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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

Facebook only ever did one thing well, and I think it still does it well enough, and that's being the internet's answer to the telephone book. In the last few years, through the era of social distancing, needing to get in touch with people not already in your personal address book has no doubt declined, but presumably that will return again.

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I think facebook does marketplace really well. Whenever I listed something it sold, and I'm talking about really trashy stuff like a $20 microwave. I get a lot of noise (weird messages) but haven't seem explicit scams like you see on CL and you can sell the stuff usually within a day.

They also do events pretty well. It's easy to invite people and most people my age have a neglected facebook account so you can usually find who you want to invite. You just have to make sure you don't miss seeing the event.

I think Marketplace quickly became a goto over Craigslist because a Facebook profile is much more trustworthy than the essential anonymity of Craigslist.

Funny enough, I prefer craigslist because I don't want my personal identity involved in a simple transaction like buying electronics. It's not like you have much recourse if you get scammed on marketplace, the user can just use a fake account and delete it after scamming you

Yeah, but you can quickly look at a profile and get basic verification it looks real. If it doesn't just don't transact with them. I've been 100x more confident in facebook marketplace than craigslist

My only experience with FB marketplace had a gal selling an iPad from the northeast…only to receive a receipt from a dude in Turkey.

FB, PayPal, the bank all stopped the charges quickly enough, but it was 6 weeks of bullshit in the meantime.

Profile age doesn't guarantee anything. I sold an iphone 11 on Ebay and a scammer used the credentials from a ten year old account with many legit purchases to try and run some kind of paypal payment request trick.

However on the seller side, dropping anonymity is super effective at reducing scams.

Have you tried making a fake Facebook account recently? Not happening.

Underrated comment. Facebook is an informal identity provider, which has value to market participants.

or cost depending on your perspective. CL is part of the weird, old internet being used in current times, with all the good & bad that comes with that.

Until they very quickly ruined Marketplace by heavily promoting low quality new and "shipped to you" items rather than local used goods.

This. Otherwise Marketplace makes a giant sucking sound.

People should have a score and be excluded from it based on their shit ghosting behavior and lack of follow though.

Just as a counterpoint, I've sold almost 200 items on CL in the last 5 years in NYC as part of a decluttering project — everything from pro cameras to $3 adapters and cables to furniture. I have a process for when I switch from email to text, when I give my cross streets and train stop, and when I give my exact address, as well as boilerplate about cash, pickup only etc.

On the other hand, I'd been looking for a used car on FB Marketplace for about 3 years and couldn't find a single listing that seemed like it was from a legit owner (i.e. someone who wasn't selling a bunch of random cars parked on the street or a dealer posting fake prices).

Stuff does tend to sell quickly on Marketplace but searching for items is horrendous, there are so many puzzling things about the UI. Why have a 'max distance' field I can set to 40 miles if you are going to completely disregard it and show me things from neighboring states?

They do private events for your friends you're already connected to well.

However, they don't do social private groups well at all. For them it's all or nothing. Meetup, unfortunately, is still used for that.

They either force you to do all private events or all public and broadcasted events. Theres no way to maintain a community or a LUG on FB.

What sort of groups do you organize?

I've been working on an app inspired by challenges I had organizing hack nights and poker games. It's kind of a cross between Facebook events and Google Calendar, and allows you to send an invite link and send text updates. Would love to hear your thoughts!

https://regroup.app

I organized a semi public social meetup group for my city. People should be able to see the kinds of events we do .. but also rsvp/be a member to come out. Sometimes we enjoy the abiltiy to make the location private.

Makes a lot of sense, esp when making events more public. Thanks for your feedback!

I use marketplace. It's buggy on mobile, didn't work for a year or so, there are scammers on there. I saw a flood of dodgey adverts over the last week. Reported, persisted. I still use of for marketplace and a forum.

Marketplace and messenger are the most useful Meta apps. While I don't use it for any social media wall posting stuff I do know a lot of people my age who do. Mostly people from rural areas.

Interesting point. I was talking about this very issue with someone. Facebook was awesome when it first came out because you could connect with people you hadn't seen or heard from in years. You'd connect through mutual friends mostly.

Those days are gone. People have moved from landlines to permanent cell numbers, so once you have someone's number, you always have it. Email addresses are gmail.com, outlook.com, etc. As with the phone number, once you have an email address, you always have it. Plus, with widespread cellphone usage and unlimited text messaging, it's low cost for both parties to send a quick text message to stay in touch.

Facebook's original source of popularity is now dead. Of course this does not imply that Facebook will disappear.

That's true but there are a fair number of people who are friends of mine or at least acquaintances who I like sort of keeping in contact with--but who I wouldn't necessarily text or email out of the blue. Facebook provides a nice low-friction way of keeping in touch, sharing photos, etc. (That said I don't really have that many friends on Facebook and most of my circle seems to have really cut back on their usage.)

But that's where the design of Facebook gets in the way. With Twitter, I can follow someone without them even knowing. Facebook requires sending a request and then having that request accepted. I interact with many people on Twitter that I'd never consider sending a request on Facebook. For me at least, there's not much of a gap between those I'd send an email or text and those I'd send a Facebook request, and even for them there's not much of an advantage of Facebook over the alternatives in 2022.

You can follow all profiles on facebook but only the public profiles ones on twitter. Becoming a friend take two on facebook and can't be done on twitter

That's pretty much how I think about LinkedIn. Certainly, looking for someone in professional circles, LinkedIn would be my go to--not Facebook. Lots of people aren't on Facebook. Most I know have a LinkedIn profile even if they don't maintain it.

One person’s perspective here, but it seems to me like Facebook sucks for that now. I have had very little success recently looking people up on Facebook, even when I know their name, where they live, and that they have a Facebook account.

I think it is because so many people have low trust in Facebook. For years there has been a huge movement of people encouraging each other to lock down their FB account. So while they might keep an account to check in on old friends and family, they have set their profiles to be not searchable.

The image detection/tagging feature was what got me onto the platform originally. That was way ahead of others in the space at the time, and was a great way to build up a photo album over time as your friends uploaded their own pictures that included you.

I think of Facebook as a photo album. It is perfect for sharing pictures of my kids with my friends and family. It is great for seeing what my distant friends are up to.

I have to aggressively block all jokes (there were funny 1000 shares ago), memes (always stupid, but they seem insightful), politics (left and right wing extremism), cats (not your cat, I don't care), and other things people share that get in the way of the purpose of seeing what my friends and family are up to.

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