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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

So in other words TikTok has made them have to pause and switch to prioritize Reels (which are in every way worse than TikTok BTW) and that means less eyeballs on ads.

Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from people I don’t know that someone I do know shared, and the rest I can’t even classify but it’s utter garbage. The only useful piece of FB was Marketplace but they managed to cram it so full of paid content and the rest is clearly online stores pretending to be local sellers that are this point I have zero use for that as well. I am sure they’ll continue to be printing money with their “generate outrage => show ads” core loop but how long will that actually last?

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> My feed is full of shit I don’t want

I don't log in to Facebook very often, but when I do it's not bad at all. I scroll through a few updates from friends and family and catch up with a few people, then I close it for another week or two.

There isn't just one "Facebook" that we all see, obviously. Your feed is going to be a reflection of the groups you've joined and the friends you keep (and haven't muted). If you've just accumulated groups and connections for a decade without doing anything to shape your feed, I could see how it wouldn't be very interesting.

But if you take a few seconds here and there to "like" things you want to see more of, hide things you want to see less of, mute the obnoxious people you don't want to hear from at all, and leave groups you're not interested in, it's not bad at all.

Finally, someone with a similar Facebook experience to my own. I've been reading threads about how horrific the FB feed is for years, but my own is literally 99% updates from friends I don't get to see, and an occasional ad (that is interesting more often than not). Glad to know I'm not completely alone!

I just glanced at mine and it's like 90% people I used to know posting pictures of their kids. The rest is stuff like my buddy's mom posting a recipe for 10 minute Roti.

Overall not bad to be honest. Still not much I'm actually interested in but far from cancerous.

FB knows the optimal amount of ads to show a user, and that has to vary between time spent on the site. Someone who just glances at the site could see significantly less ads than someone who a "perma-scroller" for lack of a better term.

I removed the feed completely, but still kept my account so I can still engage with groups, which is the only thing keeping me there. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...

I also enjoy using Facebook. I never see extreme ideas. My feed is just:

The local expat group for my city

Vegan recipes

Updates from robot teams

Lame jokes / skits that I enjoy

Birthday posts

Cat pictures

Travel restrictions group (support group for those wanting to come to country X, which is difficult because for the last 2 years it been only charter flights and you need approval from 5 government agencies)

Listen, I am really glad it works for someone! I miss those days. It just feels like a total loss for me and starting to sort through why just feels like a seriously daunting task for a dubious result. I have found ways to keep up with friends that are better (mostly text messaging) and so that’s what I stick to. FB was that for a few years but whatever happened to my feed feels like it can’t be undone.

99% of what you see is updates from friends, but are you seeing all of your friends updates?

When a friend posts, I want to see it. Simple. Sometime, years ago, FB decided to pick and choose what to show me from my friend's feeds. That's when I skipped out of FB, deleted my account.

I want to hear about everything that my friends want to tell me so long as it requires a slight modicum of effort on their part.

Facebook turned everyone into bulk junk mailers. They pay the postage and then slap ads on the flyers everyone sends out. People get to spam their friends with basically zero effort.

If Facebook can weed out zero effort, low value posts from my friends with a high degree of accuracy that at least blunts some of the damage the platform itself has done.

And they're deciding which of your posts are zero effort as well.

You do realize all these platforms ramp up ads the more you use them right?

I eventually had to delete my Facebook, but I also did what the parent said, but my feed was primarily suggested content, which was mostly videos, and occasionally it would throw in Fox news, or one of the alt-right shills. I think this content is driven by who you're connected to, and I think it ignores your mutes. I have a lot of friends and family in Louisiana. I've lost friends to QAnon.

So, yeah, if we're going with anecdata, then my experience doesn't match yours, even with this approach of trying to highly curate it.

Fox news is alt right now?

Most of the network, no, and I wasn't insinuating that. Carl Tuckerson is very much alt-right. His program is white power hour.

Commenter mentioned "...throw in Fox news, or one of the alt-right shills". Not "...throw in Fox news, one of the alt-right shills"

Comprehension 101

Word association 101. You place a word that close to another word most readers associate them, which is what they’re trying to achieve here. Take some psych classes?

This, along with all the replies down below is the most un-HN comment I have read for the past 10+ years. Facebook is doomed and crap was the accepted norm.

Especially during pandemic when I get to see update from my friends. Their new born, or kids finally going to school. I have a suspicious feeling many of the negative and politics went somewhere else like Twitter. And the rest are there you could easily filter out. The place is now a lot more calm than it used to be. Although this may be confined to US and UK? My AUS friends are still on Facebook for political battle for some reason.

During the run up to the Brexit referendum, Facebook became very political. I just blocked all political groups that popped up because friends were sharing or commenting under their posts. That made it much more sane and pleasant to scroll through.

I'm guessing maybe the algorithms figure out if you are into political battles or not and adjust your feed accordingly? I get hardly any of that stuff personally.

I can describe a tale of two Facebooks. It was at first the best of times and now the worst of times.. In the beginning was my old account that had basically mostly friend status updates with photos. I deleted this account during the last election and covid pandemic to get a break. I rejoined later and despite adding most of my same friends it's been a complete disaster. So many ads and group suggestions. I feel like I am swamped by craiglist posts if I ever click on the group section even inadvertently. And I have a couple of groups I want to be in!! Just a total cluster f$$$ really.

I am actually grateful b/c I was addicted to FB. I broke that addiction and the reintroduction hasn't been anywhere close to where it was. Now twitter has seemed to become better... but maybe I've changed.

HN is still well, still here, maybe I should leave and see what I think in 6 months.

This is roughly my experience, but I didn't delete Facebook in-between. It's just terrible now. I watched as the newsfeed was aggressively tuned for outrage. I used to see updates about friends. Now it's just outrage and clickbait and ads. So many ads. Even with adblockers. I just can't use it anymore. It's so terrible.

Or I could just go follow different groups I care about on Reddit. I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me.

> I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me.

If you're not interested in content from people in your social network, then I don't understand what you're expecting to get out of a social network anyway. Facebook isn't a bad way to keep up with friends and family, but if you don't like your friends on any platform then you're probably not going to have a good time.

In other words: You're not their target customer. As with any business, trying to extrapolate your own use case on to the general public is going to be very misleading.

I have meaningful conversation with people on other social networks. Discord, Instagram, Twitter, even TikTok. Facebook is the exception: it throws content at me that I explicitly don’t want and as its user base ages the content becomes less and less interesting. Topic-based groups are good but other networks simply do them better. And the idea of keeping up with what Karen from high school is doing isn’t all that fun at least to me.

I am not on FB but I use Reddit and I’m a little worried about how they will try to monetize when they go public. I have a feeling eventually it will become unusable. I’ve been a Redditor for 10 years now and I really hope the marketing via outrage culture doesn’t make its way there but I feel like it’s only natural.

> I have a feeling eventually it will become unusable.

> I really hope the marketing via outrage culture doesn’t make its way there...

Reddit has been unusable for at least the past five years owing to how they tailor the homepage and r/all to be a wasteland of outrage designed to keep users seething at others. It's basically become the two minutes hate.

r/all has never been usable if you didn’t unsubscribe from default subreddits.

I suspect the small subreddits will be useful well into the future, while the major subs and the front page will become increasingly terrible.

I use FB all the time and it’s great. I subscribe to a few heavily moderated groups for my city that are full of genuinely helpful and productive posts. It’s where I find out what’s going on here.

I’ve unfollowed almost everyone from my past and when I add someone new I unfollow them as soon as they post anything publicly that I don’t care about.

Ive done that to the point where it frequently says "there's nothing to show here" instead of a feed. I know people I'm interested in hearing from are posting things, but Facebook will never decide to show them to me, regardless of my settings

I get 'suggested posts'.

I'm still a Facebook user (over 30, with kids, friends all over the world, and lots of groups that I care about), but the Reels thing is making me seriously consider leaving for good. It's awful, cringeworthy intrusive clickbaity videos from random kids I've never heard of every few posts on my feed. I clicked the X to make it go away but surprise, it's back. At this point their demographic is not the TikTok demographic, and they're just going to drive their remaining users away trying to force that.

I feel like they might have had better luck starting a new Reels app, just like messenger is available as a standalone app. They're cramming too much functionality into a single app/webpage and trying to force people to use things they're not interested in. Why not just make a tiktok clone and keep it separate?

>their demographic is not the TikTok demographic

In other words, not the youth, which is an existential problem for a growth oriented social media company no?

Yep, hence the loss of 25% of their market cap today haha.

> I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people

As a random aside, there is a Facebook ‘experiment’ (a/b test basically) that disables all ads for your account permanently. It was customary, for a while at least, to opt your user id (and that of a few friends) into that particular experiment on your last day of working at the company. Best leaving gift ever!

Somewhere in the A/B test slurry there is sometimes a menu item that sorts your news feed chronologically. It really lays bare what a ghost town Facebook is. In my default feed there is all the garbage that you described perfectly, and a burst of content like a friend’s wedding. That little nugget gets replayed over and over so that it feels like that’s what’s “going on.” Chronologically, it’s old news and no one I’m friends with has posted anything for over a week, just random garbage.

Ironically I feel like the change away from chronological order is what started the slow decline of my feed. I used to see things from people I cared about but didn’t interact with much. Now all I see are things from the same 10 people that I’m closest with, and I don’t care to scroll further.

I guess it’s hard to make ads look organic when it’s chronological?

Totally agree wrt marketplace. For awhile it was great, the only reason to sign on to Facebook. You could sell anything locally easily and quickly. It really pulled off being a better craigslist which is no easy feat and not something I ever would have thought Facebook would do.

Then maybe a year ago they started focusing on non local/commercial sales and it rapidly degraded to the point where it's not worth using now. It seems like they have diverted all traffic to paid listings so my cheap yardsale-esque deals on stuff I'm trying to get rid of get no views (where a year ago I would get ten messages a day for the same item)

Even better is when your yard sale gets blocked because its generating too much traffic/too many messages.

Wife had that happen when we moved last year.

The overarching theme I'm seeing is one of FB jumping into whatever format bored people turn to, then slowly cramming it w/ ads until those eyeballs drift to the next fad, rinse and repeat.

Regardless of how one might dislike it, the "generate outrage => show ads" thing has been working just peachy for Fox and friends. So my cynical take is that FB will continue to do just fine even as people shift to different consumption formats, and even if tiktok took over the world, because fundamentally, bored people will always exist and fads come and go.

By the time I deactivated my account all I had in my newsfeed were posts from groups I joined when I was a teenager and the occasional news channel post. Friends had steadily dropped off over the years, which made it very easy to pull the pin in the end.

There one or two days where you get the little ping in your brain to check the app (as an ex-smoker the sensation is not at all dissimilar to cravings), and after that you wonder why you spent time there in the first place. I can’t leave WhatsApp or Messenger because I have too many people I have on both, but that’s a different issue as far as I’m concerned.

Now I am spending some time on TikTok - but I’m get content from there that I actually generally enjoy, so that’s a net win as far as I’m concerned.

Wow I left it around the time of the Cambridge analytica thing. Sounds like I haven't missed anything...

I felt that way about 8 years ago and stopped using it then

For me, Facebook used to be a place to connect with people as I met them IRL. Now LinkedIn has taken over this purpose of being a digital address book.

But sometimes I get stuck scrolling forever. Maybe that ad revenue is enough for them. I still go to FB for groups and business' pages.

I've been blocked twice from using Facebook. The first time was when I tried to register with Oculus to unlock my Oculus Go. I only check Facebook once a week, but still keep in touch with some people, so I went through the process of submitting my ID and phone number and recovered my account. It happened again, because I used a non-standard browser, and this time they can shove it. If they want to keep users they shouldn't block them from using their product. It's abject stupidity.

I don't think DNS ad blocking will do much wrt your feed. Sure you won't be able to click into the ads but they're likely all served from the FB domain

https://www.fbpurity.com/ is good. Blocks ads and sponsored stuff. You can customize what you want. Web only I think, not the app.

> My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level

Maybe A is a consequence of B?

If you don't let them track you, you get random advertising. And random advertising is painful to watch. I'm not advocating for targeted advertising, just stating a simple fact.

I’m assuming you are using a Pi-hole to block the ads? From my understanding that is becoming less effective with companies like YouTube and Facebook since they serve ads directly from their domain.

I use NextDNS which works pretty well but yes it does seem like ads on platforms like this are creeping back in.

Obviously not feasible for everyone but you can solve this by:

1. Subscribing to YouTube premium 2. Not using Facebook

What do you use to block ads at DNS-level?

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