12 ms·

Been using Facebook every day since 2007. Recently though I've noticed my visits to the site drop to maybe once or twice per day, whereas at its peak I was chec

by jgroome 14y ago

Been using Facebook every day since 2007. Recently though I've noticed my visits to the site drop to maybe once or twice per day, whereas at its peak I was checking it multiple times per hour. I think in their desire to work out what exactly makes them money, they've changed the way you're supposed to use the site. Where I used to see a news feed full of (mostly mundane but still interesting) status updates and photos from my friends, I'm increasingly bombarded with Shares, memes, comics, and pictures that would have been derided as old on 4chan back in 2006. Now we're hearing about "fake users" - not the fault of the company themselves, I'm sure - and how FB is now just a place where tech marketing people see imagined riches. And in the process, they've ruined the site for the rest of us. The less pleasant the website experience, the less people will want to use it. Before long it'll just be dummy accounts and bots on the site. Barring a major change of attitude and user experience, I would be surprised if I'm still using the site this time next year.

Andrenid 14y ago
My massive decline in use is directly correlated to how annoying they've made it to use. Eg: You can't have your feed always sort by "Most Recent", it keeps defaulting to "Top Stories", keeping old/stagnant stories at the top of my feed just because they got a few comments, while not showing me the new stuff. Also, the sheer amount of crap they shove in your face now. "<friend name> Likes TOYOTA!" then a big post by Toyota shoved front and center of my feed, all because that friend Liked that page a few months back. Also, the annoying way that you can't ignore just a certain type of post from friends (bar a few). You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc. There's lots more reasons, but they've basically made the site a pain in the ass to use, so I find myself back to reading sites via RSS and chatting to people directly on Google Talk when I need some "social".
- malenm 14y ago
  -You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc. There is actually a setting for this - You need to "Unsubscribe from comments and likes by ___" I worked vigilantly at this over a few weeks and eventually my feed went back to what it used to look like circa 2008. Then, sadly, a few weeks ago, they were all back one day out of the blue. Since then, the unsubscribe functionality has been straight-up broken. https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2297060 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2297060 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2300268 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2300268
  - samstave 14y ago
    Having to spend weeks vigilantly managing how it displays data to you sound like a nightmare.
    - malenm 14y ago
      It was pretty annoying, not gonna lie, but weeks may have been a bit of a stretch - I have about 450 friends and I'd say after a couple days of 'vigilance' I was 90% of the way there, but there were stragglers that showed up for a while after that. It wasn't until everything reverted and started showing up again that it truly felt like a nightmare.
      - samstave 14y ago
        Sure, but that is still too much work.
- fitzpasd 14y ago
  I believe that if you group all your friends into a list 'myfriends' and select that as your newsfeed, it will be sorted by 'Most Recent'.
lusr 14y ago
Their mobile iOS application is absolutely the worst application I have ever used on iOS. It just doesn't work far too often (it took 2 months for notifications to randomly start working on my new iPhone 4S, but activating them can't load the new content half the time or just sits there loading forever; I have no network issues with any other iOS applications) and irritates me too much (e.g. I keep getting stories from pages I hid on the desktop site, you can't manage photos properly like on the desktop site, etc.). I've reverted to using the desktop site under mobile Safari but I'm dying for somebody to replace Facebook simply with something of higher quality - I don't mind the ads or tracking and I genuinely find it a useful site, it's just of such poor quality it's annoying!
- jps359 14y ago
  This is my primary gripe with facebook. You'd think that they'd be able to develop a decent mobile app, being as large as it is. The google+ app works way way way better. So smooth and everything loads quickly as it should. Hell, even the tumblr app I use works better than the facebook one.
  - ryanmolden 14y ago
    The cynic in me assumes since they have no mobile monetization story that I have seen their desire to spend time on mobile clients is low. I find some humor in a firm that trots out how they only hire the best of the best of the best can't field an even half-way decent mobile app.
  - RandallBrown 14y ago
    Their iPhone app used to work really well. Then, they tried to do some crazy cross platform shenanigans to keep the mobile website, iPhone, and Android versions on the same general codebase. That's when things really suffered and I've read articles saying they're ditching the cross platform stuff and going back to native. We'll see.
- what_ever 14y ago
  I had heard a couple of months ago that Facebook doesn't want to improve the native apps and instead Google and Apple to improve the html5 support in their respective browsers. Facebook wants to have a uniform experience across platforms and html5 site would be best way to achieve that. This explains why their apps are not customized as per the Android/iOS standards. They even formed a group to discuss the state of mobile browsers and Google and Apple have been ignoring it.
taligent 14y ago
I wonder if Facebook actually analyses the uploaded content to determine its meaning. So if you did start to hide more and more comics whether it would be able to automatically do that irrespective of which friend uploaded it. That said it is a bit strange that you would seek to blame Facebook when clearly it is a problem with your friends. I for example never receive any 4chan content.
joshuahedlund 14y ago
I've had a similar experience and similar thoughts. I'm a strong believer in free markets, etc, but sometimes I don't understand the unending need for growth (i.e. why is it considered a bad thing that Facebook is so large that it doesn't have much room for growth?) If you're large and profitable, what's wrong with that? It often seems like the relentless pursuit for growth leads to short-term decisions to increase profits that have long-term consequences of reduced customer satisfaction and thus lost profits.
- klawed 14y ago
  You're questioning the fundamental philosophy ow Wall Street (I almost wrote capitalism instead but I don't know if that's true). Solvency is not enough to drive stock prices because the price of a stock is a bet on the future value of the company, not the present value. I don't like it either... Edit:fixing phone-induced typos.
  - rfurmani 14y ago
    It's not really about "like" or "not like" but fundamental economics and mathematics: things that grow behave differently then things that don't, and are worth more. Suppose FB found a way to consistently make 1B a year, give it to the investors, and only grow as much as inflation. Then the valuation would settle on something like 10-15 billion (plus however much cash it has on hand at that time). And a solid part of the market will love it as a long-term investment and tout its value. On the other hand, to value it at 50 billion you have to assume that its earnings will at least quintuple over time, so good luck to them.
  - tatsuke95 14y ago
    You can't call this a Wall Street philosophy; Facebook was trying to grow massively before they were public. In fact, that's where the growth was happening. At any point in time they could have decided to remain where they were, with the money they were making to pay the bills, and stayed private. They didn't. Instead, Facebook told us that they were going to, essentially, grow the company to 5 or 6 times the current state. In other words, Facebook caused Facebook's problems, not Wall Street.
checoivan 14y ago
There was also a statistic about the percentage of people who open facebook for their dogs. I wonder if dog and stalker accounts are in that fake count, or if they do count as active as they generate puppy treat ad revenue.
tsahyt 14y ago
I already stopped using it a couple of months ago for a couple of reasons. Most notably privacy concerns upon realizing that nothing ever gets lost there. Yeah I know, as a tech person I should have known that from the start. Well, Facebook ended up with about a year and a half of my life, well documented online and stored deeply inside their database and their backups. But as you pointed out, Facebook becomes less appealing to it's users for a variety of reasons that - I think - are all rooted in the fact that it doesn't really seem to care about what the user wants Facebook to do. That's never a good thing. Somehow it gives the impression that FB is beginning to openly admit that users are not their customers but their product.

by jgroome 14y ago

Andrenid 14y ago

My massive decline in use is directly correlated to how annoying they've made it to use. Eg: You can't have your feed always sort by "Most Recent", it keeps defaulting to "Top Stories", keeping old/stagnant stories at the top of my feed just because they got a few comments, while not showing me the new stuff. Also, the sheer amount of crap they shove in your face now. "<friend name> Likes TOYOTA!" then a big post by Toyota shoved front and center of my feed, all because that friend Liked that page a few months back. Also, the annoying way that you can't ignore just a certain type of post from friends (bar a few). You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc. There's lots more reasons, but they've basically made the site a pain in the ass to use, so I find myself back to reading sites via RSS and chatting to people directly on Google Talk when I need some "social".

malenm 14y ago
-You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc. There is actually a setting for this - You need to "Unsubscribe from comments and likes by ___" I worked vigilantly at this over a few weeks and eventually my feed went back to what it used to look like circa 2008. Then, sadly, a few weeks ago, they were all back one day out of the blue. Since then, the unsubscribe functionality has been straight-up broken. https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2297060 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2297060 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2300268 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2300268
- samstave 14y ago
  Having to spend weeks vigilantly managing how it displays data to you sound like a nightmare.
  - malenm 14y ago
    It was pretty annoying, not gonna lie, but weeks may have been a bit of a stretch - I have about 450 friends and I'd say after a couple days of 'vigilance' I was 90% of the way there, but there were stragglers that showed up for a while after that. It wasn't until everything reverted and started showing up again that it truly felt like a nightmare.
    - samstave 14y ago
      Sure, but that is still too much work.
fitzpasd 14y ago
I believe that if you group all your friends into a list 'myfriends' and select that as your newsfeed, it will be sorted by 'Most Recent'.

lusr 14y ago

Their mobile iOS application is absolutely the worst application I have ever used on iOS. It just doesn't work far too often (it took 2 months for notifications to randomly start working on my new iPhone 4S, but activating them can't load the new content half the time or just sits there loading forever; I have no network issues with any other iOS applications) and irritates me too much (e.g. I keep getting stories from pages I hid on the desktop site, you can't manage photos properly like on the desktop site, etc.). I've reverted to using the desktop site under mobile Safari but I'm dying for somebody to replace Facebook simply with something of higher quality - I don't mind the ads or tracking and I genuinely find it a useful site, it's just of such poor quality it's annoying!

jps359 14y ago
This is my primary gripe with facebook. You'd think that they'd be able to develop a decent mobile app, being as large as it is. The google+ app works way way way better. So smooth and everything loads quickly as it should. Hell, even the tumblr app I use works better than the facebook one.
- ryanmolden 14y ago
  The cynic in me assumes since they have no mobile monetization story that I have seen their desire to spend time on mobile clients is low. I find some humor in a firm that trots out how they only hire the best of the best of the best can't field an even half-way decent mobile app.
- RandallBrown 14y ago
  Their iPhone app used to work really well. Then, they tried to do some crazy cross platform shenanigans to keep the mobile website, iPhone, and Android versions on the same general codebase. That's when things really suffered and I've read articles saying they're ditching the cross platform stuff and going back to native. We'll see.
what_ever 14y ago
I had heard a couple of months ago that Facebook doesn't want to improve the native apps and instead Google and Apple to improve the html5 support in their respective browsers. Facebook wants to have a uniform experience across platforms and html5 site would be best way to achieve that. This explains why their apps are not customized as per the Android/iOS standards. They even formed a group to discuss the state of mobile browsers and Google and Apple have been ignoring it.

taligent 14y ago

I wonder if Facebook actually analyses the uploaded content to determine its meaning. So if you did start to hide more and more comics whether it would be able to automatically do that irrespective of which friend uploaded it. That said it is a bit strange that you would seek to blame Facebook when clearly it is a problem with your friends. I for example never receive any 4chan content.

joshuahedlund 14y ago

I've had a similar experience and similar thoughts. I'm a strong believer in free markets, etc, but sometimes I don't understand the unending need for growth (i.e. why is it considered a bad thing that Facebook is so large that it doesn't have much room for growth?) If you're large and profitable, what's wrong with that? It often seems like the relentless pursuit for growth leads to short-term decisions to increase profits that have long-term consequences of reduced customer satisfaction and thus lost profits.

klawed 14y ago
You're questioning the fundamental philosophy ow Wall Street (I almost wrote capitalism instead but I don't know if that's true). Solvency is not enough to drive stock prices because the price of a stock is a bet on the future value of the company, not the present value. I don't like it either... Edit:fixing phone-induced typos.
- rfurmani 14y ago
  It's not really about "like" or "not like" but fundamental economics and mathematics: things that grow behave differently then things that don't, and are worth more. Suppose FB found a way to consistently make 1B a year, give it to the investors, and only grow as much as inflation. Then the valuation would settle on something like 10-15 billion (plus however much cash it has on hand at that time). And a solid part of the market will love it as a long-term investment and tout its value. On the other hand, to value it at 50 billion you have to assume that its earnings will at least quintuple over time, so good luck to them.
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  You can't call this a Wall Street philosophy; Facebook was trying to grow massively before they were public. In fact, that's where the growth was happening. At any point in time they could have decided to remain where they were, with the money they were making to pay the bills, and stayed private. They didn't. Instead, Facebook told us that they were going to, essentially, grow the company to 5 or 6 times the current state. In other words, Facebook caused Facebook's problems, not Wall Street.

checoivan 14y ago

There was also a statistic about the percentage of people who open facebook for their dogs. I wonder if dog and stalker accounts are in that fake count, or if they do count as active as they generate puppy treat ad revenue.

tsahyt 14y ago

I already stopped using it a couple of months ago for a couple of reasons. Most notably privacy concerns upon realizing that nothing ever gets lost there. Yeah I know, as a tech person I should have known that from the start. Well, Facebook ended up with about a year and a half of my life, well documented online and stored deeply inside their database and their backups. But as you pointed out, Facebook becomes less appealing to it's users for a variety of reasons that - I think - are all rooted in the fact that it doesn't really seem to care about what the user wants Facebook to do. That's never a good thing. Somehow it gives the impression that FB is beginning to openly admit that users are not their customers but their product.