Comment by rjett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjett | Hacker News Reader

All privacy concerns aside, Facebook has had declining utility to me (and my loved ones) over the last few years, which has translated into less and less use by everyone in my network. My news feed from three to five years ago was much more diverse in terms of content and number of people posting. Today, every other post is an ad, and in between are the posts of the remaining power users in my network. I'm not sure if anyone else has had this experience, but I would label the power users as the least common denominators in my network. Thus, my news feed has come to resemble a trashy tabloid magazine more so than a collection of the goings-ons of my network of friends. In my mind's eye, the Facebook ecosystem is like a corrupt, dangerous, almost comic book-like city: A lot of good people may still live there but they only occasionally peak out of the blinds from the protection of their homes and they rarely participate in the community. The streets are filled with trash, and the people running freely on the streets are lunatics and crooked cops. But maybe that's just my wild, childish imagination. I'm a much heavier user of instagram these days, which is probably just like a movie set with sunny skies built within this corrupt ecosystem of Facebook.

Exactly this...

If I am friends with someone, I want their feed unless I explicitly turn it off. But then I remember that I am not the customer, I am the product.

For I don't think the problem is that my less garrulous friends aren't writing about their lives, but rather that some stupid machine learning algorithm has decided on my behalf that I don't wish to hear from them because I don't tend to reply to or "like" the things they post. I know this because I occasionally seek their facebook pages out and find out what I've been missing.

And still, blatant tangent, I can't edit my Facebook updates from the mobile client.

That IMO is an example of the true robot apocalypse: a bunch of "performance enhancements" and marching moron machine learning algorithms that pass A/B tests by some ill-conceived metric and get inflicted on us all to improve shareholder value by Google, Facebook et al.

Facebook isn't alone here: On my Android phone, Google Now was initially useful. It provided location-dependent weather, stock information, time/date-sensitive commute information along with occasional bits of news that related to frequent search terms. If only they'd stopped there. Recently, they "improved" it with a new ridiculously white-spaced layout (WTF is up with whitespacing a 6" screen anyway?) and a tsunami of distracting trivia about anything I had searched for in recent months and nearly every place I had driven, even #%$%ing gas stations and one-time doctor appointments. Obviously, this also passed some sort of A/B test to make it into production, but all it made me do was factory reset my phone and turn off nearly every feature of Google Now.

And that's why IMO people are opting for relatively simpler systems like Instagram and Twitter.

And Google Now keeps prompting me to turn on more tracking and history settings. Despite me opting out each time, I guess if they just keep asking, they'll trick people eventually.

If you use voice actions, they also store voice recordings on the cloud.

Google Now saddens me, since the obvious focus is now data collection (same goes for Fit), instead of working on the platform more (battery drain and memory leaks in Lollipop and they haven't even address it publicly after 3 months).

How do you think they process your voice to figure out what you said?

I get privacy-conscious people wanting to avoid leaking personal information, but I don't get those same people wanting personally-relevant services without providing that information.

I understand that, although I don't want such services. Neither did my cousin and his whole family, who were shocked that this was uploaded when I've shown them. They didn't even know. That's probably also in the way Google enables such things, the focus is again data collection, not the user.

I'm sure Google has the resources to do both. Google Now was always touted as a personal assistant of sorts, which can only be helpful if it knows a lot about you. Don't have to use it.

And there are dozens of entire teams working on platform issues.

Just disable Google Now. Problem solved.

Wow, Facebook has been the exact opposite for me. When Google Reader started becoming too much work to manage, and its closure was on the radar, I moved to Facebook and decided to follow all the brands, companies, and people I'm interested in hearing from, much like what I did in Reader with RSS feeds. After that, I "Unfollowed" everyone I didn't want to hear from me. My news feed turned into exactly what I wanted it to– a resource where I can see everything important at glance. I separated things out into lists, and I made better, more targeted ways to find stories.

It's constantly gotten better with things like "Followers vs Friends", Facebook pushing comments from your friends to the top, Facebook collecting "Shares" towards the top of your feed, lists, displaying links in a more attractive way, etc.

And tastemakers and power users are using it more than ever.

I don't know of any other way to stay connected to the things that matter other than Facebook. Twitter is just a noisy stream of links and quips that you can't keep up with. Linkedin is just awful.

Reddit, HN and things like Techmeme are pretty much the only other places where the curation around topics are really good.

I find it interesting how people use Facebook in such widely different ways. For me, Facebook is strictly for friends--most of whom I don't have any sort of professional connection with. I never follow a brand/company/etc. on Facebook. I use Twitter and Google+ for professional stuff. (And still use RSS as well.)

For me, Facebook = distant relatives.

That's it.

Todo: Get extended family on email list and delete Facebook.

Yes, and you're ok to sell yourself for that? Man, really??

Bands? subscribe to YouTube channels or twitter or mailing lists or what else , your friends? Call them. IT? Come here or use Reddit. This is just over simplification of it, I have ten times more interests than that, and it's not at all hard to manage them without Facebook. You could use some browsers specifically designed with integration of content as their primary feature, I don't remember the names but at some point I've tried a couple and was really impressed.

But again, most importantly, are you really ok with selling yourself for ANY hypothetical advantage FB platform could offer. I never would...

"subscribe to YouTube channels or twitter"

Yes. Not for profit YouTube who doesn't advertise. Twitter? Really?

That's not the point! The article was about how FB deals with privacy, and it makes some considerations on the fact that from the very first moment you start using it, you do accept that they are entitled to record every little detail about your life. And I was saying, is it worth it given there are some least worst alternatives? No! Not at all!

I never said that those alternatives are ad-free, but at least they are operating in a different way.

Google may know my current location, which bands and pizzas I like, my job, all I've searched so far, and even does automatically scan my mail to put some targeted ads in it. Ok, but at least formally, they offer me the chance to opt out from all of that: don't track my position, don't save a chronology of my search history, don't do targeted ads, ...

Speaking of Twitter, they are probably analyzing the hell out of my tweets too, but by design Twitter it's much less all-around-every-aspect-of-your-life than FB. Can you really compare the quantity and the granularity of personal and private information that FB is admittedly collecting with Twitter's? Honestly they have a much clearer business model too: pay them some money, they'll put your hashtags in trending topics. That's it. Moreover being that Twitter is mainly used as a public communication system - and was born like that right from the start - I couldn't care less if they analyzed what I was saying because that's how advertisement has always worked! If I decided to publicly express my love for baking cakes and the day after I was presented with an advertisement for a baking course in my city, then that'd be perfectly fine. Go around and shout out loud "I love dogs!" Sooner or later someone will approach you trying to sell you a dog. That's supply and demand. It's always worked like that and there's nothing wrong with it.

Of course, what Google and FB might illegally be doing under their hoods it's a totally different concern...

Here we are speaking about how FB is publicly and explicitely perpetrating this behaviour and how dangerous it can be not only to the uninformed ones who go by the "I have nothing to hide" argument but to their friends/relatives which don't even own a FB account.

So all I was saying is: is it worth it, given what we know about FB and that there are some least worst alternatives (even by a small degree) ? No, not even for a second. And we should start exploring those alternatives.

And the following quote from @jasonbarone, which I had originally replied to, explains exactly why:

>"I don't know of any other way to stay connected to the things that matter other than Facebook."

"Google may know my current location, which bands and pizzas I like, my job, all I've searched so far, and even does automatically scan my mail to put some targeted ads in it. Ok, but at least formally, they offer me the chance to opt out from all of that: don't track my position, don't save a chronology of my search history, don't do targeted ads, ..."

That's not an accurate assessment. The key here might be "while actively using the service".

You cannot opt out of such things while in Gmail, for example, any more than you can opt out of Facebook intelligence while using Facebook.

Twitter?! I had my company's account blocked because it looked suspicious to them. In my opinion the only suspicious thing was the fact that we tweeted only 2 or 3 times during its one month lifetime. At least Facebook didn't do that to us.

No Facebook will always be glad to have you, don't worry :)

I never understand how people can seriously suggest calling your friends as a replacement for Facebook. How many friends do you have? Must not be very many. I have a small number of close friends, that I talk to at least weekly via some method. But then I have probably around 100 other friends that I talk to not that often, but still want to be friends with, and another 500 people that I like to know what they are up to, but thats about it. For example, I went traveling recently, and one of those 500 happened to post before I left about a trip they made to the same place. I asked them about it, and found out about some cool things to do in that place. That is extremely valuable to me , and if you have a way to replace that type of interaction outside of Facebook, I'd love to hear it.

Calling is absolutely a better substitute for maintaining contact with friends than Facebook. Actual real-life facetime is even better. A lot more information can be conveyed in a real conversation.

I can understand that Facebook might be a good way to keep in touch with acquaintances, but if you use it to keep in touch with friends that's what they'll soon become: mere acquaintances. Exchanging a few typed words every now and than isn't enough.

Also: nice ad hominem on the "not very many", please try to keep it civil on hackernews.

This comment comes up all in sorts of discussions and I don't quite get it. I follow a huge amounts of pages/people on Facebook to stay up to date on industries. The fact that I "like" Humans of New York, the Wynn Las Vegas, or Taylor Swift doesn't mean I actually like them in real life. I've just opted in to receive notifications when they post stuff. For all I care Facebook could have an incredibly detailed profile that I engage with Wynn's page 50x per year somehow, and that I'm in love with Taylor Swift because I clicked Like on one of her posts. I really don't care. I get ads that are somewhat close to what I'd be interested in and I'm OK with that.

I'm using Facebook as my primary listening tool to follow things/people.

Your solution is for me to use a browser or an aggregation tool of some sort. Facebook already does that very well, and has apps for all major platforms.

If at some point there's a better tool, I'll use it, and I'll stop using Facebook. But there's not. If that happens, and Facebook hoards a database entry of my lists of likes and communication, that's cool.

You do realize that brand likes are public, right?

Yes, and my profile is public. I also follow brands I don't necessarily like, but am interested in following, whether it's keeping up to date on an industry, or just knowing what competitors are up to.

I can relate to this experience as well. For me, today, Facebook's utility is that of an address book of acquaintances, a place where you can contact people that you once came across but weren't close enough to ask for a phone or an email address. That's it.

To me it has become like LinkedIn. It is a directory of people and a very occasional way to communicate via messenger and events. I have not used the newsfeed at all for about a year (except a few really specific occasions where I was told about something out of band). For entertainment, Imgur and HN fullfil my needs currently.

This is my experience too. Most people are still on Facebook, but they are less and less active. And nothing gets me closing the page faster than seeing a bunch of advertising.

Keep in mind that facebook filters your default feed view by who you interact with the most. So if you want more of a certain person's posts, make sure to like/comment on anything they post (and hopefully they do the same to you). It sounds like maybe you went passive so they can't surface what you want any more.

Facebook is now nothing more than a glorified feed reader for me. All actual communication happens on WhatsApp. All pictures from last night's party go on Instagram.

Which is to say, Facebook is dead, but it is also very much alive and kicking

Literally in every Facebook post there is someone saying how their Facebook feed is a mess and how Facebook is "declining." I'm sorry to tell you this, but it's you and the people you are friends with that are the problem. Not Facebook (all of their metrics and revenues are up). Try being friends with more interesting people (or at least mute the bad ones).

That's just one side of story. On the other hand given how much Facebook supposedly knows, it could prioritize better what's shown in the news feed. There are high chances that even these people who are complaining, still have a couple of friends who post interesting stuff.

Curious. What do you use to remain in touch with friends and relatives?

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