Sam Trenholme’s blog

Facebook and Reddit

August 14, 2026

Facebook and Reddit have both, to use an expression popular in the first 2000s decade, “jumped the shark”.

Fixing Facebook’s timeline

I am now using a project called Facebook clean my feeds to remove the typical social media slop from my feed. Now my Facebook is like the Facebook of 2010: What I see on my timeline is only what my friends post and, yes, ads—I’m not trying to rob Facebook of their revenue stream, but I also think it’s downright evil for Facebook to pollute my timeline with a bunch of “suggested for you” AI Slop, video reels from people I don’t know, and so on.

One could make the argument Facebook deserves to have their ads blocked because they have made it difficult to keep in touch with my friends, but I feel it’s important I take the high ground here.

Now that my feed is cleaned up, I can see why Facebook started polluting my feed with so much “suggested” content (usually AI slop): People aren’t using Facebook anymore they way they were in 2010, and Facebook is trying to hide this fact by filling timelines with AI slop. Or, as we would had said in 2010, Facebook has “jumped the shark”.

The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious.

Reddit is now a walled garden

Reddit is now a walled garden. Going to old.reddit.com now shows a notice that “To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit.” Probably for the best; while there still is useful information on Reddit, it has also become a feed full of flamebait and posts low on useful information designed to make left-wing people really angry.

Locking down old.reddit.com to stop anonymous surfing is the last straw for me: Reddit has now fully jumped the shark. Not that Reddit was ever great; it was always full of stoners and losers. I remember in 2015 Reddit users comparing synthesizers to the amount of weed you could buy for the same amount of money.