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Comment by mrleinad | Hacker News Reader

I'd like Facebook to have an option to see all posts, without filtering, just as they're posted. It's not hard, it's a simple UX, but it's just not there.

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I kind of understand the point on not showing everything: too much people producing too much content (and it's hard to decide whom to unfollow when everyone produces more or less the same percentage of quality and non-quality content), which led me few years ago to immediately abandon Twitter after just a few days. I followed a handful of people and have been just catching up with yesterday's tweets whole morning each day. This seems to be less of a problem those days but it might be subjective.

What makes me go nuts though is stuff disappearing from my FB wall (using mbasic web). Lately I see that a lot: see a few interesting entries on timeline, I click one, come back to the wall and they've disappeared and some random stuff from 3 days ago took their place and I can't find them again.

Same happens in YouTube Android app. See a few interesting videos, click one (I can't "open in new tab" in the app...), go back, they're gone and replaced with something totally unrelated. Ugh.

They used to do that. They had two different news feeds, one with their algorithm and one that was just a real-time feed. Then they scrapped the real-time feed in favor of their algorithm-based feed. It's not that the real-time was hard to do, it's that the algorithm is more easily monetized.

Moving the feed from 'chronological' to 'algorithmic' obfuscates the true quantity of actual content on the user's timeline, thereby allowing a higher density of ads and other sponsored content without the user necessarily being able to tell or prove.

I hypothesized about other benefits and drawbacks here [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12190724

Yup. It was a huge deal in, what, 2008, when they did this? Almost as big as when they got rid of curated content and turned everyone's link-able "interests" into weird generic "likes" (it was a really strange period for at least a few months as I recall).

For awhile you could switch back every time you logged in, manually, to a chronological news feed.

Instagram was one of the last holdouts but they switched a year or two ago.

Twitter is amazingly bad at this. It takes screenfuls of junk on mobile to get to the chronological stuff.

What I want is a feed API to write my own post selection algorithm. Sadly, it's never gonna happen.

There used to be a Feed API, but it was removed for privacy reasons... people (understandably) didn't like that their friends could allow another company to read their posts.

There's a lot of API stuff they used to have but don't anymore. Like how I can read events from their API but can't create an event using their API. Not sure why Facebook doesn't want me adding content to their site but have no problem with me pulling content from their site.

It's probably a core part of their scalability that they never have to produce a complete list of posts. Every fetch is on best effort basis within a small time constraint.

Not a complete list, but doing what twitter does, fetching the latest and adding a notification to the top when there's a new one.

They don't even produce complete search results. Go to a group with a long history, and use "search this group" for a keyword that will return over, say, 100 results--some of them a couple of years old.

You won't see many of the older posts, and facebook gives no indication that they have been pruned. It's very hard to find old things without just scrolling through chronologically, which is slow and error prone.

Drives me insane.

I believe that option already exists[0].

[0] http://imgur.com/a/gg2DH

The pace at which it updates suggests to me that it is not truly an unfiltered stream of everything new.

not on ios mobile

If it's anything like the Android version, it's hidden in the settings.

Hamburger menu > Scroll way down to the "Feeds" section > "Most Recent"

No, that's still from your own bubble that you see on "Top Stories", just ranked "newest first". Not the full list you've subscribed to (as in, every single page and every single friend).

It's a very temporary setting. If you click on any Facebook link (someone's profile, a page, a post page) it reverts to you "Top"

I believe if you create a "group" and then add your entire friends list to it (this involves lots of clicking btw, take a few letters of the alphabet per day) you can accomplish this if you really want.

FWIW I would like that option as well.

Between this and their terrible search and filling up all the white space with ads, it's clear that a FB replacement is nigh.

twitter.com

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