Goodbye Facebook.
techsavvybutterfly.wordpress.com
techsavvybutterfly.wordpress.com
Outside of the sub-group of individuals who thrive on sharing every aspect of their life, most people want Facebook to be a fancy email. There's all your friends; you can talk with them and literally see what they're up to . And to be honest, the platform is great for that.
Facebook, on the other hand, needs you to be an information sharing and data providing machine, talking about brands and products, all while doing whatever they can to entice (or trick) you into putting your information in the public domain. They want to you be connected with everyone. People are learning that's a lot of work.
The problem is that the more Facebook pushes the latter, the worse the former -- the user experience -- has to get. Nobody wants to stare at ads and feel like they're being "watched" (by both Facebook and other connections) while they "engage" with friends. As the author discovered...it's odd.
Facebook is getting impersonal without a competent list/circles system. I find myself texting or messaging content to people more than posting it on my wall because I want to be selective about who views it.
Sometimes these are stories about the cute girl I talked to at Starbucks or a service I'm loving. Sometimes it's a personal story with little branding value. But I naturally have both types of conversations and so don't see the mutual exclusivity between encouraging conversation and getting data.
Similarly, the problem with friending everyone goes away with a decent lists/circles concept - I add a lot more people on Google+ (granted, I don't post anything there. But I'd like to).
Addiction is not proportional to the quality of the user experience.
Enter the news feed - which was hugely unpopular at first - and is more like walking into a public square, with ads, vendors, and people on soapboxes. Some people don't like to be so public in the way they share, and other people's interesting stuff gets lost in the crowd.
The Facebook of today isn't the one I signed up for, which is fine, but also explains why I use it less now.
The other day someone sent me an e-mail or text (I forget) to invite me to an event. They knew I had abandoned Facebook and wanted to make sure I was included. I felt slightly honored that they would go "out of their way" to include me, and it was much more meaningful than the average Facebook invite-all event listing.
Have you ever met someone you hadn't seen in a while, and they ask you what you've been doing, and you get a plethora of different reactions as you explain the ups and downs of your recent adventures? You don't get that if they're on Facebook. Human interaction is based on communication, and Facebook is not communication. It's the Reader's Digest version of The Truman Show.
Maybe I am a luddite. But what i'm fighting against is the replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. Maybe someday soon, Google Glass will become so ubiquitous that we'll all watch snippets of other people's lives instead of status updates, and we'll never have to live life on our own again; we'll just live through someone else.
Ignoring your patronizing, insulting tone for a bit, somehow I doubt it's that easy for most. If you're addicted to something (and I mean really, truly addicted), and it has negative consequences on your life, the answer is always "Well just stop it doing it, then". However, people do not work that way, and it's at the very least naive to assume it's that simple.
>You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.
Applies to Twitter, email, SMS, basically any communication method ever. The fact that becoming addicted to a communication medium can have a negative impact on your life is not a valid argument against said communication medium, because it applies to all of them.
>Facebook is not communication.
What would you call it then!? It's a platform where you share and talk with friends. How is that not communication?
>replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology.
If you've never been emotionally impacted by a social interaction which did not occur with the person standing right next to you (i.e. via technology), I daresay you are either leading us on, or are not much of a communicator to begin with.
I said replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. It's the removal of the human element that troubles me. When people stop reaching out to one another, and instead reach out to a plastic widget. When instead of sharing, laughing, and crying together, we take, laugh, and cry in a room, alone, our thumbs and index fingers hurriedly punching out comments on data streams, missing vital clues and skipping over the common human courtesies we learn and use in the course of physical interaction. Facebook is stripping away our humanity.
The simplest example is the occasional comment-box-flame-war you'll see when someone posts something about race, religion, sex, politics, etc. Total strangers haranguing your friends because they decided your status update's comment box was a nice place to have a pointless argument. It's made worse by the vagueries of the internet and the invincibility of the internet.
Email and text don't work the same way, and aren't a threat to human interaction in the way Facebook is. Twitter is similar, though, which is why I also deleted Twitter.
You say "human courtesies", I (and others) say impediments to effective communication. Think of the average phone call. Think of how much of that is completely needless and only dictated by tradition as opposed to any real informational, emotional, communicative, or any other value.
And if you can't look past the medium to see the person on the other side, there's not a whole lot I can say on that. My BF on the phone vs Skype vs Facebook vs Twitter. It's all the same person, all their communique are special to me, medium regardless. In fact the textual ones have a benefit - I can easily retrieve those later.
Who really uses Facebook to the exclusion of meeting in person?
>Facebook is stripping away our humanity.
Such hyperbole.
>the negative consequences ("lack of pictures and status updates") are not nearly as broad as addiction to most other things in life.
You realize there is such a thing as mental addiction, yes? Your brain chemistry doesn't have to have been impacted by chemicals to be addicted to something.
I guess, try to imagine yourself in a state where you cannot move any part of your body but your eyes. Your body is slumped into a mattress for so long that there's a permanent dent in it. You can not hear, you can not talk, but luckily technology has progressed to such a state that you can project text through some technological medium onto a computer. Facebook is your only connection to the world you knew.
After years and years of existing in this state, one day you are miraculously cured. Do you think you would still find a phone call to be an impediment to communication at all? Maybe, maybe not, depending how comfortable you had become with your new world. But I know what would be important to me. I'll take a human conversation over text, every time.
Did you meet your BF through Facebook?
> In fact the textual ones have a benefit - I can easily retrieve those later.
Sorry, but this is creepy. The advantage of spoken word is that it's ephemeral, personal and unshareable with others; said things get forgotten and (if they were ugly), forgiven too.
When one sends a email newsletter to 50K people, that is also communication. When one blogs, that is also communication. But these are not replacements for actual "conversations" which you have with one person at a time, or very small groups (2-3 people?) - which is very engaged, where everyone is interested in everyone else and emotionally involved.
Facebook news feed is like a giant scrolling billboard of "announcements" - sure it is communication in the sense our friends are telling us what they were upto - that is pretty much it.
May be I am wrong, but I think GP meant the difference between real conversations and broadcasting announcements.
Agreed, but that is not Facebook's only function.
Facebook has the same relationship to communication that Doritos has to food.
Facebook tries to pretend its more. Its not.
If I want to hold private dialogues with people from across the country - long, intense, and thoughtful - I prefer email.
On the other hand, maybe you've missed a dozen of other events, where you could have had your share of "real" communication.
I despise Facebook as a company, and its many shady schemes, but I have to admit, it's a very efficient tool for connecting people.
In fact I shall start an "experiment" myself to see if replacing every instance of "experiment" in these kind of articles with "controversial decision" to see if they read better. I mean it's as if people use the word "experiment" to justify being avant-garde.
Except in this case it's not even a controversial thing. People are leaving facebook for tonnes of reasons (fad has died, not finding its uses any more, don't want to be tied with a system that hoards personal data and sells them off to companies etc). Leaving Facebook isn't an edgy thing to do; not before and not now. Anyone I knew that announced that they're "leaving facebook" end up being rather smugly obnoxious when tech news headlines say "facebook did some things that people don't like. boooo facebook!" saying they "knew all along" and they were obviously smarter and more superior than the regular "tech weenie" still on their facebook.
We all know what the result of this "experiment" is going to be. "My life was significantly improved thanks to not using facebook. Just as I thought! Aren't I clever?". There's no point denying it because that's what they're going to say. Just like I said I'll replace "experiment" with "controversial decision". I already know that I'm going to say "Nope. The posts were not better at all. Told ya!" because I know that when it's something I dislike in the first place I'm going to have a visceral reaction to hate it rather than say doing an ACTUAL experiment which doesn't have this cognitive bias.
And I'm right, am I? I mean I'm not WRONG or something? Please someone validate my beliefs which I portray on the internet. I desperately need this!!!
I think that was supposed to be ironic. I think. Regardless, that's how it came off to me too. I still have no Facebook account, and I'm not getting one. If you're unhappy just leave, no need to make a big fuss out of it.
"Yeah, I saw your post on Facebook" is one of the phrases I've found myself and my friends saying over the past couple of years, and sometimes I don't like hearing it, even from my own mouth.
Nevertheless, announcing it publicly as an "experiment" - it's debatable whether this has any value or point.
There is nothing interesting or novel in these posts. All that happens is that the people who have also left facebook find validation in seeing someone else do it so they up vote their story to the front page.
I don't know if it's about individuality or some perceived minority of 'non-facebook' users wanting to band together, but the fact that someone has left facebook is uninteresting.
In addition to this it's made worse by the articles acting as if it's some crowning achievement when all they're doing is limiting their methods of interacting with other people.
Surely you can do this with or without Facebook.
Maybe I'm a unique snowflake but Facebook to me is exactly the opposite of that: it's a way to give a quick (often meaningless) insight into my life, what I'm thinking or what I'm doing. It's a way to share something that maybe someone will be interested in, but probably not. If I share something to Facebook it's not because I want all my friends to see it, it's because I think those that might see it might find value in it and it represents what I'm doing/thinking/enjoying. If I want someone to see something or engage with me in conversation I send them a message.
Facebook isn't a replacement for "normal" communication between friends, it's an extension. The only reason anyone would want to see complaints about someone's life falling apart is the same reason people watch train wrecks of car crashes. They don't care about the individual, they care about the spectacle. Using any one->many communication platform for complaints about life seems misguided.
Maybe https://everyme.com/ would fill the void he has in his life.
Since Facebook, my email inbox is almost devoid of "RE:RE:FW:FW" broadcast messages.
I still get plenty of email from family and friends, but they are more selective in what they send. Things that are personal, or detailed, or very specific to me.
I still use my phone a lot, but spend less time telling people how great (or not) my weekend was. If they want to know, they can look. If they want details, they call and ask.
The faint echoes of Gödel and Turing in the back of my mind say: no social algorithm can ever optimize its results to take into account how people will modify their behavior in response to the algorithm itself.
I still see the same problems. When I talk to people, it's always "oh yeah, I saw on Facebook that you got a new job," etc. etc.
I went back and looked through my old e-mails from right before Facebook was becoming popular, early 2004. I once sent out one of those "My e-mail address is changing. Oh btw how are you?" e-mails to my whole list, and got back around 50 genuine responses that turned into conversations. Not "broadcast" style conversations, not public conversations, but real honest person-to-person human communication. It was brilliant.
I realized that I had completely lost that. If I was doing it today, I could send the same e-mail but people would send nothing back; it would just be "Thanks" because they already know everything else there is to know about my life, and I theirs.
It's a very strange and new way of connecting to people. On the one hand I have some deep insights into the lives of friends I might not otherwise talk to, or even those I do; on the other hand, I miss the humanity of one-on-one conversation.
I'm yet undecided if this is a good thing. But overall, I think the article overblows the affect this has on relationships. Personally, I sort of like it. All the trivial stuff is known already. No one cares where you work or what you're doing anymore, they want to hear how you're doing and how your life is really going. It negates some shallowness and small talk. Not necessarily bad.
But it is enormously complex. We still don't know how society will change as people become more connected in so many ways, but we do know it will change. Some might say it's the next level in our evolution; collaborative social evolution is the next step since biological evolution can't keep up. It'll be a fun ride.
Unless Facebook has made some truly ground-breaking advances in AI, the company's algorithms cannot anticipate how users might modify their behavior in response to the algorithms themselves. AFAIK, that's not possible today.
Over time, this utter lack of 'intelligent auto-incorporation of feedback' might show up as people sharing 'fake' instead of real feelings, or as 'social' graphs diverging significantly from the true state of real-world relationships, or as automatic sharing of 'relevant' information (like ads) that look great to the algorithm but in hindsight are misguided.
(BTW, in my view, this is one of the biggest long-term risks for Facebook's business: that society over time learns to 'route around it' and it gradually loses relevance for day-to-day use.)
FWIW, I do agree with you that no one knows with certainty how society will change as a result of Facebook and its ilk.
I think the behavior change that you were talking about originally is a bit of a stretch—most people have integrated Facebook and the like into their social fabric. It has become another level of communication, and at all levels and at all times we present a version of ourselves to others, whether facebook or not.
I don't believe the "social algorithm" needs to anticipate this natural human behavior any more than a telephone needs to anticipate it and change your conversation to feel more personal. Facebook is simply the format we're communicating through. I think it has to do more with the audience the format involves than anything else, and with Facebook, it's simply the self you present in the public non-anonymous space. This space has existed before, and Facebook is just a digital version. If people want something different from this that compensates for this behavior change, they won't use an AI algorithm; they'll just use a different platform. They'll chat, pick up the phone, or visit in person. Simple as that.
I think most people do this just fine. Like I said, my conversations with friends change because they know more details about my life, but they don't necessarily get worse or more impersonal. In fact they may be better since we're less focused on the trivial. The writer of this article may not have that perspective, and that's fine, but I think she's ignoring many advantages of the communication format that Facebook provides while emphasizing all of the disadvantages.
And my understanding from chatting with friends in the fraud-detection space is that, while current state-of-the-art machine-learning systems can successfully adapt to the data they obtain from users, they cannot adapt to users learning to game or 'route around' the system -- at least not without programmer intervention 'from above.'
The link to Gödel and Turing I saw is that solving this problem without intervention 'from above' would require a computer program that can successfully model itself as it interacts with humans, but then we run into those two guys, no?
Not only that, but the utter lack of transparency is concerning to say the least. There is this monstrous set of data--PII--that this company holds and who's to say the bus monitor doesn't all of a sudden decide that's it's best for me if they provide this data to Experien. Or to the justice dept.
The real problem is that people are addicted to distraction. Fb offers this droves. So much so that not only are people more than willing to hand over their data, they are willing to hand it over to someone who thinks you don't even deserve to know when they make sweeping changes to which parts of that data are displayed to the world.
/rant
As if the primary reason you're expressing your dislike for the service in a discussion about it, is because you wish to proclaim smug superiority.
I think it's important for those who dislike the current platform, and are concerned about the future ramifications of it, to speak up in public forums. To state openly that they don't use Facebook for reasons of principal and also, because Facebook's actions have spoken louder than words numerous times and in my opinion, to continue to use the service is like staying with an abusive partner.
For school teachers, perhaps the reason might be principal.
The OP started off by stating his reasons for dropping FB in this "experiment".. namely losing touch with the people for which he originally signed up under.
But he clearly doesn't engage with them if he's not seeing their updates.
Your social graph needs fine tuning. It's like any good bayesian filter, it learns over time what interests you. You can of course give it a push in the right direction by putting people in acquaintances, or hiding specific people from your timeline. (People in your acquaintances don't show up as often in your newsfeed).
This post just shows that you most likely don't understand the full feature set of Facebook and how to best optimize your social graph (not that this is your fault). Facebook has some of the best machine learning for figuring out what is relevant to me. I'd probably argue that you click on too many memes and don't interact with your friends as much if this is what it is serving you.
Don't drop Facebook, just learn how to use it. I personally don't use Facebook for interacting with that many friends. I have about 96% of my friends as acquantiances. I have a small set of about 10 people as friends, and I subscribe to about 100~ people. My newsfeed is so rich with really good content.
You can try defend the social graph, how much Facebook has done to improve it and so on, but for a lot of people it doesn't actually achieve what it used to, and that's an issue.
Either that, or I just don't care for random, short-form content.
Or you can just take control of your relationships and nourish them the old fashioned way: calling, email, face to face, etc.
Email for example: "Sure you could dePend on a soulless money making machine to optimize your communications... And hope it does it right. Or you can just take control of the situation and do it the old fashioned way: letters and stamps."
You have control over email: providers, client applications, encryption. Sure, many many people use gmail and gmail isn't too different to facebook in this regard, but email itself is an open protocol where you can use a competing service and still integrate with others.
Facebook is not about "helping you connect to your friends", it's about buying eyeball-time and pumping commercials into your brain.
Any person that has not been completely brainwashed can see the fallacy in this kind of system.
> it's about buying eyeball-time and pumping
> commercials into your brain.
(Ouch, but FB is meme/funny picture city. Gross.)
I've seen those options under my friends' accounts ("lists", right? "close friends", "acquaintances", etc.?) ... is that where I'd do that? Is that something they see (I don't want to offend people by demoting them to "acquaintances", but if I can do that without them seeing, that'd be great).
Honestly, Facebook would be a lot more valuable to me if they had some sort of basic tutorial explaining what's going on with it and how I can make it work for me. As it is, all I use it for is as a slightly glorified birthday reminder.
If you have any resources to that end (how to tune your feed), I'd love to hear about them.
Basically: you can move friends to "acquaintances", they won't see that status change, and their posts will only rarely show up in your feed.
People commenting it's just a money making machine, where do they make money off me? I don't click on anything I don't want to and I'm not forced to buy stuff.
I log into Facebook, see a picture of my friends baby, I comment, we have a laugh then I arrange to go round and see them. I don't interact any more or any less than I would over the phone etc
I see updates from the people I want to see updates from, if someone writes a load of crap all the time, I just filter them out.
I never understand all the hate people have for Facebook, constant jibes about privacy. If you as a person are putting information on Facebook that is that private then you are the idiot, not Facebook. If you don't want people to see private pictures of your children, simple, don't upload them!
Everything needs a revenue stream of some sort, does everyone think Apple do what they do because they want to make everyone happy??
Back shortly, just going to check out my friends wedding pics that everyone else uploaded and tagged them in.
However, because of the nature of FB, it makes relationships less personal/authentic, as we try to show off our "best self" to others, rather than our real selves. The tool itself encourages this, so instead of adapting to it, for some people it's best to not use it.
It's like eating at a fast food restaurant. Yes, you can adapt to it and order the salads, and healthy dishes.. But noone's forcing you to go there, you can just not go to them in the first place.
Some people use it to tell people how well they are doing or how much they love their loved ones. I text or ring my wife if I feel like telling her out the blue how much I love her. Others use the facebook wall to do it so everyone could see how sensitive they are. I think it's all bollocks really.
I do just use it as a tool, I plan events, I upload the odd photo and comment on others status' that I find funny / worth a comment. e.g. I uploaded a video of my little boy at the driving range the other night as I was impressed how well he hit it for his second time at golf. I did it for the benefit of my family and friends to see though. Nothing more.
Everyone else I just filter out or de-friend based on who they are to me.
I regret accepting old high school/college friends (who I haven't' seen in 25 years), army buds, and family members I didn't even know I had.
Now I post, maybe once every 2 weeks. Usually something safe - like about the current game I'm playing. I don't dare get personal on FB now.
The irony.
I spent a year writing many handwritten letters. People loved receiving them but seldom, if ever, returned the favor. I try and try again to meet with my friends to catch up (ie, going for coffee). Almost never happens, and when it does it's a chore to actually set up. Instead, it has to be an 'event' and it should be 'social'. I text my friends and they respond rather quickly...because I know if I call, many times they don't answer.
Of course, all this means is that the LCD is either me or society.
In doing this we miss out on some deeper conversations, but I think we gain on balance because it allows people to _choose_ which conversations they want to pursue. That's the key thing here - if you aren't feeling a benefit from socializing, you aren't motivated to do it. Which inevitably leads to the conclusion that most people are finding each other boring, even if they're friends...
this kind of frightens me, even though I lean towards introversion.
Just because someones post isn't "liked" or clicked on in some way doesn't mean it's not valuable. It's a passive form of communication.
I don't know if this is just my perception, and maybe Facebook doesn't prioritize things in the news feed. Regardless, it's a UX question that needs to be asked by their team.
Or to put it another way, if I can't figure out how to make facebook show me stuff that isn't shite, how are ordinary people going to figure it out?
edit: Also I've figured out that the reason I no longer hear from an awful lot of my facebook friends is that I've probably set at least half of 'em to "ignore" due to 'em posting too much garbage.
Well, actually I do but I don't want to dive into a long comment about how it's a voyeuristic, social panopticon and how easy it is to project your insecurities onto it. Well, I have a small and strange solution to staying in contact with your friends, do what I do: remove all your actual friends from your newsfeed.
When you see them, you won't already have eagerly instantiated things to talk about, you won't jaw off about some article they posted about the latest bath salt murder -- you'll actually catch up and connect in genuine conversation.
The site only has as much power as you give it, posting a long diatribe about how it has no power over you anymore because you deactivated is legitimizing its power over you.
On a side note, why is it so important to declare that you are no longer using or on Facebook. This isn't limited to the OP either. I've met people in real life, who take great pride in not using FB anymore. I find it in the tech & podcast world too. It's a strange type of snobbery, between 'those in the know who aren't on facebook' versus the 'sheep who are on facebook'.
Well, I am no longer using brand name nasal spray. It wasn't fulfilling my life I like I thought it was supposed to. I used it like the bottle says too and while it does what it says it's supposed to, it's not what I want.
Your nasal spray, however, is not a hot topic.
Just stop checking your Facebook page and start hanging out more with friends in person. No need to be so dramatic about it.
The problem is, despite Facebook having many tools to calibrate one's communications, Facebook is still a blackbox. We click the appropriate Account Settings radio button and like the good scientists we are, wait to see what happens. The fact of the matter is, we are pulling a lever and hoping it is attached to some mechanism on the other side.
The same is true of Google and SEO.
Odd that obfuscation is the hallmark of our internet experiences.
I agree that facebook is a lot less personal than it used to be. Personally, I rarely update my facebook status or stare at the newsfeed. I use facebook to connect with "friends" whose phone number or e-mail address I don't have and to join or create events.Those two situations are perfectly well handled by facebook.
It was a bit hard for me to do this though, nearly took an hour.. so here are two suggestions
1) Brute force: option to mark everyone as acquaintances in one go and then de-select the people back to friends.
2) More automated: Facebook should make a module where if a person allows the app access to the phonebook, it somehow recommends a list of people who are important to me based on my frequency of calling/speaking them offline. I know privacy conscious people would absolutely scream in horror so this is why it should be opt-in only.
P.S. 3) Oh and timeline still sucks. It is just too hard to read, there ought to be a way to going back to the simple news feed.
Hmm, that's just a tough anecdote to use to make his point...it could be that that his friend is not much of a conversationalist with him.
But I admit to using FB to promote things that I don't feel like wasting real-time talking about...like projects or articles I liked...And everyone who's ever been on the receiving end of a mass-email is happy about that.
And you can't just deny people you know from being your friend on Facebook. It's rude. If you're ok with being rude, this doesn't apply to you, but the quality of my Facebook stream is not worth sacrificing my manners - not when I can get better content elsewhere without having to do so.
I haven't left Facebook, I just ignore it, because there's nothing interesting there. I don't want to clean it up when my accounts on Twitter, Quora, Hacker News, and Stack Exchange provide much more interesting content.
lol, my wife does this to me all the time :) (or should the emoticon be :( )
I like the idea of the news feed filter algorithm. Just implementation is not the best. The only way to 'fix' it is just to change friend status (acquaintance, friend, close friend, etc). But... I am not sure if the algorithm can be improved actually. It determines whether to show or not by how much do you interact with some one on facebook (more or less). And it's the only way to determine whether you might be interested or not. Because believe me, you wouldn't be happy if you could see what everyone is posting if you have 200+ friends.
Aye, totally agree. The day Facebook launched EdgeRank was the day Facebook started it's decline. In fact, there's a pattern that happens to companies that try and "assume" what their users want to see.
I "Like" some pages but you can easily click on that drop down to unsubscribe.
FB is pretty flexible on what content you want to appear in your feed and sometimes there are surprises but you can pretty easily scold it with a few button clicks and it'll fix right back up. Works for me. I understand there's a need for it to just work without the use of any interaction but then you'd lose a lot of features if you had that.
On one hand, it feels like junk-food-friendship: it feels like you're connecting and communicating, but in reality the time you spend scrolling lists on your phone could be spent with something far better: closing the FB app and calling a buddy.
On the other hand, so many people use FB that it's tough to completely pull away from it. It's where my generational cohort shares photos, so I can't fully walk away unless I want to miss out on the photos from last week's camping trip, etc.
I am back on Facebook because it is easier to connect to future-to-be-friends. You connect on Facebook and may be become good friends.
I plan to slowly wind Facebook down and eventually leave it for good.
Don't want your entire friends list to see a post only share with with a specific circle.
Don't care to hear useless banter ? Don't include a person in your circle or turn down the volume on that circle. I had a good friend of mine from growing up who decided one day he was going to post nothing but memes. He went into the silent circle and I can check in on him every now and then if I so choose.
To which the solution is easy: cut down the number of people you are friends with on Facebook.
For me, I have < 30 people I've friended on Facebook. But they're real friends and family, people I know and want to keep in touch with. And that's made all the difference to how I use Facebook.
I wish I could ditch it altogether, but the events and messaging are an integral part of my social life now.
Nowadays, if you "Like" something, then that something can pay for the privilege to insert whatever stories it likes into your friends' facebook feeds, under the heading "so-and-so likes such-and-such" followed by your own message. Interestingly the person whose name is being used for the advertisement has no idea what ads are going out under their name.
Two of these in particular show up in my facebook feed several times a week and raise my blood pressure every time they do. One is a particularly annoying evangelical preacher slash motivational speaker who fills up my newsfeed with god-stuff due to the fact that a vague acquaintance I've met a couple of times happens to "like" him. Another is a political thing which fills up my newsfeed with posts I find highly disagreeable under the name of another friend of mine.
What were they thinking? Facebook has designed a feature which makes me hate my friends.
I just defriended someone who works for a social game company because they were pushing waaaay too many ads through to my feed. I felt bad about doing it because I don't mind the guy on a personal level, but shit it was annoying. Anyway, having defriended him I reloaded my news feed only to find that the ad was still there!
Now, maybe that's a one-off and the servers hadn't quite synchronized yet, but damn. Facebook makes me dump my friends to avoid ads and still gives me the ads!
I don't facebook often... don't they still have the ability to turn down how frequently you see posts from people? Can't you put them in facebook's equivalent of "circles" and keep their crap out of your feed?
Even if you put a person on "ignore" the ads will still show up.
It's like maintaining your inbox unfortunately.
It's almost enough that I want to email my family and tell them to unlike all the crap they liked... Even trying to get FB not to display "likes" from that person fails to hide them.
I find myself wanting to set up a Facebook account just to start screwing with that. Is it something that can be screwed with? ("jerf liked Crest brand toothpaste! He said: 'When you get home from a long day of work and just really need the unctuous feel of something smeared on your feet, there's nothing like Crest Toothpaste. Mmmm.... yeah.... oh my.... pics soon.'") Getting someone else to pay for that would almost be worth it.
Jerf likes Crelm Toothpaste [blah blah blah a big picture depicting how wonderful Crelm toothpaste is]
Of course, it could be no other way, since I'm hardly the only one who feels this way.
As my message implies, I'm not actually on Facebook, but my wife yesterday registered a complaint about a cousin I have that "likes" a couple dozen things a day. (And again, disclaimer, I don't actually take the HN discussions to her, as a non-tech person she ends up bringing them to me. These are not uncommon feelings.) Of course Facebook is just selling eyeballs, but there's a delicate dance of deception they must do with their users to not let it become blatent. If it becomes blindingly obvious that the users are taking second priority to the real customers, the users will eventually leave, and then where will the real customers be?
That's funny. It's a little like chalk and cheese. I had a friend on Facebook who posted political links religiously, he swamped my news feed and it was pretty depressing. In the end - I somehow muted him. He's more recently moved over to a blog (I think he was annoying others too.) Can't say that I've bothered to tune in though. I miss it in a way.
My stream is even more flooded on G+. I'd rather a page full of teasers with click down stories. G+ is just overwhelming even if you do create circles.
"Connecting with friends" is a terrible point to make: e-mail has been around for decades. However, such a point does intersect with my main goal for making this post. People are lazy. Now programmers are saying it, and now everyone else will realize just how true it is, and being lazy has consequences.
So, we've had e-mail for decades. Why won't people use it? Instead of wasted texting plans, etc.? You could always keep up with your friends and family through e-mail. But the interfaces were either ugly, inconvenient, or disorganized. It's beyond me that an {interface} should have to tell me to contact my mother or that an {interface} should compel me to "keep up with old friends."
This. Is. Absurd.
[Luddite Rant:] Sorry, but pick up the damn phone and call them. (Or click "compose" and just {try} to type out something meaningful.)
I believe this finely leads into my next point: Not many of you have anything Gricean (http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html) to say. What [would] you say in an e-mail to a friend? --
People don't have much to say anyway (and for my personal stake in it, it's because they're not reading anything interesting), and Facebook isn't going to change that. That, I think, is the point behind http://weknowwhatyouredoing.com/. There's nothing-to-hide, and conversely, there's nothing-to-show either. FB is an enabler of oversharing, and it's allowing people to empty out too much without taking in substantive content.
I'm going to say it engenders bad cognitive hygiene.
Seriously: _Why?_ Why do we need we need a "social framework" that captures the rest of our human-interaction? We do we need a "social baseline"? Why do we need a system to maintain familiarity for us? I'm not even sure I understand the value of the point you've made, even if it is a good argument. _I_ maintain familiarity; Facebook is a tool for supporting what I do naturally.
> It maintains familiarity.
I'm not sure what this means. How does it do this? By making an API function do... What?
> Subbed in a co-ed game of ultimate frisbee and met some people? Add them on Facebook.
Add their e-mails? Organize your labels.
The sweet spot for _who_? I'm telling others to drop it because you can achieve those goals through other interfaces; you're telling me that others shouldn't set their goals too high (acquaintances). My point still stands. E-mail [certainly] would make more sense within the "acquaintances" counterpoint.
Facebook is a set of opinions as to how one should manage (or maintain?) one's social life. Isn't it clear that if one rejects that System, one might be expected to provide an alternative, or possibly simpler, solution? The argument cannot really be a surprise to you, surely.
[EDIT:] I'm _struggling_ to understand the point about "maintaining" familiarity. I really do wish to understand it, as I feel it touches the heart of the matter. However, such an idea may require a break-down.
I think the issue of "discovery" is an important one, but what actually am I discovering in this digital world? A portfolio? Or a person? To argue that FB's sweet spot is about acquaintances from the evidence that it's a good tallying tool, or a notes tool, for friends made in the physical social world, I think, is a bad argument, or at least it's not very compelling. I think such an argument only re-confirms the "tired argument" I initially presented.
Now, once you're friends with them, Facebook passively (or actively, with minor communication such as comments) maintains familiarity. Basically what this means is if you happen to run into them six months later, it isn't like meeting them for the first time. Facebook can by no means fully maintain this sort of low-level relationship indefinitely. However, I've found it's very effective at increasing the half-life of such things.
Facebook automates the maintenance of my social network. That is valuable.
I could use a blog + microblog for a similar way of sharing -- but most people aren't so interested in what I'm doing that they'll go and read some random links I've posted -- but when they have the time and are in the mood to have a look -- facebook works. Additionally I can post semi-private things on facebook -- because it has an authorization infrastructure in place -- I know most of my friends wouldn't be interested in or able to remember a set of credentials just to have a look at my microblog.
Personally I'd like to use a "homepage" (remember those?) for the same things -- and I probably will move to that eventually -- but a lot of people I'd like to keep in touch with simply don't have a reasonable way to "watch" 100s of activity streams from different blogs, microblogs, rss feeds etc. I realize many people use twitter for a similar reason.
My main problem with both of those are the same: the have broken a perfectly good distributed architecture by centralizing it -- and then worked really hard to make it scale again. Still working on a design for something less centralized, but still workable for those that aren't interested in technology.
The Diaspora "pod" concept seems likely to be the way to go -- in essence it's what all "micro communties" such as phpbb boards for teams/groups/clans etc are doing today. I'm not sure if it is feasible to make something "general" that also works -- but it'll be interesting to try. For authentication and authorization openid/google login and optional "local" registration combined with "friend lists"/"circles" should do the trick.
There still remains the problem of discovery -- "friend me on facebook" is usually quite simple if you remember the first name, and know someone in common -- "go to my blog, log in and say hi!" -- doesn't quite work. I do agree "send me an email" works better than both those -- it's a shame a lot of people simply aren't using email much these days.
It's useful for finding people - a directory. If I want to get in touch with someone - and I don't have their contact details I can probably find them on Facebook and fire them a message.
If email was just as easy, people would have probably taken to that. Which is a shame, because Email could have been that easy. Privacy used to be more of a concern, and spam drove people away from publishing their addresses in directories.
I've left (privacy and personal reasons.) I since have missed the community. It's encouraged me to pick up the phone more, which is a nice thing. You just can't have the same rich interaction with people when typing compared to talking. But you can have a greater audience. Perhaps you communicate to more people with less content over something like Facebook, compared to having richer relationships with fewer people. It might all balance out.
Ultimately time is a premium. I certainly don't think G+ is the answer - it's much of the same.
- Ludditism
Usually of the form:
Technology is *TEARING US APART* don't you see?! (Response: No, not really, perhaps you just suck at communicating?)
- Ignorance of use
Usually of the form:
WTF I got fired for posting all those pictures of me using drugs?! (Response: Learn to use the privacy settings!)
or: It's too noisy, all of these stupid game requests.. (Response: Block the offending apps and ask your friends to knock it off)
- Bad connections
Usually of the form:
or: [annoying/offensive] $person keeps appearing in my news feed (Response: Block the offending person!)
or: All of my friends post pointless, boring minuate of their lives! (I.e. the Twitter argument) (Response: Don't friend those people!)
or: I don't want to turn down my Boss' friend request and look bad! I'm $sociallyUnfasionableThing! (Response: Use lists.)
Every single one of these things above, though, traces back to ignorance (usually) or cirucmstance. Could Facebook do a better job of making these things obvious? Absolutely. Facebook is not an intuitive site to use, and even when you have your head around it, they usually change something arbitrarily (the recent email thing comes to mind).
However, that said, you really shouldn't dump on the site wholesale just because it doesn't work for you. It works for millions of other people just fine.