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FB Gets Worse

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Clarissa

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The shift is the most significant overhaul in years to Facebook’s News Feed, the cascading screen of content that people see when they log into the social network. Over the next few weeks, users will begin seeing fewer viral videos and news articles shared by media companies. Instead, Facebook will highlight posts that friends have interacted with — for example, a photo of your dog or a status update that many of them have commented on or liked.

This stinks! Every time I think FB couldn’t get any more inconvenient and weird, it proves me wrong. I detest it when FB forces me to spy on friends by exposing me to comments they made someplace else and didn’t ask me to see. It’s very uncomfortable to see interactions that were not intended for me and that people don’t even know I’m seeing.

I also don’t want more news items from friends. I already know what they read. I read all the same stuff. It’s a total echo-chamber already. The only thing that’s going to happen now is that everybody will be shown the same darn article a hundred times in a row because all of one’s friends saw it and liked it. 

6 responses to “FB Gets Worse”

  1. Crystallizing chaos Avatar
    Crystallizing chaos

    This is exactly how facebook used to be before viral videos, memes and sponsored stories took over. And I really liked it then. My view of facebook was like this – imagine you’re at a big party and having a conversation with a few people in a corner. Someone manages to overhear what you’re saying and jumps in. This adds to the conversation and isn’t spying because you know that there are people around and all conversations are semi-private.

    If I wanted to share something really privately, I’d send them a private message which all social-networking websites provide.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      “My view of facebook was like this – imagine you’re at a big party and having a conversation with a few people in a corner. Someone manages to overhear what you’re saying and jumps in.”

      • This is precisely what I fear because it’s my nightmare scenario. 🙂 I use FB instead of a news aggregator, to scroll through links and find out what the hot stories are. And instead it shows me the same post by somebody I don’t know and have zero interest in because somebody I do know is participating in the discussion to that post. The worst part of FB for me are conversations. I used to like the news items, though.

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  2. Z Avatar
    Z

    This is why it has gotten so boring, then. I used to get a lot of news from it automatically but now it keeps repeating the same two or three posts, some of them quite old indeed.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I like your posts because they are not superficial. And there’s no pasta.

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    I’ve never understood the point of facebook or known how to actually make it do things.

    “imagine you’re at a big party and having a conversation with a few people in a corner. Someone manages to overhear what you’re saying and jumps in”

    Like a forum…. which I like on dedicated topics of interest to me, but socializing for the sake of socializing is awful and terrible for me. I can’t stand the disorienting randomness of facebook. It’s an introvert’s worst dystopian nightmare.

    Add the idea of a rich entitled fuckwit wanting to micro-manage the direction of conversations and it seems about as attractive a place to spend time as a plague ward.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Also, within the same group of acquaintances and relatives, everybody consumes the exact same news. So one ends up seeing the same goshdarn article featured by 20 people in a row. And it’s all interspersed with photos of pasta taken by a friend who really loves pasta and photographs it ten times a day.

      On the positive side, I’m now never tempted by pasta.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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