8 ms·

Dear Facebook: You Suck

199 points by Killswitch 13y ago

jeffehobbs 13y ago
Well, yeah. It's awful. Don't use it.
- lignuist 13y ago
  But... how are we supposed to keep in touch with our friends and families???
  - tsahyt 13y ago
    I keep in touch with mine just fine without Facebook. I use my phone every now and then for actual phone calls and sometimes even meet them. In short, I do what people have been doing years before Facebook and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. But then again, what works for me doesn't have to work for everyone.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
  - sramov 13y ago
    You can't, Facebook is the only way.
    - lignuist 13y ago
      Yeah, thanks for the confirmation. I never believed in this crap about email, phone, letters and personal visits (WTF?)!
      - sramov 13y ago
        What's sad is that many people will read comments like ours and not get it.
  - mproud 13y ago
    You don’t have to use Facebook like a daily newspaper. There’s nothing wrong with just using Facebook like the Yellow Pages. It’s there when you need it — if you need it.
hawkharris 13y ago
There are two types of social networks: the ones that everyone complains about, and the ones that no one uses.
- kbar13 13y ago
  google+ kinda sucks in that Google's trying way too hard to push everyone into it, but I actually prefer it to Facebook, if not only because the design is cleaner and I don't see as many duckface pics on my feed each day.
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    >> "I don't see as many duckface pics on my feed each day." That's your problem for friending those people, not the networks for showing you what you explicitly asked for (not duckface pics but posts from those people).
    - grannyg00se 13y ago
      These things develop a culture though. The same friends you have on facebook may behave completely differently on a different platform.
      - KyeRussell 13y ago
        Nope.
    - jethro_tell 13y ago
      Kinda. I have dozens of cousins with terrible politics and duck faces that I love to hang out with 2 or 3 times per year. things that get organized on Facebook. It's tough to have only digital friends that don't do duck face or push shitty politics if you also have real life friends.
      - k-mcgrady 13y ago
        I'd suggest Facebook's hide button. I have several family members I need to use Facebook to keep in touch with but they post things I have no interest in seeing. Those two clicks to hide their posts really improved me FB experience. I think it's something Facebook should make more obvious because it would improve the experience for a lot of people - particularly those with lots of 'friends' they've only met a few times or don't want to delete because of the social stigma attached.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Facebook ranking posts is something that IS needed - they just need to do a better job. I bet you'd see a lot more shit if they didn't bother ordering stuff. >> "Stop what you're doing and just let it be natural." If they did that you would probably miss a lot more stuff. Nobody wants to have to scroll back through their timeline to catch up on the important stuff they missed, and they don't want to have to wade through a ton of crap to find the important stuff.
- Killswitch 13y ago
  You do have a point there, it just annoys me that legitimate things I want to see are never shown, like I stated in this post, my friends mother died on Thursday. I scroll my feed and see posts from Monday, but not something 3 days ago with THAT much activity? I mean me and this friend share 300+ friends... Most of the activity on that status are from mutual friends, you'd think that's something that should be shown, right? Nope. Becky hates Mondays, and Gary watered his garden in some stupid game.
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    >> "I scroll my feed and see posts from Monday, but not something 3 days ago with THAT much activity?" I agree with you. I think though that Facebook probably takes into account how often most people visit the site. In Facebook time 3 days is probably quite long ago - probably over 100 posts ago for a lot of people.
- kamjam 13y ago
  The problem I find is this: http://imgur.com/nEUGq6p http://imgur.com/nEUGq6p I prefer the newsfeed to be sorted by "most recent", a chronological list of the postings. Facebook in it's infinite wisdom keeps deciding that is not the best way to consume the content and keeps reverting me back to "top stories". I think this is a more recent change, because it used to remember my selection. It's a little annoying it doesn't remember this.
  - tehwalrus 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rebel 13y ago
This is why I've started using Twitter more. All I want from my social media feed is a quick update on what my friends are doing. Twitter is simple and to the point. Facebook has evolved to a point where it's terrible for real-time communication, but it's the absolute best way to see someones history over a longer period of time. If I meet someone new I'd learn a lot more about them from their Facebook compared to their Twitter. I believe there's room for more than one social network and I think Twitter and FB have found non-competing paths.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  >> "Facebook has evolved to a point where it's terrible for real-time communication" Can't you use Facebook Messenger for that?
  - throwaway98604 13y ago
    Seen at 7:29 AM
  - girvo 13y ago
    One to many, not one to one
  - rebel 13y ago
    I'm referring to social networking. For private messaging I stick to SMS.
patrickaljord 13y ago
Reminds me of this article from a week ago about how google maps sucked because it failed at a particular coffee shop query in SF a gentleman that happens to be a techcrunch writer did. Google Maps and Facebook are amazing services that try to guess what's more relevant to you and most of the time get it write. This in itself is a pretty amazing achievement. This is what we should be amazed at, not these few times those services get it wrong. The level of self-entitlement is high here, especially that we're talking free web services here. The day they always get it right is the day we get human like (edit: or rather god like mind reading) perfect AI, not happening any time soon guys. So in the meantime, relax and enjoy the show. Or stop using these services if they're that bad, or even better, build your own.
- frostmatthew 13y ago
  > The day they always get it right is the day we get human like perfect AI I agree with the majority of your comment, but not that line. Accomplishing that feat would not be "human like perfect AI" - it'd be mind-reading. My very closest friends could probably do a better job filtering my newsfeed than Facebook, but no way they would ever get it always right.
  - patrickaljord 13y ago
    Thanks, edited.
- 7952 13y ago
  Some services (like Google Search) are about returning a set of results that may possibly be right. Algorithms are undoubtedly brilliant in that context. When you want a single authoritative answer the gaps in datasets become much more obvious. To answer that type of question you either need better data (with cost and privacy concerns), or more human input. There are lots of problems that algorithm centred companies are not good at solving and it is very annoying that we are so reliant on them.
wickedOne 13y ago
just wondering how good a "best friend" is when you rely on facebook status updates to keep in touch with her… i might be old fashioned, but what happened with speaking to / seeing people irl? "My 3rd cousin whom I haven't seen since a family reunion 10 years ago" so why is she in your feed to begin with? to me this all sounds like a rant from someone blaming a website s/he's socially awkward
- Killswitch 13y ago
  Because we both are on Facebook, and check it quite a bit, and despite everyone saying "just pick up a phone" Well, sometimes when I am free, she's not, or vice versa, and it's easier to just make a post on their wall and say "Hey, how's your day going?" and let them respond when they get time? Plus in her situation it's a lot easier to let everyone know that her mother had passed by posting a status on Facebook than it is to call/text every single person. We're not teenagers, we have our own lives, we meet up when we can, not every day.
djhworld 13y ago
This is why I deleted my facebook account about 8 months ago. Never looked back.
benihana 13y ago
I hate these kinds of posts. It's a guy who thinks he knows more than he does trying to tell the most successful social network in history how to make things 'better' for an extremely tiny sample size that he thinks is much more significant and representative. It's just so arrogant and short sighted and comes at it from such a limited perspective. That's bad enough, without it being coupled to the fact that facebook is completely free and optional and no one is forcing you to use it.
- gum_ina_package 13y ago
  I think that's very cynical to say because you could say that about the majority of the posts on this site. HN is a place for people who understand the issues/live in the tech scene to debate, discuss, and disagree with each other about issues like the article.
  - mproud 13y ago
    May be, but I always liked most of the articles posted because they bring insightful remarks. Obviously this article falls short. Don’t whine about stupid things with Facebook. Tell us things we don’t know, that we’re not aware of, or bring powerful analysis to things that truly matter.
    - redwood 13y ago
      I hear you, but think that while the article in and of itself doesn't do or say too much; its presence and popularity here makes it into something more. This sentiment has now been blessed by a lot of technology insiders. It's a common set of feelings, perhaps not well put but nevertheless captured something we're feeling. FB employees: heed this warning. We your early adopters will leave if you don't fix it.
      - Killswitch 13y ago
        > It's a common set of feelings, perhaps not well put but nevertheless captured something we're feeling. Exactly, sorry I'm not a great writer, I'm a programmer. :(
foresterh 13y ago
I don't understand why people are "friends" with people they don't care about seeing updates on. Or why they don't ignore them. But I don't really use Facebook anymore so maybe that's not an option? Try Google+... You choose who you want to see, and they don't have to choose to see you. Such a better way to get information you want. And circles and communities make that so much more useful. Of course it probably helps that most of the people that spam Facebook with games they play and emotions they describe don't use Google+. Or I should say most people don't use Google+.
- falcolas 13y ago
  Social pressure. I dropped my facebook account because my wife's entire extended family expected to be able to friend me. That's 30+ accounts full of duck faces, child updates, and Farmville pings.
- _delirium 13y ago
  > Or why they don't ignore them. [...] maybe that's not an option? It is; you can click the [V] in the corner of a post in your feed, and choose "Hide all from [username]". I'm not sure how widely known that is, though.
- KyeRussell 13y ago
  Facebook provides VERY similar functionality. It's the HN user base that just complains about problems instead of trying to fix them.
moron4hire 13y ago
If only there were a messaging system that was A) standardized, B) available world wide, C) decentralized from the control of one corporation, D) available on every platform, D.2) with instant notification on mobile devices, and E) everyone was already signed up for. coughEMAILcough. As far as I'm concerned, the only reason people like Facebook is because the email listserv is not very discoverable. Sometimes, you want to be included in the stream by default but don't want to participate right away. An email chain is too easy to exclude people. I use Facebook only insomuch as I have friends who use it and send me messages through it. Most of my "social" interactions through the internet are through email now, with groups of friends setup on lists so we can tune in and out as we want. It's easier to search than Facebook's past, too.
matthewmacleod 13y ago
Okay - you've identified one particular scenario where Facebook didn't correctly work out what was important to you. But I'm curious to to what you think "let it be natural" actually means. We can immediately discount a naïve timeline of events. Say events will appear in the timeline when they originally happen – that's not going to work, because it's be buried within an hour or two, regardless of the importance. Maybe events' places in the timeline could be based on when they were last "updated", as in liked, commented on etc. – that's probably more appropriate, but raises prioritisation questions. And let's say somebody catches up after a week, and comments on an older status - does everybody need to see it again? So something more complex is required - the simple timeline's no longer appropriate, even in relatively straightforward cases, given the volume of friends that many users have. It seems pretty obvious then to build something like a friend graph, with edges weighted based on e.g. frequency of interaction and mutual friend count, and use that to weight news items. As far as I know, that's what Facebook is doing. Personally, I do prefer the simple timeline – but that's because I've been using Facebook since it was first available at my university, and I don't have a huge friend list. But I appreciate that's probably not applicable to most users, and when I do look at my news feed, it does seem to do a pretty good job of prioritising things I'm interested in - especially if you engage a little bit and downrank/hide posts that you don't want to see.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- moultano 13y ago
  A better way to say what he's saying is that facebook is being too smart by half. Any reasonable algorithm should have shown him this post. It's the obvious thing to do from a simple use of the signals available, so either the algorithm is broken or there's a bug.
  - dade_ 13y ago
    I have experienced the same thing, important content missing from the presented list. I actually prefer Facebook on my BlackBerry Playbook because the app is old and doesn't seem to support the ranking feature. I think their algorithm is worse than useless and they should provide an option to turn it off. I have considered getting rid of my Facebook account because people keep assuming I am aware of their posts and at least they would know that I am not.
moron4hire 13y ago
I think we're stuck in a culture of "friend scarcity". When meeting people in meat-space, you don't have the time capacity to be able to make deep, meaningful relationships with a lot of people. Facebook gives the illusion of giving you more time to engage friends on a deep level. You're not socializing in a work setting, you're chewing the fat over goofy cat pictures. You're (ostensibly) keeping up with "how are the wife and kids". And because our brains are wired to expect that to be a scarce resource, we gather as many "friends" as we can on Facebook. It's also probably a learned response from us having gone through the early days of social networking. There just weren't as many people total on the internet back then. If there was a person you knew and they also had internet access, and they also used Facebook, it was somewhat more of a rare thing than it is today. You friended them because, again, you understood the Facebook friend to be a semi-scarce resource and human brains are hardwired to hoard scarce resources. So now that we live in an era where sugary, salty, fatty foods and Facebook friends are no longer scarce resources, we gorge ourselves on them and have become obese as a result. "Facebook-friend-fat". Sounds like it's time to cut out the empty calories and start exercising. Get rid of the people who post vapid shit, regardless of how well you think you know that person (how many times do we hear people make excuses for not eating better because it's uncomfortable?). And start posting better content of your own. One tends to get out what one puts in.
tomasien 13y ago
Anytime Facebook and Myspace get compared, I tune out immediately. They have nothing in common, Facebook ate Myspace's lunch when it was 10 million users, this has nothing to do with what may kill a network with the entire US and 1 billion ACTIVE users. We have no idea what, if anything, will kill Facebook.
xpose2000 13y ago
Sounds like the author wants facebook to improve its popular posts algorithm and gave a great example of where it failed. Very fair point, but why not just say that?
hvass 13y ago
There is no reason this should be trending as #1 on HN. A quip about Facebook's algorithm not getting a post right on time in front of you - and? What's the takeaway? What are the insights?
cormacrelf 13y ago
I'm still a teenager, and though I have deactivated my account for exams, Facebook has been a large part of the culture among my friends and within my school. I maintain that the best thing about it was text posts. People had a go at being witty or relevant or informative, and it seems everywhere you go on the site these qualities are suppressed. Text posts are truncated and offer a See More button, and images and other easily digestible content are prioritised. This has two important effects: => News feeds are much quicker to skim, and are much less substantial, which leaves you unsatisfied even when you've seen everything new, so you stick around. I admit this is pretty good monetising strategy on Facebook's behalf. => People start moving to services which imitate the fast flash of attention model promoted by the news feed. That's Snapchat, for example. I feel similarly dissatisfied finding out that Alice and Sally got fake-Facebook-married-but-really-just-BFFLs-still for the sixth time as I do seeing some guy who's not really my friend doing a random snapchat of his mock-surprised face. It strikes me that so few of my daily interactions online make me feel in any way connected. The best ones are still just talking to people via text or chat, and frankly I feel more connected to @ryanpequin, the comic artist who tweets with brutal honesty from the other side of the world, than most of the friends I see a few times a week. I think Facebook almost hit the nail on the head regarding what teenagers wanted. They live in highly structured communities (schools) and Facebook made it easy to keep thoughts vaguely within communities simply by showing them to people via algorithms. Unfortunately now it doesn't have the same charm, and many of the people I know feel the same. But all our friends are on it, so we stay.
camus2 13y ago
Dear OP: you sound like a spoiled teenager. i'm not even going to read your blogpost.
vacipr 13y ago
It's your own damn fault.This is what happends when you have too many useless friends on facebook.Start managing your newsfeed.
- michh 13y ago
  No it's not. It'll show a friend commented on something irrelevant in a public group I'm not a member of in the morning and not show the same friend broke up with their fiancee who is also a friend later that day. Removing them as a friend wouldn't have solved that. It's impossible to correctly guess the 'importance' of these types of things 100% of the time but surely they can do better than they are doing now.
  - vacipr 13y ago
    As far as I can remember you can choose what updates you receive from different persons and you can also prioritize this by creating groups like "close friends",but as you said they can do better than this.
babuskov 13y ago
It seems to me that the first "mother" on line 17 should be changed to "friend".
joebo 13y ago
Is it possible to sort my feed by # of likes or # of comments in facebook? I see "sort by top stories", but I don't think that does it. It seems like more control over sorting and filtering would help.
ibudiallo 13y ago
Recently I was using google and facebook and despite all the whining we do, these are pretty good services. I even wrote about it[1]. Sure there is the privacy issue but cases like this post just make me angry a little. They find the tiniest error and make a very big deal about it. [1] http://idiallo.com/blog/2013/11/privacy-aside-damn-good-service http://idiallo.com/blog/2013/11/privacy-aside-damn-good-serv...
joeblau 13y ago
Sounds like you need the Facebook 300 diet or #FB300D. Delete all but the 300 people you actually care about. I cut my users down from 900 and my feed has been a lot better.
- philwelch 13y ago
  300!? That's way too much.
- solnyshok 13y ago
  how about 3, err 13 people I actually care about?
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
Dear Nobody: There are two kinds of people: people that do things(good or bad) and people that don't. People that don't do anything love to criticize those that do. You will find them criticizing how bad other person dances in a party, but of course you won't find them dancing as is risky for them. Well, yes, facebook sucks, but as the most important social network on earth, they suck less than the alternatives. If you have a better idea you are free to do something about it.
- throwaway2048 13y ago
  Ah yes, i am upset about the NSA, what i clearly need to do is quit bitching and found my own country.
cmac2992 13y ago
Wait... You want it to to be natural? That means you would likely have never seen that post with all the likes. The likes would have been irrelevant on a chronological news feed.
bostonscott 13y ago
I agree with the author, and i'd like to add privacy management to the list of things they suck at. The privacy setting experience is convoluted and not intuitive. It seems they've just continued to add new privacy features without thinking through the goals and objectives of various user-segments. Who has 60-minutes of free time to sort through all their options and nuances?
chrisweekly 13y ago
What is the deal w the horizontal scrolling required to read the text on that site? "I'm a web developer" creds badly damaged if you can't present static text legibly on an iphone 4s. Didn't read the whole article, annoyed by both content and presentation. FB might suck but you aren't convincing anyone.
- Killswitch 13y ago
  It's a pastebin, I posted it there because it's not covered in advertisements like pastebin.com is, and the site was built by a user in my irc channel, I'll let him know this, but in the mean time, if you want to read my rant, here's the raw text: https://www.refheap.com/ee96f4d90abd10b643cee0448/raw https://www.refheap.com/ee96f4d90abd10b643cee0448/raw
kalleboo 13y ago
I find Facebook's bozo filter actually works pretty well to filter out the crap I don't care about. That shift along with a few hints of "don't show this person on my news feed" has turned my Facebook from a cesspit to something that's not a chore to browse through. The thing is, one one hand you have people complaining about all the trivial stuff they don't want to read invading their news feed, and on the other hand you have people complaining that Facebook are filtering their news feed too heavily and they want to see EVERYTHING. It's a difficult balance to make, and I'm sure they're continually tweaking it back and forth to find an equilibrium. The filtering/ranking has also gotten a LOT better since they first introduced it, when I was reaching for the "show in chronological order" button all the time.
BrandonRead 13y ago
I have always loved computers and the internet. But now I am frustrated with my use of the internet and the interconnectedness of everything. I don’t like being a node in a graph full of properties, incoming, and outgoing edges. I don’t like being inspected everyday, by the companies with the wealth to do so, like I am an anonymous bug in an experiment. I don’t like brands anymore. Even if the companies have great people, I still loathe a brand name. It’s embedded; they spread it like an infectious disease. It pervades all spaces of the web. Of my web—my web personalized for me. They tell me what I need. I don’t tell them. Because the algorithms are smart, really, they are. But they are blind to what matters—to what matters to me. Maybe I am the sum of my likes. Maybe my interests help them learn so they can bring me the things they think I’ll like. It only makes it worse. Everything is too familiar, too formulaic, and all very much the same. For communication, I love the formula. Messages are sent to every different type of person you can imagine, and they can all understand perfectly well. But it is the message that is the problem. The message, as I said, is always the same. It’s a tagline, a ‘service’, and a subscription fee. Our technology is a burden to psychology. Within our society, it is a weapon. It’s a tool. And it’s digging up and targeting you. The technology needs a divorce if it will help. It needs to divorce itself from corporate wealth, from unregulated self-interest that harms people. People are hurting and people or mourning, and people wake up in the morning with no hope for a future but keep on going because that’s what they were told to do. I wrote this yesterday and I was so delighted to see something so similar at the top of HN this afternoon.
jdabgotra 13y ago
You knock it off :) Facebook is a for-profit company and you've agreed to their user agreements. They use proprietary software, they store your data, and they aren't liable to what happens to your data, much less liable for keeping you happy in exchange for you doing absolutely nothing but consume. You aren't entitled to anything from them. Stop using it if you don't like it. Use something else or create something else. Life is not going to be served up for you on a platter without you doing anything for it, from the government, much less a large corporation which has no accountability towards you, who so blindly signed up, supported and agreed to let over all your personal content and social connections over to a for profit company. I'm confuse as to how people can feel this entitled without deserving anything due to not putting any work or ethical and moral reflection on how you use the Internet. Knock it off. Sorry, your letter pissed me off. It pisses me off that it is #1 on Hacker News right now. Knock it off, everyone. I am a very liberal person but this sense of entitlement from middle class Internet users has to stop. It is the reflection of a society that consumes far more than in produces. Excuse my rant.
sidcool 13y ago
It's a very subjective article. I don't disagree totally with the sentiment behind it, but facebook is working hard pon retaining people. It surely do not want to lose users to messaging apps like WhatsApp etc., as reported by a recent article. I am sure they have the talent to bring something out new to keep people hooked.
siliconviking 13y ago
I highly recommend this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
calinet6 13y ago
I realized a while ago that they're really not trying to provide a good UX anymore. There are some complainers, but most people are locked in and mostly enjoy it. If you're smart you block people and prune your friends list wisely. But then that damn news feed sort order keeps popping back to the default sort order... "Top Stories." It's a tiny little link; just large enough to exist. When the default is selected it just says "Sort". It's designed to be ignored. A UI anti-pattern used with intention. If they could remove it without a revolt, they surely would. Facebook doesn't want you to have a good user experience: Facebook wants you to have a Facebook Experience. One that they control and provide, with information they get to choose, and other people get to buy. News stories are bought and sold and "Top Stories" is just another way to let them insert whatever the hell they want above the fold. That space goes to the highest bidder, or the highest generator of ad revenue, or the most viral stories they've algorithmically decided to enhance. It's a method of control designed not to improve the experience, but to forge the great machine and make it a more efficient way to guarantee a value proposition. It's simple really. And it's not so bad, in the end. People have been complaining about TV commercials since their inception, but they're widely accepted and more valuable than ever. Facebook is just taking its place in the economic reality of media. They've grown up.
- 5555624 13y ago
  >Facebook doesn't want you to have a good user experience: Facebook wants you to have a Facebook Experience. One that they control and provide, with information they get to choose, and other people get to buy. This. They want to control not just your experience, but your information, so they can package it up neatly and sell it. Advertisers can get both your information, but they also know how advertising -- at least on Facebook -- will be presented.
bestest 13y ago
it's funny how people rant about things they don't understand and don't even try to understand them. getting relevant stuff on your news feed is trivially simple on facebook, you don't even need to major in anything.
Havoc 13y ago
Not much money in dying moms unless you're an oncologist.
bestest 13y ago
on the other hand though, it looks like someone needs to create a "Facebook Manual", for the ones unable to configure their news-feeds.
dysinger 13y ago
Dear posters that post things like this: Did you delete your account? No? You Suck. Just delete your FB account. You'll feel better.
slvn 13y ago
facebook? i have never been on facebook, but i happened to access my g+ 'home' page today (from another computer) and it was full... i usually don't go there it did not feel like 'home' at all...
sTevo-In-VA 13y ago
Before I ditched facebook I got really good at using 'Adblock Plus Select an element to hide'. After my class reunion I thought to myself, 'Do I really care about Mary's crafts, Farmville, and do I need people I hate prying into my private life?'. So I am currently facebookless, lindedinless, & twitterless and don't miss the noise for a second.
sakopov 13y ago
I'd have to agree. Facebook is becoming the same trash that Myspace used to be a few years back. They seem to struggle even with ads. I don't know how many times I've logged into my Facebook account to see a Software Developer ad with a picture of a big ass/boobs next to the description. Their suggested posts are nothing but advertisement spam which has nothing to do with my likes and interests. Enter Google+. An entirely different experience. If anything, G+ feels more personal. Suggested posts are from users like me posting something worthwhile and interesting. My newsfeed consists of great content every single day. It seems like Facebook is already losing teens. If they don't realize that the chase for money has gone too far, they'll start dropping everyone else as well.
mcgwiz 13y ago
The root problem is not that Facebook is trying to maximize it's sustainability, or that this guy wants something for nothing, it's simply that for years, Facebook effectively set very clear expectations in the minds of users, and then stopped meeting them. This, of course, is common with consumer web startups, where the prevailing wisdom is "grow Grow GROW!! ...and worry about monetization later". That's great only if you're gunning for a flip or acquihiring. Good to signal monetization intent, and how that might affect the experience, early. (Best to actually try monetizing early.)
darkbot 13y ago
This the reason why I too hate Facebook. I've switched to Diaspora*, while being far from perfect it does at least not bury important stuff with some shady algorithm.
circa 13y ago
I feel very similar to this post. I used to enjoy browsing Facebook. I rarely bother with it other than messaging. Twitter I have used since 2006 and still use it just as frequently as a few years ago.

199 points by Killswitch 13y ago

jeffehobbs 13y ago

Well, yeah. It's awful. Don't use it.

lignuist 13y ago
But... how are we supposed to keep in touch with our friends and families???
- tsahyt 13y ago
  I keep in touch with mine just fine without Facebook. I use my phone every now and then for actual phone calls and sometimes even meet them. In short, I do what people have been doing years before Facebook and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. But then again, what works for me doesn't have to work for everyone.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
- sramov 13y ago
  You can't, Facebook is the only way.
  - lignuist 13y ago
    Yeah, thanks for the confirmation. I never believed in this crap about email, phone, letters and personal visits (WTF?)!
    - sramov 13y ago
      What's sad is that many people will read comments like ours and not get it.
- mproud 13y ago
  You don’t have to use Facebook like a daily newspaper. There’s nothing wrong with just using Facebook like the Yellow Pages. It’s there when you need it — if you need it.

hawkharris 13y ago

There are two types of social networks: the ones that everyone complains about, and the ones that no one uses.

kbar13 13y ago
google+ kinda sucks in that Google's trying way too hard to push everyone into it, but I actually prefer it to Facebook, if not only because the design is cleaner and I don't see as many duckface pics on my feed each day.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  >> "I don't see as many duckface pics on my feed each day." That's your problem for friending those people, not the networks for showing you what you explicitly asked for (not duckface pics but posts from those people).
  - grannyg00se 13y ago
    These things develop a culture though. The same friends you have on facebook may behave completely differently on a different platform.
    - KyeRussell 13y ago
      Nope.
  - jethro_tell 13y ago
    Kinda. I have dozens of cousins with terrible politics and duck faces that I love to hang out with 2 or 3 times per year. things that get organized on Facebook. It's tough to have only digital friends that don't do duck face or push shitty politics if you also have real life friends.
    - k-mcgrady 13y ago
      I'd suggest Facebook's hide button. I have several family members I need to use Facebook to keep in touch with but they post things I have no interest in seeing. Those two clicks to hide their posts really improved me FB experience. I think it's something Facebook should make more obvious because it would improve the experience for a lot of people - particularly those with lots of 'friends' they've only met a few times or don't want to delete because of the social stigma attached.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

Facebook ranking posts is something that IS needed - they just need to do a better job. I bet you'd see a lot more shit if they didn't bother ordering stuff. >> "Stop what you're doing and just let it be natural." If they did that you would probably miss a lot more stuff. Nobody wants to have to scroll back through their timeline to catch up on the important stuff they missed, and they don't want to have to wade through a ton of crap to find the important stuff.

Killswitch 13y ago
You do have a point there, it just annoys me that legitimate things I want to see are never shown, like I stated in this post, my friends mother died on Thursday. I scroll my feed and see posts from Monday, but not something 3 days ago with THAT much activity? I mean me and this friend share 300+ friends... Most of the activity on that status are from mutual friends, you'd think that's something that should be shown, right? Nope. Becky hates Mondays, and Gary watered his garden in some stupid game.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  >> "I scroll my feed and see posts from Monday, but not something 3 days ago with THAT much activity?" I agree with you. I think though that Facebook probably takes into account how often most people visit the site. In Facebook time 3 days is probably quite long ago - probably over 100 posts ago for a lot of people.
kamjam 13y ago
The problem I find is this: http://imgur.com/nEUGq6p http://imgur.com/nEUGq6p I prefer the newsfeed to be sorted by "most recent", a chronological list of the postings. Facebook in it's infinite wisdom keeps deciding that is not the best way to consume the content and keeps reverting me back to "top stories". I think this is a more recent change, because it used to remember my selection. It's a little annoying it doesn't remember this.
- tehwalrus 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

rebel 13y ago

This is why I've started using Twitter more. All I want from my social media feed is a quick update on what my friends are doing. Twitter is simple and to the point. Facebook has evolved to a point where it's terrible for real-time communication, but it's the absolute best way to see someones history over a longer period of time. If I meet someone new I'd learn a lot more about them from their Facebook compared to their Twitter. I believe there's room for more than one social network and I think Twitter and FB have found non-competing paths.

k-mcgrady 13y ago
>> "Facebook has evolved to a point where it's terrible for real-time communication" Can't you use Facebook Messenger for that?
- throwaway98604 13y ago
  Seen at 7:29 AM
- girvo 13y ago
  One to many, not one to one
- rebel 13y ago
  I'm referring to social networking. For private messaging I stick to SMS.

patrickaljord 13y ago

Reminds me of this article from a week ago about how google maps sucked because it failed at a particular coffee shop query in SF a gentleman that happens to be a techcrunch writer did. Google Maps and Facebook are amazing services that try to guess what's more relevant to you and most of the time get it write. This in itself is a pretty amazing achievement. This is what we should be amazed at, not these few times those services get it wrong. The level of self-entitlement is high here, especially that we're talking free web services here. The day they always get it right is the day we get human like (edit: or rather god like mind reading) perfect AI, not happening any time soon guys. So in the meantime, relax and enjoy the show. Or stop using these services if they're that bad, or even better, build your own.

frostmatthew 13y ago
> The day they always get it right is the day we get human like perfect AI I agree with the majority of your comment, but not that line. Accomplishing that feat would not be "human like perfect AI" - it'd be mind-reading. My very closest friends could probably do a better job filtering my newsfeed than Facebook, but no way they would ever get it always right.
- patrickaljord 13y ago
  Thanks, edited.
7952 13y ago
Some services (like Google Search) are about returning a set of results that may possibly be right. Algorithms are undoubtedly brilliant in that context. When you want a single authoritative answer the gaps in datasets become much more obvious. To answer that type of question you either need better data (with cost and privacy concerns), or more human input. There are lots of problems that algorithm centred companies are not good at solving and it is very annoying that we are so reliant on them.

wickedOne 13y ago

just wondering how good a "best friend" is when you rely on facebook status updates to keep in touch with her… i might be old fashioned, but what happened with speaking to / seeing people irl? "My 3rd cousin whom I haven't seen since a family reunion 10 years ago" so why is she in your feed to begin with? to me this all sounds like a rant from someone blaming a website s/he's socially awkward

Killswitch 13y ago
Because we both are on Facebook, and check it quite a bit, and despite everyone saying "just pick up a phone" Well, sometimes when I am free, she's not, or vice versa, and it's easier to just make a post on their wall and say "Hey, how's your day going?" and let them respond when they get time? Plus in her situation it's a lot easier to let everyone know that her mother had passed by posting a status on Facebook than it is to call/text every single person. We're not teenagers, we have our own lives, we meet up when we can, not every day.

djhworld 13y ago

This is why I deleted my facebook account about 8 months ago. Never looked back.

benihana 13y ago

I hate these kinds of posts. It's a guy who thinks he knows more than he does trying to tell the most successful social network in history how to make things 'better' for an extremely tiny sample size that he thinks is much more significant and representative. It's just so arrogant and short sighted and comes at it from such a limited perspective. That's bad enough, without it being coupled to the fact that facebook is completely free and optional and no one is forcing you to use it.

gum_ina_package 13y ago
I think that's very cynical to say because you could say that about the majority of the posts on this site. HN is a place for people who understand the issues/live in the tech scene to debate, discuss, and disagree with each other about issues like the article.
- mproud 13y ago
  May be, but I always liked most of the articles posted because they bring insightful remarks. Obviously this article falls short. Don’t whine about stupid things with Facebook. Tell us things we don’t know, that we’re not aware of, or bring powerful analysis to things that truly matter.
  - redwood 13y ago
    I hear you, but think that while the article in and of itself doesn't do or say too much; its presence and popularity here makes it into something more. This sentiment has now been blessed by a lot of technology insiders. It's a common set of feelings, perhaps not well put but nevertheless captured something we're feeling. FB employees: heed this warning. We your early adopters will leave if you don't fix it.
    - Killswitch 13y ago
      > It's a common set of feelings, perhaps not well put but nevertheless captured something we're feeling. Exactly, sorry I'm not a great writer, I'm a programmer. :(

foresterh 13y ago

I don't understand why people are "friends" with people they don't care about seeing updates on. Or why they don't ignore them. But I don't really use Facebook anymore so maybe that's not an option? Try Google+... You choose who you want to see, and they don't have to choose to see you. Such a better way to get information you want. And circles and communities make that so much more useful. Of course it probably helps that most of the people that spam Facebook with games they play and emotions they describe don't use Google+. Or I should say most people don't use Google+.

falcolas 13y ago
Social pressure. I dropped my facebook account because my wife's entire extended family expected to be able to friend me. That's 30+ accounts full of duck faces, child updates, and Farmville pings.
_delirium 13y ago
> Or why they don't ignore them. [...] maybe that's not an option? It is; you can click the [V] in the corner of a post in your feed, and choose "Hide all from [username]". I'm not sure how widely known that is, though.
KyeRussell 13y ago
Facebook provides VERY similar functionality. It's the HN user base that just complains about problems instead of trying to fix them.

moron4hire 13y ago

If only there were a messaging system that was A) standardized, B) available world wide, C) decentralized from the control of one corporation, D) available on every platform, D.2) with instant notification on mobile devices, and E) everyone was already signed up for. coughEMAILcough. As far as I'm concerned, the only reason people like Facebook is because the email listserv is not very discoverable. Sometimes, you want to be included in the stream by default but don't want to participate right away. An email chain is too easy to exclude people. I use Facebook only insomuch as I have friends who use it and send me messages through it. Most of my "social" interactions through the internet are through email now, with groups of friends setup on lists so we can tune in and out as we want. It's easier to search than Facebook's past, too.

matthewmacleod 13y ago

Okay - you've identified one particular scenario where Facebook didn't correctly work out what was important to you. But I'm curious to to what you think "let it be natural" actually means. We can immediately discount a naïve timeline of events. Say events will appear in the timeline when they originally happen – that's not going to work, because it's be buried within an hour or two, regardless of the importance. Maybe events' places in the timeline could be based on when they were last "updated", as in liked, commented on etc. – that's probably more appropriate, but raises prioritisation questions. And let's say somebody catches up after a week, and comments on an older status - does everybody need to see it again? So something more complex is required - the simple timeline's no longer appropriate, even in relatively straightforward cases, given the volume of friends that many users have. It seems pretty obvious then to build something like a friend graph, with edges weighted based on e.g. frequency of interaction and mutual friend count, and use that to weight news items. As far as I know, that's what Facebook is doing. Personally, I do prefer the simple timeline – but that's because I've been using Facebook since it was first available at my university, and I don't have a huge friend list. But I appreciate that's probably not applicable to most users, and when I do look at my news feed, it does seem to do a pretty good job of prioritising things I'm interested in - especially if you engage a little bit and downrank/hide posts that you don't want to see.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
moultano 13y ago
A better way to say what he's saying is that facebook is being too smart by half. Any reasonable algorithm should have shown him this post. It's the obvious thing to do from a simple use of the signals available, so either the algorithm is broken or there's a bug.
- dade_ 13y ago
  I have experienced the same thing, important content missing from the presented list. I actually prefer Facebook on my BlackBerry Playbook because the app is old and doesn't seem to support the ranking feature. I think their algorithm is worse than useless and they should provide an option to turn it off. I have considered getting rid of my Facebook account because people keep assuming I am aware of their posts and at least they would know that I am not.

moron4hire 13y ago

I think we're stuck in a culture of "friend scarcity". When meeting people in meat-space, you don't have the time capacity to be able to make deep, meaningful relationships with a lot of people. Facebook gives the illusion of giving you more time to engage friends on a deep level. You're not socializing in a work setting, you're chewing the fat over goofy cat pictures. You're (ostensibly) keeping up with "how are the wife and kids". And because our brains are wired to expect that to be a scarce resource, we gather as many "friends" as we can on Facebook. It's also probably a learned response from us having gone through the early days of social networking. There just weren't as many people total on the internet back then. If there was a person you knew and they also had internet access, and they also used Facebook, it was somewhat more of a rare thing than it is today. You friended them because, again, you understood the Facebook friend to be a semi-scarce resource and human brains are hardwired to hoard scarce resources. So now that we live in an era where sugary, salty, fatty foods and Facebook friends are no longer scarce resources, we gorge ourselves on them and have become obese as a result. "Facebook-friend-fat". Sounds like it's time to cut out the empty calories and start exercising. Get rid of the people who post vapid shit, regardless of how well you think you know that person (how many times do we hear people make excuses for not eating better because it's uncomfortable?). And start posting better content of your own. One tends to get out what one puts in.

tomasien 13y ago

Anytime Facebook and Myspace get compared, I tune out immediately. They have nothing in common, Facebook ate Myspace's lunch when it was 10 million users, this has nothing to do with what may kill a network with the entire US and 1 billion ACTIVE users. We have no idea what, if anything, will kill Facebook.

xpose2000 13y ago

Sounds like the author wants facebook to improve its popular posts algorithm and gave a great example of where it failed. Very fair point, but why not just say that?

hvass 13y ago

There is no reason this should be trending as #1 on HN. A quip about Facebook's algorithm not getting a post right on time in front of you - and? What's the takeaway? What are the insights?

cormacrelf 13y ago

I'm still a teenager, and though I have deactivated my account for exams, Facebook has been a large part of the culture among my friends and within my school. I maintain that the best thing about it was text posts. People had a go at being witty or relevant or informative, and it seems everywhere you go on the site these qualities are suppressed. Text posts are truncated and offer a See More button, and images and other easily digestible content are prioritised. This has two important effects: => News feeds are much quicker to skim, and are much less substantial, which leaves you unsatisfied even when you've seen everything new, so you stick around. I admit this is pretty good monetising strategy on Facebook's behalf. => People start moving to services which imitate the fast flash of attention model promoted by the news feed. That's Snapchat, for example. I feel similarly dissatisfied finding out that Alice and Sally got fake-Facebook-married-but-really-just-BFFLs-still for the sixth time as I do seeing some guy who's not really my friend doing a random snapchat of his mock-surprised face. It strikes me that so few of my daily interactions online make me feel in any way connected. The best ones are still just talking to people via text or chat, and frankly I feel more connected to @ryanpequin, the comic artist who tweets with brutal honesty from the other side of the world, than most of the friends I see a few times a week. I think Facebook almost hit the nail on the head regarding what teenagers wanted. They live in highly structured communities (schools) and Facebook made it easy to keep thoughts vaguely within communities simply by showing them to people via algorithms. Unfortunately now it doesn't have the same charm, and many of the people I know feel the same. But all our friends are on it, so we stay.

camus2 13y ago

Dear OP: you sound like a spoiled teenager. i'm not even going to read your blogpost.

vacipr 13y ago

It's your own damn fault.This is what happends when you have too many useless friends on facebook.Start managing your newsfeed.

michh 13y ago
No it's not. It'll show a friend commented on something irrelevant in a public group I'm not a member of in the morning and not show the same friend broke up with their fiancee who is also a friend later that day. Removing them as a friend wouldn't have solved that. It's impossible to correctly guess the 'importance' of these types of things 100% of the time but surely they can do better than they are doing now.
- vacipr 13y ago
  As far as I can remember you can choose what updates you receive from different persons and you can also prioritize this by creating groups like "close friends",but as you said they can do better than this.

babuskov 13y ago

It seems to me that the first "mother" on line 17 should be changed to "friend".

joebo 13y ago

Is it possible to sort my feed by # of likes or # of comments in facebook? I see "sort by top stories", but I don't think that does it. It seems like more control over sorting and filtering would help.

ibudiallo 13y ago

Recently I was using google and facebook and despite all the whining we do, these are pretty good services. I even wrote about it[1]. Sure there is the privacy issue but cases like this post just make me angry a little. They find the tiniest error and make a very big deal about it. [1] http://idiallo.com/blog/2013/11/privacy-aside-damn-good-service http://idiallo.com/blog/2013/11/privacy-aside-damn-good-serv...

joeblau 13y ago

Sounds like you need the Facebook 300 diet or #FB300D. Delete all but the 300 people you actually care about. I cut my users down from 900 and my feed has been a lot better.

philwelch 13y ago
300!? That's way too much.
solnyshok 13y ago
how about 3, err 13 people I actually care about?

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

Dear Nobody: There are two kinds of people: people that do things(good or bad) and people that don't. People that don't do anything love to criticize those that do. You will find them criticizing how bad other person dances in a party, but of course you won't find them dancing as is risky for them. Well, yes, facebook sucks, but as the most important social network on earth, they suck less than the alternatives. If you have a better idea you are free to do something about it.

throwaway2048 13y ago
Ah yes, i am upset about the NSA, what i clearly need to do is quit bitching and found my own country.

cmac2992 13y ago

Wait... You want it to to be natural? That means you would likely have never seen that post with all the likes. The likes would have been irrelevant on a chronological news feed.

bostonscott 13y ago

I agree with the author, and i'd like to add privacy management to the list of things they suck at. The privacy setting experience is convoluted and not intuitive. It seems they've just continued to add new privacy features without thinking through the goals and objectives of various user-segments. Who has 60-minutes of free time to sort through all their options and nuances?

chrisweekly 13y ago

What is the deal w the horizontal scrolling required to read the text on that site? "I'm a web developer" creds badly damaged if you can't present static text legibly on an iphone 4s. Didn't read the whole article, annoyed by both content and presentation. FB might suck but you aren't convincing anyone.

Killswitch 13y ago
It's a pastebin, I posted it there because it's not covered in advertisements like pastebin.com is, and the site was built by a user in my irc channel, I'll let him know this, but in the mean time, if you want to read my rant, here's the raw text: https://www.refheap.com/ee96f4d90abd10b643cee0448/raw https://www.refheap.com/ee96f4d90abd10b643cee0448/raw

kalleboo 13y ago

I find Facebook's bozo filter actually works pretty well to filter out the crap I don't care about. That shift along with a few hints of "don't show this person on my news feed" has turned my Facebook from a cesspit to something that's not a chore to browse through. The thing is, one one hand you have people complaining about all the trivial stuff they don't want to read invading their news feed, and on the other hand you have people complaining that Facebook are filtering their news feed too heavily and they want to see EVERYTHING. It's a difficult balance to make, and I'm sure they're continually tweaking it back and forth to find an equilibrium. The filtering/ranking has also gotten a LOT better since they first introduced it, when I was reaching for the "show in chronological order" button all the time.

BrandonRead 13y ago

I have always loved computers and the internet. But now I am frustrated with my use of the internet and the interconnectedness of everything. I don’t like being a node in a graph full of properties, incoming, and outgoing edges. I don’t like being inspected everyday, by the companies with the wealth to do so, like I am an anonymous bug in an experiment. I don’t like brands anymore. Even if the companies have great people, I still loathe a brand name. It’s embedded; they spread it like an infectious disease. It pervades all spaces of the web. Of my web—my web personalized for me. They tell me what I need. I don’t tell them. Because the algorithms are smart, really, they are. But they are blind to what matters—to what matters to me. Maybe I am the sum of my likes. Maybe my interests help them learn so they can bring me the things they think I’ll like. It only makes it worse. Everything is too familiar, too formulaic, and all very much the same. For communication, I love the formula. Messages are sent to every different type of person you can imagine, and they can all understand perfectly well. But it is the message that is the problem. The message, as I said, is always the same. It’s a tagline, a ‘service’, and a subscription fee. Our technology is a burden to psychology. Within our society, it is a weapon. It’s a tool. And it’s digging up and targeting you. The technology needs a divorce if it will help. It needs to divorce itself from corporate wealth, from unregulated self-interest that harms people. People are hurting and people or mourning, and people wake up in the morning with no hope for a future but keep on going because that’s what they were told to do. I wrote this yesterday and I was so delighted to see something so similar at the top of HN this afternoon.

jdabgotra 13y ago

You knock it off :) Facebook is a for-profit company and you've agreed to their user agreements. They use proprietary software, they store your data, and they aren't liable to what happens to your data, much less liable for keeping you happy in exchange for you doing absolutely nothing but consume. You aren't entitled to anything from them. Stop using it if you don't like it. Use something else or create something else. Life is not going to be served up for you on a platter without you doing anything for it, from the government, much less a large corporation which has no accountability towards you, who so blindly signed up, supported and agreed to let over all your personal content and social connections over to a for profit company. I'm confuse as to how people can feel this entitled without deserving anything due to not putting any work or ethical and moral reflection on how you use the Internet. Knock it off. Sorry, your letter pissed me off. It pisses me off that it is #1 on Hacker News right now. Knock it off, everyone. I am a very liberal person but this sense of entitlement from middle class Internet users has to stop. It is the reflection of a society that consumes far more than in produces. Excuse my rant.

sidcool 13y ago

It's a very subjective article. I don't disagree totally with the sentiment behind it, but facebook is working hard pon retaining people. It surely do not want to lose users to messaging apps like WhatsApp etc., as reported by a recent article. I am sure they have the talent to bring something out new to keep people hooked.

siliconviking 13y ago

I highly recommend this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

calinet6 13y ago

I realized a while ago that they're really not trying to provide a good UX anymore. There are some complainers, but most people are locked in and mostly enjoy it. If you're smart you block people and prune your friends list wisely. But then that damn news feed sort order keeps popping back to the default sort order... "Top Stories." It's a tiny little link; just large enough to exist. When the default is selected it just says "Sort". It's designed to be ignored. A UI anti-pattern used with intention. If they could remove it without a revolt, they surely would. Facebook doesn't want you to have a good user experience: Facebook wants you to have a Facebook Experience. One that they control and provide, with information they get to choose, and other people get to buy. News stories are bought and sold and "Top Stories" is just another way to let them insert whatever the hell they want above the fold. That space goes to the highest bidder, or the highest generator of ad revenue, or the most viral stories they've algorithmically decided to enhance. It's a method of control designed not to improve the experience, but to forge the great machine and make it a more efficient way to guarantee a value proposition. It's simple really. And it's not so bad, in the end. People have been complaining about TV commercials since their inception, but they're widely accepted and more valuable than ever. Facebook is just taking its place in the economic reality of media. They've grown up.

5555624 13y ago
>Facebook doesn't want you to have a good user experience: Facebook wants you to have a Facebook Experience. One that they control and provide, with information they get to choose, and other people get to buy. This. They want to control not just your experience, but your information, so they can package it up neatly and sell it. Advertisers can get both your information, but they also know how advertising -- at least on Facebook -- will be presented.

bestest 13y ago

it's funny how people rant about things they don't understand and don't even try to understand them. getting relevant stuff on your news feed is trivially simple on facebook, you don't even need to major in anything.

Havoc 13y ago

Not much money in dying moms unless you're an oncologist.

bestest 13y ago

on the other hand though, it looks like someone needs to create a "Facebook Manual", for the ones unable to configure their news-feeds.

dysinger 13y ago

Dear posters that post things like this: Did you delete your account? No? You Suck. Just delete your FB account. You'll feel better.

slvn 13y ago

facebook? i have never been on facebook, but i happened to access my g+ 'home' page today (from another computer) and it was full... i usually don't go there it did not feel like 'home' at all...

sTevo-In-VA 13y ago

Before I ditched facebook I got really good at using 'Adblock Plus Select an element to hide'. After my class reunion I thought to myself, 'Do I really care about Mary's crafts, Farmville, and do I need people I hate prying into my private life?'. So I am currently facebookless, lindedinless, & twitterless and don't miss the noise for a second.

sakopov 13y ago

I'd have to agree. Facebook is becoming the same trash that Myspace used to be a few years back. They seem to struggle even with ads. I don't know how many times I've logged into my Facebook account to see a Software Developer ad with a picture of a big ass/boobs next to the description. Their suggested posts are nothing but advertisement spam which has nothing to do with my likes and interests. Enter Google+. An entirely different experience. If anything, G+ feels more personal. Suggested posts are from users like me posting something worthwhile and interesting. My newsfeed consists of great content every single day. It seems like Facebook is already losing teens. If they don't realize that the chase for money has gone too far, they'll start dropping everyone else as well.

mcgwiz 13y ago

The root problem is not that Facebook is trying to maximize it's sustainability, or that this guy wants something for nothing, it's simply that for years, Facebook effectively set very clear expectations in the minds of users, and then stopped meeting them. This, of course, is common with consumer web startups, where the prevailing wisdom is "grow Grow GROW!! ...and worry about monetization later". That's great only if you're gunning for a flip or acquihiring. Good to signal monetization intent, and how that might affect the experience, early. (Best to actually try monetizing early.)

darkbot 13y ago

This the reason why I too hate Facebook. I've switched to Diaspora*, while being far from perfect it does at least not bury important stuff with some shady algorithm.

circa 13y ago

I feel very similar to this post. I used to enjoy browsing Facebook. I rarely bother with it other than messaging. Twitter I have used since 2006 and still use it just as frequently as a few years ago.