Why I hate Facebook (beyond the usual reasons)
Talking with Shadesong and Sairaali about a friend yesterday, they mentioned $MajorLifeEvent that had happened.
And I'd missed it, in spite of being Facebook friends with the person (as well as LJ and real-life friends), and in spite of the person posting about it multiple times. Why? Because Facebook's algorithms decided I didn't need to see it. It didn't even bother showing me the usual "your friends commented on this post" crap it tends to do. And unlike LJ (or RSS feed, Twitter, or any other fucking system that assumes users are not complete morons incapable of making their own choices), Facebook does not allow you to just keep scrolling back to see everything chronologically. It shows what it thinks I want to see.
Fuck that shit.
Look, I use Facebook a lot, and post a lot of ephemera there. But I'll never waste time writing a post of more than three sentences there for exactly this reason. It's a way to get quick life updates from co-workers and old classmates, but between the lack of a useful feed and the inability to thread comments (a problem with almost every non-LJ blogging tool, which still baffles me), it'll never be suited for deeper interactions.
The fact that Facebook has pretty much killed the "notes" section only confirms this.
Incidentally, said person did not post the news to LJ. That doesn't mean I don't miss LJ posts; I do that all the time. But I'm a lot less likely to miss stuff here (maybe not as good about Dreamwidth; LJ's still my default reader), especially now that LJ's a wasteland.
(Related: See my Twitter feed rant from October.)
And I'd missed it, in spite of being Facebook friends with the person (as well as LJ and real-life friends), and in spite of the person posting about it multiple times. Why? Because Facebook's algorithms decided I didn't need to see it. It didn't even bother showing me the usual "your friends commented on this post" crap it tends to do. And unlike LJ (or RSS feed, Twitter, or any other fucking system that assumes users are not complete morons incapable of making their own choices), Facebook does not allow you to just keep scrolling back to see everything chronologically. It shows what it thinks I want to see.
Fuck that shit.
Look, I use Facebook a lot, and post a lot of ephemera there. But I'll never waste time writing a post of more than three sentences there for exactly this reason. It's a way to get quick life updates from co-workers and old classmates, but between the lack of a useful feed and the inability to thread comments (a problem with almost every non-LJ blogging tool, which still baffles me), it'll never be suited for deeper interactions.
The fact that Facebook has pretty much killed the "notes" section only confirms this.
Incidentally, said person did not post the news to LJ. That doesn't mean I don't miss LJ posts; I do that all the time. But I'm a lot less likely to miss stuff here (maybe not as good about Dreamwidth; LJ's still my default reader), especially now that LJ's a wasteland.
(Related: See my Twitter feed rant from October.)