8 ms·
Facebook was great in the early years. No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipula
by gthtjtkt 9y ago
Facebook was great in the early years.
No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out.
If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.
- grenoire 9y agoYou cannot exactly enforce the nice-ities though. You would have to structure the community around using your service like that, but that still can be broken down. Manipulative algorithms can be taken out though, I suppose.
- aeorgnoieang 9y agoExcluding the "ads", how would you prevent users from posting "political spam", "viral garbage", and "pictures of what your friend ate for dinner"?
- ksenzee 9y agoYou'd get most of the way there by making it possible not to see things your friends have shared.
- ed312 9y agoYou'd only let people in with a .edu email and marketing as a hookup app
- na85 9y ago.edu is only used in the United States.
- guelo 9y agoPart of the Facebook problem is that they mostly took control of the feed away from users. They now surface the more "engaging" posts at the top and more frequently. This leads to the overemphasis of viral images and videos. If you post a simple personal status message without an image and Facebook's sentiment analysis considers it to be non-engaging many of your friends won't even see it as Facebook will favor marketing spam over your actual personal post. Users also become trained over time by the number of likes they receive to tailor their posts to conform to Facebook's whims.
- odbol_ 9y agoI tried to write an extension that would hide all video/photo/link posts and only show pure text posts from my friends. It was really nice, although there wasn't much to the feed once all the garbage was hidden...
- krrrh 9y agoEven worse, purposely optimizing for engagement isn't too different from accidentally optimizing for outrage.
- ballenf 9y agoI'm kind of in the opposite camp. The way-too-excited responses from people reacting to the silly video of my kid just remind me how I often don't like the FB-version of my friends and family. So I really avoid interacting with them there.
- gthtjtkt 9y agoEasy: Stop littering the feed with pictures, videos and articles. Exclude them altogether or show them very rarely. You can also easily identify "viral" content that doesn't belong to the user and remove it. Eventually they'll learn not to waste their time posting those things because they'll get no responses. And if someone posts an article, leave it as a plain old text link instead of creating a massive preview of the article (complete with title, picture, lede, etc.). Facebook does the opposite now, which leads people to use it as a content consumption platform rather than a social network. Obviously that's what Facebook wants, since content consumption is infinitely more profitable than people posting on each other's walls all day.
- mysterydip 9y agoRemove the like, and let the feed be the actual feed and not an algorithmically-filtered list, would be a great start IMHO.
- xadhominemx 9y agoTry switching your feed from "Top Stories" to "Most Recent"
- JBReefer 9y agoThat doesn't stick between sessions
- xadhominemx 9y agogo to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr instead of https://www.facebook.com/ https://www.facebook.com/
- JBReefer 9y agoThank you!
- wordupmaking 9y agoAllow people to tag their posts, and have friends who tag their posts. Then have an option to not see posts of type X (link, photo, text, video, audio) tagged with Y by contact Z. Have further options to display little icons with some info for hidden posts to easily expand them inline. And so on. Yes, you'd have to manually curate some things, but otherwise I think it's mostly just a matter of not hiring any marketing people, and creating the features first and looking how to make them easily usable second. Especially if the goal isn't to "kill FB", but simply offer an alternative to those who want the good bits and actually like, uhh, reading manuals and being proficient with the tools they use. They can't come if there is nowhere for them to come to, and then it's easy to pretend they don't exist. But they do, even among the old and young and not so technical.
- Zak 9y agoUI can help with that. If there wasn't a share button or URL previews, the percentage of original content would be greater. AI can help with that. Facebook already has automatic alt text for images, for example: * Image may contain: 1 person, standing, selfie and phone * Image may contain: cat * Image may contain: food And for an end-user, simple filtering can help with that. I sometimes use the FBPurity browser extension to hide everything that's a link or shared post, leaving almost exclusively original content. It can filter on that automatic alt text too if you hate cats, but I don't mind frivolous posts that are original content from my actual friends.
- zelos 9y ago> no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner Posting pictures of your food should be a criminal offence. Nothing too serious, just a couple of years in prison or something.
- jessaustin 9y agoPrison costs too much. Corporal punishment would fit this crime, and besides lots of people would just volunteer to swing the cane upon hearing the phrase "posted pictures of food".
- rosser 9y agoThis sounds to me like nothing so much as the setup for a Milgram-esque study of just how willing people are to inflict violence upon one another for engaging in trivial but annoying behaviors like ... posting pictures of food on the internet. Because, yeah. Caning is totally commensurate with that.
- gthtjtkt 9y agoI can't help but laugh when I imagine what this would've looked like before the internet existed. "Look, honey, we got something in the mail from Katie and John! It's... oh... just a bunch of pictures of food. That's odd." Meanwhile Katie and John are still at home, furiously stuffing envelopes with the same food pictures so they can send one to everybody in their address book.
- jfoutz 9y agoI always figured photos of cocktails and food were a standard part of the after vacation slideshow you'd invite your friends to. A few once a year isn't bad. People complained about those slideshows also though.
- Jaruzel 9y agoYour joke is my command: http://www.jaruzel.com/files/look-honey.png http://www.jaruzel.com/files/look-honey.png :)
- traek 9y ago> No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out. > If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today. Get into the world of finstas, that's basically the concept behind them. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finstagram-fake-account.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finstag...
- Chaebixi 9y ago> Facebook was great in the early years. That seems to be depressingly true of any social website. There seems to be a sort, sweet spot that exists briefly between the implementation of a good idea and when the parasites catch on and move in to ruin it.
- rezistik 9y agoEternal September is the term for that. When the social site begins to accept too much trash because of it's size.
- Clubber 9y agoFor those that don't know, September was when all the freshmen would get their first access to the non-commercial internet in college. It was a pain because they (we) had to learn all the nuances of how to interact with the people already on it. Newgroups, IIRC, etc. Eternal September is the term for when the internet went commercial in 1995. Wow that happened 27 years ago. Time does fly.
- Raphmedia 9y ago> If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today. Make your own. Here's what I did for my local network of friends (who also all hate Facebook). Install Wordpress, add the free Buddypress plugin, purchase $50 BuddyPress theme. Throw on a server. There you go, your own private social network in under a week.
- loceng 9y agoHow active is it with your friends?
- Raphmedia 9y agoHigh activity when planning events or gaming sessions, low otherwise. We already did all of our talking and planning in a Facebook group, so this allow us to expand on that without the privacy issues. The Facebook group itself was similar in activity.
- webtechgal 9y agoThis. I tried the exact same thing for a family network a couple of years ago (but the network did not hate Facebook intensely, so it was a bit of an uphill battle). Before I could get them all fully on board, I got sucked into some large gigs so no business resulted in the end. I still hope to revive it some day.
- EGreg 9y agoActually I spent 5 years building a social networking platform to let people design and host their own social networks and apps. And no it isn't as simple as just Wordpress + BuddyPress. https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform
- Raphmedia 9y agoAwesome! I found buddypress through https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted, perhaps you could have your project added there!
- xadhominemx 9y agoyou know you can sort your newsfeed to "most recent" right? And mute your obnoxious friends from appearing in your newsfeed. You can also hide posts from particular websites from appearing on your newsfeed. In a short period of time, that would solve 90% of your problems.
- maksimum 9y ago> you know you can sort your newsfeed to "most recent" right? Just looked through settings and wasn't able to find anything for order of posts in news feed. > And mute your obnoxious friends from appearing in your newsfeed. Yep this is pretty easy to do. > You can also hide posts from particular websites from appearing on your newsfeed. This isn't helpful since you cannot block the entire class of "transitive" posts. Eg a Honda ad because a friend of mine liked a Honda page. Sure I can block Honda. But Toyota or Volkswagen can still show up until I block them individually...
- xadhominemx 9y agoIt's not in settings, it's in the News Feed toggle on the top of the navigation pane on the top LHS of the home page. And I think after a couple weeks hiding posts you'll significantly reduce the variety of content hitting your newsfeed.
- niutech 9y agoThere is still convenient Google+ with its Communities. Or you can make your own social network with Diaspora* (https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org) or GNU Social (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757)
- machine-wisdom 9y agoThe only problem is that it takes a group of people to make the move, you can't go their without convincing your friends to tag along
- dagw 9y agoIf someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today Lots of people have. There was for example Ello a couple of years ago. Me and many of my Facebook friends created accounts, used it for a couple of weeks and slowly kind of ended up back on facebook. Apparently no one else stuck around either since Ello seems to have turned itself into something else.
- ciex 9y agoEllo didn't feel like a personal space for me. Its sleek design screams 'present yourself, show me what you've got'.
- enos_feedler 9y agoThe picture of what your friend ate for dinner sticks out as something that doesn't belong here. That actually _is_ a means of connecting directly with our friends/family. The other things you list are not. I'd still signup, even if I saw food pics occasionally.
- benoliver999 9y agoIt was like MySpace but without the shitty customisation, and without the need to pick a list of your top friends.