ogwh

These types of posts are recurring.

The most generic version of this would be "brain shaped by experience".

If two people are instructed to lift their finger, but one is told to point up and the other to point down then bravo they've "reshaped their brains".

These sorts of articles are always meaningless junk.

No matter what experience is the subject of the article there will ALWAYS be changes to the brain that reflect it.

Examples:

"Widespread usage of mirrors associated with brain changes"

"Running modifies neuronal connections"

"Eating spaghetti associated with increased neural density in the pasta pathway of the prefrontal cortex"

"Being bilingual associated with larger language-processing centres in the midbrain"

"People who wear blue are more likely to have more efficient neural connections in the visual cortex associated with the colour blue"

"People who regularly drink are more likely to be hydrated"

"Cats usually have four legs"

So yeah they're pointless articles and a waste of time.

I have all tracking settings possible turned off on my devices, including in the Facebook and Amazon apps.

Usually the ads shown to me are random, great!

Except whenever I use the Amazon Android app, not long after Facebook starts showing me targeted ads based on products I've viewed on Amazon.

For instance I was looking for gravel and other types of decorative stones for gardening purposes. Many of the products I looked at were marketed as for use in aquariums or with reptiles.

So now Facebook is showing me ads for fish and reptile pet products. When I checked the "why am I seeing this ad?" page they've added pets, fish and reptiles to my "interests".

The only place I've looked at those types of things is in the Amazon app.

What's going on here?

P.S. I even have the global Android targeted ads setting turned off.

Long story short over all these years I never bothered with Facebook. It turns out some hobby groups only exist on there, so I created an account about a week ago.

I'm shocked at how buggy the Android app is for such a large tech company with so many years and so much money being thrown at engineers. I hear on HN about massive 6-7 figure salaries yet their main product barely works.

Some of the bugs I see every time I use the app are:

1) App randomly closes

2) Hiding suggested group posts says they won't show me that again... Followed by endless pages of posts from those groups

3) Closed suggested friends reappear as soon as I reopen the app

4) Pressing the back button sometimes closes the app instead of going back a screen

5) The bar to sort posts randomly appears when scrolling then disappears just as quickly with no known way to get it back

6) Tapping notifications doesn't scroll to the comment referenced, half of the time it's not even in the list

And overall just constant confusion because nothing seems to do what you expect.

It's almost as if the app is actively trying to prevent the user doing what they want.

So I wanted to know if Facebook has always been this bad at UX and execution but people just put up with it or is it a recent phenomena? Or perhaps Facebook has become so widely used that no regular user even notices, like when you take a shit but don't notice how bad it smells because your brain filters it out?