The Facebook experiment has failed • Hacker News Board

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#211

Post by micah63 » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 4:47 PM UTC

I just planned a 30th Bday party for my wife and had a 100 people out. It would have been a nightmare to do it without Facebook. I just don't have all those people's phone numbers and emails and whatever. I set up an event, made a couple of her girl friends hosters of the event (can't invite people you aren't friends with) and shebam, 100 person nacho potluck party complete!

Yah, don't use it for the news feed, but even with the crap, it can still be interesting to see what some of your funny friends are saying and jab some friends when your hockey team is winning!

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#212

Post by drcube » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 4:56 PM UTC

> An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures.

AKA Email.

Seriously, somebody needs to build an email client that makes maintaining incoming/outgoing mailing lists and filtering your inbox very easy, and offers a few extra "friend discovery" search features. You would probably have a facebook killer.

A lot of people think "social networking" is a new kind of thing. But it's just a fancy UI on top of email.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#213

Post by smspence » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 4:59 PM UTC

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,…

That doesn't sound accurate to me...

You're not always talking to everybody. On Facebook you can create friend lists, and then post things that are only visible to the people in the chosen list, in the same way that you can share things with only certain "Circles" on Google+. For example, I have different lists for "Close Friends", "Family", "Work Friends", "Random Acquaintances", etc. If I choose, I can share a post with only my "close friends" list, and none of my family or work friends will see it.

This problem has been solved already. On Google+ the concept is called "Circles". On Facebook, they call them "Friends Lists". Why does everyone on HN praise Google+ Circles, but ignore or hate the Facebook Friends Lists feature?

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#214

Post by robomartin » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 4:59 PM UTC

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,…

The only way a services can be non-intrusive is if you, the user, pay for it. If you paid for the full cost of developing and supporting a solution that did not require such things as advertising and social graph mining in order to build, grow and support a company you'd get a much better product. You'd probably get a product that is far more sensitive to the needs and wants of it's paying client user-base.

That's one of the problems with this culture of everything being free on the 'net. Free isn't really free. Businesses don't run on air. They run on money. The user always pays. If it isn't in real currency it will be in ways the company can convert into currency. That's just the way it is.

Aspects of your post bother me to some extent because you are complaining about services you are not paying for. I think that is a very important distinction. Don't get me wrong, I have lots of problems with some of the services you mention in your post. I simply choose not to use them.

I also happen to think that people who use ad blockers are just short of thieves. It's hypocritical to navigate to a site and make use of its free services and, at the same time, go out of your way to deny them revenue. It's like someone figuring out a way to make you work and legally not pay you for it.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#215

Post by hnha » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 5:04 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #214

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,…

The only way a services can be non-intrusive is if you, the user, pay for it. If you paid for the full cost of developing and supporting a solution that did not require such things as advertising and social graph mining in order to build, grow and support a company you'd get a much better product. You'd probably get a product that is far more sensitive to the needs and wants of it's paying client user-base. That's on…

i use free xmpp servers to talk with people who I "met" on free websites. Many people provide services for free because they believe in a shared good. It's not all money money.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#216

Post by roc » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 5:04 PM UTC

austenallred wrote: post #175

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 muc…

> "Google+ really was on to something with its circles:... I could use google +, but no one else does"

I wonder how much of Google+'s 'use' problem relates to this feature working extremely well.

You section off people you like to keep in contact with, just not on a daily basis. You then don't send most of your day-to-day posts their way. They look at Google+ and see a wasteland.

And whenever they mention Google+, you can't just say "I love it and use it daily; I just put you in the 'Siberia' circle". The only answer is "I don't use it much." Which re-affirms their view of the service as being basically empty.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#217

Post by bradleysmith » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 5:06 PM UTC

hkmurakami wrote: post #60

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'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.

This is also where I receive value from facebook; I grew up in Saudi Arabia and all my childhood friends scattered around the globe. There is no other tool like facebook that lets me both maintain meaningful contact with friends & find undiscovered friends spanning large geographies. Relatedly, I've always found facebook's geography-based search tools (friends/posts & content in a city/region)have left much to be desired.

I agree with the article author's opinion that Facebook IS growing less useful for me. As Graue said in above post, though, this really only applies to me and my reactions to MY OWN social circle.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#218

Post by roc » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 5:09 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #185

jblz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 :)

I've wondered about this as well. When I was going through my 20's there came big splits in my friends pool in terms of common interests, first the division of friends who were married and those who weren't, and then the much bigger split of people with kids and those without. I noticed that my focus changed at those times as did others and the folks who weren't married or didn't have kids were really not interested…

Facebook doesn't really want to pick that up.

What keeps people coming back is the illusion of activity. The sound and fury. If/when people close out the noise successfully, it winds up looking a lot like an email box.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#219

Post by moheeb » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 5:16 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #214

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,…

The only way a services can be non-intrusive is if you, the user, pay for it. If you paid for the full cost of developing and supporting a solution that did not require such things as advertising and social graph mining in order to build, grow and support a company you'd get a much better product. You'd probably get a product that is far more sensitive to the needs and wants of it's paying client user-base. That's on…

So what would folks using an ad blocker be then, if they're "just short of thieves"?

I was hoping you had a website in your profile so I could surf all over it.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#220

Post by Gormo » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 5:19 PM UTC

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,…

> 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.

Nothing has yet approached traditional web forums, IRC, and even old-school Usenet in this capacity. These forms of online community are clearly-defined social spaces, in which everyone has a direct view to who is and isn't participating. There may be many separate contexts going at any given time, with lots of overlap among participants, but each one is still an independent venue with legible boundaries. Modern "social media" lacks this sense of defined space, which, I think, is necessary for anything to be legitimately called a "community".

Forums and IRC are like a few dozen friends sitting around a table, with everyone engaged in a single coherent conversation at any given time. Twitter and Facebook are like two hundred acquaintances having 40,000 conversations by shouting at each other across the floor of a gymnasium.