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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

There's a different problem I want solved. I want the option to see only original content, nothing shared.

I don't want to see some random cat video Sarah thought was cute. I can go to /r/kittens myself if I want to see random cute cat videos. I do want to see the video Jen took of her cat because I know him and sometimes feed him when she's out of town.

I think I'm not alone in this, and some of the popularity of Instagram is due to its UX making it easy to upload content directly from a mobile device and not so convenient to share content not created by the user.

I've used the FBPurity browser extension to create a nearly share-free Facebook feed. It reduced the amount of content by 80+% and greatly improved the signal to noise ratio.

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You're missing one thing. The reason we have the algorithm and not the latest newsfeed is not because it's better for the users but it's because better for Facebook to be able to charge the people who create the shared content to float up in the feed. You see the shared meme about the latest new Netflix show before your friends Cat photo because Netflix paid Facebook to show it more often. Netflix is the customer here, you are the product.

Again, if you were able to control exactly what you wanted to see with a control panel - that's a simple thing to implement, but that's not what Facebook does/is. It's an advertising platform. "social networking" is double speak.

I'm entirely aware that the only reason there isn't a tab for this on Facebook is that Facebook doesn't want it. It would obviously be easy for them to implement it.

It might, however be a compelling feature for whatever displaces Facebook to offer. It would require a business model that's not identical to Facebook's.

100% ... although I sometimes value some links and images shared by friends that aren't original content, I _rarely_ appreciate the stupid memes, and page shares that are little more than just people screaming into the echo chamber at people that already agree with them.

I've been manually blocking page after page after page ... every time something gets through, and I think to myself, "ugh, this is stupid", I "hide everything" from that page in the hopes that I'll never see it again (and yet, "LAD Bible" keeps coming back into my feed!).

As you say, I much prefer to see original content and pics posted by people ... in fact, even if it's a link that's posted (and not re-shared from another page), it's usually interesting because they took the time to actually copy/paste that link from a website, so chances are they've actually read the content.

> if it's a link that's posted (and not re-shared from another page), it's usually interesting

I agree, and would be fine with including that sort of thing, especially with a UX that encouraged writing something about the link. A text post including a URL is still something my friend wrote.

On the little dropdown menu for a shared link on Facebook, you can tell it to block all posts from that domain. I found that after doing that on half-dozen of the biggest click-baity sites, my feed is almost all original content again (and this was before Facebook did their big refocus recently).

I've often wondered that it wouldn't be that hard to make an image-based 'social network'/sharing platform à la Imgur (or /r/pics, etc.), but using simple visual hashing to make every image is unique. By partitioning your network so that low-effort memes have a place to go, and with some light moderation you could probably make something quite enjoyable.

I'd love a per-user flag for this. "Don't show me shares from Bob" in the drop-down on posts. I've got friends whose lives I enjoy hearing about - kids, families, photos, etc. - but whose multiple times daily political memes I find toxic.

I'm kinda the opposite. I depend on certain people filtering certain subjects and giving me a "best of." I would never go waste time on some sites myself- and now I don't have to. Jackie finds the good stuff and shares.

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