Facebook's Problem Isn't Privacy | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's Problem Isn't Privacy

cringely.com

37 pointsrfreytag13 comments

"If Facebook really wants to get profitable it needs to get smaller by kicking-off users who don’t make it money. Then it has to be be really nice to the ones they keep."

As far as I can see, this contradicts most of what he was talking about previously. If you kick the people off of Facebook who don't make them much money, you'll be kicking off the people who don't play Farmville or Mafia Wars, and you will be left with an even worse signal to noise ratio.

Despite that, I thought it was an interesting article.

The reason people use facebook is because everyone is there. Get rid of that network effect by kicking off 90% of users, and facebook has just suicided.

Better curation of posts is what's needed. The rushing torrent of information is useless. We need to reward those who post interesting things and penalize those who post drivel, without alienating friends. We also need better filters.

Cringely gives good advice would facebook target to be a web service. Seems clear that their first goal is not to be a popular web service but to harvest data. Business wise this makes sense as the potential value of that huge pile of information should surpass the earnings of any subscription site.

This criticism is spot on, but it's not FB's fault. Look, if you have >800 "friends", chances are you will get many less than interesting status updates, that is true for any social medium. You can of course hide people, but I've found that the cost of miss is much larger than the cost of false alarm, e.g. I can quickly filter, maybe 20 status updates per minute to judge their level of relevance. However, even people who post "inane" updates sometimes post interesting stuff.

Now, one interesting thing that FB doesn't have is a "best-of-today" display of all public updates, that can be voted up or down by all users. This would be an incentive to post interesting updates. What do you think?

Facebook is useless to me. We’re all too connected to really connect.

Exactly. Once again, it's the problem of social flatland. Meeting everyone we know all at once is never conducive to meaningful interaction. It's why, even at a party, surrounded by many people we know, we rarely address the entire group and certainly never carry on a conversation that way.

Social networking will stagnate until someone builds upon a non-flat model.

Facebook isn't flat. It has friend lists. The problem isn't the product; it's the people. It's not always easy to mentally categorize new people you meet because you don't know what bucket they're ultimately going to end up in. Pruning and adding to lists is work. Worst of all, creating lists to begin with requires sifting through all of your friends and bucketing them.

Facebook has tried to address this by automatically filtering your feed to show you the people it thinks you care about. I don't know how well this works because I'm too much of an information glutton to allow things to be hidden from me, so I turned the filtering off.

The problem isn't the product; it's the people.

I think Don Norman would probably disagree with you.

I maintain that this is a design problem. We meet people in a variety of different contexts in real life: These contexts vary by geography, time, and purpose, but they're discrete entities that should be as translatable to an application's design patterns as our person-to-person relationships already are. How to do this smoothly, of course, is a bit trickier than just making a buddy list, hence the fact that it's not being done very well right now. But that's no reason to give up and blame the users!

The funny thing is, Facebook actually got this mostly right at the beginning. The "networks" were exactly the kind of construct that a non-flat social network needs; their downfall was that they started out too big to be useful and only bloated from there until they were retired. Networks the size of your immediate family, a group close friends, your team at the office, would have worked. And, with proper design, they still can.

Some problems are just hard. No one blames calculators for the difficulty of calculus. Classifying relationships is something we don't normally do consciously.

People use email and Facebook messages for the small groups you've mentioned. Attempting to shoehorn that use case into the news feed and the post workflow would complicate things. Most things that people share outside of work don't need to be limited to few people.

Cringely is basically saying, "I wish Facebook solved this problem that I have, but few of its other users probably have as well." It makes no sense.

I guess I'm just a social leper or something, but I don't have this problem. Nor do most of the people I know who aren't professional networkers. I have something in the neighborhood of 150 "friends" on FB. Only about 30 or so of them post with any regularity.

If you are "friends" with ever person you ever meet, yeah, this will be a problem for you. On the other hand, if you limit your "friends" to people you would actually make a point to hang out with in person when you're in the same place, it doesn't seem to be an issue.

In other words, this isn't Facebook's problem, it's Cringely's problem.

An alternative view: Facebook needs more kinds of friends. Best friends. Respected advisors. Acquaintances. Annoying friends. Tolerated relatives. Workable filtering could be inferred from these designations. (Which could then be tweaked into good filtering.)

I think the problem of facebook is not the size of your friend list, but the size of "useless" (matter of tastes) apps that populate the timeline, like quizzes, and a big etc of questions, games...

I block one, and ten new appear...

By default, Facebook limits the Live Feed to show only posts from people it thinks you care about to limit overload. I assume few people change this, but Cringely has. Click "Edit Options" at the bottom of the Live Feed.

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