Facebook will struggle to make the next leap (IMHO, of course) because there's a disconnect between how users want to use it, and how Facebook wants/needs you to use it.<p>Outside of the sub-group of individuals who thrive on sharing every aspect of their life, most people want Facebook to be a fancy email. There's all your friends; you can talk with them and literally see what they're up to . And to be honest, the platform is great for that.<p>Facebook, on the other hand, needs you to be an information sharing and data providing machine, talking about brands and products, all while doing whatever they can to entice (or trick) you into putting your information in the public domain. They want to you be connected with <i>everyone</i>. People are learning that's a lot of work.<p>The problem is that the more Facebook pushes the latter, the worse the former -- the user experience -- <i>has</i> to get. Nobody wants to stare at ads and feel like they're being "watched" (by both Facebook and other connections) while they "engage" with friends. As the author discovered...it's odd.
For all of you wondering <i>"Can I really give up Facebook?"</i> the answer is an emphatic "Of course, stupid." You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.<p>The other day someone sent me an e-mail or text (I forget) to invite me to an event. They knew I had abandoned Facebook and wanted to make sure I was included. I felt slightly honored that they would go "out of their way" to include me, and it was much more meaningful than the average Facebook invite-all event listing.<p>Have you ever met someone you hadn't seen in a while, and they ask you what you've been doing, and you get a plethora of different reactions as you explain the ups and downs of your recent adventures? You don't get that if they're on Facebook. Human interaction is based on communication, and Facebook is not communication. It's the Reader's Digest version of The Truman Show.<p>Maybe I am a luddite. But what i'm fighting against is the replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. Maybe someday soon, Google Glass will become so ubiquitous that we'll all watch snippets of other people's lives instead of status updates, and we'll never have to live life on our own again; we'll just live through someone else.
Oh boy another internet "experiment" when someone gives up $technology and ends up saying absolutely nothing in their post. I sure do love reading these pretentious pieces of "intellectual" prose.<p>In fact I shall start an "experiment" myself to see if replacing every instance of "experiment" in these kind of articles with "controversial decision" to see if they read better. I mean it's as if people use the word "experiment" to justify being avant-garde.<p>Except in this case it's not even a controversial thing. People are leaving facebook for tonnes of reasons (fad has died, not finding its uses any more, don't want to be tied with a system that hoards personal data and sells them off to companies etc). Leaving Facebook isn't an edgy thing to do; not before and not now. Anyone I knew that announced that they're "leaving facebook" end up being rather smugly obnoxious when tech news headlines say "facebook did some things that people don't like. boooo facebook!" saying they "knew all along" and they were obviously smarter and more superior than the regular "tech weenie" still on their facebook.<p>We all know what the result of this "experiment" is going to be. "My life was significantly improved thanks to not using facebook. Just as I thought! Aren't I clever?". There's no point denying it because that's what they're going to say. Just like I said I'll replace "experiment" with "controversial decision". I already know that I'm going to say "Nope. The posts were not better at all. Told ya!" because I know that when it's something I dislike in the first place I'm going to have a visceral reaction to hate it rather than say doing an ACTUAL experiment which doesn't have this cognitive bias.<p>And I'm right, am I? I mean I'm not WRONG or something? Please someone validate my beliefs which I portray on the internet. I desperately need this!!!
> I want us to talk. I want a personal email. I want to find a way to share photos in a way that encourages us to talk about them with each other.<p>Surely you can do this with or without Facebook.<p>Maybe I'm a unique snowflake but Facebook to me is exactly the opposite of that: it's a way to give a quick (often meaningless) insight into my life, what I'm thinking or what I'm doing. It's a way to share something that <i>maybe</i> someone will be interested in, but probably not. If I share something to Facebook it's not because I <i>want</i> all my friends to see it, it's because I think those that <i>might</i> see it <i>might</i> find value in it and it represents what I'm doing/thinking/enjoying. If I want someone to see something or engage with me in conversation I send them a message.<p>Facebook isn't a replacement for "normal" communication between friends, it's an extension. The only reason anyone would want to see complaints about someone's life falling apart is the same reason people watch train wrecks of car crashes. They don't <i>care</i> about the individual, they care about the spectacle. Using any one->many communication platform for complaints about life seems misguided.<p>Maybe <a href="https://everyme.com/" rel="nofollow">https://everyme.com/</a> would fill the void he has in his life.
As I see it, the seeds of this user's disappointment were planted as soon as she starting gaming the system: "my posts became more and more filtered as the 'Friend' list increased. Now, they were getting the facade, the highlights because I donned the 'happy' mask. My closer friends were still catching the true story through instant messaging, text messaging and phone calls..."<p>The faint echoes of Gödel and Turing in the back of my mind say: no social algorithm can ever optimize its results to take into account how people will modify their behavior in response to the algorithm itself.
My problem with fb and the reason I don't use it is simple: principal. I understand the model, and oblige with google (though not g+ as it is pretty quiet in my neck of the woods). But to not only give them the value of my data but also have them go around changing things like registered email without so much as a heads up is a slap in the face. It's like a conceited bus monitor that just goes ahead and "does what's best for me". I'm an adult; I know what email address I prefer to use.<p>Not only that, but the utter lack of transparency is concerning to say the least. There is this monstrous set of data--PII--that this company holds and who's to say the bus monitor doesn't all of a sudden decide that's it's best for me if they provide this data to Experien. Or to the justice dept.<p>The real problem is that people are addicted to distraction. Fb offers this droves. So much so that not only are people more than willing to hand over their data, they are willing to hand it over to someone who thinks you don't even deserve to know when they make sweeping changes to which parts of that data are displayed to the world.<p>/rant
Aside from the fact that this post is mostly pointless, it's also totally misinformed.<p>The OP started off by stating his reasons for dropping FB in this "experiment".. namely losing touch with the people for which he originally signed up under.<p>But he clearly doesn't engage with them if he's not seeing their updates.<p>Your social graph needs fine tuning. It's like any good bayesian filter, it learns over time what interests you. You can of course give it a push in the right direction by putting people in acquaintances, or hiding specific people from your timeline. (People in your acquaintances don't show up as often in your newsfeed).<p>This post just shows that you most likely don't understand the full feature set of Facebook and how to best optimize your social graph (not that this is your fault). Facebook has some of the <i>best</i> machine learning for figuring out what is relevant to me. I'd probably argue that you click on too many memes and don't interact with your friends as much if this is what it is serving you.<p>Don't drop Facebook, just learn how to use it.
I personally don't use Facebook for interacting with that many friends. I have about 96% of my friends as acquantiances. I have a small set of about 10 people as friends, and I subscribe to about 100~ people.
My newsfeed is so rich with really good content.
Well the OP is right about one thing: Facebook has become less personal.<p>I regret accepting old high school/college friends (who I haven't' seen in 25 years), army buds, and family members I didn't even know I had.<p>Now I post, maybe once every 2 weeks. Usually something safe - like about the current game I'm playing. I don't dare get personal on FB now.
I've gone "old school" (trying to connect to people in 'old fashion' ways) on many somewhat prolonged occasions and it doesn't work. It's a reflection of society not my particular grouping of friends.<p>I spent a year writing many handwritten letters. People loved receiving them but seldom, if ever, returned the favor. I try and try again to meet with my friends to catch up (ie, going for coffee). Almost never happens, and when it does it's a chore to actually set up. Instead, it has to be an 'event' and it should be 'social'. I text my friends and they respond rather quickly...because I know if I call, many times they don't answer.<p>Of course, all this means is that the LCD is either me or society.
The anecodte the poster gives is spot on and huge. There have been many times I've thought "I wonder why I don't hear from this person anymore" and it was simply a matter of Facebook no longer prioritizing their posts in my news feed.<p>Just because someones post isn't "liked" or clicked on in some way doesn't mean it's not valuable. It's a passive form of communication.<p>I don't know if this is just my perception, and maybe Facebook doesn't prioritize things in the news feed. Regardless, it's a UX question that needs to be asked by their team.
I don't know why everyone takes Facebook so seriously.<p>Well, actually I do but I don't want to dive into a long comment about how it's a voyeuristic, social panopticon and how easy it is to project your insecurities onto it. Well, I have a small and strange solution to staying in contact with your friends, do what I do: remove all your actual friends from your newsfeed.<p>When you see them, you won't already have eagerly instantiated things to talk about, you won't jaw off about some article they posted about the latest bath salt murder -- you'll actually catch up and connect in genuine conversation.<p>The site only has as much power as you give it, posting a long diatribe about how it has no power over you anymore because you deactivated is legitimizing its power over you.
I have to agree with the sentiments here: it seems to me that my Facebook feed is much less useful than it was about a year ago. I don't know what they've done, but it's really not good.
Not being on Facebook seems to be the new "I don't even own a tv" <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...</a>
I think people put too much emphasis on Facebook and what perceived problems it is 'suppose to solve' in their lives. You get out of it what you put it into it, just like anything else (mostly). If you don't feel connected with your friends, it's not FB's fault. FB to me isn't designed to make my connections with friends stronger, it's designed to keep lingering friendships going.<p>On a side note, why is it so important to declare that you are no longer using or on Facebook. This isn't limited to the OP either. I've met people in real life, who take great pride in not using FB anymore. I find it in the tech & podcast world too. It's a strange type of snobbery, between 'those in the know who aren't on facebook' versus the 'sheep who are on facebook'.<p>Well, I am no longer using brand name nasal spray. It wasn't fulfilling my life I like I thought it was supposed to. I used it like the bottle says too and while it does what it says it's supposed to, it's not what I want.
Many of the complaints could be resolved with more transparency on Facebook's part. The frustrations seem to be generally focused on managing communication: incoming and outgoing, an issue of curation.<p>The problem is, despite Facebook having many tools to calibrate one's communications, Facebook is still a blackbox. We click the appropriate Account Settings radio button and like the good scientists we are, wait to see what happens. The fact of the matter is, we are pulling a lever and hoping it is attached to some mechanism on the other side.<p>The same is true of Google and SEO.<p>Odd that obfuscation is the hallmark of our internet experiences.
Facebook is defective by design as a social network. It's for profit driven, privacy abusing and etc. and etc. It's a pity that it became a virtual monopoly. Same bad as happened with Windows on the desktop.
So just because you don't have the proper settings on your news feed, you're quitting facebook altogether.<p>I agree that facebook is a lot less personal than it used to be. Personally, I rarely update my facebook status or stare at the newsfeed. I use facebook to connect with "friends" whose phone number or e-mail address I don't have and to join or create events.Those two situations are perfectly well handled by facebook.
Yes, I too had the similar problem. I was missing out on updates from my brother while being bombarded with stupid gifs. But as pointed out in another comment it's just one day I had to sit for an hour and put everyone who I don't speak on phone regularly as acquaintances. Problem solved!<p>It was a bit hard for me to do this though, nearly took an hour.. so here are two suggestions<p>1) Brute force: option to mark everyone as acquaintances in one go and then de-select the people back to friends.<p>2) More automated: Facebook should make a module where if a person allows the app access to the phonebook, it somehow recommends a list of people who are important to me based on my frequency of calling/speaking them offline. I know privacy conscious people would absolutely scream in horror so this is why it should be opt-in only.<p>P.S. 3) Oh and timeline still sucks. It is just too hard to read, there ought to be a way to going back to the simple news feed.
> <i>Conversing with a friend, I start to share a story I’d earlier posted on Facebook. Since she didn’t comment or “like” the post I guessed she hadn’t yet seen it. Instead, she cuts me short: “Yeah, I saw your post on Facebook.” And that was it. No dialog, no joy at conversing with each other, just friends passively watching each other from a distance. I’m guilty, I’ve done it too. We’ve become quiet ships, passing by in the dark silence of the night.</i><p>Hmm, that's just a tough anecdote to use to make his point...it could be that that his friend is not much of a conversationalist with him.<p>But I admit to using FB to promote things that I don't feel like wasting real-time talking about...like projects or articles I liked...And everyone who's ever been on the receiving end of a mass-email is happy about that.
Curation of social media is becoming a big problem that only occured within the last few years. Trying to solve it algorithmically with plus ones and likes and upvotes seems to work when the content is centered around a specific topic, but not something so general as your Facebook friends list or Twitter feed.<p>And you can't just deny people you know from being your friend on Facebook. It's rude. If you're ok with being rude, this doesn't apply to you, but the quality of my Facebook stream is not worth sacrificing my manners - not when I can get better content elsewhere without having to do so.<p>I haven't left Facebook, I just ignore it, because there's nothing interesting there. I don't want to clean it up when my accounts on Twitter, Quora, Hacker News, and Stack Exchange provide much more interesting content.
"Conversing with a friend, I start to share a story I’d earlier posted on Facebook. Since she didn’t comment or “like” the post I guessed she hadn’t yet seen it. Instead, she cuts me short: “Yeah, I saw your post on Facebook.”"<p>lol, my wife does this to me all the time :) (or should the emoticon be :( )
The arguments are valid here, not one more 'Zuck I HATE YOU, remove timeline' when actually timeline does not make any difference unless you are stalking some one every day :))<p>I like the idea of the news feed filter algorithm. Just implementation is not the best. The only way to 'fix' it is just to change friend status (acquaintance, friend, close friend, etc). But... I am not sure if the algorithm can be improved actually. It determines whether to show or not by how much do you interact with some one on facebook (more or less). And it's the only way to determine whether you might be interested or not. Because believe me, you wouldn't be happy if you could see what everyone is posting if you have 200+ friends.
"One evening, over pizza and wine she’s telling me about a breakup and a poem she posted. I never saw the poem. When I visited her Timeline I realized she had been posting every day and it never once showed up in my Newsfeed. Instead I see a photo of someone I don’t know; gliding down my Newsfeed simply because one of my friends “liked” it and the original poster doesn’t have their privacy settings in place."<p>Aye, totally agree. The day Facebook launched EdgeRank was the day Facebook started it's decline. In fact, there's a pattern that happens to companies that try and "assume" what their users want to see.
These posts are pretty common I feel in HN. Every time it just comes down to FB gets harder to use. I have a Close Friends tab and I put my close friends in it. That's it.<p>I "Like" some pages but you can easily click on that drop down to unsubscribe.<p>FB is pretty flexible on what content you want to appear in your feed and sometimes there are surprises but you can pretty easily scold it with a few button clicks and it'll fix right back up. Works for me. I understand there's a need for it to just work without the use of any interaction but then you'd lose a lot of features if you had that.
I've been on the fence about quitting Facebook for a while.<p>On one hand, it feels like junk-food-friendship: it feels like you're connecting and communicating, but in reality the time you spend scrolling lists on your phone could be spent with something far better: closing the FB app and calling a buddy.<p>On the other hand, so many people use FB that it's tough to completely pull away from it. It's where my generational cohort shares photos, so I can't fully walk away unless I want to miss out on the photos from last week's camping trip, etc.
I have taken about 2 weeks of Facebook fast. It was great. You are more peaceful. Their is no guilt about not being able to do all the things that you should to be doing. You save time. You have more intense face to face or phone conversation with your friends.<p>I am back on Facebook because it is easier to connect to future-to-be-friends. You connect on Facebook and may be become good friends.<p>I plan to slowly wind Facebook down and eventually leave it for good.
So this is exactly the problem Google+ was designed to solve.<p>Don't want your entire friends list to see a post only share with with a specific circle.<p>Don't care to hear useless banter ? Don't include a person in your circle or turn down the volume on that circle. I had a good friend of mine from growing up who decided one day he was going to post nothing but memes. He went into the silent circle and I can check in on him every now and then if I so choose.
The problem seems to ultimately always boil down to "I added far too many people to Facebook as friends, and now Facebook is useless!"<p>To which the solution is easy: cut down the number of people you are friends with on Facebook.<p>For me, I have < 30 people I've friended on Facebook. But they're real friends and family, people I know and want to keep in touch with. And that's made all the difference to how I use Facebook.
Has some good points, but I think many get the wrong idea about facebook. It's a way to keep in touch with far off friends who you wouldn't hear from at all otherwise. It's never affected a real relationship for me in the slightest, other than, "I saw your pics." The news feed could be better, but it has become more relevant since I've silenced a few overposters and blocked apps, etc.
This is fucking on-point. The Timeline is just completely useless anymore as a way of keep tabs on people I care about. I rarely care if my friend was tagged in a picture, and I never care that they commented on a wall post by some random person I've never met.<p>I wish I could ditch it altogether, but the events and messaging are an integral part of my social life now.
Please, please, can you consider implementing a higher contrast color scheme for the text on your blog? It's really painful to read as it is now; I wanted to and tried but had to give up.
Without an analysis of causes, I can agree that my own FB "news feed" has been becoming consistently crappier. Especially since roughly the beginning of this year.
I did the same thing 2 weeks back. People whom I meet keep asking, but honestly, I haven't missed it for one second. I wrote a little something about it <a href="http://tumblr.bhashkar.me/post/23712148539/why-i-deactivated-my-facebook-account" rel="nofollow">http://tumblr.bhashkar.me/post/23712148539/why-i-deactivated...</a>
You'll eventually get over being "too cool" for Facebook. It's ok, I did it too. We'll welcome you back when you change your mind. Life is too short to worry so much about these things.
I'm considering leaving facebook for the first time, because of the Sponsored Stories thing, which is showing up with disturbing regularity, and frequently winds up as ads for things that make me angry.<p>Nowadays, if you "Like" something, then that something can pay for the privilege to insert whatever stories it likes into your friends' facebook feeds, under the heading "so-and-so likes such-and-such" followed by your own message. Interestingly the person whose name is being used for the advertisement has <i>no idea</i> what ads are going out under their name.<p>Two of these in particular show up in my facebook feed several times a week and raise my blood pressure every time they do. One is a particularly annoying evangelical preacher slash motivational speaker who fills up my newsfeed with god-stuff due to the fact that a vague acquaintance I've met a couple of times happens to "like" him. Another is a political thing which fills up my newsfeed with posts I find highly disagreeable under the name of another friend of mine.<p>What were they thinking? Facebook has designed a feature which makes me hate my friends.
Hold on. First off, you should have deleted your account years ago.<p>"Connecting with friends" is a terrible point to make: e-mail has been around for decades. However, such a point does intersect with my main goal for making this post. People are lazy. Now programmers are saying it, and now everyone else will realize just how true it is, and being lazy has consequences.<p>So, we've had e-mail for decades. Why won't people use it? Instead of wasted texting plans, etc.? You could always keep up with your friends and family through e-mail. But the interfaces were either ugly, inconvenient, or disorganized. It's beyond me that an {interface} should have to tell me to contact my mother or that an {interface} should compel me to "keep up with old friends."<p>This. Is. Absurd.<p>[Luddite Rant:] Sorry, but pick up the damn phone and call them. (Or click "compose" and just {try} to type out something meaningful.)<p>I believe this finely leads into my next point: Not many of you have anything Gricean (<a href="http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html</a>) to say. What [would] you say in an e-mail to a friend? --<p>People don't have much to say anyway (and for my personal stake in it, it's because they're not reading anything interesting), and Facebook isn't going to change that. That, I think, is the point behind <a href="http://weknowwhatyouredoing.com/" rel="nofollow">http://weknowwhatyouredoing.com/</a>. There's nothing-to-hide, and conversely, there's nothing-to-show either. FB is an enabler of oversharing, and it's allowing people to empty out too much without taking in substantive content.<p>I'm going to say it engenders bad cognitive hygiene.
I have privacy concerns about Facebook, and resent the fact that it's such a silo, but in the main in succeeds where other technologies have failed.<p>It's useful for finding people - a directory. If I want to get in touch with someone - and I don't have their contact details I can probably find them on Facebook and fire them a message.<p>If email was just as easy, people would have probably taken to that. Which is a shame, because Email could have been that easy. Privacy used to be more of a concern, and spam drove people away from publishing their addresses in directories.<p>I've left (privacy and personal reasons.) I since have missed the community. It's encouraged me to pick up the phone more, which is a nice thing. You just can't have the same rich interaction with people when typing compared to talking. But you can have a greater audience. Perhaps you communicate to more people with less content over something like Facebook, compared to having richer relationships with fewer people. It might all balance out.<p>Ultimately time is a premium. I certainly don't think G+ is the answer - it's much of the same.
With Facebook you are not their customer, you are their product. If anything, if Zuck would like a way to monetize better without alienating users he should add some kind of Facebook Premium/Gold account upgrade. Where users can choose to throw a few bucks at them each month or year, whatever, in exchange for some cool extra features, and/or to be exempt from advertisements and privacy shenanigans. Money is money, so they shouldn't care exactly where it comes from. But if you give the opportunity for each user to decide for themselves whether they wish to be a product or a customer, I think it will lead to a better situation for everyone involved. Also better fits that market divide between the folks who want the cheapest experiences versus the best experiences.
Facebook has a feature specifically for this, so that you see every update posted by people on your "VIP" list. I only know this because they put the feature in my face, I didn't go looking for it. Come on.
I've really never seen a "facebook sucks" post that wasn't based on one of the following tired arguments:<p><pre><code> - Ludditism
Usually of the form:
Technology is *TEARING US APART* don't you see?! (Response: No, not really, perhaps you just suck at communicating?)
- Ignorance of use
Usually of the form:
WTF I got fired for posting all those pictures of me using drugs?! (Response: Learn to use the privacy settings!)
or: It's too noisy, all of these stupid game requests.. (Response: Block the offending apps and ask your friends to knock it off)
- Bad connections
Usually of the form:
or: [annoying/offensive] $person keeps appearing in my news feed (Response: Block the offending person!)
or: All of my friends post pointless, boring minuate of their lives! (I.e. the Twitter argument) (Response: Don't friend those people!)
or: I don't want to turn down my Boss' friend request and look bad! I'm $sociallyUnfasionableThing! (Response: Use lists.)
</code></pre>
It was refreshing to see one that actually lays out with an actual example what the problem is, in this case, algorithmic changes which ruined his experience. He veered toward #1 above at the very end, but still this was interesting to read.<p>Every single one of these things above, though, traces back to ignorance (usually) or cirucmstance. Could Facebook do a better job of making these things obvious? Absolutely. Facebook is not an intuitive site to use, and even when you have your head around it, they usually change something arbitrarily (the recent email thing comes to mind).<p>However, that said, you really shouldn't dump on the site wholesale just because it doesn't work for you. It works for millions of other people just fine.