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The Facebook experiment has failed

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Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#151

Post by juandopazo »

I feel like the odd one around here when it comes to Facebook. To paraphrase the article, "I am signed into Facebook right now. At a quick glance, the entire list of posts on the first screen" consists of:

- Picture of a friend who's traveling and doing volunteer work. Awesome.

- Picture of a family member living abroad that got pregnant. Like. - Sister making boring comment. Meh.

- Link to this TEDx Talk: http://youtu.be/b5OOOIKtj8w. May be interesting.

- Pictures of some friends/acquaintances' weekend out. Meh.

- A bunch of incredibly beautiful pictures of an old coworker visiting San Francisco. Awesome.

I take Facebook as a way of keeping in touch with people I don't have a lot of face to face contact with, a chat service and a simple way to keep in touch with people I recently met. It seems to work well at that.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#152

Post by spupy »

zt wrote: post #73
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…

My best friend and I actually run a ~100 person listserv to this end. We call it "Feed Your Brain" and people send out interesting articles, music, poetry, etc, they find on the internet. Sometimes there is a great discussion or debate, sometimes not. It is very private and intimate and it feels closer to early Reddit or HN than anything else I have found.

Sounds like this group could use a private subreddit on reddit.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#153

Post by kalleboo »

samikc wrote: post #58
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…

Agree to what you say. Facebook is great in some cases, like finding your old buddy from college or school. I use FB to find them, but after that I get their email ids and from then on its email communication. So for me FB is the place to find people. But FB is not for getting news about the topics I like; because, IMHO like the OP, Facebook news feed is broken for this purpose. Yes it is broken if you like to get ne…

I think Facebook is getting into "follow information" as well. Recently I've started getting items in my newsfeed from pages I've never visited or liked, with the header " posted about "

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#154

Post by hawkharris »

This well-written article makes some great points about Facebook, but they are points that have been raised many times before.

The problem for many people is not why to leave Facebook, but how. For example, many of us feel deterred from leaving because all of our friends use the service.

How can people leave Facebook and still feel socially satisfied? To where should they turn? I think an article that proposed a solution to these questions would be more interesting.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#155

Post by lipanski »

sergiosgc wrote: post #139
lipanski wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 frie…

Your post on begs the question: If having decent content in Facebook requires as much customization (work) as email, why not use email instead? With email I get none of the privacy blunders of Facebook, none of the advertising, I get a federated service and asymmetrical connections. People expect that Facebook provides the automatic content customization/filtering. And rightfully so, I may add. It's a shame that Face…

consider this: all your Facebook friends decide to start emailing each other pics of funny cats instead of posting them on their walls. you're a friend, so you get added to the CC. wouldn't it be the same amount of work to filter through all this content for relevant information?

I'm not a big fan of Facebook (especially because of the news feed ads), but most of my friends are camped there, so the only thing I can do is try and get the best out of it. I do enjoy email conversations with my friends (mostly with my programmer buddies), but the replies tend to be a bit slower and the stories never get so many follow-ups as Facebook posts. also if you want to email pictures, you'd better use a different service (Picasa, Dropbox) if you don't want to download zipped files all the time. same for videos...

to make this clear, I'm not advocating for Facebook here. I just find it curious to read something like "the facebook experiment has failed", when there's no interest in the author to see what the experiment has to offer. more specifically to try out some of Facebook's features (some of them are really obivous, some are implied, some are more difficult to understand). when you've got 1000 friends but you're not really interested in anything they say, who's fault is it?! and yet Facebook gives you the tools to filter them out...

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#156

Post by jwdunne »

lucian1900 wrote: post #110
weavie wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

What, exactly, are the flaws you are talking about? I'm interested because email is simple and there may be ways, inventive or not, of fixing it without protocol changes, or at most a layer written above email.

I've been thinking about how to fix email as per YCs list of things they'd like to fund (just to get the juices flowing) and it might be cool to build on top of the email protocol rather than replace it - e.g it's trivial to format, say, todos in an email in a human readable format such that they can still be read and returned checked off by users who don't use this additional layer.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#157

Post by kmtrowbr »

I actually sat down and spent a few hours 'curating' my Facebook recently: marking people as acquaintances, 'hiding' posts on my timeline that I don't want to see, setting up lists of different types of friends ...

Arguably this should happen automatically -- but, I'm pretty surprised at the large positive effect this has had: Facebook is revealed as an amazing communication tool -- it's not perfect, but considering it's (mostly) free, certainly not something to complain about.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#158

Post by [deleted] »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #64

An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures. This is pretty close to how I use facebook. The problem is Sharing. It is the most fundamental feature of Facebook, and it’s completely broken For me, the directory itself is most fundamental. If all of my friends switched to another social network, I would immediately switch.…

[deleted]

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#159

Post by lucian1900 »

lostlogin wrote: post #120
bigiain wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me that perhaps "reply all abuse" is indicative of poorly chosen recipient lists. (Which doesn't help if it wasn't you who sent the original mail…)

Yeah, I'm a recipient. Professional body that has god knows how many members who use the reply all to ask each other for coffee. I tried binning their emails but that caused havoc with bills/body requirements. It's awful.

Sounds like they need a non-work mailing list.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#160

Post by freehunter »

Larrikin wrote: post #145
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.

I travel a lot and have done multiple study abroads on different continents when I was in college. I find this to be a gift and a curse of Facebook. Its great when they are genuinely interesting people that you share lots of interest with. But its awful when you have a good night or even a good week with the person and then you friend them on Facebook only to find out later you don't have much in common with them. It…

Well, friending someone on Facebook is starting a relationship with that person. Just like I wouldn't call someone the next day if I didn't want to start a relationship with them, I wouldn't friend them either.

Friending them just to realize you have little in common is akin to dating someone only to realize you have little in common.

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