What the Facebook algorithm thinks I want to see

I use Facebook much less often than I used to. I usually log in for a few minutes first thing while I'm eating my breakfast to check the local village group for morning traffic updates and to have a quick scroll through the home feed. But nowadays one in every three or four posts that I'm given is an advert, and I hardly ever see the personal posts that I want to see. I think that people I follow just aren't using Facebook as much as they used to.

Predictably quite a few of the adverts that I see are related to my interests - Hobbycraft, The Works, craft subscription boxes and craft e-courses, all that kind of thing. But for some reason every now and then Facebook gets itself fixated on something that it thinks I want to see (usually based on one curious click) and then it's impossible to get rid of. 

Currently Facebook is desperate to spam my home feed with terrible advert filled photo roundup pages. It's difficult to describe if you've not seen them yourself (and I'm not going to link to one because they'll think I like them even more!) but it has a title something like 'These entitled people got what was coming to them!" and it's a long page filled with screenshots from social media, text messages and photos to fit the theme. I must admit that I have clicked on a few in the past, and now I just can't get rid of them!

I am really trying to control the algorithm by liking any advert that reflects my interest, then using the hide and block function to remove the ones that I'm really not interested in seeing. Sometimes I even log out of Facebook as soon as I've blocked the offending post, just to show it what's what. But it's taking ages to sort itself out, and it definitely doesn't seem to want me to use Facebook!

Do you get annoyed with the Facebook algorithm? What does it think you want to see?

Photo credit Solen Feyissa via Unsplash