Linked: Liking everything on Facebook is incredibly dangerous (no surprise)

via Wired:

By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. I’m offered the chance to like the 2nd Amendment and some sort of anti-immigrant page. I like them both. I like Ted Cruz. I like Rick Perry. The Conservative Tribune comes up again, and again, and again in my News Feed.

and

As day one rolled into day two, I began dreading going to Facebook. It had become a temple of provocation. Just as my News Feed had drifted further and further right, so too did it drift further and further left. Rachel Maddow, Raw Story, Mother Jones, Daily Kos and all sort of other leftie stuff was interspersed with items that are so far to the right I’m nearly afraid to like them for fear of ending up on some sort of watch list.

and

But maybe worse than the fractious political tones my feed took on was how deeply stupid it became. I’m given the chance to like a Buzzfeed post of some guy dancing, and another that asks Which Titanic Character Are You? A third Buzzfeed post informs me that “Katy Perry’s Backup Dancer is the Mancandy You Deserve.” According to New York magazine, I am “officially old” because Malia Obama went to Lollapalooza (like!) and CNN tells me “Husband Explores His Man-ternal Instincts” alongside a photo of a shirtless man cupping his nipples. A cloud that looks like a penis. Stop what you’re doing and look at this baby that looks exactly like Jay-Z. My feed was showing almost only the worst kind of tripe that all of us in the media are complicit in churning out yet should also be deeply ashamed of. Sensational garbage. I liked it all.

I have always hated Facebook and preferred Twitter. This sort of stupidity is why Facebook’s ads are making so much money but there has to be a better way. For a while, I was peeved that every time I visited my news feed, I had to click the drop down that said “all stories” instead of “top stories”. Finally, that option went away completely. If you want to see everything from your friends, good luck.

It’s worse than that though. Facebook today (or at least 11 months ago when I closed my account), is news articles your friends shared / liked. Very rarely are there actual status updates from my friends unless it’s a person or topic I’ve interacted with in the past.

I’ve linked to a lot of these sort of pieces over the last 2 years but when the borg decides what content you want from what you’ve liked / friended, that’s too much. Twitter wins because even though I might miss something in my feed if I close TweetDeck for an hour, I can still go back to it later or not miss an update that I’m looking at.

If anyone asks you what the single different thing between these two social networks. If your friend likes statuses from their friends, they can decide if they want to see every update or what some AI algorithm chooses for them.

I choose to see what I’ve subscribed to and I can’t be alone