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Comment by matt_wilson_206 | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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?

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