Live data from Hacker News

Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

insidefacebook.com

91–100 of 139 posts

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#93
post #84
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just not follow the spammers on twitter and be fine?

Not really, when they message you whenever you mention a keyword they're tracking on (e.g. ipad), then all you can do is manually block them. It's a fairly painful process, and considering how much visibility Twitter has of each twitter client, their automatic anti-spam process should actually be much more effective than it currently is.

I just keep my tweets protected. Seems to work.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is absolutely fabulously done (complaints about it concern privacy and abuse potential but the interface is top-notch). The thing about Facebook though, is A) The interface requires lots of care and feeding to stay clean and appealing - Facebook has stayed nice through it small number of very talented engineers. B) Facebook's economics and its supply of topnotch talent has been leverage from its constant gro…

Are we talking about the same service? The User experience is horrible. I am not just talking from a hacker perspective, as most of the people I know that complain about facebook are very NON technical people. They just complain about the same things that I also hate: That facebook makes it impossible ( by design ) to hide the endless stream of inane auto-generated SPAM that fills your news stream. The worst is that…

You can disable/block a lot of those types of updates. I get very few automated updates, and it's very easy to block automated updates from apps people might use. I only say this because I don't see "X is now friends with 10 new people" or notifications that "X changed their profile pic." You can disable a lot of these notifications by clicking the little X on each post, and blocking the specific item you want to block.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#95
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. Facebook private groups https://www.facebook.com/groups are working quite well among my circle of friends to provide a focused view of one or another niche community that forms a natural subset of my friends. There is a particular Facebook secret group that I visit…

One problem with Facebook Groups I find is that you can't have wall posts from your groups appearing in your primary timeline/newsfeed. Because of this, you have to make a concious effort to visit the group to catch up. Since none of the groups I joined have the same level of activity I'm used to on specialized forums for those subjects, I never bother to check up on them - which of course lends itself to a vicious c…

Posts from groups that I'm a part of do show up in my main feed. Maybe you need to tweak some settings here or there?

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we talking about the same service? The User experience is horrible. I am not just talking from a hacker perspective, as most of the people I know that complain about facebook are very NON technical people. They just complain about the same things that I also hate: That facebook makes it impossible ( by design ) to hide the endless stream of inane auto-generated SPAM that fills your news stream. The worst is that…

You can disable/block a lot of those types of updates. I get very few automated updates, and it's very easy to block automated updates from apps people might use. I only say this because I don't see "X is now friends with 10 new people" or notifications that "X changed their profile pic." You can disable a lot of these notifications by clicking the little X on each post, and blocking the specific item you want to blo…

If you click the X it removes the specific story you clicked on. It does not (at least in the fb version I am being served) block all stories of the same type, nor do I see any option to do so.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#98
post #67

We're two of those deserters here. It seemed too much like tv, in reverse. Everybody transmits and nobody watches.

This is a problem inherent in any form of social media. Unfortunately, it's not easily fixed. You need to find a way to strike a balance between rewarding content creation and punishing spam, and the line in thin.

people bring this stuff on themselves by treating fb as a massive 'who I know or am related to' index instead of following who they are interested in. I suppose fb brought some of this on themselves when they went down the twitter-emulation path a few years ago.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#99
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hope is that people have simply tired of the concept. The privacy implications are staggering.

How many Facebook users care about privacy? I agree that there are considerable issues with regard to Facebook and privacy, but I'm not sure that most of their users are proactive in caring about it as much. It is probably more likely that people are tired of Facebook, and aren't using it as much.

That's my point -- we know that people aren't proactive about their privacy, yet we also know that there are "considerable issues with regard to Facebook and privacy." So what can we do but hope that the fickleness of public interest eventually steers the culture away from this danger?

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#100
post #95
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem with Facebook Groups I find is that you can't have wall posts from your groups appearing in your primary timeline/newsfeed. Because of this, you have to make a concious effort to visit the group to catch up. Since none of the groups I joined have the same level of activity I'm used to on specialized forums for those subjects, I never bother to check up on them - which of course lends itself to a vicious c…

Posts from groups that I'm a part of do show up in my main feed. Maybe you need to tweak some settings here or there?

Do posts made by others to the group wall show up?
Post reply on HN