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Comment by clusmore | Hacker News Reader

I haven't deactivated my account, but I have unfollowed absolutely everything so that I have an entirely blank news feed, and uninstalled the app from my phone to avoid notifications. I still use messenger for communication with friends. For me, it was the realisation that 99% of the content in my news feed was posts by corporate pages. I signed up to connect with friends, and initially I did only see status updates from friends. But over time it became exclusively friends liking or commenting on posts by pages, and I was no longer connecting with people.

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> But over time it became exclusively friends liking or commenting on posts by pages

I just scrolled through several pages of my newsfeed (actually found a bunch of pages I never saw content from but which were also not relevant to me anymore which I unliked) and didn't find anything like that. Everything was personal posts, a few relevant page posts and posts from groups I'm in.

But why did you unfollow everything just for messenger? Wouldn't it be far easier to just use the messenger site directly and ignore facebook.com?

Hmm, maybe it has improved. I did this around a year ago. I spent weeks trying to train it, hiding every single "X liked this post" "Y commented on this post" and worse "Z liked a comment on this post" hoping to only see actual posts by my actual friends but it never worked. The reason I unfollowed everything was to stop my self from coming back to Facebook and scrolling through pages of garbage, wasting my time. Now if I ever accidentally visit Facebook (I do use messenger.com) it's empty so I close the tab straight away.

I was recently surprised to find out they if you deactivate your account, FB gives you the option to keep Messenger. Might be an option for you or OP.

Most of the posts from friends on facebook are personal posts and even the ones that are my friends commenting on posts or sharing stories are at least somewhat interesting to me because I want to see what my friends think are interesting or important.

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