Hacker News Reader

Comment by heurist | Hacker News Reader

The masses (especially boomers in America) still use Facebook, they've just retreated into groups, messenger, and marketplace. This behavior aligns with Facebook's product focuses. The Facebook killer does not exist yet.

Personally, Twitter makes me feel gross. Too much marketing spam in a small amount of time. Too easy to get sucked in and lose 30 minutes of my life to informationless noise.

View on HN

On twitter you just block the accounts that are sending you promoted tweets. Eventually, you'll run out of people trying to target you. You have no recourse on Facebook.

You'll still see promoted tweets, they'll just get more and more strange as you collect all the bigger corporate brand accounts in your blocklist.

Strange random ads are ok compared to seeing creepy demographically targeted ads. Also, there are only so many national brands who are willing to spend money indiscriminately.

I had a clicketty clicky addiction to Facebook, which I replaced with the reddit mobile app.

In a past age I was a true believer in reddit, up until 2010-2011. I had a >6-year old account. True believer, paid for gold, believed that to be something special. Reddit ruined that and went for a different, shallower audience. Turns out, that audience is also me.

The problem with reddit got significantly worse when companies started AstroTurfing campaigns there.

Shilling and karma farming have killed ingenuous sharing of information. I used to go on reddit to discover new things. That's no longer the case. I still visit small subs about some shows, games, languages, etc, but I am no longer exposed to unexpected unknown information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com