[richardv]

Aside from the fact that this post is mostly pointless, it's also totally misinformed.

The OP started off by stating his reasons for dropping FB in this "experiment".. namely losing touch with the people for which he originally signed up under.

But he clearly doesn't engage with them if he's not seeing their updates.

Your social graph needs fine tuning. It's like any good bayesian filter, it learns over time what interests you. You can of course give it a push in the right direction by putting people in acquaintances, or hiding specific people from your timeline. (People in your acquaintances don't show up as often in your newsfeed).

This post just shows that you most likely don't understand the full feature set of Facebook and how to best optimize your social graph (not that this is your fault). Facebook has some of the best machine learning for figuring out what is relevant to me. I'd probably argue that you click on too many memes and don't interact with your friends as much if this is what it is serving you.

Don't drop Facebook, just learn how to use it. I personally don't use Facebook for interacting with that many friends. I have about 96% of my friends as acquantiances. I have a small set of about 10 people as friends, and I subscribe to about 100~ people. My newsfeed is so rich with really good content.

[nicholassmith]

I don't want to 'optimise my social graph'. Especially given it used to work properly and feed me the relevant content that I wanted about a year ago.

You can try defend the social graph, how much Facebook has done to improve it and so on, but for a lot of people it doesn't actually achieve what it used to, and that's an issue.

[johnchristopher]

Isn't the fact we add too many contacts the core issue ? And then it turns out that it's easier to look at funny stuff posted by anyone than diving emotionnaly into the life turmoils of our real close friends ? I firmly believe the simple solution is to have more than one account.

[nicholassmith]

I know people with multi-accounts, and multi-hundreds of friends accounts and they all say they're annoyed by how irrelevant most of the content is by default even with as few as 30-50 friends on an account.

[johnchristopher]

I have ~60 contacts and I don't suffer from that effect. Doesn't mean I don't believe you though, as I know I made sure to force everyone's updates.

[personlurking]

I have 20 and even then most of it is muted. I think it's the platform and the culture that the service creates which give rise to hiding stories and unsubscribing from people's feeds.

Either that, or I just don't care for random, short-form content.

[yuvadam]

Why do I need to invest time in "fine tuning my social graph"? What's in it for me? And is it even my social graph?

Facebook is not about "helping you connect to your friends", it's about buying eyeball-time and pumping commercials into your brain.

Any person that has not been completely brainwashed can see the fallacy in this kind of system.

[pyre]

  > it's about buying eyeball-time and pumping
  > commercials into your brain.

You've just defined television. I think that you need to broaden your definition of Facebook if you want people to listen to you point. Facebook is more than just the local television company.

[briandear]

It's more like cable access. Occasionally, there'll be something interesting, but most of the time it's a bunch of people standing around trying to put on a show about stuff about which no one cares.

[mattgreenrocks]

Sorry, local television company + Reddit.

(Ouch, but FB is meme/funny picture city. Gross.)

[AznHisoka]

Yes you can dePend on a soulless money making machine to optimize your relationships... And hope they get it right

Or you can just take control of your relationships and nourish them the old fashioned way: calling, email, face to face, etc.

[deelowe]

This argument could be applied to any technical progress.

Email for example: "Sure you could dePend on a soulless money making machine to optimize your communications... And hope it does it right. Or you can just take control of the situation and do it the old fashioned way: letters and stamps."

[thebigshane]

How is email a "soulless money making machine"?

You have control over email: providers, client applications, encryption. Sure, many many people use gmail and gmail isn't too different to facebook in this regard, but email itself is an open protocol where you can use a competing service and still integrate with others.

[deelowe]

gmail, hotmail, etc...

[chrislomax]

I don't know why you have so much hate for the comment you made but I couldn't agree more. Facebook is a tool, all tools need to be guided by yourself, they never just work. Equally one tool will not work for everyone so sometimes you have to adapt that tool.

People commenting it's just a money making machine, where do they make money off me? I don't click on anything I don't want to and I'm not forced to buy stuff.

I log into Facebook, see a picture of my friends baby, I comment, we have a laugh then I arrange to go round and see them. I don't interact any more or any less than I would over the phone etc

I see updates from the people I want to see updates from, if someone writes a load of crap all the time, I just filter them out.

I never understand all the hate people have for Facebook, constant jibes about privacy. If you as a person are putting information on Facebook that is that private then you are the idiot, not Facebook. If you don't want people to see private pictures of your children, simple, don't upload them!

Everything needs a revenue stream of some sort, does everyone think Apple do what they do because they want to make everyone happy??

Back shortly, just going to check out my friends wedding pics that everyone else uploaded and tagged them in.

[AznHisoka]

I agree, FB is a tool.

However, because of the nature of FB, it makes relationships less personal/authentic, as we try to show off our "best self" to others, rather than our real selves. The tool itself encourages this, so instead of adapting to it, for some people it's best to not use it.

It's like eating at a fast food restaurant. Yes, you can adapt to it and order the salads, and healthy dishes.. But noone's forcing you to go there, you can just not go to them in the first place.

[chrislomax]

I think I must be in the minority of people that doesn't use Facebook to brag or project a different side to myself. I think this is the reason I don't see it from the other side of the fence.

Some people use it to tell people how well they are doing or how much they love their loved ones. I text or ring my wife if I feel like telling her out the blue how much I love her. Others use the facebook wall to do it so everyone could see how sensitive they are. I think it's all bollocks really.

I do just use it as a tool, I plan events, I upload the odd photo and comment on others status' that I find funny / worth a comment. e.g. I uploaded a video of my little boy at the driving range the other night as I was impressed how well he hit it for his second time at golf. I did it for the benefit of my family and friends to see though. Nothing more.

Everyone else I just filter out or de-friend based on who they are to me.

[charliepark]

This is actually really interesting. There's a way to fine-tune my newsfeed? (I'm not trolling here; I've honestly never heard about this.) Facebook has provided very little actual value to me, mainly because the signal-to-noise ratio has been so low.

I've seen those options under my friends' accounts ("lists", right? "close friends", "acquaintances", etc.?) ... is that where I'd do that? Is that something they see (I don't want to offend people by demoting them to "acquaintances", but if I can do that without them seeing, that'd be great).

Honestly, Facebook would be a lot more valuable to me if they had some sort of basic tutorial explaining what's going on with it and how I can make it work for me. As it is, all I use it for is as a slightly glorified birthday reminder.

If you have any resources to that end (how to tune your feed), I'd love to hear about them.

[charliepark]

For anyone looking for info on this, this is a good post: How do I use lists to organize my friends? (https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=200538509990389)

Basically: you can move friends to "acquaintances", they won't see that status change, and their posts will only rarely show up in your feed.

[jps359]

I agree. Facebook is awesome for keeping in touch with people that I normally wouldn't keep in touch with (people who aren't close friends but are still friends). I've made great friends through it and my news feed always has relevant content. The experience is what you make it. If the OP lost touch with people it's because he made no effort to keep in touch with them. Not to mention the obvious click-bait of his submission... "goodbye facebook"? Please. 900M accounts. They're not going anywhere for some time.

[otterley]

In the early days, the News Feed was a full feed of all updates, much like LiveJournal's friends page. Why can't they return to its previous behavior, subject to the restrictions you specify? (e.g. unsubscribe from app activities).

[briandear]

Fuck the social graph.