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Comment by dickbasedregex | Hacker News Reader

I left FB ~4 years ago. One of the straws that broke the camel for me was that it was obvious FB was "curating" my feed for me. Without notifying or consulting me. Posts from friends wouldn't show in my feed and vice versa. The privacy issues were bad enough but when I couldn't trust the platform to fulfill the only need I had for it, I walked.

I'm far better for it.

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The worst part is you can switch it back to the chronological view, but Facebook will undo your change at their earliest convenience. You have to make a bookmark to the correct feed to keep it showing up properly.

It is annoying, but I'm not a power user. I only check it once every few days to keep up with the relatives, maybe post once a week or so. It's pretty low maintenance.

And worse -- they seem to have recently capped the chronological view to 24 hrs. with just a tag at the end "to see more, add more friends" :-/

AFAICT even the "chronological" view is not chronological. I don't know -- I switched over to mbasic.facebook.com because it works without JavaScript -- but I remember posts randomly appearing and disappearing.

There is no chronological view You have either: 'Most recent' = filtered or 'Top stories' = heavily filtered

my favorite part is when facebok switched to prioritizing popularity of posts, and not time.

Now I see from my friends "I'm going out to devil's den in 20 minutes if anyone wants to join me - 23 hours ago"

yeah, thanks for that facebook. i really needed cat videos and political rants triaged ahead of that for a whoel day.

If it is a complete machine-learning backed algorithm (I have no idea if it is), it could learn that if you find a time sensitive post after the deadline, it gives you FOMO and you start checking FB more frequently. That is, the algorithm is optimizing for engagement.

Given that you were frustrated by not seeing all of your friends' posts and their not seeing all of yours, how are you better for it now that you see 0.0% of your friends' posts of any kind and now that you can now share your own content with only 0.5% of them (personally or through email etc)?

Depends on how he reacted to the change. I started talking to my friends on the phone more often. I probably also reduced the overall number of friends I have - but then are they really friends if you won't make the effort to contact them? Maybe I'm just old enough to feel comfortable letting past friends, colleagues, etc. fade into the past in favor of focusing on the people right in front of me.

Perhaps those 0.5% are the ones who matter. There are friends and then there facebook friends.

i'm in this situation as well, i've moved to a slack group with my work friends and direct messaging with others, facebook was just a shitty way to talk to people i don't really care about where my posts were spirited away almost immediately

0.5% is being generous, i had almost no interaction with people i cared about while i was on there and i'm glad i've switched to other platforms where they aren't as interested in feeding me their stuff and just letting people talk

FYI Slack could easily do the same thing. And indeed, being a closed system, what protection do you have against it?

That would utterly annihilate its corporate use if there was even a rumor they randomly censored content like operations and QA/QC discussion. My company also pays extra money to slack for the "we log everything for your e-discovery enjoyment" so there would be substantial legal issues if they randomly started hiding stuff we're paying to be e-discovered. Slack has problems, but weird censorship stuff isn't one of them.

Weird as it probably sounds, FB sucks for humans because its users are people not corporations.

What makes you think I see 0.0% of my friends' posts? What you're actually saying is that people who have left facebook see 0.0% of stuff on Facebook.

That's not a problem.

Friends will share important stuff outside of Facebook because that's how friendship works.

And there are many other platforms where things can be shared too. People can post the same or similar things to multiple platforms quite easily these days.

To answer your question, the only thing worse in practice than no news, is fake news.

There are relationship negatives to censored personal news. My wife was tangentially involved in a family feud where facebook randomly promoted or hid various attacks and defenses and apologies of the two major factions. Its just not a platform useful for social interaction anymore. The censorship of the family feud and the resulting weird interpersonal drama reminds me of some incidents in the meme-war on facebook leading up to the election of Trump which is interesting.

Superficially it sounds awful to have family drama increased by hiding half the posts, much like playing a board game where half the moves are deleted sounds terrible. However, for a short period of time, until the users are completely alienated, FB made money by increasing the depth and length of that family feud by increasing readership during the height of the feud. In the long run people won't use FB at all, of course.

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