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It seems to me that Facebook has always been stuck with a damned lot: to make their product profitable, they have make their product worse. This is exactly the
by rohern 14y ago
It seems to me that Facebook has always been stuck with a damned lot: to make their product profitable, they have make their product worse. This is exactly the problem with "social" games. These games are lousy exactly because the lousy features make them money. With the direction that Facebook is going, it seems to be a service where users volunteer to receive spam. I do not think any company in this position is setup for long-term success.
On a philosophical note, I have always felt that Facebook is just a slot machine company. They make a fancy box that takes advantage of the weaknesses of the human brain (obsession with novelty, gossip, and visual stimulus) to keep users doing an activity for much longer than required to get the benefit of that activity. I could be radical and say that I think Facebook delivers no value to its customers and that most people end up actively regretting the time they spend on Facebook (I think it is uncontroversial to say that no one goes to bed wishing he had spent more of his day on Facebook), however there is always someone with a story about reuniting with a long-lost elementary school friend due to Facebook. Nonetheless, even if this value does exist, in no way does it justify the amount of time most Facebook users spend on the site nor does it describe the majority of user activity. This is not to say that Facebook is doomed any more than Las Vegas is doomed, but maybe people will wise up and be more careful about how they spend their time...
A bit of anecdote: I have noticed people on reddit commenting that they now use reddit more than Facebook as all the good content on Facebook is just copied from reddit. If reddit had some kind of social interface, it might move aggressively into this market.
- panacea 14y agoIsn't that the same phenomenon as television? It's still going strong. (Increasingly coupled with a realtime twitter stream)
- rohern 14y agoAbsolutely yes.
- bradwestness 14y agoI think so. In the natural arc of a new medium, social media is now at the point that television hit thirty years ago, when the "big three" networks started losing control to a host of new cable channels. TV is obviously still around, but it's much more of a bazaar now.
- minimaxir 14y agoParadoxically, a social interface would kill Reddit, as it thrives on anonymity. Also a Catch-22.
- rohern 14y agoI think you're probably right. Then again, people seem to have a great time at reddit meetups.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoAnd all the good content on Reddit comes from HN Which is not meant as facaetious as it sounds - in financial terms Facebook is the Belgium Dentist of ephemeral trivia.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoThen again I spend far far too much time on here, and all HN uses to keep me here is a points system.
- artursapek 14y agoYou stay on HN because of the points system? Your points are mostly not even visible to others.
- alan_cx 14y agoSo what? Are points, or what ever, only any use for showing off to others? I'd bet that to a fair few people here, the points are a quiet way that they, well, we, get our opinions or thoughts sort of validated to our selves. So, if my karma goes up after this post, I will quietly know more agreed with me than disagreed. And that is kind of comforting. But I don't feel any need for others to have to know that, its just a nice quiet me thing. And of course the opposite is true, and I quietly get to know I might be taking rubbish.
- graeme 14y agoOne problem I've found with that is that people are discouraged from downvoting unless something is off topic or out of line, whereas upvotes are encouraged more broadly. If only 20% of people reading a comment like it, at least some will still upvote. So on average, even my mediocre comments get +1-3 points. Thus the more I comment, the more points I get, even if quality is only so-so.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoIt was more that Facebook et al have sophisticated gamification to keep one engaged, HN just has karma (and community) yet I react like one of Skinners rats. I suppose if I have learnt something it's get addicted to something that has positive effects
- contextfree 14y agoI don't spend a lot of time on facebook and the time I do spend there I feel I get a lot more value from, or regret a lot less, on average than, say, time spent reading blog comments or reddit/HN or tech pundits or ... Granted that's not saying much ...