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What happens when facebook engagement as a whole starts dropping? My news feed is maybe 5 real posts, 10 "upworthy" style video shares, top10 lists and "brand"

by taurath 12y ago

What happens when facebook engagement as a whole starts dropping? My news feed is maybe 5 real posts, 10 "upworthy" style video shares, top10 lists and "brand" content. The whole thing feels useless, and all the things I actually care about are buried under ads and crapware. Events and messaging are the main usable portions of the platform - I only know a few people who use those exclusively, and once they're off I'm done with facebook entirely.

sytelus 12y ago
Ok... this is not ready yet. I'm working on it on and off but you might want to try out http://fbtidy.com http://fbtidy.com. The basic concept is to extract "real" status messages in FB. Rest of the things are in other tabs to checkout if you have time. Nothing is stored on server. The whole app is JS making client-side Graph API calls directly to FB. Code is here: https://github.com/sytelus/fbtidy https://github.com/sytelus/fbtidy Any feedback welcome.
- bhouston 12y ago
  Great idea, but if it is takes off you will get a C&D from facebook unfortunately.
aragot 12y ago
New trend to expect: People are so afraid of posting their real status because of privacy, that you won't expect anything meaningful from your newsfeed.
- pestaa 12y ago
  We like to believe privacy will be a determining factor but even most of my CS university friends don't give a damn about privacy. People need to burn their hands before they watch out for fire.
- sharpneli 12y ago
  There is another problem. Namely not wanting to bother some segments of your contacts. Twitter and linkedin suffer from the same problem. As an example if I post something to facebook is it the sharpneli that loves to fish? Is it the one who plays esports at somewhat competitive level? Is it the one who posts an example how to do something with OpenCL? All of those circles are mutually exclusive and frankly posting something regarding esports would bore majority of my friends. Same applying to any other subset. That's why my own postings are always in sites that are very specific and focused on a certain topic.
  - jonathansizz 12y ago
    This is why I'm frustrated that G+ (or something similar) hasn't taken off. Facebook's usefulness is limited to friends and family. Twitter is good as a fine-tuned information feed. I've also tried using Twitter for two-way communication on very specific topics, but there's an immediate problem: I have many and varied interests, so I know that most of my followers won't be interested in most of my tweets. The character limit is also a significant handicap (and makes little sense now that SMS is being replaced by IM). Google+ with its circles seemed like a perfect solution to this problem, but unfortunately, except for topics related to technology, there seems to be very little interaction going on. So this means I'm limited to specialist websites or sites like Reddit. While this isn't awful, I think that having a genuine interest-based social network (that isn't just a mouthpiece for the powerful and famous) would offer several improvements. For a start, I'd have control over my 'circles', eliminating the troll problem that plagues all forum-based websites. I could make my circles as large or small, and as specialised or general as I wished. This ideal social network would emphasize mutual following and active participation, and provide many tools for discovery of relevant connections. Maybe there just isn't the demand for this, I don't know.

by taurath 12y ago

sytelus 12y ago

Ok... this is not ready yet. I'm working on it on and off but you might want to try out http://fbtidy.com http://fbtidy.com. The basic concept is to extract "real" status messages in FB. Rest of the things are in other tabs to checkout if you have time. Nothing is stored on server. The whole app is JS making client-side Graph API calls directly to FB. Code is here: https://github.com/sytelus/fbtidy https://github.com/sytelus/fbtidy Any feedback welcome.

bhouston 12y ago
Great idea, but if it is takes off you will get a C&D from facebook unfortunately.

aragot 12y ago

New trend to expect: People are so afraid of posting their real status because of privacy, that you won't expect anything meaningful from your newsfeed.

pestaa 12y ago
We like to believe privacy will be a determining factor but even most of my CS university friends don't give a damn about privacy. People need to burn their hands before they watch out for fire.
sharpneli 12y ago
There is another problem. Namely not wanting to bother some segments of your contacts. Twitter and linkedin suffer from the same problem. As an example if I post something to facebook is it the sharpneli that loves to fish? Is it the one who plays esports at somewhat competitive level? Is it the one who posts an example how to do something with OpenCL? All of those circles are mutually exclusive and frankly posting something regarding esports would bore majority of my friends. Same applying to any other subset. That's why my own postings are always in sites that are very specific and focused on a certain topic.
- jonathansizz 12y ago
  This is why I'm frustrated that G+ (or something similar) hasn't taken off. Facebook's usefulness is limited to friends and family. Twitter is good as a fine-tuned information feed. I've also tried using Twitter for two-way communication on very specific topics, but there's an immediate problem: I have many and varied interests, so I know that most of my followers won't be interested in most of my tweets. The character limit is also a significant handicap (and makes little sense now that SMS is being replaced by IM). Google+ with its circles seemed like a perfect solution to this problem, but unfortunately, except for topics related to technology, there seems to be very little interaction going on. So this means I'm limited to specialist websites or sites like Reddit. While this isn't awful, I think that having a genuine interest-based social network (that isn't just a mouthpiece for the powerful and famous) would offer several improvements. For a start, I'd have control over my 'circles', eliminating the troll problem that plagues all forum-based websites. I could make my circles as large or small, and as specialised or general as I wished. This ideal social network would emphasize mutual following and active participation, and provide many tools for discovery of relevant connections. Maybe there just isn't the demand for this, I don't know.