11 ms·

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 'b

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. :(
- paulrouget 13y ago
  Here OP is not "debating". He's being aggressive and condescending.
redwood 13y ago
Quite the contrary: he's not telling them how to make it better. He's telling them that intuitively it has gone from being a good experience to being a shitty one, and he provided some examples of what good was and could be. CAN facebook cut through the noisy garbage and give people what they want again? Can they pull this off when folks have befriended people that aren't really their friends? Perhaps not.. it's not an easy technological challenge to pull off. But it's clear that FB is focused primarily on extracting cash in the near term before the collapse of its user base, and that's putting it into a death spiral where they don't appear to be doing much to address these intuitions. It's hard to find something more valuable, in a consumer product, than intuition.
- calinet6 13y ago
  Furthermore, it's not some super rare occurrence that a large corporation that has long departed from its in-touch startup roots forgets how to have that intuition. For that reason alone, posts like this from individuals to large companies are valuable, and the argument that it's invalid because somehow the large corporation knows better is the opposite of true.
abus 13y ago
Damn I accidentally upvoted you before I got to the end. Facebook is not optional, you are forced to use it or be left out of a huge amount of social interaction, and it's not because Facebook is good, it's because everyone uses it. Not to mention my college literally requires you to use it.
- mhurron 13y ago
  > you are forced to use it or be left out of a huge amount of social interaction That is still optional.
  - speeder 13y ago
    Depends, if you can live as a hermit, then maybe yes. But my circle of contacts for example communicate with Facebook only, and I am already a not social person, if I deleted my Facebook I would spend months before getting. Invited to a party or funeral
    - mhurron 13y ago
      It's impossible to have friends that don't use facebook? It would seem that Facebook is 'required' because you see some requirement to interact with people that won't talk to you in any other way. That is also a choice you made.
      - hnha 13y ago
        no, of course it's not. But friendships are not something you can plan or form like that.
      - speeder 13y ago
        Currently what I do is move as needed to get money as needed, and the places where I ended so far everyone else as only passing through too, so new friendships don't have the chance to form.
  - throwaway2048 13y ago
brymaster 13y ago
> optional and no one is forcing you to use it. Optional like the sites that have "sign in via facebook" and no other option? Optional in that they track your every move from "like buttons" all over the web? Or optional that they develop shadow profiles on users that aren't even users? Which optional is it?
- abraininavat 13y ago
  > Optional like the sites that have "sign in via facebook" and no other option? Yes. Or are you under the impression that those sites are also not optional?
  - brymaster 13y ago
    If one wants to log into a website that isn't facebook, one shouldn't be forced to have a login from a "social network" they don't use.
    - chaz 13y ago
      Shouldn't you be blaming the site for only giving you only one option? Why didn't they provide a second?
    - sbarre 13y ago
      That's not really Facebook's fault though.
      - avmich 13y ago
        Are you sure that it isn't something somehow related to Facebook which makes those site to use Facebook login, and not, say, its own?
        tedunangst 13y ago
        What is this something that forces sites to use FaceBook login and not implement their own?
anon1385 13y ago
>the fact that facebook is completely free and optional and no one is forcing you to use it. This is highly simplistic. Moxie gave a good talk a few years back that covered this idea that we have a 'choice' about using new communication technologies like smartphones, and the arguments apply just as much to social networks Changing Threats To Privacy From Tia To Google (Blackhat 2010) by Moxie Marlinspike http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084 http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084 I've transcribed the relevant part[1]: I think if you look at the way that people tend to organise in groups and communities, there are often informal communications networks that bind them together, that allow them to communicate, make plans, coordinate activities. If you introduce something like the GSM cellular network to this group, and if I start using it, I am subject to something that is very well known called the No Network Effect. If I am the only one with a cell phone it's really not worth very much. The value of the network is in the number of people that are connected to it and that if I'm the only one I can't really communicate with anyone. However if I somehow manage to get everyone to start using my communications network it becomes very effective and very valuable. But there is an interesting side effect, which is that the old informal mechanisms people use to communicate and to collaborate disappear, that they are destroyed by the introduction of technology. The technology actually changes the social fabric of how people communicate and coordinate. Mobile phones, there are many obvious examples. People used to make plans, they would say: "I'll meet you on this street corner at this time on this day and, you know, we'll do something" and now people say "I'll call you when I'm getting off work" or "I'll text you" and if you don't have a mobile phone you can't really participate in this type of organisation and you begin to find yourself kind of alone. Because if I now make a choice not to be a part of this cellular network, there is sort of an interesting thing where once again I am subject to the no network effect. The network that used to exist, the informal communications channels, has been destroyed. So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society. In some ways the choice to have a mobile phone today has become not necessarily just whether you have a piece of consumer electronics in your pocket but whether or not you are even a part of society, and that's a much bigger choice. Maybe not one that we should have to make, or at least maybe one that isn't really a choice at all. [1] originally transcribed for this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451313
Houshalter 13y ago
>facebook is completely free and optional and no one is forcing you to use it. First of all you should be able to complain and criticize even free services. Second Facebook is pretty much a monopoly. Everyone you know uses facebook, therefore you have to use facebook. It's not like you can just go to a different social network. It's a great example of the Network Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jesserosenthal 13y ago
The threads in response to you are fascinating and mystifying. I'm not sure whom to respond to, since everyone seems to be saying some variation of the same thing: that Facebook is simply a necessity of modern life. I think I'm a pretty normal, fairly technical, member of society, and I've never found that to be the case. I turned down the first stage of Facebook invites in 2006 or 2007 or whenever. Honestly, at the time, I probably thought I'd spend too much time obsessing about my ex. I work in a fairly computerized environment (a university) and I've never felt particularly hermetic. We have friends, live in a city, I have and make professional connections, etc. I'm 37, so maybe I'm not representative, and I'm willing to believe that my life might be a little more wife-and-kids-and-job-centric than some here. But I'm honestly a bit surprised by the claims that it's impossible to live without it. I'm willing to believe it, because it seems unlikely that this many people would be so wildly exaggerating, but it's surprising all the same. What are the elements of life that I live without that folks can't even conceive of living without?
code_duck 13y ago
Your comments don't address the actual matter here: Facebook's filtering does a poor job of selecting what's what's interesting or notable to an individual. Personally, I was just observing today to my girlfriend that it seems my news feed is rather sparse, mainly consisting of the same 15-20 people over and over again and few enough total posts per day that I often reach the end of posts I haven't seen. Then, when I look at the pages of actual friends I am surprised to see them posting significant things that somehow I was not presented with. I would prefer that the news feed work like twitter: show me everything, from everyone, sequentially. The choice between 'Top Stories' and 'Most Recent' isn't enough since lost recent, as noted, shows a small and poorly chosen subset of friend activity. And then, the mix is frequently updated behind the scenes in an opaque manner.
accelguy 13y ago
Its getting very annoying to see all these linkbait articles being posted to HN
- Killswitch 13y ago
  I don't think that word means what you think it means. I did not "post a linkbait article", If I wanted to post a linkbait article I would have not put it on a free, ad-less site that has zero use for me outside of it's use for everyone else... I posted it in an ad-free pastebin because I don't want it to be linkbait.
jonchang 13y ago
I agree. Facebook needs you to tell it which posts from friends you want to see. I've found the friend organizer really helps with that: https://www.facebook.com/friends/organize https://www.facebook.com/friends/organize You're basically asked whether you want to move people into two lists: Close Friends and Acquaintances. You'll see pretty much every single action your close friends perform on Facebook, and you won't see anything from your acquaintances except the important updates (i.e., ones with lots of likes / shares / comments).
- Killswitch 13y ago
  That's nice and all, but I am friends with everyone on my Facebook because whether we're best of friends and interact with each other every day, or once a year, I still want to keep up to date with them.
ta_delited 13y ago
> facebook is completely free and optional and no one is forcing you to use it. Facebook certainly not free, far from it actually and that's a root cause of what's wrong and sucks with facebook. You're not paying with money but with personal information, refer to how google went from a search engine to an ad seller. Facebook is barely optional since everybody and their grandma and their dog are using it, as someone who refused since day to register on facebook, social pressure to get a facebook account is real and powerful. I had to renounce relationships and staying in touch with many people I wanted to stay in touch with because their only mean of online communication is facebook, and there's not a month without someone pointing me to facebook to interact with them or know about upcoming events. It's even worse with younger generations and in north america where not having facebook lead to being ostracized.

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. :(
paulrouget 13y ago
Here OP is not "debating". He's being aggressive and condescending.

redwood 13y ago

Quite the contrary: he's not telling them how to make it better. He's telling them that intuitively it has gone from being a good experience to being a shitty one, and he provided some examples of what good was and could be. CAN facebook cut through the noisy garbage and give people what they want again? Can they pull this off when folks have befriended people that aren't really their friends? Perhaps not.. it's not an easy technological challenge to pull off. But it's clear that FB is focused primarily on extracting cash in the near term before the collapse of its user base, and that's putting it into a death spiral where they don't appear to be doing much to address these intuitions. It's hard to find something more valuable, in a consumer product, than intuition.

calinet6 13y ago
Furthermore, it's not some super rare occurrence that a large corporation that has long departed from its in-touch startup roots forgets how to have that intuition. For that reason alone, posts like this from individuals to large companies are valuable, and the argument that it's invalid because somehow the large corporation knows better is the opposite of true.

abus 13y ago

Damn I accidentally upvoted you before I got to the end. Facebook is not optional, you are forced to use it or be left out of a huge amount of social interaction, and it's not because Facebook is good, it's because everyone uses it. Not to mention my college literally requires you to use it.

mhurron 13y ago
> you are forced to use it or be left out of a huge amount of social interaction That is still optional.
- speeder 13y ago
  Depends, if you can live as a hermit, then maybe yes. But my circle of contacts for example communicate with Facebook only, and I am already a not social person, if I deleted my Facebook I would spend months before getting. Invited to a party or funeral
  - mhurron 13y ago
    It's impossible to have friends that don't use facebook? It would seem that Facebook is 'required' because you see some requirement to interact with people that won't talk to you in any other way. That is also a choice you made.
    - hnha 13y ago
      no, of course it's not. But friendships are not something you can plan or form like that.
    - speeder 13y ago
      Currently what I do is move as needed to get money as needed, and the places where I ended so far everyone else as only passing through too, so new friendships don't have the chance to form.
- throwaway2048 13y ago

brymaster 13y ago

> optional and no one is forcing you to use it. Optional like the sites that have "sign in via facebook" and no other option? Optional in that they track your every move from "like buttons" all over the web? Or optional that they develop shadow profiles on users that aren't even users? Which optional is it?

abraininavat 13y ago
> Optional like the sites that have "sign in via facebook" and no other option? Yes. Or are you under the impression that those sites are also not optional?
- brymaster 13y ago
  If one wants to log into a website that isn't facebook, one shouldn't be forced to have a login from a "social network" they don't use.
  - chaz 13y ago
    Shouldn't you be blaming the site for only giving you only one option? Why didn't they provide a second?
  - sbarre 13y ago
    That's not really Facebook's fault though.
    - avmich 13y ago
      Are you sure that it isn't something somehow related to Facebook which makes those site to use Facebook login, and not, say, its own?
      - tedunangst 13y ago
        What is this something that forces sites to use FaceBook login and not implement their own?

anon1385 13y ago

>the fact that facebook is completely free and optional and no one is forcing you to use it. This is highly simplistic. Moxie gave a good talk a few years back that covered this idea that we have a 'choice' about using new communication technologies like smartphones, and the arguments apply just as much to social networks Changing Threats To Privacy From Tia To Google (Blackhat 2010) by Moxie Marlinspike http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084 http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084 I've transcribed the relevant part[1]: I think if you look at the way that people tend to organise in groups and communities, there are often informal communications networks that bind them together, that allow them to communicate, make plans, coordinate activities. If you introduce something like the GSM cellular network to this group, and if I start using it, I am subject to something that is very well known called the No Network Effect. If I am the only one with a cell phone it's really not worth very much. The value of the network is in the number of people that are connected to it and that if I'm the only one I can't really communicate with anyone. However if I somehow manage to get everyone to start using my communications network it becomes very effective and very valuable. But there is an interesting side effect, which is that the old informal mechanisms people use to communicate and to collaborate disappear, that they are destroyed by the introduction of technology. The technology actually changes the social fabric of how people communicate and coordinate. Mobile phones, there are many obvious examples. People used to make plans, they would say: "I'll meet you on this street corner at this time on this day and, you know, we'll do something" and now people say "I'll call you when I'm getting off work" or "I'll text you" and if you don't have a mobile phone you can't really participate in this type of organisation and you begin to find yourself kind of alone. Because if I now make a choice not to be a part of this cellular network, there is sort of an interesting thing where once again I am subject to the no network effect. The network that used to exist, the informal communications channels, has been destroyed. So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society. In some ways the choice to have a mobile phone today has become not necessarily just whether you have a piece of consumer electronics in your pocket but whether or not you are even a part of society, and that's a much bigger choice. Maybe not one that we should have to make, or at least maybe one that isn't really a choice at all. [1] originally transcribed for this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451313

Houshalter 13y ago

>facebook is completely free and optional and no one is forcing you to use it. First of all you should be able to complain and criticize even free services. Second Facebook is pretty much a monopoly. Everyone you know uses facebook, therefore you have to use facebook. It's not like you can just go to a different social network. It's a great example of the Network Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jesserosenthal 13y ago

The threads in response to you are fascinating and mystifying. I'm not sure whom to respond to, since everyone seems to be saying some variation of the same thing: that Facebook is simply a necessity of modern life. I think I'm a pretty normal, fairly technical, member of society, and I've never found that to be the case. I turned down the first stage of Facebook invites in 2006 or 2007 or whenever. Honestly, at the time, I probably thought I'd spend too much time obsessing about my ex. I work in a fairly computerized environment (a university) and I've never felt particularly hermetic. We have friends, live in a city, I have and make professional connections, etc. I'm 37, so maybe I'm not representative, and I'm willing to believe that my life might be a little more wife-and-kids-and-job-centric than some here. But I'm honestly a bit surprised by the claims that it's impossible to live without it. I'm willing to believe it, because it seems unlikely that this many people would be so wildly exaggerating, but it's surprising all the same. What are the elements of life that I live without that folks can't even conceive of living without?

code_duck 13y ago

Your comments don't address the actual matter here: Facebook's filtering does a poor job of selecting what's what's interesting or notable to an individual. Personally, I was just observing today to my girlfriend that it seems my news feed is rather sparse, mainly consisting of the same 15-20 people over and over again and few enough total posts per day that I often reach the end of posts I haven't seen. Then, when I look at the pages of actual friends I am surprised to see them posting significant things that somehow I was not presented with. I would prefer that the news feed work like twitter: show me everything, from everyone, sequentially. The choice between 'Top Stories' and 'Most Recent' isn't enough since lost recent, as noted, shows a small and poorly chosen subset of friend activity. And then, the mix is frequently updated behind the scenes in an opaque manner.

accelguy 13y ago

Its getting very annoying to see all these linkbait articles being posted to HN

Killswitch 13y ago
I don't think that word means what you think it means. I did not "post a linkbait article", If I wanted to post a linkbait article I would have not put it on a free, ad-less site that has zero use for me outside of it's use for everyone else... I posted it in an ad-free pastebin because I don't want it to be linkbait.

jonchang 13y ago

I agree. Facebook needs you to tell it which posts from friends you want to see. I've found the friend organizer really helps with that: https://www.facebook.com/friends/organize https://www.facebook.com/friends/organize You're basically asked whether you want to move people into two lists: Close Friends and Acquaintances. You'll see pretty much every single action your close friends perform on Facebook, and you won't see anything from your acquaintances except the important updates (i.e., ones with lots of likes / shares / comments).

Killswitch 13y ago
That's nice and all, but I am friends with everyone on my Facebook because whether we're best of friends and interact with each other every day, or once a year, I still want to keep up to date with them.

ta_delited 13y ago

> facebook is completely free and optional and no one is forcing you to use it. Facebook certainly not free, far from it actually and that's a root cause of what's wrong and sucks with facebook. You're not paying with money but with personal information, refer to how google went from a search engine to an ad seller. Facebook is barely optional since everybody and their grandma and their dog are using it, as someone who refused since day to register on facebook, social pressure to get a facebook account is real and powerful. I had to renounce relationships and staying in touch with many people I wanted to stay in touch with because their only mean of online communication is facebook, and there's not a month without someone pointing me to facebook to interact with them or know about upcoming events. It's even worse with younger generations and in north america where not having facebook lead to being ostracized.