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Comment by ashray | Hacker News Reader

I'm not worried about people self promoting. I'm worried about them having to. Do I want to hear about my friends getting engaged ? Yeah! Do I want them to pay for that to happen ? Hell no!

> Your newsfeed is already controlled by your FB habits..

That's not necessarily a good thing.

Also, I want to know what happens with everyone on my news feed. The ones I don't want to know about, I either unfriend them or block them. The issue is that it's already quite messed up that a 3rd party algorithm decides what I should/shouldn't see. There are obvious challenges with all of this and I know that facebook is working on them. However, that doesn't make it any less creepy or intrusive.

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For what it's worth, I recently announced that I was changing jobs and moving countries on Facebook, and pretty much all of my friends saw that message, because it's the sort of thing everyone likes and so Facebook will designate it as important whether you pay or not.

An engagement would be similar. Events and PMs too, because you get notifications for those.

This feature, it seems to me, would be most suitable for things that you may think are very important but that are easy to miss or ignore for your friends. Like a benefit dinner at your kids' school or whatever. Things that are in between personal and promotional.

Doesn't freak me out. Don't know why it should.

I think it depends on your habits. Facebook is unreliable for social interaction on a deep level for me because there is a negative cycle of reinforcement based on poor data.

My closest friends are the ones who I want to hear the most about, and yet for some reason, their updates are the ones I see the least. Part of the reason was because my feed was flooded by people who used Facebook voraciously, though I considered many of them only acquaintances to whom I was connected to keep in touch, but nothing more (i.e. Facebook is my social rolodex, while LinkedIn is my professional rolodex).

But I'll comment on what's in my feed, and so I'm interacting with those for whom I care less. That interaction is recorded by Facebook as saying, "Look, these guys must be good friends, they're interacting with each other." So Facebook sends me more of their stuff, giving even less opportunity for my closest friends' stuff to pop up in my feed.

It's no wonder that with my closest friends, we rather use email for our interactions, which ironically further reinforces to Facebook that I'm not close to these people: wow, look, these people don't interact at all, they must hate each other! Let's not send him any more updates from those people! Path was an interesting idea for intimacy, but why sign up for yet another service when email is so easy and already proven? We even tried setting up a private Facebook group titled Posse to stop using email. Didn't work for various reasons.

I still log into Facebook because I enjoy seeing what's up with people, etc. But I never go there to interact with my closest friends anymore. That ship somehow sailed a long time ago, and I'm not going to go through a manual process of ranking people to a special group, or anything like that, to fix the issue. Ironically, as Zuckerberg once famously said in response to Circles, "We found out that people hate making lists."

Add those people to your "close friends" FB friend list (it's a default list that everybody has and can't delete) and you'll get a FB notification every time they do something. It can be noisy but if you have a small core of people it'll ensure you never miss what they're up to.

Quoting myself:

That ship somehow sailed a long time ago, and I'm not going to go through a manual process of ranking people to a special group, or anything like that, to fix the issue. Ironically, as Zuckerberg once famously said in response to Circles, "We found out that people hate making lists."

If that feature were there when my Facebook friends numbered below 50, sure. Easy to sift through 50 to find 40. At over 600, to find 40, not so easy, and laziness dictates don't bother when email is working just fine.

edit: I can see the rebuttal coming: if you know 40 people's email addresses, you know 40 people's facebook names. Should be easy to add them to the special list. The point is not just that I be able to track them. It's also that we be willing to contact each other. There needs to be some momentum for us to all start caring to message each other on Facebook, otherwise the negative cycle continues. And we're too lazy to bother now. Honestly, I think anyone who tries to solve this problem doesn't realize that the problem's stakeholders don't care if it's not solved. Perhaps that's only in my case, I don't know.

You can't remember the names of <10 people that you count as your best friends and are already connected to on Facebook?

Quoting myself (this edit happened long before your reply):

I can see the rebuttal coming: if you know 40 people's email addresses, you know 40 people's facebook names. Should be easy to add them to the special list. The point is not just that I be able to track them. It's also that we be willing to contact each other. There needs to be some momentum for us to all start caring to message each other on Facebook, otherwise the negative cycle continues. And we're too lazy to bother now. Honestly, I think anyone who tries to solve this problem doesn't realize that the problem's stakeholders don't care if it's not solved. Perhaps that's only in my case, I don't know.

Email is the least secure technology you can pick. For my communications, sharing birthday-pictures and so on, Id like to know that it takes more than to just sniff the somewhere along its path.

Practically speaking, in most cases, whoever is in control of your SMTP server and whoever is in control of the recipients mail server can read the email. (Reading it in between those would usually require deep packet inspection).

Similarly, if you post it on Facebook, people with access to Facebook's databases can see it. The risk seems to be pretty comparable to me, it's just different companies you trust. Certainly sniffing your email off the wire would take a lot more effort than somebody at Facebook reading your posts, and moreover has to be done while the email is in transit.

Email has the option to provide more security through encryption, and is less dependent on a single company.

For communicating anything of importance to my friends, I prefer phone or email, in this way I'm pretty sure that they'll receive it. To Facebook I post chit-chat and interesting tidbits for which I don't care who reads it and who misses it.

If you use the same provider as your friends, and connect using a secure channel (IMAPS, HTTPS, etc), it's the exactly the same.

As sad and undesirable as it may be, I have a lot more sensitive information than simple birthday pictures in my inbox. Email simply makes sense compared to other options from a usability standpoint, especially when communicating with people who are not technically inclined. It's a risk that many of us still take, even if we know better, because the alternatives are not user friendly or mainstream.

Ideally you would hear about your friends getting engaged without Facebook.

Although that's true, Facebook wants to change the game, no? Facebook wants to be the tool you use to tell all your friends about being engaged. So what is ideal is irrelevant if Facebook manages to change the game and become the preferred tool over phone, direct email, handwritten letters, and surprise dinner parties. Difficult road, especially replacing surprise dinner parties.

and without providing metadata to advertisers about it in the process

> Also, I want to know what happens with everyone on my news feed

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can still see everything if you check Facebook enough and scroll down enough. The algorithms just decide which posts to show for the vast majority of users who don't take the time to read every update from all of their X00 friends. If that's true, Facebook is not really hiding anything, they're just guessing which posts you want to see if you're only going to see Y% of the posts anyway.

> Also, I want to know what happens with everyone on my news feed.

I just added ALL my "friends" to the "Close friends" list. :)

(Actually, if you then start reading FB via the "Close friends" link instead of the "Newsfeed" link, you get a creepy amount of updates and comments and tags)

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