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Lately 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 ve

Lately 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Likewise. So much for people saying email is broken and outdated.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 ago
    so 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 ago
    If 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 ago
      Seems 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…)
      - lostlogin 13y ago
        Yeah, I'm a recipient. Professional body that has god knows how many members who use the reply all to ask each other for coffee. I tried binning their emails but that caused havoc with bills/body requirements. It's awful.
        gizzlon 13y ago
        Sounds more like a people problem than a email problem :)
        lucian1900 13y ago
        Sounds like they need a non-work mailing list.
  - lucian1900 13y ago
    Well, in addition to being very useful it is also broken and outdated. Sadly, the "alternatives" (facebook, google plus, etc.) fix almost none of the flaws and add some of their own (non-federated!)
    - jwdunne 13y ago
      What, exactly, are the flaws you are talking about? I'm interested because email is simple and there may be ways, inventive or not, of fixing it without protocol changes, or at most a layer written above email. I've been thinking about how to fix email as per YCs list of things they'd like to fund (just to get the juices flowing) and it might be cool to build on top of the email protocol rather than replace it - e.g it's trivial to format, say, todos in an email in a human readable format such that they can still be read and returned checked off by users who don't use this additional layer.
      - bradleyjg 13y ago
        There are two different sets of problems with email. The first, more concrete, set arises simply because of the age of the protocols. They were developed when the internet was a club of like minded people rather than a global public space. Things like: a lack of rock solid authentication, no guarantees of transit privacy (much less at rest privacy), clunky formatting, multimedia and hypermedia support, arcane attachment problems, and only hacked on support for anything beyond 1:N messaging (e.g. mailing lists). A lot of these problems have good, solid, proposed solutions but inertia and collective action problems mean that near universal support for protocol additions / changes take years if not decades. The second, more amorphous, set of problems have to do with how some people use email pervasively in their lives in a fashion that (inevitably) would be more efficiently accomplished with a tool specialized to their needs. So for example, people who spend a fair amount of time in a corporate enviorment with Exchange often bitterly miss the calendar management integration. They say that vanilla email is broken because it has no equivalent capability. Although the critique is legitamite I think the target is off, it's not email that's broken, it's federated calendaring in general. But because email can sort-of, kind-of substitute it gets the blame.
- lipanski 13y ago
  what do you usually do when you're inbox gets spammed with a lot of irrelevant information - you apply filters / labels. same thing can be done with Facebook, but for some reason people still treat it as a service that doesn't need any customization. you just login and out of the sudden quality information starts pouring down from all panels. it's not like that... it's just like with your inbox, even though your friends aren't really selling Viagra, but some of them aren't far either. every post on your news feed has got a tiny "hide" link, which you can use to either unsubscribe completely from a friend's wall posts (yeah, keep those "how I met your mother" quotes for yourself bro), choose which kind of news you're actually interested in (pictures only, events etc.) or even choose how often you wanna see a person's posts ("all updates" or "most important"). if you get the tendency to disable a post that you don't like the moment you see it, then (on the long run) you'll end up with a wall that's at least 2/3 interesting or let's call it decent (facebook is not really hacker news). I'm not aware if this is the actual implementation, but would be really cool if Facebook would actually learn from the posts you hide and stop suggesting similar ones in the future. I've got around 300 friends and had I not unsubscribed from a lot of them, my news feed would have been packed with wedding pictures of people I don't know, events I can't go to or causes I don't really care about. just to end here, email has its purpose but that purpose is not social sharing any more. just like emails took over writting letters years ago, social networks should improve over emails in the aspect of sharing information with ease. oh, and to the author: the facebook experiment hasn't failed - you just need to tell it what you expect of it.
  - sergiosgc 13y ago
    Your post on begs the question: If having decent content in Facebook requires as much customization (work) as email, why not use email instead? With email I get none of the privacy blunders of Facebook, none of the advertising, I get a federated service and asymmetrical connections. People expect that Facebook provides the automatic content customization/filtering. And rightfully so, I may add. It's a shame that Facebook is little more than a walled-garden email service with photo storage.
    - lipanski 13y ago
hkmurakami 13y ago
I tend to have a hard time discerning whether commenting on a shared item will make my comment appear on the original thread or the "sharer"'s thread, and I usually end up not commenting even when I have something I could say.
- _k 13y ago
  Comments don't appear on both ? How weird is that ?
zt 13y ago
My best friend and I actually run a ~100 person listserv to this end. We call it "Feed Your Brain" and people send out interesting articles, music, poetry, etc, they find on the internet. Sometimes there is a great discussion or debate, sometimes not. It is very private and intimate and it feels closer to early Reddit or HN than anything else I have found.
- joshAg 13y ago
  seems you stumbled on the secret of keeping a good online community: don't let a person's contacts exceed the network's dunbar number[1]. non-default subreddits can still be quite good, but many/most/all of the default subreddits are wastelands ravaged by a silent majority of up- and down-voters while the huddled masses of commenters cling together for safety. of course, there's the same phenomenon within the commenters community, where insightful comments are buried amongst puns and prejudice and adolescent jokes that get upvoted much quicker. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
  - AndrewKemendo 13y ago
    Path tried that in the social network format but it doesn't seem to be catching on.
    - gavingmiller 13y ago
      Speculating here, but that's probably due to the fact that small and private isn't compatible with VC money.
- tinha 13y ago
  I use a private group on Facebook to share and talk with my closest friends.
- spupy 13y ago
  Sounds like this group could use a private subreddit on reddit.
- 13y ago
StavrosK 13y ago
I built an app specifically to make this easier: http://www.yourpane.com/ http://www.yourpane.com/ You click the bookmarklet, pick friends and it sends the current page.
lenazegher 13y ago
Perhaps even more oddly, when I have an interesting link, I tend to post it to the facebook group chat I have running with four of my closest friends. It's useful because everyone can see everyone else's reaction. I use facebook almost every day, but I can't remember the last time I posted a status update or read anyone else's status update. I use it as a glorified chat/email hybrid client. It's useful because only people I've chosen to accept can send me messages (like chat), but it's truly asynchronous, stores everything and supports rich messages (like email). If, tomorrow, facebook disabled the ability of everyone to post statuses, play games, use apps, answer quizzes, post photos and all the rest of it, my usage of facebook would be precisely the same as it is now.
rmc 13y ago
I like that part of Facebook. It means it's now easy for you to keep in touch with people you wouldn't normally meet reguarly.
jblz 13y ago
"It's (for me) evolved into my less-close friends' vacations and babies and memes." This. Further, I think Fb serves a very important purpose in my life: it has supplanted any need or desire to attend a high school reunion. I can easily find out "what you've been up to" if I care in the slightest. Also, upvoted b/c babies are cute :)
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  I've wondered about this as well. When I was going through my 20's there came big splits in my friends pool in terms of common interests, first the division of friends who were married and those who weren't, and then the much bigger split of people with kids and those without. I noticed that my focus changed at those times as did others and the folks who weren't married or didn't have kids were really not interested in the stuff I was focused on. We now have a generation of people going through this with Facebook and it doesn't surprise me if suddenly one group of friends is not as relevant as they used to be, and that a system like Facebook can't easily pick that up.
  - roc 13y ago
    Facebook doesn't really want to pick that up. What keeps people coming back is the illusion of activity. The sound and fury. If/when people close out the noise successfully, it winds up looking a lot like an email box.

icelancer 13y ago

I 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 ago
Likewise. 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 ago
  so 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 ago
  If 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 ago
    Seems 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…)
    - lostlogin 13y ago
      Yeah, I'm a recipient. Professional body that has god knows how many members who use the reply all to ask each other for coffee. I tried binning their emails but that caused havoc with bills/body requirements. It's awful.
      - gizzlon 13y ago
        Sounds more like a people problem than a email problem :)
      - lucian1900 13y ago
        Sounds like they need a non-work mailing list.
- lucian1900 13y ago
  Well, in addition to being very useful it is also broken and outdated. Sadly, the "alternatives" (facebook, google plus, etc.) fix almost none of the flaws and add some of their own (non-federated!)
  - jwdunne 13y ago
    What, exactly, are the flaws you are talking about? I'm interested because email is simple and there may be ways, inventive or not, of fixing it without protocol changes, or at most a layer written above email. I've been thinking about how to fix email as per YCs list of things they'd like to fund (just to get the juices flowing) and it might be cool to build on top of the email protocol rather than replace it - e.g it's trivial to format, say, todos in an email in a human readable format such that they can still be read and returned checked off by users who don't use this additional layer.
    - bradleyjg 13y ago
      There are two different sets of problems with email. The first, more concrete, set arises simply because of the age of the protocols. They were developed when the internet was a club of like minded people rather than a global public space. Things like: a lack of rock solid authentication, no guarantees of transit privacy (much less at rest privacy), clunky formatting, multimedia and hypermedia support, arcane attachment problems, and only hacked on support for anything beyond 1:N messaging (e.g. mailing lists). A lot of these problems have good, solid, proposed solutions but inertia and collective action problems mean that near universal support for protocol additions / changes take years if not decades. The second, more amorphous, set of problems have to do with how some people use email pervasively in their lives in a fashion that (inevitably) would be more efficiently accomplished with a tool specialized to their needs. So for example, people who spend a fair amount of time in a corporate enviorment with Exchange often bitterly miss the calendar management integration. They say that vanilla email is broken because it has no equivalent capability. Although the critique is legitamite I think the target is off, it's not email that's broken, it's federated calendaring in general. But because email can sort-of, kind-of substitute it gets the blame.
lipanski 13y ago
what do you usually do when you're inbox gets spammed with a lot of irrelevant information - you apply filters / labels. same thing can be done with Facebook, but for some reason people still treat it as a service that doesn't need any customization. you just login and out of the sudden quality information starts pouring down from all panels. it's not like that... it's just like with your inbox, even though your friends aren't really selling Viagra, but some of them aren't far either. every post on your news feed has got a tiny "hide" link, which you can use to either unsubscribe completely from a friend's wall posts (yeah, keep those "how I met your mother" quotes for yourself bro), choose which kind of news you're actually interested in (pictures only, events etc.) or even choose how often you wanna see a person's posts ("all updates" or "most important"). if you get the tendency to disable a post that you don't like the moment you see it, then (on the long run) you'll end up with a wall that's at least 2/3 interesting or let's call it decent (facebook is not really hacker news). I'm not aware if this is the actual implementation, but would be really cool if Facebook would actually learn from the posts you hide and stop suggesting similar ones in the future. I've got around 300 friends and had I not unsubscribed from a lot of them, my news feed would have been packed with wedding pictures of people I don't know, events I can't go to or causes I don't really care about. just to end here, email has its purpose but that purpose is not social sharing any more. just like emails took over writting letters years ago, social networks should improve over emails in the aspect of sharing information with ease. oh, and to the author: the facebook experiment hasn't failed - you just need to tell it what you expect of it.
- sergiosgc 13y ago
  Your post on begs the question: If having decent content in Facebook requires as much customization (work) as email, why not use email instead? With email I get none of the privacy blunders of Facebook, none of the advertising, I get a federated service and asymmetrical connections. People expect that Facebook provides the automatic content customization/filtering. And rightfully so, I may add. It's a shame that Facebook is little more than a walled-garden email service with photo storage.
  - lipanski 13y ago

hkmurakami 13y ago

I tend to have a hard time discerning whether commenting on a shared item will make my comment appear on the original thread or the "sharer"'s thread, and I usually end up not commenting even when I have something I could say.

_k 13y ago
Comments don't appear on both ? How weird is that ?

zt 13y ago

My best friend and I actually run a ~100 person listserv to this end. We call it "Feed Your Brain" and people send out interesting articles, music, poetry, etc, they find on the internet. Sometimes there is a great discussion or debate, sometimes not. It is very private and intimate and it feels closer to early Reddit or HN than anything else I have found.

joshAg 13y ago
seems you stumbled on the secret of keeping a good online community: don't let a person's contacts exceed the network's dunbar number[1]. non-default subreddits can still be quite good, but many/most/all of the default subreddits are wastelands ravaged by a silent majority of up- and down-voters while the huddled masses of commenters cling together for safety. of course, there's the same phenomenon within the commenters community, where insightful comments are buried amongst puns and prejudice and adolescent jokes that get upvoted much quicker. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
- AndrewKemendo 13y ago
  Path tried that in the social network format but it doesn't seem to be catching on.
  - gavingmiller 13y ago
    Speculating here, but that's probably due to the fact that small and private isn't compatible with VC money.
tinha 13y ago
I use a private group on Facebook to share and talk with my closest friends.
spupy 13y ago
Sounds like this group could use a private subreddit on reddit.
13y ago

StavrosK 13y ago

I built an app specifically to make this easier: http://www.yourpane.com/ http://www.yourpane.com/ You click the bookmarklet, pick friends and it sends the current page.

lenazegher 13y ago

Perhaps even more oddly, when I have an interesting link, I tend to post it to the facebook group chat I have running with four of my closest friends. It's useful because everyone can see everyone else's reaction. I use facebook almost every day, but I can't remember the last time I posted a status update or read anyone else's status update. I use it as a glorified chat/email hybrid client. It's useful because only people I've chosen to accept can send me messages (like chat), but it's truly asynchronous, stores everything and supports rich messages (like email). If, tomorrow, facebook disabled the ability of everyone to post statuses, play games, use apps, answer quizzes, post photos and all the rest of it, my usage of facebook would be precisely the same as it is now.

rmc 13y ago

I like that part of Facebook. It means it's now easy for you to keep in touch with people you wouldn't normally meet reguarly.

jblz 13y ago

"It's (for me) evolved into my less-close friends' vacations and babies and memes." This. Further, I think Fb serves a very important purpose in my life: it has supplanted any need or desire to attend a high school reunion. I can easily find out "what you've been up to" if I care in the slightest. Also, upvoted b/c babies are cute :)

ChuckMcM 13y ago
I've wondered about this as well. When I was going through my 20's there came big splits in my friends pool in terms of common interests, first the division of friends who were married and those who weren't, and then the much bigger split of people with kids and those without. I noticed that my focus changed at those times as did others and the folks who weren't married or didn't have kids were really not interested in the stuff I was focused on. We now have a generation of people going through this with Facebook and it doesn't surprise me if suddenly one group of friends is not as relevant as they used to be, and that a system like Facebook can't easily pick that up.
- roc 13y ago
  Facebook doesn't really want to pick that up. What keeps people coming back is the illusion of activity. The sound and fury. If/when people close out the noise successfully, it winds up looking a lot like an email box.