But Facebook isn't like that. Your Facebook timeline is based entirely on your friends and how you interact with Facebook.

And so, every few weeks it seems, we get these posts from some techie who believes that his (it's always a man) experiences with social media are universal.

It just ain't so. This may be a pat little summary of why using Facebook is unrewarding for the author, but to generalize that to a "failed" experiment for everyone, would require talking to other humans about how they experience Facebook — i.e., doing actual research. (Even then, the conclusion would only hold, at best, for the types of humans with whom the author has spoken.) And as usual for these rants, there's no evidence this research has been done.

This piece of writing, therefore, does not contribute meaningfully to the discussion around Facebook.

People are using Facebook because they want to, not because some weird social power is forcing them to. My friends love it, my parents love it, heck my grandma thinks it's absolutely magical. We get to share things and communicate with family in a way we've never been able to ever. It's not replacing the deep connections and interpersonal relationships—you need to actually meet up with someone and talk to them in person or on the phone for that. But we already have ways to do that!

The annoying people on Facebook are the ones who don't like it, like the author of this article. They're the ones that just post "Dang Facebook sucks more every day" or useless stuff like that and never actually use it for its capabilities. They expect Facebook to do their social for them, when it's really just a tool that you have to use optimistically.

"I'll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just ... because," Casey says. "It's not like I want to or I don't. I just go on it. I'm, like, forced to. I don't know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life." http://kottke.org/13/05/wanting-to-be-liked

Are we forced to be here?

Aren't there studies that find there is an element of addiction to browsing the internet?

It's a bit like having a drug addiction really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder

I think it is fascinating that people feel compelled to visit Facebook or any website, and don't know why. It's like calling someone every morning: you want to communicate. If you stop doing that suddenly, you'll miss it.

Calling it an 'addiction' or 'some strange social force' or other conspiracy ideas are interesting, but flawed arguments.

At the end of a couple of hours of commenting on people I know's pictures of cats or whatever I look back and think "Wow, where'd that time go?" whereas if I've done something "productive" I feel much better. It's possible that's just because I've filed time-on-the-internet under "wasting time" and so I'm judging myself, but I think the feeling bad was the reason I decided I shouldn't do it, not the other way 'round.

Sorry, that turned into a ramble.

That is real value that Facebook does deliver, something I must admit despite my wide ranged mistrust and distaste for various other aspects of the service.

Friending them just to realize you have little in common is akin to dating someone only to realize you have little in common.

I agree with the article author's opinion that Facebook IS growing less useful for me. As Graue said in above post, though, this really only applies to me and my reactions to MY OWN social circle.

Im in the same boat as you here. And it worries me. Imagine if we had to go back to the old days of using msn status updates and actually having to gasp converse with one another in order to get our fill of socal interaction.

There is a temptation when people comment on Facebook to extrapolate their experience with the vast array of different societies, social norms, perspectives, ages, interests, backgrounds, maturities etc.

So right now the first few stories in my news feed only has 3 posts I find interesting. And? I look at my feed every now and then and if often there is nothing interesting it doesn't hinder me. Some stuff is really interesting and helps me break out of the internet bubble I'm in bust mostly facebook is groups and chat for me. And that's why I love it.

Not for much longer [1,2].

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/how-goo...

[2] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2419020,00.asp

The one that is interesting is his comparison to Google and SEO. In Google's world there are three players: (1) the searchers, (2) the advertisers and (3) the black hats who try to game the system. Unfortunately for Facebook, (2) and (3) are the same, so the people they make money from are also the people who are degrading the system. They don't have Google's luxury of cracking down hard on (3) because that's who their income comes from, which ends up sucking for the rest of us.

Moreover, if my news feed of middle-Americans-quite-pleased-to-share-indiscriminately is any indication, Facebook is what most people need. MOST PEOPLE. This whole elitist attitude in the tech community is breeding "innovators" who don't have the first clue what the world really wants or needs.

There is a trend towards emotional populist content on social networks. It's interesting to you because it's your friends and it feels personal.

However in a broader context its creating a society that is inward looking (walled garden of your friends) and concerned with re-enforcing social norms (the like button).

How does this activity improve us as a society? Where is the creativity and freedom?

People have always been insular and self-contained within their circles. Said circles form early in life and change very slowly. Even when you move people around geographically, they quickly fall back into the same closed circles. In these circles they reinforce whatever social memes have developed - inside jokes, similar views, etc.

Very few people in the world (though they do exist) actually continually meet new people outside of their existing groups.

So sure, Facebook doesn't improve us as a society, nor is it a magical bastion of creativity and freedom - but life never was, and Facebook hasn't made it worse. Facebook is merely a magnification of who you are. If you were prone to sharing stupid motivational pictures, now your'e sharing a lot of them. If you surrounded yourself with constantly insightful, smart people, now you get to talk to a lot more of them, a lot more frequently.

Facebook is what you make of it. I have a habit of squelching friends who don't post meaningful things. Click on the top right corner of their post and you can adjust their weighting in your feed - I have many people who essentially no longer contribute to my feed, and that's fine. Looking at my front page right now, nearly all of the information is stuff I actually care about.

I do wish that social network wasn't Facebook, though.

Fixed that for you.

On the other hand, technical people are like rats. They're the first to pile on to fresh meat (there was even a prominent website by this name...), and they're the first to flee when the place is burning down.

Look at the success of Pinterest or Instagram for example. Neither grew because of technical people.

However ... Facebook is probably the only social network where I feel a high level of obligation to add people like Aunt Jemima, and Bill who I went to college with, years ago. It's "for" keeping in touch - i.e that's how most people use it. It's the fallback social network for contacts who don't fit into other, targeted social networks.

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the only person out there who has used the "unfriend" button before. I've deleted hundreds of people; many of whom I only met for one night 5 years ago or didn't even talk to way back in high school. Now, my Facebook feed has content that only features people I care to hear from and "interest pages," which is sorta meh. It's really not this social media wasteland I keep reading about?

Too harsh. I agree that there is not enough rigor to speculate on the universal experience, but this absolutely has value in the larger Facebook discussion.

The increasing frequency of these anecdotal experiences is a hint that there exists a segment of frustrated users. It would be a mistake to summarily ignore their frustration due to the presentation of the argument.

These "increasingly common" anecdotes are from the same demographic of people.

Facebook is used by 1.15 BILLION people. Think about that for a second. It's an absolutely staggering number and they're adding MILLIONS of new users every single day.

Do you think the people in Africa, South America, Iceland, and even China, are going to have the same experiences as the person writing this article?

But FB is not for getting news about the topics I like; because, IMHO like the OP, Facebook news feed is broken for this purpose. Yes it is broken if you like to get news and information related to your interests. The prime reason, which I have discovered over the years of using FB, is I like things which my friends do not like a lot and vice-versa. I cannot blame Facebook for this. So when they like something which I do not, I still get the news in the feed. The same thing is happening in Twitter.

I felt that it would be better if we can follow information we like rather than the people we like. This way we will be able to get the information that we want/like rather than the noise. A critical step towards this is tags and if we can follow a tag it would be better [1].

[1] Disclaimer: I have created a website to do just that. Link is https://www.scoopspot.com/ .

Online, that's as old as Usenet, and it continued through topics on CompuServe and AOL. It continues today through specialised forums and bulletin boards, especially the forums on subject-based websites. Good ones include AV Forums, Hydrogen Audio, DPReview, Doom9 etc.

Anyone who thinks Facebook is, or is meant to be, a substitute for Doom9 is extremely dim.

A lot of Facebook is social grooming and phatic communication http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/phaticterm.htm

So this post should just be downvoted. Another guy with an opinion on the internet, nothing to get too excited about.

It seems that the more controversy you create, the more popular you get on HN, regardless of whatever you have any ground to your claims.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/06/01/the-new...

So, enjoy your once democratic access to information.

Facebook is still great, but it's different than what it used to be. It's (for me) evolved into my less-close friends' vacations and babies and memes. Which is fine! I imagine Facebook has a lot of data that suggests this is exactly what I'd like to view. But it does seem much less engaging than it used to be.

It feels like an Eternal September, perhaps one I've brought on myself by friending too many people.

non-default subreddits can still be quite good, but many/most/all of the default subreddits are wastelands ravaged by a silent majority of up- and down-voters while the huddled masses of commenters cling together for safety. of course, there's the same phenomenon within the commenters community, where insightful comments are buried amongst puns and prejudice and adolescent jokes that get upvoted much quicker.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

I've thought about doing something just like that, but haven't spent the time to figure out a "good" way to set it up.

[0]: http://www.freelists.org/

We had one for our 'post-college' social circle. It was a good way to spread the word about happy hours and parties, without spamming everyone on facebook.

This. Further, I think Fb serves a very important purpose in my life: it has supplanted any need or desire to attend a high school reunion. I can easily find out "what you've been up to" if I care in the slightest. Also, upvoted b/c babies are cute :)

We now have a generation of people going through this with Facebook and it doesn't surprise me if suddenly one group of friends is not as relevant as they used to be, and that a system like Facebook can't easily pick that up.

What keeps people coming back is the illusion of activity. The sound and fury. If/when people close out the noise successfully, it winds up looking a lot like an email box.

It's useful because everyone can see everyone else's reaction.

I use facebook almost every day, but I can't remember the last time I posted a status update or read anyone else's status update.

I use it as a glorified chat/email hybrid client. It's useful because only people I've chosen to accept can send me messages (like chat), but it's truly asynchronous, stores everything and supports rich messages (like email).

If, tomorrow, facebook disabled the ability of everyone to post statuses, play games, use apps, answer quizzes, post photos and all the rest of it, my usage of facebook would be precisely the same as it is now.

I've been thinking about how to fix email as per YCs list of things they'd like to fund (just to get the juices flowing) and it might be cool to build on top of the email protocol rather than replace it - e.g it's trivial to format, say, todos in an email in a human readable format such that they can still be read and returned checked off by users who don't use this additional layer.

The first, more concrete, set arises simply because of the age of the protocols. They were developed when the internet was a club of like minded people rather than a global public space. Things like: a lack of rock solid authentication, no guarantees of transit privacy (much less at rest privacy), clunky formatting, multimedia and hypermedia support, arcane attachment problems, and only hacked on support for anything beyond 1:N messaging (e.g. mailing lists).

A lot of these problems have good, solid, proposed solutions but inertia and collective action problems mean that near universal support for protocol additions / changes take years if not decades.

The second, more amorphous, set of problems have to do with how some people use email pervasively in their lives in a fashion that (inevitably) would be more efficiently accomplished with a tool specialized to their needs. So for example, people who spend a fair amount of time in a corporate enviorment with Exchange often bitterly miss the calendar management integration. They say that vanilla email is broken because it has no equivalent capability. Although the critique is legitamite I think the target is off, it's not email that's broken, it's federated calendaring in general. But because email can sort-of, kind-of substitute it gets the blame.

(Which doesn't help if it wasn't you who sent the original mail…)

every post on your news feed has got a tiny "hide" link, which you can use to either unsubscribe completely from a friend's wall posts (yeah, keep those "how I met your mother" quotes for yourself bro), choose which kind of news you're actually interested in (pictures only, events etc.) or even choose how often you wanna see a person's posts ("all updates" or "most important"). if you get the tendency to disable a post that you don't like the moment you see it, then (on the long run) you'll end up with a wall that's at least 2/3 interesting or let's call it decent (facebook is not really hacker news). I'm not aware if this is the actual implementation, but would be really cool if Facebook would actually learn from the posts you hide and stop suggesting similar ones in the future.

I've got around 300 friends and had I not unsubscribed from a lot of them, my news feed would have been packed with wedding pictures of people I don't know, events I can't go to or causes I don't really care about.

just to end here, email has its purpose but that purpose is not social sharing any more. just like emails took over writting letters years ago, social networks should improve over emails in the aspect of sharing information with ease. oh, and to the author: the facebook experiment hasn't failed - you just need to tell it what you expect of it.

People expect that Facebook provides the automatic content customization/filtering. And rightfully so, I may add. It's a shame that Facebook is little more than a walled-garden email service with photo storage.

I'm not a big fan of Facebook (especially because of the news feed ads), but most of my friends are camped there, so the only thing I can do is try and get the best out of it. I do enjoy email conversations with my friends (mostly with my programmer buddies), but the replies tend to be a bit slower and the stories never get so many follow-ups as Facebook posts. also if you want to email pictures, you'd better use a different service (Picasa, Dropbox) if you don't want to download zipped files all the time. same for videos...

to make this clear, I'm not advocating for Facebook here. I just find it curious to read something like "the facebook experiment has failed", when there's no interest in the author to see what the experiment has to offer. more specifically to try out some of Facebook's features (some of them are really obivous, some are implied, some are more difficult to understand). when you've got 1000 friends but you're not really interested in anything they say, who's fault is it?! and yet Facebook gives you the tools to filter them out...

You click the bookmarklet, pick friends and it sends the current page.

It's not a news feed. It's not stories relevant to me. It's not a way to actually have friends. It's not a place where people create things and share (mostly). People might think it's those things. Hell, Facebook itself will tell you that it's those things, but it's not.

I agree with the article. Facebook's biggest problem is that, because you're always talking to everybody, you really can't say much. Conversation is, and has always been, context-dependent. You don't say things at a funeral home that you would at a keg party. You don't share the same stories with your peers that you would with your grandma.

I've always thought Facebook was from the devil. Anybody that would use my own friends against me to suck me into a network of participating whether I wanted to or not? Not somebody with my best interests in mind.

I only use Facebook with the FB Purify plugin that gets rid of a lot of the spam. Even then, if I could abstract myself completely away from it, and do all of my social networking activity on my O/S without a browser or a layer of commercial crap stuck on top, I would in a heartbeat.

ADD: It might also be a decent shared photo album. Jury is still out on that one.

What really bothers me is not that these services like FB, Twitter, G+, or various cloud storage systems are not useful -- they are. It's that, instead of being internet standards, they're branded properties. And they're all doing the same thing. It's like if email was a completely different thing depending on which ISP you used. These things should be completely abstracted away from any corporate logo. If I want to store things in the cloud, for instance, I could care less who actually keeps the bytes. If I want to reach my high school chums, why the heck do I need some other party to help me do that? I control gigabytes of storage and god knows how many computational cycles on my personal possessions, and I need Google+ to tell me whose birthday it is today? Really?

I have found, however, that my Facebook experience has greatly improved once I started hiding posts from people i don't care about as much from my news feed. There are people I still want to be able to check up on now and then, but I don't want to see 99% of the things they have to say. It's like unsubscribibg to junk mail; it makes everything feel wanted and relevant.

I wonder how much of Google+'s 'use' problem relates to this feature working extremely well.

You section off people you like to keep in contact with, just not on a daily basis. You then don't send most of your day-to-day posts their way. They look at Google+ and see a wasteland.

And whenever they mention Google+, you can't just say "I love it and use it daily; I just put you in the 'Siberia' circle". The only answer is "I don't use it much." Which re-affirms their view of the service as being basically empty.

You and I apparently have drastically different pictures of G+.

I talk to my good friends offline and use G+ for the communities. It's almost like reddit with 90% less trolling.

Oddly, I've found the opposite to be true. Apart from clearing out app-request spam, streamlining my facebook feed to only the "friends I care about" tends to result in the most predictable updates. It seems to me the outer-circle friends have the most potential to be interesting.

You get to learn the kind of personal information about your past acquaintances that otherwise you could only get by going to a reunion. You can find out if anyone you thought would be successful has ended up struggling, if anyone you thought was a slacker has done something interesting, if that person who is attractive, and successful is somehow also a nice person, etc.

Spending a few minutes looking at this kind of trivia can be a lot more fun than yet another youtube cat and the game only gets more interesting the more friends you have on facebook.

For me, Facebook did work the way I wanted long ago- people tagged you in photos and it was fun to look at photos of you and your friends. The problem is that in order for Facebook to grow, your feed needs to get broader and broader (status updates, youtube videos) and it gets filled up with things that are not as relevant.

80% of the crap is from 20% of the people.

Just hide them from your timeline. In your browser, hover over the person's photo, then hover over the Friends button and deselect "Show in News Feed".

Problem (mostly) solved.

Spot on....

There hasn't been a generation growing up with Google+ yet.

During my lifetime I've lived on 6 cities in 3 different countries. I've got friends (some of them, became very good friends) and people I know from all these places.

Facebook allows me to stay in contact with them, and if I want, to peek at where are they know (and what are they doing). For me, it works as an "information push" platform, where sometimes I'll see an update from an old time friend who I forgot about, and I would use that moment to say hello and congratulate him or give kudos for whatever he is doing (or just say 'haha' at whatever funny picture he shared).

Before that, I had to remember to send an email to every person I knew... and ask them specifically what where they doing.

Sure, some people might find no sense in maintaining those kind of relations (staying in touch with people who you do not actively talk to). But I think we never know when we might be able to get together again, and having this point of contact is good.

With that said, Facebook is slowly reducing the Signal-to-Noise ratio, and it's an ominous sign for the platform as a whole.

Nothing has yet approached traditional web forums, IRC, and even old-school Usenet in this capacity. These forms of online community are clearly-defined social spaces, in which everyone has a direct view to who is and isn't participating. There may be many separate contexts going at any given time, with lots of overlap among participants, but each one is still an independent venue with legible boundaries. Modern "social media" lacks this sense of defined space, which, I think, is necessary for anything to be legitimately called a "community".

Forums and IRC are like a few dozen friends sitting around a table, with everyone engaged in a single coherent conversation at any given time. Twitter and Facebook are like two hundred acquaintances having 40,000 conversations by shouting at each other across the floor of a gymnasium.

In fact, it seems an artificially wedged in middleman at some point. And it becomes more efficient to get it out of the way and go back to simple email, phone calls or, as you say, IRC and forums.

This all happened at about the same time, though, and it all fits under the umbrella of the (sensible, from FB's standpoint) strategy of "grow as large as possible."

You're not always talking to everybody. On Facebook you can create friend lists, and then post things that are only visible to the people in the chosen list, in the same way that you can share things with only certain "Circles" on Google+. For example, I have different lists for "Close Friends", "Family", "Work Friends", "Random Acquaintances", etc. If I choose, I can share a post with only my "close friends" list, and none of my family or work friends will see it.

This problem has been solved already. On Google+ the concept is called "Circles". On Facebook, they call them "Friends Lists". Why does everyone on HN praise Google+ Circles, but ignore or hate the Facebook Friends Lists feature?

Facebook has proved over and over that their priorities are about public sharing, and even to make more things public that previously were private. In part this might be Zuckerberg's vision that sharing almost everything is the future. But as a business they are also incentivized to make sharing effortless, to encourage people to put data on Facebook without thought.

Any thought to privacy is always a little bit of friction. So it's always de-emphasized, if not actually buried.

Can you remove all the promoted content (aka crap)?

Is it easy to see who you are really sharing with even after creating list?

Can you prevent one list from knowing what you liked or commented on other lists?

You most likely haven't used G+ to really know the difference. FB lists are anything but G+ Circles.

That's one of the problems with this culture of everything being free on the 'net. Free isn't really free. Businesses don't run on air. They run on money. The user always pays. If it isn't in real currency it will be in ways the company can convert into currency. That's just the way it is.

Aspects of your post bother me to some extent because you are complaining about services you are not paying for. I think that is a very important distinction. Don't get me wrong, I have lots of problems with some of the services you mention in your post. I simply choose not to use them.

I also happen to think that people who use ad blockers are just short of thieves. It's hypocritical to navigate to a site and make use of its free services and, at the same time, go out of your way to deny them revenue. It's like someone figuring out a way to make you work and legally not pay you for it.

What's your stance on turning down the volume and preparing a sandwich during a TV commercial break? Would you be just short of a thief, or would you simply be doing what's reasonable when having the ability to opt out of information you are not interested in? Don't try and turn a flawed business model built on an infrastructure not meant to support it into a question of ethics.

Also, as some pointed out, to the user, free can really be free. Ever maintained a personal website? How did (or would) your visitors pay for it? Everyone with an internet connection has the option to deliver free services and content at no additional cost.

Facebook's revenue model is built upon your participation (labor) and your information. Sure you're paying for it.

>It's hypocritical to navigate to a site and make use of its free services and, at the same time, go out of your way to deny them revenue.

But it's OK for FB to welcome you to their site, encourage you to supply information using your own "labor", then sell that information to third parties (even if in aggregate form)? And, it is OK for them to constantly look for ways to further track and glean data about you for its own profit? How is people using ad blockers any different from Facebook burying their monetization schemes in fine print?

Perhaps FB should simply ban ad blockers or make users prove they've viewed x ads per page view. Ah, but that would open too much dialogue about how much FB utilizes information that it harvests from users and how it monetizes it. Wouldn't want those items foremost on members' minds.

The point stands: If you as a user don't explicitly pay for it with cash, using an ad blocker means you have chosen to deny the service some revenue.

OK, don't call it theft. That's fine.

Here's a simple mental exercise: Assume that 100% of the entire world-wide Internet audience used ad blockers. How much of the internet would cease to exist as free services? The answer: A huge chunk.

I was hoping you had a website in your profile so I could surf all over it.

Here's a website you can surf: mcmaster.com

Have fun.

Also, for a distributed social network, we have Bitmessage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_dTotavJZ8

https://bitmessage.org/

But you can't stop using it. Why?

I quit Facebook about two years ago, when I stopped liking it. Too many political arguments and misunderstandings. Guess what? Life goes on.

Turns out there's quite a lot that we do.

- Indiscriminate Sharing

I don't want to have to make a decision every time I want to share a link to something interesting about what subset of friends I'm sharing it to. I don't want to be pressured to create circles of friends for different things.

If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see then it's a mistake to post it. It's better for the default to be public than some sort of pseudo private. If it's that you only want to share specific interests with specific people I never thought that that was a problem people actually had to begin with.

- Facebook gets worse the more you use it

This is just anecdotal, but facebook's news feed has always been impressively on point to who I'm interacting with more in real life. It also seems to send heartbeat posts from friends I haven't seen in a while occasionally (or more often when I check in on their page manually). People who are consistently bad I just unfollow which solves that.

- Loudmouths now have gigantic megaphones.

Unfollow them.

- Social Media Scamsters

This is pretty minor and only effects the case when friends are liking things that are completely uninteresting or liking many things so that it's spamming you (something I haven't really noticed because I think the newsfeed filters it).

In general facebook is a solid chat platform and way to share interesting content/pictures with your network.

The main complaint I can come up with for facebook is that skype sucks and their video chat could be much better.

If the idea is that there is some content you don't want a subset of people to see than it's a mistake to post it.

is a privileged perspective.

I'm guessing a lot of HNers aren't subject to gang injunctions, but imagine for a moment that you are. Suddenly, "pictures of me and my friends hanging out" become dangerous, something that can land you in jail.

Or let's say you identify as queer to your close friends and immediate family, but you have more distant relatives who you're not ready to tell just yet, but don't want to 'unfriend' on Facebook.

Or let's say you're a member of a religious group that's persecuted in the country you live in, but you'd still like to be a part of Facebook groups full of people for whom it's not an issue.

The fact that you're able to be the same person in public at all times is a privilege that not everyone has. For everyone else, you're saying that constant self-censorship should be "good enough". I find that perspective abhorrent.

I also think these situations are not the common case and because of this should not be the default. The ability to configure this exists within facebook.

Using a pseudonym can help a lot. I mean, it's not 100%, but it's really the best you've got.

but yeah, that's what I think is wrong with both facebook and google plus; both expect us to have a single identity, and then to trust them to separate out our different faces to different groups. I mean, the big problem here is that they expect me to use my real name. Well, facebook never was a professional network. It started out as the 'get me a date' context, but is now solidly in the 'family' context. Problem is? it uses my real name. Like most people, I've chosen to use my real name in the business context, so I've now got bleedthrough.

(I mean, for me, that bleedthrough isn't going to get me thrown in jail- it's mostly about having to deal with two sets of inboxes with dramatically different priorities. This would be a much bigger deal if i was sharing family secrets I didn't want generally known in my professional context, or something like that.)

The thing is many facebook users understand that.

Your neighbors know tons about you, but you're only worried about people working in datacenters.

I have said before and I will say again, Facebook is primarily useful as a tool for self-marketing, not for socializing. If you aren't marketing yourself and trying carefully to create a specific image, you are better off elsewhere.

For example, the act of posting it, even to a subset of friends, is a risk. There's the possibility of a Facebook bug that sends that information public instead.

2) Anyone who actually finds themselves under a gang injunction or might be hurt by bigoted family members ought to be smart and not post & overshare.

3) Self-censorship & under sharing is a wonderful strategy to make one's life easier. Publicly posting on ad-supported social networks isn't free speech or a crucial method of self-expression. If one is under threat, there are tons of ways to express oneself- all of which are low to zero cost: Go blog; make a fake twitter account; etc

4) The thing I'm genuinely scared of is "frictionless sharing" on social networks (Esp Linkedin) that can have real-life implications.

I do think though that the term often obscures more than it elucideates. Part of the problem is that there is the illusion that privilege can only work one way, so we can't talk about, for example, the fact that in terms of supporting children that we biologically have, that women are in a far privileged position relative to men in our culture (and that male privilege is necessarily a product of this, and that it has very few if any reasonable solutions[2]), so on the whole I think we are far better off just talking about problems and how they interrelate rather than forcing things into an overly simplistic narrative of privilege (yes all narratives are simplifications, but realizing this I think is the first step).

But additionally I don't think it is a "privileged" viewpoint not to worry about what one posts. I think it is a foolish viewpoint. The fact is if you are in the most apparently privileged demographic (I say apparently because if privilege is a useful concept it only makes sense in specific contexts), you can still be ruined by indiscretions regarding sharing stuff on facebook.

[1] http://www.scotusblog.com/media/conversation-with-justice-th... Truly mind-blowing interview about history, life, and race.

[2] Any solution you can find to the problem of single mothers having all the rights regarding reproduction and single fathers only having secondary rights contingent on the mother's actions are far worse than the problem. But if you accept inequality here, in this fundamental aspect of life, it is necessarily impossible to expect that there will be full equality elsewhere, at least as long as work and family are expected to be separate. Additionally the contrary side is that if you make things uniform, asking a man to restrict paternity leave to two weeks is very different from asking a woman to do so.

it's difficult to write what I wrote without sounding like a snobby d-bag- I just hate that phrase, the language & syntax of it (usually because it is abused so often by well-intentioned grad students)

To be clear, I don't dispute the idea for one second that there are some ppl in US that no matter what they do or how hard they try it will be exceedingly difficult for them to get ahead. I also have no disagreement that aloof & sheltered (but perhaps well-meaning) say that all marginalized/overlooked people need to do is pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

I'm not sure even where you & I agree "disagree" that much, but I figure that since there are a ton of options online that are super-easy for even zero-tech savvy people to find & use to express themselves & conceal their identity this isn't that big of a crisis

For example, I am opposed to affirmative action but wouldn't want to see it go without a larger reform taking its place. I am opposed because I think that affirmative action is a bad solution to the wrong problem, that in seeking to help some blacks (particularly since they were the primary victims of segregation) escape the black inner city community, we are in essence helping token individuals and perpetuating the fundamental injustices of segregation. I think this leads not only to capital but also talent flight from such communities, and deepens rather than resolves the economic disparity. It would be different if we encouraged such people to go back into the inner city and start businesses, but instead we saddle them with big loans, and force them to go work for others. If you see segregation as a wealth pump sucking black communities dry, there isn't so much a problem of white privilege so much as there is one of systematic black disempowerment, of which things like affirmative action and social welfare programs are actually key components today (insofar as they heavily discourage people going out and getting involved in economic production on their own terms).

And this is why I'm not on facebook

Sure, I'm cool with family baby photos, and "oh, my kid did X, y or Z, I'm so proud" you know, that's what I expect out of a family list. that's all well and good.

But if I have to wade through a gazillion "likes" and a bunch of half-baked emotionally-charged political rants to get at those things?

Nope. I'm logging off. Seriously, do you know how many messages I get a day that I actually have to deal with? It's a large number. It's not at all unusual for me to send 30 emails before I take my morning shower.

That's the thing about email. We've worked out an etiquette. Nobody is going to email me a link to a funny cat video; or email me an emotionally charged political rant. that's rude, and I'll tell family that is rude if they start doing that to me.

In fact, that's the thing I like about facebook the most; it is such a great platform for emotionally charged political rants and cute cat pictures that my family has moved all that stuff to facebook and off of email. I mean, I'm missing all the baby pictures now, but that's a price I can pay.

I like this point. Personally, I find that there's too much friction between choosing which friend belongs where and then further choosing the appropriate group when sharing content. I might just be lazy but it just doesn't work for me.

I also think there's a certain value in being well behaved when sharing content if you have people on there that you wouldn't want them to see, for example colleagues, managers and, more importantly, children. For example, I look after a 2.5 year old boy and I do not use curse words in his vicinity nor do I look at pictures of boobs when he can see. It's just not proper. However, I'm free to do those things when he is in bed and out of the way (with regards to boobs, I don't but me and my fiance will behave like adults).

Based on this, rather than a whole bunch of categories for your friends, why not set up certain filters? This could be quite simple: Do not allow friends under the age of x to see my content at all after HH:MM and before HH:MM. These can also be set on a per-friend basis so if you have a couple of colleagues as friends that haven't set their workplace, you can set something like this up for them too.

A way to only share to certain people is great but FB has this and it's adequate: groups. I founded a number of programming groups and I will share stuff relating to that to them rather than my news feed since it's more suited to them AND there are many people in there I'm not friends with. It's a great way to get good, categorised discussion and the added bonus of meeting new people.

As I said, I don't think it's very valuable, not in terms of technology but in terms of society, for people to be able to share unlimited amounts of content at all times which you wouldn't share to the whole public.

"- Facebook gets worse the more you use it..."

The disagreement with this is good too: it's the way you to use it. I use FB slightly differently but, as said above, setting up my programming groups and inspiring others to do the same has created a great community within Facebook and I can honestly say I've had some very decent conversations as a result of this, even with people I don't know or never met. This isn't what FB sells itself as but it can be done quite easily and I see value in that.

The point is that it is not about poster comfort, but others comfort - you think that you post something interesting and worth sharing but that might not be an impression of your friends, who might like 20% of your posts, maybe on a given subject, and they don't want to unfollow you.

Your friends are your friends, so there is not reason to unfollow someone, I would prefere to be able to unfollow from certain types of posts (jokes, funny cat picures, stuff funny for hackers, whatever).

The article advocates that there should be an easy way to say "that's not interesting for me" without unfollowing given person.

I think FB misses something like Dislike button, that would tell FB that I am not interested in a given subject.

This is pretty close to how I use facebook.

The problem is Sharing. It is the most fundamental feature of Facebook, and it’s completely broken

For me, the directory itself is most fundamental. If all of my friends switched to another social network, I would immediately switch.

I'm not sure what's failed? Maybe if he fleshed out a viable alternative?

It's important not to trivialize what they've accomplished just because its core feature now seems mundane.

The core feature is trivial; it has been implemented by hundreds of sites. Facebook's strength was its organic growth, which is slowing down the MySpaceification tremendously.

You appear to be trivialising it by simply saying this as if just being their caused organic growth. FB not only provided the core ability to link people together but did so in a package that was/is accessible to a broad range of people in a non-threatening way.

Several sites tried before, you mention MySpace, and never achieved the broad appeal FB did. Several have tried since - consider Google Wave. Or how about Google+, which hasn't failed yet, but has struggled it seems to make inroads in as broad a demographic as FB has.

I like to malign FB probably more than the average person but their achievement is so easily downplayed without proper warrant.

Also, "people can message each other, post text updates and pictures". This is exactly what I use Facebook for, and it works pretty well for me. I get updates and pictures from my friends and family, and I have tuned it such that I can see more content from people with whom I don't interact on a regular basis. Sounds like a case of user error to me.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the vast, vast majority of Facebook users (like, 90%+ is my SWAG) don't do any tuning at all. I'm also going to guess that a large percentage of users "friend" people they aren't friends with in real-life, due to just "shared common interest" or whatever. IF both of these assumptions hold, then the scenario the author of TFA is painting, could well be true for a significant portion of Facebook users.

Whether that's actually the case or not would be hard to measure. But to share one more anecdote: find my Facebook feed to be less and less interesting over time. With little "tuning" on my part, FB is doing a pretty crap job of figuring out what I actually want to see.

So... I could do the work to go in, delete less-than-useful "friends", tune my preferences, etc... or I could just slowly begin to drift away from Facebook, logging in less and less frequently and using Twitter and/or G+ more. Guess which one is more likely?

What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.

Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me). And with what, maybe one of those people hidden every few months, I otherwise actually have a pleasant experience catching up on what my friends & family have been up to. It's not that complicated...

What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.

Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me).

Right, and I think this is the wrong approach. There's not an absolute correlation between who said something and whether or not the subject is of interest to me. If I have a friend who I share political beliefs with, I may care about his post on, say, gun control... but if that same friend is a religious fundamentalist, I absolutely don't want to see any "pro Jesus" crap. I think this assumption, that content should be selected / filtered based on provenance, is one of the most broken things about online social networking.

Also, Facebook just isn't important enough to me, for me to spend any time "tuning" things to try and tailor my stream to what I want it to be. Like most of us, I have about a bazillion things competing for my time and attention. If Facebook isn't delivering a desirable experience (regardless of the reason), then I, for one, am likely to just drift away from it and let something else entertain me.

As a an actual social network, where friend go to exchange information with their other close friends, it jumped the shark some time ago. The EdgeRank algorithm helped to render a lot of online communication dead. When part of the goal is to keep people on your site in order to pitch advertising, that's not a good sign.

I've been thinking for a while now that the whole vibe around Facebook feels exactly like MySpace did about 4-5 years ago. The only thing preventing its demise is the lack of anything else that resembles it that everyone can latch onto.

Twitter has more of an information sharing vibe,and many people don't jibe with it. Many people dismiss Pinterest or don't get that either. Tumblr up until a week ago really felt like LiveJournal did back in the day, but I don't have a ton of high hopes for it lasting the next few years.

I find it ironic that having capitalized on the mistakes of the social networks that preceded it, Facebook is on the verge of repeating many of those same errors.

What's left is the people I care about and the content from pages I care about (e.g. The Economist posts really good content every day, so does Rap Genius, and brands like Nike/Adidas; all of which I like-- in the traditional sense).

It's basically my "newspaper". I even follow HN and it feeds me the newest stuff from HN alongside other publications, pictures of my friends from around the world, and status updates from people I care about.

I also have AdBlock so I don't get the sidebar ads which I do agree are a bit spammy.

This article is just a bunch of bullshit. It has no real critical analysis and doesn't really say much at all. It's very shallow and a repost to boot (it was on here just days ago). Let's not upvote this garbage.

It's like going to a great restaurant, ordering five times as much as you can eat and then complaining about the food.

Just look at your feed. As soon as you see someone you don't care about just one click hide them or unfriend them (if socially possible).

If you see a post from a page you don't care about, then one click unfollow them.

It's really simple. Their newsfeed algorithms are actually really awesome at figuring out the rest once you give it a tiny bit of feedback like I mentioned above.

I totally agree, and that's not to say that Google+'s stream isn't equally filled with content I don't care about, but that is also because I followed a random circle of 500 "interesting people".

Google+'s focus on smaller circles as it's primary feature, and I think the larger emphasis on sharing with circles and not the public at large (unless you are one of the internet famous) attempts to give user's the power to interact in this way. And if you use gmail, it's basically email + all the rich content social network benefits have to offer.

(The interface also invites having a "loudmouth" circle with zero notification level, so you can follow people without having their posts in your default stream).

Otherwise, G+ Circles are ridiculously clunky and slow, due to Google choosing superficial eye-candy over functionality.

The fact that Google+ prioritizes and emphasizes splitting friends into these circles as a PRIMARY means of organizing your friends is a huge difference. Although it is cumbersome, it is a much more realistic representation of human interaction, making friends and having different groups of friends.

Almost all my extended global family uses Facebook several times a day (we have a closed group), and I often sit next to other family members using the system. I am much more familiar with it than most people, especially with non-expert users.

It does require some effort to sort Facebook friends into half a dozen channels, but Facebook suggests people to add, which actually makes it rather easy. It becomes a natural progression, over time.

Meanwhile, whatever the theoretical claims, G+ remains almost completely unusable. In my experience, it's virtually impossible to get ordinary people to use it, and they don't last more than a day or two. And from a usability point of view, Circles are crap.

Although I've used G+ quite a lot, and have something over 5,000 followers, my use has declined over time. Following the last desperate (Facebook copying) redesign, I've more or less given in...

I think none of the networks are perfect, but I don't use Google+ only for personal connections. There is quite a lot of (photographic and technology, at least) content that is interesting to read.

And not to get into any sort of Fanboy war, but which redesign are you talking about? Before Google+'s most recent redesign into the multi-column pinterest-esque layout, Facebook's timeline update is in fact quite a copy of Google+'s old design (bigger pictures in speech bubbly things out of profile pictures).

I've lived in North America and my wife's family is Chinese so we are pretty widely spread. I have close relations in five different countries, but the majority are in Asia.

So, in an average Facebook session, I see posts from about 50 people, and I know almost all of them very well. I see a lot of baby and toddler pictures, with more to come ;-)

I have no relatives at all who use G+, and very few colleagues/business contacts who actually use it. Also, I don't see much new content there. I've usually seen it already via Twitter, Reddit, HN or RSS feeds.

I also use LinkedIn and Quora, and as a former /. and Digg user, I sometimes drop by those as well. They all have their niches. Unfortunately, it's hard to see anything that G+ does better than the rest, from my point of view.

Also, Hangouts is probably the biggest unique thing for Google+. By far the best web-based, free, multi-person video chatting experience IMHO. Not to mention it can be tremendously productive if need be, with in-window document editing and screensharing. It's somewhat based on the video conferencing solution that Google has been using internally for remoting into meetings for a long time.

I agree about Hangouts but it's a non-starter when none of my family is using G+. They use Facebook chat, Facebook group chat, and Skype. Hardly any of them use Gmail, so my chances of moving 30-odd people to G+ are basically zero....

With consumers, technology is a relatively small part of technology choices, and inertia is a huge factor.

These were my thoughts when I wrote it:

1. Most stuff being shared is of no value to most people. Does not encourage exchange of good ideas. Sharing, as it works now looks like a fad. It has peaked. Most people I know are bored now, it's just the inertia that keeps them there.

2. If someone is genuinely interested in something, they will seek out good communities to join. HN is a good example. And Slashdot (much more so earlier, but even now), gamer forums, some reddits, astronomy forums, photography etc.

3. There would probably need to be a tool to share with family and close friends. But that doesn't need to look like FB. Then again, Social networks help fight against totalitarian regimes. FB would be missed here, although I think Twitter plays a bigger role.

Josh Miller in "The Next Facebook" makes an interesting point: The next network could be about making it easy to talk to people you don't know so well. Example, again Hacker News. https://medium.com/musings-about-text-boxes/8157c364d26a

I am working on some related ideas, for open communities and forums. This will be open source, and I'll document, share and collaborate on the entire process of designing this application (like discussions, whiteboards, sketches etc) . Plan to start this week, if interested add me on Twitter (@jeswin). Code isn't committed yet, but it will be here: https://github.com/jeswin/fora

PS: This was written in a hurry. I apologize for mistakes. I have to leave now; I'll check comments later in the day.

In general I think that experiences in life are so different and all require a different set that you simply can't aggregate them all on one and unique website. "The next network could be about making it easy to talk to people you don't know so well." is just called the web?

What you are describing is a tool for more introverted style people (like myself) who primarly want to talk about common interests

These two concepts are not at all the same thing. Social communications between friends and family are not idea-based, they are fact-based. "How was your day?" "How's your sister?" "What happened to your face?" "How are you feeling?" "Did you get that new car?" etc. People want just want a taste of the other person's life and emotional state. Facebook is great for that.

I agree that Facebook is not great for exchanging and discussing ideas. As you point out, that is why forums like HN have grown at the same time as Facebook has grown.

The idea that the shared stuff is of "no value to most people" is a good indication that you haven't understood what's actually going on.

> doesn't need to look like FB

This is true, but then, Facebook has 1.1bn users and has thrashed all of the rival sites in the marketplace.

You should be able to work out why Facebook has been really successful and why Friendster, Orkut, Hi5, MySpace, and many others have not.

If you don't understand that, then you're not in a good position to criticise Facebook.

A bunch of my friends don't use Facebook. We exchange long emails regularly instead. It's awesome. Solves the problem Facebook supposedly solves much, much better. And I think it would be enough to replace Facebook given a few extra features to abstract away, through a user interface, stuff that email can already do.

I'm in the same boat as you. I email with most of my friends and family.

Fortunately for Zuckerberg and company they've already crossed the chasm. They will sink or swim based on the habits of the masses, not the fickle hipster tastes of a startup guy who desperately wants to predict the future.

This isn't the first time this has happened; I remember when Reddit was small too (and if you go back on HN, the old HN had higher quality comments).

It's inevitable that the values of a community change as it scales. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

G+ is in that general direction. The social network for hobbys. Connect to granny on facebook, but connect to the guys in your ham radio club and/or photographers and/or podcasters on G+...

You 'Like' something/someone for one simple reason. You feel that page is interesting to you and you want updates. If you don't want updates from something you like, you write it down in a notebook.

Gone are the days when Facebook was an obsession. People tend to expect more and more from the service (even though it's free) they use but Facebook went in the exact opposite direction - they gave back less of what we want and more of what we don't.

I see more and more companies exclusively on Twitter which is great. Twitter's a great platform for business while I always had this sense that Facebook is more suitable for individuals.

After a week/month/year/half a decade you realise it's taking up a larger percentage of your than you'd like and you make cuts.

I have kept my Facebook account open but I can't remember when was the last time I checked it out of interest. If someone messages me or write on my wall, I get a (non-push) notification on my mobile or email (in the mailbox Newsletters which I check/clean at the end of the week). But that's it, Facebook is (almost) a past for me, just like Myspace.

Seriously though, if you don't think that Facebook Data Science's the fuck out of their news feed algorithm, then I don't know what to tell you.

If it's not working well for you, either it is and you don't realize it (ie, you are reading the "spam" more than you think), or you are an outlier.

FB can't and won't be everything to everyone, but a blanket statement like this is just trolling.

medium.com again.

medium.com does not scroll in Chrome on the Nexus 7

This means I can't actually read anything on there.

I can't even figure out who to email, because the About page also doesn't scroll.

Living in the future sucks :(

Don't worry though, you're not missing out on much.

I can live with bugs. But bugs that make it impossible (FSVO) for me to report them are a special sort of evil.

I suppose I'll check the about page on another device at some point and thereby derive the ability to help them diagnose and fix the problem.

But ... argh.

Even staring at uninteresting content on Facebook from time to time serves a fundamental human need to socialize, to see what others are up to. Hardcore Randians might disagree but life isn't all about narrowly/subjectively-defined "progress", after all. Some people just like to live and to escape a little bit every once in a while, and checking what one's peers are up to is a great way to do just that.

In reading this post, I have a very hard time sympathizing with this author's point. He's taking his personal expectations and experience of Facebook and projecting it to a catastrophic failure of the entire company to reach its audience - that's unfair at best, and honestly narcissistic. Nearly a billion people use Facebook, it's not a failure. This is like saying Google has botched search. No, Google and Facebook practically control their domains.

Is there room for disruption? Sure. Is Facebook perfect? No. But I believe the author is using Facebook the wrong way based on his points. It's not a professional platform. I don't use it the same way I use Twitter.

A rebuttal, in order of points made:

>Jump through hoops...share selectively.

News flash, most people don't care. I actively use Facebook and I've literally never touched the selective buttons for what to share with who or what to delineate between friends. I use Facebook for friends - there isn't a boilerplate for this when you sign up. It's for friends - the only reason Facebook introduced this was so that you could share that funny, raunchy video and your girlfriend's mom won't see it.

>As you use Facebook...you accumulate friends.

This entire point is null and void. You set it up by implying you have no control over the friends you make or the groups you join. That's blatantly false. Just don't friend professional coworkers or acquaintances. Again, not difficult.

>Loudmouths now have gigantic megaphones.

Dude, skim or limit your newsfeed. Are you so intolerant that you feel didactically opposed to the feature? It's not as painful as all that, you pass a status, read the first sentence, and decide if you have interest. If not, move on, don't comment. If it really offends you, defriend the person or limit what you can see from them on your newsfeed. There's a button literally next to their name.

>Social media scamsters.

I'll give this to you. However, I personally find more amusement than anything. And while I don't want to criticize you, you might want to be more selective in who you see sharing from on your newsfeed. I find the people who share this (gullible friends) are outliers and you can deal with them individually in the same manner as the above bullet point.

In summation, I believe the author doesn't understand why his qualms are actually features - it seems as though he's using it for the wrong reason. I'm not going to say Facebook is flawless. It's not, there is a lot to critique and it has things that could be improved. But all of this is not constructive criticism and it's mostly doom-seeking. Does he have a better idea for a social network? How can he condemn Facebook as a failure? His authority and points don't support that claim.

If you're looking for a system where friends are not just friends, but everyone you know, and you need selectivity in sharing or conversations, go to Twitter or Google Plus. If you want to kill time and have more or less the same experience with friends, with the same annoyances (native to social interaction, not the medium), go to Facebook.

This is my news feed at the moment. I tweeted a similar picture on Friday. At the top, there is a piece of content from Deadspin, which, while I do like them, but I don't need every update from. Beside that, it is 100% ads, six in total. Any other site, this would be considered completely unacceptable spam. The only ad I'm even remotely interested in on my sidebar is the Titleist irons and that is only because I recently bought a set, meaning i won't need another, so that's a pretty sure sign this ad is ineffective. Same with T. Rowe Price. I just opened a Schwab account, so I assume that was why I was targeted, but does it really make sense for T. Rowe Price to try to advertise for people who JUST opened a Schwab account? I'm really starting to wonder how this could possibly be useful to anyone.

I remember on my first day at Facebook, I sat in orientation while they explained to us why Google's advertising platform would be overtaken by Facebook's, and the idea was that they could figure out what people wanted to buy or were looking at, and then serve them an ad for something relevant. Cool idea and all, but 3 years later, this has clearly not happened, AT ALL. Facebook is still paying an engineering team hundreds of millions of dollars to figure out ways to more efficiently cram my browser full of spam. How is this useful for anyone except Facebook stockholders who want money?

Then this happened -

I posted something in which I wanted to include a goo.gl shortened URL (yes, I wanted that specific shortener for geek humourous effect!). FB forbid me from using the goo.gl link because it considered it "spammy", discarded my entire post text and logged me out. When I logged back in, it declared my computer as infected with a virus (that would be a macbook air), made me confirm that I've disinfected it, and oh it made me change my password too before I could login, sigh, and retype my post text using different link. All that while I logged into FB in an incognito window in Chrome!

That's when I thought "Man! I'm glad I ditched FB!". The next thought was "what if this happens to google+?". As DanielBMarkham noted, if we really value social networks, they can't be placed in the hands of one company or site. ISPs are probably best placed to make this happen, but that won't happen due to network effects - just like folks don't bother using ISPs email accounts anyway. People would just login to FB or something. The internet as a social network seems doomed to evolve into FBs and G+s!

1) Either tell Facebook to explicitly ignore these people's posts so that they're hidden from your feed.

2) Just unfriend people who don't matter.

3) Don't friend people who aren't consistently in your life in the first place.

4) Don't use Facebook as often.

Facebook isn't broken; people just need to do house cleaning and to stop using it like linkedin

"While Google actively tries to thwart SEO scamsters"

Google has monetised SEO and actively encourages bad SEO through SEM. You've got this strange case of Google creating shitty search results through Adwords and SEM which devalues their core product.

Looks like FB and other social platforms are suffering a similar issue. Ads are creating a frothing steam of noise which is drowning out quality content.

I am well connected in 3 communities that are not mutually compatible, so I don't share everything I would share if I were only in community #2 because I spam-filter on the sending side what I send to all 3 communities. This sucks for my community #2 friends cause they miss out on #2 stuff and it sucks for those that really are not interested in #2. If #1 and #3 people could black list buzz words from my #2 community (bitcoin for example), I could share much more with the peace of mind not to annoy my other "friends".

Facebook is now being destroyed by its overwhelming success. Since people feel locked in (because, hey, that's where all my friends are...) facebook can keep cranking up the heat, making the experience more and more unpleasant for users, and they will still stick around and give their eyeballs to it.

From talking to many people on and offline, it seems that facebook is almost universally hated now, but we have no choice, since everyone else is on facebook.

This will probably keep working for some time, but eventually, and very suddenly, there will be a tipping point where many people suddenly can't stand it any more. Once facebook loses that first big chunk, then not everyone will be on facebook anymore, and all the others who despised it for years but hung on because everyone else did will not have to put up with it anymore.

Facebook will suddenly go from universal necessity to irrelevant, and it will happen overnight.

Inevitably, there is an entire industry working non-stop creating low quality, emotionally appealing content that gets ‘likes’ from gullible users.

This is so true. I believe Google's efforts to stop spammy SEO made SEO a good thing for users. This is extremely hard to stop in Facebook when social media people know how effective (in the number of likes) emotionally appealing content (read overused pictures of something cute happening) can be to a large percentage of people. These people don't seem to engage with the companies behind these posts but they do get promoted and eventually that's all you will see.

I'm not a Twitter user but I'm wondering what will the effect be for its users.

A friend of mine has just arrived from across the country to the city I'm in. He just moved here and now I know he's here and we can hang out.

Another friend is looking for help with some yardwork. Free beer or pizza is involved.

Other friends posted pictures of their children, or graduation photos from college.

Another person I know recently got out of the hospital.

All of these are at least somewhat relevant to me.

What else do I use facebook for?

I put an album of photos from a hike I went on the other day. Lots of friends had asked me about it, now they can all see it.

I play on a kickball team and we like to hang out with eachother outside of our normal thursday night games. Plans get made in our facebook group quite often.

Long ago I realized that some of my friends aren't worth keeping up with. I muted or unfriended them on Facebook. Facebook is what you make it, and I've made it in to something that I use every day.

You can skim off the customers of the local news merely by rising above that low level, you don't need perfection. That is the mistake in the original article of complaining about only 4 relevant stories in 30. OK, well, if that is bad, what is good? Local news is profitable with less than 1 in 30, so what's the problem with 4 in 30?

Facebook has already thought of that problem for you, OP.

- Picture of a friend who's traveling and doing volunteer work. Awesome.

- Picture of a family member living abroad that got pregnant. Like. - Sister making boring comment. Meh.

- Link to this TEDx Talk: http://youtu.be/b5OOOIKtj8w. May be interesting.

- Pictures of some friends/acquaintances' weekend out. Meh.

- A bunch of incredibly beautiful pictures of an old coworker visiting San Francisco. Awesome.

I take Facebook as a way of keeping in touch with people I don't have a lot of face to face contact with, a chat service and a simple way to keep in touch with people I recently met. It seems to work well at that.

I've had the exact opposite experience with Facebook even with ads. As I google search on my computer, Facebook's ads actually become relevant. As I scan my front page, I see news from friends that I find interesting and status posts about friends that I care about. If I see something irrelevant or spam-ish, there's a convenient tab next to the post that gives me the option to never see it again.

Sure, there's some self-management involved in getting Facebook to work for you but it's audience is so broad it kind of has to be that way right?

I call this 'social routing'. I hoped that Google+ would do that - but they only covered half of the idea - they let the sender target the message, and they let the receiver choose their sources (in a tangled together way) - but they don't let them negotiate the connection.

Revisited: “The Facebook Experiment has failed.”

https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f57f3bc8b377

So.. I would create 3 groups. Family, Friends, Acquaintances.

Family + Friends status's would always appear. Acquaintances status updates would require 5 likes by other people before they appeared in my stream.

All likes from Acquaintances and Friends would be hidden.

All app invites from Acquaintances would be hidden.

As for companies I like / follow. Individual controls for each would be great.

I hardly use Facebook because of the noise. I only have < 60 friends on Facebook and < 10 likes. I can't imagine what it gets like with hundreds of friends. My idea probably wouldn't scale. Would be neat though. Would actually get me using Facebook.

I bet for the younger crowd, FB works just fine for the most part.

Yah, don't use it for the news feed, but even with the crap, it can still be interesting to see what some of your funny friends are saying and jab some friends when your hockey team is winning!

Also because it's not as easy as drag&dropping a mail into the right tab.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

PS : Actually Facebook is going through the same thing Mail has been going through since its creation. It was only friends at first, then co-workers and friends, then spam & forum notification, newsletter etc... came around and now it's becoming hard to sort through all those things. So my remark on Gmail's tabs still stands.

I honestly don't understand how this doesn't describe facebook today.

This isn't exactly true. The FB algorithm dictates that a post hits an average of 18% of your network for personal accounts (15% for businesses). It's an average, because if you frequently share content that has low engagement (likes, comments, shares) FB shows your content to a smaller % of your network.

On the other hand, if you produce content with high engagement, it will get a higher % share with your network.

Arguably this should happen automatically -- but, I'm pretty surprised at the large positive effect this has had: Facebook is revealed as an amazing communication tool -- it's not perfect, but considering it's (mostly) free, certainly not something to complain about.

See you all after the collapse!

AKA Email.

Seriously, somebody needs to build an email client that makes maintaining incoming/outgoing mailing lists and filtering your inbox very easy, and offers a few extra "friend discovery" search features. You would probably have a facebook killer.

A lot of people think "social networking" is a new kind of thing. But it's just a fancy UI on top of email.

The problem for many people is not why to leave Facebook, but how. For example, many of us feel deterred from leaving because all of our friends use the service.

How can people leave Facebook and still feel socially satisfied? To where should they turn? I think an article that proposed a solution to these questions would be more interesting.

Now we have a complaint about seeing too many updates.

Am I the only FB user thinking that overall, FB does a pretty good job in prioritizing updates? (i.e. the further down I scroll in my news feed, the less likely I see something I truly care about).

I see this happening all around me: groupchat with pictures is the new Facebook.

Maybe when someone will combine bittorrent and forums, something really new will come out, but for now, facebook is just one big computer cluster, where you can gossip using your real name and where everyone can read you. I don't really call it a progress. I guess paparazzis enjoy it, but not everyone is into that stuff.

And so I left and closed my account. Since then I've mainly been using Friendica. No spam or creepy business models, just conversations with friends.

So it doesn't scale to the networking needs of an entrepreneur or academic. That's really not what it sets out to do.

So I kinda agree. Almost no stories what pick my intrest. Only win-to-share post and not relevant post.