I'm from the US and have the same experience. Just glancing at my feed it's:

Somebody celebrating getting out of rehab.

Somebody heading to Italy for vacation.

Somebody going in a hot air balloon.

Somebody going to Santa Fe for vacation and asking for things to do.

Somebody said last night was one of the best nights of their life.

Somebody sharing progress updates on their offgrid homestead.

Somebody got a new pizza oven for National pizza month

Somebody going on a train ride.

Somebody telling me that Dune movie tickets go on sale today (cool).

A bunch of posts from a tesla owners group, laser cutter operators group, and sailing groups that I am a part of.

A bunch of posts from buy nothing, and housing groups that I'm a part of.

I see literally nothing related to politics.

However, jumping over to twitter it's:

Something about "the establishment"

A news story about somebody getting shot.

Something about counterterrorism strategies.

North Korean FUD

Something about a gunfight and a DEA agent being killed.

etc. etc.

Facebook seems to me to be a place where people come together and talk to each other about happy things happening in their lives (or sometimes, looking for support when sad things happen).

Twitter seems like a place people go to get angry and scream at each other.

I quit FB for a bit over a year then came back because I missed connecting with people. I was quickly shocked by what I was actually 'missing'. The thing that jumped out at me was a former elementary/high school classmate who was literally arguing for vehicular manslaughter (murder?) -- that protesters should be run over at high-speeds for blocking the freeway[0].

Now, that's one post from one person. Yes, it's an outlier, but there was a ton of truly corrosive shit people were posting. I quickly found that for me, getting out of FB altogether was the best option. I deleted my account a while back and I don't miss it.

I get that people can actively curate their feed and use FB as a tool for communication, but for me, that's far too much effort and wasn't worth it. I'm actually quite sad -- the promise of what FB could be falls far short of what it is.

[0] https://www.startribune.com/500-gather-near-u-of-m-to-protes...

The obvious question to me here is why you're "friends" with people like that? One of you sent the friend request in the first place and the other accepted. If/when it turns up you made a mistake with either step it's easy to undo it. As you said it's mostly outliers. Most people don't post/comment at all and the ones who do you can easily regulate (unfriend, or create a custom list (either black- or whitelist) if you need to stay "friends" for whatever reason).

> The obvious question to me here is why you're "friends" with people like that?

I'm sure a lot of people loved others who have had drug addictions, joined a cult, or were fed misinformation by a group of zealots. Sometimes being a friend means "in spite of" not "because of".

As it happens, this individual was the shortest-lived connection I had on the platform. I had gone back on, received and accepted the friend request, and they posted that shortly thereafter, at which point I immediately unfriended them. It wasn't long after that I decided to scrap the whole endeavor.

Same here. I'm not a FB fan but I still use it. I do have a few old friends or acquaintances who post pictures of their families and vacations. It's not the most intellectual content but it's certainly not toxic and it let me stay in touch with people.

Even with your feed I could see someone getting depressed if they couldn't afford vacations in Italy, hot air balloon rides, etc.

Anyway, maybe you're using Facebook correctly, but clearly enough of the world isn't to cause problems. Do you expect all those folks to change, or is it easier to regulate Facebook itself?

I wonder how much this is country-specific. I always see Americans decry the content on Twitter. I'm in Australia and follow mostly Australians. I'm sure there is outrage somewhere, but I don't see much in my feed.

My feed is half Americans (since I primarily live in the US) and half from a SEA country / expat friends from all over the world.

I don't get where people see this outrage content. Mine is just like cookie recipes and I'm in tons of groups with hundreds of "friends".

A bunch of family I have that are retired spend time shitposting and sharing political junk shares. It’s like forwarding spam, honestly.

It sounds like you have a curated Facebook feed, and alot of shit on your Twitter feed.

The difference is that Facebook will more aggressively push crap at you. Twitter feeds tend to rot over time.

I'm surprised to hear you even have content. That was Facebook for me like 7 years ago. Now it's a ghost town and the only people left are people hitting the share button on low effort posts. I did block almost all of the people who post or share political stuff from one side

Thats odd. My experience is same on Twitter AND Facebook. Politics and angry screaming.

> Somebody got a new pizza oven for National pizza month

There's a national pizza month?

Apparently: https://nationaltoday.com/national-pizza-month/

But honestly: who cares. Any excuse to eat some pizza is good enough for me!

I picked an awful month to start dieting…again

Pizza isn't really/doesn't have to be that unhealthy. Fast food takeaway pizza is of course, but 'pizza' is redundant in that.

Pretty much all that makes a homemade or otherwise decent pizza less healthy than a sandwich is the amount of it one typically eats in a sitting. Or of course if you for some reason pile unhealthy stuff high on your pizzas, but stuff your sandwiches with the height of nutrition. But I assume that would be uncommon.

There's a "day" or "month" for everything these days. It's just how globalisation blends with capitalism. People are more herd like than ever before.

It's just marketing, I don't see what globalisation particularly has to do with it. Capitalism perhaps, but only to the (debatable) extent that it's responsible for marketing.

You don't see what being connected as a whole (world) has to do with creating social calendar dates? Really?

These things are figments of marketing imagination. They spread through people, not TV or ads. Albeit they start that way. You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick. Which is becoming increasingly easy as we become a whole connected people.

Sales (lower priced periods) are marketing. "National ___ day" is way more than that.

> You don't see what being connected as a whole (world) has to do with creating social calendar dates? Really?

Well firstly I meant economic globalisation, I was thinking in terms of trade; it seems it has broader/other usages too that I didn't realise. Secondly I'd point to days like Mothering Sunday/Mothers' Day which has a slew of different dates throughout the connected world (even the countries where it's a wholly secular marketing creation can't agree):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day#Dates_around_th...

> These things are figments of marketing imagination.

Did you mean not? Otherwise we're in agreement.

> You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick.

They don't need to stick, very few do, you hear for the first time about world tie day in late August, maybe get persuaded to buy a wacky new tie, and then forget all about it - or at least when it is - again.

In your list you left out a bunch of ads that were chosen based on targeted surveillance of the private lives of you and your friends.

Sure, although it doesn't seem to be doing very well at the targetting. All of the ads seem to revolve around a singular life event that I recently posted about.

Facebook sells ads. Facebook doesn't care if the ads work.

Just out of curiosity, in that taxonomy how would you characterize Reddit?

I try to avoid reddit.com/r/all and have my subreddits pared down to dogs, mechanical keyboards, tesla stuff, cryptocurrency, sailing, and locally-relevant things (city subs for the places I have homes).

I'd say facebook is: older people sharing stuff about their life. Benign posts about traveling, maybe some light complaining about the neighborhood where they live getting too expensive, complaining about their job or sports or something like that etc.

Twitter is: younger people who are angry at the world and looking for a scapegoat. Everything is "here's why $outgroup is the core of all the problems in the world in 240 characters or less". Absolutely psychologically abusive garbage.

Reddit is like twitter, but more of an impotent rage. Lots of corporate pop culture references, but still with a strong dose of "here's why $outgroup is so bad!"

Looking at some of the parenting subs I'm on, some of the top posts are prompts for people to explain how terrible things in the world are.

Just really really toxic, awful things.

If I had to guess why: facebook is relatively private. The only things I see are either from people choose to follow explicitly, or from a tier-2 follow like a group (which I can filter if the group starts veering into toxicity).

Twitter is explicitly public. You see and interact with everything from everybody. There seems to be a strong ephasis on sharing other things from people I don't follow.

Reddit is the worst. Completely public, I never followed any of these people. Ignoring/blocking individuals would have almost no effect.

This is kinda insightful to hear. Do you happen to have an Instagram? Would love to hear your thoughts on it.

On Jan. 5, my Facebook feed had an acquaintance from college saying Trump would triumph the next day, so there’s always that.

100% agreed. And there is nothing funnier than seeing people on "team Twitter" excitedly tweeting about how "nothing of value was lost" without any sense of irony whatsoever.

To me, it's the difference between default private and default public. On both platforms you can curate your content, and arguably the worst content festers on Facebook because it is so hidden from the public eye, but it also means it doesn't have to find its way to you.

Facebook as a company has had much more problematic behavior, I'd agree with that one for sure.

But if there's anything we've learned from the past decade, it's the old axiom "sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong.

>>"sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong.

Certainly for some types of infectant such as weapons-grade dezinformatsiya...

Or at least, to achieve disinfection, that sunlight needs to be applied at intensities found on the surface of the sun vs at the surface of the earth.

>Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people.

This is the most underrated aspect. With the caveat that you can't choose your family and schoolfriends, you get the facebook you deserve. And you know, maybe you should try a bit harder to understand your family and schoolfriends?

Maybe you should also try harder to understand the corporate and political system in which your family and friends live.

Facebook seems to make that harder rather than easier.

I'm from the U.S. and your experience matches mine. I just have like 1 niece, 1 cousin and a friend or two that I had to unfollow. I'm still friends with them, I just don't see any of the political stuff they post.

I know some people have like 500+ friends or even the max of 5,000. I keep my friend list to the 250 people I know in real life that I want to keep in touch with. Probably still melting my brain but I'm convinced it's nice to keep up with people's lives.

Exactly. 150 or so for me, but the ones who insist on being political all the time have long since been muted or unfriended.

And who do you know who still sends Christmas cards? That was for those people that you never see IRL. Now they're FB friends.

I feel that way about Twitter. Lots of people in my feed complain about the baggage that dominates their feeds. Mine has none.

There is only one person who was bringing baggage (all men are terrible people, here is a never-ending stream of examples of what they do to make me so bitter) so I just muted them. Other than that person, the people who I've chosen to interact with don't bring these negative experiences, and hopefully appreciate that I likewise don't bring it to them.

Someone else in this thread posted a similar observation to some of the people in my Twitter feed. I personally think most people already know you can refuse to follow and can mute those who make for such negative experiences. If you participate in it, of course it's going to feel that way.

Most of my followers and followerees on twitter are artists, so it's pleasant. I ignore all the other crap.

I'm in agreement that facebook is partly what you make it and experiences vary. My own experience has been generally positive; However I was a member of a niche interest group that used to be run on an old-school forum at its own domain. Over the years more and more content moved to the facebook group and there was roughly an even split when an accident by the web host lead to the total loss of the forum which could not be restored which meant all users now moved to the facebook group. The quality of material and the standard of discourse is shockingly worse on facebook than it was on the forums to the point where many interactions degrade into mudslinging. There shouldn't be too much difference between the forum/fb groups, but the only explanation I have come up with is that facebook's algorithm selects and displays content to people who would never have seen it on the forum, and some of them feel compelled to comment with either nasty or unhelpful input. On the forum I think the discovery of this content is self-directed and so only those with a genuine interest come across the post and interact with it, most others will just ignore the post title and scroll on, whereas facebook will show them the whole post with images and this makes them more likely to interact when they shouldn't. The other explanation is just that the mudslinging was always on the forum, but I did not come across it because it was not selected for me, but this goes both ways in that perhaps facebook is selecting "high-engagement" posts (with LOTS of argument) to display to me as well, thinking these will be of more interest. Whatever the cause, the difference is stark for this particular online community.

I suspect the original poster was not complaining about these topics showing up on their timeline; they don't want them showing up on anyone's timeline.

It can't show up on their timeline, mainly because they "Never had a Facebook" or "deleted their Facebook a day/month/year ago and it instantly made them better/happier/sexier"

Facebook is like a mirror. If you want to learn about yourself, look at your feed. If you see a bunch of political stuff, then it turns out that you had a weakness for political content. If you see a bunch of kittens, then you were overindexing in how you interacted with that content compared to alternatives.

It's not too different from alcohol. Two different people start drinking a lot of beer in college. One grows out of it, the other becomes an alcoholic. All things being same, the latter person had a more addictive personality and should have been more careful with alcohol.

To extend the alcohol analogy - some people wanted to prohibit it, but ultimately it's still here and it's just heavily regulated. You're not allowed to have it when you're young or when you're driving. Your friends will think poorly of you if you have too much of it too frequently. I wouldn't be surprised if social networks end up in a similar place.

Twitter is the real warzone.

If you are moderately famous, anything will be controversial.

You can say "water is good for you", and I can guarantee you that someone will reply with "actually, my friend drank too much water and died". Then, the drama would ensue.

it's the importance of curating your social media, twitter for me is basically just tech stuff, sometimes I see the edge of war when other tech people are involved, but mostly its all about cool things happening in tech. Facebook I've limited down a bit, I've mostly stopped looking at comments on news articles (really wish there was an option to remove the ability to see comments on some pages) other than that, its pretty good, except when friends engage in war. I'm also subscribed to some atheist groups, and those are super messy at times.

The thing is: if you ever engaged with political posts, facebook will make sure to show you political posts for the rest of your life, and the more likely to upset you, the better.

  >  a bunch of niche hobby groups

This. I actually unfriended and blocked all my personal contacts (not because I hate them, I was just removing my personal self from the platform) and then use it only for a bunch of amateur radio related groups which are largely very civil and helpful, good folks. For many, it's an easier-to--use groups.io.

It's the aggregate experience is and its influence on society that is more important than the experience of an individual user.

Twitter may seem like more of a war zone, and that's possible, but you have to actually measure things. I suspect the dark corners of Facebook are darker than Twitter, because Facebook is more siloed.

Yeah. For me, the overwhelming majority of my feed is just photos of my friends' babies and children.

My experience on Facebook is the same, but I also have the same experience on Twitter. I follow really smart people who are in tech who have interesting things to say. That's all I see on Twitter.

>I should add that I'm not from the US.

That's probably a big part of it.

Yep. I wouldn't say that there's no politics on my FB feed. But it's all either liberal or socialist -- because that's the consensus among my friends. And none of it is particularly nasty even when it falls out of that. It just doesn't get controversial.

Also, not from the US. From Canada.

Where I see the nastiness is when politics leaks into various hobby topic groups I'm on. And it's almost always Americans raising a stink (mad about masks, vaccines, "libtards" whatever)