Facebook was never an "experiment." It was a directory, then it was a platform, and now it's a machine to make money.
Remember when the service is free... you aren't the customer, you're the product
The Facebook experiment has failed
231–240 of 304 posts
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#232Facebook 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 pos…
I am a fairly savvy computer user, and I use Facebook lists. I always have trouble figuring out who is in what list and which list I'm talking to, and how to add and remove people from that list.
Facebook has proved over and over that their priorities are about public sharing, and even to make more things public that previously were private. In part this might be Zuckerberg's vision that sharing almost everything is the future. But as a business they are also incentivized to make sharing effortless, to encourage people to put data on Facebook without thought.
Any thought to privacy is always a little bit of friction. So it's always de-emphasized, if not actually buried.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#233I have been under the impression that the point of Facebook is to log in regularly, scan through postings from the Ridiculous and Obscure, and to deduce, accordingly, that life could be so much worse. On the bright side, the product ("Facebook Therapy"?)seems to work so well that, in time, logging in no longer becomes necessary..
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#234I stick to private groups on FB for most of my activity. I get a lot more meaningful conversations and closer personal connections through those groups than the author thinks possible.
The Wall-stream is a bonus.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#235People 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…
People also love Yahoo Mail (and loved the previous, more-horrendous version, too). Doesn't mean it couldn't be better.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#236I beg to differ. Every month or so HN always has some blog post hit front page about how Facebook is broken and needs to be fixed, pointing out all of its issues (subjectively) and offering no alternatives or solutions.
I've had the exact opposite experience with Facebook even with ads. As I google search on my computer, Facebook's ads actually become relevant. As I scan my front page, I see news from friends that I find interesting and status posts about friends that I care about. If I see something irrelevant or spam-ish, there's a convenient tab next to the post that gives me the option to never see it again.
Sure, there's some self-management involved in getting Facebook to work for you but it's audience is so broad it kind of has to be that way right?
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#237People 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 universal experience, but this absolutely has value in the larger Facebook discussion.
The increasing frequency of these anecdotal experiences is a hint that there exists a segment of frustrated users. It would be a mistake to summarily ignore their frustration due to the presentation of the argument.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#238Earlier 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…
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…
I agree. I email my friends, or see them in person so I know what's going on in their lives. Too often people only want to analyze facebook as an organizational tool. But there is a great entertainment component built in as well.
You get to learn the kind of personal information about your past acquaintances that otherwise you could only get by going to a reunion. You can find out if anyone you thought would be successful has ended up struggling, if anyone you thought was a slacker has done something interesting, if that person who is attractive, and successful is somehow also a nice person, etc.
Spending a few minutes looking at this kind of trivia can be a lot more fun than yet another youtube cat and the game only gets more interesting the more friends you have on facebook.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#239Earlier 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…
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…
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I almost want to just do a reset of the feeds I'm blocking. I did such specific blocking that now I really only see posts from the same group of people and most of those peoples most interesting/original thoughts are very certainly not going on Facebook. I've essentially created a large social network only to cut off most of it.
Re: The Facebook experiment has failed
#240Facebook 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…
Yeah it just turns into "oh my golf friends would love this, but everyone else would think its uninteresting" or "oh, my friends who are passionate about politics might be able to start an interesting discussion here, but having older relatives also comment will turn this into a clusterfuck" or "My poker buddies would love this, but I don't want most of my friends knowing I gamble." Groups seems like the main answer, and I suppose this is the main reason that I mostly use Groups when I'm actually using fb at this point.