Few people know that Facebook is a service for feeding the masses shit with a shovel. The shovel is so big that there is enough for everyone, and so there is only one. You have only the illusion of content personalization based on your likes and friends. But in reality there is no personalization at all, and if you want it, you will simply be denied the service of any content whatsoever.
By default, Facebook shows so-called “top-content”. Supposedly, these are the posts that are most popular among users. Since top content is generated automatically, it’s obvious that there is nothing interesting there for me personally, because Facebook will never write an algorithm that would guess what I like. To make me click ads more often — they’ll write one; to make me like the posts — no.
Facebook has a “recent stories” mode, i.e. all posts and events in chronological order. Naturally, this mode is more attractive, because I don’t want to miss something important in my friends’ lives that Facebook’s algorithm won’t consider important.
But even here there is the drawback that my friends not only publish information from themselves, but also like other people’s posts, repost, and comment. VKontakte and Facebook have a very useful feature — hide posts by a particular author.
I highly recommend this feature for maintaining information hygiene. A person, as an individual, is what he reads. Over the past few years I have banned 4,000 VKontakte public pages. Now I simply don’t see reposts from those public pages. Despite the fact that I have about 500 VKontakte friends, it’s enough for me to log in once a week for 15 minutes to see all my friends’ news from the past week.
Recently I decided to filter Facebook too. After several weeks of filtering, to my surprise my personalized feed turned out to be broken. They might show me 10 entries, maybe 5, or maybe just one. When I scroll through the posts, this one hangs at the end, and nothing else loads:
The attempt to personalize the content, to opt out of what I’m not interested in, ended in failure. Now I don’t see any content at all. I tried clearing cookies, tried two browsers: Yandex and Safari. Same result.
Technologically, VKontakte is better than Facebook. They don’t have this problem.