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The Facebook experiment has failed

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Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#271

Post by unclebucknasty »

Gormo wrote: post #220
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 part…

Good points. And, after a while it seems like there's not much ROI on using a piece of software like FB to try to "manage" with whom you communicate and how.

In fact, it seems an artificially wedged in middleman at some point. And it becomes more efficient to get it out of the way and go back to simple email, phone calls or, as you say, IRC and forums.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#272

Post by nevster »

It's very simple.

80% of the crap is from 20% of the people.

Just hide them from your timeline. In your browser, hover over the person's photo, then hover over the Friends button and deselect "Show in News Feed".

Problem (mostly) solved.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#273

Post by kinleyd »

tracker1 wrote: post #258
roc wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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+, yo…

I find that for tech follows, it works better than twitter and fb... but there's much less signal overall, which is nice... for random musings, I'll glance at a twitter feed now and then... it's more of a highest noise platform to me. FB is mainly to keep up with friends/family, some of whom I'd otherwise never talk/communicate with.

Exactly my experience with tech follows which I enjoy most of all. I've found it entertaining, informative and inspiring. I've never used twitter and stopped using Facebook. Also, so far no issues with spam on G+.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#274

Post by unclebucknasty »

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…

>You are complaining about products that you are not paying for

Facebook's revenue model is built upon your participation (labor) and your information. Sure you're paying for it.

>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.

But it's OK for FB to welcome you to their site, encourage you to supply information using your own "labor", then sell that information to third parties (even if in aggregate form)? And, it is OK for them to constantly look for ways to further track and glean data about you for its own profit? How is people using ad blockers any different from Facebook burying their monetization schemes in fine print?

Perhaps FB should simply ban ad blockers or make users prove they've viewed x ads per page view. Ah, but that would open too much dialogue about how much FB utilizes information that it harvests from users and how it monetizes it. Wouldn't want those items foremost on members' minds.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#275

Post by nevster »

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…

Totally agree.

80% of the crap is from 20% of the people.

Just hide them from your timeline. In your browser, hover over the person's photo, then hover over the Friends button and deselect "Show in News Feed".

Problem (mostly) solved.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#276

Post by stephengillie »

einhverfr wrote: post #125
gonehome wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm saying is that if you have real secrets it's a bad idea to share them to a subset online because it's trivial for that to get shared outside of that group. I also think these situations are not the common case and because of this should not be the default. The ability to configure this exists within facebook.

But again, that's what's wrong with facebook. The Zucherberg has basically said he things we need less privacy, but humans need that safe place, and a society without privacy doesn't offer that. The thing is many facebook users understand that.

The problem isnt Facebook, the problem is People who have built their lives on the skeletons in their closet, and technology allowing people to know more about each other.

Your neighbors know tons about you, but you're only worried about people working in datacenters.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#277

Post by thinkloop »

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,…

> You don't share the same stories with your peers that you would with your grandma.

Turns out there's quite a lot that we do.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#278

Post by onedev »

mike_herrera wrote: post #237
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…

> And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal. ... > And as usual for these rants, there's no evidence this research has been done. This piece of writing, therefore, does not contribute meaningfully to the discussion around Facebook. Too harsh. I agree that there is not enough rigor to speculate on the univ…

You have to remember Facebook's scale.

These "increasingly common" anecdotes are from the same demographic of people.

Facebook is used by 1.15 BILLION people. Think about that for a second. It's an absolutely staggering number and they're adding MILLIONS of new users every single day.

Do you think the people in Africa, South America, Iceland, and even China, are going to have the same experiences as the person writing this article?

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#279

Post by jlgaddis »

pseut wrote: post #171
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.

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.

A friend/former co-worker runs FreeLists[0], which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

[0]: http://www.freelists.org/

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#280

Post by bittercynic »

robomartin wrote: post #253
hnha wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, sure. You go and try to run a real web-based business with employees, offices and the required infrastructure without "money money". The point stands: If you as a user don't explicitly pay for it with cash, using an ad blocker means you have chosen to deny the service some revenue. OK, don't call it theft. That's fine. Here's a simple mental exercise: Assume that 100% of the entire world-wide Internet audience us…

That might not be so good for Silicon Valley, but I believe mankind would be richer overall if a huge chunk of the internet ceased to exist.
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