5 ms·

Facebook will sink under the weight of socially obligated "friendships" (2007)

20 points by _pius 16y ago

chrmaury 16y ago
Was this re-posted to say that they were prescient? or that they were dead wrong? Isn't this the driving force behind everyone trying to innovate in the social space? Providing segmented social groups that down have the implied obligations of "friendship." Isn't this the impetus for why we spend all of our time on HN and Reddit?
- kreek 16y ago
  I spend more time on HN than Facebook because I prefer to pull to push.
  - bstriddy 16y ago
    I heard shoving is worse than pushing, but I'd rather know a shover than a pusher 'cause a pusher's a jerk.
    - mdemare 16y ago
      No puns, please, we're Serious People.
  - tokenadult 16y ago
    I spend more time on Facebook than on HN because Facebook's topic restrictions (implicit in what my friends choose to discuss and recommend as links) are very nearly exactly the union of all of my various interests, being defined solely by my friends' interests. I still "pull" links or messages from what Facebook displays to me, just as I don't open absolutely every thread here on HN. I like HN a lot, and appreciate its openness in principle to the whole world combined with its high aspirations for community and civility, but Facebook feeds me links and thus interesting conversations that I would never see on HN. After edit, having seen first reply: Yes, I am quite intentional about building a network of smart friends who have worthwhile things to say (not screened in any way by native language, country of origin, religious opinions, political opinions, or occupation). One of the delights of middle age is accumulating a group of interesting friends. (And that brings me here to HN.) As I noted another time Facebook's level of interest came up here on HN, once when I asked "Does Facebook bore you?" (in response to a front-page post here on HN), one friend replied, "I believe it was Samuel Johnson who said, 'When a man is tired of Facebook, he is tired of life.'" That kind of literary allusion in a humorous comment is routine among my friends, and one of the reasons I like spending a lot of time on Facebook. And after further edit, I'd be delighted to hear from other readers here why they think Facebook could or could not do the same for them. Meanwhile, I will ask my Facebook friends, having posted the original link that was referred to in this submission here on HN, http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573 http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=... what they think of the predicted problem. (And the first reply was, "I guess I'm just not avoiding that many people... it hasn't been a problem.")
    - chrmaury 16y ago
      You are a lucky, lucky person if your facebook feed is has that high a signal to noise ratio. Mine, and I think a lot of other people's is all drivel, and that's after taking the time to block people who I don't care to see.
    - chrmaury 16y ago
      You are extremely fortunate. I started using Facebook in College, when it was just for college students, and the use case was COMPLETELY different than I would want to use it now. Now, I'm constantly searching to find an online equivalent of the high-level conversation which I get in the real world (similar to your humour literary allusions). I'm much more protective of my real-world social connections.
    - Chocobean 16y ago
      a definite disadvantage of being non-middle aged is that my friends do not parody Dr. Johnson, they post pictures of their last meals with their boyfriends. HN is one of the means through which I escape the constraints of my real life social circles.
  - chrmaury 16y ago
    How would you classify commenting in HN? It's not pulling, because you are creating content. But its not shoving either, cuz the only people who would take the time to read it are people who are at least moderately interested.
barista 16y ago
Facebook hasn't sunk really but this is certainly their achille's heel. What FB badly needs is a concept of social circles or a better implemented groups and an intelligent way to restrict shared stuff from being more public than it needs to be. The author just overestimated the impact of the issue but the issues still exists and is very real.
- nopal 16y ago
  I recently created a list of friends that is a subset of my friends and changed the default level of sharing on everything I post to only be accessible by this list. This basically creates a sub-Facebook in which my close friends and I operate. I still see stuff come in from other people in my main friends list, but they don't see anything I do (unless I explicitly post on someone else's public item). It's working out very nicely.
  - theli0nheart 16y ago
    The problem is that lists don't work both ways. People in cliques are generally aware of who is in the clique and who is not. Friend lists are one-sided; only one person (you) knows who is in the list and who is not. There are no checks in place to ensure that interaction in one group doesn't spill over into another group. In real life, when you hang out with a group of people, everyone else is aware of who you are hanging out with at that moment. Facebook shows this information only to the poster. I am uncomfortable posting a comment on a friend's update that would be embarrassing depending on who else could see it. In a group of friends hanging out this would never be an issue. I suppose there is some asymmetry in real-life social networks, but nothing on the level which Facebook encourages.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - Florin_Andrei 16y ago
      Right, so basically they need to create "rooms" on Facebook. Just like real life.
budu3 16y ago
Facebook needs a way for you to form groups of friends that mimic real life social groupings so that you can share info with the appropriate group(s) with the added complexity of this being done with as less effort from the user as possible. I don't think their current implementation of friend lists is working.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  Facebook needs a way for you to form groups of friends that mimic real life social groupings I have been using such a feature for months now. It is called Facebook private groups, https://www.facebook.com/groups https://www.facebook.com/groups and I have told fellow HNers about this feature before. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319788 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319788 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398397 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398397 To expand on what I wrote last time, one good use case on Facebook is a group of friends with a defined commonality forming a "private group." 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 than the main Facebook page introducing the concept of private groups. 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). I have had good success restricting status messages, links, and the like to subsets of my friends (friend lists) and even better success having many interesting conversations on the most active of the Facebook private groups that I am on. To me, the currently most frustrating aspect of the Facebook user interface is the hard limit of twenty recipients on a private message. Raising that to about thirty would fit my use cases a lot better some of the time. But so far Facebook's adaptations have worked well for me to keep up with a very diverse group of friends, relatives, co-workers, and former classmates met in two different countries on two continents.
- samtp 16y ago
  Sounds like the concept behind Color (the one with all the money)
jfr 16y ago
The boingboing article is just a link and excerpt for the actual article on InformationWeek. You could have linked directly: http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573 http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=...
kariatx 16y ago
I don't know if this is specific to where I live (Austin), but the most interesting people I've been meeting lately have very little to no Facebook presence. Everyone is on Twitter though. Facebook has turned into the place I avoid my crazy family and embarrassing childhood friends, while Twitter still is decent for finding and building new friendships.
- crikli 16y ago
  Yup. Facebook is people I used to know, Twitter is people I'd like to.
jcnnghm 16y ago
I stopped using Facebook a while ago for this reason. Family, personal, and professional are better off separate. Incidentally, at every family event I go to now I'm asked if my sister is a lesbian because "she is in a relationship with a girl on facebook, she must be a lesbian". My dad got several calls from relatives asking. Bottom line is I dont want status updates from many people. And if I do, I want it to be so important that they'll call and tell me.
- dctoedt 16y ago
  > Bottom line is I dont want status updates from many people. Just hide the ones you don't want. I've got several hundred FB friends but only see updates from a couple of dozen at most.
  - anonymous246 16y ago
    Why do you have the others as friends?
    - dctoedt 16y ago
      > Why do you have the others as friends? I know a lot of people. I generally don't turn down friend requests from people I know, but then I don't necessarily have their updates in my FB stream. And I've set up a couple of family- and work-related lists, and will sometimes post only to one or another list.
warmfuzzykitten 16y ago
Nonsense. As @1adam12 said, just say no. And when you're no longer socially obligated, unfriend them.
MikeHo 16y ago
Ive noticed as my friends list grew from 100 to over 1000 over the years.. I update my status less and less specially the more personal they are.. as my facebook friends list consist of acquaintances and friends of all backgrounds -- Facebook for me now has just become a social rolodex, a collection of people I've met over the years. Could I post about something funny that happens at a bar on a friday night out on town? Sure! Do I think twice? Yeah, how would colleagues view it / business acquaintances (as I tend to view everyone as a "friend" no matter how long I've known them for) Something exclusive for just my grad class or those in my immediate or near immediate (weekend friends / friends to go on trips with) would be nice in a simplified, less feature filled site service.

20 points by _pius 16y ago

Was this re-posted to say that they were prescient? or that they were dead wrong? Isn't this the driving force behind everyone trying to innovate in the social space? Providing segmented social groups that down have the implied obligations of "friendship." Isn't this the impetus for why we spend all of our time on HN and Reddit?

kreek 16y ago
I spend more time on HN than Facebook because I prefer to pull to push.
- bstriddy 16y ago
  I heard shoving is worse than pushing, but I'd rather know a shover than a pusher 'cause a pusher's a jerk.
  - mdemare 16y ago
    No puns, please, we're Serious People.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  I spend more time on Facebook than on HN because Facebook's topic restrictions (implicit in what my friends choose to discuss and recommend as links) are very nearly exactly the union of all of my various interests, being defined solely by my friends' interests. I still "pull" links or messages from what Facebook displays to me, just as I don't open absolutely every thread here on HN. I like HN a lot, and appreciate its openness in principle to the whole world combined with its high aspirations for community and civility, but Facebook feeds me links and thus interesting conversations that I would never see on HN. After edit, having seen first reply: Yes, I am quite intentional about building a network of smart friends who have worthwhile things to say (not screened in any way by native language, country of origin, religious opinions, political opinions, or occupation). One of the delights of middle age is accumulating a group of interesting friends. (And that brings me here to HN.) As I noted another time Facebook's level of interest came up here on HN, once when I asked "Does Facebook bore you?" (in response to a front-page post here on HN), one friend replied, "I believe it was Samuel Johnson who said, 'When a man is tired of Facebook, he is tired of life.'" That kind of literary allusion in a humorous comment is routine among my friends, and one of the reasons I like spending a lot of time on Facebook. And after further edit, I'd be delighted to hear from other readers here why they think Facebook could or could not do the same for them. Meanwhile, I will ask my Facebook friends, having posted the original link that was referred to in this submission here on HN, http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573 http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=... what they think of the predicted problem. (And the first reply was, "I guess I'm just not avoiding that many people... it hasn't been a problem.")
  - chrmaury 16y ago
    You are a lucky, lucky person if your facebook feed is has that high a signal to noise ratio. Mine, and I think a lot of other people's is all drivel, and that's after taking the time to block people who I don't care to see.
  - chrmaury 16y ago
    You are extremely fortunate. I started using Facebook in College, when it was just for college students, and the use case was COMPLETELY different than I would want to use it now. Now, I'm constantly searching to find an online equivalent of the high-level conversation which I get in the real world (similar to your humour literary allusions). I'm much more protective of my real-world social connections.
  - Chocobean 16y ago
    a definite disadvantage of being non-middle aged is that my friends do not parody Dr. Johnson, they post pictures of their last meals with their boyfriends. HN is one of the means through which I escape the constraints of my real life social circles.
- chrmaury 16y ago
  How would you classify commenting in HN? It's not pulling, because you are creating content. But its not shoving either, cuz the only people who would take the time to read it are people who are at least moderately interested.

barista 16y ago

Facebook hasn't sunk really but this is certainly their achille's heel. What FB badly needs is a concept of social circles or a better implemented groups and an intelligent way to restrict shared stuff from being more public than it needs to be. The author just overestimated the impact of the issue but the issues still exists and is very real.

nopal 16y ago
I recently created a list of friends that is a subset of my friends and changed the default level of sharing on everything I post to only be accessible by this list. This basically creates a sub-Facebook in which my close friends and I operate. I still see stuff come in from other people in my main friends list, but they don't see anything I do (unless I explicitly post on someone else's public item). It's working out very nicely.
- theli0nheart 16y ago
  The problem is that lists don't work both ways. People in cliques are generally aware of who is in the clique and who is not. Friend lists are one-sided; only one person (you) knows who is in the list and who is not. There are no checks in place to ensure that interaction in one group doesn't spill over into another group. In real life, when you hang out with a group of people, everyone else is aware of who you are hanging out with at that moment. Facebook shows this information only to the poster. I am uncomfortable posting a comment on a friend's update that would be embarrassing depending on who else could see it. In a group of friends hanging out this would never be an issue. I suppose there is some asymmetry in real-life social networks, but nothing on the level which Facebook encourages.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - Florin_Andrei 16y ago
    Right, so basically they need to create "rooms" on Facebook. Just like real life.

budu3 16y ago

Facebook needs a way for you to form groups of friends that mimic real life social groupings so that you can share info with the appropriate group(s) with the added complexity of this being done with as less effort from the user as possible. I don't think their current implementation of friend lists is working.

tokenadult 16y ago
Facebook needs a way for you to form groups of friends that mimic real life social groupings I have been using such a feature for months now. It is called Facebook private groups, https://www.facebook.com/groups https://www.facebook.com/groups and I have told fellow HNers about this feature before. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319788 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319788 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398397 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398397 To expand on what I wrote last time, one good use case on Facebook is a group of friends with a defined commonality forming a "private group." 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 than the main Facebook page introducing the concept of private groups. 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). I have had good success restricting status messages, links, and the like to subsets of my friends (friend lists) and even better success having many interesting conversations on the most active of the Facebook private groups that I am on. To me, the currently most frustrating aspect of the Facebook user interface is the hard limit of twenty recipients on a private message. Raising that to about thirty would fit my use cases a lot better some of the time. But so far Facebook's adaptations have worked well for me to keep up with a very diverse group of friends, relatives, co-workers, and former classmates met in two different countries on two continents.
samtp 16y ago
Sounds like the concept behind Color (the one with all the money)

jfr 16y ago

The boingboing article is just a link and excerpt for the actual article on InformationWeek. You could have linked directly: http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573 http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=...

kariatx 16y ago

I don't know if this is specific to where I live (Austin), but the most interesting people I've been meeting lately have very little to no Facebook presence. Everyone is on Twitter though. Facebook has turned into the place I avoid my crazy family and embarrassing childhood friends, while Twitter still is decent for finding and building new friendships.

crikli 16y ago
Yup. Facebook is people I used to know, Twitter is people I'd like to.

jcnnghm 16y ago

I stopped using Facebook a while ago for this reason. Family, personal, and professional are better off separate. Incidentally, at every family event I go to now I'm asked if my sister is a lesbian because "she is in a relationship with a girl on facebook, she must be a lesbian". My dad got several calls from relatives asking. Bottom line is I dont want status updates from many people. And if I do, I want it to be so important that they'll call and tell me.

dctoedt 16y ago
> Bottom line is I dont want status updates from many people. Just hide the ones you don't want. I've got several hundred FB friends but only see updates from a couple of dozen at most.
- anonymous246 16y ago
  Why do you have the others as friends?
  - dctoedt 16y ago
    > Why do you have the others as friends? I know a lot of people. I generally don't turn down friend requests from people I know, but then I don't necessarily have their updates in my FB stream. And I've set up a couple of family- and work-related lists, and will sometimes post only to one or another list.

warmfuzzykitten 16y ago

Nonsense. As @1adam12 said, just say no. And when you're no longer socially obligated, unfriend them.

MikeHo 16y ago

Ive noticed as my friends list grew from 100 to over 1000 over the years.. I update my status less and less specially the more personal they are.. as my facebook friends list consist of acquaintances and friends of all backgrounds -- Facebook for me now has just become a social rolodex, a collection of people I've met over the years. Could I post about something funny that happens at a bar on a friday night out on town? Sure! Do I think twice? Yeah, how would colleagues view it / business acquaintances (as I tend to view everyone as a "friend" no matter how long I've known them for) Something exclusive for just my grad class or those in my immediate or near immediate (weekend friends / friends to go on trips with) would be nice in a simplified, less feature filled site service.