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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>> 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.

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.

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.

>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.

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