The Lie That Facebook Sold You | Hacker News Reader

The Lie That Facebook Sold You

havenweb.org

73 pointsmawise97 comments

Interesting to see posts like this where people speculate on specific factual things, but they don't have any information about the specific factual thing.

This post is factually wrong about how Facebook works and what the goals are. Facebook does not "uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling".

I worked on the feed algorithm for Instagram and know how the Facebook feed algorithm worked in 2020. I read all the code. The #1 goal of the Facebook feed algorithm is to get users to post more. The #2 goal is to get you to engage in interactions like commenting and liking. Facebook cares about how much you scroll and would like you to do more of it, but posting and interacting is way more important. Facebook optimizes for more posting at the measured cost of less scrolling.

Instagram does the same thing but at the time was less successful at it.

It's not hard to see how the author got there when FB and especially IG feeds are absolutely nothing but

"videos you just can't stop watching"

It's a huge turnoff for me and I close app as soon as I realize it's happening, meaning I use the app for about 5 seconds total each week now.

Maybe that's not what they were trying to do but it sure is what those platforms have become and does not bode well for Meta's future.

Thanks for the facts.

I think the basic premise of the article seems sound and unsurprising -- facebook users are the product sold to advertizers.

> That’s the lie that gets you in the door, and then Facebook uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling. As long as you’re scrolling you’re looking at Facebook ads.

What your comment suggests to me is that getting users to post and comment is probably instrumental to getting them to view more ads? More content, more scrolling, more ads?

Or is that mistaken as well based on your experience?

Yes in the long term. People who post are more likely to be retained for a long time for a lot of reasons, partially because they are more likely to receive feedback on their posts and the feedback keeps them engaged.

The ultimate long term goal of Facebook is to get everyone to use VR. The shorter term goal (3-5 years) is to get people to keep coming back to Facebook and enjoying it.

Lets assume for a second that Facebook's only goal is to maximise global scrolling, (measured in metres, say). They obviously need content for people to scroll through. If I post something compelling, potentially all my friends will scroll an extra 20cm. If I have 300 friends, that's a total of 60 metres extra scrolling in the world. More than I alone am likely to scroll in a day.

Great info, thank you for sharing.

Lets rewrite "keep you scrolling" as an inexact colloquial English expression that parses down to "spend time on site", and what they really mean to express: "form the daily habit".

Whether it is passively watching hands free a la TikTok or being prompted to press a like button, post text, or smoke a cigarette and regardless of the trigger - so long as you don't forget the thing exists and come back to it every day profits go up.

EDIT: No

Yeah, people attack Meta engineers for no reason. I wish you nothing but the best.

BTW, here is a cool game for you to take your mind off things, please enjoy thoroughly:

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Edit: please note before above reply was edited to 'No' it literally said that what I wrote is 'pretty much accurate'.

I don't work there anymore, and as you can probably tell from the stock ticker, Facebook is much closer to myspace than a universal paperclip machine.

It's just been a fad to be concerned about it. That's basically passed now, and the next few fads are already pretty mature.

MySpace peaked at 75 million users, currently Facebook is approaching 3 billion and still growing (just slower). Of course I am counting humans and you are measuring by stock ticker.

But hey at least it didn't drink the blood of all humanity, what's done is done. We should move on, you are correct.

Although, on second thought, it did spur those new next fads and set a precedent. And they do seem to be improving on the original in habit forming. It is also attempting to generate a new one to ride to a higher water mark and to be completely honest I'm not sure all those posts and things it prompted people to do en masse were beneficial to society overall..

Maybe there's some sort of lesson to be gleaned here.

> drink the blood of all humanity

Building a product that people for less time per day on average than TikTok, Youtube, Snapchat is "drinking blood"?

I think you should take a step back and evaluate if it's really as bad as you think it is.

> Building a product that people for less time per day on average than TikTok, Youtube, Snapchat

Firstly, that is despite your best efforts and not for lack of trying.

Secondly, as we established, whether it is 5 minutes or 5 hours, the key is the formation of the habitual use.

Thirdly, the 'drinking the blood of humanity' is about the Paperclips game. Even if you've played it before here is that link again to rejigger your memory: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Please do make sure to play it all the way through to understand the reference. A bit of a time commitment but really not as bad as you think it is.

Having a goal of using the product we make more isn't inherently evil, so why would anyone write about it that way.

> Whether it is passively watching hands free a la TikTok or being prompted to press a like button, post text, or smoke a cigarette and regardless of the trigger - so long as you don't forget the thing exists and come back to it every day profits go up.

You're just describing the basics of business but framing it to be nefarious? People who make a product, generally want it to be used as much as possible. It's why newspapers have crosswords and tv shows have cliffhangers. It's a problem when you want it to happen over the wellbeing of the users, so unless you think getting people to communicate with their friends and families is as bad as smoking, it doesn't seem to be the same thing.

It reminds me of that Key and Peele sketch where Peele described robbing a bank by working for them every day for 40 years

> It's a problem when you want it to happen over the wellbeing of the users, so unless you think getting people to communicate with their friends and families is as bad as smoking, it doesn't seem to be the same thing.

Facebook thinks its pretty bad: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagr...

I don't know that it is worse than cancer. Lets hope not. Strange yardstick.

High level:

"We know Facebook executives believe that the company has positive overall benefits for the world"

And it was you that originally brought up cigarettes

“We know Facebook executives believe that the company has positive overall benefits for the world, and we also know that they are meticulous students of their own data,” Newton wrote on Tuesday. “It’s hard to understand why, if the data is so positive, Facebook is often so reluctant to share it.”

Please don't take things out of context. The authors really actually are claiming that Facebook knows it is harmful and knew all along - disagree with them if you want but don't rewrite their position.

> People who make a product, generally want it to be used as much as possible.

It's true for things that have a recurring revenue, and most of the time it's at the expense of the actual purpose of the product.

We take it for granted with social media, but imagine an email client doing the same and adding some random content between emails to keep you more engaged. Would you use it?

I filter out the ads - so they definitely fail to optimize showing ads for me.

Which ad filters block facebook ads? IIRC a few years ago they had a surprisingly robust ad-blocker-blocker technique, using a crazy stacked div strategy to hide ad text.

FBP extension. Very feature-rich

Is it possible that Facebook's feed is not as good at that supposed goal as it is at getting people to scroll endlessly?

I've stopped using Facebook and Instagram in the last few years, so I can only speak from observing friends and family on those platforms... but I mostly left them because my friends and family didn't post. Once my feed became 90% ads and reshared posts from strangers, I left.

Maybe your definition of "posting and interacting" is different from the author's.

And on the subject of "every nasty trick [to] keep you scrolling": that includes, for instance, making it incredibly difficult to delete your account. Seriously, give it a try. You can't navigate to the delete page through the UI -- the only way to get there is to somehow find a link to the delete page URL. Facebook repeatedly asks you if you're "absolutely sure" you want to leave. They show you a slideshow of friends and family who "won't be able to contact you" if you leave. Then they make you wait 30 days (with no login attempts) to actually delete the account.

Seems pretty nasty to me.

> I mostly left them because my friends and family didn't post.

Yeah this is exactly the problem, and Facebook understands it. They want people posting more so that their friends will see their posts and stick around. Facebook cares about this more than scrolling because people stick around more in the long term if their friends and family are posting.

> Seems pretty nasty to me.

Yeah maybe, I've never tried. What I meant is that Facebook could do many things to get people to spend more time scrolling, but they don't do most because it would harm the user experience. For example Facebook was reluctant to add unconnected content on Feed, but eventually did. If they only cared about "keeping you scrolling" they would have done it 10 years ago instead of ~1 year ago.

I was on Feed from 2017 until 2020. Every year some minor sub-team would show off their plans for an unconnected content unit. It never shipped until Zuck began to understand that the ship had already sailed with Gen-Z on to TT (which he or a deputy refused to buy when he had the chance).

Everything Meta is doing today can be explained by Zuck's frustration with not owning a mobile OS (VR) and knowing that he has already lost the new generation (Reels and Rooms).

Not only did they mostly stop posting, but Facebook doesn't show the posts they make, giving me the sense that there's nobody to look at such a post

> to get you to engage in interactions

> like commenting and liking

But also, like blocking.

So if you block someone for posting something you really hate, you will see more posts that are like that post you really hated.

No, the opposite is actually true (I worked on things like this, it works)

You might be overfixating on “keep scrolling”.

So the goal was/is to get people to engage more. So? Is the goal to keep people engaged for ad’s sake or not? Or is it to foster community and togetherness.

The thesis is about engagement with ads. Not whether you scroll or not.

Yes they are fixating on that because they’re still convinced society is wrong here, not them.

Most people (the layman discussing and planning to regulate companies like FB) consider interacting as part of scrolling, you’re being pedantic and “actually”ing here. The fact you worked on these algorithms is hilariously telling.

No, they are different because of how the UI works (also different on TikTok).

On facebook, you have to "enter into" a comment thread. Doing so makes it harder to scroll and causes you to consume less content. On Instagram this actually loads a new page and you can't scroll any more.

"Entering into" a comment section is bad for scrolling, it decreases ads consumption in the short term (per session) and the medium term (time scales of weeks or months). It increases ads consumption in the long term (years) very indirectly, because people enjoy the product more.

Even though it decreases "scrolling", Facebook attempts to cause people to "enter into" the comment section. This isn't an "achtually point, it's a real difference in how laymen would want to regulate companies like FB.

Now there are other problems with what I described, for example people might "enter into" comments to engage in political arguments or become polarized, but that's a different topic that Facebook also spends a lot of money attempting to solve.

This is not an important aspect of the discussion at all dude. The layman uses “scrolling” the way tech marketers use engagement and everyone knows this. No one cares about this attempt to strawman the actual problem here by yet again assuring they masses they’re too dumb to understand.

This is why these tech firms will be heavily regulated to death. They still don’t get that these minor nuances are things only they care about thus it’s passed time to let them figure this out on their own. They’ve talked passed the average citizen for long enough.

No, I disagree.

"Scrolling" means something like, "spending time on the app".

Facebook accepts less time spent on the app in the long term for more posting.

I worked on the same teams as you in nearly overlapping time periods and I add support to what you say.

FB is (or was, before I quit) driven by getting contributing users to contribute more.

We knew a million "tricks" to get people to be hooked on scrolling or watching ads. We did not use them, because we had already done a million experiments to know that people hate that shit, and quit. Interactions with friends is what drives use of social media, as it should be.

The trouble is, Facebook is so deep underwater PR-wise and user-content-quality-wise (in America at least, India still loves it), that subconscious evaluations of which app to open are facing very strong headwinds now.

> The trouble is, Facebook is so deep underwater PR-wise and user-content-quality-wise (in America at least, India still loves it), that subconscious evaluations of which app to open are facing very strong headwinds now.

Yes, the trouble is that ordinary people are making incorrect subconscious evaluations based on bad PR, such on the nose verbiage from you.

Is the app bad? No.

The app was foiled by that dastardly subconscious mind.

commenting and liking or disliking.

I would think that one thing FB could do to encourage them to post more is show how many people have seen something you post. Right now 50 people could see your post and all you know is that three people liked it and one commented. I think people would be encouraged to post more when they know they have an audience (assuming they actually do have an audience).

Not to criticize but the post would be most appropriate 5-7yrs ago. Nowadays this is a known secret. TikTok abandoned all posturing and came out as a purely ad driven network to make you scroll. What facebook and others say is mostly moot. They already have a diminishing user retention problem to deal with. The overall perception of these services have changed over the last five years and particularly facebook only has the volume but not the momentum anymore.

What's funny about Facebook's user retention problem is that if somebody built the same product that Facebook had back in 2010 I might want to use it again.

Except that now we all know the trajectory that services like that seem to end up on, so I probably wouldn't.

The product mentioned in this post, Haven, seems very much like a self-hosted (optionally cloud-hosted, for a fee) 2010-era Facebook to me.

The distributed nature suggests that it won't go down the Facebook path.

I feel like "I only use Facebook to keep up with family and friends" is the 21st century equivalent of "I only drink socially" - True for some people, less true for many others.

If "keep up with" involves reading people's feeds, are you just.. using Facebook normally? The "I only..." that's most common around me is only using it for Events and Marketplace functionality, but never looking at people's feeds.

I deleted my Facebook in 2016, and the only reason I've ever wanted to go back was for Marketplace and Events functionality. And if I wanted to keep up with people's feeds, I'd use Instagram (roughly the same thing, I know, but less wordy for me and more enjoyable).

Amusingly, some of my friends that use it for Marketplace express a desire for Craigslist to be popular again, if not only for the absolutely insane people on Marketplace that demand to pay $20 for an item listed at $300 and then start spamming you and making public posts about how you're a thief and scammer for trying to rip off a single parent who just wanted to get their kid a present for $20, linking your profile the entire time.

The events functionality stopped working well around then, so you didn't miss anything there

Meanwhile half the population is freebasing TikTok and insisting that it's healthy.

Half the US population. The version in China is a bitters and soda, for good reason.

I wonder if TikTok is China's revenge for opium. It's addicting and mindless and keeps our population sedated and lazy.

Nah, TikTok is something new. Fentanyl is them running opium game.

This take is so interesting; Douyin is the way it is because of government regulation. If the US tried to regulate what you can see on Instagram, many people would cry bloody murder.

Bytedance doesn't make Chinese TikTok "educational" from the goodness of their heart. Chinese companies were happy to let teenagers play video games from dusk till dawn until the CCP got involved, not because Tencent wants American teens hooked on league and Chinese teens studying.

TikTok is always painted as some masterclass psychological Chinese weapon instead of it just being a failure of our own American government to do anything but stalemate and worry about bathrooms. There is no reason to believe that if TikTok is banned that Instagram wont supplant it in serving up the same garbage to users (except no one would complain because the gripe about TikTok is xenophobia for most people, not any principled stance on entertainment).

It's worth examining how much of the current failure and stalemating in the US government is the deliberate product of mass foreign psy-op campaigns, conducted significantly via social media, to undermine the quality of the electoral field, and the electorate itself.

I'm really interested in the studies 30 years from now that tell us the long term effects. People might be more sedentary and maybe psychologically stressed, but also they're not spending their time smoking and drinking and munching cheetos in front of a TV.

You can smoke, drink, and munch cheetos while scrolling social media.

"I read Playboy, but only for the interviews"

I've never met anyone who literally says "I only drink socially" that isn't somewhere on the alcoholism spectrum. I have met people who really do only drink socially, but they don't feel the need to say so.

Disclaimer: positive sentiment towards Meta app

I'm a millennial and I use Instagram (mainly stories) as the primary tool for keeping in touch with people. It's easier to share an image, maybe with a short caption, rather than composing a post, and consuming friend's stories are quicker than text posts since you don't need to read. It's a more efficient/faster way to know what my friends and family are up to and it prompts me to communicate with them more.

I may be an outlier but I'm very bad at remembering to text/call/email friends if I don't see them regularly, so following them on IG helps a lot.

"It's easier to share an image, maybe with a short caption, rather than composing a post, and consuming friend's stories are quicker than text posts since you don't need to read."

I don't want to invest the time and effort to really connect with people.

"It's a more efficient/faster way to know what my friends and family are up to and it prompts me to communicate with them more."

So I pretend.

"I may be an outlier but I'm very bad at remembering to text/call/email friends if I don't see them regularly"

In general, I can't be bothered to care about other people.

Meaningful connections with people require time, effort, and care. There are no shortcuts.

You woke up and chose violence today, didn't you? Or is it just so impossible to believe that a social media product actually promotes pro-social behaviors?

What you are describing is not pro-social. It's anti-social. That's the problem. Clearly, I failed in conveying that message.

Your last line can stand very well on its own, and the judgmental fabrication before it was totally unnecessary.

Can you point out the inaccuracies in the translation?

Do you connect with people by judging them?

The feedback given was what a therapist might give, or even just what a self-help book might tell you. I don't see it as judging, I see it as stripping away rationalisations.

The poster above was not describing a replacement for meaningful connections. You can do both.

I have closer relationships with a select group of people, but there's others where it's fine if we only keep up with each other as much as instagram stories and occasional quick chats allow.

I remember using Instagram and thinking "why am I just staring at their feed and hitting like? Why don't I just text them 'hey how are you?'" So I quit social media and now I just text them. The difference is obvious now: the former wasn't real interaction, the latter is. Biggest difference: actually being surprised in a conversation where you didn't know something that happened to somebody.

You know you can message people in Instagram, right?

You can even call them in IG, but I've heard several people say they would find it highly insulting to get a call via Instagram.

Maybe you should get your friends on Signal, and use their (E2EE!) Stories instead, if that's the only feature that matters to you?

I'd be happy to if they were open to it. The network effect means that that's not going to happen any time soon though. It's also not the only feature that matters to me, though. Also, their stories are brand new, so likely not at feature parity yet.

Personally I'm just becoming more private about what I say online as well as what I want to share about the family. I just think Facebook reached a tipping point where it became stale, I got sick of political arguments, I started to distrust my "friends", and I just switched to directly texting people photos.

pull vs push though. of course my closest friends get sent pictures of everything, but for other friends, sending each and every one of them a picture of my latest hairdo or new pet or whatever just seems weird. But a post on Facebook that they have to pull to receive, isn't at all weird.

This is just an ad for an RSS reader.

If you unfollow everyone you don't see ads ever again. You just have to visit your friend's profiles one by one (or whatever group of friends you have created) to see their unaltered feeds with no ads.

You can also use FluffBuster. I never see ads ever. My Facebook page is a very stripped down news feed.

I use that web browser add-on and I set it to not show things people share and like so I only see what my friends post themselves. It's a much better experience.

Honest question: how many of your friends are still on Facebook? I remember it being wildly popular when I was in college, but since then, I think that only two of my friends still have accounts.

I haven't checked recently, but last time I visited the site there were some ppl that is consistently posting high quality content, but it is like 5-10%

Seems like nothing new, classic "attention economy" stuff we've all known for years now. I wondered why they wrote the article, but then I saw the plug at the bottom -

This article is an ad.

I tried the demo of Haven that this site is advocating for and found it was a perfect storm of a bad demo. (I'd be very happy to talk w/ the Havenites about the details) I like what they are trying to accomplish but from a marketing perspective it's going nowhere. Someone who is unhappy with the current state of feeds may or may not be interested in publishing a blog for instance, and they ought to offer people an easy way to set up a feed and see how it works, or get some idea of what it looks like w/o having to create an instance and log in (even a video would be good)

Also for as long as RSS feeds have been around the UIs have been something only a mother could love, particularly they don't address the problem of overloading, particularly the spamming with "me-too" articles (I have seen so many articles about "the nearest black hole to the Earth" being discovered for such a long time that I'm starting to wonder if they discovered another one, not to mention the breathless clickbait articles from The Atlantic about the Twitter collapse that are 72 hours out of date)

Text analysis technology was good enough in 2005 to filter articles from a feed that you'd like, I know because I used old technology to do it

https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/

I'm pretty sure that some kind of dimensional reduction on the data (say Latent Dirichlet Allocation) would cut the error rate in half and slightly less sure that spending $1500 on a GPU and using currently fashionable language models would cost you $1500 and a few months of time and not make much of a difference if you ever get it to work.

I also know the "twisty little articles that all look alike" problem (a.k.a. "me-too") was solved by Google when they developed Google News because whenever The New York Times publishes an article 300 other papers write an article that says "The New York Times reported that..." and Google News would be completely unusable, the same way that RSS feed readers are completely unusable.

I'd guess some kind of clustering is the answer to that but I'm not so sure what kind of clustering. (I think the language model might help with that)

Why can't there be a social media site that lives in locally optimal minima? One where there is enough ad revenue to cover costs but not so much that it leads to bloat. One where instead of trying to compete with the likes of TikTok and YouTube by maximizing time spent on the site, the goal is "can catch up with friends in X amount of time".

as a person that works for a healthcare startup that relies on facebook ads, while I agree with how much it sucks as a consumer, as a business offering there is nothing like it.

There is no add network that reaches more people, and gets more clicks, than the facebook add network. We felt it hard when Apple mucked with them, as well did a lot of other startups. So while I understand the "privacy risks", I think it's equally foolhardy to ignore the positive impact it has for many businesses. It accounts for more than 1/2 of total revenue, for sure. If it went away, something would fill it's shoes for us eventually, and quite frankly I don't think that replacement would be any better for humanity.

> We felt it hard when Apple mucked with them, as well did a lot of other startups

I have no sympathy for that. Creepy stalking as a business model? There is no polite response that does it justification.

> I think it's equally foolhardy to ignore the positive impact it has for many businesses.

Even less sympathy. Find a business model that does not treat your customers as fungible units to be reached en mass. Your benefit does not make me happier about my suffering.

The creation of a surveillance network that removes privacy entirely (which is what we do not have because we stopped facebook, but it is still a risk - forever vigilant) is too high a price to pay for your business success.

Golly. You made me angry.

Breathe. I agree that stalking people without their permission (can one be stalked with permission?) should not be an option and is a bad necessity of a business. The goal of the customer is to use the product to its fullest potential. Re: advertising, customer will hyper target as much as possible.

The blame is squarely on Facebook for allowing invasive targeting. That said, I really enjoyed the fine grained hyper targeting when I was running some local election campaigns. I could literally send messages to specific friends via the ads!

While I understand the cancer risks, it's foolhardy to ignore the positive impact asbestos had for construction businesses in terms of affordability and convenience of installation.

While I understand your analogy, advertising tracking != death.

And also...yup. Exactly right. Thankfully something did come along that provided the business affordability and convenience of installation, while simultaneously reducing the health effects. You see, they took everything into consideration when then replaced it - both the benefit to the consumers and the businesses using it.

> This leaves an open question: how do you keep in touch with your friends online?

That implies that one must keep in touch with friends online. The question I asked myself is "Do I need this to keep in touch with my friends?" The answer was obviously no. I wasn't using Facebook to "keep in touch" with friends as I was primarily passively consuming whatever was being put out. That's not keeping in touch in any meaningful way, and it's highly selective for specific friends.

Email, telephone, and text messaging are far superior for keeping in touch as far as I'm concerned.

My mother uses Facebook now, and from what I can tell she's primarily using it as Facebook intends. Endless scrolling through nonsense.

I should have more sympathy for all of these addicts, but I don't. I sympathize w/ a herion addiction because it's physically addictive, etc etc. Addicted to Facebook, to other people's baby pictures??

Consider this: everything you learn about your friends through Facebook, you weren't important enough to be reached out to personally about. THEREFORE! You shouldn't even know those things.

I have a lot of people I like to talk to where I'm not close enough for 1:1 communication to make sense. Most of my FB usage is talking with these not-especially-close friends about whatever we're interested in.

Not that different from talking here, except that my FB friends (and especially my FB friends with FB's learned weighting of how interested I am in what each posts) are on average more likely to be interested in the same things I am and have more similar preferences around conversational norms.

It's important to remember that modern social media is a complete assault on your dopamine receptors. If you take a look at your feed, a vanishingly small amount of the content Facebook belches up is created by your friends. Instead you're shown content that you're likely to interact with.

That's not to mention that people use social media as a substitute for personally reaching out to friends.

>Consider this: everything you learn about your friends through Facebook, you weren't important enough to be reached out to personally about. THEREFORE! You shouldn't even know those things.

Interesting take.

One thing I struggle with is a diverse set of interests that practically nobody in my life shares with me. A common denominator for these interests is that most were/are cultivated by online content. There is a pervasive feeling of loneliness throughout my life, and I can't help but view the internet with suspicion as a possible threat vector to my sanity. I stay engaged here on HN, but I don't have any real friends here. All of my friends are hundreds or thousands of miles away, and I can count them all on one hand. Facebook and other attention-capitalizing networks provide an empty nicotine-buzz mimicing the real social interactions that I probably need. The idea that social media is toxic isn't new, but I guess lately that truth has been resonating deeper within me.

I think most people have figured out by now the pitfalls associated with using Facebook and have devised strategies for mitigating the worst of them. If they haven't, then they soon will.

> Over the last quarter of 2021, Facebook made over $60 per user In the US and Canada.

Wow. I guess it's clear why they would never move away from an ad-based model, to an ad-free paywall for example. No way anyone is paying $20/mo (maybe $5/mo in the US, and much less than that in most of the world).

This is a sad post.

> That’s the lie that gets you in the door, and then Facebook uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling.

I get to the bottom of my feed pretty quickly. Yes, you can have an end to your feed! It says this:

> No More Posts

> Add more friends to see more posts in your Feed.

> Find Friends [button]

When I reach the end of my feed I get an error, 100% of the time. I see 3 days of content followed by:

"News Feed isn't available right now. This may be because of a technical error that we're working to get fixed. Try reloading this page."

The whole article is: FB optimizes for user retention so Booo! evil. Use RSS instead. Yeah, these kind of posts are out of touch IMO.

This is very much like the food industry where sugar drinks give you instant gratification but isn't good for your health long term. Same should be true in the digital realm.

The current solution is implementing screen time usage limitation on mobile OSes. Even though that's good but it works at the app level. I'd like a more high tech solution that works at the content level. Something that can limit how much pet videos or comedy I watch across apps.

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