Facebook isn't broken, I'm just not interesting | Hacker News Reader

Facebook isn't broken, I'm just not interesting

medium.com

12 pointswelcomebrand9 comments

Medium.com's voting ring is capable of putting 4 posts on the homepage at the same time without tripping the circuits, impressive.

"Dear users: you're doing it wrong".

I don't think this is a very good answer. If the majority of your users think that your site isn't useful (and I'm not at all sure this is the case, although I can certainly identify with this sentiment) then you need to go back to the drawing board.

I think the disconnect is that Facebook sells itself as a way to stay in touch with all your fiends, when in fact, as we all know, it doesn't really work that way. Every change to the site seems to take is farther and farther from the ideal of staying in touch with everybody.

Personally, I seem to have it tuned fairly well right now. By keeping a lot of people on "Important Only" updates, I don't see the memes, cat pictures, and political crap unless it's noteworthy enough to generate more than a few comments. Yet I do see the prom pictures of their kids or other things that I actually care about because they do generate enough activity to trigger whatever the threshold is to be an important post.

While I generally agree with the post (after having also read the other FB-related post), I'd like to think that the reason I recently left FB (yet again) is that I was one of virtually 2 other people in my network posting interesting things to read or watch, rather than post nonsense like the majority.

Either I falsley think the content I linked to is, in fact, interesting or my FB friends aren't interesting...or, perhaps, there's just a disconnect between my friends and what I think is interesting. I know otherwise intelligent people who continously post rubbish.

This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the 'The Facebook experiment has failed' article. It seems like just another case of people not knowing how to filter their wall feed.

I still wish I could switch to an unfiltered mode. I use a service like facebook because I want to keep involved in my friends lives and see all the stuff they post. FB seems to conspire to make the feed/wall experience an echo chamber of the few people you interact with the most. It's precisely the folks I don't interact with most that I want to hear from...

Interesting, I'm not a facebook user, I deleted my account 3 or 4 years ago. Is there a way to setup multiple concurrent filters so you can basically switch modes? So you could have your feed/wall (sorry I'm not great with the fb terminology) show you:

1) Close friends & family

2) Posts related to the subject "Programming"

3) Posts from people who haven't otherwise made it to your wall in the last 30 days.

Basically what level of granularity is currently offered in terms of FB filters, and can you setup multiple ones to switch between them?

Is this an area that FB are currently working on? Seems like this would be a good remedy for people who aren't finding the content they want.

Users are still going to be required to do some work to setup their filters though, I really don't see how you can avoid that though.

I don't know if you can get as fine-grained as "posts relating to programming" or "people you haven't interacted with in X days" but you can add people to "Lists" and then switch your wall view between those lists. One person can be in many lists.

You acknowledge that most people probably have similar problems; the stuff their friends are posting isn't interesting, and also acknowledge that you don't follow along with your friends' posts.

You're agreeing with the original post. That is a sign that the site is useless as is, except as an echo chamber for you to post things you are interested in but nobody else cares about.

You're posting running stuff, and there's millions of people who are interested in running stuff, but instead of those running posts finding other runners, they find your friends and family most of whom aren't interested.

That's the problem with Facebook. This is less of an issue on Twitter where it's normal for you to follow whomever you want, not just friends and family.

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