6 ms·

The end of social

177 points by tortilla 15y ago

jcr 15y ago
Two relevant papers (a few links away from the oreilly.com article) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1826825 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1826825 http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DAED_a_00114 http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DAED_a_00114
kmfrk 15y ago
For those interested, a tangentially related article, "Faux Friendship"[1] by Willian Deresiewicz, is one of my all-time-favourite online articles, which I urge everyone to read. It's long, but worth it. [1]: http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/ http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/
- chunky1994 15y ago
  This article is spot on! Brilliant stuff! Thank you!
- x3c 15y ago
  Thanks for the link. This type of high quality content and opinion sharing is why I love HN.
moocow01 15y ago
I couldn't agree with this article more. Due to the awkwardness around not accepting a friend invite, my Facebook consists of just about everyone I've ever known in my life. It is convenient to have an easy channel to track someone down if you need to talk to them but the wall has become completely unusable to me. The combination of 1) having too many people that I don't have real relationships with on Facebook 2) many of my friends' postings of very low value things (ex. I'm eating an apple right now) 3) the increased usage of auto-updates (ex. I'm listening to 'Rihanna'), Facebook has turned into a wasteland of posts where about 1 / 500 updates are actually useful to me and finding that 1 is no longer worth it. I know the natural response to this is that I should be organizing my friends better but I'm not sure that this is a solution, because I have certain friends that will post 'low value' updates and then post something very 'high value' (value meaning somehow interesting to me). So the first problem for Facebook is trying to figure out how to cherry pick the good posts to show me and this in itself is incredibly difficult. But the problem gets exponentially harder as I add more friends (which will continue to happen to avoid awkward moments in the real world) assuming that I only have time to read X number of updates. In other words if on average every friend has 1 / 100 high value updates, the chance of Facebook getting it right and getting that high value update into the 100 updates I read every day gets lower as I add more friends and there is more noise to filter. It seems to me that there may be a bell curve to the usefulness of Facebook based on your friend count - in the beginning it is marginally useful when you only have a few friends, it becomes very useful when you have some magical conservative number of friends and then it becomes again marginally useful as your friend count gets very high. The problem is that keeping your friend count at that magical number and not progressing past that is very difficult.
frossie 15y ago
Good piece. It is not far off from the things people like danah boyd have been saying. The exchange of personal information is a unit of social currency. If you treat it like it has no value, then it becomes of no value. Editorial effort, on the other hand, both adds value and also signals value.
lhnn 15y ago
Writing a letter, is much more personal than sending email or texting. It means you've taken time out of your day to sit down, plan out your thoughts, put them in a package and pay to have it shipped to someone personally. Or how a cheap, thoughtful gift means more than a $100 bill at Christmas. It's the effort, the thought, that really counts.
nextparadigms 15y ago
He actually means the "end of Facebook". There will be other social services to take its place, just like Facebook took the place of Myspace. Those services probably already exist, just like Facebook existed years before Myspace even started to lose users.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
cageface 15y ago
Increasingly I see the most important role online to be that of the editor. I already have far too much information to deal with. The one service I'm willing to pay real money for at this point is the one that finds only the very most interesting bits for me. So far this role has really only been served for me by a handful of genuine friends.
- freshlog 15y ago
  I agree, nothing beats content that have been deliberately selected just for you and friends, who know you personally, are best positioned to do just that. How have you been getting content from your friends? I'd love to hear about that from you. On a related note, I thought I'd just share that I built this app called Handpick, which helps you be selective about what you share with whom you share: http://handpick.me http://handpick.me Let me know if you might find this useful, I can send out invites. - Alvin
  - cageface 15y ago
    I still rely on good old-fashioned email. I try to exercise enough restraint in what I send out that I don't saturate my friends' attention. I used to run a private email list of about 20 people but haven't had the time to curate it lately. I'll try your beta if you have room.
    - freshlog 15y ago
      Sure, email me at al@alvinlai.com or just enter your email on the front page of http://handpick.me http://handpick.me and I'll send you an invite. - Alvin
- acabal 15y ago
  That's precisely why while everyone is predicting the death of traditional publishing houses, I predict that they'll continue to flourish (though in a slightly transformed state) even with ebooks supposedly leveling the playing field. In an era where everyone and their grandma can sell their ebook on Amazon, you need a respected publisher (or "editor" as you put it) to sort through the coal and present you only with the gems. This is a role that traditional publishers actively do today!
jcromartie 15y ago
I'd like to see the end of the use of the word "social" as an uncountable noun.
hansef 15y ago
Social streaming creates white noise, while curated social sharing provides meaning. Having the devices in a hundred friends' pockets passively alert their social profile that they ate at a burger joint is meaningless. Having my friend tweet a photo of the mouthwatering burger she ate at the Umami Burger in my neighborhood at least provides some level of ambient value. I listen to a lot of new music. My Spotify account is linked to Facebook. Seeing an automatically posted list of the last 70 songs I listened to might be interesting to a stalker, but having me specifically post "Bah, the new Weeknd mixtape isn't nearly as good as House of Balloons" actually tells you something about my taste.
twmb 15y ago
This has been posted by andygeers 5 days ago. /item?id=3315065 It's currently on page 7 of the top.
jderick 15y ago
I'm going to disagree here. One important distinction with automated sharing is that it is being displayed in a sidebar, outside the main feed. It isn't just adding spam. It is allowing you to dive deeper, see some details that maybe your friends wouldn't have thought to share with you but maybe you would have been interested to know anyway. If you are in a hurry and just want the big events of the day you won't read it. But if you are just relaxing with nothing to do or feel like reading something a little different maybe you will learn something new about one of your friends. In the same way that facebook let people 'send emails' that didn't have to be read, these sidebar updates allow you to 'post statuses' that don't have to be looked at. It is adding a new priority level to communication. Kind of like the background music in a coffeeshop, you wouldn't say you go there just for the music, but you definitely appreciate the ambiance and the music is something that adds up to make that experience.
- Qz 15y ago
  It is adding a new priority level to communication. The 'this doesn't matter' priority?
- karpathy 15y ago
  Super agreed and also I feel like this is one aspect that nobody gets right so far. Some updates are very important. Some are interesting. Some are boring on scope of things, but can still be interesting at the moment. Communication between people is tiered in importance, and this is the first step in acknowledging that. I think the ticker is a genius idea.
- natrius 15y ago
  On top of that, Facebook tries to surface interesting aspects of the passively shared information. If multiple friends read the same article, Facebook will tell me. If someone visits my profile, they can see what music I've been listening to for the past month. There is a such thing as having too much shared information to deal with, but Facebook filters it and presents it in a way that I find useful.
10011110 15y ago
I sometimes feel like a vast nummber of people have been "duped" into believing listing their information on the open internet is somehow beneficial to them. They believe they should do it and that it will benefit them. A prime example is LinkedIn. Or Facebook. Or now G+. I believe if many people knew who was really going to benefit by having personal information listed on the open internet, and how those benefitting go about doing that (analysing the info in bulk and selling it off to advertisers and the like), I wonder if many people would really think twice about listing themselves with these "services". The way this information is handled by these websites and the people who scrape them is anything but "social". Being "social" is about respect for other people, including their privacy. I'm curious if anyone else feels this way.
tewolde 15y ago
I agree, it will definitely be the doom of Facebook or any other social network if it does not let users easily differentiate between sharing and faux-sharing. It will be like an email account that can't filter out spam.
jronkone 15y ago
In other words, automated "now playing" scripts are as annoying and useless on social media as they were on irc and and instant messengers.
guard-of-terra 15y ago
I wonder why people write their opinions on facebook music experience sharing without mentioning that last.fm already solved this problem at least once and the solution was a meaningful product that worked for some people. In this context, reading claims like "a constant pipeline of what's queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless" make me laugh. People figured it out and it wasn't meaningless. If they don't know about last.fm, why do they bother? They obviously don't care about music very much.
- Alexia 15y ago
  The whole point of Last.fm is that you get stats on your listening habits (and those of your friends). The realtime thing is just how the system collects the stats. Besides, even there, my friends' "Now playing" stuff in never bigger than a small icon on the side. It's not the core of the site. Facebook, with Spotify, gives you the useless part (the "Now playing") without the good part (the advanced stats, recommandations, music compatibility, etc)
  - guard-of-terra 15y ago
    That's the fact any seamless sharing reviewer should mention. Others have figured out, the world doesn't end with facebook.
- icebraining 15y ago
  Agreed. A single event can be meaningless, but the aggregation can still have value. Of course, that depends on how the system manages the data, not on the data itself.
weichi 15y ago
Interesting article, and as a forty-year-old who doesn't use facebook, it makes sense to me. But I wonder whether 20 year-olds who have been immersed in this kind of thing for 3-4 years would agree. And what today's 13-year-olds will think then they are 20, and this has been a part of their entire post-childhood..
- Zirro 15y ago
  Well, as a nineteen-year old (quite soon to be 20) I can say that I don't care much for the Facebook ticker (the "share everything" list), nor do my friends seem to. I agree with this article, but I may not represent the "average" Facebook-visitor, considering I barely read my friends updates, create updates of my own or play Facebook-games. (I visit for two groups which I participate actively in) Sharing everything takes the value out of it, and I think most people, 20-year olds or not, would agree. Perhaps that's why I've stopped checking what my friends are saying, my interests are already way too specialised for me to have any interest in what they blast out to everyone.
chadyj 15y ago
I agree that lots of random sharing data can be useless, but I think it is only useless in its current form. There is a great deal of data to be intelligently mined there. For example, I wish Facebook told me aggregate info, like 12 of my friends are reading X book, and 15 listen to Y song, and 5 have liked Z restaurant. To me this is a lot more compelling as I can see real trends in what my social circle is consuming.

177 points by tortilla 15y ago

jcr 15y ago

Two relevant papers (a few links away from the oreilly.com article) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1826825 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1826825 http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DAED_a_00114 http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DAED_a_00114

kmfrk 15y ago

For those interested, a tangentially related article, "Faux Friendship"[1] by Willian Deresiewicz, is one of my all-time-favourite online articles, which I urge everyone to read. It's long, but worth it. [1]: http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/ http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/

chunky1994 15y ago
This article is spot on! Brilliant stuff! Thank you!
x3c 15y ago
Thanks for the link. This type of high quality content and opinion sharing is why I love HN.

moocow01 15y ago

I couldn't agree with this article more. Due to the awkwardness around not accepting a friend invite, my Facebook consists of just about everyone I've ever known in my life. It is convenient to have an easy channel to track someone down if you need to talk to them but the wall has become completely unusable to me. The combination of 1) having too many people that I don't have real relationships with on Facebook 2) many of my friends' postings of very low value things (ex. I'm eating an apple right now) 3) the increased usage of auto-updates (ex. I'm listening to 'Rihanna'), Facebook has turned into a wasteland of posts where about 1 / 500 updates are actually useful to me and finding that 1 is no longer worth it. I know the natural response to this is that I should be organizing my friends better but I'm not sure that this is a solution, because I have certain friends that will post 'low value' updates and then post something very 'high value' (value meaning somehow interesting to me). So the first problem for Facebook is trying to figure out how to cherry pick the good posts to show me and this in itself is incredibly difficult. But the problem gets exponentially harder as I add more friends (which will continue to happen to avoid awkward moments in the real world) assuming that I only have time to read X number of updates. In other words if on average every friend has 1 / 100 high value updates, the chance of Facebook getting it right and getting that high value update into the 100 updates I read every day gets lower as I add more friends and there is more noise to filter. It seems to me that there may be a bell curve to the usefulness of Facebook based on your friend count - in the beginning it is marginally useful when you only have a few friends, it becomes very useful when you have some magical conservative number of friends and then it becomes again marginally useful as your friend count gets very high. The problem is that keeping your friend count at that magical number and not progressing past that is very difficult.

frossie 15y ago

Good piece. It is not far off from the things people like danah boyd have been saying. The exchange of personal information is a unit of social currency. If you treat it like it has no value, then it becomes of no value. Editorial effort, on the other hand, both adds value and also signals value.

lhnn 15y ago

Writing a letter, is much more personal than sending email or texting. It means you've taken time out of your day to sit down, plan out your thoughts, put them in a package and pay to have it shipped to someone personally. Or how a cheap, thoughtful gift means more than a $100 bill at Christmas. It's the effort, the thought, that really counts.

nextparadigms 15y ago

He actually means the "end of Facebook". There will be other social services to take its place, just like Facebook took the place of Myspace. Those services probably already exist, just like Facebook existed years before Myspace even started to lose users.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

cageface 15y ago

Increasingly I see the most important role online to be that of the editor. I already have far too much information to deal with. The one service I'm willing to pay real money for at this point is the one that finds only the very most interesting bits for me. So far this role has really only been served for me by a handful of genuine friends.

freshlog 15y ago
I agree, nothing beats content that have been deliberately selected just for you and friends, who know you personally, are best positioned to do just that. How have you been getting content from your friends? I'd love to hear about that from you. On a related note, I thought I'd just share that I built this app called Handpick, which helps you be selective about what you share with whom you share: http://handpick.me http://handpick.me Let me know if you might find this useful, I can send out invites. - Alvin
- cageface 15y ago
  I still rely on good old-fashioned email. I try to exercise enough restraint in what I send out that I don't saturate my friends' attention. I used to run a private email list of about 20 people but haven't had the time to curate it lately. I'll try your beta if you have room.
  - freshlog 15y ago
    Sure, email me at al@alvinlai.com or just enter your email on the front page of http://handpick.me http://handpick.me and I'll send you an invite. - Alvin
acabal 15y ago
That's precisely why while everyone is predicting the death of traditional publishing houses, I predict that they'll continue to flourish (though in a slightly transformed state) even with ebooks supposedly leveling the playing field. In an era where everyone and their grandma can sell their ebook on Amazon, you need a respected publisher (or "editor" as you put it) to sort through the coal and present you only with the gems. This is a role that traditional publishers actively do today!

jcromartie 15y ago

I'd like to see the end of the use of the word "social" as an uncountable noun.

hansef 15y ago

Social streaming creates white noise, while curated social sharing provides meaning. Having the devices in a hundred friends' pockets passively alert their social profile that they ate at a burger joint is meaningless. Having my friend tweet a photo of the mouthwatering burger she ate at the Umami Burger in my neighborhood at least provides some level of ambient value. I listen to a lot of new music. My Spotify account is linked to Facebook. Seeing an automatically posted list of the last 70 songs I listened to might be interesting to a stalker, but having me specifically post "Bah, the new Weeknd mixtape isn't nearly as good as House of Balloons" actually tells you something about my taste.

twmb 15y ago

This has been posted by andygeers 5 days ago. /item?id=3315065 It's currently on page 7 of the top.

jderick 15y ago

I'm going to disagree here. One important distinction with automated sharing is that it is being displayed in a sidebar, outside the main feed. It isn't just adding spam. It is allowing you to dive deeper, see some details that maybe your friends wouldn't have thought to share with you but maybe you would have been interested to know anyway. If you are in a hurry and just want the big events of the day you won't read it. But if you are just relaxing with nothing to do or feel like reading something a little different maybe you will learn something new about one of your friends. In the same way that facebook let people 'send emails' that didn't have to be read, these sidebar updates allow you to 'post statuses' that don't have to be looked at. It is adding a new priority level to communication. Kind of like the background music in a coffeeshop, you wouldn't say you go there just for the music, but you definitely appreciate the ambiance and the music is something that adds up to make that experience.

Qz 15y ago
It is adding a new priority level to communication. The 'this doesn't matter' priority?
karpathy 15y ago
Super agreed and also I feel like this is one aspect that nobody gets right so far. Some updates are very important. Some are interesting. Some are boring on scope of things, but can still be interesting at the moment. Communication between people is tiered in importance, and this is the first step in acknowledging that. I think the ticker is a genius idea.
natrius 15y ago
On top of that, Facebook tries to surface interesting aspects of the passively shared information. If multiple friends read the same article, Facebook will tell me. If someone visits my profile, they can see what music I've been listening to for the past month. There is a such thing as having too much shared information to deal with, but Facebook filters it and presents it in a way that I find useful.

10011110 15y ago

I sometimes feel like a vast nummber of people have been "duped" into believing listing their information on the open internet is somehow beneficial to them. They believe they should do it and that it will benefit them. A prime example is LinkedIn. Or Facebook. Or now G+. I believe if many people knew who was really going to benefit by having personal information listed on the open internet, and how those benefitting go about doing that (analysing the info in bulk and selling it off to advertisers and the like), I wonder if many people would really think twice about listing themselves with these "services". The way this information is handled by these websites and the people who scrape them is anything but "social". Being "social" is about respect for other people, including their privacy. I'm curious if anyone else feels this way.

tewolde 15y ago

I agree, it will definitely be the doom of Facebook or any other social network if it does not let users easily differentiate between sharing and faux-sharing. It will be like an email account that can't filter out spam.

jronkone 15y ago

In other words, automated "now playing" scripts are as annoying and useless on social media as they were on irc and and instant messengers.

guard-of-terra 15y ago

I wonder why people write their opinions on facebook music experience sharing without mentioning that last.fm already solved this problem at least once and the solution was a meaningful product that worked for some people. In this context, reading claims like "a constant pipeline of what's queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless" make me laugh. People figured it out and it wasn't meaningless. If they don't know about last.fm, why do they bother? They obviously don't care about music very much.

Alexia 15y ago
The whole point of Last.fm is that you get stats on your listening habits (and those of your friends). The realtime thing is just how the system collects the stats. Besides, even there, my friends' "Now playing" stuff in never bigger than a small icon on the side. It's not the core of the site. Facebook, with Spotify, gives you the useless part (the "Now playing") without the good part (the advanced stats, recommandations, music compatibility, etc)
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  That's the fact any seamless sharing reviewer should mention. Others have figured out, the world doesn't end with facebook.
icebraining 15y ago
Agreed. A single event can be meaningless, but the aggregation can still have value. Of course, that depends on how the system manages the data, not on the data itself.

weichi 15y ago

Interesting article, and as a forty-year-old who doesn't use facebook, it makes sense to me. But I wonder whether 20 year-olds who have been immersed in this kind of thing for 3-4 years would agree. And what today's 13-year-olds will think then they are 20, and this has been a part of their entire post-childhood..

Zirro 15y ago
Well, as a nineteen-year old (quite soon to be 20) I can say that I don't care much for the Facebook ticker (the "share everything" list), nor do my friends seem to. I agree with this article, but I may not represent the "average" Facebook-visitor, considering I barely read my friends updates, create updates of my own or play Facebook-games. (I visit for two groups which I participate actively in) Sharing everything takes the value out of it, and I think most people, 20-year olds or not, would agree. Perhaps that's why I've stopped checking what my friends are saying, my interests are already way too specialised for me to have any interest in what they blast out to everyone.

chadyj 15y ago

I agree that lots of random sharing data can be useless, but I think it is only useless in its current form. There is a great deal of data to be intelligently mined there. For example, I wish Facebook told me aggregate info, like 12 of my friends are reading X book, and 15 listen to Y song, and 5 have liked Z restaurant. To me this is a lot more compelling as I can see real trends in what my social circle is consuming.