The Facebook experiment has failed
medium.com
The Facebook experiment has failed
1–10 of 304 posts
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#2So the OP is friends with people who bore them, and that's Facebook's fault?
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#3Typical overzealous and incorrect analysis. Facebook may have failed for the author, but Facebook is not a failure. Its user base, advertising base and page traffic paint quite the opposite picture.
Also, "people can message each other, post text updates and pictures". This is exactly what I use Facebook for, and it works pretty well for me. I get updates and pictures from my friends and family, and I have tuned it such that I can see more content from people with whom I don't interact on a regular basis. Sounds like a case of user error to me.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#4Typical overzealous and incorrect analysis. Facebook may have failed for the author, but Facebook is not a failure. Its user base, advertising base and page traffic paint quite the opposite picture. Also, "people can message each other, post text updates and pictures". This is exactly what I use Facebook for, and it works pretty well for me. I get updates and pictures from my friends and family, and I have tuned it s…
When the pictures and the status updates are lost In a sea of spammy adverts and shares, the messaging becomes the only feature that I can use anymore.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#5Well, my anecdote says otherwise.
Seriously though, if you don't think that Facebook Data Science's the fuck out of their news feed algorithm, then I don't know what to tell you.
If it's not working well for you, either it is and you don't realize it (ie, you are reading the "spam" more than you think), or you are an outlier.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#6Well, my anecdote says otherwise. Seriously though, if you don't think that Facebook Data Science's the fuck out of their news feed algorithm, then I don't know what to tell you. If it's not working well for you, either it is and you don't realize it (ie, you are reading the "spam" more than you think), or you are an outlier.
Or you haven't told facebook that you don't care about certain people yet. It's surprisingly easy to do, and yet a lot of people seem to think defriending is the only way to get stories to not show up on their feed.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#7Typical overzealous and incorrect analysis. Facebook may have failed for the author, but Facebook is not a failure. Its user base, advertising base and page traffic paint quite the opposite picture. Also, "people can message each other, post text updates and pictures". This is exactly what I use Facebook for, and it works pretty well for me. I get updates and pictures from my friends and family, and I have tuned it s…
When the pictures and the status updates are lost In a sea of spammy adverts and shares, the messaging becomes the only feature that I can use anymore.
My FB feed is phenomenal. I hide people that post spam, and unfollow pages that spam me.
What's left is the people I care about and the content from pages I care about (e.g. The Economist posts really good content every day, so does Rap Genius, and brands like Nike/Adidas; all of which I like-- in the traditional sense).
It's basically my "newspaper". I even follow HN and it feeds me the newest stuff from HN alongside other publications, pictures of my friends from around the world, and status updates from people I care about.
I also have AdBlock so I don't get the sidebar ads which I do agree are a bit spammy.
This article is just a bunch of bullshit. It has no real critical analysis and doesn't really say much at all. It's very shallow and a repost to boot (it was on here just days ago). Let's not upvote this garbage.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#8Typical overzealous and incorrect analysis. Facebook may have failed for the author, but Facebook is not a failure. Its user base, advertising base and page traffic paint quite the opposite picture. Also, "people can message each other, post text updates and pictures". This is exactly what I use Facebook for, and it works pretty well for me. I get updates and pictures from my friends and family, and I have tuned it s…
and I have tuned it
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the vast, vast majority of Facebook users (like, 90%+ is my SWAG) don't do any tuning at all. I'm also going to guess that a large percentage of users "friend" people they aren't friends with in real-life, due to just "shared common interest" or whatever. IF both of these assumptions hold, then the scenario the author of TFA is painting, could well be true for a significant portion of Facebook users.
Whether that's actually the case or not would be hard to measure. But to share one more anecdote: find my Facebook feed to be less and less interesting over time. With little "tuning" on my part, FB is doing a pretty crap job of figuring out what I actually want to see.
So... I could do the work to go in, delete less-than-useful "friends", tune my preferences, etc... or I could just slowly begin to drift away from Facebook, logging in less and less frequently and using Twitter and/or G+ more. Guess which one is more likely?
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#9Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.
medium.com again.
medium.com does not scroll in Chrome on the Nexus 7
This means I can't actually read anything on there.
I can't even figure out who to email, because the About page also doesn't scroll.
Living in the future sucks :(
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#10We need better alternatives, but I think people overestimate what a "better alternative" would look like. That whitepaper from a few years back about building a social network on top of existing email infrastructure comes to mind.
A bunch of my friends don't use Facebook. We exchange long emails regularly instead. It's awesome. Solves the problem Facebook supposedly solves much, much better. And I think it would be enough to replace Facebook given a few extra features to abstract away, through a user interface, stuff that email can already do.