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Comment by iamthemonster | Hacker News Reader

It's so interesting how different people's Facebook feeds are so different. I do have excessive ads for products, that's fair enough, but I have absolutely nothing political. My only issue with Facebook is that it's poorly designed, actually very dated and cluttered, and none of my friends really use it for personal posts except me.

I suspect that each Facebook user exists in a different bubble. Possibly they see someone reporting frequently and think "oh great, here's an engaged user, let's show them some more hate speech to get them even more engaged".

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FB is RSS for non-tech content.

In my experience FB is what you make it to be. It requires some curration effort but you can mold it to be useful. But you can’t just add, you’ll have to block as well, including ads - each ad source can be turned off.

For me, FB is the main source of news about local concerts. Sure, you’ll find about major ones anyway, but there’s no way to effectively track small ones. It doesn’t have to be music. FB is the easiest way to track niche local businesses, events, or groups of interest. Some of them even don’t have web sites and FB is where they post. Even when they have sites, you wouldn’t visit each of them every day to find out what is new and interesting and you’ll miss stuff.

If concert info is what keeps you on the platform, you can kick FB out of your life with Bandsintown.

It's not that useful in my part of world. Also, I'm not only interested in pop/rock bands. I also want jazz, classical, movie festivals, etc. That's why I follow handful of small venues, organizers and cultural magazines. It's all very niche and hard to follow otherwise.

For instance there's no way I would find about "Days of Organ music" few months ago. I didn't even know that there's a catholic cathedral with pipe organ in Belgrade, most churches here are orthodox and they don't have pipe organs.

This is just an example. There are other kinds of local interests you can only follow effectively on FB - hiking groups, sales in local music stores, environmental protests, whatever rocks your boat.

Fair enough, for me it's fairly useful even with niche genres, but promoters around here tend to use it too (or the info gets scraped because the area has more things going on). I've had free open air (no venue) concerts of Balkan folk pop in there!

It’s not. With RSS you are in charge, as you select exactly which feeds you subscribe to and see everything from those feeds. Facebook hides posts from things you subscribed to and shows you stuff you didn’t subscribe to, to keep you hooked.

I agree. Not perfect. But there's no alternative to this kind of curated local content.

I don't mean to sound like a smartarse here but there would be if more ppl stopped using FB (which seems to be the trend anyway).

Problem is we have dozens of various interests, which are different for each one of us. Single interest platforms can be good for only subset of things.

FB does come with lots of strings attached. We're all aware of that. I'm just suggesting that, with some effort of unfollowing and blocking, it can be useful.

But the web isn't "single interest" and, as you yourself referenced, there are open standard ways (RSS) to compile information from across it. This may have evolved more without FB so heavily dominating the scene.

Most of this long-tail stuff we're talking about here had minimal or no web presence before FB created "alternative web publishing" experience for them. And centralized easy experience for their audience to follow what they like.

I still use RSS, but sadly, that's not where I find news from local music school or running group. Could it end up differently if FB didn't show up? Quite possibly.

You just posted the alternative. ;)

>to and shows you stuff you didn’t subscribe to

Never seen that myself. Unless you mean video.

Sponsored and suggested posts consisted of roughly half of my feed. It's also known that even if you subscribe to some page they won't show it in your feed unless the other party pays their fees.

This is Interesting. I have Ads. But I dont see any Sponsored or Suggested Post. I suspect this is specific to certain demographics or Americans?

I lived in Southeast Asia. Have only a low three-figure friends and did not follow any pages. I was sent sponsored content and suggested content quite often. I tried to check why the particular posts reached me, but the answer is just a blanket (Speaks language, age within range). I will be more forgiving if they showed how my friends interacted with the page, but the criteria shown isn't helpful.

There are niche solution for all such niches. Spotify has the best concert agenda for my town. There's two local publishers doing online presentation for businesses here (one is indebuurt).

Not surprising though. That small, focused, local niche solutions are more effective than a giant behemoth can ever be.

Yes, FB has all the data. But it needs to analyze that in tiny contexts before it can build a tailored solution for that context, first.

This is exactly what happens. What's worse, I thought it was doing that because I had responded to some political post, but FB just sees "you engaged with person-X, I will now alert you when person-X posts, and when people respond to his posts, even if you haven't looked at it"

This led to increasingly divisive messages literally showing up in my notifications that I had nothing to do with. This still happens months after I stopped responding to any of those messages.

The same is true for YouTube. Somebody sent me funny cat video which I don't usually watch, and now my feed is full of funny videos, or I quickly searched some Minecraft guide for a friend (which I don't play), and now I have many Minecraft guides in the feed.

Ye FB does something like this. I hate "funny" videos where people hurt them self. But somehow FB thought my annoyance with them was that I liked them, so they spammed them on me. Maybe I moved my cursor to slow over them or something when I took my time to mute the guy posting them.

People are bad at removing friends and family that contribute to their poor mental health.

I unfollow everyone on facebook, I found it gives me peace of mind that I can still message them, but very little incentive to use facebook since I see no news feed.

If you talk about real life, a "hack" that I also discovered by myself is called "grey rock method" -- for people you cannot cut out of your luck, you respond in such a generic, brief, unemotional way that there's no payoff for them in interacting/playing with you.

Can this be used in work?

I don't advice anybody to do it longer term, but yes, you can do it at work.

>I unfollow everyone on facebook, I found it gives me peace of mind that I can still message them, but very little incentive to use facebook since I see no news feed.

You might be interested to know that you can actually deactivate your Facebook account while still retaining an active Messenger account if the ability to message is all that's keeping you around.

Excuse me but, how?

Yeah same here, the only thing I see are posts from the groups I've joined which are mostly field of work related, the occasional corporate promotion and maybe a friend post about someone's holiday or something once in a blue moon.

When people say "I deleted facebook because of all the hate" it just makes me wonder what kind of assholes they're friends with. Removing their facebook posts from your view just hides who they are, they don't stop being assholes. What they really need to fix is their damn social circle.

My FB isn't full of fury and hate speech. It's boring!

Half of my friends like to post anodyne motivational quotes, "hilarious" forwarded jokes, pretty pictures of events they attended, and their own not-so-interesting musings. Unfortunately, that half is by far the most active on Facebook.

The overall atmosphere is mawkish. The best aspect is seeing pics of people's kids. You can't fault that.

> The best aspect is seeing pics of people's kids. You can't fault that.

I can. I think it's unfair of parents to post their children's images on the web, which are then being stockpiled by FB in perpetuity.

Facebook shows you whatever is working to keep you there. I do like reading about politics but I also mute or unfollow anyone that is putting too much of that on my feed.

Twitter is where I go to be mad about news. I've managed to keep FB about old-friend stalking.

I have very little content on my news feed. Friends used to post a lot more often, but now all I see are posts from local government accounts and, of course, ads between every two or three posts. After a few pages of this I get an error message asking me to reload the page and a reload page button that does nothing.

100% agreed that it is poorly designed. I suspect it's that design (and the bugs) that are driving away my friends.

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