I can't get over how incoherent the mobile app has become. To give a recent example. Yesterday, I had commented on another person's post. I later wanted to get back to add to the comment. So I navigated to it from my activity log. This took me to the post, but wouldn't display any of the comments on the post. The screen was clearly rendered differently than when I pulled up the person's wall, found the post, then clicked on the comments to find my comment. My guess is that "activity log > post" was written by a different engineers than "wall > post". This is the latest, updated iOS app.
That's just one minor example. There's crap like this throughout the app. The web site is also glitchy as hell these days. When I brought up m.facebook.com the other day and went to type a status update, for every space I typed, two spaces were inserted.
Agreed. It pains me to say this, but I don't understand the facebook app anymore -- and I work as a programmer! The website is a little better, but only a little.
I can never find settings for what I want. Most of the config is a mystery to me, no matter how many times facebook shows a message in my wall "hey, did you know you can do X this way?" or "we care about your privacy, so we added this or that option". I don't understand how groups work. I can never find the posts I want. Their constant reordering of my wall drives me mad. If I see a post I like, but I accidentally open a link or close the app and want to go back to it, it's bye bye post -- and good luck finding it again.
I cannot understand how facebook privacy works. I absolutely CANNOT send a private message to my wife sharing a photo "memory" of us two, no other people tagged, that facebook itself suggested I can share with her: it's always "message cannot be sent". What the hell, facebook?
I cannot understand how facebook censors publications in groups that sell things (too long to explain here, I asked a friend who works there, who asked the team involved, and they couldn't explain what was triggering the censorship either after I gave them the exact offending posts). Good luck finding specific posts in groups in a reasonable way, too.
> I asked a friend who works there, who asked the team involved, and they couldn't explain what was triggering the censorship either after I gave them the exact offending posts
I guess this is down to AI classifying the posts. No one can explain how the AI works except to say that it was trained on a huge amount of data and the data looks sufficiently similar to your posts that they got a bad score. (Also, welcome to the future! I expect in future lots of life-changing decisions will happen in a way that no one can explain or override).
I tried Facebook in, IDK, 2009 or so, for a month or two.
I have productively used, for significant amounts of time: every desktop Windows since 3.1, maybe a half-dozen Linux window managers under almost as many distros, BeOS, Solaris CDE, and more, a half-dozen GUI word processing programs, at least as many instant message programs, forums of all sorts, maybe a dozen image and WYSYWG HTML editors combined, and so on off to the horizon. I've figured out how to use obtuse UIs for games like Shadow President and Crusader Kings II.
Facebook's UI was too confusing so I stopped using it. I couldn't figure it out at all. Recently I've been exposed to "Facebook Work" or whatever, and it's just as bad. What's this? Where does this post go? To whom? Why are these in this order? Is this thing the same as that other thing with the same name, and if so why's it on the page twice and grouped with different things? WTF.
Facebook used to be polished, believe it or not. The newsfeed was once just that, a feed for new items posted by your friends on their walls, ordered chronologically so you can get through it quickly and efficiently. People used to never share links they found on the web, why would you be that spammy asshole after all? That was the thinking then, at least. Then third party pages appeared and began posting into your newsfeed, then it became possible to share these posts with your other friends, then the feed quickly lost any utility it might have had as it became flooded with third party content and advertisement grouped in no particular order at all.
The next thing to go was notifications. I don't care if my uncle liked my aunts posts, yet I get the notification! They even had the nerve to have a notification setting to turn this off that did absolutely nothing at all. Completely broken, but probably a feature and not a bug.
Once you have audience _capture_, worse UX becomes a valuable dark pattern because it requires _investment_.
Have you ever seen a modern slot machine? There seems to be a pattern to winning, if only you study it a bit longer...just put in one more coin and the epiphany will come.
Same observation here. That's what cemented my realization that facebook isn't for me, they just want my comments in order to generate "engagement", not actually be useful. It's my content and they make it nearly impossible to curate.
I had a similar realization a couple of years back when I stopped using Facebook.
After mostly using Reddit for a while I realized that Facebook wasn't designed for having actual conversations or expressing yourself.
So for example, unlike sites like Reddit or HN, you can't downvote on Facebook. Downvoting is crucial so that the community can curate the content. Facebook (or Twitter) doesn't want you doing that. They just want as much content as possible and only care about likes/upvotes to trigger dopamine bursts. "Jane has liked your photo!!!" In anonymous sites people will just downvote you and tell you why you are wrong without mercy.
Another example. In Reddit and HN you have enough space for having actual conversations. In Facebook not only the space for comments is extremely small, but it's very difficult to know how are comments related to each other. After a couple of replies the UI stops making any sense. You don't know who is replying to who, etc. In practice, Facebook comments end up encouraging people leaving reactions to some content the user posted instead of being a place for discussion. Again, to trigger that dopamine burst when someone says something in the photo you just posted.
Of course, the objective of all this behavior shaping is to get more user engagement so that they spend more time in the platform and consume more ads.
Its ridiculous. Scroll through the feed, click a link, then go back in the browser. You will be scrolled to the same position on the feed of course, like any good and friendly web browser would do for you, but the feed will be in a completely different order and you have no idea if you should be scrolling UP or DOWN to return to the content.
Axing the chronological feed wasn't about making the platform better, it was about making it more difficult and time consuming to use, and they lost me as a regular user in the process.
A (lay) reading of their TOS makes it less than clear this is the case. Sure, it’s yours, but they have the right to do as they please as far as I can tell.
https://m.facebook.com/about/privacy/update?refid=42
The one that gets me is if a person I am friends with replies to a comment from someone I'm not friends with on a public post with a lot of comments.
Facebook puts this in my news feed saying "X replied to a comment on this post" and showing the post. But if I go to comments, it doesn't surface the comment that my friend replied to (or their reply). Why tell me the comment exists and then not let me see it?
Perhaps this is a side effect of it being difficult to measure things like "frustration" or "incoherence" at scale. Any team told to own `wall > ` and optimize for "engagement" is going to want to iterate independently on making the most wall-friendly post system they can think of. And unless this is a highly constrained optimization problem, with a centralized design team having coherence as their* KPI, it's going to be unconstrained free-for-all optimization on a team-by-team basis. A well-managed team-of-teams does not imply a UX-coherent team-of-teams. And maybe Facebook is fine with that. It's a challenge we need to face as technical leaders - where do you spend political capital pushing for a better product?
Instagram is doing the same thing from the activity feed. Clicking on a like/comment/mention from there takes you only to the comments section, so you can't see what image the thread is taking place on
I find it frustrating that communities are using FB. Notifications and mentions go missing left and right, and its UI is not (yet?) ideal for proper discussions - I much prefer the plain forums that have always existed. I get that FB is convenient because most people have an account already, but a FB login button would also do the trick for most communities. We surely don’t need a multi-billion company to host events and groups for us. Lock-in (social graph etc) is actually quite low for these features, so I think this is a bit of a desperate move from them.
Forums are nerdy and almost nobody wants to check N number of different forums to keep up with any groups they want to be part of.
FB isn't convenient because people have an account that works with "Login with Facebook." It's convenient because it's a one stop shop for your members.
Whether FB is ideal is going to vary per community though.
I hate that my gym uses FB as its primary communication tool. I don't use FB and often miss out on news and announcements.
I love the gym and I am probably the only member who doesn't use FB so I don't expect them to change, I just hope over time more and more people abandon it so they use more open methods of communications...
>We surely don’t need a multi-billion company to host events and groups for us
This is the crazy part about most "cloud" and "social" things today. Instead of spending money on making core technologies easy to use and accessible to all people we (collectively) fund middlemen who provide usability as a centralized, temporary service. This is exactly like TurboTax, except it's happening with all kinds of IT products and almost nobody cares.
For example, there is no fundamental reason why creating your own forum should be significantly more complicated than creating a Facebook account and installing their app on your phone. The only essential pieces of information you need for a forum are universal name/id of some sort (e.g. a domain name), administrative login and administrative password. Maybe not even that. Really, you don't even need login/password if you're okay with using email for authentication. Everything else is made-up bullshit that IT industry refuses to optimize (and, in fact, makes more complicated as years go by).
This isn't just about being annoyed by Facebook's bloated UI and glitches. We live in an increasingly information-driven society, so the ability of normal people to own and control their online information is increasingly important.
I loathe forums. Absolutely hate them. I've used them since I was a kid, even to the point of being an SA-Goon and every year on my birthday I'm reminded of the several hundred I've joined over the past 20+ years and they feel like this archaic thing I have to dust off when I dive in.
I'm in a lot of Jeep communities and there are a LOT of forums. Local, regional, national, drama-splintered, etc. I want a system that aggregates things I care about to me, not to dig through page after page looking for something interesting, tracking things via email notifications or staying logged in constantly.
Kind of like a quasi Reddit/Forum/Twitter mix. Longer form, a great search, the ability to follow tags.
The rare time I sign up for a forum nowadays, if my first try username is taken I just don't even join it.
I deleted FB last year and this is one of the only real pains I have from doing so. It wasn't amazing for groups anymore but it was better than having to log in to 20 different forums to find out if any of the Jeep groups were going to XYZ event next weekend.
> I want a system that aggregates things I care about to me, not to dig through page after page looking for something interesting, tracking things via email notifications
What's the problem with email notifications? I would think that's the ideal decentralized system that aggregates the things you care about. Is the problem that all notifications end up mixed in your inbox? One should be able put up an automated filter that moves incoming mail that matches arbitrary criteria and organizes these mails in folders. In fact, such a filter I believe is created automatically if you use `+` addresses in gmail and probably other email providers.
Have you tried shifting to RSS? It takes setup getting things situated but it's excellent. I get everything on the web into my RSS reader now: youtube, twitter, reddit, hn, news, blogs, pubmed alerts, journal tables of content, just about everything can be had via RSS. Even email newsletters can be turned into an RSS feed. It's all right there, and instead of checking a dozen sites I can skim through my feeds in no time at all, from my desktop or my phone.
At first I thought it was a good thing that I started seeing condo buildings create FB groups to create at least some sense of community.
But the ones I’ve seen just end up being an disorganized mess of negative comments that should be directed to condo boards and security themselves. If there is useful information it shouldn’t be locked into a platform like FB either…
> I much prefer the plain forums that have always existed
Indeed. Forums were (almost) perfect for me. Unfortunately the communities I was/am part of have switched to facebook, so my preferences don't matter. Facebook groups frustrate me to no end, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
The cost of entry to creating a Facebook community is zero, whereas it is non-zero to host your own. For example, there are local Pokemon Go, Spartan training, and 'local gossip' communities that simply wouldn't exist if Facebook didn't.
Forums existed before Facebook and will continue to exist after Facebook. Just because Facebook was seen as the lowest barrier to entry for many groups doesn’t mean they wouldn’t exist without it.
I also find it very frustrating. How can I get rid of FB while important groups I'm a part of use it?
However, the demise of RSS combined with the desire of individuals to share things online without having their own "site," means that there is no place like FB for aggregation of content I'm interested in.
I'm still trying to start a forum outside of FB, though. I'm using Discourse. It's a far cry from phpBB.
> I also find it very frustrating. How can I get rid of FB while important groups I'm a part of use it?
I think the only way to break the lock-in/network effect is: 1. creating a FB scraper; 2. push the scraped content to an alternative (more open) platform; 3. as more people use the scraper, more and more content from FB becomes available in the alternative platform; eventually everybody can move to the new platform.
Of course, a scraper is against FB's ToS, but this shouldn't be an impediment. For example, a scraper for YouTube has been available for years, and so far has not been successfully blocked.
> I much prefer the plain forums that have always existed.
How many of you remember NNTP, which offered a wealth of clients, each with its own formatting, threading, filtering, sorting, etc.? PHP forums weren't bad, but they were mostly just a mediocre replacement for what we already had. Now I expect we'll get this. Other than Facebook advertisers and shareholders, does anyone want it?
I've never used NNTP, but for the purpose they served I trust it was a more powerful system compared to web forums. I may also be wrong, but I imagine one of the primary reasons web forums became more popular than NNTP was because you only had to click on the blue e icon and click on a bookmark, compared to setting up an NNTP client. In other words, it was more accessible to computer laymen. This is the same case now with web forums vs Facebook. Facebook is more accessible to computer laymen. So, what gives you the confidence to say that "we'll get this"?
Forum software has also had a dip in convenience in my opinion; I prefer phpbb over discorse. I don't care about whitespace and infinite scrolling, I need my catalogical organization
XenForo is the consensus pick amongst forum folks (admins and users) I know, and it's significantly better than phpBB while not getting weird and silly like Discourse.
> I get that FB is convenient because most people have an account already, but a FB login button would also do the trick for most communities.
More than that convenience, I think it's the convenience of not having to deal with configuring some forum server software and using it. To many people, FB is the internet. Basing a community elsewhere raises the bar of entry for their target community.
I'm 26 now, and I first got into Facebook 12 years ago as a Freshman in high school.
It was cool at first because I actually spent time with my "friends" on there, or at least saw them on a daily basis at my small high school. It's changed in a couple key ways over time:
1. Family joining Facebook. It used to be a funny place I could goof around with my friends, posting whatever I wanted. Now I have to filter everything I say because my grandparents can see it. I concede that that's probably not a concern for many people, but I noticed the "vibe" changed significantly when Facebook's popularity grew beyond high school/college age people.
2. Sharing. Virtually everything on my timeline came from pages that post short "viral" videos for people to share. No one was posting anything unique or interesting. It was like a heavily bastardized version of Reddit without any interesting content. Anecdotally, this content seems to appeal to older people, who don't know of ways to see more interesting content.
Privacy concerns aside, those are the main reasons that I no longer care about Facebook. I deleted mine 6 months ago and I don't miss it at all.
> 1. Family joining Facebook. It used to be a funny place I could goof around with my friends, posting whatever I wanted. Now I have to filter everything I say because my grandparents can see it.
Google+ nailed this perfectly. You could place connections into Circles, and a post could be shared to specific circle(s). It let teenagers be teenagers, allowed professionals to separate their personal life and maintain a professional appearance, and so on.
In reality we do maintain separate personas for different groups of people we know, and it's ridiculous that no social network reflects this. The closest anyone else has come to this is Reddit where you can use multiple pseudonyms, so someone recognizing your posts/comments on one account does not get access to all of your posts/comments.
To be fair to Facebook (as if they deserve it it), they're fixing this with their focus on Groups. They know people aren't interested in the News Feed any more, so Groups are just another stab at that Circles concept.
I wouldn't say they nailed it perfectly, as the UX was stupidly confusing to use.
Also I'm pretty sure you can create lists of your friends and share certain posts or images with "everybody but X, Y, and Z" or "X and Z only" where [XYZ] are either lists or specific friends.
I think the point this changed for me was when the facebook feed changed from a chronological feed, to weighted "interest" posts. (Top stories and all that guff).
It used to be a bizarro town-hall of people I knew posting comments, photos etc. with each new post jumping to the top of the queue for people to pay attention to in "real time". It felt involved.
Now it just seems to be (in between all the shared memes and dodgy news articles) the more "active" posts popping up as a priority, which makes it feel more static to me. I liked seeing the posts with no likes as much as the high activity ones even if I wasn't going to like or comment on it myself. I wan't to see everything in order.
It's not very dynamic anymore.
I know you can still change the feed to chronological, but if most aren't doing that, the point is moot.
I use it for events, otherwise I'd have deleted it years ago too.
#1 really smacked me in the face recently. A friend of mine invited me to join her lifestyle group on FB. I couldn't do it because I just don't need my 70 year old mother or teenage daughter assuming things about my sex life based on FB groups I'm a member of.
I'm 38 and I feel exactly the same way. As soon as my parents joined it (along with hordes of people their age), it seems like that was when the changes in how the timeline functions happened.
I’d like to challenge the implied premise that the world needs Facebook to begin with. This is the premise under which Facebook seems to operate, but it doesn’t seem to concern with marketing the premise to users. What’s in it for any human person with a smartphone or computer? What value could possibly be extracted by such a person from being “on” Facebook?
Any redesign or other change made to the platform is pointless without a clear narrative concerning the underlying value proposition. How does the change affect that value proposition? My take is that the value of Facebook is zero in the best case, and possibly a net negative for society at large and for individuals. Isn’t Facebook supposed to convince us that their premise isn’t all evil, that there’s something in it for us beyond participation in mass data collection?
Facebook isn't obligated in any way to lay out their value prop in clear terms for users as you suggest. If users don't find their service valuable, they won't use it. Clearly that's not the case.
The value prop for advertisers is obvious. Without Facebook, thousands of small businesses (delivering great services) would be much smaller or out of business.
The value prop for users is manifold. To name a couple, without Facebook, people wouldn't connect and interact with people outside their proximal social circles. These otherwise lost connections often lead to strong healthy friendships, relationships, and/or partnerships. Many people also derive satisfaction from an entertainment perspective through Facebook whether that be through gossiping, viewing cat memes, or playing games. Though you may find these to be unimportant, that's you projecting your value system on someone else.
To say that Facebook's existence is a net negative to society requires some fundamental assumptions around what is valuable. For example, if all you value in this world is privacy, then of course Facebook is detrimental. If what you value is family, entertainment, and pleasure, Facebook is probably of great benefit.
>Facebook isn't obligated in any way to lay out their value prop in clear terms for users as you suggest. If users don't find their service valuable, they won't use it. Clearly that's not the case.
Of course they're not obligated, but it's a useful thing to ask in the context of this discussion. The average lifespan of a S&P 500 company is 18 years, tendency going down. So it seems to make sense to ask what Facebook's mi d and long term value proposition is.
And I think all the points you make don't apply to facebook in particular at all, but to online communication platforms in general. It's true that small businesses and communities profit from means to communicate online, but it's not obvious at all that in the future that means having a centralized, ad driven company run the show, or Facebook specifically.
In fact the entire pivot seems to indicate that all the things that facebook is built on, is ill suited for that future. How is Facebook going to sustain it's giant ad-driven money engine in a world of private, encrypted community interaction?
>What value could possibly be extracted by such a person from being “on” Facebook?
It seems silly to deny that people genuinely enjoy Facebook and find it useful. It makes sense considering that Facebook has supplanted and absorbed many of the sites and software that people used to use - Flickr, ICQ/AIM, and vBulletin/phpbb for instance.
I know a lot of people who share family photos on Facebook. I know many people who discuss topics ranging from gangstalking to glassblowing to autism. A lot of people share memes and humor and political discussion and people consume that content. Clearly people value FB for communication and entertainment. Messenger is also clearly with value for text chat, voice calls and video calls.
Many artists I know have made a living from selling things for free on Facebook, with few restrictions and 100% less fees than Etsy and eBay (the market switched to Instagram ~4 years ago). Many advertisers get the majority of their leads from Facebook.
Does the world need Facebook to do this? No, there are alternatives. But people clearly find it useful and it would be hard to support that the platform is without utility or value. Are you saying that the harm done by Facebook’s business practices exceeds the value of providing this for free to consumers?
Facebook has marketed its value prop pretty clearly with this update - (1) you can find events you like in your area, (2) you can participate in communities of people who have shared interests.
And to confidently claim that all 2.3 billion users of Facebook are getting zero or negative value out of it is pretty naive.
It seems they market their premise to users every day. Every event that I find it easier to keep track of, every event I find it easier to plan. Every community I participate in.
This is a clever redesign because events are even 'stickier' in their network effects than the news feed is. I don't think it's altruistic, but I think it's smart.
It's not that the world "needs" Facebook. The world wants Facebook. Facebook is a social network and people want to use social networks, for various reasons. Facebook happens is the biggest social networks. That's the value proposition. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant.
> My take is that the value of Facebook is zero in the best case, and possibly a net negative for society at large and for individuals.
You could confidently make the same claim about alcohol and cigarettes, yet both of these are good business.
I think the net-negative claim can be said for all real-time social media, including the site we're communicating on right now.
Healthy communication with other humans requires empathy and careful consideration of how your words affect others. Both get thrown out the window when you blast something into a text box, aimed at a random username.
how many people on the planet do you think smoke cigarettes?
I mean sure you can argue, in circular fashion, that everything people do provides net value to them or else they wouldn't do it, in which case there's no actual way to falsify that claim, but in a more genuine sense it's not at all clear that social media consumption has long term, net individual or social benefits.
It is an extremely new technology that has entered our society without much oversight and there's no reason to believe we have a good grip on its mid and long term effects. The evidence we have, for example concerning mental health of adolescents, in particular girls, is quite devastating.
Another comment has already provided a pretty solid refutation of your argument, but I have to ask: Why in the world do you think that the implied premise of Facebook redesigning one of its surfaces (for the 100th time..) is that the world needs it?
That's because you don't know what you're missing. Or, at least, that's what FB wants you to think.
FB is a vortex of dopamine hits, and zero 0⃣ value. It made me mad to be addicted to news I don't care about. I've manage to get myself out of that dopamine hit, and addicted to HN. But HN brings in some good information from time to time.
I quit FB more than a year ago but stared going in my profile again because I had to create a page for my app and I am shocked how slow and cluttered fb desktop site has become. its alarmingly bad, like terrible and yet I read on the news that their advertising revenue has increased. did people start using fb more? who clicks on these ads? who buys stuff on fb.
It could be a boiling the frog thing, but IMO the desktop experience hasn't changed much in a few years. It's not exactly information-dense, but more so than Twitter, somehow, despite the latter's "short text only" origins.
imho, advertising is an extremely fuzzy business. Advertisers throw money on campaigns because facebook tells them to do so, and then increases their prices. It generates revenue for sure, but i dont see it working out well in the long term
A fun thing you'll see sometimes in rants about other websites is the screenshot where someone coloured the content part of the website from all the other stuff, UI, sidebars and ads. The obvious labels are "stuff I'm interested in" vs. "stuff I'm not interested in".
Facebook was always bad in that regard. Friends posts are small boxes, crammed between sidebars. This redesign seems to think that the stuff we're not interested in, the sidebars, needs even more enlargement.
This seems like a brilliant move to help manage their public image. Groups and events seem like much more purpose-driven and thus value-generating interactions with Facebook.
I absolutely see why Facebook would want to be seen as the place where one goes to grow their community rather than the current stigma of fake news and inflammatory pieces on the feed.
Readit News
That's just one minor example. There's crap like this throughout the app. The web site is also glitchy as hell these days. When I brought up m.facebook.com the other day and went to type a status update, for every space I typed, two spaces were inserted.
I can never find settings for what I want. Most of the config is a mystery to me, no matter how many times facebook shows a message in my wall "hey, did you know you can do X this way?" or "we care about your privacy, so we added this or that option". I don't understand how groups work. I can never find the posts I want. Their constant reordering of my wall drives me mad. If I see a post I like, but I accidentally open a link or close the app and want to go back to it, it's bye bye post -- and good luck finding it again.
I cannot understand how facebook privacy works. I absolutely CANNOT send a private message to my wife sharing a photo "memory" of us two, no other people tagged, that facebook itself suggested I can share with her: it's always "message cannot be sent". What the hell, facebook?
I cannot understand how facebook censors publications in groups that sell things (too long to explain here, I asked a friend who works there, who asked the team involved, and they couldn't explain what was triggering the censorship either after I gave them the exact offending posts). Good luck finding specific posts in groups in a reasonable way, too.
I guess this is down to AI classifying the posts. No one can explain how the AI works except to say that it was trained on a huge amount of data and the data looks sufficiently similar to your posts that they got a bad score. (Also, welcome to the future! I expect in future lots of life-changing decisions will happen in a way that no one can explain or override).
I have productively used, for significant amounts of time: every desktop Windows since 3.1, maybe a half-dozen Linux window managers under almost as many distros, BeOS, Solaris CDE, and more, a half-dozen GUI word processing programs, at least as many instant message programs, forums of all sorts, maybe a dozen image and WYSYWG HTML editors combined, and so on off to the horizon. I've figured out how to use obtuse UIs for games like Shadow President and Crusader Kings II.
Facebook's UI was too confusing so I stopped using it. I couldn't figure it out at all. Recently I've been exposed to "Facebook Work" or whatever, and it's just as bad. What's this? Where does this post go? To whom? Why are these in this order? Is this thing the same as that other thing with the same name, and if so why's it on the page twice and grouped with different things? WTF.
The next thing to go was notifications. I don't care if my uncle liked my aunts posts, yet I get the notification! They even had the nerve to have a notification setting to turn this off that did absolutely nothing at all. Completely broken, but probably a feature and not a bug.
Have you ever seen a modern slot machine? There seems to be a pattern to winning, if only you study it a bit longer...just put in one more coin and the epiphany will come.
It is the least intuitive thing imaginable.
I think there is a certain logic to it, but it is a complicated logic, like learning Haskell or something.
The funny thing is a lot of artists seem to like it.
That was 10 years ago. Things may have changed for better or worse (or both)...
After mostly using Reddit for a while I realized that Facebook wasn't designed for having actual conversations or expressing yourself.
So for example, unlike sites like Reddit or HN, you can't downvote on Facebook. Downvoting is crucial so that the community can curate the content. Facebook (or Twitter) doesn't want you doing that. They just want as much content as possible and only care about likes/upvotes to trigger dopamine bursts. "Jane has liked your photo!!!" In anonymous sites people will just downvote you and tell you why you are wrong without mercy.
Another example. In Reddit and HN you have enough space for having actual conversations. In Facebook not only the space for comments is extremely small, but it's very difficult to know how are comments related to each other. After a couple of replies the UI stops making any sense. You don't know who is replying to who, etc. In practice, Facebook comments end up encouraging people leaving reactions to some content the user posted instead of being a place for discussion. Again, to trigger that dopamine burst when someone says something in the photo you just posted.
Of course, the objective of all this behavior shaping is to get more user engagement so that they spend more time in the platform and consume more ads.
Axing the chronological feed wasn't about making the platform better, it was about making it more difficult and time consuming to use, and they lost me as a regular user in the process.
A (lay) reading of their TOS makes it less than clear this is the case. Sure, it’s yours, but they have the right to do as they please as far as I can tell. https://m.facebook.com/about/privacy/update?refid=42
Facebook puts this in my news feed saying "X replied to a comment on this post" and showing the post. But if I go to comments, it doesn't surface the comment that my friend replied to (or their reply). Why tell me the comment exists and then not let me see it?
FB isn't convenient because people have an account that works with "Login with Facebook." It's convenient because it's a one stop shop for your members.
Whether FB is ideal is going to vary per community though.
I love the gym and I am probably the only member who doesn't use FB so I don't expect them to change, I just hope over time more and more people abandon it so they use more open methods of communications...
>We surely don’t need a multi-billion company to host events and groups for us
This is the crazy part about most "cloud" and "social" things today. Instead of spending money on making core technologies easy to use and accessible to all people we (collectively) fund middlemen who provide usability as a centralized, temporary service. This is exactly like TurboTax, except it's happening with all kinds of IT products and almost nobody cares.
For example, there is no fundamental reason why creating your own forum should be significantly more complicated than creating a Facebook account and installing their app on your phone. The only essential pieces of information you need for a forum are universal name/id of some sort (e.g. a domain name), administrative login and administrative password. Maybe not even that. Really, you don't even need login/password if you're okay with using email for authentication. Everything else is made-up bullshit that IT industry refuses to optimize (and, in fact, makes more complicated as years go by).
This isn't just about being annoyed by Facebook's bloated UI and glitches. We live in an increasingly information-driven society, so the ability of normal people to own and control their online information is increasingly important.
Acquiring users, finding volunteers for content moderation.. that’s the hard part.
What are these things? I've never used a phpbb host before.
I'm in a lot of Jeep communities and there are a LOT of forums. Local, regional, national, drama-splintered, etc. I want a system that aggregates things I care about to me, not to dig through page after page looking for something interesting, tracking things via email notifications or staying logged in constantly.
Kind of like a quasi Reddit/Forum/Twitter mix. Longer form, a great search, the ability to follow tags.
The rare time I sign up for a forum nowadays, if my first try username is taken I just don't even join it.
I deleted FB last year and this is one of the only real pains I have from doing so. It wasn't amazing for groups anymore but it was better than having to log in to 20 different forums to find out if any of the Jeep groups were going to XYZ event next weekend.
What's the problem with email notifications? I would think that's the ideal decentralized system that aggregates the things you care about. Is the problem that all notifications end up mixed in your inbox? One should be able put up an automated filter that moves incoming mail that matches arbitrary criteria and organizes these mails in folders. In fact, such a filter I believe is created automatically if you use `+` addresses in gmail and probably other email providers.
But the ones I’ve seen just end up being an disorganized mess of negative comments that should be directed to condo boards and security themselves. If there is useful information it shouldn’t be locked into a platform like FB either…
Indeed. Forums were (almost) perfect for me. Unfortunately the communities I was/am part of have switched to facebook, so my preferences don't matter. Facebook groups frustrate me to no end, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
However, the demise of RSS combined with the desire of individuals to share things online without having their own "site," means that there is no place like FB for aggregation of content I'm interested in.
I'm still trying to start a forum outside of FB, though. I'm using Discourse. It's a far cry from phpBB.
I think the only way to break the lock-in/network effect is: 1. creating a FB scraper; 2. push the scraped content to an alternative (more open) platform; 3. as more people use the scraper, more and more content from FB becomes available in the alternative platform; eventually everybody can move to the new platform.
Of course, a scraper is against FB's ToS, but this shouldn't be an impediment. For example, a scraper for YouTube has been available for years, and so far has not been successfully blocked.
How many of you remember NNTP, which offered a wealth of clients, each with its own formatting, threading, filtering, sorting, etc.? PHP forums weren't bad, but they were mostly just a mediocre replacement for what we already had. Now I expect we'll get this. Other than Facebook advertisers and shareholders, does anyone want it?
More than that convenience, I think it's the convenience of not having to deal with configuring some forum server software and using it. To many people, FB is the internet. Basing a community elsewhere raises the bar of entry for their target community.
It was cool at first because I actually spent time with my "friends" on there, or at least saw them on a daily basis at my small high school. It's changed in a couple key ways over time:
1. Family joining Facebook. It used to be a funny place I could goof around with my friends, posting whatever I wanted. Now I have to filter everything I say because my grandparents can see it. I concede that that's probably not a concern for many people, but I noticed the "vibe" changed significantly when Facebook's popularity grew beyond high school/college age people.
2. Sharing. Virtually everything on my timeline came from pages that post short "viral" videos for people to share. No one was posting anything unique or interesting. It was like a heavily bastardized version of Reddit without any interesting content. Anecdotally, this content seems to appeal to older people, who don't know of ways to see more interesting content.
Privacy concerns aside, those are the main reasons that I no longer care about Facebook. I deleted mine 6 months ago and I don't miss it at all.
Google+ nailed this perfectly. You could place connections into Circles, and a post could be shared to specific circle(s). It let teenagers be teenagers, allowed professionals to separate their personal life and maintain a professional appearance, and so on.
In reality we do maintain separate personas for different groups of people we know, and it's ridiculous that no social network reflects this. The closest anyone else has come to this is Reddit where you can use multiple pseudonyms, so someone recognizing your posts/comments on one account does not get access to all of your posts/comments.
Also I'm pretty sure you can create lists of your friends and share certain posts or images with "everybody but X, Y, and Z" or "X and Z only" where [XYZ] are either lists or specific friends.
It used to be a bizarro town-hall of people I knew posting comments, photos etc. with each new post jumping to the top of the queue for people to pay attention to in "real time". It felt involved.
Now it just seems to be (in between all the shared memes and dodgy news articles) the more "active" posts popping up as a priority, which makes it feel more static to me. I liked seeing the posts with no likes as much as the high activity ones even if I wasn't going to like or comment on it myself. I wan't to see everything in order.
It's not very dynamic anymore.
I know you can still change the feed to chronological, but if most aren't doing that, the point is moot.
I use it for events, otherwise I'd have deleted it years ago too.
Any redesign or other change made to the platform is pointless without a clear narrative concerning the underlying value proposition. How does the change affect that value proposition? My take is that the value of Facebook is zero in the best case, and possibly a net negative for society at large and for individuals. Isn’t Facebook supposed to convince us that their premise isn’t all evil, that there’s something in it for us beyond participation in mass data collection?
The value prop for advertisers is obvious. Without Facebook, thousands of small businesses (delivering great services) would be much smaller or out of business.
The value prop for users is manifold. To name a couple, without Facebook, people wouldn't connect and interact with people outside their proximal social circles. These otherwise lost connections often lead to strong healthy friendships, relationships, and/or partnerships. Many people also derive satisfaction from an entertainment perspective through Facebook whether that be through gossiping, viewing cat memes, or playing games. Though you may find these to be unimportant, that's you projecting your value system on someone else.
To say that Facebook's existence is a net negative to society requires some fundamental assumptions around what is valuable. For example, if all you value in this world is privacy, then of course Facebook is detrimental. If what you value is family, entertainment, and pleasure, Facebook is probably of great benefit.
Of course they're not obligated, but it's a useful thing to ask in the context of this discussion. The average lifespan of a S&P 500 company is 18 years, tendency going down. So it seems to make sense to ask what Facebook's mi d and long term value proposition is.
And I think all the points you make don't apply to facebook in particular at all, but to online communication platforms in general. It's true that small businesses and communities profit from means to communicate online, but it's not obvious at all that in the future that means having a centralized, ad driven company run the show, or Facebook specifically.
In fact the entire pivot seems to indicate that all the things that facebook is built on, is ill suited for that future. How is Facebook going to sustain it's giant ad-driven money engine in a world of private, encrypted community interaction?
It seems silly to deny that people genuinely enjoy Facebook and find it useful. It makes sense considering that Facebook has supplanted and absorbed many of the sites and software that people used to use - Flickr, ICQ/AIM, and vBulletin/phpbb for instance.
I know a lot of people who share family photos on Facebook. I know many people who discuss topics ranging from gangstalking to glassblowing to autism. A lot of people share memes and humor and political discussion and people consume that content. Clearly people value FB for communication and entertainment. Messenger is also clearly with value for text chat, voice calls and video calls.
Many artists I know have made a living from selling things for free on Facebook, with few restrictions and 100% less fees than Etsy and eBay (the market switched to Instagram ~4 years ago). Many advertisers get the majority of their leads from Facebook.
Does the world need Facebook to do this? No, there are alternatives. But people clearly find it useful and it would be hard to support that the platform is without utility or value. Are you saying that the harm done by Facebook’s business practices exceeds the value of providing this for free to consumers?
And to confidently claim that all 2.3 billion users of Facebook are getting zero or negative value out of it is pretty naive.
This is a clever redesign because events are even 'stickier' in their network effects than the news feed is. I don't think it's altruistic, but I think it's smart.
> My take is that the value of Facebook is zero in the best case, and possibly a net negative for society at large and for individuals.
You could confidently make the same claim about alcohol and cigarettes, yet both of these are good business.
I haven't seen anything that has convinced me this is true.
I don't consider the dopamine-driven compulsions of its users to be evidence of 'want'.
Healthy communication with other humans requires empathy and careful consideration of how your words affect others. Both get thrown out the window when you blast something into a text box, aimed at a random username.
I mean sure you can argue, in circular fashion, that everything people do provides net value to them or else they wouldn't do it, in which case there's no actual way to falsify that claim, but in a more genuine sense it's not at all clear that social media consumption has long term, net individual or social benefits.
It is an extremely new technology that has entered our society without much oversight and there's no reason to believe we have a good grip on its mid and long term effects. The evidence we have, for example concerning mental health of adolescents, in particular girls, is quite devastating.
Facebook has employees whose entire job is to make this service addictive and to keep people posting.
In that sense, the 'value' is hard to differentiate from a dopamine-driven compulsion to continue posting and hitting 'like'.
Personally, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by not being on Fb.
FB is a vortex of dopamine hits, and zero 0⃣ value. It made me mad to be addicted to news I don't care about. I've manage to get myself out of that dopamine hit, and addicted to HN. But HN brings in some good information from time to time.
My understanding is that the hip and with-it (or the under-30s) don't use FB anyway nowadays.
For me, it's almost purely a slightly better version of SMS.
People who install adblockers are people who do not want to click on ads.
Me, accidentally while trying to tell facebook to never show me that ad again.
Like you noticed, the ad situation has become dire.
Still cluttered and awful but fast.
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Facebook was always bad in that regard. Friends posts are small boxes, crammed between sidebars. This redesign seems to think that the stuff we're not interested in, the sidebars, needs even more enlargement.
I absolutely see why Facebook would want to be seen as the place where one goes to grow their community rather than the current stigma of fake news and inflammatory pieces on the feed.