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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder if this is a reaction to recent claims that FB has a general political slant

I don't want to generalize too much from my own window into Facebook, but it does look like they may be in a feedback loop. As more and more toxic conservative garbage gets reshared, progressives start ditching Facebook. That means the remaining userbase likes that stuff more, so the feed gets tuned to make it more prominent. That turns off more progressives, who drop out. Rinse, lather, repeat.

When I go on Facebook now, it looks like Internet Fox News, and that's despite trying very hard to unfollow the people who reshare that stuff.

Even the left-leaning content on Facebook has gotten more extreme and virulent. It's just a miserable hellhole now of two tribes screaming at each other while the feed AI fans the flames.

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> As more and more toxic conservative garbage gets reshared, progressives start ditching Facebook.

I think this is a function of the friends you have, and what Facebook assumes you like to see based on the pages your friends like (lookalike audience targeting). When I was more active on Facebook, there was a lot of left-wing direct action, and zero Fox News stuff.

Maybe find different friends :)

Maybe find different friends :)

Has anyone actually ever taken this advice when receiving it in the context of frustrating social media content? I see people throwing this advice around a LOT in these discussions and have always tried to find someone who actually went and did it just because someone on the internet said to.

Curious how well it worked. It sounds about as useful advice as telling someone to “just” get another job after mildly venting about a rough day at the office (or on zoom, given the state of things here recently), which is something we’ve all done just to decompress I would imagine.

I wonder if pay to remove a post model would work well. Moderation costs money and by pay walling the report button, you can insure that only real cases are reported and take action.

Well there is the "Hide Post" feature, which back when I still even had a FB account I would use with extreme prejudice and can be used free of charge. It was quite helpful before finally making the decision to just leave the platform entirely.

Personal curation is a thing, which I think will solve the case for a non-trivial amount of people, if more were intentional and deliberate about it, but it stops short personally of getting 'better' friends.

Which...I just think is unhelpful advice unless an individual is truly and consistently harming the friendship with their actions and behaviors.

Does FB have no controls like Twitter to manage your feed without unfriending? On Twitter I can mute, "see less from X", block, etc.

It does, actually! You can select to see less from friend, see less of the account that friend shared the post from, or you can 'unfollow' a person entirely, which has the same effect but without formally "unfriending" them, so you see none of their stuff at all, but maintain the network 'connection'.

You can also 'snooze' a person for up to 30 days. Problem I noticed with that was once that 30 days is up, the news feed algorithm SEEMINGLY overcorrects and tends to show you nothing BUT posts from that individual with a higher weight against everything else once their snooze period is over.

As someone who had a number of friends that posted content that was just annoying and boring (not so much incendiary or vitriolic-although they get snoozed too), I used snooze quite a bit. They're great friends, we just have very different tastes and tolerances for what happens on social media. So I used the tools given to me to see less of it, but maintained the friendship.

> When I was more active on Facebook, there was a lot of left-wing direct action, and zero Fox News stuff.

I saw a good mix of both, given I have friends and family that span the political spectrum. In any case, I've suspended my account and given up on FB because it has become just too toxic. Maintaining a diverse circle of FB friends requires refraining from saying or responding to anything even remotely political and that just became too damn tedious for me. I'm off twitter as well (not that I was ever really into that one).

Social Media is a cancer and needs to DIAF.

That reminds me, I have yet another email from a FB recruiter sitting in my inbox, guess I wasn't quite rude enough the last time.

> there was a lot of left-wing direct action

There is a lot of that too, but I also find that fairly toxic. I'm not interested in angry tribal signaling even when it's for my own tribe.

> Maybe find different friends :)

We don't all have the luxury of replacing our family and personal history.

My experience is similar and I'm pretty certain it's because I'm friends with so many people from my hometown who are all mostly conservatives. So I get a lot of conspiracy theories and stuff. I guess I should just start unfriending people. I decided to just quit using FB for a while and see how it goes. So far my anxiety levels are down.

The sad part is that I don't really have real life friends, so seeing what people are up to on Facebook was kind of cool. Until it turned into just a big political echo chamber.

Easier with friends than family. I have found it very dismaying to see the garbage shared by my extended family (both left and right). In this sense FB has definitely not brought the family together.

But wouldn't that feedback loop work the other way too? That there's someone saying "as more toxic liberal garbage gets reshared, conservatives start ditching Facebook"? Leaving just the people who enjoy screaming at each other?

> "as more toxic liberal garbage gets reshared, conservatives start ditching Facebook"

I think you misspelled "Twitter" :)

it works both ways, the ironic thing is people on either side of the spectrum believe they're the good ones and the other side that should be removed by facebook, and don't recognize they're part of the problem themselves.

I miss the days when Facebook was about sharing personal connections, stupid and fun stuff, as a shy kid in high school who didn't speak very good English, facebook has helped me made friends and connect with kids in my school as I was more comfortable talking to them online. Hard to imagine that would ever take place with the way Facebook is today, where you log on to scream at other people's political opinions which are different from yours.

Made a very similar joke a few weeks ago. I quote, verbatim, myself: "I can't believe this, but I actually miss when Facebook was full of baby pictures and food pictures." Finally just gave in and deleted the profile at the 1st of Sept.

You're assuming that the reward function is giving you the community you want. In reality the reward function is to maximize engagement, which is a proxy for ad revenue. When there's an asymmetry in engagement dynamics then the whole thing drifts. The mass fallacy here is that FB is trying to build communities.

The "engagement" that you're talking about is causing other people to leave, so I don't know how that works in FB's advantage here.

If they really wanted to maximize "engagement" they would actually hide all of the political posts and rage inducing comments and show nothing but cat pictures.

Well, parler is seeing explosive growth for a reason (though parler is more of a twitter clone). Looks like the two tribes just can't handle being on the same social networks together anymore. So we're retreating further into our own echo chambers.

This should end well.

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