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Comment by vipref | Hacker News Reader

> people conversing are quite aware This is not true

I doubt many people who use facebook don’t understand that they can see in the Newsfeed posts that weren’t addressed directly to them by their friends. That is the entire point of the Newsfeed.

It was a big change when Facebook introduced the newsfeed back in 2006 or 2007 and I do remember people calling it the ‘stalker feed’ and there being a big facebook group with a million members asking for it to be removed. But people got over it, liked it, and instead of moving to myspace or one of the many alternative social networks stuck with facebook and facebook just got bigger and bigger thanks to users loving it.

I don't know about "liked it". "Did not stop using FB due to need to scroll through unrelated posts" would be a better description of what happened.

We are just fortunate enough to be able to fix this problem for ourselves using a browser extension. Others just complain.

I don't know. At the time the Newsfeed was introduced (September 2006), Facebook was not the juggernaut it was today. There were other countries with social networks that had much stronger network effects locally (e.g. Orkut).

Facebook only opened membership to non-college or high school students in Sept 2006 in fact - so if we had wanted to jump ship because of the 'stalker feed', there were still plenty of other options (e.g. MySpace) and the chance for a disruptor to launch if the other options weren't suitable. In practice, users chose to join Facebook and grow it to what we know it as now.

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