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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

This is how Facebook operates. Open up the platform until everyone piles on and basically ruins it, then tighten it back up and start charging those same people to do what they were previously doing for free.

They did it with games (they became basically spam until they locked it down). Then when they opened things up to advertising, you could basically run any ad you want to any offer you want. Then they tightened that down once it got adoption. And now they're going to lock the news feed back down a bit.

It's interesting how well they've pulled this off without poisoning the well and alienating their user base.

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Personally I've been alienated, and many of my non techie friends have been too, but the network effect is just too strong and pulls you back in when old-so-and-so plans their birthday party or whatever.

That's it. I use it purely for answering invitations to events and a handy address book. Otherwise my social media time is away from FB, though, I still spend time on FB in the form of Instagram.

Interesting. I don't think I've ever used Facebook for anything productive (like RSVPing to something). My newsfeed is a complete and utter wasteland, but there's something interesting and addicting about it. It's like watching a car wreck. It's awful, but you can't look away.

I find Facebook pages visually ugly -- unpleasant to look at at a level that has nothing to do with my opinions about the site.

But that's just me. I find that British tabloids like the Sun look similar -- and they are designed that way to attract rather than repel eyeballs.

It's not just you. Maybe FB is not an example of brutalist design [1] [2] because it's more polished that true brutalists are. It's just a plain vanilla site. Instead of thousands of different layouts on myspace and even on blogger, it's a one size fit all design. A white and blue page should be enough for everybody, and it seems it is, especially when it has the size of an app on a phone. Remember that the vast majority of its users didn't have any web property before their page and feed on FB. They don't find anything missing.

[1] http://brutalistwebsites.com/

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05...

Facebook is overall ugly in appearance with a bad layout, bad column widths, bad fonts, bad font sizes...the list grows. Lot of clutter in a small space is how I see it.

If you think Facebook is ugly, remember Myspace.

I deleted my FB account several years ago and you'd be surprised how many actually find my email when they want to invite me for something. If someone can't be bothered to send me an email I'm not too concerned about going to their party.

I never had one, and you'd be surprised how many don't. This has caused me to miss camping trips, parties, dinners, and weddings. Of course it's possible that I'm just such an obnoxious person that nobody wants me around, but if that were the case, I doubt I'd have received such abject and clearly heartfelt apologies from people who didn't invite me to things because I wasn't on their Facebook friends list.

Of course, such apologies always come with the implicit "...but if you don't get on Facebook, it's going to keep happening." I actually started to create a Facebook account, but refused to continue past the point where it asked for my email account credentials in order to construct a friends list from my correspondents.

Yes, I'm aware that's optional and can be bypassed - but when the relationship starts out with a boundary test as blatant and extreme as that, I'm really not interested in hanging around to find out where my new abusive partner is going to decide to go from there.

So I still don't have a Facebook account. As a direct result of this, I also don't have a meaningful social life any more, which is a shame, because I rather enjoyed the one I did have. I'm hardly alone in this. Is it any wonder there are people who want to kill Facebook with a hatchet?

Weddings really? That's sad. Using FB to send out wedding invites seems pretty gauche.

No, using a Facebook friends list as a basis for an invitation list, and forgetting to add in the couple of people you know who aren't on Facebook because you haven't noticed that Facebook has become your address book of record.

It's just not something people think about, and that worries the hell out of me. We've never before seen a world where a single, rather secretive corporation, which has already shown itself willing to experiment with its users' perceptions in order to better serve its own purposes, mediates practically every interpersonal relationship of a significant fraction of the species. When I was growing up, that would've been nothing but fodder for third-rate dystopian sf, and yet here we are.

I don't view going to parties as a chore, I actually enjoy them - so I don't want to miss out. It's nice to see what events your friends are interested in too.

And for spontaneous events (wanna hang out in the park this afternoon?), facebook group chat is still the common denominator, although that might change with facebook forcing people to install their messenger in order to being able to use it on mobile.

They (FB) prey on us with perceived or actual low enough social standing for us to not be found by email.

My email address is so obvious, in fact you can even work it out from my user id, however that still doesn't stop my so-called 'friends' telling me they didn't know how to contact me during my FB detox periods. Some people just don't want the friction that having to actually send an email, brings. Go figure.

Someone always hits 'reply all' and ruins it for everyone.

Good luck trying to hit "Reply-All" when the email is sent correctly (all recipients are BCC for their own privacy).

I missed plenty of bithday parties because of facebok. I usually just call and congratulate in those cases, people feel awkward and then say "you need to get on fb". If I do show up after the call it often messes things up, like their plan for some number of seats of something. I thing facebookers perceive non-fakebookers as antisocial. I'm okay with that, I'm also okay that people erode the friendship because I'm not on fakebook, it means you weren't a real friend after all because you weren't also friend on fb, how simple is it really!

From a business point of view that is okay.

You're not one of the users that brings money directly to the fb platform but you help keep the network effect in place.

Obviously Facebook can't be all things to all people, so these types of complaints doesn't really show that Facebook is weak, but rather that it is strong and has a lot of auxiliary users that helps keep core functions valuable.

Thankfully facebook events never really took off in my social groups. Currently it's just a couple of Watsapp groups (core friends/activities/classes) and an increasingly daunting email thread for a wedding later this summer.

Although your comment makes me wonder if there is a space for a more specialised 'events' app. Maybe this is where the Google/Apple calendars are vaguely headed.

Strangely, I thought Foursquare with its checkins would add event scheduling (future checkins), but I guess they went a different way.

> It's interesting how well they've pulled this off without poisoning the well and alienating their user base.

Who says they haven't? Just because people endure it for now because everyone else they know uses it doesn't mean they'll all stick around.

Re:ads. So shocked people still bother to buy them at all, seen companies throw 7 figures at it with only a fraction of an investment back from it (1 mil invested got about 80K of product sales IIRC). Always advise wayyyy against it these days.

well, they still have well over a billion active users. They've alienated some, but it's barely a blip on their radar it seems.

Facebook did the same with buy more like and promote posts features.

I have written a blog post about it two years ago.

That's why I don't get into their bandwagon as customer anymore.

http://fatihdonmez.me/facebook-marketing-black-hole/

I think of this as their "killing you softly method". If they want to discourage some activity, they don't just kill it outright, instead just slowly turn down the dial on some virality-affecting coefficient.

They've also done it with app developers!

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