Facebook Home – What Can Go Wrong | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Home – What Can Go Wrong

andrewmunsell.com

50 pointsandrewmunsell49 comments

Your Facebook Home experience, like the website itself, is solely determined by your freinds' activity.

Term: Facebook IQ

Definition: The floor function of the IQ of the set containing all of your Facebook "friends"... and all of their friends.

In plain terms, on Facebook you can never be any smarter than the stupidest of your friends (to the second degree).

... and all of the Suggested Posts.

In plain terms, on Facebook you can never be any smarter than the stupidest of your friends (to the second degree).

Do you think that is invariably true? I learn a lot from a lot of my Facebook friends. One of those friends calls my wall the "PBS of Facebook" (a reference to the public television network in the United States) because we mostly discuss links (some of which I see first here on HN) and have thoughtful discussions of research and policy issues. Sure, once in a while one of us passes around a photoshopped picture with a silly caption, but most of the time we keep things intellectually engaging and civil, much like HN at its best. (Just a few of my Facebook friends are also members of the HN community.) I think the atmosphere of a group of Facebook friends can be shaped by example, just like any other local culture.

>>Do you think that is invariably true? Do you think that is invariably true?

I guess he is not referring to an entire time-line of incidents and taking an average out of that. But the isolated lows and highs. Minimums and maximums. Read it as a friend posting an image with a sensational and stupid caption posing it as a video which leads to a link to a spam site, now imagine that friend doing it again again(marking it spam/hiding doesn't work - Facebook gives you the option just to screw with you). Now, imagine a friend posting sth not stupid, like an informative link or a question or s statement or his thoughts that sparks a very healthy discussion - this is extremely rare on Facebook, unlike HN and Quora(better still). You've got your high and low.

It's an entirely different aspect if you have a highly curated list of Facebook friends. Spam haters, privacy aficionados(can't think why they would be on Fb), thinkers, minimalists etc etc. Or simply your (all, without even curating the friend list) friends are just what I have mentioned above. You are lucky because mine aren't and I don't know anyone whose are.

Don't you mean the min function, not the floor function?

Yes, my bad. :-(

You guys know that you can unfollow people while staying friends on FB, right? I personally enjoy 90-100% of the updates on my wall thanks to unfollowing everyone who regularly post rubbish. I wish Twitter would allow it too!

Yep, I use it a lot, actually.

What would be the purpose of "following" someone on Twitter if you don't want to read what they say? Genuinely curious; i'm not a Twitter user, but AFAIK the "following" relation there is unidirectional (i.e. you don't have to follow people that follow you).

He's referring to Facebook-- there's a feature where you can still be friends with someone and not see anything (or just some things) they post. It's good for obsessive Farmville/Words with Friends types to hide that activity.

He refers to Facebook, but he mentions he wishes Twitter were like this, hence the question what utility would this have for Twitter.

Same as Facebook--maintain the relationship but reduce the noise. You can only DM with followers for example.

Technically, you can only DM people who follow you. Whether you follow them is irrelevant.

Twitter is a pub sub model, it doesn't really make sense to want to sub but not sub. Twitter follows aren't like friendships at all, they're a "I want to see your content" marker.

Yes but the fact that they are publicly visible makes them serve a secondary purpose.

I like to have my friends on Twitter so I can shoot them @ messages but as soon as the number of people I follow goes above around 100 the signal to noise ratio turns me off. I don't have the time or the interest to read all of that to find couple of good tweets. I'm a light Twitter user due to this; I assume creating lists can help.

If only there were any other ways of messaging people on the internet

So? Why do you even need the Internet? You could just SMS them? or why do you even need SMS? Why not just send them snail mail letters or see them in person?

There are certain pros and cons -- differeing levels of convenience being one of them -- of every communications medium and your response completely ignores that.

The problem comes when you realize if you unfollowed everyone who posts unteresting stuff on facebook you would end up with an almost literally empty feed.

Empty? Don't forget about your steady diet of sponsored post.

That's not a problem, that's what you're aiming for.

I found it much easier to never sign up for Facebook. Never got past it nagging for my gmail password.

Isn't this just due to the fact that your friends are clowns and not the fact that Facebook Home can go wrong?

He has friends posting pics of their own feces and somehow this is Facebook's fault.

None of your friends clown around on FB? I don't have a FB account, but I figured it'd be full of things like that

I don't remember ever seeing poop on my Facebook (N=sufficient). Maybe it's an age thing.

Fair; but, what about other things you wouldn't want your boss, or your mom, or anyone you know to see?

Your friend completely trashed with markings on him? His friend like that?

Do your friends have to be clowns?

I have gone from facebook for coming up on two years, but I see some of the pictures posted on my girlfriends feed. A good portion (she is a college student) are pictures of fairly messy nights out.

Even if its not toilet pictures, a picture of a drunk, scantily clad teenager may not look any better, and these pictures dominate facebook. At least the feeds of young people that I know.

Hard mode: make it take pictures from reddit.com/r/FiftyFifty.

This sort of thing is why I want some form of account switching on my phone. Ideally with a guest account that allows basic web browsing and phone functionality but all my personal stuff requires authentication of some kind.

I had a situation like this where I was away on business, and ended up at a bar with a guy I worked with. He asked to borrow my phone for a minute to check something online.

So I give him the phone without thinking, I would feel like a bit of a dick saying no.

When he hands me the phone back and I go to the homescreen I find I have a new message, turns out it's a colourful message from a lady friend.

Then it suddenly hits me that whenever I receive a new message it automatically scrolls across the top of the screen..

Looks like another chicken and egg problem. Your friends won't learn to behave unless they see a reason for it. Knowing that you use Facebook Home might become that reason if they also start using it and see other crap (pun intended) on the screen.

Alternatively, they start to think it's funny and start purposely posting the content-- until they're unfriended, that is ;)

Right, so drunk people at 3AM are going to say "Oh wait, what if one of my friends has Facebook Home?"? Not likely.

Great, now my entire phone can be monopolized by the bored spouses of my friends.

I don't know about you guys, but there is a lot of gore on facebook. When i was a regular user i constantly had to flag some content. So yeah, have fun with that on your phone screen.

Never seen gore on Facebook, was it by your friends or shared?

it was shared. and i happened to have many friends in Egypt, so think about the situation in Egypt and the kind of pictures that go through my feed.

These of course is not the case for everyone, but everyone has different experience, but most of the time we don't want to see what our friends post on our homepage. Either people will get used to it, like Timeline, or the app will be a failure.

Sounds to me like you need to have a discussion with your friends or pare down your friends list. If you are old enough to have a boss and a schedule, your friends should be old enough to not post a photo of their morning accomplishment. Problem solved.

Stole my line! ;) "Sounds like you have a friends problem not a Facebook/Home problem"

Unfortunately, college age is the time where some people have bosses, and others post photos of what they did last night. I have a pretty small friends list, to be honest-- it's just some of the people I know don't always think before they post ;)

It's definitely not a problem with Home, but it's definitely exaggerated when you use Home.

The problem is that the weakest link in the chain is the problem. Also, alcohol.

That sounds nice is theory, but I know plenty of people with important professional jobs and fairly a juvenile sense of humour.

It would be pretty easy for Facebook to filter out inappropriate content.

Define "pretty easy". How is FB supposed to know if something is inappropriate for you?

It's pretty easy to state that on Hacker News. It just takes a few keypresses.

Have you ever tried to automatically prune content? It's nearly if not completely impossible.

On the other hand, if it actually is easy for you, then you could make a LOT of money as a contractor. :)

An interesting article on exactly how they do it, since machines are not quite ready to make these sorts of decisions:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9118778/The-d...

You have a typo 'freinds' in the third paragraph

Thanks, pushing a fix.

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