Live data from Hacker News

The Facebook experiment has failed

medium.com

221–230 of 304 posts

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#221

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…

Agreed that Circles are a great idea- and they're just as great on Facebook. I am lucky that I have a relatively small number of friends- categorising them did not take long at all. Now I can post updates to different groups, and it works great.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> but no one else does You and I apparently have drastically different pictures of G+.

Seriously. I use G+ all the time, although not in the same way people use FB.

I talk to my good friends offline and use G+ for the communities. It's almost like reddit with 90% less trolling.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#225

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…

I thought so as well, but I'm not really that interested in "organizing" my friend list. Ideally, yes, I would. But there's too many corner cases and overlapping circles that it's never exactly what I want and it quickly gets out of date.

For me, Facebook did work the way I wanted long ago- people tagged you in photos and it was fun to look at photos of you and your friends. The problem is that in order for Facebook to grow, your feed needs to get broader and broader (status updates, youtube videos) and it gets filled up with things that are not as relevant.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#226

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…

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.

Oddly, I've found the opposite to be true. Apart from clearing out app-request spam, streamlining my facebook feed to only the "friends I care about" tends to result in the most predictable updates. It seems to me the outer-circle friends have the most potential to be interesting.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#227
post #171
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.

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.

i would love to see this, too.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#228
post #21
post #9

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. medium.com again. medium.com does not scroll in Chrome on the Nexus 7 This means I can't actually read anything on there. I can't even figure out who to email, because the About page also doesn't scroll. Living in the future sucks :(

Yeesh, didn't expect something like this from someone like you. Don't worry though, you're not missing out on much.

After 5 minutes of trying tapping combinations and getting nowhere, again (there's a bunch of medium links on HN recently and some of them have been quite worthwhile), going to the front page and discovering that the 'about' page is actually a post and thereby has the same bug pushed me over the edge into ranting.

I can live with bugs. But bugs that make it impossible (FSVO) for me to report them are a special sort of evil.

I suppose I'll check the about page on another device at some point and thereby derive the ability to help them diagnose and fix the problem.

But ... argh.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument made sense in the years past where there only were technical people on the internet. But now it is less so. People are comfortable making their own choices on the internet and don't need the recommendations or advice of technical people like they did it in the past. Look at the success of Pinterest or Instagram for example. Neither grew because of technical people.

Pinterest and Instagram grew out from the base of early smartphone adopters. These is as techy a group as you can find...

Early smartphones mostly came out in the mid 2000s...way before Instagram or Pinterest.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#230
post #21
post #9

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. medium.com again. medium.com does not scroll in Chrome on the Nexus 7 This means I can't actually read anything on there. I can't even figure out who to email, because the About page also doesn't scroll. Living in the future sucks :(

Yeesh, didn't expect something like this from someone like you. Don't worry though, you're not missing out on much.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN