The trouble is this assumption that Facebook as it is now is “messed up”. What if it's not messed up? What if, for the simple majority, even the vast majority of people, Facebook is actually just fine? Maybe we like the fact that we see updates from people we don't know as closely. Maybe we enjoy being able to stay in touch with people we maybe weren't that close with in person? What if perhaps we're interested in hearing at least the stuff they post on Facebook? Maybe we establish relationships that couldn't have been established otherwise, because of circumstances, distance, opportunity, whatever? Maybe we're willing to deal with the noise, because we end up with signal we wouldn't have otherwise? Maybe it's just an appeal to a base desire for gossip?
In short, maybe Michael Arrington's (and the author's) aspect of what could make Facebook better is just... Wrong? Maybe the reason Facebook is so successful is because they picked the right path, not the wrong one.
The question of "is this assumption even right for most people" is certainly a fair one. My observations which were driven from personal experience as well as various data/user research suggest that at least SOME meaningful percentage of people find utility decay in social network design.
My main point is that just restarting these systems won't solve this problem for those who have it, because we'll rush towards this same race condition. Rather my product suggestions allow for release valves without fundamentally altering the value that a Facebook, G+, Twitter, etc deliver.
"...that at least SOME meaningful percentage of people find utility decay in social network design."
Define "Some"? I mean, you can never please 100% of your user base. Ever.
And to be crude, who cares if 5% of the user base doesn't like the service? Then leave. You don't have to be on Facebook. You don't have to be on Twitter. Or do you?
my hypothesis is that (a) no one likes "noise" (b) everyone has a different notion of what "noise" is and (c) these systems are designed to amplify noise (but there are ways to create noise dampeners).
Personally I find my direct usage of some mature social networks decreasing for the reasons that Mike and I outlined.
But it's also important to know that the tools are there in all service sto decrease the noise and increase the signal.
You can unfriend people. You can unfollow. You can unsubscribe. You can hide/block/remove almost everything you don't like.
I get your point that human nature makes it a lot harder to do these things, but the tools are there. Every time I meet people who complain about some social services I tell them that the services are exactly what you make them, and not the other way around. They are so broad, so general, and so open that you can make your experience exactly as you want it.
And that's important to remember. If Facebook sucks for you, it's mostly because YOU made it suck. :)
I would disagree with you on this part. Noise is the social. The lack of "noise" is what made G+ sooo boring for so many. I know once I added the noise of HN circle on G+, even though I didn't know any of these people, I enjoyed G+ tremendously more.
How much of this comes from just pure boredom and/or an addiction to social networking?
From boredom can come great ideas for a business or personal analysis. Two of the great tech titans in this industry in Gates and Jobs did not have this addiction and limited web access to their children. They did not grow up with the web. What is the effect of a lack of boredom? Does forward progress suffer as a result?
>Maybe we establish relationships that couldn't have been established otherwise, because of circumstances, distance, opportunity, whatever?
I wonder if that's true for most. I'd suspect that most of the youth that uses Facebook would not know where to start in finding interesting posts.
It may be what people want but it may not be what they need.
I'm not saying that's not possible. But there's a pronounced tendency in human nature to assume that because we don't like something no one does, or because something isn't good for us it isn't good for anyone (or, in reverse, because something is good for us it must be good for everyone). I think it's important to take a step back when we make pronouncements like this and consider whether we're actually right in thinking that or not.
And I suspect we have no idea what kinds of crazy things youth are doing with Facebook. Crazy meaning, useful but in a way that isn't immediately apparent to us. The thing about networking is, its utility goes up with time. The guy you chilled with at some party yesterday may be useless to you today or tomorrow or next year, but maybe in five years you'll issue a general request on facebook to see if anyone has a couch you can crash on in Chicago, and he'll volunteer. This is the kind of interaction that's honestly a bit new, and we're still getting comfortable with it.
Is it what we need? Maybe not, but then again it's stupendously difficult to figure out what it is that we “need”—indeed, every person's definition varies.
"we say we love high signal, low noise services but then proceed to bring the noise."
I wrote about this 2 years ago:
"People will jump to the next great thing, somewhere along the facebook-twitter-friendfeed trajectory, and they'll find it works so much better! They'll think it's because of some shiny new feature in the new tool. They'll never realize it's just that they're subscribed to less crap. So they'll start subscribing to crap again, and the cycle will repeat."
"Imagine Twitter without public follower/following counts..."
I suspect it wouldn't work -- due in some part to vanity, and in a large part to the well established social-psychological phenomenon of "social proof." As a species, we like things that are popular. Conversely, we are hesitant to sample things, let alone subscribe to them, until they've been validated by others. Ideally, we seek things that have been validated by others of high social status. But in a pinch, validation by a large number of people will do the trick.
We keep social score. And, even if we don't consciously realize or even accept it, we want others to know our own score.
I tend to agree with most of your points, though. As you very eloquently put it, our natural tendency is to accumulate noise -- even if we claim to want signal clarity. Google+'s circles are a great attempt to let us have our cake (noise) and eat it, too (signal). But over time, I imagine that the act of constant social curation and message-filtering will grow more tiresome than it's worth for many users. That's just a hunch, and it's totally unsubstantiated by any data I have, or could ever hope to get my hands on. At least for now.
i had heard, and don't know how credible this is, that early on there was discussion at Twitter about hiding follower/following counts from public view. The notion was they were designing a system w constraints (140 characters) and were willing to buck convention. Would love to hear from Jack or Ev on this one day.
If such a discussion was had, I'd also be very curious to hear the details of it. I imagine the followers display was carefully considered, and I'd love to have been a fly on the wall for the conversations on reasons why vs. reasons why not.
Part of me thinks, well, maybe they could just split the difference and make the display an opt-outable feature.
But I think the genie is well out of the bottle at this point. We now inhabit a world in which a lot of people make their livings based on Twitter fanbase reach (or, really, on the public display thereof, given that they're not actually capable of engaging every single follower with every single tweet). And I think there'd be an interesting psychological game afoot if various people started opting out of the display. Would others see that as some sort of admission of lower status? Would they see it as somehow antisocial? Personally speaking, I think it would be a nice feature to have, and I wouldn't care about who did and did not display his counts. But if I've learned anything in my life, it's that my preferences are atypical.
yeah, duh, fixed that now. You should be proud that thousands of other people didn't catch that. Or maybe we should be scared thousands of other people didn't catch that :)
I have quite literally never heard anyone brag even jokingly, or for that matter even mention their friend count on Facebook. The few friend counts I've noticed and remembered, including my own, have all hovered around 150-200. I think his claim that Facebook friend count is a motivating popularity metric like Twitter's follower count is spurious.
I have about 200 friends, I have met all of them in real life, I occasionally add new people, but I also remove people when I realize I don't care about them and what they do. I care about my friend count, but in the opposite way, I want to keep it low, and meaningful. The same is true for most of my friends. Most of them only add other people they actually know.
As for posting, neither me nor my friends use Facebook for chatting. It's photos and status updates about what we are doing or going to do. It's almost never questions, only statements. Then again, me and my friends are in our mid-thirties, none of us "grew up" with Facebook, none of us used it at university, and the common topics are work and kids and vacations.
I have a number of friends on Facebook that are younger around 20, extended family and the like, and they use it in a completely different way: They add more friends. They never remove friends. They have no critera for friends other than "doesn't dislike", it doesn't matter if they don't know the person well or not.
They also use it a lot more for public chatting. Someone posts a status update, and then two or three people have an unrelated conversation in the comments to that, because... it's an input field and it was there and they know the relevant friends will see it.
And that's just two different ways of using it, I'm sure there are a myriad more and I have absolutely no idea which way is the most common. But it's pretty clear from your post, and from the piece by Arrington that both of you bring your own biases into it. You both think that most other people have the same Facebook experience as you do.
So Arrington goes "Facebook sucks for me, therefore all of Facebook is broken!". You're much, much less egocentric, but still, I wouldn't make the bet that you did that the grandparent post's view was unique. :-)
I very quickly shot up to 150 friends and have only recently, years later, broken 200. I don't expect it to accelerate any time soon.
I don't go out of my way to delete people I don't speak to, but I do lose friends over time, either people removing me, or people deleting facebook. The rate at which I lose friends is just slightly slower than the rate that I'm adding friends.
Hunter's rule: Any communication service which publicly displays a metric serving as a proxy for popularity will cause users to take steps to increase that number.
I'm sorry, but as a "ground rule", this seems just wrong to me.
There are many ways and many reasons to use e.g. Facebook as a communication service that have nothing to do with "being popular". Let me describe just one: I have a pseudonymous Facebook profile which gathers a number of people I have worked and played with before; some of them I know for more than 30 years already. Additions to this group happen, but are rare; these people are special to me, a status which is not for everybody. Each one in there is an important voice in my life, representing their values as they post their daily findings to my feed. Since I'm also all locked down against games and other apps, I have no problems with my signal-to-noise ratio being low.
I have got really into Path since leaving Facebook. I have been very strict about who I accept and it has given me the best parts of Facebook without all the dross. I am in love with social networking again. You can follow me on twitter here: www.twitter.com/ricburton ;)
Isn't this obvious? This is the human ego at play. We all like to imagine we have a lot of friends. To feel important. So we add lots of people, bigger numbers, more people, more contacts etc. It's just human nature, isn't it?
of all the services, Twitter makes it the easiest to unfollow albeit at the individual level. Try severing a LinkedIn connection w someone - astoundingly challenging.
In short, maybe Michael Arrington's (and the author's) aspect of what could make Facebook better is just... Wrong? Maybe the reason Facebook is so successful is because they picked the right path, not the wrong one.