Facebook feed has changed - seems strange - anyone else?

[splendyd]

I'm a very light FB user. I don't post, and most of my connected friends have stopped posting, apart from a few who post regularly about holidays, life events etc. I mainly use it to follow local community and news pages, plus the pages of sports clubs my kids are involved in. Many of these pages either post regularly themselves, or else (in the case of the community pages) are regularly posted to by their followers. Until a few months ago, my FB feed was dominated by these posts, but now something has changed. My feed is filled has more sponsored adverts (which I can understand) but also lots of random 'suggested' memes, by which I mean cartoon funnies, irritating quotes, unwanted advice about how to clean/repair things, etc. I don't interact with these, but they seem to dominate my feed. I know I can click to say I'm not interested, but if I do they are just replaced by something else. No doubt FB is trying to work out what I am interested in - the obvious answer to that is that I'm interested in the things I follow and not interested in their suggestions.

I know I will get lots of anti-fb replies, but I'm wondering if others are experiencing this as a recent change (and whether anyone has managed to just turn off "suggestions" altogether, or reduce their number?).

You're right OP. My FB feed is dominated by short Tik-Tok style videos of things I have no interest in. I clicked on a few of them to start with out of curiosity as to why they were there and the algorithm that runs FB clearly decided that I like that kind of thing, so now that's 50% of what I see. I never post stuff on FB any more and of my 150 FB friends very few post anything any more, so I suppose the algorithm is filling up the blank space, but I'm so fed up with it that I'm considering leaving FB altogether. The only thing that stops me is that most of the 150 people I have no other way of contacting them and I don't want to completely lose touch.

This happened to me a few months ago. I only really use FB to use the village group, but it never shows me those posts anymore, I have to go to groups and manually select the group. The rest of it is absolute rubbish and I have no idea why it is showing me such shit!

Yeah - I only use FB for the marketplace and very occasionally for local information like a road being closed. Consequently whenever I do log in it's just weird videos, like 5 minute crafts? Just hands doing weird shit.

I think FB has generally just degraded to this point now? It reminds me of Usenet after the web really took off. Just surreal spam and that guy who thought the radio was talking to him.

The only reason I still have mine is the old photos from years ago (friends birthdays and things, eras gone by). What is the best way to download them as I’d quite like to delete my account. I have another ‘fake’ one just for following national trust and other groups, but I find my own ‘real’ one strangely stressful!

On the Android app if you click the menu, there's an option for feeds, you can select friends to see mainly your friend's feeds. Unfortunately you can't leave it set on this.
I find FB useless now for local companies/info as I always get the posts late or don't see them at all. There are lots of small businesses/artist that I follow, but I rarely see their posts anymore, even though I interact.
Mainly use FB for groups and marketplace now.

It's a mess these days. No longer in chronological order. I keep being suggested random community groups of places I've never been to. I spend more time hiding groups than looking at what I want.

Same. Drives me mad.

Sadly yes and it doesn't even do what it says it does when you mute notifications from a group! I had so many notifications from one group all spam adverts I reported them as spam (Facebook said they weren't spam which was ridiculous) anyway they kept showing me more and more because I was interacting so I stopped then I began hiding them as "not interested" still they showed me these fricking posts I muted the group still showed me so I LEFT THE GROUP now under groups you might be interested in it THAT BLOODY GROUP STILL ON MY FEED

I'm irrationally peeved about it

I noticed this a few years ago and deactivated my account

Yes, it's just videos, and adverts for those dodgy clothing websites where it looks too good to be true because they have stolen photos.

I go through and hide all the crap. I still have quite a lot of memes, but at least they're mostly cat ones, which I quite like, and ads for travel.

Marketplace is unusable for selling anything. The minute you post an advert to sell eg a computer table, you'll get a swarm of scammers all saying they're interested but don't have the time to come over so they'll send a courier or their mum's neighbour's dog's friend round with the money. All they want is to harvest your address which they combine with information from your Fb feed and other SM so they can scam you.

They're probably using a lot more automation and AI plus it's a numbers game to satisfy their advertisers that they have x millions of users. I stopped being part of their cannon fodder a decade ago.

A few times on here I’ve seen threads complaining about an annoying trend ‘on Facebook videos’ and I wonder why people click on them in the first place. I’ve never clicked on a single one, if I wanted crappy spammy videos I’d join TikTok.
They seem to have stopped popping up on my feed for the moment, the main thing that’s annoying me now is Facebook’s insistence that I want to see the same posts from friends over and over again, still clogging up my feed after six days.
Even after Elon Musk shat all over Twitter, Facebook still manages to be way less user-friendly and that’s saying something.

I while ago I googled a few things about South Africa and since then my FB feed has been full of posts from African pages and businesses.

I also seem to get a lot of memes about dogs even though I'm not a dog person (I have cats though and am a member of many cat related FB groups, so don't understand why the algorithm throws dogs at me instead).

I also occasionally get shown adverts for international companies but for the wrong country so for example an advert for new ice cream available at McDonalds in Australia 🤨 It's strange FB knows and tracks so much information about us and yet gets it so wrong.

Agree, it's becoming rather unusable. I too keep it for some local pages and distant friends but finding their updates becomes increasingly difficult.

I used to literally only have dd, dp and dm as friends and use FB for groups.

Then I decided to accept friend requests and use it a bit more like Twitter.
Most posts in my feed are from "friends" that I don't know but share interests and so post things I'm interested in.

I probably miss things posted by RL friends but if it's important, they'll text or WhatsApp.

Plenty of ads but mine seem to be mostly charities with a few for theatres and vegan/feminist/political clothing. I don't mind any of those popping up. I'm just glad it's finally stopped showing me the ads for binders.

I don't mind the reels either. Not enough to be really annoying. I scroll past ones I'm not interested in, click the ones I like and get more of the same. This morning, there was a great one of celebrities shutting down sexist interview questions and another of a group of sheep taking turns to jump from one huge bale of hay to another. Made me smile.

The "suggested for you" posts are generally pretty spot on too.

The algorithms are working well for me and how I use FB.

Mine is completely bizarre and I deleted the app just yesterday. Nobody I know posts on it any and nor do I. It’s just weird generated content and those strange booking.com ads.

Me too. I was on FB a few times on Friday and only read about a kids Halloween event at 10pm that day. I would have loved to go but it never came up before the event. I have to search by community group which kind of makes FB mostly pointless now

I don't mind sponsored posts, adverts or suggested pages as long as the algorithm is good enough to pick up things I'm interested in

Nothing in my history would suggest I'm interested in sport in random overseas countries or TV programmes I never watch or pages that share dumb memes and surely AI is sophisticated enough to recognize that a local post about a road closure last week isn't going to something I need to see today

I do still use Facebook but it could be way better

Yeah, I keep getting weird martyr posts with twee cartoons from pages called things like "milky boobies" about how if you have kids, as long as you focus on them 24/7 for the rest of your life it doesn't matter if you live in a shit hole, look like shit, have no friends etc. bloody strange -I never interact with them, just hide but they keep coming. I also went through a period of lots of cat stuff. I never see stuff I'm actually interested in anymore, despite being in lots of interest based groups, and when it is a friend's post, it comes up repeatedly for days. I don't have any other social media than Mumsnet and Facebook so don't know whether to delete it and try something else, but I don't know what.

I've got this add-on called Facebook Purity ('FBP') which is available for Google Chrome, Firefox, etc. You can ruthlessly block things you don't want, and it has a number of v. useful features. You can find it by Googling or going to fbpurity.com. My Malwarebytes gives it a clean bill of health. 'F.B. Purity is compatible with the following web browsers: Firefox, Google Chrome, Edge, Safari, Opera, Brave and Maxthon, running on Windows, Mac, Linux etc. '

Glad it's not just me then.

The only thing I "interacted with" recently was to react to a friend's post about her grief at losing a child in tragic circumstances. I couldn't ignore that, but for days afterwards my thread was filled with grief poems. Completely innapropriate.