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I Just Paid Facebook $7

johnnystartup.com

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Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#31

Post by anonymouz »

chuppo wrote: post #27
PakG1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on your habits. Facebook is unreliable for social interaction on a deep level for me because there is a negative cycle of reinforcement based on poor data. My closest friends are the ones who I want to hear the most about, and yet for some reason, their updates are the ones I see the least. Part of the reason was because my feed was flooded by people who used Facebook voraciously, though I consider…

Email is the least secure technology you can pick. For my communications, sharing birthday-pictures and so on, Id like to know that it takes more than to just sniff the somewhere along its path.

Practically speaking, in most cases, whoever is in control of your SMTP server and whoever is in control of the recipients mail server can read the email. (Reading it in between those would usually require deep packet inspection).

Similarly, if you post it on Facebook, people with access to Facebook's databases can see it. The risk seems to be pretty comparable to me, it's just different companies you trust. Certainly sniffing your email off the wire would take a lot more effort than somebody at Facebook reading your posts, and moreover has to be done while the email is in transit.

Email has the option to provide more security through encryption, and is less dependent on a single company.

For communicating anything of importance to my friends, I prefer phone or email, in this way I'm pretty sure that they'll receive it. To Facebook I post chit-chat and interesting tidbits for which I don't care who reads it and who misses it.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#32

Post by DanBC »

This shows a problem of one-size-fits-all design.

It's good to make design choices. It's bad to then prevent users from being able to re-configure those choices if they need to.

I only have 40 people in my list. 2 of those people make very frequent posts, and I don't want to see those. But I do want to see every post that every other person in my list makes. The setting for that resets pseudo-randomly, meaning I need to keep changing it. (and it has a frustrating mouseover non-selecting thing making it hard to clicky.)

Hiding people's posts, and then offering them a fee to not hide their posts, feels a bit scummy to me.

Note that I don't care about promoted posts. Even if FB is showing me all posts from everyone they can still give prominence to promoted posts, or leave them up top for longer.

And I hope that they never go back to "apps can spam the heck out of everybody's walls".

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#33

Post by DanBC »

napoleond wrote: post #24
pootch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are a spammer

That's a pretty strong term, especially on HN. I don't know tomasien personally, but I find no reason to jump to your conclusion based on his comment--I, for one, would be happy to see a promoted post from a band/cause I like/care about, and that sort of content doesn't usually last long enough to be noticed on a feed dominated by daily/hourly/faster social interactions.

For email the definition is nice and easy - unsolicited bulk email is spam.

But there are different expectations for social media, where you expect a bunch of fluff. The whole point is that you've signed up for unsolicited bulk nonsense. I'm not sure what the difference is between someone who just posts a bunch of "come see my band" posts, and someone who pays to promote a bunch of "come see my band" posts.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#34

Post by icebraining »

chuppo wrote: post #27
PakG1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on your habits. Facebook is unreliable for social interaction on a deep level for me because there is a negative cycle of reinforcement based on poor data. My closest friends are the ones who I want to hear the most about, and yet for some reason, their updates are the ones I see the least. Part of the reason was because my feed was flooded by people who used Facebook voraciously, though I consider…

Email is the least secure technology you can pick. For my communications, sharing birthday-pictures and so on, Id like to know that it takes more than to just sniff the somewhere along its path.

If you use the same provider as your friends, and connect using a secure channel (IMAPS, HTTPS, etc), it's the exactly the same.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#35

Post by motters »

I'm not a Facebook user, but it seems to me that "promoted" (or bribed) posts could be very damaging to their business, because it confuses what's interesting with what has been paid for. If the idea takes off then users are increasingly only going to see commercial spam in their streams, and not stuff that they're actually interested in. At some point the noise becomes greater than the signal.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#36

Post by 0x0 »

ashray wrote: post #16
danso wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it quite disconcerting that someone else gets to decide what aspects of my friend's lives are 'interesting' enough for me to know about. I find it even more disconcerting that some of my friends would need to pay to highlight some aspects of their lives to me. Creepy :O Both of those things are self-regulating. Your newsfeed is already controlled by your FB habits...people you chat with/stalk the most natura…

I'm not worried about people self promoting. I'm worried about them having to . Do I want to hear about my friends getting engaged ? Yeah! Do I want them to pay for that to happen ? Hell no! > Your newsfeed is already controlled by your FB habits.. That's not necessarily a good thing. Also, I want to know what happens with everyone on my news feed. The ones I don't want to know about, I either unfriend them or block…

> Also, I want to know what happens with everyone on my news feed.

I just added ALL my "friends" to the "Close friends" list. :)

(Actually, if you then start reading FB via the "Close friends" link instead of the "Newsfeed" link, you get a creepy amount of updates and comments and tags)

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#37

Post by PakG1 »

flyt wrote: post #26
PakG1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on your habits. Facebook is unreliable for social interaction on a deep level for me because there is a negative cycle of reinforcement based on poor data. My closest friends are the ones who I want to hear the most about, and yet for some reason, their updates are the ones I see the least. Part of the reason was because my feed was flooded by people who used Facebook voraciously, though I consider…

Add those people to your "close friends" FB friend list (it's a default list that everybody has and can't delete) and you'll get a FB notification every time they do something. It can be noisy but if you have a small core of people it'll ensure you never miss what they're up to.

Quoting myself:

That ship somehow sailed a long time ago, and I'm not going to go through a manual process of ranking people to a special group, or anything like that, to fix the issue. Ironically, as Zuckerberg once famously said in response to Circles, "We found out that people hate making lists."

If that feature were there when my Facebook friends numbered below 50, sure. Easy to sift through 50 to find 40. At over 600, to find 40, not so easy, and laziness dictates don't bother when email is working just fine.

edit: I can see the rebuttal coming: if you know 40 people's email addresses, you know 40 people's facebook names. Should be easy to add them to the special list. The point is not just that I be able to track them. It's also that we be willing to contact each other. There needs to be some momentum for us to all start caring to message each other on Facebook, otherwise the negative cycle continues. And we're too lazy to bother now. Honestly, I think anyone who tries to solve this problem doesn't realize that the problem's stakeholders don't care if it's not solved. Perhaps that's only in my case, I don't know.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#38

Post by PakG1 »

chuppo wrote: post #27
PakG1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on your habits. Facebook is unreliable for social interaction on a deep level for me because there is a negative cycle of reinforcement based on poor data. My closest friends are the ones who I want to hear the most about, and yet for some reason, their updates are the ones I see the least. Part of the reason was because my feed was flooded by people who used Facebook voraciously, though I consider…

Email is the least secure technology you can pick. For my communications, sharing birthday-pictures and so on, Id like to know that it takes more than to just sniff the somewhere along its path.

As sad and undesirable as it may be, I have a lot more sensitive information than simple birthday pictures in my inbox. Email simply makes sense compared to other options from a usability standpoint, especially when communicating with people who are not technically inclined. It's a risk that many of us still take, even if we know better, because the alternatives are not user friendly or mainstream.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#39

Post by pbhjpbhj »

8% of 800million @ $7 would be half a billion dollars.

Yes it's ridiculously unrealistic to suggest this is going to equate with actual use and revenue figures but when you've got the users base that FB have it seems that micropayments wouldn't half add up.

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