Get drawn into a FB thread that becomes one of the long ones, the equivalent of one of our 500+ post threads. Click to change “most relevant” to “show all”. It still doesn’t do anything of the sort, since under Sue Smith’s reply to Joe Jones, it reads “37 Replies” and it’s a button to actually show them to you, and you click it and it still doesn’t. You end up with a “More replies” button after four or five more posts. So you go clickety clickety clickety feeling like you’re playing Whack-A-Mole and finally you see no more obvious places where replies are hidden.
But the whole conversation is upside down, newest posts on top! Except that the initial replies to a post are indented and appear below, so it’s newest posts on top except when the newer posts are beneath.
But you’re deciphering some of it anyway, following the discussion somewhat coherently, and…
And then someone somewhere makes a new post and Facebook scrolls the entire discussion out from under you and propels you to the top so you can see someone’s selfie of themselves shopping for potato chips in the supermarket.
How in the name of Cthulhu did this piece of shit displace all the message boards and draw all the people in?
Beats me. It’s annoying that when I’m trying to follow a post and its replies that it disappears into the ether and may or may not ever appear again. In fact, as you scroll down, the previous posts mysteriously just disappear. Now this could be because possibly I don’t fully understand how FB works, but honestly, most of the stuff on there is so banal that I really don’t care if I see it again..
I don’t suppose there’s a browser plugin somewhere that shows every single post with OLDEST on top and disables the “scroll you to the top of your feed” interruptions? I like some of what that Fluff Busting Purity thing does but it doesn’t seem to deal with making a discussion coherent.
Well over half the posts that come up on my newsfeed are from people and pages that I haven’t even befriended or followed. They’re from pages I don’t have any interest in, or even oppose, in the guise of suggestions.
If you want to pursue a particular post, either because it’s so long you have to click to “See more” or you’re following the ensuing discussion, you should right-click on the date/time link under the poster’s name to open it in a new tab, otherwise if you navigate away from it at any point it’s gone, gone, gone. At least that works with a desktop or laptop; I don’t know what happens on a phone.
It didn’t displace reddit. Which has a lot of the same issues. I did find an app (sees Ahunter’s Fb wish) which opens and expands ALL reddit subthreads, tho I haven’t DLed it yet.
I think it’s because FB was never intended as a place for any discussions longer or more serious than “where should we have lunch?” But that’s just my opinion.
And I will plug again, as I do in all FB-related threads, my plug for my favorite extension, which allows you much more ability to customize Facebook and limit the amount of crud that you get in your feed. It’s free, it updates frequently to counter the counter-programming from FB, and it’s called Fluff Busting Purity (or FB Purity, wink wink, nudge nudge).
Yes, this much I’ve learned over time, although I keep forgetting to do it. Open it in a new tab from the post timestamp link. That does keep it from refreshing to the FB top, but it still keeps reloading and individual posts go back to hiding behind links, and you lose your place.
I forget to do the “open timestamp link in a separate tabl” trick until I get burnt at least once by the “FB wants you to read the new stuff” monkeys.