I miss Facebook | Hacker News Reader

I miss Facebook

cfenollosa.com

208 pointscarlesfe114 comments

This article reminds me of a complaint I've had about online gaming. I'm 36 and I remember when all online FPS games were played on centralized servers. If you logged on at the same time of day, you would see the same players you saw yesterday. Over time, you would develop relationships with those people and perhaps you would eventually meet them in real life. I have 2-3 very good real-life friends that I originally met online because of centralized FPS servers.

Nowadays, you can jump on an online FPS whenever you want and have a full server of players. But the chances you'll play someone from yesterday are very slim unless you deliberately 'friend' them. I feel sorry for kids growing up right now that are missing out on finding your own 'people' online.

I had the same experience and agree with your sentiment. Some people I've explained this to have argued that you can still experience this by joining clans, guilds, etc, but it's just not the same, not as organic.

Meeting someone in an FPS server and growing a relationship with them has the same feeling as being a kid, wandering off to a playground on your own a few blocks away, and making a friend.

MUDs were like that, too. I knew when my friends were on, and we'd hang out, smash a few monsters and do a few quests, and talk about our days. Met quite a few people in real life from there. Most of the MUDs I frequented (LPs, primarily) are dead, or a shadow of their former selves.

Same experience for me, made friends logging in at the same time of day after school but with StarCraft on battle.net

I agree with everything you said but will add that a young relative showed me how he played Xbox online and rather than teaming up with regulars he added friends with anyone he had a good game with. After that the online indications helped connect them in any game and over time certain friendships stuck. I’ve started doing this as well and it’s different but still feels like it has a similar result.

I had that experience with Minecraft around 2012.

Yeah, it's too bad that online game companies don't realize this and deliberately pair up the same "pool" of people together to create the sort of atmosphere where this can occur.

FWIW I have made many friends in Destiny 2 and I have plans to meet some of them in person.

Many games do not foster this, but I think destiny does.

MMO games still allow for this as you (generally) select one larger, persistent server at character creation, and remain on that server.

I saw this mechanism occur directly with the game Team Fortress 2, released in 2007/8.

At first, you had to use the "server browser" which had a big list of servers. They had various plugins, maps, and customization, and each one had a group of "regulars" who knew each other, the moderators of the server, etc.

At some point (2013/14, I think?) they implemented a "quick-play" system which would deposit you into a random server. They quickly tightened it to exclude servers with any type of customization or plugins, and then eventually added "stock" servers.

My community server eventually totally dried up. You used to have to wait half an hour to get in when it was at its prime. I met several people from the server in real life.

It's like any other social place really. People making friends with strangers requires repeated contact, with the same group of people, in the same place/context.

IMO Minecraft is the big example of this nowadays - servers are self-hosted with their own rules and communities, and the nature of the game highly encourages social interaction. I've certainly played on servers that are closer to chatrooms than games, and some that have close-knit groups that have remained together for years.

There is an interesting video essay about this phenomenon, using TF2 old servers and Overwatch new game matching as examples.

Errant Signal: Social Spaces & Payload Races - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hj1haLcdI0

This a big draw that old style MMOs like vanilla World of Warcraft had. Due to the way leveling works in this game, it takes a lot of time and unless you follow a guide, you will do a lot of backtracking. Along the way you will encounter players doing the same leveling that you do. While some will jump ahead because they play much more, for the most part, you stay on the adventure with the same kind of people, around your level. After a while, you'll start grouping with them for some harder quests. By the time you hit max level, you already have a group of friends you can play with that you've made throughout your adventure.

It's not the case with newer MMOs. Nowadays most MMOs try to rush you through the leveling considering it necessary evil, and any group content you can queue for and form a group with strangers. Once you finish the content, the group disbands and you can find another set of strangers, but it's not the same.

> I feel sorry for kids growing up right now that are missing out on finding your own 'people' online.

A lot of kids are connecting via games like Roblox and Minecraft. A case in point is EthanGamer who has an expanding network of friends that all met up that way:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1o4Ct4ca7uzqohH0xdaZpQ

I've seen a few other gamer kids with similar networks.

FYI I don't follow those kids myself, it's my 5yo that loves watching these older kids play Roblox and Minecraft. It's on in the background sometimes and I noticed the networks being created.

Anyway, I think the current gen of kids are probably doing just fine creating their friend groups! Not sure about older teens though.

“Kids these days” dont have the problem you are experiencing

Sure 12 year olds blowing off steam in an FPS will go to quick play but people self organize

Many obscure mobile games have robust chats with the same regulars and centralized servers

Twitch communities and discord groups are pretty wild

I had the same experience on a small private WoW server. We knew each other very well and I have 4 friends from that era.

Btw even nowadays small twitch streamers are also a good place to find friends.

Back in the day, I thought the local phone companies in the US should use the increasingly empty space in their central offices to locate gaming equipment. This was back in the dialup days as things slowly shifted to ADSL.

It would be much more fun to play against kids you saw every day. Things could have scaled up to include older players and other kinds of games.

Unfortunately, the local telco I dealt with had no interest in such things. They resisted thinking past next week. They installed a 3-inch, 800-pair line for the ISP I worked at rather than installing digital.

Hits the nail on the head.

For me the main uses of FB are now:

1) Rolodex of friends, with reminders from the ones who actually use it.

2) Bad version of stumbleupon. Seriously large amount of unuseful content, but it does kick up something interesting now and again.

3) Reasonable funnies stream. There's always someone with a good meme.

There's no real content though. All the news commentary is simply terrible. Loads of people trying to be funny. An enormous number of flamewars. Very few people who know anything at all, not just in politics but science as well. The actually insightful comments are drowned out completely.

Other things:

- Loads of comments are just people tagging a friend so they see an article. FB could fix this very easily, I don't really care if Richard Head wants his friend James Smith to see some article.

- Autoplay videos are annoying

- Obvious parasite accounts aren't dealt with. I know my dad hasn't started a new account with the same pic and added me. Do something about it.

All in all, I'm not sure FB would have become FB if its product was what it is now 10 yers ago.

I really don't understand tagging friends in a comment on FB and IG. This is precisely what the share feature is for!

Simply put: UX is bad and most people figured out this was an easier way to do it. (Also something that comes to a shock to people working in the Bay: Most people are really not that good with computers).

Also, basic behavior mimicry. You see other people do it so you also do it.

People do it because every other option sucks.

Sharing to someone else's timeline is way too invasive, sharing to your own timeline and tagging the person is weird, sharing via message is too disruptive.

What people is looking for is a "Show it to a friend" button that just creates a notification on the person's bell icon and allows them to respond in any way they want.

But would it increase engagement? Number of comments is one way we measure engagement and you’re advocating for a feature that would take away 90% of those comments away? Increase engagement at all costs this is the only way.

Easy and expected solution: they should count the number of Share via Message into the share count (even if it is shared privately).

Are shares not as good of a metric as comments (even though most comments are effectively shares, making them even more noisy)?

I share via message. It essentially just creates another notification like you suggest.

Nice alternatives for (3) are 9gag and imgur. They got the 'typical':

connect.facebook.net, google-analytics.com, googletagservices.com, gstatic.com, imasdk.googleapis.com, scorecardresearch.com, platform.twitter.com, amplitude.com, amazon-adsystem.com, googletagmanager.com

but once you block them with Privacy Badger and/or NoScript (or add them to your hosts file), they are an endless source of memes and other funnies.

>but once you block them with Privacy Badger and/or NoScript

or run uBlock in dynamic filtering mode.

I don't want to sound like a snob, but 9GAG and Imgur are pretty awful communities with content taken from Reddit–which itself "steals" content, but it's less horrible about it. Both of these communities are heavily moderated and most users don't actually realize where their "fresh memes" are coming from: 9GAG's moderation team actually sways voting to control what hits the front page and immediately bans accounts that mention "Reddit" in any way.

I don't disagree, but ... should I care? I personally don't care where my funnies originated, only that I get them. If 9gag is a nice skin over ripping off reddit but preselected, why shouldn't I use that?

Marketplace is useful if you want to sell things locally.

Recently "live comments" were introduced and I cannot read a simple body of text without it constantly being bumped around because of loaded comments from timeline entries above.

I normally use FB as a birthday reminder and sometimes group chat with friends who mainly use it to stay in touch. I recently joined a neighborhood group because there's been a bunch of property crime and we're all sharing camera footage and so on. Anyway, 85% of every thread is just other people's names. However, I don't seem to get email updates about these comments, just the more substantive ones. To me, it looks ridiculous and amateurish but at least I'm not getting tons of email spam.

>Rolodex of friends, with reminders from the ones who actually use it.

Check out personal CRMs out there. They are still in their infancy, but already usable.

IMO Facebook has three useful features left: the personal rolodex, event planning, and groups. I truly think that a large number of users would migrate over if someone replicated those three. No large info collection on your profile, no wall or posts, just a friend/messaging option, the ability to create events, and to organize into groups made by users to make posts there only, not in public. You know, to actually make and support communities that would actual exist in physical space.

With the troubles of Facebook and the alternatives, many just don't use Facebook anymore, even if those features aren't broken. If it's a fresh service with no ties to Facebook, I think you'd see something interesting.

Groups is really the only thing I use it for anymore. The rest of its 'features' have become more and more useless.

Those were the same three features that were a core part of thefacebook before they introduced the News Feed. If it was the same site that it was in 2005, but with more people, I'd still be using it. But now, it's mainly a machine that turns other people's content into dollars.

If the news feed was status updates only, no links, no news, no pics, it’d be decent.

Groups was launched in ‘08, I think.

Not possible. One of the things I did in the week after the News Feed was launched was to join a rather large (for 2006) group protesting the News Feed.

I miss IRC, for a lot of the same reasons the author misses Facebook. Being above 35 like the author, I think it’s more the fact that people just aren’t chatty anymore. It’s anecdotal of course, but if I look at myself, I’m really not that chatty anymore either. I too used to have late night chats about random stupid things, but right now, I can even remember when I last saw 3AM unless it was to feed a baby or clean up after a sick child.

So when I say I miss IRC, it’s probably more true to say that I miss the freedom that comes with having almost no responsibilities. Maybe I should work on making more of my time, mine though.

I think it's just that those kinds of conversations and communities are migrating. I find that a lot of Discord servers are a throwback to the old IRC days. Just remember that the nostalgia factor might be clouding you to remember how toxic and time consuming it can get sometimes.

As a twenty year old, the problem is not that people aren’t chatty; it’s that the people you interact with aren’t chatty. For any niche topic you can find a Discord server or a Telegram channel or a Signal group chat or a Slack server or a whatever, where people are chatting about it 24/7. It’s the same model as IRC, although it is unfortunately now siloed.

How was IRC not siloed when you've always had different networks managed by different people?

It's the amount of silos. There was never more than a single digit number of IRC networks that anyone actually cared about. And even if you did need to be connected to a lot of them, you could do it all from the same client.

It’s siloed by technology now when it wasn’t before - you could connect to any irc server with one client but you need a different client for each network now.

I am in the exact same spot. Whenever I do get the chance to go back to gaming/IRC I tend to feel quite bad about it (it's strongly affiliated with being lonely). So what to do now, it doesn't make it easier that the amount of freedom without responsibilities is quite low and tend to show up spontaneously. As it should be when you have kids.

It's painful to let go of those memories and accept that life has probably changed permanently, and with that what kind of activity that fits best.

I still use IRC. People are still plenty chatty.

Idem. I don't miss IRC because I'm still on IRC and it's still the same as always.

are you saying there's a market for Augmented Baby attending ?

I agree with your point about age, that said IRC is still pretty much the same, and even if you don't live in it as passionately as you (we) did before, it's still ~the highest signal/noise system out there.

I don’t miss Facebook. I just weaned myself off Facebook about a week or two ago.

I realised that I needed to get off Facebook because it made me feel depressed. When I was on Facebook, I would look at the feed and become poignantly aware of how boring my life is. (I don’t travel. I don’t do any “fun” thing. I don’t go to parties.)

So one day I decide that I have had enough and I just uninstalled Facebook from my phone, closed all Facebook tabs in my browser sessions, and turned off all notifications (including the e-mail one that tries to drag you back in). The only notification that I leave enabled is account/security notifications. I haven’t outright deactivated/deleted my Facebook account because I may still need it someday for some stupid reason.

Anyway, as soon as I took those steps, I freed myself from the reminder of my misery. I’m not actually having any more fun, but at least I’m no longer constantly comparing my life with those of my “friends”.

So what about people who may want to reach me via Facebook? I’ve decided that if someone can or know only to reach me via Facebook, then they are not my real friend anyway and I don’t need them in my life.

Quit Facebook. It can be done and it should be done.

Same for me. I've kept my account, but I only log in once every few months or so when I feel really bored.

Whenever I do, it only takes minutes before I start to feel bad, mostly for the same reasons you do. I then realise that literally just sitting in your chair, staring at a monitor that is turned off, is a better use of your time than going to Facebook.

Likewise I ‘quit’ Facebook about a year ago in much the same fashion (except I kept the app on my phone too, because about once a month I go on it and see if anything very important has occurred in what remains of my social circle.

To this day I’m irritated that these product managers got between me and my friends and smashed our means of staying connected.

I don't miss facebook, either. I deactivated/closed my account some 6 years ago (if not longer ago) and never missed it, ever. It was a good decision. :)

This article reminded me of what Facebook was and the fact that I did actually like it when I first joined. The major complaint I see is usually centered around politics. But for me, I never saw any of that. The main reason I've stopped using it is simple: I used Facebook as a tool to see what people were doing in a passive way that I wouldn't have otherwise. But now the feeds are geared towards the advertisers, not what my friends are doing. Therefore it is no longer a good tool. It's bad software, plain and simple. I really wish there was a better alternative. I know a lot have tried, but they don't seem to "get" what Facebook was for some reason. They all seem to be Twitter alternatives rather than Facebook ones.

The number one feature about the way Facebook works is simple: I can share something on someone else's wall/feed/timeline and all of their friends can see it and comment. No other site/network seems to have that feature. Google+ didn't have it, Mastodon doesn't have it. Everything is post on your own page.

Ah the old days of having a wall and poking people

Aside from the stuff mentioned everywhere else, my biggest complain was ephemeral nature of the feed.

If I saw something interesting I had to act on it at that percise moment or never ever see it again. No scrolling, no page reloads, no "I'll do it in a sec". Once something was out of my sight the Facebook fold seemed to devour it forever ;p

If I recall correctly the feed wasn't always like this, but once it became like that it took only a couple of frustrating months for me to start truly hating FB.

Nowadays, just because of that, I use FB only maybe once per month and usually only when I have to. Hell, maybe that ephemeral nature of the feed did some good afterall? ;P

Yes, this is frustrating, especially with the "Top stories" feed which seems to quite randomly choose something interesting occasionally and when you go see it again it's buried by something else.

The "Most recent" feed at least tries to stay coherent for a while I still see posts that I can't find later unless I spotted who shared it and where, and then go look that up — and I still might not find it.

However, the "Most recent" feed is also quite short: you can easily hit the bottom which makes you realise that you probably saw 1% of all the "most recent" posts. This isn't the only case, though.

I have a custom list that includes all of my friends so that I could see their posts, hopefully most if not all of them. Guess what? I only get maybe ~20 posts until that list runs out of items.

So, it seems that it's quite impossible to get to see what's happening in your friends' lives by using a Facebook view into their posts. And this is why I started using Facebook in the first place.

It wouldn't be technically impossible to dig up the last 7 days of posts from the couple of hundred people I have as friends and sort them based on likes and amount of commentary. I could then consume that list to the extent I want. But that wouldn't be good business, apparently.

This too. There was no finding that post again, or catching up. And it because even worse on the app because sometimes hitting "back" from one link would refresh the feed and it'd be gone. After it happening 1-3 times in a session, I closed the app and uninstalled it (for a long while).

This really hits home. So what ruined Facebook?

The Wall was replaced by an algorithm which sunk original content below a flood of ads, fake news, and externally shared content "you might like". We stopped seeing original content. Then, people stopped sharing personal stuff, as nobody interacted with it.

Isn't it part of the usual pattern of .. maybe everything ?

Things catch wind, and they try to leverage and survive long term .. changing their "core" value in the process, much to the despair of users. Twitter did change a lot too .. you could say the same for artists also.

It's not about survival. These companies are making billions to satisfy the unquenchable thirst for profit of their investors.

oversurvival may I say ?

I think in survival there's no real good measure of balance. If you don't overdo it, you're wasting "meals" and giving them to competitors. I don't condone it, but it seems a natural law of systems.

I quit Facebook many years ago, but one of the reasons I stopped engaging with it was after they started creepily sharing interactions made on the site. Seeing "Pam liked this photo" or "Dave commented on this post" in my feed - almost certainly without them knowing I was seeing it - made me very hesitant to interact with the site at all. I'm sure they have a ton of metrics proving it increases engagement for the majority of users, but it was enough to turn me off the site completely.

This is exactly what made me stop using it. I didn't post anything for a few weeks, and I started getting these fake "notifications" that had nothing to do with me. It felt like Facebook was some sort of stalky overly clingly ex, trying way too hard to get me to engage. So creepy.

>So what ruined Facebook?

The need for growth. When facebook has roughly maxed out its user base, how does it proceed to grow? 1. Infiltrate comment sections on major websites and require commenters to log in via facebook. 2. Optimize facebook content to increase user engagement and keep their eyeballs moving across advertisements.

Facebook could have remained a simple and fun social network app for much longer, but the need for growth is destructive.

That’s every web site these days though. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, things were built because “it’d be cool if...” The commonality between everything created today is “this will be great at serving people ads” as the primary focus.

I am from approximately the same age group as the author. I remember FidoNet and PhpBB forums. I remember blogging, and LiveJournal. But I completely missed the Facebook craze. The first time I logged into Facebook — after having used LiveJournal for several years — I was shocked by the unfamiliarity and unintuitiveness of the interface, and the total absence of formatting options. I looked around — and then ran back to the familiar internet tools and services.

It’s weird. Seeing stories pop up lately about how people get disenchanted with Facebook, I keep wondering what the big deal was.

(And another source of wonder and cognitive dissonance is how a company with what seemed like such an unappealing product managed to attract so smart engineers and to bring about a number of significant technical innovations.)

LiveJournal was, for my money, the correct balance of text to image content. You could upload photos and other media, but it was a bit of a pain. And in 2006, people didn't necessarily have the ability to play media anyways, at least not without a few false starts. Consequently, people wrote. Their thoughts weren't always that interesting. But they were at least original and the product of real effort. It worked fairly well, and was a lot more appealing to me than memes and viral marketing.

I love this article. Sums it up perfectly. Back during my school days, everyone was on Facebook. Like as if your friends were always with you. However, lack of moderation, the decrease in content quality and endless walls of meaningless excess really kills the value prop. For me, it's not necessarily privacy - it's more about trust. And I know that's one thing Facebook has lost.

I share the feeling. I too am in my mid-thirties, still know my ICQ number by heart (8 digits by the way), was on IRC and used Facebook in the early days.

Nowadays I often wonder if my sentimental feeling about the social networks of yesterday is just a function of me getting old.

The world changes. It is probably neither better nor worse. It’s just different.

I had a 6 digit ICQ number and I'm about the same age... someone deleted my account using my unlocked computer and I was never able to get it back...

>someone deleted my account using my unlocked computer

Strikes me as insane that they'd allow account deletion without entering password for confirmation.

Also, what an asshole, whoever did that to you.

She did worst... but I got her back, somewhat. I just wish that ICQ would have been willing to undelete my account.

BTW, at that time, almost noone required passwords to make major changes to your account if you were logged in.

Someone got mine (298387 -- I'll never forget) through a security flaw that they temporarily had. The attacker tried selling it back to me for $1000. Loved the low number, but didn't use it anymore outside of testing Gaim (used to be a developer on that), so.. RIP 298387.

Back when Facebook changed to the Newsfeed algorithm I knew it wasn't good and I didnt like it. In retrospect its definently when it all started going downhill for me as a user of the platform. Now, I haven't posted anything in 3 years....

Exactly this. It used to be a real-time showcase of what my friends and family were up to. Great to keep tabs on everyone I care about lives. Now it's just ads and the same few posters. I don't even read the newsfeed at all any more. I go directly to a few people's pages to see updates on a few close friends, nieces and nephews and that's it.

Everything that he mentions he misses is now in a group chat for me. A group of 20 or so friends have a Telegram group where we spit out random thoughts, talk about news, day to day life, spontaneously throw together plans to hang out or go for dinner, post candid/embarrassing photos of stuff we’re doing, etc.

Some days only a few people are active, other days you’ll open it up to hundreds of unread messages from everyone.

It’s not public, but it doesn’t need to be. In fact we end up having more entertaining and honest chats since it’s private.

I feel like everybody I know is part of a private group chat with their family. With some, it extends out to all the first cousins (40+ people), but for me it's just my siblings and their spouses and my parents. Baby pictures, jokes, vacation pictures, random questions--stuff that Facebook was known for, but not like Instagram at all. There's no posturing, since it's all family and close friends.

We used to use WhatsApp, but recently switched to Signal.

If only Signal had reasonable multi-device support.

I don't use Facebook, but the rest of my family uses it for group chat. It honestly makes sense as it's more usable. We also have a Signal group, but it's fallen out of favour.

The other thing that I know people like about Facebook is groups (different from group chat). If Signal also had the equivalent of that, it would be much easier to get people to switch.

I am not sure the "niche" Facebook used to fill even exists anymore.

The social landscape has changed for the worse. People no longer want to connect with friends, they want to show off how better/popular/wealthier they think they are.

Even if someone relaunched that era's Facebook without all the crap I wouldn't be surprised if today's society still manages to make it toxic.

Is this really true or is this a case of "get off my lawn" that seems to naturally come with getting older? People have always behaved that way as far as I know, just by different mediums. Going to the symphony is one of my favorite things and people throw me dirty looks because I don't wear a suit and gaudy jewelry/accessories there; I doubt that's new or a result of social media.

So you just turn up in jeans/t-shirt to listen to some Rachmaninoff?

You don't? I generally wear long sleeves, but I prefer to be comfortable at concerts.

I actually haven't been to one, but I should go and see what it's like. Apparently the sound is much better?

Wearing a suit feels a bit pompous, but it would be interesting to hear what the musicians and conductors think about the audiance's attire. I assume most don't care.

As a performer, and an occasional attendee, what people wear doesn't matter. It's the music that's important. But wearing slacks and a button down seems right for the room.

That said, I'd encourage anyone to go to a concert wearing jeans vs not going to a concert. The music is what's important.

Actually, with regard to whether the sound is better, I think the biggest point that I like about live orchestras is that I can see the performers... each performance is different, I can see where different sounds are coming from and see the passion each player is putting into it. The acoustics are of course also great since the conductor is varying volume to match the room, but it really connects me to the music to watch the person playing the line I'm following with my ear.

> The social landscape has changed for the worse. People no longer want to connect with friends, they want to show off how better/popular/wealthier they think they are.

It is the gamification factor. People is optimizing their behavior to get more likes not to get better connected.

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" summarizes quite well the situation.

So we need to remove likes from Facebook? It definitely was a different place prior to the feature.

I don't think this is really true, those conversations just aren't on Facebook. Like my family has a signal group and my friend group has a signal group people post random stuff in. I would prefer better options, not really sure what will ever be right. Honestly email is underrated, the granularity in who hears your discussion is pretty straightforward to use.

There was a period when the internet was new for everybody, and everybody was discovering it at the same time. It was like the first few weeks of college, except it was the entire world. And that's not going to happen again. Somebody will come up with a new social media app that solves the problems of the current platforms, and it will have some of the old magic. But the rush of the early days of the internet / blogging / social media, was a one time thing.

Eternal September is finally over...

Perhaps the writer misses their 20s now that they are 35, like almost everyone.

That may be a part of it, but OP is right that after the initial years FB changed and not for good. It's kinda like how I remember loving watching videos on MTV as a kid in early 90s, but by late 90s their programming had changed and it simply sucked.

I'm 36, I agree with the article to the last comma and I don't think it's just an age thing. I enjoyed IRC and ICQ a lot, met a lot of people there, some of which are now very important in my life. I loathed when they were replaced (in my country) with MSN messenger. I didn't like Fotolog, but I enjoyed the very early days of Orkut and then the Facebook golden age mentioned here, and I hated when it became an ad feed and people migrated to Instagram.

So (for me) it's not just a downward slope where older = better as I become crankier, it's that some particular services at some particular points in time hit a sweet spot that others didn't. For me, important qualities are protagonism of text (networks with protagonism of images like Fotolog or Instagram are posturing tools, as the author says), thematic groups/channels (I like to discuss topics like politics, philosophy, videogames, learn languages, etc.), and ways to actually meet people (MSN didn't have this).

Facebook was great in its peak as it ticked all these boxes, with the added value that you could find real-life acquaintances and follow them - no social network has ever been that strong at letting me know about my old classmates' weddings and children, which is a cool thing IMO.

Today, the widespread social tool that comes closest to my ideal may be Telegram groups, but the discovery and meeting people part is only so-so.

If you really struggle with configuring it, and ignore the right hand column entirely, you can still sort of track what your friends are doing. But I stopped looking at Facebook much a few months back. Maybe twice a month now.

Remember, sharing is spamming.

I assume that I'm fully outside any influential demographic now since not only am I not on Instagram but I don't know anyone on Instagram. My friends who don't do Facebook do either email or Discord (and a good portion of my friends do do Facebook).

Honest question, is the division of the world into distinct social networks an expression of increasing social stratification around the world? I know little about Instagram but it sounds a lot like a place for people aspiring to wealth.

> is the division of the world into distinct social networks an expression of increasing social stratification

i think it is more about the level of need for social signaling. affluent people probably dont need it , except the narcissistic ones, while signaling seems to be very important for the middle classes.

I agree. I've tried using FBPurity to hide things that aren't my friends creating text or pictures themselves, or more simply, setting "friends feed" to be the default. That used to help, but not so much anymore. The problem is most of them have stopped, or greatly cut back posting.

I remember when I first decided to create a Facebook account. I had previously avoided social media. I wasn't motivated enough for Livejournal, and Myspace seemed like a useless vanity page. After watching over some friends' shoulders as they used Facebook, I saw that it was a genuinely useful communication tool.

The share button was the worst thing to happen to Facebook from this user's perspective. It actually did exist before I started using Facebook, but most people didn't press it often. Facebook is not a very good place for news stories compared to Google News. Facebook is not a very good place for cat pictures compared to reddit. By trying to be the place people go for things like that, Facebook has ceased to be good at the thing it was good at: keeping up to date with an extended group of friends and family.

I miss 2005-2007 era Facebook. It was so different before the Newsfeed was introduced. It was a really different concept when it was limited to college students. You could add your dorm or class and see other students in the same groups. It was really useful for making friends.

Now it’s just shameless bragging or political shouting and Zuck has become a quasi-villain which makes using it more unsavory.

I never think positively about facebook these days, but one author's point rings a bell:

there's a point before and after society rerooted itself over internet (jobs, businesses), which caused a huge change. Everything is a business in disguise now.. no more freedom

I'm Facebook free for more than 10years. It's hard, as a lot of information is considered as delivered once it's on Facebook (like community updates on my neighborhood).

But anything becomes nostalgic. I still remember my own BBS joining fidonet so it was able to provide email service (once a night from a Hub BBS). I still remember the ping-pong virus. Or even Google not being evil.

I guess in a few years will see a post "I miss iPhone" :)

I miss the News Feed back when it showed mostly information about my friends' lives. At some point I feel like their algorithms started showing me more links to clickbait and other time-wasting bullshit. After a while it gave me almost nothing I actually cared about, which induced me to install the "News Feed Eradicator for Facebook" Chrome extension. I visit FB very rarely nowadays.

I also use Facebook only for the positive things it brings me. I refuse any conventional "news" stories I see there.

> I miss knowing how my online friends are really doing these days. Being able to go through their life, their personal updates, the ups and the downs.

What? That was horrible! The simpletons talking about every mood change, or publicly plotting juvenile retribution against an ex-lover, or a respected keynote speaker who was previously isolated to that role now inviting you to Mafia Wars

I deleted my first “everyone I met everywhere” Facebook in 2008.

Allowing a new bare bones one in 2012 which is merely deactivated now.

This article is a mere nostalgic highlight reel, ironic how it complains then about instagram

Yeah ok, people in their 30s complain about selfies, selfie sticks, pictures of food, ephemeral stories, vertical videos, and older people using social media. They’re lost in between a dichotomy demographics that do not care and who these current networks are made for.

I would say the delayed gratisfaction is bigger component to the prior experience: planning, coordinating, and uploading just a few photos from different sources much later. The next day even, if your friends were tech savvy and had fast connections. The dopamine of social interaction coming in bursts, and the anticipation of the possibility having its own allure.

I've been without it for the better part of a decade. The only time I missed it is when I realized I couldn't purchase facebook ads.

My solution was to create a fake account with a fake name on FB, never download the app to my phone, never share my phone number, never upload any contacts, never use a real picture, and only add close friends who know who the fake profile is.

Makes me pretty much impossible to look up on the system, I value my privacy and not being listed is important to me. This gives me the best of both worlds. I can join all the interest groups I want, follow all the events, without having to share my identity.

I'd expect it to not be very hard to find you, from the perspective of someone willing to put in a bit of effort, based on who your friends are associated with.

As soon as Facebook became a widespread thing I knew it was going to become a shitshow, and Zuckersnuffles was such an obvious snake I couldn't even consider empowering him by turning over personal info. I've never had a real account, and even my fake dev accounts fell into disuse as I rejected more contracting gigs involving FB integration. I feel somewhat vindicated, though we have a way to go when even many 'ethical' NGOs still require FB for engagement.

Why was the title of the submission changed? The original one was the same as the blog post's

I feel that we need a Facebook, but without pictures, just text

Pictures are good, as long as they are original pictures and not reposted memes & other garbage.

Facebook needs original content. Not links to outside crap, no clickbait, no memes. That alone would make the platform much better.

I have 4 Facebook accounts... I don't miss Facebook.

This is precisely how I feel

Facebook is designed to be addictive and pervasive. Missing it does not mean you need it back in your life. Stay strong.

After reading the article, better phrasing would be “I miss what Facebook used to be”. It may be addictive and pervasive now, but the feeling is that it no longer fills the niche it used to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com