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When there's lots of people on your FB, it's mostly noise and very little signal. When there's few (as mine is now), you realize there's still very little signa

When there's lots of people on your FB, it's mostly noise and very little signal. When there's few (as mine is now), you realize there's still very little signal. I could never get over the fact that, IMO, broadcasting on a social network isn't meaningful. This is the main reason why I really like dedicated one-on-one messaging (ex, WhatsApp) but pretty much find FB proper useless in 9/10 cases (Events being the only nice aspect). That being said, I hold out little hope that FB will finally die.

Spooky23 10y ago
I unfollowed most people and started liking things. My feed turned into a sort of ghetto Google Reader... but they always tweak it to meet Facebooks objectives. To be honest, the only content left is the mommy swap pages. Fancy Craigslist. :)
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
The signal fell off a cliff: when I used it 10 years ago in uni, it was actually useful (and the algorithm did a better job of showing things you wanted to see/there were less ads of all types); now it's mostly a proxy for emails about parties and spotify/hulu/tinder login. I think Facebook has failed to notice the precipitous drop, because they can only A/B test small changes, and none of the thousand cuts seemed like much damage. Now they lack the magic to get new users hooked, are transparently a psychologically-manipulative ad-network, and are wondering why engagement is dropping or young users are finding new platforms. I call it stats blindness: you optimize for a proxy, and end up walking slowly downhill.
thisrod 10y ago
I never used Facebook until I ended up as secretary of a sports club. It adds a lot of value for messages such as, "Could someone who regularly drives past the bottle shop please pick up a carton of beer and drop it off next time they come to the club rooms?" If you post that on Facebook, people read it a lot sooner than if it's on some group-specific message board. Then, whoever offers to do it gets to have the whole club see them volunteer. If you're trying to organise a community instead of just making money from its economy, then a semi-public space like Usenet or Facebook turns out to be really useful.

Spooky23 10y ago

I unfollowed most people and started liking things. My feed turned into a sort of ghetto Google Reader... but they always tweak it to meet Facebooks objectives. To be honest, the only content left is the mommy swap pages. Fancy Craigslist. :)

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

The signal fell off a cliff: when I used it 10 years ago in uni, it was actually useful (and the algorithm did a better job of showing things you wanted to see/there were less ads of all types); now it's mostly a proxy for emails about parties and spotify/hulu/tinder login. I think Facebook has failed to notice the precipitous drop, because they can only A/B test small changes, and none of the thousand cuts seemed like much damage. Now they lack the magic to get new users hooked, are transparently a psychologically-manipulative ad-network, and are wondering why engagement is dropping or young users are finding new platforms. I call it stats blindness: you optimize for a proxy, and end up walking slowly downhill.

thisrod 10y ago

I never used Facebook until I ended up as secretary of a sports club. It adds a lot of value for messages such as, "Could someone who regularly drives past the bottle shop please pick up a carton of beer and drop it off next time they come to the club rooms?" If you post that on Facebook, people read it a lot sooner than if it's on some group-specific message board. Then, whoever offers to do it gets to have the whole club see them volunteer. If you're trying to organise a community instead of just making money from its economy, then a semi-public space like Usenet or Facebook turns out to be really useful.