Making Groups for Kid Pictures

 May 17th, 2018
facebook, kids, kidsgroup
Facebook tries really hard to show people what it thinks they want to see, but it still has major problems dealing with a pretty common situation: baby pictures. If I post a cute picture of one of my kids, Facebook first shows it to people that tend to like what I post. Many of those people are more interested in blog posts about contra dance, effective altruism, music, or other things, however, and don't want a Facebook feed full of kid pictures. Other people will 'like' the picture, though, and Facebook learns both that they reacted positively to the photo but also that they tend to react positively to my posts. The next day, when I post a boring blog post Facebook thinks it should show the post to the people who 'like'ed the kid picture, and not the people who usually read my posts, it doesn't get shown to anyone who actually wants to read it, I don't get the helpful comments I usually get. Not a good outcome all around.

What I've wanted for a while is some way for to give guidance to Facebook about which friend clusters are likely to enjoy what things. This way contra dance posts are more likely to go to contra dancers, EA posts to EAs, etc, but everything is still public.

I don't have a solution to the general case, but in the case of kid stuff the difference in what people want to see is really strong, so it's worth figuring something out even if it's not ideal. What we've been doing is keeping a group for pictures etc of our kids. Several other parents we're friends with do this too. It works pretty well, but the main failing is people who would like to see kid stuff but don't know about the group. So, in addition to describing the problem and our awkward solution, this post also serves as notification that this group exists.

Referenced in:

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Linkpost for July

Effective Altruism

via Thing of Things July 3, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

more     (via openring)