7 ms·

Ask HN: Is it time for a new Facebook?

• sp332 14y ago
  Why don't you just follow or friend more interesting people, groups, and businesses?
  • Diamons 14y ago
    That sort of alludes to the problem though. I've been on Facebook for about 6 years now. When I first signed on, it was great because it was personal. Now it's more about businesses and "Confessions" groups as well as meme pages.
  • illuminate 14y ago
    Because they're drowned in a sea of garbage.
• gabipurcaru 14y ago
  Facebook: "[your friend] likes Salitos!" "[the same friend] likes Salitos!" ... a week later "[your friend] likes Salitos!" "Man, I guess he really likes Salitos!". I've asked him about it, and it seems he barely remembered liking their page. So yea, IMO it's time for a new facebook
  • smartwater 14y ago
    It's time for a new Facebook because your friend doesn't remember clicking the "like" button?
• bking 14y ago
  Facebook will go the way of every other "big" social network. It overcomplicates its old vision and looses its fresh feel. Every new feature is less effective than the last, getting lost in the sea of older functionality. Facebook needs to pivot.
  • mrkmcknz 14y ago
    Public companies don't just 'pivot' like your average start-up.
• gesman 14y ago
  It's time for NO facebook.
  • deadfall 14y ago
    Yes, I agree. I am starting to dislike seeing people I went to school with and their babies. Some babies are cute and some are hideous. I started using twitter a lot more a few months ago after getting bored with FB.
    • skim213 14y ago
      I got pretty sick of seeing a continuous picture stream of people's babies. A lot of people have FB but I see less and less activity happening among my friends.
• Schiphol 14y ago
  Well, there is [Friendica](http://friendica.com http://friendica.com) which is free software and could become the new Facebook or anything else.
  • victorhn 14y ago
    Do some HNers have another recommendation of an already open source software to build a custom social site - a la Facebook? I checked Elgg (http://elgg.org/ http://elgg.org/) and it looks good at first sight, but still looking for other recommendations.
• GFischer 14y ago
  My use case for Facebook is keeping in touch with friends and family abroad: most of my family, college friends, coworker friends, etc... are now spread around the globe. We have a private group for my family, and I aggresively filter people and software from my feed. It works really well to keep "connected" and know what they're up to, but I do try to call semi-regularly. It's hard on me since I can't afford to visit them :( . I probably should do a heavy culling of old classmates, but Facebook hardly shows me photos of their babies anyways :) .
• soneca 14y ago
  I think the great problem Facebook solved was to remove all the noise that exists in the real world while we are trying to keep touch with our friends and acquaintances. But now it is bringing back the noise. Partly because of this tendency that people must share and share and share, and share a little more. Partly because it became so easy to keep in touch with acquaintances that we now know that are some good reasons behind all the noise of the real world. We have too many acquaintances these days to keep in touch with all of them. I've being thinking a lot about this because I am trying to solve this problem of noise and focus in friendships with my startup.
• argonaut 14y ago
  1. Leave Facebook. 2. Go to other social network. 3. Realize none of your friends are there. 4. ??? 5. Go back to Facebook.
  • mrkmcknz 14y ago
    It's interesting to see my younger cousins who are around 10-12 not actually showing any interest in Facebook. They're by far the most connected any generation has ever been at that age. They use a mix of communication applications and media rich social networks such as Instagram. But I guess you could say Instagram is Facebook in one respect.
  • fakeer 14y ago
    I've Facebook Messenger on Android and use it to keep in touch with friends. Especially those who have made their Facebook account as primary account of communication. To make matters worse, some of them replies to my emails, not via email, but from their Facebook accounts to mine without any capitalization and a lot these "....." with varying amount of dots in those strings. Once in a while I do check my Facebook account on the web. Sometimes I upload few pics for my (all) friends to see, otherwise my photo sharing is restricted to Dropbox mostly. I tried to leave but couldn't, for the same reason as yours.
• 27182818284 14y ago
  Facebook isn't going away soon, but do please look into being the next timesink for the web. It definitely feels ripe for a new timesink. People are getting bored with Facebook, no doubt, but they still use it daily. Surely it will be disrupted in the future, (few of the original NYSE companies exist) but not anytime soon. When Mark said there were other social networks, PG's laughing response of "Not really" was correct. If half of Facebook's daily users quit it'd only set them back a year or two. On top of that, Facebook is in the great position of already having the chicken-egg problem solved, so if they did want to move into, say, PayPal's area, they could do it. (Imagine if grandpa can send his grand daughter money for school and see her picture while he does it. Way more comfortable than PayPal. Not to mention they could probably do better fraud detection, etc) Again for emphasis, Facebook isn't going away. People share more than ever and use it daily, but they are getting bored with it so a new opening for another timesink has been created. For example, all of the people I know that use Pinterest also use Facebook. Pinterest is a newer timesink, but it doesn't replace Facebook.
• pasbesoin 14y ago
  My (largely non-techy, for this population) friends are exiting it. Not "publicly", but through ever decreasing presence. A minority remain and fill up my news feed (along with the ads), but it and/or their posts are a decreasingly interesting subset. (And, lately, non-personal pictures and graphics... ever more of these.) These are largely the "next older" generation, after the ten and twenty-somethings that, per all the recent reporting, have moved on to Twitter, Tumblr, or... I guess, the next "T". So... I have no objective evaluation, but it's certainly becoming a less interesting place to me, even to keep up with "non-technical friends". Also... I'm increasingly hesitant to comment on public posts. People who "market" themselves with public posts, further discourage my participation. (NOT that I want the post security setting indicator taken away. It's the only thing that, when not public, prompts me to comment at all.)
  • argonaut 14y ago
    I recently graduated high school (for perspective). 1) Nobody I know outside of techy-majors (I'm in college now) uses Twitter. 2) Everyone uses either Facebook or Instagram. 3) As many people use Tumblr as people use Twitter (but not limited to just people interested in tech) I am very wary when people assert that Facebook is not cool anymore and is going to be replaced. Sure, it's not cool anymore. Then again, texting is not "cool." It's basically assumed you have a Facebook in the same sense that it's assumed you are willing to receive texts. Keep in mind that all those meme-y, "Confessions"-type pages proliferate precisely because they are addictive time-sinks for teenaged and college-student users.
    • pasbesoin 14y ago
      Interesting. I don't have a lot of connections to... "your generation". (Sigh, I guess I'm to the point where I get/have to say that. ;-) Therefor, I've been going more than a bit by what I've seen others writing in the press and blogging. Never an entirely trustworthy source of information. Perhaps I'm part of an atypical graph. And/or the recent FB news feed jiggering has decreased my perceived quality. My own reaction is probably primarily one of privacy. I don't get super-paranoid, but I don't want to be blatting my personal interactions all over a fully public, searchable interface. It suddenly occurs to me to ask: The press -- more a few years ago than recently -- reports on different generational perspectives towards privacy including online. (As in, younger people... are more ready to take on the nuances, if not that they are simple unconcerned, as some perhaps misinforming reporting has claimed.) I also read recently that a major attraction of Tumblr has been pseudonyms. You tell your friends what your Tumblr ID is, but you don't necessarily freely associate your (full) name with it. Would you have and care to share any perspective on these points: Privacy, and pseudonymity in order to at least loosely control the resulting... "graph" and perhaps unwanted discovery? (If not, no worries -- thought I'd ask, though.)
• 6thSigma 14y ago
  I created a Facebook in 06 because a class required it. For the first 6 months or so it pretty much only had my profile picture and one or two status updates (much like my current G+ profile). I was the only one of my friends who had a FB profile - everyone else was on Myspace. I visited Myspace daily at the time. I remember when the shift happened. More and more of my friend posted Myspace bulletins with "Deleting my Myspace, add me on FB!" It seemed to happen all at once. I've seen a few of these 'leaving' declarations on my FB, but there isn't the same rush. FB may be going through a Myspace fate at a much slower rate, or perhaps we are in a new day and age where users will have profiles on many different social networks. I tend to think it's the latter.
  • illuminate 14y ago
    Those of us who do so generally do so because we're sick of the noise and forced interaction overload. We don't replace it, there's nothing with granular enough options to filter out the drek. Shame about Diaspora not coming into its own.
• chris_dcosta 14y ago
  Yahoo was uncool years ago, but it's still going, so I can see FB doing the same. The numbers are just too big to die, and although you/we may be bored, it won't stop unless the money stops coming in.
• schuylerlarson 14y ago
  I'm building it right now. Can't wait to show you guys!