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Comment by shock-value | Hacker News Reader

It's not that massive. So you can send short messages to your friends that your other friends can also see. Cool, but, not exactly a rival to the birth of personal computing.

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People know more about the lives of their friends and family than they ever have before, and with far less effort. Facebook has dramatically strengthened weak social ties, and judging by the existence of cities, social ties are fairly important to our societies. The company has had significant and meaningful effects on the world, and we're only beginning to understand them.

    People know more about the lives of their friends and
    family than they ever have before

Wow. I couldn't disagree more. Event notifications are probably the only thing that is substantially more useful in facebook as far as I can tell. Aside from that, the only additional knowledge I've gained from facebook is that a handful of people who I barely remember from high school really like reposting stuff from r/pics. My family has been active on facebook for years, but it's had nothing remotely close to a revolutionary impact on how we communicate.

There's a ton of stuff that goes on in our lives that don't merit notifying everyone about directly, but might merit posting a status or picture to Facebook. It reduces the friction involved in sharing information. I don't think I ever would've seen as many pictures of the random events in the lives of my family and friends without Facebook. That's valuable to me. I also have a much better idea of the interests of acquaintances and people I haven't seen in a while since the links they share shed some light on that.

Of course more direct communication still happens outside of Facebook. I think that "random nonsense" is more valuable to people that you're assuming. Presumably, people wouldn't use Facebook if they didn't find it valuable.

    I don't think I ever would've seen as many pictures of 
    the random events in the lives of my family and friends 
    without Facebook

That hasn't been my experience at all. Seriously. Savy people use/used flickr, others used Myspace, and handful used photobucket, others use/used awful photo sharing sites like kodak's and others use/used email. In my experience, most of the additional volume of photos on my wall are from people I should probably defriend since I barely know who they are.

    I think that "random nonsense" is more valuable to 
    people that you're assuming

It seems to me, both by looking at my own wall and what people post online, that the nonsense is at most a simple diversion, just like many other diversions that exist and have existed for years. Despite the fact that many of my friends and family members are productive people who are well-known in their respective fields, I have yet to see anything of any substance actually occur on facebook. The closest thing to actual substance in that regard would be events. And the computer illiterates? The volume hasn't changed, they just post their stuff to facebook rather than CCing everyone in their address book 1-3 times a day.

Photo sharing isn't new, but tagging people in photos is, as is being able to effortlessly access anyone's photos without having to figure out where they are and find some link in an old email or something along those lines. I'm not arguing that Facebook has been particularly innovative, though they have been in some cases. My argument is that their product has changed the way people interact with each other, and that's easy to see.

Eh, at least in my personal experience, Facebook hasn't been that big of a deal to me. And I suspect it's the same for lots of its casual users (which I further suspect make up most of its userbase).

Yes, you are right, in terms of "one-way" communication (status updates etc), it lets you keep tabs on your friends more easily. But that sort of status-updating functionality wasn't even in there (or at least emphasized) until Twitter came along. So give them some credit. And even then, I think you overestimate just how much people share on Facebook. I've noticed that some (like 10-15%) of my fb friends constantly post updates, pictures, etc., while the others (while still maintaining a "presence" on the site) just don't. And for the purposes of this post, I actually went and checked a few friends' profiles to be sure it wasn't just that I was only seeing a select few on my feed, heh. (I'm one of the ones who don't share much, and these days I don't even check Facebook much actually.)

In terms of two-way communication, it's only real innovation was to allow others to follow along with the conversation. Which is a pretty big deal, of course--allowing others to join in on digital conversations is a big boon. But that's really it... the rest of its functionality isn't as big of a deal and frankly was scraped from other sites anyway (even being able to follow a conversation on a profile based website was an idea from Myspace actually).

That's my take anyway. I've been on Facebook since 2006 (well, on and off--deleted my profile for about a year then made a new one a few months ago), and honestly it really hasn't been a part of my life nearly to the extent that computers and all the other services they provide have been. And for what its worth, I'm a pretty social, outgoing person, so my viewpoint shouldn't be slanted by introversion.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling post.

EDIT: I should add (as danieldon noted) that events are a genuinely useful feature that Facebook had before any other site (to my knowledge). I give them credit for that. Anything else is pretty much fluff though, and while I understand the idea that even vacuous communication should lead to greater trust and social bonds in the real world, I disagree that that actually happens in practice.

The value of facebook to a person varies dramatically based on whether that person's friends and family would previously overcome the trivial inconvenience[1] of communicating with them in pre-facebook ways.

[1] lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/

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