I don‘t use Instagram often, but I recently met a girl irl who wanted to connect. I open the search in the app and it instantly recommends exclusively girls showing off their bodies, even though I only follow friends otherwise. It was quite embarrassing.

Then you probably want mastodon. Chronological feeds are the only option there!

It's showing me a lot of luxury handbag influencers that obviously target a very different demographic. I'm absolutely sure I never looked for anything like that (I follow mostly science/scientist accounts and comics and I'm male). I also keep getting ads for commercial pilot insurance and I'm definitely not in that demographic either. Instagram's recommendation model seems to work well if you fit a common categorization well (women interested in luxury handbags perhaps), and utterly break down when you don't. I'm a software engineer, I don't need specialty carts to move Boeing aircraft engines.

No, it just shows what your "demographic" mostly wants. And unfortunately for me as a gay man, the average straight man thirsts after scantily clad chicks on insta etc, even if they have to demean and debase themselves for a crumb of attention.

Google's getting wiser tho, I went from getting insta thirst ads to getting anime weaboo girl ads, to getting half naked dragon girl ads, until finally I recently got advertised some gay furry stuff. Nice.

Talk to us about these half naked dragon girls...

Ahaha, well I'm pretty sure it was for some heavily monetised crapware with art that you can pretty much find on e6 anyways.

That said, chatgpt is pretty decent at role playing, if you know how to trick it into it (still actually not that hard). It's an interesting topic though; some people are resistant to playing that sort of "game" with it, even though those people are fine with in-game romances such as those in Mass Effect and Baldur's Gate.

As a very casual Instagram user, I had a similar experience to the parent comment (not so much now).

From what I can tell, this is the way Instagram recommendations treat cold start users. It was only when I started liking stuff that they went away.

Thirstbait is the default for these companies. I don't access YouTube with any Google cookies so their profiling is suppressed. They periodically load up their front page with T&A content despite never having a personal history of clicking on such content.

Confirmed. I tried tiktok but was flooded with 3/4 naked teenage girls before I could do anything on the platform. It's like they ignored my onboarding preferences completely and just said here...she so thirsty.

Instagram thought I was a black women for the longest time, and was serving me content geared toward black women.

I have never posted, liked a post, and follow family exclusively. I keep clicking the "not interested" option but it hasn't changed anything.

It was strange but comforting to know Meta doesn't have shit on me.

This was happening to me too (Instagram but same thing); it’s pretty easy to fix.

Ultimately it is because I wasn’t using Instagram actively enough so the algorithm defaulted to Late 20s Male profiling.

Spend 2-5 minutes selecting the posts you don’t want to see and training the algorithm.

Instagram: Press and hold on items on the search tab and select “not interested”. To give it your actual interests, search for a few things like Golf, Cars, etc.

Threads: Select the three dots on posts and choose “Hide”. Same as Instagram, search for a few generic topics you prefer.

Massively better results as soon as the next day.

I want threads to work so badly compared to Twitter that I’ve happily just written a guide to train Metas algorithm. That’s how badly Twitter has dropped the ball.

Same here. The algorithm seems to be really bad at recommending relevant content on the 'for you' style timeline, and barely seems to take my likes and follows into account at all...

You mean, Twitter.

I had the opposite experience. I never had this problem either, until all the firings happened.

After that, either someone wasn't looking after the thirst traps, or they actively changed the throttle of them so they kept appearing.

That was about a month before I left that cess pit.

I didn’t notice any difference until the last month or so, and now it’s not ordinary users posting thirst traps, but obvious bots “looking for love” liking and retweeting my posts seconds after I post them. It’s a different problem than Instagram, but it’s still pretty bizarre considering Musk’s complaints that pre-acquisition Twitter had too many bots.

Facebook is flooded with these as well. They have gotten really good at making the profiles look organic.

This sounds all true, but on Twitter - I never had the issue before so it seems more than a coincedence.

In fact, I used to be very surprised to read that Twitter had been previously widely used for porn adverts. I was kind of deluded into not even thinking about it. But scratch the surface and it was there. But it never appeared in my daily use.

Prior to the takeover I had been oblivious to it. After the takeover, the surface was scratched and what had previously been "underground" really made itself known in my twitter feed.

That isn't what made me leave the platform, but just my observation at the time.

Are you complaining? Edit /s