Typical overzealous and incorrect analysis. Facebook may have failed for the author, but Facebook is not a failure. Its user base, advertising base and page traffic paint quite the opposite picture.
Also, "people can message each other, post text updates and pictures". This is exactly what I use Facebook for, and it works pretty well for me. I get updates and pictures from my friends and family, and I have tuned it such that I can see more content from people with whom I don't interact on a regular basis. Sounds like a case of user error to me.
When the pictures and the status updates are lost In a sea of spammy adverts and shares, the messaging becomes the only feature that I can use anymore.
My FB feed is phenomenal. I hide people that post spam, and unfollow pages that spam me.
What's left is the people I care about and the content from pages I care about (e.g. The Economist posts really good content every day, so does Rap Genius, and brands like Nike/Adidas; all of which I like-- in the traditional sense).
It's basically my "newspaper". I even follow HN and it feeds me the newest stuff from HN alongside other publications, pictures of my friends from around the world, and status updates from people I care about.
I also have AdBlock so I don't get the sidebar ads which I do agree are a bit spammy.
This article is just a bunch of bullshit. It has no real critical analysis and doesn't really say much at all. It's very shallow and a repost to boot (it was on here just days ago). Let's not upvote this garbage.
You're a very lucky person then! Sadly I'm at around the 1,000 friends mark and I have a feeling it'd be a bit too much work to make my timeline useful again.
Just look at your feed. As soon as you see someone you don't care about just one click hide them or unfriend them (if socially possible).
If you see a post from a page you don't care about, then one click unfollow them.
It's really simple. Their newsfeed algorithms are actually really awesome at figuring out the rest once you give it a tiny bit of feedback like I mentioned above.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the vast, vast majority of Facebook users (like, 90%+ is my SWAG) don't do any tuning at all. I'm also going to guess that a large percentage of users "friend" people they aren't friends with in real-life, due to just "shared common interest" or whatever. IF both of these assumptions hold, then the scenario the author of TFA is painting, could well be true for a significant portion of Facebook users.
Whether that's actually the case or not would be hard to measure. But to share one more anecdote: find my Facebook feed to be less and less interesting over time. With little "tuning" on my part, FB is doing a pretty crap job of figuring out what I actually want to see.
So... I could do the work to go in, delete less-than-useful "friends", tune my preferences, etc... or I could just slowly begin to drift away from Facebook, logging in less and less frequently and using Twitter and/or G+ more. Guess which one is more likely?
Good lord, man. How do you deal with people you meet in real life? Do you walk around responding "What you just said is irrelevant to me."?
What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.
Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me). And with what, maybe one of those people hidden every few months, I otherwise actually have a pleasant experience catching up on what my friends & family have been up to. It's not that complicated...
It seems that you think we disagree about something fundamental here, but I can't figure out what it is. Especially since I could easily have written this bit myself:
What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.
Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me).
Right, and I think this is the wrong approach. There's not an absolute correlation between who said something and whether or not the subject is of interest to me. If I have a friend who I share political beliefs with, I may care about his post on, say, gun control... but if that same friend is a religious fundamentalist, I absolutely don't want to see any "pro Jesus" crap. I think this assumption, that content should be selected / filtered based on provenance, is one of the most broken things about online social networking.
Also, Facebook just isn't important enough to me, for me to spend any time "tuning" things to try and tailor my stream to what I want it to be. Like most of us, I have about a bazillion things competing for my time and attention. If Facebook isn't delivering a desirable experience (regardless of the reason), then I, for one, am likely to just drift away from it and let something else entertain me.
If the goal of Facebook is to collect a lot of users and advertising revenue, then sure it's a success. Just not as much as was forecast on the day of its IPO.
As a an actual social network, where friend go to exchange information with their other close friends, it jumped the shark some time ago. The EdgeRank algorithm helped to render a lot of online communication dead. When part of the goal is to keep people on your site in order to pitch advertising, that's not a good sign.
I've been thinking for a while now that the whole vibe around Facebook feels exactly like MySpace did about 4-5 years ago. The only thing preventing its demise is the lack of anything else that resembles it that everyone can latch onto.
Twitter has more of an information sharing vibe,and many people don't jibe with it. Many people dismiss Pinterest or don't get that either. Tumblr up until a week ago really felt like LiveJournal did back in the day, but I don't have a ton of high hopes for it lasting the next few years.
I find it ironic that having capitalized on the mistakes of the social networks that preceded it, Facebook is on the verge of repeating many of those same errors.
Or you haven't told facebook that you don't care about certain people yet. It's surprisingly easy to do, and yet a lot of people seem to think defriending is the only way to get stories to not show up on their feed.
Typically when there's a post in my news feed I don't care about, I unfriend them because it's from someone I haven't seen in years, never really talked to, and never really liked.
If you have to update your browser to read a site, on a site that's main function is to provide someones thoughts in text form, then I'd consider the website at fault.
After 5 minutes of trying tapping combinations and getting nowhere, again (there's a bunch of medium links on HN recently and some of them have been quite worthwhile), going to the front page and discovering that the 'about' page is actually a post and thereby has the same bug pushed me over the edge into ranting.
I can live with bugs. But bugs that make it impossible (FSVO) for me to report them are a special sort of evil.
I suppose I'll check the about page on another device at some point and thereby derive the ability to help them diagnose and fix the problem.
We need better alternatives, but I think people overestimate what a "better alternative" would look like. That whitepaper from a few years back about building a social network on top of existing email infrastructure comes to mind.
A bunch of my friends don't use Facebook. We exchange long emails regularly instead. It's awesome. Solves the problem Facebook supposedly solves much, much better. And I think it would be enough to replace Facebook given a few extra features to abstract away, through a user interface, stuff that email can already do.
I disagree with the general statement and basically every sub point.
- Indiscriminate Sharing
I don't want to have to make a decision every time I want to share a link to something interesting about what subset of friends I'm sharing it to. I don't want to be pressured to create circles of friends for different things.
If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see then it's a mistake to post it. It's better for the default to be public than some sort of pseudo private. If it's that you only want to share specific interests with specific people I never thought that that was a problem people actually had to begin with.
- Facebook gets worse the more you use it
This is just anecdotal, but facebook's news feed has always been impressively on point to who I'm interacting with more in real life. It also seems to send heartbeat posts from friends I haven't seen in a while occasionally (or more often when I check in on their page manually). People who are consistently bad I just unfollow which solves that.
- Loudmouths now have gigantic megaphones.
Unfollow them.
- Social Media Scamsters
This is pretty minor and only effects the case when friends are liking things that are completely uninteresting or liking many things so that it's spamming you (something I haven't really noticed because I think the newsfeed filters it).
In general facebook is a solid chat platform and way to share interesting content/pictures with your network.
The main complaint I can come up with for facebook is that skype sucks and their video chat could be much better.
If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see than it's a mistake to post it.
is a privileged perspective.
I'm guessing a lot of HNers aren't subject to gang injunctions, but imagine for a moment that you are. Suddenly, "pictures of me and my friends hanging out" become dangerous, something that can land you in jail.
Or let's say you identify as queer to your close friends and immediate family, but you have more distant relatives who you're not ready to tell just yet, but don't want to 'unfriend' on Facebook.
Or let's say you're a member of a religious group that's persecuted in the country you live in, but you'd still like to be a part of Facebook groups full of people for whom it's not an issue.
The fact that you're able to be the same person in public at all times is a privilege that not everyone has. For everyone else, you're saying that constant self-censorship should be "good enough". I find that perspective abhorrent.
I think the general opinion of the parent poster is that if you are posting something that you wish to be private, then you shouldn't. The idea being that Facebook now has access to it, as do their advertisers (possibly). That information can now be released publicly intentionally or unintentionally.
For example, the act of posting it, even to a subset of friends, is a risk. There's the possibility of a Facebook bug that sends that information public instead.
This is less of an issue though. Presumably if your 'inner circle' knows that you are gay, then sharing LBGT links on Facebook isn't going to increase the likelihood that they will spill the beans to someone by a large margin.
It's also important to point out that Facebook is decidedly not neutral on this issue. They take information that used to be private and make it public all the time, because they think it should be, and every new product feature is built from that perspective. That is a bug.
What I'm saying is that if you have real secrets it's a bad idea to share them to a subset online because it's trivial for that to get shared outside of that group.
I also think these situations are not the common case and because of this should not be the default. The ability to configure this exists within facebook.
>What I'm saying is that if you have real secrets it's a bad idea to share them to a subset online because it's trivial for that to get shared outside of that group.
Using a pseudonym can help a lot. I mean, it's not 100%, but it's really the best you've got.
but yeah, that's what I think is wrong with both facebook and google plus; both expect us to have a single identity, and then to trust them to separate out our different faces to different groups. I mean, the big problem here is that they expect me to use my real name. Well, facebook never was a professional network. It started out as the 'get me a date' context, but is now solidly in the 'family' context. Problem is? it uses my real name. Like most people, I've chosen to use my real name in the business context, so I've now got bleedthrough.
(I mean, for me, that bleedthrough isn't going to get me thrown in jail- it's mostly about having to deal with two sets of inboxes with dramatically different priorities. This would be a much bigger deal if i was sharing family secrets I didn't want generally known in my professional context, or something like that.)
But again, that's what's wrong with facebook. The Zucherberg has basically said he things we need less privacy, but humans need that safe place, and a society without privacy doesn't offer that.
The problem isnt Facebook, the problem is People who have built their lives on the skeletons in their closet, and technology allowing people to know more about each other.
Your neighbors know tons about you, but you're only worried about people working in datacenters.
It isn't just that though. It's that you have a lot of information now that can be ripped out of context and used to create a very different narrative.
I have said before and I will say again, Facebook is primarily useful as a tool for self-marketing, not for socializing. If you aren't marketing yourself and trying carefully to create a specific image, you are better off elsewhere.
1) I really don't say this to attack you personally, but frankly using the word "privileged" like that is whiny typical out if touch grad-student speak, it's divorced from reality. People are not that helpless
2) Anyone who actually finds themselves under a gang injunction or might be hurt by bigoted family members ought to be smart and not post & overshare.
3) Self-censorship & under sharing is a wonderful strategy to make one's life easier. Publicly posting on ad-supported social networks isn't free speech or a crucial method of self-expression. If one is under threat, there are tons of ways to express oneself- all of which are low to zero cost: Go blog; make a fake twitter account; etc
4) The thing I'm genuinely scared of is "frictionless sharing" on social networks (Esp Linkedin) that can have real-life implications.
I don't mean this personally either, but I think anyone who believes using the word "privileged" is "out-of-touch" probably needs to get more in touch with levels of society outside their own.
it's difficult to write what I wrote without sounding like a snobby d-bag- I just hate that phrase, the language & syntax of it (usually because it is abused so often by well-intentioned grad students)
To be clear, I don't dispute the idea for one second that there are some ppl in US that no matter what they do or how hard they try it will be exceedingly difficult for them to get ahead. I also have no disagreement that aloof & sheltered (but perhaps well-meaning) say that all marginalized/overlooked people need to do is pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
I'm not sure even where you & I agree "disagree" that much, but I figure that since there are a ton of options online that are super-easy for even zero-tech savvy people to find & use to express themselves & conceal their identity this isn't that big of a crisis
But part of the problem with "privilege" is that it attaches this to largely non-mutable characteristics of an individual and stops the discussion over what is happening regarding families and communities.
For example, I am opposed to affirmative action but wouldn't want to see it go without a larger reform taking its place. I am opposed because I think that affirmative action is a bad solution to the wrong problem, that in seeking to help some blacks (particularly since they were the primary victims of segregation) escape the black inner city community, we are in essence helping token individuals and perpetuating the fundamental injustices of segregation. I think this leads not only to capital but also talent flight from such communities, and deepens rather than resolves the economic disparity. It would be different if we encouraged such people to go back into the inner city and start businesses, but instead we saddle them with big loans, and force them to go work for others. If you see segregation as a wealth pump sucking black communities dry, there isn't so much a problem of white privilege so much as there is one of systematic black disempowerment, of which things like affirmative action and social welfare programs are actually key components today (insofar as they heavily discourage people going out and getting involved in economic production on their own terms).
IDK. I think the term is overly used, but having heard Clarence Thomas talk a bit about multiculturalism and the intersection of folks telling people what they should think based solely on race,[1] maybe there is a point.
I do think though that the term often obscures more than it elucideates. Part of the problem is that there is the illusion that privilege can only work one way, so we can't talk about, for example, the fact that in terms of supporting children that we biologically have, that women are in a far privileged position relative to men in our culture (and that male privilege is necessarily a product of this, and that it has very few if any reasonable solutions[2]), so on the whole I think we are far better off just talking about problems and how they interrelate rather than forcing things into an overly simplistic narrative of privilege (yes all narratives are simplifications, but realizing this I think is the first step).
But additionally I don't think it is a "privileged" viewpoint not to worry about what one posts. I think it is a foolish viewpoint. The fact is if you are in the most apparently privileged demographic (I say apparently because if privilege is a useful concept it only makes sense in specific contexts), you can still be ruined by indiscretions regarding sharing stuff on facebook.
[2] Any solution you can find to the problem of single mothers having all the rights regarding reproduction and single fathers only having secondary rights contingent on the mother's actions are far worse than the problem. But if you accept inequality here, in this fundamental aspect of life, it is necessarily impossible to expect that there will be full equality elsewhere, at least as long as work and family are expected to be separate. Additionally the contrary side is that if you make things uniform, asking a man to restrict paternity leave to two weeks is very different from asking a woman to do so.
"I don't want to have to make a decision every time I want to share a link to something interesting about what subset of friends I'm sharing it to."
The point is that it is not about poster comfort, but others comfort - you think that you post something interesting and worth sharing but that might not be an impression of your friends, who might like 20% of your posts, maybe on a given subject, and they don't want to unfollow you.
Your friends are your friends, so there is not reason to unfollow someone, I would prefere to be able to unfollow from certain types of posts (jokes, funny cat picures, stuff funny for hackers, whatever).
The article advocates that there should be an easy way to say "that's not interesting for me" without unfollowing given person.
I think FB misses something like Dislike button, that would tell FB that I am not interested in a given subject.
I like this point. Personally, I find that there's too much friction between choosing which friend belongs where and then further choosing the appropriate group when sharing content. I might just be lazy but it just doesn't work for me.
I also think there's a certain value in being well behaved when sharing content if you have people on there that you wouldn't want them to see, for example colleagues, managers and, more importantly, children. For example, I look after a 2.5 year old boy and I do not use curse words in his vicinity nor do I look at pictures of boobs when he can see. It's just not proper. However, I'm free to do those things when he is in bed and out of the way (with regards to boobs, I don't but me and my fiance will behave like adults).
Based on this, rather than a whole bunch of categories for your friends, why not set up certain filters? This could be quite simple: Do not allow friends under the age of x to see my content at all after HH:MM and before HH:MM. These can also be set on a per-friend basis so if you have a couple of colleagues as friends that haven't set their workplace, you can set something like this up for them too.
A way to only share to certain people is great but FB has this and it's adequate: groups. I founded a number of programming groups and I will share stuff relating to that to them rather than my news feed since it's more suited to them AND there are many people in there I'm not friends with. It's a great way to get good, categorised discussion and the added bonus of meeting new people.
As I said, I don't think it's very valuable, not in terms of technology but in terms of society, for people to be able to share unlimited amounts of content at all times which you wouldn't share to the whole public.
"- Facebook gets worse the more you use it..."
The disagreement with this is good too: it's the way you to use it. I use FB slightly differently but, as said above, setting up my programming groups and inspiring others to do the same has created a great community within Facebook and I can honestly say I've had some very decent conversations as a result of this, even with people I don't know or never met. This isn't what FB sells itself as but it can be done quite easily and I see value in that.
>I don't want to have to make a decision every time I want to share a link to something interesting about what subset of friends I'm sharing it to. I don't want to be pressured to create circles of friends for different things.
And this is why I'm not on facebook
Sure, I'm cool with family baby photos, and "oh, my kid did X, y or Z, I'm so proud" you know, that's what I expect out of a family list. that's all well and good.
But if I have to wade through a gazillion "likes" and a bunch of half-baked emotionally-charged political rants to get at those things?
Nope. I'm logging off. Seriously, do you know how many messages I get a day that I actually have to deal with? It's a large number. It's not at all unusual for me to send 30 emails before I take my morning shower.
That's the thing about email. We've worked out an etiquette. Nobody is going to email me a link to a funny cat video; or email me an emotionally charged political rant. that's rude, and I'll tell family that is rude if they start doing that to me.
In fact, that's the thing I like about facebook the most; it is such a great platform for emotionally charged political rants and cute cat pictures that my family has moved all that stuff to facebook and off of email. I mean, I'm missing all the baby pictures now, but that's a price I can pay.
I would suggest that friendster and myspace (among others) were the first attempts - and facebook got it right. Really though there were many variables that contributed to the success and failure of these companies.
To be honest, I spend more time on HackerNews than I do on Facebook. I feel like I go to Facebook to see what people from Highschool and College are doing and to keep tabs on my local area, but if I want intellectual stimulation, it's too much work to dig through my newsfeed.
This isn't the first time this has happened; I remember when Reddit was small too (and if you go back on HN, the old HN had higher quality comments).
It's inevitable that the values of a community change as it scales. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.
G+ is in that general direction. The social network for hobbys. Connect to granny on facebook, but connect to the guys in your ham radio club and/or photographers and/or podcasters on G+...
Fortunately for Zuckerberg and company they've already crossed the chasm. They will sink or swim based on the habits of the masses, not the fickle hipster tastes of a startup guy who desperately wants to predict the future.
I may not be representative of most people but it seems to me like like Facebook usage is going down. I'd say that only 10% of my friends still post stuff on their walls. I would have closed my account a while ago but I can't seem to convince any of my siblings to use any other chat client.
Funny how much a lot of this person's complaints ring exactly like a Google+ marketing campaign, and yet no one has really mentioned Google+ yet.
I totally agree, and that's not to say that Google+'s stream isn't equally filled with content I don't care about, but that is also because I followed a random circle of 500 "interesting people".
Google+'s focus on smaller circles as it's primary feature, and I think the larger emphasis on sharing with circles and not the public at large (unless you are one of the internet famous) attempts to give user's the power to interact in this way. And if you use gmail, it's basically email + all the rich content social network benefits have to offer.
Except it really is not. Facebook friends can be equally curated and pruned. Facebook offers its own variant of circles, and importantly my friends are on facebook which can facilitate discussion.
Even though everyone has gmail and Google is forcing G+ down everybody's throat, G+ has not taken off. There is no material to discuss on G+.
Besides, the same problems will creep in with G+ too. Do you want to pick and choose content to share to a particular circle? It is a good idea, but it is cumbersome.
The keywords are "can be". Or as the author put it "unless you jump through hoops". The Google+ interface makes a difference. The majority of stuff on Google+ is shared privately, because the interface invites doing it that way.
(The interface also invites having a "loudmouth" circle with zero notification level, so you can follow people without having their posts in your default stream).
It's really easy to hide people on Facebook, if you even see their stuff in the first place. Mainly, you'll see stuff from the people you interact with.
Otherwise, G+ Circles are ridiculously clunky and slow, due to Google choosing superficial eye-candy over functionality.
The problem with Facebook's mechanism for "hiding people" is that until you go through immense effort, your experience sucks. The "Acquaintances" list (which I might add was a knee-jerk reaction to the launch of Google+) only serves to take certain people out of your stream, while plugging in other friends that you don't care about. Until you go through this cycle (which is actually phenomenal social engineering as it is self-reinforcing - once you start you have to continue otherwise it's worse) repeatedly to prune out ALL your non-close contacts, your experience sucks.
The fact that Google+ prioritizes and emphasizes splitting friends into these circles as a PRIMARY means of organizing your friends is a huge difference. Although it is cumbersome, it is a much more realistic representation of human interaction, making friends and having different groups of friends.
Odd, but your experience is completely unlike mine, and that of everybody else I know well. I almost never see stuff from people I don't interact with (except when close friends share it, which is bad enough). In my experience, most people don't need to hide more than a couple of friends, and certainly not more than a few at once.
Almost all my extended global family uses Facebook several times a day (we have a closed group), and I often sit next to other family members using the system. I am much more familiar with it than most people, especially with non-expert users.
It does require some effort to sort Facebook friends into half a dozen channels, but Facebook suggests people to add, which actually makes it rather easy. It becomes a natural progression, over time.
Meanwhile, whatever the theoretical claims, G+ remains almost completely unusable. In my experience, it's virtually impossible to get ordinary people to use it, and they don't last more than a day or two. And from a usability point of view, Circles are crap.
Although I've used G+ quite a lot, and have something over 5,000 followers, my use has declined over time. Following the last desperate (Facebook copying) redesign, I've more or less given in...
I'm curious, how many Facebook friends do you have approximately? Two years ago I removed 600 friends, and now I still have 1200 again -__-
I think none of the networks are perfect, but I don't use Google+ only for personal connections. There is quite a lot of (photographic and technology, at least) content that is interesting to read.
And not to get into any sort of Fanboy war, but which redesign are you talking about? Before Google+'s most recent redesign into the multi-column pinterest-esque layout, Facebook's timeline update is in fact quite a copy of Google+'s old design (bigger pictures in speech bubbly things out of profile pictures).
I have about 500 Facebook friends, but only about two dozen in a family channel and another two dozen in a Close Friends channel. The bulk are in channels for work colleagues (big company), business contacts, and people I know who live abroad. Today, I wouldn't friend most of the business contacts, but that's ancient history.
I've lived in North America and my wife's family is Chinese so we are pretty widely spread. I have close relations in five different countries, but the majority are in Asia.
So, in an average Facebook session, I see posts from about 50 people, and I know almost all of them very well. I see a lot of baby and toddler pictures, with more to come ;-)
I have no relatives at all who use G+, and very few colleagues/business contacts who actually use it. Also, I don't see much new content there. I've usually seen it already via Twitter, Reddit, HN or RSS feeds.
I also use LinkedIn and Quora, and as a former /. and Digg user, I sometimes drop by those as well. They all have their niches. Unfortunately, it's hard to see anything that G+ does better than the rest, from my point of view.
Thanks for sharing :) I find Google+ to be useful for sharing photos with people who are not on Facebook, because it still allows you to share with an email address and it works pretty well. Not sure how to do this in FB, but I bet there is a way.
Also, Hangouts is probably the biggest unique thing for Google+. By far the best web-based, free, multi-person video chatting experience IMHO. Not to mention it can be tremendously productive if need be, with in-window document editing and screensharing. It's somewhat based on the video conferencing solution that Google has been using internally for remoting into meetings for a long time.
If I want to share by emailing links I use SkyDrive, though most people seem to post pics to Facebook. SkyDrive doesn't change the size or the filenames of your pics, or "improve" them, and I have 25GB of free space.
I agree about Hangouts but it's a non-starter when none of my family is using G+. They use Facebook chat, Facebook group chat, and Skype. Hardly any of them use Gmail, so my chances of moving 30-odd people to G+ are basically zero....
With consumers, technology is a relatively small part of technology choices, and inertia is a huge factor.
My frustration with these types of rants is that no solutions are proposed. In this case, the author ends with a vague reference to smaller communities, but I don't see how using a smaller community would solve any of the problems that he mentions, since they seem to manifest as real-life social problems as well (ever have a loudmouth at a dinner party? or a friend that talks only about themselves? or social circles that collide?). On top of that, I'm confused why his Facebook can't be the small community he desires. He's free to be friends with only his x closest friends.
FB can't and won't be everything to everyone, but a blanket statement like this is just trolling.
People really just don't seem to understand that experiences with social media are specific to the individual. I guess it's understandable. I see the same Google Maps as everyone else does. I see the same Hacker News as everyone else who visits HN.
But Facebook isn't like that. Your Facebook timeline is based entirely on your friends and how you interact with Facebook.
And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal.
It just ain't so. This may be a pat little summary of why using Facebook is unrewarding for the author, but to generalize that to a "failed" experiment for everyone, would require talking to other humans about how they experience Facebook — i.e., doing actual research. (Even then, the conclusion would only hold, at best, for the types of humans with whom the author has spoken.) And as usual for these rants, there's no evidence this research has been done.
This piece of writing, therefore, does not contribute meaningfully to the discussion around Facebook.
Completely agree. Most every point he makes doesn't apply to my use of Facebook.
The one that is interesting is his comparison to Google and SEO. In Google's world there are three players: (1) the searchers, (2) the advertisers and (3) the black hats who try to game the system. Unfortunately for Facebook, (2) and (3) are the same, so the people they make money from are also the people who are degrading the system. They don't have Google's luxury of cracking down hard on (3) because that's who their income comes from, which ends up sucking for the rest of us.
> And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal.
Moreover, if my news feed of middle-Americans-quite-pleased-to-share-indiscriminately is any indication, Facebook is what most people need. MOST PEOPLE. This whole elitist attitude in the tech community is breeding "innovators" who don't have the first clue what the world really wants or needs.
Yep - this is an old thing, it applies to twitter, LiveJournal or to any other social network where you pick who you read. It's more about your choices than anything else: If you don't like the content you're reading, read different people.
However ... Facebook is probably the only social network where I feel a high level of obligation to add people like Aunt Jemima, and Bill who I went to college with, years ago. It's "for" keeping in touch - i.e that's how most people use it. It's the fallback social network for contacts who don't fit into other, targeted social networks.
Agree to what you say. Facebook is great in some cases, like finding your old buddy from college or school. I use FB to find them, but after that I get their email ids and from then on its email communication. So for me FB is the place to find people.
But FB is not for getting news about the topics I like; because, IMHO like the OP, Facebook news feed is broken for this purpose. Yes it is broken if you like to get news and information related to your interests. The prime reason, which I have discovered over the years of using FB, is I like things which my friends do not like a lot and vice-versa. I cannot blame Facebook for this. So when they like something which I do not, I still get the news in the feed. The same thing is happening in Twitter.
I felt that it would be better if we can follow information we like rather than the people we like. This way we will be able to get the information that we want/like rather than the noise. A critical step towards this is tags and if we can follow a tag it would be better [1].
I think Facebook is getting into "follow information" as well. Recently I've started getting items in my newsfeed from pages I've never visited or liked, with the header "<page> posted about <topic from my profile>"
I agree, but people have always followed the information they want.
Online, that's as old as Usenet, and it continued through topics on CompuServe and AOL. It continues today through specialised forums and bulletin boards, especially the forums on subject-based websites. Good ones include AV Forums, Hydrogen Audio, DPReview, Doom9 etc.
Anyone who thinks Facebook is, or is meant to be, a substitute for Doom9 is extremely dim.
I'm not a heavy FB user, but having lived in various places around the world, it's one of the few ways I can passively keep in touch with what my dear friends have been up to half way around the globe.
That is real value that Facebook does deliver, something I must admit despite my wide ranged mistrust and distaste for various other aspects of the service.
And that thin veil is held together by its complicated breakups, baby pictures and cat memes. If it wasnt that everyone enjoyed sharing these things id hate to think what might happen.
Im in the same boat as you here. And it worries me. Imagine if we had to go back to the old days of using msn status updates and actually having to gasp converse with one another in order to get our fill of socal interaction.
Have never seen a single baby picture or cat meme or anything like it on Facebook. And several of my friends have kids.
There is a temptation when people comment on Facebook to extrapolate their experience with the vast array of different societies, social norms, perspectives, ages, interests, backgrounds, maturities etc.
One baby picture so far on FB and that was in a private message. The only source of memes is Mr. Takei. We have evening planning chats with people from (guesstimate) 10-15 different countries (all living in our town in Germany), groups for special topics. Conversing gasp with people who moved back to their home country is another regular activity. And it's all held together by an interface that makes it really easy even for the most non-tech people.
So right now the first few stories in my news feed only has 3 posts I find interesting. And? I look at my feed every now and then and if often there is nothing interesting it doesn't hinder me. Some stuff is really interesting and helps me break out of the internet bubble I'm in bust mostly facebook is groups and chat for me. And that's why I love it.
I love baby pictures, they're really cute. I love seeing my friends' and family's babies grow up through pictures on FB because I can't always be there in person.
That's its value to me, too. I sit in Budapest and I'm actually in closer contact with my old high school friends in Indiana than I have ever been. And my kid's friends' parents in Puerto Rico. And yeah, some people here in Budapest. It does exactly what I want it to do, and it's way more effective than remembering to send Christmas cards.
I travel a lot and have done multiple study abroads on different continents when I was in college. I find this to be a gift and a curse of Facebook. Its great when they are genuinely interesting people that you share lots of interest with. But its awful when you have a good night or even a good week with the person and then you friend them on Facebook only to find out later you don't have much in common with them. It really dampers your mood when you look back at the old pictures and you're having a good time with someone you deleted because of all their irrelevant wall spam and complaints. Some relationships are much better when they are fleeting and you only have the good memories.
Well, friending someone on Facebook is starting a relationship with that person. Just like I wouldn't call someone the next day if I didn't want to start a relationship with them, I wouldn't friend them either.
Friending them just to realize you have little in common is akin to dating someone only to realize you have little in common.
This is also where I receive value from facebook; I grew up in Saudi Arabia and all my childhood friends scattered around the globe. There is no other tool like facebook that lets me both maintain meaningful contact with friends & find undiscovered friends spanning large geographies. Relatedly, I've always found facebook's geography-based search tools (friends/posts & content in a city/region)have left much to be desired.
I agree with the article author's opinion that Facebook IS growing less useful for me. As Graue said in above post, though, this really only applies to me and my reactions to MY OWN social circle.
There is a trend towards emotional populist content on social networks. It's interesting to you because it's your friends and it feels personal.
However in a broader context its creating a society that is inward looking (walled garden of your friends) and concerned with re-enforcing social norms (the like button).
How does this activity improve us as a society? Where is the creativity and freedom?
A single social networks doesn't have to be everything and all-encompassing to be useful; the place where you organize a family lunch is usually not the same where you run a LAN party or perform body painting.
I do wish that social network wasn't Facebook, though.
Your comment is fair, but I think you've imagined a creative, free society where the walled garden didn't exist - where it never existed in actuality.
People have always been insular and self-contained within their circles. Said circles form early in life and change very slowly. Even when you move people around geographically, they quickly fall back into the same closed circles. In these circles they reinforce whatever social memes have developed - inside jokes, similar views, etc.
Very few people in the world (though they do exist) actually continually meet new people outside of their existing groups.
So sure, Facebook doesn't improve us as a society, nor is it a magical bastion of creativity and freedom - but life never was, and Facebook hasn't made it worse. Facebook is merely a magnification of who you are. If you were prone to sharing stupid motivational pictures, now your'e sharing a lot of them. If you surrounded yourself with constantly insightful, smart people, now you get to talk to a lot more of them, a lot more frequently.
Facebook is what you make of it. I have a habit of squelching friends who don't post meaningful things. Click on the top right corner of their post and you can adjust their weighting in your feed - I have many people who essentially no longer contribute to my feed, and that's fine. Looking at my front page right now, nearly all of the information is stuff I actually care about.
> And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal.
On the other hand, technical people are like rats. They're the first to pile on to fresh meat (there was even a prominent website by this name...), and they're the first to flee when the place is burning down.
Your argument made sense in the years past where there only were technical people on the internet. But now it is less so. People are comfortable making their own choices on the internet and don't need the recommendations or advice of technical people like they did it in the past.
Look at the success of Pinterest or Instagram for example. Neither grew because of technical people.
Dating the smartphone revolution at anytime before the first iPhone is disingenuous and you know it. Even then, the bulk of Internet-using smartphone users were tech heads.
I Agree.
The difference between a blogger and a researcher is that the former can say what the heck he wants on the internet and state it as an objective and universal truth.
While a researcher, on the other hand, must back his claims with some evidence.
So this post should just be downvoted. Another guy with an opinion on the internet, nothing to get too excited about.
It seems that the more controversy you create, the more popular you get on HN, regardless of whatever you have any ground to your claims.
I agree that his piece isn't well-researched, and the title is sensationalist, but I share most of his experiences and sentiments. I hope a more quantitative research around this area does emerge though.
Brilliant. This is a perfect analysis of this article.
People are using Facebook because they want to, not because some weird social power is forcing them to. My friends love it, my parents love it, heck my grandma thinks it's absolutely magical. We get to share things and communicate with family in a way we've never been able to ever. It's not replacing the deep connections and interpersonal relationships—you need to actually meet up with someone and talk to them in person or on the phone for that. But we already have ways to do that!
The annoying people on Facebook are the ones who don't like it, like the author of this article. They're the ones that just post "Dang Facebook sucks more every day" or useless stuff like that and never actually use it for its capabilities. They expect Facebook to do their social for them, when it's really just a tool that you have to use optimistically.
"I'll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just ... because," Casey says. "It's not like I want to or I don't. I just go on it. I'm, like, forced to. I don't know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life."
http://kottke.org/13/05/wanting-to-be-liked
Wanting to stay connected and communicate with other humans is not a disorder, it's actually quite healthy!
I think it is fascinating that people feel compelled to visit Facebook or any website, and don't know why. It's like calling someone every morning: you want to communicate. If you stop doing that suddenly, you'll miss it.
Calling it an 'addiction' or 'some strange social force' or other conspiracy ideas are interesting, but flawed arguments.
I somewhat question the effectiveness of ... let's say Reddit as actual communication, though. Maybe I'm projecting, but I find my online social interactions are nice, but don't really compare to actually hanging out with friends, or even taking time to do something I enjoy, like cooking a nice meal or whatever.
At the end of a couple of hours of commenting on people I know's pictures of cats or whatever I look back and think "Wow, where'd that time go?" whereas if I've done something "productive" I feel much better. It's possible that's just because I've filed time-on-the-internet under "wasting time" and so I'm judging myself, but I think the feeling bad was the reason I decided I shouldn't do it, not the other way 'round.
Oh right, I forgot that having both an opinion and a penis is a crime. How does being a man have anything to do with it at all? Plenty of non-technical people have come to very similar conclusions, some of them have even been women. You are seeing what you want to see.
I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the only person out there who has used the "unfriend" button before. I've deleted hundreds of people; many of whom I only met for one night 5 years ago or didn't even talk to way back in high school. Now, my Facebook feed has content that only features people I care to hear from and "interest pages," which is sorta meh. It's really not this social media wasteland I keep reading about?
I never friended people I didn't wish to hear from to begin with. I've only ever unfriended one person, and I've never broken the 200-friend threshold, so I can't claim to have unfriended hundreds.
> And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal.
...
> And as usual for these rants, there's no evidence this research has been done.
This piece of writing, therefore, does not contribute meaningfully to the discussion around Facebook.
Too harsh. I agree that there is not enough rigor to speculate on the universal experience, but this absolutely has value in the larger Facebook discussion.
The increasing frequency of these anecdotal experiences is a hint that there exists a segment of frustrated users. It would be a mistake to summarily ignore their frustration due to the presentation of the argument.
These "increasingly common" anecdotes are from the same demographic of people.
Facebook is used by 1.15 BILLION people. Think about that for a second. It's an absolutely staggering number and they're adding MILLIONS of new users every single day.
Do you think the people in Africa, South America, Iceland, and even China, are going to have the same experiences as the person writing this article?
I love Medium titles. They always pop into Hacker News with dramatic headlines, begging you to see what the author's radical notion is.
In reading this post, I have a very hard time sympathizing with this author's point. He's taking his personal expectations and experience of Facebook and projecting it to a catastrophic failure of the entire company to reach its audience - that's unfair at best, and honestly narcissistic. Nearly a billion people use Facebook, it's not a failure. This is like saying Google has botched search. No, Google and Facebook practically control their domains.
Is there room for disruption? Sure. Is Facebook perfect? No. But I believe the author is using Facebook the wrong way based on his points. It's not a professional platform. I don't use it the same way I use Twitter.
A rebuttal, in order of points made:
>Jump through hoops...share selectively.
News flash, most people don't care. I actively use Facebook and I've literally never touched the selective buttons for what to share with who or what to delineate between friends. I use Facebook for friends - there isn't a boilerplate for this when you sign up. It's for friends - the only reason Facebook introduced this was so that you could share that funny, raunchy video and your girlfriend's mom won't see it.
>As you use Facebook...you accumulate friends.
This entire point is null and void. You set it up by implying you have no control over the friends you make or the groups you join. That's blatantly false. Just don't friend professional coworkers or acquaintances. Again, not difficult.
>Loudmouths now have gigantic megaphones.
Dude, skim or limit your newsfeed. Are you so intolerant that you feel didactically opposed to the feature? It's not as painful as all that, you pass a status, read the first sentence, and decide if you have interest. If not, move on, don't comment. If it really offends you, defriend the person or limit what you can see from them on your newsfeed. There's a button literally next to their name.
>Social media scamsters.
I'll give this to you. However, I personally find more amusement than anything. And while I don't want to criticize you, you might want to be more selective in who you see sharing from on your newsfeed. I find the people who share this (gullible friends) are outliers and you can deal with them individually in the same manner as the above bullet point.
In summation, I believe the author doesn't understand why his qualms are actually features - it seems as though he's using it for the wrong reason. I'm not going to say Facebook is flawless. It's not, there is a lot to critique and it has things that could be improved. But all of this is not constructive criticism and it's mostly doom-seeking. Does he have a better idea for a social network? How can he condemn Facebook as a failure? His authority and points don't support that claim.
If you're looking for a system where friends are not just friends, but everyone you know, and you need selectivity in sharing or conversations, go to Twitter or Google Plus. If you want to kill time and have more or less the same experience with friends, with the same annoyances (native to social interaction, not the medium), go to Facebook.
I think most people probably don't use facebook to see what their loudmouth acquaintances have to say. They use it look at photos of their friends and family.
Lately I've noticed something odd. When I find a story I find interesting, I email it to some of my closest friends and we talk about it in email. It feels very 2003, but it works and feels more private and intimate. Similarly, when I take a picture I want to share with my family, I sms it to them.
Facebook is still great, but it's different than what it used to be. It's (for me) evolved into my less-close friends' vacations and babies and memes. Which is fine! I imagine Facebook has a lot of data that suggests this is exactly what I'd like to view. But it does seem much less engaging than it used to be.
It feels like an Eternal September, perhaps one I've brought on myself by friending too many people.
so true. i respect people who put an effort to compose an email to share something, rather than hitting share button. most of the time they dont even remember what they have shared over fb!
If people didn't abuse the reply all button I might be able to come to terms with email usage. Reply all button abuse makes email almost Facebook bad for me.
Yeah, I'm a recipient. Professional body that has god knows how many members who use the reply all to ask each other for coffee. I tried binning their emails but that caused havoc with bills/body requirements. It's awful.
Well, in addition to being very useful it is also broken and outdated. Sadly, the "alternatives" (facebook, google plus, etc.) fix almost none of the flaws and add some of their own (non-federated!)
What, exactly, are the flaws you are talking about? I'm interested because email is simple and there may be ways, inventive or not, of fixing it without protocol changes, or at most a layer written above email.
I've been thinking about how to fix email as per YCs list of things they'd like to fund (just to get the juices flowing) and it might be cool to build on top of the email protocol rather than replace it - e.g it's trivial to format, say, todos in an email in a human readable format such that they can still be read and returned checked off by users who don't use this additional layer.
There are two different sets of problems with email.
The first, more concrete, set arises simply because of the age of the protocols. They were developed when the internet was a club of like minded people rather than a global public space. Things like: a lack of rock solid authentication, no guarantees of transit privacy (much less at rest privacy), clunky formatting, multimedia and hypermedia support, arcane attachment problems, and only hacked on support for anything beyond 1:N messaging (e.g. mailing lists).
A lot of these problems have good, solid, proposed solutions but inertia and collective action problems mean that near universal support for protocol additions / changes take years if not decades.
The second, more amorphous, set of problems have to do with how some people use email pervasively in their lives in a fashion that (inevitably) would be more efficiently accomplished with a tool specialized to their needs. So for example, people who spend a fair amount of time in a corporate enviorment with Exchange often bitterly miss the calendar management integration. They say that vanilla email is broken because it has no equivalent capability. Although the critique is legitamite I think the target is off, it's not email that's broken, it's federated calendaring in general. But because email can sort-of, kind-of substitute it gets the blame.
what do you usually do when you're inbox gets spammed with a lot of irrelevant information - you apply filters / labels. same thing can be done with Facebook, but for some reason people still treat it as a service that doesn't need any customization. you just login and out of the sudden quality information starts pouring down from all panels. it's not like that... it's just like with your inbox, even though your friends aren't really selling Viagra, but some of them aren't far either.
every post on your news feed has got a tiny "hide" link, which you can use to either unsubscribe completely from a friend's wall posts (yeah, keep those "how I met your mother" quotes for yourself bro), choose which kind of news you're actually interested in (pictures only, events etc.) or even choose how often you wanna see a person's posts ("all updates" or "most important"). if you get the tendency to disable a post that you don't like the moment you see it, then (on the long run) you'll end up with a wall that's at least 2/3 interesting or let's call it decent (facebook is not really hacker news). I'm not aware if this is the actual implementation, but would be really cool if Facebook would actually learn from the posts you hide and stop suggesting similar ones in the future.
I've got around 300 friends and had I not unsubscribed from a lot of them, my news feed would have been packed with wedding pictures of people I don't know, events I can't go to or causes I don't really care about.
just to end here, email has its purpose but that purpose is not social sharing any more. just like emails took over writting letters years ago, social networks should improve over emails in the aspect of sharing information with ease.
oh, and to the author: the facebook experiment hasn't failed - you just need to tell it what you expect of it.
Your post on begs the question: If having decent content in Facebook requires as much customization (work) as email, why not use email instead? With email I get none of the privacy blunders of Facebook, none of the advertising, I get a federated service and asymmetrical connections.
People expect that Facebook provides the automatic content customization/filtering. And rightfully so, I may add. It's a shame that Facebook is little more than a walled-garden email service with photo storage.
consider this: all your Facebook friends decide to start emailing each other pics of funny cats instead of posting them on their walls. you're a friend, so you get added to the CC. wouldn't it be the same amount of work to filter through all this content for relevant information?
I'm not a big fan of Facebook (especially because of the news feed ads), but most of my friends are camped there, so the only thing I can do is try and get the best out of it. I do enjoy email conversations with my friends (mostly with my programmer buddies), but the replies tend to be a bit slower and the stories never get so many follow-ups as Facebook posts. also if you want to email pictures, you'd better use a different service (Picasa, Dropbox) if you don't want to download zipped files all the time. same for videos...
to make this clear, I'm not advocating for Facebook here. I just find it curious to read something like "the facebook experiment has failed", when there's no interest in the author to see what the experiment has to offer. more specifically to try out some of Facebook's features (some of them are really obivous, some are implied, some are more difficult to understand).
when you've got 1000 friends but you're not really interested in anything they say, who's fault is it?! and yet Facebook gives you the tools to filter them out...
I tend to have a hard time discerning whether commenting on a shared item will make my comment appear on the original thread or the "sharer"'s thread, and I usually end up not commenting even when I have something I could say.
My best friend and I actually run a ~100 person listserv to this end. We call it "Feed Your Brain" and people send out interesting articles, music, poetry, etc, they find on the internet. Sometimes there is a great discussion or debate, sometimes not. It is very private and intimate and it feels closer to early Reddit or HN than anything else I have found.
seems you stumbled on the secret of keeping a good online community: don't let a person's contacts exceed the network's dunbar number[1].
non-default subreddits can still be quite good, but many/most/all of the default subreddits are wastelands ravaged by a silent majority of up- and down-voters while the huddled masses of commenters cling together for safety. of course, there's the same phenomenon within the commenters community, where insightful comments are buried amongst puns and prejudice and adolescent jokes that get upvoted much quicker.
Would you mind adding a few details on how you set this up (I'm assuming that you're using 'listserv' as a generic term)? Is it on your own machine, through a web host, etc?
I've thought about doing something just like that, but haven't spent the time to figure out a "good" way to set it up.
You could use google groups (it's basically a mailing list). Pretty straight forward.
We had one for our 'post-college' social circle. It was a good way to spread the word about happy hours and parties, without spamming everyone on facebook.
I would caution against using a service like Google Groups for this, actually. There's been too many changes to corporate-backed services like this (Yahoo! Groups' 2010 mess, remember Google Groups was originally a usenet reader to begin with) and moving a community is a pain. Host it somewhere that won't pivot.
Perhaps even more oddly, when I have an interesting link, I tend to post it to the facebook group chat I have running with four of my closest friends.
It's useful because everyone can see everyone else's reaction.
I use facebook almost every day, but I can't remember the last time I posted a status update or read anyone else's status update.
I use it as a glorified chat/email hybrid client. It's useful because only people I've chosen to accept can send me messages (like chat), but it's truly asynchronous, stores everything and supports rich messages (like email).
If, tomorrow, facebook disabled the ability of everyone to post statuses, play games, use apps, answer quizzes, post photos and all the rest of it, my usage of facebook would be precisely the same as it is now.
"It's (for me) evolved into my less-close friends' vacations and babies and memes."
This. Further, I think Fb serves a very important purpose in my life: it has supplanted any need or desire to attend a high school reunion. I can easily find out "what you've been up to" if I care in the slightest. Also, upvoted b/c babies are cute :)
I've wondered about this as well. When I was going through my 20's there came big splits in my friends pool in terms of common interests, first the division of friends who were married and those who weren't, and then the much bigger split of people with kids and those without. I noticed that my focus changed at those times as did others and the folks who weren't married or didn't have kids were really not interested in the stuff I was focused on.
We now have a generation of people going through this with Facebook and it doesn't surprise me if suddenly one group of friends is not as relevant as they used to be, and that a system like Facebook can't easily pick that up.
What keeps people coming back is the illusion of activity. The sound and fury. If/when people close out the noise successfully, it winds up looking a lot like an email box.
I think what this author may be feeling is that "sharing" things that already happened isn't very useful to one's life. That's the major shortcoming not just of facebook but other online forums for sharing things you found / saw / thought.
I mostly just read the updates from my Close Friends list. At some point I had to sort out my friends to acquaintances, friends, and close friends, and that has sort of fixed the glitch for me.
Great article. I have to take issue with this though:
"While Google actively tries to thwart SEO scamsters"
Google has monetised SEO and actively encourages bad SEO through SEM. You've got this strange case of Google creating shitty search results through Adwords and SEM which devalues their core product.
Looks like FB and other social platforms are suffering a similar issue. Ads are creating a frothing steam of noise which is drowning out quality content.
303 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadAlso, "people can message each other, post text updates and pictures". This is exactly what I use Facebook for, and it works pretty well for me. I get updates and pictures from my friends and family, and I have tuned it such that I can see more content from people with whom I don't interact on a regular basis. Sounds like a case of user error to me.
What's left is the people I care about and the content from pages I care about (e.g. The Economist posts really good content every day, so does Rap Genius, and brands like Nike/Adidas; all of which I like-- in the traditional sense).
It's basically my "newspaper". I even follow HN and it feeds me the newest stuff from HN alongside other publications, pictures of my friends from around the world, and status updates from people I care about.
I also have AdBlock so I don't get the sidebar ads which I do agree are a bit spammy.
This article is just a bunch of bullshit. It has no real critical analysis and doesn't really say much at all. It's very shallow and a repost to boot (it was on here just days ago). Let's not upvote this garbage.
It's like going to a great restaurant, ordering five times as much as you can eat and then complaining about the food.
Just look at your feed. As soon as you see someone you don't care about just one click hide them or unfriend them (if socially possible).
If you see a post from a page you don't care about, then one click unfollow them.
It's really simple. Their newsfeed algorithms are actually really awesome at figuring out the rest once you give it a tiny bit of feedback like I mentioned above.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the vast, vast majority of Facebook users (like, 90%+ is my SWAG) don't do any tuning at all. I'm also going to guess that a large percentage of users "friend" people they aren't friends with in real-life, due to just "shared common interest" or whatever. IF both of these assumptions hold, then the scenario the author of TFA is painting, could well be true for a significant portion of Facebook users.
Whether that's actually the case or not would be hard to measure. But to share one more anecdote: find my Facebook feed to be less and less interesting over time. With little "tuning" on my part, FB is doing a pretty crap job of figuring out what I actually want to see.
So... I could do the work to go in, delete less-than-useful "friends", tune my preferences, etc... or I could just slowly begin to drift away from Facebook, logging in less and less frequently and using Twitter and/or G+ more. Guess which one is more likely?
What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.
Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me). And with what, maybe one of those people hidden every few months, I otherwise actually have a pleasant experience catching up on what my friends & family have been up to. It's not that complicated...
What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.
Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me).
Right, and I think this is the wrong approach. There's not an absolute correlation between who said something and whether or not the subject is of interest to me. If I have a friend who I share political beliefs with, I may care about his post on, say, gun control... but if that same friend is a religious fundamentalist, I absolutely don't want to see any "pro Jesus" crap. I think this assumption, that content should be selected / filtered based on provenance, is one of the most broken things about online social networking.
Also, Facebook just isn't important enough to me, for me to spend any time "tuning" things to try and tailor my stream to what I want it to be. Like most of us, I have about a bazillion things competing for my time and attention. If Facebook isn't delivering a desirable experience (regardless of the reason), then I, for one, am likely to just drift away from it and let something else entertain me.
As a an actual social network, where friend go to exchange information with their other close friends, it jumped the shark some time ago. The EdgeRank algorithm helped to render a lot of online communication dead. When part of the goal is to keep people on your site in order to pitch advertising, that's not a good sign.
I've been thinking for a while now that the whole vibe around Facebook feels exactly like MySpace did about 4-5 years ago. The only thing preventing its demise is the lack of anything else that resembles it that everyone can latch onto.
Twitter has more of an information sharing vibe,and many people don't jibe with it. Many people dismiss Pinterest or don't get that either. Tumblr up until a week ago really felt like LiveJournal did back in the day, but I don't have a ton of high hopes for it lasting the next few years.
I find it ironic that having capitalized on the mistakes of the social networks that preceded it, Facebook is on the verge of repeating many of those same errors.
Seriously though, if you don't think that Facebook Data Science's the fuck out of their news feed algorithm, then I don't know what to tell you.
If it's not working well for you, either it is and you don't realize it (ie, you are reading the "spam" more than you think), or you are an outlier.
medium.com again.
medium.com does not scroll in Chrome on the Nexus 7
This means I can't actually read anything on there.
I can't even figure out who to email, because the About page also doesn't scroll.
Living in the future sucks :(
Don't worry though, you're not missing out on much.
I can live with bugs. But bugs that make it impossible (FSVO) for me to report them are a special sort of evil.
I suppose I'll check the about page on another device at some point and thereby derive the ability to help them diagnose and fix the problem.
But ... argh.
A bunch of my friends don't use Facebook. We exchange long emails regularly instead. It's awesome. Solves the problem Facebook supposedly solves much, much better. And I think it would be enough to replace Facebook given a few extra features to abstract away, through a user interface, stuff that email can already do.
I'm in the same boat as you. I email with most of my friends and family.
- Indiscriminate Sharing
I don't want to have to make a decision every time I want to share a link to something interesting about what subset of friends I'm sharing it to. I don't want to be pressured to create circles of friends for different things.
If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see then it's a mistake to post it. It's better for the default to be public than some sort of pseudo private. If it's that you only want to share specific interests with specific people I never thought that that was a problem people actually had to begin with.
- Facebook gets worse the more you use it
This is just anecdotal, but facebook's news feed has always been impressively on point to who I'm interacting with more in real life. It also seems to send heartbeat posts from friends I haven't seen in a while occasionally (or more often when I check in on their page manually). People who are consistently bad I just unfollow which solves that.
- Loudmouths now have gigantic megaphones.
Unfollow them.
- Social Media Scamsters
This is pretty minor and only effects the case when friends are liking things that are completely uninteresting or liking many things so that it's spamming you (something I haven't really noticed because I think the newsfeed filters it).
In general facebook is a solid chat platform and way to share interesting content/pictures with your network.
The main complaint I can come up with for facebook is that skype sucks and their video chat could be much better.
If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see than it's a mistake to post it.
is a privileged perspective.
I'm guessing a lot of HNers aren't subject to gang injunctions, but imagine for a moment that you are. Suddenly, "pictures of me and my friends hanging out" become dangerous, something that can land you in jail.
Or let's say you identify as queer to your close friends and immediate family, but you have more distant relatives who you're not ready to tell just yet, but don't want to 'unfriend' on Facebook.
Or let's say you're a member of a religious group that's persecuted in the country you live in, but you'd still like to be a part of Facebook groups full of people for whom it's not an issue.
The fact that you're able to be the same person in public at all times is a privilege that not everyone has. For everyone else, you're saying that constant self-censorship should be "good enough". I find that perspective abhorrent.
For example, the act of posting it, even to a subset of friends, is a risk. There's the possibility of a Facebook bug that sends that information public instead.
I also think these situations are not the common case and because of this should not be the default. The ability to configure this exists within facebook.
Using a pseudonym can help a lot. I mean, it's not 100%, but it's really the best you've got.
but yeah, that's what I think is wrong with both facebook and google plus; both expect us to have a single identity, and then to trust them to separate out our different faces to different groups. I mean, the big problem here is that they expect me to use my real name. Well, facebook never was a professional network. It started out as the 'get me a date' context, but is now solidly in the 'family' context. Problem is? it uses my real name. Like most people, I've chosen to use my real name in the business context, so I've now got bleedthrough.
(I mean, for me, that bleedthrough isn't going to get me thrown in jail- it's mostly about having to deal with two sets of inboxes with dramatically different priorities. This would be a much bigger deal if i was sharing family secrets I didn't want generally known in my professional context, or something like that.)
The thing is many facebook users understand that.
Your neighbors know tons about you, but you're only worried about people working in datacenters.
I have said before and I will say again, Facebook is primarily useful as a tool for self-marketing, not for socializing. If you aren't marketing yourself and trying carefully to create a specific image, you are better off elsewhere.
2) Anyone who actually finds themselves under a gang injunction or might be hurt by bigoted family members ought to be smart and not post & overshare.
3) Self-censorship & under sharing is a wonderful strategy to make one's life easier. Publicly posting on ad-supported social networks isn't free speech or a crucial method of self-expression. If one is under threat, there are tons of ways to express oneself- all of which are low to zero cost: Go blog; make a fake twitter account; etc
4) The thing I'm genuinely scared of is "frictionless sharing" on social networks (Esp Linkedin) that can have real-life implications.
it's difficult to write what I wrote without sounding like a snobby d-bag- I just hate that phrase, the language & syntax of it (usually because it is abused so often by well-intentioned grad students)
To be clear, I don't dispute the idea for one second that there are some ppl in US that no matter what they do or how hard they try it will be exceedingly difficult for them to get ahead. I also have no disagreement that aloof & sheltered (but perhaps well-meaning) say that all marginalized/overlooked people need to do is pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
I'm not sure even where you & I agree "disagree" that much, but I figure that since there are a ton of options online that are super-easy for even zero-tech savvy people to find & use to express themselves & conceal their identity this isn't that big of a crisis
For example, I am opposed to affirmative action but wouldn't want to see it go without a larger reform taking its place. I am opposed because I think that affirmative action is a bad solution to the wrong problem, that in seeking to help some blacks (particularly since they were the primary victims of segregation) escape the black inner city community, we are in essence helping token individuals and perpetuating the fundamental injustices of segregation. I think this leads not only to capital but also talent flight from such communities, and deepens rather than resolves the economic disparity. It would be different if we encouraged such people to go back into the inner city and start businesses, but instead we saddle them with big loans, and force them to go work for others. If you see segregation as a wealth pump sucking black communities dry, there isn't so much a problem of white privilege so much as there is one of systematic black disempowerment, of which things like affirmative action and social welfare programs are actually key components today (insofar as they heavily discourage people going out and getting involved in economic production on their own terms).
I do think though that the term often obscures more than it elucideates. Part of the problem is that there is the illusion that privilege can only work one way, so we can't talk about, for example, the fact that in terms of supporting children that we biologically have, that women are in a far privileged position relative to men in our culture (and that male privilege is necessarily a product of this, and that it has very few if any reasonable solutions[2]), so on the whole I think we are far better off just talking about problems and how they interrelate rather than forcing things into an overly simplistic narrative of privilege (yes all narratives are simplifications, but realizing this I think is the first step).
But additionally I don't think it is a "privileged" viewpoint not to worry about what one posts. I think it is a foolish viewpoint. The fact is if you are in the most apparently privileged demographic (I say apparently because if privilege is a useful concept it only makes sense in specific contexts), you can still be ruined by indiscretions regarding sharing stuff on facebook.
[1] http://www.scotusblog.com/media/conversation-with-justice-th... Truly mind-blowing interview about history, life, and race.
[2] Any solution you can find to the problem of single mothers having all the rights regarding reproduction and single fathers only having secondary rights contingent on the mother's actions are far worse than the problem. But if you accept inequality here, in this fundamental aspect of life, it is necessarily impossible to expect that there will be full equality elsewhere, at least as long as work and family are expected to be separate. Additionally the contrary side is that if you make things uniform, asking a man to restrict paternity leave to two weeks is very different from asking a woman to do so.
The point is that it is not about poster comfort, but others comfort - you think that you post something interesting and worth sharing but that might not be an impression of your friends, who might like 20% of your posts, maybe on a given subject, and they don't want to unfollow you.
Your friends are your friends, so there is not reason to unfollow someone, I would prefere to be able to unfollow from certain types of posts (jokes, funny cat picures, stuff funny for hackers, whatever).
The article advocates that there should be an easy way to say "that's not interesting for me" without unfollowing given person.
I think FB misses something like Dislike button, that would tell FB that I am not interested in a given subject.
I like this point. Personally, I find that there's too much friction between choosing which friend belongs where and then further choosing the appropriate group when sharing content. I might just be lazy but it just doesn't work for me.
I also think there's a certain value in being well behaved when sharing content if you have people on there that you wouldn't want them to see, for example colleagues, managers and, more importantly, children. For example, I look after a 2.5 year old boy and I do not use curse words in his vicinity nor do I look at pictures of boobs when he can see. It's just not proper. However, I'm free to do those things when he is in bed and out of the way (with regards to boobs, I don't but me and my fiance will behave like adults).
Based on this, rather than a whole bunch of categories for your friends, why not set up certain filters? This could be quite simple: Do not allow friends under the age of x to see my content at all after HH:MM and before HH:MM. These can also be set on a per-friend basis so if you have a couple of colleagues as friends that haven't set their workplace, you can set something like this up for them too.
A way to only share to certain people is great but FB has this and it's adequate: groups. I founded a number of programming groups and I will share stuff relating to that to them rather than my news feed since it's more suited to them AND there are many people in there I'm not friends with. It's a great way to get good, categorised discussion and the added bonus of meeting new people.
As I said, I don't think it's very valuable, not in terms of technology but in terms of society, for people to be able to share unlimited amounts of content at all times which you wouldn't share to the whole public.
"- Facebook gets worse the more you use it..."
The disagreement with this is good too: it's the way you to use it. I use FB slightly differently but, as said above, setting up my programming groups and inspiring others to do the same has created a great community within Facebook and I can honestly say I've had some very decent conversations as a result of this, even with people I don't know or never met. This isn't what FB sells itself as but it can be done quite easily and I see value in that.
And this is why I'm not on facebook
Sure, I'm cool with family baby photos, and "oh, my kid did X, y or Z, I'm so proud" you know, that's what I expect out of a family list. that's all well and good.
But if I have to wade through a gazillion "likes" and a bunch of half-baked emotionally-charged political rants to get at those things?
Nope. I'm logging off. Seriously, do you know how many messages I get a day that I actually have to deal with? It's a large number. It's not at all unusual for me to send 30 emails before I take my morning shower.
That's the thing about email. We've worked out an etiquette. Nobody is going to email me a link to a funny cat video; or email me an emotionally charged political rant. that's rude, and I'll tell family that is rude if they start doing that to me.
In fact, that's the thing I like about facebook the most; it is such a great platform for emotionally charged political rants and cute cat pictures that my family has moved all that stuff to facebook and off of email. I mean, I'm missing all the baby pictures now, but that's a price I can pay.
Revisited: “The Facebook Experiment has failed.”
https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f57f3bc8b377
Facebook was a first attempt at social networks, another company (in the future) will get it right.
I honestly don't understand how this doesn't describe facebook today.
This isn't the first time this has happened; I remember when Reddit was small too (and if you go back on HN, the old HN had higher quality comments).
It's inevitable that the values of a community change as it scales. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.
G+ is in that general direction. The social network for hobbys. Connect to granny on facebook, but connect to the guys in your ham radio club and/or photographers and/or podcasters on G+...
Fortunately for Zuckerberg and company they've already crossed the chasm. They will sink or swim based on the habits of the masses, not the fickle hipster tastes of a startup guy who desperately wants to predict the future.
I totally agree, and that's not to say that Google+'s stream isn't equally filled with content I don't care about, but that is also because I followed a random circle of 500 "interesting people".
Google+'s focus on smaller circles as it's primary feature, and I think the larger emphasis on sharing with circles and not the public at large (unless you are one of the internet famous) attempts to give user's the power to interact in this way. And if you use gmail, it's basically email + all the rich content social network benefits have to offer.
(The interface also invites having a "loudmouth" circle with zero notification level, so you can follow people without having their posts in your default stream).
Otherwise, G+ Circles are ridiculously clunky and slow, due to Google choosing superficial eye-candy over functionality.
The fact that Google+ prioritizes and emphasizes splitting friends into these circles as a PRIMARY means of organizing your friends is a huge difference. Although it is cumbersome, it is a much more realistic representation of human interaction, making friends and having different groups of friends.
Almost all my extended global family uses Facebook several times a day (we have a closed group), and I often sit next to other family members using the system. I am much more familiar with it than most people, especially with non-expert users.
It does require some effort to sort Facebook friends into half a dozen channels, but Facebook suggests people to add, which actually makes it rather easy. It becomes a natural progression, over time.
Meanwhile, whatever the theoretical claims, G+ remains almost completely unusable. In my experience, it's virtually impossible to get ordinary people to use it, and they don't last more than a day or two. And from a usability point of view, Circles are crap.
Although I've used G+ quite a lot, and have something over 5,000 followers, my use has declined over time. Following the last desperate (Facebook copying) redesign, I've more or less given in...
I think none of the networks are perfect, but I don't use Google+ only for personal connections. There is quite a lot of (photographic and technology, at least) content that is interesting to read.
And not to get into any sort of Fanboy war, but which redesign are you talking about? Before Google+'s most recent redesign into the multi-column pinterest-esque layout, Facebook's timeline update is in fact quite a copy of Google+'s old design (bigger pictures in speech bubbly things out of profile pictures).
I've lived in North America and my wife's family is Chinese so we are pretty widely spread. I have close relations in five different countries, but the majority are in Asia.
So, in an average Facebook session, I see posts from about 50 people, and I know almost all of them very well. I see a lot of baby and toddler pictures, with more to come ;-)
I have no relatives at all who use G+, and very few colleagues/business contacts who actually use it. Also, I don't see much new content there. I've usually seen it already via Twitter, Reddit, HN or RSS feeds.
I also use LinkedIn and Quora, and as a former /. and Digg user, I sometimes drop by those as well. They all have their niches. Unfortunately, it's hard to see anything that G+ does better than the rest, from my point of view.
Also, Hangouts is probably the biggest unique thing for Google+. By far the best web-based, free, multi-person video chatting experience IMHO. Not to mention it can be tremendously productive if need be, with in-window document editing and screensharing. It's somewhat based on the video conferencing solution that Google has been using internally for remoting into meetings for a long time.
I agree about Hangouts but it's a non-starter when none of my family is using G+. They use Facebook chat, Facebook group chat, and Skype. Hardly any of them use Gmail, so my chances of moving 30-odd people to G+ are basically zero....
With consumers, technology is a relatively small part of technology choices, and inertia is a huge factor.
FB can't and won't be everything to everyone, but a blanket statement like this is just trolling.
But Facebook isn't like that. Your Facebook timeline is based entirely on your friends and how you interact with Facebook.
And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal.
It just ain't so. This may be a pat little summary of why using Facebook is unrewarding for the author, but to generalize that to a "failed" experiment for everyone, would require talking to other humans about how they experience Facebook — i.e., doing actual research. (Even then, the conclusion would only hold, at best, for the types of humans with whom the author has spoken.) And as usual for these rants, there's no evidence this research has been done.
This piece of writing, therefore, does not contribute meaningfully to the discussion around Facebook.
The one that is interesting is his comparison to Google and SEO. In Google's world there are three players: (1) the searchers, (2) the advertisers and (3) the black hats who try to game the system. Unfortunately for Facebook, (2) and (3) are the same, so the people they make money from are also the people who are degrading the system. They don't have Google's luxury of cracking down hard on (3) because that's who their income comes from, which ends up sucking for the rest of us.
Moreover, if my news feed of middle-Americans-quite-pleased-to-share-indiscriminately is any indication, Facebook is what most people need. MOST PEOPLE. This whole elitist attitude in the tech community is breeding "innovators" who don't have the first clue what the world really wants or needs.
However ... Facebook is probably the only social network where I feel a high level of obligation to add people like Aunt Jemima, and Bill who I went to college with, years ago. It's "for" keeping in touch - i.e that's how most people use it. It's the fallback social network for contacts who don't fit into other, targeted social networks.
Not for much longer [1,2].
[1] http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/how-goo...
[2] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2419020,00.asp
But FB is not for getting news about the topics I like; because, IMHO like the OP, Facebook news feed is broken for this purpose. Yes it is broken if you like to get news and information related to your interests. The prime reason, which I have discovered over the years of using FB, is I like things which my friends do not like a lot and vice-versa. I cannot blame Facebook for this. So when they like something which I do not, I still get the news in the feed. The same thing is happening in Twitter.
I felt that it would be better if we can follow information we like rather than the people we like. This way we will be able to get the information that we want/like rather than the noise. A critical step towards this is tags and if we can follow a tag it would be better [1].
[1] Disclaimer: I have created a website to do just that. Link is https://www.scoopspot.com/ .
Online, that's as old as Usenet, and it continued through topics on CompuServe and AOL. It continues today through specialised forums and bulletin boards, especially the forums on subject-based websites. Good ones include AV Forums, Hydrogen Audio, DPReview, Doom9 etc.
Anyone who thinks Facebook is, or is meant to be, a substitute for Doom9 is extremely dim.
A lot of Facebook is social grooming and phatic communication http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/phaticterm.htm
That is real value that Facebook does deliver, something I must admit despite my wide ranged mistrust and distaste for various other aspects of the service.
Im in the same boat as you here. And it worries me. Imagine if we had to go back to the old days of using msn status updates and actually having to gasp converse with one another in order to get our fill of socal interaction.
There is a temptation when people comment on Facebook to extrapolate their experience with the vast array of different societies, social norms, perspectives, ages, interests, backgrounds, maturities etc.
So right now the first few stories in my news feed only has 3 posts I find interesting. And? I look at my feed every now and then and if often there is nothing interesting it doesn't hinder me. Some stuff is really interesting and helps me break out of the internet bubble I'm in bust mostly facebook is groups and chat for me. And that's why I love it.
Friending them just to realize you have little in common is akin to dating someone only to realize you have little in common.
I agree with the article author's opinion that Facebook IS growing less useful for me. As Graue said in above post, though, this really only applies to me and my reactions to MY OWN social circle.
There is a trend towards emotional populist content on social networks. It's interesting to you because it's your friends and it feels personal.
However in a broader context its creating a society that is inward looking (walled garden of your friends) and concerned with re-enforcing social norms (the like button).
How does this activity improve us as a society? Where is the creativity and freedom?
I do wish that social network wasn't Facebook, though.
People have always been insular and self-contained within their circles. Said circles form early in life and change very slowly. Even when you move people around geographically, they quickly fall back into the same closed circles. In these circles they reinforce whatever social memes have developed - inside jokes, similar views, etc.
Very few people in the world (though they do exist) actually continually meet new people outside of their existing groups.
So sure, Facebook doesn't improve us as a society, nor is it a magical bastion of creativity and freedom - but life never was, and Facebook hasn't made it worse. Facebook is merely a magnification of who you are. If you were prone to sharing stupid motivational pictures, now your'e sharing a lot of them. If you surrounded yourself with constantly insightful, smart people, now you get to talk to a lot more of them, a lot more frequently.
Facebook is what you make of it. I have a habit of squelching friends who don't post meaningful things. Click on the top right corner of their post and you can adjust their weighting in your feed - I have many people who essentially no longer contribute to my feed, and that's fine. Looking at my front page right now, nearly all of the information is stuff I actually care about.
Fixed that for you.
On the other hand, technical people are like rats. They're the first to pile on to fresh meat (there was even a prominent website by this name...), and they're the first to flee when the place is burning down.
Fitting in with your surroundings is still a function of the lizard brain, is it not?
Look at the success of Pinterest or Instagram for example. Neither grew because of technical people.
So this post should just be downvoted. Another guy with an opinion on the internet, nothing to get too excited about.
It seems that the more controversy you create, the more popular you get on HN, regardless of whatever you have any ground to your claims.
People are using Facebook because they want to, not because some weird social power is forcing them to. My friends love it, my parents love it, heck my grandma thinks it's absolutely magical. We get to share things and communicate with family in a way we've never been able to ever. It's not replacing the deep connections and interpersonal relationships—you need to actually meet up with someone and talk to them in person or on the phone for that. But we already have ways to do that!
The annoying people on Facebook are the ones who don't like it, like the author of this article. They're the ones that just post "Dang Facebook sucks more every day" or useless stuff like that and never actually use it for its capabilities. They expect Facebook to do their social for them, when it's really just a tool that you have to use optimistically.
"I'll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just ... because," Casey says. "It's not like I want to or I don't. I just go on it. I'm, like, forced to. I don't know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life." http://kottke.org/13/05/wanting-to-be-liked
Are we forced to be here?
Aren't there studies that find there is an element of addiction to browsing the internet?
It's a bit like having a drug addiction really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder
I think it is fascinating that people feel compelled to visit Facebook or any website, and don't know why. It's like calling someone every morning: you want to communicate. If you stop doing that suddenly, you'll miss it.
Calling it an 'addiction' or 'some strange social force' or other conspiracy ideas are interesting, but flawed arguments.
At the end of a couple of hours of commenting on people I know's pictures of cats or whatever I look back and think "Wow, where'd that time go?" whereas if I've done something "productive" I feel much better. It's possible that's just because I've filed time-on-the-internet under "wasting time" and so I'm judging myself, but I think the feeling bad was the reason I decided I shouldn't do it, not the other way 'round.
Sorry, that turned into a ramble.
Oh right, I forgot that having both an opinion and a penis is a crime. How does being a man have anything to do with it at all? Plenty of non-technical people have come to very similar conclusions, some of them have even been women. You are seeing what you want to see.
I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the only person out there who has used the "unfriend" button before. I've deleted hundreds of people; many of whom I only met for one night 5 years ago or didn't even talk to way back in high school. Now, my Facebook feed has content that only features people I care to hear from and "interest pages," which is sorta meh. It's really not this social media wasteland I keep reading about?
Too harsh. I agree that there is not enough rigor to speculate on the universal experience, but this absolutely has value in the larger Facebook discussion.
The increasing frequency of these anecdotal experiences is a hint that there exists a segment of frustrated users. It would be a mistake to summarily ignore their frustration due to the presentation of the argument.
These "increasingly common" anecdotes are from the same demographic of people.
Facebook is used by 1.15 BILLION people. Think about that for a second. It's an absolutely staggering number and they're adding MILLIONS of new users every single day.
Do you think the people in Africa, South America, Iceland, and even China, are going to have the same experiences as the person writing this article?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/06/01/the-new...
So, enjoy your once democratic access to information.
In reading this post, I have a very hard time sympathizing with this author's point. He's taking his personal expectations and experience of Facebook and projecting it to a catastrophic failure of the entire company to reach its audience - that's unfair at best, and honestly narcissistic. Nearly a billion people use Facebook, it's not a failure. This is like saying Google has botched search. No, Google and Facebook practically control their domains.
Is there room for disruption? Sure. Is Facebook perfect? No. But I believe the author is using Facebook the wrong way based on his points. It's not a professional platform. I don't use it the same way I use Twitter.
A rebuttal, in order of points made:
>Jump through hoops...share selectively.
News flash, most people don't care. I actively use Facebook and I've literally never touched the selective buttons for what to share with who or what to delineate between friends. I use Facebook for friends - there isn't a boilerplate for this when you sign up. It's for friends - the only reason Facebook introduced this was so that you could share that funny, raunchy video and your girlfriend's mom won't see it.
>As you use Facebook...you accumulate friends.
This entire point is null and void. You set it up by implying you have no control over the friends you make or the groups you join. That's blatantly false. Just don't friend professional coworkers or acquaintances. Again, not difficult.
>Loudmouths now have gigantic megaphones.
Dude, skim or limit your newsfeed. Are you so intolerant that you feel didactically opposed to the feature? It's not as painful as all that, you pass a status, read the first sentence, and decide if you have interest. If not, move on, don't comment. If it really offends you, defriend the person or limit what you can see from them on your newsfeed. There's a button literally next to their name.
>Social media scamsters.
I'll give this to you. However, I personally find more amusement than anything. And while I don't want to criticize you, you might want to be more selective in who you see sharing from on your newsfeed. I find the people who share this (gullible friends) are outliers and you can deal with them individually in the same manner as the above bullet point.
In summation, I believe the author doesn't understand why his qualms are actually features - it seems as though he's using it for the wrong reason. I'm not going to say Facebook is flawless. It's not, there is a lot to critique and it has things that could be improved. But all of this is not constructive criticism and it's mostly doom-seeking. Does he have a better idea for a social network? How can he condemn Facebook as a failure? His authority and points don't support that claim.
If you're looking for a system where friends are not just friends, but everyone you know, and you need selectivity in sharing or conversations, go to Twitter or Google Plus. If you want to kill time and have more or less the same experience with friends, with the same annoyances (native to social interaction, not the medium), go to Facebook.
Facebook is still great, but it's different than what it used to be. It's (for me) evolved into my less-close friends' vacations and babies and memes. Which is fine! I imagine Facebook has a lot of data that suggests this is exactly what I'd like to view. But it does seem much less engaging than it used to be.
It feels like an Eternal September, perhaps one I've brought on myself by friending too many people.
(Which doesn't help if it wasn't you who sent the original mail…)
I've been thinking about how to fix email as per YCs list of things they'd like to fund (just to get the juices flowing) and it might be cool to build on top of the email protocol rather than replace it - e.g it's trivial to format, say, todos in an email in a human readable format such that they can still be read and returned checked off by users who don't use this additional layer.
The first, more concrete, set arises simply because of the age of the protocols. They were developed when the internet was a club of like minded people rather than a global public space. Things like: a lack of rock solid authentication, no guarantees of transit privacy (much less at rest privacy), clunky formatting, multimedia and hypermedia support, arcane attachment problems, and only hacked on support for anything beyond 1:N messaging (e.g. mailing lists).
A lot of these problems have good, solid, proposed solutions but inertia and collective action problems mean that near universal support for protocol additions / changes take years if not decades.
The second, more amorphous, set of problems have to do with how some people use email pervasively in their lives in a fashion that (inevitably) would be more efficiently accomplished with a tool specialized to their needs. So for example, people who spend a fair amount of time in a corporate enviorment with Exchange often bitterly miss the calendar management integration. They say that vanilla email is broken because it has no equivalent capability. Although the critique is legitamite I think the target is off, it's not email that's broken, it's federated calendaring in general. But because email can sort-of, kind-of substitute it gets the blame.
every post on your news feed has got a tiny "hide" link, which you can use to either unsubscribe completely from a friend's wall posts (yeah, keep those "how I met your mother" quotes for yourself bro), choose which kind of news you're actually interested in (pictures only, events etc.) or even choose how often you wanna see a person's posts ("all updates" or "most important"). if you get the tendency to disable a post that you don't like the moment you see it, then (on the long run) you'll end up with a wall that's at least 2/3 interesting or let's call it decent (facebook is not really hacker news). I'm not aware if this is the actual implementation, but would be really cool if Facebook would actually learn from the posts you hide and stop suggesting similar ones in the future.
I've got around 300 friends and had I not unsubscribed from a lot of them, my news feed would have been packed with wedding pictures of people I don't know, events I can't go to or causes I don't really care about.
just to end here, email has its purpose but that purpose is not social sharing any more. just like emails took over writting letters years ago, social networks should improve over emails in the aspect of sharing information with ease. oh, and to the author: the facebook experiment hasn't failed - you just need to tell it what you expect of it.
People expect that Facebook provides the automatic content customization/filtering. And rightfully so, I may add. It's a shame that Facebook is little more than a walled-garden email service with photo storage.
I'm not a big fan of Facebook (especially because of the news feed ads), but most of my friends are camped there, so the only thing I can do is try and get the best out of it. I do enjoy email conversations with my friends (mostly with my programmer buddies), but the replies tend to be a bit slower and the stories never get so many follow-ups as Facebook posts. also if you want to email pictures, you'd better use a different service (Picasa, Dropbox) if you don't want to download zipped files all the time. same for videos...
to make this clear, I'm not advocating for Facebook here. I just find it curious to read something like "the facebook experiment has failed", when there's no interest in the author to see what the experiment has to offer. more specifically to try out some of Facebook's features (some of them are really obivous, some are implied, some are more difficult to understand). when you've got 1000 friends but you're not really interested in anything they say, who's fault is it?! and yet Facebook gives you the tools to filter them out...
non-default subreddits can still be quite good, but many/most/all of the default subreddits are wastelands ravaged by a silent majority of up- and down-voters while the huddled masses of commenters cling together for safety. of course, there's the same phenomenon within the commenters community, where insightful comments are buried amongst puns and prejudice and adolescent jokes that get upvoted much quicker.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
I've thought about doing something just like that, but haven't spent the time to figure out a "good" way to set it up.
We had one for our 'post-college' social circle. It was a good way to spread the word about happy hours and parties, without spamming everyone on facebook.
[0]: http://www.freelists.org/
You click the bookmarklet, pick friends and it sends the current page.
It's useful because everyone can see everyone else's reaction.
I use facebook almost every day, but I can't remember the last time I posted a status update or read anyone else's status update.
I use it as a glorified chat/email hybrid client. It's useful because only people I've chosen to accept can send me messages (like chat), but it's truly asynchronous, stores everything and supports rich messages (like email).
If, tomorrow, facebook disabled the ability of everyone to post statuses, play games, use apps, answer quizzes, post photos and all the rest of it, my usage of facebook would be precisely the same as it is now.
This. Further, I think Fb serves a very important purpose in my life: it has supplanted any need or desire to attend a high school reunion. I can easily find out "what you've been up to" if I care in the slightest. Also, upvoted b/c babies are cute :)
We now have a generation of people going through this with Facebook and it doesn't surprise me if suddenly one group of friends is not as relevant as they used to be, and that a system like Facebook can't easily pick that up.
What keeps people coming back is the illusion of activity. The sound and fury. If/when people close out the noise successfully, it winds up looking a lot like an email box.
"While Google actively tries to thwart SEO scamsters"
Google has monetised SEO and actively encourages bad SEO through SEM. You've got this strange case of Google creating shitty search results through Adwords and SEM which devalues their core product.
Looks like FB and other social platforms are suffering a similar issue. Ads are creating a frothing steam of noise which is drowning out quality content.