Make Hacker News Your Facebook Newsfeed | Hacker News Reader

Make Hacker News Your Facebook Newsfeed

github.com

253 pointsslammmm94 comments

I expected something more creative, replacing posts with my friends, like my grandmother sharing why React is awesome and my primary school friends discussing how did they go microservices.

this made me laugh much more than I expected it to

Circa 2040 racist grandpa memes are replaced with rants about the newest JavaScript framework

This is brilliant

I love this so much. Sitting at a party that you have no interest in, reading hackernews, while everyone thinks you're just hanging out on facebook.

Is one of those less nerdy than the other?

Yes, but it's also the one that's less fulfilling

it's funny how staring at your phone at a party is not only socially acceptable, but also almost necessary to communicate that you have friends. This browser plugins helps us less popular people appear important.

This is not at all true.

This is completely and totally true.

There are aspects of truth to this.

Or just redirect facebook to hackernews via your hosts file?

I can't emphasize enough how beneficial it has been to stop using facebook completely, I would highly recommend you try it.

I think the point of this extension is for people who need to access facebook features like groups and events, but don't want to get distracted by the dopamine-inducing newsfeed on the way

It's been more like cancer-inducing with all of the political talk these days.

I've unfollowed all my friends who discuss politics in an alarmist and sensationalist way (keeping the small number who take a tempered and balanced perspective), and it honestly _is_ saving me from cancer since my stress levels (which causes all sorts of ailments) are much lower now.

If that's the intention I would recommend this Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

Sure, I think OP's just proffering that rather than replacing it with nothing, you replace it with a feed you do want to see.

So instead you're distracted by the dopamine-inducing Hacker News feed.

Yep. I'm off facebook but I've been thinking about blocking hackernews and fark at the router level if I could. At some point you have to start doing things instead of reading about the people who are.

    noprocrast: yes
    maxvisit: 60
    minaway: 1440

Contemplating making minaway 10080

Other than it being almost a complete waste of time with all the nonsense spam clickbait articles there nowadays, I don't see what other benefits there are from avoiding it really. Jealousy at people's fake lives perhaps?

There are plents. This page (while obviously written to someone else) is good. Specifically for the number of links at the bottom with much more in depth information: www.matthewbrecher.com/socialmedia.html

What are the benefits?

I'm confused as to why someone would want this instead of just going to HN directly? If you don't like Facebook, don't use it. :-/

I thought the same, but I could use this to check messenger & groups while skipping the feed.

https://www.facebook.com/messages/ allows you to just view messenger directly.

http://www.messenger.com is the web version of their mobile messenger clients. I often spend extended periods without seeing my newsfeed/notifications but still use the messenger everyday.

One word: Addiction

Facebook events are invaluable to my life these days, but the news feed is an addiction that I've been fighting since university. If only I could be %100 dedicated to all resolutions without any effort then I wouldn't need any tricks like this.

Plus this is just meant to be silly. I should really just blank out the news feed like someone else suggested.

But you realize, that reading hacker news is, an addiction on its own? ;)

But clearly it's not addictive enough, someone needs to fully facebookize HN.

The difference is like coffee and heroin, also both HN and coffee are good for you.

Edit: doing the trick like this, injecting HN into FB feels like injecting coffee into your veins - I don't think it will give you the effect you're after.

You can also simply block out Facebook news feed. I wrote about it here :

https://medium.com/@NikitaVoloboev/the-best-kind-of-web-3c91...

Here is a similar attempt at fighting Facebook addiction https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/29032-hide-yo-timeline

as if humans were masters of their own minds. LOL

Yeah this was my first thought too. I way prefer just coming here than trying to navigate the shared HN stories on my Facebook timeline. There is something unsettling to me about seeing HN stories shared on Facebook anyway but maybe I'm weird.

There was a missed opportunity here to format HN posts using Facebook styles

I expected it to be FB posts formatted HN style.

Stop complaining, it's a GitHub project. Fork and improve! ;)

If you want this as a feature, you can provide it through a pull request OR submit it as an issue ticket on the repo, and we'll get to it.

Either way: https://github.com/yczeng/hackernews-newsfeed

there is already a facebook HN bot which posts top articles. Could always just block everything else from your feed except that.

I've always used an extension to completely block the news feed (like [0]) and I've found it to be an excellent deterrant to using facebook in general. Generally now I use messenger.com when I have to but otherwise completely avoid the site.

Although HN has now pretty much replaced facebook as my go-to site when I open a browser, so I'm not sure how useful it is after all. At least it's domain-specific and less psychologically manipulative.

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

I went cold turkey and closed my fb account. Feeling a little bit of abstinence, but I think I'm replacing it with more activity here and instead of opening fb on my phone, I open an ebook reader, so it's good so far.

I'd love to do that, but I'm sucked in by the social pull...too many of my friends use Groups and Messenger to organize, despite my pleas to the contrary.

In a perfect world, I'd have only the functionality that those two provide, perhaps with some sort of static profile.

Me too, but I still can't stop using WhatsApp, it's the most popular IM app in my country, and only a small percentage of my friends cares enough about their privacy and digital freedom to switch to an alternative.

Oh, I kept Whatsapp. It's not that I care about privacy or digital freedom, I assume those are lost by now.

I care about the amount of time I spend on those platforms and the amount of garbage I consume on them. Whatsapp is just a messaging platform, not one that provides an information feed to consume. I kept twitter because it's short and limits the text I could post to someone about something, which also limits the desire to do so because a tweet is ironic, informative or sarcastic, but cannot ensue a good and lenghty discussion (though some people try that, I cannot bear to imagine doing so)

Can't go without whatsapp. Though facebook is out. Never was very active. Heck, I am more on HN than on facebook, twitter combined.

I can't believe what an awesome idea this is.

Lately I've been saying I wish my Facebook friends followed Hacker News guidelines, Facebook would improve 1000% for me.

This cuts out the middle man.

Glad to hear it! :)

This is actually useful! I had unfollowed every one of my friends and my home page is always empty.

Why do you go to facebook then?

Event invites.

To decline game invites.

Groups and Events.

I've been off facebook for a month now and I really really miss pages of some artists and groups for abstract art. I was seriously getting into asemic writing at the same time I was trying to kick the habit of typing out whatever bullshit ideas about politics were in my mind. Aaaand I chose the latter. :-(

If you really miss those, you can write a bot that logs in a dummy account and scraps the content and emails it to you. Makes for a cool weekend project.

I've always wanted to do something like this but haven't found the time to. I've written something to turn my Twitter consumption into RSS feeds, and I want the same thing for Facebook. Just turn whatever things I want to follow into RSS feeds and read it at my leisure.

To get sad while wondering I need a life.

i'm considering the same! i use facebook more to follow/find groups or businesses that i have an interest in.

I agree. Facebook is a good place to connect with your friends. Not so good for any educational value though

Ha! this is great.

I made a similar one that replaces newsfeed with a todo app that unlocks when you complete your work: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/todobook/ihbejplhk...

It will also optionally replace Hacker News, Product Hunt, Reddit, Twitter, and Youtube homepages/feed with the same todo app. Basically all the sites that stop me from doing my work (HN is one of the worst for me)

I use a chrome extension go fucking do it, which disables facebook, twitter and reddit. The only thing that I can see is hackernews.

As a fall back, I have also installed facebook newsfeed eradicator (chrome extension), because I dont trust myself. It shows me motivational quotes instead of the newsfeed.

This extension just gave me the idea to replace the newsfeed with hackernews posts, and as someone mentioned, have the ability to comment on posts....(another side project enqueued)

What I have realized for myself tough is that being a developer, you need an avenue for mindless tasks. Unfortunately due to cultural programming and a good job on behalf of the creators, it is the social media sites, the productive yield of which is very low.

So, for myself atleast, I have realized that I cannot absolutely stop using these sites. The best thing to do then, is to replace it with another activity that is productive and similar. hackernews does a good job.

Some people mentioned reading an ebook that sounds better. Will try that as well.

I think gaming can be considered as well.

I completely agree. Although it is not that mindless of a task, I personaly prefer playing a musical instrument without thinking too much of its theory. Playing music like a musician who codes really helps.

Thats a good advice as well, tried my luck learning a guitar but the threshold to enjoyment was too high....I think I should pick that up again....

For now I play fifa, or CS with my team mates. Tough it takes much more time than i would want to give to it...

Immediately added to Chrome. Any plans on making it so that when I click 'more' I get more HackerNews rather than being redirected from Facebook to HackerNews?

Developer of hackernews-newsfeed here: I'll work on that this weekend :)

Check out the rest of comments. Making it look like some of my contacts shared news on HN would be awesome.. though tricky I presume.

The other dev of this project here - I think it's less of a challenge than presumed because, essentially, we're hijacking Facebook's markup structure anyway. All we have to do is inject stories one-by-one into existing elements rather than replacing the news feed entirely.

If you want this as an actual feature, create a new issue ticket for your request here: https://github.com/yczeng/hackernews-newsfeed. Happy hacking!

Done!

It could be a bit more creative. Like just insert some top HN posts into my feed rather than replacing the entire thing. Would be helpful.

Ok, now i like the concept, and it helps controlling the addiction to facebook. but doesn't this just get access to our facebook account ? and a hell of a privacy concern it creates.

The JavaScript is right there for you to read. This won't give anyone access to your FB account.

This does not make any sense. Like whats the point?

"I've made a robot that screams!"

"Why"

If you're sick of Facebook's ad-ridden news feed, why not try Lyra instead? www.hellolyra.com

Because no one really needs another social networking service.

We believe the web needs a conversation platform that's open, respects language and discourse, and is free from the influence of advertising revenue.

Yeah really, what is really the use of this thing ? i thought it would be interesting but it isn't.

Why would I need that unless I work at a place where I'm forced to use Facebook?

Neat userscript though!

I like it. Imma make it better. www.github.com/abhiii5459. This is me.

hn is one of the very few places where we can find stuff outside the "bubble". Putting it in FB feed will "create" another bubble.

Dont u think so ?

Cool stuff. But why would we want that?

Why do you need Greasemonkey for this?

You don't actually need Greasemonkey. These scripts are browser-agnostic, so if you use Chrome, you can just install this as a Chrome extension. If you don't use Chrome, you can install this on Firefox using Greasemonkey.

The chrome extension blocks the column to the left of the newsfeed for me, too. The tampermonkey script does not.

Currently, the Grease/Tampermonkey userscript and the Chrome extension driver script are separate entities. We're working to either make them one and the same OR be exclusively driver scripts, and the real work is done somewhere else.

If you want to make this a suggestion that we can track, open up a new issue ticket at https://github.com/yczeng/hackernews-newsfeed.

I suggested it and the issue was closed as "won't fix".

GENIUS!

This does not make any sense.

just delete a fuckin facebook profile, you will do yourself a favour

I think, this is a relevant comment as its a very direct way of achieving the same result - avoiding Facebook (or the way it affects us).

I got rid of my account few years back. Best thing I did. And I'd recommend that to most people.