Hacker News Reader

Comment by wufufufu | Hacker News Reader

If any Facebook employees are reading this, there's a really annoying "feature" that will show a list of suggested friends to add to a private group. I've accidentally added people to private groups by accidentally clicking a single time while scrolling.

Imagine being in an AA group or HIV support group and adding your coworker to it on accident.

Please change this.

View on HN

It's disappointing to see stuff like this. It means that the decision makers don't dogfood their own features.

Or that their tiny bubble doesn’t know enough about the real world to be careful with things like this.

Yes. See also: Google

Google Buzz was a much worse disaster for similar reasons.

https://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/technology/1012/gallery...

Or they do dogfood, but the (flawed) engagement numbers support their next promo case.

Zuckerberg has been joining groups recently so I am sure he'll fix it if he sees it as an issue.

Playing devil's advocate, I've found the feature useful for meme pages and university groups. However, I think they should add another tap to the process as it's too easy to send accidental invites on mobile.

Alternative: keep it one tap, but hold it for a couple minutes while an "undo" option is visible. Possibly also a "confirm" option for those in a hurry.

this seems like a simple and effective solution. a one to five minute delay on a group invite does not seem like a terrible inconvenience.

Nothing is on Facebook by pure chance. This feature is there because it was designed to be.

Perhaps it even tells you something about your coworkers ...

The whole Facebook friendship stuff is a disaster.

It's really easy to complain about this, but it's very hard to actually come up with a solution.

Did you have any suggestions how cases like this could be detected?

Maybe make it a two-step process to add people to a group. Sure, show the list of friends to suggest, but make the "adding friends" page separate, so if you accidentally click, you're still a step away from adding someone.

Product people are going to hate that friction, just add an undo invite button

That would work until another product person decides to eliminate the friction of "accept invitation" and adds an auto-accept invitation feature

Or better allow people to mark groups as more private (lets call it sensitive) and only if done so have a two-step process to add people and possible other changes.

Just jumping in here, but if detecting accidental triggering of irreversible actions is a challenge, maybe the overall approach is problematic. You could, though, temporarily introduce a confirmation step and see what % of users choose to cancel rather than confirm their invitations or something like that. The chance of a random tap on a face that Facebook (not the user) chose to put on a screen seems to guarantee there will be some accidental invitations no matter what, since accidental taps happen.

An option in the group settings that says "show friend suggestions in the group".

Done.

> it's very hard to actually come up with a solution

Just not have "suggested friends"? I've never gotten anything out of that feature, and I imagine it provides little actual value to anyone since if someone was actually a friend or even an acquaintance, they'd have that person in mind when adding friends on Facebook.

I’ve used that feature a few times. It’s very helpful when trying to grow a new group

Or even have an ability for an admin of a group to turn off "suggested friends" for that group alone. Ah, but that's not just a new boolean field in the model, a database migration, GraphQL dependency, and an if statement in the template... but also a committee meeting to clear the text used in the admin's interface, translations to all languages used by Facebook (you wouldn't want Facebook to be seen as causing problems for only non-English-speaking HIV support groups, right?), additional overhead to track, potentially stepping on the toes of the design team that maintains the mockups for that admin interface. It would need to be someone's passion project, and even that might not be enough. And perhaps the people at Facebook who know the problem firsthand from being in AA or HIV support groups don't want to draw attention to why they're justifying this feature, for obvious reasons.

This is why we can't have nice things.

> It's really easy to complain about this, but it's very hard to actually come up with a solution.

I don't want to be rude, but I'm really not sure what you mean by this. "Don't show suggested friends, at least for private groups" seems simple, obvious, and effective.

Dialog: "Are you sure you would like to invite x?" - This solution has existed for a very long time. Not difficult.

While we're at it we can add checkbox with label 'Dont show this dialog again'

A confirmation screen after you click "suggest friend?"

Delay the action for five minutes and add an "undo" button for the five minutes.

Not the poster's job. Facebook is a business. If they want a solution from the poster, pay for it.

Possibly FB’s algo thinks they are alcoholics or have HIV and would like the group?

Anyway, it should be easy to block that element client-side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com