
Facebook without the News Feed - maxfriedrich
http://maxfriedrich.de/post/86417669824
======
Nursie
What I'd like is facebook without any algorithmic 'intelligence' behind the
feed.

I'd really like to keep up on the minutiae of life that people casually post
to facebook. I'd particularly like to see posts from people who don't post
very often or who I don't interact with very often. But AFAICT there's no way
to stop it prioritising, filtering, hiding, reordering as it sees fit. And
that's with it set to display "Most Recent" instead of top stories.

I don't 'like' anything, or have hundreds of pages spamming my feed. I have a
number of friends somewhere between 50 and 100, most of whom don't post that
much, that often. I'd just like the unedited feed of what they post, but
apparently that's not possible.

~~~
brd
I second this. I knew facebook filtered the feed pretty heavily but I had no
idea how bad it was until recently.

A few weeks ago I met up with some old friends and learned that a mutual
friend was getting married. We're friends on facebook and she has been posting
about her wedding day regularly and yet I had absolutely no idea it was
happening because facebook decided for me that she was unimportant.

They really need a way to turn this aggressive filtering off. I use facebook
specifically to keep in touch with wayward friends, I don't need a feed full
of BS updates from people I speak with regularly.

~~~
sconstantinides
I made a site with the goal of showing just important information about
friends, but all of it: getnotably.com. Check it out and let me know if it
solves your problem!

~~~
lordcanyon
although that sums um what i want, it's just a program for a mobile phone but
i don't use a mobile phone.

------
EGreg
I think the main problem is that centralized social networking sites like
Facebook decide for you what to present, what filters to apply, and you're
lucky if they throw you a bone and let you set your own privacy. And then you
hope that they will in fact honor it. If the NSA wants wholesale spying on
thousands of facebook users, it can go ahead and do it.

What we need is a decentralized social platform. Not something like diaspora*
but a basic social layer on which developers can write apps and where each
person can host their own account where they wish, install their own apps and
plugins, and present things their way.

Think Redmine vs some Project Management As A Service. You can have it for
free and only pay for hosting, install any plugins, and customize it to your
heart's content. And the NSA can't break into everyone's project management at
once. They have to target someone first.

Something like this: [http://platform.qbix.com](http://platform.qbix.com)

~~~
bluthru
Another big draw would be to not publicize your friends or the number of
friends you have. This encourages quantity over quality, but it's obvious why
social networks desire higher numbers.

------
nilkn
I don't mind the news feed, though I do not like whatever algorithms decide
what to show me.

The main reason I rarely use Facebook is because it's so bloated. On the left
side I've got a bunch of "games" that I've never played, or have no
recollection of playing, but Facebook thinks they're important enough to
dedicate part of the front page to them.

And I'm really sick of seeing updates in my news feed about other people
playing games. The top post in my news feed right now is "Friend X and Friend
Y gave a life in Candy Crush Saga." It actually takes up a fair amount of
space because it's got a big picture of a heart with the flavor text "A life
to be used in the sweetest facebook game ever."

~~~
killerdhmo
You can hide those stories. Click the 'v' and select "I don't want to see
this" or something like that.

------
xefer
This is interesting because I actually have the exact opposite setup. I _only_
wanted to see the news feed, not anything on either side. I added these custom
filters to AdBlock+:

    
    
      ##*#leftCol
      ##*#rightCol
    

And it's just want I wanted

------
mavroprovato
You could use your favorite chat client to connect to facebook chat, because
this is all that is left. Or am I missing something?

~~~
mdpane
Events as well. That's all I use Facebook these days, along with chat.

------
k-mcgrady
Cool idea. Seems like a useful tool for people who find themselves getting
sucked in and wasting time but still need FB for communication.

>> "People tend to create albums of mediocre photos on Facebook while they
only post their best on Instagram."

Really? I love Instagram but I guess I'm not seeing what you're seeing. When a
friend of mine is out for the night they might post one ok photo on Instagram.
When I look at Facebook I can see the full story of that night. Unless you're
an excellent photographer with good subject matter one photo doesn't tell much
of a story IMO.

------
skrause
You can easily always have an empty news feed without any custom CSS or
userscripts by simply unfollowing all your friends (unfollwing is not the same
as unfriending and can always be reverted with a single click).

~~~
icpmacdo
I did this, I had ~300 friends and each time I checked Facebook I would
unfollow every single person on the feed. Within 3 days I had no more posts
and the news feed. I also did this with Reddit. It has slightly helped with
"changing the channels" between digg, facebook, reddit and hacker news during
finals a few weeks ago but being off for the summer I am reverting back to it
and becoming less productive. If other people have this problem I would
recommend the chrome extension concentrate.

~~~
markyc
i did exactly this a few months back and don't miss it one bit!

------
ozh
You can also use Adblock to block simple CSS rules like these

[https://adblockplus.org/en/filters#elemhide](https://adblockplus.org/en/filters#elemhide)

------
luos
I am using facebook like this for at least half a year with the News Feed
Eradicator plugin. I don't really care about other people posts or jokes for
the 2214 time. Sometimes I check it on my phone on the bus and it really just
reinforces my decision to hide. And the best is that it's eradicates the
possibility of mindless-endless scrolling. Overall, recommended. :)

------
tantalor
Try [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/facebook-
messenger/id4546384...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/facebook-
messenger/id454638411?mt=8) or
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.o...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.orca)

~~~
boqeh
And if you're not using mobile:
[https://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php](https://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php)

------
mani_batra
Awesome work !! Facebook sure is distracting! For the same reason, being on a
mac, I added facebook message account to iMessage. No more going to facebook
now :) Here is how to do it [http://www.mactrast.com/2013/11/setup-facebook-
chat-messages...](http://www.mactrast.com/2013/11/setup-facebook-chat-
messages-ichat/)

------
vpontis
KillNewsFeed for Chrome is an extension that does this. I've been using it
lately and I like it a lot. I'm going to fork it and also kill my trending
box.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news-
feed/hjo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news-
feed/hjobfcedfgohjkaieocljfcppjbkglfd)

------
liricooli
I'm so glad sombody finally did it. I've been dreaming about something like
this a while ago.

Improvments would be to create a kind of a control dashboard of what you want
to see. maybe remove only pictures and videos ? subscribe to a specific list
of friends, etc..

------
taude
I believe this is why facebook is breaking up into separate apps. I agree, the
newsfeed isn't important to me and mostly distracting and time wasting.

But, I like the Messenger (chat and email-esqe) and Events/Calendar, and Group
communications.

Something for everyone.

------
fivedogit
I had this _exact same_ idea yesterday.

I loathe Facebook altogether and did not miss it one iota when I quit for 3
months earlier this year. I had to go back to it, however, when I caved and
added Facebook login to my chrome extension project.

Thanks for the new tool.

------
mrpsbrk
actually, a shortcut to the message queue
([https://www.facebook.com/messages/](https://www.facebook.com/messages/)) has
the same effect to me...

------
mindprince
I feel the same way - deleting the Facebook app from my phone and just keeping
the Facebook Messenger app turned out to be a very good decision.

------
elanperach
you can use this chrome extension
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbmkiecgbjeifoejpgmdaleoha?hl=en)

to implement this css code
[http://stylebot.me/styles/5808](http://stylebot.me/styles/5808)

------
okso
That works great with Stylish on Firefox, thanks !

I remember a time when the content of the news feed was almost relevant and
interesting...

------
joaor
If you just wanna chat, try astro: [http://astroim.com/](http://astroim.com/)

------
tbg
if all you need is the chat you can use any pretty much every XMPP client,
Pidgin for example.

~~~
skinnymuch
You can't access group chats that way, unfortunately.

~~~
onedev
You can keep it to a mix of XMPP client on Desktop and FB Messenger on Mobile
(for group messaging).

You literally never have to visit Facebook.com proper, ever again.

------
levosmetalo
Might be a good idea to create Greasemonkey script to hide Facebook news feed.

------
criswell
I feel like this totally defeats the purpose of facebook and he should just
switch to email... but I'm glad he was able to hack at it to get it how he
likes.

~~~
hucker
I wish this was possible, but ~80% of my friends are reachable almost
exclusively through facebook. I too use facebook only for the chat because of
this.

