11 ms·

Facebook is just fine

147 points by cmod 13y ago

tokenadult 13y ago
I see that now we are going to have debates among different columnists who write for medium.com, which may spice up the content a bit. I agree with this author more than I agreed with the last author, who wrote decrying Facebook. Sure, I have been careful to select friends for their capacity to maintain civil, thoughtful conversation, but now that I have a circle of friends like that, living in countries around the world, Facebook is a convenient medium for all of us to have conversations on. I like Facebook because I see my friends there. I have written before here on Hacker News, "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it." I used to see friends on AOL. I never felt an obligation to help AOL monetize just because of that. Networks are a dime a dozen. Right now, Facebook is a very convenient network, and I like it. I do not predict that Facebook will make a lot of money because of users like me.
- dasil003 13y ago
  Talking about Facebook is the ultimate bike-shedding discussion. Everybody, and I mean literally everybody inside and outside of the tech world has an opinion. That's fine, but when people start extrapolating their opinion to predict the fate of Facebook (and this applies more to the previous article than this one) I just have to laugh. I'm sure Facebook will make a fascinating topic for anthropologists 50 years from now, but in the meantime I don't need a slew of columnists going all Nostradamus on the subject. What one likes or dislikes about FB, or tips on how to use it are all potentially good topics, but the grand predictions are just so much noise.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    I agree thst predictions by themselves are noise. However, predictions that are based on analogy are fascinating. Mark Twain said, "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." We see this all the time in the technology sector alone. For example, back in the 80s companies used to buy IBM servers because the thought was that nobody would be fired for buying the safe product. As a result, IBM stagnated in the very area in which it was most competitive. These days, we see Oracle in the exact same spot. Their salespeople use the exact same "fear, uncertainty and doubt" strategy and therefore it is safe to predict that they will end up just like IBM in many ways, just like Facebook will end up like AOL.
    - dasil003 13y ago
      I guess my problem with Facebook predictions is that the majority of them seem to simply be someone writing about their personal experience with Facebook and then extrapolating that out. I honestly think that what blogger X or tech journalist Y thinks about using Facebook is utterly immaterial to the future of Facebook. They've crossed the chasm, it doesn't matter if the technorati think Facebook is "done", they don't need us, and our nerd rage will not affect their future in any way.
dvt 13y ago
The crux of the essay is the following: > Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby. As soon as I saw it, I said to myself: "boy oh boy, he better give some hard evidence." The article goes on even without providing anecdotal evidence, let alone anything to the extent I was expecting or hoping. In fact, the entire discussion seems to be about the hiding feature. Yeah, everyone knows about it (and more and more people are using it), but I'm not sure how using a destructive feature of a service makes the service more necessary (I would argue for the opposite). If I hide 90% of my "friends" from my feed, for example, what's the point of Facebook? Apart from the ego-boosting friend-count (which I might also hide). Now, going back to the initial (bolded!) argument: Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby. I think that this is just simply not true. Of course, a definition of "care deeply" would be needed, but my assumption here is that we're talking about moms, dads, sisters, brothers, aunts, BFFs, and the like -- NOT ex-girlfriends/boyfriends or classmates from high school that helped us out that one time on that one biology project in freshman year. If I only contacted my mom or dad through Facebook, my parents would first of all be quite mad -- and second of all, our relationship would suffer. People that I care deeply about get emails, phone calls, Skype calls, text messages, sometimes even snail-mail from me! I'm not sure how the OP expects us to connect Facebook to "caring deeply." Again, some evidence (or an actual argument) would've been nice. I don't hate Facebook, but more often than not, I find myself just using it when I'm bored and semi-creeping around seeing what X or Y is up to and randomly clicking on that "cute girl that's a friend of a friend of a friend" (incidentally, this is what most people use it for). "Creeping on Facebook," has in fact, become a relatively common colloquialism; I wouldn't even attribute a negative quality to the idea, but I would argue it's a fundamental failure of FB (and something that should capitalize on). I posted about this before, but I really believe that the next "big social thing" will be a start-up that will somehow make it easy to approach people you don't know and spark up a conversation. There are so many people on FB, and yet most of us hide 90% of the people we're friends with and we don't add the ones we might find interesting but don't know. That doesn't seem "just fine" to me. Oh yeah, go ahead and add me on Facebook.
- gfodor 13y ago
  What, exactly, do you expect in terms of hard evidence from someone who is claiming they find Facebook useful? Do you expect to get a spreadsheet of their usage activity and a split test they ran where they defriended half of their closest friends and tried using e-mail for a week? The only people who can share "hard evidence" of engagement data of the Facebook news feed are Facebook themselves, and they are not going to do that. When it comes to understanding user satisfaction, anecdotes count a lot, particularly when those anecdotes re-enforce the thesis of a product by example. You raise the question of what is the point of Facebook if you hide 90% of your "friends". Just asking this question shows that you don't really get what the author is saying. Putting quotes around "friends" tells me you are missing the point that the author is, in fact, leaving left un-hid people who meet two attributes: are legitimate close friends/relatives and post interesting and meaningful content. What remains is a one-of-a-kind stream of content that provides him/her with the ability to feel they are in tune with the lives of people who they are no longer nearby. People who come to HN and rail on Facebook about privacy concerns and ethics have a point. People who come on HN and rail on Facebook The Product are missing the point. If Facebook's news feed is not engaging, it means one of two things: you have over-friended and not hidden people who post bad content, or you are not connected to any people who post content on Facebook that you enjoy. There are many, many people that do not fit in either of these categories.
bowerbird 13y ago
craig mod says: > If you are overtly negative > (which is different than > having opinions differing from my own), > you get hidden. i didn't know who was writing this when i first read it. but i still chuckled when i came across that sentence... and when i looked and it was _craig_mod_, i laughed at loud. because it's "just fine" if you disagree with craig mod, just as long as you kiss his ass while you're doing it. otherwise, he will peg you as "overtly negative"... -bowerbird
- sergiotapia 13y ago
  On HN you don't need to leave your signature, we can tell who wrote the post.
  - bowerbird 13y ago
    thanks. but i have a 18-year history of signing every post i make on the internet -- owning up to the words that i write -- and i don't wanna break my perfect record. :+) -bowerbird
    - asdfologist 13y ago
      That just fills up space with no useful content. Imagine if everybody on HN did this.
      - bowerbird 13y ago
        imagine if everyone here owned up to their words? well, um, yes, i think that would be a good thing. on the other hand, your "asdfologist" handle rocks. :+) -bowerbird
  - tucif 13y ago
    I think that works the same for email, we can tell who sent it by address and name, but people still sign it, most of the time with name only. I do. Weirder here, and I really hope he doesn't have/do that on a twitter account though...
deleted 13y ago
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tezka 13y ago
Facebook works for me very well because I don't quite use the news feed as a social networking feed. I have changed its push model to a pull model. That means, I have pretty much hidden all of my friends and use the news feed to only read updates from magazines and pages I am interested in. I however visit people's profile that I am reminded of every now and then to see whats going on with their lives. The closer I am to someone the more frequent her/his profile gets a visit. To make this tractable, I every few months go through a round of deleting people I don't care about (like someone I've met for a few minutes and I am sure I will not see again, or if I do I will mostly likely pretend I don't know the person).
sergiotapia 13y ago
I agree completely with this cat. Maybe it's because I use Facebook from Bolivia and ads aren't really shown down here (no market?), but almost of my timeline posts are nice to see. I also hide dumb, annoying and negative people but keep them as a friend to avoid hurting feelings. I get to talk to my immediate family instantly from anywhere in the city, laptop or mobile phone - what other free service does that? Facebook isn't terrible, naysayers are just hipsters wanting to hate on something popular.
- arindone 13y ago
  Agreed -- and I find your use case interesting, because when I hear of some obscure new social network that only works on web or some has some crazy obscure features that only rich white tech people care about, I think about the case of someone from Bolivia/South Africa/Phillipines who uses Facebook, can access it on pretty much any phone, and finds it valuable...a problem that many products/networks (outside of maybe Twitter and Evernote) have successfully solved
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  "naysayers are just hipsters wanting to hate on something popular" I "hate" Facebook since 2007, when a small forum I was part of and liked a lot decided to "move to facebook", where it died a really quick and really pointless death. It got worse and more idiotic since then, and these days I "hate" facebook for leaving poop trails everywhere else, too (i.e. sites that only allow facebook to sign up, "like this" buttons everywhere, that sort of crap). If Facebook, its users and those who prey on them would refrain from shoving it into my face 10 times a day, maybe I would feel accordingly. For example, I never "hated" AOL, it was just something stupid that people do in private. Facebook, not so much. It's like I normally wouldn't comment on the size and shape of someone's penis, but if they keep rubbing it into my face, I get kinda bitey. "what other free service does that?" What other free service doesn't? There are a million things that would work the same way, if people used them. Starting with email, IM, and all the fascinating things one can install on webservers. See, that's exactly what I mean. The existance and use of facebook leads to me having to read crap like this, "what other free service does that?". That does hurt my brain, so I sometimes snarl. That people who don't make the cut come up with rationalizations for that is kind of expected.
ultimoo 13y ago
I'm really shy about sharing stuff on facebook. Maybe because of the number of highschool and college folks I have friended there. So basically I'm a 'scroller' (I have a 20yo real life friend who called me this term offline). I do go to facebook to scroll once every couple of days and it is interesting. I'm just happy that people aren't as shy as I when it comes to posting updates and uploading photos etc.
igorgue 13y ago
What the heck is is he talking about? This is facebook, 28 of 29 posts are about pages I liked or pages talking about pages I like (yeap, like I care about Lakers Nation talking about LeBron James). I can't share anything there either because some of my friends and family get offended by my views (atheist, anarchist, pro-drugs). I could create lists, but who has time for that? I rather just use leaser known social networks like Vine and Snapchat where the people are more open minded.
- brown9-2 13y ago
  You must have missed the whole point of the article - hide people or pages who post content you don't care about (or never subscribe).
  - lizardking 13y ago
    Hiding people will not keep them from seeing your posts. It keeps you from seeing their posts.
    - alagappanr 13y ago
      Using lists and sharing with lists helps you prevent certain people from seeing your posts.
  - avalaunch 13y ago
    That would address the first half of his complaint, but not the second half. He doesn't feel free to post anything of substance because the post is being broadcast too broadly. And he realizes he can control that with lists, but lists are a pain to make on FB.
jonathanjaeger 13y ago
A million times this. Curate your feed for content ('like' good pages) and hide those 'friends' you're not interested in. What other place can you chat easily with friends far away, find a last minute ticket for a concert from someone who has an online identity without paying scalper prices, find out an old friend moved to your area, keep in touch with the masses who connect with you for other reasons (e.g. I run a music community and chat with users on Facebook sometimes), and the list goes on. Show me more ads, I don't care! They're not horrible popups and the News Feed ones are only somewhat intrusive.
- jdminhbg 13y ago
  > Curate your feed for content Why in the world would I want to do this? I eventually gave up on Facebook because I spent more time "curating" it than using it, and the end result was awkward conversations with friends who assumed I had seen something when in fact I was no longer subscribed to their baby pictures. > What other place can you ... Mostly email, iMessage/SMS/BBM/WhatsApp, and Twitter.
  - jonathanjaeger 13y ago
    I don't have 1000 friends on Facebook, it's pretty easy to curate 200-300 friends. It takes a few seconds to remove someone from your feed. >iMessage/SMS/BBM/WhatsApp, and Twitter. Very few of my friends use Twitter and I can't easily drop links and have long, fast conversations with people. Facebook chat integrates with the private messages seamlessly. It's a much better experience than texting (how can I easily send many links) or sending 140 characters or less.
brown9-2 13y ago
I tend to hide people whose updates are annoying yet I don't want to unfriend as well, but one thing that strikes me as weird about this arrangement is that I have essentially set up a one-way sharing relationship with this person - this person whom I've probably forgot about can see whatever I post, but I'm ignoring all signs of their existence on the news feed. To me, that's why this strategy doesn't really seem scalable.
tomasien 13y ago
"Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby." He goes on to explain the way in which it works for him, but that's the point. I, for example, don't do anything but see my stream without much hiding and I love it. I love seeing why my friends having going on, I love the weird swath of reactions and conversations, I love it. Hell, I love that my aunt bothers me on Facebook all the time, I would never talk to her otherwise! It's not everything to everyone, but it's a REALLY important thing to a REALLY huge amount of people. It could die. Mobile (or other things) could kill it, I don't deny that, but it's great. Long live Facebook, until something does what it does better.
alphang 13y ago
I do not agree that having to hide friends so you get a curated News Feed really works. For me, this is a lot of work just to get Facebook back as a fun product again - and FB doesn't really provide great, painless tools for curating your feed. (I'd love a dashboard and power-user shortcuts) But even if your News Feed looks great, the other side of controlling your FB experience is How You Share. Sure, we can all create lists for our families and faraway friends and acquaintances — but trust and relationships evolve, and pretty soon you're fiddling with "+Family -AuntJenny +HighSchool -Amanda" just for one little post about your relationship status. You can deal with this by unfriending or self-censoring yourself, but it's really not fun to hold your tongue, and there's a social cost to unfriending. The author is probably right that "Facebook is fine", if you put enough work into it. But depending on your comfort level, this can mean a lot of work. So the questions are 1) is this really a user error, or a problem with the product? and 2) how can Facebook improve this area? and 3) is it even in Facebook's interest to go down this path?
suredo 13y ago
Hiding what most people post on Facebook is how I spend a minimum amount of time on Facebook too..
edwardunknown 13y ago
It's not an ad machine, it stores your face and personal information and that data will be sold as a service as soon as things start to look bad for them. Nobody cares about personalized ads on the internet, they care that in a few years they'll be walking down the street and with just a camera and a computer anybody who's willing to pay will know everything about them.
soup10 13y ago
Anyone else read the post and take an immediate dislike to the guy? Maybe it's the new yorker in me, but hiding people who exude negativity? Cynicism is cherished way of life for some people sir. Also why do you like baby pictures so much, ugh. Why the passive aggression? just unfriend people you don't like. What else? Who honestly cares that much about inane facebook posts that they feel more connected. shrug
avalaunch 13y ago
The problem I have with the hiding strategy is that nobody in my network of friends and family is producing 100% signal and nobody is producing 100% noise. If I hide all users that ever produce noise I end up with an empty feed. I need a better way of cutting through the noise - preferably an algorithm that does it for me. The other problem I have is that I don't feel comfortable posting all of my thoughts to all of my friends and family. I could create lists but that really is a pain.
grandalf 13y ago
My facebook feed is mostly spam. Mostly app ads and very lame things that distant acquaintances have liked. Facebook ignores the people who I tend to "like". It ignores the profiles I look at periodically. It ignores the people who I message with. Facebook forgets which setting I prefer (most recent vs most popular) again and again. Facebook shows me the same annoying ads again and again even though I don't click on them and spend no time hovering over them in the mobile app. Facebook knows that I continue to log in at least twice a day and that rarely is there any new information for me, since my friends have all drastically curtailed their facebook usage. I think it's too late. Soon the habit of checking facebook will disappear. My advice. Remove the ads immediately, create different experiences for people with 100 friends vs 300 vs 500 vs 1000 vs 3000. Don't ever show the same spammy stuff twice unless the recipient likes it. The fact that my distant high school acquaintance likes Samsung is of ZERO value to me and frankly it's incredibly annoying to be told about the major corporations that distant acquaintances have clicked the like button about again and again and again. Today I got an email with stuff I "missed" on Facebook. This makes me think that Facebook is dying. Just take the advice in the above paragraph and restore it to its previously useful state.
- chaostheory 13y ago
  > My facebook feed is mostly spam. Mostly app ads and very lame things that distant acquaintances have liked. Do you hide any of it from your feed? I do this periodically, and I don't have anything lame or spammy. It's just like what's said in the article.
  - grandalf 13y ago
    it's not possible to hide all of the content that ends up in the feed. If I could I would.
    - res0nat0r 13y ago
      You need to install FBPurity: http://www.fbpurity.com http://www.fbpurity.com
    - 13y ago
shmerl 13y ago
> Facebook is just fine.... That’s crazy, right? I mean, Facebook is just a personal data farm, isn’t it? It’s just a not-too-coy set of dopamine-optimized actions to trick you into dumping information about yourself into the magic Zucker Woodchipper?... I’m not denying any of this. It is an ad machine, in part. But that doesn’t mean Facebook can’t also provide value. The fact that it provides value doesn't make it fine. The criticism of Facebook is not about the value it provides, but about the cost they charge for it. That cost is users' privacy. Fine social network should serve the purpose of social interactions without ulterior motives of some hidden entities which profit on users' data. You can't practically achieve that with such centralized social networks, and decentralized design makes it more feasible.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Obligatory Eben Moglen interview: http://betabeat.com/2011/12/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-yells-at-me-for-being-on-facebook/ http://betabeat.com/2011/12/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-...
  - shmerl 13y ago
    Great interview, thanks for the pointer :)
deleted 13y ago
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jmduke 13y ago
I feel like people on HN just want Facebook to fail. (Or be "disrupted.") Facebook lets me chat with my girlfriend, my grandparents, and my college roommate all at the same time. It lets me upload pictures of my new apartment for people to see. It lets me comment with a bunch of other angry misanthropes about how the Heat are gonna blow it this year. Until another service lets me do that in one browser tab, I'm fine with sticking with Facebook. (I notice a huge correlation, too, with people's feelings about Facebook and people's level of extroversion/social aptitude in general. I think some people, website or no website, are going to want to keep to themselves -- and no app is ever going to change that.)
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Sometimes it is more subtle than that, sometimes people want it to be what it could be rather than what it is. Those can be the hardest things to accept. (it's a stereotypical parent angst "You could be a doctor and you want to be a park ranger?" kinds of things) Facebook has a huge user base, .001% of them whining about how it sucks is a whole bunch of people.
  - chx 13y ago
    I acknowledge that life, society etc is changing the expectation of privacy is changing as well. Perhaps Facebook is changing it too fast.
    - Kequc 13y ago
      If Facebook is changing it feels like that's happening at a snails pace, people are just getting complacent with how bad it is. Stockholm syndrome is setting in, so many people still refuse to just use better alternatives. "What alternatives?" like email.
- david927 13y ago
  This is Hacker News; the audience is comprised of people who could re-write the core of Facebook in a heartbeat and they are extremely critical. They're also quite smart; they know Facebook lets you chat with your girlfriend. What they're saying is that Facebook is not working the way it should. It's partially due to its popularity, but it has diminished its usefulness. Try this: Open it up right now and read the first 10 to 20 status updates and then count how many you care about, then count how many are important in any way. After doing that a few times (and trying to manage what updates I see, to improve things), I closed my account. (And I'm an extrovert!) We are Hacker News. We know that technology and its uses is in a constant dialectic. Our members include Zuckerberg and very probably his successor. It's nothing personal; it's just how this works.
trustfundbaby 13y ago
I think the "hiding" process is a bit too heavy handed, what I'd like to see is a dislike button that only affects your feed. So a person would never actually see that you disliked their post, but facebook could use that data privately to help you curate you feed. If you keep disliking someone's posts (and possibly even comments) facebook would show you less and less of them until they were completely gone from your news feed ... Not sure it would work so well in light of a recent article on here (I think) that showed that people in social networks like/upvote things and order of magnitude more than they dislike/flag things, but I think it would be interesting to try.
zaphar 13y ago
I left facebook because I was tired of continually curating their email notifications. I would clean it all up and then boom something would change and I have to wade through their settings again and turn off more stuff. I don't want to ruthlessly curate my social network feed. It killed the enjoyment for me so I left. Now I get a curated rundown from my wife so I guess in a way I still have facebook but someone else is doing the curation for me. I wonder if there's a product idea there?
abalashov 13y ago
(Hiding from newsfeed, it should be noted, is different from unfriending — they’ll never know.) Well, they will know, because you never, ever like or comment on their stuff, like ever. :-)
nullc 13y ago
I must confess to giggling at the authors examples of 'signal': > "Lots of signal. Lots of friends becoming parents. > Getting engaged. Couples falling in love. Babies. [...] > Friends and acquaintances off on adventures. Beautiful > mountain photos [...] Family outings. [...] orphanage > a good friend of mine runs in Nepal. [...] updates on > the dog back home on the east coast" All that stuff sounds like the expected output of a random human condition generator. Knowing those things wouldn't change my life at all. I trust that that kind of stuff is happening all on its own without having to take any of my attention. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. However, I suspect he may be missing the mark because the audience he's addressing with his "just use hide!" may well be like me and find all that stuff inane. 'Use hide to reveal the signal under the noise' doesn't work when there is no signal.
- deleted 13y ago
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- coldpie 13y ago
  Yeah, I had a similar reaction. I guess I'm selfish: I just don't care about what's going on in others' lives if it doesn't impact me. I also don't share what's going on in my life with the Internet, unless I think it would interest or help someone else like me. (E.g. I started a blog last fall. It has 3 posts. Every post has over 700 words. Social media just isn't my bag.) I tried using Facebook for about a month, and got overwhelmed with the amount of boring and infuriating crap that goes through the service. It felt like reading chain emails from the 90s. Why would anyone subject themselves to that level of banality? As you say, different strokes for different folks. It just doesn't do anything for me.
shanelja 13y ago
I really don't understand the anti-facebook nature of HN users, personally I think it's a fantastic product, it perfectly fulfills my use case. I'm 20 years old, I feel that's somehow relevant before I give my long list of anecdotes. When I woke up this morning, I checked my feed, 3 notifications! The first (ranked by importance of course) was that one of my cousins was pregnant. She lives in Spain, I'm the only member of my family in the UK, how would I otherwise have found out? Snail mail? Pah! Takes too long and my address isn't always static for longer than a few months. Phone? Really? Do you know how much international calls cost when you aren't on a Silly Valley wage?! E-Mail? ... Do people actually still do the whole E-Mail thing? And isn't E-Mail completely broken anyway? The second was a party event my friend was throwing and had invited me too this weekend, it took one click and now I know all about it, I accepted and left a message. So in 30 seconds on one application, I've discovered my cousin is going to have a baby, congratulated her and let her know that I "like" this outcome, told my friend I'm cool to hang out this weekend and asked him if he wants to go halves on a Pizza Saturday. Last night I used it to talk over video with my grandma who's been ill recently (and also coincidentally lives abroad) because she doesn't know what a Skoop (Skype) is and MSN no longer exists, but Facebook is still here, she's already on it and she uses it frequently. After this I checked up on my company feed to look at photos of my co-workers birthday party and the comments on the photo I took (and uploaded in seconds to the internet after applying filters to make him prettier) of him opening his presents. I literally just got out of bed and I have a message already from my girlfriend (who's out of texts) asking me what we're doing tonight, I've told her it's a surprise and send her a photo to give her a clue. Anyway... The point of this is that while you may detest Facebook for whatever privacy issues you may have (and lets face it, other companies such as our beloved Google are often much, much worse) it is a fantastic application making it easier than ever to connect to the people who I actually care about (for the record, I only keep 40 friends on there), if perhaps a little out of your particular use case.
- dvt 13y ago
  > E-Mail? ... Do people actually still do the whole E-Mail thing? And isn't E-Mail completely broken anyway? It's so funny when people are critical of FB critics (I do not consider myself to be a critic of FB, even though my post garnered a lot of debate), but then go on to criticize email. Specifically, what's funny is that email is used to transfer magnitudes more information than FB on a daily basis. So, um... yes? Email is still around. And people use it. And it's not broken, per se. It's a sort of analogy with Spotify and radio.. "omg is FM still around? lol!! what noobs"
rfatnabayeff 13y ago
There is a proverb in Russia (actually, it's a quote): "There're someone for whom even a mare is a fine bride". So, it's not surprising that for someone Facebook is fine too.
United857 13y ago
The author should try Path. The use case is what the author wants, a more limited FB with just his close friends and quality original content.
alan_cx 13y ago
Given that people seem not to care that much that government is spying on them to an industrial level, why would the masses care one jot about the bad side of facebook, which is broadly privacy concerns?
Zigurd 13y ago
Of course Facebook is fine, no matter what HN readers think of it. I suspect I'm typical in minimizing my Facebook use because, if for no more serious reason, too many instances of a Facebook "app" spamming my contact list. And yet, I almost certainly count among Facebook's monthly active users. I cross-post to Facebook. I have family that doesn't grok Google+. There are even business contacts that prefer Facebook to LinkedIn for whatever reasons. That might make the value of many Facebook users very low, but as long as Facebook doesn't stagnate technologically, it's more than just viable.

147 points by cmod 13y ago

I see that now we are going to have debates among different columnists who write for medium.com, which may spice up the content a bit. I agree with this author more than I agreed with the last author, who wrote decrying Facebook. Sure, I have been careful to select friends for their capacity to maintain civil, thoughtful conversation, but now that I have a circle of friends like that, living in countries around the world, Facebook is a convenient medium for all of us to have conversations on. I like Facebook because I see my friends there. I have written before here on Hacker News, "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it." I used to see friends on AOL. I never felt an obligation to help AOL monetize just because of that. Networks are a dime a dozen. Right now, Facebook is a very convenient network, and I like it. I do not predict that Facebook will make a lot of money because of users like me.

dasil003 13y ago
Talking about Facebook is the ultimate bike-shedding discussion. Everybody, and I mean literally everybody inside and outside of the tech world has an opinion. That's fine, but when people start extrapolating their opinion to predict the fate of Facebook (and this applies more to the previous article than this one) I just have to laugh. I'm sure Facebook will make a fascinating topic for anthropologists 50 years from now, but in the meantime I don't need a slew of columnists going all Nostradamus on the subject. What one likes or dislikes about FB, or tips on how to use it are all potentially good topics, but the grand predictions are just so much noise.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  I agree thst predictions by themselves are noise. However, predictions that are based on analogy are fascinating. Mark Twain said, "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." We see this all the time in the technology sector alone. For example, back in the 80s companies used to buy IBM servers because the thought was that nobody would be fired for buying the safe product. As a result, IBM stagnated in the very area in which it was most competitive. These days, we see Oracle in the exact same spot. Their salespeople use the exact same "fear, uncertainty and doubt" strategy and therefore it is safe to predict that they will end up just like IBM in many ways, just like Facebook will end up like AOL.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    I guess my problem with Facebook predictions is that the majority of them seem to simply be someone writing about their personal experience with Facebook and then extrapolating that out. I honestly think that what blogger X or tech journalist Y thinks about using Facebook is utterly immaterial to the future of Facebook. They've crossed the chasm, it doesn't matter if the technorati think Facebook is "done", they don't need us, and our nerd rage will not affect their future in any way.

dvt 13y ago

The crux of the essay is the following: > Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby. As soon as I saw it, I said to myself: "boy oh boy, he better give some hard evidence." The article goes on even without providing anecdotal evidence, let alone anything to the extent I was expecting or hoping. In fact, the entire discussion seems to be about the hiding feature. Yeah, everyone knows about it (and more and more people are using it), but I'm not sure how using a destructive feature of a service makes the service more necessary (I would argue for the opposite). If I hide 90% of my "friends" from my feed, for example, what's the point of Facebook? Apart from the ego-boosting friend-count (which I might also hide). Now, going back to the initial (bolded!) argument: Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby. I think that this is just simply not true. Of course, a definition of "care deeply" would be needed, but my assumption here is that we're talking about moms, dads, sisters, brothers, aunts, BFFs, and the like -- NOT ex-girlfriends/boyfriends or classmates from high school that helped us out that one time on that one biology project in freshman year. If I only contacted my mom or dad through Facebook, my parents would first of all be quite mad -- and second of all, our relationship would suffer. People that I care deeply about get emails, phone calls, Skype calls, text messages, sometimes even snail-mail from me! I'm not sure how the OP expects us to connect Facebook to "caring deeply." Again, some evidence (or an actual argument) would've been nice. I don't hate Facebook, but more often than not, I find myself just using it when I'm bored and semi-creeping around seeing what X or Y is up to and randomly clicking on that "cute girl that's a friend of a friend of a friend" (incidentally, this is what most people use it for). "Creeping on Facebook," has in fact, become a relatively common colloquialism; I wouldn't even attribute a negative quality to the idea, but I would argue it's a fundamental failure of FB (and something that should capitalize on). I posted about this before, but I really believe that the next "big social thing" will be a start-up that will somehow make it easy to approach people you don't know and spark up a conversation. There are so many people on FB, and yet most of us hide 90% of the people we're friends with and we don't add the ones we might find interesting but don't know. That doesn't seem "just fine" to me. Oh yeah, go ahead and add me on Facebook.

gfodor 13y ago
What, exactly, do you expect in terms of hard evidence from someone who is claiming they find Facebook useful? Do you expect to get a spreadsheet of their usage activity and a split test they ran where they defriended half of their closest friends and tried using e-mail for a week? The only people who can share "hard evidence" of engagement data of the Facebook news feed are Facebook themselves, and they are not going to do that. When it comes to understanding user satisfaction, anecdotes count a lot, particularly when those anecdotes re-enforce the thesis of a product by example. You raise the question of what is the point of Facebook if you hide 90% of your "friends". Just asking this question shows that you don't really get what the author is saying. Putting quotes around "friends" tells me you are missing the point that the author is, in fact, leaving left un-hid people who meet two attributes: are legitimate close friends/relatives and post interesting and meaningful content. What remains is a one-of-a-kind stream of content that provides him/her with the ability to feel they are in tune with the lives of people who they are no longer nearby. People who come to HN and rail on Facebook about privacy concerns and ethics have a point. People who come on HN and rail on Facebook The Product are missing the point. If Facebook's news feed is not engaging, it means one of two things: you have over-friended and not hidden people who post bad content, or you are not connected to any people who post content on Facebook that you enjoy. There are many, many people that do not fit in either of these categories.

bowerbird 13y ago

craig mod says: > If you are overtly negative > (which is different than > having opinions differing from my own), > you get hidden. i didn't know who was writing this when i first read it. but i still chuckled when i came across that sentence... and when i looked and it was _craig_mod_, i laughed at loud. because it's "just fine" if you disagree with craig mod, just as long as you kiss his ass while you're doing it. otherwise, he will peg you as "overtly negative"... -bowerbird

sergiotapia 13y ago
On HN you don't need to leave your signature, we can tell who wrote the post.
- bowerbird 13y ago
  thanks. but i have a 18-year history of signing every post i make on the internet -- owning up to the words that i write -- and i don't wanna break my perfect record. :+) -bowerbird
  - asdfologist 13y ago
    That just fills up space with no useful content. Imagine if everybody on HN did this.
    - bowerbird 13y ago
      imagine if everyone here owned up to their words? well, um, yes, i think that would be a good thing. on the other hand, your "asdfologist" handle rocks. :+) -bowerbird
- tucif 13y ago
  I think that works the same for email, we can tell who sent it by address and name, but people still sign it, most of the time with name only. I do. Weirder here, and I really hope he doesn't have/do that on a twitter account though...

deleted 13y ago

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tezka 13y ago

Facebook works for me very well because I don't quite use the news feed as a social networking feed. I have changed its push model to a pull model. That means, I have pretty much hidden all of my friends and use the news feed to only read updates from magazines and pages I am interested in. I however visit people's profile that I am reminded of every now and then to see whats going on with their lives. The closer I am to someone the more frequent her/his profile gets a visit. To make this tractable, I every few months go through a round of deleting people I don't care about (like someone I've met for a few minutes and I am sure I will not see again, or if I do I will mostly likely pretend I don't know the person).

sergiotapia 13y ago

I agree completely with this cat. Maybe it's because I use Facebook from Bolivia and ads aren't really shown down here (no market?), but almost of my timeline posts are nice to see. I also hide dumb, annoying and negative people but keep them as a friend to avoid hurting feelings. I get to talk to my immediate family instantly from anywhere in the city, laptop or mobile phone - what other free service does that? Facebook isn't terrible, naysayers are just hipsters wanting to hate on something popular.

arindone 13y ago
Agreed -- and I find your use case interesting, because when I hear of some obscure new social network that only works on web or some has some crazy obscure features that only rich white tech people care about, I think about the case of someone from Bolivia/South Africa/Phillipines who uses Facebook, can access it on pretty much any phone, and finds it valuable...a problem that many products/networks (outside of maybe Twitter and Evernote) have successfully solved
PavlovsCat 13y ago
"naysayers are just hipsters wanting to hate on something popular" I "hate" Facebook since 2007, when a small forum I was part of and liked a lot decided to "move to facebook", where it died a really quick and really pointless death. It got worse and more idiotic since then, and these days I "hate" facebook for leaving poop trails everywhere else, too (i.e. sites that only allow facebook to sign up, "like this" buttons everywhere, that sort of crap). If Facebook, its users and those who prey on them would refrain from shoving it into my face 10 times a day, maybe I would feel accordingly. For example, I never "hated" AOL, it was just something stupid that people do in private. Facebook, not so much. It's like I normally wouldn't comment on the size and shape of someone's penis, but if they keep rubbing it into my face, I get kinda bitey. "what other free service does that?" What other free service doesn't? There are a million things that would work the same way, if people used them. Starting with email, IM, and all the fascinating things one can install on webservers. See, that's exactly what I mean. The existance and use of facebook leads to me having to read crap like this, "what other free service does that?". That does hurt my brain, so I sometimes snarl. That people who don't make the cut come up with rationalizations for that is kind of expected.

ultimoo 13y ago

I'm really shy about sharing stuff on facebook. Maybe because of the number of highschool and college folks I have friended there. So basically I'm a 'scroller' (I have a 20yo real life friend who called me this term offline). I do go to facebook to scroll once every couple of days and it is interesting. I'm just happy that people aren't as shy as I when it comes to posting updates and uploading photos etc.

igorgue 13y ago

What the heck is is he talking about? This is facebook, 28 of 29 posts are about pages I liked or pages talking about pages I like (yeap, like I care about Lakers Nation talking about LeBron James). I can't share anything there either because some of my friends and family get offended by my views (atheist, anarchist, pro-drugs). I could create lists, but who has time for that? I rather just use leaser known social networks like Vine and Snapchat where the people are more open minded.

brown9-2 13y ago
You must have missed the whole point of the article - hide people or pages who post content you don't care about (or never subscribe).
- lizardking 13y ago
  Hiding people will not keep them from seeing your posts. It keeps you from seeing their posts.
  - alagappanr 13y ago
    Using lists and sharing with lists helps you prevent certain people from seeing your posts.
- avalaunch 13y ago
  That would address the first half of his complaint, but not the second half. He doesn't feel free to post anything of substance because the post is being broadcast too broadly. And he realizes he can control that with lists, but lists are a pain to make on FB.

jonathanjaeger 13y ago

A million times this. Curate your feed for content ('like' good pages) and hide those 'friends' you're not interested in. What other place can you chat easily with friends far away, find a last minute ticket for a concert from someone who has an online identity without paying scalper prices, find out an old friend moved to your area, keep in touch with the masses who connect with you for other reasons (e.g. I run a music community and chat with users on Facebook sometimes), and the list goes on. Show me more ads, I don't care! They're not horrible popups and the News Feed ones are only somewhat intrusive.

jdminhbg 13y ago
> Curate your feed for content Why in the world would I want to do this? I eventually gave up on Facebook because I spent more time "curating" it than using it, and the end result was awkward conversations with friends who assumed I had seen something when in fact I was no longer subscribed to their baby pictures. > What other place can you ... Mostly email, iMessage/SMS/BBM/WhatsApp, and Twitter.
- jonathanjaeger 13y ago
  I don't have 1000 friends on Facebook, it's pretty easy to curate 200-300 friends. It takes a few seconds to remove someone from your feed. >iMessage/SMS/BBM/WhatsApp, and Twitter. Very few of my friends use Twitter and I can't easily drop links and have long, fast conversations with people. Facebook chat integrates with the private messages seamlessly. It's a much better experience than texting (how can I easily send many links) or sending 140 characters or less.

brown9-2 13y ago

I tend to hide people whose updates are annoying yet I don't want to unfriend as well, but one thing that strikes me as weird about this arrangement is that I have essentially set up a one-way sharing relationship with this person - this person whom I've probably forgot about can see whatever I post, but I'm ignoring all signs of their existence on the news feed. To me, that's why this strategy doesn't really seem scalable.

tomasien 13y ago

"Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby." He goes on to explain the way in which it works for him, but that's the point. I, for example, don't do anything but see my stream without much hiding and I love it. I love seeing why my friends having going on, I love the weird swath of reactions and conversations, I love it. Hell, I love that my aunt bothers me on Facebook all the time, I would never talk to her otherwise! It's not everything to everyone, but it's a REALLY important thing to a REALLY huge amount of people. It could die. Mobile (or other things) could kill it, I don't deny that, but it's great. Long live Facebook, until something does what it does better.

alphang 13y ago

I do not agree that having to hide friends so you get a curated News Feed really works. For me, this is a lot of work just to get Facebook back as a fun product again - and FB doesn't really provide great, painless tools for curating your feed. (I'd love a dashboard and power-user shortcuts) But even if your News Feed looks great, the other side of controlling your FB experience is How You Share. Sure, we can all create lists for our families and faraway friends and acquaintances — but trust and relationships evolve, and pretty soon you're fiddling with "+Family -AuntJenny +HighSchool -Amanda" just for one little post about your relationship status. You can deal with this by unfriending or self-censoring yourself, but it's really not fun to hold your tongue, and there's a social cost to unfriending. The author is probably right that "Facebook is fine", if you put enough work into it. But depending on your comfort level, this can mean a lot of work. So the questions are 1) is this really a user error, or a problem with the product? and 2) how can Facebook improve this area? and 3) is it even in Facebook's interest to go down this path?

suredo 13y ago

Hiding what most people post on Facebook is how I spend a minimum amount of time on Facebook too..

edwardunknown 13y ago

It's not an ad machine, it stores your face and personal information and that data will be sold as a service as soon as things start to look bad for them. Nobody cares about personalized ads on the internet, they care that in a few years they'll be walking down the street and with just a camera and a computer anybody who's willing to pay will know everything about them.

soup10 13y ago

Anyone else read the post and take an immediate dislike to the guy? Maybe it's the new yorker in me, but hiding people who exude negativity? Cynicism is cherished way of life for some people sir. Also why do you like baby pictures so much, ugh. Why the passive aggression? just unfriend people you don't like. What else? Who honestly cares that much about inane facebook posts that they feel more connected. shrug

avalaunch 13y ago

The problem I have with the hiding strategy is that nobody in my network of friends and family is producing 100% signal and nobody is producing 100% noise. If I hide all users that ever produce noise I end up with an empty feed. I need a better way of cutting through the noise - preferably an algorithm that does it for me. The other problem I have is that I don't feel comfortable posting all of my thoughts to all of my friends and family. I could create lists but that really is a pain.

grandalf 13y ago

My facebook feed is mostly spam. Mostly app ads and very lame things that distant acquaintances have liked. Facebook ignores the people who I tend to "like". It ignores the profiles I look at periodically. It ignores the people who I message with. Facebook forgets which setting I prefer (most recent vs most popular) again and again. Facebook shows me the same annoying ads again and again even though I don't click on them and spend no time hovering over them in the mobile app. Facebook knows that I continue to log in at least twice a day and that rarely is there any new information for me, since my friends have all drastically curtailed their facebook usage. I think it's too late. Soon the habit of checking facebook will disappear. My advice. Remove the ads immediately, create different experiences for people with 100 friends vs 300 vs 500 vs 1000 vs 3000. Don't ever show the same spammy stuff twice unless the recipient likes it. The fact that my distant high school acquaintance likes Samsung is of ZERO value to me and frankly it's incredibly annoying to be told about the major corporations that distant acquaintances have clicked the like button about again and again and again. Today I got an email with stuff I "missed" on Facebook. This makes me think that Facebook is dying. Just take the advice in the above paragraph and restore it to its previously useful state.

chaostheory 13y ago
> My facebook feed is mostly spam. Mostly app ads and very lame things that distant acquaintances have liked. Do you hide any of it from your feed? I do this periodically, and I don't have anything lame or spammy. It's just like what's said in the article.
- grandalf 13y ago
  it's not possible to hide all of the content that ends up in the feed. If I could I would.
  - res0nat0r 13y ago
    You need to install FBPurity: http://www.fbpurity.com http://www.fbpurity.com
  - 13y ago

shmerl 13y ago

> Facebook is just fine.... That’s crazy, right? I mean, Facebook is just a personal data farm, isn’t it? It’s just a not-too-coy set of dopamine-optimized actions to trick you into dumping information about yourself into the magic Zucker Woodchipper?... I’m not denying any of this. It is an ad machine, in part. But that doesn’t mean Facebook can’t also provide value. The fact that it provides value doesn't make it fine. The criticism of Facebook is not about the value it provides, but about the cost they charge for it. That cost is users' privacy. Fine social network should serve the purpose of social interactions without ulterior motives of some hidden entities which profit on users' data. You can't practically achieve that with such centralized social networks, and decentralized design makes it more feasible.

icebraining 13y ago
Obligatory Eben Moglen interview: http://betabeat.com/2011/12/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-yells-at-me-for-being-on-facebook/ http://betabeat.com/2011/12/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-...
- shmerl 13y ago
  Great interview, thanks for the pointer :)

deleted 13y ago

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jmduke 13y ago

I feel like people on HN just want Facebook to fail. (Or be "disrupted.") Facebook lets me chat with my girlfriend, my grandparents, and my college roommate all at the same time. It lets me upload pictures of my new apartment for people to see. It lets me comment with a bunch of other angry misanthropes about how the Heat are gonna blow it this year. Until another service lets me do that in one browser tab, I'm fine with sticking with Facebook. (I notice a huge correlation, too, with people's feelings about Facebook and people's level of extroversion/social aptitude in general. I think some people, website or no website, are going to want to keep to themselves -- and no app is ever going to change that.)

ChuckMcM 13y ago
Sometimes it is more subtle than that, sometimes people want it to be what it could be rather than what it is. Those can be the hardest things to accept. (it's a stereotypical parent angst "You could be a doctor and you want to be a park ranger?" kinds of things) Facebook has a huge user base, .001% of them whining about how it sucks is a whole bunch of people.
- chx 13y ago
  I acknowledge that life, society etc is changing the expectation of privacy is changing as well. Perhaps Facebook is changing it too fast.
  - Kequc 13y ago
    If Facebook is changing it feels like that's happening at a snails pace, people are just getting complacent with how bad it is. Stockholm syndrome is setting in, so many people still refuse to just use better alternatives. "What alternatives?" like email.
david927 13y ago
This is Hacker News; the audience is comprised of people who could re-write the core of Facebook in a heartbeat and they are extremely critical. They're also quite smart; they know Facebook lets you chat with your girlfriend. What they're saying is that Facebook is not working the way it should. It's partially due to its popularity, but it has diminished its usefulness. Try this: Open it up right now and read the first 10 to 20 status updates and then count how many you care about, then count how many are important in any way. After doing that a few times (and trying to manage what updates I see, to improve things), I closed my account. (And I'm an extrovert!) We are Hacker News. We know that technology and its uses is in a constant dialectic. Our members include Zuckerberg and very probably his successor. It's nothing personal; it's just how this works.

trustfundbaby 13y ago

I think the "hiding" process is a bit too heavy handed, what I'd like to see is a dislike button that only affects your feed. So a person would never actually see that you disliked their post, but facebook could use that data privately to help you curate you feed. If you keep disliking someone's posts (and possibly even comments) facebook would show you less and less of them until they were completely gone from your news feed ... Not sure it would work so well in light of a recent article on here (I think) that showed that people in social networks like/upvote things and order of magnitude more than they dislike/flag things, but I think it would be interesting to try.

zaphar 13y ago

I left facebook because I was tired of continually curating their email notifications. I would clean it all up and then boom something would change and I have to wade through their settings again and turn off more stuff. I don't want to ruthlessly curate my social network feed. It killed the enjoyment for me so I left. Now I get a curated rundown from my wife so I guess in a way I still have facebook but someone else is doing the curation for me. I wonder if there's a product idea there?

abalashov 13y ago

(Hiding from newsfeed, it should be noted, is different from unfriending — they’ll never know.) Well, they will know, because you never, ever like or comment on their stuff, like ever. :-)

nullc 13y ago

I must confess to giggling at the authors examples of 'signal': > "Lots of signal. Lots of friends becoming parents. > Getting engaged. Couples falling in love. Babies. [...] > Friends and acquaintances off on adventures. Beautiful > mountain photos [...] Family outings. [...] orphanage > a good friend of mine runs in Nepal. [...] updates on > the dog back home on the east coast" All that stuff sounds like the expected output of a random human condition generator. Knowing those things wouldn't change my life at all. I trust that that kind of stuff is happening all on its own without having to take any of my attention. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. However, I suspect he may be missing the mark because the audience he's addressing with his "just use hide!" may well be like me and find all that stuff inane. 'Use hide to reveal the signal under the noise' doesn't work when there is no signal.

deleted 13y ago
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coldpie 13y ago
Yeah, I had a similar reaction. I guess I'm selfish: I just don't care about what's going on in others' lives if it doesn't impact me. I also don't share what's going on in my life with the Internet, unless I think it would interest or help someone else like me. (E.g. I started a blog last fall. It has 3 posts. Every post has over 700 words. Social media just isn't my bag.) I tried using Facebook for about a month, and got overwhelmed with the amount of boring and infuriating crap that goes through the service. It felt like reading chain emails from the 90s. Why would anyone subject themselves to that level of banality? As you say, different strokes for different folks. It just doesn't do anything for me.

shanelja 13y ago

I really don't understand the anti-facebook nature of HN users, personally I think it's a fantastic product, it perfectly fulfills my use case. I'm 20 years old, I feel that's somehow relevant before I give my long list of anecdotes. When I woke up this morning, I checked my feed, 3 notifications! The first (ranked by importance of course) was that one of my cousins was pregnant. She lives in Spain, I'm the only member of my family in the UK, how would I otherwise have found out? Snail mail? Pah! Takes too long and my address isn't always static for longer than a few months. Phone? Really? Do you know how much international calls cost when you aren't on a Silly Valley wage?! E-Mail? ... Do people actually still do the whole E-Mail thing? And isn't E-Mail completely broken anyway? The second was a party event my friend was throwing and had invited me too this weekend, it took one click and now I know all about it, I accepted and left a message. So in 30 seconds on one application, I've discovered my cousin is going to have a baby, congratulated her and let her know that I "like" this outcome, told my friend I'm cool to hang out this weekend and asked him if he wants to go halves on a Pizza Saturday. Last night I used it to talk over video with my grandma who's been ill recently (and also coincidentally lives abroad) because she doesn't know what a Skoop (Skype) is and MSN no longer exists, but Facebook is still here, she's already on it and she uses it frequently. After this I checked up on my company feed to look at photos of my co-workers birthday party and the comments on the photo I took (and uploaded in seconds to the internet after applying filters to make him prettier) of him opening his presents. I literally just got out of bed and I have a message already from my girlfriend (who's out of texts) asking me what we're doing tonight, I've told her it's a surprise and send her a photo to give her a clue. Anyway... The point of this is that while you may detest Facebook for whatever privacy issues you may have (and lets face it, other companies such as our beloved Google are often much, much worse) it is a fantastic application making it easier than ever to connect to the people who I actually care about (for the record, I only keep 40 friends on there), if perhaps a little out of your particular use case.

dvt 13y ago
> E-Mail? ... Do people actually still do the whole E-Mail thing? And isn't E-Mail completely broken anyway? It's so funny when people are critical of FB critics (I do not consider myself to be a critic of FB, even though my post garnered a lot of debate), but then go on to criticize email. Specifically, what's funny is that email is used to transfer magnitudes more information than FB on a daily basis. So, um... yes? Email is still around. And people use it. And it's not broken, per se. It's a sort of analogy with Spotify and radio.. "omg is FM still around? lol!! what noobs"

rfatnabayeff 13y ago

There is a proverb in Russia (actually, it's a quote): "There're someone for whom even a mare is a fine bride". So, it's not surprising that for someone Facebook is fine too.

United857 13y ago

The author should try Path. The use case is what the author wants, a more limited FB with just his close friends and quality original content.

alan_cx 13y ago

Given that people seem not to care that much that government is spying on them to an industrial level, why would the masses care one jot about the bad side of facebook, which is broadly privacy concerns?

Zigurd 13y ago

Of course Facebook is fine, no matter what HN readers think of it. I suspect I'm typical in minimizing my Facebook use because, if for no more serious reason, too many instances of a Facebook "app" spamming my contact list. And yet, I almost certainly count among Facebook's monthly active users. I cross-post to Facebook. I have family that doesn't grok Google+. There are even business contacts that prefer Facebook to LinkedIn for whatever reasons. That might make the value of many Facebook users very low, but as long as Facebook doesn't stagnate technologically, it's more than just viable.