6 ms·

I 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

by js2 8y ago

I 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 8y ago
Same 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 8y 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 8y ago
    Meh, 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.
    - elliekelly 8y ago
      > 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. You are indeed correct. Which is why GDPR, even with all of its faults, is a step in the right direction. GDPR requires what I call “informed(ish) consent(ish).” In the US a company just needs a record of you clicking “I accept” and you’re on the hook. Believe it or not this is a pretty big improvement from the recent past when they could just burry a clause in their T&C’s that said by simply being on the site you agreed to them. I’m pretty sure we have Dell & their shady software license (that you were forced to agree to before you could even read) to thank for that.
- pier25 8y ago
  I had a similar realization a couple of years back when I stopped using Facebook. After mostly using Reddit for a while I realized that Facebook wasn't designed for having actual conversations or expressing yourself. So for example, unlike sites like Reddit or HN, you can't downvote on Facebook. Downvoting is crucial so that the community can curate the content. Facebook (or Twitter) doesn't want you doing that. They just want as much content as possible and only care about likes/upvotes to trigger dopamine bursts. "Jane has liked your photo!!!" In anonymous sites people will just downvote you and tell you why you are wrong without mercy. Another example. In Reddit and HN you have enough space for having actual conversations. In Facebook not only the space for comments is extremely small, but it's very difficult to know how are comments related to each other. After a couple of replies the UI stops making any sense. You don't know who is replying to who, etc. In practice, Facebook comments end up encouraging people leaving reactions to some content the user posted instead of being a place for discussion. Again, to trigger that dopamine burst when someone says something in the photo you just posted. Of course, the objective of all this behavior shaping is to get more user engagement so that they spend more time in the platform and consume more ads.
  - js2 8y ago
    FB does sort comments by “relevance” now by default which might be related to likes on the comments, but who knows.
    - mipmap04 8y ago
      They are also piloting comment voting.
      - username223 8y ago
        I'm not in the social space, but I assume that "piloting" has a specific technical meaning. My guess is "altering to maximize engagement and/or revenue."
        pier25 8y ago
- asdff 8y ago
  Its ridiculous. Scroll through the feed, click a link, then go back in the browser. You will be scrolled to the same position on the feed of course, like any good and friendly web browser would do for you, but the feed will be in a completely different order and you have no idea if you should be scrolling UP or DOWN to return to the content. Axing the chronological feed wasn't about making the platform better, it was about making it more difficult and time consuming to use, and they lost me as a regular user in the process.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    This what I'm thinking too. Facebook doesn't want a clean and efficient UI, they want it to be just tricky enough that it increases "engagement" by forcing each interaction to take at least a little longer to perform (I'm being generous here, I know.)
    - elliekelly 8y ago
      It's like the person who designed Ikea's floor plan now works on Facebook's UI.
btown 8y ago
Perhaps this is a side effect of it being difficult to measure things like "frustration" or "incoherence" at scale. Any team told to own `wall > ` and optimize for "engagement" is going to want to iterate independently on making the most wall-friendly post system they can think of. And unless this is a highly constrained optimization problem, with a centralized design team having coherence as their* KPI, it's going to be unconstrained free-for-all optimization on a team-by-team basis. A well-managed team-of-teams does not imply a UX-coherent team-of-teams. And maybe Facebook is fine with that. It's a challenge we need to face as technical leaders - where do you spend political capital pushing for a better product?
the_af 8y ago
Agreed. It pains me to say this, but I don't understand the facebook app anymore -- and I work as a programmer! The website is a little better, but only a little. I can never find settings for what I want. Most of the config is a mystery to me, no matter how many times facebook shows a message in my wall "hey, did you know you can do X this way?" or "we care about your privacy, so we added this or that option". I don't understand how groups work. I can never find the posts I want. Their constant reordering of my wall drives me mad. If I see a post I like, but I accidentally open a link or close the app and want to go back to it, it's bye bye post -- and good luck finding it again. I cannot understand how facebook privacy works. I absolutely CANNOT send a private message to my wife sharing a photo "memory" of us two, no other people tagged, that facebook itself suggested I can share with her: it's always "message cannot be sent". What the hell, facebook? I cannot understand how facebook censors publications in groups that sell things (too long to explain here, I asked a friend who works there, who asked the team involved, and they couldn't explain what was triggering the censorship either after I gave them the exact offending posts). Good luck finding specific posts in groups in a reasonable way, too.
- rwmj 8y ago
  > I asked a friend who works there, who asked the team involved, and they couldn't explain what was triggering the censorship either after I gave them the exact offending posts I guess this is down to AI classifying the posts. No one can explain how the AI works except to say that it was trained on a huge amount of data and the data looks sufficiently similar to your posts that they got a bad score. (Also, welcome to the future! I expect in future lots of life-changing decisions will happen in a way that no one can explain or override).
asark 8y ago
I tried Facebook in, IDK, 2009 or so, for a month or two. I have productively used, for significant amounts of time: every desktop Windows since 3.1, maybe a half-dozen Linux window managers under almost as many distros, BeOS, Solaris CDE, and more, a half-dozen GUI word processing programs, at least as many instant message programs, forums of all sorts, maybe a dozen image and WYSYWG HTML editors combined, and so on off to the horizon. I've figured out how to use obtuse UIs for games like Shadow President and Crusader Kings II. Facebook's UI was too confusing so I stopped using it. I couldn't figure it out at all. Recently I've been exposed to "Facebook Work" or whatever, and it's just as bad. What's this? Where does this post go? To whom? Why are these in this order? Is this thing the same as that other thing with the same name, and if so why's it on the page twice and grouped with different things? WTF.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  > I tried Facebook in, IDK, 2009 or so, for a month or two. That was 10 years ago. Things may have changed for better or worse (or both)...
- etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
  For me the worst UI ever invented would have to be the 3D tool known as ZBrush. It is the least intuitive thing imaginable. I think there is a certain logic to it, but it is a complicated logic, like learning Haskell or something. The funny thing is a lot of artists seem to like it.
  - mattferderer 8y ago
    Strange, when did you first use Zbrush? I haven't touched it in over 10 years, but back then it was super easy to get started with for a novice. Much easier than Mudbox. Though I had amazing Digital Tutors videos.
    - etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
      Same, haven't used in 10 years. The UI seemed to have a lot of modes. I mean quite literally they seem hard to learn. Come to think of it, Blender has a very nonintuitive UI as well. Holy moly, yikes. I like to look at Solidworks as an example of how to make a 3D user interface rather approachable. It has simple objects organized cleanly. Granted Solidworks is mechanical and ZBrush is organic, but I can't fathom that organic modeling would require a more complicated UI than mechanical design...
SifJar 8y ago
The one that gets me is if a person I am friends with replies to a comment from someone I'm not friends with on a public post with a lot of comments. Facebook puts this in my news feed saying "X replied to a comment on this post" and showing the post. But if I go to comments, it doesn't surface the comment that my friend replied to (or their reply). Why tell me the comment exists and then not let me see it?
flipchart 8y ago
Instagram is doing the same thing from the activity feed. Clicking on a like/comment/mention from there takes you only to the comments section, so you can't see what image the thread is taking place on

by js2 8y ago

athenot 8y ago

Same 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 8y 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 8y ago
  Meh, 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.
  - elliekelly 8y ago
    > 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. You are indeed correct. Which is why GDPR, even with all of its faults, is a step in the right direction. GDPR requires what I call “informed(ish) consent(ish).” In the US a company just needs a record of you clicking “I accept” and you’re on the hook. Believe it or not this is a pretty big improvement from the recent past when they could just burry a clause in their T&C’s that said by simply being on the site you agreed to them. I’m pretty sure we have Dell & their shady software license (that you were forced to agree to before you could even read) to thank for that.
pier25 8y ago
I had a similar realization a couple of years back when I stopped using Facebook. After mostly using Reddit for a while I realized that Facebook wasn't designed for having actual conversations or expressing yourself. So for example, unlike sites like Reddit or HN, you can't downvote on Facebook. Downvoting is crucial so that the community can curate the content. Facebook (or Twitter) doesn't want you doing that. They just want as much content as possible and only care about likes/upvotes to trigger dopamine bursts. "Jane has liked your photo!!!" In anonymous sites people will just downvote you and tell you why you are wrong without mercy. Another example. In Reddit and HN you have enough space for having actual conversations. In Facebook not only the space for comments is extremely small, but it's very difficult to know how are comments related to each other. After a couple of replies the UI stops making any sense. You don't know who is replying to who, etc. In practice, Facebook comments end up encouraging people leaving reactions to some content the user posted instead of being a place for discussion. Again, to trigger that dopamine burst when someone says something in the photo you just posted. Of course, the objective of all this behavior shaping is to get more user engagement so that they spend more time in the platform and consume more ads.
- js2 8y ago
  FB does sort comments by “relevance” now by default which might be related to likes on the comments, but who knows.
  - mipmap04 8y ago
    They are also piloting comment voting.
    - username223 8y ago
      I'm not in the social space, but I assume that "piloting" has a specific technical meaning. My guess is "altering to maximize engagement and/or revenue."
      - pier25 8y ago
asdff 8y ago
Its ridiculous. Scroll through the feed, click a link, then go back in the browser. You will be scrolled to the same position on the feed of course, like any good and friendly web browser would do for you, but the feed will be in a completely different order and you have no idea if you should be scrolling UP or DOWN to return to the content. Axing the chronological feed wasn't about making the platform better, it was about making it more difficult and time consuming to use, and they lost me as a regular user in the process.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  This what I'm thinking too. Facebook doesn't want a clean and efficient UI, they want it to be just tricky enough that it increases "engagement" by forcing each interaction to take at least a little longer to perform (I'm being generous here, I know.)
  - elliekelly 8y ago
    It's like the person who designed Ikea's floor plan now works on Facebook's UI.

btown 8y ago

Perhaps this is a side effect of it being difficult to measure things like "frustration" or "incoherence" at scale. Any team told to own `wall > ` and optimize for "engagement" is going to want to iterate independently on making the most wall-friendly post system they can think of. And unless this is a highly constrained optimization problem, with a centralized design team having coherence as their* KPI, it's going to be unconstrained free-for-all optimization on a team-by-team basis. A well-managed team-of-teams does not imply a UX-coherent team-of-teams. And maybe Facebook is fine with that. It's a challenge we need to face as technical leaders - where do you spend political capital pushing for a better product?

the_af 8y ago

Agreed. It pains me to say this, but I don't understand the facebook app anymore -- and I work as a programmer! The website is a little better, but only a little. I can never find settings for what I want. Most of the config is a mystery to me, no matter how many times facebook shows a message in my wall "hey, did you know you can do X this way?" or "we care about your privacy, so we added this or that option". I don't understand how groups work. I can never find the posts I want. Their constant reordering of my wall drives me mad. If I see a post I like, but I accidentally open a link or close the app and want to go back to it, it's bye bye post -- and good luck finding it again. I cannot understand how facebook privacy works. I absolutely CANNOT send a private message to my wife sharing a photo "memory" of us two, no other people tagged, that facebook itself suggested I can share with her: it's always "message cannot be sent". What the hell, facebook? I cannot understand how facebook censors publications in groups that sell things (too long to explain here, I asked a friend who works there, who asked the team involved, and they couldn't explain what was triggering the censorship either after I gave them the exact offending posts). Good luck finding specific posts in groups in a reasonable way, too.

rwmj 8y ago
> I asked a friend who works there, who asked the team involved, and they couldn't explain what was triggering the censorship either after I gave them the exact offending posts I guess this is down to AI classifying the posts. No one can explain how the AI works except to say that it was trained on a huge amount of data and the data looks sufficiently similar to your posts that they got a bad score. (Also, welcome to the future! I expect in future lots of life-changing decisions will happen in a way that no one can explain or override).

asark 8y ago

I tried Facebook in, IDK, 2009 or so, for a month or two. I have productively used, for significant amounts of time: every desktop Windows since 3.1, maybe a half-dozen Linux window managers under almost as many distros, BeOS, Solaris CDE, and more, a half-dozen GUI word processing programs, at least as many instant message programs, forums of all sorts, maybe a dozen image and WYSYWG HTML editors combined, and so on off to the horizon. I've figured out how to use obtuse UIs for games like Shadow President and Crusader Kings II. Facebook's UI was too confusing so I stopped using it. I couldn't figure it out at all. Recently I've been exposed to "Facebook Work" or whatever, and it's just as bad. What's this? Where does this post go? To whom? Why are these in this order? Is this thing the same as that other thing with the same name, and if so why's it on the page twice and grouped with different things? WTF.

spookthesunset 8y ago
> I tried Facebook in, IDK, 2009 or so, for a month or two. That was 10 years ago. Things may have changed for better or worse (or both)...
etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
For me the worst UI ever invented would have to be the 3D tool known as ZBrush. It is the least intuitive thing imaginable. I think there is a certain logic to it, but it is a complicated logic, like learning Haskell or something. The funny thing is a lot of artists seem to like it.
- mattferderer 8y ago
  Strange, when did you first use Zbrush? I haven't touched it in over 10 years, but back then it was super easy to get started with for a novice. Much easier than Mudbox. Though I had amazing Digital Tutors videos.
  - etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
    Same, haven't used in 10 years. The UI seemed to have a lot of modes. I mean quite literally they seem hard to learn. Come to think of it, Blender has a very nonintuitive UI as well. Holy moly, yikes. I like to look at Solidworks as an example of how to make a 3D user interface rather approachable. It has simple objects organized cleanly. Granted Solidworks is mechanical and ZBrush is organic, but I can't fathom that organic modeling would require a more complicated UI than mechanical design...

SifJar 8y ago

The one that gets me is if a person I am friends with replies to a comment from someone I'm not friends with on a public post with a lot of comments. Facebook puts this in my news feed saying "X replied to a comment on this post" and showing the post. But if I go to comments, it doesn't surface the comment that my friend replied to (or their reply). Why tell me the comment exists and then not let me see it?

flipchart 8y ago

Instagram is doing the same thing from the activity feed. Clicking on a like/comment/mention from there takes you only to the comments section, so you can't see what image the thread is taking place on