HN Explorer

Facebook is now completely useless

14 points by coderdude ↗ HN
I spoke too soon. Not a day before I was declaring that Facebook had beat the crap out of Google+ just to have Facebook release a layout change that makes it completely useless. Everyone is now subscribed to but the default setting is to only show "Most updates" in your news feed unless you manually change the setting for every single friend. Instead of having a news feed with all status updates they are forcing everyone to use a variation of the "most important updates" or whatever it was called before. Facebook really screwed up.

9 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 28.4 ms ] thread
hugacow
Agree that FB should not be trying to make things more complicated. Simplicity and the large number of users they had were their two strong points. Now one of those is starting to go.
wonderyak
I think they are wary about being a has-been site like all the big networks before them. Whereas the other two failed to innovate quick enough, Facebook seems prime to innovate itself right out of existence.
georgemcbay
Innovation is fine.. in fact, it should be encouraged. Where websites (and most other products) really fall down is that few companies are good at introducing innovation subtly. If you create some hot new feature, surely you have to make it front-and-center in your site design, using up space to make it stand-out to users.

Do this enough times and you start to look like myspace (or now Facebook) a jumbled mess of previously "hot new" features scattered all over the place. I can barely tell what the hell is even going on when looking at a Facebook page anymore, which is exactly where I was with myspace pages right when the service peaked and then started plummeting into the ground.

Zimahl
> Facebook is completely useless

FTFY

wakaflokkaflame
Sorry, but this post is ridiculous. To expect hundreds of millions of people to up and leave a site...that is highly unlikely.

Is facebook obnoxious? Yes. Do their features generally work well enough to keep the unwashed 95% happy? Yes. Are people proficient with computers/interwebz more likely to be upset anytime FB/another entity changes something? Yes.

This post seems to fall into the latter of the above 3 categories. The take-away, I suppose, is that people tend to be averse to change. No surprise there...

sek
I don't understand what they want? Who asked for this text wall?

To be honest, 99% of the time i just check for new messages or use the chat and don't care about anything else.

There may be a lot of people who care about this stuff, but how are they supposed to find anything relevant?

michaelbuckbee
I deeply admire Facebook for having the guts to make these large UI changes. Every time they rollout anything that is different there is a near riot of people clamoring about how bad it is or how things were so much better with the old system.

I don't think the updates are capricious or arbitrary, I think they are the result of doing lots of testing with lots of users and then having the strength to weather the criticism that inevitably comes with change while they watch the metrics to see if things are actually improving.

notahacker
Agree. It first became obvious just how big Facebook would come when they simply breezed through the objections to the introduction of the newsfeed and opening up of the site to high-schoolers.

They've also proved willing to dump more good ideas than most startups have ever had.

dgunn
Useless? Really? I used facebook last night. And it seemed to get the job done. Are you sure you’re not being overly dramatic?