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Comment by blululu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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