5 ms·

FB is very clearly deeply invested in convincing people to over-share by accident or habit, yeah. It makes their network more addictive, and they know it, so t

by Groxx 4y ago

FB is very clearly deeply invested in convincing people to over-share by accident or habit, yeah. It makes their network more addictive, and they know it, so they press that button as hard as possible while building things that technically satisfy niches. --- I quite liked G+'s focus on choosing your audience. Because you have sub-groups even within small, tightly-knit friend groups; when you raise that number into the hundreds it's only more true, not less. It was a mostly-effective UX for embracing that, and it led to my feed being dramatically more relevant. Mastodon is filling a similar purpose for me, lately. The server you join has a pretty powerful impact on your local timeline - join a couple, use them as targeted sharing / browsing groups, and it's working much better for me than any algorithmic sorting ever did.

invig 4y ago
G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though? Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading. That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?). I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how social things work.
- Groxx 4y ago
  Somewhat, yeah. Personally I'd like to let people define their own publishing "topics" and let people select which ones they want to follow.[1] "Did you see X" is largely killed by algorithmic feeds though IMO, which makes it somewhat irrelevant for any full-scale heavily-used network. Facebook is a prime example - important updates frequently are not seen by many close friends, because Facebook chose to not show them. Assuming nobody knows anything specific has kinda become the norm, sadly. [1]: Obviously many will not, but that's fine. By following them you just get an unfiltered stream. But many of my friends couldn't care less about what programming language of the week I'm looking at (because they're not techy), or what nearby events I'm going to (because they're 1000 miles away) and I'm very much the sort of person who will categorize that for them so they aren't flooded with things they won't be able to join in on. Hashtags are kinda like a crappy in-band version of this, and I have yet to see a system embrace them for this purpose. They're basically always for public purposes, which is part of why you need to use a million near-identical ones to actually get good coverage.
  - foobarbecue 4y ago
    +1 for topics. Conceptually, pub sub. Maybe also give publisher to have the ability to choose an access policy for their topics (anybody can join, exclude some, only requests I accept).
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Circles were trivially shareable though. It made it super easy to create... Well, circles of friends :). These are the 15 of us into computers, 12 of us into photography, 6 of us into dnd, whatever. And then the best feature of all, Sharing of curated circles. A kind of competitive marketplace of topic related circles emerged so you could find these amazing circles of photographers or musicians etc. Best of all you ingested and then owned that (instance of) circle.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
foobarbecue 4y ago
I don't think that's true about FB convincing people to over-share. That may have been true years ago (Bob's relationship status has changed to single!) but these days I get warnings and stuff whenever I set anything to public, and all the defaults are friends only.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Facebook got sued a whole bunch. Between the FTC's various privacy-related consent decrees, Cambridge Analytica, and the GDPR, they functionally can't do the whole "push people to overshare" thing anymore. I will say though, it's specifically the old Facebook mentality that made me hyped back when Google+ was announced. And then it crashed and burned - which was exactly the point in time where I stopped wanting to be on literally any new social network.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by Groxx 4y ago

invig 4y ago

G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though? Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading. That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?). I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how social things work.

Groxx 4y ago
Somewhat, yeah. Personally I'd like to let people define their own publishing "topics" and let people select which ones they want to follow.[1] "Did you see X" is largely killed by algorithmic feeds though IMO, which makes it somewhat irrelevant for any full-scale heavily-used network. Facebook is a prime example - important updates frequently are not seen by many close friends, because Facebook chose to not show them. Assuming nobody knows anything specific has kinda become the norm, sadly. [1]: Obviously many will not, but that's fine. By following them you just get an unfiltered stream. But many of my friends couldn't care less about what programming language of the week I'm looking at (because they're not techy), or what nearby events I'm going to (because they're 1000 miles away) and I'm very much the sort of person who will categorize that for them so they aren't flooded with things they won't be able to join in on. Hashtags are kinda like a crappy in-band version of this, and I have yet to see a system embrace them for this purpose. They're basically always for public purposes, which is part of why you need to use a million near-identical ones to actually get good coverage.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  +1 for topics. Conceptually, pub sub. Maybe also give publisher to have the ability to choose an access policy for their topics (anybody can join, exclude some, only requests I accept).
NikolaNovak 4y ago
Circles were trivially shareable though. It made it super easy to create... Well, circles of friends :). These are the 15 of us into computers, 12 of us into photography, 6 of us into dnd, whatever. And then the best feature of all, Sharing of curated circles. A kind of competitive marketplace of topic related circles emerged so you could find these amazing circles of photographers or musicians etc. Best of all you ingested and then owned that (instance of) circle.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

foobarbecue 4y ago

I don't think that's true about FB convincing people to over-share. That may have been true years ago (Bob's relationship status has changed to single!) but these days I get warnings and stuff whenever I set anything to public, and all the defaults are friends only.

kmeisthax 4y ago
Facebook got sued a whole bunch. Between the FTC's various privacy-related consent decrees, Cambridge Analytica, and the GDPR, they functionally can't do the whole "push people to overshare" thing anymore. I will say though, it's specifically the old Facebook mentality that made me hyped back when Google+ was announced. And then it crashed and burned - which was exactly the point in time where I stopped wanting to be on literally any new social network.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]