I block all the big social networks from my phone and laptop, except for 2 hours on Saturday, and I noticed that when I check Facebook on Saturday, the notifications are always boring and not something I care about. Then I scroll through the newsfeed for a bit and it quickly becomes all boring too.
And I was surprised. Could it be that, all the hype and narrative aside, I actually just wasn’t interested in what was happening on Facebook? That I could remove it from my life and just not really be missing anything?
On my walk home from work today I realised that this wasn’t the case. Facebook has interesting posts I want to follow, but they’re not in my notifications. They’re sparsely distributed in my newsfeed, such that they appear a few times per week, randomly. I can get a lot of value from Facebook, but not by checking once per week—only by checking it all the time. That’s how the game is played.
Anyway, I am not trading all of my attention away for such small amounts of value. So it remains blocked.
I’ve found Facebook absolutely terrible as a way to both distribute and consume good content. Everything you want to share or see is just floating in the opaque vortex of the f%$&ing newsfeed algorithm. I keep Facebook around for party invites and to see who my friends are in each city I travel too, I disabled notifications and check the timeline for less than 20 minutes each week.
OTOH, I’m a big fan of Twitter. (@yashkaf) I’ve curated my feed to a perfect mix of insightful commentary, funny jokes, and weird animal photos. I get to have conversations with people I admire, like writers and scientists. Going forward I’ll probably keep tweeting, and anything that’s a fit for LW I’ll also cross-post here.
In my experience this problem is easily solved if you simply unfollow ~95% of your friends. You can mass unfollow relatively easily from the News Feed Preferences page in Settings. Ever since doing this, my Facebook timeline has had a high signal/noise ratio—I’m glad to encounter something like 85% of posts. Also, since this only produces ~5-20 minutes of reading/day, it’s easy to avoid spending lots of time on the site.
I did actually unfollow ~95% of my friends once but then found myself in that situation where suddenly Facebook became interesting again I was checking it more often. I recommend the opposite and follow as many friends from high school and work as possible (assuming you don’t work at a cool place).
Huh, 95% is quite extreme. But I realise this probably also solves the problem whereby if the people I’m interested in comment on *someone else’s* wall, I still get to see it. I’ll try this out next week, thx.
(I don’t get to be confident I’ve seen 100% of all the interesting people’s good content though, the news feed is fickle and not exhaustive.)
While I basically endorse blocking FB (pssst, hey everyone still saying insightful things on Facebook, come on over to LessLong.com!), but fwiw, if you want to keep tabs on things there, I think most reliably way is to make a friends-list of the people who seem especially high signal-to-noise-ratio, and then create a bookmark for specifically following that list.
Yeah, it’s what I do with Twitter, and I’ll probably start this with FB. Won’t show me all their interesting convo on other people’s walls though. On a Twitter I can see all their replies, not on FB.
I block all the big social networks from my phone and laptop, except for 2 hours on Saturday, and I noticed that when I check Facebook on Saturday, the notifications are always boring and not something I care about. Then I scroll through the newsfeed for a bit and it quickly becomes all boring too.
And I was surprised. Could it be that, all the hype and narrative aside, I actually just wasn’t interested in what was happening on Facebook? That I could remove it from my life and just not really be missing anything?
On my walk home from work today I realised that this wasn’t the case. Facebook has interesting posts I want to follow, but they’re not in my notifications. They’re sparsely distributed in my newsfeed, such that they appear a few times per week, randomly. I can get a lot of value from Facebook, but not by checking once per week—only by checking it all the time. That’s how the game is played.
Anyway, I am not trading all of my attention away for such small amounts of value. So it remains blocked.
I’ve found Facebook absolutely terrible as a way to both distribute and consume good content. Everything you want to share or see is just floating in the opaque vortex of the f%$&ing newsfeed algorithm. I keep Facebook around for party invites and to see who my friends are in each city I travel too, I disabled notifications and check the timeline for less than 20 minutes each week.
OTOH, I’m a big fan of Twitter. (@yashkaf) I’ve curated my feed to a perfect mix of insightful commentary, funny jokes, and weird animal photos. I get to have conversations with people I admire, like writers and scientists. Going forward I’ll probably keep tweeting, and anything that’s a fit for LW I’ll also cross-post here.
This thread is the most bizarrely compelling argument that twitter may be better than FB
In my experience this problem is easily solved if you simply unfollow ~95% of your friends. You can mass unfollow relatively easily from the News Feed Preferences page in Settings. Ever since doing this, my Facebook timeline has had a high signal/noise ratio—I’m glad to encounter something like 85% of posts. Also, since this only produces ~5-20 minutes of reading/day, it’s easy to avoid spending lots of time on the site.
I did actually unfollow ~95% of my friends once but then found myself in that situation where suddenly Facebook became interesting again I was checking it more often. I recommend the opposite and follow as many friends from high school and work as possible (assuming you don’t work at a cool place).
Either way I’ll still only check it in a 2 hour window on Saturdays, so I feel safe trying it out.
Huh, 95% is quite extreme. But I realise this probably also solves the problem whereby if the people I’m interested in comment on *someone else’s* wall, I still get to see it. I’ll try this out next week, thx.
(I don’t get to be confident I’ve seen 100% of all the interesting people’s good content though, the news feed is fickle and not exhaustive.)
Not certain, but I think when your news feed becomes sparse enough it might actually become exhaustive.
My impression is that sparse newsfeeds tend to start doing things you don’t want.
While I basically endorse blocking FB (pssst, hey everyone still saying insightful things on Facebook, come on over to LessLong.com!), but fwiw, if you want to keep tabs on things there, I think most reliably way is to make a friends-list of the people who seem especially high signal-to-noise-ratio, and then create a bookmark for specifically following that list.
Yeah, it’s what I do with Twitter, and I’ll probably start this with FB. Won’t show me all their interesting convo on other people’s walls though. On a Twitter I can see all their replies, not on FB.