Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

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There are two things, one trivial and one non-trivial, that would vastly improve the feed for me (and I imagine for a certain cohort of which I am a member):

The trivial one: Allow me to turn off all links. All of them, globally. I don't care about the news article you just saw that reinforces your political views; I don't care about the clickbait editorial you just read; I don't even care about the moderately interesting piece you just shared because I probably already saw it on Twitter. No links. Just the pictures and status updates like before the age of inline expand.

The non-trivial one: Allow me to turn off all images with text in them. Why? Because these are, with stunningly high frequency, visual versions of the same political-view-reinforcement article links. I already know if a friend or family member identifies as a liberal or a conservative. I don't need a regular stream of smug SomeEECards or Memegenerator pictures to remind me. On the technical side, there's clearly some fuzziness, but I have to think simply detecting the presence of text would be a comparatively simple task to what else Facebook's deep learning systems do.

What you are describing is basically Instagram. No "sharing" or "reposting" other content, only original posts from friends. Some have found ways around that but it's not the default.

I'm not familiar with Snapchat but I expect they have a similar mechanic. It seems like the newer social networks are avoiding the problems caused by virality, and getting back to the original reason we wanted to join social networks: to see what our friends are up to.

Instagram has no links...

Interesting, a bunch of my instagram friends use it to share memes and reposts. Facebook seems to have more "personal" photos whereas instagram seems to be (at least amongst my friends) more of where they share cute random images or pictures of celebs, what bands they like, etc.

For the Trivial one -

http://www.fbpurity.com/

>F.B. Purity is a browser extension / add-on that lets you clean up and customise Facebook. It filters out the junk you don't want to see, leaving behind the stories and page elements you do wish to see. The list of story types that FBP hides is customizable to your taste.

I'm not sure what it is on the surface but that site instantly screamed "scam/virus" at me as soon as I opened it. I think it's because it looks cluttered and some images just look out of place (including a stretched Facebook share button on the right)

Is it actually trustworthy?

It does what it says on the tin, but the dev is gradually being squeezed out of various browsers (due to plug-in API deprecation) and sometimes falls behind in the arms race vs. Facebook.

There are two things, one trivial and one non-trivial, that would vastly improve the feed for me...

And Facebook isn't interested because it's not intended to build something that's everyone's perfectly tweaked feed.

It's much more in Facebook's interests to be a somewhat uniform "public space" than to be everyone's ideal filter. To some extent, it forces people to care stuff they wouldn't otherwise simply because the stuff is being made public.

Part of this is that we aren't Facebook's customers, we are Facebook's product and Facebook's advertisers are its customers. But that was essentially true of newspapers as well (newsstand revenues were supplement to advertising revenues even before the Internet).

To some small extent that can be a good thing since a human society requires some mutual awareness of our activity. Like newspapers, Facebook and other social media generate something like a space where public reactions can be seen. An information filter couldn't do that - for ill or good.

>Allow me to turn off all links... Allow me to turn off all images with text in them.

Would hiding all of them work? According to the post, the algorithm treats hides as negative feedback and tries to avoid those posts in the future.

It's a never ending battle. They never go away completely.

It seems the algorithm would interpret that as 'show less posts from this person' or 'show less posts about this topic', rather than 'show less posts that are links'.

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