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Comment by tgb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

>>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.

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