[blhack]

I must have really different experiences than all of these people that write these articles (it seems like there has been something like this, every week on HN, for the last 10 years)

My facebook is mostly people showing pictures of stuff, sharing memes, some movie discussion groups, event planning groups. It seems like mostly just people using facebook as a proxy for real world interactions.

Twitter on the other hand is just pure toxic garbage which seems made to intentionally divide people and incite hatred and eventually violence.

I think there is a simple explanation for this: the people writing these articles are twitter users, and the people who use facebook are their outgroup.

[eppp]

I live in a rural area and I don't actually know anyone that uses twitter except me.

My wife's facebook on the other hand is a dumpster fire. Religion, racism, politics all day long with various ads for crappy little boutique stores selling the same cheap clothes at a giant markup.

People post crap about religion and politics that they would never bring up in real life.

[busterarm]

You're in a socioeconomically-stratified filter bubble on facebook.

My facebook was sufficiently diverse and my feed was exactly like twitter, even though none of my friend group were twitter users. I closed all of my social accounts.

Doomsday machine is _exactly_ how I would describe all social media.

[jasonv]

Back when I had Facebook, it was just RSS for me. I wasn't a member of many groups, and I realized I mostly followed organizations and entities. Well, I also followed people, but they were all reluctant social media users. They didn't post, so I found no value in Facebook any longer. It was easy for me to leave.

I un-followed everyone on Twitter some-time ago and set up TweetDelete to delete all my tweets after 2 weeks. I started re-following select accounts on Twitter, and it's not that many. In fact, I frequently find no new content on Twitter, so I am free to ignore it for a while.

I also found that I unfollow any accounts from humans that post too often. Anyone who's sitting on Twitter all day... I don't want to follow. Not very often is it valuable. Even the reasonable constant-posters, they're just jacked into their twitter-sphere. I don't need that. It's a weird thing, to have a job and crank out 20-40 tweets/day.

[blhack]

I am? My Facebook feed contains people who make over $1M/yr, and people who live in their car. Some right wing people talking about how suspicious they think the election was, and left wing people talking about how bad those people are.

I’m not sure how that’s me living is a socioeconomically stratified filter bubble.

My twitter on the other hand, is mostly (all?) left wing Silicon Valley/tech types. It’s diverse in the way that I’d expect a hackathon to be “diverse”.

[cbozeman]

> contains people who make over $1M/yr, and people who live in their car.

If you live in the Bay Area, this can actually be the same group.

[busterarm]

I'm not shaming you. Congrats, you made it.

But you're basically talking about all Bay Area people, which is not a representative cross-section of America as a whole in any way shape or form.

I've lived all over this country and abroad, succeeded, failed, been homeless, succeeded again. My social circle is absurdly broad and my Facebook looked like people fighting each other all the time.

Facebook has even confirmed that it drives engagement.

[blhack]

>But you're basically talking about all Bay Area people, which is not a representative cross-section of America as a whole in any way shape or form.

What? I live in Arizona, and I grew up in the midwest. I've only ever even been to the bay area like 4 times in my life. Most of my friends are in Arizona, and then some in North Dakota, northern MN, and Iowa.

[pjc50]

> Some right wing people talking about how suspicious they think the election was, and left wing people talking about how bad those people are.

And somehow this isn't spilling over into big toxic feuds?

[blhack]

No not that I've seen. On facebook, most of the people know each other in real life, so it seems like those sorts of feuds don't really happen there as much.

There is a groups of people I can think of who occupy dramatically different idealogical spaces, and they do argue with one another, but it's usually more in the form of giant walls of text back and forth.

The most "dramatic" thing happening in my facebook space right now is that a bunch of my friends worked on building a drive through Christmas light show (many of my friends are artists and fabricators), and then the person they built it for didn't pay them, so they're organizing protests.

Just going through my feed right now it's:

Somebody posting pictures about her adventure van build.

Somebody posting a "shop local" guide for Arizona.

A person posting a bunch of selfies of herself.

Somebody asking questions about a soft egg that one of their chickens laid (in a backyard chickens group)

Somebody posting that she just graduated with her masters degree

A post in a group called "let's really argue about film/tv" about christmas movies.

A solicitation for donations to a charity for the homeless (its' getting cold here in Phoenix right now. It was in the 30s last night)

Solicitations in a "buy nothing Tempe" group.

Ah, the first political post: the headline is: "even with three Trump appointed justices on the Bench, SCOTUS Declines to Roll Back Marriage equality"

Picture of a clock tower

A news article about NZ lifting covid restrictions

A motivational picture/meme about self care

Somebody talking about fasting

Somebody selling their tiedyes

Somebody graduating nursing school

More backyard chickens

I'm trying to find something inflammatory here but honestly my entire feed is basically just this forever and ever. People I know and am acquainted with in real life just posting about what they're doing. A few political posts here and there, and generally those don't get any comments.

[Merman_Mike]

When you have billions of users, and you know every little detail about their lives, "millionaires plus guys sleeping in their car" is probably it's own little segment.

[jancsika]

> I must have really different experiences than all of these people that write these articles (it seems like there has been something like this, every week on HN, for the last 10 years)

Me too!

It's almost as if the recommendation algorithm and ad model end up showing and reinforcing different types of content and behavior for different sets of users.

We really need a good word for this process how different people on Facebook see different things-- how it's kind of "sifted," so to speak, in such a way that even if the user tries to venture out to find different content, they can easily end up back where they started. Like walking inside a sphere without knowing it.

For example, maybe I read articles like this one for a full decade and tried at least one time to find fake news and rabid content on Facebook. So I started looking, but lo and behold, the recommendation engine never hooked me up with the ICE Facebook group, or a proudboys group, or one of the zillion other nasty echo chambers these articles keep mentioning.

Did any of the articles you read for the last 10 years give a name to this phenomenon of keeping a user in a cordoned off area with their custom-sifted content? I'll be honest, I've never actively searched to see if such a term exists. But you'd think after all this time an article that uses such a term would have eventually been posted to my wall.

[fatnoah]

This has been my experience as well. I am FB friends with some very right wing people (Coronavirus skeptic types) and left wing people (literal anarchists). My feed remains fairly innocuous and is mostly photos and comments from friends with the occasional discussion friend.

Occasionally I do have to mute someone that's getting too annoying or use the "stop showing me this" feature for certain re-shared content. These are actions I take every few months, so it's not a very regular maintenance.

[dundarious]

Twitter's character limit certainly begs for hot takes, but I find Twitter to be as filled with cat photos, Simpsons memes, movie rankings, and whatnot. Nevertheless, I do enjoy the political sparring there as well.

My qualm with the "Twitter is toxic" discourse is that it often (not accusing you of doing this) points the finger at people with opposing beliefs who are making _fun_ of each other, or being "snarky" as HN guidelines put it. Certainly HN isn't the place for that, nor should it be, but I don't see why Twitter should stop being a place for that. Of course there are users who do incite violence as you say, and I don't have a problem with calling them toxic, and moderating them.

I should also add that Twitter is far easier to curate -- there is no social obligation to follow people in your real world social circle.

[pjc50]

Twitter is also incredibly bad in many ways, but you can still switch to non-algorithmic timeline, you can be anon or pseudonymous, and people aren't socially "expected" to be on there.

On Twitter it's complete strangers who are the problem (and the occasional bluetick or celebrity). On Facebook, it's your friends and family being recommended all sorts of extremist propaganda groups to join.

(Oh, and there's an incredibly nasty feedback loop between the worst of the media and the worst of Twitter, producing things like the Graham Linehan anti-trans fiasco)

[blhack]

You can also switch to non algorithmic timeline on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

Look, I'm not trying to defend facebook here. I agree that social media is basically a drug, and have said many times that one day we will look back at it the way we look back now at cigarettes.

But I think it's a little bit ridiculous to see all of the fingers get pointed at facebook when at least my experience has been that facebook is bad, and twitter is infinitely worse to the point where somebody could reasonably assume that twitter was actively trying to create chaos and make people hate one another.

[johncena33]

> Twitter on the other hand is just pure toxic garbage which seems made to intentionally divide people and incite hatred and eventually violence.

That's also my impression. I mostly use FB for my neighborhood, hiking, biking, bird watching or any kind of nature related groups. It's been mostly pleasant experience for me. I think you can use FB without lowering yourself in all that outrage and drama. It's absolutely doable.

Twitter, OTOH, is a cesspool. I feel the whole platform was designed to congregate the worst of humanity and to bring out the worst in any decent person. It's almost impossible to use Twitter without causing emotional harm to yourself or the others. I find it interesting that FB gets so much hate from media, but Twitter seems to be a media-darling.

[noahtallen]

I think it’s little to do with your local circles and more to do with the content you interact with. I know someone whose Facebook is mostly helpful tips, cooking, and family photos without any politics. Another person in the same household has a very different Facebook experience with lots of politics and religion and toxicity. This is coming from an extremely rural part of Ohio with people who have a very conservative social circle.

The difference is that the one person doesn’t care about politics very much and thus doesn’t interact with political content if it shows up, whereas the other person gets very invested into political content. I myself deleted Facebook because I was getting far too invested into political content.

The overall point being that Facebook’s machine learning algorithm is going to increase your engagement with the platform by showing you posts with content you’re more likely to interact with.

So I guess the question is: OP, do you have a tendency to interact and comment on political posts if they ever come up, or do you just ignore them?

[lurker619]

The ratio of signal to noise on my facebook feed is much worse than my twitter feed. Maybe I'm the right target segment for twitter (young professional in tech) but I see 100x more interesting content from tech/comedians/VCs on twitter as compared to FB, which even my elder family members don't use anymore (they all use whatsapp groups for sharing photos).

[BitwiseFool]

Journalists also have an axe to grind with Facebook, seeing as the primary revenue source for journalism is (used to be?) advertisements.

[1ark]

I have exactly the same experience on both FB and Twitter. And the same reflection for a while regarding recent articles. Most on my FB feed are sharing moments of their life. Twitter is a chaos of retweets etc.

[klunger]

I have the exact opposite experience tbh. It probably depends on the network of people you engage with. Twitter is, for me, mostly about professional networking. I just tweet about software development and follow other developers.

Facebook is where I am "friends" with extended family and random people from high school. This is where all the toxic garbage in my social media life comes from. Thank goodness for the option to "unfollow but don't unfriend" there.

[gwbas1c]

> My facebook is mostly people showing pictures of stuff, sharing memes, some movie discussion groups, event planning groups. It seems like mostly just people using facebook as a proxy for real world interactions.

Lucky you!

For me: A childhood friend's mother reposts anti-muslim propaganda right out of the nazi playbook. My friends on the left also repost stuff that's tonedeaf, but it's a bit harder to explain why.

[dorkwood]

My Twitter feed is mostly people sharing art and personal projects.

I can see where people get this idea, though. Twitter is trying really hard to make it impossible to curate your feed. They started jamming "follow topic" suggestions into mine recently, which appear to be random tweets from angry video game nerds I don't know or care about. I had to write my own script to remove them from the page since there seems to be no way to do it through Twitter's own settings.

I really wish they'd let me keep it to just the people I follow, and the things they like and retweet. I don't want to see anything else.

[sudosysgen]

My mom doesn't use Twitter, and her Facebook feed gets much worse than Twitter, fast.

[Keeeeeeeks]

What do you think motivated them to be Twitter users instead of Facebook users?