Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

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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.

I quit FB for a bit over a year then came back because I missed connecting with people. I was quickly shocked by what I was actually 'missing'. The thing that jumped out at me was a former elementary/high school classmate who was literally arguing for vehicular manslaughter (murder?) -- that protesters should be run over at high-speeds for blocking the freeway[0].

Now, that's one post from one person. Yes, it's an outlier, but there was a ton of truly corrosive shit people were posting. I quickly found that for me, getting out of FB altogether was the best option. I deleted my account a while back and I don't miss it.

I get that people can actively curate their feed and use FB as a tool for communication, but for me, that's far too much effort and wasn't worth it. I'm actually quite sad -- the promise of what FB could be falls far short of what it is.

[0] https://www.startribune.com/500-gather-near-u-of-m-to-protes...

The obvious question to me here is why you're "friends" with people like that? One of you sent the friend request in the first place and the other accepted. If/when it turns up you made a mistake with either step it's easy to undo it. As you said it's mostly outliers. Most people don't post/comment at all and the ones who do you can easily regulate (unfriend, or create a custom list (either black- or whitelist) if you need to stay "friends" for whatever reason).

> The obvious question to me here is why you're "friends" with people like that?

I'm sure a lot of people loved others who have had drug addictions, joined a cult, or were fed misinformation by a group of zealots. Sometimes being a friend means "in spite of" not "because of".

As it happens, this individual was the shortest-lived connection I had on the platform. I had gone back on, received and accepted the friend request, and they posted that shortly thereafter, at which point I immediately unfriended them. It wasn't long after that I decided to scrap the whole endeavor.

Same here. I'm not a FB fan but I still use it. I do have a few old friends or acquaintances who post pictures of their families and vacations. It's not the most intellectual content but it's certainly not toxic and it let me stay in touch with people.

Even with your feed I could see someone getting depressed if they couldn't afford vacations in Italy, hot air balloon rides, etc.

Anyway, maybe you're using Facebook correctly, but clearly enough of the world isn't to cause problems. Do you expect all those folks to change, or is it easier to regulate Facebook itself?

I wonder how much this is country-specific. I always see Americans decry the content on Twitter. I'm in Australia and follow mostly Australians. I'm sure there is outrage somewhere, but I don't see much in my feed.

My feed is half Americans (since I primarily live in the US) and half from a SEA country / expat friends from all over the world.

I don't get where people see this outrage content. Mine is just like cookie recipes and I'm in tons of groups with hundreds of "friends".

A bunch of family I have that are retired spend time shitposting and sharing political junk shares. It’s like forwarding spam, honestly.

It sounds like you have a curated Facebook feed, and alot of shit on your Twitter feed.

The difference is that Facebook will more aggressively push crap at you. Twitter feeds tend to rot over time.

I'm surprised to hear you even have content. That was Facebook for me like 7 years ago. Now it's a ghost town and the only people left are people hitting the share button on low effort posts. I did block almost all of the people who post or share political stuff from one side

Thats odd. My experience is same on Twitter AND Facebook. Politics and angry screaming.

> Somebody got a new pizza oven for National pizza month

There's a national pizza month?

Apparently: https://nationaltoday.com/national-pizza-month/

But honestly: who cares. Any excuse to eat some pizza is good enough for me!

I picked an awful month to start dieting…again

Pizza isn't really/doesn't have to be that unhealthy. Fast food takeaway pizza is of course, but 'pizza' is redundant in that.

Pretty much all that makes a homemade or otherwise decent pizza less healthy than a sandwich is the amount of it one typically eats in a sitting. Or of course if you for some reason pile unhealthy stuff high on your pizzas, but stuff your sandwiches with the height of nutrition. But I assume that would be uncommon.

There's a "day" or "month" for everything these days. It's just how globalisation blends with capitalism. People are more herd like than ever before.

It's just marketing, I don't see what globalisation particularly has to do with it. Capitalism perhaps, but only to the (debatable) extent that it's responsible for marketing.

You don't see what being connected as a whole (world) has to do with creating social calendar dates? Really?

These things are figments of marketing imagination. They spread through people, not TV or ads. Albeit they start that way. You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick. Which is becoming increasingly easy as we become a whole connected people.

Sales (lower priced periods) are marketing. "National ___ day" is way more than that.

> You don't see what being connected as a whole (world) has to do with creating social calendar dates? Really?

Well firstly I meant economic globalisation, I was thinking in terms of trade; it seems it has broader/other usages too that I didn't realise. Secondly I'd point to days like Mothering Sunday/Mothers' Day which has a slew of different dates throughout the connected world (even the countries where it's a wholly secular marketing creation can't agree):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day#Dates_around_th...

> These things are figments of marketing imagination.

Did you mean not? Otherwise we're in agreement.

> You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick.

They don't need to stick, very few do, you hear for the first time about world tie day in late August, maybe get persuaded to buy a wacky new tie, and then forget all about it - or at least when it is - again.

In your list you left out a bunch of ads that were chosen based on targeted surveillance of the private lives of you and your friends.

Sure, although it doesn't seem to be doing very well at the targetting. All of the ads seem to revolve around a singular life event that I recently posted about.

Facebook sells ads. Facebook doesn't care if the ads work.

Just out of curiosity, in that taxonomy how would you characterize Reddit?

I try to avoid reddit.com/r/all and have my subreddits pared down to dogs, mechanical keyboards, tesla stuff, cryptocurrency, sailing, and locally-relevant things (city subs for the places I have homes).

I'd say facebook is: older people sharing stuff about their life. Benign posts about traveling, maybe some light complaining about the neighborhood where they live getting too expensive, complaining about their job or sports or something like that etc.

Twitter is: younger people who are angry at the world and looking for a scapegoat. Everything is "here's why $outgroup is the core of all the problems in the world in 240 characters or less". Absolutely psychologically abusive garbage.

Reddit is like twitter, but more of an impotent rage. Lots of corporate pop culture references, but still with a strong dose of "here's why $outgroup is so bad!"

Looking at some of the parenting subs I'm on, some of the top posts are prompts for people to explain how terrible things in the world are.

Just really really toxic, awful things.

If I had to guess why: facebook is relatively private. The only things I see are either from people choose to follow explicitly, or from a tier-2 follow like a group (which I can filter if the group starts veering into toxicity).

Twitter is explicitly public. You see and interact with everything from everybody. There seems to be a strong ephasis on sharing other things from people I don't follow.

Reddit is the worst. Completely public, I never followed any of these people. Ignoring/blocking individuals would have almost no effect.

This is kinda insightful to hear. Do you happen to have an Instagram? Would love to hear your thoughts on it.

On Jan. 5, my Facebook feed had an acquaintance from college saying Trump would triumph the next day, so there’s always that.

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