Comment by brickmort | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brickmort | Hacker News Reader

I deleted my Facebook account after realizing that every time I would go on it, the clickbait and mindless minutia would irritate me more than entertain me. between the advertisements, there would be 'you'll never guess what happens next!' posts, then political propaganda, then children/marriage updates on people I hadn't interacted with in years. At a certain point, I realized that it wasn't even fun to me anymore, so I bid farewell to everyone, backed up my contacts & pictures, then deleted my facebook. It's been about two years since I left and, for the most part, I don't really regret it.

With that said, what I do regret is missing out on my growing family. My cousins from out of state as well as my siblings are getting married and having kids. I was helping my mom log into her facebook the other day and I saw pictures of my niece's first day of ballet class and my nephew's first day of kindergarden. It made me light up and think "Ah shit, I'm kind of missing out on these things." Although I see them every now and then, stuff like that is the only reason I would even consider getting back on FB. I find it funny that it's for a completely different purpose from when I first joined in college.

I just found News Feed Eradicator the other day and it has changed my Facebook habits drastically. It lets you use all of the useful features of FB (messages, groups, pages, etc.) and replaces the newsfeed with a quote about procrastination or productivity. 10/10 would recommend - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

I used this for a while but noticed it greatly slowed down my Facebook in general. Ended up uninstalling it after a few days. Wish they had a lighter weight one.

I know this might sound like a really non-efficient thing to do, but you can individually unfollow every single one of your contacts. I only have around ~200 friends so unfollowing them wasn't that hard.

Nowadays, I love going to Facebook. My news feed is completely empty.

I don't go to that extreme, but I did find Facebook was much more manageable when I started just unfollowing anyone whose posts/reshares annoyed me more than a couple of times.

I've probably only unfollowed about 10% of my total friends list, but the difference is immense, a lot of the noise tends to come from a small subset of the people, in my experience.

This is a missed opportunity. As Shirky points out, social media is "publish, then filter", and you've found a powerful filter that lets you reap the benefits. (And he also points out power laws--10% of the people in your feed post 90% of the garbage.)

While I don't log in to Facebook more than once every six months, your observation gives me hope that I might be able to find some utility in it.

I love this approach personally. Unfollowing almost everyone (except for a few I actually want to see) has it so I usually am OK with going on there now without feeling exasperated. I'm learning a foreign language so I began following people I don't even know who use that language so I can get practice reading it. I'm trying to make it work for my needs instead of completely checking in or out of the whole thing.

It seems to me that the parent would still miss out on what he would like to see the most: pictures of his extended family's (cousins and niece) daily life. The nice thing about the News Feed is that it shows them to you unprompted. Otherwise you'd have to go into each and every single profile and check to see if they have posted anything.

Don't get me wrong, I love the News Feed Eradicator, but it doesn't always change the "Facebook experience" for the better.

Seeing family/friend photos (as well as sharing mine with family) is one of the few reasons I keep Facebook around. I've found it's not tough to get things setup to minimize the annoyances:

1) If someone is consistently filling your feed with crap, just unfollow them. It's as easy as clicking an arrow on their post.

2) Go to the profiles of people you want to keep tabs on (family, close friends, etc), click on the "Friends" button up top, and select "Get Notifications". Now you can pretty much ignore your news feed, and only pay attention to Facebook when you receive a notification.

3) I just discovered this and haven't tried it: click the "Following" button (next to the above mentioned "Friends" button) and select "See First". I assume this prioritizes their posts in your news feed. Neat.

Pictures are nice when they are once in a while. Most FB parents post so many pics you get sick of them quickly.

Seriously, I wish there was a baby face detector/blocker extension. Usually, when I know a friend is having a baby, I just unfollow them for about a year.

Here ya go: http://getrather.com/

It scans only for keywords, no face/children detection

The simple solution for me has been to unfollow everyone in my friend list. You then have an empty news feed, apart from the birthdays which apparently are really important on fb, for some reason. And, of course, a good ad blocker. That still doesn't make fb enjoyable from my POV, but it's still an improvement.

Thanks, just did this! Great solution.

Call them, shoot them an email, or pay them a visit. Not only can you stay in touch, it will also likely be a more satisfying interaction than browsing a feed.

Lots of us live far away from our extended families, and phone calls don't really replace seeing pictures of your nephews. Email might, but in my experience since FB came around, people aren't all that interested in regularly sending emails just for you - I'm told that I should just join FB like everyone else.

That is partly my point: I don't tend to think of replacing one-on-one interaction with a "broadcast" pub/sub model as being more conducive to building and maintaining intimate, fulfilling relationships.

I think you're painting a false dichotomy, though. Using Facebook as a way to keep track of your family's pictures stream doesn't prevent you from interacting with them one-on-one - in fact, it might enhance it!

It's definitely possible, and I'd guess it does enhance for some. But, I don't believe it's generally the case, as it's not a format that encourages it.

Instead, I believe it discourages more focused one-on-one relationship-building in favor of a bi-directional consumption model. People don't interact as much as publish and consume. Knowing what people are doing is not a real substitute for intimacy, but I think the dependence on FB as the medium tends to relegate people to the former (i.e. just keeping up).

In any case, I was responding specifically to an ancestor who stated that he/she was having trouble keeping in touch outside of FB. That makes my point: people tend to be so reliant on FB to manage their relationships, that those relationships evaporate sans FB to the point that people don't even communicate! But, of course, while on FB, people don't generally have meaningful, in-depth conversations.

That pretty much says it all, as it doesn't leave much space for real relationships. Not saying this is absolute, but that it is a net negative.

Thank you anon for updating us in the state of your growing family, that your niece does ballet and that your nephew goes to kindergarten. You may want to rejoin and put this on FB, where someone might be interested :)

hahahah :)

I did the same thing for three years, and really didn't regret it. I reactivated Facebook after I realized I had lost touch with a few people. After reactivating, I think I have a much healthier attitude about Facebook and genuinely enjoy using it in a limited, high-utility way.

I wish the News Feed could be modified significantly, though. It's terrible - so terrible.

What's the best way to delete everything from your fb wall these days? I know they keep crippling the tools.

I wonder if you could set up a private Flickr group for photo sharing and encourage family to participate there.

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