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Comment by r3bl | Hacker News Reader

On top of that, Facebook and I have a different view on what constitutes as an ad.

A Facebook page that I'm following paying money to reach me is an ad according to Facebook. To me, that's extortion.

On the other side, we have notifications about friend suggestions. You can't turn them off in the notification settings. That to me is an "ad" for Facebook itself, even if nobody payed them money. It's an undesired content that pulls my attention away from what I came there to do in order to promote a product.

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> A Facebook page that I'm following paying money to reach me is an ad according to Facebook. To me, that's extortion.

How would you fix that? The only thing I can think of would be a chronological feed where everybody sees every post.

That would indeed be best and has been the number one complaint about Facebook UX since time immemorial. It would also end one of the most annoying issues on FB's timeline - "I just saw an interesting post, but the timeline randomly refreshed itself and now it's gone".

The model they currently use serves two goals: to extort money from fanpages, and to hook users up by intermittent reinforcement.

Oh yes, very occasionally it's been an ad, or at least mass media output - even when I recall who posted it it's hard to find.

They probably already record every item displayed on screen (and how long for, and whether my cursor hovered it, etc.) so a list of items I saw (on any device) in the chronological order I saw them should just be a simple db lookup away.

Do they need to solve it or do they need to provide me with the tools to help me filter them out?

If you build a cockpit by measuring everyone's dimensions and averaging them, you'll end up with a cockpit that fits nobody[0]. I believe the same is true for feeds as well.

There's an amount of information that works for the average Facebook user. However, none of us are precisely on that average. By building algorithms whose mission is max consumption by the average user, they've made their product useless to everyone.

[0] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

Delete Facebook.

Honestly, everything this company does is shady beyond all shame.

Twitter keeps fucking around with their timeline feed, but they've preserved a "chronological, show me everything" option through all of their other bad ideas.

Do you hide tweets liked by the people you follow? Shadow notifications? "In case you've missed it" sections?

After a few refreshes of my Twitter homepage in a short time span, I did a little research: I've edited the CSS to make the distinction of "liked" tweets more obvious. Over 50% of "fresh" content turned out to be likes by the people I follow that are in no way chronological.

You can fight it... for now, but I assume not for long. I've stopped relying on Twitter for that same reason I've stopped relying on Facebook.

> Shadow notifications?

Is that the name for the "recent tweet from X" notifications? Those have made Twitter notifications completely useless for me. :(

That's how I refer to all the notifications that I didn't expect and don't need.

As far as I know, there's no universal term for them. Since we already associate darkness with bad UX patterns, "shadow notifications" as a subset of "dark patterns" has a nice ring to it.

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