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Comment by ihumanable | Hacker News Reader

I think what facebook does for a lot of people is allows them to have an online presence without having to:

1) Buy a domain name 2) Pay for hosting 3) Install WordPress, etc.

This is really great for people who don't want to deal with the complexities of hosting their own site but still want to be able to post stuff.

The problem is that with 600m users everyone's presence online starts to feel the same, cookie cutter, boring. It's like if everyone in the world had to use the same stylesheet. If you look at things like the profile image strip hack, people are dying to be unique (even if the only way they can do that is by copying other people's hacks).

I think there will always be a place for Facebook, my mom isn't going to head on over to namecheap to register a domain anytime soon. But I think that facebook is homogenization of the internet, and I think it's boring.

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Most people don't really care about having a "presence" online (if they did, they'd already have a blog out there). Facebook is about your friends and social network; your mom is on Facebook because her friends and family are, not because she has great opinions and stories to tell the world. Facebook's success has very little to do with being a platform to post things on, those are simply features it evolved into.

Although I do find it humorous you would mention profile customization as something people want or care about. I personally hated the disorganization and tacky pages on networks like MySpace.

Agreed, I think the other point is that people hardly go to people's facebook pages anymore. When I first add a friend, I might go check out their profile. But after that, it's all about the news feed and what everyone is doing at the moment. When you can comment from the news feed on whatever post your friend just put out there, why is there a need to even go to the facebook page?

Yeah, everybody looks at facebook from their own perspective, business people think it's boring because you can't customize it enought, similarly teens look at facebook as a place for teens to hookup, etc. I recently saw a post from a +- 14 year girl saying "I think people over 18 shouldn't be allowed in facebook, its gross". Hehe go figure.

No, your mom's on facebook because her friends and family are posting photos and comments about their lives on facebook.

So in a sense, it is "just" a simplified blogging platform with strong social connections between people that makes it so popular.

Agreed, but I will take boring any day over the abomination that was MySpace. User-customizable styling only works when users have the taste and technical knowledge to use it appropriately.

I used to feel this way, but I've had a change of heart.

Why shouldn't someone be able to express themselves by having bright pink text on a bright rainbow-unicorn background? It's not my cup of tea, but I bet it makes a bunch of people happy.

The best solution, imho, would be to have user-styles enabled by default (these could be as ridiculous as people wanted), and then having a standard site-wide mechanism for reverting to the standard style (this would also shut down any background music or videos).

Reddit does this, and it works well. They allows subreddits to be styled as the mods like and give the user an option to disable the custom styling globally. The Reddit Enhancement Suite takes it one step further and allows subreddit specific toggling of custom styles.

Works well for me. I turn off the annoying ones.

User-customizable styling only works when users have the taste and technical knowledge to use it appropriately.

This is true of any privilege. If you take away some right to prevent misuses, you also prevent people from using it correctly. If you could style your Facebook page any way you wanted, 99% would look like crap. But 1% would be works of art. The current system prevents that 1% from ever existing.

(I could think of a million analogies for this. If cars were limited to going 35mph, then nobody would speed. But nobody would be able to drive someone having a heart attack to the hosptial as quickly as possible. 99% of the time, speeding is just some jackass in a hurry. But 1% of the time, it's essential for preserving human life. So it's allowed.)

I only partially agree.

I'd say that most people are not on Facebook to express themselves, they are on Facebook to interact socially. When people are on Facebook, they primarily are looking at other people's information -- not their own profile. With a personal site, you typically spend time customizing it and creating content, not interacting.

This leads to much different design goals. With Facebook's homogenized appearance, it is much easier to keep track of everybody.

I think people interact socially by expressing themselves. We are inherently social creatures and our self-image is shaped by the judgement of others. To improve our own self-image, we try to influence other people's perception of ourselves.

Facebook is great (popular) because people have a blank slate for creating a public persona, then can instantly see feedback from other people reinforcing their created persona.

Right. One of the ways people earn social capital is by exhibiting creativity to peers. danah boyd has written a lot about the kind of identitive performance that social networks enable.

Blogging platform already solves this by selling custom, good looking templates.

If Facebook starts doing this, they will be swimming in even more money.

well, if you want a site that is basically facebook but allows you to customize your profile, i hear myspace is up for sale.

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