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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

The thing that drove me away from Facebook is not fake news, but that there is news (and other viral content) at all, fake or not. 90% of my feed is content about people and events I have no connection to or care for. I thought to whole point of FB was to connect with people you know.

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I've been hoping there would be a feature added to FB that would be simply "do not show any posts with links" or "do not show any posts sharing posts from another account." The number of things people post linking politics, news, random crap, memes, etc. is enough to almost drive me up a wall. I've tried putting lots of effort into curating by "hide things like this", etc, but inevitably more like it ends up in the feed. I really, really do not like the inability to disable that kind of content from the news feed showing up.

I would love that!

I go to Facebook for the cat and baby pictures, and knowing what people are actually doing in their lives. I want to see vacation pictures and people just living and enjoying themselves. I don't want to see re-shares from accounts who post polarizing shit that's mean to make everyone angry.

I'm not sure you even want this. Several studies have shown that it correlates with people being depressed about their lifes. Eg http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Of course correlation is not causality, but one should still be careful

I imagine that's where they get the vast majority of their ad-targeting signals, though. They can't show ads based on how much you like the random thoughts of an acquaintance of unknown proximity, they need us to signal our feelings toward fixed commercial targets and sources that can be analyzed reliably for sentiment.

It's a Faustian bargain.

For me it was the fact that the spammy hyperactive friends were prominently featured, whereas knowledgeable silent types that posted once in a while were completely removed from the feed. It should be exactly the other way round.

The feed thing is pretty easy to fix. You just have to tell Facebook you don't want to see posts like that (three dot menu). I did that a while back and don't get any memes or shared links on my feed anymore.

You would think so wouldn't you? But if you tell it you don't want one thing on your feed it is then supplemented by 10 others. It is virtually endless and there is no hiding all content that is not hand written by your friends and family.

I tried that. It builds up quickly again, because you can only disable individual sources. I have no interest in tending a viral garden. If Facebook wants to keep me around they'll instate a binary option to disable all 3rd party content.

Just unfollow everybody. Believe me you won't miss your feed.

That's my strategy also, can't recommend it enough.

I use a stylish plugin which masks the feed entirely. It was useful when I was having to use facebook often to promote a brand. Nowadays though it's eliminated the vast majority of facebook's use for me. 95% of my notifications are random 'so and so invited you to an event' and 'so and so posted in some group'. I realized that the fb feed had become a content aggregator, much like that other website we all know and love(?), but instead your f&f were the contributors. Blacking out the feed of inane content effectively made fb useless for me.

I did same thing. It makes you ignore newsfeed by default because it will only contain ads.

And slowly, I started to check facebook less often. Now I log onto facebook maybe once or twice a week. And that is only if I need to contact someone.

Instagram has been really horrible about this. The app constantly suggests that I follow the same people even after I “x” their suggestion. I don’t need a random person I went to elementary school with and haven’t talked to since to show up in my feed everyday. I could block them but that seems like overkill.

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