Facebook as Nonfad | Hacker News Reader

Facebook as Nonfad

unalone.net

17 pointsunalone11 comments

Facebook is rotting from the inside out due to its lack of control of third-party applications. A year ago I could look at my "feed" and see interesting things that my friends were doing; now all I see is information about the (very) lame games they are playing.

Have you ever been over to a friend's house and watched them play a videogame? That's about how much fun Facebook has become, and the signal-to-noise ratio grows worse every day. If Facebook provides any "utility", as this article describes it, it is being strangled by the constant flow of boring information being auto-generated by these games and applications.

It takes about one session of five minutes to block all those applications permanently. I haven't seen a single non-Facebook app in half a year, and before then I saw a handful at most.

The one thing Facebook doesn't do is regulate itself. If you want to block those things it takes a little initiative.

Interesting....how do you go about this?

I've been able to block application invitations, etc. but I've found no way to eliminate the "updates" from the news feed.

Click "Hide" next to the item in the feed you want to hide. You'll be able to either "Hide Julie" or "Hide FarmVille."

This is alright, but not much better than spam control from 2000 which is silly because unlike spam, Facebook knows what updates come from third-party apps...

...there should just be an "off" button

Having never seen "Hide FarmVille," I've just chosen "Hide Julie."

find one of those incredibly annoying app ads in your status feed. there should be a little button in the upper right corner. click it, and a menu comes down. one of the options allows you to not see anything more from 'mafia wars' or 'farmville' or whatever the latest stupid thing is.

Why is this page styled with Facebook's CSS and header? Who is this written by?

Me. The HTML page is directly taken from the original Facebook note.

I added an author cred to clear up confusion.

Interesting and effective

There's still a risk to Facebook that they'll come to be seen as stodgy as new generations come online. But given how well they've been conscious of, and managed, the risks of trends passing them by so far, I don't think it's a major threat.

In many ways Facebook's end-user lock-in is much stronger than even Google's lock on the search-user -- the folks who are now populating Facebook do not flitter to every new thing online, as a group, pulling all their relationships. (Google's economic lock on the advertising-clearinghouse side is still stronger.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com