Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by skydhash 3 days ago
As someone that was raised in a small town, the feed was very shallow compared to my actual interactions with friends. It was great for status updates (especially for friends in foreign countries), but messenger was way more popular than the feed.
2 comments
bluGill 3 days ago
Close friends are better. However I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie from high school) and relatives are doing. I want to know when they have babies, see a couple pictures of their kids dance reticle - it gives me something to talk about when our next reunion comes around.

My life is worse because instead of see the above I see only fads. Now that I only check my feed once a month I see less fads are more real life - but I also have reason to believe there is more going on from those distant friends that facebook chooses to hide from me because I don't interact with them enough.

link
skydhash 3 days ago
> I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie from high school) and relatives are doing

YMMV, but I got all of these through words of mouth (and WhatsApp status updates). I think it’s ok to be estranged from a friend or a relative. The next time, we meet, I can ask them how everything is going and what has happened. And if they want they can show me pictures then.

link
emodendroket 3 days ago
All right, but "I personally don't care for that" wasn't actually the proposition anyone was arguing with.
link
dbspin 3 days ago
For some context, messenger (originally FB chat) didn't launch until 2008. A year later in 2009 FB started sorting posts by popularity, by 2011 they'd switched the newsfeed to a blogspam / advertising feed, burying your friends posts. Depending on your age, you may never have used 'golden age' Facebook. As someone who was in college 2003 - 2008, there was a period in which Facebook was an insanely useful tool for organising your social life. You could literally make a facebook post about an event or even stating where you were on a given night, and know that people were likely to see it.

Facebooks business model after around 2011 explicitly became disconnecting people. This isn't stated loudly enough or often enough, but algorithmic feeds and mixing 'news' 'entertainment' with real status updates meant that social networks in general became forces for disconnection and polarisation around this time.

Early FB and Twitter were useful and operated in precisely the opposite way - because they didn't use any algorithmic filtering whatsoever.

link