Likely, you will see a bunch of random ads instead of targeted ones of things that might actually be interesting to you. Whether or not that's better is up to the user.

I'm assuming I will see a lot more posts from old high school friends who I don't really interact with anymore. It would be a fun experiment to try though.

the two systems are probably unrelated.

muddling newsfeed and ad targeting would make both systems unnecessarily complicated.

I had the realization a while back that certain advertisers were flooding my Newsfeed with Sponsored posts every time I interacted with them in some way -- on or off Facebook. So I started regularly clearing out the Interests and Advertisers sections of Ad Preferences and now my Newsfeed is almost entirely devoid of Sponsored posts.

The experience using Facebook without them exploiting knowledge of my "preferences" is substantially better.

Granted, I'm running ad blockers, so most of the low-value advertising on FB was already blocked.

Indeed. I've discovered it can make major mistakes on who's "important" to me - I'd thought they'd stopped Facebooking, but it turned out their algorithm had for some reason deemed them not to be a "close" friend and de-emphasized them from my feed.

He meant 'my Facebook won't be as profitable'.

I agree this probably won't make Facebook as good. I relate this to the time before spam filters were good and 50% of my email was penis enlargement pills and money wire fraud. You dump all this data and we go back to a time where I'm not known, and Facebook shows me my active "friends" and it's just my aunt sharing her latest Bejeweled score.

I'm all for better control of my data, but there needs to be some balance so the ads I see are still relevant and not acai berries super juices and Hot Local Singles In My Area.

Why do you want to see ads?

Because I want Facebook to be free... just like I want Google to be free and Gmail and Google Maps and my news site and my sports site and my fantasy sports app and...and...and...and...

I understand that an ad model is what allows me to do many things I do on the internet without cost. Now, if I have to choose between an ad model that shows me "Dewalt Tools 25% off" (Something I am interested in) or "Gluten Free Bread" (something I'm not interested in), I will select the former.

Advertising is a race to the bottom. As long as GDPR affects everyone more-less equally, it'll only reduce the current depth of advertising hole. That is, non-targeted ads might become more profitable again.

It won't have that "tailored experience".

People can pin this on Facebook all day, but that's the same bullshit every user-productizing company spews. That the best experience is the one they design, which necessarily includes tracking, ads, and half of the dark patterns in the book.

Some days, I secretly wonder if my experience would indeed be better, because I've been blocking ads and tracking shit for the 20 years I've been online. Because frankly, I wouldn't know, maybe this world of constantly being targeted with advertising is really cool. They keep telling me I'm missing out, you know?

It's a veiled threat, just like when they told you that if you disable facial recognition you're worsening the experience of blind users, and that nefarious people will take your photos and impersonate you.

I read that sentence as you can try to get rid of us, but we'll be back!

> If critics don't use this feature, they can put the blame solely on them.

Once this rolls out, I'm going to be posting instructions to my feed. One of the only reasons I still keep Facebook around is to publicize articles critical of social media and stuff like this.

Why is this downvoted? The article itself is a demonstration that they really do this.

Case in point: If you're not logged in to the FB tracking network, after 5 seconds of reading, you get surprised by this "funny" jump scare: https://i.imgur.com/PCQOo8N.png

That is deliberately worsening the experience. If you click the close-button (helpfully labelled "Not now"), it is replaced with a sticky footer that takes 33% of your screen (depending on your window size and zoom setting).