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I don't know if it's algorithmic, or if most of my close friends just hardly use facebook anymore, but it seems like I just rarely see anything anymore in my fe

I don't know if it's algorithmic, or if most of my close friends just hardly use facebook anymore, but it seems like I just rarely see anything anymore in my feed anymore that I care about. It also seems weird that what does appear is generally from people I'm very faint acquaintances with -- if I am curious about one of my actual friends I pretty much have to go straight to their profile. Besides that though, I think it just encourages behaviors I don't really enjoy seeing in my friends. I definitely know people who in real-life are totally cool, but their social media presence makes me question why I ever liked them in the first place. Mostly I see a lot of: 1) very overt attention seeking for pretty lame things (like, pretty girls posting selfies of themselves doing nothing interesting, or dudes with gym photos, that kind of thing) 2) Extremely broad and poorly thought out political rants 3) sharing really vapid motivational quotes 4) people being maybe a little too vulnerable to a very broad audience, to the point where it's awkward. 5) This one is the worst of all. People taking passive aggressive swipes at individuals by posting very vague status updates. I hate stuff like that. I don't think of myself as a super judgmental person, but whenever I get on facebook I spend half my time just thinking "really?" and then feeling kind of gross.

flamedoge 8y ago
you definitely don't sound like majority voice.
0x0 8y ago
Facebook was a lot more fun when there was a chronological timeline of non-rich-text status updates and comments from friends. These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion. I know there are interesting posts by people on my friend list but they're simply being hidden. Maybe some fb developer was happy with increased engagement metrics merely caused by confused users forever scrolling up and down in desperate attempts to find out where all their friends whose posts used to show up have gone. And when actual friends' posts show up, 90% of the time it's a like or a share of some uninspiring web page's article with no comment. It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.
- tinalumfoil 8y ago
  > These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion I think putting the spam on facebook on equal footing with its post targeting as to why people aren't using facebook is wrong. I have hundreds of friends and tens of pages on FB, which I'll admit by FB's standards isn't all that much, yet I still find it much harder to browse than other sites with many times the content. Most people simply don't post that often or not at all, and the pages I joined don't post often either. Despite how little content there is I find the issue of managing it all completely intractable. When I'm on Feedly I go through hundreds of posts worth of content in a few minutes by mashing the j key until I find content I want to read later, save it and then spend maybe 2 hours a week going through content I care about. When I'm on Twitter I skim until I see familiar content and pick out the stuff I care about. When I'm on reddit, I know it takes about 48 hours for my feed to "refresh" so I'll spend some time every other day skimming from top to bottom. I can't even begin to figure out a workflow for finding content on Facebook. The whole thing is laid out so quickly finding the things I care about is impossible. I can scroll past ten posts I've seen before something new pops up so I have no idea when to stop scrolling. There's no concept of a "read" post and unlike reddit the "hide" button, hidden behind a menu, acts like a downvote. I have no way of creating a single stream of just the things I care about, and if I did there's no way to update myself when things change. Unlike youtube, there's no RSS feeds so I can't just do my browsing from Feedly. Even just getting a feed of my events is impossible since FB has the audacity to suggest events from pages I've never interacted with, have no friends going and thinks those are more important to me than the events created by pages I actually follow. Push notifications are insanely coursely-grained (or at least they do a good job hiding the interface). Cambridge Analytica be damned, the reason I don't use FB is because I can't figure out how. My age, income level and computer-addicted brain should make me prime meat for advertisers, yet I change the oil more often than login to FB simply because the algorithms that generate my feeds are just that bad.
  - derefr 8y ago
    “Tractable” is another way to say “I can finish what I came to the site to do, and then leave.” Of course they don’t want that! ;)
justboxing 8y ago
> pretty girls posting selfies of themselves doing nothing interesting, or dudes with gym photos, that kind of thing That's Instagram.
- oceanman888 8y ago
  When your business is around a "original photo" sharing platform for the "mass" and you focus on maxing "views". What else should we expect?
gppong 8y ago
I guess it reads as a little gross or awkward on the surface but those are all signs of people who are feeling lonely or powerless. When you’re really turned off by a post (or posts), try flipping it the other way around and see if you can feel your honest concern. Don’t patronize the person and make a big deal of the post, but act constructively: reach out and say hi and share the things that you like about them. And if you can’t feel moved to do that, that’s fine. You’re not obliged to do anything. But it just might make you leave less grossed out and it might do your friend some good.
- officemonkey 8y ago
  I think I would do this for my friends, even without Facebook. The problem is when I have to spend emotional labor tending to people I haven't seen since high school.
- overgard 8y ago
  It's not that I'm not empathetic, but the kind of Real Speak you're sort of proposing feels out of place in a relatively public setting. I'd rather have a coffee or beer with them if I know them well, and if I don't, it's not like I call them on it, but it does slowly make me want to interact with facebook less. (I know I can unfollow people, but at a certain point it strikes me less about people misusing facebook, and more that facebook incentivizes these kind of behaviors)
  - bscphil 8y ago
    > feels out of place in a relatively public setting. I'd rather have a coffee or beer with them if I know them well To follow up on gppong's comment, these are often people who don't know anyone well ("lonely or powerless"). So the fact that it's people you don't know well who post things like that is kind of obvious in hindsight.
officemonkey 8y ago
My favorite social network is the one I have on Goodreads. I love to see what my friends (who are readers) are reading. I also have found a bunch of people whose book tastes are similar to mine. Everyone is interested in the same goal: finding and reading good books. When someone overshares, or gets soapboxy, or just spammy, I just unfriend. I did this with my sister! That's something I'd never do on Facebook.
- Maakuth 8y ago
  I've also enjoyed Goodreads. It's almost a mirror image of FB in a sense: in Facebook, your friends often appear dumber than in real life. In Goodreads, only their reading is visible and that might make them appear smarter than you thought :) But how does one even overshare on Goodreads when all the updates are about book reads or picks to to-read? In the comments?
  - officemonkey 8y ago
    Or the reviews. If somebody is reviewing books I have zero interest in (eg: super partisan politics, superhero comic books) then I'm likely to unfriend them on Goodreads. One of my middle-aged male friends was really into Young Adult romances. Like two books a week. I had to let him go.
perl4ever 8y ago
I'm probably one of the rare people who has avoided Facebook for many years and has been using it more recently, so I'm just discovering many things people complain about. I figured out how to exclude people whose updates tend to be really judgmental or political from my feed without defriending them, but I am still really frustrated by there being no way to keep it chronological. Facebook wants me to read the "top" posts, over and over, apparently, regardless of whether I'm interested or have already read them. And yet, there are many updates that I miss if I don't go to the effort of looking for them. Most of the value to me is in the messaging function, but there's really nothing special about it compared to all the others that have existed - it's only useful because it's on FB and connected to the people I know that are there. I find it disturbing when people I don't know ask to be friends, if they don't have any friends in common with me. I can't really understand why FB even allows this as when would they not be bots or scammers?
- dec0dedab0de 8y ago
  I find it disturbing when people I don't know ask to be friends, if they don't have any friends in common with me. I can't really understand why FB even allows this as when would they not be bots or scammers? When it's someone you just recently met.
  - mygo 8y ago
    yep I can imagine an alternate reality where you move into a new town and are socially outcast online by a facebook policy where you must have at least one facebook friend in common. imagine going out of state for college and then not being able to add the hundreds of people you’ve met to your facebook friends list because you’re not already connected on facebook with at least one person in common. people would just spend more time on another social network, where they can connect.
  - marci 8y ago
    IIRC, last I used fb (some years ago), there was an option to only allow requests to be made by friends of friends. Faulty memory or option removed?
natecavanaugh 8y ago
I've definitely been guilty of #4 even recently (I'm not sure if they made anyone feel awkward, though; those that did probably just ignored it), but there are 2 reasons I don't mind it from the poster's point of view. 1. If it makes you feel awkward that I'm honest about who I am in writing, then yeah, our friendship is probably superficial at best, and in those cases, I'm not really concerned on your feelings about my feelings. Feel free to unfollow (I know I unfollow certain friends posts). 2. Blogs have been used for this sort of thing for a MUCH wider audience than a group of friends behind a gated digital community, and I've personally never had any kind of issue with reading people's personal struggles, even other devs, and in fact it makes them far more human to me. Then again, the type of vulnerability you're thinking of may be different than mine, but either way, to each his own. :) The rest of the behaviors you mentioned are pretty much why I generally don't use Instagram or Twitter more than once every few months. Those formats, even when following devs, seem to encourage the types of activity you're discussing at least in my feeds. But FB is probably the platform I curate the most, simply because most of the people I care about use it to share about their life, from milestones to quick takes, for the most part, without excessive narcissistic self aggrandizing posts (some do, but most are fairly harmless, otherwise after a while, I just choose not to follow). But I've noticed that there are definitely preferences across the board, which is mainly why they all seem to stick around. I doubt there will be one social media platform to rule them all, the same way there's no one amusement park or one kind of gym. There are behemoths, but there's always a long tail, especially in socializing.
stopnamingnuts 8y ago
This. The feed algorithm appears to be designed by committee with the usual results. Fonzi stuck his landing a long time ago. I used to post random thoughts that struck me as funny and I spent some time getting the wording just right. But I'm such an outlier that it stopped being fun. I just text them to a couple of people now. On the few occasions I go on Facebook I have to resist the urge to post a tongue-in-cheek comment about how I check in so rarely because "you're all so goddamn boring." And if I have to look at one more picture of somebody's $37 plate of paella I'm going to burn my eyes out with a fireplace poker.
- hellofunk 8y ago
  > I'm going to burn my eyes out with a fireplace poker. I hope you’re joking but if not, there is help available for you. Facebook is not reason enough for self-harm. It comes very, very, very close, but close is not close enough.
heckanoobs 8y ago
Honestly I left Facebook to get away from ppl like you who turn every post into a chance to judge me against some unwritten moral code. Who needs enemies when you have friends on Facebook? So it seems the candle is burning from both ends.
- seattle_spring 8y ago
  Don't post ridiculous political rants. Don't post passive aggressive public posts targeted at one of your friends. There, your unwritten moral code is now written. Go forth and spread your seed.
eksemplar 8y ago
Instagram and others like it killed my Facebook feed, but because it was Instagram and others, it meant that people spread, and as a result the other feeds died out fairly quickly as well. I don’t miss it much, but it made me realize I missed blogs and personal geeky pages with actual substance and that I had been using the shallow Facebook feed as a replacement for the “real” internet. Facebook is still so useful for groups and events that it’s impossible to leave though. I mean, you can leave, but then you’re the guy/woman whom others need to go out of their way to schedule with.
jpamata 8y ago
I have noticed the same thing, my news feed is full of people that I don't even message at facebook. Later I realised that it's because I unconsciously spend more time on their posts because of their clickbaity nature (ex. politics, humorous posts, attractive people, controversial topics) than I do with my real friends. I tried creating a few accounts to test this hypothesis and found out that even if I don't like or comment on their posts, just the act of hovering over their posts for a few seconds longer than other friends is enough for the news feed algo to prioritise these posts on my feed. Twitter got it right with a "customisable news feed", the list[0], where I could create several list timelines for my friends and organize them by those who post about tech, business, political rants, etc. [0] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists
telltruth 8y ago
I hope you realize most people on facebook are not there to find intellectual content. These are the same set of people who have made shows like Judge Judy and Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer famous. Vast majority of population loves cat videos and would click on "Top 30 reasons to see royal wedding". They are the one who will stay on FB for hours and contribute towards FB's impression goals. One time I was researching replies in twitter feed of Trump and other conservatives like Ann Coulter. It's purely fascinating how many people are out there with nothing else to do, hanging out there for hours on, posting stupid meme after meme for insignificant posts. You, me and crowd in general at HN is different. FB is not optimized for us and I highly doubt they would care about how we want FB to be.
- BicyclRepairMan 8y ago
  Username checks out
- gaius 8y ago
  Vast majority of population loves cat videos and would click on "Top 30 reasons to see royal wedding" I bet those people are shown what their friends post and are moaning on their own forums about the lack of memes and quizzes these days. The point of the algorithm seems to be to keep you scrolling and scrolling to see what you actually want so I bet that noone is happy.
telltruth 8y ago
BTW, FB has this "See First" feature where you can mark your friends to show their posts first. That has improved FB's usability to me just to borderline. Unfortunately they don't let me chose more than 30 people. It's mind numbing what kind of morons FB has hired who makes these decisions. Why the fuck I don't want to see more than 30 friends post first? Even worse, why the fuck can't they figure this out from all the decade worth of data they have on me?
rtpg 8y ago
I find Facebook to be way more enjoyable after aggressively muting people whose posts I don't care for. Now it's really an RSS feed for friends and family, minus a lot of junk
- mkirklions 8y ago
  I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to purge my friends list of thousands of people. I moved on.
baxtr 8y ago
Agree. It pretty much has the feeling of a sugar shock. You enjoy it first, get a bit of a rush, and then feel exhausted and gross afterwards. Better avoid it
SuoDuanDao 8y ago
Facebook and Youtube both seem to obviously be optimising for the wrong metrics. It's really unfortunate, their original versions were much more fun to use and probably easier to code, but they have sufficient network effects that any disruptors will have to be not just a little but a lot better to replace them, even as their quality drops.
bartread 8y ago
I am fully sick of all the political, religious, and commercial posts on facebook. It used to be fun: it used to be about what my friends were doing, and organising events. Now it's just full of garbage, all of which is pushing some sort of agenda, and it feels extremely tired.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  I havent used facebook in 3 months for anything other than a status asking for volunteers for an event. (and that status didnt even work) I havent missed it. It was a bunch of people that arent my friends sharing things that drive me crazy(politics that I have no impact on).
bmans94 8y ago
I’ve found that, much like reddit, it’s best experienced by tailoring your feed to what you actually want to see. In my case, I unfollowed all posts from anyone I don’t actually care about, and removed my interests section entirely (fan pages and such contributed at least 50% of the spam on my feed - random sports autoplay videos are not what I’m looking for when i go on facebook). Facebook is a tool for making sure I’m not out of the loop with my actual friends. I don’t need to keep up to date with some person from my calculus class halfway across the country - and if i do run into them again, i can simply ask.
Shorel 8y ago
If it is any consolation, I am thinking you are actually a judgemental person.

flamedoge 8y ago

you definitely don't sound like majority voice.

0x0 8y ago

Facebook was a lot more fun when there was a chronological timeline of non-rich-text status updates and comments from friends. These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion. I know there are interesting posts by people on my friend list but they're simply being hidden. Maybe some fb developer was happy with increased engagement metrics merely caused by confused users forever scrolling up and down in desperate attempts to find out where all their friends whose posts used to show up have gone. And when actual friends' posts show up, 90% of the time it's a like or a share of some uninspiring web page's article with no comment. It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.

tinalumfoil 8y ago
> These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion I think putting the spam on facebook on equal footing with its post targeting as to why people aren't using facebook is wrong. I have hundreds of friends and tens of pages on FB, which I'll admit by FB's standards isn't all that much, yet I still find it much harder to browse than other sites with many times the content. Most people simply don't post that often or not at all, and the pages I joined don't post often either. Despite how little content there is I find the issue of managing it all completely intractable. When I'm on Feedly I go through hundreds of posts worth of content in a few minutes by mashing the j key until I find content I want to read later, save it and then spend maybe 2 hours a week going through content I care about. When I'm on Twitter I skim until I see familiar content and pick out the stuff I care about. When I'm on reddit, I know it takes about 48 hours for my feed to "refresh" so I'll spend some time every other day skimming from top to bottom. I can't even begin to figure out a workflow for finding content on Facebook. The whole thing is laid out so quickly finding the things I care about is impossible. I can scroll past ten posts I've seen before something new pops up so I have no idea when to stop scrolling. There's no concept of a "read" post and unlike reddit the "hide" button, hidden behind a menu, acts like a downvote. I have no way of creating a single stream of just the things I care about, and if I did there's no way to update myself when things change. Unlike youtube, there's no RSS feeds so I can't just do my browsing from Feedly. Even just getting a feed of my events is impossible since FB has the audacity to suggest events from pages I've never interacted with, have no friends going and thinks those are more important to me than the events created by pages I actually follow. Push notifications are insanely coursely-grained (or at least they do a good job hiding the interface). Cambridge Analytica be damned, the reason I don't use FB is because I can't figure out how. My age, income level and computer-addicted brain should make me prime meat for advertisers, yet I change the oil more often than login to FB simply because the algorithms that generate my feeds are just that bad.
- derefr 8y ago
  “Tractable” is another way to say “I can finish what I came to the site to do, and then leave.” Of course they don’t want that! ;)

justboxing 8y ago

> pretty girls posting selfies of themselves doing nothing interesting, or dudes with gym photos, that kind of thing That's Instagram.

oceanman888 8y ago
When your business is around a "original photo" sharing platform for the "mass" and you focus on maxing "views". What else should we expect?

gppong 8y ago

I guess it reads as a little gross or awkward on the surface but those are all signs of people who are feeling lonely or powerless. When you’re really turned off by a post (or posts), try flipping it the other way around and see if you can feel your honest concern. Don’t patronize the person and make a big deal of the post, but act constructively: reach out and say hi and share the things that you like about them. And if you can’t feel moved to do that, that’s fine. You’re not obliged to do anything. But it just might make you leave less grossed out and it might do your friend some good.

officemonkey 8y ago
I think I would do this for my friends, even without Facebook. The problem is when I have to spend emotional labor tending to people I haven't seen since high school.
overgard 8y ago
It's not that I'm not empathetic, but the kind of Real Speak you're sort of proposing feels out of place in a relatively public setting. I'd rather have a coffee or beer with them if I know them well, and if I don't, it's not like I call them on it, but it does slowly make me want to interact with facebook less. (I know I can unfollow people, but at a certain point it strikes me less about people misusing facebook, and more that facebook incentivizes these kind of behaviors)
- bscphil 8y ago
  > feels out of place in a relatively public setting. I'd rather have a coffee or beer with them if I know them well To follow up on gppong's comment, these are often people who don't know anyone well ("lonely or powerless"). So the fact that it's people you don't know well who post things like that is kind of obvious in hindsight.

officemonkey 8y ago

My favorite social network is the one I have on Goodreads. I love to see what my friends (who are readers) are reading. I also have found a bunch of people whose book tastes are similar to mine. Everyone is interested in the same goal: finding and reading good books. When someone overshares, or gets soapboxy, or just spammy, I just unfriend. I did this with my sister! That's something I'd never do on Facebook.

Maakuth 8y ago
I've also enjoyed Goodreads. It's almost a mirror image of FB in a sense: in Facebook, your friends often appear dumber than in real life. In Goodreads, only their reading is visible and that might make them appear smarter than you thought :) But how does one even overshare on Goodreads when all the updates are about book reads or picks to to-read? In the comments?
- officemonkey 8y ago
  Or the reviews. If somebody is reviewing books I have zero interest in (eg: super partisan politics, superhero comic books) then I'm likely to unfriend them on Goodreads. One of my middle-aged male friends was really into Young Adult romances. Like two books a week. I had to let him go.

perl4ever 8y ago

I'm probably one of the rare people who has avoided Facebook for many years and has been using it more recently, so I'm just discovering many things people complain about. I figured out how to exclude people whose updates tend to be really judgmental or political from my feed without defriending them, but I am still really frustrated by there being no way to keep it chronological. Facebook wants me to read the "top" posts, over and over, apparently, regardless of whether I'm interested or have already read them. And yet, there are many updates that I miss if I don't go to the effort of looking for them. Most of the value to me is in the messaging function, but there's really nothing special about it compared to all the others that have existed - it's only useful because it's on FB and connected to the people I know that are there. I find it disturbing when people I don't know ask to be friends, if they don't have any friends in common with me. I can't really understand why FB even allows this as when would they not be bots or scammers?

dec0dedab0de 8y ago
I find it disturbing when people I don't know ask to be friends, if they don't have any friends in common with me. I can't really understand why FB even allows this as when would they not be bots or scammers? When it's someone you just recently met.
- mygo 8y ago
  yep I can imagine an alternate reality where you move into a new town and are socially outcast online by a facebook policy where you must have at least one facebook friend in common. imagine going out of state for college and then not being able to add the hundreds of people you’ve met to your facebook friends list because you’re not already connected on facebook with at least one person in common. people would just spend more time on another social network, where they can connect.
- marci 8y ago
  IIRC, last I used fb (some years ago), there was an option to only allow requests to be made by friends of friends. Faulty memory or option removed?

natecavanaugh 8y ago

I've definitely been guilty of #4 even recently (I'm not sure if they made anyone feel awkward, though; those that did probably just ignored it), but there are 2 reasons I don't mind it from the poster's point of view. 1. If it makes you feel awkward that I'm honest about who I am in writing, then yeah, our friendship is probably superficial at best, and in those cases, I'm not really concerned on your feelings about my feelings. Feel free to unfollow (I know I unfollow certain friends posts). 2. Blogs have been used for this sort of thing for a MUCH wider audience than a group of friends behind a gated digital community, and I've personally never had any kind of issue with reading people's personal struggles, even other devs, and in fact it makes them far more human to me. Then again, the type of vulnerability you're thinking of may be different than mine, but either way, to each his own. :) The rest of the behaviors you mentioned are pretty much why I generally don't use Instagram or Twitter more than once every few months. Those formats, even when following devs, seem to encourage the types of activity you're discussing at least in my feeds. But FB is probably the platform I curate the most, simply because most of the people I care about use it to share about their life, from milestones to quick takes, for the most part, without excessive narcissistic self aggrandizing posts (some do, but most are fairly harmless, otherwise after a while, I just choose not to follow). But I've noticed that there are definitely preferences across the board, which is mainly why they all seem to stick around. I doubt there will be one social media platform to rule them all, the same way there's no one amusement park or one kind of gym. There are behemoths, but there's always a long tail, especially in socializing.

stopnamingnuts 8y ago

This. The feed algorithm appears to be designed by committee with the usual results. Fonzi stuck his landing a long time ago. I used to post random thoughts that struck me as funny and I spent some time getting the wording just right. But I'm such an outlier that it stopped being fun. I just text them to a couple of people now. On the few occasions I go on Facebook I have to resist the urge to post a tongue-in-cheek comment about how I check in so rarely because "you're all so goddamn boring." And if I have to look at one more picture of somebody's $37 plate of paella I'm going to burn my eyes out with a fireplace poker.

hellofunk 8y ago
> I'm going to burn my eyes out with a fireplace poker. I hope you’re joking but if not, there is help available for you. Facebook is not reason enough for self-harm. It comes very, very, very close, but close is not close enough.

heckanoobs 8y ago

Honestly I left Facebook to get away from ppl like you who turn every post into a chance to judge me against some unwritten moral code. Who needs enemies when you have friends on Facebook? So it seems the candle is burning from both ends.

seattle_spring 8y ago
Don't post ridiculous political rants. Don't post passive aggressive public posts targeted at one of your friends. There, your unwritten moral code is now written. Go forth and spread your seed.

eksemplar 8y ago

Instagram and others like it killed my Facebook feed, but because it was Instagram and others, it meant that people spread, and as a result the other feeds died out fairly quickly as well. I don’t miss it much, but it made me realize I missed blogs and personal geeky pages with actual substance and that I had been using the shallow Facebook feed as a replacement for the “real” internet. Facebook is still so useful for groups and events that it’s impossible to leave though. I mean, you can leave, but then you’re the guy/woman whom others need to go out of their way to schedule with.

jpamata 8y ago

I have noticed the same thing, my news feed is full of people that I don't even message at facebook. Later I realised that it's because I unconsciously spend more time on their posts because of their clickbaity nature (ex. politics, humorous posts, attractive people, controversial topics) than I do with my real friends. I tried creating a few accounts to test this hypothesis and found out that even if I don't like or comment on their posts, just the act of hovering over their posts for a few seconds longer than other friends is enough for the news feed algo to prioritise these posts on my feed. Twitter got it right with a "customisable news feed", the list[0], where I could create several list timelines for my friends and organize them by those who post about tech, business, political rants, etc. [0] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists

telltruth 8y ago

I hope you realize most people on facebook are not there to find intellectual content. These are the same set of people who have made shows like Judge Judy and Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer famous. Vast majority of population loves cat videos and would click on "Top 30 reasons to see royal wedding". They are the one who will stay on FB for hours and contribute towards FB's impression goals. One time I was researching replies in twitter feed of Trump and other conservatives like Ann Coulter. It's purely fascinating how many people are out there with nothing else to do, hanging out there for hours on, posting stupid meme after meme for insignificant posts. You, me and crowd in general at HN is different. FB is not optimized for us and I highly doubt they would care about how we want FB to be.

BicyclRepairMan 8y ago
Username checks out
gaius 8y ago
Vast majority of population loves cat videos and would click on "Top 30 reasons to see royal wedding" I bet those people are shown what their friends post and are moaning on their own forums about the lack of memes and quizzes these days. The point of the algorithm seems to be to keep you scrolling and scrolling to see what you actually want so I bet that noone is happy.

telltruth 8y ago

BTW, FB has this "See First" feature where you can mark your friends to show their posts first. That has improved FB's usability to me just to borderline. Unfortunately they don't let me chose more than 30 people. It's mind numbing what kind of morons FB has hired who makes these decisions. Why the fuck I don't want to see more than 30 friends post first? Even worse, why the fuck can't they figure this out from all the decade worth of data they have on me?

rtpg 8y ago

I find Facebook to be way more enjoyable after aggressively muting people whose posts I don't care for. Now it's really an RSS feed for friends and family, minus a lot of junk

mkirklions 8y ago
I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to purge my friends list of thousands of people. I moved on.

baxtr 8y ago

Agree. It pretty much has the feeling of a sugar shock. You enjoy it first, get a bit of a rush, and then feel exhausted and gross afterwards. Better avoid it

SuoDuanDao 8y ago

Facebook and Youtube both seem to obviously be optimising for the wrong metrics. It's really unfortunate, their original versions were much more fun to use and probably easier to code, but they have sufficient network effects that any disruptors will have to be not just a little but a lot better to replace them, even as their quality drops.

bartread 8y ago

I am fully sick of all the political, religious, and commercial posts on facebook. It used to be fun: it used to be about what my friends were doing, and organising events. Now it's just full of garbage, all of which is pushing some sort of agenda, and it feels extremely tired.

mkirklions 8y ago
I havent used facebook in 3 months for anything other than a status asking for volunteers for an event. (and that status didnt even work) I havent missed it. It was a bunch of people that arent my friends sharing things that drive me crazy(politics that I have no impact on).

bmans94 8y ago

I’ve found that, much like reddit, it’s best experienced by tailoring your feed to what you actually want to see. In my case, I unfollowed all posts from anyone I don’t actually care about, and removed my interests section entirely (fan pages and such contributed at least 50% of the spam on my feed - random sports autoplay videos are not what I’m looking for when i go on facebook). Facebook is a tool for making sure I’m not out of the loop with my actual friends. I don’t need to keep up to date with some person from my calculus class halfway across the country - and if i do run into them again, i can simply ask.

Shorel 8y ago

If it is any consolation, I am thinking you are actually a judgemental person.