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Facebook is redesigning its core app
- bouncing 7y agoNon-paywall article discussing the same thing: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523265/facebook-events-groups-redesign-news-feed-features-f8-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523265/facebook-events-... I'd speculate that Facebook is emphasizing events and groups because, quite frankly, those are the two things people are still on Facebook for. (It isn't your baby pics!)
- ljm 7y agoI use it almost as a personal blog. Not just sharing selfies and pictures of things I’d rather enjoy in the moment, but slightly longer form thoughts around how I am or what I’m dealing with. In that sense it’s an online support network where I can share my experiences with mental health and other things. Most of my FB friends do similar, it’s very thoughtful and introspective.
- paxys 7y agoIt isn't quite speculation when that is the exact reason Facebook has given, and is right there in the article you linked.
- tcfunk 7y agoI know at least 4 people who are very interested in pictures of my kids ;)
- vorpalhex 7y agoI don't know that I trust Facebook to stop being evil, but it would be very nice if they knocked it off and figured out how to behave.
- akshayB 7y agoIt feels like they redesigned the website and the app with less blue on it. But there is no indication or emphasis of security of the user data. End to end encryption is good but what happens when data ends getting stored somewhere, there is nothing been talked about it?
- paxys 7y agoThere are a million articles about this all over the internet. Why does a paywalled one (that too from a non-tech focused publication) make the front page?
- whatever_dude 7y agoArticles from the WSJ get to the front page often. I don't get it either.
- itsaidpens 7y agoI have an // unfounded, with zero-evidence // suspicion that WSJ is seeding articles here... or manipulating rankings. I agree with you, it seems very strange.
- draw_down 7y agoEverything is a conspiracy with you guys.
- aaronbrethorst 7y agoOr people are upvoting based on headlines, not article content.
- itsaidpens 7y agoYou can't really complain about that, it happens.
- sctb 7y agoNot at all; in fact I've just penalized WSJ since the paywall workarounds seem to work only intermittently (and more rarely lately). We've updated the article from https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gets-a-new-look-less-blue-more-groups-11556645587 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gets-a-new-look-less-b..., but we're happy to update it again if someone can suggest a better source.
- pgodzin 7y agoI saw the story break while I was reading WSJ and forgot most people are paywalled. Can definitely promise this specific case was not "seeded"
- mi100hael 7y agoFrom the screen shots, it looks a lot more like Instagram now. I wonder how long it takes them to merge IG into the mothership at this point.
- mtgx 7y agoThe merger began a while ago.
- js2 7y agoI can't get over how incoherent the mobile app has become. To give a recent example. Yesterday, I had commented on another person's post. I later wanted to get back to add to the comment. So I navigated to it from my activity log. This took me to the post, but wouldn't display any of the comments on the post. The screen was clearly rendered differently than when I pulled up the person's wall, found the post, then clicked on the comments to find my comment. My guess is that "activity log > post" was written by a different engineers than "wall > post". This is the latest, updated iOS app. That's just one minor example. There's crap like this throughout the app. The web site is also glitchy as hell these days. When I brought up m.facebook.com the other day and went to type a status update, for every space I typed, two spaces were inserted.
- athenot 7y agoSame observation here. That's what cemented my realization that facebook isn't for me, they just want my comments in order to generate "engagement", not actually be useful. It's my content and they make it nearly impossible to curate.
- lostlogin 7y ago> It's my content A (lay) reading of their TOS makes it less than clear this is the case. Sure, it’s yours, but they have the right to do as they please as far as I can tell. https://m.facebook.com/about/privacy/update?refid=42 https://m.facebook.com/about/privacy/update?refid=42
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoMeh, their TOS are nonsense. Facebook wouldn't have a snowflakes chance in hell of demonstrating that even the most technically include user, or even a regular lawyer, fully understands what their agreeing to. As far as I'm concerned, contracts are only binding if informed consent is given, and that's strictly not possible with Facebook's end user agreements. Edit to add: what I mean to say is, we need strong legal protections for the average person in this the-user-isn't-the-customer world we live in.
- amiune 7y agoPlastic surgery for the aging facebook. Death is coming, smartly it adopted two children, instagram and whatsapp
- maxaf 7y agoI’d like to challenge the implied premise that the world needs Facebook to begin with. This is the premise under which Facebook seems to operate, but it doesn’t seem to concern with marketing the premise to users. What’s in it for any human person with a smartphone or computer? What value could possibly be extracted by such a person from being “on” Facebook? Any redesign or other change made to the platform is pointless without a clear narrative concerning the underlying value proposition. How does the change affect that value proposition? My take is that the value of Facebook is zero in the best case, and possibly a net negative for society at large and for individuals. Isn’t Facebook supposed to convince us that their premise isn’t all evil, that there’s something in it for us beyond participation in mass data collection?
- 5trokerac3 7y agoI think the net-negative claim can be said for all real-time social media, including the site we're communicating on right now. Healthy communication with other humans requires empathy and careful consideration of how your words affect others. Both get thrown out the window when you blast something into a text box, aimed at a random username.
- smallgovt 7y agoFacebook isn't obligated in any way to lay out their value prop in clear terms for users as you suggest. If users don't find their service valuable, they won't use it. Clearly that's not the case. The value prop for advertisers is obvious. Without Facebook, thousands of small businesses (delivering great services) would be much smaller or out of business. The value prop for users is manifold. To name a couple, without Facebook, people wouldn't connect and interact with people outside their proximal social circles. These otherwise lost connections often lead to strong healthy friendships, relationships, and/or partnerships. Many people also derive satisfaction from an entertainment perspective through Facebook whether that be through gossiping, viewing cat memes, or playing games. Though you may find these to be unimportant, that's you projecting your value system on someone else. To say that Facebook's existence is a net negative to society requires some fundamental assumptions around what is valuable. For example, if all you value in this world is privacy, then of course Facebook is detrimental. If what you value is family, entertainment, and pleasure, Facebook is probably of great benefit.
- minimaxir 7y agoAs someone who works with Facebook Pages for my job, my concern that Facebook's new emphasis on Groups and Events will deemphasize Pages, which will lead to even more trouble for Pages which rely on that traffic (the absolute lack of discussion about Pages in the F8 keynote in favor of Messenger-based alternatives is concerning).
- dependsontheq 7y agoI have the 20 people on a team that work with Facebook Pages and we have been telling all our clients for years that Facebook Pages are either dead already or will be dead soon. From a strategic perspective for Facebook they only made sense as a cheap gateway to get brands on board the platform. Time to saddle your horse!
- spunker540 7y agoIs there any reason why you couldn’t create a group to accomplish the same goals?
- theNJR 7y agoFacebook has been talking about this in the quarterly earnings for a while now. They've been very clear about it. Last winter I made a messenger bot[1] that was driving revenue ($5k/month for a CPG startup). Give that a try. [1]https://www.nicholasjrobinson.com/blog/branding/three-ways-to-start-marketing-on-facebook-messenger https://www.nicholasjrobinson.com/blog/branding/three-ways-t...
- agumonkey 7y agotweestagram
- yash1th 7y agoI was listening to the MZ’s keynote and it felt to me that the facebook groups moving towards more like the concept of subreddits, although with limited functionality (like moderating)
- dezzeus 7y agoIMHO enforcing public groups is probably just a way to collect data from user’s public activity, which allows for better targeted advertising without boring (themself) with privacy. Which is fine if used in a good way.
- hackbinary 7y agoWill they make away to disable stories?
- tonak_li 7y agoI can not understand why facebook is making a new app. Facebook is just waste of time! The problem is the core idea and the objective functions they have.
- ttepasse 7y agoA fun thing you'll see sometimes in rants about other websites is the screenshot where someone coloured the content part of the website from all the other stuff, UI, sidebars and ads. The obvious labels are "stuff I'm interested in" vs. "stuff I'm not interested in". Facebook was always bad in that regard. Friends posts are small boxes, crammed between sidebars. This redesign seems to think that the stuff we're not interested in, the sidebars, needs even more enlargement.
- asdff 7y agoBecause there's ads in the sidebars.
- YeahSureWhyNot 7y agoI quit FB more than a year ago but stared going in my profile again because I had to create a page for my app and I am shocked how slow and cluttered fb desktop site has become. its alarmingly bad, like terrible and yet I read on the news that their advertising revenue has increased. did people start using fb more? who clicks on these ads? who buys stuff on fb.
- superpie 7y agoFacebook sort-of-recently introduced measures to defeat ad blockers, which I think has greatly increased the number of clicks.
- alexkavon 7y agoYes the “Similar to other stories you’ve interacted with...” has introduced a nice new level of spamvertising.
- the_af 7y agoSurely any clicks resulting from adblocker-defeating measures are unintentional clicks by frustrated users? People who install adblockers are people who do not want to click on ads.
- taormina 7y agoWell, some of us do: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
- perl4ever 7y agoIs there any benefit to that? I mean, does it convince anyone of anything, like that you're not using an ad-blocker? Or is it a pure public service?
- r3bl 7y agoI don't use it myself, but as far as I understand it, the idea is to increase the noise you make so that any signal you make would get lost. Ads can't be tailored to you if you click on every ad ever shown to you (in the background of course).
- manmal 7y agoI find it frustrating that communities are using FB. Notifications and mentions go missing left and right, and its UI is not (yet?) ideal for proper discussions - I much prefer the plain forums that have always existed. I get that FB is convenient because most people have an account already, but a FB login button would also do the trick for most communities. We surely don’t need a multi-billion company to host events and groups for us. Lock-in (social graph etc) is actually quite low for these features, so I think this is a bit of a desperate move from them.
- dlivingston 7y agoThe cost of entry to creating a Facebook community is zero, whereas it is non-zero to host your own. For example, there are local Pokemon Go, Spartan training, and 'local gossip' communities that simply wouldn't exist if Facebook didn't.
- thinkmassive 7y agoForums existed before Facebook and will continue to exist after Facebook. Just because Facebook was seen as the lowest barrier to entry for many groups doesn’t mean they wouldn’t exist without it.
- perl4ever 7y agoLots of things existed in, say, 1996 that were more or less equivalent to modern things on the internet. But the size of the internet was a tiny, tiny fraction of what it is now, so I think it's very plausible that reinventing the wheel was part of growing it and if we went backwards it might indeed mean most of it would stop existing.
- eswat 7y agoAt first I thought it was a good thing that I started seeing condo buildings create FB groups to create at least some sense of community. But the ones I’ve seen just end up being an disorganized mess of negative comments that should be directed to condo boards and security themselves. If there is useful information it shouldn’t be locked into a platform like FB either…
- josteink 7y agoLooking at the screenshots, it’s not too bad looking. It looks much simpler. But I doubt they’ll actually simplify the underlying data-model, which makes the design a lie. A lie at best, a confusing UX at worst. Time will tell. Either way, as a quitee, I’m entirely unaffected and very happy about that.
- new_guy 7y agoFacebook are losing their core competency. Just this morning I had a post removed for 'violating community guidelines'. I have a number of pages most of which automatically post content, and I have absolutely no idea which post was removed, from which page, or why, the notification just didn't say. This move reeks of desperation, Facebook needs to forget about 'redesign' and garbage like 'workspace' and just work on fixing it. The best way to do that is to get the people building it actually using it again.
- the_af 7y agoIf it's any consolation, sometimes the relevant facebook team doesn't understand what triggers the censorship algorithms they themselves built. Source: I asked them, via a friend who works there and had access to them, in order to understand a particular case, and they were baffled (and probably overworked and my question was low priority, sure -- but had it been obvious, they would have answered it).
- xiaolingxiao 7y agodo you guys think there's room for another big social mobile app, maybe unbundling some of facebook/instagram's features?
- theNJR 7y agoYes. Facebook says the future is private, and I agree. I just don't think they're the ones that will do it right.
- morenoh149 7y agocould you elaborate on this? when did they say this and what did they mean? like apple?
- asdff 7y agoIt would be nice to see the space get more federalized. Lots of different apps that do one thing really well.
- Moxdi 7y agoso facebook is becoming reddit without anonimity?
- inlined 7y agoThis seems like a brilliant move to help manage their public image. Groups and events seem like much more purpose-driven and thus value-generating interactions with Facebook. I absolutely see why Facebook would want to be seen as the place where one goes to grow their community rather than the current stigma of fake news and inflammatory pieces on the feed.
- miguelmota 7y agoIt's like a combination of Reddit and Google+ Circles
- theNJR 7y agoIs anyone part of a Facebook group that they like? I've never seen a modern place online with better discourse than HN.
- StavrosK 7y agoI like many groups, although they don't have better discourse than HN.
- NoPiece 7y agoThere are lots of Facebook groups I like. No one is talking about my neighborhood on HN! But besides interesting local groups, there are amazing niche technical groups on Facebook that would crossover with HN. A few I find useful: Apple ][ Enthusiasts: https://www.facebook.com/groups/5251478676/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/5251478676/ BMW i3 Worldwide: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BMWi3/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/BMWi3/ Monoprice Mini (3d printer group) https://www.facebook.com/groups/710952782398723/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/710952782398723/ Commodore Amiga: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga/
- asdff 7y agoMy buddies from highschool and I used to have one for posting goofy internet stuff, but it's been pretty dead for years.
- baby 7y agoI tried to create a group on cryptography (in order to fill my newsfeed with interesting posts) buy nobody seemed to be interested. If anyone here is I could post the link.
- ssss11 7y agoThe truly sad part is that continual media theatrics like this will make 99% of the public believe FB has changed and is now privacy conscious.
- killjoywashere 7y agoYawn ... let me know when they redesign their core business.
- xtracerx 7y agooh boy, I'm sure everyone is going to have a totally rational response and not freak out at all when it launches.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thanatropism 7y agoFacebook appears as an advertiser - sometimes even with video - in Duolingo for iOS.
- willand31 7y agoFacebook's design isn't the problem. The unethical use of our data is the problem.
- Chazprime 7y agoThey should really roll the site back to its 2010-2013 iteration. It was much easier to search for content in your/your friend’s feeds, the UI was much less cluttered with sponsored content and news and the site actually felt like…social media.
- sky_projektor 7y agoFacebook needs a good thought on the user, friends of Zuckerberg, before doing anything fruitful to their core app. More than minor cosmetic changes, what is required is the experience of staying in touch with 'friends' not advertisers throwing a net of posts for potential catches, likers! For that, people & their faces should be more visible on the screens rather than that big repost of the day, that is going viral.
- andykx 7y agoI'm 26 now, and I first got into Facebook 12 years ago as a Freshman in high school. It was cool at first because I actually spent time with my "friends" on there, or at least saw them on a daily basis at my small high school. It's changed in a couple key ways over time: 1. Family joining Facebook. It used to be a funny place I could goof around with my friends, posting whatever I wanted. Now I have to filter everything I say because my grandparents can see it. I concede that that's probably not a concern for many people, but I noticed the "vibe" changed significantly when Facebook's popularity grew beyond high school/college age people. 2. Sharing. Virtually everything on my timeline came from pages that post short "viral" videos for people to share. No one was posting anything unique or interesting. It was like a heavily bastardized version of Reddit without any interesting content. Anecdotally, this content seems to appeal to older people, who don't know of ways to see more interesting content. Privacy concerns aside, those are the main reasons that I no longer care about Facebook. I deleted mine 6 months ago and I don't miss it at all.
- JauntyHatAngle 7y agoI think the point this changed for me was when the facebook feed changed from a chronological feed, to weighted "interest" posts. (Top stories and all that guff). It used to be a bizarro town-hall of people I knew posting comments, photos etc. with each new post jumping to the top of the queue for people to pay attention to in "real time". It felt involved. Now it just seems to be (in between all the shared memes and dodgy news articles) the more "active" posts popping up as a priority, which makes it feel more static to me. I liked seeing the posts with no likes as much as the high activity ones even if I wasn't going to like or comment on it myself. I wan't to see everything in order. It's not very dynamic anymore. I know you can still change the feed to chronological, but if most aren't doing that, the point is moot. I use it for events, otherwise I'd have deleted it years ago too.
- the_pwner224 7y ago> 1. Family joining Facebook. It used to be a funny place I could goof around with my friends, posting whatever I wanted. Now I have to filter everything I say because my grandparents can see it. Google+ nailed this perfectly. You could place connections into Circles, and a post could be shared to specific circle(s). It let teenagers be teenagers, allowed professionals to separate their personal life and maintain a professional appearance, and so on. In reality we do maintain separate personas for different groups of people we know, and it's ridiculous that no social network reflects this. The closest anyone else has come to this is Reddit where you can use multiple pseudonyms, so someone recognizing your posts/comments on one account does not get access to all of your posts/comments.
- quarkral 7y agoRegardless of how people feel about Facebook in general, I think this is a step forward. Groups and messenger are what I primarily use, and both of those are completely in my control with no mysterious recommender algorithm deciding what I get to look at today. I bookmark my Facebook to go straight into Messenger and get notifications from groups that I care about.
- chrisandchips 7y agoI mean these changes make sense to me; anyone who uses facebook actively can tell how much people gravitate to groups and events (and little else). Since groups have really picked up I've found myself using Facebook more than ever before. I think the main benefit is that a lot of people have a facebook account, including those who would never have thought or bothered to join forums in the pre facebook era, so now we're seeing a ton of really great communities. Then again, I wasn't on the internet for all that much of the pre-facebook era, so maybe I don't really know how things were before.
- divan 7y agoIt still hard to believe that one of the largest tech giants can't handle UI and UX of their main product right. I would normally assume it's an inherently hard problem them, but there is a counter-example to compare with – VKontakte, the most popular russian social network. It started basically as 1-to-1 clone of Facebook, but somehow managed to evolve into social network with one of the best user experiences I've seen. Now, I'm not using it anymore for political reasons, but I truly wish Facebook hired Vk's UI/UX folks or just cloned their design :)
- tempodox 7y agoThe only bit of news about FB that could possibly interest me is if they miraculously stopped collecting data about everyone who's not a user (hence never gave their consent). The tortures and abuses their users are willing to endure are really none of my business.
- IloveHN84 7y agoThey got some spaghetti code in it for sure. I don't know if React is the cause of it. Anyway I hope they will not introduce some other spying/backdoors in the app (more than now)
- stesch 7y agoThe design needs a bit more of the typical Facebook blue. People won't recognize it otherwise.
- return1 7y agoTheir redesign reminds a lot of google plus, which incidentally was used by many communities because it was convenient and relatively uncluttered. i dont think people can get excited by this anymore though. Facebook is in a decline trajectory thats going to take a long time. The friends networks have become stale, and people are learning to move to other platforms. Like all other facebook's redesigns, this will create a massive backlash when it launches, but unlike previous times, it will most likely be seen as an excuse to quit the site.
- cutler 7y agoWill PHP/Hack still power the back-end or is it finally being retired?
- azr79 7y agoWhy do people still use the mobile facebook app? I've just added the web app shortcut on my phone and it's more than enough, plus it doesn't bother you with useless updates, doesn't track you when you're not running the app, and doesn't drain your battery.
- bromuro 7y agoSo much negativity here. I like using Facebook and I am excited for the new design and to read about it has been implemented!