry tactics and practice with military hardware? That I found deeply weird.

(A netherworld version of this would be funny: "FaceTome used to be the best place to meet disembodied wraiths like myself, but now I see only recipes and wildlife photos from before I crossed the veil!")
posted by ianso at 1:12 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


This is pretty much how my spouse's Facebook looks: I have an array of privacy blocking Firefox extensions that leave ad trackers perplexed, but T uses Facebook to do a lot of pro-vax work, among other things, and Facebook's ad algorithm is very bad at distinguishing between critical and appreciative interest. So T routinely gets ads that are tuned wildly and entertainingly inaccurately.

I am idly toying with spinning my Facebook up a little more; I'm getting a puppy in a month or so and Dog Social Media is very much Facebook-based. (Plus I want to stare at all my breeder's dogs and obsessively wait for more puppy photos, and that's where I get to see them.) It's really a reminder for me of how much online community can become about figuring out where critical masses of the people you want to listen to are and gravitating to that place, irrespective of the actual qualities of the platform itself.
posted by sciatrix at 1:13 PM on November 20, 2022 [5 favorites]


FB is one of my favorite modern forum layouts. Groups can be hyper specific or broad, and the way conversations are threaded it doesn’t make me feel like I have to sit in a group so I can comment in time. Reddit makes me feel like there’s a four or five hour window to comment on stuff, traditional forums can make replying to individuals a nightmare, and the busier discord is the harder it is to talk. The biggest issue with fb groups is overzealous auto moderation, which has lead to newspeakish self censorship. Maybe both me and my friends are uncool but most are still there.
posted by Betty_effn_White at 1:27 PM on November 20, 2022 [6 favorites]


Every time I see Facebook described as a ghost town I feel like I’m going insane, as is it wasn’t one of the major drivers of online ad spending. It feels like such a split between perception and reality that I can’t see straight.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:27 PM on November 20, 2022 [11 favorites]


Last I checked, Facebook drives 75% of all website referrals, so I think it might be premature to call it a ghost town. More like a shanty town full of tacky gift shops.
posted by credulous at 1:34 PM on November 20, 2022 [8 favorites]


Also, free link to the actual article because paying the writers when possible is good.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:42 PM on November 20, 2022 [4 favorites]


> Obviously all this will be better in VR.

The Job Simulator VR game is a pretty good proof of concept for Metaverse.

(Appropriately, it's available on Occulus)
posted by Peter H at 2:08 PM on November 20, 2022


the Algorithm has apparently thrown its hands up and decided that I really, really want to have a lot of General Hospital pages recommended to me.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 2:10 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


The only way to see a chronological feed from friends is to go to their page. It's anti-social media.

https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr still mostly works.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:24 PM on November 20, 2022 [3 favorites]


I'm getting a puppy in a month

omg what breed what breeder have you been told which puppy
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:25 PM on November 20, 2022 [4 favorites]


... figuring out where critical masses of the people you want to listen to are and gravitating to that place, irrespective of the actual qualities of the platform itself.
This is how I've made Facebook work for me. I use an adblocker, so don't see much advertising and spent some effort in joining groups and saying 'show me less of this' for stupid shit and I get pretty much only things I'm actually interested in. Which is good, but can also be a bit boring.
posted by dg at 2:42 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


Cattle Dog, yes, gonna go gush in DMs so as not to derail further. <3
posted by sciatrix at 3:21 PM on November 20, 2022 [5 favorites]


saying 'show me less of this' for stupid shit

A lot of my college-era friends are on the book of face so I'm there for a while (especially with the up/downheaval of other social media) and I've hidden so many adverts I don't get to hide them any more. I've used up my lifetime supply of "no more of this ad", I guess.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 3:42 PM on November 20, 2022


Last I checked, Facebook drives 75% of all website referrals

We haven't found this to be the case at our (pretty big news) site, Google is way more. For a while Facebook was a firehose but it's gone way down, and there was also a big focus on short video (on its platform) that it juiced a lot then kind of abandoned. It's still big for some things but I don't think it's anywhere near 75%.

That said those of us who have left it behind think it a ghost town at our peril — hundreds of millions still use it very actively, just not journalists, tech people, and young folks.

That makes it less of a ghost town and more of a... anticosmopolis. I just made that word up but it might be something.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:04 PM on November 20, 2022 [5 favorites]


For a short while I clicked hide one almost every video, and it seemed to have worked. But I have a quite low footprint fp presence, a few relatives and a very few interest groups. Never saw right wing stuff in the feed. And kinda funny, I was perplexed by the ad discussions as I never noticed any, then I realized the only ads were from Formlabs and I'd just assumed they were from an interest I'd signed up for. Being generally oblivious make social media go down a tad smoother. ;-)
posted by sammyo at 4:04 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


Also, as far as TikTok being "creepily accurate," it's certainly true that they're creepily insistent on spamming my email. I've unsubscribed FOUR TIMES and they keep coming.
posted by JHarris at 4:12 PM on November 20, 2022


Ahem. 2 billion users is *not* a ghost town.

I can see how one's personal experience of FB can be a ghost town, but it takes some effort. As the author mentions, their peers leave. But that's not the same as saying "Facebook Is a [Freak Show] Ghost Town."
posted by doctornemo at 4:25 PM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]


I used to use Facebook pretty often. I'd post photos for family and friends sometimes. But mostly I'd share links that I thought others would find interesting or funny. Many of the links I shared I found on MeFi. I rarely check it these days, but I can still see new family photos. For some reason, my D&D group decided to use FB Messenger to schedule online games via Roll20, so I get messages about that.

The ads I get are almost entirely for expensive "technical" pants and underwear, pricy socks, super-heavy duty workshirts for people who work in cubicles, and comfy footwear.

Years ago, I did unfollow some people who posted right wing political crap. But that only happened a very few times. I never got conspiracy stuff pushed to me, or wingnut political garbage. My personal FB experience didn't make me leave FB, it was all the behind the scenes news about FB and Zuckerberg that I read that led me to (mostly) dropping it.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:49 PM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]


If we're talking personal experiences, my own FB experience is pretty different.

I have the anti-ghosttown experience, which perhaps colors my previous comment. I connect with tons of people from a wild range of my life: current and former students, former housemates, coworkers, people I went to elementary school with, authors I admire, etc. It's too much to take in, really. It gets even more varied and huger when Groups come into play.

Apart from the people, I have some of the same experience as the author, but it depends on the folks I follow. "so bad it’s good" doesn't describe most of it. I also use a plugin which blocks ads, so FB actually functions as a social network for me.

Naturally some of this is due to my age, being that never to be spoken of G_n X.

One problem: the FB algo doesn't like my professional work. It loves my cats, my cooking, my photos, my politics, movies, jokes, pleas for sympathy, but isn't a fan of my research. Posts from people I follow professionally rarely surface.
posted by doctornemo at 4:55 PM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]


Before I peaced out my entire feed was nothing but click bait and antisemitic comments. It's a cesspool. If I could deactivate suggested stories I'd consider going back. All I want is the community I chose. FB's algorithm is too stupid to give me anything else I want to see.
posted by 1adam12 at 5:08 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


I also am a little surprised by the "ghost town" characterization. If you join groups that interest you and use blocking and unfollowing pretty liberally, and you have the right group of friends and are OK with making new friendquaintances there, it can be a really delightful place. Most of the targeted ads I get are also for relatively interesting things that I'd actually consider buying.

The most annoying thing for me is active groups that I like persistently disappearing from my feed until I seek them out again.
posted by verbminx at 5:11 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'm fascinated by this:

Before I peaced out my entire feed was nothing but click bait and antisemitic comments. It's a cesspool.

and

If you join groups that interest you and use blocking and unfollowing pretty liberally, and you have the right group of friends and are OK with making new friendquaintances there, it can be a really delightful place.

I've seen similar divergences in Twitter experience as well.
posted by doctornemo at 6:38 PM on November 20, 2022 [5 favorites]


My ghost town comment was in the context of the other part of that sentence - my specific peer group. Some have started posting on Instagram, others have stepped away from social media generally. I've got a few groups, but either they too have run out of energy post covid or the vibe is off as they have started veering into reactionary bs.

And part of it is my own attention - I have significantly reduced my own time on Facebook. I'm not going to put the effort into joining more groups just to improve my feed - I would rather just be on metafilter.
posted by zenon at 6:59 PM on November 20, 2022 [3 favorites]


While Facebook is still a thriving, active social network for the over-45 set

Yep -- you know, more than half the adult population!

Facebook for me is what it has been for a decade; a place where people I know through work, school, and neighborhood post things and chat about stuff. There are only a couple of active groups I'm a member of. It does the thing it's supposed to do and no more.

But obviously Facebook is different things for different people.
posted by escabeche at 7:54 PM on November 20, 2022 [3 favorites]


I have a steady trickle of friends who post stuff I want to see on Facebook, but all my feed wants to show me are reposted memes that come at a furious pace from three or four people in my feed. If it were Twitter I could "turn off retweets", and maybe my feed would be bearable, but instead my only option is to mute those folks completely or endure.
posted by 3j0hn at 9:17 PM on November 20, 2022 [6 favorites]


About a month ago, FB separated more sharply how I operate my personal profile and business page. The latter is for a local news site I run. I can no longer post from my personal page to my business FB page; I have to have move over to the business page. Anyway, ever since the change, I have been absolutely bombarded with an astonishing number of recommendations for groups around the country that FB thinks I should follow: auto speedways, college sports teams, church choirs, equine groups, radio personalities, college and professional sports teams and fans (so far, I've counted 13 fan groups attached to just the NY Giants that I'm supposed to care about) and on and on. I should point out that I rarely cover sports on my local news site, so I don't know where this is coming from, and nothing that has to do with speedways, jockeys or anything else.
posted by etaoin at 10:54 PM on November 20, 2022


A friend once described Facebook as being like an anxiety dream. You're talking about, I dunno, how The Godfather is basically a movie adaptation of Dune, with a co-worker from three jobs ago and a buddy from college who lives in Japan now, and now here comes your old youth pastor and a local politician you met at a party this summer to tell you why you're wrong.
posted by gauche at 6:07 AM on November 21, 2022 [5 favorites]


Instagram (which I used to love) is the only social media account I have left, and that one is hanging by a thread because my feed is mostly stupid ads and suggested accounts now; pics from the people I follow (mostly personal friends, none of whom are influencers or power users) often don't show up at all and I have to go to their personal account page to see them. Facebook I left around ten years ago for similar reasons; on top of everything else about Facebook, the information I actually wanted it to provide me with got buried in an avalanche of stuff I actively didn't want.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:26 AM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


When "Suggested for you" started showing up so aggressively a month or two ago, I started just closing Facebook when I saw more than two Suggested posts in a row. I had originally been reporting them as spam until I understood Facebook was doing it intentionally. I usually get a handful of latest updates from the family and the few groups I'm in before it veers off into "You didn't ask for this but I'm showing you anyway" land.

I don't know if Facebook is smart enough to learn from the fact they ran me off, but it has nonetheless reduced the amount of Facebook I ingest.

Twitter on the other hand: I never see posts from anyone other than who I follow. Ever. It still lets me sort chronologically so it is mostly bloggy for me, so I tend to read more there even though there's generally less content on Twitter. My problem with Twitter's app is the "view more tweets" breaks and the randomly returning me to the top so it's impossible to actually see everything in my timeline.

I have no idea who they designed Facebook and Twitter timelines for because it was definitely not me.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:21 AM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


Why would my NYT app, that I pay a subscription for, allow Facebook, Google, ComScore, Functional Software and Data Log to track my data. Its all just money right? I guess I just think, hey I'm paying for this and you're still letting people track me.
Edit- posted in the wrong area.
posted by PHINC at 9:01 AM on November 21, 2022


"My ghost town comment was in the context of the other part of that sentence - my specific peer group." zenon, I was referring to the post and piece, not your comments, which I appreciate.
posted by doctornemo at 11:10 AM on November 21, 2022


I used a banned extension to mass unfollow everyone and everything while remaining "friends." That made Facebook both less interesting and less annoying. I used to delete my account every couple of years, take a month or two off, then come crawling back, but I've decided to just stay in place rather than annoy family and friends with re-friending. Now when I follow a group it has to be something weird, like an Outsider Art group. FB proved oddly useful recently as residents of my city came together to fight a city proposition that was being promoted by a handful of greedy millionaires. It was wonderful to see grassroots politics at play regardless of party affiliation. God bless America, or what's left of it.
posted by mecran01 at 2:21 PM on November 21, 2022


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