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Comment by cytzol | Hacker News Reader

> I've never been a fan of Facebook.

This is something that's puzzled me. Is it the privacy implications, or just a general dislike for the company? The way I see it, it's a publishing platform for posts shorter than blog entries and longer than tweets. I read things that my friends write, and I write things for them to read. While there are games and pages and things, you don't have to use them.

I've had friends switch (switch, not start to use both) from Facebook to Google+, and treat it in exactly the same way as they treated Facebook. So I'm not sure if Google+ is better by its own merit, or just that Facebook has a bad reputation.

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Before the privacy stuff became a concern, I just didn't like the product. The whole symmetric relationship model just never really hooked me. It's not any particular philosophical hatred. I just never "got it" like others seemed to. I understand it, but it was never the sort of thing that I was constantly refreshing.

It wasn't very useful to me before the whole app platform thing, and after the app platform launched, it quickly became too noisy and cluttered.

Facebook now has asymmetric relationships with subscriptions, and the app platform noisiness has improved a great deal in recent years. I just block apps which are particularly noisy.

A big part of it is that it is just too much work to clean up what you see to a point where I don't have to wade through massive amounts of pure junk to see anything that's interesting.

No, I don't care what you had for dinner

Meanwhile Google+ makes it exceedingly easy to group people in ways that makes filtering easy, and now with the slider to let you "mix" how much from each circle appears in your full feed, I can pretty close to mute anyone that becomes obnoxious while still just being one click away from still finding out what they had for dinner.

Google+ is already more usable for me than Facebook, and they already have far better tools available to deal with an information overload that doesn't really exist there yet. I'm far more confident that as more people I know starters using Google+, I won't drown in updates I don't care about.

"Updates I don't care about" neatly summarizes why I don't like Facebook much. Maybe 1% of what I see when I log in to Facebook interests me.

I also much prefer the asymmetric relationships of Google+ - it matches the real world far better than Facebook "friends".

> Google+ is already more usable for me than Facebook, and they already have far better tools available to deal with an information overload that doesn't really exist there yet. I'm far more confident that as more people I know starters using Google+, I won't drown in updates I don't care about.

Facebook lets you tone down updates and the like as well. Also, have you tried managing a page with Google+ yet? Let me let you in on a secret: they did not make it very intuitive.

> A big part of it is that it is just too much work to clean up what you see to a point where I don't have to wade through massive amounts of pure junk to see anything that's interesting. > No, I don't care what you had for dinner

That's not a Facebook problem, that's a "people" problem. Whenever there are people involved, you will know what someone had for breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, etc.

> Facebook lets you tone down updates and the like as well.

Well, that shows you how little time I now spend on Facebook. Never seen that. Where is it? I still can't find the options to do that, after clicking around like crazy. Unless you mean the person by person "all/most/only important" - that's far too much hassle.

In Google+ I've toned down the number of updates from my "following" circle that I use for people I don't personally know, for example, and I don't have to remember to adjust settings for individual people when I add them to that circle. Meanwhile, if I want to see that unfiltered stream, I only need to click on that circle, not on each individual member of it.

> Also, have you tried managing a page with Google+ yet? Let me let you in on a secret: they did not make it very intuitive.

I haven't, as I've never had any interest in using it, or in following any for that matter.

> Unless you mean the person by person "all/most/only important" - that's far too much hassle.

Yeah, that's the one. How else would you do it? It might be more annoying since you'd have to re-organise your existing friends all at once instead of doing it when you circle them. But I did that, and now I only see things from people I actually care about.

It might be that Facebook started out as just a news feed while Google+ started out as several, so it's more intuitive for a Google+ user to tone down the updates. There are Close Friends/Acquaintances/People Near You streams on Facebook, but I keep forgetting about them.

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