8 ms·

Facebook was a lot more fun when there was a chronological timeline of non-rich-text status updates and comments from friends. These days it's all semi-spam fro

by 0x0 8y ago

Facebook was a lot more fun when there was a chronological timeline of non-rich-text status updates and comments from friends. These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion. I know there are interesting posts by people on my friend list but they're simply being hidden. Maybe some fb developer was happy with increased engagement metrics merely caused by confused users forever scrolling up and down in desperate attempts to find out where all their friends whose posts used to show up have gone. And when actual friends' posts show up, 90% of the time it's a like or a share of some uninspiring web page's article with no comment. It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.

tinalumfoil 8y ago
> These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion I think putting the spam on facebook on equal footing with its post targeting as to why people aren't using facebook is wrong. I have hundreds of friends and tens of pages on FB, which I'll admit by FB's standards isn't all that much, yet I still find it much harder to browse than other sites with many times the content. Most people simply don't post that often or not at all, and the pages I joined don't post often either. Despite how little content there is I find the issue of managing it all completely intractable. When I'm on Feedly I go through hundreds of posts worth of content in a few minutes by mashing the j key until I find content I want to read later, save it and then spend maybe 2 hours a week going through content I care about. When I'm on Twitter I skim until I see familiar content and pick out the stuff I care about. When I'm on reddit, I know it takes about 48 hours for my feed to "refresh" so I'll spend some time every other day skimming from top to bottom. I can't even begin to figure out a workflow for finding content on Facebook. The whole thing is laid out so quickly finding the things I care about is impossible. I can scroll past ten posts I've seen before something new pops up so I have no idea when to stop scrolling. There's no concept of a "read" post and unlike reddit the "hide" button, hidden behind a menu, acts like a downvote. I have no way of creating a single stream of just the things I care about, and if I did there's no way to update myself when things change. Unlike youtube, there's no RSS feeds so I can't just do my browsing from Feedly. Even just getting a feed of my events is impossible since FB has the audacity to suggest events from pages I've never interacted with, have no friends going and thinks those are more important to me than the events created by pages I actually follow. Push notifications are insanely coursely-grained (or at least they do a good job hiding the interface). Cambridge Analytica be damned, the reason I don't use FB is because I can't figure out how. My age, income level and computer-addicted brain should make me prime meat for advertisers, yet I change the oil more often than login to FB simply because the algorithms that generate my feeds are just that bad.
- derefr 8y ago
  “Tractable” is another way to say “I can finish what I came to the site to do, and then leave.” Of course they don’t want that! ;)
killerdhmo 8y ago
So... like twitter then?
- eToThePiIPower 8y ago
  Nah, my Twitter feed is curated by people I actually like but are complete strangers to me, with the odd speaker-I-met-once-at-a-meetup thrown in.
  - daxfohl 8y ago
    As the saying goes, Twitter is where you connect with the people you wish you knew, and facebook is where you connect with the people you wish you didn't.
- mygo 8y ago
  twitter also has an annoying algorithm that thinks it knows what you really want to see. chronological newsfeeds are dearly missed.
  - klez 8y ago
    I usually just reload the page a couple of times and tweets are put in chronological order again. Does this work only because I follow <100 people?
- telltruth 8y ago
  Twitter is falling in to same prey... About 30% of the tweets I see are what other people retweeted and liked. Just show me their own tweets damn it!
taneq 8y ago
Also their stupid push to make each single-line shitpost bigger and flashier and more impactful has driven the information density way down. It was bad enough when people started posting pictures of text instead of just posting the text. Now they're posting videos of static text. What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts?
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  I think the idea was to let single line shitposts compete with all the other shitposts, but they went the wrong direction. Should've made the media shitposts sized down to the text posts. I assume big media pieces are where the advertising money is.
  - taurath 8y ago
    And video. You can tell every ad buy sells video at many times a text ad because google and Facebook are pushing them everywhere they can.
- monocasa 8y ago
  > What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts? You joke, but they bought Oculus for a reason.
  - letsgetphysITal 8y ago
    Ready Player One was a warning, not a manual!
- newscracker 8y ago
  It's like flashy banner ads from the 90s back again that people jumped to for grabbing attention. At that time it was ads, now it's people posting their thoughts in this fashion. Since Facebook provides these backgrounds only up to a certain message character length limit, many people curate their messages just so it would fit with these flashy backgrounds. And because these posts with the backgrounds get larger font sizes compared to normal posts, to get attention in a voluminous group one must play the same dirty game. They're literally dragging people into the dirt pit. Hope they don't introduce animation in these gaudy backgrounds!!! Why not just give some font controls instead and remove all this background nonsense?! (Though this could also be argued to be terrible) One day everyone will look back at these stunts and see them for the ugliness and abomination they are, just like we look back at banner ads with derision and hate.
colanderman 8y ago
Snapchat has mostly replaced Facebook for my friends that like just sharing fun updates. I think it's a combination of the ease of sharing spur-of-the-moment updates, and the difficulty of using it for anything but that (e.g. political rants). I still use Facebook, but almost expressly to follow specific groups, friends who post typically about specific topics, or to ask/answer questions within my friend group.
- telltruth 8y ago
  I have zero idea how people are using snapchat. Even as a programmer, I find their UX extremely hard to understand, enjoy and use. It's the shittiest app that is on my phone and I have opened it only twice in a year.
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    you use it to signal that you’re paying attention to someone in a relatively passive/casual way via read receipts on one-to-many picture messages. it’s mostly useful for groups of friends, and (critically) interacting with someone you’re romantically or sexually interested in with plausible deniability. the ui i won’t bother to defend though.
flatfilefan 8y ago
My experience is exactly the same. Looks like fb has failed it big time on mobile. Is there a method to their madness? I’d really like to know. Twitter is not a replacement as it’s totally public but it’s much more fun right now exactly for the lack of that silly algorithmic selection of posts.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
> It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure. I don't think I've read a more accurate description of anything in a long time... Thanks for putting my feelings on Facebook into words!
pc86 8y ago
> These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion. The last thing I care about is that my friend's aunt comment on a thread from October 2016, but for some reason Facebook thinks that needs the #2 slot on my feed.

by 0x0 8y ago

tinalumfoil 8y ago

> These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion I think putting the spam on facebook on equal footing with its post targeting as to why people aren't using facebook is wrong. I have hundreds of friends and tens of pages on FB, which I'll admit by FB's standards isn't all that much, yet I still find it much harder to browse than other sites with many times the content. Most people simply don't post that often or not at all, and the pages I joined don't post often either. Despite how little content there is I find the issue of managing it all completely intractable. When I'm on Feedly I go through hundreds of posts worth of content in a few minutes by mashing the j key until I find content I want to read later, save it and then spend maybe 2 hours a week going through content I care about. When I'm on Twitter I skim until I see familiar content and pick out the stuff I care about. When I'm on reddit, I know it takes about 48 hours for my feed to "refresh" so I'll spend some time every other day skimming from top to bottom. I can't even begin to figure out a workflow for finding content on Facebook. The whole thing is laid out so quickly finding the things I care about is impossible. I can scroll past ten posts I've seen before something new pops up so I have no idea when to stop scrolling. There's no concept of a "read" post and unlike reddit the "hide" button, hidden behind a menu, acts like a downvote. I have no way of creating a single stream of just the things I care about, and if I did there's no way to update myself when things change. Unlike youtube, there's no RSS feeds so I can't just do my browsing from Feedly. Even just getting a feed of my events is impossible since FB has the audacity to suggest events from pages I've never interacted with, have no friends going and thinks those are more important to me than the events created by pages I actually follow. Push notifications are insanely coursely-grained (or at least they do a good job hiding the interface). Cambridge Analytica be damned, the reason I don't use FB is because I can't figure out how. My age, income level and computer-addicted brain should make me prime meat for advertisers, yet I change the oil more often than login to FB simply because the algorithms that generate my feeds are just that bad.

derefr 8y ago
“Tractable” is another way to say “I can finish what I came to the site to do, and then leave.” Of course they don’t want that! ;)

killerdhmo 8y ago

So... like twitter then?

eToThePiIPower 8y ago
Nah, my Twitter feed is curated by people I actually like but are complete strangers to me, with the odd speaker-I-met-once-at-a-meetup thrown in.
- daxfohl 8y ago
  As the saying goes, Twitter is where you connect with the people you wish you knew, and facebook is where you connect with the people you wish you didn't.
mygo 8y ago
twitter also has an annoying algorithm that thinks it knows what you really want to see. chronological newsfeeds are dearly missed.
- klez 8y ago
  I usually just reload the page a couple of times and tweets are put in chronological order again. Does this work only because I follow <100 people?
telltruth 8y ago
Twitter is falling in to same prey... About 30% of the tweets I see are what other people retweeted and liked. Just show me their own tweets damn it!

taneq 8y ago

Also their stupid push to make each single-line shitpost bigger and flashier and more impactful has driven the information density way down. It was bad enough when people started posting pictures of text instead of just posting the text. Now they're posting videos of static text. What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts?

wlesieutre 8y ago
I think the idea was to let single line shitposts compete with all the other shitposts, but they went the wrong direction. Should've made the media shitposts sized down to the text posts. I assume big media pieces are where the advertising money is.
- taurath 8y ago
  And video. You can tell every ad buy sells video at many times a text ad because google and Facebook are pushing them everywhere they can.
monocasa 8y ago
> What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts? You joke, but they bought Oculus for a reason.
- letsgetphysITal 8y ago
  Ready Player One was a warning, not a manual!
newscracker 8y ago
It's like flashy banner ads from the 90s back again that people jumped to for grabbing attention. At that time it was ads, now it's people posting their thoughts in this fashion. Since Facebook provides these backgrounds only up to a certain message character length limit, many people curate their messages just so it would fit with these flashy backgrounds. And because these posts with the backgrounds get larger font sizes compared to normal posts, to get attention in a voluminous group one must play the same dirty game. They're literally dragging people into the dirt pit. Hope they don't introduce animation in these gaudy backgrounds!!! Why not just give some font controls instead and remove all this background nonsense?! (Though this could also be argued to be terrible) One day everyone will look back at these stunts and see them for the ugliness and abomination they are, just like we look back at banner ads with derision and hate.

colanderman 8y ago

Snapchat has mostly replaced Facebook for my friends that like just sharing fun updates. I think it's a combination of the ease of sharing spur-of-the-moment updates, and the difficulty of using it for anything but that (e.g. political rants). I still use Facebook, but almost expressly to follow specific groups, friends who post typically about specific topics, or to ask/answer questions within my friend group.

telltruth 8y ago
I have zero idea how people are using snapchat. Even as a programmer, I find their UX extremely hard to understand, enjoy and use. It's the shittiest app that is on my phone and I have opened it only twice in a year.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  you use it to signal that you’re paying attention to someone in a relatively passive/casual way via read receipts on one-to-many picture messages. it’s mostly useful for groups of friends, and (critically) interacting with someone you’re romantically or sexually interested in with plausible deniability. the ui i won’t bother to defend though.

flatfilefan 8y ago

My experience is exactly the same. Looks like fb has failed it big time on mobile. Is there a method to their madness? I’d really like to know. Twitter is not a replacement as it’s totally public but it’s much more fun right now exactly for the lack of that silly algorithmic selection of posts.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

> It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure. I don't think I've read a more accurate description of anything in a long time... Thanks for putting my feelings on Facebook into words!

pc86 8y ago

> These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion. The last thing I care about is that my friend's aunt comment on a thread from October 2016, but for some reason Facebook thinks that needs the #2 slot on my feed.