The Facebook experiment has failed

https://medium.com/a-programmers-tale/f7b8c66109ea

by mattront • 13 years ago

612 284 13 years ago

So the OP is friends with people who bore them, and that's Facebook's fault?

mosqutip• 13 years ago

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.

andyhmltn2• 13 years ago

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.

onedev5• 13 years ago

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.

mindcrime2• 13 years ago

and I have tuned it

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?

mattpardee• 13 years ago

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...

johnjlocke2• 13 years ago

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.

gfodor• 13 years ago

Well, my anecdote says otherwise.

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.

YokoZar• 13 years ago

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.

quarterto• 13 years ago

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.

mst2• 13 years ago

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

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 :(

msoad• 13 years ago

Why don't you install the beta version? I was able to read it in my nexus seven

ryalfalpha• 13 years ago

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.

rcfox• 13 years ago

Yeesh, didn't expect something like this from someone like you.

Don't worry though, you're not missing out on much.

mst2• 13 years ago

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.

But ... argh.

pyvek• 13 years ago

Here you go - http://pastebin.com/MARe4Ca5

beatpanda6• 13 years ago

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.

snom3802• 13 years ago

Do you have a link to the whitepaper?

I'm in the same boat as you. I email with most of my friends and family.

beatpanda6• 13 years ago

Right here: http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/papers/mrprivacy.pdf

gonehome4• 13 years ago

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.

beatpanda6• 13 years ago

This:

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.

pyre2• 13 years ago

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.

gonehome4• 13 years ago

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.

hoopla20132• 13 years ago

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.

piokoch• 13 years ago

"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.

jwdunne2• 13 years ago

"- Indiscriminate sharing..."

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.

lsc2• 13 years ago

>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.

guiambros• 13 years ago

Here's a better and more thoughtful corollary post, covering some of the things that the OP left out:

Revisited: “The Facebook Experiment has failed.”

https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f57f3bc8b377

ronreiter• 13 years ago

Haters gonna hate.

david9272• 13 years ago

Yahoo was a first attempt at web search, Google got it right.

Facebook was a first attempt at social networks, another company (in the future) will get it right.

gonehome4• 13 years ago

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.

pjbrunet• 13 years ago

Real social networks don't need technology. So technology will never measure up to the real thing.

jacalata• 13 years ago

An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures.

I honestly don't understand how this doesn't describe facebook today.

josh2600• 13 years ago

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.

djim• 13 years ago

I also spend far more time reading comments of strangers on HN (after reading the articles, of course) than I do on Facebook.

VLM2• 13 years ago

"but if I want intellectual stimulation"

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+...

dasil003• 13 years ago

That's a bold pronouncement.

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.

matdrewin• 13 years ago

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.

indubitably• 13 years ago

Oh whatever.

Maro• 13 years ago

I upvoted the OP because I'm curious about the discussion it will generate here on HN.

cargo84• 13 years ago

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.

iamshs• 13 years ago

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.

abrahamsen• 13 years ago

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).

chaz• 13 years ago

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.

graue• 13 years ago

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.

onedev5• 13 years ago

I completely agree with you. I think you've hit the nail on the head exactly.

ianstormtaylor• 13 years ago

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.

taproot3• 13 years ago

Muddling the term black hat and "black hat seo" on the internet, hn no less. You certainly have the balls I lack.

thenomad• 13 years ago

Also the content creators on whose sites ads are placed (and to whose sites the search results point), surely?

dclowd9901• 13 years ago

> 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.

SideburnsOfDoom• 13 years ago

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.

curiousdannii2• 13 years ago

But that obligation doesn't mean anything about what you read. Add them and ignore them if you want.

femto• 13 years ago

> I see the same Google Maps as everyone else does.

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

samikc• 13 years ago

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].

[1] Disclaimer: I have created a website to do just that. Link is https://www.scoopspot.com/ .

kalleboo• 13 years ago

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>"

scholia8• 13 years ago

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.

A lot of Facebook is social grooming and phatic communication http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/phaticterm.htm

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

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.

taproot3• 13 years ago

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.

Vivtek2• 13 years ago

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.

Larrikin• 13 years ago

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.

bradleysmith• 13 years ago

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.

nextw33k• 13 years ago

I feel that you are missing his point.

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?

icebraining• 13 years ago

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.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

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.

saraid2163• 13 years ago

> There is a trend towards emotional populist content on the internet.

Fixed that for you.

foobarbazqux• 13 years ago

> 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.

johnjlocke2• 13 years ago

Having an original opinion is a dangerous thing...mmm, boy.

Fitting in with your surroundings is still a function of the lizard brain, is it not?

threeseed2• 13 years ago

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.

myoffe• 13 years ago

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.

alphang2• 13 years ago

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.

calinet6• 13 years ago

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.

alphang2• 13 years ago

Funny you should mention 'forcing them to':

"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

papsosouid• 13 years ago

>(it's always a man)

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.

smith70182• 13 years ago

Thank you.

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?

saraid2163• 13 years ago

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.

deluko• 13 years ago

People also love Yahoo Mail (and loved the previous, more-horrendous version, too). Doesn't mean it couldn't be better.

mike_herrera• 13 years ago

> 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.

onedev5• 13 years ago

You have to remember Facebook's scale.

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?

wavefunction• 13 years ago

Soon, you will not see the same Google Maps as everyone else:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/06/01/the-new...

So, enjoy your once democratic access to information.

dylangs1030• 13 years ago

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.

EugeneOZ• 13 years ago

Tl;dr: my newsfeed on facebook is spamed and I'm too lazy to manage subscriptions.

thedaveoflife• 13 years ago

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.

nostromo• 13 years ago

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.

icelancer• 13 years ago

I do the same thing. I have different groups of people and just talk over email threads. Works far better than G+ or FB.

weavie• 13 years ago

Likewise. So much for people saying email is broken and outdated. It's the one medium I've been using for 20 years now and keep coming back to.

lipanski2• 13 years ago

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.

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

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.

_k• 13 years ago

Comments don't appear on both ? How weird is that ?

zt• 13 years ago

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.

joshAg2• 13 years ago

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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

tinha• 13 years ago

I use a private group on Facebook to share and talk with my closest friends.

spupy• 13 years ago

Sounds like this group could use a private subreddit on reddit.

pseut3• 13 years ago

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.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

I built an app specifically to make this easier: http://www.yourpane.com/

You click the bookmarklet, pick friends and it sends the current page.

lenazegher• 13 years ago

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.

rmc• 13 years ago

I like that part of Facebook. It means it's now easy for you to keep in touch with people you wouldn't normally meet reguarly.

jblz• 13 years ago

"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 :)

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

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.

EGreg• 13 years ago

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.

yason• 13 years ago

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.

andrewfelix• 13 years ago

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.

sidcool• 13 years ago

This is a good article. A good point of view. Not everyone will and needs to agree.

kevinalexbrown• 13 years ago

An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures.

This is pretty close to how I use facebook.

The problem is Sharing. It is the most fundamental feature of Facebook, and it’s completely broken

For me, the directory itself is most fundamental. If all of my friends switched to another social network, I would immediately switch.

I'm not sure what's failed? Maybe if he fleshed out a viable alternative?

It's important not to trivialize what they've accomplished just because its core feature now seems mundane.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

> It's important not to trivialize what they've accomplished just because its core feature now seems mundane.

The core feature is trivial; it has been implemented by hundreds of sites. Facebook's strength was its organic growth, which is slowing down the MySpaceification tremendously.

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

>Facebook's strength was its organic growth //

You appear to be trivialising it by simply saying this as if just being their caused organic growth. FB not only provided the core ability to link people together but did so in a package that was/is accessible to a broad range of people in a non-threatening way.

Several sites tried before, you mention MySpace, and never achieved the broad appeal FB did. Several have tried since - consider Google Wave. Or how about Google+, which hasn't failed yet, but has struggled it seems to make inroads in as broad a demographic as FB has.

I like to malign FB probably more than the average person but their achievement is so easily downplayed without proper warrant.

pavs• 13 years ago

By far the best description of how facebook works I have read so far.

lesswire• 13 years ago

Facebook is not meant to be for creating ideas. It is meant to entertain you by knowing what your friends are doing.

chaostheory• 13 years ago

Indiscriminate friending is a big problem. People friend and stay friends on Facebook with people who are no longer relevant to them. There are easy fixes for it.

1) Either tell Facebook to explicitly ignore these people's posts so that they're hidden from your feed.

2) Just unfriend people who don't matter.

3) Don't friend people who aren't consistently in your life in the first place.

4) Don't use Facebook as often.

Facebook isn't broken; people just need to do house cleaning and to stop using it like linkedin

microtherion• 13 years ago

The last round of Facebook complaints on HN I recall was by page owners complaining that not their entire audience would see every single one of their updates.

Now we have a complaint about seeing too many updates.

Am I the only FB user thinking that overall, FB does a pretty good job in prioritizing updates? (i.e. the further down I scroll in my news feed, the less likely I see something I truly care about).

brunorsini• 13 years ago

I disagree with the article's point of view. There's much to be improved on Facebook, starting with more options for customizing the feed, but to say it's doomed or "just doesn't work" because of irrelevant content is silly and elitist.

Even staring at uninteresting content on Facebook from time to time serves a fundamental human need to socialize, to see what others are up to. Hardcore Randians might disagree but life isn't all about narrowly/subjectively-defined "progress", after all. Some people just like to live and to escape a little bit every once in a while, and checking what one's peers are up to is a great way to do just that.

jeswin• 13 years ago

Author here. Didn't think this would show up on HN.

These were my thoughts when I wrote it:

1. Most stuff being shared is of no value to most people. Does not encourage exchange of good ideas. Sharing, as it works now looks like a fad. It has peaked. Most people I know are bored now, it's just the inertia that keeps them there.

2. If someone is genuinely interested in something, they will seek out good communities to join. HN is a good example. And Slashdot (much more so earlier, but even now), gamer forums, some reddits, astronomy forums, photography etc.

3. There would probably need to be a tool to share with family and close friends. But that doesn't need to look like FB. Then again, Social networks help fight against totalitarian regimes. FB would be missed here, although I think Twitter plays a bigger role.

Josh Miller in "The Next Facebook" makes an interesting point: The next network could be about making it easy to talk to people you don't know so well. Example, again Hacker News. https://medium.com/musings-about-text-boxes/8157c364d26a

I am working on some related ideas, for open communities and forums. This will be open source, and I'll document, share and collaborate on the entire process of designing this application (like discussions, whiteboards, sketches etc) . Plan to start this week, if interested add me on Twitter (@jeswin). Code isn't committed yet, but it will be here: https://github.com/jeswin/fora

PS: This was written in a hurry. I apologize for mistakes. I have to leave now; I'll check comments later in the day.

vincentperes• 13 years ago

1. I feel that the pages I'm following bring me a good value. When it comes to people, if somebody is posting crap, I usually remove it from my timeline. I don't think Facebook is meant to exchange good ideas in public, but to share information. I don't want to be philosophical, but being bored is like everything else in life, you keep taking public transport, because it's useful, not that you are in love with it. 2. Facebook is not meant to build a community around a theme, you get information and feedback on pages but nothing more. Dedicated website on games, astronomy etc. were there before and will be there after. 3. I'm living abroad and share every week with my family on a Facebook private group, I just find the feature great!

In general I think that experiences in life are so different and all require a different set that you simply can't aggregate them all on one and unique website. "The next network could be about making it easy to talk to people you don't know so well." is just called the web?

rythie• 13 years ago

I think what you're missing is, that facebook is a tool for extraverts - it doesn't matter that people don't have much to talk about - they just want to talk with friends - about anything really.

What you are describing is a tool for more introverted style people (like myself) who primarly want to talk about common interests

scholia8• 13 years ago

Re point 1, see my answer above, especially the last bit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5814061

The idea that the shared stuff is of "no value to most people" is a good indication that you haven't understood what's actually going on.

> doesn't need to look like FB

This is true, but then, Facebook has 1.1bn users and has thrashed all of the rival sites in the marketplace.

You should be able to work out why Facebook has been really successful and why Friendster, Orkut, Hi5, MySpace, and many others have not.

If you don't understand that, then you're not in a good position to criticise Facebook.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

> 1. Most stuff being shared is of no value to most people. Does not encourage exchange of good ideas.

These two concepts are not at all the same thing. Social communications between friends and family are not idea-based, they are fact-based. "How was your day?" "How's your sister?" "What happened to your face?" "How are you feeling?" "Did you get that new car?" etc. People want just want a taste of the other person's life and emotional state. Facebook is great for that.

I agree that Facebook is not great for exchanging and discussing ideas. As you point out, that is why forums like HN have grown at the same time as Facebook has grown.

msutherl• 13 years ago

I have the same experience as the author and so do many of my friends. My solution is to simply unfollow every single friend I have on Facebook. Effectively disable the Timeline. Highly recommended.

david9272• 13 years ago

I had the same experience as the author and I quit Facebook. Highly recommended.

zby• 13 years ago

Caring about the receiver - this is what is lacking. The sender should think about the receiver and send only stuff that would be interesting to him, or help him even if he does not like it at once. The sender should have means to target his messages only to people who would like it. The receiver should have means to express what he liked and what he did not. Channels should be negotiated between the receiver and the sender.

I call this 'social routing'. I hoped that Google+ would do that - but they only covered half of the idea - they let the sender target the message, and they let the receiver choose their sources (in a tangled together way) - but they don't let them negotiate the connection.

ziko• 13 years ago

I was done with Facebook when they introduced that the content from a page you 'Like' doesn't necessarily appear on your timeline. That was a deal breaker for me and many others.

You 'Like' something/someone for one simple reason. You feel that page is interesting to you and you want updates. If you don't want updates from something you like, you write it down in a notebook.

Gone are the days when Facebook was an obsession. People tend to expect more and more from the service (even though it's free) they use but Facebook went in the exact opposite direction - they gave back less of what we want and more of what we don't.

I see more and more companies exclusively on Twitter which is great. Twitter's a great platform for business while I always had this sense that Facebook is more suitable for individuals.

After a week/month/year/half a decade you realise it's taking up a larger percentage of your than you'd like and you make cuts.

I have kept my Facebook account open but I can't remember when was the last time I checked it out of interest. If someone messages me or write on my wall, I get a (non-push) notification on my mobile or email (in the mailbox Newsletters which I check/clean at the end of the week). But that's it, Facebook is (almost) a past for me, just like Myspace.

baby• 13 years ago

They could really improve by doing an automatic "tabbing" like the new Gmail does. People don't really use lists on facebook since it's not forced (like in Google +).

Also because it's not as easy as drag&dropping a mail into the right tab.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

PS : Actually Facebook is going through the same thing Mail has been going through since its creation. It was only friends at first, then co-workers and friends, then spam & forum notification, newsletter etc... came around and now it's becoming hard to sort through all those things. So my remark on Gmail's tabs still stands.

Vivtek2• 13 years ago

This article entirely misses the point: the author is not Facebook's market. And this is why Facebook will be a long-term feature of the Internet - because it actually works exactly the way most people want to communicate.

So it doesn't scale to the networking needs of an entrepreneur or academic. That's really not what it sets out to do.

ojr• 13 years ago

The Instagram experiment is working well, always remember Facebook bought Instagram

motters• 13 years ago

I got to this point in 2011 - i.e. looking at my Facebook stream and considering whether any of it had any relevance to me at all (it didn't). Was I just wasting my time looking at this? (yes I was).

And so I left and closed my account. Since then I've mainly been using Friendica. No spam or creepy business models, just conversations with friends.

iaskwhy• 13 years ago

The way Facebook advertising works, it bumps the spamming potential of a ‘Like’ up a notch. A ‘Like’ on a product or service will make a paid story visible not just to the person who liked it, but also to their friends.

Inevitably, there is an entire industry working non-stop creating low quality, emotionally appealing content that gets ‘likes’ from gullible users.

This is so true. I believe Google's efforts to stop spammy SEO made SEO a good thing for users. This is extremely hard to stop in Facebook when social media people know how effective (in the number of likes) emotionally appealing content (read overused pictures of something cute happening) can be to a large percentage of people. These people don't seem to engage with the companies behind these posts but they do get promoted and eventually that's all you will see.

I'm not a Twitter user but I'm wondering what will the effect be for its users.

DocG• 13 years ago

After MSN went bad with WLM and Skype(its awful, online list seems to be random), it is last place where most people talk. And it is mainly used as messenger/email hybrid platform. Around my friends, it is main reason why we are still there...

So I kinda agree. Almost no stories what pick my intrest. Only win-to-share post and not relevant post.

bobsy• 13 years ago

The ideal facebook for me would let me explicitly set a threshold before things become visible.

So.. I would create 3 groups. Family, Friends, Acquaintances.

Family + Friends status's would always appear. Acquaintances status updates would require 5 likes by other people before they appeared in my stream.

All likes from Acquaintances and Friends would be hidden.

All app invites from Acquaintances would be hidden.

As for companies I like / follow. Individual controls for each would be great.

I hardly use Facebook because of the noise. I only have < 60 friends on Facebook and < 10 likes. I can't imagine what it gets like with hundreds of friends. My idea probably wouldn't scale. Would be neat though. Would actually get me using Facebook.

cubicle67• 13 years ago

offtopic, but is three-fourths, as opposed to three-quarters, a cultural thing? I've always been taught/read quarters as, well, quarters rather than fourths, but I see the use of fourths regularly as well

eLobato• 13 years ago

Does the OP know you can hide stories from everyone but your closest circle of friends and family? Honestly every time I see anything from an acquaintance I played beer pong with 5 years ago, I click on "hide all publications by this guy", and voila.

Facebook has already thought of that problem for you, OP.

agentultra• 13 years ago

I love the naive assumption many Facebook users have that, "everyone is on Facebook." It's much like Redditors who believe their beloved site is the homepage of the Internet.

Really, it's just you.

A great many people is still not everyone.

spacecadet• 13 years ago

While I have always thought of social media as a waste of time, I dont actually see it going away anytime soon.. The big success of social applications and the entire modern web is accessibility to new users. And I don't mean the UX term accessibility, I mean content. 2000 - Content is generally not interesting to non-tech users. 2013 - Content is generally boring to tech-users, but the overall user base has grown i.e. my grand-mother now gets it..

See you all after the collapse!

llort• 13 years ago

typical sensational link bait.

medium.com is spamming hacker news with a lot of articles with no real content. ev's probably A/B test optimizing link baits

VLM2• 13 years ago

Its interesting that I didn't see a compare and contrast analysis. My "news.google.com" is semi personalized, I've got a couple relevant keywords, and there's nothing to see most of the time. My hometown newspaper fired most of their reporters a couple years ago and has gone full on tabloid with stuff like "Latinos hope 'soap' about diabetes hits home" and "Gatherings: Menu explores new territory with veggies and ice cream", seriously, that's what passes for local news.

You can skim off the customers of the local news merely by rising above that low level, you don't need perfection. That is the mistake in the original article of complaining about only 4 relevant stories in 30. OK, well, if that is bad, what is good? Local news is profitable with less than 1 in 30, so what's the problem with 4 in 30?

RakshaC• 13 years ago

Most of the times Facebook appears to be a'Show off book'. With so many friends lot of sharing with little of interest.

75lb• 13 years ago

"Facebook is godsent for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say." - oh the irony.

useless article.. a bad workman always blames his tools.

jatin085• 13 years ago

Can a dislike button improve the quality of Facebook content? That can be used to demote most of the spam users are complaining about.

juandopazo• 13 years ago

I feel like the odd one around here when it comes to Facebook. To paraphrase the article, "I am signed into Facebook right now. At a quick glance, the entire list of posts on the first screen" consists of:

- Picture of a friend who's traveling and doing volunteer work. Awesome.

- Picture of a family member living abroad that got pregnant. Like. - Sister making boring comment. Meh.

- Link to this TEDx Talk: http://youtu.be/b5OOOIKtj8w. May be interesting.

- Pictures of some friends/acquaintances' weekend out. Meh.

- A bunch of incredibly beautiful pictures of an old coworker visiting San Francisco. Awesome.

I take Facebook as a way of keeping in touch with people I don't have a lot of face to face contact with, a chat service and a simple way to keep in touch with people I recently met. It seems to work well at that.

hawkharris• 13 years ago

This well-written article makes some great points about Facebook, but they are points that have been raised many times before.

The problem for many people is not why to leave Facebook, but how. For example, many of us feel deterred from leaving because all of our friends use the service.

How can people leave Facebook and still feel socially satisfied? To where should they turn? I think an article that proposed a solution to these questions would be more interesting.

kmtrowbr• 13 years ago

I actually sat down and spent a few hours 'curating' my Facebook recently: marking people as acquaintances, 'hiding' posts on my timeline that I don't want to see, setting up lists of different types of friends ...

Arguably this should happen automatically -- but, I'm pretty surprised at the large positive effect this has had: Facebook is revealed as an amazing communication tool -- it's not perfect, but considering it's (mostly) free, certainly not something to complain about.

gdonelli• 13 years ago

I think Twitter suffers the same issue, that's the reason why I built an app which allows me to focus only on the people I really care about: http://EssenceApp.com

arikrak• 13 years ago

I think it cans be interesting to see the links people are sharing, just Facebook doesn't do a good job deciding what to show you. If they put a greater effort into really knowing what topics interets you, they could only show you links on those topics.

joeblau• 13 years ago

I grew up all over the world so the value that I get out of Facebook now is from being able to stay in communication with my friends from other countries. I feel like the utility of Facebook has changed since 2005 when I was using it as a communication platform for my buddies in college. Facebook is starting to reminds me of how AIM started deteriorating after AOL tried to cram so much extra crap into AIM (stock ticker, news, ads, group chats, etc...) after AOL realized that's where all of the users were.

webwanderings2• 13 years ago

What's all those comments on Medium, how is it done?

DanielBMarkham• 13 years ago

Facebook is performance art. It's a phonebook of people I lost contact with many years ago. It's also a quasi-broken emailing list program. It might be a decent advertising platform for small businesses. Don't know.

It's not a news feed. It's not stories relevant to me. It's not a way to actually have friends. It's not a place where people create things and share (mostly). People might think it's those things. Hell, Facebook itself will tell you that it's those things, but it's not.

I agree with the article. Facebook's biggest problem is that, because you're always talking to everybody, you really can't say much. Conversation is, and has always been, context-dependent. You don't say things at a funeral home that you would at a keg party. You don't share the same stories with your peers that you would with your grandma.

I've always thought Facebook was from the devil. Anybody that would use my own friends against me to suck me into a network of participating whether I wanted to or not? Not somebody with my best interests in mind.

I only use Facebook with the FB Purify plugin that gets rid of a lot of the spam. Even then, if I could abstract myself completely away from it, and do all of my social networking activity on my O/S without a browser or a layer of commercial crap stuck on top, I would in a heartbeat.

ADD: It might also be a decent shared photo album. Jury is still out on that one.

What really bothers me is not that these services like FB, Twitter, G+, or various cloud storage systems are not useful -- they are. It's that, instead of being internet standards, they're branded properties. And they're all doing the same thing. It's like if email was a completely different thing depending on which ISP you used. These things should be completely abstracted away from any corporate logo. If I want to store things in the cloud, for instance, I could care less who actually keeps the bytes. If I want to reach my high school chums, why the heck do I need some other party to help me do that? I control gigabytes of storage and god knows how many computational cycles on my personal possessions, and I need Google+ to tell me whose birthday it is today? Really?

austenallred• 13 years ago

Google+ really was on to something with its circles: My friends are easily divisible into groups, and, apart from life events like getting engaged, what I want to share is only really relevant to a specific subset. I know Facebook has groups you can share specific things with, but it's not a feature Facebook has focused on, so even I don't really use it. I could use google +, but no one else does, and there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room.

I have found, however, that my Facebook experience has greatly improved once I started hiding posts from people i don't care about as much from my news feed. There are people I still want to be able to check up on now and then, but I don't want to see 99% of the things they have to say. It's like unsubscribibg to junk mail; it makes everything feel wanted and relevant.

scholia8• 13 years ago

> there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room

Spot on....

saraid2163• 13 years ago

> I could use google +, but no one else does, and there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room.

There hasn't been a generation growing up with Google+ yet.

moron4hire• 13 years ago

>> but no one else does

You and I apparently have drastically different pictures of G+.

roc2• 13 years ago

> "Google+ really was on to something with its circles:... I could use google +, but no one else does"

I wonder how much of Google+'s 'use' problem relates to this feature working extremely well.

You section off people you like to keep in contact with, just not on a daily basis. You then don't send most of your day-to-day posts their way. They look at Google+ and see a wasteland.

And whenever they mention Google+, you can't just say "I love it and use it daily; I just put you in the 'Siberia' circle". The only answer is "I don't use it much." Which re-affirms their view of the service as being basically empty.

untog• 13 years ago

Agreed that Circles are a great idea- and they're just as great on Facebook. I am lucky that I have a relatively small number of friends- categorising them did not take long at all. Now I can post updates to different groups, and it works great.

brianpan• 13 years ago

I thought so as well, but I'm not really that interested in "organizing" my friend list. Ideally, yes, I would. But there's too many corner cases and overlapping circles that it's never exactly what I want and it quickly gets out of date.

For me, Facebook did work the way I wanted long ago- people tagged you in photos and it was fun to look at photos of you and your friends. The problem is that in order for Facebook to grow, your feed needs to get broader and broader (status updates, youtube videos) and it gets filled up with things that are not as relevant.

Goladus• 13 years ago

I have found, however, that my Facebook experience has greatly improved once I started hiding posts from people i don't care about as much from my news feed.

Oddly, I've found the opposite to be true. Apart from clearing out app-request spam, streamlining my facebook feed to only the "friends I care about" tends to result in the most predictable updates. It seems to me the outer-circle friends have the most potential to be interesting.

nahname• 13 years ago

The problem with Google+ is that they are so terrified of the user seeing no content, it comes pre-loaded with... well crap. Friends list is empty? Let's import everyone you know, but create 5 separate contacts each. Then spam those people to join because they are not actually on G+. Send them a message? They are not actually there. You cannot hide that your social network is a ghost town by putting fake people in it.

nevster2• 13 years ago

Totally agree.

80% of the crap is from 20% of the people.

Just hide them from your timeline. In your browser, hover over the person's photo, then hover over the Friends button and deselect "Show in News Feed".

Problem (mostly) solved.

daigoba66• 13 years ago

In the beginning (circa 2003-2005 when I was in college) it was a tool for only your peers. Granted at the time it was little more than a directory and event management tool. But it served a useful purpose back then. In my opinion the jumping-the-shark moment was either when it was opened to the world or when "Apps" were introduced.

pseut3• 13 years ago

IMO it started to degrade pretty quickly once the 2003-2005 cohort started to have babies. That pushed extended family, etc. to join to see baby pictures, etc. But I agree somewhat about the apps too, especially the way the games were introduced (when I think about how much I know about some of my friends' mafia wars habits vs. how much I care...)

This all happened at about the same time, though, and it all fits under the umbrella of the (sensible, from FB's standpoint) strategy of "grow as large as possible."

xtracto2• 13 years ago

Facebook works very well for me:

During my lifetime I've lived on 6 cities in 3 different countries. I've got friends (some of them, became very good friends) and people I know from all these places.

Facebook allows me to stay in contact with them, and if I want, to peek at where are they know (and what are they doing). For me, it works as an "information push" platform, where sometimes I'll see an update from an old time friend who I forgot about, and I would use that moment to say hello and congratulate him or give kudos for whatever he is doing (or just say 'haha' at whatever funny picture he shared).

Before that, I had to remember to send an email to every person I knew... and ask them specifically what where they doing.

Sure, some people might find no sense in maintaining those kind of relations (staying in touch with people who you do not actively talk to). But I think we never know when we might be able to get together again, and having this point of contact is good.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

Put another way: Facebook is for friends outside arm's reach, people you don't want to forget but who are not part of your current "inner circle". Real current friends are not maintained via Facebook precisely because you do connect with them in other ways. It's for those you don't want to lose, but don't want to put much effort into either.

ripperdoc• 13 years ago

I have a similar situation with multiple countries and friends and family back home. Facebook is a good tool for that. Sure, the toolset itself is only ok (crashy app, opaque list-management, messy UI). But more than half of the value of Facebook is NOT the tools it provide, but the fact that almost everyone is ON it. A stellar social tool startup would be of no use to me considering it would take years before the people I need to talk to are memers, if ever.

With that said, Facebook is slowly reducing the Signal-to-Noise ratio, and it's an ominous sign for the platform as a whole.

smspence• 13 years ago

That doesn't sound accurate to me...

You're not always talking to everybody. On Facebook you can create friend lists, and then post things that are only visible to the people in the chosen list, in the same way that you can share things with only certain "Circles" on Google+. For example, I have different lists for "Close Friends", "Family", "Work Friends", "Random Acquaintances", etc. If I choose, I can share a post with only my "close friends" list, and none of my family or work friends will see it.

This problem has been solved already. On Google+ the concept is called "Circles". On Facebook, they call them "Friends Lists". Why does everyone on HN praise Google+ Circles, but ignore or hate the Facebook Friends Lists feature?

neilk• 13 years ago

I am a fairly savvy computer user, and I use Facebook lists. I always have trouble figuring out who is in what list and which list I'm talking to, and how to add and remove people from that list.

Facebook has proved over and over that their priorities are about public sharing, and even to make more things public that previously were private. In part this might be Zuckerberg's vision that sharing almost everything is the future. But as a business they are also incentivized to make sharing effortless, to encourage people to put data on Facebook without thought.

Any thought to privacy is always a little bit of friction. So it's always de-emphasized, if not actually buried.

dirkgently• 13 years ago

Can you limit your feed to default to only certain lists?

Can you remove all the promoted content (aka crap)?

Is it easy to see who you are really sharing with even after creating list?

Can you prevent one list from knowing what you liked or commented on other lists?

You most likely haven't used G+ to really know the difference. FB lists are anything but G+ Circles.

robomartin4• 13 years ago

The only way a services can be non-intrusive is if you, the user, pay for it. If you paid for the full cost of developing and supporting a solution that did not require such things as advertising and social graph mining in order to build, grow and support a company you'd get a much better product. You'd probably get a product that is far more sensitive to the needs and wants of it's paying client user-base.

That's one of the problems with this culture of everything being free on the 'net. Free isn't really free. Businesses don't run on air. They run on money. The user always pays. If it isn't in real currency it will be in ways the company can convert into currency. That's just the way it is.

Aspects of your post bother me to some extent because you are complaining about services you are not paying for. I think that is a very important distinction. Don't get me wrong, I have lots of problems with some of the services you mention in your post. I simply choose not to use them.

I also happen to think that people who use ad blockers are just short of thieves. It's hypocritical to navigate to a site and make use of its free services and, at the same time, go out of your way to deny them revenue. It's like someone figuring out a way to make you work and legally not pay you for it.

hnha• 13 years ago

i use free xmpp servers to talk with people who I "met" on free websites. Many people provide services for free because they believe in a shared good. It's not all money money.

moheeb2• 13 years ago

So what would folks using an ad blocker be then, if they're "just short of thieves"?

I was hoping you had a website in your profile so I could surf all over it.

boomlinde2• 13 years ago

The real thieves are the people not visiting your website.

boomlinde2• 13 years ago

Not to leave a perfectly valid point to argue to a joke, here's my stance on ad blocking: You don't get to decide what content recipients will fetch. Content is commonly split into multiple separate requests for data which some users and clients won't even have the means to turn into useful information. The interactivity and selectivity in receiving said content is inherent to the protocol, and by all means what makes it different from other mass media. You can't deny users the ability to "receive" whatever part of the content you want unless you are willing to deliver it in another, more intrusive way. What you are really saying is that people are "just short of thieves" for not requesting content that an HTML document merely presents to them as an available resource.

What's your stance on turning down the volume and preparing a sandwich during a TV commercial break? Would you be just short of a thief, or would you simply be doing what's reasonable when having the ability to opt out of information you are not interested in? Don't try and turn a flawed business model built on an infrastructure not meant to support it into a question of ethics.

Also, as some pointed out, to the user, free can really be free. Ever maintained a personal website? How did (or would) your visitors pay for it? Everyone with an internet connection has the option to deliver free services and content at no additional cost.

unclebucknasty2• 13 years ago

>You are complaining about products that you are not paying for

Facebook's revenue model is built upon your participation (labor) and your information. Sure you're paying for it.

>It's hypocritical to navigate to a site and make use of its free services and, at the same time, go out of your way to deny them revenue.

But it's OK for FB to welcome you to their site, encourage you to supply information using your own "labor", then sell that information to third parties (even if in aggregate form)? And, it is OK for them to constantly look for ways to further track and glean data about you for its own profit? How is people using ad blockers any different from Facebook burying their monetization schemes in fine print?

Perhaps FB should simply ban ad blockers or make users prove they've viewed x ads per page view. Ah, but that would open too much dialogue about how much FB utilizes information that it harvests from users and how it monetizes it. Wouldn't want those items foremost on members' minds.

Gormo• 13 years ago

> I agree with the article. Facebook's biggest problem is that, because you're always talking to everybody, you really can't say much. Conversation is, and has always been, context-dependent.

Nothing has yet approached traditional web forums, IRC, and even old-school Usenet in this capacity. These forms of online community are clearly-defined social spaces, in which everyone has a direct view to who is and isn't participating. There may be many separate contexts going at any given time, with lots of overlap among participants, but each one is still an independent venue with legible boundaries. Modern "social media" lacks this sense of defined space, which, I think, is necessary for anything to be legitimately called a "community".

Forums and IRC are like a few dozen friends sitting around a table, with everyone engaged in a single coherent conversation at any given time. Twitter and Facebook are like two hundred acquaintances having 40,000 conversations by shouting at each other across the floor of a gymnasium.

ryguytilidie3• 13 years ago

Yeah it just turns into "oh my golf friends would love this, but everyone else would think its uninteresting" or "oh, my friends who are passionate about politics might be able to start an interesting discussion here, but having older relatives also comment will turn this into a clusterfuck" or "My poker buddies would love this, but I don't want most of my friends knowing I gamble." Groups seems like the main answer, and I suppose this is the main reason that I mostly use Groups when I'm actually using fb at this point.

unclebucknasty2• 13 years ago

Good points. And, after a while it seems like there's not much ROI on using a piece of software like FB to try to "manage" with whom you communicate and how.

In fact, it seems an artificially wedged in middleman at some point. And it becomes more efficient to get it out of the way and go back to simple email, phone calls or, as you say, IRC and forums.

thinkloop• 13 years ago

> You don't share the same stories with your peers that you would with your grandma.

Turns out there's quite a lot that we do.

gavinpc• 13 years ago

> I've always thought Facebook was from the devil.

But you can't stop using it. Why?

I quit Facebook about two years ago, when I stopped liking it. Too many political arguments and misunderstandings. Guess what? Life goes on.

gasull• 13 years ago

Nutshellmail lets you use Facebook and Twitter receiving a daily update by email (or more or less frequently if you prefer). You don't need to log into Facebook or Twitter at all.

Also, for a distributed social network, we have Bitmessage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_dTotavJZ8

https://bitmessage.org/

webwanderings2• 13 years ago

1. Create Lists. 2. Change everyone's settings to only see important updates. 3. Instead of following your front page, follow your lists.

Giszmo• 13 years ago

I disagree!!! Facebook is great from the sender side and so is G+ but both suck at the receiving side. What we need is not a way to select who we spam as that is a feature that would be ignored by the loud mouths. We need a feature to select what we receive. There are "friends" I easily want to read all ten messages per day but there are others that I just want to be on my friend list cause it publicly shows my appreciation but that are too noisy to actually read their updates about their cat pooping again.

I am well connected in 3 communities that are not mutually compatible, so I don't share everything I would share if I were only in community #2 because I spam-filter on the sending side what I send to all 3 communities. This sucks for my community #2 friends cause they miss out on #2 stuff and it sucks for those that really are not interested in #2. If #1 and #3 people could black list buzz words from my #2 community (bitcoin for example), I could share much more with the peace of mind not to annoy my other "friends".

mathattack• 13 years ago

I've been a modest bear on Facebook because I perceive that people are moving away. This is entirely subjective, but it seems to me like once everyone found all their long lost friends and shared a round of photos, things got much more quiet. This is very unscientific, but just my impression. It's almost as if they need a new attractor to engage folks every 6-12 months. It started as apps, then it turned into twitter-esque announcements, and recently evolved into photos. They need a Next every 6-12 months.

turar• 13 years ago

> An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures.

And that's LiveJournal.

SonicSoul• 13 years ago

while a lot of the problems he describes can be solved with unbaby.me and hiding the loud mouths, i am really impressed with the way this blog integrated comments. i love how they are tied directly to a paragraph and hidden away via ghostly counter icon!

is this standard with any theme??

thehme• 13 years ago

I totally agree with the author. This is why I haven't used Facebook in several years, because to me it's just useless unless your family lives hundreds of miles away and you want to share pics/info with ONLY them. This seems to me like the best and only reason to use a social network like Facebook. When I did have Facebook, I was part of tech groups that would post important info, but very often their posts would be polluted by the usual college drama. I got rid of facebook and I am a freer and happier individual with "actual real friends". People who actually care to learn/share important info need to do so by reading legitimate sources from sites like Hacker News and other respectable places.

breakupapp• 13 years ago

Facebook evolves. It used to be a directory of school mates, then a place for self expression, then an amplification system and address book, and then a messaging platform and identity layer. Who knows what it's going to be next but one thing's for sure. It won't stay the same.

bedhead• 13 years ago

I think FB's usefulness breaks down as you get older. It's helpful to understand the average FB user. They're young. They're in high school and college. They probably dont have work friends, random old acquaintances, etc...no uniquely distinct groups of friends. They're less mature. It's typically only later in your twenties that your life starts fragmenting and these issues of "Do I really want to share this with everyone??" arise. That's when FB becomes dominated by generic crap and baby pictures and it goes from being a great tool to being nothing more than a time-waster.

I bet for the younger crowd, FB works just fine for the most part.

tharris0101• 13 years ago

The solution to this problem was G+ and that failed too. I find myself using Facebook less and less. I'm not bitter about it and I'm not making a conscious decision to stay away. I just am finding less and less value in it.

bernardlunn• 13 years ago

Facebook seemed to promise something better than email. Yet email is an open standard and so will still be part of all of our daily lives long after FB is a memory or a niche. We moan about email but it gives us choice - free with ads or paid and ad free, basic or full featured. For keeping in touch with friends I find email, phone, Skype and train 'n boats 'n planes work pretty well.

leishulang• 13 years ago

fackbook might not be useful to some, but I met my wife there.

ryguytilidie3• 13 years ago

http://cl.ly/image/0k3p1b0b012B

This is my news feed at the moment. I tweeted a similar picture on Friday. At the top, there is a piece of content from Deadspin, which, while I do like them, but I don't need every update from. Beside that, it is 100% ads, six in total. Any other site, this would be considered completely unacceptable spam. The only ad I'm even remotely interested in on my sidebar is the Titleist irons and that is only because I recently bought a set, meaning i won't need another, so that's a pretty sure sign this ad is ineffective. Same with T. Rowe Price. I just opened a Schwab account, so I assume that was why I was targeted, but does it really make sense for T. Rowe Price to try to advertise for people who JUST opened a Schwab account? I'm really starting to wonder how this could possibly be useful to anyone.

I remember on my first day at Facebook, I sat in orientation while they explained to us why Google's advertising platform would be overtaken by Facebook's, and the idea was that they could figure out what people wanted to buy or were looking at, and then serve them an ad for something relevant. Cool idea and all, but 3 years later, this has clearly not happened, AT ALL. Facebook is still paying an engineering team hundreds of millions of dollars to figure out ways to more efficiently cram my browser full of spam. How is this useful for anyone except Facebook stockholders who want money?

ywang0414• 13 years ago

I completely agree with the article. I've always found FB to be useless and noisy. I have a lot of friends. But they all have different interest. And I only want to share things that are relevant to them. When I post something on Facebook, I rarely get a response, largely because it's just noise to 90% of my FB friends. At the same time, FB is actually a closed social networking, meaning that the things I share cannot reach people who might actually be interested, and would contribute back. Our startup is trying to solve this problem. Will post on HN once we think we are ready.

micah63• 13 years ago

I just planned a 30th Bday party for my wife and had a 100 people out. It would have been a nightmare to do it without Facebook. I just don't have all those people's phone numbers and emails and whatever. I set up an event, made a couple of her girl friends hosters of the event (can't invite people you aren't friends with) and shebam, 100 person nacho potluck party complete!

Yah, don't use it for the news feed, but even with the crap, it can still be interesting to see what some of your funny friends are saying and jab some friends when your hockey team is winning!

drcube• 13 years ago

> An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures.

AKA Email.

Seriously, somebody needs to build an email client that makes maintaining incoming/outgoing mailing lists and filtering your inbox very easy, and offers a few extra "friend discovery" search features. You would probably have a facebook killer.

A lot of people think "social networking" is a new kind of thing. But it's just a fancy UI on top of email.

godisdad• 13 years ago

Facebook is the Central Limit Theory for awfulness applied to the internet

dreamdu5t2• 13 years ago

Am I the only one who has no issue with Facebook whatsoever? I love it. It's free. I find incredible value in it.

People need to get a grip.

puredemo• 13 years ago

You find incredible value in it because you're so old. Of course someone in their fifties wants to feel like they're "more a part of something."

dreamdu5t2• 13 years ago

I'm 25.

dtkuhn• 13 years ago

I have been under the impression that the point of Facebook is to log in regularly, scan through postings from the Ridiculous and Obscure, and to deduce, accordingly, that life could be so much worse. On the bright side, the product ("Facebook Therapy"?)seems to work so well that, in time, logging in no longer becomes necessary..

DArcMattr• 13 years ago

I stick to private groups on FB for most of my activity. I get a lot more meaningful conversations and closer personal connections through those groups than the author thinks possible.

The Wall-stream is a bonus.

kin• 13 years ago

I beg to differ. Every month or so HN always has some blog post hit front page about how Facebook is broken and needs to be fixed, pointing out all of its issues (subjectively) and offering no alternatives or solutions.

I've had the exact opposite experience with Facebook even with ads. As I google search on my computer, Facebook's ads actually become relevant. As I scan my front page, I see news from friends that I find interesting and status posts about friends that I care about. If I see something irrelevant or spam-ish, there's a convenient tab next to the post that gives me the option to never see it again.

Sure, there's some self-management involved in getting Facebook to work for you but it's audience is so broad it kind of has to be that way right?

cmillard789• 13 years ago

"Just like its features, Facebook algorithms are equally stupid. Share more, get noticed more. Originality be damned."

This isn't exactly true. The FB algorithm dictates that a post hits an average of 18% of your network for personal accounts (15% for businesses). It's an average, because if you frequently share content that has low engagement (likes, comments, shares) FB shows your content to a smaller % of your network.

On the other hand, if you produce content with high engagement, it will get a higher % share with your network.

manuela610• 13 years ago

Recently, I've been treating Facebook the way Flipboard intends to be used. I use it for news directly relevant to me (because at some point I liked certain websites so that I would get their updates). I find that they provide more relevant content to me than my "friends" do. A brand that uses their Facebook well, with an interesting image and grabbing headline, is a link I will click on.

CyberDroiD2• 13 years ago

Works great for me for all purposes required. I don't have any specific needs in this area, so it's a fun website for when I want a diversion. None of the author's complaints make sense to me, except yes, I do notice advertising.

The original post author seems to have specific interests and needs that are not being fulfilled? That sounds like a personal problem. My suggestion would be to move to another social media platform that better fits his needs.

But, in reality, I think the author's problem is PEBKAC. If he doesn't like the website, he should make one that he does like. Nobody is stopping him.

enok• 13 years ago

Finally someone writes an article about this! I've been thinking the exact same thing for some time now.

RandallBrown• 13 years ago

My first page is actually quite relevant to me.

A friend of mine has just arrived from across the country to the city I'm in. He just moved here and now I know he's here and we can hang out.

Another friend is looking for help with some yardwork. Free beer or pizza is involved.

Other friends posted pictures of their children, or graduation photos from college.

Another person I know recently got out of the hospital.

All of these are at least somewhat relevant to me.

What else do I use facebook for?

I put an album of photos from a hike I went on the other day. Lots of friends had asked me about it, now they can all see it.

I play on a kickball team and we like to hang out with eachother outside of our normal thursday night games. Plans get made in our facebook group quite often.

Long ago I realized that some of my friends aren't worth keeping up with. I muted or unfriended them on Facebook. Facebook is what you make it, and I've made it in to something that I use every day.

dobbsbob• 13 years ago

Kids don't use facebook anymore, mainly because their entire family is on it.

Most kids I know just use whatsap and instagram/twitter they won't go near fb

vic_nyc• 13 years ago

Facebook has some uses, but people can't expect it to be everything. They can't expect it to be more than it is. For me, Facebook is good at keeping in touch with friends who are far away. They may have moved to a different place, or they may be in a vacation somewhere. They post pics and impressions about a place. I also like the occasional article links people post. Sometimes people go to events and they advertise it on FB and that's how I find out about them. I might decide to join. All these are very good use-cases. I don't use FB to share very personal or deep things, because it's not a suitable medium for that. Real life conversations, in person or over the phone, are much better suited for that. So, FB is a tool, it has its uses. To call it failure is like saying the phone has failed and we shouldn't use it anymore, just because the Internet is here.

jokoon• 13 years ago

I thought everyone already knew that.

Maybe when someone will combine bittorrent and forums, something really new will come out, but for now, facebook is just one big computer cluster, where you can gossip using your real name and where everyone can read you. I don't really call it a progress. I guess paparazzis enjoy it, but not everyone is into that stuff.

aufreak3• 13 years ago

I'd been off facebook for about a year. I mean not even logging in. Just a while ago, I logged in to post about ... guess what ... our second baby. I took a glance through the feed and thought "looks like nothing's changed in a year".

Then this happened -

I posted something in which I wanted to include a goo.gl shortened URL (yes, I wanted that specific shortener for geek humourous effect!). FB forbid me from using the goo.gl link because it considered it "spammy", discarded my entire post text and logged me out. When I logged back in, it declared my computer as infected with a virus (that would be a macbook air), made me confirm that I've disinfected it, and oh it made me change my password too before I could login, sigh, and retype my post text using different link. All that while I logged into FB in an incognito window in Chrome!

That's when I thought "Man! I'm glad I ditched FB!". The next thought was "what if this happens to google+?". As DanielBMarkham noted, if we really value social networks, they can't be placed in the hands of one company or site. ISPs are probably best placed to make this happen, but that won't happen due to network effects - just like folks don't bother using ISPs email accounts anyway. People would just login to FB or something. The internet as a social network seems doomed to evolve into FBs and G+s!

reddit_clone• 13 years ago

> Facebook is godsent for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say.

Hilarious. So true.

nevster2• 13 years ago

It's very simple.

80% of the crap is from 20% of the people.

Just hide them from your timeline. In your browser, hover over the person's photo, then hover over the Friends button and deselect "Show in News Feed".

Problem (mostly) solved.

bittercynic2• 13 years ago

It is not an experiment, it is a mechanism to make gobs of money, and it worked.

Facebook is now being destroyed by its overwhelming success. Since people feel locked in (because, hey, that's where all my friends are...) facebook can keep cranking up the heat, making the experience more and more unpleasant for users, and they will still stick around and give their eyeballs to it.

From talking to many people on and offline, it seems that facebook is almost universally hated now, but we have no choice, since everyone else is on facebook.

This will probably keep working for some time, but eventually, and very suddenly, there will be a tipping point where many people suddenly can't stand it any more. Once facebook loses that first big chunk, then not everyone will be on facebook anymore, and all the others who despised it for years but hung on because everyone else did will not have to put up with it anymore.

Facebook will suddenly go from universal necessity to irrelevant, and it will happen overnight.

sssparkkk• 13 years ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned WhatsApp groups and Google Hangouts yet. To me this is the evolution of social networking, where people finally start sharing stuff with each other again. Only this time, it's in a very private group of people, real-time and organised around a common interest/background.

I see this happening all around me: groupchat with pictures is the new Facebook.

The Facebook experiment has failed

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