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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook groups are like the new Internet forums. There’s tons of stuff that’s moved to Facebook groups like Fishing and Car forums. For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums.

Marketplace seems to be the new Craigslist and much better IMHO.

Posting is probably dead or dying. I haven’t done it in a decade or so.

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They could be huge in this, but sadly they'll continue to ruin it because (IMHO) they are rotten at the core. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a question posted on a relevant topic, switched tabs to consult the manual to verify my memory, and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question.

Once people get sufficiently frustrated and the ad revenue declines below the cost of running the servers, we will immediately lose all of the information shared there. None of it will be archived like the old forums. It's a genuinely sad situation.

> and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question

Does anyone know why facebook does this? It's the most infuriating thing, like it's assuming the poor user doesn't know how to "refresh" a page so it does it for them, because clearly they got stuck on an old crusty piece of content.

You know exactly why they do it. To generate “engagement”.

>For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums

Facebook groups are very disjointed and the algo does a bad job and keeping the good bits floating to the top.

In my experience the Facebook groups always turn to crap, especially if it's a group that attracts more than about 500 users. Abusive posts, scam posts, fake groups with the same name created by bots. I've reverted to old school forums for all my special interests. Marketplace is still the best classifieds product though.

It depends on the mods and the specific communities the groups are about. I have seen what you describe in some, but not at all in others.

> For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums.

How so? I find FB groups strictly worse than old-school forums.

I don't even enjoy FB Groups any more because of the way they filter comments to “most relevant” so I have to click twice to change it to “all comments” on every single post, over and over and over. Tiresome.

It's embarrassingly dumb sometimes, too, like a post can show “3 comments”, I click it, and the “most relevant” will just be two of them with a bunch of empty space left over in the UI. Just show me all of the fucking comments omfg!!!

Only reason I caved and joined Facebook a few years ago was to get access to a group dedicated to Boston Whaler boats. There were two previously-thriving forums that were slowly dying. The forums were great. The Facebook group was not better, just alive.

Also events, it's probably the platform affecting discoverability of events the most.

The ways fb is (still) the most useful to users are the ones meta cares the least about.

That's interesting. In what sense would you say FB groups are much better than forums?

But yeah I agree, groups and marketplace are the only things keeping FB alive.

They’re better in the sense that people actually use them

Probably true with most successful things. Marketplace is just a low barrier to entry for people already using Facebook. I find it generally terrible, but that's where people are selling.

would rather use reddit for foruming than facebook groups

I would rather have ol' good forums. I would rather have years long posts in the frontpage and the ability to bump a long burried post when new info is up, and not missing the opportunity to engage with a topic just because 1-2 days passed without me logging in and thus the post, being more than 1-2 days old, is not in the frontpage anymore.

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