Facebook’s dark matter: “secret” groups

Could I ask a simple question, not because I want to mock people or anything, but because I've been experiencing a similar phenomenon lately.<p>Why does facebook make you hate people you know?<p>I do generally find that most people I'm not actively great friends with at the moment tend to annoy the shit out of me with either bragging, illogical nonsense about things like politics, or just passive-aggressive teenager posts. I see friends post good content sometime, but honestly it seems more and more rare. I'm not sure if people are worse at posting or if its that these type of posts have worn on me and I've gotten more and more annoyed by them over time. What has it been like for everyone else?

So now Facebook isn't passe because of secret groups, which aren't visible outside the group of people who are communicating privately? That was the same argument which pro-Facebook partisans pooh-poohed when it was made about Google+, interestingly enough.<p>The only difference was that G+ started with private circles, and later added circles which could be shared and public communities, whereas Facebook started with the "let it all hang out" model and then grafted privacy on later. The problem with this, though, as Randi Zuckerberg discovered to her discomfort, is that like security, grafting privacy onto a product design afterwards is fraught with peril and often doesn't work well (if at all).

I use FB only for groups.<p>I think the reason people are not moving off of FB to G+ is because of the groups. These secret/closed groups are heavily organized and ingrained and it is practically impossible for people to make a move to anywhere else. These FB groups are like Yahoogroups (the old fashioned email listserv) which are still going strong as far as I know.

Odd one this for me.<p>I recently closed my FB account, and it was exactly because of: “Twitter makes me love people I've never met; Facebook makes me hate people I know.”<p>Not the Twitter bit as I don't use it, but the FB part was exactly what happened to me. I just ended up loathing almost every one I "knew". So, coupled with the constant rumblings about FB's privacy attitudes and all that, I closed my FB account. However, the reason I ended up loathing all my "friends" was because of the secret groups. It was in the groups where I began to really not like them. But it is true that the vast majority of my FB time was spent in those groups.<p>So, I go with the initial point, but also agree with the parts that are supposed to disprove it.

People seriously didn't know about this? "Secret" Groups are probably the only reason that I and any of the friends I care about are still using Facebook.

Can some people talk about example secret groups? I quit using facebook/never had the friends to discover these.

This is very true, as I've observed with a small community of programmers I founded.<p>I created a FB page called "I Live Prograaming" and played with FB ads, which gave the page about 1000 likes in a short doace if time, a few years ago and the old format for pages worked quite well for a community, which timeline destroyed. We (three others were helping me at this point) discovered that groups are actually exactly what we needed.<p>We started creating groups and each turned into fairly active communities, seeded from our growing page. We found the demography of our groups matched that of our page, which seems obvious but found it interesting.<p>We have many that are secret with hundreds of members - past a certain member count you are unable to change this setting with your member's privacy as the reason against , which makes a lot of sense.<p>Our format is fairly simple: I Love X, where X is anything technical, which began with I Love Programming.<p>Some groups hold over 200 members each and there are groups for most common programming languages and platforms (I Love C is fairly popular).<p>I'm not trying to plug though, I've refrained from linking, but more to show a full picture of what the article refers to.<p>Facebook, for me, had been a great way to build a community based around my passions.

I love "secret" groups. It's great for my close group of friends to share pictures that we would otherwise not put on the Internet (and no I don't need a lecture, I'm aware that's "risky". If my employer wants to fire me if a picture leaks out of there, their priorities aren't set correctly)