Finally, someone with a similar Facebook experience to my own. I've been reading threads about how horrific the FB feed is for years, but my own is literally 99% updates from friends I don't get to see, and an occasional ad (that is interesting more often than not). Glad to know I'm not completely alone!

I just glanced at mine and it's like 90% people I used to know posting pictures of their kids. The rest is stuff like my buddy's mom posting a recipe for 10 minute Roti.

Overall not bad to be honest. Still not much I'm actually interested in but far from cancerous.

FB knows the optimal amount of ads to show a user, and that has to vary between time spent on the site. Someone who just glances at the site could see significantly less ads than someone who a "perma-scroller" for lack of a better term.

I removed the feed completely, but still kept my account so I can still engage with groups, which is the only thing keeping me there. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...

I also enjoy using Facebook. I never see extreme ideas. My feed is just:

The local expat group for my city

Vegan recipes

Updates from robot teams

Lame jokes / skits that I enjoy

Birthday posts

Cat pictures

Travel restrictions group (support group for those wanting to come to country X, which is difficult because for the last 2 years it been only charter flights and you need approval from 5 government agencies)

Listen, I am really glad it works for someone! I miss those days. It just feels like a total loss for me and starting to sort through why just feels like a seriously daunting task for a dubious result. I have found ways to keep up with friends that are better (mostly text messaging) and so that’s what I stick to. FB was that for a few years but whatever happened to my feed feels like it can’t be undone.

99% of what you see is updates from friends, but are you seeing all of your friends updates?

When a friend posts, I want to see it. Simple. Sometime, years ago, FB decided to pick and choose what to show me from my friend's feeds. That's when I skipped out of FB, deleted my account.

I want to hear about everything that my friends want to tell me so long as it requires a slight modicum of effort on their part.

Facebook turned everyone into bulk junk mailers. They pay the postage and then slap ads on the flyers everyone sends out. People get to spam their friends with basically zero effort.

If Facebook can weed out zero effort, low value posts from my friends with a high degree of accuracy that at least blunts some of the damage the platform itself has done.

And they're deciding which of your posts are zero effort as well.

You do realize all these platforms ramp up ads the more you use them right?

I eventually had to delete my Facebook, but I also did what the parent said, but my feed was primarily suggested content, which was mostly videos, and occasionally it would throw in Fox news, or one of the alt-right shills. I think this content is driven by who you're connected to, and I think it ignores your mutes. I have a lot of friends and family in Louisiana. I've lost friends to QAnon.

So, yeah, if we're going with anecdata, then my experience doesn't match yours, even with this approach of trying to highly curate it.

Fox news is alt right now?

Most of the network, no, and I wasn't insinuating that. Carl Tuckerson is very much alt-right. His program is white power hour.

Commenter mentioned "...throw in Fox news, or one of the alt-right shills". Not "...throw in Fox news, one of the alt-right shills"

Comprehension 101

Word association 101. You place a word that close to another word most readers associate them, which is what they’re trying to achieve here. Take some psych classes?

This, along with all the replies down below is the most un-HN comment I have read for the past 10+ years. Facebook is doomed and crap was the accepted norm.

Especially during pandemic when I get to see update from my friends. Their new born, or kids finally going to school. I have a suspicious feeling many of the negative and politics went somewhere else like Twitter. And the rest are there you could easily filter out. The place is now a lot more calm than it used to be. Although this may be confined to US and UK? My AUS friends are still on Facebook for political battle for some reason.

During the run up to the Brexit referendum, Facebook became very political. I just blocked all political groups that popped up because friends were sharing or commenting under their posts. That made it much more sane and pleasant to scroll through.

I'm guessing maybe the algorithms figure out if you are into political battles or not and adjust your feed accordingly? I get hardly any of that stuff personally.

I can describe a tale of two Facebooks. It was at first the best of times and now the worst of times.. In the beginning was my old account that had basically mostly friend status updates with photos. I deleted this account during the last election and covid pandemic to get a break. I rejoined later and despite adding most of my same friends it's been a complete disaster. So many ads and group suggestions. I feel like I am swamped by craiglist posts if I ever click on the group section even inadvertently. And I have a couple of groups I want to be in!! Just a total cluster f$$$ really.

I am actually grateful b/c I was addicted to FB. I broke that addiction and the reintroduction hasn't been anywhere close to where it was. Now twitter has seemed to become better... but maybe I've changed.

HN is still well, still here, maybe I should leave and see what I think in 6 months.

This is roughly my experience, but I didn't delete Facebook in-between. It's just terrible now. I watched as the newsfeed was aggressively tuned for outrage. I used to see updates about friends. Now it's just outrage and clickbait and ads. So many ads. Even with adblockers. I just can't use it anymore. It's so terrible.

Or I could just go follow different groups I care about on Reddit. I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me.

> I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me.

If you're not interested in content from people in your social network, then I don't understand what you're expecting to get out of a social network anyway. Facebook isn't a bad way to keep up with friends and family, but if you don't like your friends on any platform then you're probably not going to have a good time.

In other words: You're not their target customer. As with any business, trying to extrapolate your own use case on to the general public is going to be very misleading.

I have meaningful conversation with people on other social networks. Discord, Instagram, Twitter, even TikTok. Facebook is the exception: it throws content at me that I explicitly don’t want and as its user base ages the content becomes less and less interesting. Topic-based groups are good but other networks simply do them better. And the idea of keeping up with what Karen from high school is doing isn’t all that fun at least to me.

I am not on FB but I use Reddit and I’m a little worried about how they will try to monetize when they go public. I have a feeling eventually it will become unusable. I’ve been a Redditor for 10 years now and I really hope the marketing via outrage culture doesn’t make its way there but I feel like it’s only natural.

> I have a feeling eventually it will become unusable.

> I really hope the marketing via outrage culture doesn’t make its way there...

Reddit has been unusable for at least the past five years owing to how they tailor the homepage and r/all to be a wasteland of outrage designed to keep users seething at others. It's basically become the two minutes hate.

r/all has never been usable if you didn’t unsubscribe from default subreddits.

I suspect the small subreddits will be useful well into the future, while the major subs and the front page will become increasingly terrible.

I use FB all the time and it’s great. I subscribe to a few heavily moderated groups for my city that are full of genuinely helpful and productive posts. It’s where I find out what’s going on here.

I’ve unfollowed almost everyone from my past and when I add someone new I unfollow them as soon as they post anything publicly that I don’t care about.

Ive done that to the point where it frequently says "there's nothing to show here" instead of a feed. I know people I'm interested in hearing from are posting things, but Facebook will never decide to show them to me, regardless of my settings

I get 'suggested posts'.