WTF Facebook!

I’m looking for a bit of feedback if anyone cares to give it.

I’ve been on Facebook for over eleven years now, joining at the beginning of 2009. I find it useful for some things, and there are certain groups (in particular, my high school friends) for which I still use it as my primary communication and news conduit. And being active on Facebook (as well as Twitter, this site, Instagram, YouTube, and so on) is a big plus when trying to get accepted to NASA Socials, which I dearly love attending.

Facebook isn’t without its benefits.

But let’s face it, Facebook just becomes more actively evil by the day. It gets harder and harder to get content and stay connected to friends and family because what you get to see and who gets to see your posts is controlled by vague, mysterious, out of our control algorithms. More to the point, groups of fascists, terrorists, Putin’s kompromat, and the insane fringe elements of our society are using Facebook to disseminate lies, misinformation, propaganda, and outright bullshit to people who should know better, but don’t.

Facebook sucks.

With all of that being the case, what I’ve seen in the last month or so is the most frustrating bit of all for me – a DELUGE of ads. However, I don’t know if I got lucky for eleven years and somehow was never exposed to the horrors of Facebook ads every third or fourth post 24/7/365, or if something’s changed for everyone now.

This is where I can use some feedback from y’all. Is it me? Or did Facebook suddenly decide to fuck us all over starting a couple weeks ago?

For me, I would occasionally see an ad here or there, maybe a couple a week, for at least the first at least 8 or 9 years. It wasn’t a big deal. Most days I never saw an ad at all.

Then, about a year or two ago, I would have “ad days” every couple of months, where when I first logged on I would see an ad every third or fourth post. I would see three or four as I scrolled down my timeline, but as I deleted them, they would go away after seeing five or six, and that would be it. They were annoying, but there seemed to be a limit. Maybe 15-20 a day for a single day every now and then.

Then it was 20-25 a day for a single day maybe once a month.

Then 30-40 a day for a single day maybe every other week.

But always, when I got to that limit, it was like having survived a week of being bored to death waiting to be called for jury duty. Once I hit my limit and had paid my pound of flesh by going through X ads, I was off for a few weeks or a month.

Until late July, about a month ago.

Since then, EVERY time I connect, whether it be on my desktop, my phone, my iPad, EVERY! SINGLE! TIME! it’s an ad every 3rd or 4th post, all day, every day, 24/7.

And it’s like nails on a blackboard.

So before I walk away from Facebook permanently and just delete my account, or at a minimum just stop using it except maybe to check for messages once a week from high school classmates, I’m looking for context and a little information from you.