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Comment by cabaalis | Hacker News Reader

As a mid-30s guy, I use Facebook primarily to share pictures and updates of my son and things we do together with my friends and family.

Every. Single. Person. that I personally know despises the political crap, occasional venting of some personal problem, and news outrage fishing that comes across on there. I wish there was some way to "categorize" these posts, and to allow me to simply filter out what I don't want to see. As an example, there is a person I am friends with on there who I greatly admire and enjoy being friends with. But every time I see "Drumph" with a big red background, I sigh and scroll on. I don't need that in my life.

Even if that makes me miss the odd post here and there, they are practically valueless anyway and seeing only the categories of updates that I want greatly outweighs that minuscule loss.

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I'm in the opposite camp: I stopped using FB because all friends were posting pictures of their kids, family, trips, parties, whatever. I really don't understand how people can post such things to FB.

I don't care what their kids ate today or how they fell asleep. I don't care that they bought a new phone and now posting pictures of it. I think all that stuff is personal and shouldn't be exposed to the public.

But I wish I could open FB and read political and tech news (no fakes please).

But ... why? You can read political and tech news anywhere why read it on Facebook? The only thing I want to see on Facebook are the things I can't see elsewhere which are: personal updates and local events.

Because Facebook is uniquely positioned to show you news that aligns with your views (or is opposed to your views- is there an option for that?)

Uniquely? Do you really have a hard time finding news sources that align with your views? This has been a solved problem since the invention of the newspaper.

Facebook knows alot more about your views than the New York times does.

How is that a good thing for where you get your news? It is one of those things where it is probably better that you are getting an objective (not crafted for you) selection of the contemporary news instead of one that's filtered for you.

That's exactly the problem with politics in today's society. So many people are getting their information from places like Facebook, and much (most?) of this information is biased and/or less than factual. This causes people to develop more extreme, more polarized viewpoints than they would otherwise have.

Because FB collects so much data about everyone and it would be nice to have personalized news, events, articles in your feed. Instead of using websites that show the same thing for everyone.

But they use all that data to show me pictures of crappy food, kids, drunk parties and stupid FB game ads.

FB doesn't optimize for enriching you, or even for agreeing with you - it's optimized for engaging you. If a barely-lucid rant comming out of a political faction you hate will mindworm you, that's what they'll show you.

Apparently their optimization strategy failed to engage in this instance.

>Instead of using websites that show the same thing for everyone.

But that's a good thing. It sounds like you WANT to be ensconced in a political bubble. People splitting off into echo chambers is a major source of the problems we see today.

Yah, the only thing I really like on facebook is pictures of friends hiking and backpacking trips. Some of the hiking groups also have great content and relatively recent info on trail conditions that is hard to find elsewhere.

>>The only thing I want to see on Facebook are the things I can't see elsewhere which are: personal updates and local events.

You can only get personal updates on Facebook?

What a strange thing to say.

I think it's fairly accurate. If you have a couple dozen (or 100) friends scattered around the world, it's a lot easier to see pictures of their kids or new kitchen on a Social Media platform than to try to call them every day.

Why do you feel like you need to see pictures of their kids and new kitchen if they are scattered all over the world?

Does it make you feel like you care about them?

I can't legitimately care about 20 people living in 20 different parts of the world?

That's not what I meant.

Here's what I'm getting at: if you really cared about someone, you wouldn't settle for the bare minimum of passively consuming their uploaded photos and status updates.

I posit that Facebook is popular among people with scattered friends and relatives because it makes them feel like they care. However, in my opinion, truly caring about someone warrants more than just maintaining an awareness of what is going on in their lives by consuming their content on your news feed and occasionally clicking 'Like' or posting a comment.

In terms of social media, yes, it's the only place that will tell me that my high school friend is getting married. And to a large extent it's the only thing I will ever find that out from, depending on who we are talking about. In other words, the social updates that I go to Facebook for are updates that I cannot get elsewhere.

> But I wish I could open FB and read political and tech news

RIP Google Reader

I agree - posting pictures of your children on facebook or any social network (assuming they are young enough to not understand or care) is doing something against their will. Who knows how facebook/government is going use this data in the future, and how it will affect them down the road.

Disclaimer: I have no kids, and im not on facebook

> is doing something against their will

kids have no will, legally speaking, until they are not minors.

going to school is often 'against their will' as well, few argue that forcing them to go is an abuse of parental power..

that said, this is a different topic and of course you have a point.

You've got it backwards -- FB is for staying in touch with people digitally (i.e. the pictures of their friends and family). There are a plethora of other sites better suited for reading political and tech news (HN being an example)

I find Google photos to be much better at sharing photos and videos with family and friends. Photos are posted to specific shared albums. People who may care are invited those albums, those that don't care don't accept. They get notified when there are new ones and can make limited comments. I like that it is just a place to share/view photos - I don't need a million other features or distractions.

News - anywhere but FB.

So what do I use FB for? Local groups, the community, yard sale, a few for specific interests. I might check it weekly.

You "don't understand" how people can have a desire to share pictures of their children with friends and family members who care about them? No one cares that you "don't care what their kids ate today" - just stop following them or unfriend them.

> I really don't understand how people can post such things to FB.

I live 10k kilometers away from my family, so posting those things to Facebook is an easy way to keep each other up-to-date with our daily lives.

> As a mid-30s guy, I use Facebook primarily to share pictures and updates of my son and things we do together with my friends and family.

Make sure you have the originals of those pics backed up somewhere else. When I tried to use the "takeout" (not sure what's the proper fb name) to download all my FB content and get pics from a decade ago when I wasn't as diligent in backing, I was surprised to find out that fb gives you 800x600 versions of your photos, with all EXIF metadata wiped out, even though they still have the original size.

It was a big "oh, you want your stuff so you can leave fb? here's a big fuck you". They actually spent resources to make your experience worse.

I'm pushing my kids photos to their own Google Photos album. Every once in a while I'll pull down the entire thing so I have a copy. They don't act like they own my photos.

Are you sure they have the original size from 10 years ago? I think they may have been saving space/bandwidth back then by only keeping resized versions.

They do, if I open the photo on the fb website and download it, I get the original size. If I download through their takeout service, I get around 800x600 (exact dimensions vary slightly) with no EXIF data.

They actually go the extra mile just to make your life shittier. Such a great company!

That's why I stopped using FB. The last election unhinged some of my friends, and it became tiresome.

I had one who went full lunatic, pizzagate and all. Does anyone have good theories as to how (and I mean cognitively how, not a description of the phenomena) this happened especially more in this last cycle?

echo-chamber is all you need to know (besides basic understanding of social psychology and psychology overall)

Somehow I think it's not ok to post pictures of your children on Facebook. Maybe, in hindsight, they don't want that once they're grown-ups. Then again, maybe that's just me thinking that

I think as long as you keep track of who you're sharing with (maybe keep it to family, close friends who actually care about the children) it's really no different than emailing pics or breaking out wallet snapshots during parties. The only additional issue would be Facebook's face-tracking algorithms and things like that - a parent would have to make their own determination about that.

> it's really no different than emailing pics or breaking out wallet snapshots during parties.

It's more like breaking out wallet snapshots at a party, handing them off to a middleman who scans and stores them for future analysis, then maybe shows them to your friends (with some advertisements mixed in) depending on whether or not their algorithm decides it's profitable to do so.

How about bugs around privacy features? How about somebody clicking "save as" on your pictures and doing whatever they want with it?

Personally, I use an adaptation of the "an unloaded gun doesn't exist" rule and think that once you put something on the Internet, anywhere on the Internet, it is accessible by everybody for ever.

Use the Social Fixer plugin. You can hide posts based on keyword matches (political, Trump, Scentsy/Pampered Chef, etc).

You can quickly curate your feed to something more pleasant. https://socialfixer.com/

Generally curious why don't you use instagram or snapchat, if you are just sharing pictures and updates of your son with friends and family?

I assume the main reason is the older members of your family only have facebook.

Less tech savvy relatives and friends are not on Snapchat/Instagram. Plus, Instagram feels more like a picture book than a musings diary. Basically, Instagram/Snapchat are less 'communicative' (I mean, they have their uses, of course).

To answer your question, probably laziness. I've got all those contacts on FB and would take a decent effort to connect on other platforms. Secondary to that, I'm sure several of my family members are FB-only.

You can click the button to hide all from "news", politics, and meme pages as they appear in your feed. It's rather tedious to filter out all of them but after doing that my feed mostly only shows my friends and family out doing stuff.

Thanks, sounds like exactly what I was asking for! I'll look into that this evening.

It's absolutely worth it. I also started unfollowing people while remaining "friends". My stream is so curated I can get 5 mins of FB a day to see all I want to see.

This is starting to break for me. I am getting content now (mostly pages) where that button is missing. I only use the website and whenever I browse my feed I actively filter content. I'm seeing it all start to bubble up again.

If this is a true story, you would have taken the 20 seconds to look at the post and click that you want to see either less post or see no post from the person. But it is also possible you just wanted to complain about people complaining about Trump.

That's a bad fix. There are lots of people I like interacting with, on a normal, non-political basis, that I can't get along with politically. In normal social situations, we get along fine, because it's not normal to constantly talk about divisive political issues. But on Facebook, it's become (for many people) a norm to post endless political memes.

If I didn't want to hear anything about these people's lives, I wouldn't have friended them in the first place. I don't want to have to block all of their posts just so that I don't have to deal with their obnoxiously-expressed views.

Ultimately, I think the norm of people posting political things on Facebook will go away--or at least, the only people being obnoxiously political on Facebook will be the same people who are obnoxiously political in real life. In the mean time, it's pretty annoying.

You missed a possibility: I wanted to complain about seeing things in Facebook that I do not want to see nor add any value to my life, which is exactly what I wrote in my post. It also happens to be the accurate selection of my intent.

This is a bullshit thing I always hear from pro-FB people. I tried doing that and the result was that my feed is incredibly sparse because it turns out that the most annoying people are the ones that post often, and regular people rarely post. So now, every time I log in, 85% of the content is something I've seen more than 3 times already. Your choice is either crappy content, or redundant content.

I'm in the same boat as you, but this just means you should check Facebook less. Obviously not good for Facebook, but it seems great for us.

My solution has been to unfollow everyone. I still get event notifications, I can still use messenger, but I don’t see ads (the home screen thinks I’m a new user), and it’s one less endless feed to be addicted to. I check it every couple of days, and spend 0 time on site.

Less work than it sounds like. And as you say, bad for them, good for us.

That's the greatest thing about twitter: You never run out of fresh content.

That's the greatest thing about farms: You never run out of fresh manure.

The problem with that is I've found that telling FB I want to see less of a post often translates into not seeing anything from that person.

It's not a left / right... trump / anything else item like you seem to be making (the original person gave an example, you seem to be taking his example personally).

The request seems pretty simple - give people a way to categorize the content they post and then give the friends a way to filter what comes into their daily stream of stuff by those categories.

> I wish there was some way to "categorize" these posts, and to allow me to simply filter out what I don't want to see.

Just use Instragram instead. It's FB with just pics.

Unfriend or unfollow people? If you want to see photos and updates of your son, only follow your son. I genuinely don't see the issue.

I'd be pretty upset if I grew up to find out that my parents had been sharing pictures and details of my life with an advertising company from an early age. You've taken away his ability to make an informed choice whether or not he wants Facebook to have a permanent record of his entire life from birth... and for what? Internet points?

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