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Facebook suffered from 2 waves of "Eternal September"[0]: wave 1: the addition of everybody outside your immediate friends and close family. You get the goof

• CharlesW 9y ago
  I like this. If I may propose one more… wave 3: bots[1] [1] https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/facebook-phony-accounts-admission/ https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/facebook-phony-accounts-admi...
  • et-al 9y ago
    I don't encounter bots on Facebook that much, but they're definitely ruining Instagram. Years ago, I'd be more open to making "Instagram friends". However nowadays when I get a few likes, I go to the user's profile and see that their followers/following ratio is skewed, I know they're fishing for followers with a bot. Ultimately all interactions on social media will be scripted by bots.
    • taftster 9y ago
      Et-al's Law: "All interactions on social media will be scripted by bots" If you add Atwood's Law to this, all social media interactions will be scripted by bots written in Javascript. Then the brain-bender: What if you are that bot?
    • cfpg 9y ago
      Not only bots are ruining Instagram, their algorithm showing you posts from 3 days ago and an ad every 8-10 pictures is a killer, pretty much forcing me to only see stories. "Oh let me show you this picture that you missed 4 days ago when we where showing you pictures that are 8 days old."
    • toomanybeersies 9y ago
      I went through a bit of a phase for a week or two of trying to get more followers on my photography insta. It didn't take me long at all to realise that the vast majority of new followers were either just straight up spambots, or were using bots to fish for followers. Botting to fish for followers in Insta isn't the worst, usually it's just automating what a person would do: search for a hashtag; like photos; and drop some comments. But it really kills engagement when most comments are something like "Nice! :thumbs:", or "Love this! :heart:", and you know that 90% of accounts that follow you will automatically unfollow you in a week. Instagrams social discovery aspect has been ruined. It has been taken over by bots and groups of people on whatsapp/$messaging_service that schedule when to post and all like the photo the moment it gets posted to boost it to the discover page. It has become all about gaming the algorithm.
• btown 9y ago
  Not to mention the erosion of the idea that it is default-safe to share your social experiences with your group of "friends." Adoption by colleagues and family shifts the tone considerably towards LinkedIn, where one's professional image is paramount - and all that does is make the platform more stressful to use. Facebook does provide tools to segment one's friends into groups to whom content can be privately posted, but from a UX perspective they're deemphasized. I see a lot more social conversations moving to group chats (some on Facebook Messenger, some on GroupMe/WhatsApp and the like), because membership is determinate, you make the choice of target audience before being prompted to make a post, and the context into which you post is not a newsfeed (which we've been trained to think is global to an entire circle of friends) but just that specific chat history. (I'm sure there's some psychology/UX research in that people don't intuit that a "posting destination" can be distinct from the list of content you're viewing.) Chats are just a "safer space" to be oneself. And if Facebook wants to capture one's true self and preferences, it will need to evolve beyond the idea that a single newsfeed is the place people want to do that.
  • Pigo 9y ago
    I know this is one tiny use case, but it's one that's bothered me for some time. I can't change my profile picture without it becoming a huge news story for family and "friends" to comment on. I change a little picture of me, remove the event from my timeline, and I still get hokey comments or messages reminding me how bored and lonely everyone I know must be. I severely miss when it was just a place to chat up a cute girl you seen in college, or find out who's going to see NIN, etc.
    • dieterrams 9y ago
      I can’t remember if this still works, but you used to be able to set the privacy of your profile photo to “only me”, which would prevent it from appearing in friends’ news feeds. After a few days or so you could safely set the privacy back to friends or public and be reasonably assured it wouldn’t be seen as its own post. It is completely silly that you have to jump through these hoops, though, assuming it’s even still an option. Btw, hiding something from your timeline has absolutely no effect on whether it appears in friends’ feeds or not. It’s purely about whether people can see if it they go to your timeline. Which is pretty unintuitive and anti-user: if I don’t want something in my timeline, why would I want it showing up in people’s news feeds?
• g09980 9y ago
  What did for me was the influx of the "you won't believe what happens next, this video will make you cry" shares, and then political diatribes (you may call it virtue signaling) by well-meaning friends. Unfriended many people to cull my list to around 100 and FB has been more palatable since.
  • freehunter 9y ago
    I instituted this policy back in the days where people would constantly invite you to play their stupid games, they had to invite you or they wouldn't be able to play. But anyone who invited me to Farmville or Mafia Wars or any nonsense got unfriended. If you wanted me back, you'd have to start to uncheck my name when you clicked "invite". I also do a soft sort of "if I haven't talked to you in three months" rule to get rid of stale contacts. It's not LinkedIn, I don't need people for future reference. If I haven't talked to them in three months and they aren't someone incredibly important to me, they're gone. I agree Facebook is awful and they're making it worse every day, but a lot of the problems people have with it are self-made. I don't get people posting awful political opinions because I don't follow anyone who does that. I don't get spammed with memes because I don't follow anyone who does that. I don't see most of the ads because I have an ad blocker. I don't see people I don't know because I unfriend them. I don't see businesses I don't care about because I don't follow businesses I don't care about. The only problem I have with Facebook as a consumer of Facebook is not seeing things from people I want to see things from. But I rarely see things I don't want to see, because Facebook gives you all the tools you need to stop seeing that kind of stuff.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  • mrighele 9y ago
    I would love an option like "do not show anything from this contact unless it is original content, or at most share of an original content". That would remove 90% of the crap from the feed (i.e. the "viral" part).
• btilly 9y ago
  And the thing is that social networks are not nearly as sticky as they seem. As https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is-wrong https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-i... makes clear, multiple lines of evidence suggests that the total possible value out of a social network scales like O(n log(n)). (Yes, I am biased as one of the authors. But what shocked me was how many independent lines of argument the other authors came up with for the same conclusion!) As the experience of Facebook goes down, it takes less and less work for a competitor to make up the O(log(n)) first mover advantage. I would therefore not bet on Facebook lasting over the long haul...
  • taurath 9y ago
    It’ll be a slow chip away and then a mass migration catalyzed by some event. The chip away is already well under way.
    • discardable_dan 9y ago
      The truth of it, though, is that many people who are moving away from Facebook aren't moving elsewhere, they're disengaging the social media sphere. Many people are simply not logging in, preferring direct messaging, chat rooms, or in-person interactions. Nowadays, it feels like Facebook fills the "instant messaging" gap for people who never got into it, and, to be completely honest, that's often the group of people I feel the least imperative to connect with. As described in the comments above, I'd rather read a Discord chat with some people I know than see what the group of people I only communicate with via Facebook are saying.
    • drewmol 9y ago
      I agree, and the chip sure seems to be arriving sooner, and progressing faster than my own (pretty sure my position is very short on facebook compared to most) gloomy forecast. Just looked it up and the domain: grandkids.com is being marketred by Domain Agents Platform Inc. advertising a min bid $500. A few years after the mass migration you predict, I propose that domain for Facebook's rebranding...
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
• IntronExon 9y ago
  I think a significant portion of the issue is just that people have started to see and experience the downsides of projecting a running tab of their life for all to see, for all time. As people become more technologically literate, the appeal of selling your personal info for the dubious privelage of nothing much has to pale. I imagine the revelations that governments (US especially) are warehousing every scrap of data they can find on us hurts too. Mostly though, FB is boring and depressing, and eventually even the easily swayed figure that out.
• greenhouse_gas 9y ago
  What I don't understand is what is FB thinking? Look at it this way: What do I want to see? Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Pages I like image/text > Friends of Friends image/text > Memes > Ads. What does FB want me to see? Ads > Doesn't matter. So what do they do? Ads > Memes > Friends of Friends image/video Pages/Group Image/Video > Friends Image/Video ------------------> Text. Why? What financial incentive do they have to show me Memes over what I want to see?
  • manigandham 9y ago
    They are measuring and reacting. Ads make money so they will always have a certain priority, and everything else is a combination of your interests combined with what's popular as a whole. Memes are popular and/or your friends share a lot of memes so that's what gets shown to you.
  • gaius 9y ago
    What financial incentive do they have to show me Memes over what I want to see? Because you scroll and scroll and scroll through the feed looking for something you actually wanted to see, and all that extra time spent is "engagement".
  • ncallaway 9y ago
    Because if they show you: Ads > Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Pages I like image/text > Friends of Friends image/text > Memes Then you'll go through a few and then leave the site. Ads > Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Leave FB They optimize how much time you spend on FB, so they can show you more ads. Thus, it makes sense to stick the stuff you really care about at the end. To make it hard to find. Because, then instead of coming to the site and getting what you want, you'll spend an hour trying to dig through the crap to find what you want. More "engagement" is more ads. Nobody at facebook through about whether it makes sense to measure "engagement" alone, or to try and measure some form of "valuable engagement", or "useful engagement".
  • Yizahi 9y ago
    Because in the acronym AI only one letter is true - Artificial, and Intelligence is just buzzword. They just can't do proper tailoring of news feed to you, so as long as ADs are prioritized and the feed is not entirely atrocious they just don't care.
• arwhatever 9y ago
  Wave 3: ruthlessly trim your friends list to make feed less annoying Wave 4: still too annoying, deletes Facebook account altogether.
  • geoelectric 9y ago
    I kept the friends list, at least for people with whom I was OK sharing contact info. I did, however, unfollow around 500 people or so, which shrunk my feed to only a small number of people whose opinion I actually care to read. FB really should make the unfollow option more obvious, because it largely solves the feed noise issue.
• oneshot908 9y ago
  All true, but the Eternal September for me came when I lost control of my feed to arbitrary ML algorithms attempting to maximize shareholder value whilst alienating the fewest users. I think someone could recreate early FB on the blockchain and take a huge chunk of interesting people off of the two current awful choices. Because I do remember the time when it was fun to reconnect with people and follow their lives there.
  • natalyarostova 9y ago
    Urbit's ambition is to achieve something that fosters that ability.
  • msangi 9y ago
    Have a look at Patchwork, which runs over the decentralised Scuttlebot https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
  • stanleydrew 9y ago
    on the blockchain Why? Everything else you wrote makes sense to me except for this.
    • oneshot908 9y ago
      Because I doubt a corporation would stay aligned with the non-paying customer long-term. Witness GOOG. Compare and contrast with AMZN where the customer is indeed the customer.
      • fabianhjr 9y ago
        I think we can have decentralized technolgy without blockchains though.
    • spookthesunset 9y ago
      > Why? Shysters gotta shyst. After all, somebody has to buy those heavy bags...
  • 9y ago
• makecheck 9y ago
  I wish the “of course ads are needed” weren’t true. I am waiting for the service that charges me $1/month so that I can demand zero garbage: no unwanted sharing, no ads, no spying; just a useful service for storing photos and updating friends and inviting people to events.
  • adrianmsmith 9y ago
    True, but if your friends also needed to pay $1 then many of them wouldn't, and then the service still wouldn't be useful to you (despite paying $1).
    • Retra 9y ago
      It could be an unofficial share, like Netflix subscriptions. "Somebody" needs to pay, but if you know someone who has, then you can use the service fairly easily.
      • fphhotchips 9y ago
        Why not just have a freemium model like a Facebook Blue or something? I pay you money, I get no ads and premium control of my feed. I don't pay you money, I get what I'm given.
        • jkestner 9y ago
          At least in the US, that amount would be $7/month - what Facebook makes per user now.
• justherefortart 9y ago
  2005 was great for me as an old man taking classes at the University. My classmates said to get on this facebook thing and you could see everything from everyone, everywhere. Made a bunch of random friends around the world and picked up a few college girls as well. :'-) Good times! I thought everyone quit after the newsfeed in 2006? Then when grandma could get an account a couple years later.
• epberry 9y ago
  Great reference to "Eternal September" - didn't know about that. I can now think of many examples of this happening to online communities.
  • tomcooks 9y ago
    You might also enjoy reading about ancient greek ideas of ἐσωτερικός and ἐξωτερικός
    • smogcutter 9y ago
      What would you recommend as a starting point? A quick google didn't have anything relevant, and Liddell & Scott just gives the straightforward interior/exterior definition. I can see a connection between the eternal september and insiders/outsiders, but it sounds like you're getting at something specific and I'm curious.
      • lione 9y ago
        Well from what I've seen in my googling, it seems to be a concept relating to the Unwritten Doctrine of Plato. He had esoteric teachings reserved for his close following vs his exoteric writings for the public. Esoteric came to mean shadowy/hidden, but it's really just how you say/think/act differently with an insider group then an outsider group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines
        • smogcutter 9y ago
          Thanks! My google skills failed me.
• Yhippa 9y ago
  Facebook is no longer the best way for me to share content with people I care about. For me that's WhatsApp, Google Photos, and MMS.
  • ZenoArrow 9y ago
    If you're using WhatsApp instead of Facebook, Facebook the company doesn't care, it's still money in the bank to them (selling advertisers a detailed profile of who their users are for targeted ads). The whole idea behind buying Instagram and Whatsapp would've been to stay relevant when the inevitable decline in their flagship product kicked in. Looks like their plan is working.
    • discardable_dan 9y ago
      At this point, communicating electronically basically necessitates someone collecting information at this point. I don't care. I just care that the dumb argument I had two years ago is in a chat room with 10 people I know and my employer will never see it.
      • ZenoArrow 9y ago
        > "At this point, communicating electronically basically necessitates someone collecting information at this point." No, it doesn't require that. There are secure options. The main thing that keeps the current unsecure options in play is momentum, i.e. if not enough people care, nothing will get better.
    • ulfw 9y ago
      Buying Whatsapp and Instagram for ANY price where the best business decisions Zuckerberg and Co have done. By far. They knew Facebook would die off like myspace and friendster did. or BBS and Compuserve and AOL if you want to go back that far. Social networks come and go in waves. Some stay longer, some fizzle out quicker. Owning the biggest alternatives to your own network is a brilliant move. If Whatsapp or Insta kills Facebook, so be it. As long as no one else does ;)
  • 9y ago
• baby 9y ago
  Also, I get invited to "groups" all the time. Because my friends want to win beauty cream and free flights to X. I leave the group, then I get re-invited again. Then I leave, then I get re-invited again. Why is this a thing?
  • billysielu 9y ago
    Is unfriending them the only way to stop it properly?
    • baby 9y ago
      yeah I think so, which is not going to happen, still friends.
• damontal 9y ago
  My problem is that I share certain things with friends from college, certain things with my parents, certain things with coworkers. When my friends list contained all of the above and there was no intuitive way to separate what I share to them, I stopped posting.
• agorabinary 9y ago
  We need a social network experience where users own their data, and are presented with a simple and user friendly interface that connects this data with their chosen friends. Currently we have user data mined en masse at great privacy risk and for endless profit, ad infinitum. Facebook has not decayed because of an influx of new users beginning with this "eternal september", but because of the pointed decisions by its leadership to choose greed over respect for its users. The paramount decision is the decision to go public, necessitating indefinite growth at any cost in order to satisfy investors. It must have been obvious to Facebook's early employees that a Facebook at the behest of investors would increasingly dilute the user experience, and yet only now do they lament what they created.
  • djsumdog 9y ago
    Are you running your own Masterdon server yet? I'm working on migrating my blocks to a new docker structure and hope to have mine up this month. It starts with people like us, in tech, running our own services and connecting with friends or even strangers in our field and growing out from there. I don't think any one big thing can (or should) replace Facebook. The future of the Internet needs to be diverse and distributed. People need to learn about RSS feeds again and posting their content to a variety of services or hosting it themselves (if they know how).
  • toomanybeersies 9y ago
    Sounds like you're describing Diaspora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
    • robbrit 9y ago
      I have a feeling Diaspora isn't going anywhere anytime soon until they clean up their UX. Here's the initial experience: 1) Go to the site, click Join Us. 2) Get shuttled down the page to a wall of text. Click Sign Up since I don't want to read the text, and I see a green button. 3) See a list of "pods" - looks like a chatroom? I click the "Confused" button which auto-sends you to a pod. 4) See a bunch of text in German. 5) Press back. 6) Click the pod at the top of the list that says "US". 7) Get a 500 error. 8) Close tab. I love the idea here, but I hate to say that it is poorly executed so far.
• zamalek 9y ago
  > wave 1 I've found that regular pruning keeps my utility on Facebook very high. I only really have to visit it once a week (as my newsfeed doesn't stream all that fast with only ~50 friends) and it's highly relevant. Apart from the constant nags to friend people that I don't know, that is - Facebook seems to take issue with my succinct friends list. > forwarded memes People who I give a damn about are posting to my timelines, so even the memes are mostly enjoyable. If they aren't, there is usually something enjoyable soon after precisely because my timeline moves so slowly: the signal to noise ratio is pretty good. The downfall of Facebook is in limited ways PEBCAK. Facebook encourages degenerate use of the platform, but you don't have to fall for it.
• cozzyd 9y ago
  Yeah I remember being super-annoyed when non-college students were allowed on...