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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

You know what's weird?

I discovered that the following link shows my FB feed in chronological order:

https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

I thought, oh, great, this is the key to making FB decent again.

But after a while of using it, it usually shows almost nothing. Sometimes literally nothing. People are still posting stuff though that I can see with the default view. I almost think I may have triggered some sort of adversarial logic that is trying to force me to use the engagement-driven ordering.

Edit: In fairness, it could be that they are hostile to uBlock origin, either deliberately or as emergent behavior. I wouldn't mind ads in principle, normal ads like you used to have in print media, but I often get ones that are very unpleasant if I don't use the blocker.

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I have experimented with Chronological order in the past, and it almost invariably provides a worse feed. It's like email with no spam filters. The grim reality is that most of the content that is uploaded to Facebook is repetitive and uninteresting. In my personal experience the friends who used to post the most interesting things have mostly stopped, and all that remains is the chaff.

Yeah this is less a statement on chronological ordering and more a product of subscribing to all of your uncles. I do think chronological ordering can help you diagnose this problem quicker.

It's always baffling to me to read about people who complain about their Facebook feed because their friends post shit, and because they like pages who post shit...

Facebook can't magically fix your feed for you, you have to curate it yourself, how come people don't understand that?

It pisses me off when someone reassigns the blame to the user and not to the cancerous Facebook shit and it's scumbag leadership. Just because WE are too stupid to "curate it ourselves".... Here are the three top search results when searching (in DDG) for: Facebook timeline psychological experiment

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

2: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...

3: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...

Now then.. are we all so stupid, or is Facebook ran by a bunch of scumbags who care only for "user engagement" no-matter-what? And it may be that some people get confused by its practices, then understand the dishonesty that is causing the confusion and give it up (abandon FB), while others get trapped in it, so net-net FB made more £€¥$ and kept the bad practices.

Stuff on your timeline doesn't appear there because Facebook picks stuff at complete random to display to you. Your feed is built from the sum of what your friends post, and what your liked pages post. Granted, Facebook does an enormous amount of shenanigans to highlight the most engaging/enraging posts from that source, and they're manipulating your friends to re-post engaging/enraging things they've seen, so it can spread to you.

But at the end of the day, the source for your feed is what your friends post. If all your friends post nothing but cute baby pictures, your feed is going to be 100% cute baby pictures, and nothing else. If your friends post nothing but cute cat pictures, it's caturday forever on your feed. And if your friends keep posting political bullshit that you hate, then that's what you're going to keep seeing.

The position I don't understand is the one where people endlessly complain about how Facebook has turned to shit, and then expect Facebook to magically fix it for them? That's never going to happen. Either curate your feed, or stop using Facebook. Those are your options.

I disagree. My friends almost post nothing, but what they post I wamt to see. What they do much of however, is like and comment on pages. Fb, for some reason, think that's interesting to see. However, I cannot stop fb from doing so. I cannot say I don't want to see things this person comments on, then I have to mute them.

I don't care that they comment on some post to win some product, or is tagging a friend in some viral video. I don't want my feed to be full of fake engagement. But I guess that's all Facebook is now, as no one really posts anything anymore, so that's what they show to make it seem things happen.

Of course FB doesn't pick stuff at random; that's the problem! At complete random would be almost as good as chronological. I certainly wouldn't complain.

Saying if everyone posted only agreeable stuff it would be fine is an impossible scenario. Nobody has friends that all post exactly the same thing all the time, and nobody is going to eliminate all their friends that aren't exactly identical. And you know, if you got nothing but saccharine positive thoughts and "law of attraction" style BS, that would be unbearable too.

The well known saying is that "the poison is in the dose". Facebook can concentrate virtually anything into a toxic dose.

As a science experiment enthusiast I don't mind facebook running the odd experiment. The issue is whether they use the knowledge and power for good or ill. I'll give them a 6/10 for that.

It's the same argument as posting content to any audience-limited platform. E.g. LinkedIn.

If I have interesting content, that I wish the maximum number of people to see, then why wouldn't I make it internet-accessible?

Consequently, what's left is (a) people who actually want access to the userbase (e.g. advertisers) and (b) people too technologically limited to avail themselves of other options.

You can tweak the engagement algorithms all you like, but boring content is still boring content.

I think this is partly a byproduct of the non-chronological feed: the algo rewards quality (via visibility/engagement boosts), but it doesn't punish quantity, which incentivizes high-volume posting with no regard for your average signal:noise ratio.

The resulting noise keeps users reliant on the algo for a coherent experience.

When everyone sees a chrono feed by default, their own conduct is informed by the behavior they like/dislike in others. For example, I remember ~10 years ago when posting a picture of your lunch every day was widely understood to be poor form, precisely because it diluted everyone else's experience. It's a bit ironic that it's become a legitimate use case for instagram.

What you talk about still exists. Such content is now entirely in stories. Feeds are mostly an anachronism.

Chat and stories are what most people want and use.

Yep, this has happened to me for years. Occasionally it will show me days-old posts from friends and then say that there are no more stories. If I switch back to the regular view, it will show me many new stories.

My guess is they aren't ruining this experience on purpose, but they aren't keen to fix it because they don't want you using this mode.

I’m not looking for Facebook to be great, just useful enough.

And I reckon I’ve got it doing that by only following people and groups that serve my interests and don’t rile me.

That means I generally tried to avoid what my individual friends have to say, as it’s mostly the usual things which aren’t really worth engaging with.

I find it almost unbearable the way it selects the worst of what everyone posts. I know, it's easy to blame the person and not the algorithm. But I think people underestimate how much manipulating context can warp perceptions and how vulnerable anyone who posts a fair amount is.

I get to feeling almost persecuted and then I look at someone's posts in context chronologically and it seems quite normal. Just by selecting a small fraction of posts, there is an illusion of a personality that doesn't exist. Context matters so much. It's not humanly possible to overcome the effect of what you don't see other than by challenging it, going out and looking for a more representative sample.

Yeah, look, I mean, I only follow groups like specific model vehicle owners group for my local state / country and say, in my own context as an example, permaculture and mushroom identification groups, which are usually well moderate to exclude poor behaviour / encourage good behaviour.

Having said that, I do see how the most divisive posts and comments get more attention.

And fuck Facebook and everyone one of the individuals who work there and enable that.

I've been experiencing the same behavior here lately and take it as a hint to go do something else.

If you use FBPurity you can block all kinds of garbage on FB. It can also ensure sk=h_chr is always enabled, if you want.

I use FBnofb and it allows me to block all the garbage on Facebook by not having an account and never visiting that dump.

On a more serious note, I deleted my account several years ago. This after coming to the realization how much I was passively scrolling past misinformation, polarizing political discussions and curated self-promotion from acquaintances I barely new.

It was funny to have people who never talked to me, complain to a mutual friend that they didn’t what was going on in my life because I was no longer on Facebook, but then never once reached out via any other channel to catch up.

There is some middle ground possible - I simply unfollowed everyone on Facebook, so my feed is always empty, and unfriend anyone with whom I wouldn't be willing to have a coffee.

I'm often invited to events that are organized via Facebook, and it's sometime the only point of contact I have for people when they change their other contact info, so my approach seems, for me, more practical than deleting my account entirely.

It doesn't work anymore - it used in the past before they started dumping sponsored posts, before the option of "subscribing" to selected friends was added and before they redesigned privacy options. What I do noticed is that after few times of selecting between the posts sorting options, there won't be anything else shown in "most recent" but "top stories" will puke posts at random from random time up to about a week. Maybe it's for everyone or maybe it's just for me - I'm not sure; I'm visiting that site once per month to check if someone wanted something and thus, perhaps algorithms have no data to display.

When you say 'discovered' do you mean you used the UI? That option is in my UI on my facebook. Although I realize that different people may have different UI from what I have heard.

To be fair, the kind of ads social media companies have been most criticized for (those masquerading as real posts) are exactly the sort adblockers don't effect.

I always use the chronological feed. That way when I see a story I recognize I know I can stop. It's much much faster than the default view where you have to scroll through a ton of content you've already seen to find something your friend just posted.

You can hide and report ads as offensive if you really dislike them.

I've noticed recently that if I flag too many things I start getting ones that I can't reject. It's just unrelenting implacable pressure; you can report or hide things forever, but it never gets you anywhere and you start suspecting some subtle retaliation in the algorithms.

I don't know about Facebook specifically, but every time I see something I don't like on Google News (on my phone), I tell it I never want to see that news source again, but then it started to give me news stories that collect a large number of sources together, without the ability to get rid of them all at once.

Trying to curate this stuff is like sculpting fog.

Nothing in FB feed is pretty much perfect, more time for HN.

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