Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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