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:
Yep, that's another "yikes" from me. To be fair, though, sometimes that suggested questions feature is pretty useful! Like with this post, for example:
Why is she wearing pink heels? What is her personality? Great questions, Meta.
I said these were "mostly" AI-generated. The truth is with how good the models are getting these days, it's hard to tell, and I think a couple of them might be real people.
Still, some of these are pretty obviously AI. Here's one with a bunch of alien text and mangled logos on the scoreboard in the background:
Hmm, I wonder if anyone has noticed this is AI? Let's check out the comments and see if anyone's pointed that ou—
...never mind. (I dunno, maybe those are all bots too.)
So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm?
I mean... maybe? That's part of the whole thing with these algorithmic feeds; it's hard to know if anyone else is seeing what I'm seeing.
On the one hand, I doubt most (straight) women's feeds would look like this. But on the other hand, I hadn't logged in in nearly a decade! I hate to think what the feed looks like for some lonely old guy who's been scrolling the lightly-clothed AI gooniverse for hours every day.
Did everyone but me know it was like this? I'd seen screencaps of stuff like the Jesus-statue-made-out-of-broccoli slop a year or two ago, but I thought that only happened to grandmas. I hadn't heard it was this bad.
I wonder if this evolution was less noticeable for people who are logging in every day. Or maybe it only gets this bad when there aren't any posts from your actual friends?
In any case, I stopped exploring after I saw a couple more of those AI-generated pictures but with girls that looked like they were about ~14, which made me sick to my stomach. So long Facebook, see you never, until one day I inexplicably need to use your platform to get updates from my kid's school.