[ajslater]

> Social media is all about making you feel bad.

> Its a platform for people with low self esteem to dream about what their lives could have been. For older folks to remember the past. For the average guy/gal to keep tabs on old flames.

It's amazing what a mirror Facebook is. Your Facebook description resembles very few other people's Facebook. Its nothing like mine.

I briefly worked on an app that had Facebook integration and got to see different people's feeds. Even straight white male programmer dudes like myself, each one had unrecognizably different content in their feeds. Mine is mostly baby pictures, art posts & science posts. Someone elses was entirely niche events and parties. Another was the most banal tabloid celebrity gossip. Another just seemed a random mix of every sort of media. Another was predominantly toxic right wing graphical text posts urging you to be afraid and lots of flags.

What I'm getting at here, is that I don't think Facebook itself is the problem. It's never the problem with a feed that you curate yourself.

[jakubp]

I was with you until the last sentence. A feed we curate ourselves? Really? I never got to see most of what my friends posted over the years, so I can hardly be curating any of it, can I? :)

[ajslater]

You follow people if you want to see some of their posts.

You unfollow people if you don't want to see any of their posts.

If you like something, Facebook shows you more posts like that.

If you hide something, Facebook shows you fewer posts like that.

No one does any of that for you. Its entirely you. The result is your feed.

I like all my social media feeds because I choose what's in them. It's not the slightest bit difficult.

It works the same on Twitter. It works roughly the same on Tumblr and every social network.

Every single grandstanding "I am quitting this self curated feed platform" post is ridiculous in the same way.

[jakubp]

That would make sense if we only had a few friends. If you have a few hundred, you only see a small percentage of what they posted, regardless of your actions. Now I understand that my actions impact what I see, but I'm pretty sure it's way more nuanced than what you describe: what does it mean "like that"? I may like or read two posts and discussions about food, and Facebook infers it's about food, but I actually just liked the pictures of broccoli and don't want more food articles. I didn't curate anything, i just wanted to see the damn broccoli.

It's not "me" who decides what I see. I may just want the damn broccoli, but it may take a year or two before Facebook's AI figures that out. And I sure as hell will never figure out what THEY inferred about my preferences, because there isn't any "here's what _you_ decided to see" list that summarizes my inoccuous choices...

How many signals go to the feed? How many of these are my conscious choice? And I am what you could call an expert computer user who actually worked for one of those big tech companies so I can at least imagine some of that complexity and reason about it...

[ajslater]

The liking and hiding emphasis features are trivial. They hardly matter. If Facebook's post emphasis algorithm was entirely random, very nuanced or specifically malevolent it wouldn't matter.

Only follow people whose posts you find enjoyable and you will find Facebook enjoyable. This is entirely up to you. If you stop enjoying someone's posts, you unfollow them.

Guaranteed 100% success rate. It's not difficult or tricky. There's no gotcha, there's no fee. Most people can figure this out. I'm not sure why this isn't intuitive for the OP or yourself.