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The Facebook experiment has failed

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Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#171

Post by pseut »

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.

Would you mind adding a few details on how you set this up (I'm assuming that you're using 'listserv' as a generic term)? Is it on your own machine, through a web host, etc?

I've thought about doing something just like that, but haven't spent the time to figure out a "good" way to set it up.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#172

Post by Giszmo »

I disagree!!! Facebook is great from the sender side and so is G+ but both suck at the receiving side. What we need is not a way to select who we spam as that is a feature that would be ignored by the loud mouths. We need a feature to select what we receive. There are "friends" I easily want to read all ten messages per day but there are others that I just want to be on my friend list cause it publicly shows my appreciation but that are too noisy to actually read their updates about their cat pooping again.

I am well connected in 3 communities that are not mutually compatible, so I don't share everything I would share if I were only in community #2 because I spam-filter on the sending side what I send to all 3 communities. This sucks for my community #2 friends cause they miss out on #2 stuff and it sucks for those that really are not interested in #2. If #1 and #3 people could black list buzz words from my #2 community (bitcoin for example), I could share much more with the peace of mind not to annoy my other "friends".

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#173

Post by mathattack »

I've been a modest bear on Facebook because I perceive that people are moving away. This is entirely subjective, but it seems to me like once everyone found all their long lost friends and shared a round of photos, things got much more quiet. This is very unscientific, but just my impression. It's almost as if they need a new attractor to engage folks every 6-12 months. It started as apps, then it turned into twitter-esque announcements, and recently evolved into photos. They need a Next every 6-12 months.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#175

Post by austenallred »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #169

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,…

Google+ really was on to something with its circles: My friends are easily divisible into groups, and, apart from life events like getting engaged, what I want to share is only really relevant to a specific subset. I know Facebook has groups you can share specific things with, but it's not a feature Facebook has focused on, so even I don't really use it. I could use google +, but no one else does, and there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room.

I have found, however, that my Facebook experience has greatly improved once I started hiding posts from people i don't care about as much from my news feed. There are people I still want to be able to check up on now and then, but I don't want to see 99% of the things they have to say. It's like unsubscribibg to junk mail; it makes everything feel wanted and relevant.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#176

Post by SonicSoul »

while a lot of the problems he describes can be solved with unbaby.me and hiding the loud mouths, i am really impressed with the way this blog integrated comments. i love how they are tied directly to a paragraph and hidden away via ghostly counter icon!

is this standard with any theme??

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#177

Post by thehme »

I totally agree with the author. This is why I haven't used Facebook in several years, because to me it's just useless unless your family lives hundreds of miles away and you want to share pics/info with ONLY them. This seems to me like the best and only reason to use a social network like Facebook. When I did have Facebook, I was part of tech groups that would post important info, but very often their posts would be polluted by the usual college drama. I got rid of facebook and I am a freer and happier individual with "actual real friends". People who actually care to learn/share important info need to do so by reading legitimate sources from sites like Hacker News and other respectable places.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#178

Post by AndrewKemendo »

joshAg wrote: post #82
zt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

seems you stumbled on the secret of keeping a good online community: don't let a person's contacts exceed the network's dunbar number[1]. non-default subreddits can still be quite good, but many/most/all of the default subreddits are wastelands ravaged by a silent majority of up- and down-voters while the huddled masses of commenters cling together for safety. of course, there's the same phenomenon within the comment…

Path tried that in the social network format but it doesn't seem to be catching on.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#179

Post by papsosouid »

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…

>(it's always a man)

Oh right, I forgot that having both an opinion and a penis is a crime. How does being a man have anything to do with it at all? Plenty of non-technical people have come to very similar conclusions, some of them have even been women. You are seeing what you want to see.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#180

Post by mindcrime »

mattpardee wrote: post #44
mindcrime wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good lord, man. How do you deal with people you meet in real life? Do you walk around responding "What you just said is irrelevant to me."? What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting t…

It seems that you think we disagree about something fundamental here, but I can't figure out what it is. Especially since I could easily have written this bit myself:

What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.

Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me).

Right, and I think this is the wrong approach. There's not an absolute correlation between who said something and whether or not the subject is of interest to me. If I have a friend who I share political beliefs with, I may care about his post on, say, gun control... but if that same friend is a religious fundamentalist, I absolutely don't want to see any "pro Jesus" crap. I think this assumption, that content should be selected / filtered based on provenance, is one of the most broken things about online social networking.

Also, Facebook just isn't important enough to me, for me to spend any time "tuning" things to try and tailor my stream to what I want it to be. Like most of us, I have about a bazillion things competing for my time and attention. If Facebook isn't delivering a desirable experience (regardless of the reason), then I, for one, am likely to just drift away from it and let something else entertain me.

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