Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

and I have tuned it

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the vast, vast majority of Facebook users (like, 90%+ is my SWAG) don't do any tuning at all. I'm also going to guess that a large percentage of users "friend" people they aren't friends with in real-life, due to just "shared common interest" or whatever. IF both of these assumptions hold, then the scenario the author of TFA is painting, could well be true for a significant portion of Facebook users.

Whether that's actually the case or not would be hard to measure. But to share one more anecdote: find my Facebook feed to be less and less interesting over time. With little "tuning" on my part, FB is doing a pretty crap job of figuring out what I actually want to see.

So... I could do the work to go in, delete less-than-useful "friends", tune my preferences, etc... or I could just slowly begin to drift away from Facebook, logging in less and less frequently and using Twitter and/or G+ more. Guess which one is more likely?

Good lord, man. How do you deal with people you meet in real life? Do you walk around responding "What you just said is irrelevant to me."?

What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.

Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me). And with what, maybe one of those people hidden every few months, I otherwise actually have a pleasant experience catching up on what my friends & family have been up to. It's not that complicated...

It seems that you think we disagree about something fundamental here, but I can't figure out what it is. Especially since I could easily have written this bit myself:

What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.

Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me).

Right, and I think this is the wrong approach. There's not an absolute correlation between who said something and whether or not the subject is of interest to me. If I have a friend who I share political beliefs with, I may care about his post on, say, gun control... but if that same friend is a religious fundamentalist, I absolutely don't want to see any "pro Jesus" crap. I think this assumption, that content should be selected / filtered based on provenance, is one of the most broken things about online social networking.

Also, Facebook just isn't important enough to me, for me to spend any time "tuning" things to try and tailor my stream to what I want it to be. Like most of us, I have about a bazillion things competing for my time and attention. If Facebook isn't delivering a desirable experience (regardless of the reason), then I, for one, am likely to just drift away from it and let something else entertain me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com