The New Facebook Design Sucks | Hacker News Reader

The New Facebook Design Sucks

jyssicaschwartz.medium.com

62 pointsbra-ket100 comments

Less information density = more time required to read the same amount of content = more "engagement". This is the exact same reason behind the algorithmic timeline: since you can't easily tell whether you've reached the end (up to where you left off last time), you keep scrolling more, thus more time spent and more opportunities for ads to show up.

This trend will continue until users revolt against this by refusing to use engagement-funded services in favor of service they actually pay for, so that the incentive is no longer to waste the user's time to generate engagement but to give the user what they want in the most efficient way possible in order to keep them paying for the product.

More time required = more bouncing users. I even skip a 5 sponsored ad on youtube. I have no patience for this stuff. The first thing I do is scroll to the comments to see the list of thing the video says (for example top 5 things to eat, or whatever), as I have no patience for these videos being longer just so they get ranked higher, because that's the metric youtube is currently using.

I read HN headlines + top comments, because I have no patience to read a 20 page article that is badly written, or is written in such a way to get more pageviews.

You want engagement? Give me high quality content. Short, long, doesn't matter. High quality, dense content.

The internet is full of fluff. It's like everybody is using this xantham gum these days.

Facebook rolls out UI changes in less valuable markets to gather data to verify their changes don't decrease engagement.

Oh wow this is interesting / something to remember for my own life. So basically, they might try something out first in [small country] and if it works go to [medium country] and then if it stills works roll out to everyone?

This has been how companies have worked since forever.

In the 19th- and mid-20th centuries, all of the big advertising agencies handling consumer goods were headquartered in Chicago (many still are).

They would test products by introducing them a couple of hundred miles away in Peoria, Illinois. If the items were well accepted there, then they were rolled out to the rest of the country. It's where the expression, "But will it play in Peoria?" comes from.

This still happens. Back when Starbucks was still cool, it would roll out new drinks in Chicago and a couple of other cities as test markets, and then later in the rest of the nation if they were successful.

This makes complete sense - I just had never thought about it - Obviously, had thought about testing things in a smaller market, but for some reason my brain hadn't mapped that to software / websites / etc.

And props for history less on "But will it play in Peoria?"

New Zealand gets almost everything first. It's the ideal test market for FB to trial new features that mimic's it's primary revenue generating users in the USA and EMEA.

Yes, Google will iterate on the search results / new search result features in smaller markets also.

You are a minority and/or your behavior is only possible because there are alternative/better sources for the content you’re looking for, allowing you to skip the bullshit and get the same/similar content on a different source (like HN) with a better experience.

Most of the content on FB is either exclusive to it (all your friends are on there) or the majority of their target market doesn’t know/care about finding other sources which provide that content with a better experience.

I am a minority. I uused a chrome extension before to filter out posts that were liked by many people. Also, I forced it to be chronological. I was very happy, until it didn't work anymore.

Most posts these days are tiktok reposts anyway. The only things I like about fb these days:

- Some groups I'm in

- I like the marketplace

- For people to find me

Is this why reddit made its new UI's layout much less information dense?

Most likely. It's also less scary to less literate people. Not tech literate, literate in general.

Yes, and to fit in more advertising.

>Less information density = more time required to read the same amount of content = more "engagement".

No.

Yes, actually. The scare-quotes around "engagement" are intentional. More _perceived_ engagement, even though it's not accurately measuring customer satisfaction or actions.

Facebook isn't designed to look good or even be usable. It's designed to make money.

I have some faith that Facebook's redesign isn't losing them a ton of money, or they would've reverted it. It's probably increasing the KPIs they're trying to target.

All these metrics are very short-term and the user dissatisfaction builds up over time. It makes sense for everyone involved (the short term is all that counts for investors and CEOs), but I personally can't wait to see Facebook eat itself.

Techies keep waiting for that and they keep falling upwards:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/277963/facebooks-quarter...

Facebook will not eat itself for a very long, long time. Their corruption of various nice things in life will be with us for many decades.

Algorithmic timelines have objective advantages: they can keep the most frequent posters from drowning everyone else.

That's of course not to say they aren't maliciously misused.

the ability to easily filter/unfilter users from my feed is a much more user-friendly solution to that problem.

It's not that simple is it?

I want to see the photos my crazy aunt posts of her family and dogs, but I would love to not see the alt-right political memes she also posts.

I can do this already to some extent by simply blocking certain sources that she's reposting from. It's harder to do when the content is copied and pasted.

I would rather deal with the occasional offputting post than with the completely non-chronological mess FB has now that will decide which friends' posts I don't see at all seemingly arbitrarily. Right now I deal with both.

If someone goes on a racist rant you can quickly scroll past that entire streak with a chronological timeline. With an algorithmic one it's not so easy.

> This trend will continue until users revolt against this by refusing to use engagement-funded services in favor of service they actually pay for.

Will they revolt, though? Will consumers pay for it, though?

I sure hope so, as this is basically the whole reason I started working on communick[0]. But every feedback I've been collecting so far has been along the lines of "You should target this for the enterprise, not end-users". I went to Brave's BAT subreddit (a group of people supposedly tech-savvy people and who I thought were privacy-conscious) to ask them how/if they would like to spend the BAT received in privacy-oriented services[1]. The answers were depressing.

Granted, I was not expecting communick to be an overnight success and there is still a lot of work to be done to help people get onboard - both the technology and the privacy-first mindset. But even running super-lean I am far from covering my operational costs. If I don't get to the end of year and it is still not paying itself, I guess I will have to pivot and focus only on enterprise customers.

[0]: https://communick.com

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/i46g72/howwhere...

The reality is while there's a vocal minority, and that it may be subjectively worse, the design was absolutely A/B tested and performed better in whatever KPI's Facebook chose as their goals (such as ad revenue, session length, engagement metrics). That's the simple answer.

Full disclosure: I haven't logged on Facebook much in the past couple years.

Very possible that the majority of people who truly care about these things "haven't logged on Facebook much in the past couple years". I very much fall into that category. There are so many awful things about it that the UI is the least of my reasons for drastically limiting usage.

I killed my Facebook accounts a while ago but walked past my partner's station while she was doing some Facebook stuff. I was a bit surprised how bad it looked... Tonka Toys meets White Mode AOL.

Probably right about the A/B testing.

Glad I don't have to care.

Having a dark mode available is one of its redeeming qualities in my opinion.

I logged in for the first time in a few years a month or so ago to delete my account permanently, and was surprised how terrible it looks. It's got a real kindergartener vibe.

If people haven't logged in for the past years, they should never be the population considered to judge wether the new design is good or bad. OC's and your opinion are meaningless to the discussion if you are not a user.

>session length

I certainly hope they didn't use this metric... I can't find anything anymore so of course it takes me longer! I still struggle to find things under Microsoft's "new" Office ribbon...

Instead of session length they could use time to success and number of successes. A success being dwelling on content for a certain length of time or interacting with it (commenting, liking). I guess these fall under GP's "engagement metrics".

All I know is this change has made it even easier for me to quit, so I'm thankful for it!

Don't really agree with the criticism, to me the interface feels cleaner and less cluttered.

>It’s confusing and feels very “oversized.”

I don't see how it's confusing. Contacts on the right, navigation bar at the top, Groups, friends and so on on the left, feed in the middle, all visually separated.

>Of the 5 main giant buttons (navigation icons) at the top of the page, none of them are notifications — arguably the single most-used button and the one I need most.

This I don't understand at all because for me the second button from the right in the top bar literally is the notification button.

I also absolutely don't mind that things take up more space or are larger because it improves readability. I don't think scrolling is bad in any way, packing more things on the same space is not good design just because you make things denser, if that was the case we wouldn't use paragraphs in text, and scrolling on the web is free. I'm actually glad that pages move away from stuffing everything onto one page like the early web, as if we only had one sheet of paper.

> This I don't understand at all because for me the second button from the right in the top bar literally is the notification button.

Sure, but it's not one of the main, prominent buttons. It looks the same as "search" and "menu", IIRC. I definitely keep getting confused by it every time and click groups, which is useless to me.

I hate the new design, and not just because it's different.

One thing I love about new Facebook is the accessibility. As a blind user, old FB was close to unusable, the consensus in the community was to use mbasic.facebook.com, which lacked a lot of features and was designed for (keyboard based) feature phones.

The new FB works much, much better, and I personally switched to it a long time ago.

I hadn't thought about the accessibility improvements in the new design. When I was forced to switch I went directly into Grumpy Old Man mode and spent the next couple of days moaning about it. Then I got over myself/it and went back to admiring other people's pet photographs and trying to start fights with poets.

Change hurts, but life still goes on. I'm glad the FB changes has been beneficial to others in ways I was too self-centred to notice at the time.

Yeah sure the new design makes poor use of screen real estate, but the deal breaker for me is the memory consumption and extreme lag when using it. I find it extremely surprising that Facebook’s flagship product fails to leverage React’s optimizations.

For me, the chat has started lagging a lot which is strange since it was the pioneering ReasonML project, which they praised a lot after the rewrite.

I have no opinion on the Facebook designs but I'm so tickled to see this post. What a blast from the past! I thought "the new Facebook design sucks" posts died out ten years ago :-D

Ha, I remember being in high school and having the same debate. I think users reject dramatic change but slowly get used to it. The exception is “new Reddit”, which is still widely disliked in favor of https://old.reddit.com.

As a service to the community, there's probably a redirect extension for whatever browser you're using that can be configured to take you directly to the "old Reddit" look-and-feel. For FireFox, I use Redirector and the following rule:

Redirect: https://www.reddit.com/(.*) to: https://old.reddit.com/$1 Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/ → https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/

I also (apparently) use it to redirect mobile wikipedia to regular wikipedia.

> I think users reject dramatic change but slowly get used to it.

Your post almost made me feel like they had a choice. Personally I quit facebook two years ago and it's been a great two years.

The layout is just okay. Personally I think they are wanting FB to be a mobile-first service kind of like Instagram is. Insta was to the point where you used to not even be able to log in on a computer.

My problem is that the main feed has been completely useless to me for years. Here's what I would really like to see:

- Direct posts from an inner circle at the top

- Direct posts from acquaintances / posts in groups that I am a member of

- Reshares either gone or deprioritized from any direct post

- Ability to mute all reshares from a person instead of the current functionality of muting the individual source page.

Currently if I use my bookmark to my mother's page I can see that that is day 9 of 10 in some 'post your art' challenge. It's all stuff I haven't seen before because it's been a hot minute since I visited her, and I'm interested in these posts. She doesn't usually want her art online AT ALL and it's nice to see she is branching out in this way.

If I go to the main feed, it isn't there at all. I only know about it because I visited her page directly. When I call her, she will ask if I saw something my sister posted. I did not, because facebook doesn't think my sister is important to me either.

Then there's reshares. For the few people who facebook does think are important to me, it's 90% reshared memes and 10% the actual content I want to see. If I try to hide that content, my only options are to unfollow that person entirely, or to hide whatever meme page they shared from this time. Only problem is that every single post is from a different page, so that is not a workable solution.

My problem is that the whole interface is a minefield of pop up panels on the browser. There is little space that you can move your mouse without it tossing up some panel on mouse over events. It is adds a lot of visual clutter and most of the popups add nothing in the movement. Why does every name and date generate a pop up with more details on mouseover? I can click through if I want more.

It is particularly troublesome when you move your mouse to click on something and pass over a hotspot that pop us up another panel just as you click. Suddenly you’ve missed your click target and clicked something else.

I suspect that all of these popups are also why the page now consumes so much RAM. If facebook is loaded it soon consumes 2GB or more of RAM. The CPU usage also rises. This is a site with “big bones”.

I'm apparently in the minority here, but I opted into this beta a long while ago, toggled dark mode, and haven't missed the old interface at all. I don't care about scrolling and I think it's cleaner. To each their own I suppose.

If you wanted to see what you posted two weeks ago, is it possible with new interface? Let's say it was to a Facebook Group?

I've been struggling with this and also with finding that cool post I saw on my Home page just a second ago and now I can't find it.

Overall, my currently unavoidable experience with FB is one incident like this after another...

It's like me saying, I want to know if--

and then Facebook ignoring and interrupting me to say, forget that shit, bro, look at this instead!

But for real - when they switched over to the current design, I couldn't believe how bad it was.

Main concern is how TINY the actual width of feed is. I don't give two f%%ks about the left "Home" bar with groups etc. It's just woefully mismanaged real-estate AFAIK. This is a critique I've heard from others, when it switched over.

I love the new design because it make me use fb less often

Yeah, it really does. It's so cramped I feel like I can't read it most of the time, and browser zoom doesn't help at all.

I still don't even understand what the "stories" are exactly? When I've clicked it was a complete waste of time. That showed up earlier though.

The notifications on the right are simply not readable due to cramp and wrapping over three-ish lines, like a table with columns way too narrow for the content.

However, I do appreciate the dark mode.

Stories are a port from Instagram, which is a copy of a Snapchat feature. Basically like "status message" in good ol' IMs, except a) made from pictures or videos, and b) self-destructing after 24 hours.

I personally hate them as a concept, but that's because I generally don't like transient things on the Internet. Given their popularity, however, I'm guessing that more than half of photo sharing activity on social media is through such self-deleting broadcasts, leaving no trace and no ability to catch up on it. Which is probably why the platforms like it - it exploits FOMO to keep you checking the app every day.

If there is one reliable thing in webdev, it's users complaining when something is redesigned.

Give it a week and everyone will have gotten used to it.

It's been months now. It still sucks.

(I'm surprised to see this being called a "new" design, I've been using it for ~half a year now, and the switch was optional for a while before that.)

It is horrible, but I wonder if it’s not designed to push more use into mobile. If they get more data and better ads conversion from mobile, the desktop friction may be financially beneficial.

Mobile Facebook is a mess, they’re so far down the RN rabbit hole, supporting dark mode is a huge chore.

I've never spent a lot of time on FB and with the interface change, I avoid FB even more than I did before. Interfaces with fewer, larger elements always strike me as a dumbing down. Companies that offer (insist upon) that may have the numbers to justify it but they lose my engagement. Meaning, either I don't use them at all or as little as possible.

Facebook UI changes are designed specifically to make you frustrated .. frustrated enough that you spend time getting to know the new UI (spending more time on the platform), but not over frustrating so you stop using it.

I doubt this went live without it going through hundreds of focus groups to find that sweetspot to maximize every user's value as ad revenue.

This reminds me of the good old days of Facebook and the massive protests by users whenever they made any UI updates, including all the "bring back the old Facebook" groups. Users never like changes, but like always they'll get used to it and eventually talk about how good this interface was when the next change comes around.

Every single time Facebook does a redesign they get at least one of these posts.

I think it's tradition at this point.

Facebook sucks, no need to write about its design/UI like it's a hot topic. All FB needs it to dive users into more time usage of their anti-democratic services.

"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."

People have been complaining about Facebook redesigns on HN for 14 years now. It's a time-honored tradition at this point!

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=facebook+redesign

A bit off-topic, but I always find it so interesting that the creators of React - the premier web UI framework - did such a poor job with Facebook on mobile web.

It’s borderline unusable, but I suspect this might be intentionally done to drive users to the mobile app.

I don't even remember what the old design looked like. Like always, I will probably hate any redesign in the future saying they should revert back to the current design and then quickly get used to it. Rinse and repeat.

I don't know, maybe I'm better about removing bad habits but when this happened to reddit I just stopped using the site.

I don't even know what any of the facebook designs look like except whatever they had ~2007 though.

I still use old reddit, but if I'm logged out or somehow come across the new version, I just close the tab. It's just terrible, and I'll stop using the site when the old version is gone.

They have stated they will never remove old Reddit. And to an extent, I believe them. But instead what I think will happen is old Reddit will just slowly decay. Here is an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Stepmania/comments/jg2ab2/remote_ar...

That link at the bottom is for a video. I can't figure out how to watch that video in old Reddit. But if you load this post up in new Reddit, the video plays in line.

I say the new design not only looks fine, but it's an improvement. I do not use Facebook regularly, but I prefer this to the version where everything was smaller.

Facebook outlived its usefulness 8 or 9 years ago. If you're still using it in 2020, then you kind of deserve whatever you get.

This.

The sooner people start watching Social Dilemma or read Surveillance capitalism the better. The only way this gets better is by STOP using it.

No one in Social Dilemma stopped until they were multi millionaires if not billionaires.

They arguably haven't stopped since social dilemma is on Netflix.

If people are still using it in 2020, FB definitely provides something useful to their lives. Your tiny internet bubble does not represent the ~8 billion people living on Earth.

Ironically, facebook is the one creating tiny internet bubbles.

These unwanted forced design changes will be one of the main drivers of everyone off-platforming to their own social network.

"Everyone" meaning a few people who care more about the social network's design than communicating with the people who use it? I find it very hard to believe that there's going to be some kind of mass de-platforming event that leaves Facebook a ghost town. Maybe because of changes to political content policies, but definitely not because of UI changes.

Snapchat has gone through a number of major, controversial redesigns. It's definitely not going anywhere (at least among its target demographic). Facebook is far more entrenched than Snapchat; its target audience is less quick to switch platforms as well.

It begins with those who have the know-how to do it today, and they are bringing their friends and family, and the acceleration is exponential.

Look at Digg: two-fold cause of 1) UI changes, and 2) user perceptions of centrally controlled, biased, and influenced information flow.

Digg was thought to have unbreakable critical mass.

Now, Reddit and Facebook are both going down the same road, with user-hostile UI and opaque information sourcing.

People aren't dumb, and they've already noticed and made up their mind about it. Now they're just looking for somewhere to jump.

I recently interviewed two kids no older than 20 for a user study. Not techies. One of them doesn't use Snapchat for privacy reasons. Other one thought about it and said, "I don't know why I use it, because I know that it's not really private." I didn't even prompt them with any questions about privacy or control, I was just doing a cursory "what apps or social networks do you use?"

More and more people are saying, "I know it's crap, but I'm on there because everyone else is using it." It means they're already looking for another place to go.

> Digg was thought to have unbreakable critical mass.

Nowhere near it. Digg peaked at about 40 million MAU in 2010. That's two magnitudes less than Facebook.

Facebook adds a Digg-equivalent to its MAU every month.

People have complained about Facebook design changes for over a decade.

People always complain about new layouts because we don't like change. The change didn't bother me much this time around. I switched to the new layout 4-6 months ago, turned on dark mode and never looked back. Facebook has always had a confusing interface, it feels easier to use nowadays. Then again all I do is check out groups and use messenger so I'm not exactly a Facebook power user.

Talking about Facebook sure seems to be a divisive subject. I simply stated a fact and after that my personal experience, I'm unsure why that warrants a downvote?

LOL at the people threatening to quit Facebook. Quitting Facebook is like "going off the grid" -- sure, some people do it, but 99% of the people who threaten to will never even get close, and the people who actually do it don't spend their time shouting about how they're going to do it.

I miss those snappy chat boxes so much.

messenger.com is as ugly and slow as F5.

I don't know why but i'm still on the old interface.

Facebook almost always has a long-term holdout group in experiments like this to make sure that any gains from the design change aren't just short-lived blips from the novelty factor that ultimately result in long-term regressions.

I understand but, they announced that it would disappear in September. We are at the end of October. Considering the feedback, I'm quite happy to be still on the old version.

They are probably rethinking now after seeing the feedback

Yeah. Like they re-thought the wall or feed or messenger as a separate app. All of which got negative feedback.

Posting about how the new Facebook design sucks on a blog which I can't read because the blogging platform sucks.

a multi-billion dollar blogger should know better

I have an idea for a revolutionary blogging platform, would you like to hear?

It's kind of like facebook for wordpress with a twist.

We're looking to raise $378M to have sufficient runway.

I want in.

That's gonna require 200 engineers at SF rates. Better shoot for $0.5B if you want to be taken seriously.

I have some office space I am willing to lease to you, however I wont take any equity I need hard cash.

with ml based analytics

Oooh I didn't expect a tu quoque as the first comment.

Really? It's HN. You can't even have a thread without at least one comment complaining about bad website design.

Oh I don't mind people complaining that Medium sucks, because Medium does suck, I just didn't expect someone to use that to discount the argument the article is making.

In their defense it's hard to come up with a counter argument when you can't read anything.

The article appears to be one sentence long and doesn't make an argument in that sentence, so criticizing the platform for not actually displaying the article is basically the only thing I can say about it.

Disabling cookies should help. I've already read my first members-only story 4 times this month and I still have 2 left.

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