I tried to make Facebook's news feed random and fun | Hacker News Reader

I tried to make Facebook's news feed random and fun

theatlantic.com

32 pointsmatt40778 comments

This is why I mostly gave up on FB, I hate how the same article you commented on, circles back up every time someone else comments on it...I tend to like to give my two cents, then mostly forget about if someone replies and I catch it in notifications and want to respond I'll do it, I don't need it in my feed to do that, they also should have some toggle to avoide seeing the same thing twice duplicate content gets so fucking annoying.

Reddit, there's some duplicates w/ cross-posting, but for the most part you click /r/all or even /r/frontpage it's a much funner experience for input seekers.

Multireddits are my favorite, if I'm in a tech mood I've got one for tech / startups or one for just webdev/programming, etc... It's also a lot less 'look at me' and more 'look at this cool thing', plus there's a snippy/witty attitude that most comments on reddit seem to have.

Honestly I feel depressed, moody, and mind-drained when I browse fb, reddit I feel more relaxed, and enriched. I also keep my frontpage on reddit less political, facebook is way too political.

One thing I occasionally do in my free time: Wikipedia has a Random Article feature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Just click and you will be redirected to a random article. Most of the time the article will not be very interesting to me, but occasionally I discover interesting things I never knew about.

Here's a few wikis I like to randomize sometimes:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Special:Random

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Special:Random

I set the random wiki URL to be my browser homepage years ago, so I get a random page each time I open up a new window. I suggest everyone do it!

A little randomness is fun and enjoyable. Not to mention, it can throw off those ad targeting algorithms a bit by injecting a little disinformation into the mix.

One of my favorite (now, sadly defunct) links was http://random.yahoo.com/bin/ryl to give you a random link from the Yahoo! directory.

A little randomness is what made StumbleUpon so enjoyable, too. But, like the link you've shared, it too is defunct.

I spent an afternoon writing a python script that picks a random word, searches sites where weird/creative folks gather (instructables? tumblr? hacker news? are.na? i need more ideas!), and opens a random link from the search results. The word list it draws from needs some pruning, but it was a decent way to return to the feeling that SU used to give me. I was thinking of turning it into a single serving site, but my dev skills really aren't up to par yet. I don't know where I'd even start to get a basic page up and running.

It's nifty to read about a collection of services from people who had similar feelings!

check out /r/randonauts fatum bot

> Not to mention, it can throw off those ad targeting algorithms a bit by injecting a little disinformation into the mix.

you mean provide them with richer signal about what you will and won't engage with?

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