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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with both Facebook and Instagram is that I feel completely out of control over what I see.

There is neither a way to avoid what I don't want, nor a way to ensure I see my friends' posts. The timeline shows me the same handful of people in mystery sort order mixed with ads, and then I later find out I haven't seen months' worth of someone's content when I happen to visit their profile.

The only half-ass solution I've found is to bookmark each profile and check them individually, which is, of course, not very practical past a dozen or two.

All in all, it feels like Facebook thinks I'm an idiot and treats me accordingly.

And maybe I am an idiot, since I've yet to figure out an alternative.

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> All in all, it feels like Facebook thinks I'm an idiot and treats me accordingly.

This is the way of social media algorithms. I suspect it makes sense be cause the majority of users are indeed "idiots", in the sense of doing a poor job managing their subscription feeds and such. I'm sure they have tons of data showing how they improve user retention in aggregate by treating them like idiots.

But those of us willing to build and curate our own experience, we're the edge case not worth accommodating.

When you say that people are doing a "poor job managing their subscription feeds and such", it almost sounds like you think that's possible using Facebook's interface?

I don't use Facebook anymore, but in the past... I guess?

At a minimum, you could unfollow people/pages that were too low signal:noise to be worthwhile, and mute the ones that you wanted to follow but not here from. Crude, but easy way to ditch a lot of the noise.

But people didn't really use those basic tools. They just followed... everything... didn't mute the annoying family they were obliged to friend, and complained when their feed sucked.

It's hard for me to imagine Facebook et. al. providing useful controls that people will actually use that doesn't reduce down to "give us some signal and our AI will magically figure out the right thing". And basically that's the extreme version of what they have now.

It seems like they really do mangle the main timeline, no matter what you try to do.

But a small workaround, if you are a member of any useful Facebook groups: there is a real, permanent sorting option.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/[groupid-goes-here]?sorting_...

Bookmark that with a group for a proper chronological view.

Thanks for the tip, it's nice to at least be able to do that for one group at a time.

However, I follow about 300 groups :-/

Seems they disabled that since you posted it?

> Your request couldn't be processed

> There was a problem with this request. We're working on getting it fixed as soon as we can.

Nah, it’s not because they think you’re an idiot but because this way they can keep you longer in the website.

One clear example for me was when YouTube changed the homepage to show random videos instead of the subscriptions. My subscription videos run out, but random videos don’t. Same goes with unrelated sh*t every other social media companies show you.

Related: Twitter literally suggested a post under the topic: Hot dogs. [1] You can’t make this stuff up.

1: https://ibb.co/WpCXCxt

During election season I went through and blocked every forward source that wasn't highbrow, ie 99% of them. Unfollowed a few OCD people as well. Cleared things up a lot.

After the latest revamp my favs no longer showed in the timeline. Went in and unlikd then liked again, and now they are listed prominently. Sheesh.

Well, that sounds straightforward, reliable, and transparent. :D

>There is neither a way to avoid what I don't want, nor a way to ensure I see my friends' posts

There's both on Facebook. You can set it so you always see a person's posts and you can click on any post to see less of that type of content (or none from the poster).

How do I check what my current settings are, list all the people I've set to "show always", and all which are hidden?

I also do not recall ever hiding anyone intentionally, because then I'd probably just unfollow them. I could be wrong, however.

Also, is there a way to see friends I'm currently not following, in case I did that by accident?

Thank you, that would be very helpful.

Edit: I am reminded now of the settings you must be talking about, the "show me more of this" preferences. I tried them, but they seem to have no effect on what I see or don't. And, of course, I can't hide the ads.

There's also an option (maybe it was by adding them to favorites) to make it so you always get a friend's posts.

You can also do the 'see less of this' on ads.

Alternatively you can also just install FB Purity or a similar extension to tweak what you see better.

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