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Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

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131–139 of 139 posts

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#131
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why it would stress you out. Can you explain?

My wife has the same issue with it. She gets too bound up in the day-to-day, and feels too obligated to keep up to date, which the site makes nearly impossible to do efficiently. Then there's the typical drama on any social network, the annoyances with closed systems (we're happy with email and caldav, thanks, anything can use them!), and the endless, endless spam on the news feed. I always hid the feed with my user…

I think my social circle is less active and less dramatic than yours. I guess that means that I am boring and my friends are also relatively boring.

I guess different social circles are different and it probably varies by age group as well.

I find your comments interesting because it is so completely different than my social world.

I should also add that I don't find it addictive at all.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I click on the X, and it gives me the option to block all stories coming form an App (as well as other options). That being said, I remember the first time I discovered that. For the longest time, I just assumed it would remove only the post. Odd.

From an App. You have no option to remove such stories that Facebook generates itself, without any apps.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#133
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife has the same issue with it. She gets too bound up in the day-to-day, and feels too obligated to keep up to date, which the site makes nearly impossible to do efficiently. Then there's the typical drama on any social network, the annoyances with closed systems (we're happy with email and caldav, thanks, anything can use them!), and the endless, endless spam on the news feed. I always hid the feed with my user…

I think my social circle is less active and less dramatic than yours. I guess that means that I am boring and my friends are also relatively boring. I guess different social circles are different and it probably varies by age group as well. I find your comments interesting because it is so completely different than my social world. I should also add that I don't find it addictive at all.

This is throughout college, so add annoyance about normal college stupidity and a dash of escapism. Though I'm not sure what your age is, so it could be you're in that situation.

I don't find it particularly addicting either, but to each their own. I'd be willing to bet there are at least as many FB addicts as WOW addicts, though.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#134
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why it would stress you out. Can you explain?

My wife has the same issue with it. She gets too bound up in the day-to-day, and feels too obligated to keep up to date, which the site makes nearly impossible to do efficiently. Then there's the typical drama on any social network, the annoyances with closed systems (we're happy with email and caldav, thanks, anything can use them!), and the endless, endless spam on the news feed. I always hid the feed with my user…

Sorry to hear you found the newsfeed so spammy - I work at Facebook on keeping spam out of the feed (and off the site in general), and I'm curious what you found most annoying. I'd love to work on reducing it, as it probably annoys other folks too.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#135

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…

Is your newsfeed literally 90% "x is friends with 10 new people" stories? If so that's very likely a bug (I work at FB am incidentally a pretty active user and have never seen that).

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#136
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit seems to do a great job.

Don't kid yourself. Reddit has gotten to the point where reposts continue to make the front page because even if a lot of people have seen it, not all have. And I have noticed that the same comments will garner karma. The problem with websites like Reddit is that they suffer from the so called black swans. A good post can garner karma in the thousands, but a bad one will only have a negative one or two. So, reposting…

The real problem with Reddit is that the community sucks.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#137
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife has the same issue with it. She gets too bound up in the day-to-day, and feels too obligated to keep up to date, which the site makes nearly impossible to do efficiently. Then there's the typical drama on any social network, the annoyances with closed systems (we're happy with email and caldav, thanks, anything can use them!), and the endless, endless spam on the news feed. I always hid the feed with my user…

Sorry to hear you found the newsfeed so spammy - I work at Facebook on keeping spam out of the feed (and off the site in general), and I'm curious what you found most annoying. I'd love to work on reducing it, as it probably annoys other folks too.

Oh, it's a systemic issue, for the most part. And it's not so much actual spam as it is social spam. Facebook revolves heavily around pushing information towards your attention, and I'm very much a pull-oriented person with rare exceptions.

As to my CSS {display:none;}, though, I ended up distributing it to a large portion of my friends. The overall consensus was (and likely is, though this is mostly before the ability to categorize things) that the feed is:

A) too addicting, because it pulls you back in when you could be doing something else. There's always something interesting going on when you have a lot of connections, and you can't remove connections or risk offending people (though that's largely fixed now). Its mere presence is a threat to being productive, which ends up leaving you feeling like you wasted your day.

and B) utterly crammed with irrelevant information (app this, lame-quote-status-update that, drinking-photos those), so the bits you actually wish to keep up on get lost in the sea or pushed off the end of the world (page 2). I recognize this is a largely un-solvable problem, as everyone is different, but the tool-set simply isn't there to even manage it efficiently.

So it ends up being the zeitgeist of things you're not involved in and you either want to be in on or you want to just shut up. With the occasional relevant flotsam that keeps you checking it through all the failing times.

Last I saw, things had improved somewhat, with the most important step being lists of friends. But I've been out of it for a couple years now, so some of the gripes may not be overly relevant.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#138

To quote the Disney Hipster meme, "it's too mainstream". Perhaps I have an obscure point of view, but Facebook lost it's luster for a lot of people when the older crowd started to really embrace it. It's not as cool as it once was. This is a big problem for a lot of companies, not just social media.

This. Was pretty cool at first connecting with classmates and writing messages about papers, projects, and planning stuff for the weekend. Now it's some gossipy aunt you haven't talked to in months and your seven year old niece sending a friend request.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#139
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear you found the newsfeed so spammy - I work at Facebook on keeping spam out of the feed (and off the site in general), and I'm curious what you found most annoying. I'd love to work on reducing it, as it probably annoys other folks too.

Oh, it's a systemic issue, for the most part. And it's not so much actual spam as it is social spam. Facebook revolves heavily around pushing information towards your attention, and I'm very much a pull-oriented person with rare exceptions. As to my CSS {display:none;}, though, I ended up distributing it to a large portion of my friends. The overall consensus was (and likely is, though this is mostly before the abili…

Gotcha. I guess I'm glad it's not straight up malicious spam (woohoo! I'm doing my job!), but rather an (admittedly tougher-to-solve) quality issue.

That being said, I think the folks working on feed ranking have done quite a lot of awesome stuff over the last couple years (most of which shouldn't require any explicit work on your part other than using the site) - I'd be curious what you thought if your account was still around and you gave it another shot for a few weeks.

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