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The Facebook experiment has failed
- curiousdannii 13y agoSo the OP is friends with people who bore them, and that's Facebook's fault?
- mosqutip 13y agoTypical overzealous and incorrect analysis. Facebook may have failed for the author, but Facebook is not a failure. Its user base, advertising base and page traffic paint quite the opposite picture. Also, "people can message each other, post text updates and pictures". This is exactly what I use Facebook for, and it works pretty well for me. I get updates and pictures from my friends and family, and I have tuned it such that I can see more content from people with whom I don't interact on a regular basis. Sounds like a case of user error to me.
- andyhmltn 13y agoWhen the pictures and the status updates are lost In a sea of spammy adverts and shares, the messaging becomes the only feature that I can use anymore.
- onedev 13y agoMy FB feed is phenomenal. I hide people that post spam, and unfollow pages that spam me. What's left is the people I care about and the content from pages I care about (e.g. The Economist posts really good content every day, so does Rap Genius, and brands like Nike/Adidas; all of which I like-- in the traditional sense). It's basically my "newspaper". I even follow HN and it feeds me the newest stuff from HN alongside other publications, pictures of my friends from around the world, and status updates from people I care about. I also have AdBlock so I don't get the sidebar ads which I do agree are a bit spammy. This article is just a bunch of bullshit. It has no real critical analysis and doesn't really say much at all. It's very shallow and a repost to boot (it was on here just days ago). Let's not upvote this garbage.
- andyhmltn 13y agoYou're a very lucky person then! Sadly I'm at around the 1,000 friends mark and I have a feeling it'd be a bit too much work to make my timeline useful again.
- scholia 13y agoSo why did you friend a load of people you don't really know? It's like going to a great restaurant, ordering five times as much as you can eat and then complaining about the food.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- onedev 13y agoIt doesn't take any work at all. Just look at your feed. As soon as you see someone you don't care about just one click hide them or unfriend them (if socially possible). If you see a post from a page you don't care about, then one click unfollow them. It's really simple. Their newsfeed algorithms are actually really awesome at figuring out the rest once you give it a tiny bit of feedback like I mentioned above.
- mindcrime 13y agoand I have tuned it I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the vast, vast majority of Facebook users (like, 90%+ is my SWAG) don't do any tuning at all. I'm also going to guess that a large percentage of users "friend" people they aren't friends with in real-life, due to just "shared common interest" or whatever. IF both of these assumptions hold, then the scenario the author of TFA is painting, could well be true for a significant portion of Facebook users. Whether that's actually the case or not would be hard to measure. But to share one more anecdote: find my Facebook feed to be less and less interesting over time. With little "tuning" on my part, FB is doing a pretty crap job of figuring out what I actually want to see. So... I could do the work to go in, delete less-than-useful "friends", tune my preferences, etc... or I could just slowly begin to drift away from Facebook, logging in less and less frequently and using Twitter and/or G+ more. Guess which one is more likely?
- mattpardee 13y agoGood lord, man. How do you deal with people you meet in real life? Do you walk around responding "What you just said is irrelevant to me."? What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment. Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me). And with what, maybe one of those people hidden every few months, I otherwise actually have a pleasant experience catching up on what my friends & family have been up to. It's not that complicated...
- mindcrime 13y agoIt seems that you think we disagree about something fundamental here, but I can't figure out what it is. Especially since I could easily have written this bit myself: What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment. Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me). Right, and I think this is the wrong approach. There's not an absolute correlation between who said something and whether or not the subject is of interest to me. If I have a friend who I share political beliefs with, I may care about his post on, say, gun control... but if that same friend is a religious fundamentalist, I absolutely don't want to see any "pro Jesus" crap. I think this assumption, that content should be selected / filtered based on provenance, is one of the most broken things about online social networking. Also, Facebook just isn't important enough to me, for me to spend any time "tuning" things to try and tailor my stream to what I want it to be. Like most of us, I have about a bazillion things competing for my time and attention. If Facebook isn't delivering a desirable experience (regardless of the reason), then I, for one, am likely to just drift away from it and let something else entertain me.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- johnjlocke 13y agoIf the goal of Facebook is to collect a lot of users and advertising revenue, then sure it's a success. Just not as much as was forecast on the day of its IPO. As a an actual social network, where friend go to exchange information with their other close friends, it jumped the shark some time ago. The EdgeRank algorithm helped to render a lot of online communication dead. When part of the goal is to keep people on your site in order to pitch advertising, that's not a good sign. I've been thinking for a while now that the whole vibe around Facebook feels exactly like MySpace did about 4-5 years ago. The only thing preventing its demise is the lack of anything else that resembles it that everyone can latch onto. Twitter has more of an information sharing vibe,and many people don't jibe with it. Many people dismiss Pinterest or don't get that either. Tumblr up until a week ago really felt like LiveJournal did back in the day, but I don't have a ton of high hopes for it lasting the next few years. I find it ironic that having capitalized on the mistakes of the social networks that preceded it, Facebook is on the verge of repeating many of those same errors.
- gfodor 13y agoWell, my anecdote says otherwise. Seriously though, if you don't think that Facebook Data Science's the fuck out of their news feed algorithm, then I don't know what to tell you. If it's not working well for you, either it is and you don't realize it (ie, you are reading the "spam" more than you think), or you are an outlier.
- YokoZar 13y agoOr you haven't told facebook that you don't care about certain people yet. It's surprisingly easy to do, and yet a lot of people seem to think defriending is the only way to get stories to not show up on their feed.
- quarterto 13y agoTypically when there's a post in my news feed I don't care about, I unfriend them because it's from someone I haven't seen in years, never really talked to, and never really liked.
- mst 13y agoAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. medium.com again. medium.com does not scroll in Chrome on the Nexus 7 This means I can't actually read anything on there. I can't even figure out who to email, because the About page also doesn't scroll. Living in the future sucks :(
- msoad 13y agoWhy don't you install the beta version? I was able to read it in my nexus seven
- ryalfalpha 13y agoIf you have to update your browser to read a site, on a site that's main function is to provide someones thoughts in text form, then I'd consider the website at fault.
- rcfox 13y agoYeesh, didn't expect something like this from someone like you. Don't worry though, you're not missing out on much.
- mst 13y agoAfter 5 minutes of trying tapping combinations and getting nowhere, again (there's a bunch of medium links on HN recently and some of them have been quite worthwhile), going to the front page and discovering that the 'about' page is actually a post and thereby has the same bug pushed me over the edge into ranting. I can live with bugs. But bugs that make it impossible (FSVO) for me to report them are a special sort of evil. I suppose I'll check the about page on another device at some point and thereby derive the ability to help them diagnose and fix the problem. But ... argh.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pyvek 13y agoHere you go - http://pastebin.com/MARe4Ca5 http://pastebin.com/MARe4Ca5
- beatpanda 13y agoWe need better alternatives, but I think people overestimate what a "better alternative" would look like. That whitepaper from a few years back about building a social network on top of existing email infrastructure comes to mind. A bunch of my friends don't use Facebook. We exchange long emails regularly instead. It's awesome. Solves the problem Facebook supposedly solves much, much better. And I think it would be enough to replace Facebook given a few extra features to abstract away, through a user interface, stuff that email can already do.
- fossuser 13y agoI disagree with the general statement and basically every sub point. - Indiscriminate Sharing I don't want to have to make a decision every time I want to share a link to something interesting about what subset of friends I'm sharing it to. I don't want to be pressured to create circles of friends for different things. If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see then it's a mistake to post it. It's better for the default to be public than some sort of pseudo private. If it's that you only want to share specific interests with specific people I never thought that that was a problem people actually had to begin with. - Facebook gets worse the more you use it This is just anecdotal, but facebook's news feed has always been impressively on point to who I'm interacting with more in real life. It also seems to send heartbeat posts from friends I haven't seen in a while occasionally (or more often when I check in on their page manually). People who are consistently bad I just unfollow which solves that. - Loudmouths now have gigantic megaphones. Unfollow them. - Social Media Scamsters This is pretty minor and only effects the case when friends are liking things that are completely uninteresting or liking many things so that it's spamming you (something I haven't really noticed because I think the newsfeed filters it). In general facebook is a solid chat platform and way to share interesting content/pictures with your network. The main complaint I can come up with for facebook is that skype sucks and their video chat could be much better.
- beatpanda 13y agoThis: If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see than it's a mistake to post it. is a privileged perspective. I'm guessing a lot of HNers aren't subject to gang injunctions, but imagine for a moment that you are. Suddenly, "pictures of me and my friends hanging out" become dangerous, something that can land you in jail. Or let's say you identify as queer to your close friends and immediate family, but you have more distant relatives who you're not ready to tell just yet, but don't want to 'unfriend' on Facebook. Or let's say you're a member of a religious group that's persecuted in the country you live in, but you'd still like to be a part of Facebook groups full of people for whom it's not an issue. The fact that you're able to be the same person in public at all times is a privilege that not everyone has. For everyone else, you're saying that constant self-censorship should be "good enough". I find that perspective abhorrent.
- guiambros 13y agoHere's a better and more thoughtful corollary post, covering some of the things that the OP left out: Revisited: “The Facebook Experiment has failed.” https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f57f3bc8b377 https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f57f3bc8b377
- ronreiter 13y agoHaters gonna hate.
- david927 13y agoYahoo was a first attempt at web search, Google got it right. Facebook was a first attempt at social networks, another company (in the future) will get it right.
- fossuser 13y agoI would suggest that friendster and myspace (among others) were the first attempts - and facebook got it right. Really though there were many variables that contributed to the success and failure of these companies.
- pjbrunet 13y agoReal social networks don't need technology. So technology will never measure up to the real thing.
- jacalata 13y agoAn ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures. I honestly don't understand how this doesn't describe facebook today.
- josh2600 13y agoTo be honest, I spend more time on HackerNews than I do on Facebook. I feel like I go to Facebook to see what people from Highschool and College are doing and to keep tabs on my local area, but if I want intellectual stimulation, it's too much work to dig through my newsfeed. This isn't the first time this has happened; I remember when Reddit was small too (and if you go back on HN, the old HN had higher quality comments). It's inevitable that the values of a community change as it scales. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.
- djim 13y agoI also spend far more time reading comments of strangers on HN (after reading the articles, of course) than I do on Facebook.
- VLM 13y ago"but if I want intellectual stimulation" G+ is in that general direction. The social network for hobbys. Connect to granny on facebook, but connect to the guys in your ham radio club and/or photographers and/or podcasters on G+...
- dasil003 13y agoThat's a bold pronouncement. Fortunately for Zuckerberg and company they've already crossed the chasm. They will sink or swim based on the habits of the masses, not the fickle hipster tastes of a startup guy who desperately wants to predict the future.
- matdrewin 13y agoI may not be representative of most people but it seems to me like like Facebook usage is going down. I'd say that only 10% of my friends still post stuff on their walls. I would have closed my account a while ago but I can't seem to convince any of my siblings to use any other chat client.
- indubitably 13y agoOh whatever.
- Maro 13y agoI upvoted the OP because I'm curious about the discussion it will generate here on HN.
- cargo8 13y agoFunny how much a lot of this person's complaints ring exactly like a Google+ marketing campaign, and yet no one has really mentioned Google+ yet. I totally agree, and that's not to say that Google+'s stream isn't equally filled with content I don't care about, but that is also because I followed a random circle of 500 "interesting people". Google+'s focus on smaller circles as it's primary feature, and I think the larger emphasis on sharing with circles and not the public at large (unless you are one of the internet famous) attempts to give user's the power to interact in this way. And if you use gmail, it's basically email + all the rich content social network benefits have to offer.
- iamshs 13y agoExcept it really is not. Facebook friends can be equally curated and pruned. Facebook offers its own variant of circles, and importantly my friends are on facebook which can facilitate discussion. Even though everyone has gmail and Google is forcing G+ down everybody's throat, G+ has not taken off. There is no material to discuss on G+. Besides, the same problems will creep in with G+ too. Do you want to pick and choose content to share to a particular circle? It is a good idea, but it is cumbersome.
- abrahamsen 13y agoThe keywords are "can be". Or as the author put it "unless you jump through hoops". The Google+ interface makes a difference. The majority of stuff on Google+ is shared privately, because the interface invites doing it that way. (The interface also invites having a "loudmouth" circle with zero notification level, so you can follow people without having their posts in your default stream).
- scholia 13y agoIt's really easy to hide people on Facebook, if you even see their stuff in the first place. Mainly, you'll see stuff from the people you interact with. Otherwise, G+ Circles are ridiculously clunky and slow, due to Google choosing superficial eye-candy over functionality.
- chaz 13y agoMy frustration with these types of rants is that no solutions are proposed. In this case, the author ends with a vague reference to smaller communities, but I don't see how using a smaller community would solve any of the problems that he mentions, since they seem to manifest as real-life social problems as well (ever have a loudmouth at a dinner party? or a friend that talks only about themselves? or social circles that collide?). On top of that, I'm confused why his Facebook can't be the small community he desires. He's free to be friends with only his x closest friends. FB can't and won't be everything to everyone, but a blanket statement like this is just trolling.
- graue 13y agoPeople really just don't seem to understand that experiences with social media are specific to the individual. I guess it's understandable. I see the same Google Maps as everyone else does. I see the same Hacker News as everyone else who visits HN. But Facebook isn't like that. Your Facebook timeline is based entirely on your friends and how you interact with Facebook. And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal. It just ain't so. This may be a pat little summary of why using Facebook is unrewarding for the author, but to generalize that to a "failed" experiment for everyone, would require talking to other humans about how they experience Facebook — i.e., doing actual research. (Even then, the conclusion would only hold, at best, for the types of humans with whom the author has spoken.) And as usual for these rants, there's no evidence this research has been done. This piece of writing, therefore, does not contribute meaningfully to the discussion around Facebook.
- onedev 13y agoI completely agree with you. I think you've hit the nail on the head exactly.
- ianstormtaylor 13y agoCompletely agree. Most every point he makes doesn't apply to my use of Facebook. The one that is interesting is his comparison to Google and SEO. In Google's world there are three players: (1) the searchers, (2) the advertisers and (3) the black hats who try to game the system. Unfortunately for Facebook, (2) and (3) are the same, so the people they make money from are also the people who are degrading the system. They don't have Google's luxury of cracking down hard on (3) because that's who their income comes from, which ends up sucking for the rest of us.
- dylangs1030 13y agoI love Medium titles. They always pop into Hacker News with dramatic headlines, begging you to see what the author's radical notion is. In reading this post, I have a very hard time sympathizing with this author's point. He's taking his personal expectations and experience of Facebook and projecting it to a catastrophic failure of the entire company to reach its audience - that's unfair at best, and honestly narcissistic. Nearly a billion people use Facebook, it's not a failure. This is like saying Google has botched search. No, Google and Facebook practically control their domains. Is there room for disruption? Sure. Is Facebook perfect? No. But I believe the author is using Facebook the wrong way based on his points. It's not a professional platform. I don't use it the same way I use Twitter. A rebuttal, in order of points made: >Jump through hoops...share selectively. News flash, most people don't care. I actively use Facebook and I've literally never touched the selective buttons for what to share with who or what to delineate between friends. I use Facebook for friends - there isn't a boilerplate for this when you sign up. It's for friends - the only reason Facebook introduced this was so that you could share that funny, raunchy video and your girlfriend's mom won't see it. >As you use Facebook...you accumulate friends. This entire point is null and void. You set it up by implying you have no control over the friends you make or the groups you join. That's blatantly false. Just don't friend professional coworkers or acquaintances. Again, not difficult. >Loudmouths now have gigantic megaphones. Dude, skim or limit your newsfeed. Are you so intolerant that you feel didactically opposed to the feature? It's not as painful as all that, you pass a status, read the first sentence, and decide if you have interest. If not, move on, don't comment. If it really offends you, defriend the person or limit what you can see from them on your newsfeed. There's a button literally next to their name. >Social media scamsters. I'll give this to you. However, I personally find more amusement than anything. And while I don't want to criticize you, you might want to be more selective in who you see sharing from on your newsfeed. I find the people who share this (gullible friends) are outliers and you can deal with them individually in the same manner as the above bullet point. In summation, I believe the author doesn't understand why his qualms are actually features - it seems as though he's using it for the wrong reason. I'm not going to say Facebook is flawless. It's not, there is a lot to critique and it has things that could be improved. But all of this is not constructive criticism and it's mostly doom-seeking. Does he have a better idea for a social network? How can he condemn Facebook as a failure? His authority and points don't support that claim. If you're looking for a system where friends are not just friends, but everyone you know, and you need selectivity in sharing or conversations, go to Twitter or Google Plus. If you want to kill time and have more or less the same experience with friends, with the same annoyances (native to social interaction, not the medium), go to Facebook.
- EugeneOZ 13y agoTl;dr: my newsfeed on facebook is spamed and I'm too lazy to manage subscriptions.
- thedaveoflife 13y agoI think most people probably don't use facebook to see what their loudmouth acquaintances have to say. They use it look at photos of their friends and family.
- nostromo 13y agoLately I've noticed something odd. When I find a story I find interesting, I email it to some of my closest friends and we talk about it in email. It feels very 2003, but it works and feels more private and intimate. Similarly, when I take a picture I want to share with my family, I sms it to them. Facebook is still great, but it's different than what it used to be. It's (for me) evolved into my less-close friends' vacations and babies and memes. Which is fine! I imagine Facebook has a lot of data that suggests this is exactly what I'd like to view. But it does seem much less engaging than it used to be. It feels like an Eternal September, perhaps one I've brought on myself by friending too many people.
- icelancer 13y agoI do the same thing. I have different groups of people and just talk over email threads. Works far better than G+ or FB.
- weavie 13y agoLikewise. So much for people saying email is broken and outdated. It's the one medium I've been using for 20 years now and keep coming back to.
- iffyuva 13y agoso true. i respect people who put an effort to compose an email to share something, rather than hitting share button. most of the time they dont even remember what they have shared over fb!
- lostlogin 13y agoIf people didn't abuse the reply all button I might be able to come to terms with email usage. Reply all button abuse makes email almost Facebook bad for me.
- bigiain 13y agoSeems to me that perhaps "reply all abuse" is indicative of poorly chosen recipient lists. (Which doesn't help if it wasn't you who sent the original mail…)
- EGreg 13y agoI think what this author may be feeling is that "sharing" things that already happened isn't very useful to one's life. That's the major shortcoming not just of facebook but other online forums for sharing things you found / saw / thought.
- yason 13y agoI mostly just read the updates from my Close Friends list. At some point I had to sort out my friends to acquaintances, friends, and close friends, and that has sort of fixed the glitch for me.
- andrewfelix 13y agoGreat article. I have to take issue with this though: "While Google actively tries to thwart SEO scamsters" Google has monetised SEO and actively encourages bad SEO through SEM. You've got this strange case of Google creating shitty search results through Adwords and SEM which devalues their core product. Looks like FB and other social platforms are suffering a similar issue. Ads are creating a frothing steam of noise which is drowning out quality content.
- sidcool 13y agoThis is a good article. A good point of view. Not everyone will and needs to agree.
- kevinalexbrown 13y agoAn ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures. This is pretty close to how I use facebook. The problem is Sharing. It is the most fundamental feature of Facebook, and it’s completely broken For me, the directory itself is most fundamental. If all of my friends switched to another social network, I would immediately switch. I'm not sure what's failed? Maybe if he fleshed out a viable alternative? It's important not to trivialize what they've accomplished just because its core feature now seems mundane.
- _pmf_ 13y ago> It's important not to trivialize what they've accomplished just because its core feature now seems mundane. The core feature is trivial; it has been implemented by hundreds of sites. Facebook's strength was its organic growth, which is slowing down the MySpaceification tremendously.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago>Facebook's strength was its organic growth // You appear to be trivialising it by simply saying this as if just being their caused organic growth. FB not only provided the core ability to link people together but did so in a package that was/is accessible to a broad range of people in a non-threatening way. Several sites tried before, you mention MySpace, and never achieved the broad appeal FB did. Several have tried since - consider Google Wave. Or how about Google+, which hasn't failed yet, but has struggled it seems to make inroads in as broad a demographic as FB has. I like to malign FB probably more than the average person but their achievement is so easily downplayed without proper warrant.
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- pavs 13y agoBy far the best description of how facebook works I have read so far.
- lesswire 13y agoFacebook is not meant to be for creating ideas. It is meant to entertain you by knowing what your friends are doing.
- chaostheory 13y agoIndiscriminate friending is a big problem. People friend and stay friends on Facebook with people who are no longer relevant to them. There are easy fixes for it. 1) Either tell Facebook to explicitly ignore these people's posts so that they're hidden from your feed. 2) Just unfriend people who don't matter. 3) Don't friend people who aren't consistently in your life in the first place. 4) Don't use Facebook as often. Facebook isn't broken; people just need to do house cleaning and to stop using it like linkedin
- microtherion 13y agoThe last round of Facebook complaints on HN I recall was by page owners complaining that not their entire audience would see every single one of their updates. Now we have a complaint about seeing too many updates. Am I the only FB user thinking that overall, FB does a pretty good job in prioritizing updates? (i.e. the further down I scroll in my news feed, the less likely I see something I truly care about).
- brunorsini 13y agoI disagree with the article's point of view. There's much to be improved on Facebook, starting with more options for customizing the feed, but to say it's doomed or "just doesn't work" because of irrelevant content is silly and elitist. Even staring at uninteresting content on Facebook from time to time serves a fundamental human need to socialize, to see what others are up to. Hardcore Randians might disagree but life isn't all about narrowly/subjectively-defined "progress", after all. Some people just like to live and to escape a little bit every once in a while, and checking what one's peers are up to is a great way to do just that.
- jeswin 13y agoAuthor here. Didn't think this would show up on HN. These were my thoughts when I wrote it: 1. Most stuff being shared is of no value to most people. Does not encourage exchange of good ideas. Sharing, as it works now looks like a fad. It has peaked. Most people I know are bored now, it's just the inertia that keeps them there. 2. If someone is genuinely interested in something, they will seek out good communities to join. HN is a good example. And Slashdot (much more so earlier, but even now), gamer forums, some reddits, astronomy forums, photography etc. 3. There would probably need to be a tool to share with family and close friends. But that doesn't need to look like FB. Then again, Social networks help fight against totalitarian regimes. FB would be missed here, although I think Twitter plays a bigger role. Josh Miller in "The Next Facebook" makes an interesting point: The next network could be about making it easy to talk to people you don't know so well. Example, again Hacker News. https://medium.com/musings-about-text-boxes/8157c364d26a https://medium.com/musings-about-text-boxes/8157c364d26a I am working on some related ideas, for open communities and forums. This will be open source, and I'll document, share and collaborate on the entire process of designing this application (like discussions, whiteboards, sketches etc) . Plan to start this week, if interested add me on Twitter (@jeswin). Code isn't committed yet, but it will be here: https://github.com/jeswin/fora https://github.com/jeswin/fora PS: This was written in a hurry. I apologize for mistakes. I have to leave now; I'll check comments later in the day.
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- vincentperes 13y ago1. I feel that the pages I'm following bring me a good value. When it comes to people, if somebody is posting crap, I usually remove it from my timeline. I don't think Facebook is meant to exchange good ideas in public, but to share information. I don't want to be philosophical, but being bored is like everything else in life, you keep taking public transport, because it's useful, not that you are in love with it. 2. Facebook is not meant to build a community around a theme, you get information and feedback on pages but nothing more. Dedicated website on games, astronomy etc. were there before and will be there after. 3. I'm living abroad and share every week with my family on a Facebook private group, I just find the feature great! In general I think that experiences in life are so different and all require a different set that you simply can't aggregate them all on one and unique website. "The next network could be about making it easy to talk to people you don't know so well." is just called the web?
- msutherl 13y agoI have the same experience as the author and so do many of my friends. My solution is to simply unfollow every single friend I have on Facebook. Effectively disable the Timeline. Highly recommended.
- david927 13y agoI had the same experience as the author and I quit Facebook. Highly recommended.
- zby 13y agoCaring about the receiver - this is what is lacking. The sender should think about the receiver and send only stuff that would be interesting to him, or help him even if he does not like it at once. The sender should have means to target his messages only to people who would like it. The receiver should have means to express what he liked and what he did not. Channels should be negotiated between the receiver and the sender. I call this 'social routing'. I hoped that Google+ would do that - but they only covered half of the idea - they let the sender target the message, and they let the receiver choose their sources (in a tangled together way) - but they don't let them negotiate the connection.
- ziko 13y agoI was done with Facebook when they introduced that the content from a page you 'Like' doesn't necessarily appear on your timeline. That was a deal breaker for me and many others. You 'Like' something/someone for one simple reason. You feel that page is interesting to you and you want updates. If you don't want updates from something you like, you write it down in a notebook. Gone are the days when Facebook was an obsession. People tend to expect more and more from the service (even though it's free) they use but Facebook went in the exact opposite direction - they gave back less of what we want and more of what we don't. I see more and more companies exclusively on Twitter which is great. Twitter's a great platform for business while I always had this sense that Facebook is more suitable for individuals. After a week/month/year/half a decade you realise it's taking up a larger percentage of your than you'd like and you make cuts. I have kept my Facebook account open but I can't remember when was the last time I checked it out of interest. If someone messages me or write on my wall, I get a (non-push) notification on my mobile or email (in the mailbox Newsletters which I check/clean at the end of the week). But that's it, Facebook is (almost) a past for me, just like Myspace.
- baby 13y agoThey could really improve by doing an automatic "tabbing" like the new Gmail does. People don't really use lists on facebook since it's not forced (like in Google +). Also because it's not as easy as drag&dropping a mail into the right tab. Anyway, just my 2 cents. PS : Actually Facebook is going through the same thing Mail has been going through since its creation. It was only friends at first, then co-workers and friends, then spam & forum notification, newsletter etc... came around and now it's becoming hard to sort through all those things. So my remark on Gmail's tabs still stands.
- Vivtek 13y agoThis article entirely misses the point: the author is not Facebook's market. And this is why Facebook will be a long-term feature of the Internet - because it actually works exactly the way most people want to communicate. So it doesn't scale to the networking needs of an entrepreneur or academic. That's really not what it sets out to do.
- ojr 13y agoThe Instagram experiment is working well, always remember Facebook bought Instagram
- motters 13y agoI got to this point in 2011 - i.e. looking at my Facebook stream and considering whether any of it had any relevance to me at all (it didn't). Was I just wasting my time looking at this? (yes I was). And so I left and closed my account. Since then I've mainly been using Friendica. No spam or creepy business models, just conversations with friends.
- iaskwhy 13y agoThe way Facebook advertising works, it bumps the spamming potential of a ‘Like’ up a notch. A ‘Like’ on a product or service will make a paid story visible not just to the person who liked it, but also to their friends. Inevitably, there is an entire industry working non-stop creating low quality, emotionally appealing content that gets ‘likes’ from gullible users. This is so true. I believe Google's efforts to stop spammy SEO made SEO a good thing for users. This is extremely hard to stop in Facebook when social media people know how effective (in the number of likes) emotionally appealing content (read overused pictures of something cute happening) can be to a large percentage of people. These people don't seem to engage with the companies behind these posts but they do get promoted and eventually that's all you will see. I'm not a Twitter user but I'm wondering what will the effect be for its users.
- DocG 13y agoAfter MSN went bad with WLM and Skype(its awful, online list seems to be random), it is last place where most people talk. And it is mainly used as messenger/email hybrid platform. Around my friends, it is main reason why we are still there... So I kinda agree. Almost no stories what pick my intrest. Only win-to-share post and not relevant post.
- bobsy 13y agoThe ideal facebook for me would let me explicitly set a threshold before things become visible. So.. I would create 3 groups. Family, Friends, Acquaintances. Family + Friends status's would always appear. Acquaintances status updates would require 5 likes by other people before they appeared in my stream. All likes from Acquaintances and Friends would be hidden. All app invites from Acquaintances would be hidden. As for companies I like / follow. Individual controls for each would be great. I hardly use Facebook because of the noise. I only have < 60 friends on Facebook and < 10 likes. I can't imagine what it gets like with hundreds of friends. My idea probably wouldn't scale. Would be neat though. Would actually get me using Facebook.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cubicle67 13y agoofftopic, but is three-fourths, as opposed to three-quarters, a cultural thing? I've always been taught/read quarters as, well, quarters rather than fourths, but I see the use of fourths regularly as well
- eLobato 13y agoDoes the OP know you can hide stories from everyone but your closest circle of friends and family? Honestly every time I see anything from an acquaintance I played beer pong with 5 years ago, I click on "hide all publications by this guy", and voila. Facebook has already thought of that problem for you, OP.
- agentultra 13y agoI love the naive assumption many Facebook users have that, "everyone is on Facebook." It's much like Redditors who believe their beloved site is the homepage of the Internet. Really, it's just you. A great many people is still not everyone.
- nnpodz 13y agoI hate it when this sort of shit makes it into second place on HN.
- spacecadet 13y agoWhile I have always thought of social media as a waste of time, I dont actually see it going away anytime soon.. The big success of social applications and the entire modern web is accessibility to new users. And I don't mean the UX term accessibility, I mean content. 2000 - Content is generally not interesting to non-tech users. 2013 - Content is generally boring to tech-users, but the overall user base has grown i.e. my grand-mother now gets it.. See you all after the collapse!
- llort 13y agotypical sensational link bait. medium.com is spamming hacker news with a lot of articles with no real content. ev's probably A/B test optimizing link baits
- VLM 13y agoIts interesting that I didn't see a compare and contrast analysis. My "news.google.com" is semi personalized, I've got a couple relevant keywords, and there's nothing to see most of the time. My hometown newspaper fired most of their reporters a couple years ago and has gone full on tabloid with stuff like "Latinos hope 'soap' about diabetes hits home" and "Gatherings: Menu explores new territory with veggies and ice cream", seriously, that's what passes for local news. You can skim off the customers of the local news merely by rising above that low level, you don't need perfection. That is the mistake in the original article of complaining about only 4 relevant stories in 30. OK, well, if that is bad, what is good? Local news is profitable with less than 1 in 30, so what's the problem with 4 in 30?
- RakshaC 13y agoMost of the times Facebook appears to be a'Show off book'. With so many friends lot of sharing with little of interest.
- 75lb 13y ago"Facebook is godsent for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say." - oh the irony. useless article.. a bad workman always blames his tools.
- jatin085 13y agoCan a dislike button improve the quality of Facebook content? That can be used to demote most of the spam users are complaining about.
- juandopazo 13y agoI feel like the odd one around here when it comes to Facebook. To paraphrase the article, "I am signed into Facebook right now. At a quick glance, the entire list of posts on the first screen" consists of: - Picture of a friend who's traveling and doing volunteer work. Awesome. - Picture of a family member living abroad that got pregnant. Like. - Sister making boring comment. Meh. - Link to this TEDx Talk: http://youtu.be/b5OOOIKtj8w http://youtu.be/b5OOOIKtj8w. May be interesting. - Pictures of some friends/acquaintances' weekend out. Meh. - A bunch of incredibly beautiful pictures of an old coworker visiting San Francisco. Awesome. I take Facebook as a way of keeping in touch with people I don't have a lot of face to face contact with, a chat service and a simple way to keep in touch with people I recently met. It seems to work well at that.
- hawkharris 13y agoThis well-written article makes some great points about Facebook, but they are points that have been raised many times before. The problem for many people is not why to leave Facebook, but how. For example, many of us feel deterred from leaving because all of our friends use the service. How can people leave Facebook and still feel socially satisfied? To where should they turn? I think an article that proposed a solution to these questions would be more interesting.
- kmtrowbr 13y agoI actually sat down and spent a few hours 'curating' my Facebook recently: marking people as acquaintances, 'hiding' posts on my timeline that I don't want to see, setting up lists of different types of friends ... Arguably this should happen automatically -- but, I'm pretty surprised at the large positive effect this has had: Facebook is revealed as an amazing communication tool -- it's not perfect, but considering it's (mostly) free, certainly not something to complain about.
- gdonelli 13y agoI think Twitter suffers the same issue, that's the reason why I built an app which allows me to focus only on the people I really care about: http://EssenceApp.com http://EssenceApp.com
- arikrak 13y agoI think it cans be interesting to see the links people are sharing, just Facebook doesn't do a good job deciding what to show you. If they put a greater effort into really knowing what topics interets you, they could only show you links on those topics.
- joeblau 13y agoI grew up all over the world so the value that I get out of Facebook now is from being able to stay in communication with my friends from other countries. I feel like the utility of Facebook has changed since 2005 when I was using it as a communication platform for my buddies in college. Facebook is starting to reminds me of how AIM started deteriorating after AOL tried to cram so much extra crap into AIM (stock ticker, news, ads, group chats, etc...) after AOL realized that's where all of the users were.
- webwanderings 13y agoWhat's all those comments on Medium, how is it done?
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoFacebook is performance art. It's a phonebook of people I lost contact with many years ago. It's also a quasi-broken emailing list program. It might be a decent advertising platform for small businesses. Don't know. It's not a news feed. It's not stories relevant to me. It's not a way to actually have friends. It's not a place where people create things and share (mostly). People might think it's those things. Hell, Facebook itself will tell you that it's those things, but it's not. I agree with the article. Facebook's biggest problem is that, because you're always talking to everybody, you really can't say much. Conversation is, and has always been, context-dependent. You don't say things at a funeral home that you would at a keg party. You don't share the same stories with your peers that you would with your grandma. I've always thought Facebook was from the devil. Anybody that would use my own friends against me to suck me into a network of participating whether I wanted to or not? Not somebody with my best interests in mind. I only use Facebook with the FB Purify plugin that gets rid of a lot of the spam. Even then, if I could abstract myself completely away from it, and do all of my social networking activity on my O/S without a browser or a layer of commercial crap stuck on top, I would in a heartbeat. ADD: It might also be a decent shared photo album. Jury is still out on that one. What really bothers me is not that these services like FB, Twitter, G+, or various cloud storage systems are not useful -- they are. It's that, instead of being internet standards, they're branded properties. And they're all doing the same thing. It's like if email was a completely different thing depending on which ISP you used. These things should be completely abstracted away from any corporate logo. If I want to store things in the cloud, for instance, I could care less who actually keeps the bytes. If I want to reach my high school chums, why the heck do I need some other party to help me do that? I control gigabytes of storage and god knows how many computational cycles on my personal possessions, and I need Google+ to tell me whose birthday it is today? Really?
- austenallred 13y agoGoogle+ really was on to something with its circles: My friends are easily divisible into groups, and, apart from life events like getting engaged, what I want to share is only really relevant to a specific subset. I know Facebook has groups you can share specific things with, but it's not a feature Facebook has focused on, so even I don't really use it. I could use google +, but no one else does, and there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room. I have found, however, that my Facebook experience has greatly improved once I started hiding posts from people i don't care about as much from my news feed. There are people I still want to be able to check up on now and then, but I don't want to see 99% of the things they have to say. It's like unsubscribibg to junk mail; it makes everything feel wanted and relevant.
- webwanderings 13y ago1. Create Lists. 2. Change everyone's settings to only see important updates. 3. Instead of following your front page, follow your lists.
- Giszmo 13y agoI disagree!!! Facebook is great from the sender side and so is G+ but both suck at the receiving side. What we need is not a way to select who we spam as that is a feature that would be ignored by the loud mouths. We need a feature to select what we receive. There are "friends" I easily want to read all ten messages per day but there are others that I just want to be on my friend list cause it publicly shows my appreciation but that are too noisy to actually read their updates about their cat pooping again. I am well connected in 3 communities that are not mutually compatible, so I don't share everything I would share if I were only in community #2 because I spam-filter on the sending side what I send to all 3 communities. This sucks for my community #2 friends cause they miss out on #2 stuff and it sucks for those that really are not interested in #2. If #1 and #3 people could black list buzz words from my #2 community (bitcoin for example), I could share much more with the peace of mind not to annoy my other "friends".
- mathattack 13y agoI've been a modest bear on Facebook because I perceive that people are moving away. This is entirely subjective, but it seems to me like once everyone found all their long lost friends and shared a round of photos, things got much more quiet. This is very unscientific, but just my impression. It's almost as if they need a new attractor to engage folks every 6-12 months. It started as apps, then it turned into twitter-esque announcements, and recently evolved into photos. They need a Next every 6-12 months.
- turar 13y ago> An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures. And that's LiveJournal.
- SonicSoul 13y agowhile a lot of the problems he describes can be solved with unbaby.me and hiding the loud mouths, i am really impressed with the way this blog integrated comments. i love how they are tied directly to a paragraph and hidden away via ghostly counter icon! is this standard with any theme??
- thehme 13y agoI totally agree with the author. This is why I haven't used Facebook in several years, because to me it's just useless unless your family lives hundreds of miles away and you want to share pics/info with ONLY them. This seems to me like the best and only reason to use a social network like Facebook. When I did have Facebook, I was part of tech groups that would post important info, but very often their posts would be polluted by the usual college drama. I got rid of facebook and I am a freer and happier individual with "actual real friends". People who actually care to learn/share important info need to do so by reading legitimate sources from sites like Hacker News and other respectable places.
- breakupapp 13y agoFacebook evolves. It used to be a directory of school mates, then a place for self expression, then an amplification system and address book, and then a messaging platform and identity layer. Who knows what it's going to be next but one thing's for sure. It won't stay the same.
- bedhead 13y agoI think FB's usefulness breaks down as you get older. It's helpful to understand the average FB user. They're young. They're in high school and college. They probably dont have work friends, random old acquaintances, etc...no uniquely distinct groups of friends. They're less mature. It's typically only later in your twenties that your life starts fragmenting and these issues of "Do I really want to share this with everyone??" arise. That's when FB becomes dominated by generic crap and baby pictures and it goes from being a great tool to being nothing more than a time-waster. I bet for the younger crowd, FB works just fine for the most part.
- tharris0101 13y agoThe solution to this problem was G+ and that failed too. I find myself using Facebook less and less. I'm not bitter about it and I'm not making a conscious decision to stay away. I just am finding less and less value in it.
- bernardlunn 13y agoFacebook seemed to promise something better than email. Yet email is an open standard and so will still be part of all of our daily lives long after FB is a memory or a niche. We moan about email but it gives us choice - free with ads or paid and ad free, basic or full featured. For keeping in touch with friends I find email, phone, Skype and train 'n boats 'n planes work pretty well.
- leishulang 13y agofackbook might not be useful to some, but I met my wife there.
- ryguytilidie 13y agohttp://cl.ly/image/0k3p1b0b012B http://cl.ly/image/0k3p1b0b012B This is my news feed at the moment. I tweeted a similar picture on Friday. At the top, there is a piece of content from Deadspin, which, while I do like them, but I don't need every update from. Beside that, it is 100% ads, six in total. Any other site, this would be considered completely unacceptable spam. The only ad I'm even remotely interested in on my sidebar is the Titleist irons and that is only because I recently bought a set, meaning i won't need another, so that's a pretty sure sign this ad is ineffective. Same with T. Rowe Price. I just opened a Schwab account, so I assume that was why I was targeted, but does it really make sense for T. Rowe Price to try to advertise for people who JUST opened a Schwab account? I'm really starting to wonder how this could possibly be useful to anyone. I remember on my first day at Facebook, I sat in orientation while they explained to us why Google's advertising platform would be overtaken by Facebook's, and the idea was that they could figure out what people wanted to buy or were looking at, and then serve them an ad for something relevant. Cool idea and all, but 3 years later, this has clearly not happened, AT ALL. Facebook is still paying an engineering team hundreds of millions of dollars to figure out ways to more efficiently cram my browser full of spam. How is this useful for anyone except Facebook stockholders who want money?
- ywang0414 13y agoI completely agree with the article. I've always found FB to be useless and noisy. I have a lot of friends. But they all have different interest. And I only want to share things that are relevant to them. When I post something on Facebook, I rarely get a response, largely because it's just noise to 90% of my FB friends. At the same time, FB is actually a closed social networking, meaning that the things I share cannot reach people who might actually be interested, and would contribute back. Our startup is trying to solve this problem. Will post on HN once we think we are ready.
- micah63 13y agoI just planned a 30th Bday party for my wife and had a 100 people out. It would have been a nightmare to do it without Facebook. I just don't have all those people's phone numbers and emails and whatever. I set up an event, made a couple of her girl friends hosters of the event (can't invite people you aren't friends with) and shebam, 100 person nacho potluck party complete! Yah, don't use it for the news feed, but even with the crap, it can still be interesting to see what some of your funny friends are saying and jab some friends when your hockey team is winning!
- drcube 13y ago> An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures. AKA Email. Seriously, somebody needs to build an email client that makes maintaining incoming/outgoing mailing lists and filtering your inbox very easy, and offers a few extra "friend discovery" search features. You would probably have a facebook killer. A lot of people think "social networking" is a new kind of thing. But it's just a fancy UI on top of email.
- godisdad 13y agoFacebook is the Central Limit Theory for awfulness applied to the internet
- dreamdu5t 13y agoAm I the only one who has no issue with Facebook whatsoever? I love it. It's free. I find incredible value in it. People need to get a grip.
- tomc1985 13y agoFacebook was never an "experiment." It was a directory, then it was a platform, and now it's a machine to make money. Remember when the service is free... you aren't the customer, you're the product
- dtkuhn 13y agoI have been under the impression that the point of Facebook is to log in regularly, scan through postings from the Ridiculous and Obscure, and to deduce, accordingly, that life could be so much worse. On the bright side, the product ("Facebook Therapy"?)seems to work so well that, in time, logging in no longer becomes necessary..
- DArcMattr 13y agoI stick to private groups on FB for most of my activity. I get a lot more meaningful conversations and closer personal connections through those groups than the author thinks possible. The Wall-stream is a bonus.
- kin 13y agoI beg to differ. Every month or so HN always has some blog post hit front page about how Facebook is broken and needs to be fixed, pointing out all of its issues (subjectively) and offering no alternatives or solutions. I've had the exact opposite experience with Facebook even with ads. As I google search on my computer, Facebook's ads actually become relevant. As I scan my front page, I see news from friends that I find interesting and status posts about friends that I care about. If I see something irrelevant or spam-ish, there's a convenient tab next to the post that gives me the option to never see it again. Sure, there's some self-management involved in getting Facebook to work for you but it's audience is so broad it kind of has to be that way right?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cmillard789 13y ago"Just like its features, Facebook algorithms are equally stupid. Share more, get noticed more. Originality be damned." This isn't exactly true. The FB algorithm dictates that a post hits an average of 18% of your network for personal accounts (15% for businesses). It's an average, because if you frequently share content that has low engagement (likes, comments, shares) FB shows your content to a smaller % of your network. On the other hand, if you produce content with high engagement, it will get a higher % share with your network.
- manuela610 13y agoRecently, I've been treating Facebook the way Flipboard intends to be used. I use it for news directly relevant to me (because at some point I liked certain websites so that I would get their updates). I find that they provide more relevant content to me than my "friends" do. A brand that uses their Facebook well, with an interesting image and grabbing headline, is a link I will click on.
- CyberDroiD 13y agoWorks great for me for all purposes required. I don't have any specific needs in this area, so it's a fun website for when I want a diversion. None of the author's complaints make sense to me, except yes, I do notice advertising. The original post author seems to have specific interests and needs that are not being fulfilled? That sounds like a personal problem. My suggestion would be to move to another social media platform that better fits his needs. But, in reality, I think the author's problem is PEBKAC. If he doesn't like the website, he should make one that he does like. Nobody is stopping him.
- enok 13y agoFinally someone writes an article about this! I've been thinking the exact same thing for some time now.
- RandallBrown 13y agoMy first page is actually quite relevant to me. A friend of mine has just arrived from across the country to the city I'm in. He just moved here and now I know he's here and we can hang out. Another friend is looking for help with some yardwork. Free beer or pizza is involved. Other friends posted pictures of their children, or graduation photos from college. Another person I know recently got out of the hospital. All of these are at least somewhat relevant to me. What else do I use facebook for? I put an album of photos from a hike I went on the other day. Lots of friends had asked me about it, now they can all see it. I play on a kickball team and we like to hang out with eachother outside of our normal thursday night games. Plans get made in our facebook group quite often. Long ago I realized that some of my friends aren't worth keeping up with. I muted or unfriended them on Facebook. Facebook is what you make it, and I've made it in to something that I use every day.
- stmartin 13y agoWow - you sooooo NAILED it with this article, it's not even funny!
- dobbsbob 13y agoKids don't use facebook anymore, mainly because their entire family is on it. Most kids I know just use whatsap and instagram/twitter they won't go near fb
- vic_nyc 13y agoFacebook has some uses, but people can't expect it to be everything. They can't expect it to be more than it is. For me, Facebook is good at keeping in touch with friends who are far away. They may have moved to a different place, or they may be in a vacation somewhere. They post pics and impressions about a place. I also like the occasional article links people post. Sometimes people go to events and they advertise it on FB and that's how I find out about them. I might decide to join. All these are very good use-cases. I don't use FB to share very personal or deep things, because it's not a suitable medium for that. Real life conversations, in person or over the phone, are much better suited for that. So, FB is a tool, it has its uses. To call it failure is like saying the phone has failed and we shouldn't use it anymore, just because the Internet is here.
- jokoon 13y agoI thought everyone already knew that. Maybe when someone will combine bittorrent and forums, something really new will come out, but for now, facebook is just one big computer cluster, where you can gossip using your real name and where everyone can read you. I don't really call it a progress. I guess paparazzis enjoy it, but not everyone is into that stuff.
- aufreak3 13y agoI'd been off facebook for about a year. I mean not even logging in. Just a while ago, I logged in to post about ... guess what ... our second baby. I took a glance through the feed and thought "looks like nothing's changed in a year". Then this happened - I posted something in which I wanted to include a goo.gl shortened URL (yes, I wanted that specific shortener for geek humourous effect!). FB forbid me from using the goo.gl link because it considered it "spammy", discarded my entire post text and logged me out. When I logged back in, it declared my computer as infected with a virus (that would be a macbook air), made me confirm that I've disinfected it, and oh it made me change my password too before I could login, sigh, and retype my post text using different link. All that while I logged into FB in an incognito window in Chrome! That's when I thought "Man! I'm glad I ditched FB!". The next thought was "what if this happens to google+?". As DanielBMarkham noted, if we really value social networks, they can't be placed in the hands of one company or site. ISPs are probably best placed to make this happen, but that won't happen due to network effects - just like folks don't bother using ISPs email accounts anyway. People would just login to FB or something. The internet as a social network seems doomed to evolve into FBs and G+s!
- reddit_clone 13y ago> Facebook is godsent for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say. Hilarious. So true.
- nevster 13y agoIt's very simple. 80% of the crap is from 20% of the people. Just hide them from your timeline. In your browser, hover over the person's photo, then hover over the Friends button and deselect "Show in News Feed". Problem (mostly) solved.
- bittercynic 13y agoIt is not an experiment, it is a mechanism to make gobs of money, and it worked. Facebook is now being destroyed by its overwhelming success. Since people feel locked in (because, hey, that's where all my friends are...) facebook can keep cranking up the heat, making the experience more and more unpleasant for users, and they will still stick around and give their eyeballs to it. From talking to many people on and offline, it seems that facebook is almost universally hated now, but we have no choice, since everyone else is on facebook. This will probably keep working for some time, but eventually, and very suddenly, there will be a tipping point where many people suddenly can't stand it any more. Once facebook loses that first big chunk, then not everyone will be on facebook anymore, and all the others who despised it for years but hung on because everyone else did will not have to put up with it anymore. Facebook will suddenly go from universal necessity to irrelevant, and it will happen overnight.
- sssparkkk 13y agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned WhatsApp groups and Google Hangouts yet. To me this is the evolution of social networking, where people finally start sharing stuff with each other again. Only this time, it's in a very private group of people, real-time and organised around a common interest/background. I see this happening all around me: groupchat with pictures is the new Facebook.