Ask HN: What Sucks About Facebook?

In my opinion, Facebook has some time left but not much. I would guess that a new site will take over within the next 12 months. The transition will be similar to the one we saw a few years back when everyone made the shift from Myspace to Facebook.

Even though I am 20 and in college and am friends with everyone I know in real life, everyone I knew growing up and from summer camps, and many of my internet friends as well, I rarely go on anymore. It used to be a daily activity.

What went wrong? I think it just became so popular, had so many people that it wasn't not interesting anymore. We all have a little hipster in us - once everyone you know and their mother and their grandmother is using something, it starts to lose its appeal.

Lastly, Facebook had too much change. They could have updated it once or twice with fairly big changes and been fine. I noticed that I hated hearing about facebook or going on facebook when they were rolling out new privacy agreements and rearranging the site layout once a week.

There is a big potential for anyone developing the next social networking site. Who knows what aspects will make it popular though.

I think social networks are cyclic because they have a 'fashion' element to them. Whereever the 'hip' people are that's where the rest will follow. So once the 'hip' people (some would say the trend-setters) move out their groupies will follow.

Of course after that it's a long way down that hill that you can literally shoot up on but I don't think there ever will be a permanent social network. It's more like a locust thing. And hip people will always be on the move, if only because they really can't be seen eating in the same restaurant that every other person eats at, so they'll go and discover a new joint that nobody else has heard of or a new style of wearing their hair, their jeans or their baseball caps. It's a fashion thing.

IMO Facebook is too big and real to be a fad. That doesn't mean that they can be taken over one day by another service, but they are managed very well (unlike Myspace) and have an excellent product vision. I knew myspace would crash and burn eventually, I hated that site from early on. Surfing myspace was too godamned annoying with animated GIFs, background music, random friend requests, and spam. Facebook however, gave everyone what they wanted; information and connections to people they know.

I still use facebook everyday and I'm a year out of college. I probably engage with less features (like wall commenting, photo uploading, apps, games) than I used to and do more passive browsing.

I think the next big "social network" won't be recognized as a social network. It will gather an audience based on some form of engagement revolving around a winning feature set. Kind of like the way Twitter came along, but with a better feature fit that would eventually creep into Facebook territory.

Facebook sucks because it is careless about my privacy.

What are you doing during all those hours? I never got into it that much (other than trawling for hot women).