Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

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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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