Hacker News Reader

Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

> “messages from non-friends are really hard to find lol” UI dark pattern

You think you would do something different here? And you have considered all the possible ramifications of doing so? No doubt you've considered the impact on the number of spammy/scammy interactions that everyone experiences, the number of harassing messages that people around the world receive and you've made an informed trade-off between that and meaningful social interactions people have with the folks who find their wallet.

Seems like a pretty strong statement to call it a dark pattern, implying malice, when it could just be a good thing.

View on HN

FB's solution to unsolicited messages and spam was basically to make messages from non-friends totally invisible. I wouldn't really call it a dark pattern, but they have broken the ability to send messages to anyone who is not your friend. It's pretty much a spam filter with with one binary parameter. It's just lazy.

Interesting point, I wonder if they can apply some logic into it, like if the sender is male and he's written to many female non-friends, give him a higher "probably junk" score. But if he's gotten good response rates his message is probably worth delivering.

FB probably already has data to know how much of a pervert someone is... if they linger on those beach pictures for too long, for example.

Wtf?

It _is_ a dark pattern. It prevents you from _knowing_ someone has messaged you. In 99,9% of cases you want to know someone sent you a message.

In 99.9% of cases you don't. It's mostly spam.

Facebook is a friend platform, not a stranger platform. Don't use it to message strangers, it's very explicitly not what the platform is designed for.

If email worked this way, the whole thing would collapse, because much of the time, you really do want to receive messages from new people. How would contacting a business work if their email system auto-rejected all messages from people not already known?

Sure, spam is a big problem, and that's why we've invented spam filters. Google was able to do that and it works well. Granted, Google is a huge company with lots of resources, but so is Facebook, so why can't they be bothered?

>Don't use it to message strangers, it's very explicitly not what the platform is designed for.

Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other. This doesn't mean everyone wants to be friends first before exchanging some messages.

This is what friend requests are for.

I don't want unsolicited messages from people. It's bad enough for me on LinkedIn, where that's the whole point.

When I still maintained a FB account, I had very few friends, basically family plus 2-3 others. I didn’t like the privacy problems.

Not everyone uses the tool the same way you do.

Tools don't exist in a vacuum. When a tool is a closed platform driven by a business, that business is going to heavy-handidly steer how the tool is used.

It isn’t always socially appropriate to friend request people, which is why I rarely do it (because I have no idea what the other person’s expectations are). If I’ve been introduced to a total stranger via Messenger, I don’t necessarily want to (nor should I have to) be their “friend” just to have them see my messages.

I guess I just have completely different use cases. Why would I want to read Facebook messages from complete strangers?

If I don't want them to be Facebook friends, then I'll give them my email.

> If email worked this way, the whole thing would collapse, because much of the time, you really do want to receive messages from new people.

Of course. But Facebook isn't e-mail. A closed system that thrives on heavily weighted social graphs is just nothing like an open standard for arbitrary message exchange.

> Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other.

Based on what? Have you used Facebook? Everything they do is about building and establishing communities, that's their business and they know it. They do almost nothing to help strangers communicate one-off. We are literally in the middle of a discussion about how Facebook gives low priority to messages from strangers, which is evidence that they have this mentality.

And that's why it will die or get nationalized like a water utility. A "friends" platform is inherently less scaleable than an "everyone" platform.

The whole world is on there. If I make my profile public I obviously intend to use it for people to find me.

Booting off the spammers seems like a much better idea to me.

This is literally the only thing I have used it for in the past 10 years. And it used to work well for that purpose.

If Facebook is not a stranger platform, then what are businesses doing there?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com