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Comment by revskill | Hacker News Reader

Long time ago, my facebook newsfeed was full of my friends' sharing, it's been very useful place for us to keep friends update. But now, it's a different place. It's a place for ads, for livestream, for real "social" stuffs, but most of them is useless to me for what i use facebook for.

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Facebook's business model is inherently in conflict with the use cases for normal people which you've just described. When you only spend time engaging with your friends and family, you cost Facebook money. Facebook only wants you on the platform because you contribute to the network effect. The people who make all the money for Facebook are the masses who are most easily swayed by all of the manipulation going on.

The Facebook news feed is dead to anyone but trolls, at least in my anecdotal experience.

Facebook is only useful for its yellow pages function. Unfortunately that alone is enough to keep my social circle on Facebook. It’s just really hard to break away, because social circles consists of people with different social circles, and not everyone is going to replace Facebook with the samething, and then everyone is still on Facebook.

Maybe e-mail could be the core of the next generation yellow pages? It’s the only thing everyone has.

My Facebook news feed is fine. I actively unfollow (hide all from) almost all shared third-party content (including news) so that I mostly only see original content from my friends and family.

I don’t follow anything that isn’t people I know and meet at least semi-regularly in the real world. I’ve actively unfollowed a few of them (shhh), but my feed can go a few days with no updates from the 90 people I’m down to.

But of course that’s my anecdotal view. I just never saw the point in following a company or a news paper on a social media.

The issue is that sometimes friends will share posts from third-party pages, and then those sometimes show up in your feed. You have to manually hide all from each source in order to prevent that.

Excuse me, do you mean white pages? I don't use Facebook for finding businesses.

I guess I do, in Denmark they came in the same book called the yellow pages (de gule sider). I guess that was because we’re a tiny nation, but now that you mention it the “people” pages were indeed white.

Email was killed by spam (and lack of ease of use) long ago. Now it's mostly used by business.

That’s interesting, my news feed these days is almost 100% free of any news.

Only really big topics make it through like the New Zealand shooting.

Have you tried curating your feed by unfollowing pages, groups, people who share things you don’t like?

I’ve noticed more people engaged with LinkedIn over the last year. People are sharing things I once saw on Facebook years ago: personal achievements and struggles, side hobbies, congratulations, etc. Surprisingly, I’ve found myself considering engaging with content on LinkedIn a few times the last few months.

LinkedIn is good. The fact that people depend on it to find work seems to keep things reasonably well-behaved. At least for now.

My feed is still pretty reasonable, but I also aggressively delete people I don't interact with and use the "Block all from <X>" option very liberally. Also, unfollowing people who you need to be friends with (for family reasons, etc.) but whose crap you don't want to see can work pretty well.

This sounds like an opportunity, a social media platform that separates all political content to some secondary feed would be interesting...

That is an interesting idea, sort of like how Gmail has the "Social" and "Promotions" tab.

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