Hacker News Reader

Comment by criley | Hacker News Reader

I tried it out but I found it too suffocating -- Facebook, like Google, wants their "feed" to be your main IV-line of info-tainment but in practice the vapid updates of friends mixed in with poorly constructed advertisements isn't very engaging.

If someone makes Facebook Home for aggregated RSS feeds, than they've invented mobile crack and I will never be able to put it down. So maybe don't do that.

Also, Chat Heads is the best SMS implementation I've used on Android, so kudos to Facebook for that.

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vapid updates of friends

Don't friend people on Facebook who post garbage. Any social service (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is only as good as the effort you put into curating the experience.

Oh, and if you feel you must friend someone, you can just hide everything they post from your news feed.

Stop blaming the users for a bad product, especially when your suggestion goes against the core purpose of the product in question.

Oh yeah and there's email, phone, and all kinds of other communication platforms. They are all bad products because there's so much spam, right?

"e-mail" and "phone" are not products. That's like calling Facebook "internet".

Has it occurred to you that there might be a use-case mismatch between treating a social network as a source of always-on, in-your-face infotainment and a communications vehicle with imperfect yet valued human beings you know and care about?

Or do you expect everyone you know to be excellent, always-interesting, content curators?

I expect users of a social network service to understand the most basic details of how such a service works. Slamming the service because you don't like the postings of people you chose to subscribe to is just a little bit ridiculous.

It would be like subscribing to political blogs on $rssApp and then leaving bad ratings for the app because your news stream is filled with political news.

Facebook's tools have been pretty good so far from blocking spam from friends. Games (the main offenders) can be outright hidden or blocked, noisy or shitposting friends can be turned down to manageable levels (updates -> only important) or hidden outright.

Really the best thing they could add for flexibility is a keyword filter...

So i'll say it again. You, the user, is ultimately responsible for what comes up in your stream.

I think you've got confused between a rating and an in depth product review.

If I have the "wrong friends" for a product to be useful to me, then I would probably not rate it highly.

>So i'll say it again. You, the user, is ultimately responsible for what comes up in your stream.

I think this is a very outdated and anti-user way to approach the Facebook service, and I hope your idea of how these services work will be overthrown by better startups or a better Facebook.

I see it as simply:

* A failure of Facebook to figure out what I like seeing, which is shocking seeing as I literally "Like" the things I like seeing!

* A failure of Facebook to categorize input properly at the time of input.

If Facebook properly understood input, and properly understood what I like seeing, then "curation" wouldn't be an issue.

In light of those user experience failures on the part of Facebook, your opinion is "curate it yourself" but my opinion is "Facebook has failed when I curate it myself".

If I want to curate it myself, I won't use a walled garden feed system like Facebook...

I can only imagine the shitstorm that will happen when Facebook starts actively curating content for you...

They already do by default, but they are doing a pretty bad job. Unless you specifically set it to do so, you only get updates from the people Facebook considers you are interested in.

Right now, it's easy to either unfriend someone, or hide ALL of their stuff from your feed.

I'd prefer to be able to say things like, "Show me photos that X posts, but don't show me any of the web links that X posts".

I'd love to be able to say #politics when I post to Facebook so that my friends who aren't interested in politics can "hide" the politics category.

But, I'm just dreaming now.

>> Slamming the service because you don't like the postings of people you chose to subscribe to is just a little bit ridiculous.

It appears you are viewing Facebook as some kind of alternative to Google+, or as a news feed where you can 'subscribe to interesting people' or something like that. That's one way of using Facebook, but I'd estimate the vast majority of people use it more like a network of friends, relatives, close or distant acquaintances, famous people/companies/products you they like, etc. The idea behind Facebook Home is to put information originating from this network in your face, all the time. Just saying you should simply block updates from anyone who isn't interesting enough to randomly show up on your home screen, kind of defeats the purpose of the feature.

Why are you blaming the users and the friends, but not the service?

I friend people based on how well I know them and wanting to keep in touch, not how interesting their facebook posts are. Sure, I don't really care about all the mundane things my friends' kids do every day, but it's nice to know what people are up to in general. That doesn't mean the stream is irrelevant or useless to me, but it also doesn't mean I need to see it every time I turn on my phone.

You're not getting his argument. I can have friends and colleagues that I want to stay in touch with, but I don't necessarily want to read everything they post. Facebook doesn't give you very effective tools for filtering content as opposed to people. Mind you, this is general problem in social, I'm not trying to single out FB particularly.

Family.

my life is about finding interesting work to do, and sharing experiences with my friends and family - I don't have time to waste "curating" my life.

I like getting different levels of detail from different networks, particularly since I've never seen a good implementation of multiple views at different "noisiness" on the same network. So it would be a net negative for me to combine all my streams in a single view; facebook is at one priority level, email is another, rss is another.

Flipboard does quite a good job of grabbing content from multiple sources of your choice and displaying them in an attractive format. It's not a homescreen thing, but that's probably for the best. Do you really want non-urgent things shoved in your face constantly?

Google Now has the most useful approach here, and I'm eager to see that developed even further. If you could populate it with selected RSS feeds, that would be nice.

Flipboard does have a Daydream mode, where you can let it take the screen over whenever your Android device is docked or charging (you decide which, or both)

This way essentially Flipboard-formatted RSS becomes your screen saver.

This is an awesome new feature discovery for me, but I don't think my phone will ever have a net gain in charge anymore.

The HTC One UI has an interesting feature for the default home screen that many compare to Flipboard called BlinkFeed. Choices of news feeds are limited and controlled, but it shows lots of promise in terms of attractive formatting and pulling in content from various social nets & news sources with tight integration with the social apps on your phone. (ala updating/replying/reposting something from home screen)

http://blog.htc.com/2013/03/htc-one-blinkfeed/

> the vapid updates of friends mixed in with poorly constructed advertisements isn't very engaging

Did you really expect prolific and intense discussion? This is Facebook we're talking about here...

If there were an HN Home I would download it without even thinking.

There are no ads currently in Home. Are you sure you really paid attention?

Just because there's no Facebook advertising itself doesn't mean there's no advertising.

Facebook seems to be a crazy mix of "share and like and win" advertising, "share and like and win" like farming, floods of bait advertising from games, and any other number of bizarre scams their users get mixed up in.

>If someone makes Facebook Home for aggregated RSS feeds, than they've invented mobile crack and I will never be able to put it down. So maybe don't do that.

Reader?

Errr, no, Reader would be like the Facebook App. A dedicated app to do something...

I mean, if someone created a full lockscreen/homescreen replacement around the idea of my feeds and my content with the same polish and quality that Facebook did, that that would be my killer app.

Simplest answer is Tumblr. It's crack to the digital kids these days.

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