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by cobbzilla 2018 days ago
> No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made.

Well, one can control oneself, that's about the best we can do. As others have mentioned, don't use it.

I tried that. After years of not using FB at all, I missed out on some important news that was only posted there.

I decided to get back on FB, on my own terms. I created Bubble [1] and now I can visit FB with most tracking disabled, no ads, I only see posts from my friends, and even then only posts that do not link to news websites or contain political keywords.

My signal/noise ratio is usually about 50%. I love my clean feed. Works on LinkedIn, Twitter, others.

But the root problem goes deeper -- clearly not everyone cares or has the motivation to filter their own social media feeds. Some people like reading echo-chamber/fake news posts, truth is far down on their list of priorities.

I don't know what the big-picture answer is.

[1] https://getbubblenow.com (currently in beta)

1 comments

I got tired of the garbage. First of all, I made a decision Facebook is not the center of my life and decided to stop posting personal things on it except for major announcements. I also started doing the following very aggressively:

- unfollowing everyone who only tended to posted stuff I didn't want to see,

- using the "Hide Post", "Hide All From X", and "Hide Ad" options very liberally - if I had any problem at all with the post or ad whatsoever,

- reporting posts that had content I didn't like and even had a hint of violating Facebook policies--none got deleted but I think this affects Facebook's AI.

I'd love to see a list of everything I've blocked and share it, but I don't see how to get that from Facebook.

It took several months, but probably would have been less time if I was a daily Facebook user.

At this point I have no political or news items (things I hid like crazy) on my Facebook at all. I have fun things from groups I've joined and that's it.

It's boring and quiet, and there if I really need it without annoyances.

But it did take some work and it's true, not everyone cares to put in that work. But they'll repost dumb meme stuff all day.