Ask HN: What Sucks About Facebook? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Sucks About Facebook?

16 pointsbl4k34 comments

The web tore through Friendster, Orkut, MySpace etc. Will Facebook be next, and if so, when? I realized that time was up for MySpace when I wasn't using it, and when people I knew where not using it. That gap was plugged by Facebook rather quickly, and it spread like a weed. Is Facebook still vulnerable? It would have been impossible to imagine MySpace dying the way it has, but it happen.

I now realize that I no longer use Facebook. I am there, but I rarely login anymore. Instead of listing my reasons, I wold prefer to hear from HN what they think sucks about Facebook. I spoke to some 'average users' and got some feedback from them as well, and it seems that Facebook could be a fad. So HN, Facebook: The next Google or MySpace and why?

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I deleted mine a few days ago. Hopefully I'll make it through the 14-days where I can re-activate.

## My Facebook Rants:

* __Friends__ - A social network should just sense the people you're interested in and give updates accordingly. This would do away with your creepy co-worker demanding that you be his/her "friend." You wouldn't have to delete, and offend, that kid that you never spoke to in the 5th grade. In fact, Facebook kind of requires that its users adopt a kind of 5th grade mentality towards social interaction. "Will you be my girlfriend?"

OkCupid gets this part right. You can add people as friends but updates from people you've recently stalked show up in your feed automatically. If OkCupid wasn't a dating-oriented site, it wouldn't make a bad social networking site.

* __The e-mails__ - I block Facebook emails on gmail. There really should be a way to opt-out of this. It's annoying.

* __Tagging__ - This seemed neat at first and was what probably made Facebook popular in the Facebook but it was a mistake. When I had Facebook, I just blocked anyone from seeing pictures I was tagged in. If I went to a party or something; I would avoid cameras because I didn't want to have to worry about a picture of me drinking and playing dice in an alley to show up on my wall.

* __Vendor Lock-In__ - You can't download your own profile pictures, status updates, etc without the use of some ephemeral 3rd party tool that probably won't exist for very long.

* __The 14-day re-activation period__ - I quit smoking after 6 years; it was easier.

(Just pretend that HN supports markdown :)

Good answers. I am the same with photos

I believe Facebook is the most amazing social interaction thing ever made so I kind have this need to correct some of the things you said, sorry!

Friends: If you reject someone from being your friend they are not informed about it but, if they are smart enough, they can check your profile page and see if they can add you again; you can also block that person and he won't be able to ask to be your friend again; I think this is almost perfect, the only problem I see here is the word "friend". You can accept someone and add that person to a list which will make that person unable to see anything if you want to while still being "friends". Oh, you can also just forget about accepting friendships you don't want to have, the person asking for it will know you still didn't accept him but that's about it.

Emails: You can disable all email notifications (or toggle most of them off leaving the most important on, it's really well done) going to "My Account", "Notifications" tab.

Tagging: You can make your default friends' settings restrict things like seeing photos. If you want some of them to see those photos you can add them to a list where you let them see photos.

Vender Lock-In: I'm not sure about this but didn't Open Social just solve this problem?

I think social networks are cyclic because they have a 'fashion' element to them. Whereever the 'hip' people are that's where the rest will follow. So once the 'hip' people (some would say the trend-setters) move out their groupies will follow.

Of course after that it's a long way down that hill that you can literally shoot up on but I don't think there ever will be a permanent social network. It's more like a locust thing. And hip people will always be on the move, if only because they really can't be seen eating in the same restaurant that every other person eats at, so they'll go and discover a new joint that nobody else has heard of or a new style of wearing their hair, their jeans or their baseball caps. It's a fashion thing.

I do agree with you. But if you view it this way, are't most systems cyclic? companies, economic boom and burst. Even America might fall one day after its peak. The important question is how long the cycle is. Previous social networks have never gained such mainstream adoption and user participation as Facebook have. Facebook might fall one day, but my bet is that it's gonna take longer than you anticipated. Everything is a fashion thing, essentially (even religions).

The interval between shifts seems to be lengthening, I think this is due to the increased effectiveness of the predominant social network du jour to exploit network effects. Maybe that alone will be enough to counter the 'fashion' factor but I don't think we're there yet.

And sure, everything is eventually cyclic (well, almost everything) but I mean cyclic on a measurable (say 10 years) time-scale, not something geological.

I don't think so, but of course this differs between demographics. In my experience it has become completely natural to "add someone on Facebook" instead of asking their telephone number. Also all the local competition here (Sweden) has been marginalized.

Great answer (by google engineer) to your question http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

I just finished going through that, thanks a lot for the link - and excellent presentation.

Great presentation. It put into words exactly what has concerned me most about Facebook.

In my opinion, Facebook has some time left but not much. I would guess that a new site will take over within the next 12 months. The transition will be similar to the one we saw a few years back when everyone made the shift from Myspace to Facebook.

Even though I am 20 and in college and am friends with everyone I know in real life, everyone I knew growing up and from summer camps, and many of my internet friends as well, I rarely go on anymore. It used to be a daily activity.

What went wrong? I think it just became so popular, had so many people that it wasn't not interesting anymore. We all have a little hipster in us - once everyone you know and their mother and their grandmother is using something, it starts to lose its appeal.

Lastly, Facebook had too much change. They could have updated it once or twice with fairly big changes and been fine. I noticed that I hated hearing about facebook or going on facebook when they were rolling out new privacy agreements and rearranging the site layout once a week.

There is a big potential for anyone developing the next social networking site. Who knows what aspects will make it popular though.

I actually like Facebook and don't have any complaints that come to mind. Perhaps demographic has something to do with it: I'm an engineer in my mid-40's who spends a fair amount of time online. But I got an account because of a very non-technical friend who used it to share pictures and anecdotes about her life. I log onto FB about 1-2 times a week for around 10 minutes each, so I'm not a heavy user. I'm using it mostly to keep in touch with people I haven't seen since college, or friends who live a long distance away that I don't talk to often. And for that it works really well.

I don't care about FB privacy because really, there's nothing there that I worry about getting out. My friends are pretty boring :-)

I think a powerful part of Facebook is the photosharing operation - I believe it is the biggest photosharing site on the web now. Without it I think it could die off quicker.

I myself have been using the site less and less over the last 6 months but I still log in at least daily.

I think it will be a generation gap that will end it- people in their early teens will not want to be on the same social networking site as their mothers and fathers!

IMO Facebook is too big and real to be a fad. That doesn't mean that they can be taken over one day by another service, but they are managed very well (unlike Myspace) and have an excellent product vision. I knew myspace would crash and burn eventually, I hated that site from early on. Surfing myspace was too godamned annoying with animated GIFs, background music, random friend requests, and spam. Facebook however, gave everyone what they wanted; information and connections to people they know.

I still use facebook everyday and I'm a year out of college. I probably engage with less features (like wall commenting, photo uploading, apps, games) than I used to and do more passive browsing.

I think the next big "social network" won't be recognized as a social network. It will gather an audience based on some form of engagement revolving around a winning feature set. Kind of like the way Twitter came along, but with a better feature fit that would eventually creep into Facebook territory.

There needs to be some way to easily differentiate between close friends and casual acquaintances. I'm mainly interested in interacting with close friends, and there are some things I don't wish to share with everyone I know. Without this, everyone is on the same level and it leads to bad signal to noise ratio.

I already hinted at this on a comment I made above but you can make list with different permissions. I have one for real friends, one for people I have to accept but I don't want them to see anything about me and those who aren't on any of those lists are on the default one: they can't see most things but they can see more than those who are almost blocked.

Facebook is not free. There is a psychological price and a spiritual tax to pay, both are sly enough to go unnoticed by 90% of Facebook’s users. They are called ‘users’ for a good reason; users = addicts. The product itself is designed like a potent drug that exploits reptilian and mammillian frailties for additional profit. Cynic, you say? Just look for yourself, it’s hard to deny that the founders behind Facebook saw an ocean of data waiting to be exploited for billions of dollars.

What sucks about facebook? That I can't stay away from it and I waste at least an hour or two everyday on it. Someone should ban facebook. I'm not even kidding

What are you doing during all those hours? I never got into it that much (other than trawling for hot women).

I am recent graduate, so I guess that explains a little. Normally, its being in touch with everyone. I moved here from Nepal 4 years ago and Facebook is a great way to be in touch with my high school friends. Maybe I like to keep an eye on what people are upto :) plus, lots of event planning and chat communication happen in facebook now. I see myself just leaving a msg on facebook than using my email client. It's very sad that how digital world is separating real life communications, eh?

wth, this comment will always bother me.

  sad...

so contact people in real life! Write a hand written letter to someone.

If you don't know anybody that will sincerely appreciate a hand-written letter from you, make some new friends and get a new mother, father, sister, uncle, aunt, and dog.

Communication is not a one way street, sir! I was just saying what I feel. My friends prefer texting over phone calls while I am the other way. I have texting disabled on my phone so that I can actually talk more often, though at the expense of few lost communications.

regarding "get a new mother, father..." it doesn't cost to have some respect for others, like seriously! I don't know why did I even bothered to respond

Friendster, Orkut, Myspace all failed due to emergence of Facebook. If another better social networking platform comes up, Facebook will go down...But I don't see that happening in near future. Facebook does look like going to be soaring up higher and higher if you look at the rate of their growth in not just the number of users but also their features and company size.

That I can't hide friends from other friends.

this came up recently. most people in real life have more than one social network/graph. facebook needs to support this at some point (ie. work, family, friends, ex-girlfriends, f buddies, etc.)

Check my comment above about lists, it's already there!

Uploading multiple photos/videos from an iPhone. If this is possible in the fb app I can't find it. Pixelpipe is the best solution I can find.

The unfiltered narcissism, the disjointed philosophy spewed by bored people, and the rap lyrics. Of course, most of my friends are young.

Centralized, and closed. I want an OpenAuth or similar solution. Diaspora could be it.

Ye I just don't know if most people care about that though..

Facebook sucks because it is careless about my privacy.

the concept itself

the movie

the games.

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