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Comment by kevando | Hacker News Reader

The trouble is this is 100% from the content creator's perspective. From the user perspective, this ends up working out quite well.

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From a user perspective, I like things because I want to see content. It annoys me to no end that I know I'm missing out on updates from sources I care about because Facebook selectively decides what to show me, and effectively holds my attention hostage.

This is the argument I find confusing...You ask Facebook to curate your news feed and then get upset when they curate it.

Where am I asking Facebook to curate (in this case, read: cull) from posts that I've indicated that I want to see?

I'm asking to see posts from something I've explicitly stated an interest in; I'm not asking them to pick and choose a subset that I get to see beyond that.

Do you believe it's possible for Facebook to improperly curate content?

Can't someone write a browser extension that tracks what you like/have liked, and then builds your own Facebook experience, putting back the content you are missing? Running the entire Facebook data system is daunting, but running my own view of Facebook that I want should be easy to manage in a browser.

>Can't someone write a browser extension that tracks what you like/have liked"

The issue is that most of don't want to click like, like, like on everything we "like", just to see that content.

I don't need to like HN; it's implicit in every visit I make to the site.

Not necessarily. If content from your friends and family and other pages you enjoy is regularly filtered out and replaced with paid "promoted" posts, it decreases the quality of the site.

And from there, you have the fallacy of this argument. This decreases the quality of your experience on Facebook. With the million other options and networks, why on earth would Facebook purposefully lower the quality of their product in order to make a few bucks with ads?

Because they can get away with it in the short term. Millions of dollars is more than a "few bucks" but it's driving the site down hill and possibly contributing to their eventual collapse. In any case you claimed it works out for the users quite well, which it obviously does not.

They would do it to make more than "a few bucks" with ads. Business is full of these tradeoffs, so I don't know wherefrom this presumption of purity from FB to our walls comes from.

because where else do you have a network of "friends" as extensive as the one on facebook?

Yep. Half of my news feed is bullshit stuff that my friends like because they haven't discovered true content aggregators. They use Facebook for the sort of stuff that I use Reddit for and it completely ruins my experience.

I'm there to see what's happening IRL with my friends, not to see pictures of stuff that I saw a few days ago while on the toilet.

For context, I'm a 19 year old student going into my third year at uni, so that puts me right in Facebook's original target demographic. It's disappointing that a service so useful for staying in touch with friends has degraded into little more than an IM service because the rest of it's been spammed to hell.

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