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The New Facebook Design Sucks

jyssicaschwartz.medium.com

21–30 of 109 posts

Re: The New Facebook Design Sucks

#22
post #2

Less information density = more time required to read the same amount of content = more "engagement". This is the exact same reason behind the algorithmic timeline: since you can't easily tell whether you've reached the end (up to where you left off last time), you keep scrolling more, thus more time spent and more opportunities for ads to show up. This trend will continue until users revolt against this by refusing…

More time required = more bouncing users. I even skip a 5 sponsored ad on youtube. I have no patience for this stuff. The first thing I do is scroll to the comments to see the list of thing the video says (for example top 5 things to eat, or whatever), as I have no patience for these videos being longer just so they get ranked higher, because that's the metric youtube is currently using.

I read HN headlines + top comments, because I have no patience to read a 20 page article that is badly written, or is written in such a way to get more pageviews.

You want engagement? Give me high quality content. Short, long, doesn't matter. High quality, dense content.

The internet is full of fluff. It's like everybody is using this xantham gum these days.

Re: The New Facebook Design Sucks

#23

I'm apparently in the minority here, but I opted into this beta a long while ago, toggled dark mode, and haven't missed the old interface at all. I don't care about scrolling and I think it's cleaner. To each their own I suppose.

If you wanted to see what you posted two weeks ago, is it possible with new interface? Let's say it was to a Facebook Group?

I've been struggling with this and also with finding that cool post I saw on my Home page just a second ago and now I can't find it.

Overall, my currently unavoidable experience with FB is one incident like this after another...

It's like me saying, I want to know if--

and then Facebook ignoring and interrupting me to say, forget that shit, bro, look at this instead!

Re: The New Facebook Design Sucks

#25

These unwanted forced design changes will be one of the main drivers of everyone off-platforming to their own social network.

"Everyone" meaning a few people who care more about the social network's design than communicating with the people who use it? I find it very hard to believe that there's going to be some kind of mass de-platforming event that leaves Facebook a ghost town. Maybe because of changes to political content policies, but definitely not because of UI changes.

Snapchat has gone through a number of major, controversial redesigns. It's definitely not going anywhere (at least among its target demographic). Facebook is far more entrenched than Snapchat; its target audience is less quick to switch platforms as well.

Re: The New Facebook Design Sucks

#26
post #2

Less information density = more time required to read the same amount of content = more "engagement". This is the exact same reason behind the algorithmic timeline: since you can't easily tell whether you've reached the end (up to where you left off last time), you keep scrolling more, thus more time spent and more opportunities for ads to show up. This trend will continue until users revolt against this by refusing…

More time required = more bouncing users. I even skip a 5 sponsored ad on youtube. I have no patience for this stuff. The first thing I do is scroll to the comments to see the list of thing the video says (for example top 5 things to eat, or whatever), as I have no patience for these videos being longer just so they get ranked higher, because that's the metric youtube is currently using. I read HN headlines + top com…

Facebook rolls out UI changes in less valuable markets to gather data to verify their changes don't decrease engagement.

Re: The New Facebook Design Sucks

#28
Yeah sure the new design makes poor use of screen real estate, but the deal breaker for me is the memory consumption and extreme lag when using it. I find it extremely surprising that Facebook’s flagship product fails to leverage React’s optimizations.

Re: The New Facebook Design Sucks

#30
My problem is that the whole interface is a minefield of pop up panels on the browser. There is little space that you can move your mouse without it tossing up some panel on mouse over events. It is adds a lot of visual clutter and most of the popups add nothing in the movement. Why does every name and date generate a pop up with more details on mouseover? I can click through if I want more.

It is particularly troublesome when you move your mouse to click on something and pass over a hotspot that pop us up another panel just as you click. Suddenly you’ve missed your click target and clicked something else.

I suspect that all of these popups are also why the page now consumes so much RAM. If facebook is loaded it soon consumes 2GB or more of RAM. The CPU usage also rises. This is a site with “big bones”.

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