Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fargoan | Hacker News Reader

The newsfeed was added later. They integrated it from a company they bought. I almost quit Facebook when it was added. In retrospect, it was so much better than what we have now. It has an end, was in chronological order, wasn't filled with spam and propaganda

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The feed has been a hinderance to groups. So many people asking the same questions because you can't find the posts where they've been answered over and over.

FriendFeed! It was great. Pre-facebook you could build a feed using RSS from all your sources or comments off other sites. It was chronological and it excluded any algorithms. - If you subscribed to your friend feeds all the data slid into a chronological feed on your main site. It was the best, initially FB kept most of these features but in the end slowly killed them.

People thought the news feed was creepy. A bunch of interactions on the site that users considered semi private or like something you needed to visit the page to see -- like writing on a friend's wall -- suddenly generated stories on the feed which would be shown proactively. Many facebook users felt this was a bad change.

Especially since Facebook's game from the beginning of the feed was clearly and openly user manipulation for profit, with the aim of expanding to encompass all of a user's monetizable activities on the web, whether inside or outside of facebook e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

This is from the beginning. Wikipedia characterizes the Beacon episode with: "In general, Beacon was viewed as a mistake because it appeared to be too explicit about the intentions inscribed in its protocol."

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