Facebook will struggle to make the next leap (IMHO, of course) because there's a disconnect between how users want to use it, and how Facebook wants/needs you to use it.
Outside of the sub-group of individuals who thrive on sharing every aspect of their life, most people want Facebook to be a fancy email. There's all your friends; you can talk with them and literally see what they're up to . And to be honest, the platform is great for that.
Facebook, on the other hand, needs you to be an information sharing and data providing machine, talking about brands and products, all while doing whatever they can to entice (or trick) you into putting your information in the public domain. They want to you be connected with everyone. People are learning that's a lot of work.
The problem is that the more Facebook pushes the latter, the worse the former -- the user experience -- has to get. Nobody wants to stare at ads and feel like they're being "watched" (by both Facebook and other connections) while they "engage" with friends. As the author discovered...it's odd.
Facebook's user model changed completely when it introduced the news feed. Before that, users spent a lot of time "curating" their profile pages with favorite books, movies, etc., while updating status only occasionally ("dbot is ..."). Visiting someone's page was more like going over and knocking on their door. You would learn a lot about that person and what they've been up to.
Enter the news feed - which was hugely unpopular at first - and is more like walking into a public square, with ads, vendors, and people on soapboxes. Some people don't like to be so public in the way they share, and other people's interesting stuff gets lost in the crowd.
The Facebook of today isn't the one I signed up for, which is fine, but also explains why I use it less now.
This is probably a generational thing, but I don't care about being watched. If I am, that information doesn't go on Facebook, in an email, in a text, and perhaps even not in a phone call.
Facebook is getting impersonal without a competent list/circles system. I find myself texting or messaging content to people more than posting it on my wall because I want to be selective about who views it.
Sometimes these are stories about the cute girl I talked to at Starbucks or a service I'm loving. Sometimes it's a personal story with little branding value. But I naturally have both types of conversations and so don't see the mutual exclusivity between encouraging conversation and getting data.
Similarly, the problem with friending everyone goes away with a decent lists/circles concept - I add a lot more people on Google+ (granted, I don't post anything there. But I'd like to).
I'm seeing similar things on Facebook. A group of my friends is in a Facebook group that was originally intended for a business purpose. It is still used for that, but we also frequently post things there that we want to share to a small audience and not broadcast to all Facebook contacts.
I disagree about Facebook potentially struggling because of this disconnect. Facebook can continue to grow by steering users toward doing what Facebook wants while intermittently rewarding them with what users want. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_rein...
Addiction is not proportional to the quality of the user experience.
Agreed. I think G+ could beat Facebook here as they don't need to directly monetise the service and can provide more of the platform people want. Whether or not they can get to a tipping point of users however is another question.
For all of you wondering "Can I really give up Facebook?" the answer is an emphatic "Of course, stupid." You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.
The other day someone sent me an e-mail or text (I forget) to invite me to an event. They knew I had abandoned Facebook and wanted to make sure I was included. I felt slightly honored that they would go "out of their way" to include me, and it was much more meaningful than the average Facebook invite-all event listing.
Have you ever met someone you hadn't seen in a while, and they ask you what you've been doing, and you get a plethora of different reactions as you explain the ups and downs of your recent adventures? You don't get that if they're on Facebook. Human interaction is based on communication, and Facebook is not communication. It's the Reader's Digest version of The Truman Show.
Maybe I am a luddite. But what i'm fighting against is the replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. Maybe someday soon, Google Glass will become so ubiquitous that we'll all watch snippets of other people's lives instead of status updates, and we'll never have to live life on our own again; we'll just live through someone else.
Ignoring your patronizing, insulting tone for a bit, somehow I doubt it's that easy for most. If you're addicted to something (and I mean really, truly addicted), and it has negative consequences on your life, the answer is always "Well just stop it doing it, then". However, people do not work that way, and it's at the very least naive to assume it's that simple.
>You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.
Applies to Twitter, email, SMS, basically any communication method ever. The fact that becoming addicted to a communication medium can have a negative impact on your life is not a valid argument against said communication medium, because it applies to all of them.
>Facebook is not communication.
What would you call it then!? It's a platform where you share and talk with friends. How is that not communication?
>replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology.
If you've never been emotionally impacted by a social interaction which did not occur with the person standing right next to you (i.e. via technology), I daresay you are either leading us on, or are not much of a communicator to begin with.
Any bit of information can make an emotional impact, if it's meaningful to you. Maybe you learned that your whole family burned alive via morse code. Doesn't really matter how you got the information, you got it. And you'll probably have an emotional response. That isn't what i'm talking about at all.
I said replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. It's the removal of the human element that troubles me. When people stop reaching out to one another, and instead reach out to a plastic widget. When instead of sharing, laughing, and crying together, we take, laugh, and cry in a room, alone, our thumbs and index fingers hurriedly punching out comments on data streams, missing vital clues and skipping over the common human courtesies we learn and use in the course of physical interaction. Facebook is stripping away our humanity.
The simplest example is the occasional comment-box-flame-war you'll see when someone posts something about race, religion, sex, politics, etc. Total strangers haranguing your friends because they decided your status update's comment box was a nice place to have a pointless argument. It's made worse by the vagueries of the internet and the invincibility of the internet.
Email and text don't work the same way, and aren't a threat to human interaction in the way Facebook is. Twitter is similar, though, which is why I also deleted Twitter.
>When instead of sharing, laughing, and crying together, we take, laugh, and cry in a room, alone, our thumbs and index fingers hurriedly typing out replies to communication, missing vital clues and skipping over the common human courtesies we learn and use in the course of physical interaction.
You say "human courtesies", I (and others) say impediments to effective communication. Think of the average phone call. Think of how much of that is completely needless and only dictated by tradition as opposed to any real informational, emotional, communicative, or any other value.
And if you can't look past the medium to see the person on the other side, there's not a whole lot I can say on that. My BF on the phone vs Skype vs Facebook vs Twitter. It's all the same person, all their communique are special to me, medium regardless. In fact the textual ones have a benefit - I can easily retrieve those later.
Who really uses Facebook to the exclusion of meeting in person?
>Facebook is stripping away our humanity.
Such hyperbole.
>the negative consequences ("lack of pictures and status updates") are not nearly as broad as addiction to most other things in life.
You realize there is such a thing as mental addiction, yes? Your brain chemistry doesn't have to have been impacted by chemicals to be addicted to something.
I'd like to continue this discussion but it's verging on pointlessness. I don't know how to describe the immense value that talking to someone has over making a comment on a status update.
I guess, try to imagine yourself in a state where you cannot move any part of your body but your eyes. Your body is slumped into a mattress for so long that there's a permanent dent in it. You can not hear, you can not talk, but luckily technology has progressed to such a state that you can project text through some technological medium onto a computer. Facebook is your only connection to the world you knew.
After years and years of existing in this state, one day you are miraculously cured. Do you think you would still find a phone call to be an impediment to communication at all? Maybe, maybe not, depending how comfortable you had become with your new world. But I know what would be important to me. I'll take a human conversation over text, every time.
> My BF on the phone vs Skype vs Facebook vs Twitter. It's all the same person,
Did you meet your BF through Facebook?
> In fact the textual ones have a benefit - I can easily retrieve those later.
Sorry, but this is creepy. The advantage of spoken word is that it's ephemeral, personal and unshareable with others; said things get forgotten and (if they were ugly), forgiven too.
What would you call it then!? It's a platform where you share and talk with friends. How is that not communication?
When one sends a email newsletter to 50K people, that is also communication. When one blogs, that is also communication. But these are not replacements for actual "conversations" which you have with one person at a time, or very small groups (2-3 people?) - which is very engaged, where everyone is interested in everyone else and emotionally involved.
Facebook news feed is like a giant scrolling billboard of "announcements" - sure it is communication in the sense our friends are telling us what they were upto - that is pretty much it.
May be I am wrong, but I think GP meant the difference between real conversations and broadcasting announcements.
> > Facebook is not communication.
>
> What would you call it then!? It's a platform where
> you share and talk with friends. How is that not
> communication?
Facebook has the same relationship to communication that Doritos has to food.
You're underestimating the worth of having literally all my friends using the same feature-rich messaging platform. I'm in China and using the opportunity to spend a little time away from western social platforms (not using a VPN) and the only thing I've missed is facebook messenger.
Oh boy another internet "experiment" when someone gives up $technology and ends up saying absolutely nothing in their post. I sure do love reading these pretentious pieces of "intellectual" prose.
In fact I shall start an "experiment" myself to see if replacing every instance of "experiment" in these kind of articles with "controversial decision" to see if they read better. I mean it's as if people use the word "experiment" to justify being avant-garde.
Except in this case it's not even a controversial thing. People are leaving facebook for tonnes of reasons (fad has died, not finding its uses any more, don't want to be tied with a system that hoards personal data and sells them off to companies etc). Leaving Facebook isn't an edgy thing to do; not before and not now. Anyone I knew that announced that they're "leaving facebook" end up being rather smugly obnoxious when tech news headlines say "facebook did some things that people don't like. boooo facebook!" saying they "knew all along" and they were obviously smarter and more superior than the regular "tech weenie" still on their facebook.
We all know what the result of this "experiment" is going to be. "My life was significantly improved thanks to not using facebook. Just as I thought! Aren't I clever?". There's no point denying it because that's what they're going to say. Just like I said I'll replace "experiment" with "controversial decision". I already know that I'm going to say "Nope. The posts were not better at all. Told ya!" because I know that when it's something I dislike in the first place I'm going to have a visceral reaction to hate it rather than say doing an ACTUAL experiment which doesn't have this cognitive bias.
And I'm right, am I? I mean I'm not WRONG or something? Please someone validate my beliefs which I portray on the internet. I desperately need this!!!
Maybe that's how it came off, but if we look past the "look at me and my controversial decision masquerading as an experiment!" layer, and focus on his reasoning behind the decision: can you relate at all? I can.
"Yeah, I saw your post on Facebook" is one of the phrases I've found myself and my friends saying over the past couple of years, and sometimes I don't like hearing it, even from my own mouth.
Nevertheless, announcing it publicly as an "experiment" - it's debatable whether this has any value or point.
> And I'm right, am I? I mean I'm not WRONG or something? Please someone validate my beliefs which I portray on the internet. I desperately need this!!!
I think that was supposed to be ironic. I think. Regardless, that's how it came off to me too. I still have no Facebook account, and I'm not getting one. If you're unhappy just leave, no need to make a big fuss out of it.
I deleted my Facebook account about 2 years ago. Want to know how it has changed my life? Well, it really hasn't. Sometimes I don't hear about parties / events, but it's usually just an event that I'd either hear about anyway, or would be uninteresting to me in some way. Other than that, no life-changing epiphanies, no extra productivity, no increased level of smugness. Absolutely nothing has changed, and nobody cares. The author of the article may be concerned, thinking their life will change drastically or they will drop off the face of the earth and have to claw their way back to the top of their perceived social food chain, but they'll learn over time that their presence on facebook also does not matter, and they'll have to find another way to tell the world about their thoughts, and hope that people will sign up for an RSS feed to know when they've made new blog posts.
Another week another post about someone leaving facebook.
There is nothing interesting or novel in these posts. All that happens is that the people who have also left facebook find validation in seeing someone else do it so they up vote their story to the front page.
I don't know if it's about individuality or some perceived minority of 'non-facebook' users wanting to band together, but the fact that someone has left facebook is uninteresting.
In addition to this it's made worse by the articles acting as if it's some crowning achievement when all they're doing is limiting their methods of interacting with other people.
> I want us to talk. I want a personal email. I want to find a way to share photos in a way that encourages us to talk about them with each other.
Surely you can do this with or without Facebook.
Maybe I'm a unique snowflake but Facebook to me is exactly the opposite of that: it's a way to give a quick (often meaningless) insight into my life, what I'm thinking or what I'm doing. It's a way to share something that maybe someone will be interested in, but probably not. If I share something to Facebook it's not because I want all my friends to see it, it's because I think those that might see it might find value in it and it represents what I'm doing/thinking/enjoying. If I want someone to see something or engage with me in conversation I send them a message.
Facebook isn't a replacement for "normal" communication between friends, it's an extension. The only reason anyone would want to see complaints about someone's life falling apart is the same reason people watch train wrecks of car crashes. They don't care about the individual, they care about the spectacle. Using any one->many communication platform for complaints about life seems misguided.
Exactly. If it replaces anything, it's because it is more efficient at it. This is all anecdotal, I know...
Since Facebook, my email inbox is almost devoid of "RE:RE:FW:FW" broadcast messages.
I still get plenty of email from family and friends, but they are more selective in what they send. Things that are personal, or detailed, or very specific to me.
I still use my phone a lot, but spend less time telling people how great (or not) my weekend was. If they want to know, they can look. If they want details, they call and ask.
As I see it, the seeds of this user's disappointment were planted as soon as she starting gaming the system: "my posts became more and more filtered as the 'Friend' list increased. Now, they were getting the facade, the highlights because I donned the 'happy' mask. My closer friends were still catching the true story through instant messaging, text messaging and phone calls..."
The faint echoes of Gödel and Turing in the back of my mind say: no social algorithm can ever optimize its results to take into account how people will modify their behavior in response to the algorithm itself.
Her point still stands. I've been Facebooking since the start, so I don't necessarily alter my behavior much, I just use it to keep up with friends, post interesting tidbits about my life, and try to have real conversations happen.
I still see the same problems. When I talk to people, it's always "oh yeah, I saw on Facebook that you got a new job," etc. etc.
I went back and looked through my old e-mails from right before Facebook was becoming popular, early 2004. I once sent out one of those "My e-mail address is changing. Oh btw how are you?" e-mails to my whole list, and got back around 50 genuine responses that turned into conversations. Not "broadcast" style conversations, not public conversations, but real honest person-to-person human communication. It was brilliant.
I realized that I had completely lost that. If I was doing it today, I could send the same e-mail but people would send nothing back; it would just be "Thanks" because they already know everything else there is to know about my life, and I theirs.
It's a very strange and new way of connecting to people. On the one hand I have some deep insights into the lives of friends I might not otherwise talk to, or even those I do; on the other hand, I miss the humanity of one-on-one conversation.
I'm yet undecided if this is a good thing. But overall, I think the article overblows the affect this has on relationships. Personally, I sort of like it. All the trivial stuff is known already. No one cares where you work or what you're doing anymore, they want to hear how you're doing and how your life is really going. It negates some shallowness and small talk. Not necessarily bad.
But it is enormously complex. We still don't know how society will change as people become more connected in so many ways, but we do know it will change. Some might say it's the next level in our evolution; collaborative social evolution is the next step since biological evolution can't keep up. It'll be a fun ride.
calinet6: the fact that you're no longer sending 'broadcast' emails, nor consciously updating people about the changes in your life, and that "no one cares where you work or what you're doing anymore" are just more examples of gradual but dramatic changes in behavior resulting from the use of Facebook.
Unless Facebook has made some truly ground-breaking advances in AI, the company's algorithms cannot anticipate how users might modify their behavior in response to the algorithms themselves. AFAIK, that's not possible today.
Over time, this utter lack of 'intelligent auto-incorporation of feedback' might show up as people sharing 'fake' instead of real feelings, or as 'social' graphs diverging significantly from the true state of real-world relationships, or as automatic sharing of 'relevant' information (like ads) that look great to the algorithm but in hindsight are misguided.
(BTW, in my view, this is one of the biggest long-term risks for Facebook's business: that society over time learns to 'route around it' and it gradually loses relevance for day-to-day use.)
FWIW, I do agree with you that no one knows with certainty how society will change as a result of Facebook and its ilk.
I think you may have mashed up 12 different parts of my response and randomized the order... anyway. Yes, you have a point, but there's no algorithm at play here, it's simply that people are changing their behavior based on the fundamental and uncomplicated premise behind facebook itself: the sharing of personal information among a group. There's no need for an AI to anticipate that or guess behaviors. The simple fact that the information is shared as intended is enough to elicit the result I described. It's very simple. Complexity arisen from simple beginnings.
I think the behavior change that you were talking about originally is a bit of a stretch—most people have integrated Facebook and the like into their social fabric. It has become another level of communication, and at all levels and at all times we present a version of ourselves to others, whether facebook or not.
I don't believe the "social algorithm" needs to anticipate this natural human behavior any more than a telephone needs to anticipate it and change your conversation to feel more personal. Facebook is simply the format we're communicating through. I think it has to do more with the audience the format involves than anything else, and with Facebook, it's simply the self you present in the public non-anonymous space. This space has existed before, and Facebook is just a digital version. If people want something different from this that compensates for this behavior change, they won't use an AI algorithm; they'll just use a different platform. They'll chat, pick up the phone, or visit in person. Simple as that.
I think most people do this just fine. Like I said, my conversations with friends change because they know more details about my life, but they don't necessarily get worse or more impersonal. In fact they may be better since we're less focused on the trivial. The writer of this article may not have that perspective, and that's fine, but I think she's ignoring many advantages of the communication format that Facebook provides while emphasizing all of the disadvantages.
Unintended consequences are a fact of life. What the "company's algorithms cannot anticipate" is simply a specific instance of the more general problem that we cannot predict the future, nor can we run a simulation of the universe to see what the consequences of something will be. This is not at all specific to facebook, designing and adjusting systems like this will probably remain a task for humans for the foreseeable future.
I would just like to say that that has absolutely nothing to do with anything by Gödel or Turing. There definitely can exist machine learning algorithms which continually adapt, and I see no technical reason why you couldn't try and model human agency as well. The work by Gödel and Turing you're thinking of is about _formal_ systems such as logic or computer programs, and while it is very common for people to turn (i.e., abuse) their results into a metaphor with seemingly broader implications, this is actually a mistake; their proofs simply don't hold under those more general circumstances.
andreasvc: AFAIK, there is no program in existence today that can successfully model "human agency" (as you put it). Wouldn't that require major breakthroughs in AI?
And my understanding from chatting with friends in the fraud-detection space is that, while current state-of-the-art machine-learning systems can successfully adapt to the data they obtain from users, they cannot adapt to users learning to game or 'route around' the system -- at least not without programmer intervention 'from above.'
The link to Gödel and Turing I saw is that solving this problem without intervention 'from above' would require a computer program that can successfully model itself as it interacts with humans, but then we run into those two guys, no?
Yes I see the superficial resemblance with Gödel and Turing, but it's not more than that. The reason I insist on that is because the value of their theorems lies in the fact that they have been mathematically proven, and the proof only holds in very particular conditions. Basically, a system that is strong enough to prove statements about arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency. This hypothesis about the difficulty of certain machine learning tasks is a conjecture, at best. I don't think you could prove it, and if you could, it would look very different from the incompleteness proof. I think it has to do with certain AI problems being hard, but this is a rather vague notion; perhaps we simply lack certain concepts or mathematical tools. The important thing about the incompleteness proofs is that that is completely ruled out: given the right formal conditions, certain things are absolutely impossible to do.
My problem with fb and the reason I don't use it is simple: principal. I understand the model, and oblige with google (though not g+ as it is pretty quiet in my neck of the woods). But to not only give them the value of my data but also have them go around changing things like registered email without so much as a heads up is a slap in the face. It's like a conceited bus monitor that just goes ahead and "does what's best for me". I'm an adult; I know what email address I prefer to use.
Not only that, but the utter lack of transparency is concerning to say the least. There is this monstrous set of data--PII--that this company holds and who's to say the bus monitor doesn't all of a sudden decide that's it's best for me if they provide this data to Experien. Or to the justice dept.
The real problem is that people are addicted to distraction. Fb offers this droves. So much so that not only are people more than willing to hand over their data, they are willing to hand it over to someone who thinks you don't even deserve to know when they make sweeping changes to which parts of that data are displayed to the world.
I've seen comments such as "How do you know someone doesn't use Facebook? Because they'll tell you".
As if the primary reason you're expressing your dislike for the service in a discussion about it, is because you wish to proclaim smug superiority.
I think it's important for those who dislike the current platform, and are concerned about the future ramifications of it, to speak up in public forums. To state openly that they don't use Facebook for reasons of principal and also, because Facebook's actions have spoken louder than words numerous times and in my opinion, to continue to use the service is like staying with an abusive partner.
I saw the email thing as a non-issue - if you're looking at my info on FB, then the easiest way to contact me is on FB. It doesn't bother me that people aren't referred to my Gmail account instead.
Again, it's the principle of it--have the decency to tell people what's up. Same applies for all the privacy and other changes that have happened un-announced and un-explained, not just the email change.
Aside from the fact that this post is mostly pointless, it's also totally misinformed.
The OP started off by stating his reasons for dropping FB in this "experiment".. namely losing touch with the people for which he originally signed up under.
But he clearly doesn't engage with them if he's not seeing their updates.
Your social graph needs fine tuning. It's like any good bayesian filter, it learns over time what interests you. You can of course give it a push in the right direction by putting people in acquaintances, or hiding specific people from your timeline. (People in your acquaintances don't show up as often in your newsfeed).
This post just shows that you most likely don't understand the full feature set of Facebook and how to best optimize your social graph (not that this is your fault). Facebook has some of the best machine learning for figuring out what is relevant to me. I'd probably argue that you click on too many memes and don't interact with your friends as much if this is what it is serving you.
Don't drop Facebook, just learn how to use it.
I personally don't use Facebook for interacting with that many friends. I have about 96% of my friends as acquantiances. I have a small set of about 10 people as friends, and I subscribe to about 100~ people.
My newsfeed is so rich with really good content.
I don't want to 'optimise my social graph'. Especially given it used to work properly and feed me the relevant content that I wanted about a year ago.
You can try defend the social graph, how much Facebook has done to improve it and so on, but for a lot of people it doesn't actually achieve what it used to, and that's an issue.
Isn't the fact we add too many contacts the core issue ?
And then it turns out that it's easier to look at funny stuff posted by anyone than diving emotionnaly into the life turmoils of our real close friends ? I firmly believe the simple solution is to have more than one account.
I know people with multi-accounts, and multi-hundreds of friends accounts and they all say they're annoyed by how irrelevant most of the content is by default even with as few as 30-50 friends on an account.
I have 20 and even then most of it is muted. I think it's the platform and the culture that the service creates which give rise to hiding stories and unsubscribing from people's feeds.
Either that, or I just don't care for random, short-form content.
> it's about buying eyeball-time and pumping
> commercials into your brain.
You've just defined television. I think that you need to broaden your definition of Facebook if you want people to listen to you point. Facebook is more than just the local television company.
It's more like cable access. Occasionally, there'll be something interesting, but most of the time it's a bunch of people standing around trying to put on a show about stuff about which no one cares.
This argument could be applied to any technical progress.
Email for example: "Sure you could dePend on a soulless money making machine to optimize your communications... And hope it does it right. Or you can just take control of the situation and do it the old fashioned way: letters and stamps."
You have control over email: providers, client applications, encryption. Sure, many many people use gmail and gmail isn't too different to facebook in this regard, but email itself is an open protocol where you can use a competing service and still integrate with others.
I don't know why you have so much hate for the comment you made but I couldn't agree more. Facebook is a tool, all tools need to be guided by yourself, they never just work. Equally one tool will not work for everyone so sometimes you have to adapt that tool.
People commenting it's just a money making machine, where do they make money off me? I don't click on anything I don't want to and I'm not forced to buy stuff.
I log into Facebook, see a picture of my friends baby, I comment, we have a laugh then I arrange to go round and see them. I don't interact any more or any less than I would over the phone etc
I see updates from the people I want to see updates from, if someone writes a load of crap all the time, I just filter them out.
I never understand all the hate people have for Facebook, constant jibes about privacy. If you as a person are putting information on Facebook that is that private then you are the idiot, not Facebook. If you don't want people to see private pictures of your children, simple, don't upload them!
Everything needs a revenue stream of some sort, does everyone think Apple do what they do because they want to make everyone happy??
Back shortly, just going to check out my friends wedding pics that everyone else uploaded and tagged them in.
However, because of the nature of FB, it makes relationships less personal/authentic, as we try to show off our "best self" to others, rather than our real selves. The tool itself encourages this, so instead of adapting to it, for some people it's best to not use it.
It's like eating at a fast food restaurant. Yes, you can adapt to it and order the salads, and healthy dishes.. But noone's forcing you to go there, you can just not go to them in the first place.
I think I must be in the minority of people that doesn't use Facebook to brag or project a different side to myself. I think this is the reason I don't see it from the other side of the fence.
Some people use it to tell people how well they are doing or how much they love their loved ones. I text or ring my wife if I feel like telling her out the blue how much I love her. Others use the facebook wall to do it so everyone could see how sensitive they are. I think it's all bollocks really.
I do just use it as a tool, I plan events, I upload the odd photo and comment on others status' that I find funny / worth a comment. e.g. I uploaded a video of my little boy at the driving range the other night as I was impressed how well he hit it for his second time at golf. I did it for the benefit of my family and friends to see though. Nothing more.
Everyone else I just filter out or de-friend based on who they are to me.
This is actually really interesting. There's a way to fine-tune my newsfeed? (I'm not trolling here; I've honestly never heard about this.) Facebook has provided very little actual value to me, mainly because the signal-to-noise ratio has been so low.
I've seen those options under my friends' accounts ("lists", right? "close friends", "acquaintances", etc.?) ... is that where I'd do that? Is that something they see (I don't want to offend people by demoting them to "acquaintances", but if I can do that without them seeing, that'd be great).
Honestly, Facebook would be a lot more valuable to me if they had some sort of basic tutorial explaining what's going on with it and how I can make it work for me. As it is, all I use it for is as a slightly glorified birthday reminder.
If you have any resources to that end (how to tune your feed), I'd love to hear about them.
I agree. Facebook is awesome for keeping in touch with people that I normally wouldn't keep in touch with (people who aren't close friends but are still friends). I've made great friends through it and my news feed always has relevant content. The experience is what you make it. If the OP lost touch with people it's because he made no effort to keep in touch with them.
Not to mention the obvious click-bait of his submission... "goodbye facebook"? Please. 900M accounts. They're not going anywhere for some time.
In the early days, the News Feed was a full feed of all updates, much like LiveJournal's friends page. Why can't they return to its previous behavior, subject to the restrictions you specify? (e.g. unsubscribe from app activities).
Indeed - the more 'connected' we are, the more socialized we're forced to be. Facebook is not the third place simply because there are too many appearances we're have to maintain.
I've gone "old school" (trying to connect to people in 'old fashion' ways) on many somewhat prolonged occasions and it doesn't work. It's a reflection of society not my particular grouping of friends.
I spent a year writing many handwritten letters. People loved receiving them but seldom, if ever, returned the favor. I try and try again to meet with my friends to catch up (ie, going for coffee). Almost never happens, and when it does it's a chore to actually set up. Instead, it has to be an 'event' and it should be 'social'. I text my friends and they respond rather quickly...because I know if I call, many times they don't answer.
Of course, all this means is that the LCD is either me or society.
I think it's a rational trend. Our direction has been towards more "omniscient/passive" forms of information, where you can update at your own pace, and others consume that information optionally. Doing this is cost-effective and allows people to prioritize their contacts by reading their feed occasionally, rather than by doing "pavement pounding" to make calls and arrange dates.
In doing this we miss out on some deeper conversations, but I think we gain on balance because it allows people to _choose_ which conversations they want to pursue. That's the key thing here - if you aren't feeling a benefit from socializing, you aren't motivated to do it. Which inevitably leads to the conclusion that most people are finding each other boring, even if they're friends...
I more than "lean" towards introversion, and this doesn't really frighten me; it makes me a bit sad, that's all. But I doubt it's a new observation. I suspect most people have always found most other people boring much of the time, even if they are friends. It's just more evident now because people have more alternatives for spending their time that fill a need for "socializing" without requiring direct in-person interaction.
The anecodte the poster gives is spot on and huge. There have been many times I've thought "I wonder why I don't hear from this person anymore" and it was simply a matter of Facebook no longer prioritizing their posts in my news feed.
Just because someones post isn't "liked" or clicked on in some way doesn't mean it's not valuable. It's a passive form of communication.
I don't know if this is just my perception, and maybe Facebook doesn't prioritize things in the news feed. Regardless, it's a UX question that needs to be asked by their team.
Can you block sponsored stories? Besides, what good are controls if they keep 'evolving' and force you to actually maintain those settings. Settings and prefs should be fire and forget. I should not have to revisit settings in response to some new feature. For example, that jackass new @facebook email thing. Facebook is circa 1999 Windows.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Most facebook controls are buried three levels of counterintuitive links down in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
Or to put it another way, if I can't figure out how to make facebook show me stuff that isn't shite, how are ordinary people going to figure it out?
edit: Also I've figured out that the reason I no longer hear from an awful lot of my facebook friends is that I've probably set at least half of 'em to "ignore" due to 'em posting too much garbage.
I don't know why everyone takes Facebook so seriously.
Well, actually I do but I don't want to dive into a long comment about how it's a voyeuristic, social panopticon and how easy it is to project your insecurities onto it. Well, I have a small and strange solution to staying in contact with your friends, do what I do: remove all your actual friends from your newsfeed.
When you see them, you won't already have eagerly instantiated things to talk about, you won't jaw off about some article they posted about the latest bath salt murder -- you'll actually catch up and connect in genuine conversation.
The site only has as much power as you give it, posting a long diatribe about how it has no power over you anymore because you deactivated is legitimizing its power over you.
I have to agree with the sentiments here: it seems to me that my Facebook feed is much less useful than it was about a year ago. I don't know what they've done, but it's really not good.
I think people put too much emphasis on Facebook and what perceived problems it is 'suppose to solve' in their lives. You get out of it what you put it into it, just like anything else (mostly). If you don't feel connected with your friends, it's not FB's fault. FB to me isn't designed to make my connections with friends stronger, it's designed to keep lingering friendships going.
On a side note, why is it so important to declare that you are no longer using or on Facebook. This isn't limited to the OP either. I've met people in real life, who take great pride in not using FB anymore. I find it in the tech & podcast world too. It's a strange type of snobbery, between 'those in the know who aren't on facebook' versus the 'sheep who are on facebook'.
Well, I am no longer using brand name nasal spray. It wasn't fulfilling my life I like I thought it was supposed to. I used it like the bottle says too and while it does what it says it's supposed to, it's not what I want.
Oh, thats easy. Because there is a huge group of people that will view you as "off the norm" if you don't use Facebook. Which is snobbery as well. Every time i ride the bus, I hear the word "Facebook" at least once. So, the thing itself is a hot topic, so why not talk about it, even if you are not using it?
Many of the complaints could be resolved with more transparency on Facebook's part. The frustrations seem to be generally focused on managing communication: incoming and outgoing, an issue of curation.
The problem is, despite Facebook having many tools to calibrate one's communications, Facebook is still a blackbox. We click the appropriate Account Settings radio button and like the good scientists we are, wait to see what happens. The fact of the matter is, we are pulling a lever and hoping it is attached to some mechanism on the other side.
The same is true of Google and SEO.
Odd that obfuscation is the hallmark of our internet experiences.
Facebook is defective by design as a social network. It's for profit driven, privacy abusing and etc. and etc. It's a pity that it became a virtual monopoly. Same bad as happened with Windows on the desktop.
So just because you don't have the proper settings on your news feed, you're quitting facebook altogether.
I agree that facebook is a lot less personal than it used to be. Personally, I rarely update my facebook status or stare at the newsfeed. I use facebook to connect with "friends" whose phone number or e-mail address I don't have and to join or create events.Those two situations are perfectly well handled by facebook.
Not just proper settings on his news feed. He also felt like he had to filter himself for propriety, and found little worth in the communication that resulted through that facade. That's not a technical issue, it's his valid personal issue. He's not the only one with that view of facebook.
Yes, I too had the similar problem. I was missing out on updates from my brother while being bombarded with stupid gifs. But as pointed out in another comment it's just one day I had to sit for an hour and put everyone who I don't speak on phone regularly as acquaintances. Problem solved!
It was a bit hard for me to do this though, nearly took an hour.. so here are two suggestions
1) Brute force: option to mark everyone as acquaintances in one go and then de-select the people back to friends.
2) More automated: Facebook should make a module where if a person allows the app access to the phonebook, it somehow recommends a list of people who are important to me based on my frequency of calling/speaking them offline. I know privacy conscious people would absolutely scream in horror so this is why it should be opt-in only.
P.S. 3) Oh and timeline still sucks. It is just too hard to read, there ought to be a way to going back to the simple news feed.
> Conversing with a friend, I start to share a story I’d earlier posted on Facebook. Since she didn’t comment or “like” the post I guessed she hadn’t yet seen it. Instead, she cuts me short: “Yeah, I saw your post on Facebook.” And that was it. No dialog, no joy at conversing with each other, just friends passively watching each other from a distance. I’m guilty, I’ve done it too. We’ve become quiet ships, passing by in the dark silence of the night.
Hmm, that's just a tough anecdote to use to make his point...it could be that that his friend is not much of a conversationalist with him.
But I admit to using FB to promote things that I don't feel like wasting real-time talking about...like projects or articles I liked...And everyone who's ever been on the receiving end of a mass-email is happy about that.
Curation of social media is becoming a big problem that only occured within the last few years. Trying to solve it algorithmically with plus ones and likes and upvotes seems to work when the content is centered around a specific topic, but not something so general as your Facebook friends list or Twitter feed.
And you can't just deny people you know from being your friend on Facebook. It's rude. If you're ok with being rude, this doesn't apply to you, but the quality of my Facebook stream is not worth sacrificing my manners - not when I can get better content elsewhere without having to do so.
I haven't left Facebook, I just ignore it, because there's nothing interesting there. I don't want to clean it up when my accounts on Twitter, Quora, Hacker News, and Stack Exchange provide much more interesting content.
"Conversing with a friend, I start to share a story I’d earlier posted on Facebook. Since she didn’t comment or “like” the post I guessed she hadn’t yet seen it. Instead, she cuts me short: “Yeah, I saw your post on Facebook.”"
lol, my wife does this to me all the time :) (or should the emoticon be :( )
The arguments are valid here, not one more 'Zuck I HATE YOU, remove timeline' when actually timeline does not make any difference unless you are stalking some one every day :))
I like the idea of the news feed filter algorithm. Just implementation is not the best. The only way to 'fix' it is just to change friend status (acquaintance, friend, close friend, etc). But... I am not sure if the algorithm can be improved actually. It determines whether to show or not by how much do you interact with some one on facebook (more or less). And it's the only way to determine whether you might be interested or not. Because believe me, you wouldn't be happy if you could see what everyone is posting if you have 200+ friends.
"One evening, over pizza and wine she’s telling me about a breakup and a poem she posted. I never saw the poem. When I visited her Timeline I realized she had been posting every day and it never once showed up in my Newsfeed. Instead I see a photo of someone I don’t know; gliding down my Newsfeed simply because one of my friends “liked” it and the original poster doesn’t have their privacy settings in place."
Aye, totally agree. The day Facebook launched EdgeRank was the day Facebook started it's decline. In fact, there's a pattern that happens to companies that try and "assume" what their users want to see.
These posts are pretty common I feel in HN. Every time it just comes down to FB gets harder to use. I have a Close Friends tab and I put my close friends in it. That's it.
I "Like" some pages but you can easily click on that drop down to unsubscribe.
FB is pretty flexible on what content you want to appear in your feed and sometimes there are surprises but you can pretty easily scold it with a few button clicks and it'll fix right back up. Works for me. I understand there's a need for it to just work without the use of any interaction but then you'd lose a lot of features if you had that.
I've been on the fence about quitting Facebook for a while.
On one hand, it feels like junk-food-friendship: it feels like you're connecting and communicating, but in reality the time you spend scrolling lists on your phone could be spent with something far better: closing the FB app and calling a buddy.
On the other hand, so many people use FB that it's tough to completely pull away from it. It's where my generational cohort shares photos, so I can't fully walk away unless I want to miss out on the photos from last week's camping trip, etc.
I have taken about 2 weeks of Facebook fast. It was great. You are more peaceful. Their is no guilt about not being able to do all the things that you should to be doing. You save time. You have more intense face to face or phone conversation with your friends.
I am back on Facebook because it is easier to connect to future-to-be-friends. You connect on Facebook and may be become good friends.
I plan to slowly wind Facebook down and eventually leave it for good.
So this is exactly the problem Google+ was designed to solve.
Don't want your entire friends list to see a post only share with with a specific circle.
Don't care to hear useless banter ? Don't include a person in your circle or turn down the volume on that circle. I had a good friend of mine from growing up who decided one day he was going to post nothing but memes. He went into the silent circle and I can check in on him every now and then if I so choose.
The problem seems to ultimately always boil down to "I added far too many people to Facebook as friends, and now Facebook is useless!"
To which the solution is easy: cut down the number of people you are friends with on Facebook.
For me, I have < 30 people I've friended on Facebook. But they're real friends and family, people I know and want to keep in touch with. And that's made all the difference to how I use Facebook.
Has some good points, but I think many get the wrong idea about facebook. It's a way to keep in touch with far off friends who you wouldn't hear from at all otherwise. It's never affected a real relationship for me in the slightest, other than, "I saw your pics." The news feed could be better, but it has become more relevant since I've silenced a few overposters and blocked apps, etc.
This is fucking on-point. The Timeline is just completely useless anymore as a way of keep tabs on people I care about. I rarely care if my friend was tagged in a picture, and I never care that they commented on a wall post by some random person I've never met.
I wish I could ditch it altogether, but the events and messaging are an integral part of my social life now.
Please, please, can you consider implementing a higher contrast color scheme for the text on your blog? It's really painful to read as it is now; I wanted to and tried but had to give up.
Without an analysis of causes, I can agree that my own FB "news feed" has been becoming consistently crappier. Especially since roughly the beginning of this year.
You'll eventually get over being "too cool" for Facebook. It's ok, I did it too. We'll welcome you back when you change your mind. Life is too short to worry so much about these things.
I'm considering leaving facebook for the first time, because of the Sponsored Stories thing, which is showing up with disturbing regularity, and frequently winds up as ads for things that make me angry.
Nowadays, if you "Like" something, then that something can pay for the privilege to insert whatever stories it likes into your friends' facebook feeds, under the heading "so-and-so likes such-and-such" followed by your own message. Interestingly the person whose name is being used for the advertisement has no idea what ads are going out under their name.
Two of these in particular show up in my facebook feed several times a week and raise my blood pressure every time they do. One is a particularly annoying evangelical preacher slash motivational speaker who fills up my newsfeed with god-stuff due to the fact that a vague acquaintance I've met a couple of times happens to "like" him. Another is a political thing which fills up my newsfeed with posts I find highly disagreeable under the name of another friend of mine.
What were they thinking? Facebook has designed a feature which makes me hate my friends.
"Nowadays, if you "Like" something, then that something can pay for the privilege to insert whatever stories it likes into your friends' facebook feeds, under the heading "so-and-so likes such-and-such" followed by your own message."
I find myself wanting to set up a Facebook account just to start screwing with that. Is it something that can be screwed with? ("jerf liked Crest brand toothpaste! He said: 'When you get home from a long day of work and just really need the unctuous feel of something smeared on your feet, there's nothing like Crest Toothpaste. Mmmm.... yeah.... oh my.... pics soon.'") Getting someone else to pay for that would almost be worth it.
That's not how it works. Instead, Crelm toothpaste will note that you've liked them and forevermore your friends will get stories posted directly by Crelm toothpaste with the heading
Jerf likes Crelm Toothpaste
[blah blah blah a big picture depicting how wonderful Crelm toothpaste is]
So when you say "followed by your own message", the "your" is the advertiser? (That's valid, just clarifying.)
Of course, it could be no other way, since I'm hardly the only one who feels this way.
As my message implies, I'm not actually on Facebook, but my wife yesterday registered a complaint about a cousin I have that "likes" a couple dozen things a day. (And again, disclaimer, I don't actually take the HN discussions to her, as a non-tech person she ends up bringing them to me. These are not uncommon feelings.) Of course Facebook is just selling eyeballs, but there's a delicate dance of deception they must do with their users to not let it become blatent. If it becomes blindingly obvious that the users are taking second priority to the real customers, the users will eventually leave, and then where will the real customers be?
I've been wondering about this, if I'm the only one going crazy or what. I don't think the ones that appear in your news feed are called "sponsored stories", but I could be wrong.
It's almost enough that I want to email my family and tell them to unlike all the crap they liked... Even trying to get FB not to display "likes" from that person fails to hide them.
Facebook already includes tools to solve your issues. Either unfriend the vague acquintances, hide all their posts from your feed, or hide the annoying posts following some criteria.
I "unsubscribed" from the family member I no longer want to hear from. That way we're still "friends", I can visit his page and read what he's been posting, but it doesn't show up on my feed.
Agree. Facebook is a tool whose scope of use can be adjusted by each user's needs and expectations. It is true that the setting changes are not the most user-friendly / intuitive. It's also fair that some people want to cut off certain dependency of any tool, but it's not the tool to blame but a personal choice to make.
Actually, I just discovered that ads keep appearing even if you defriend the person!
I just defriended someone who works for a social game company because they were pushing waaaay too many ads through to my feed. I felt bad about doing it because I don't mind the guy on a personal level, but shit it was annoying. Anyway, having defriended him I reloaded my news feed only to find that the ad was still there!
Now, maybe that's a one-off and the servers hadn't quite synchronized yet, but damn. Facebook makes me dump my friends to avoid ads and still gives me the ads!
Why are you facebook friends with people who post things you don't like?
I don't facebook often... don't they still have the ability to turn down how frequently you see posts from people? Can't you put them in facebook's equivalent of "circles" and keep their crap out of your feed?
They don't post things I don't like -- they merely like things I don't like and the things they like post things on their behalf and without their knowledge.
Even if you put a person on "ignore" the ads will still show up.
From talking to other people about it (and also from the only one other comment in this thread that goes "right on, I thought I was going crazy") I'm thinking it might be a limited rollout so far... a lot of people seem to have no idea what I'm talking about, but how could you miss it when your newsfeed suddenly starts acquiring a bunch of stories posted by random jerks you've never heard of?
> What were they thinking? Facebook has designed a feature which makes me hate my friends.
That's funny. It's a little like chalk and cheese. I had a friend on Facebook who posted political links religiously, he swamped my news feed and it was pretty depressing. In the end - I somehow muted him. He's more recently moved over to a blog (I think he was annoying others too.) Can't say that I've bothered to tune in though. I miss it in a way.
My stream is even more flooded on G+. I'd rather a page full of teasers with click down stories. G+ is just overwhelming even if you do create circles.
Hold on. First off, you should have deleted your account years ago.
"Connecting with friends" is a terrible point to make: e-mail has been around for decades. However, such a point does intersect with my main goal for making this post. People are lazy. Now programmers are saying it, and now everyone else will realize just how true it is, and being lazy has consequences.
So, we've had e-mail for decades. Why won't people use it? Instead of wasted texting plans, etc.? You could always keep up with your friends and family through e-mail. But the interfaces were either ugly, inconvenient, or disorganized. It's beyond me that an {interface} should have to tell me to contact my mother or that an {interface} should compel me to "keep up with old friends."
This. Is. Absurd.
[Luddite Rant:] Sorry, but pick up the damn phone and call them. (Or click "compose" and just {try} to type out something meaningful.)
People don't have much to say anyway (and for my personal stake in it, it's because they're not reading anything interesting), and Facebook isn't going to change that. That, I think, is the point behind http://weknowwhatyouredoing.com/. There's nothing-to-hide, and conversely, there's nothing-to-show either. FB is an enabler of oversharing, and it's allowing people to empty out too much without taking in substantive content.
I'm going to say it engenders bad cognitive hygiene.
How is it this same tired argument pops up every time quitting Facebook is discussed? The sweet spot for Facebook is acquaintances. People you would not usually email or call, and only hear about once in a while through the grapevine. It maintains familiarity. Subbed in a co-ed game of ultimate frisbee and met some people? Add them on Facebook.
I think it's a "tired argument" because its not easily defeated. _Why_ wouldn't you "usually" e-mail or call? Why? Why would you? (This seems like Churchill's point: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.") E-mail didn't fail, this is why we're seeing a resurgence of it (http://three.sentenc.es/, 501 developers against e-mail bombardment, minimalism over e-mail organization, etc.). Why has FB suddenly become "the best we've got" when all people seem to argue for is particular features that could be replaced. FB is a mash-up; this has nothing to do with "maintainability of social grace." It's a mash-up; and consumers like mash-ups.
Seriously: _Why?_ Why do we need we need a "social framework" that captures the rest of our human-interaction? We do we need a "social baseline"? Why do we need a system to maintain familiarity for us? I'm not even sure I understand the value of the point you've made, even if it is a good argument. _I_ maintain familiarity; Facebook is a tool for supporting what I do naturally.
> It maintains familiarity.
I'm not sure what this means. How does it do this? By making an API function do... What?
> Subbed in a co-ed game of ultimate frisbee and met some people? Add them on Facebook.
Add their e-mails? Organize your labels.
The sweet spot for _who_? I'm telling others to drop it because you can achieve those goals through other interfaces; you're telling me that others shouldn't set their goals too high (acquaintances). My point still stands. E-mail [certainly] would make more sense within the "acquaintances" counterpoint.
Facebook is a set of opinions as to how one should manage (or maintain?) one's social life. Isn't it clear that if one rejects that System, one might be expected to provide an alternative, or possibly simpler, solution? The argument cannot really be a surprise to you, surely.
[EDIT:] I'm _struggling_ to understand the point about "maintaining" familiarity. I really do wish to understand it, as I feel it touches the heart of the matter. However, such an idea may require a break-down.
I think the issue of "discovery" is an important one, but what actually am I discovering in this digital world? A portfolio? Or a person? To argue that FB's sweet spot is about acquaintances from the evidence that it's a good tallying tool, or a notes tool, for friends made in the physical social world, I think, is a bad argument, or at least it's not very compelling. I think such an argument only re-confirms the "tired argument" I initially presented.
So, you're at an ultimate frisbee game. Everyone introduces themselves. You can then go home and find them on Facebook based on their name and mutual friends (since you probably know some other people on the team). No asking for contact info and all the associated social baggage. There's one benefit.
Now, once you're friends with them, Facebook passively (or actively, with minor communication such as comments) maintains familiarity. Basically what this means is if you happen to run into them six months later, it isn't like meeting them for the first time. Facebook can by no means fully maintain this sort of low-level relationship indefinitely. However, I've found it's very effective at increasing the half-life of such things.
Facebook automates the maintenance of my social network. That is valuable.
I disagree. A lot of the sharing I do on facebook are "neat" things -- things that would drive most of my friends crazy if I put them in an email -- but stuff that those who want to see "what I'm up to" can check out from time to time. If anyone emailed me all the top stuff on y-combinator I'd be upset -- I have no problem skimming the list and looking at what I find interesting.
I could use a blog + microblog for a similar way of sharing -- but most people aren't so interested in what I'm doing that they'll go and read some random links I've posted -- but when they have the time and are in the mood to have a look -- facebook works. Additionally I can post semi-private things on facebook -- because it has an authorization infrastructure in place -- I know most of my friends wouldn't be interested in or able to remember a set of credentials just to have a look at my microblog.
Personally I'd like to use a "homepage" (remember those?) for the same things -- and I probably will move to that eventually -- but a lot of people I'd like to keep in touch with simply don't have a reasonable way to "watch" 100s of activity streams from different blogs, microblogs, rss feeds etc. I realize many people use twitter for a similar reason.
My main problem with both of those are the same: the have broken a perfectly good distributed architecture by centralizing it -- and then worked really hard to make it scale again. Still working on a design for something less centralized, but still workable for those that aren't interested in technology.
The Diaspora "pod" concept seems likely to be the way to go -- in essence it's what all "micro communties" such as phpbb boards for teams/groups/clans etc are doing today. I'm not sure if it is feasible to make something "general" that also works -- but it'll be interesting to try. For authentication and authorization openid/google login and optional "local" registration combined with "friend lists"/"circles" should do the trick.
There still remains the problem of discovery -- "friend me on facebook" is usually quite simple if you remember the first name, and know someone in common -- "go to my blog, log in and say hi!" -- doesn't quite work. I do agree "send me an email" works better than both those -- it's a shame a lot of people simply aren't using email much these days.
I have privacy concerns about Facebook, and resent the fact that it's such a silo, but in the main in succeeds where other technologies have failed.
It's useful for finding people - a directory. If I want to get in touch with someone - and I don't have their contact details I can probably find them on Facebook and fire them a message.
If email was just as easy, people would have probably taken to that. Which is a shame, because Email could have been that easy. Privacy used to be more of a concern, and spam drove people away from publishing their addresses in directories.
I've left (privacy and personal reasons.) I since have missed the community. It's encouraged me to pick up the phone more, which is a nice thing. You just can't have the same rich interaction with people when typing compared to talking. But you can have a greater audience. Perhaps you communicate to more people with less content over something like Facebook, compared to having richer relationships with fewer people. It might all balance out.
Ultimately time is a premium. I certainly don't think G+ is the answer - it's much of the same.
With Facebook you are not their customer, you are their product. If anything, if Zuck would like a way to monetize better without alienating users he should add some kind of Facebook Premium/Gold account upgrade. Where users can choose to throw a few bucks at them each month or year, whatever, in exchange for some cool extra features, and/or to be exempt from advertisements and privacy shenanigans. Money is money, so they shouldn't care exactly where it comes from. But if you give the opportunity for each user to decide for themselves whether they wish to be a product or a customer, I think it will lead to a better situation for everyone involved. Also better fits that market divide between the folks who want the cheapest experiences versus the best experiences.
Facebook has a feature specifically for this, so that you see every update posted by people on your "VIP" list. I only know this because they put the feature in my face, I didn't go looking for it. Come on.
Related: "I don't have a Facebook" is the new "I don't have a TV." For some reason, those who either refused to sign up or chose to deactivate their accounts feel the need to share this with everyone everywhere.
I've really never seen a "facebook sucks" post that wasn't based on one of the following tired arguments:
- Ludditism
Usually of the form:
Technology is *TEARING US APART* don't you see?! (Response: No, not really, perhaps you just suck at communicating?)
- Ignorance of use
Usually of the form:
WTF I got fired for posting all those pictures of me using drugs?! (Response: Learn to use the privacy settings!)
or: It's too noisy, all of these stupid game requests.. (Response: Block the offending apps and ask your friends to knock it off)
- Bad connections
Usually of the form:
or: [annoying/offensive] $person keeps appearing in my news feed (Response: Block the offending person!)
or: All of my friends post pointless, boring minuate of their lives! (I.e. the Twitter argument) (Response: Don't friend those people!)
or: I don't want to turn down my Boss' friend request and look bad! I'm $sociallyUnfasionableThing! (Response: Use lists.)
It was refreshing to see one that actually lays out with an actual example what the problem is, in this case, algorithmic changes which ruined his experience. He veered toward #1 above at the very end, but still this was interesting to read.
Every single one of these things above, though, traces back to ignorance (usually) or cirucmstance. Could Facebook do a better job of making these things obvious? Absolutely. Facebook is not an intuitive site to use, and even when you have your head around it, they usually change something arbitrarily (the recent email thing comes to mind).
However, that said, you really shouldn't dump on the site wholesale just because it doesn't work for you. It works for millions of other people just fine.
Outside of the sub-group of individuals who thrive on sharing every aspect of their life, most people want Facebook to be a fancy email. There's all your friends; you can talk with them and literally see what they're up to . And to be honest, the platform is great for that.
Facebook, on the other hand, needs you to be an information sharing and data providing machine, talking about brands and products, all while doing whatever they can to entice (or trick) you into putting your information in the public domain. They want to you be connected with everyone. People are learning that's a lot of work.
The problem is that the more Facebook pushes the latter, the worse the former -- the user experience -- has to get. Nobody wants to stare at ads and feel like they're being "watched" (by both Facebook and other connections) while they "engage" with friends. As the author discovered...it's odd.