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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: "
by 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 agoWhat, 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.
- dvt 13y agoI think you missed my point. I expect hard evidence (or even anecdotal evidence!) when making the following claim: "Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby." A) I think that care deeply needs to be defined. B) My opinion is that FB is too superficial to merit any kind of "deep connection." Here is where some evidence would have been nice. B.1) Even so, considering that (just about) everything on FB is semi-public, I'm not sure how anything posted on FB would be conducive to a personal and deep relationship with anyone. Unless we're only talking about private messages sent via FB messenger or something (but FB as a whole is a different kind of animal). I wasn't railing on FB the Product, as you call it. But I think that the new generation is looking for something more substantive. (There have been slews of such articles [providing hard evidence, incidentally] lately.) I think I'd also be looking for something more substantive (even though I'm 27). My point is that it doesn't seem possible to maintain a personal and deep connection with just about anyone through FB (given the semi-private nature of the service); saying otherwise is begging the question: how, exactly, do you maintain this relationship merely though the superficiality of FB?