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The Facebook experiment has failed

medium.com

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Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#31

Post by chaz »

My frustration with these types of rants is that no solutions are proposed. In this case, the author ends with a vague reference to smaller communities, but I don't see how using a smaller community would solve any of the problems that he mentions, since they seem to manifest as real-life social problems as well (ever have a loudmouth at a dinner party? or a friend that talks only about themselves? or social circles that collide?). On top of that, I'm confused why his Facebook can't be the small community he desires. He's free to be friends with only his x closest friends.

FB can't and won't be everything to everyone, but a blanket statement like this is just trolling.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#32

Post by pyvek »

mst wrote: post #9

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. 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 :(

Here you go - http://pastebin.com/MARe4Ca5

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#33

Post by gonehome »

pyre wrote: post #28
beatpanda wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This: If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see than it's a mistake to post it. is a privileged perspective. I'm guessing a lot of HNers aren't subject to gang injunctions, but imagine for a moment that you are. Suddenly, "pictures of me and my friends hanging out" become dangerous, something that can land you in jail. Or let's say you identify as queer to your close friends a…

I think the general opinion of the parent poster is that if you are posting something that you wish to be private, then you shouldn't. The idea being that Facebook now has access to it, as do their advertisers (possibly). That information can now be released publicly intentionally or unintentionally. For example, the act of posting it, even to a subset of friends, is a risk. There's the possibility of a Facebook bug…

Yeah that's what I was trying to suggest, and even if there is no bug people can share it outside of your protected group pretty easily.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#34

Post by beatpanda »

pyre wrote: post #28
beatpanda wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This: If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see than it's a mistake to post it. is a privileged perspective. I'm guessing a lot of HNers aren't subject to gang injunctions, but imagine for a moment that you are. Suddenly, "pictures of me and my friends hanging out" become dangerous, something that can land you in jail. Or let's say you identify as queer to your close friends a…

I think the general opinion of the parent poster is that if you are posting something that you wish to be private, then you shouldn't. The idea being that Facebook now has access to it, as do their advertisers (possibly). That information can now be released publicly intentionally or unintentionally. For example, the act of posting it, even to a subset of friends, is a risk. There's the possibility of a Facebook bug…

...which should be an indictment of Facebook's misunderstanding of how social identity works in the real world, not of its users.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#35

Post by graue »

People really just don't seem to understand that experiences with social media are specific to the individual. I guess it's understandable. I see the same Google Maps as everyone else does. I see the same Hacker News as everyone else who visits HN.

But Facebook isn't like that. Your Facebook timeline is based entirely on your friends and how you interact with Facebook.

And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal.

It just ain't so. This may be a pat little summary of why using Facebook is unrewarding for the author, but to generalize that to a "failed" experiment for everyone, would require talking to other humans about how they experience Facebook — i.e., doing actual research. (Even then, the conclusion would only hold, at best, for the types of humans with whom the author has spoken.) And as usual for these rants, there's no evidence this research has been done.

This piece of writing, therefore, does not contribute meaningfully to the discussion around Facebook.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#36

Post by piokoch »

gonehome wrote: post #12

I disagree with the general statement and basically every sub point. - Indiscriminate Sharing I don't want to have to make a decision every time I want to share a link to something interesting about what subset of friends I'm sharing it to. I don't want to be pressured to create circles of friends for different things. If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see then it's a mist…

"I don't want to have to make a decision every time I want to share a link to something interesting about what subset of friends I'm sharing it to."

The point is that it is not about poster comfort, but others comfort - you think that you post something interesting and worth sharing but that might not be an impression of your friends, who might like 20% of your posts, maybe on a given subject, and they don't want to unfollow you.

Your friends are your friends, so there is not reason to unfollow someone, I would prefere to be able to unfollow from certain types of posts (jokes, funny cat picures, stuff funny for hackers, whatever).

The article advocates that there should be an easy way to say "that's not interesting for me" without unfollowing given person.

I think FB misses something like Dislike button, that would tell FB that I am not interested in a given subject.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#37

Post by beatpanda »

pyre wrote: post #28
beatpanda wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This: If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see than it's a mistake to post it. is a privileged perspective. I'm guessing a lot of HNers aren't subject to gang injunctions, but imagine for a moment that you are. Suddenly, "pictures of me and my friends hanging out" become dangerous, something that can land you in jail. Or let's say you identify as queer to your close friends a…

I think the general opinion of the parent poster is that if you are posting something that you wish to be private, then you shouldn't. The idea being that Facebook now has access to it, as do their advertisers (possibly). That information can now be released publicly intentionally or unintentionally. For example, the act of posting it, even to a subset of friends, is a risk. There's the possibility of a Facebook bug…

It's also important to point out that Facebook is decidedly not neutral on this issue. They take information that used to be private and make it public all the time, because they think it should be, and every new product feature is built from that perspective. That is a bug.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#38

Post by pyre »

gonehome wrote: post #33
pyre wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the general opinion of the parent poster is that if you are posting something that you wish to be private, then you shouldn't. The idea being that Facebook now has access to it, as do their advertisers (possibly). That information can now be released publicly intentionally or unintentionally. For example, the act of posting it, even to a subset of friends, is a risk. There's the possibility of a Facebook bug…

Yeah that's what I was trying to suggest, and even if there is no bug people can share it outside of your protected group pretty easily.

This is less of an issue though. Presumably if your 'inner circle' knows that you are gay, then sharing LBGT links on Facebook isn't going to increase the likelihood that they will spill the beans to someone by a large margin.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#39

Post by onedev »

graue wrote: post #35

People really just don't seem to understand that experiences with social media are specific to the individual. I guess it's understandable. I see the same Google Maps as everyone else does. I see the same Hacker News as everyone else who visits HN. But Facebook isn't like that. Your Facebook timeline is based entirely on your friends and how you interact with Facebook. And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these p…

I completely agree with you. I think you've hit the nail on the head exactly.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#40

Post by quarterto »

YokoZar wrote: post #6
gfodor wrote: post #5

Well, 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.

Typically when there's a post in my news feed I don't care about, I unfriend them because it's from someone I haven't seen in years, never really talked to, and never really liked.
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