4 ms·

ever since i enabled 2 factor i'm too lazy to log in so that did the trick. When I do log in once in a while, it just looks like a tumblr feed of people posting

ever since i enabled 2 factor i'm too lazy to log in so that did the trick. When I do log in once in a while, it just looks like a tumblr feed of people posting funny videos with occasional personal photo, I can get that on reddit already. so i'm just keeping my account alive in case i have anything to announce in the future..

cbeach 11y ago
You can control what you see from individual people and what things they share. It's very granular and it works well. You can also follow really interesting people, pages and groups. It's all about using the tool properly.
- SonicSoul 11y ago
  I find following interesting people on twitter to be a better signal to noise ratio. That way I get exactly what they put out and nothing more, instead of some complicated algorithm designed to keep me "engaged".
  - mxuribe 11y ago
    I agree, i do like Twitter just a slight tad more...but I wonder: if a person is following someone on Twitter, do they see all of the actual output from that person? Or does Twitter do something similar to Facebook, and limit things a bit? If not now, then I wonder if it will happen eventually (Twitter's gotta monetize somehow, someday)? I should have began my comment with the disclaimer that I am becoming more and more of a curmudgeon of being a user on someone else's platform. Doubtful I'll get to RMS levels, but def. I'm a curmudgeon. ;-)
    - SonicSoul 11y ago
      frankly I wish twitter would do this for direct replies to other tweets (maybe just show the first reply, and to see the rest you should click on that thread)
- PavlovsCat 11y ago
  Tool? It all just gets thrown into one page, either chronologically (a setting FB constantly "forgets") or filtered through a totally opaque algorithm. There is no way to display things in various ways, e.g. as list (just the date, type (text/link/image/video), poster, number of likes/comments/shares). There is no way to show posts matching specific criteria, be it the date range or content. There is just the endless scrolling nonsense. Anything I ever posted on my own CMS I can find in like 10 seconds if I remember any detail about it. On Facebook, unless it was last week, why bother? The stuff effectively disappears for normal human use, and is only really remembered by the algorithms and spooks that peruse the data. So it's not even trying to be a tool as far as I can see. It's certainly not about people posting and curating things, it's just about posting and seeing whatever random stuff some random person or group currently posted. The same for groups: the way they are, they're as bad as no forum ever was, even in the 90s. Which I would say about a lot of sites with comment functions, e.g. YouTube and Twitter, but that doesn't improve FB.
  - cbeach 11y ago
    Facebook is not a blogging platform. It isn't promising a long-term store of curated searchable data. It's an endlessly scrolling feed of what's going on now, plus an events tool and photos etc. When did it ever promise anything more?
    - PavlovsCat 11y ago
      Well, it is a long-term store of searchable data, just not for the people who actually put it there or care what their friends said or did. But more to your point: so it doesn't break a completely meaningless promise such as this one: > Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them. Great promise. I have a hard time coming up with anything, from cooking food to murdering people in the streets, that doesn't fit this definition if you just squint hard enough. I judge Facebook by how it improves or impoverishes the world and the web, not by whether it keeps promises that are so vague one could apply them to just about anything, and which I would say are also lies by omission (which may be par of the course for marketing, but that doesn't change what it is). I don't see anything in their FAQ about "dumb fucks" trusting anyone, either. You cannot "control what you see from individual people" as you claimed. You can click "see less stuff like this", sure, but what is "like this"? Nobody knows, nobody cares, just some fuzzy thing or other. That's not "control". And even if you follow people/groups that never post stuff you don't like, it's still a tumblr-like "feed", and that has nothing to do with using the "tool" wrong, that's using it exactly right, seeing random stuff and feeding algorithms with your likes and shares. It extracts value from people, it keeps the data, and gives very little back to them; again, par of the course, again, doesn't change what it is.
- bowlich 11y ago
  I spent two months trying to control what the facebook feed would give me. I wanted only posts by my friends. Photos of my friends. Videos of my friends. No third-party posts. No news posts. No ads masquerading as content. No clickbait. No stupid memes. Only news about the lives of my friends. Every morning I would open my feed and go through every post on the top page that was a "shared" post and tell Facebook to never display content from that site again. I probably blocked hundreds of sites and yet every morning my feed would still be full of idiotic shared news articles. I blocked all my pages and I really only have a small number of friends and relatives added to the site (less than a hundred). I have yet to find a tool where Facebook actually shows me what is blocked and allows me to define what I want (no shared content, only first-party posts by friends). I still saw a lot of blocked site's content pop up the next day even after blocking it the day prior, so I highly suspect the "block this content" option is taken as a suggestion and not a hard demand.

cbeach 11y ago

You can control what you see from individual people and what things they share. It's very granular and it works well. You can also follow really interesting people, pages and groups. It's all about using the tool properly.

SonicSoul 11y ago
I find following interesting people on twitter to be a better signal to noise ratio. That way I get exactly what they put out and nothing more, instead of some complicated algorithm designed to keep me "engaged".
- mxuribe 11y ago
  I agree, i do like Twitter just a slight tad more...but I wonder: if a person is following someone on Twitter, do they see all of the actual output from that person? Or does Twitter do something similar to Facebook, and limit things a bit? If not now, then I wonder if it will happen eventually (Twitter's gotta monetize somehow, someday)? I should have began my comment with the disclaimer that I am becoming more and more of a curmudgeon of being a user on someone else's platform. Doubtful I'll get to RMS levels, but def. I'm a curmudgeon. ;-)
  - SonicSoul 11y ago
    frankly I wish twitter would do this for direct replies to other tweets (maybe just show the first reply, and to see the rest you should click on that thread)
PavlovsCat 11y ago
Tool? It all just gets thrown into one page, either chronologically (a setting FB constantly "forgets") or filtered through a totally opaque algorithm. There is no way to display things in various ways, e.g. as list (just the date, type (text/link/image/video), poster, number of likes/comments/shares). There is no way to show posts matching specific criteria, be it the date range or content. There is just the endless scrolling nonsense. Anything I ever posted on my own CMS I can find in like 10 seconds if I remember any detail about it. On Facebook, unless it was last week, why bother? The stuff effectively disappears for normal human use, and is only really remembered by the algorithms and spooks that peruse the data. So it's not even trying to be a tool as far as I can see. It's certainly not about people posting and curating things, it's just about posting and seeing whatever random stuff some random person or group currently posted. The same for groups: the way they are, they're as bad as no forum ever was, even in the 90s. Which I would say about a lot of sites with comment functions, e.g. YouTube and Twitter, but that doesn't improve FB.
- cbeach 11y ago
  Facebook is not a blogging platform. It isn't promising a long-term store of curated searchable data. It's an endlessly scrolling feed of what's going on now, plus an events tool and photos etc. When did it ever promise anything more?
  - PavlovsCat 11y ago
    Well, it is a long-term store of searchable data, just not for the people who actually put it there or care what their friends said or did. But more to your point: so it doesn't break a completely meaningless promise such as this one: > Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them. Great promise. I have a hard time coming up with anything, from cooking food to murdering people in the streets, that doesn't fit this definition if you just squint hard enough. I judge Facebook by how it improves or impoverishes the world and the web, not by whether it keeps promises that are so vague one could apply them to just about anything, and which I would say are also lies by omission (which may be par of the course for marketing, but that doesn't change what it is). I don't see anything in their FAQ about "dumb fucks" trusting anyone, either. You cannot "control what you see from individual people" as you claimed. You can click "see less stuff like this", sure, but what is "like this"? Nobody knows, nobody cares, just some fuzzy thing or other. That's not "control". And even if you follow people/groups that never post stuff you don't like, it's still a tumblr-like "feed", and that has nothing to do with using the "tool" wrong, that's using it exactly right, seeing random stuff and feeding algorithms with your likes and shares. It extracts value from people, it keeps the data, and gives very little back to them; again, par of the course, again, doesn't change what it is.
bowlich 11y ago
I spent two months trying to control what the facebook feed would give me. I wanted only posts by my friends. Photos of my friends. Videos of my friends. No third-party posts. No news posts. No ads masquerading as content. No clickbait. No stupid memes. Only news about the lives of my friends. Every morning I would open my feed and go through every post on the top page that was a "shared" post and tell Facebook to never display content from that site again. I probably blocked hundreds of sites and yet every morning my feed would still be full of idiotic shared news articles. I blocked all my pages and I really only have a small number of friends and relatives added to the site (less than a hundred). I have yet to find a tool where Facebook actually shows me what is blocked and allows me to define what I want (no shared content, only first-party posts by friends). I still saw a lot of blocked site's content pop up the next day even after blocking it the day prior, so I highly suspect the "block this content" option is taken as a suggestion and not a hard demand.