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The Facebook experiment has failed

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Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#161

Post by jblz »

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…

"It's (for me) evolved into my less-close friends' vacations and babies and memes."

This. Further, I think Fb serves a very important purpose in my life: it has supplanted any need or desire to attend a high school reunion. I can easily find out "what you've been up to" if I care in the slightest. Also, upvoted b/c babies are cute :)

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#163

Post by arikrak »

I think it cans be interesting to see the links people are sharing, just Facebook doesn't do a good job deciding what to show you. If they put a greater effort into really knowing what topics interets you, they could only show you links on those topics.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#164

Post by bradleyjg »

jwdunne wrote: post #156
lucian1900 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in addition to being very useful it is also broken and outdated.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…

There are two different sets of problems with email.

The first, more concrete, set arises simply because of the age of the protocols. They were developed when the internet was a club of like minded people rather than a global public space. Things like: a lack of rock solid authentication, no guarantees of transit privacy (much less at rest privacy), clunky formatting, multimedia and hypermedia support, arcane attachment problems, and only hacked on support for anything beyond 1:N messaging (e.g. mailing lists).

A lot of these problems have good, solid, proposed solutions but inertia and collective action problems mean that near universal support for protocol additions / changes take years if not decades.

The second, more amorphous, set of problems have to do with how some people use email pervasively in their lives in a fashion that (inevitably) would be more efficiently accomplished with a tool specialized to their needs. So for example, people who spend a fair amount of time in a corporate enviorment with Exchange often bitterly miss the calendar management integration. They say that vanilla email is broken because it has no equivalent capability. Although the critique is legitamite I think the target is off, it's not email that's broken, it's federated calendaring in general. But because email can sort-of, kind-of substitute it gets the blame.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#165

Post by joeblau »

I grew up all over the world so the value that I get out of Facebook now is from being able to stay in communication with my friends from other countries. I feel like the utility of Facebook has changed since 2005 when I was using it as a communication platform for my buddies in college. Facebook is starting to reminds me of how AIM started deteriorating after AOL tried to cram so much extra crap into AIM (stock ticker, news, ads, group chats, etc...) after AOL realized that's where all of the users were.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#166

Post by potatolicious »

nextw33k wrote: post #69
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 feel that you are missing his point. There is a trend towards emotional populist content on social networks. It's interesting to you because it's your friends and it feels personal. However in a broader context its creating a society that is inward looking (walled garden of your friends) and concerned with re-enforcing social norms (the like button). How does this activity improve us as a society? Where is the crea…

Your comment is fair, but I think you've imagined a creative, free society where the walled garden didn't exist - where it never existed in actuality.

People have always been insular and self-contained within their circles. Said circles form early in life and change very slowly. Even when you move people around geographically, they quickly fall back into the same closed circles. In these circles they reinforce whatever social memes have developed - inside jokes, similar views, etc.

Very few people in the world (though they do exist) actually continually meet new people outside of their existing groups.

So sure, Facebook doesn't improve us as a society, nor is it a magical bastion of creativity and freedom - but life never was, and Facebook hasn't made it worse. Facebook is merely a magnification of who you are. If you were prone to sharing stupid motivational pictures, now your'e sharing a lot of them. If you surrounded yourself with constantly insightful, smart people, now you get to talk to a lot more of them, a lot more frequently.

Facebook is what you make of it. I have a habit of squelching friends who don't post meaningful things. Click on the top right corner of their post and you can adjust their weighting in your feed - I have many people who essentially no longer contribute to my feed, and that's fine. Looking at my front page right now, nearly all of the information is stuff I actually care about.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#167

Post by pbhjpbhj »

_pmf_ wrote: post #68
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.…

> It's important not to trivialize what they've accomplished just because its core feature now seems mundane. The core feature is trivial; it has been implemented by hundreds of sites. Facebook's strength was its organic growth, which is slowing down the MySpaceification tremendously.

>Facebook's strength was its organic growth //

You appear to be trivialising it by simply saying this as if just being their caused organic growth. FB not only provided the core ability to link people together but did so in a package that was/is accessible to a broad range of people in a non-threatening way.

Several sites tried before, you mention MySpace, and never achieved the broad appeal FB did. Several have tried since - consider Google Wave. Or how about Google+, which hasn't failed yet, but has struggled it seems to make inroads in as broad a demographic as FB has.

I like to malign FB probably more than the average person but their achievement is so easily downplayed without proper warrant.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#169

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Facebook is performance art. It's a phonebook of people I lost contact with many years ago. It's also a quasi-broken emailing list program. It might be a decent advertising platform for small businesses. Don't know.

It's not a news feed. It's not stories relevant to me. It's not a way to actually have friends. It's not a place where people create things and share (mostly). People might think it's those things. Hell, Facebook itself will tell you that it's those things, but it's not.

I agree with the article. Facebook's biggest problem is that, because you're always talking to everybody, you really can't say much. Conversation is, and has always been, context-dependent. You don't say things at a funeral home that you would at a keg party. You don't share the same stories with your peers that you would with your grandma.

I've always thought Facebook was from the devil. Anybody that would use my own friends against me to suck me into a network of participating whether I wanted to or not? Not somebody with my best interests in mind.

I only use Facebook with the FB Purify plugin that gets rid of a lot of the spam. Even then, if I could abstract myself completely away from it, and do all of my social networking activity on my O/S without a browser or a layer of commercial crap stuck on top, I would in a heartbeat.

ADD: It might also be a decent shared photo album. Jury is still out on that one.

What really bothers me is not that these services like FB, Twitter, G+, or various cloud storage systems are not useful -- they are. It's that, instead of being internet standards, they're branded properties. And they're all doing the same thing. It's like if email was a completely different thing depending on which ISP you used. These things should be completely abstracted away from any corporate logo. If I want to store things in the cloud, for instance, I could care less who actually keeps the bytes. If I want to reach my high school chums, why the heck do I need some other party to help me do that? I control gigabytes of storage and god knows how many computational cycles on my personal possessions, and I need Google+ to tell me whose birthday it is today? Really?

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