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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Some people actually use those "takeout" features to collect archive data. So then you do get the archive, it's like having somebody's cuttings from a local newspaper rather than a complete set of local papers on microfiche.

One reason I take these is that I have RAM and I have grep and apparently either the people who had the data don't have RAM or they don't have grep, and so while I can ask my local Facebook archive "Er, didn't I write something about anti-freeze?" and get an answer in seconds, Facebook itself will try to suggest I might want pages about anti-freeze, a group that cares about anti-freeze, a sponsored advert for anti-freeze ... and not the thing I wrote.

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Facebook's search and suggestion engine is hilariously broken.

Say, I am commenting in a thread trying to respond to John Smith. That's the only person whose name starts with a J.

If I start typing @J..., the suggestions would be for literally anyone else but John Smith in the thread.

On their mobile website (which lags behind the app), typing @John Smith will sometimes suggest a number of John Smiths, none of them being the one in the thread I am writing in.

Same with friends. If I want to tag a friend of mine and start typing their name, I usually get suggestions for random people first (neither from my friend list or the comment thread).

Why on Earth is the list not prioritized by (friends in thread) / (everyone else in thread) / (friends) / (everyone else) is absolutely beyond me.

Once you do manage to tag @JohnSmith, he will get a notification that he has been tagged in the thread. One notification per thread, regardless of the number of individual posts he was tagged in.

The link on the notification will take him to the top of the thread.

Depending on the thread's popularity, John could have a very difficult time finding the posts he's tagged in.

These are just symptoms, though, not coding mistakes.

Facebook literally wants you to be caught up in wading through their posts, spending your life on their website.

Ha ha, perfect - you both summed up the hellhole that is Facebook commenting so well.

> Some people actually use those "takeout" features to collect archive data. So then you do get the archive, it's like having somebody's cuttings from a local newspaper rather than a complete set of local papers on microfiche.

The problem with these (at least the Facebook ones) is that the data is lacking all context. It's kinda OK if you just want copies of your photos, but I can't make heads or tails of most my comments from the archive, and posts are missing a lot without the comments.

I have this exact same situation with my Youtube history. I used to be able to search it in Google's history search, but that only shows a subset of results.

If I want to really search for the title of a random video I saw 5 years ago the only option is to download a raw CSV of my history and use grep :(

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