Facebook and Instagram are going to show even more posts from accounts you don’t | Hacker News Reader

Facebook and Instagram are going to show even more posts from accounts you don’t

theverge.com

18 pointsthesecretceo12 comments

Any chance there could be a version of hackernews in the future that doesn't show or isn't consumed by stupid meta headlines?

Meta is irrelevant, basically aol to me. I don't use them, i won't use them (again, ever, under any circumstances). I don't trust them. I only tell my friends and family not to either. There is nothing they could do to change my mind, if they built the very best Metaverse i still won't use it. I will happily use the one that is not theirs, because my people will be there.

Hackernews has a lot of my type of people too.

Look for or create a browser extension that does this for you.

Regardless, I suspect the answer to your question is a hearty: No.

Meta is a tech company (and very relevant one at that), so these articles will continue to appear. I see no objective problem with that.

Write a simple JavaScript userscript using ViolentMonkey, TamperMonkey, or GreaseMonkey, and it should be fairly easy to accomplish this.

Many of these types of posts concerning social media companies are quite interesting to me because they impact and Influence the entire Internet and how it operates... Just as much as I like reading about the most dominant headlines in tech, I like being informed about how these companies are screwing up marketing and promotion for everyone, because I run my own companies, and it's been very difficult and increasingly costly to promote the work I do because of social media companies and their strangle hold on the planet.

I am pretty sure this latest attempt by Meta is only a cover-up to allow them to continue to push more sponsored posts into everyone's feeds rather than pushing original work from independent creators.

Using TikTok made me realize that I'm not fundamentally opposed to this approach, but it needs to be done well. That is, it needs to recognize what I care about and show it to me. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube have never been great at it. Starting over on a new Twitter account did make it a fair bit better though. And Reddit's email digest things are pretty neat, if a little tunnel-visioned into the same subs.

>needs to recognize what I care about

"How does TikTok solve this in a way that the others do not?" I wonder.

I think it's just simply better at it. As users, we provide signals to these systems in the form of engagement metrics. But these systems have to interpret those metrics. If I'm highly engaged with a piece of content, the system has to figure out what characteristic of that content appealed to me. I feel like YouTube in particular uses way too coarse/siloed characteristics that results in funneling into a few characteristics. But with TikTok, I get the sense that it ends up with a much finer grain idea of what I like.

Another major source of tuning is going to be the frequency and the novelty of content injected into the stream. TikTok will throw new things at you more frequently than other platforms. Because viewing a Tok is so low investment and easy to swipe past, they can afford a few misses and still keep you in the app. This leads to a better search process for the things you care about.

But is showing you what you care about aligned with them making more money? It might be, or it might not be.

I think so, because it keeps me in the app and watching content.

Tangentially related:

In the past month or so, my "people you may know" has gone from people who have a few contacts with me (I do know of some of these people) to always leading with multiple scantily-clad women in my area with no social graph relation to me.

I used to Remove them from the list. But now Facebook redesigned their mobile webapp, and that button is gone.

I'm sure some PM's metrics were boosted by this change, but it's pretty pathetic.

Meta is just driving down the drain....forgetting the swirling whirlpool. its fastest to the bottom.....what crock

The weird thing has been how much content Facebook has been feeding me that is overtly political. LOTS of depressing nihilistic anti-capitalist kind of stuff.

Is this what people go to these platforms to consume? Who cranks out all of this miserable content?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com