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Comment by badestrand | Hacker News Reader

I would love it if Facebook worked that way for me. But unfortunately its just selfies and crappy shares of motivational or "funny" memes. The people that I am interested in mostly never post anything - and me neither, because I a) would like to share with close friends and family but not everyone I am connected to* and b) I find it too stressful to having to worry that my post won't garner many likes and thus will be a "social failure"

* Yes, I know that I can set the target group but I never set it up and is too much work for just a small posting

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Unfortunately customizing your news feed takes some work. Frankly I'd like a setting that just says I'm not interested in any of the following:

- Tag a friend who ...

- Quizzes

- Inspirational quotes of any kind

- Social game results of any kind (or invites for that matter)

In my own feed I had a few culprits who were largely responsible for this noise. I think only in one case did I have to resort to unfollow (although it's an option). It seems that less than 20 sites/pages are responsible for the vast bulk of these. Or perhaps that's just the case out of my friends. I really don't know. Either way after hiding these posts and choosing to see no more posts from whatever the source page was, my news feed is pretty clean.

Others post a lot of BS politics, which I kinda hate. The more ignorant ones (we're talking family here) I've even baited when bored. But I know people who have started using Instagram to avoid the nonsense politics (even though some of these same people like to share inspirational quotes /sigh).

If you're interested in say family photos and updates then Instagram may be a purer experience for you. Assuming who you're interested in posts to Instagram that is.

As for your stuff not getting shared/liked, well that's a whole other thing. Disclaimer: I work for Facebook. Only for a short time thus far but long enough that I've been involved with a bunch of research on groups. A lot of people take groups pretty seriously. One admin I heard speak was talking about how he always made an effort to make people feel included and heard like if someone's post wasn't getting a lot of comments they'd go out of their way to comment on it and include others so that person felt like part of the community.

So I don't know what your interests are but I'm pretty sure at this point there's a group for basically everything. In the right group you may find more sense of community and less of a barrier to posting and sharing because of good admins and just the common interest you have by being in that group.

I use http://www.fbpurity.com/ to do filtering on Facebook and it works well enough even if it breaks the layout sometimes.

> In the right group you may find more sense of community

Interesting, but I am not even looking for a community, I just don't want to put a post out there that will be "unsuccessful". It doesn't bother me if I only get a few likes, it bothers me that all my friends see how my post is "failing". I am not in panic but it puts me off from posting. Am I the only one with those thoughts? Facebook without the like mechanism would cater to me much more.

Have you tried caring less about if you get likes or not, or whether your posts are "successful" or not, and just genuinely share things?

Whatever posts I make on Facebook are usually things I genuinely want to share, whether it's photos while I'm traveling, or link to an article that I find really meaningful. Some people will see it, they might even like it but not press Like, I don't really care. It's something that I wanted to share and I know it reached someone, and that's all I wanted to do. It could be an article that explains really well what Net Neutrality means and why people should care, or it could be an amazing waterfall in Iceland.

Incidentally, I subscribe to certain subreddits about hobby topics (like Dragon Ball Z), and whenever I make posts on them, I (irrationally) care more about how many upvotes (or worse, downvotes) my posts get than I care about my posts' "success" on Facebook. So maybe I do know what you mean, but I see Facebook differently (and more personally and less social-media-y) than everyone else does.

I prefer G+ Communities and Twitter for my nerdy, interest-based communications. Instagram for meatspace folk.

I don't know what it is exactly, but the Facebook stream fills me with an anxious loathing -- I even find that shade of blue repulsive.

> I would love it if Facebook worked that way for me. But unfortunately its just selfies and crappy shares of motivational or "funny" memes.

I don't know much about Facebook's feed because I don't use it a ton, but can't you just unfollow the people who post this stuff? I'd imagine after doing this just a handful of times, your feed would become a lot better tuned to the kind of stuff you actually want to see.

The ~once a month I do end up scrolling through my Facebook feed, I find a pretty healthy amount of interesting things from those friends of mine that are interesting. The majority of these aren't even links, they're actual posts.

> can't you just unfollow the people who post this stuff?

Actually I did just a month ago but now my feed is quite empty. It seems the people I am interested in stopped posting or even deleted their accounts. I wonder whether and how FB is working on getting those back.

The same happened to me. First, I started unfollowing people I don't interact with in real life anymore, after that, I unfollowed people I care about but who posted uninteresting things, then, I noticed there were tons of irrelevant Facebook pages in my timeline (pages I've "Liked" a long time ago maybe because I saw a good post from them or maybe the page's name was appealing) so I unfollowed all of them. I used to check Facebook several times during the day, now I check it two or maybe three times a day, because my timeline is almost empty. After several tries of quitting by deactivating my account, I think I finally found a good way to quit it, and maybe I don't even need to totally deactivate it since it doesn't absorbs my time anymore.

What I would like is the ability to filter out all reposts. If all you saw was original posts, it would clean up 90 percent of all the garbage.

> I find it too stressful to having to worry that my post won't garner many likes and thus will be a "social failure"

Shitposting has helped me personally get over that. I share stuff I find interesting and fun. If people like it, wonderful, if they don’t, eh it was a shitpost anyway what do I care.

The reasons I keep doing it are in part the same as everyone, it’s great when a little thing you found cool garners some attention, much dopamine, or brings out some stimulating discussion, much learn. But when it doesn’t do any of those, it still helps me better remember and notice those little moments in life that otherwise pale into the background. A form of intentionalness and inthemomentness or whatever the zen buzzwords are these days, if you will.

Strangely enough, I get more comments and questions IRL than I do likes/comments on Facebook. Seems people love to watch and read, but don’t lik publicly exposing themselves as having done so.

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