Hacker News Reader

Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

> The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends.

That's bizarre.

When I go to m.facebook.com it consists of posts from people I know and groups I'm in.

There are occasional carousels of People You Might Know or Groups You Might Like, but other than that it's just words and photos from real people.

View on HN

I go to m.facebook.com and I get redirected to facebook.com, since I am not on mobile. I force the browser to go as it was mobile and I get:

* Stories

* A post from one group I am subscribed to

* People you may know

* A meme from a group I am not subscribed to

* A comic from another group I am not subscribed to

* Reel from people I don't know

* Another meme

* A post from a person I don't know

* Another meme

* A post from a friend

* A post from a game publisher (not subscribed to)

* A post from a friend

* A post from another "somebody"

* Another reel

* Another unwanted comic

3 posts out of 15. 20% is better that OPs 10%, still not good

Similar experience for me. Abysmal.

I think they realized the antitrust folks are coming, so they released a "friend feed":

https://lifehacker.com/tech/facebooks-new-friends-only-lets-...

I haven't been able to find it myself - I refuse to use the app, browser only.

I imagine what they can't say is that your feed is otherwise too empty. Whether you want that or not, that doesn't suit them at all. Newspapers back in the day would only run as many pages as they had ads to support. If they didn't have the ads, pieces already written and ready to go wouldn't be included. Unless you follow a long list of active people or semi-professional content creators, you're not going to see enough ads.

Now, presumably you hate this, and I certainly hate this, but without doing things their way, we're unwanted. They want the consumers and they want those that can be convinced to follow suggestions and join new groups.

Once upon a time, the technically literate would leave Altavista and join Google to start a migration, but Facebook buys the Instagrams and slowly twists them the same way to suit them. It's miserable enshittification.

I usually find it pretty terrible and so hardly ever visit, so let's try:

* 10 day old post from someone I know, involving other people I know

* a reel, with no origin specified

* People you may know

* a recent post from someone I know

* an old post from someone I know

* a recent photo from someone I know

* an old post from someone I know

* People you may know

* An old post from someone I don't know tagging someone I know

* then I scroll further and it does a weird jumping thing so I can no longer keep track of where I was

This is actually better than I remember in terms of "relevant" things, but I long ago lost the habit of facebook, and sometimes seem to get a whole lot of stuff that doesn't feel relevant which tends to put me off. Also that odd scrolling behaviour that starts happening after a bit.

ISTR some people observing that if you've been gone for a while they stack the deck in favor of things relevant to specifically you. Which may be why you report so many old things; they may have been reaching back trying to find those things specifically. If you were browsing routinely they might never show you those old things.

I would be surprised if mine was even 10%. It's low quality, irrelevant garbage. News from towns I've never been to. A lot of pirated comic scans.

I'm in plenty of active groups. And some of my friends still actively post. But I have to go out of the main feed and into the "feeds" section to see any of that.

Somehow, your feed is different from everyone else's. I don't even go on Facebook all that often (maybe once a week to post a pic or two) and my feed is basically:

1. 2-3 posts from actual friends

2. "Reels" of young women jumping on trampolines in bikinis

(Note: I do not and have never watched Reels on Facebook.)

The friends feed is polluted these days also, not so badly as the infamous "feed" though. But it's bad enough overall that whatever feed/page I'm checking out on Facebook (which happens pretty rarely in the recent years) the absolutely first thing I check is who the post is from. If it's not a friend or a group I recognize as mine I just skip looking at the entire post.

I pulled up the mobile app. Every post that didn’t say “sponsored” was from someone I knew and am following.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com