korin43 comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong

89 Post author: Vaniver 09 December 2015 06:59PM

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Comment author: korin43 03 December 2015 05:11:07PM 10 points [-]

Ignoring privacy / monopoly concerns, Facebook is also remarkably inconvenient for reading long-form writing.

  • The main feed semi-randomly decides what it thinks you want to read and may decide not to show you something at all.
  • You can set it up to notify you about new posts from a particular person, but that gets annoying with longer writing (since you can't easily tell it to remind you later).
  • Saving to services like Pocket doesn't work right.
  • There's no RSS feeds.

Twitter and Tumblr have similar problems. I thought Reddit did too, but they actually make their RSS feeds easy to find, although it's fairly annoying that they're not full-text (makes it much harder to read on a phone).

Comment author: gjm 03 December 2015 06:05:44PM 4 points [-]

The main feed semi-randomly decides what it thinks you want to read

You can make it less random by viewing in chronological order. You do that either by appending "?sk=h_chr" to the main Facebook URL, or by selecting "Recent First" rather than "Top Stories" in the little dropdown near the top of the left sidebar whose name I forget.

(In case it helps remember the cryptic string of characters: "?" in a URL introduces parameters, and is followed by something of the form key=value&key=value&key=value; in this case we have only one key/value pair; "sk" presumably stands for "sort key", i.e., the attribute of a feed entry that will be used for sorting on when FB decides what to show you and in what order; I don't know why "h_"; "chr" is clearly short for "chronological".)

I am not sure whether in this mode of operation FB always shows you all the stuff you are potentially interested in in chronological order; my guess is that it still filters it in some undisclosed way. But it's at least a bit more deterministic.

(I agree with all you've said here about Facebook.)

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 03 December 2015 09:09:56PM *  1 point [-]

you can't easily tell it to remind you later

You can save a post for later reading from the dropdown menu to the right of the byline, though you'll still need to remember to check your saved posts once in a while.

(BTW, does anybody remember how the hell you access the list of saved posts on Less Wrong? EDIT: never mind, here it is.)

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