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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Facebook suffered from 2 waves of "Eternal September"[0]:

wave 1: the addition of everybody outside your immediate friends and close family. You get the goofy uncle, the distant high school acquaintances, and all the work acquaintances from every previous job that submitted a "friend request" that you didn't reject out of politeness. The newsfeed gets polluted by nonsense such as forwarded memes, politics, and other junk.

wave 2: the corporate advertisers filling up the newsfeed that crowds out the desirable posts from your real friends & family.

The 2004 to 2008 period was probably the "magical" time for Facebook from a user standpoint. The initial wave of Harvard students had a beautiful user experience with TheFacebook. As for the new members joining Facebook today in 2018?!? Not so much.

Of course, ads are needed to pay for the datacenters so any social network like Facebook inevitably decays into a worthless waste of time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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Not to mention the erosion of the idea that it is default-safe to share your social experiences with your group of "friends." Adoption by colleagues and family shifts the tone considerably towards LinkedIn, where one's professional image is paramount - and all that does is make the platform more stressful to use.

Facebook does provide tools to segment one's friends into groups to whom content can be privately posted, but from a UX perspective they're deemphasized. I see a lot more social conversations moving to group chats (some on Facebook Messenger, some on GroupMe/WhatsApp and the like), because membership is determinate, you make the choice of target audience before being prompted to make a post, and the context into which you post is not a newsfeed (which we've been trained to think is global to an entire circle of friends) but just that specific chat history. (I'm sure there's some psychology/UX research in that people don't intuit that a "posting destination" can be distinct from the list of content you're viewing.)

Chats are just a "safer space" to be oneself. And if Facebook wants to capture one's true self and preferences, it will need to evolve beyond the idea that a single newsfeed is the place people want to do that.

I know this is one tiny use case, but it's one that's bothered me for some time. I can't change my profile picture without it becoming a huge news story for family and "friends" to comment on. I change a little picture of me, remove the event from my timeline, and I still get hokey comments or messages reminding me how bored and lonely everyone I know must be.

I severely miss when it was just a place to chat up a cute girl you seen in college, or find out who's going to see NIN, etc.

I can’t remember if this still works, but you used to be able to set the privacy of your profile photo to “only me”, which would prevent it from appearing in friends’ news feeds. After a few days or so you could safely set the privacy back to friends or public and be reasonably assured it wouldn’t be seen as its own post.

It is completely silly that you have to jump through these hoops, though, assuming it’s even still an option.

Btw, hiding something from your timeline has absolutely no effect on whether it appears in friends’ feeds or not. It’s purely about whether people can see if it they go to your timeline. Which is pretty unintuitive and anti-user: if I don’t want something in my timeline, why would I want it showing up in people’s news feeds?

I can't comment on a friend's public post without it being broadcast to my timeline! this is the one dark feature that has most affected any good feelings I might have had towards facebook and my usage thereof

My mother is on Facebook, and she doesn't have many many Facebook friends other than me and the closest family. Resulting in Facebook posting an event to her Facebook news feed, whenever I do something on Facebook (because there's not much else to show in her news feed). If I post a comment in a discussion at Facebook, she gets to know about it, and sometimes joins the same discussion she too.

Sometimes it's fun to hear what she thinks about the discussions I join. At the same time, feels as if Facebook is in this case a surveillance tool. I know there are other people I'm connected with, who I don't really know who they are and also don't have many other friends at Facebook. Those mostly-strangers-to-me are probably also being sent notifications about everything I do.

Yep. I stopped using it when realized it was broadcasting comments I was making inside groups to everyone I was connected to. Even if they removed the feature, I wouldn't go back. The fact that they started doing it with absolutely no warning was a pretty good sign that I couldn't trust the company.

This has seriously reduced my willingness to comment on posts. Terrible feature.

Absolutely. I don't care if they stumble across it but I never want to broadcast a comment, at least not to people who wouldn't already have seen the post. The worst is when public groups use Facebook as the only way to contact them - I once posted a question about leaving a coat at an event and then got a message from a friend suggesting that I hadn't invited him to the event (it wasn't the kind of thing he thought it was, though). Why. Same for the profile picture change. I accidently put my profile picture to the wrong one of two and haven't changed it since I noticed a few days later that it was wrong and was embarrassed to broadcast this fact to everyone not once but twice.

Wouldn't it make more sense to simply assume that anything one posts to the Internet could potentially be broadcast to everyone they know and published on the front page of the New York Times? I don't understand why people think the content they post to a website will be kept private, especially if not keeping it private maximizes shareholder value.

But the thing is, I don't think it maximizes shareholder value. I would engage more with Facebook if my actions were quieter than if not. I don't really care that anyone can see it but broadcasting it is just crazy.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. A little tact on the behalf of Facebook’s designers can save people a ton of unneeded frustration, even if it’s technically true that the info is public for people who want to do a thorough search.

Just because data is public doesn’t mean that companies can’t be criticized for exposing it in the most annoying ways possible.

Different threat model. Your friend isn't the NSA, and would be thwarted if it weren't broadcast.

A “broadcast this comment?” prompt after successfully submitting a comment, even a toggle that’s default-on, would solve this elegantly IMO. I have no idea why they don’t do it. Facebook was once great at understanding that people don’t want to draw outside attention to some things that they technically do in public. They seem to have ceded that ground to Snapchat entirely, which is a painful sentence to type.

> I have no idea why they don’t do it.

Not to beat this hackneyed drum to death, but: it’s because you’re not the consumer—you’re the product. They have armies of data scientists optimising their holy interaction metrics to death. They are incentivised to wage a holy war for your eyeballs, and wage a war they will. Every last base point is priceless at their scale.

Every single pixel, every possible user story, everything down to the very last detail is optimised for user interaction.

If you ever find yourself wondering why they missed something: they didn’t. It’s intentional.

Even if everything they do today is intentional and quantitatively optimal (color me skeptical), the site is still changing as the world changes and their user/"product" characteristics change.

The intentional things they do tomorrow will be different and may address issues like users becoming apprehensive about interacting when it's not clear who will get an e-mail saying "Psst... Hey... We thought you should judge what User has been up to..."

That sounds like a great way to overfit. I do not know exactly when it was, as it was in a lot of ways a "boiling frog" process, but from ~2010-2015 I felt the shift from "user" to "product", fully at the expense of enjoyment and user experience.

I agree, "broadcasting" your activity likely increases engagement within your network.

I have a separate account (with no "friends" apart from my main account) just for commenting on anything public, and for posting in public groups.

Sure, but that's because the post is public - I agree that it probably makes people increasingly unwilling to comment on such things.

Hmm. Most folks I know address the colleague issue with a "no current coworkers" policy.

(Not to imply you should immediately add newly-former coworkers).

> a "no current coworkers" policy

So if someone asks, Can you add me on FB? Would you reply?: No, I have a no current coworkers policy. Is there a way to do this without hurting people's feelings?

What you wrote is pretty good. To wrap it up, you can offer an alternative, like "let's do LinkedIn instead" so they know it's not just them you say no to and that you are actually interested in connecting with them not just blowing them off.

"I use Facebook for mostly family stuff. Are you on LinkedIn?"

When I was a TA, I'd have students constantly try to add me on Facebook. The conversation would go nearly exactly like you'd describe:

> Are you on Facebook? Is this your profile?

> Yes, but I'm not gonna accept your friend request.

The reply was usually a bit snarky with a bit of a chuckle, and that did it for most college-aged people. The few times someone persisted, I explained that Facebook is an aspect of my social life, not my professional life, and I intended to keep it that way.

That's exactly how you do it without hurting their feelings. It's an impersonal blanket rule.

I was in this situation many times and I have always replied with "sorry, I keep my facebook friends only to the closest group of friends and family". Never had any negative reaction to it(apart from my friend's crazy ex who decided he should absolutely break up all contact with me immediately and never talk to me again because I refused to accept her invitation literally within 5 minutes of receiving it).

I also frequently go through the list of my friends and remove everyone I haven't spoken to in a while, keeping my friends well below 100.

That's what I've done. Professional contacts/co-workers on LinkedIn (not that I use it all that much anyway), and family on FB (since I don't live in the same state I can use it to still see pictures my sister posts).

So do you de-friend people if you get a job with them? Or do you regard people you add after you've finished working with them as 'real Facebook friends' and let them stay privy to your social life?

I know I've definitely experienced a bit of a 'chilling effect' on the stuff I post since adding a few former colleagues. Tech is a small town and you never know who you'll be working with next year.

Someone who is your friend and then becomes your coworker is still your friend.

Someone who is your coworker and then becomes your friend is likely not really your friend in any real sense, unless-and-until you leave that job and they bother to remain in contact with you.

It's not a question of following some flowchart; it's a question of whether a given person values your relationship with them more, or values how they could get ahead using the information they've learned about you more. This fact is generally illegible for current coworkers, but mostly resolves out once you leave that job—the people who valued you personally keep in touch.

This fact is also generally legible for people who you meet outside of work: people mostly don't bother to get to know you unless they [expect to] value you personally. (Or they're conducting some form of long-term industrial espionage. I don't envy the people important enough to worry about this.)

I think Linkedin has the long tail advantage here in that since it was setup as a professional network, it tends to stay that way in regards to typical interactions and people will continue to build their network on Linkedin over their career. Additionally, Linkedin has the benefit that younger people will signup to CONNECT WITH OLDER PEOPLE as networking with those senior people might help them in their career. Facebook suffers from people assuming "hidden landmines" could exist from something they posted or wrote when they were in college, which disincentives someone to maintain and enhance new social or professional connections. So it is interesting to think about what happens when you lose young users, while simultaneously you have mature users no longer keeping their social network up-to-date on Facebook? A long time ago (in tech years), it seemed like part of Facebook's moat was that the switching costs would be high on a social network. Is this still the case? Would a reasonable analogy be what if Netflix stopped creating new content and expected continued viewership relying on only existing content? How long of a lead/lad would there be until a large drop in viewership? Facebook does owns Whatsapp and Instagram though, which provides an argument that the company is well positioned from the prospective of offering the platform for targeting group chats, and still being the epicenter of most people's social experience.

Exactly. Due to the ever-increasing friend list, I now consider posting to facebook effectively the same as posting something publicly and non-anonymously. Which I never do.

And the thing is that social networks are not nearly as sticky as they seem.

As https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-i... makes clear, multiple lines of evidence suggests that the total possible value out of a social network scales like O(n log(n)). (Yes, I am biased as one of the authors. But what shocked me was how many independent lines of argument the other authors came up with for the same conclusion!) As the experience of Facebook goes down, it takes less and less work for a competitor to make up the O(log(n)) first mover advantage.

I would therefore not bet on Facebook lasting over the long haul...

It’ll be a slow chip away and then a mass migration catalyzed by some event. The chip away is already well under way.

The truth of it, though, is that many people who are moving away from Facebook aren't moving elsewhere, they're disengaging the social media sphere. Many people are simply not logging in, preferring direct messaging, chat rooms, or in-person interactions. Nowadays, it feels like Facebook fills the "instant messaging" gap for people who never got into it, and, to be completely honest, that's often the group of people I feel the least imperative to connect with. As described in the comments above, I'd rather read a Discord chat with some people I know than see what the group of people I only communicate with via Facebook are saying.

I agree, and the chip sure seems to be arriving sooner, and progressing faster than my own (pretty sure my position is very short on facebook compared to most) gloomy forecast. Just looked it up and the domain: grandkids.com is being marketred by Domain Agents Platform Inc. advertising a min bid $500. A few years after the mass migration you predict, I propose that domain for Facebook's rebranding...

In a relatively recent discussion, I think on HN, Metcalfe apparently aadmitted his "law" was intentionally overstating the case.

My view is that networks also see an unavoidable per-node cost function, and that this ultimately defines network size. (You can work the relationship backwards to find the actual value.) I've suggested this to Odlyzko. He's not yet invited me to co-author a paper.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat...

We need a social network experience where users own their data, and are presented with a simple and user friendly interface that connects this data with their chosen friends. Currently we have user data mined en masse at great privacy risk and for endless profit, ad infinitum.

Facebook has not decayed because of an influx of new users beginning with this "eternal september", but because of the pointed decisions by its leadership to choose greed over respect for its users. The paramount decision is the decision to go public, necessitating indefinite growth at any cost in order to satisfy investors. It must have been obvious to Facebook's early employees that a Facebook at the behest of investors would increasingly dilute the user experience, and yet only now do they lament what they created.

Are you running your own Masterdon server yet? I'm working on migrating my blocks to a new docker structure and hope to have mine up this month.

It starts with people like us, in tech, running our own services and connecting with friends or even strangers in our field and growing out from there.

I don't think any one big thing can (or should) replace Facebook. The future of the Internet needs to be diverse and distributed. People need to learn about RSS feeds again and posting their content to a variety of services or hosting it themselves (if they know how).

Sounds like you're describing Diaspora:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

I have a feeling Diaspora isn't going anywhere anytime soon until they clean up their UX. Here's the initial experience:

1) Go to the site, click Join Us.

2) Get shuttled down the page to a wall of text. Click Sign Up since I don't want to read the text, and I see a green button.

3) See a list of "pods" - looks like a chatroom? I click the "Confused" button which auto-sends you to a pod.

4) See a bunch of text in German.

5) Press back.

6) Click the pod at the top of the list that says "US".

7) Get a 500 error.

8) Close tab.

I love the idea here, but I hate to say that it is poorly executed so far.

Snapchat was fine for choosing who to send what to, though their UX is garbage especially with their new experience. Something like that with its separation of concerns, particularly advertising, but not photo-based, would be wonderful.

All true, but the Eternal September for me came when I lost control of my feed to arbitrary ML algorithms attempting to maximize shareholder value whilst alienating the fewest users.

I think someone could recreate early FB on the blockchain and take a huge chunk of interesting people off of the two current awful choices. Because I do remember the time when it was fun to reconnect with people and follow their lives there.

> I think someone could recreate early FB on the blockchain

wtf does this mean?

I'm asking only because this sounds exactly as loaded and buzzwordy as "I lost control of my feed to arbitrary ML algorithms attempting to maximize shareholder value whilst alienating the fewest users" you've just gone the opposite direction with the hyperbole.

It means I would like "liking" a post of grumpy cat to use as much energy as a Toyota Carola driving from Miami to Washington DC. Luckily, actually posting grumpy cat photos causes brownouts, so there are none to like.

Hyperbole. Modern blockchains do not use much energy. This is an obvious great idea waiting for implementation.

You got a source for that? Everything I've read says they do. And yeah, obviously hyperbole in service of a joke...

I also have no idea why this is such an obviously great idea. I don't see anything obviously great about it. Care to explain.

It means move the authorization and verification of identity outside of any corporation and make the feed 100% user-controlled. Corporations end up pursuing goals frequently unaligned with the goals of their users because the users have become the product.

And are you really saying in 2018 that ML is just a buzzword?

Because what I see is an algorithm (whatever it is, probably some secret sauce ML goulash of topic models or clustering) picking stuff I don't want to see and burying stuff I do. Just give me the pure feed and the ability to follow/unfollow. This is apparently now hard(tm).

But it doesn't call for a blockchain to address. It calls for a subscription based social network.

It wouldn't need to be expensive either to keep the servers running. There would be no flashy advertising displaying links that you would never click anyway and there be no sneaky algorithms trying to maximize your clicks or your attention since that would no longer contribute to the company results.

Everything would be far simpler. Getting there is less simple.

    on the blockchain

Why? Everything else you wrote makes sense to me except for this.

Because I doubt a corporation would stay aligned with the non-paying customer long-term. Witness GOOG.

Compare and contrast with AMZN where the customer is indeed the customer.

I think we can have decentralized technolgy without blockchains though.

> Why?

Shysters gotta shyst. After all, somebody has to buy those heavy bags...

Have a look at Patchwork, which runs over the decentralised Scuttlebot https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

Urbit's ambition is to achieve something that fosters that ability.

There is already SSB / Patchwork that was recently feautred here in HackerNews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273096

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

and if I understand correctly, the 'log' of your activity is basically a blockchain!

I like this. If I may propose one more…

wave 3: bots[1]

[1] https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/facebook-phony-accounts-admi...

I don't encounter bots on Facebook that much, but they're definitely ruining Instagram.

Years ago, I'd be more open to making "Instagram friends". However nowadays when I get a few likes, I go to the user's profile and see that their followers/following ratio is skewed, I know they're fishing for followers with a bot.

Ultimately all interactions on social media will be scripted by bots.

Not only bots are ruining Instagram, their algorithm showing you posts from 3 days ago and an ad every 8-10 pictures is a killer, pretty much forcing me to only see stories.

"Oh let me show you this picture that you missed 4 days ago when we where showing you pictures that are 8 days old."

I went through a bit of a phase for a week or two of trying to get more followers on my photography insta.

It didn't take me long at all to realise that the vast majority of new followers were either just straight up spambots, or were using bots to fish for followers.

Botting to fish for followers in Insta isn't the worst, usually it's just automating what a person would do: search for a hashtag; like photos; and drop some comments. But it really kills engagement when most comments are something like "Nice! :thumbs:", or "Love this! :heart:", and you know that 90% of accounts that follow you will automatically unfollow you in a week.

Instagrams social discovery aspect has been ruined. It has been taken over by bots and groups of people on whatsapp/$messaging_service that schedule when to post and all like the photo the moment it gets posted to boost it to the discover page. It has become all about gaming the algorithm.

Et-al's Law: "All interactions on social media will be scripted by bots"

If you add Atwood's Law to this, all social media interactions will be scripted by bots written in Javascript.

Then the brain-bender: What if you are that bot?

What did for me was the influx of the "you won't believe what happens next, this video will make you cry" shares, and then political diatribes (you may call it virtue signaling) by well-meaning friends. Unfriended many people to cull my list to around 100 and FB has been more palatable since.

I instituted this policy back in the days where people would constantly invite you to play their stupid games, they had to invite you or they wouldn't be able to play. But anyone who invited me to Farmville or Mafia Wars or any nonsense got unfriended. If you wanted me back, you'd have to start to uncheck my name when you clicked "invite".

I also do a soft sort of "if I haven't talked to you in three months" rule to get rid of stale contacts. It's not LinkedIn, I don't need people for future reference. If I haven't talked to them in three months and they aren't someone incredibly important to me, they're gone.

I agree Facebook is awful and they're making it worse every day, but a lot of the problems people have with it are self-made. I don't get people posting awful political opinions because I don't follow anyone who does that. I don't get spammed with memes because I don't follow anyone who does that. I don't see most of the ads because I have an ad blocker. I don't see people I don't know because I unfriend them. I don't see businesses I don't care about because I don't follow businesses I don't care about.

The only problem I have with Facebook as a consumer of Facebook is not seeing things from people I want to see things from. But I rarely see things I don't want to see, because Facebook gives you all the tools you need to stop seeing that kind of stuff.

I would love an option like "do not show anything from this contact unless it is original content, or at most share of an original content". That would remove 90% of the crap from the feed (i.e. the "viral" part).

What I don't understand is what is FB thinking?

Look at it this way:

What do I want to see?

Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Pages I like image/text > Friends of Friends image/text > Memes > Ads.

What does FB want me to see?

Ads > Doesn't matter.

So what do they do?

Ads > Memes > Friends of Friends image/video Pages/Group Image/Video > Friends Image/Video ------------------> Text.

Why? What financial incentive do they have to show me Memes over what I want to see?

Because if they show you:

Ads > Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Pages I like image/text > Friends of Friends image/text > Memes

Then you'll go through a few and then leave the site.

Ads > Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Leave FB

They optimize how much time you spend on FB, so they can show you more ads. Thus, it makes sense to stick the stuff you really care about at the end. To make it hard to find. Because, then instead of coming to the site and getting what you want, you'll spend an hour trying to dig through the crap to find what you want.

More "engagement" is more ads. Nobody at facebook through about whether it makes sense to measure "engagement" alone, or to try and measure some form of "valuable engagement", or "useful engagement".

What financial incentive do they have to show me Memes over what I want to see?

Because you scroll and scroll and scroll through the feed looking for something you actually wanted to see, and all that extra time spent is "engagement".

They are measuring and reacting. Ads make money so they will always have a certain priority, and everything else is a combination of your interests combined with what's popular as a whole. Memes are popular and/or your friends share a lot of memes so that's what gets shown to you.

Because as every big corporation without any creative mind of their own A/B tests shit ad infinitum. Whatever minimal change they made to the feed won an individual A/B test. Unfortunately the reality in life is not necessarily 1000 tiny improvements = 1 huge better product. Especially if there is no consistent thinking about the user experience.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that Facebook lost it's user focus.

Because in the acronym AI only one letter is true - Artificial, and Intelligence is just buzzword. They just can't do proper tailoring of news feed to you, so as long as ADs are prioritized and the feed is not entirely atrocious they just don't care.

> wave 1

I've found that regular pruning keeps my utility on Facebook very high. I only really have to visit it once a week (as my newsfeed doesn't stream all that fast with only ~50 friends) and it's highly relevant. Apart from the constant nags to friend people that I don't know, that is - Facebook seems to take issue with my succinct friends list.

> forwarded memes

People who I give a damn about are posting to my timelines, so even the memes are mostly enjoyable. If they aren't, there is usually something enjoyable soon after precisely because my timeline moves so slowly: the signal to noise ratio is pretty good.

The downfall of Facebook is in limited ways PEBCAK. Facebook encourages degenerate use of the platform, but you don't have to fall for it.

Facebook is no longer the best way for me to share content with people I care about. For me that's WhatsApp, Google Photos, and MMS.

My wife and I use Google Photos to share pictures of our child with our families thousands of miles away. It's unbelievably good. No ads, no bullshit promoted celebrity accounts I should follow, actually no social features at all except the bare minimum: 1) sharing albums with others (no Google account required AFAIK, it's email-based) and 2) leaving simple text-based comments on pictures and videos. No bullshit algorithmic reordering of content either, it's just all there in reverse chronological order. My 75 yo parents can't make sense of the Facebook clutter at all (I barely can myself) but they started using Google Photos as soon as they got the invite email out of the blue. I'm sure that Google is happy that I'm uploading my family life to their servers and they'll make money out of it somehow, but from a UX perspective it's close to perfect.

If you're using WhatsApp instead of Facebook, Facebook the company doesn't care, it's still money in the bank to them (selling advertisers a detailed profile of who their users are for targeted ads). The whole idea behind buying Instagram and Whatsapp would've been to stay relevant when the inevitable decline in their flagship product kicked in. Looks like their plan is working.

Buying Whatsapp and Instagram for ANY price where the best business decisions Zuckerberg and Co have done. By far. They knew Facebook would die off like myspace and friendster did. or BBS and Compuserve and AOL if you want to go back that far.

Social networks come and go in waves. Some stay longer, some fizzle out quicker.

Owning the biggest alternatives to your own network is a brilliant move. If Whatsapp or Insta kills Facebook, so be it. As long as no one else does ;)

At this point, communicating electronically basically necessitates someone collecting information at this point. I don't care. I just care that the dumb argument I had two years ago is in a chat room with 10 people I know and my employer will never see it.

> "At this point, communicating electronically basically necessitates someone collecting information at this point."

No, it doesn't require that. There are secure options. The main thing that keeps the current unsecure options in play is momentum, i.e. if not enough people care, nothing will get better.

I wish the “of course ads are needed” weren’t true. I am waiting for the service that charges me $1/month so that I can demand zero garbage: no unwanted sharing, no ads, no spying; just a useful service for storing photos and updating friends and inviting people to events.

True, but if your friends also needed to pay $1 then many of them wouldn't, and then the service still wouldn't be useful to you (despite paying $1).

It could be an unofficial share, like Netflix subscriptions. "Somebody" needs to pay, but if you know someone who has, then you can use the service fairly easily.

Why not just have a freemium model like a Facebook Blue or something? I pay you money, I get no ads and premium control of my feed. I don't pay you money, I get what I'm given.

At least in the US, that amount would be $7/month - what Facebook makes per user now.

Great reference to "Eternal September" - didn't know about that. I can now think of many examples of this happening to online communities.

You might also enjoy reading about ancient greek ideas of ἐσωτερικός and ἐξωτερικός

What would you recommend as a starting point? A quick google didn't have anything relevant, and Liddell & Scott just gives the straightforward interior/exterior definition.

I can see a connection between the eternal september and insiders/outsiders, but it sounds like you're getting at something specific and I'm curious.

Well from what I've seen in my googling, it seems to be a concept relating to the Unwritten Doctrine of Plato. He had esoteric teachings reserved for his close following vs his exoteric writings for the public. Esoteric came to mean shadowy/hidden, but it's really just how you say/think/act differently with an insider group then an outsider group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines

Thanks! My google skills failed me.

Also, I get invited to "groups" all the time. Because my friends want to win beauty cream and free flights to X. I leave the group, then I get re-invited again. Then I leave, then I get re-invited again. Why is this a thing?

Is unfriending them the only way to stop it properly?

yeah I think so, which is not going to happen, still friends.

Wave 3: ruthlessly trim your friends list to make feed less annoying

Wave 4: still too annoying, deletes Facebook account altogether.

I kept the friends list, at least for people with whom I was OK sharing contact info.

I did, however, unfollow around 500 people or so, which shrunk my feed to only a small number of people whose opinion I actually care to read. FB really should make the unfollow option more obvious, because it largely solves the feed noise issue.

My problem is that I share certain things with friends from college, certain things with my parents, certain things with coworkers. When my friends list contained all of the above and there was no intuitive way to separate what I share to them, I stopped posting.

Yeah I remember being super-annoyed when non-college students were allowed on...

I think a significant portion of the issue is just that people have started to see and experience the downsides of projecting a running tab of their life for all to see, for all time. As people become more technologically literate, the appeal of selling your personal info for the dubious privelage of nothing much has to pale. I imagine the revelations that governments (US especially) are warehousing every scrap of data they can find on us hurts too.

Mostly though, FB is boring and depressing, and eventually even the easily swayed figure that out.

2005 was great for me as an old man taking classes at the University. My classmates said to get on this facebook thing and you could see everything from everyone, everywhere.

Made a bunch of random friends around the world and picked up a few college girls as well. :'-) Good times!

I thought everyone quit after the newsfeed in 2006? Then when grandma could get an account a couple years later.

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