Facebook is Worse than AOL | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is Worse than AOL

tomorrowmuseum.com

29 pointsblasdel19 comments

This is essentially one person's long rant about why they don't like Facebook (especially the "Poke" feature!). I think some of the anger is misdirected; if you don't want your worlds colliding, don't add some people as friends. How hard is that? Or just don't use it.

Lighten up, man. It's a website, not a government or a religion or a philosophy. It's a fucking website.

I kind of liked it. He makes some good points about why Facebook might not be the be-all, end-all of social networking. I found the historical comparisons to AOL informative since I never spent much time inside the garden.

Also, it seems a little disingenuous to say that Facebook is just a website. There are a lot of blog posts and a lot of valuation arguing that they are going to be a huge, profitable business for a long time to come. If you want a broader philosophical issue, think about the trend towards semi-open systems in tech today. Facebook has apps and Connect, but they keep a pretty tight hold on user's data. Apple has an app store for the iPhone, but, well, they're Apple. Speculation/rants on how all of this will turn out is interesting to me.

Hrm AOL provided internet service via a restrictive piece of software to people who didn't know any other way to access all of the internet. AOL distributed so many FREE AOL CDs that you could probably hollow out Mauna Kea and fill it with those ubiquitous bold font neon colored plastic discs. More than once in the early part of this decade I would find broken AOL CD litter on the street. Then there is the stop loss phone policy where customer service reps would put you through such hell when you attempted to cancel your service that you'd end up rather going with 90 days of free service than bear it. AOLHell punters, password stealer detectors, and various buddy invite spam proggs. Phishing was practically invented via AOL IM. Rainbowed colored ~~~&&&(({HuGZzz$}))&&&-- chat. Steve Case's tight control over everything makes Steve Jobs look like Richard Stallman. To top off it AOL even fucked its own AND Time Warner's share holders and settled a massive half-billion dollar accounting fraud. Since Case left, AOL has been in the business of layoffs.

In what universe is Facebook worse than AOL?

Except for physical litter I can see quite a few similarities on some abstract level, don't you?

"“Poke” is the dumbest and worst feature ever invented for a social network. "

Really? Because I think plenty of people (primarily teens) would disagree. Imagine you're 16 and there's a cute girl that you're too nervous to talk to but maybe if you just poked... Oh wait. You did it. Can't take it back now. Will she respond..?

I'd love to see how many relationships were kindled this way. I know this isn't really crucial to her argument, but she spent a whole paragraph ripping on pokes.

Edit: Corrected author's gender.

http://www.facebook.com/joanne.mcneil

He?

If you continually do it back and forth, it also becomes a voluntary mechanism to show that you're still alive/online/paying attention. It's basically a human ping.

Actually yeah... I have a "poke war" still on with a friend that I've lost touch with in real life. It's been almost 3 years now - people make too big a deal out of it. It's a virtual ping, you don't have to pong if you don't want.

I was a poke-hoarder. It has the nice advantage of preventing people from continually poking me. Email me if you want a response, a poke carries zero information.

I really appreciated the article's look back to previous experience with collapsing networks and how users found spaces in those as they were dying. Facebook will provide value like that for a while, but the latest homepage update is part of a too steady trend toward less and less user control over the aspects of the Facebook interface that matter most for the user experience. If the user experience is annoying, it is easy for Facebook to die.

How does the new design give you less control? I actually think that they have been remarkably good at fixing problems. I remember saying that the apps would kill facebook. I was sent beers, challenged to ninja wars and whatnot many, many times a day. They designed their way out of that.

When I only read status updates, I didn't see all the annoying notifications of friends' other activities that I don't want to see. It's barely possible, by using left navigation "Friends | Status Updates" to get the view of the feed I used to like, except that seems to be buggy just now.

Also, my own homepage is junked up with back notifications of where I have commented or who I have friended, and I don't have a default to turn off those notifications, which I have to delete one by one. Facebook is often annoying like that--it refuses to stay clean and simple. It doesn't allow global settings that give me what I want.

I think this misses one very important point. FB has a killer feature in photo sharing and a comment feed that surrounds that and now other media and updates. However, I still believe that the photo sharing on FB is done better than anywhere else, and that will continue to be a driver for them.

Now if only they'd start serving images larger than 800x600! You don't even have the option to laboriously click through twice to see a larger version (as with Flickr) -- I think they don't even store any larger sizes as a way to avoid boiling the ocean of storage.

At least the default display size is larger than Flickr's absurd 500px, and it's much faster and nicer to browse quickly. Flickr is fucking abysmal for actually looking at photos, and for no good reason. Everyone just has to use greasemonkey scripts to get a decent view.

Flickr is fucking abysmal for actually looking at photos, and for no good reason.

How about bandwidth?

They have the fullscreen Flash slideshow view that uses higher-res photos, and defaults to downloading the next one every 3s. It used to be ridiculously awful: super slow, never preloading images, and if you wanted to see the title or description it would shrink the image down to 300px. Now they've improved it to be merely mediocre, but it still doesn't preload more than the next image, and you have to click through to the standard photo page to see anything else.

I think they're just obstinate -- the standard pages haven't really changed since maybe 2004. Besides, Flickr was never about looking at images -- it was originally a MMUD, and it still basically is -- there was a moment of truth back in ~2005 when the site was invaded by users from the U.A.E. mass-spamming groups and pools in a huge clusterfuck, and the site encouraged that rather than reject them. Meanwhile you would get your account hell-banned (NIPSAed) if you posted illustrations or screenshots, as if you were posting porn. This practice only really stopped a few years ago, not long before they started hosting short videos.

Now they've improved it to be merely mediocre, but it still doesn't preload more than the next image, and you have to click through to the standard photo page to see anything else.

Again, if they're optimizing for bandwidth...

I'm guessing that the standard photo pages and photostream pages account for 99% of their usage. It also sounds like you have more of a philosophical beef with them than anything else.

I understand this is one person's rant against FB but i am quite surprised that not a lot more people have experienced the same rage against FB.

I think the author does make a good point about boundaries. Lets say i sign up to FB using the same email id i used for sending an email to an office colleague once , now FB will suggest him to me and me to my colleague as "Add as a friend". This is fundamentally broken and no simply ignoring it or rejecting that is not enough. Why ? because the other party "knows" that you have rejected them.

Boundaries in social interaction are important and much more subtle than what FB models, add to this broken model the prevalence of stupid apps and that's enough for someone like to me get out of FB.

I thought I was going to be the only one commenting on how terrible this article is. Its a few sentences away from being aimless. Someone just has a personal problem with Facebook. The crowd that's using Facebook isn't the same crowd that was inhabiting some old message boards with him/her back in the AOL days. Those are the borderline geeks.

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