Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Facebook experiment has failed

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 304 posts

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#101

Post by vincentperes »

jeswin wrote: post #84

Author here. Didn't think this would show up on HN. These were my thoughts when I wrote it: 1. Most stuff being shared is of no value to most people. Does not encourage exchange of good ideas. Sharing, as it works now looks like a fad. It has peaked. Most people I know are bored now, it's just the inertia that keeps them there. 2. If someone is genuinely interested in something, they will seek out good communities to…

1. I feel that the pages I'm following bring me a good value. When it comes to people, if somebody is posting crap, I usually remove it from my timeline. I don't think Facebook is meant to exchange good ideas in public, but to share information. I don't want to be philosophical, but being bored is like everything else in life, you keep taking public transport, because it's useful, not that you are in love with it. 2. Facebook is not meant to build a community around a theme, you get information and feedback on pages but nothing more. Dedicated website on games, astronomy etc. were there before and will be there after. 3. I'm living abroad and share every week with my family on a Facebook private group, I just find the feature great!

In general I think that experiences in life are so different and all require a different set that you simply can't aggregate them all on one and unique website. "The next network could be about making it easy to talk to people you don't know so well." is just called the web?

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#102

Post by Semaphor »

taproot wrote: post #85
hkmurakami wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a heavy FB user, but having lived in various places around the world, it's one of the few ways I can passively keep in touch with what my dear friends have been up to half way around the globe. That is real value that Facebook does deliver, something I must admit despite my wide ranged mistrust and distaste for various other aspects of the service.

And that thin veil is held together by its complicated breakups, baby pictures and cat memes. If it wasnt that everyone enjoyed sharing these things id hate to think what might happen. Im in the same boat as you here. And it worries me. Imagine if we had to go back to the old days of using msn status updates and actually having to gasp converse with one another in order to get our fill of socal interaction.

One baby picture so far on FB and that was in a private message. The only source of memes is Mr. Takei. We have evening planning chats with people from (guesstimate) 10-15 different countries (all living in our town in Germany), groups for special topics. Conversing gasp with people who moved back to their home country is another regular activity. And it's all held together by an interface that makes it really easy even for the most non-tech people.

So right now the first few stories in my news feed only has 3 posts I find interesting. And? I look at my feed every now and then and if often there is nothing interesting it doesn't hinder me. Some stuff is really interesting and helps me break out of the internet bubble I'm in bust mostly facebook is groups and chat for me. And that's why I love it.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#104

Post by motters »

I got to this point in 2011 - i.e. looking at my Facebook stream and considering whether any of it had any relevance to me at all (it didn't). Was I just wasting my time looking at this? (yes I was).

And so I left and closed my account. Since then I've mainly been using Friendica. No spam or creepy business models, just conversations with friends.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#105

Post by abrahamsen »

iamshs wrote: post #43
cargo8 wrote: post #29

Funny how much a lot of this person's complaints ring exactly like a Google+ marketing campaign, and yet no one has really mentioned Google+ yet. I totally agree, and that's not to say that Google+'s stream isn't equally filled with content I don't care about, but that is also because I followed a random circle of 500 "interesting people". Google+'s focus on smaller circles as it's primary feature, and I think the la…

Except it really is not. Facebook friends can be equally curated and pruned. Facebook offers its own variant of circles, and importantly my friends are on facebook which can facilitate discussion. Even though everyone has gmail and Google is forcing G+ down everybody's throat, G+ has not taken off. There is no material to discuss on G+. Besides, the same problems will creep in with G+ too. Do you want to pick and cho…

The keywords are "can be". Or as the author put it "unless you jump through hoops". The Google+ interface makes a difference. The majority of stuff on Google+ is shared privately, because the interface invites doing it that way.

(The interface also invites having a "loudmouth" circle with zero notification level, so you can follow people without having their posts in your default stream).

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#106

Post by iaskwhy »

The way Facebook advertising works, it bumps the spamming potential of a ‘Like’ up a notch. A ‘Like’ on a product or service will make a paid story visible not just to the person who liked it, but also to their friends.

Inevitably, there is an entire industry working non-stop creating low quality, emotionally appealing content that gets ‘likes’ from gullible users.

This is so true. I believe Google's efforts to stop spammy SEO made SEO a good thing for users. This is extremely hard to stop in Facebook when social media people know how effective (in the number of likes) emotionally appealing content (read overused pictures of something cute happening) can be to a large percentage of people. These people don't seem to engage with the companies behind these posts but they do get promoted and eventually that's all you will see.

I'm not a Twitter user but I'm wondering what will the effect be for its users.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#107

Post by lostlogin »

weavie wrote: post #79
icelancer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same thing. I have different groups of people and just talk over email threads. Works far better than G+ or FB.

Likewise. So much for people saying email is broken and outdated. It's the one medium I've been using for 20 years now and keep coming back to.

If people didn't abuse the reply all button I might be able to come to terms with email usage. Reply all button abuse makes email almost Facebook bad for me.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#108

Post by lipanski »

icelancer wrote: post #53
nostromo wrote: post #51

Lately I've noticed something odd. When I find a story I find interesting, I email it to some of my closest friends and we talk about it in email. It feels very 2003, but it works and feels more private and intimate. Similarly, when I take a picture I want to share with my family, I sms it to them. Facebook is still great, but it's different than what it used to be. It's (for me) evolved into my less-close friends' v…

I do the same thing. I have different groups of people and just talk over email threads. Works far better than G+ or FB.

what do you usually do when you're inbox gets spammed with a lot of irrelevant information - you apply filters / labels. same thing can be done with Facebook, but for some reason people still treat it as a service that doesn't need any customization. you just login and out of the sudden quality information starts pouring down from all panels. it's not like that... it's just like with your inbox, even though your friends aren't really selling Viagra, but some of them aren't far either.

every post on your news feed has got a tiny "hide" link, which you can use to either unsubscribe completely from a friend's wall posts (yeah, keep those "how I met your mother" quotes for yourself bro), choose which kind of news you're actually interested in (pictures only, events etc.) or even choose how often you wanna see a person's posts ("all updates" or "most important"). if you get the tendency to disable a post that you don't like the moment you see it, then (on the long run) you'll end up with a wall that's at least 2/3 interesting or let's call it decent (facebook is not really hacker news). I'm not aware if this is the actual implementation, but would be really cool if Facebook would actually learn from the posts you hide and stop suggesting similar ones in the future.

I've got around 300 friends and had I not unsubscribed from a lot of them, my news feed would have been packed with wedding pictures of people I don't know, events I can't go to or causes I don't really care about.

just to end here, email has its purpose but that purpose is not social sharing any more. just like emails took over writting letters years ago, social networks should improve over emails in the aspect of sharing information with ease. oh, and to the author: the facebook experiment hasn't failed - you just need to tell it what you expect of it.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#109

Post by david927 »

msutherl wrote: post #86

I have the same experience as the author and so do many of my friends. My solution is to simply unfollow every single friend I have on Facebook. Effectively disable the Timeline. Highly recommended.

I had the same experience as the author and I quit Facebook. Highly recommended.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#110

Post by lucian1900 »

weavie wrote: post #79
icelancer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same thing. I have different groups of people and just talk over email threads. Works far better than G+ or FB.

Likewise. So much for people saying email is broken and outdated. It's the one medium I've been using for 20 years now and keep coming back to.

Well, in addition to being very useful it is also broken and outdated. Sadly, the "alternatives" (facebook, google plus, etc.) fix almost none of the flaws and add some of their own (non-federated!)
Post reply on HN