Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgiampapa | Hacker News Reader

Social media is mostly about what you make of it and how you interact to find value. This is the same in Twitter, TikTok, FB, Instagram, even LinkedIn.

If you don't interact with the product, you get lowest denominator crap.

View on HN

This is not true for the major social media sites that control the algorithmic feeds. (Facebook, Xitter, Reddit, YouTube...)

While you may be able to add a small bend to the feed, it's really 90% in their power, not yours.

I'm looking at Facebook "Home" feed. Funny how they added a separate "Friends" feed, the original purpose of the site, that's not the default.

IDK, I still find my Facebook and Instagram feeds very topical and useful to me, so I keep using them. I also curate aggressively, have a wide variety of interests and a few hundred close connections. It could be that I am just fitting into what the algo is steering to, but I don't get the low quality stuff that OP is complaining about.

For Reddit, you can select an option so that it only shows you things from subs you follow. Dramatically improves the experience!

sure, but now it's giving me days old crappy posts with 3 votes from those subs as it leans wholeheartedly in the Dark Pattern of always feeding me something so I keep reflexively coming back for more.

Was curious what my abandoned FB shows if I log in now. Mostly posts from groups I joined ages ago that are surprisingly still active, some random local news articles, and ads for restaurants.

I used to run the Facebook page for a church-affiliated children's summer program associated with a minority group.

I accidentally switched to that account the other day.

The feed was the most right-wing, Fox News crap you could imagine!

I have a very sweet elderly friend of the family who only uses Facebook for church-related stuff, and since I'm "the tech guy" she asked me to look at her facebook and help her understand why she sees so much Trump, right-wing, hateful, violent, "Nazi-adjacent" (interestingly never -overtly- Nazi) stuff in her feed. I didn't have the heart to try to explain to her demographic bias, revealed preferences, and overlapping group interests, so I just said it's probably a software glitch in Facebook.

I am both strongly pro 2A, and extremely liberal. Sometimes it gets things wrong, but I just use the feedback buttons and snooze content I don't agree with and it remarkably stays mostly on track for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com