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).
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.)
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.)
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).
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.)
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.)