14 ms·

Facebook is Big and Boring

155 points by rachelbaker 16y ago

A trend I have noticed among my friends is the decreasing number of status updates posted to Facebook. Just six months ago my news feed would have been filled with the daily dribblings of my friends. Now there are less than a handful of status updates in my newsfeed, often from the same 5 people.

dotme 16y ago
by the end of this year people will realise that there is life outside fb.
- rachelbaker 16y ago
  Where will they go? I guess that is what I am wondering.
  - forensic 16y ago
    They don't have to go anywhere. Most communication will continue to happen through gossip, as it should. Facebook is stupid because it has become a social obligation to "friend" people on it, and like you pointed out, way too hard to set up effective privacy measures. Normal people are scared of public speaking.
- younata 16y ago
  Gods, I hope so. My english professor this semester has this crusade against facebook. There have been very few classes go by where he doesn't connect what we're reading about with how facebook is causing the decline of civilization.
mmurph211 16y ago
Couldn't agree more with the post
- rachelbaker 16y ago
  Thank you for reading!
sabat 16y ago
So invent something better. Don't just complain. OP has taken what is actual innovation and groundswell for granted. Not enough? Then innovate.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  The title is sort of inflammatory, but did you read the article? It's an observation about peoples' behavior on Facebook and how it has changed. She's not saying "Facebook is Boring! Down with Facebook!" She's saying "I loved all the status updates! Why are they gone? Where did they go?"
  - sabat 16y ago
    My point exactly. If Facebook is failing to deliver, find a better way. Don't just say "This place sucks! It used to be cool! Now it sucks!"
- MostExtremeCake 16y ago
  It is not the responsibility of the critic to fix problems. Often, these kinds of articles are met with the "Well YOU build something and then you can talk" responses. This kind of response is an attack on the person making the argument (or at least their qualifications) and not on the argument itself.
  - sabat 16y ago
    It is not the responsibility of the critic to fix problems. I strongly disagree, obviously, and find it disconcerting that you've gotten upvotes. This is a community of makers, and apparently it's becoming a community of bitchers and whiners. The OP's argument is the equivalent of Beavis and Butthead: "this place used to be cool, but now it sucks." It's useless and unhelpful. Thinking of joining Jacques in going silent. This kind of response is an attack on the person No, this is not argumentum ad hominem. I'm not attacking the person, just suggesting that if she feels that strongly, she she should go build something. Bitching is useless.
bergie 16y ago
I found Facebook useful back when I was single - less creepy than real dating sites, and much better coverage of people from my circles. But even that utility is diminishing, as people appear to do less there. Of course, I know many people who practically live on Facebook, but I suppose that is mainly due to boring desk jobs instead of actual gossip addiction. If Facebook starts winding down, it will be interesting to see how all those millions of sites relying on FB for their social features and authentication cope.
dstein 16y ago
Back in the olden times people built personal websites, customized them to their liking, and posted creative things they made, their photography and other hobbies, and writings (which eventually got renamed "blogs"). Some of these websites had interesting private discussion forums that were separate from the rest of the internet. It was a glorious time... and then Blogger, and Facebook, and Twitter came along and normalized everything, leaving only status updates and pictures and useless ramblings. There must be some sort of law that the internet's signal to noise ratio drops proportionately to the growth of social networks.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  The s/n ratio of the internet is already abysmal because of spam and other forms of parasitic commerce. Adding 6 billion pages full of baby pictures, Twilight: The Fourth Coming reviews, etc probably raises the bar.
- amackera 16y ago
  The entire point of social networks is that they personalize the information stream that the user sees, making that information more valuable (this raises the SNR). At least that's how I see it. I guess the ease and ubiquity of Facebook has lowered the barrier of entry to publishing content to the Internet. Consequently the average quality level of content decreases, despite its added value of being personalized.
- raganwald 16y ago
  There must be some sort of law that the internet's signal to noise ratio drops proportionately to the growth of social networks. Here it is: "The signal is highly concentrated in the early adopters of every publishing technology." That is to say, the people most likely to have something interesting to share are the ones busy trying to find new ways to share it. Thus, when the Internet first became available to the masses, the early adopters were people with things to say but no easy way to share their ideas with people interested in what they had to say. So they put up home pages and essays. Then the masses came on board and businesses catered to them and we got FrontPage and GeoCities and the signal dropped to zero. We can see the same thing in every forum, in Slashdot, in Reddit, and here. Early adopters are invariably chagrined to see the laggards driving the signal to noise down, some leave in search of new media with an opportunity to enjoy the high signal of halcyon days. Eventually the older media have an Eternal September, and the combination of high signal early adopters leaving and a sudden wave of new laggards joining the signal down to nearly zero, and suddenly everyone is dissatisfied. While not every early adopter has something interesting to say and not every laggard is taciturn, the proportion of writers to readers is higher amongst the early adopters of any communication medium than it is amongst the laggards, which creates the phenomenon you observed.
ihumanable 16y ago
I think what facebook does for a lot of people is allows them to have an online presence without having to: 1) Buy a domain name 2) Pay for hosting 3) Install WordPress, etc. This is really great for people who don't want to deal with the complexities of hosting their own site but still want to be able to post stuff. The problem is that with 600m users everyone's presence online starts to feel the same, cookie cutter, boring. It's like if everyone in the world had to use the same stylesheet. If you look at things like the profile image strip hack, people are dying to be unique (even if the only way they can do that is by copying other people's hacks). I think there will always be a place for Facebook, my mom isn't going to head on over to namecheap to register a domain anytime soon. But I think that facebook is homogenization of the internet, and I think it's boring.
- rbritton 16y ago
  Agreed, but I will take boring any day over the abomination that was MySpace. User-customizable styling only works when users have the taste and technical knowledge to use it appropriately.
  - xiaomai 16y ago
    I used to feel this way, but I've had a change of heart. Why shouldn't someone be able to express themselves by having bright pink text on a bright rainbow-unicorn background? It's not my cup of tea, but I bet it makes a bunch of people happy. The best solution, imho, would be to have user-styles enabled by default (these could be as ridiculous as people wanted), and then having a standard site-wide mechanism for reverting to the standard style (this would also shut down any background music or videos).
    - spydez 16y ago
      Reddit does this, and it works well. They allows subreddits to be styled as the mods like and give the user an option to disable the custom styling globally. The Reddit Enhancement Suite takes it one step further and allows subreddit specific toggling of custom styles. Works well for me. I turn off the annoying ones.
zinssmeister 16y ago
I think the biggest part of this change in facebook usage is that we all just grew out of this college network and started adding co-workers and all sorts of other mature audience. This then causes you to tread facebook as a different kind of communication tool. I guess you can say the experience on facebook just matured all together and people are using it differently. Everyone is more cautious about the way they come across on the social graph and what they make public. After all thanks to Zynga we now all got our mothers, relatives and what not as facebook friends. And like the article says, who has time to setup lists?!
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erikpukinskis 16y ago
Cachey-cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BEkQRiUb2hgJ:rachelbaker.me/facebook-big-boring/+http://rachelbaker.me/facebook-big-boring/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BEkQRiU...
- rachelbaker 16y ago
  Site should be back up in a few minutes.
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- 9999 16y ago
  Facebook initially had many important distinctions from Myspace--exclusivity, better privacy control, and no potential for flashing neon design abortions. The first two are gone now, so I think you're pretty much right. I do wonder if it will be replaced by another actual social network or if social networking features will be turned into a basic protocol that can be shared and distributed from any number of unrelated non-commercial servers or services.
  - TillE 16y ago
    > exclusivity It was exactly this that made Facebook great for college kids and drove its initial growth. Facebook was once a quasi-private space, and that was all kinds of fun. Sort of a unique online social experience (and not in the buzzword sense of "social") that was available for a couple years. Now it's just another AOL.
deleted 16y ago
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osamet67 16y ago
Facebook taught the world what's social networking - now it's time for interest groups and niche SNs. It's just natural progression.
joebadmo 16y ago
So, what does the future look like? Will everyone abandon Facebook en masse, just like they did AOL and Myspace? Or did Facebook really win? Will Google finally do something interesting in the space? Will any of these open source distributed/federated interoperative social networks catch on? All of them? I sort of hope for a combination the last two. It doesn't look like any of the big players have an incentive to open up and become interoperable, and it doesn't look like any of the new open/distributed upstarts are getting any sort of real traction. Google's the only big player that has a history of demonstrating a willingness to push open/distributed/interoperable data because an open web is a crawlable web is an advertisable web. Once the social networking/identity thing is more open and distributed, I imagine networks like Facebook becoming more like a place to go to hang out with certain people and share certain things, with various other places for different contexts and different appropriate activities, and different degrees of privacy, but all working from a single, centralized identity.
- farlington 16y ago
  What's the advantage of open information in the context of social applications? Excluding of course social networks built on mutual interest, like twitter or quora. With real-world friends, family, contacts, etc., the closed nature of facebook is what makes it attractive to me. And I think that's true for most users. It's probably why there's massive outrage every time they relax their privacy defaults. Maybe data portability? But data on facebook is portable enough, and even if it weren't, what are you going to import it in? Some hypothetical future rival social network? I imagine for a majority of users, simply viewing a friend's profile to remember an email address, phone number, etc, is enough.
  - joebadmo 16y ago
    I think privacy is actually a good reason for strong data portability. If users can easily leave your service for another, you have a strong incentive not to violate their privacy expectations. To extrapolate that point out: strong data portability and interoperability encourage a competitive environment. I think you're conflating "closed" with "private." An open social networking environment can still harbor private (I would argue more private) sharing contexts.
gammarator 16y ago
"A trend I have noticed among my friends is the decreasing number of status updates posted to Facebook. Just six months ago my news feed would have been filled with the daily dribblings of my friends. Now there are less than a handful of status updates in my newsfeed, often from the same 5 people." I wonder if this was an algorithmic change by Facebook in their "Top News" section. I noticed an extremely sharp decline in the number of new stories I see when I log in, starting a couple of months ago. There's plenty in "Most Recent," however, so it's just getting filtered out. For me personally, it's made Facebook seem much less interesting and decreased my usage. I'm sure they're watching the numbers, though...
- rachelbaker 16y ago
  I am aware of the Top News vs. Most Recent - and I still see a general interaction decline. The number of brands friends are liking has gone up, but their actual person to person interactions have gone down.
  - gammarator 16y ago
    It's plausible that the two are related. The fewer real interactions people have on the site, the less they'll be active. Automated content fills its space, and soon there's little social engagement.
    - sili 16y ago
      And than your wall is filled with useless spammy content.
  - whatusername 16y ago
    Are you also aware of the "Friends and pages you interact with the most" vs "All of your friends and pages" distinction?
- Tycho 16y ago
  Most people are shy in front of big audiences... this remains true on Facebook as people accumulate ever larger friend-lists. Of course, they're probably all just as addicted as ever. I'm a 'light' FB user, I've only posted one pic, only been tagged in one, post a status update about once a month, comment about once a week, never sent someone a friend-request, only have 60 or so friends, and even I check the thing 2 or 3 times per day.
Vmabuza 16y ago
Couldnt see the article the site is down.Nevertheless i think Facebook has become more about ''Likes and Comments Hunting'' and photo Viewing and sooner or later we will get tired of this.There will come a time where being on facebook is such a lame thing to do and is as shame as being caught by your friends viewing Adultfinder.
- rachelbaker 16y ago
  I am sorry the site was down. I agree, soon being on Facebook will be equal to still being on Friendster
amitraman1 16y ago
Facebook is not boring but I do think the Fan pages have way too many updates. They get in the way of updates from my friends.
- lurker19 16y ago
  Monetization will always interfere with user experience in a system whose value is amplified by network effects.
sobbybutter 16y ago
I think what made facebook appealing in the beginning was the "post an update, get an immediate reaction" phenomenon. The number of posts was small enough and the number of friendly eyes high enough that the probability of even the smallest discourse was high. Add to that the fact that one's list of "friends" starts relatively small and encompasses a higher ratio of people who are actual friends. Over time, one's list of "friends" expands to the point where a user's feed is comprised of non-relevant information. For me at least, it lessens the desire to contribute content knowing that that content will be diluted in the huge sea of updates. The same holds true for reading my news feed; I don't want to comb through lots of posts to find a few that are interesting. Note: I write this post from my own experience as a college student. It may very well be different from how others use facebook.
BrandonM 16y ago
The article makes some very good points, but I would love to make a copy-editing pass over it.
wh-uws 16y ago
I was visiting some friends at a major US university last weekend, a few who are a Djs and party promoters when they said something that struck me. "The freshman aren't really using facebook [to find parties] anymore." We went on to talk about how there was a very low signal to noise ratio on it nowadays with too many promoters sending to many unwanted messages and how having family on it has changed things as well. Apprently they're moving more to twitter and tumblr to a certain extent this does not bode well for facebook Also I think it was a big mistake to take status updates from the center of the header on profile pages. It let you broadcast more about how you are at a moment vs who in general
- rachelbaker 16y ago
  Agreed. It was the status updates (and pictures to a lesser degree) that made Facebook interactive.
- deepu_256 16y ago
  So they are ok with making their tweets and posts on tumblr being exposed to public but they are not ok with their parents being on facebook ??
  - notahacker 16y ago
    Difference is that Twitter accounts are pseudonymous and deniable, and your parents probably don't know what Tumblr is... That said, it first became obvious how big Facebook would become when they calmly ignored the protests of those who didn't want to be connected with their younger siblings at high school and thought newsfeeds were intrusive.
    - dhs 16y ago
      I can assure you that at least some parents do know what Tumblr is.
- akkartik 16y ago
  I find myself nodding along with you, then unable to reconcile myself with the reality: that facebook is a high-growth company, and it's unlikely to become the next AOL for another decade. Perhaps the answer is raganwald's comment below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2397934 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2397934): people find use in it, it's just not the same use we found.
dsplittgerber 16y ago
Back in the times of Geocities, everyone's site was unique(ly ugly). Today, everyone's facebook page looks exactly the same. Geez, and you wonder why rate-of-use will probably decline over time? Facebook et al. will not be the end of connecting with people online. Now that everyone's been pressed into a one-size-fits-all and the lowest common denominator has been found (satisfying your curiosity what your hs buddies are up to, who got fatter last year etc.), the game will start anew for the new shiny thing - connecting people while at the same time bringing out their best sides.
kariatx 16y ago
I can't help but wonder if the "Hide" button has sucked all the meaningful engagement out of Facebook. I don't know about anyone else, but I have about 80% of my "friends" hidden. Over the past year, Facebook has pretty much become a ghost town for me compared to a few years ago.
- alextp 16y ago
  I'm in the same situation, but unhiding friends to recover sense is just not practical, with all the app-spam going around facebook these days. I might be the only one in here who can't stand viral-app-spam, but in my social circle there's a sharp division between people who can and who can't stand it, and I think this is in part responsible to the huge drop in interaction in facebook.
lazylland 16y ago
There are so many updates that I miss from people I care about, and chance upon them much later ! * There doesn't seem to be a way to explicity follow all the updates of a person * If I manage to get my friends into a group, their updates still don't show up in the group * The current News Feed algorithm is weighed a little too tightly to the people I interact with often Hmm .. maybe I should try writing a client with these features ;)
Legion 16y ago
"Big and boring"... I thought this was going to be another one of those posts about writing "boring" code instead of being excessively clever, as boring is well tested and boring is easily maintained. Instead, it's another "I don't like using Facebook" post. Joy.
jonmc12 16y ago
I've run into many stats lately on women's use of facebook: 1. "Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, has talked about how women are not only the majority of its users, but drive 62% of activity in terms of messages, updates and comments, and 71% of the daily fan activity." 2. "Women aged 35-54 are the most active group in mobile socialization" 3. "Most women — 83% of respondents in this survey — are annoyed at one time or another by the posts from their Facebook connections." [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/why-women-rule-the-internet/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/why-women-rule-the-internet... [2] http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/mobile-by-the-numbers-infogrpahic/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/mobile-by-the-numbers-infogrp... [3] http://mashable.com/2011/03/30/women-facebook-survey/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/30/women-facebook-survey/ So, I started talking to the women in my life about facebook. And I have a speculative theory - sorry that this is a theory based on gender and its kind of vague.. but facebook makes so much more sense to me when I look at it this way, and I find it an interesting discussion. Basically, you have mother types and you have single women types. Single women are the early adopter social photo sharers - this is fun for them, and it strengthens reputation and attracts men. Meanwhile, mothers are off doing what they do - strengthening their family and social relationships through chat, gossip, hobbies, etc - it forms a safety net for their family. Then there are men. Single men chase the single women. This forms a crowd. This crowd attracts married men / fathers and mothers alike (including people like me who are standing around saying 'wtf?'). Further, the crowd attracts social capitalists who leverage the crowd's attention to promote themselves, their business or their cause. But, the average single female may have 2-7 years of her status as a single woman. Whereas the average mother will have her role for 18yrs+. So, you end up with this crowd mass, in the center is hookup activity. However, the majority of the crowd becomes family-centric and cause-centric security nets. And yea, when you look at this from a distance, its big and boring.
- josefresco 16y ago
  Masses of single-folks 'hooking up' on Facebook is equally if not more boring close-up and from afar than masses of family-centric people. It's better to say "Masses are boring". Just read the comments at CNN.com or YouTube which mostly read like meaningless chatter.
kin 16y ago
With 600 million users you can't just generalize a noticeable trend in your personal account to reflect that of others. If anything, my Facebook feed has been more active than ever. View a friend's profile and FB will know you show interest in that person, putting that person's stream on a higher rank to show up on your feed. The feed becomes more relevant the more you use it I suppose. There may be a lot of small talk on Facebook, but for me that normally leads to longer discussions in person.
tokenadult 16y ago
I read the fine blog post submitted here (by the author of the blog post). I then posted the link to my Facebook profile, with the question "Does Facebook bore you?" Then I read the comments here on HN. In just that short span of time, three of my friends replied to my question, saying, 1) "Not with friends like mine!" 2) no 3) "Not yet." I find Facebook interesting, because I take care to put interesting people on my friends list. (I have removed one person from my friends list for only participating in online games with total strangers and never interacting with anyone he actually knows in real life. I have blocked three other persons from my home page feed, but still allow them to comment on things I post, for similar overuse of online games.) To comment on some of the issues brought up in the interesting comments here, one good use case on Facebook is a group of friends with a defined commonality forming a "private group." (Again, I try to Google up the page on Facebook's help about creating private groups, and again Facebook has an epic fail of making that link prominent. But here it is, https://www.facebook.com/groups https://www.facebook.com/groups found after I drilled into Facebook's Help Center a bit. The Help Center page about groups features https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=414 https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=414 is perhaps even more helpful.) I have a THRIVING private group including a whole bunch of friends who are currently or were formerly subscribers to the national email list of a membership organization we have all been part of. The official email lists of the organization have gone increasingly quiet, as everyone moves over to Facebook, where the atmosphere is at once more fun (more light-hearted topics) and more serious (gut-wrenching intimate topics that are easier to share to a specific group of friends than to all subscribers to an email list). Facebook is also working very well in reconnecting me with old classmates whom I have not seen in more than thirty years but whom I look forward to seeing in a massive multi-class reunions this summer that has mostly been organized on Facebook. That has been very enjoyable. I have to agree that it's a bit odd that status updates are no longer prominent even on people's own profiles, but I think Facebook has figured out by analysis of user behavior that most Facebook readers are even more interested in links (my favorite thing to post, which brings me a big readership on Facebook and elicits many fun discussions) or photos (some of some of my friends' favorite things to post). P.S. I have to agree with the comments below that if you want to post on a site without a "house style," Geocities used to have that market covered, and MySpace still does. It does improve usability of Facebook that some of the basic page design decisions are made by a small group of evidently professional designers rather than by the whole population of Facebook users. Profiles pages show individuality by the actual content posted by each Facebook user, and that is good enough for me. P.P.S. By the time I finished typing this, two more friends had replied to my question: 4) "I agree - with the right friends, how could it be boring?" 5) "I believe it was Samuel Johnson who said, "When a man is tired of Facebook, he is tired of life."
jcfrei 16y ago
I'm sure one amongst us will come up with something that brings down fb. no single company will ever be able to grasp the whole social experience.
aridiculous 16y ago
This thread is making me reflect on my 7-8 years of using Facebook. To be honest, I'm surprised I'm still on it, but I am. It's the best way for me to send media bits to people I like. It's easier than email for me. However, I'm a sharer, and many people I know aren't. I don't really have a clue why they're on Facebook then (if they are). It does seem kind of dry. In college, it was awesome because it was a community setting where you could find out about acquaintances (i.e. stalking) in a trusted network setting. It was OPEN within a CLOSED off system. I could see that still being the case to a certain degree in some social groups or large companies. But the stripping down, deemphasis and normalization of the profile, turning it from a 'face book' into a social news tool was the inflection point for me. Facebook was great when you could surf people, not news. The funny thing is, Facebook was catalyzed tremendously by their decision to go into social news (i.e. news posted by people you know), and it'd be weird to see it causing their downfall (like a huge investment that looks great at first). I doubt that's going to be the case, as the social graph infiltrates through the internet and 'like' buttons show up on every e-commerce site in innovative ways. I don't think Facebook truly has much to worry about as they're basically becoming the ID gatekeeper to the internet. I just don't think social news is something particularly interesting, and I'd like to see them deemphasize that part of their business. I think they should focus on making the news feed less of a potpourri of news (Twitter, HN, microforums, NY times, CNN, and so on own that already) and try to innovate ways to emphasize microcommunities on Facebook. The groups feature was an attempt, but didn't really strike gold. I'd like to see them try out more things like that. I could be way off. I suspect Facebook is just losing touch with nerdy people who are more interested in things, not people. It's probably doing well with people who generally like smalltalk.
amanuel 16y ago
This has happened to every social network that has come before and it will happen again. Facebook like its predecessors Myspace, Friendster et al., is not the destination but rather the current milestone in the evolution of the Internet, the real Social Network.
alexsb92 16y ago
I think the biggest fallacy of all of these articles is that people don't seem to give any thought to the fact that they only see updates from a handful of people. The reason why that is, is because FB has algorithms to figure out who you are talking to most of the time, and basically only shows updates form people who you talk to, or people whose profile you have visited. I deduced this by myself over a year ago, and recently I was watching some interviews with Sean Parker and he was actually talking about this. So it's just like in real life, the way you have good friends with whom you talk a lot, and just friends you talk to every once in a while, FB does the same thing.
bostonvaulter2 16y ago
It would be really cool if Facebook was able to suggest groupings for your friends. They probably have enough data to do a half-decent job of it. Also, they should make some sort of more visual method to sort people into lists. Maybe like a venn-diagram.
orph 16y ago
Are you kidding me? Facebook just contributed to toppling a dictatorship in Egypt. We are still seeing the rippling effects that this form of social interaction brings to people's lives. I don't think that's boring at all.
jacoblyles 16y ago
I have too many friends on Facebook because it is impolite to refuse a friend request. Now I don't feel comfortable sharing things with the wide network of "friends" that I have there.

155 points by rachelbaker 16y ago

dotme 16y ago

by the end of this year people will realise that there is life outside fb.

rachelbaker 16y ago
Where will they go? I guess that is what I am wondering.
- forensic 16y ago
  They don't have to go anywhere. Most communication will continue to happen through gossip, as it should. Facebook is stupid because it has become a social obligation to "friend" people on it, and like you pointed out, way too hard to set up effective privacy measures. Normal people are scared of public speaking.
younata 16y ago
Gods, I hope so. My english professor this semester has this crusade against facebook. There have been very few classes go by where he doesn't connect what we're reading about with how facebook is causing the decline of civilization.

mmurph211 16y ago

Couldn't agree more with the post

rachelbaker 16y ago
Thank you for reading!

sabat 16y ago

So invent something better. Don't just complain. OP has taken what is actual innovation and groundswell for granted. Not enough? Then innovate.

erikpukinskis 16y ago
The title is sort of inflammatory, but did you read the article? It's an observation about peoples' behavior on Facebook and how it has changed. She's not saying "Facebook is Boring! Down with Facebook!" She's saying "I loved all the status updates! Why are they gone? Where did they go?"
- sabat 16y ago
  My point exactly. If Facebook is failing to deliver, find a better way. Don't just say "This place sucks! It used to be cool! Now it sucks!"
MostExtremeCake 16y ago
It is not the responsibility of the critic to fix problems. Often, these kinds of articles are met with the "Well YOU build something and then you can talk" responses. This kind of response is an attack on the person making the argument (or at least their qualifications) and not on the argument itself.
- sabat 16y ago
  It is not the responsibility of the critic to fix problems. I strongly disagree, obviously, and find it disconcerting that you've gotten upvotes. This is a community of makers, and apparently it's becoming a community of bitchers and whiners. The OP's argument is the equivalent of Beavis and Butthead: "this place used to be cool, but now it sucks." It's useless and unhelpful. Thinking of joining Jacques in going silent. This kind of response is an attack on the person No, this is not argumentum ad hominem. I'm not attacking the person, just suggesting that if she feels that strongly, she she should go build something. Bitching is useless.

bergie 16y ago

I found Facebook useful back when I was single - less creepy than real dating sites, and much better coverage of people from my circles. But even that utility is diminishing, as people appear to do less there. Of course, I know many people who practically live on Facebook, but I suppose that is mainly due to boring desk jobs instead of actual gossip addiction. If Facebook starts winding down, it will be interesting to see how all those millions of sites relying on FB for their social features and authentication cope.

dstein 16y ago

Back in the olden times people built personal websites, customized them to their liking, and posted creative things they made, their photography and other hobbies, and writings (which eventually got renamed "blogs"). Some of these websites had interesting private discussion forums that were separate from the rest of the internet. It was a glorious time... and then Blogger, and Facebook, and Twitter came along and normalized everything, leaving only status updates and pictures and useless ramblings. There must be some sort of law that the internet's signal to noise ratio drops proportionately to the growth of social networks.

erikpukinskis 16y ago
The s/n ratio of the internet is already abysmal because of spam and other forms of parasitic commerce. Adding 6 billion pages full of baby pictures, Twilight: The Fourth Coming reviews, etc probably raises the bar.
amackera 16y ago
The entire point of social networks is that they personalize the information stream that the user sees, making that information more valuable (this raises the SNR). At least that's how I see it. I guess the ease and ubiquity of Facebook has lowered the barrier of entry to publishing content to the Internet. Consequently the average quality level of content decreases, despite its added value of being personalized.
raganwald 16y ago
There must be some sort of law that the internet's signal to noise ratio drops proportionately to the growth of social networks. Here it is: "The signal is highly concentrated in the early adopters of every publishing technology." That is to say, the people most likely to have something interesting to share are the ones busy trying to find new ways to share it. Thus, when the Internet first became available to the masses, the early adopters were people with things to say but no easy way to share their ideas with people interested in what they had to say. So they put up home pages and essays. Then the masses came on board and businesses catered to them and we got FrontPage and GeoCities and the signal dropped to zero. We can see the same thing in every forum, in Slashdot, in Reddit, and here. Early adopters are invariably chagrined to see the laggards driving the signal to noise down, some leave in search of new media with an opportunity to enjoy the high signal of halcyon days. Eventually the older media have an Eternal September, and the combination of high signal early adopters leaving and a sudden wave of new laggards joining the signal down to nearly zero, and suddenly everyone is dissatisfied. While not every early adopter has something interesting to say and not every laggard is taciturn, the proportion of writers to readers is higher amongst the early adopters of any communication medium than it is amongst the laggards, which creates the phenomenon you observed.

ihumanable 16y ago

I think what facebook does for a lot of people is allows them to have an online presence without having to: 1) Buy a domain name 2) Pay for hosting 3) Install WordPress, etc. This is really great for people who don't want to deal with the complexities of hosting their own site but still want to be able to post stuff. The problem is that with 600m users everyone's presence online starts to feel the same, cookie cutter, boring. It's like if everyone in the world had to use the same stylesheet. If you look at things like the profile image strip hack, people are dying to be unique (even if the only way they can do that is by copying other people's hacks). I think there will always be a place for Facebook, my mom isn't going to head on over to namecheap to register a domain anytime soon. But I think that facebook is homogenization of the internet, and I think it's boring.

rbritton 16y ago
Agreed, but I will take boring any day over the abomination that was MySpace. User-customizable styling only works when users have the taste and technical knowledge to use it appropriately.
- xiaomai 16y ago
  I used to feel this way, but I've had a change of heart. Why shouldn't someone be able to express themselves by having bright pink text on a bright rainbow-unicorn background? It's not my cup of tea, but I bet it makes a bunch of people happy. The best solution, imho, would be to have user-styles enabled by default (these could be as ridiculous as people wanted), and then having a standard site-wide mechanism for reverting to the standard style (this would also shut down any background music or videos).
  - spydez 16y ago
    Reddit does this, and it works well. They allows subreddits to be styled as the mods like and give the user an option to disable the custom styling globally. The Reddit Enhancement Suite takes it one step further and allows subreddit specific toggling of custom styles. Works well for me. I turn off the annoying ones.

zinssmeister 16y ago

I think the biggest part of this change in facebook usage is that we all just grew out of this college network and started adding co-workers and all sorts of other mature audience. This then causes you to tread facebook as a different kind of communication tool. I guess you can say the experience on facebook just matured all together and people are using it differently. Everyone is more cautious about the way they come across on the social graph and what they make public. After all thanks to Zynga we now all got our mothers, relatives and what not as facebook friends. And like the article says, who has time to setup lists?!

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erikpukinskis 16y ago

Cachey-cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BEkQRiUb2hgJ:rachelbaker.me/facebook-big-boring/+http://rachelbaker.me/facebook-big-boring/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BEkQRiU...

rachelbaker 16y ago
Site should be back up in a few minutes.

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9999 16y ago
Facebook initially had many important distinctions from Myspace--exclusivity, better privacy control, and no potential for flashing neon design abortions. The first two are gone now, so I think you're pretty much right. I do wonder if it will be replaced by another actual social network or if social networking features will be turned into a basic protocol that can be shared and distributed from any number of unrelated non-commercial servers or services.
- TillE 16y ago
  > exclusivity It was exactly this that made Facebook great for college kids and drove its initial growth. Facebook was once a quasi-private space, and that was all kinds of fun. Sort of a unique online social experience (and not in the buzzword sense of "social") that was available for a couple years. Now it's just another AOL.

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osamet67 16y ago

Facebook taught the world what's social networking - now it's time for interest groups and niche SNs. It's just natural progression.

joebadmo 16y ago

So, what does the future look like? Will everyone abandon Facebook en masse, just like they did AOL and Myspace? Or did Facebook really win? Will Google finally do something interesting in the space? Will any of these open source distributed/federated interoperative social networks catch on? All of them? I sort of hope for a combination the last two. It doesn't look like any of the big players have an incentive to open up and become interoperable, and it doesn't look like any of the new open/distributed upstarts are getting any sort of real traction. Google's the only big player that has a history of demonstrating a willingness to push open/distributed/interoperable data because an open web is a crawlable web is an advertisable web. Once the social networking/identity thing is more open and distributed, I imagine networks like Facebook becoming more like a place to go to hang out with certain people and share certain things, with various other places for different contexts and different appropriate activities, and different degrees of privacy, but all working from a single, centralized identity.

farlington 16y ago
What's the advantage of open information in the context of social applications? Excluding of course social networks built on mutual interest, like twitter or quora. With real-world friends, family, contacts, etc., the closed nature of facebook is what makes it attractive to me. And I think that's true for most users. It's probably why there's massive outrage every time they relax their privacy defaults. Maybe data portability? But data on facebook is portable enough, and even if it weren't, what are you going to import it in? Some hypothetical future rival social network? I imagine for a majority of users, simply viewing a friend's profile to remember an email address, phone number, etc, is enough.
- joebadmo 16y ago
  I think privacy is actually a good reason for strong data portability. If users can easily leave your service for another, you have a strong incentive not to violate their privacy expectations. To extrapolate that point out: strong data portability and interoperability encourage a competitive environment. I think you're conflating "closed" with "private." An open social networking environment can still harbor private (I would argue more private) sharing contexts.

gammarator 16y ago

"A trend I have noticed among my friends is the decreasing number of status updates posted to Facebook. Just six months ago my news feed would have been filled with the daily dribblings of my friends. Now there are less than a handful of status updates in my newsfeed, often from the same 5 people." I wonder if this was an algorithmic change by Facebook in their "Top News" section. I noticed an extremely sharp decline in the number of new stories I see when I log in, starting a couple of months ago. There's plenty in "Most Recent," however, so it's just getting filtered out. For me personally, it's made Facebook seem much less interesting and decreased my usage. I'm sure they're watching the numbers, though...

rachelbaker 16y ago
I am aware of the Top News vs. Most Recent - and I still see a general interaction decline. The number of brands friends are liking has gone up, but their actual person to person interactions have gone down.
- gammarator 16y ago
  It's plausible that the two are related. The fewer real interactions people have on the site, the less they'll be active. Automated content fills its space, and soon there's little social engagement.
  - sili 16y ago
    And than your wall is filled with useless spammy content.
- whatusername 16y ago
  Are you also aware of the "Friends and pages you interact with the most" vs "All of your friends and pages" distinction?
Tycho 16y ago
Most people are shy in front of big audiences... this remains true on Facebook as people accumulate ever larger friend-lists. Of course, they're probably all just as addicted as ever. I'm a 'light' FB user, I've only posted one pic, only been tagged in one, post a status update about once a month, comment about once a week, never sent someone a friend-request, only have 60 or so friends, and even I check the thing 2 or 3 times per day.

Vmabuza 16y ago

Couldnt see the article the site is down.Nevertheless i think Facebook has become more about ''Likes and Comments Hunting'' and photo Viewing and sooner or later we will get tired of this.There will come a time where being on facebook is such a lame thing to do and is as shame as being caught by your friends viewing Adultfinder.

rachelbaker 16y ago
I am sorry the site was down. I agree, soon being on Facebook will be equal to still being on Friendster

amitraman1 16y ago

Facebook is not boring but I do think the Fan pages have way too many updates. They get in the way of updates from my friends.

lurker19 16y ago
Monetization will always interfere with user experience in a system whose value is amplified by network effects.

sobbybutter 16y ago

I think what made facebook appealing in the beginning was the "post an update, get an immediate reaction" phenomenon. The number of posts was small enough and the number of friendly eyes high enough that the probability of even the smallest discourse was high. Add to that the fact that one's list of "friends" starts relatively small and encompasses a higher ratio of people who are actual friends. Over time, one's list of "friends" expands to the point where a user's feed is comprised of non-relevant information. For me at least, it lessens the desire to contribute content knowing that that content will be diluted in the huge sea of updates. The same holds true for reading my news feed; I don't want to comb through lots of posts to find a few that are interesting. Note: I write this post from my own experience as a college student. It may very well be different from how others use facebook.

BrandonM 16y ago

The article makes some very good points, but I would love to make a copy-editing pass over it.

wh-uws 16y ago

I was visiting some friends at a major US university last weekend, a few who are a Djs and party promoters when they said something that struck me. "The freshman aren't really using facebook [to find parties] anymore." We went on to talk about how there was a very low signal to noise ratio on it nowadays with too many promoters sending to many unwanted messages and how having family on it has changed things as well. Apprently they're moving more to twitter and tumblr to a certain extent this does not bode well for facebook Also I think it was a big mistake to take status updates from the center of the header on profile pages. It let you broadcast more about how you are at a moment vs who in general

rachelbaker 16y ago
Agreed. It was the status updates (and pictures to a lesser degree) that made Facebook interactive.
deepu_256 16y ago
So they are ok with making their tweets and posts on tumblr being exposed to public but they are not ok with their parents being on facebook ??
- notahacker 16y ago
  Difference is that Twitter accounts are pseudonymous and deniable, and your parents probably don't know what Tumblr is... That said, it first became obvious how big Facebook would become when they calmly ignored the protests of those who didn't want to be connected with their younger siblings at high school and thought newsfeeds were intrusive.
  - dhs 16y ago
    I can assure you that at least some parents do know what Tumblr is.
akkartik 16y ago
I find myself nodding along with you, then unable to reconcile myself with the reality: that facebook is a high-growth company, and it's unlikely to become the next AOL for another decade. Perhaps the answer is raganwald's comment below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2397934 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2397934): people find use in it, it's just not the same use we found.

dsplittgerber 16y ago

Back in the times of Geocities, everyone's site was unique(ly ugly). Today, everyone's facebook page looks exactly the same. Geez, and you wonder why rate-of-use will probably decline over time? Facebook et al. will not be the end of connecting with people online. Now that everyone's been pressed into a one-size-fits-all and the lowest common denominator has been found (satisfying your curiosity what your hs buddies are up to, who got fatter last year etc.), the game will start anew for the new shiny thing - connecting people while at the same time bringing out their best sides.

kariatx 16y ago

I can't help but wonder if the "Hide" button has sucked all the meaningful engagement out of Facebook. I don't know about anyone else, but I have about 80% of my "friends" hidden. Over the past year, Facebook has pretty much become a ghost town for me compared to a few years ago.

alextp 16y ago
I'm in the same situation, but unhiding friends to recover sense is just not practical, with all the app-spam going around facebook these days. I might be the only one in here who can't stand viral-app-spam, but in my social circle there's a sharp division between people who can and who can't stand it, and I think this is in part responsible to the huge drop in interaction in facebook.

lazylland 16y ago

There are so many updates that I miss from people I care about, and chance upon them much later ! * There doesn't seem to be a way to explicity follow all the updates of a person * If I manage to get my friends into a group, their updates still don't show up in the group * The current News Feed algorithm is weighed a little too tightly to the people I interact with often Hmm .. maybe I should try writing a client with these features ;)

Legion 16y ago

"Big and boring"... I thought this was going to be another one of those posts about writing "boring" code instead of being excessively clever, as boring is well tested and boring is easily maintained. Instead, it's another "I don't like using Facebook" post. Joy.

jonmc12 16y ago

I've run into many stats lately on women's use of facebook: 1. "Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, has talked about how women are not only the majority of its users, but drive 62% of activity in terms of messages, updates and comments, and 71% of the daily fan activity." 2. "Women aged 35-54 are the most active group in mobile socialization" 3. "Most women — 83% of respondents in this survey — are annoyed at one time or another by the posts from their Facebook connections." [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/why-women-rule-the-internet/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/why-women-rule-the-internet... [2] http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/mobile-by-the-numbers-infogrpahic/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/mobile-by-the-numbers-infogrp... [3] http://mashable.com/2011/03/30/women-facebook-survey/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/30/women-facebook-survey/ So, I started talking to the women in my life about facebook. And I have a speculative theory - sorry that this is a theory based on gender and its kind of vague.. but facebook makes so much more sense to me when I look at it this way, and I find it an interesting discussion. Basically, you have mother types and you have single women types. Single women are the early adopter social photo sharers - this is fun for them, and it strengthens reputation and attracts men. Meanwhile, mothers are off doing what they do - strengthening their family and social relationships through chat, gossip, hobbies, etc - it forms a safety net for their family. Then there are men. Single men chase the single women. This forms a crowd. This crowd attracts married men / fathers and mothers alike (including people like me who are standing around saying 'wtf?'). Further, the crowd attracts social capitalists who leverage the crowd's attention to promote themselves, their business or their cause. But, the average single female may have 2-7 years of her status as a single woman. Whereas the average mother will have her role for 18yrs+. So, you end up with this crowd mass, in the center is hookup activity. However, the majority of the crowd becomes family-centric and cause-centric security nets. And yea, when you look at this from a distance, its big and boring.

josefresco 16y ago
Masses of single-folks 'hooking up' on Facebook is equally if not more boring close-up and from afar than masses of family-centric people. It's better to say "Masses are boring". Just read the comments at CNN.com or YouTube which mostly read like meaningless chatter.

kin 16y ago

With 600 million users you can't just generalize a noticeable trend in your personal account to reflect that of others. If anything, my Facebook feed has been more active than ever. View a friend's profile and FB will know you show interest in that person, putting that person's stream on a higher rank to show up on your feed. The feed becomes more relevant the more you use it I suppose. There may be a lot of small talk on Facebook, but for me that normally leads to longer discussions in person.

tokenadult 16y ago

I read the fine blog post submitted here (by the author of the blog post). I then posted the link to my Facebook profile, with the question "Does Facebook bore you?" Then I read the comments here on HN. In just that short span of time, three of my friends replied to my question, saying, 1) "Not with friends like mine!" 2) no 3) "Not yet." I find Facebook interesting, because I take care to put interesting people on my friends list. (I have removed one person from my friends list for only participating in online games with total strangers and never interacting with anyone he actually knows in real life. I have blocked three other persons from my home page feed, but still allow them to comment on things I post, for similar overuse of online games.) To comment on some of the issues brought up in the interesting comments here, one good use case on Facebook is a group of friends with a defined commonality forming a "private group." (Again, I try to Google up the page on Facebook's help about creating private groups, and again Facebook has an epic fail of making that link prominent. But here it is, https://www.facebook.com/groups https://www.facebook.com/groups found after I drilled into Facebook's Help Center a bit. The Help Center page about groups features https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=414 https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=414 is perhaps even more helpful.) I have a THRIVING private group including a whole bunch of friends who are currently or were formerly subscribers to the national email list of a membership organization we have all been part of. The official email lists of the organization have gone increasingly quiet, as everyone moves over to Facebook, where the atmosphere is at once more fun (more light-hearted topics) and more serious (gut-wrenching intimate topics that are easier to share to a specific group of friends than to all subscribers to an email list). Facebook is also working very well in reconnecting me with old classmates whom I have not seen in more than thirty years but whom I look forward to seeing in a massive multi-class reunions this summer that has mostly been organized on Facebook. That has been very enjoyable. I have to agree that it's a bit odd that status updates are no longer prominent even on people's own profiles, but I think Facebook has figured out by analysis of user behavior that most Facebook readers are even more interested in links (my favorite thing to post, which brings me a big readership on Facebook and elicits many fun discussions) or photos (some of some of my friends' favorite things to post). P.S. I have to agree with the comments below that if you want to post on a site without a "house style," Geocities used to have that market covered, and MySpace still does. It does improve usability of Facebook that some of the basic page design decisions are made by a small group of evidently professional designers rather than by the whole population of Facebook users. Profiles pages show individuality by the actual content posted by each Facebook user, and that is good enough for me. P.P.S. By the time I finished typing this, two more friends had replied to my question: 4) "I agree - with the right friends, how could it be boring?" 5) "I believe it was Samuel Johnson who said, "When a man is tired of Facebook, he is tired of life."

jcfrei 16y ago

I'm sure one amongst us will come up with something that brings down fb. no single company will ever be able to grasp the whole social experience.

aridiculous 16y ago

This thread is making me reflect on my 7-8 years of using Facebook. To be honest, I'm surprised I'm still on it, but I am. It's the best way for me to send media bits to people I like. It's easier than email for me. However, I'm a sharer, and many people I know aren't. I don't really have a clue why they're on Facebook then (if they are). It does seem kind of dry. In college, it was awesome because it was a community setting where you could find out about acquaintances (i.e. stalking) in a trusted network setting. It was OPEN within a CLOSED off system. I could see that still being the case to a certain degree in some social groups or large companies. But the stripping down, deemphasis and normalization of the profile, turning it from a 'face book' into a social news tool was the inflection point for me. Facebook was great when you could surf people, not news. The funny thing is, Facebook was catalyzed tremendously by their decision to go into social news (i.e. news posted by people you know), and it'd be weird to see it causing their downfall (like a huge investment that looks great at first). I doubt that's going to be the case, as the social graph infiltrates through the internet and 'like' buttons show up on every e-commerce site in innovative ways. I don't think Facebook truly has much to worry about as they're basically becoming the ID gatekeeper to the internet. I just don't think social news is something particularly interesting, and I'd like to see them deemphasize that part of their business. I think they should focus on making the news feed less of a potpourri of news (Twitter, HN, microforums, NY times, CNN, and so on own that already) and try to innovate ways to emphasize microcommunities on Facebook. The groups feature was an attempt, but didn't really strike gold. I'd like to see them try out more things like that. I could be way off. I suspect Facebook is just losing touch with nerdy people who are more interested in things, not people. It's probably doing well with people who generally like smalltalk.

amanuel 16y ago

This has happened to every social network that has come before and it will happen again. Facebook like its predecessors Myspace, Friendster et al., is not the destination but rather the current milestone in the evolution of the Internet, the real Social Network.

alexsb92 16y ago

I think the biggest fallacy of all of these articles is that people don't seem to give any thought to the fact that they only see updates from a handful of people. The reason why that is, is because FB has algorithms to figure out who you are talking to most of the time, and basically only shows updates form people who you talk to, or people whose profile you have visited. I deduced this by myself over a year ago, and recently I was watching some interviews with Sean Parker and he was actually talking about this. So it's just like in real life, the way you have good friends with whom you talk a lot, and just friends you talk to every once in a while, FB does the same thing.

bostonvaulter2 16y ago

It would be really cool if Facebook was able to suggest groupings for your friends. They probably have enough data to do a half-decent job of it. Also, they should make some sort of more visual method to sort people into lists. Maybe like a venn-diagram.

orph 16y ago

Are you kidding me? Facebook just contributed to toppling a dictatorship in Egypt. We are still seeing the rippling effects that this form of social interaction brings to people's lives. I don't think that's boring at all.

jacoblyles 16y ago

I have too many friends on Facebook because it is impolite to refuse a friend request. Now I don't feel comfortable sharing things with the wide network of "friends" that I have there.