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Comment by dymk | Hacker News Reader

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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'

> 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.

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

Done.

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.

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