Comment by trpc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trpc | Hacker News Reader

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I like how Zuckerberg insists on blaming all his problems on Russia, white nationalists and all these memes and not addressing the real issues of his company because he knows he can exploit the MSM due to its liberal/left tendencies for a long time. Facebook is a spamming website pretending to be a social network. Everybody can tell the difference of Facebook now and pre-2014 before he deliberately changed the feed algorithm to become the biggest spam website of all time in order to make money. Is the low interaction rate on Facebook now compared to 5 years ago due to Russia? Is hiding posts from pages people like and subscribe is due to Russia? Is extorting pages to pay to promote posts to get 1/10 of the organic reach (mind you this is the organic reach of people who like and subscribe to your page, they can't even see your posts on their feed anymore) of what they got for free 5 years ago is due to Russia?

How about reverting all these changes and going back to simple feed as in 2000s and early 2010s Mr. Zuckerberg? oh yes you won't because the entire business plan of your company is to sell users data to advertisers and make users stay in your services as long as possible to view and click on these ads.

"...Facebook is a spamming website pretending to be a social network..."

This.

The claim to offer you tools for controlling what you see and your privacy. I spent quite a bit of time trying to limit idiotic, banal, and click-baity crap out of my feed. What did I learn? That more and more of it keeps coming.

At some point, I realized what it reminded me of: the early days of email, when nobody had invented spam filters yet. You could easily spend 5, 10, 15 minutes a day clicking and deleting junk ... only to see just as much in your inbox the next day.

Facebook uses your friends against you. That lonely lady that lives down the street? Turns out she loves horses -- and wants to share things from a 100 different horse sites with everybody all day long. The teenage kid that your uncle is raising? He loves funny memes, and there are a 100 of them too. Repeat and rinse for anybody, anywhere that you might consider some version of "friend" who wants attention.

And they keep finding more sources. As quickly as you block one, 15 more show up.

I tried finding the people who don't value my time and preventing them from sharing anything except things they wrote themselves. Nope. Not an option. Wonder why, Facebook?

It's a captive-audience, self-generating spam machine. Anybody that knows anything about regulatory capture saw this politicized pitch for more regulation coming a mile away. We were always headed here.

But aren't these... the people you accept into your network? Facebook injects ads and applies their own capricious weighing to the visibility of posts, but doesn't the content ultimately originate from the people you accept?

Sure. So here's the question: do you want everybody you want to keep in touch with to have control over your attention span throughout the day? The site is engineered so that it's a steady stream of almost-interesting, emotionally-manipulative things somebody you once knew finds interesting.

For many things, at least at first, I was more curious as to why these people found these things interesting, so I clicked. I slowly realized that "things I rind interesting to share" and "things a lonely person who has a lot of emotional drama in their life" would find interesting to share are worlds apart.

Doesn't mean I don't like these people. Doesn't mean I want to shut them off. Many of these people are part of my past, they feature highly in important memories. And Facebook is the only way to stay in touch. (No, my 85-year-old former English teacher isn't going to join Slack anytime soon)

So we're left with this binary yes-no choice. Either you accept them in your life and spend the rest of your years each day going through and muting all the various ways they find to spend their time -- or you either unfriend or unfollow them and have no idea what they're doing.

Unfollow is best of those two options, but then you end up missing things you really wanted to hear about, like them getting sick and dying. Facebook presents a Faustian choice: accept your "friends" and let them spam you or mute them completely -- and perhaps never hear from them again. Who wants to do that to Aunt Lisa?

The situation I see is that most people have multiple points of contact (phone, Line, FaceTime, Whatsapp, even Facebook Messenger) and different overlapping social networks which relay information. There's a difference between chatting with someone on Facebook Messenger vs. having the Facebook feed for major signals in life like death.

I think there may be "too much" when you're keeping track of people who die (or get married) and you're legitimately nervous about how you would've missed the news had it not been for Facebook.

There's a huge difference between confirming that one is related to someone (not doing so can be considered really rude or even immoral depending on culture) and sitting patiently and listening to that person.

This quote might be relevant

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

- Upton Sinclair

On several occasions over the last decade or so, I've witnessed famous SV CEOs make statements and write essays that say the most wonderful-sounding things. "I'm giving money to orphans", "I want to do X (Where X is a thing people love)", or in this case the match-and-lead "Yes, this is awful, isn't it? Here are some things you already agree to that will fix it"

In each of these cases, two things happened. 1) The crowd and the media ate it up. What an amazing, insightful, kind, and effective thing for them to suggest! There was no in-depth coverage beyond that. People who criticized these statements got political push-back on the issues involved, not the quality or meaningfulness of the position 2) Digging into it, it was clear that these ideas were most likely extremely self-serving. Things were not what they appeared. The orphan guy was setting up a trust fund to dodge taxes, the X guy was dodging an important responsibility by finding a scapegoat -- and here we are with Zuck. The kindest thing I can say is that perhaps theses ideas and actions are both self-serving and in the public interest. But I kinda doubt it.

People at Facebook are not morons. If we're seeing this problem now, they saw it many, many years ago. They've just been playing the long game, stalling until the stars align for the next phase which logically looks like regulatory capture. Growing the user base. Mining the machine for more money. I'm ok with people acting in their best interests and thinking so far ahead in a clever manner. These guys rock at it. What I'm not okay with is the example they're setting for our kids. A lot of kids and wannabe startup founders idolize these people. Is this the kind of generation we really want to raise?

I think you're spot on on your evaluation

I would advise not to block sources, but unfollow people. They will still be friends, but none of their crap will show up in your timeline

Well said!

I've just opened Facebook's homepage after about 10 days. 15 new notifications, and 14 of them were absolute junk.

8 friend suggestions that can't be turned off.

4 updates from my friends for some reason (FFS, that's what the home feed is supposed to show).

2 new events I might be interested in, and one event I'm going to has posted an update.

Nobody in their right mind is going to use a product where there's 1 useful notification out of 15. If I have to ask myself why? multiple times while using a product that claims that I have control over what I see, that product may as well be dead.

If I wished them any good, I'd suggest that they seriously consider rebranding as soon as possible. The word "Facebook" makes me immediately think of frustration, and there's no going back from there.

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