Hacker News Reader

Comment by firasd | Hacker News Reader

From my readings, something Facebook has been struggling with for a couple years is getting people to post more personal updates.

Thus their Newsfeed changes de-prioritizing articles, and thus (I figure) their experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes, and enabling MySpace-like gradient backgrounds on text posts...

This dynamic makes me recall something: Anyone remember how back in the day (like 2006) Facebook had a feature called 'Wall-to-Wall' conversations? You would go to a friend's profile and just write a message, they would go to your 'wall' and reply, and mutual friends could see the conversation.

These days between the Newsfeed, comments on posts, and Messenger, the only reason I would post on another friend's profile is to wish them a happy birthday. That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.

View on HN

The wall to wall stuff loses its practicality when my mother joined Facebook. Informal group chat among friends happens on chat programs like hangouts and whatsapp were you can have a large group of friends in one chat for a very long period of time. Where nothing is said for a while until someone posts "is anyone down for pizza?" or "did you see that ludicrous display last night?"

What were they thinking?!

Posting anything deeper than dank memes & news seems futile, when The Algorithm decides who can see your post.

If they want people to make better content, they need to start figuring out why people feel like their better content gets no audience.

There was an article that I can't find for the life of me about how someone suffering with depression had killed himself, and it was only a long time afterwards that any friends friends knew because Facebook hadn't been showing his posts.

IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content.

How many other people are trying to reach out on Facebook, thinking that no one cares, when the reality is that no one even sees?

This looks like a dark and completely likely situation

Fortunately for me, it didn't go that far. But I know that feeling, because I've been there. I cut off facebook after a pretty low point in my life, and to this day, it has been the best decision I ever made.

> someone suffering with depression had killed himself, and it was only a long time afterwards that any friends friends knew because Facebook hadn't been showing his posts.

> IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content.

Don't worry! Facebook is working on an AI to detect such posts and refer the suicidal users to help! No need to bring his friends down with his negativity and decrease their engagement! /s

I wish I was joking: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16709224/facebook-suicid.... Social networks like Facebook have contributed to a big rise in depression, but instead of course correcting, we get buzzword tech band-aids.

If you want to sell glass, better go break some windows.

"A friend of mine died and I didn't know because of algorithms": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811

this reads like a black mirror episode

Ideally everyone on your friends list would see your post. If they no longer care for them they can either unfriend or hide your posts.

That’s a silly take.

I’ve hidden friends before who I have close relationships with, simply because the content they post is trash:

- reshares of “inspirational” and “motivational” memes - post frequency too high - constantly posting pictures of their kids - unfortunately a close aunt is into MLM and I can’t just unfriend her without causing drama - generally only posting things I don’t care for enough to see like guns, cars, etc

Like, just because we are friends, doesn’t mean we have to share the same interests nor does it mean I want to hear everything you have to say on every topic.

>That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.

The wall was never a good way to do this. It's neither as powerful nor as flexible as pretty much any competing way for a small group of people to communicate, including chat programs, email, txt, snapchat, etc.

Facebook's deprioritization of the wall and buy-in on messenger/whatsapp, instagram, and the newsfeed was very smart. I suspect they are ok with people moving off posting on facebook to posting on instagram and chatting privately.

The engaging part of the wall to wall wasn't how good it was for communication, it was the semi-permissioned town hall style chat for semi-related groups of friends you'd see as it whizzed by on your feed. People did all sorts of humblebragging, cries for attention, or on the nicer side of the spectrum, open discussion that chat like whatsapp and messenger do not have.

The similarity between snooping around facebook and seeing all the open chats going on with people you'd never usually talk to and watching reality TV were striking to me.

Thought admittedly, I do not know if it was one of the driving factors to FB success or not, so it may well have been past its use by date rather than the news feeds killing it.

Personally I enjoyed those days more as my feed was more of a chronological account of people chatting rather than reshares articles, videos and memes.

On the other hand, your description bears a strong resemblance to Twitter. If you have a conversation with someone through replies, anyone who follows both of you will see it in their timeline, and by default, anyone can read it by going to either of your profiles. So it’s not uncommon to have someone you’ve never heard of jump into a conversation. And it’s easy enough to “snoop around” yourself; sometimes that can be a source of genuine new acquaintances, and with time, friendships. (There’s an etiquette to it, though. If you don’t know someone, you should only butt in to their conversations if you have something to add - not because, say, you disagree with a political statement they’re making, or at the very least, certainly not if you’re planning to hurl insults!)

Unfortunately, some people and some topics tend to attract a lot of those sorts of uninvited rebuttals - in other words, harassment - driving some to make their accounts private. In that case, only approved followers can see your tweets, ever. There’s no “friends of friends”-like middle ground, or any other more flexible filtering options.

On the other hand, for most people, Twitter’s system seems to work pretty well. It works for me, and I really enjoy the spontaneity of it.

> The wall was never a good way to do this.

And yet people used it--even after the news feed and well into the reign of IM and email. I'm not sure how it's smart to remove a feature that was creating engagement just because FB didn't understand why.

Facebook never clicked for me. I've had an account for a long time, but log in maybe once or twice a year.

But Instagram I love. I check it a couple of times a week. I love seeing images from my friends and having comments barely visible is exactly what I like. My only problem with it is the increasing frequency of ads. It's sucking a lot of the joy out of the platform for me.

That was prior to chat though, and more of a desperate attempt to chat in an interface that didn't do a good job supporting it.

When chat and then messenger came along there was no need to do that anymore.

Yeah but what I'm suggesting is that the semi-public nature of wall-to-wall conversations gave Facebook a more personal vibe. I could see my friends talking and my friends could see me talking with other friends, sharing jokes, saying "I had fun at the party", stuff like that...

I think Facebook wants people to log on and post things like "It's a tough day at work but I'm looking forward to watching Black Panther" instead of just posting another link about "check out how the primaries were rigged!11". And I think the way the Newsfeed works with highly-specific posts and comments is part of the problem. There's less opportunity for laid back semi-public chatter.

Most of the people who used facebook in 2004–2006 had (and used) other ways to chat via their computers or cellphones. Most people’s profiles listed their phone numbers, email addresses and various chat service handles.

Facebook wall conversations were not used as a poor imitation of private chat, but a separate form of quasi-public communication.

Yeah, thinking back, Facebook was largely a convenient way to find and keep track of my friends' IM handles. And their phone numbers, back in the day when losing a phone meant losing all contacts because they're stored on the device.

Thinking back, Facebook was really a face book...

I couldn’t possibly comment on recent Facebook struggles.

But, on the wall-to-wall thing: it still happens, but it’s generally associated with elderly or candid people who might not grasp the visibility of their post.

One thing that I feel you should be able to do is pick an audience when you write on someone’s wall. De facto, people often do that for birthdays and those rarely appear much.

I see a lot of the same casual conversations in Groups -- assuming you have groups of friends there. Those are cool and generally where the banter happens for me.

I think that was because at the time we all probably had far fewer friends on FB. As my friend count has grown over time (and really it isn't even that much compared to most) I have felt less and less inclined to broadcast my life to a bunch of people that I know only tangentially. In a way it encourages me to actually hang out with my real friends, since their updates are so buried and I rarely post anything besides politics and links.

> something Facebook been struggling with for a couple years is getting people to post more personal updates.

This is what I perceive as well.

Thirded. It feels like a poorly kept secret. Last in the row of pushes is my Facebook has started showing how I can now post to groups of people more easily. Just in case posting for all friends to see is holding me back, you know. (yes friend lists exist since eons but this seems more ad-hoc... Unsure if I'm in an A/B test)

> experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes

While we're complaining, the Javascript associated with this is particularly slow. On clicking into the text entry box, I find that if I start typing immediately it can result in the letters coming out in the wrong order when it resets the caret.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com