Facebook without the News Feed
maxfriedrich.de
maxfriedrich.de
I'd really like to keep up on the minutiae of life that people casually post to facebook. I'd particularly like to see posts from people who don't post very often or who I don't interact with very often. But AFAICT there's no way to stop it prioritising, filtering, hiding, reordering as it sees fit. And that's with it set to display "Most Recent" instead of top stories.
I don't 'like' anything, or have hundreds of pages spamming my feed. I have a number of friends somewhere between 50 and 100, most of whom don't post that much, that often. I'd just like the unedited feed of what they post, but apparently that's not possible.
A few weeks ago I met up with some old friends and learned that a mutual friend was getting married. We're friends on facebook and she has been posting about her wedding day regularly and yet I had absolutely no idea it was happening because facebook decided for me that she was unimportant.
They really need a way to turn this aggressive filtering off. I use facebook specifically to keep in touch with wayward friends, I don't need a feed full of BS updates from people I speak with regularly.
It's truly insane.
Besides which, it seems to switch back to "Top Stories" all by itself every so often.
No, you can't on the current version of the Android app (they took that out recently), though you can go to a separate "Most Recent" feed from another menu -- the primary feed (and the one that gets a red badge for new messages to draw you back to it) is always Top Stories.
> doing this supposedly undoes the EdgeRank filtering and gives you a reverse chronological feed of what your friends are posting.
"Most recent" gives you a reverse chronological feed (mostly, though I've sometimes observed posts out-of-order in "Most Recent"), but it doesn't appear to undo EdgeRank filtering.
> But I find it also throws in random posts from people or pages that your friends comment on, and also keeps bumping your friends posts that are getting comments from your other friends further up in the feed, so it becomes unnavigable in its own way.
The primary "Top Stories" feed seems to do the same thing, except that it doesn't automatically push the most recent updates to the top -- it does seem to promote posts further up based on more recent interactions from friends.
Hope fb is happy with my much reduced engagement.
Then bookmark the url of the list page (like https://www.facebook.com/lists/{list-id} ), and use it instead of the default homepage. I use this method for years and it seems much more usable this way.
RSS is some horrible mix of protocol (for developers) and tool (for users). It's like telling someone to SMTP the information to you.
Even today I often struggle trying to get a podocast into my phone because I can't find the (correct) RSS feed on a podcast's website. RSS is a fine way for computers to talk to each other. People talk to each other in tweets, emails, posts, HN comments.. sometimes in words.
RSS the idea is great. To be able to stream things in from different sources as you see fit is much better than letting some other person's random algorithm do it for you without you having any control.
RSS the implementation still has some work ahead of it, unfortunately. You click on an RSS feed link somebody has, and it shows you code. Sometimes its hard to find the RSS link. Sometimes there is no RSS feed, and people use something else like tweets or posts. I'd prefer a future where the browser was friendlier to RSS, as well as RSS being better integrated with websites.
Btw, it is possible to get a person's RSS feed for an individual person's facebook feed. I discovered it a while back, but it's somewhat cumbersome.
The link ends up looking like this: https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=atom10&id=173...
It'd be cool if a tool could let me give them my FB credentials, and then it automatically grabbed every single friend's FB feed and produced RSS for each, and combined them into one feed while letting me control it. Weekend project anyone?
My experience is very similar to yours -- even with "most recent" (which is really "bias by recency a bit higher in the selection algorithm," as near as I can tell), I miss all sorts of things I really care about, (while still being bombarded with stuff I don't care about).
I am not, in general, a fan of machine-selection of relevant items. Even for a human to intelligently edit my fb feed would be a challenging job, and until machines begin to approach the intelligence of humans, they will do it poorly.
Even if it is a large volume, I'd like the chance. I don't have hundreds upon hundreds of friends, and I want to see what the ones I don't talk to all the time are saying.
The only feed I have on the right hand side of the page is displaying some 'trending' things (I have no interest), a couple of events I'm probably not going to and a couple of 'suggested groups'
To give a crude example, if I see lots of posts about people enjoying expensive holidays, I'm probably more likely to click on related adverts. The effect of advertisement-funded media on the style and content of programmes is quite well documented. What if social media had a similar effect on how we perceive our relationships?
What we need is a decentralized social platform. Not something like diaspora* but a basic social layer on which developers can write apps and where each person can host their own account where they wish, install their own apps and plugins, and present things their way.
Think Redmine vs some Project Management As A Service. You can have it for free and only pay for hosting, install any plugins, and customize it to your heart's content. And the NSA can't break into everyone's project management at once. They have to target someone first.
Something like this: http://platform.qbix.com
The main reason I rarely use Facebook is because it's so bloated. On the left side I've got a bunch of "games" that I've never played, or have no recollection of playing, but Facebook thinks they're important enough to dedicate part of the front page to them.
And I'm really sick of seeing updates in my news feed about other people playing games. The top post in my news feed right now is "Friend X and Friend Y gave a life in Candy Crush Saga." It actually takes up a fair amount of space because it's got a big picture of a heart with the flavor text "A life to be used in the sweetest facebook game ever."
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>> "People tend to create albums of mediocre photos on Facebook while they only post their best on Instagram."
Really? I love Instagram but I guess I'm not seeing what you're seeing. When a friend of mine is out for the night they might post one ok photo on Instagram. When I look at Facebook I can see the full story of that night. Unless you're an excellent photographer with good subject matter one photo doesn't tell much of a story IMO.
This, CSS trick is a simple hide/show functionality that allows you to go back to the news feed when you feel like it.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news-feed/hjo...
Improvments would be to create a kind of a control dashboard of what you want to see. maybe remove only pictures and videos ? subscribe to a specific list of friends, etc..
But, I like the Messenger (chat and email-esqe) and Events/Calendar, and Group communications.
Something for everyone.
I loathe Facebook altogether and did not miss it one iota when I quit for 3 months earlier this year. I had to go back to it, however, when I caved and added Facebook login to my chrome extension project.
Thanks for the new tool.
to implement this css code http://stylebot.me/styles/5808
I remember a time when the content of the news feed was almost relevant and interesting...
You literally never have to visit Facebook.com proper, ever again.