What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Café
theatlantic.com
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It's not fun or simple to use any more and you have to be on your guard about what you share and who might see it.
It's not really surprising that teenagers aren't into it.
What's with all the needless JavaScript? And more importantly, all the JavaScript ERRORS?
I don't hate FB at all, but I rarely use it. I never really was a heavy user but over the past year or so it's gotten to the point where I log in and it seems like I can't really find anything, so I log out. I can only imagine that the experience is the same for others.
That was always my favorite Lotus Notes feature. Nothing like trying to refresh your email in a hurry when someone has just sent you something and having to enter your stupid credentials again.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=or...
Actually, the hieroglyphics are just another dubious security feature. The theory is that you know what the hieroglyphics are for the correct password, and if they aren't shown, the login box is being spoofed. In reality, this is dumb, since any regular Notes user just tunes out that part of the login box.
Hell, even if they only memorized the first few sequences, they would know how your password starts.
That said, all logical bets are off when analyzing a hare-brained feature like this.
They also replaced the hieroglyphics with a key chain, which implies that at some point someone actually redesigned this wacky features.
I remember I had to use Lotusnotes with its main language set as Hebrew.
That meant everything on the screen was "flipped" and since I was not 100% up to speed on the language- for the first little while it was nearly incomprehensible. Even as I improved reading, the software still seemed clunky and it was a pain to perform basic tasks.
I always imagine that someone who can't read the language on the screen could muscle their way through and "figure it out" and become proficient on a product with a well designed ui/ux.
Ouch - that is a bit harsh.
Like SAP, Notes was created to allow Lucifer to interact with our world [1]
1 http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/2143219/allegedly-rig...
Edit: In fairness to SAP - other large scale ERP systems are probably how other eldritch abominations seek to gain control of us.
>So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Things like electrical power, indoor plumbing, etc., used to be viewed as very sexy new innovations and are now "boring", yet they have been massively successful.
I think FB is struggling to provide a platform for others to build on that doesn't turn into a spam inbox. "Lotus Notes" represents the pendulum swinging away from the 30 farmville viral invites per day that was the recent past.
A sure sign Twitter's death spiral has begun?
What's clunky about the "mail client"? And compared to it's supposed competitor - Snapchat? Really? I doubt you've actually used Lotus Notes. And perhaps you have some suggestion on how they could improve the messaging interface, but I doubt you could point out anything terribly clunky.
98% of people I know use facebook and are not confused by the interface nor do they complain about the interface. Personally I find it very well designed. Almost everything I need to do is easy to find and features are discoverable. The only significant confusion I have sometimes is around user list management.
This false schadenfreude is really silly.
When I saw Notes being mentioned, flashbacks of LotusScript, NotesSQL and came, especially it's non-relational DB (nosql a decade earlier than the rage it became later).
Notes incredibly clunky mail and document system did a few things well before anything else -- great two way replication of data for online and offline work. Domino took Notes apps and rendered them for the web, allowing complex web apps to be built in a time where there was little like it.
I didn't hesitate to leave Notes, but it wasn't for lack of respect, it was just one of the half dozen or so stacks I worked in at the time. Every line of code we write will be crap in 5 years. Every stack we use will be crap in 5 years. Everything's new, but everything's the same too.
Let me explain.
I am quite involved in the automotive community. In the last year or two it seems like almost every manufacturer, tuning shop, engineering shop etc. has set up a GOOD Facebook page and starting posting tons of cool and relevant stuff every day. News, project updates, pictures of upcoming work, event info and pictures...
I feel as if life could not be better right now for the person that wants to get plugged in to the automotive scene.
Log in to Facebook, find the page for your favorite manufacturer or shop and like it, add all your car buddies as friends, ignore/unfollow the shit you don't like, get invited to some private groups by your friends, etc.
I don't know, seems like for me there are quite a lot of people using Facebook that actually like how it works and what it enables.
[NB: I am not a Facebook user, and am well over 30. I don't consume much social media.]
In general, the focus on youth within the Internet industry is misplaced and will disappear over time, basically as the wunderkinds like Zuckerberg age.
It's happened twice before in the same place--first with semiconductors, then with personal computers.
What you are describing is what the vast majority of Facebook users feel. However, that's not very interesting, nor does it get read when you put it in a headline.
Facebook's recent engagement report (also posted on HN) showed that the percentage of users 25-31 has grown by 32%. The percentage of people 35-51 grew by 41%. And the percentage of those over 55 grew by 88%.
What other commenters probably mean to say is that Facebook is dying among teenagers. Even so, the website still has over 13 million teen users. And the users in the older groups are arguably more valuable from a financial standpoint because they have direct access to more disposable income.
Maybe you're skeptical of the report because Facebook helped generate it. Okay, I can understand that. But even if the numbers have been inflated to benefit Facebook's platform, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find any legitimate, large-scale study that doesn't show significant growth in the 25+ demographic.
Uncool? I think so, and a relatively small demographic of young people agrees with me. Dying? Definitely not.
http://istrategylabs.com/2014/01/3-million-teens-leave-faceb...
And these things can turn very quickly. I remember more social networks that used to be cool than I care for (anyone remember sixdegrees.com from 1997?)
There are many, many uncool people in the world, or people who couldn't care less what is cool, and who just want to keep in touch with some mates, or find out when the next meeting of their local cycling club is, or find out what was played on the most recent podcast they listened to, or, or, or, a hundred other uses.
The truth is, it's fun for journalists and, well, the rest of us, to point out that Facebook isn't cool. Maybe you don't find it fun, and maybe some others do.
It's the same reason "hipsters" feel pride for finding the latest band cool before anybody else does - it's just some vague social currency. By pointing out that something which was once cool is no longer cool, you are distancing yourself from it and gaining some of that currency, thus making yourself cooler. So, that's why it should be cool. To help it's users be cool.
I'm not saying this is in any way a useful point of view to take, or that it in any way affects how useful Facebook is, but I'm fairly sure that this is what is going on. Plain old-fashioned shallow trend-setting and trend-following. Playground economics.
I'm trying to parse the actual meaning of this editorialized headline (the actual headline is "What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe").
Does this equate the President of the United States to being one of the least clued-in/laggard Internet users? Otherwise what does "even the President of the US" mean?
As for what "even the President of the US" means, to me there's this image of big organizations (governments included) the world over being clunky and clueless when it comes to social media and the internet, not being able to innovate or adapt new methods of interaction, or even understand what the public is doing, and just generally being one or two steps behind the young internet savvy crowd.
It may not be true, especially for individuals within the organization, but it's still certainly the expectation these days.
Facebook isn't a billion dollar business because it is the new shiny object on the block. it is used because it delivers good old value of helping you stay in touch with your friends.
Not much of a defensible competitive advantage imo.
Someone on here the other day made a comment about the whole teenager thing and it was a pretty good one. It was to the affect of: teenagers don't need to be on Facebook yet because they still see all their friends and social circles, that becomes more difficult to manage you as move away for college. So perhaps that's when they may turn to Facebook when they need a more centralized way to do chat, pictures, statuses, etc.
She is probably doing lots of things that I don't want to know about. That's cool and Facebook gets in the way of doing that.
Facebook is not dead, dying, or sick. It's in fantastic shape.
“Maybe electricity was cool when it first came out, but pretty quickly people stopped talking about it because it’s not the new thing, the real question you want to track at that point is are fewer people turning on their lights because it’s less cool?”
The threshold is far lower.
For starters, the population in general is vastly more internet savvy. And contenders for all or part of their space is shooting up all over the place. And parts of their audience wants to be different and stand out from their parents or others.
Is having your own website cool again yet? Wake me up when we're there.
Yes, it's cool, but the only way to get people to visit it are to post it to Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
A company, platform, or technology can "die" in the sense that it loses the initiative, and more importantly, the ability to drive an industry and/or conversation, even though it hasn't yet died.
Apple was "dead" through most of the 1990s. It simply didn't matter, outside of the graphics and design areas, and for a very small cadre of fervent fans. The turnaround shocked me.
IBM very nearly died in the early 1990s, as its place as the center of the business computing world was shaken by anti-trust actions, Microsoft, and the upsurge in Unix vendors. The company's never fully regained its former footing, though it did recover largely.
Microsoft has been in the process of dying for most of the past decade. A highly symbolic moment for me was when The Economist newspaper ran a cover showing the leaders in tech: Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Microsoft wasn't even mentioned (it reminds me of an earlier revealing moment when the CEO of Visa International named the company's biggest rivals: MasterCard, AmEx, and Microsoft -- I guess it didn't pay to Discover...).
Sun Microsystems was fingered for the walking dead as Linux became ascendant, with its acquisition by Oracle (a panic response of both companies, coming at least five years too late to do either any good) coming long after it was obvious the company had not only staggered but was mortally wounded.
One thing to realize is that a fading icon is often not replaced by a direct competitor, but by one which addresses short
Facebook has dominated Silicon Valley for the past 5 years, stealing initiative from Google (who seems to be somewhat winning it back). Part of the situation is that "traditional" social networking is becoming passe, in part because it's become too Byzantine, and too intrusive. Social networks -- real social networks, not the online instantiations of them -- work best when the groups are relatively small, Dunbar's number is respected, and there's a level of insularity around any given group. TheFacebook at Harvard had those features. Facebook, Inc., 1 billion served, doesn't, and cannot. Another secret is that one of the secret sauces of social is photo sharing (still hard if you don't have your own dedicated server), and that services are sprouting up to offer this (Imgur, Snapchat, etc.), which is essentially disrupting the former Social glue much the way Craigslist gutted classified newspaper advertising in the late 1990s.
I'd like to think that the constant drumbeat of surveillance state revelations we can thank heros and patriots Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glen Greenwald for are having an effect, though I think that may be giving the general public a bit too much credit. Not totally sure of that though.
When dial-up was the only option to get "on-line", AOL was dominant. Those discs (and later CDs) were everywhere. The problem was, even though providing a dial-up connection is what made AOL into the behemoth it had become, I'd argue the real value proposition of AOL in the mid-to-late 90s was the "walled garden" version of the internet that they had created.
So, instead of bolstering their offerings in the "walled garden" arena, they fretted over the death-grip they had on their dial-up subscribers long, long after it became apparent than DSL/Cable had won the battle for your connection. (No seriously, they still have that death-grip...have you tried canceling a free AOL trial account recently?)
AOL "died", as most oversized companies do, by failing to pivot toward an emerging market in favor of holding on to their "sure thing". Look at your other examples: IBM failed to pivot away from mainframes (their sure thing) to PCs (the emerging market). Microsoft has failed to pivot from OS/Office software to Cloud/distributed computing. Apple, eventually, did manage to pivot from graphics and design to mobile devices. Google...well, Google pivots so frequently I'm surprised they don't collectively vomit from dizziness (though, they do still have a worrying dependence on search advertising for "real" revenue).
The reason I think AOL is probably the most apt example for Facebook to consider, though, is that Facebook was the primary beneficiary of AOL's failure to capitalize on the "walled garden" internet. Now, Facebook dominates this realm, but the question is for how long? You're idea that they should pivot towards photo sharing is interesting...but I couldn't say for sure (or, if I could I'm making waaay less money than I should be).
IBM did successfully enter and even define the PC market.
Microsoft saw the threat of the Internet, and reacted swiftly to own it with Windows 95. Internet Explorer demolished Netscape, with illegal methods, but most people at the time also recognized IE as the better browser. Microsoft also got a strong foothold on mobile with WinCE/PocketPC/Windows Mobile.
Google was an early entrance in social with Orkut, dominating some important emerging markets (Brazil, India).
In each case the companies seemed to lose interest and refocus on their moneymaker divisions. It might be intrinsic to large companies: If you want to advance, you should work where the money is made. So the best and most ambitious people would go there, leaving the forward looking parts of the company to die of negligence.
There are cases to be made for these reigns being useful: AT&T spawned Unix and (in part) TCP/IP and the Internet, IBM spawned much IC development, Microsoft proliferated cheap and standardized x86 CPUs. But each also quashed competition in the form of both other firms and competing technologies: AT&T, despite the role UNIX came to play in packet-switched networks, explicitly rejected them for its own network recognizing that this would undermine its own dedicated-circuit switching. Microsoft's treatment of competitors is legion, but it's IBM we have to thank for the term "FUD".
No they didn't. The original release of Windows 95 didn't come with Internet Explorer. Microsoft were still trying to push their own Microsoft Network (MSN), similar to Compuserve and AOL. They were late to the party - which is why Netscape managed to dominate for so long - and were heavily criticised for it at the time.
Thankfully, they failed. Even though IE dominated the web for far too long, that's a lot less scary than the thought that everyone might be using the MS Network right now while the Internet remained an academic curiosity! shudder
All of those ads prompting you to visit a company's Facebook page are today's version of the "find us at AOL keyword So-and-so" that you used to see all the time in the late 90s.
I'd count Yahoo as another dead contestant.
Agreed, and to add to your point, group identity is also a strong motivator for close-knit networks.
Forums are a good example of this. It's partly why I think communities (and the software they use) centred around a specific interest or activity will, for certain kinds of community, ultimately win over what we now call social networks.
It's the tools that are lacking: at the moment it seems far easier to set up a facebook group than work out what a community needs and provide it without technical knowledge.
(I have an interest in this area because tools for communities are what I left my job to work on: http://microco.sm).
⚫ Are selective. Actual or de-facto barriers to casual participation exist.
⚫ Are focused around a specific interest. Usually topical, occasionally by geography.
⚫ Are based around discussion from people interested in receiving as well as transmitting. The traditional exceptions to these are trolls and spammers, but I had a brief experience on mailing list that was heavily subscribed by people in the entertainment industry some years back. It was horrible. For, several reasons: people in love with the sound of their own voice, top-post/forward style messages (3 lines on top of 3000 wasn't uncommon), and ultimately far too many participants for the forum. Even though it wasn't spam / trolling / SEO, it was about the worst and most useless forum I'd ever seen.
Having well-established formatting and quoting styles matters. That's one of the things I enjoy about reddit, especially as compared with G+: the richer markdown, and inclusion of blockquote syntax, helps hugely. One idiot on G+ (who I finally blocked, for various reasons) had the habit of using an inline quote/response format, but his marking syntax (python-style quote tagging, I think), was all but impossible to follow. Dealing with his BS and difficult-to-follow style really weren't worth it. Oh, and it'd be nice if HN had a proper blockquote markdown as well ...
Also from G+: I noticed that without a proper "plaza", what you tended to end up with were, effectively, cocktail parties: hosts (users) who has a sufficient level of followers that they'd kick off conversations, as well as a good seed, and policing of guests to keep everything in line. Discussion nucleated around posts and specific users. Not communities, not topics, not pages.
Communities were and are effectively dead outside a very few exceptions, largely due to the inability to filter out crap. And even with the cocktail-party mode, there was a very narrow goldilocks zone: too few followers and discussions wouldn't get off the ground, too many and it rapidly got inane (effectively somewhere between a college kegger and a street brawl), and hosts who were either uninspiring or absentee would (respectively) garner similarly inane commentary and/or have largely directionless commentary.
I find the dynamics of discussions fascinating.
Hrm. I'll take a look at your project, but that website gives a horrible first impression. Try to make your text text. Not some kind of art statement.
Update: Yeah, I'm sorry but that site's just too painful to read. Show this to your Web team: http://www.contrastrebellion.com/
Our new design looks like this: http://test.lfgss.com/. We focused heavily on clear typography.
It's not quite finished, so parts of it don't work yet. But you get the idea. Feedback appreciated.
I don't think that it's that. How many people do you know who have really changed their online behaviour as a response to those revelations? How many people have started consistently using GPG for e-mail and OTR for chats, have stopped using cloud services like G-Mail, Dropbox etc.? I don't think it's that many even among the tech-savvy crowd let alone the general public.
What I do think about FB is that younger people always have a tendency of trying to distinguish themselves from their elder siblings and more importantly their parents. Both of those groups are on FB which makes it less attractive for them due to the aforementioned point and the fact that they're no longer among themselves when their parents are watching their timeline.
But I have the impression that there may be second change underway in that existing users are starting to experience sharing fatigue. Unfortunately, there are no numbers yet to back this up, it's based on anecdotal evidence and my own experience. What I mean by that is that people are getting tired of constantly putting thought into what to publicly share on their profile and try to maintain the image they're trying to project.
I personally rarely if ever share anything anymore. The two things I still do use FB for are messaging and reading about news and events from local venues like bars and clubs. The messaging component could be easily replaced by another solution like WhatsApp and I think FB knows that. This is probably why the released the standalone messenger app to be able to better compete on that front, but Snapchat is still eating FB's lunch with certain demographics. In fact, I think Zuckerberg is aware of this whole problem. He went on record yesterday saying that they plan to release more mobile standalone apps in the future thereby unbundling FB's different functionalities. In my opinion this is a move to adapt to a changing market where there is a diminished interest in having one unified platform like FB.
I'm really not even keeping tabs on that. What I do know is that I'm constantly hearing Snowden discussions in places I wouldn't ordinarily expect to, particularly in mainstream news and business coverage. More than the stories themselves, there's the incidental commentary, that that's definitely slanting toward the "ewww ... creepy" direction rather than "oh! That's so cool!" Look at the response to the Nest acquisition by Google -- a lot of that was negative, based on privacy.
Sharing fatigue (and feed fatigue) is another matter. I never really did the former -- what I post is stuff of intellectual interest (or occasionally things that tickle my funny bone). I've largely rejected social feeds as significant, and have been turning increasingly to RSS, having found some really useful tools: newsbeuter, rsstail, and multitail, all console/terminal utilities, along with Slick RSS (a Chrome extension):
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1udv6i/further_...
The unbundling strategy sounds interesting. It's also somewhat the opposite direction Google's been going.
Facebook basically stepped into the niche above. It adds instant messenging, and some automated feed organisation.
To some extent Email, IM and a little web space would suffice as well as some photo resizing tools! OSs, file managers and browsers could really help here, and if these tasks had been far easier to do in the first place Facebook wouldn't have even become what it is. Privacy and authentication for dummies is the other thing that has to be made and integrated into a solution.
With a little work Facebook could be decentralised, and having your Mum as a contact wouldn't make your social network toolset uncool.
And yes, having played a bit in social space, photo is the killer app. Google knows this as well.
I have an Aunt with an iPad full of photos, that she's pretty clueless as to how to backup or share. She's given up trying and just takes her iPad to her friends.
I have another Aunt who can't for the life her, get photos from her camera to her laptop. It's a trial.
So if you have a phone with a camera, that lets you seamlessly share photos, even if it's through imgur, facebook, or whatever, it's probably going to be easier than connecting up cables, trying to traverse file systems etc.
My brother wanted to sell a motorbike, and wanted to send the buyer a couple of photos. He was absolutely dumbfounded by the process because his SLR took big photos that his email provider rejected. He's not that web savvy. In the end I said it might be easier for you to just install Dropbox, and it was. How arse about face is that?
Even copying files onto some people's computers doesn't help that much, if their file management skills don't exist.
OSs (desktop) haven't functionally changed that much in the last decade on the face of it. And even the simple problems haven't been solved, which is laughable when you have an insight into the complexity of some of the work arounds.
Used to be we had email and MIME attachments. Which is to say: you simply attached whatever media you wanted to share to the email.
Mind: that could clog up systems with massive files moving around (though what was once considered massive for servers is now minuscule on handhelds).
With a website you control yourself, and URLs you can distribut to whom you choose, you can still use the email method, but distribute a link. Or RSS. Or a host of other tools. The problem isn't so much the technology as the incentives for people to create sharing platforms based on them, and the inclination for those platforms to be proprietary, silos, and highly monetized.
From the perspective of a nontechnical person looking to share things, you've got the challenge of comprehending technology (that's a longer rant), which is a challenge. But really. "Take picture, share privately to list of friends" isn't particularly difficult conceptually _or_ technically.
I'm well beyond convinced that a huge part of the reason that local filesystem management tools (for Windows, Mac, and Android) are so difficult to grasp is because the vendors prefer it that way. They can sell "enterprise server solutions" or "cloud social services" instead.
We're watching all FB activity and we're stumped
What social networks should the NSA target?
How can the NSA deal with the impermanence of snapchat content?
"They" being the 18-35s, prime hacker demographic, main target of surveillance.You just order them to make a backdoor they can't talk about and archive it yourself, duh. Next!
What's with this president cult. He's just another human being.
I can't stand seeing the political shams where the VIP comes in and pretends to be an ordinary person talking to other ordinary people. Of course, there is also that schadenfreude when they utterly fail to pull it off.
But I don't blame the politician; that's just what they're made to do: I blame the journalist. Rather than summarize the meaningless show of a politician gladhanding and baby-kissing his way through an audience, his hands felt like a baseball--your favorite baseball, because a true American would own several. Really? Are you sure it wasn't more like the soft leather from well-worn bootstraps, lightly marked by salt stains acquired while walking the wintry streets of Chicago's south side? Ridiculous.
It's just as bad as Bush Jr. trying to pull the Texas good ol' boy schtick and the media egging him on. I want my watchdog back, even if he's jingo yellow, not a toothless yappy lapdog.
Doesn't the law _compel_ 18-34 year-olds to sign up for health insurance?
The amount of the fine is fairly modest compared to the cost of most health insurance plans, though, so the worry is that 18-34s will choose to just pay the fine instead of joining the insurance risk pool.
"You were determined ineligible for Medicaid because your state didn’t expand eligibility for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act."
The ACA doesn't include "public insurance" as an option. The insurance available through the exchanges is private insurance.
Am I missing something here?
Also, I didn't realize that DC doesn't allow carrying of legal weapons. That's unfortunate. What if this had happened somewhere else?
As to weapons, after DC vs. Heller some of the unconstitutional restrictions were nullified, but the prohibitions against carrying are still in place. It took decades of activism for DC residents to even regain basic civil rights, such as the right to keep handguns in the home.
If this had happened somewhere else (a place that allows concealed carry, I presume you're thinking), then I guess you would just be invited to leave the area before the president entered. Or maybe let an SS agent hold your gun for you.
It took decades of activism for DC residents to even regain basic civil rights, such as the right to keep handguns in the home.
FB is bloated and appeals to the lowest common denominator. They created a set of easy tools that make the internet more accessible to people that are not technologically knowledgeable. Skype and photobucket and twitter are far too complicated for someone who thinks Outlook is email and Yahoo is the internet. Once people master how to use the tools on FB many will realize that there are better alternatives, some that aren't going to track them all across the internet.
However, there is no single alternative that aggregates these tools in a better fashion.
I was just writing a proposal last night for a new social site to replace FB/g+ that is freemium subscription based with a key selling point that there is no tracking, no ads, and a high level of privacy. It would have a base set of features and that's it. No bloat. No expansion. Just sharing with friends.
It doesn't need to be a billion dollar company. Profit margins don't have to be huge. It just needs to be profitable and deliver a needed service to the niche of people that care about privacy. The rest will follow with network effects. If the tool is effective people will use it forever even without feature creep, i.e. usenet, IRC, HN
Interesting how your mind can put the president into the same bucket as leaving the news on in the background.
The whole thing just seems to me that people LOVE facebook-stalking other people, and THAT is why they use it. So many people I work with check facebook for people before interviews or even just meeting a new person. It's creepy.
I don't care what someone puts on their facebook profile. I don't want to or need to know.
(Also can't believe I'm defending Facebook here ...)
e.g. Microsoft is pretty much alive even though it is uncool.
Quick thought: couldn't we replace Gartner's quadrant thing with this?
I would estimate that for Facebook dAlive/dt > 0 and dCool/dt < 0
Edit: I need to make a list of which companies fall into each Quadrant - I initially thought that nobody was "cool & dead" and, after thinking about it for a bit, realised that a lot of companies fall into this area:
- Symbolics
- SGI
- Cray
- Sun (undead as part of the seriously uncool Oracle)
- Harlequin (Lisp/PostScript vendor)
Remember Myspace, it was huge. A no-frills more personal alternative to it was born in Facebook. They are different products granted. But the early adopters chose to champion Facebook. Just like Google was the new cool Yahoo. Later Facebook grew into the huge monster that it is.
I have political reservations and worries about a silo like Facebook, but I have to respect it being a work of epic proportions.
A new kid on the block might be able to quickly grab the lime-light if they play their cards right, but there's the worry that they'll become the future uncool incumbent.
Some companies amazingly hang in there as the competition just isn't strong enough, good enough or wealthy enough to remove them.
As others have said a good product doesn't have to be cool. My bread board is brilliant, but it's not cool. The worry with I'd have with a well established web app, is that it might become a bloated behemoth.
People are happy to moan about Facebook right now, currently I don't really see a good alternative, but where there's a will there's a way.
To make things worse, there were many stories that tainted facebook reputations: the ad system, the privacy settings, the first suspicions of CIA links, and then the Snowden leaks.
It's no surprise. I'm still amazed there are people actually complaining about google+ and making fun of it.
Zuckerberg is not even leading it like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Google founders would.
Facebook is just a startup success story, but that ends here. It makes money, people use it like an easy-to-use internet forum and chat applications, but it's as much social as everything else that existed before it. It's just user friendly, and money making.
While that may have never been an explicit feature, I remember the events interface (circa the 2008 timeframe, if I recall correctly) doing a fairly good job of allowing you to find local events. It was my goto place to discover things to do for a while. Then they changed the behaviour, making them virtually impossible to find unless your friends were invited.
HN used to be more full of things that mattered to us. I agree that I used to go to reddit to look for stories like this. But the us here has changed some over the years.
Just upvote the stories you like and flag the worst of it and take it in stride. The whole thing is just a great big Ouija board of geek culture.
Shouldn't he know better than anyone, since his job depends so heavily on social media?