I'm from the US and have the same experience. Just glancing at my feed it's:

Somebody celebrating getting out of rehab.

Somebody heading to Italy for vacation.

Somebody going in a hot air balloon.

Somebody going to Santa Fe for vacation and asking for things to do.

Somebody said last night was one of the best nights of their life.

Somebody sharing progress updates on their offgrid homestead.

Somebody got a new pizza oven for National pizza month

Somebody going on a train ride.

Somebody telling me that Dune movie tickets go on sale today (cool).

A bunch of posts from a tesla owners group, laser cutter operators group, and sailing groups that I am a part of.

A bunch of posts from buy nothing, and housing groups that I'm a part of.

I see literally nothing related to politics.

However, jumping over to twitter it's:

Something about "the establishment"

A news story about somebody getting shot.

Something about counterterrorism strategies.

North Korean FUD

Something about a gunfight and a DEA agent being killed.

etc. etc.

Facebook seems to me to be a place where people come together and talk to each other about happy things happening in their lives (or sometimes, looking for support when sad things happen).

Twitter seems like a place people go to get angry and scream at each other.

100% agreed. And there is nothing funnier than seeing people on "team Twitter" excitedly tweeting about how "nothing of value was lost" without any sense of irony whatsoever.

To me, it's the difference between default private and default public. On both platforms you can curate your content, and arguably the worst content festers on Facebook because it is so hidden from the public eye, but it also means it doesn't have to find its way to you.

Facebook as a company has had much more problematic behavior, I'd agree with that one for sure.

But if there's anything we've learned from the past decade, it's the old axiom "sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong.

>Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people.

This is the most underrated aspect. With the caveat that you can't choose your family and schoolfriends, you get the facebook you deserve. And you know, maybe you should try a bit harder to understand your family and schoolfriends?

I'm from the U.S. and your experience matches mine. I just have like 1 niece, 1 cousin and a friend or two that I had to unfollow. I'm still friends with them, I just don't see any of the political stuff they post.

I know some people have like 500+ friends or even the max of 5,000. I keep my friend list to the 250 people I know in real life that I want to keep in touch with. Probably still melting my brain but I'm convinced it's nice to keep up with people's lives.

I feel that way about Twitter. Lots of people in my feed complain about the baggage that dominates their feeds. Mine has none.

There is only one person who was bringing baggage (all men are terrible people, here is a never-ending stream of examples of what they do to make me so bitter) so I just muted them. Other than that person, the people who I've chosen to interact with don't bring these negative experiences, and hopefully appreciate that I likewise don't bring it to them.

Someone else in this thread posted a similar observation to some of the people in my Twitter feed. I personally think most people already know you can refuse to follow and can mute those who make for such negative experiences. If you participate in it, of course it's going to feel that way.

I'm in agreement that facebook is partly what you make it and experiences vary. My own experience has been generally positive; However I was a member of a niche interest group that used to be run on an old-school forum at its own domain. Over the years more and more content moved to the facebook group and there was roughly an even split when an accident by the web host lead to the total loss of the forum which could not be restored which meant all users now moved to the facebook group. The quality of material and the standard of discourse is shockingly worse on facebook than it was on the forums to the point where many interactions degrade into mudslinging. There shouldn't be too much difference between the forum/fb groups, but the only explanation I have come up with is that facebook's algorithm selects and displays content to people who would never have seen it on the forum, and some of them feel compelled to comment with either nasty or unhelpful input. On the forum I think the discovery of this content is self-directed and so only those with a genuine interest come across the post and interact with it, most others will just ignore the post title and scroll on, whereas facebook will show them the whole post with images and this makes them more likely to interact when they shouldn't. The other explanation is just that the mudslinging was always on the forum, but I did not come across it because it was not selected for me, but this goes both ways in that perhaps facebook is selecting "high-engagement" posts (with LOTS of argument) to display to me as well, thinking these will be of more interest. Whatever the cause, the difference is stark for this particular online community.

I suspect the original poster was not complaining about these topics showing up on their timeline; they don't want them showing up on anyone's timeline.

Facebook is like a mirror. If you want to learn about yourself, look at your feed. If you see a bunch of political stuff, then it turns out that you had a weakness for political content. If you see a bunch of kittens, then you were overindexing in how you interacted with that content compared to alternatives.

It's not too different from alcohol. Two different people start drinking a lot of beer in college. One grows out of it, the other becomes an alcoholic. All things being same, the latter person had a more addictive personality and should have been more careful with alcohol.

To extend the alcohol analogy - some people wanted to prohibit it, but ultimately it's still here and it's just heavily regulated. You're not allowed to have it when you're young or when you're driving. Your friends will think poorly of you if you have too much of it too frequently. I wouldn't be surprised if social networks end up in a similar place.

Twitter is the real warzone.

If you are moderately famous, anything will be controversial.

You can say "water is good for you", and I can guarantee you that someone will reply with "actually, my friend drank too much water and died". Then, the drama would ensue.

it's the importance of curating your social media, twitter for me is basically just tech stuff, sometimes I see the edge of war when other tech people are involved, but mostly its all about cool things happening in tech. Facebook I've limited down a bit, I've mostly stopped looking at comments on news articles (really wish there was an option to remove the ability to see comments on some pages) other than that, its pretty good, except when friends engage in war. I'm also subscribed to some atheist groups, and those are super messy at times.

The thing is: if you ever engaged with political posts, facebook will make sure to show you political posts for the rest of your life, and the more likely to upset you, the better.

  >  a bunch of niche hobby groups

This. I actually unfriended and blocked all my personal contacts (not because I hate them, I was just removing my personal self from the platform) and then use it only for a bunch of amateur radio related groups which are largely very civil and helpful, good folks. For many, it's an easier-to--use groups.io.

It's the aggregate experience is and its influence on society that is more important than the experience of an individual user.

Twitter may seem like more of a war zone, and that's possible, but you have to actually measure things. I suspect the dark corners of Facebook are darker than Twitter, because Facebook is more siloed.

Yeah. For me, the overwhelming majority of my feed is just photos of my friends' babies and children.

My experience on Facebook is the same, but I also have the same experience on Twitter. I follow really smart people who are in tech who have interesting things to say. That's all I see on Twitter.

>I should add that I'm not from the US.

That's probably a big part of it.

Yep. I wouldn't say that there's no politics on my FB feed. But it's all either liberal or socialist -- because that's the consensus among my friends. And none of it is particularly nasty even when it falls out of that. It just doesn't get controversial.

Also, not from the US. From Canada.

Where I see the nastiness is when politics leaks into various hobby topic groups I'm on. And it's almost always Americans raising a stink (mad about masks, vaccines, "libtards" whatever)

I think the question is, how do you keep the good and get rid of the bad? I think there's a lot of great things that social media has done to connect people, but all too often it's only a shallow or artificial connection. I think the other problem is that social media will make you find people "like" you. Humans have always sought that out, but there was always some variance that allowed us to remember that others unlike us were still human. Now, with connections possible the world over, we ironically are more likely to only interact with individuals that share our opinions because it's a lot easier to find people like that when you can search the entire world for it. That leads to otherization of any who doesn't share that opinion. So, how do we create social media that keeps that potential for connection you are talking about, but does it in a meaningful way where individuals are exposed to more than an echo chamber?

Proof by anecdote

How do you date on Facebook? I barely ever use it these days, but I would never connect with strangers on there.

I feel like I'm missing something here.

facebook drove your other options to suicide

Facebook may bring “a lot of good to the world”, but it brings a lot of bad, too. Is it worth the tradeoff?

I for one just wanted to tell you how much I appreciated your Ghostery humor. That's pretty good. ;)

"Facebook is the best site in the world for dating and for expanding your social horizons/circle"

Maybe for boomers and some emerging markets. It appears to be losing popularity very fast among younger folks in most Western countries. Not that alternatives are much better IMO, Twitter in particular is even worse.

Nothing beats going out and talking to real people. It gives you a competitive advantage over the masses that are too lazy to socialize in real world.

Imagine that you could maybe met someone better if you have not settled for FB recommendation.

>the oppressor

It’s a website that shows you what your friends are doing. That’s it. People said the same things about television

The problem for me, and many others, is we are friends with people on the complete opposite political spectrum. I don't have the granularity to block their political posts while still being able to see their regular posts.

HN is one of the most sceptical places on the internet, which I find interesting as it's just a news aggregator for people in software.

it's not shooting the messenger because it's a curated experience to maximise ad revenue

and should be regulated as such

My God, it's full of ads.

Nature was healing.

It’s relatively low friction to migrate to Signal or Telegram compared to a social network. I could said to family and friends stop using WA use that replacement with some success, but there is no migration for FB, Insta, YouTube…

One step at a time. ;)

What you are seeing is a major weakness of platforms like HN and Reddit. This weakness could very well cause more harm than Facebook, but studies or articles that point this out likely wouldn't receive exposure on the platforms they impugn.

We've seen the negative effects of this feedback loop in the past (who else remembers Reddit's role in the Boston Marathon bombing?), but it is clearly a much lower priority than the current Facebook witch hunt.

Television is a new medium where opinions are neither rare nor well done. (~~Anonymous from the 1930s, with many varieties)

It helps to remember that most new mediums follow the same trend: when its easier to share opinions, everyone is flabbergasted at the huge volume of "low quality" opinions.

>So I tend to take the low effort comments as a visceral articulation of the relief felt at knowing that the platform and the conspiracy theories and such spreading on it are...gone, albeit only temporarily.

That's funny, because most of what I read while Facebook was down was conspiracy theories about Facebook being down.

How private companies like Twitter and Facebook took over official government communication is rather lazy, and destructive to an open society.

In the UK the COVID vaccine was offered nationally through a government site but you could get it sooner and closer through local GPs. They could stop once they had covered the old and vulnerable though. In my area, they carried on for a while but only if you requested an appointment in the comments of a private Facebook group.

I wasn't thrilled by the delay, but also thought the assumption of vaccine hesitancy from others in the meantime and hard to navigate process could put some off entirely.

But for everyone else, what a sign-up incentive!

And how simple it actually was, just turn off the sites. Like a giant global, societal parental control setting.

Here I thought that this snake had wrapped itself entirely around all of us, but it really didn’t. All we have to do is ‘flick’, turn it off. Body image issues on Insta? Not today kids.

How simple some of our biggest problems are to solve. It does make one hopeful.

Sure, this might be true but you're diverting from the point OP is making. May be it's that HN has lost it's ability to have a civil discourse without people downvoting you for the slightest challenging opinion, let alone contrarian viewpoints (which would be flagged). It used to be not like that just two years ago. It is very much reflecting a low effort echo-chamber.

In Germany, each year a committee of linguists select an "un-word of the year". "Gaslit" should be the internet unword of the decade. It has no scientific relevance and shouldn't be used when perfectly fine alternatives like "lied to" or "manipulated" exist. They just don't sound as dramatic I guess.

> Letting people contect with family and long lost friends is good.

Maybe it's overall good, maybe it's over the top and not super. Even if it is good, the existence of Facebook presents a block for better and healthier ways developing for them to connect.

Useless comments don’t make the topic being discussed useless to know about. This outage has arguably impacted more human lives than any other in computing history. I can’t back that up with facts yet, but you must agree it is a notable event for this community that has had ripples across the internet and real life.

order corn

Telegram was down for me too

WhatsApp is still down

Something else is actually going on…

From a cloudflare blog post on this, their public DNS resolvers were getting 30x their usual traffic. Presumably that was the case for DNS resolvers everywhere, so that would explain a slowdown:

> But that's not all. Now human behavior and application logic kicks in and causes another exponential effect. A tsunami of additional DNS traffic follows.

> This happened in part because apps won't accept an error for an answer and start retrying, sometimes aggressively, and in part because end-users also won't take an error for an answer and start reloading the pages, or killing and relaunching their apps, sometimes also aggressively.

... > So now, because Facebook and their sites are so big, we have DNS resolvers worldwide handling 30x more queries than usual and potentially causing latency and timeout issues to other platforms.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/

Edit: Although looking at the graph on that page, it appears that only DNS requests for FB properties increased 30x, so that last sentence appears to be misleading. Regardless, a significant overall increase.

Surely the moment facebook comes back up would be higher traffic as people rush to comment on it (see this thread's rapid rise).

Best guess: there's a DNS dependency in HN's critical path somewhere and the DNS server they used was being hammered with the facebook dns lookup retries.

All the devices on the planet with Facebook owned apps installed having no concept of backoff retries and people constantly refreshing trying to figure out why Facebook isn't loading was pegging the crap out of DNS resolvers, slowing down queries for other legitimate requests too.

Once they came back online and their DNS was resolving, it alleviated all that pressure.

I did a little testing while Facebook was down. I copied an HN frontpage request from the network traffic tab in chrome’s developer console. Using the ‘copy as curl’ option, you get a fully formatted curl request in your clipboard that makes all of the headers and protocols of the original browser request.

I then executed that request in the terminal. This request was met with the same ~5 second delay I was seeing with my browser. Front and center was my authentication cookie in the header, so I removed that from the command and the request was normal in response time (extremely fast in HN’s case). I put the cookie back, it was slow, I took the cookie out it was fast. I did this 4-5 times until i was satisfied that was it.

The delay could have been due to upstream dependencies on DNS, extra load on the authenticated request pipelines, some Facebook subterfuge in the bowels of HN or just an extremely unusual syncopation in the patterns of the universe.

But clearly the authenticated requests were slow and the unauthenticated ones were not.

DNS resolvers worldwide being bombarded with retries from clients trying to reach FB.

Could it just be people pounding HN for any update on Facebook?

Maybe HN servers share room with something that got pinned down with requests when FB was down? E.g. 100000s of devices doing a login retry loop for some app since FB auth. doesn't work, or something.

It was probably due to the global DNS system being overloaded due to people and apps repeatedly retrying facebook connections. Cloudflare reported 30x normal DNS requests for FB properties.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/

But HN doesn't have any facebook trackers

This one in particular seems interesting. Felt like one of the longer outages with soo many different sites effected.

Here's hoping to a whistleblower...

This one will definitely see the light of day considering how big a deal it is. Shareholders could easily sue over it.

Who's "mark"?

Well, as someone that has an app that had degraded performance due to their SDK failing to talk to Facebook servers. I FOR ONE would really like an explanation.

FB does have business customers with (at least) Workplace. Hence the name of this dashboard.

What do you use for messaging? In my country everyone uses WhatsApp for everything, so that's why I noticed it.

Only $13.3 million per hour in revenue [1], but about $45 billion in market cap today [2].

1. https://fortune.com/2021/10/04/facebook-outage-cost-revenue-...

2. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/FB:NASDAQ

But 6 hours for Facebook is proportionally the same as 6 hours to anyone. If 6 hours is a billion to them, they still made 3 billion

At risk of continuing the devolution of this thread, anti-vax != "Republicans bad". Disingenuous false equivalence. One is the pinnacle of dangerous, malicious misinformation and the other is just a political opinion held by some that is at worst reductionistic

That wouldn't destroy it, that'd just turn it into 4chan!

So, terrorize people?

However, most multiplayer games did not work and those that did could not get your username.

And for some reason games failed to appear in libraries for the first 10-15 minutes after starting a Quest, the entries for the games just didn't appear.

That's an argument against the Facebook Empire, not an argument for it.

Economies and comms infra should not have a single point of failure - clearly.

If Facebook wasn’t there monetizing their data to keep them in poverty maybe an open source tool would be instead.

It doesn’t sound to me like this was a DNS outage. Their records existed but their name servers were unreachable because they’d withdrawn their BGP route. So I don’t think the rest of your comment is really consistent with the available information.