He's telling them that intuitively it has gone from being a good experience to being a shitty one, and he provided some examples of what good was and could be.
CAN facebook cut through the noisy garbage and give people what they want again? Can they pull this off when folks have befriended people that aren't really their friends?
Perhaps not.. it's not an easy technological challenge to pull off. But it's clear that FB is focused primarily on extracting cash in the near term before the collapse of its user base, and that's putting it into a death spiral where they don't appear to be doing much to address these intuitions.
It's hard to find something more valuable, in a consumer product, than intuition.
For that reason alone, posts like this from individuals to large companies are valuable, and the argument that it's invalid because somehow the large corporation knows better is the opposite of true.
Not to mention my college literally requires you to use it.
That is still optional.
It would seem that Facebook is 'required' because you see some requirement to interact with people that won't talk to you in any other way. That is also a choice you made.
Your personal network is often critical for finding spouses, or jobs; it can provide helping hands when things go wrong, and for most people it's a source of happiness.
For better or worse, Facebook has appropriated the personal networks of a majority of people in our society. It is possible to opt out of Facebook, just like you can opt out of society and go live in a shack in the woods.
An option does not mean that something is exactly equivalent or that it does not come with side effects.
>It is possible to opt out of Facebook, just like you can opt out of society and go live in a shack in the woods.
Definitely not in a shack, definitely not on Facebook.
You, like a lot of people in the thread, see Facebook as required because 'everyone' uses it, except everyone uses it because it is required. Your own hangups or how it will be perceived by others makes you look on it as if it was required and not just something you chose to do one day.
Honestly a friend that won't interact with you unless you have a Facebook account isn't someone I would call a friend.
How so?
Don’t whine about stupid things with Facebook. Tell us things we don’t know, that we’re not aware of, or bring powerful analysis to things that truly matter.
This sentiment has now been blessed by a lot of technology insiders. It's a common set of feelings, perhaps not well put but nevertheless captured something we're feeling.
FB employees: heed this warning. We your early adopters will leave if you don't fix it.
Exactly, sorry I'm not a great writer, I'm a programmer. :(
Optional like the sites that have "sign in via facebook" and no other option?
Optional in that they track your every move from "like buttons" all over the web?
Or optional that they develop shadow profiles on users that aren't even users?
Which optional is it?
Yes. Or are you under the impression that those sites are also not optional?
…except when that website first make you use facebook.
> If your belief that Facebook logins are a bad thing is widespread, people will stop only implementing Facebook logins because it's a bad business decision.
These things are a slow process.
> Stop whining because the market doesn't agree with you.
Luckily, my "whining" (the part about the social logins that you could only argue against, my privacy points were bulletproof and spot-on) is backed up by evidence:
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Privacy-Concerns-Keep-Users...
But in any case, you've failed to rebut the "it's optional" argument. None of your examples are related to OP's complaint about using the activity feed to keep up with friends.
First of all you should be able to complain and criticize even free services. Second Facebook is pretty much a monopoly. Everyone you know uses facebook, therefore you have to use facebook. It's not like you can just go to a different social network. It's a great example of the Network Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect).
This is highly simplistic. Moxie gave a good talk a few years back that covered this idea that we have a 'choice' about using new communication technologies like smartphones, and the arguments apply just as much to social networks
Changing Threats To Privacy From Tia To Google (Blackhat 2010) by Moxie Marlinspike http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084
I've transcribed the relevant part[1]:
I think if you look at the way that people tend to organise in groups and communities, there are often informal communications networks that bind them together, that allow them to communicate, make plans, coordinate activities. If you introduce something like the GSM cellular network to this group, and if I start using it, I am subject to something that is very well known called the No Network Effect. If I am the only one with a cell phone it's really not worth very much. The value of the network is in the number of people that are connected to it and that if I'm the only one I can't really communicate with anyone.
However if I somehow manage to get everyone to start using my communications network it becomes very effective and very valuable. But there is an interesting side effect, which is that the old informal mechanisms people use to communicate and to collaborate disappear, that they are destroyed by the introduction of technology. The technology actually changes the social fabric of how people communicate and coordinate. Mobile phones, there are many obvious examples. People used to make plans, they would say: "I'll meet you on this street corner at this time on this day and, you know, we'll do something" and now people say "I'll call you when I'm getting off work" or "I'll text you" and if you don't have a mobile phone you can't really participate in this type of organisation and you begin to find yourself kind of alone. Because if I now make a choice not to be a part of this cellular network, there is sort of an interesting thing where once again I am subject to the no network effect. The network that used to exist, the informal communications channels, has been destroyed.
So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society. In some ways the choice to have a mobile phone today has become not necessarily just whether you have a piece of consumer electronics in your pocket but whether or not you are even a part of society, and that's a much bigger choice. Maybe not one that we should have to make, or at least maybe one that isn't really a choice at all.
[1] originally transcribed for this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451313
The one thing tech has kind of changed is that you can participate in social circles without necessarily having the spending power to physically participate in (the activities of) those same circles.
Having lived in developing nations and in countries with struggling economies, I find the amount of free or cheap things to do increases greatly making it really hard to be left out (due to lack of money).
So basically the 'no network effect' may be financially-based or just based on preference.
Opting out of facebook or cell phones does not mean you don't want to be part of society.
For example, once a technology named call card existed, you sent those to other people houses to.invite them over. If you for example to use that, most people.won't understand, and those that do, will think you are some sort of museum crazy person.
I'm 37, so maybe I'm not representative, and I'm willing to believe that my life might be a little more wife-and-kids-and-job-centric than some here. But I'm honestly a bit surprised by the claims that it's impossible to live without it. I'm willing to believe it, because it seems unlikely that this many people would be so wildly exaggerating, but it's surprising all the same. What are the elements of life that I live without that folks can't even conceive of living without?
Personally, I was just observing today to my girlfriend that it seems my news feed is rather sparse, mainly consisting of the same 15-20 people over and over again and few enough total posts per day that I often reach the end of posts I haven't seen. Then, when I look at the pages of actual friends I am surprised to see them posting significant things that somehow I was not presented with. I would prefer that the news feed work like twitter: show me everything, from everyone, sequentially. The choice between 'Top Stories' and 'Most Recent' isn't enough since lost recent, as noted, shows a small and poorly chosen subset of friend activity. And then, the mix is frequently updated behind the scenes in an opaque manner.
https://www.facebook.com/friends/organize
You're basically asked whether you want to move people into two lists: Close Friends and Acquaintances. You'll see pretty much every single action your close friends perform on Facebook, and you won't see anything from your acquaintances except the important updates (i.e., ones with lots of likes / shares / comments).
I did not "post a linkbait article", If I wanted to post a linkbait article I would have not put it on a free, ad-less site that has zero use for me outside of it's use for everyone else... I posted it in an ad-free pastebin because I don't want it to be linkbait.