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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

One simple way to improve the quality of news republished on Facebook (albeit at a possible loss of some revenue) is to pull out the date of publication and clearly indicate to the person sharing how old the article is. Well-meaning friends are constantly posting urgent-sounding stories about events that happened months or years ago because they overlooked the date of publication.

For example, I know a good few people who are opposed to that pipeline being built in North Dakota right now. Unfortunately they sometimes repost any news story about an oil spill or pipeline failure they come across in the mistaken assumption that they're seeing because it just happened.

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A way I'd prefer: quit letting people share news on facebook.

Heck, let's go back to text-only status updates and I can go back to reading what my acquaintances are eating. That would be much more pleasant than today's facebook.

How would you like them to share the news?

Email or text. Facebook itself is entirely unnecessary.

Why not just write a letter? Email and text are entirely unnecessary.

I deactivated my facebook years ago. Everyone who wanted to stay in contact I gave them a po box to write letters to. I check it bimonthly. It's pretty nice honestly.

I will respond seriously even though I know you're trying to be facetious.

Email and text, like Facebook posts, are all instantaneous means of communication, unlike sending a letter. Email and text are actually better too, because I can send the article directly to the recipients I intend on sharing it with, as opposed to a Facebook post, which is like an email, except the To: field is populated with <my entire address book, potentially>

In their own words.

Actually this gave me an interesting thought. The amount of effort required to "share" or "retweet" something is almost zero - it's a click. On the other hand, the effort to summarize something in your own words is more. Not a whole lot more, but enough that many fewer people do it. So I guess the tl;dr here is: maybe the shares that required more effort could be ranked higher.

Maybe a better summary: "retweets are cheap"

Why would I want people sharing news?

If I want to read about what's going on with the world, I'll read a news site. If I want to know what's going on with my friends' lives, I'll read facebook.

Your friends may not share your highly compartmentalized approach to socializing. For many people events in politics directly impact their lives; it seems to me you're asking that your friends refrain from disturbing you with information you don't want to know about.

There's a word for people who can't refrain from sharing their political opinions with their friends: they're called prats.

Unfortunately facebook in its current implementation seems hellbent on encouraging people to be prats.

>For many people events in politics directly impact their lives

That doesn't fit what I've seen on Facebook. A better description, "for many people, ranting about their political opinions on Facebook seems to be fulfilling for them." The only way it impacts their lives is that it was the source of their entertainment for the day.

If you have text-only status updates, couldn't someone still post the title and the URL?

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