7 ms·

98% of my facebook timeline is pure shit. I once went to facebook to keep up with friends and family. Now, all I see is clickbait and memes.

dave5104 10y ago
I found myself mindlessly scrolling through my newsfeed so often and seeing nothing but the clickbait meme crap. I finally got rid of the app on my phone and it's been great since.
sofaofthedamned 10y ago
I'm not on FB, but I did recently join LinkedIn for work reasons and holy god it's awful - only thing on my TL is posts from recruiters and LI asking me to celebrate somebody spending a year at 'looking for new opportunities'. After I get my next contract i'm off there. Only thing with any value to me is Twitter, and that's only reactively when i'm looking if there's an outage.
- kordless 10y ago
  I find the latest update to LinkedIn unfortunate, given it's authoring UI is complete crap, UX-wise. I really can't see anything of use to me anymore over there, so my visits are becoming less frequent. I used to have good conversations with connections. Now all I get is recruiter invites and companies looking to do "business" with me, mostly out of Eastern Europe. Twitter, on the other hand, is somewhat entertaining, given I have a decent amount of followers who may or may not be listening to my random rants. A minor ego boost, at best, but still probably a very large illusion on my part. It's fun to pretend though! ;) Honestly, I have to say this place, HN, feels the closest to home. Or playing Rust, depending.
  - 52-6F-62 10y ago
    Rust... that game where you gather wood in the nude for five minutes before somebody kills you, over and over? ;P
    - kordless 10y ago
      That's the one. Hardest game ever. Love it.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  LinkedIn is also a case study on dark pattern UI. I honestly do not understand how a company can fuck up their product to such a degree and still have such traction. Blows my mind.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    When I interviewed there a few years ago I got the impression that their product is LFDD: Lord of the Flies Driven Development. Pick an idea implemented on another site, pick whatever language you like, then push it out.
    - FussyZeus 10y ago
      I think you missed a step where they figure out a shady way to get as many users opted into the new feature as possible, regardless of if they actually want it or not. But yeah, that sounds about what I'd expect.
    - riffraff 10y ago
      forgive me it's been many years since I read Lord of the Flies, I might have forgotten stuff, but but how is that related?
      - rhizome 10y ago
        LinkedIn comprises a cargo-culted feature mix implemented with little consistency by those least qualified (or maybe just least-empowered) to judge the can/should question.
- rinze 10y ago
  > I did recently join LinkedIn for work reasons and holy god it's awful I have an account I opened a while ago and I just enter from time to time, or when someone asks to add me as a contact. Every single post is just mindless corporate self-help.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  LinkedIn is quite similar to facebook in the techniques and tricks they use. The difference is that LinkedIn comes directly from the paypal mafia while facebook was funded by the paypal mafia. And LinkedIn has a professional spin onto it.
nilkn 10y ago
My Facebook feed is nothing but ads, low effort clickbait, and liberal anti-Trump news pieces. I'm pretty liberal myself but I just find the incredible level of groupthink to be completely insufferable. Content from friends and family is rare to nonexistent these days. For finding clickbait, memes, etc., reddit is pretty much strictly superior to FB. If I want to follow the news, my FB feed is one of the most biased sources on the internet. In short, FB has almost no purpose for me anymore.
- astrowilliam 10y ago
  Installing an ad-blocker could save you a ton of head aches.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kristianc 10y ago
    Why? Adblockers are useless for filtering out think pieces and low effort clickbait. They're not even very good at targeting Facebook Ads.
    - thetomthought 10y ago
      While I haven't added anything for memes and clickbait, some of the noise can be filtered out with Sadblock (http://sadblock.io http://sadblock.io)
      - kristianc 10y ago
        This is pretty cool - will give it a try on Desktop. Shame nothing for mobile.
      - alexbecker 10y ago
        This is a great example of an extension I'd love to try out if the security model for extensions wasn't so broken.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Why are you there still?
- mintplant 10y ago
  Messenger, personally. Too much of my social circle uses it as the group chat provider-of-choice for closing my account to be a viable option. I almost never interact with Facebook proper.
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    You got the thinking backwards, just move away to a different chat service and tells your social circle about the move. This will auto-filter those who actually care and really are part of your circle from those who don't. If everybody just schlep along then nothing will ever change and you will continue to go to Abilene.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  People like me who have friends all over the country would have a very hard time keeping up to date and in contact with a lot of people we really, really like. Seriously if your social circle expands to more than 40 miles in every direction, Facebook is useful as hell. Even with the clickbait bullshit and invasive ads.
  - grogenaut 10y ago
    All of my friends are over 40 miles away except my new friends after moving. They all use facebook heavily. I don't have any issues keeping in contact with them.
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    I have a social circle that extent 1000 miles in every direction, I had enough common sense to never register on facebook and I'm still in contact with everybody in the circle the same way we did before facebook or web 2.0 was a thing: email and instant messaging (IRC fell out of favor after main networks got permanently wiretapped). Of course I don't keep up on a daily basis, which is in line with the AFK way of interacting with people in my local circle. We catch up once in a while through interpersonal conversation intended for the other person. Why would someone want a constant reminder of what happens in the daily life of every people they know in 40 miles radius is beyond comprehension to me. Do you even have anything to talk about when you actually see each other ? Do you even meet or talk to each other ? Facebook seems to be only useful because it is a walled prison, where prisoners are forbidden from interacting with the outside, so prisoners find it useful that they can at least communicate with each other in filtered, censored and filled with advertisement way. To me the usefulness of facebook is that it keeps much of the eternal september crap contained inside itself, though it has a tendency to leak and spill in the rest of the web when the prisoners get the occasional interaction with the outside world and not understand that what is acceptable in a prison environment is not in the normal world.
OliverJones 10y ago
Same was true for me. Nothing but cheesy fake nuz. I didn't even get everything posted by my relatives. I deleted my fb account last fall. Life has improved. I know quite a few teenagers; they say FB is for "old people" like me. It's been true since the days of suck.com: if you don't pay for the product you are the product. I'm sick of being product.
echelon 10y ago
Do you think a 100% family and friends-focused social network could supplant Facebook (for accomplishing its original intent)? Pared down, modulo the memes and spam. Simply a directory of contacts, calendar, and photos.
- sp332 10y ago
  I don't see the difference. My family posts the memes. My grandfather sends me news from questionable sources via email. If you give my family my contact info by any means, I will be seeing more of the same.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  A significant portion of the memes and spam comes from uneducated family and friends so there's that. But facebook has already been replaced by other websites for a variety of thing, the most known examples are those built around neighborhood community with extra privacy.
markha 10y ago
Faced the same. Then I un-liked all the pages (some chrome add-on), un-followed few groups and the feed is much better. Finally I can see humans and not just news/meme
Symbiote 10y ago
Click the drop-down on a meme/clickbait post, then click "Hide all from 9gag.com". Repeated about ten times, I no longer have any clickbait, and only about 5% memes.
username223 10y ago
Maybe you just need to mute/unfriend more people. Most of my handful of FB "friends" are actual friends, who tend to post a manageable volume of personal stuff, and very few cheap memes or other crap. If someone is frequently posting more than 1 thing per day, they're doing it wrong in my opinion.
davnicwil 10y ago
I'm trying out a side project social network that's ad-free and text-only: https://postbelt.com https://postbelt.com I built it in response to the same frustrations you describe. The only catch is that it's paid :-) I want to explore if a noise-free social network can be built, and the only way I think it's sustainable is with a small subscription fee. Please check it out, if the idea interests you.
- hossbeast 10y ago
  Seems pretty great
ThomPete 10y ago
Mine is full of really useful content and great conversations. The feed normally reflect the way you use it. So if you click and like that "pure shit" then you will get more of it. However if you share and like the few nuggets there are you will start getting more of that.
jug 10y ago
Yeah, and so I did spring cleaning recently and significantly cut my liked pages etc. Result? The damn thing got even worse! Now it's instead prominently showing posts my friends have commented on, liked, etc. Things that are missing my interests even more than the superfluous pages I followed before, only to keep my feed "active" so I'll want to come back. It sucks I have to keep wading through this crap and surfaced "may interest you..." only because "everyone is there".
nradov 10y ago
If you aggressively use the "Hide all from" button you can eliminate the vast majority of crap that your friends share. That way you only see their original content.
- skylan_q 10y ago
  I've done this. I've tailored my feed to get pretty interesting and I've added many friends that I've made on the Internet and I don't suffer the "90% trash in my feed" problem. I pretty much get all my news from here, some people on facebook, some people on twitter.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
weego 10y ago
Almost everyone I know just uses it as a middle-class Craigslist + the odd baby pic nowadays.
norea-armozel 10y ago
I barely use Facebook and honestly I can't imagine how anyone uses it. At this point, I think the only social network I use is Twitter and mostly because I follow quite a few synthwave artists and just content creators in general. The news side of Twitter isn't much better than what Facebook offers IMO, it's 99% opinion dressed up as news.
bigbugbag 10y ago
Wasn't it obvious from the get go that this would happen ? I mean you get a third party that want to be a MitM for all your exchange with friends and family while making the biggest profit possible out of investor story time. Then you get the worst possible internet users massively flocking to the site through antipatterns and use of all tricks in the black book. I wonder what else you were expecting. Situation was way better when blogs + rss were the craze and could be federated.

dave5104 10y ago

I found myself mindlessly scrolling through my newsfeed so often and seeing nothing but the clickbait meme crap. I finally got rid of the app on my phone and it's been great since.

sofaofthedamned 10y ago

I'm not on FB, but I did recently join LinkedIn for work reasons and holy god it's awful - only thing on my TL is posts from recruiters and LI asking me to celebrate somebody spending a year at 'looking for new opportunities'. After I get my next contract i'm off there. Only thing with any value to me is Twitter, and that's only reactively when i'm looking if there's an outage.

kordless 10y ago
I find the latest update to LinkedIn unfortunate, given it's authoring UI is complete crap, UX-wise. I really can't see anything of use to me anymore over there, so my visits are becoming less frequent. I used to have good conversations with connections. Now all I get is recruiter invites and companies looking to do "business" with me, mostly out of Eastern Europe. Twitter, on the other hand, is somewhat entertaining, given I have a decent amount of followers who may or may not be listening to my random rants. A minor ego boost, at best, but still probably a very large illusion on my part. It's fun to pretend though! ;) Honestly, I have to say this place, HN, feels the closest to home. Or playing Rust, depending.
- 52-6F-62 10y ago
  Rust... that game where you gather wood in the nude for five minutes before somebody kills you, over and over? ;P
  - kordless 10y ago
    That's the one. Hardest game ever. Love it.
FussyZeus 10y ago
LinkedIn is also a case study on dark pattern UI. I honestly do not understand how a company can fuck up their product to such a degree and still have such traction. Blows my mind.
- rhizome 10y ago
  When I interviewed there a few years ago I got the impression that their product is LFDD: Lord of the Flies Driven Development. Pick an idea implemented on another site, pick whatever language you like, then push it out.
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    I think you missed a step where they figure out a shady way to get as many users opted into the new feature as possible, regardless of if they actually want it or not. But yeah, that sounds about what I'd expect.
  - riffraff 10y ago
    forgive me it's been many years since I read Lord of the Flies, I might have forgotten stuff, but but how is that related?
    - rhizome 10y ago
      LinkedIn comprises a cargo-culted feature mix implemented with little consistency by those least qualified (or maybe just least-empowered) to judge the can/should question.
rinze 10y ago
> I did recently join LinkedIn for work reasons and holy god it's awful I have an account I opened a while ago and I just enter from time to time, or when someone asks to add me as a contact. Every single post is just mindless corporate self-help.
bigbugbag 10y ago
LinkedIn is quite similar to facebook in the techniques and tricks they use. The difference is that LinkedIn comes directly from the paypal mafia while facebook was funded by the paypal mafia. And LinkedIn has a professional spin onto it.

nilkn 10y ago

My Facebook feed is nothing but ads, low effort clickbait, and liberal anti-Trump news pieces. I'm pretty liberal myself but I just find the incredible level of groupthink to be completely insufferable. Content from friends and family is rare to nonexistent these days. For finding clickbait, memes, etc., reddit is pretty much strictly superior to FB. If I want to follow the news, my FB feed is one of the most biased sources on the internet. In short, FB has almost no purpose for me anymore.

astrowilliam 10y ago
Installing an ad-blocker could save you a ton of head aches.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kristianc 10y ago
  Why? Adblockers are useless for filtering out think pieces and low effort clickbait. They're not even very good at targeting Facebook Ads.
  - thetomthought 10y ago
    While I haven't added anything for memes and clickbait, some of the noise can be filtered out with Sadblock (http://sadblock.io http://sadblock.io)
    - kristianc 10y ago
      This is pretty cool - will give it a try on Desktop. Shame nothing for mobile.
    - alexbecker 10y ago
      This is a great example of an extension I'd love to try out if the security model for extensions wasn't so broken.

fiatjaf 10y ago

Why are you there still?

mintplant 10y ago
Messenger, personally. Too much of my social circle uses it as the group chat provider-of-choice for closing my account to be a viable option. I almost never interact with Facebook proper.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  You got the thinking backwards, just move away to a different chat service and tells your social circle about the move. This will auto-filter those who actually care and really are part of your circle from those who don't. If everybody just schlep along then nothing will ever change and you will continue to go to Abilene.
FussyZeus 10y ago
People like me who have friends all over the country would have a very hard time keeping up to date and in contact with a lot of people we really, really like. Seriously if your social circle expands to more than 40 miles in every direction, Facebook is useful as hell. Even with the clickbait bullshit and invasive ads.
- grogenaut 10y ago
  All of my friends are over 40 miles away except my new friends after moving. They all use facebook heavily. I don't have any issues keeping in contact with them.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  I have a social circle that extent 1000 miles in every direction, I had enough common sense to never register on facebook and I'm still in contact with everybody in the circle the same way we did before facebook or web 2.0 was a thing: email and instant messaging (IRC fell out of favor after main networks got permanently wiretapped). Of course I don't keep up on a daily basis, which is in line with the AFK way of interacting with people in my local circle. We catch up once in a while through interpersonal conversation intended for the other person. Why would someone want a constant reminder of what happens in the daily life of every people they know in 40 miles radius is beyond comprehension to me. Do you even have anything to talk about when you actually see each other ? Do you even meet or talk to each other ? Facebook seems to be only useful because it is a walled prison, where prisoners are forbidden from interacting with the outside, so prisoners find it useful that they can at least communicate with each other in filtered, censored and filled with advertisement way. To me the usefulness of facebook is that it keeps much of the eternal september crap contained inside itself, though it has a tendency to leak and spill in the rest of the web when the prisoners get the occasional interaction with the outside world and not understand that what is acceptable in a prison environment is not in the normal world.

OliverJones 10y ago

Same was true for me. Nothing but cheesy fake nuz. I didn't even get everything posted by my relatives. I deleted my fb account last fall. Life has improved. I know quite a few teenagers; they say FB is for "old people" like me. It's been true since the days of suck.com: if you don't pay for the product you are the product. I'm sick of being product.

echelon 10y ago

Do you think a 100% family and friends-focused social network could supplant Facebook (for accomplishing its original intent)? Pared down, modulo the memes and spam. Simply a directory of contacts, calendar, and photos.

sp332 10y ago
I don't see the difference. My family posts the memes. My grandfather sends me news from questionable sources via email. If you give my family my contact info by any means, I will be seeing more of the same.
bigbugbag 10y ago
A significant portion of the memes and spam comes from uneducated family and friends so there's that. But facebook has already been replaced by other websites for a variety of thing, the most known examples are those built around neighborhood community with extra privacy.

markha 10y ago

Faced the same. Then I un-liked all the pages (some chrome add-on), un-followed few groups and the feed is much better. Finally I can see humans and not just news/meme

Symbiote 10y ago

Click the drop-down on a meme/clickbait post, then click "Hide all from 9gag.com". Repeated about ten times, I no longer have any clickbait, and only about 5% memes.

username223 10y ago

Maybe you just need to mute/unfriend more people. Most of my handful of FB "friends" are actual friends, who tend to post a manageable volume of personal stuff, and very few cheap memes or other crap. If someone is frequently posting more than 1 thing per day, they're doing it wrong in my opinion.

davnicwil 10y ago

I'm trying out a side project social network that's ad-free and text-only: https://postbelt.com https://postbelt.com I built it in response to the same frustrations you describe. The only catch is that it's paid :-) I want to explore if a noise-free social network can be built, and the only way I think it's sustainable is with a small subscription fee. Please check it out, if the idea interests you.

hossbeast 10y ago
Seems pretty great

ThomPete 10y ago

Mine is full of really useful content and great conversations. The feed normally reflect the way you use it. So if you click and like that "pure shit" then you will get more of it. However if you share and like the few nuggets there are you will start getting more of that.

jug 10y ago

Yeah, and so I did spring cleaning recently and significantly cut my liked pages etc. Result? The damn thing got even worse! Now it's instead prominently showing posts my friends have commented on, liked, etc. Things that are missing my interests even more than the superfluous pages I followed before, only to keep my feed "active" so I'll want to come back. It sucks I have to keep wading through this crap and surfaced "may interest you..." only because "everyone is there".

nradov 10y ago

If you aggressively use the "Hide all from" button you can eliminate the vast majority of crap that your friends share. That way you only see their original content.

skylan_q 10y ago
I've done this. I've tailored my feed to get pretty interesting and I've added many friends that I've made on the Internet and I don't suffer the "90% trash in my feed" problem. I pretty much get all my news from here, some people on facebook, some people on twitter.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

weego 10y ago

Almost everyone I know just uses it as a middle-class Craigslist + the odd baby pic nowadays.

norea-armozel 10y ago

I barely use Facebook and honestly I can't imagine how anyone uses it. At this point, I think the only social network I use is Twitter and mostly because I follow quite a few synthwave artists and just content creators in general. The news side of Twitter isn't much better than what Facebook offers IMO, it's 99% opinion dressed up as news.

bigbugbag 10y ago

Wasn't it obvious from the get go that this would happen ? I mean you get a third party that want to be a MitM for all your exchange with friends and family while making the biggest profit possible out of investor story time. Then you get the worst possible internet users massively flocking to the site through antipatterns and use of all tricks in the black book. I wonder what else you were expecting. Situation was way better when blogs + rss were the craze and could be federated.