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> Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. Yep. At least among my friends, family, and acquaintances, nobody posts on thei

by Lazare 11y ago

> Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. Yep. At least among my friends, family, and acquaintances, nobody posts on their wall anymore; it's a wasteland of weird automated posts and the rare half-hearted re-share of a funny story about a cat. Where the action is in the groups. Groups for friends, patient support groups, guild groups for MMOs, groups about crafts or hobbies. Which is weird, because Facebook isn't actually a very good platform for that sort of thing. Odd.

ectoplasm 11y ago
That makes sense to me, once the novelty wears off, broadcasting stuff about yourself to everyone you know is not so fun.
justuk 11y ago
About a week ago I decide to look through all my friends' profiles and decide whether Facebook was worth keeping. It made me realise how much of their posts never made it to the wall (or whatever it's called) - bear in mind I only have about 50 people on there with a third are posting nothing. I ended up permanently deleting the account as it's just not worth it.
newscracker 11y ago
Apart from the privacy issues, one thing I really despise in Facebook is search. It literally sucks! Unlike Gmail, Facebook is built as a platform where information goes to die a quick death. In groups, as on web forums, a big drag is people asking the same questions again and again. Searching for information even by admins who would like to help people out is cumbersome and difficult due to the way Facebook search works (or doesn't work). I really long for email discussion threads tied into a web interface with a great search engine behind (like on the * Group platforms from the early web).
- Lazare 11y ago
  Yep. I mean... We've got newsgroups, hosted blog comments (like disqus), normal blog comments, email lists, usenet, forums (in all their infinite variety from oldschool phpBB to newer offerings like muut), reddit (and similar sites like hnews), google groups, RSS feeds, pingbacks, Stackoverflow and friends, Facebook groups, whatever G+ has, and probably two dozen other related products, clones, variants and crossbreeds I'm not even thinking of. ...all in an attempt to solve the same basic problem, ie, me and some other people I don't really know and who won't be online at the same time would like to chat, post stuff, and maybe find stuff that has been posted before, hopefully with the ability to build a sense of community, low barriers to entry, good usability, and decent filtering, moderating, and admin tools. I admit, it's a hard problem. But it seems like one in an unusually unsolved state, given the sheer amount of interest and work that's gone into it over the many many years we've been trying. Newsgroups date back to 1979-1980, and looking at the Facebook groups my girlfriend happily participates in, I'm not 100% sure we're any closer to solving the underlying issue. In fact, I'm afraid we might be further. It's weird. Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should have—or will ever have—one product that solves every use case. I'm wondering why we don't seem to have a product that really solves even one use case yet. Disqus or Facebook are widely used, but hardly perfect or loved. And then there's stuff like the Wikipedia project, which uses aggressively unfriendly tools for internal discussion and organisation; I have no idea how that ever seemed like a good choice.

by Lazare 11y ago

ectoplasm 11y ago

That makes sense to me, once the novelty wears off, broadcasting stuff about yourself to everyone you know is not so fun.

justuk 11y ago

About a week ago I decide to look through all my friends' profiles and decide whether Facebook was worth keeping. It made me realise how much of their posts never made it to the wall (or whatever it's called) - bear in mind I only have about 50 people on there with a third are posting nothing. I ended up permanently deleting the account as it's just not worth it.

newscracker 11y ago

Apart from the privacy issues, one thing I really despise in Facebook is search. It literally sucks! Unlike Gmail, Facebook is built as a platform where information goes to die a quick death. In groups, as on web forums, a big drag is people asking the same questions again and again. Searching for information even by admins who would like to help people out is cumbersome and difficult due to the way Facebook search works (or doesn't work). I really long for email discussion threads tied into a web interface with a great search engine behind (like on the * Group platforms from the early web).

Lazare 11y ago
Yep. I mean... We've got newsgroups, hosted blog comments (like disqus), normal blog comments, email lists, usenet, forums (in all their infinite variety from oldschool phpBB to newer offerings like muut), reddit (and similar sites like hnews), google groups, RSS feeds, pingbacks, Stackoverflow and friends, Facebook groups, whatever G+ has, and probably two dozen other related products, clones, variants and crossbreeds I'm not even thinking of. ...all in an attempt to solve the same basic problem, ie, me and some other people I don't really know and who won't be online at the same time would like to chat, post stuff, and maybe find stuff that has been posted before, hopefully with the ability to build a sense of community, low barriers to entry, good usability, and decent filtering, moderating, and admin tools. I admit, it's a hard problem. But it seems like one in an unusually unsolved state, given the sheer amount of interest and work that's gone into it over the many many years we've been trying. Newsgroups date back to 1979-1980, and looking at the Facebook groups my girlfriend happily participates in, I'm not 100% sure we're any closer to solving the underlying issue. In fact, I'm afraid we might be further. It's weird. Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should have—or will ever have—one product that solves every use case. I'm wondering why we don't seem to have a product that really solves even one use case yet. Disqus or Facebook are widely used, but hardly perfect or loved. And then there's stuff like the Wikipedia project, which uses aggressively unfriendly tools for internal discussion and organisation; I have no idea how that ever seemed like a good choice.