What Readers Found in Facebook’s ‘Other’ Folder | Hacker News Reader

What Readers Found in Facebook’s ‘Other’ Folder

mobile.nytimes.com

58 pointsghosh35 comments

I found a message which read:

Hi Howard,

This is just a friendly follow up from Facebook. A few years ago we had contacted you about positions at Facebook. Your background in web development is of interest to us. Just a quick follow up to see if you may be interested at this time in revisiting opportunities at Facebook? Please email a copy of your latest resume if you are interested and we can go from there. Thanks and hope to hear back from you!

(contact details followed)

The message was sent in April. It wasn't until October that I found it. (I replied but decided that the time wasn't right for me).

My favourites are:

- Facebook Site Governance Facebook has proposed an updated privacy policy. We encourage you to view the proposal and offer your comments at http://www.facebook.com/fbsitegovernance?v=app_4949752878 ....

- Facebook Notice of class settlement Facebook is sending you this notice of a proposed class action settlement that may affect your legal rights as a Facebook member who may have used the Beacon program. This summary notice is being sent to you by Court Order so that you may understand your rights and remedies before the Court considers final approval of the proposed settlement on February 26, 2010.

Sigh. Like others posting here, I checked my other folder. I missed a message from May inviting me to a bachelorette party for a friend getting married in September. It was last month. I know this because I saw the pictures on Facebook and was saddened that I wasn't invited. Now I'm even more sad.

So thanks Facebook. You had one job: to facilitate my connections to people. And you royally screwed up and caused me to miss out on a very special day in a close friend's life that I will never be able to get back.

I can't understand this dependency on FB for everything, even among friends and family. I mean, if someone is contacting you only through FB, is it real friendship? It would take 2 mins for her to send you the invite via email - or she can text, or call.

Sometimes I feel Facebook friends are not real friends.

As someone who just planned and had a bachelor party for my friend, I agree. Yes, I used Facebook to organize the trip and distribute information through a private event. But if someone was not responding on Facebook, I followed up with a private message, then a text, then a call if necessary.

These people are using Facebook with the expectation it works like email. Why do you feel the two are so different? In my experience, the average computer user doesn't like fiddling with email addresses - Facebook is far more friendly (opportunity for a new email client?).

Email is not immune to these issues, either. This scenario is the equivalent to sending an email and having it end up in your friend's spam folder (although arguably Facebook should be more heavily invested in getting this right!)

I agree with you. However, this was an invitation from the friend's sister, who I am not friends with (even on Facebook) and who was planning the party in secret. So Facebook was her only means of contacting me.

Don't rely on Facebook as a communications channel.

If a friend dies and you only found out about via a personal Facebook message, fault your other friends for attending the funeral without you, or stop pretending this person was a valued friend.

Job openings should be emailed to you directly if you're a good fit. If it's via Facebook, it's probably a copy/pasted recruiter message, you're not special.

Mostly, if you're using a service every day, don't complain when you suddenly realize you don't know how it works.

If you're using a service every day, and a lot of people don't understand how it works, I'd suggest that's a flaw with the design of the product or its features.

>Job openings should be emailed to you directly if you're a good fit. If it's via Facebook, it's probably a copy/pasted recruiter message, you're not special.

In fairness, the overwhelming majority of the emailed job openings are also copypasta's from recruiters.

When my best friend passed suddenly, her family asked me to get in touch with everyone I could think of. I wanted to use every means possible to make sure people found out about her death personally, rather than seeing posts on Facebook. For people who I didn't have a number or email for, I tried using facebook message to ask them to contact me. Many of these got lost in the "others" folder, but I got through to some. Incidentally, this is how I found out about the "others" folder, because I was receiving sympathy and questions regarding the service from people I didn't know.

Some people make an impact on your life, but you may lose contact with them. That doesn't make them any less important to you. Her funeral was well attended by many who hadn't seen or spoke to her in a while, but they were there because they loved her.

I'm not very old, but I've found that as I age and move around, I tend to lose contact with people I still feel very strongly connected to and love very much. One of the main reasons I still have a Facebook account is that it helps me stay in contact, which is something I'm admittedly poor at.

The problem isn't exclusively Facebook. It's a problem with spam filtering and the dangers of false positives.

> Job openings should be emailed to you directly

This scenario happened to me: I emailed my resume to a company. The company later emailed me back a few months later, asking me to come in to an interview. However, that email landed in my spam folder.

I just happened to check my spam folder and not click "Delete All" as I usually do.

I owe my entire professional career to this one lucky instance. Today, I check all my spam. I don't care how good Gmail's (or whoever's) spam filter is. One wrongly filtered message can have serious impact.

Well, this is shitty. I did check my "other folder" a few months ago and found nothing but spam. Decided to scroll down through it.

Turns out that back when I was in high school, five years ago, a girl I had a crush on messaged me her number, address, and asked me if I'm coming to her party.

Well, thanks a lot Facebook. -.-

The other folder didn't exist 5 years ago.

well then. I missed it anyways.

A buddy of mine found a note from one of his wife's friends, telling him that she suspected his wife was cheating on him.

Because it was in the "Other" inbox, he didn't see it until over a year after she sent it, and after he had caught her cheating himself, and divorced her. He could have found out a lot sooner if that note had gone to his normal inbox!

This is why I do not rely on Social Media for communication. Give people a call, especially if it is important.

And if you're calling me and don't know my mobile - my GV (whitelisted; non-unknown callers route directly to voicemail) is accessible everywhere if you know my name or have received a single email from me (in my .sig).

Conversely, my 'Other' folder is filled with trash from three years ago. Seems to be working as intended for my uses.

I found a bunch of missed stuff which made me very angry. Relatives I was out of touch with, old coworkers, events I might have attended, etc.

There's 2 problems at work here. 1) Someone doesn't realize that false positives when it comes to spam filtering are very, very, very bad. 2) Someone else outrageously tried to monetize the fixing of that.

I do like the refunding idea, though. But then, knowing that the other person won't get refunded unless you respond puts too much guilt on you to respond...

When I see things like, I try to actually answer the question "why don't they fix this"? Often it's not because the company in question is dumb, but because they're operating within certain design constraints.

Think of the design space here:

Given: 1. Facebook has close to a billion profiles linked to people's real names. 2. By default, these profiles are publicly searchable.

You want to design messaging so that: 3. People can message people they're not friends with. 4. But you don't want to encourage spammers in any way.

3 & 4 are hard to reconcile. If you have what is essentially a global telephone directory, letting people message anyone is going to lead to horrendous spam. By the sounds of the article, they do some clever filtering to let you know if your message gets through, but it seems they still have to learn towards too-strict filtering. (It's not just viagra and penis enlargement pills - probably most FB spam would be "LIKE our page for the BEST student events in Reno" or "hey girl u look fine u got bf?")

Maybe the pay-a-dollar-and-get-refunded-if-they-reply feature could work, I don't know.

From the article:

"Several readers wanted to know how they could access the Other folder on their phones or tablets.

The answer: you can’t. The Facebook apps don’t permit you to see the Other folder. (You can, of course, go to www.facebook.com in your phone or tablet’s Web browser — don’t use the app — to work on the Other folder there.)"

You can on Android: hit the gear symbol next to the 'Messages' menu option in the Facebook app menu

And you can't really on Android using a web browser (I tried in Firefox). The link to the "Other Messages" folder is underneath the message list, which keeps getting longer (endless list style) as you scroll down.

Wow, just looked in there and found a message from an old close high school friend's mother. My friend had passed away many years ago and haven't talked to his parents for 20 years. We were best friends at the time and I was very close to his parents. I had no idea that those messages existed.

To add another story, about a year ago I came across the 'other' folder which contained a message from an intermediary organisation - apparently my birth mother wanted to get in touch.

Maybe a controversial use of Facebook messaging, however wouldn't fault fb for filtering it out of my inbox.

Duuuuuude! Someone found my wallet two months ago and fb messaged me, but it ended up there.

I hate the damn paywall.

I copy the title, go to Google News, paste the title in and search.

Sometimes I use incognito mode in Chrome, but it isn't reliable.

I just cleared my cache and cookies and got around it.

I used my credit card to clear it up :-) But mild snark aside, the meta-question of value vs cost is one that I am really interested in.

The Times implemented a 'some number free' and then paywall feature. For my wife, who only reads an article there when someone points it out to her, she doesn't hit the limit which provokes the paywall. Has that been your experience or are you just reading a number of articles?

I only read them when "pointed out to me". Unfortunately for me, many articles on hackernews or reddit that have caught my eye have been from the times. Part of me thinks "Well, I guess that means I would get enough value from purchasing a subscription", and then the rest of me thinks their lowest tier is too expensive, and they should offer some middle of the road "read 25 articles a month before getting paywalled again" option.

I find HN really irritating in this regard. My NY Times subscription costs about $15 / month. It doesn't even register on my budget. I don't understand why everyone here is so reluctant to cough up a few bucks for decent journalism, not to mention the outstanding interactive graphics.

I recently found this, sent in January...

"Thanks for giving me your details on [INTERNET DATING WEBSITE], sorry is this a bit weird that I am contacting you on Facebook - couldn’t find an email address for you. You probably are thinking that I am a bit of a cheapskate, no excuse really just haven’t really got round to renewing. How was your new year?"

Fuck me! a missed opportunity from 2012 for 2-5 commissioned musical works!

Interestingly, my Other folder (which I used when navigating apartment subletting in a new city) is broken. It just "loads" forever.

I have three unread messages in it, too...

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