Facebook is just fine | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is just fine

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147 pointscmod98 comments

I feel like people on HN just want Facebook to fail. (Or be "disrupted.")

Facebook lets me chat with my girlfriend, my grandparents, and my college roommate all at the same time. It lets me upload pictures of my new apartment for people to see. It lets me comment with a bunch of other angry misanthropes about how the Heat are gonna blow it this year. Until another service lets me do that in one browser tab, I'm fine with sticking with Facebook.

(I notice a huge correlation, too, with people's feelings about Facebook and people's level of extroversion/social aptitude in general. I think some people, website or no website, are going to want to keep to themselves -- and no app is ever going to change that.)

Sometimes it is more subtle than that, sometimes people want it to be what it could be rather than what it is. Those can be the hardest things to accept. (it's a stereotypical parent angst "You could be a doctor and you want to be a park ranger?" kinds of things)

Facebook has a huge user base, .001% of them whining about how it sucks is a whole bunch of people.

I acknowledge that life, society etc is changing the expectation of privacy is changing as well. Perhaps Facebook is changing it too fast.

If Facebook is changing it feels like that's happening at a snails pace, people are just getting complacent with how bad it is. Stockholm syndrome is setting in, so many people still refuse to just use better alternatives.

"What alternatives?" like email.

This is Hacker News; the audience is comprised of people who could re-write the core of Facebook in a heartbeat and they are extremely critical. They're also quite smart; they know Facebook lets you chat with your girlfriend.

What they're saying is that Facebook is not working the way it should. It's partially due to its popularity, but it has diminished its usefulness.

Try this: Open it up right now and read the first 10 to 20 status updates and then count how many you care about, then count how many are important in any way. After doing that a few times (and trying to manage what updates I see, to improve things), I closed my account. (And I'm an extrovert!)

We are Hacker News. We know that technology and its uses is in a constant dialectic. Our members include Zuckerberg and very probably his successor. It's nothing personal; it's just how this works.

Are you sure that's not a consequence of what your friends are posting and of facebook? Or are you implying that facebook promotes sharing banal information.

"Open it up right now and read the first 10 to 20 status updates and then count how many you care about"

Repeat the experiment with a news paper, I think you will find facebook's news feed is still more interesting than other media forms.

Or repeat the experiment with gmail or any mail client or twitter. Still useful.

The value in facebook for me and most of my friends is in communication. Facebook is the only channel I use for group messaging. It acts as my social calendar. It lets me share things with friends that I think they'd like. The news feed is such a small part of facebook for me (and I'd imagine for most of my friends).

I've lived in quite a few countries and cities. Mobile phones come and go, but facebook has for the last 6 years provided a constantly up-to-date directory of all my friends. Interactions across facebook mean that I have ongoing social contact with friends in Australia and Canada that I otherwise wouldn't have.

If your friends are all nearby, and always easy to get hold of, then the value may well be diminished.

> "This is Hacker News; the audience is comprised of people who could re-write the core of Facebook in a heartbeat"

I'd amend that to say it's compromised of people who think they could rewrite the core of Facebook in a heartbeat.

The everyday life of HN involves criticizing people and things without domain knowledge, vastly underestimating problems and people, and vastly overestimating oneself.

> "Try this: Open it up right now and read the first 10 to 20 status updates and then count how many you care about"

Then why are you friends with these people?

I see this criticism a lot, but I don't understand it. Facebook is what you make of it. If you friend a bunch of people who post nothing but inanities, of course your news feed is going to be a morass of awfulness.

The best way to get a feed that you care about is to friend people you care about.

And you can do this without being a socially awkward penguin also. I fried lots of people I'm not particularly close with. Some of them turn out to post interesting things to Facebook, others don't, and it's two clicks to deprioritize them from your feed. From that point forward you will hear about them dramatically less, if ever.

In my top 10 posts on my feed right now, I care to know about 9 of them. That's pretty damned good.

My facebook feed is mostly spam. Mostly app ads and very lame things that distant acquaintances have liked.

Facebook ignores the people who I tend to "like". It ignores the profiles I look at periodically. It ignores the people who I message with.

Facebook forgets which setting I prefer (most recent vs most popular) again and again.

Facebook shows me the same annoying ads again and again even though I don't click on them and spend no time hovering over them in the mobile app.

Facebook knows that I continue to log in at least twice a day and that rarely is there any new information for me, since my friends have all drastically curtailed their facebook usage.

I think it's too late. Soon the habit of checking facebook will disappear.

My advice. Remove the ads immediately, create different experiences for people with 100 friends vs 300 vs 500 vs 1000 vs 3000. Don't ever show the same spammy stuff twice unless the recipient likes it. The fact that my distant high school acquaintance likes Samsung is of ZERO value to me and frankly it's incredibly annoying to be told about the major corporations that distant acquaintances have clicked the like button about again and again and again.

Today I got an email with stuff I "missed" on Facebook. This makes me think that Facebook is dying. Just take the advice in the above paragraph and restore it to its previously useful state.

> My facebook feed is mostly spam. Mostly app ads and very lame things that distant acquaintances have liked.

Do you hide any of it from your feed?

I do this periodically, and I don't have anything lame or spammy. It's just like what's said in the article.

it's not possible to hide all of the content that ends up in the feed. If I could I would.

You need to install FBPurity: http://www.fbpurity.com

A little hiding goes a long way. I only hide if I notice repeat offenders (happens about every other week), and signal to noise ratio hovers around 1 to 1 for me.

Well it's definitely possible to hide all of the content from people you aren't very fond of.

I see that now we are going to have debates among different columnists who write for medium.com, which may spice up the content a bit. I agree with this author more than I agreed with the last author, who wrote decrying Facebook. Sure, I have been careful to select friends for their capacity to maintain civil, thoughtful conversation, but now that I have a circle of friends like that, living in countries around the world, Facebook is a convenient medium for all of us to have conversations on. I like Facebook because I see my friends there.

I have written before here on Hacker News, "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it." I used to see friends on AOL. I never felt an obligation to help AOL monetize just because of that. Networks are a dime a dozen. Right now, Facebook is a very convenient network, and I like it. I do not predict that Facebook will make a lot of money because of users like me.

Talking about Facebook is the ultimate bike-shedding discussion. Everybody, and I mean literally everybody inside and outside of the tech world has an opinion. That's fine, but when people start extrapolating their opinion to predict the fate of Facebook (and this applies more to the previous article than this one) I just have to laugh. I'm sure Facebook will make a fascinating topic for anthropologists 50 years from now, but in the meantime I don't need a slew of columnists going all Nostradamus on the subject. What one likes or dislikes about FB, or tips on how to use it are all potentially good topics, but the grand predictions are just so much noise.

I agree thst predictions by themselves are noise. However, predictions that are based on analogy are fascinating. Mark Twain said, "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." We see this all the time in the technology sector alone. For example, back in the 80s companies used to buy IBM servers because the thought was that nobody would be fired for buying the safe product. As a result, IBM stagnated in the very area in which it was most competitive. These days, we see Oracle in the exact same spot. Their salespeople use the exact same "fear, uncertainty and doubt" strategy and therefore it is safe to predict that they will end up just like IBM in many ways, just like Facebook will end up like AOL.

I guess my problem with Facebook predictions is that the majority of them seem to simply be someone writing about their personal experience with Facebook and then extrapolating that out. I honestly think that what blogger X or tech journalist Y thinks about using Facebook is utterly immaterial to the future of Facebook. They've crossed the chasm, it doesn't matter if the technorati think Facebook is "done", they don't need us, and our nerd rage will not affect their future in any way.

The crux of the essay is the following:

> Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby.

As soon as I saw it, I said to myself: "boy oh boy, he better give some hard evidence." The article goes on even without providing anecdotal evidence, let alone anything to the extent I was expecting or hoping. In fact, the entire discussion seems to be about the hiding feature. Yeah, everyone knows about it (and more and more people are using it), but I'm not sure how using a destructive feature of a service makes the service more necessary (I would argue for the opposite). If I hide 90% of my "friends" from my feed, for example, what's the point of Facebook? Apart from the ego-boosting friend-count (which I might also hide).

Now, going back to the initial (bolded!) argument: Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby. I think that this is just simply not true. Of course, a definition of "care deeply" would be needed, but my assumption here is that we're talking about moms, dads, sisters, brothers, aunts, BFFs, and the like -- NOT ex-girlfriends/boyfriends or classmates from high school that helped us out that one time on that one biology project in freshman year. If I only contacted my mom or dad through Facebook, my parents would first of all be quite mad -- and second of all, our relationship would suffer. People that I care deeply about get emails, phone calls, Skype calls, text messages, sometimes even snail-mail from me! I'm not sure how the OP expects us to connect Facebook to "caring deeply." Again, some evidence (or an actual argument) would've been nice.

I don't hate Facebook, but more often than not, I find myself just using it when I'm bored and semi-creeping around seeing what X or Y is up to and randomly clicking on that "cute girl that's a friend of a friend of a friend" (incidentally, this is what most people use it for). "Creeping on Facebook," has in fact, become a relatively common colloquialism; I wouldn't even attribute a negative quality to the idea, but I would argue it's a fundamental failure of FB (and something that should capitalize on). I posted about this before, but I really believe that the next "big social thing" will be a start-up that will somehow make it easy to approach people you don't know and spark up a conversation. There are so many people on FB, and yet most of us hide 90% of the people we're friends with and we don't add the ones we might find interesting but don't know. That doesn't seem "just fine" to me.

Oh yeah, go ahead and add me on Facebook.

What, exactly, do you expect in terms of hard evidence from someone who is claiming they find Facebook useful? Do you expect to get a spreadsheet of their usage activity and a split test they ran where they defriended half of their closest friends and tried using e-mail for a week? The only people who can share "hard evidence" of engagement data of the Facebook news feed are Facebook themselves, and they are not going to do that.

When it comes to understanding user satisfaction, anecdotes count a lot, particularly when those anecdotes re-enforce the thesis of a product by example.

You raise the question of what is the point of Facebook if you hide 90% of your "friends". Just asking this question shows that you don't really get what the author is saying. Putting quotes around "friends" tells me you are missing the point that the author is, in fact, leaving left un-hid people who meet two attributes: are legitimate close friends/relatives and post interesting and meaningful content. What remains is a one-of-a-kind stream of content that provides him/her with the ability to feel they are in tune with the lives of people who they are no longer nearby.

People who come to HN and rail on Facebook about privacy concerns and ethics have a point. People who come on HN and rail on Facebook The Product are missing the point. If Facebook's news feed is not engaging, it means one of two things: you have over-friended and not hidden people who post bad content, or you are not connected to any people who post content on Facebook that you enjoy. There are many, many people that do not fit in either of these categories.

I think you missed my point. I expect hard evidence (or even anecdotal evidence!) when making the following claim: "Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby."

A) I think that care deeply needs to be defined.

B) My opinion is that FB is too superficial to merit any kind of "deep connection." Here is where some evidence would have been nice.

B.1) Even so, considering that (just about) everything on FB is semi-public, I'm not sure how anything posted on FB would be conducive to a personal and deep relationship with anyone. Unless we're only talking about private messages sent via FB messenger or something (but FB as a whole is a different kind of animal).

I wasn't railing on FB the Product, as you call it. But I think that the new generation is looking for something more substantive. (There have been slews of such articles [providing hard evidence, incidentally] lately.) I think I'd also be looking for something more substantive (even though I'm 27). My point is that it doesn't seem possible to maintain a personal and deep connection with just about anyone through FB (given the semi-private nature of the service); saying otherwise is begging the question: how, exactly, do you maintain this relationship merely though the superficiality of FB?

First of all, everything on FB is as public as the poster decides to make it. If you put in a tiny amount of effort, you can separate your friends into groups and have your posts by default only visible by a selected group of friends. (Funny thing is that when Google came out with circles for G+, the people who raved about it never realized the same feature was available at FB for ages. Granted, the circle metaphor and UI made the feature easier to use in G+, but the functionality was always there at FB). Really, the only privacy issue with FB is controlling what other people post about you (i.e., your friend takes a picture of you and posts it to their friends).

Secondly, I don't think anyone has claimed that they maintain a deep relationship using FB only. Like I mention in a nearby reply, having the constant superficial connection through FB strengthens the actual time spent together.

I don't see how this line of argument can be productive at all. Basically what you are saying is this person should go into detail about the specifics of individual interactions with their friends and family on Facebook, and use that as some type of "evidence" that those relationships are "deep."

The result of this, of course, will be skeptics conjuring up their own litmus tests for what constitutes a "deep" relationship in a way that the author's examples fall outside of that definition. Or, they will reframe the author's examples in other media or means and explain how those interactions would somehow be more meaningful than if they were happening on Facebook. This objectification of human relationships will, of course, be incredibly shallow and offensive to many people.

When you are dealing with people's personal lives and how they value relationships, it's pretty hard to come up with some objective measure of value beyond the self-evaluation of the people in the relationships themselves. Since otherwise, you are by definition being judgmental.

So then, are claims like "Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby." completely frivolous? I don't think so.

I'm not asking for the lurid details of a romantic relationship here, just some anecdotes that prove exactly how Facebook (as opposed to the myriad of other communication software: IM, email, Skype, etc.) helped foster a "deep relationship."

Someone argued that the OP and I have different definitions of deep. This could very well be the case. I consider deep relationships to be ones that I have with my family, best friends, romantic interest, and maybe some extended family or family friends here and there. If Facebook would disappear tomorrow, my relationship with the aforementioned groups of people wouldn't suffer one bit. But I could, as always, be mistaken.

I agree with this and the OP - but in my case Facebook has brought me closer to the friends I see every weekend. I mean, not only in the group messaging and event planning in preparation for our weekly gatherings, but it also improves our time spent together. We no longer need to talk about shallow details (restaurants we've tried, things that happened at work, what the weather is like on that side of town) but more quickly get into deeper conversations (or, you know, the drinks and board games).

It's also worth noting that hiding has improved dramatically since it was first introduced. Now, you have more control over what gets hidden. For example, you can remove a "friend" from your feed but still get notified when they have a major update or life event (e.g. get married, move away). That way, you can get rid of the noise that person creates but not throw out the signal at the same time.

> but I really believe that the next "big social thing" will be a start-up that will somehow make it easy to approach people you don't know and spark up a conversation.

Absolutely. This is a particularly acute pain point for us nerds, but it afflicts just about everyone to some extent. Our social circles are unfortunately limited in a way that technology could certainly address.

I envision a service that would include everything from dating to finding Dungeons & Dragons groups to just finding people to chat with who are currently nearby and share an interest. Google Glass would make this kind of thing even more interesting.

>> a start-up that will somehow make it easy to approach people you don't know and spark up a conversation

This technology exists and it's called approaching people you don't know and sparking up a conversation.

Social skills need to be developed just like nun-chuck skills and computer hacking skills.

Thank you.

Also, these skills are probably best developed without the cyborg-camera sitting on your face.

I developed that skill. Took a few months. Would hang out at my local coffee shop and strike up conversation with random people. You know what I found out? Most people are seriously boring. I would not recommend this option for the GP's use case. Sure you could find your next D&D group that way. But you'd be far better served searching Yahoo! groups. (Do they even have those anymore? Been so long since I played.) If you're looking for random connections, sure, by all means, talk to random people. Anything else, you may want to find something a little more targeted.

Yeah, I think the average person underestimates how broadly humanity's interests range, and so vastly overestimates the chance that a random stranger will have something in common with him. When you're used to making friends through the organizations you're part of - school, work, clubs, activities - you get a biased sample because you have the organization in common. Try online dating or chatting up random strangers and you'll quickly find that most people are pretty different in their hobbies & interests.

This exists already, but you have to do some work to find it. LiveJournal used to be particularly good at making friends with random strangers; I'm still in touch with some that I made a decade ago in the Harry Potter fandom, even though I've never met them in person. Also, all the niche forums on the Internet - whether your interest is Game of Thrones, Starcraft, startups, JQuery, Apple products, Linux, gymnastics, food, Harry Potter, Star Trek, or NaNoWriMo, there are communities out there for you. You just have to do some Googling and link-following to find them.

The sentence you quoted actually is itself an anecdote, so this is an odd criticism to make.

And I don't think we should expect every opinion piece on the web to be a PhD thesis based on a ten year double-blind cross-over study. It's just a simple opinion piece that says, "Facebook works for me."

> The sentence you quoted actually is itself an anecdote

No, it is a conclusion drawn from an implied accumulation of anecdote. An actual anecdote would be something like, "when my brother on the other side of the country had a baby, I found out on Facebook, and was thus more connected to him." Ie. it would demonstrate connectedness to someone far away who is cared about deeply.

I think the original author and the poster you replied to probably have very different definitions of "deeply". Facebook doesn't seem very useful for first tier people who get the phone/snail mail/IM/email treatment or third tier people who you don't care to keep up with much, but it has a sweet spot in that second tier. It's usefulness to individual people is probably proportional to how large their second tier is.

I understand that you're being facetious, but I don't think I'm being obtuse when I ask for evidence for X when someone says "I think X."

The essay was full of I's and me's. It was a subjective opinion, not something that required a journal abstract to back up the claim.

Sometime you are:

"I think my favorite colour is blue."

"I think I prefer brunettes to blondes."

"I think creamy pasta sauces are better than tomato sauces."

"I think Facebook works just fine, at least for me."

I'll give you evidence for things I'm claiming/quoting as _facts_, but ask me for evidence about my _opinions_, and yeah - you're being obtuse.

I agree 100% in theory -- but it's still a nice essay to have on HN given the million of other blog posts about the complete opposite reaction to Facebook that get upvoted to obilivion when they're also all pretty much annecdotal.

Essentially I upvoted the article because it's nice to know that HN isn't completely a sound-proof echo chamber =)

There are other ways to use Facebook. I don't have a single family member of co-worker friended. I use it primarily to keep up with people in a fairly niche fandom I'm a part of, that I end up seeing maybe 2-3 times a year.

If the OP said, "Facebook _helps_ keep me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby," would that address your concerns? Because I think you're over-reading this specific sentence and assuming that it means that it's the primary means of communication. I don't think that's what the OP said or meant -- on the very next line he makes it clear that he means in the context of online, "It’s one of my very few “emotive” online experiences.

Even with my closest friends that I see every week, I don't run down the week's minutiae when we see each other, even though we might see/share it on FB. Tough commute to the office? Find an interesting article worth sharing? Bragging about the cocktail you're about to drink down? None of this stuff comes up every week, but I'm happy to Like or comment on them when I see them, and, yes, it does help keep me connected. And they're in the same city. I don't think any of this should be surprising.

Also, I contend that "semi-creeping" on friends of friends is not what "most" people use Facebook for. That may be what you and your friends use it for, but I think this all goes to the underlying crux of the OP's argument -- Facebook is a personalized experience that is very different for each person, depending on who they are, how they use it, and who their connections are, and he's happy with it.

Agreed with the last point here - I would be very surprised to find that 'most' people use facebook for that creeping the grandparent mentions. Perhaps most people in their personal social demographic? Perhaps just the poster?

There is a lot of evidence to support this[1][2] (both scientific and anecdotal):

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/28/nearly-90-percent-o...

[2] http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/04/26/how-people-use-faceb...

I don't think those links are strong support for your point, which I understood to be that 'most people' use facebook for 'randomly clicking on that "cute girl that's a friend of a friend of a friend [but which I do not actually know]". The psych central article says that most people use facebook to look at specific people, as opposed to randomly clicking on unknown people. HuffPo also says that they are looking up people they already know.

I guess if your point was that most people use facebook to look at details of other people...well, I guess that's true, but it feels like saying the sky is blue, so I'm assuming you are trying to make a more specific argument?

I was mostly strengthening my first point ("seeing what X or Y is up to") -- to show that most people do not specifically foster the deep relationships OP was mentioning, but rather just see what random people (you may tangentially know) are up to.

You mean... it's a social network?

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. I'm not discrediting FB as a social network (as a matter of fact, I'm not even criticizing FB directly!).

All I'm saying is that the claim that FB fosters deep relationships is unfounded.

Actually, I think that the ambient information provided by facebook is incredibly important to maintaining a close relationship. I live 18 hours away from all of my family by timezone and almost never use any realtime form of communication with them. Sure I contact my parents mostly by email because they're not big facebook users, but I connect with my siblings mostly through facebook where I can see that my sister is trying a new recipe for dinner, my brother is posting photos of his kids at the park or their latest school project, my other sister is complaining about her first day at a new job, jump in on a conversation between two of them about whether that outfit he wore last night should ever be seen again, etc, as well as emailing them when I want to have a specific conversation. This is what he refers to as "there’s a lessening of perceived distance from that connection. Those six months don’t feel quite as long. And you have a shared déjà vu of general knowledge of what’s happened between you both."

If you're looking for serious evidence for this effect, I find support for this theory from the field of remote work and the invisible water cooler effect (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/jobcenter/workplace/bru...) as well as some papers I've read about increased connection through lightweight sharing methods (http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6931...).

I reject your anecdote and substitute my own!

When the Boston Marathon was bombed, I did a graph search on friends in Boston and checked to see if anyone I knew had been hurt.

Do I care deeply about those people? Maybe not enough to text or call each and every one of them (cellphone network failure notwithstanding) but enough to see if they had posted, "I'm OK. Thanks for checking."

That's more than I can say about any other social network.

My communication with my mom has increased tenfold since she started using Facebook.

I now speak to relatives far away on a weekly basis because of Facebook.

And do I even have to mention that I talk a lot more with my girlfriend due to Facebook?

The excuse that "relationships suffer" when using a different communication method is ridiculous. Now more than ever as people use it to justify whatever they want.

Face-to-face is better, my relationships suffer when I communicate via phone.

Phone calls are better, my relationships suffer when I communicate via email.

Email is better, my relationships suffer if I communicate via FB.

Maybe the problem is you, not the communication method.

A million times this. Curate your feed for content ('like' good pages) and hide those 'friends' you're not interested in.

What other place can you chat easily with friends far away, find a last minute ticket for a concert from someone who has an online identity without paying scalper prices, find out an old friend moved to your area, keep in touch with the masses who connect with you for other reasons (e.g. I run a music community and chat with users on Facebook sometimes), and the list goes on. Show me more ads, I don't care! They're not horrible popups and the News Feed ones are only somewhat intrusive.

> Curate your feed for content

Why in the world would I want to do this? I eventually gave up on Facebook because I spent more time "curating" it than using it, and the end result was awkward conversations with friends who assumed I had seen something when in fact I was no longer subscribed to their baby pictures.

> What other place can you ...

Mostly email, iMessage/SMS/BBM/WhatsApp, and Twitter.

I don't have 1000 friends on Facebook, it's pretty easy to curate 200-300 friends. It takes a few seconds to remove someone from your feed.

>iMessage/SMS/BBM/WhatsApp, and Twitter.

Very few of my friends use Twitter and I can't easily drop links and have long, fast conversations with people. Facebook chat integrates with the private messages seamlessly. It's a much better experience than texting (how can I easily send many links) or sending 140 characters or less.

I must confess to giggling at the authors examples of 'signal':

> "Lots of signal. Lots of friends becoming parents.

> Getting engaged. Couples falling in love. Babies. [...]

> Friends and acquaintances off on adventures. Beautiful

> mountain photos [...] Family outings. [...] orphanage

> a good friend of mine runs in Nepal. [...] updates on

> the dog back home on the east coast"

All that stuff sounds like the expected output of a random human condition generator. Knowing those things wouldn't change my life at all. I trust that that kind of stuff is happening all on its own without having to take any of my attention.

Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. However, I suspect he may be missing the mark because the audience he's addressing with his "just use hide!" may well be like me and find all that stuff inane. 'Use hide to reveal the signal under the noise' doesn't work when there is no signal.

Yeah, I had a similar reaction. I guess I'm selfish: I just don't care about what's going on in others' lives if it doesn't impact me. I also don't share what's going on in my life with the Internet, unless I think it would interest or help someone else like me. (E.g. I started a blog last fall. It has 3 posts. Every post has over 700 words. Social media just isn't my bag.)

I tried using Facebook for about a month, and got overwhelmed with the amount of boring and infuriating crap that goes through the service. It felt like reading chain emails from the 90s. Why would anyone subject themselves to that level of banality?

As you say, different strokes for different folks. It just doesn't do anything for me.

I agree completely with this cat. Maybe it's because I use Facebook from Bolivia and ads aren't really shown down here (no market?), but almost of my timeline posts are nice to see. I also hide dumb, annoying and negative people but keep them as a friend to avoid hurting feelings.

I get to talk to my immediate family instantly from anywhere in the city, laptop or mobile phone - what other free service does that?

Facebook isn't terrible, naysayers are just hipsters wanting to hate on something popular.

Agreed -- and I find your use case interesting, because when I hear of some obscure new social network that only works on web or some has some crazy obscure features that only rich white tech people care about, I think about the case of someone from Bolivia/South Africa/Phillipines who uses Facebook, can access it on pretty much any phone, and finds it valuable...a problem that many products/networks (outside of maybe Twitter and Evernote) have successfully solved

"naysayers are just hipsters wanting to hate on something popular"

I "hate" Facebook since 2007, when a small forum I was part of and liked a lot decided to "move to facebook", where it died a really quick and really pointless death.

It got worse and more idiotic since then, and these days I "hate" facebook for leaving poop trails everywhere else, too (i.e. sites that only allow facebook to sign up, "like this" buttons everywhere, that sort of crap). If Facebook, its users and those who prey on them would refrain from shoving it into my face 10 times a day, maybe I would feel accordingly. For example, I never "hated" AOL, it was just something stupid that people do in private. Facebook, not so much. It's like I normally wouldn't comment on the size and shape of someone's penis, but if they keep rubbing it into my face, I get kinda bitey.

"what other free service does that?"

What other free service doesn't? There are a million things that would work the same way, if people used them. Starting with email, IM, and all the fascinating things one can install on webservers.

See, that's exactly what I mean. The existance and use of facebook leads to me having to read crap like this, "what other free service does that?". That does hurt my brain, so I sometimes snarl. That people who don't make the cut come up with rationalizations for that is kind of expected.

> Facebook is just fine.... That’s crazy, right? I mean, Facebook is just a personal data farm, isn’t it? It’s just a not-too-coy set of dopamine-optimized actions to trick you into dumping information about yourself into the magic Zucker Woodchipper?... I’m not denying any of this. It is an ad machine, in part. But that doesn’t mean Facebook can’t also provide value.

The fact that it provides value doesn't make it fine. The criticism of Facebook is not about the value it provides, but about the cost they charge for it. That cost is users' privacy.

Fine social network should serve the purpose of social interactions without ulterior motives of some hidden entities which profit on users' data. You can't practically achieve that with such centralized social networks, and decentralized design makes it more feasible.

Obligatory Eben Moglen interview: http://betabeat.com/2011/12/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-...

Great interview, thanks for the pointer :)

What the heck is is he talking about?

This is facebook, 28 of 29 posts are about pages I liked or pages talking about pages I like (yeap, like I care about Lakers Nation talking about LeBron James).

I can't share anything there either because some of my friends and family get offended by my views (atheist, anarchist, pro-drugs).

I could create lists, but who has time for that? I rather just use leaser known social networks like Vine and Snapchat where the people are more open minded.

You must have missed the whole point of the article - hide people or pages who post content you don't care about (or never subscribe).

Hiding people will not keep them from seeing your posts. It keeps you from seeing their posts.

Using lists and sharing with lists helps you prevent certain people from seeing your posts.

That would address the first half of his complaint, but not the second half. He doesn't feel free to post anything of substance because the post is being broadcast too broadly. And he realizes he can control that with lists, but lists are a pain to make on FB.

I really don't understand the anti-facebook nature of HN users, personally I think it's a fantastic product, it perfectly fulfills my use case.

I'm 20 years old, I feel that's somehow relevant before I give my long list of anecdotes.

When I woke up this morning, I checked my feed, 3 notifications! The first (ranked by importance of course) was that one of my cousins was pregnant. She lives in Spain, I'm the only member of my family in the UK, how would I otherwise have found out? Snail mail? Pah! Takes too long and my address isn't always static for longer than a few months. Phone? Really? Do you know how much international calls cost when you aren't on a Silly Valley wage?! E-Mail? ... Do people actually still do the whole E-Mail thing? And isn't E-Mail completely broken anyway?

The second was a party event my friend was throwing and had invited me too this weekend, it took one click and now I know all about it, I accepted and left a message.

So in 30 seconds on one application, I've discovered my cousin is going to have a baby, congratulated her and let her know that I "like" this outcome, told my friend I'm cool to hang out this weekend and asked him if he wants to go halves on a Pizza Saturday.

Last night I used it to talk over video with my grandma who's been ill recently (and also coincidentally lives abroad) because she doesn't know what a Skoop (Skype) is and MSN no longer exists, but Facebook is still here, she's already on it and she uses it frequently.

After this I checked up on my company feed to look at photos of my co-workers birthday party and the comments on the photo I took (and uploaded in seconds to the internet after applying filters to make him prettier) of him opening his presents.

I literally just got out of bed and I have a message already from my girlfriend (who's out of texts) asking me what we're doing tonight, I've told her it's a surprise and send her a photo to give her a clue.

Anyway...

The point of this is that while you may detest Facebook for whatever privacy issues you may have (and lets face it, other companies such as our beloved Google are often much, much worse) it is a fantastic application making it easier than ever to connect to the people who I actually care about (for the record, I only keep 40 friends on there), if perhaps a little out of your particular use case.

> E-Mail? ... Do people actually still do the whole E-Mail thing? And isn't E-Mail completely broken anyway?

It's so funny when people are critical of FB critics (I do not consider myself to be a critic of FB, even though my post garnered a lot of debate), but then go on to criticize email.

Specifically, what's funny is that email is used to transfer magnitudes more information than FB on a daily basis. So, um... yes? Email is still around. And people use it. And it's not broken, per se. It's a sort of analogy with Spotify and radio.. "omg is FM still around? lol!! what noobs"

I was being sarcastic with the E-Mail one - but to be honest among younger people, at least in my area, you would never meet someone and say "So, what's your E-Mail address?" - you just ask for their full name and find them on Facebook, or take their number.

Phone? Really? Do you know how much international calls cost when you aren't on a Silly Valley wage?!

I just wanted to point out that international calls cost peanuts, if you do it using a VoIP provider instead of your local landline/cellphone.

I call people abroad almost every day and my small balance lasts a very long time.

Peanuts would surely be a luxury item if you had none.

Honestly, though, doesn't using VoIP seem way harder than pressing one button on Facebook?

As someone who's never used it, I would have to go through the effort of Googling for a client or an online app, figuring out how to use it, adding my billing information and then actually paying for it, when Facebook is completely free!

Also, this is always a good time to bring up how ridiculous international calls are from the UK for anyone who doesn't know. [1] My 22 minute Facebook conversation with my nan over Facebook last night would have cost me £22 + a small connection charge.

[1] http://www.vodafone.co.uk/discover-vodafone/managing-my-cost...

Peanuts would surely be a luxury item if you had none.

Not if you were allergic to them. But I fail to see your point.

Honestly, though, doesn't using VoIP seem way harder than pressing one button on Facebook?

Well, my point was just that phone calls aren't actually particularly expensive. I certainly don't make anything close to SV money.

Whether the one-time half hour cost of signing up for a service, plus playing for it, is too onerous compared to Facebook is your call. Personally, I have various reasons to dismiss Facebook a priori, so the question is irrelevant to me.

Facebook works for me very well because I don't quite use the news feed as a social networking feed. I have changed its push model to a pull model. That means, I have pretty much hidden all of my friends and use the news feed to only read updates from magazines and pages I am interested in. I however visit people's profile that I am reminded of every now and then to see whats going on with their lives. The closer I am to someone the more frequent her/his profile gets a visit. To make this tractable, I every few months go through a round of deleting people I don't care about (like someone I've met for a few minutes and I am sure I will not see again, or if I do I will mostly likely pretend I don't know the person).

"Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby."

He goes on to explain the way in which it works for him, but that's the point. I, for example, don't do anything but see my stream without much hiding and I love it. I love seeing why my friends having going on, I love the weird swath of reactions and conversations, I love it. Hell, I love that my aunt bothers me on Facebook all the time, I would never talk to her otherwise! It's not everything to everyone, but it's a REALLY important thing to a REALLY huge amount of people.

It could die. Mobile (or other things) could kill it, I don't deny that, but it's great. Long live Facebook, until something does what it does better.

Of course Facebook is fine, no matter what HN readers think of it. I suspect I'm typical in minimizing my Facebook use because, if for no more serious reason, too many instances of a Facebook "app" spamming my contact list.

And yet, I almost certainly count among Facebook's monthly active users. I cross-post to Facebook. I have family that doesn't grok Google+. There are even business contacts that prefer Facebook to LinkedIn for whatever reasons.

That might make the value of many Facebook users very low, but as long as Facebook doesn't stagnate technologically, it's more than just viable.

I left facebook because I was tired of continually curating their email notifications. I would clean it all up and then boom something would change and I have to wade through their settings again and turn off more stuff.

I don't want to ruthlessly curate my social network feed. It killed the enjoyment for me so I left. Now I get a curated rundown from my wife so I guess in a way I still have facebook but someone else is doing the curation for me.

I wonder if there's a product idea there?

I do not agree that having to hide friends so you get a curated News Feed really works. For me, this is a lot of work just to get Facebook back as a fun product again - and FB doesn't really provide great, painless tools for curating your feed. (I'd love a dashboard and power-user shortcuts)

But even if your News Feed looks great, the other side of controlling your FB experience is How You Share. Sure, we can all create lists for our families and faraway friends and acquaintances — but trust and relationships evolve, and pretty soon you're fiddling with "+Family -AuntJenny +HighSchool -Amanda" just for one little post about your relationship status.

You can deal with this by unfriending or self-censoring yourself, but it's really not fun to hold your tongue, and there's a social cost to unfriending.

The author is probably right that "Facebook is fine", if you put enough work into it. But depending on your comfort level, this can mean a lot of work. So the questions are 1) is this really a user error, or a problem with the product? and 2) how can Facebook improve this area? and 3) is it even in Facebook's interest to go down this path?

I tend to hide people whose updates are annoying yet I don't want to unfriend as well, but one thing that strikes me as weird about this arrangement is that I have essentially set up a one-way sharing relationship with this person - this person whom I've probably forgot about can see whatever I post, but I'm ignoring all signs of their existence on the news feed.

To me, that's why this strategy doesn't really seem scalable.

I'm really shy about sharing stuff on facebook. Maybe because of the number of highschool and college folks I have friended there.

So basically I'm a 'scroller' (I have a 20yo real life friend who called me this term offline).

I do go to facebook to scroll once every couple of days and it is interesting. I'm just happy that people aren't as shy as I when it comes to posting updates and uploading photos etc.

I think the "hiding" process is a bit too heavy handed, what I'd like to see is a dislike button that only affects your feed. So a person would never actually see that you disliked their post, but facebook could use that data privately to help you curate you feed. If you keep disliking someone's posts (and possibly even comments) facebook would show you less and less of them until they were completely gone from your news feed ...

Not sure it would work so well in light of a recent article on here (I think) that showed that people in social networks like/upvote things and order of magnitude more than they dislike/flag things, but I think it would be interesting to try.

Given that people seem not to care that much that government is spying on them to an industrial level, why would the masses care one jot about the bad side of facebook, which is broadly privacy concerns?

The problem I have with the hiding strategy is that nobody in my network of friends and family is producing 100% signal and nobody is producing 100% noise. If I hide all users that ever produce noise I end up with an empty feed. I need a better way of cutting through the noise - preferably an algorithm that does it for me.

The other problem I have is that I don't feel comfortable posting all of my thoughts to all of my friends and family. I could create lists but that really is a pain.

There is a proverb in Russia (actually, it's a quote): "There're someone for whom even a mare is a fine bride". So, it's not surprising that for someone Facebook is fine too.

craig mod says:

> If you are overtly negative

> (which is different than

> having opinions differing from my own),

> you get hidden.

i didn't know who was writing this when i first read it.

but i still chuckled when i came across that sentence...

and when i looked and it was _craig_mod_, i laughed at loud.

because it's "just fine" if you disagree with craig mod, just as long as you kiss his ass while you're doing it.

otherwise, he will peg you as "overtly negative"...

-bowerbird

On HN you don't need to leave your signature, we can tell who wrote the post.

thanks. but i have a 18-year history of signing every post i make on the internet -- owning up to the words that i write -- and i don't wanna break my perfect record. :+)

-bowerbird

That just fills up space with no useful content. Imagine if everybody on HN did this.

imagine if everyone here owned up to their words? well, um, yes, i think that would be a good thing.

on the other hand, your "asdfologist" handle rocks. :+)

-bowerbird

I think that works the same for email, we can tell who sent it by address and name, but people still sign it, most of the time with name only. I do.

Weirder here, and I really hope he doesn't have/do that on a twitter account though...

Signatures in email have merit, especially when correspondents use a client that strips the email addresses from quoted text in replies. The email address will sometimes be replaced with simply the contact name. While referencing such an email, the only way I can decipher which "Mark" or "Joe" sent reply in a thread is by his signature.

Outlook is, at times, guilty of this.

(Hiding from newsfeed, it should be noted, is different from unfriending — they’ll never know.)

Well, they will know, because you never, ever like or comment on their stuff, like ever. :-)

The author should try Path. The use case is what the author wants, a more limited FB with just his close friends and quality original content.

Anyone else read the post and take an immediate dislike to the guy? Maybe it's the new yorker in me, but hiding people who exude negativity? Cynicism is cherished way of life for some people sir. Also why do you like baby pictures so much, ugh.

Why the passive aggression? just unfriend people you don't like.

What else? Who honestly cares that much about inane facebook posts that they feel more connected. shrug

Hiding what most people post on Facebook is how I spend a minimum amount of time on Facebook too..

It's not an ad machine, it stores your face and personal information and that data will be sold as a service as soon as things start to look bad for them. Nobody cares about personalized ads on the internet, they care that in a few years they'll be walking down the street and with just a camera and a computer anybody who's willing to pay will know everything about them.

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