Facebook Groups Start Showing Exactly Who Saw Each Post

http://newsroom.fb.com/News/Update-to-Facebook-Groups-186.aspx

by avirambm • 14 years ago

43 57 14 years ago

newsroom.fb.com

droithomme• 14 years ago

Well that sucks.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

Seeing something isn't the same as having read and digested it.

I used to have a boss who would send out emails and request read receipts and outlook would automatically send them as soon as I clicked on the item in my Inbox.

I would sometimes get a phone call within seconds of the email arriving asking for my thoughts on it.

Shoomz• 14 years ago

They've already been doing this in chat, I suppose this is a logical extension. That said, is it really necessary to see this or is it a step beyond what is necessary?

FuzzyDunlop• 14 years ago

They're probably running out of things to implement that people want, so are now trying to shoehorn things in that people probably don't want. Probably as a result of new-found shareholder pressure.

natrius3• 14 years ago

That's a ridiculous theory.

The biggest barrier to using Facebook as a communication tool is not knowing how often other people check their messages or groups. This feature solves that and will increase the usage of messages and groups.

tar• 14 years ago

I wonder if they'll start doing this with status updates some time in the future.

badclient2• 14 years ago

Wow, this feature and the comment history feature(when editing a comment) make me uncomfortable. They might as well begin showing you who is seeing your profile and how much.

weaksauce• 14 years ago

I would wager that it was discussed in a meeting there at one time or another.

kintamanimatt• 14 years ago

Soon.

badclient2• 14 years ago

Doubt it. It would make users self-conscious and reduce engagement.

nbm5• 14 years ago

What about the comment history feature makes you uncomfortable?

alter8• 14 years ago

They don't? Orkut showed you who has seen your profile (but not in real time).

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

It's one thing Facebook has (always?) been careful not to show. Even with 3rd party apps they'd proxy all content so you couldn't make a "who's viewed my profile" app.

alttab7• 14 years ago

Probably as a way to show visual "engagement" for companies that are on Facebook but don't get a lot of likes. Its more derivative crap. We can call them "seens".

And of course there the creep factor.

I'm having a hard time determining if Facebook is just terrible, low value, and creepy, or I'm just cynical about Facebook. Probably both.

nbm5• 14 years ago

This is a feature for groups, not for pages (the way companies generally interact with people who use Facebook). Groups are generally created by people for groups of people that already meet/know each other in person or to discuss a shared interest, not by companies (unless they're company-internal groups, I suppose).

They are for things like for a bowling team in a league or a user group or other ad-hoc group of people who want to communicate with each other - co-ordinate dates and times, send out last-minute updates. The hope, as I understand it, is that it will reduce confusion/anxiety/overcommunication over who hasn't yet read something ("Did Mike read the update that mentioned he is supposed to bring the projector? Should I send him a direct message/phone him?").

Pages already have Insights which gives them aggregate-only demographic data about the audience who has interacted with a particular post ("52/48% female/male, 80% US, ...").

(A Facebook engineer, but not involved in this feature.)

alttab7• 14 years ago

Makes sense if you look at it that way, but as a potential consumer of your product every move now looks like Facebook wants to track my actions on the Internet and then tell others about it without my explicit permission.

Zero friction, sure. I'd call it zero consent. Most Internet lay users don't have the mental capacity to understand the legalease of a TOS, so to me saying they agreed to it is thin moral ice to stand on.

eshrews• 14 years ago

Personally, I think this stuff is great. It eliminates a lot of extra communication regarding whether someone has received a piece of information or not.

That said, I wonder at what point is a post considered "seen".

jgannonjr• 14 years ago

In the group context, I think this makes a lot of sense. It is similar to Path (which is basically a "group" limited to my closest friend). For every post I make, it shows me which of my friends saw it, and that is convenient and cool.

I think this could work well for small groups of trusted friends (or shared interest groups). For large scale groups of strangers this could be creepy though. I definitely would hate to see it abused by larger brands, etc (or for this to be integrated into the main news feed for that matter)... which unfortunately at this point I can't say I trust Facebook enough to believe they wouldn't try to push it past that limit

tokenadult• 14 years ago

Inspired by FuzzyDunlop's subcomment to another participant, I have to ask the direct question: does this help Facebook monetize and gain value for shareholders any more than any of its other features? I'm beginning to think that there really is a market for a PAID service where customers (the people paying for the service) are treated like customers, rather than advertisers being treated like the customers. Some of the friends I most like interacting with on Facebook are looking for a service like that. They are annoyed by Facebook's flailing about looking for ways to monetize.

natrius3• 14 years ago

I don't understand the prevalent HN stance that this is a user-hostile feature, which seems to be the source of your question. iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger do the same thing, though users can opt out. People like those products.

alttab7• 14 years ago

Blackberry doesn't steal your email address, follow your browsing history on other devices outside your phone, sell your personal data to advertisers, continually change your privacy settings in hopes you won't notice, etc.

kellishaver• 14 years ago

I can't decide if this is good or bad. I don't participate in a lot of FB groups, but I do a lot of politely keeping my mouth shut in other forms of online communication. I think I would feel like I was being put on the spot to say something, particularly in a small group.

A lot of times, I'm not going to lie and agree with that thing someone said, but I also don't want to invest the energy into arguing it with them, either... especially when it's someone who's clearly just looking for accolades and doesn't seem open to criticism.

If the other person knows you saw their message, then there's the potential for them to perceive your lack of response as rude or a show of obvious disagreement.

In huge groups, it wouldn't be an issue, but in smaller, more intimate communities, it could get awkward.

natrius3• 14 years ago

I think the social issues will work themselves out pretty quickly once people get used to it. When instant messaging was new, the same discomfort existed.

s_henry_paulson• 14 years ago

I think there's a huge difference between private messages between two people, and allowing everyone in a group to monitor other's usage.

grose• 14 years ago

I hope this doesn't spread to Events too... it'll be harder to flake out of stuff. Or maybe that's what they're going for?

alttab7• 14 years ago

Then I'd say fuck events. Stop trying to change my behavior by holding me responsible by being a creepy web application I'm forced to use due to network effects.

I still file this one under fuck Facebook.

superuser23• 14 years ago

As a student, my classmates and I use Facebook groups to organize activities. If, for example, the stage manager announces via Facebook that there will be rehearsal at a specific time, or that you should bring $5 for the director's gift, it'd be pretty stupid for all 35 cast members to reply "k" and nobody does this. But the message needs to reach all of them, and the SM has no idea who's been informed, so instead he gives himself carpel-tunnel texting everyone individually (because there is a social expectation that you acknowledge texts.)

A stage manager is in serious trouble if half the cast didn't know to show up, so he'll do it the hard way if he has to. But for large, informal social groups, people who don't use Facebook as actively simply fall through the cracks. I'm part of a roughly 30-member group that gets together to watch hilariously awful movies. We organize on Facebook, and people who don't happen to see our posts get left behind and forget about it. If the host of a movie night could easily see who already knows about it, he can contact the others by phone or in person, increasing engagement with the group while respecting those who silently declined.

Being able to see who you've already reached makes Facebook a pretty massive convenience in cases where it previously had no advantage, increasing engagement with both Facebook itself and the real-world entities represented by Facebook groups. I'd call it a win-win.

>If the other person knows you saw their message, then there's the potential for them to perceive your lack of response as rude or a show of obvious disagreement.

This goes both ways. Yes, it does eliminate ambiguity - you saw the message and chose not to respond; there wasn't a technical glitch. But where the person you're talking to would previously have escalated to a more invasive form of communication like a phone call, he now knows there's nothing wrong with Facebook; you're just not interested.

badusername• 14 years ago

Creepy shit. If I want to acknowledge a post, I can already comment on it, or do a passive like. And how exactly does fb decide that something was seen? I might not even have bothered to read the entire message. Is there any way to "unsee" it?

I feel that social contracts and relationships that people have are more complex than what fb models them to be. And leaving these imprints without any control over them is just gonna result in awkward moments.

Buzaga5• 14 years ago

where's Facebook going with this, seriously?

I already leave almost every group I'm forced into(cause I can't chose if someone 'invite me' to it), the two I decided to keep I barely ever look and have to change the settings so that shit stops notifying me for stupid shit I'm not interested

Also, I had been aching to silence(unsub) everyone in there because it just feel like a fucking noisy echo chamber with almost nothing that's remotely relevant... So.. I've probably already 'silenced' a big part of them, and then I ended up using a Chrome extension to just hide all that Wall crap out of there, because the chat is the only thing I can take some value of on this site.

But the experience is still pretty bad because I also keep getting notifications for event and game invites I don't want at all and also, for what people post in events I never RSVPed. In fact, I almost never even bother opening the event page. I'm a party dude, but I'll just care about events at the moment I want to go out. I also cannot stop notifications from invites, only for specific people, after I refuse a single invite and then 2 or 3 clicks into it(to stop invites from ONE person)

Facebook, you suck hard and you're going down soon I'm sure. I wish you didn't sucked so much because I'm getting wary I'll have to start untangling my future app from your API sooner than I expected.

Buzaga5• 14 years ago

Facebook is social in the way 'the cable guy' is social

nbm5• 14 years ago

I'm sorry you are having a bad experience.

It sounds like you have accepted some friend requests from some noisy/energetic people, and/or from people that you perhaps don't really care about. My experience is that unfriending people I don't actually care about (people I've only interacted with a few times a long time ago, for example), making a close friends list (people I care a lot about), and moving the 25%-ish people I care the least about to the acquaintance list has improved my experience a lot.

There are always some unusual cases - a cousin you mostly want to hear things from/about who loves all sorts of games, maybe. For those special cases, you can also control specifically that you don't want to hear from them about games.

I'm not really familiar with problems with events - I get a few event invites a month, and generally they are things I'm interested in going to. How many events are you being invited to? How many different people are involved in inviting you to them?

If you're using Windows, you could also try out the Facebook Messenger app to keep yourself on chat.

(I work at Facebook, but on infrastructure, not products.)

taylorbuley• 14 years ago

.aspx? Did not see that coming.

thisisblurry• 14 years ago

While odd for what has historically been a PHP shop, .aspx shouldn't be too surprising: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21458486/

mseebach• 14 years ago

It's no different than a Haskell start-up running their blog on Wordpress or Posterous.

Presumably this site is run by FB's comms department, and could be an off-the-shelf system or developed by an external agency. You don't want to tie up your precious engineers on projects that aren't critical to the mission.

totaljohn• 14 years ago

Stalker-esq. FB is on a roll of strange product decisions and 1 star apps. Oy.

petegrif• 14 years ago

Stalking - excellent!

personlurking• 14 years ago

I think this works in the chat but don't see the use of it in a group. I thought I wouldn't like it when it was announced for the chat but now it's nice to see a "seen" message. This kind of thing is a pressure to engage faster since you know when the other person has read something you sent to them in a one-on-one conversation. Then again, as others have mentioned, how can FB know if I've seen something or not. Surely, we'll have eyeball-following cameras in everything soon.

teaneedz• 14 years ago

Too reminiscent of those pesky read email requests. Also, 'Seen by' is not the same thing as 'Really read by'. One reason why I stopped using Messenger (the app and web version)

Favoring the content producer over the consumer won't necessarily lead to less confusion or a better user experience. It's kind of a forced form of social regardless of the group's size.

GoodIntentions• 14 years ago

Perhaps version 2 of this will turn on your mike and web cam to record your reaction to the post?

aneth4• 14 years ago

I hate this. I feel fine lurking in a group I've been added to unless or until I want to engage. This also gives an inappropriate amount of data to the creator of a group, who isn't always the person who is supposed to be armed with that information.

nitrogen2• 14 years ago

Why are some people so eager to give Facebook the role of dictating social behavior, rather than forcing them to be what they should be, a tool that facilitates our own social desires and expectations?

superuser23• 14 years ago

They're fixing a serious error in the way they model conversation. Please explain how this is "dictating social behavior."

People engaged in an in-person conversation constantly and involuntarily give each other verbal and nonverbal cues indicating the receipt (or loss/corruption) of each message. One of the primary gripes against the text-based communication Facebook et al "forced" us to use is the loss of that subconscious channel. Having an unreliable chat system that created the ability to hide behind "oh sorry, I didn't get your message" was one way Facebook corrupted human social interaction. Now they're making it right.

I, for one, desire and expect reliable delivery of my messages to my friends' attention. Do you see a workable solution besides acknowledgments?

nitrogen2• 14 years ago

Text-based conversations are not in-person conversations! Text-based communication has existed for centuries prior to Facebook, and existing social protocols are perfectly capable of handling "seen" notifications. "Sorry, I didn't get your message" and other half-truths are an essential part of human interaction. If you want to know if your friends received a text message, just ask them. Instantaneous "X saw your message" notifications are an intolerable intrusion into private behavior, as they can convey unintended meaning without verifying user intent, especially in multi-party conversations.

Aside from the mangling of social behavior, "seen" is an impossible flag to get right. Maybe someone else was using the PC, maybe the person shut their PC down without looking at their browser window, even though the browser window was focused, etc.

Facebook Groups Start Showing Exactly Who Saw Each Post

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