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Facebook 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

Facebook 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 ago
Google+ 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.
- scholia 13y ago
  > there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room Spot on....
  - russell 13y ago
    Primal Scream Therapy: it's quite prevalent in the Internet.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > I could use google +, but no one else does, and there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room. There hasn't been a generation growing up with Google+ yet.
  - ryanbrunner 13y ago
    There really wasn't with Facebook when it got a bit more public, and yet there was orders of magnitude more excitement and buzz when it expanded to certain cities. Google+ may have more users, but Facebook was one of those things that you had conversations about nearly daily, with people not even vaguely involved in the tech scene.
- moron4hire 13y ago
  >> but no one else does You and I apparently have drastically different pictures of G+.
  - wambotron 13y ago
    Seriously. I use G+ all the time, although not in the same way people use FB. I talk to my good friends offline and use G+ for the communities. It's almost like reddit with 90% less trolling.
    - frostmatthew 13y ago
      "90% less trolling" - where's the fun in that!
daigoba66 13y ago
In the beginning (circa 2003-2005 when I was in college) it was a tool for only your peers. Granted at the time it was little more than a directory and event management tool. But it served a useful purpose back then. In my opinion the jumping-the-shark moment was either when it was opened to the world or when "Apps" were introduced.
- pseut 13y ago
  IMO it started to degrade pretty quickly once the 2003-2005 cohort started to have babies. That pushed extended family, etc. to join to see baby pictures, etc. But I agree somewhat about the apps too, especially the way the games were introduced (when I think about how much I know about some of my friends' mafia wars habits vs. how much I care...) This all happened at about the same time, though, and it all fits under the umbrella of the (sensible, from FB's standpoint) strategy of "grow as large as possible."
xtracto 13y ago
Facebook works very well for me: During my lifetime I've lived on 6 cities in 3 different countries. I've got friends (some of them, became very good friends) and people I know from all these places. Facebook allows me to stay in contact with them, and if I want, to peek at where are they know (and what are they doing). For me, it works as an "information push" platform, where sometimes I'll see an update from an old time friend who I forgot about, and I would use that moment to say hello and congratulate him or give kudos for whatever he is doing (or just say 'haha' at whatever funny picture he shared). Before that, I had to remember to send an email to every person I knew... and ask them specifically what where they doing. Sure, some people might find no sense in maintaining those kind of relations (staying in touch with people who you do not actively talk to). But I think we never know when we might be able to get together again, and having this point of contact is good.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  Put another way: Facebook is for friends outside arm's reach, people you don't want to forget but who are not part of your current "inner circle". Real current friends are not maintained via Facebook precisely because you do connect with them in other ways. It's for those you don't want to lose, but don't want to put much effort into either.
- ripperdoc 13y ago
  I have a similar situation with multiple countries and friends and family back home. Facebook is a good tool for that. Sure, the toolset itself is only ok (crashy app, opaque list-management, messy UI). But more than half of the value of Facebook is NOT the tools it provide, but the fact that almost everyone is ON it. A stellar social tool startup would be of no use to me considering it would take years before the people I need to talk to are memers, if ever. With that said, Facebook is slowly reducing the Signal-to-Noise ratio, and it's an ominous sign for the platform as a whole.
smspence 13y ago
That doesn't sound accurate to me... You're not always talking to everybody. On Facebook you can create friend lists, and then post things that are only visible to the people in the chosen list, in the same way that you can share things with only certain "Circles" on Google+. For example, I have different lists for "Close Friends", "Family", "Work Friends", "Random Acquaintances", etc. If I choose, I can share a post with only my "close friends" list, and none of my family or work friends will see it. This problem has been solved already. On Google+ the concept is called "Circles". On Facebook, they call them "Friends Lists". Why does everyone on HN praise Google+ Circles, but ignore or hate the Facebook Friends Lists feature?
- neilk 13y ago
  I am a fairly savvy computer user, and I use Facebook lists. I always have trouble figuring out who is in what list and which list I'm talking to, and how to add and remove people from that list. Facebook has proved over and over that their priorities are about public sharing, and even to make more things public that previously were private. In part this might be Zuckerberg's vision that sharing almost everything is the future. But as a business they are also incentivized to make sharing effortless, to encourage people to put data on Facebook without thought. Any thought to privacy is always a little bit of friction. So it's always de-emphasized, if not actually buried.
- dirkgently 13y ago
  Can you limit your feed to default to only certain lists? Can you remove all the promoted content (aka crap)? Is it easy to see who you are really sharing with even after creating list? Can you prevent one list from knowing what you liked or commented on other lists? You most likely haven't used G+ to really know the difference. FB lists are anything but G+ Circles.
robomartin 13y ago
The only way a services can be non-intrusive is if you, the user, pay for it. If you paid for the full cost of developing and supporting a solution that did not require such things as advertising and social graph mining in order to build, grow and support a company you'd get a much better product. You'd probably get a product that is far more sensitive to the needs and wants of it's paying client user-base. That's one of the problems with this culture of everything being free on the 'net. Free isn't really free. Businesses don't run on air. They run on money. The user always pays. If it isn't in real currency it will be in ways the company can convert into currency. That's just the way it is. Aspects of your post bother me to some extent because you are complaining about services you are not paying for. I think that is a very important distinction. Don't get me wrong, I have lots of problems with some of the services you mention in your post. I simply choose not to use them. I also happen to think that people who use ad blockers are just short of thieves. It's hypocritical to navigate to a site and make use of its free services and, at the same time, go out of your way to deny them revenue. It's like someone figuring out a way to make you work and legally not pay you for it.
- hnha 13y ago
  i use free xmpp servers to talk with people who I "met" on free websites. Many people provide services for free because they believe in a shared good. It's not all money money.
  - robomartin 13y ago
    OK, sure. You go and try to run a real web-based business with employees, offices and the required infrastructure without "money money". The point stands: If you as a user don't explicitly pay for it with cash, using an ad blocker means you have chosen to deny the service some revenue. OK, don't call it theft. That's fine. Here's a simple mental exercise: Assume that 100% of the entire world-wide Internet audience used ad blockers. How much of the internet would cease to exist as free services? The answer: A huge chunk.
    - bittercynic 13y ago
Gormo 13y ago
> 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. Nothing has yet approached traditional web forums, IRC, and even old-school Usenet in this capacity. These forms of online community are clearly-defined social spaces, in which everyone has a direct view to who is and isn't participating. There may be many separate contexts going at any given time, with lots of overlap among participants, but each one is still an independent venue with legible boundaries. Modern "social media" lacks this sense of defined space, which, I think, is necessary for anything to be legitimately called a "community". Forums and IRC are like a few dozen friends sitting around a table, with everyone engaged in a single coherent conversation at any given time. Twitter and Facebook are like two hundred acquaintances having 40,000 conversations by shouting at each other across the floor of a gymnasium.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  Yeah it just turns into "oh my golf friends would love this, but everyone else would think its uninteresting" or "oh, my friends who are passionate about politics might be able to start an interesting discussion here, but having older relatives also comment will turn this into a clusterfuck" or "My poker buddies would love this, but I don't want most of my friends knowing I gamble." Groups seems like the main answer, and I suppose this is the main reason that I mostly use Groups when I'm actually using fb at this point.
- unclebucknasty 13y ago
  Good points. And, after a while it seems like there's not much ROI on using a piece of software like FB to try to "manage" with whom you communicate and how. In fact, it seems an artificially wedged in middleman at some point. And it becomes more efficient to get it out of the way and go back to simple email, phone calls or, as you say, IRC and forums.
thinkloop 13y ago
> You don't share the same stories with your peers that you would with your grandma. Turns out there's quite a lot that we do.
gavinpc 13y ago
> I've always thought Facebook was from the devil. But you can't stop using it. Why? I quit Facebook about two years ago, when I stopped liking it. Too many political arguments and misunderstandings. Guess what? Life goes on.
gasull 13y ago
Nutshellmail lets you use Facebook and Twitter receiving a daily update by email (or more or less frequently if you prefer). You don't need to log into Facebook or Twitter at all. Also, for a distributed social network, we have Bitmessage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_dTotavJZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_dTotavJZ8 https://bitmessage.org&#x2F https://bitmessage.org/

austenallred 13y ago

Google+ 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.

scholia 13y ago
> there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room Spot on....
- russell 13y ago
  Primal Scream Therapy: it's quite prevalent in the Internet.
saraid216 13y ago
> I could use google +, but no one else does, and there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room. There hasn't been a generation growing up with Google+ yet.
- ryanbrunner 13y ago
  There really wasn't with Facebook when it got a bit more public, and yet there was orders of magnitude more excitement and buzz when it expanded to certain cities. Google+ may have more users, but Facebook was one of those things that you had conversations about nearly daily, with people not even vaguely involved in the tech scene.
moron4hire 13y ago
>> but no one else does You and I apparently have drastically different pictures of G+.
- wambotron 13y ago
  Seriously. I use G+ all the time, although not in the same way people use FB. I talk to my good friends offline and use G+ for the communities. It's almost like reddit with 90% less trolling.
  - frostmatthew 13y ago
    "90% less trolling" - where's the fun in that!

daigoba66 13y ago

In the beginning (circa 2003-2005 when I was in college) it was a tool for only your peers. Granted at the time it was little more than a directory and event management tool. But it served a useful purpose back then. In my opinion the jumping-the-shark moment was either when it was opened to the world or when "Apps" were introduced.

pseut 13y ago
IMO it started to degrade pretty quickly once the 2003-2005 cohort started to have babies. That pushed extended family, etc. to join to see baby pictures, etc. But I agree somewhat about the apps too, especially the way the games were introduced (when I think about how much I know about some of my friends' mafia wars habits vs. how much I care...) This all happened at about the same time, though, and it all fits under the umbrella of the (sensible, from FB's standpoint) strategy of "grow as large as possible."

xtracto 13y ago

Facebook works very well for me: During my lifetime I've lived on 6 cities in 3 different countries. I've got friends (some of them, became very good friends) and people I know from all these places. Facebook allows me to stay in contact with them, and if I want, to peek at where are they know (and what are they doing). For me, it works as an "information push" platform, where sometimes I'll see an update from an old time friend who I forgot about, and I would use that moment to say hello and congratulate him or give kudos for whatever he is doing (or just say 'haha' at whatever funny picture he shared). Before that, I had to remember to send an email to every person I knew... and ask them specifically what where they doing. Sure, some people might find no sense in maintaining those kind of relations (staying in touch with people who you do not actively talk to). But I think we never know when we might be able to get together again, and having this point of contact is good.

ctdonath 13y ago
Put another way: Facebook is for friends outside arm's reach, people you don't want to forget but who are not part of your current "inner circle". Real current friends are not maintained via Facebook precisely because you do connect with them in other ways. It's for those you don't want to lose, but don't want to put much effort into either.
ripperdoc 13y ago
I have a similar situation with multiple countries and friends and family back home. Facebook is a good tool for that. Sure, the toolset itself is only ok (crashy app, opaque list-management, messy UI). But more than half of the value of Facebook is NOT the tools it provide, but the fact that almost everyone is ON it. A stellar social tool startup would be of no use to me considering it would take years before the people I need to talk to are memers, if ever. With that said, Facebook is slowly reducing the Signal-to-Noise ratio, and it's an ominous sign for the platform as a whole.

smspence 13y ago

That doesn't sound accurate to me... You're not always talking to everybody. On Facebook you can create friend lists, and then post things that are only visible to the people in the chosen list, in the same way that you can share things with only certain "Circles" on Google+. For example, I have different lists for "Close Friends", "Family", "Work Friends", "Random Acquaintances", etc. If I choose, I can share a post with only my "close friends" list, and none of my family or work friends will see it. This problem has been solved already. On Google+ the concept is called "Circles". On Facebook, they call them "Friends Lists". Why does everyone on HN praise Google+ Circles, but ignore or hate the Facebook Friends Lists feature?

neilk 13y ago
I am a fairly savvy computer user, and I use Facebook lists. I always have trouble figuring out who is in what list and which list I'm talking to, and how to add and remove people from that list. Facebook has proved over and over that their priorities are about public sharing, and even to make more things public that previously were private. In part this might be Zuckerberg's vision that sharing almost everything is the future. But as a business they are also incentivized to make sharing effortless, to encourage people to put data on Facebook without thought. Any thought to privacy is always a little bit of friction. So it's always de-emphasized, if not actually buried.
dirkgently 13y ago
Can you limit your feed to default to only certain lists? Can you remove all the promoted content (aka crap)? Is it easy to see who you are really sharing with even after creating list? Can you prevent one list from knowing what you liked or commented on other lists? You most likely haven't used G+ to really know the difference. FB lists are anything but G+ Circles.

robomartin 13y ago

The only way a services can be non-intrusive is if you, the user, pay for it. If you paid for the full cost of developing and supporting a solution that did not require such things as advertising and social graph mining in order to build, grow and support a company you'd get a much better product. You'd probably get a product that is far more sensitive to the needs and wants of it's paying client user-base. That's one of the problems with this culture of everything being free on the 'net. Free isn't really free. Businesses don't run on air. They run on money. The user always pays. If it isn't in real currency it will be in ways the company can convert into currency. That's just the way it is. Aspects of your post bother me to some extent because you are complaining about services you are not paying for. I think that is a very important distinction. Don't get me wrong, I have lots of problems with some of the services you mention in your post. I simply choose not to use them. I also happen to think that people who use ad blockers are just short of thieves. It's hypocritical to navigate to a site and make use of its free services and, at the same time, go out of your way to deny them revenue. It's like someone figuring out a way to make you work and legally not pay you for it.

hnha 13y ago
i use free xmpp servers to talk with people who I "met" on free websites. Many people provide services for free because they believe in a shared good. It's not all money money.
- robomartin 13y ago
  OK, sure. You go and try to run a real web-based business with employees, offices and the required infrastructure without "money money". The point stands: If you as a user don't explicitly pay for it with cash, using an ad blocker means you have chosen to deny the service some revenue. OK, don't call it theft. That's fine. Here's a simple mental exercise: Assume that 100% of the entire world-wide Internet audience used ad blockers. How much of the internet would cease to exist as free services? The answer: A huge chunk.
  - bittercynic 13y ago

Gormo 13y ago

> 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. Nothing has yet approached traditional web forums, IRC, and even old-school Usenet in this capacity. These forms of online community are clearly-defined social spaces, in which everyone has a direct view to who is and isn't participating. There may be many separate contexts going at any given time, with lots of overlap among participants, but each one is still an independent venue with legible boundaries. Modern "social media" lacks this sense of defined space, which, I think, is necessary for anything to be legitimately called a "community". Forums and IRC are like a few dozen friends sitting around a table, with everyone engaged in a single coherent conversation at any given time. Twitter and Facebook are like two hundred acquaintances having 40,000 conversations by shouting at each other across the floor of a gymnasium.

ryguytilidie 13y ago
Yeah it just turns into "oh my golf friends would love this, but everyone else would think its uninteresting" or "oh, my friends who are passionate about politics might be able to start an interesting discussion here, but having older relatives also comment will turn this into a clusterfuck" or "My poker buddies would love this, but I don't want most of my friends knowing I gamble." Groups seems like the main answer, and I suppose this is the main reason that I mostly use Groups when I'm actually using fb at this point.
unclebucknasty 13y ago
Good points. And, after a while it seems like there's not much ROI on using a piece of software like FB to try to "manage" with whom you communicate and how. In fact, it seems an artificially wedged in middleman at some point. And it becomes more efficient to get it out of the way and go back to simple email, phone calls or, as you say, IRC and forums.

thinkloop 13y ago

> You don't share the same stories with your peers that you would with your grandma. Turns out there's quite a lot that we do.

gavinpc 13y ago

> I've always thought Facebook was from the devil. But you can't stop using it. Why? I quit Facebook about two years ago, when I stopped liking it. Too many political arguments and misunderstandings. Guess what? Life goes on.

gasull 13y ago

Nutshellmail lets you use Facebook and Twitter receiving a daily update by email (or more or less frequently if you prefer). You don't need to log into Facebook or Twitter at all. Also, for a distributed social network, we have Bitmessage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_dTotavJZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_dTotavJZ8 https://bitmessage.org&#x2F https://bitmessage.org/