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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

The biggest irony in my opinion is the existance of the "mute" feature on facebook. I am not a FB user, but apparently, the more you share, the higher the likelihood of somebody muting you.

So in the end we will share everything with our friends, but our friends will only pretend to listen.

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Technical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty.

MySpace was destroyed by cultural problems. The technology wasn't at fault. If it was populated with HN-types, we'd see clean typography and beautiful blogs - not the epileptic-fit-causing profile pages that caused everyone to migrate to Facebook.

Culture is the difference between MySpace and Tumblr.

Building a community is everything. That's my thesis, at least.

The technology wasn't at fault.

Myspace could have survived myriad cultural problems on the strength of their once unparalleled social graph if they could have kept pace with Facebook's technology. Facebook had many things right - the news feed, valid identities, speed - that would have required Myspace to essentially start from scratch to even emulate. Myspace tried, but couldn't pull it off.

So my argument is that Facebook has room to experiment in areas where tastes may differ (i.e. culture) as long as they have great technology and an adaptable design. If the timeline/ticker turns out to be completely overwhelming and they see usage drop, Zuckerberg could practically issue an apology, flip a switch and basically turn Facebook back to yesterday's Facebook by Monday. As their experiences with failure (Beacon) and success (the news feed!) have shown, there's way more upside than downside.

Sometime try listing Tweets by geo proximity when you're downtown. The MySpace culture is alive, well, and on Twitter in numbers that far outweigh the "HN-types".

Twitter seems no worse for it, and a failure to cater to elitists wasn't MySpace's problem either. MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, HP -- their problems are cultural, but not their users' culture, their managements'.

Technical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty.

Very, very true.

I would even expand on this. Problems people encounter online can be divided into technical, social (involving groups) and interpersonal. Problems from one category cannot be effectively solved via methods from another. Attempting to do so inevitably results in many undesirable side-effects.

No, the difference between MySpace and Tumblr is that the latter has a dashboard that gets rid of everyone's theme and by extension their autoplaying music, etc.

MySpace had a great community. The software was slow and ugly. Now it's faster and a little less ugly, but the community is gone.

So in the end we will share everything with our friends, but our friends will only pretend to listen.

It's not pretending if they've muted you, you're being ignored. Which is not a bad thing, noisewise, it natural and to be expected, but that's besides my point.

My point is that you will always have a default friend who wants to hear everything you share, a friend who will never mute you, never block your Zynga Blogville updates. No, it's not me, nor is it Tom Anderson; your default friend is Facebook itself. FB will always listen to you and will always want to know about everything you do.

I wonder how long it will be until Facebook itself can be called as your character witness? Not as mere physical evidence of things you've said or done, but an analysis of all of those events over time and the phychological profile that they imply.

That could be a new job - Facebook timeline analyzer. Snake oil or not, people would probably fall for it.

    "It's not pretending if they've muted you, you're being ignored."

But does FB tell you when somebody mutes you?

No.

Thank God. I don't think my ego could handle it,

Now that you mention it - I always thought Google might be the first company to create real AI. Now I realize that Facebook might be in the game, too. Then it really could be your friend.

For me, the best way to use Facebook is to "mute" everyone. Family, friends--everyone.

It has the following advantages: - No one knows that I've muted them. - I'm still on Facebook, so if people need to contact me through that medium, they can still do it. - If I'm really curious about what anyone has been up to, I can still look at their page - No need to log to procrastinate because I never have any updates.

Kind of perfect, for me at least.

Yeah, one day I figured out that I'd already muted about half my "friends". Of the remainder, most never posted.

But the remaining folks are largely my real friends, so it all works out.

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