The Facebook experiment has failed

People <i>really</i> just don't seem to understand that experiences with social media are specific to the individual. I guess it's understandable. I see the same Google Maps as everyone else does. I see the same Hacker News as everyone else who visits HN.<p>But Facebook isn't like that. Your Facebook timeline is based entirely on <i>your</i> friends and how <i>you</i> interact with Facebook.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This piece of writing, therefore, does not contribute meaningfully to the discussion around Facebook.

Lately I've noticed something odd. When I find a story I find interesting, I email it to some of my closest friends and we talk about it in email. It feels very 2003, but it works and feels more private and intimate. Similarly, when I take a picture I want to share with my family, I sms it to them.<p>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.<p>It feels like an Eternal September, perhaps one I've brought on myself by friending too many people.

Facebook is performance art. It's a phonebook of people I lost contact with many years ago. It's also a quasi-broken emailing list program. It might be a decent advertising platform for small businesses. Don't know.<p>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 <i>think</i> it's those things. Hell, Facebook itself will tell you that it's those things, but it's not.<p>I agree with the article. Facebook's biggest problem is that, because you're always talking to <i>everybody</i>, 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>ADD: It might also be a decent shared photo album. Jury is still out on that one.<p>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 <i>branded</i> 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 <i>birthday</i> it is today? <i>Really?</i>

I disagree with the general statement and basically every sub point.<p>- Indiscriminate Sharing<p>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.<p>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.<p>- Facebook gets worse the more you use it<p>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.<p>- Loudmouths now have gigantic megaphones.<p>Unfollow them.<p>- Social Media Scamsters<p>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).<p>In general facebook is a solid chat platform and way to share interesting content/pictures with your network.<p>The main complaint I can come up with for facebook is that skype sucks and their video chat could be much better.

<i>An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures.</i><p>This is pretty close to how I use facebook.<p><i>The problem is Sharing. It is the most fundamental feature of Facebook, and it’s completely broken</i><p>For me, the directory itself is most fundamental. If all of my friends switched to another social network, I would immediately switch.<p>I'm not sure what's failed? Maybe if he fleshed out a viable alternative?<p>It's important not to trivialize what they've accomplished just because its core feature now seems mundane.

Typical overzealous and incorrect analysis. Facebook may have failed for the author, but Facebook is not a failure. Its user base, advertising base and page traffic paint quite the opposite picture.<p>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.

Funny how much a lot of this person's complaints ring exactly like a Google+ marketing campaign, and yet no one has really mentioned Google+ yet.<p>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".<p>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.

Author here. Didn't think this would show up on HN.<p>These were my thoughts when I wrote it:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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. <a href="https://medium.com/musings-about-text-boxes/8157c364d26a" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/musings-about-text-boxes/8157c364d26a</a><p>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: <a href="https://github.com/jeswin/fora" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jeswin/fora</a><p>PS: This was written in a hurry. I apologize for mistakes. I have to leave now; I'll check comments later in the day.

We need better alternatives, but I think people overestimate what a "better alternative" would look like. That whitepaper from a few years back about building a social network on top of existing email infrastructure comes to mind.<p>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.

That's a bold pronouncement.<p>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.

To be honest, I spend more time on HackerNews than I do on Facebook. I feel like I go to Facebook to see what people from Highschool and College are doing and to keep tabs on my local area, but if I want intellectual stimulation, it's too much work to dig through my newsfeed.<p>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).<p>It's inevitable that the values of a community change as it scales. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

I was done with Facebook when they introduced that the content from a page you 'Like' doesn't necessarily appear on your timeline. That was a deal breaker for me and many others.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

Well, <i>my</i> anecdote says otherwise.<p>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.<p>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.

My frustration with these types of rants is that no solutions are proposed. In this case, the author ends with a vague reference to smaller communities, but I don't see how using a smaller community would solve any of the problems that he mentions, since they seem to manifest as real-life social problems as well (ever have a loudmouth at a dinner party? or a friend that talks only about themselves? or social circles that collide?). On top of that, I'm confused why his Facebook can't be the small community he desires. He's free to be friends with only his x closest friends.<p>FB can't and won't be everything to everyone, but a blanket statement like this is just trolling.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.<p>medium.com again.<p>medium.com does not scroll in Chrome on the Nexus 7<p>This means I can't actually read anything on there.<p>I can't even figure out who to email, because the About page also doesn't scroll.<p>Living in the future sucks :(

I may not be representative of most people but it seems to me like like Facebook usage is going down. I'd say that only 10% of my friends still post stuff on their walls. I would have closed my account a while ago but I can't seem to convince any of my siblings to use any other chat client.

I disagree with the article's point of view. There's much to be improved on Facebook, starting with more options for customizing the feed, but to say it's doomed or "just doesn't work" because of irrelevant content is silly and elitist.<p>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.

I love Medium titles. They always pop into Hacker News with dramatic headlines, begging you to see what the author's radical notion is.<p>In reading this post, I have a <i>very</i> 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 <i>control</i> their domains.<p>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.<p>A rebuttal, in order of points made:<p>&#62;<i>Jump through hoops...share selectively.</i><p>News flash, most people <i>don't care.</i> 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 <i>friends</i> - there isn't a boilerplate for this when you sign up. It's for <i>friends</i> - 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.<p>&#62;<i>As you use Facebook...you accumulate friends.</i><p>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.<p>&#62;<i>Loudmouths now have gigantic megaphones.</i><p>Dude, <i>skim</i> or <i>limit</i> 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 <i>next to their name.</i><p>&#62;<i>Social media scamsters.</i><p>I'll give this to you. However, I personally find more amusement than anything. And while I don't want to criticize you, you <i>might</i> 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.<p>In summation, I believe the author doesn't understand <i>why</i> his qualms are actually <i>features</i> - 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.<p>If you're looking for a system where friends are not just friends, but <i>everyone you know</i>, 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.

<a href="http://cl.ly/image/0k3p1b0b012B" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/image/0k3p1b0b012B</a><p>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.<p>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?

I'd been off facebook for about a year. I mean not even logging in. Just a while ago, I logged in to post about ... guess what ... our second baby. I took a glance through the feed and thought "looks like nothing's changed in a year".<p>Then this happened -<p>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!<p>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!

Indiscriminate friending is a big problem. People friend and stay friends on Facebook with people who are no longer relevant to them. There are easy fixes for it.<p>1) Either tell Facebook to explicitly ignore these people's posts so that they're hidden from your feed.<p>2) Just unfriend people who don't matter.<p>3) Don't friend people who aren't consistently in your life in the first place.<p>4) Don't use Facebook as often.<p>Facebook isn't broken; people just need to do house cleaning and to stop using it like linkedin

Great article. I have to take issue with this though:<p><i>"While Google actively tries to thwart SEO scamsters"</i><p>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.<p>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 disagree!!! Facebook is great from the sender side and so is G+ but both suck at the receiving side. What we need is not a way to select who we spam as that is a feature that would be ignored by the loud mouths. We need a feature to select what we receive. There are "friends" I easily want to read all ten messages per day but there are others that I just want to be on my friend list cause it publicly shows my appreciation but that are too noisy to actually read their updates about their cat pooping again.<p>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".

It is not an experiment, it is a mechanism to make gobs of money, and it worked.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Facebook will suddenly go from universal necessity to irrelevant, and it will happen overnight.

<i>The way Facebook advertising works, it bumps the spamming potential of a ‘Like’ up a notch. A ‘Like’ on a product or service will make a paid story visible not just to the person who liked it, but also to their friends.</i><p><i>Inevitably, there is an entire industry working non-stop creating low quality, emotionally appealing content that gets ‘likes’ from gullible users.</i><p>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.<p>I'm not a Twitter user but I'm wondering what will the effect be for its users.

Facebook has some uses, but people can't expect it to be everything. They can't expect it to be more than it is. For me, Facebook is good at keeping in touch with friends who are far away. They may have moved to a different place, or they may be in a vacation somewhere. They post pics and impressions about a place. I also like the occasional article links people post. Sometimes people go to events and they advertise it on FB and that's how I find out about them. I might decide to join. All these are very good use-cases. I don't use FB to share very personal or deep things, because it's not a suitable medium for that. Real life conversations, in person or over the phone, are much better suited for that. So, FB is a tool, it has its uses. To call it failure is like saying the phone has failed and we shouldn't use it anymore, just because the Internet is here.

My first page is actually quite relevant to me.<p>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.<p>Another friend is looking for help with some yardwork. Free beer or pizza is involved.<p>Other friends posted pictures of their children, or graduation photos from college.<p>Another person I know recently got out of the hospital.<p>All of these are at least somewhat relevant to me.<p>What else do I use facebook for?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

Its interesting that I didn't see a compare and contrast analysis. My "news.google.com" is semi personalized, I've got a couple relevant keywords, and there's nothing to see most of the time. My hometown newspaper fired most of their reporters a couple years ago and has gone full on tabloid with stuff like "Latinos hope 'soap' about diabetes hits home" and "Gatherings: Menu explores new territory with veggies and ice cream", seriously, that's what passes for local news.<p>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?

Does the OP know you can hide stories from everyone but your closest circle of friends and family? Honestly every time I see anything from an acquaintance I played beer pong with 5 years ago, I click on "hide all publications by this guy", and voila.<p>Facebook has already thought of that problem for you, OP.

I feel like the odd one around here when it comes to Facebook. To paraphrase the article, "I am signed into Facebook right now. At a quick glance, the entire list of posts on the first screen" consists of:<p>- Picture of a friend who's traveling and doing volunteer work. Awesome.<p>- Picture of a family member living abroad that got pregnant. Like. - Sister making boring comment. Meh.<p>- Link to this TEDx Talk: <a href="http://youtu.be/b5OOOIKtj8w" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/b5OOOIKtj8w</a>. May be interesting.<p>- Pictures of some friends/acquaintances' weekend out. Meh.<p>- A bunch of incredibly beautiful pictures of an old coworker visiting San Francisco. Awesome.<p>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 beg to differ. Every month or so HN always has some blog post hit front page about how Facebook is broken and needs to be fixed, pointing out all of its issues (subjectively) and offering no alternatives or solutions.<p>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.<p>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 totally agree with the author. This is why I haven't used Facebook in several years, because to me it's just useless unless your family lives hundreds of miles away and you want to share pics/info with ONLY them. This seems to me like the best and only reason to use a social network like Facebook. When I did have Facebook, I was part of tech groups that would post important info, but very often their posts would be polluted by the usual college drama. I got rid of facebook and I am a freer and happier individual with "actual real friends". People who actually care to learn/share important info need to do so by reading legitimate sources from sites like Hacker News and other respectable places.

Caring about the receiver - this is what is lacking. The sender should think about the receiver and send only stuff that would be interesting to him, or help him even if he does not like it at once. The sender should have means to target his messages only to people who would like it. The receiver should have means to express what he liked and what he did not. Channels should be negotiated between the receiver and the sender.<p>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.

Here's a better and more thoughtful corollary post, covering some of the things that the OP left out:<p><i>Revisited: “The Facebook Experiment has failed.”</i><p><a href="https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f57f3bc8b377" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f57f3bc8b377</a>

The ideal facebook for me would let me explicitly set a threshold before things become visible.<p>So.. I would create 3 groups. Family, Friends, Acquaintances.<p>Family + Friends status's would always appear. Acquaintances status updates would require 5 likes by other people before they appeared in my stream.<p>All likes from Acquaintances and Friends would be hidden.<p>All app invites from Acquaintances would be hidden.<p>As for companies I like / follow. Individual controls for each would be great.<p>I hardly use Facebook because of the noise. I only have &#60; 60 friends on Facebook and &#60; 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 think FB's usefulness breaks down as you get older. It's helpful to understand the average FB user. They're young. They're in high school and college. They probably dont have work friends, random old acquaintances, etc...no uniquely distinct groups of friends. They're less mature. It's typically only later in your twenties that your life starts fragmenting and these issues of "Do I really want to share this with everyone??" arise. That's when FB becomes dominated by generic crap and baby pictures and it goes from being a great tool to being nothing more than a time-waster.<p>I bet for the younger crowd, FB works just fine for the most part.

I completely agree with the article. I've always found FB to be useless and noisy. I have a lot of friends. But they all have different interest. And I only want to share things that are relevant to them. When I post something on Facebook, I rarely get a response, largely because it's just noise to 90% of my FB friends. At the same time, FB is actually a closed social networking, meaning that the things I share cannot reach people who might actually be interested, and would contribute back. Our startup is trying to solve this problem. Will post on HN once we think we are ready.

I just planned a 30th Bday party for my wife and had a 100 people out. It would have been a nightmare to do it without Facebook. I just don't have all those people's phone numbers and emails and whatever. I set up an event, made a couple of her girl friends hosters of the event (can't invite people you aren't friends with) and shebam, 100 person nacho potluck party complete!<p>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!

They could really improve by doing an automatic "tabbing" like the new Gmail does. People don't really use lists on facebook since it's not forced (like in Google +).<p>Also because it's not as easy as drag&#38;dropping a mail into the right tab.<p>Anyway, just my 2 cents.<p>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 &#38; 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>An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures.</i><p>I honestly don't understand how this doesn't describe facebook today.

I've been a modest bear on Facebook because I perceive that people are moving away. This is entirely subjective, but it seems to me like once everyone found all their long lost friends and shared a round of photos, things got much more quiet. This is very unscientific, but just my impression. It's almost as if they need a new attractor to engage folks every 6-12 months. It started as apps, then it turned into twitter-esque announcements, and recently evolved into photos. They need a Next every 6-12 months.

I grew up all over the world so the value that I get out of Facebook now is from being able to stay in communication with my friends from other countries. I feel like the utility of Facebook has changed since 2005 when I was using it as a communication platform for my buddies in college. Facebook is starting to reminds me of how AIM started deteriorating after AOL tried to cram so much extra crap into AIM (stock ticker, news, ads, group chats, etc...) after AOL realized that's where all of the users were.

"Just like its features, Facebook algorithms are equally stupid. Share more, get noticed more. Originality be damned."<p>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.<p>On the other hand, if you produce content with high engagement, it will get a higher % share with your network.

By far the best description of how facebook works I have read so far.

I actually sat down and spent a few hours 'curating' my Facebook recently: marking people as acquaintances, 'hiding' posts on my timeline that I don't want to see, setting up lists of different types of friends ...<p>Arguably this should happen automatically -- but, I'm pretty surprised at the large positive effect this has had: Facebook is revealed as an <i>amazing</i> communication tool -- it's not perfect, but considering it's (mostly) free, certainly not something to complain about.

While I have always thought of social media as a waste of time, I dont actually see it going away anytime soon.. The big success of social applications and the entire modern web is accessibility to new users. And I don't mean the UX term accessibility, I mean content. 2000 - Content is generally not interesting to non-tech users. 2013 - Content is generally boring to tech-users, but the overall user base has grown i.e. my grand-mother now gets it..<p>See you all after the collapse!

&#62; An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures.<p>AKA Email.<p>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.<p>A lot of people think "social networking" is a new kind of thing. But it's just a fancy UI on top of email.

This well-written article makes some great points about Facebook, but they are points that have been raised many times before.<p>The problem for many people is not <i>why</i> to leave Facebook, but <i>how</i>. For example, many of us feel deterred from leaving because all of our friends use the service.<p>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.

Recently, I've been treating Facebook the way Flipboard intends to be used. I use it for news directly relevant to me (because at some point I liked certain websites so that I would get their updates). I find that they provide more relevant content to me than my "friends" do. A brand that uses their Facebook well, with an interesting image and grabbing headline, is a link I will click on.

Facebook seemed to promise something better than email. Yet email is an open standard and so will still be part of all of our daily lives long after FB is a memory or a niche. We moan about email but it gives us choice - free with ads or paid and ad free, basic or full featured. For keeping in touch with friends I find email, phone, Skype and train 'n boats 'n planes work pretty well.

The last round of Facebook complaints on HN I recall was by page owners complaining that not their entire audience would see every single one of their updates.<p>Now we have a complaint about seeing <i>too many</i> updates.<p>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'm surprised no one has mentioned WhatsApp groups and Google Hangouts yet. To me this is the evolution of social networking, where people finally start sharing stuff with each other again. Only this time, it's in a very private group of people, real-time and organised around a common interest/background.<p>I see this happening all around me: groupchat with pictures is the new Facebook.

I thought everyone already knew that.<p>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.

I got to this point in 2011 - i.e. looking at my Facebook stream and considering whether any of it had any relevance to me at all (it didn't). Was I just wasting my time looking at this? (yes I was).<p>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.

I have been under the impression that the point of Facebook is to log in regularly, scan through postings from the Ridiculous and Obscure, and to deduce, accordingly, that life could be so much worse. On the bright side, the product ("Facebook Therapy"?)seems to work so well that, in time, logging in no longer becomes necessary..

This article entirely misses the point: the author is <i>not Facebook's market</i>. And this is why Facebook will be a long-term feature of the Internet - because it actually works exactly the way most people want to communicate.<p>So it doesn't scale to the networking needs of an entrepreneur or academic. That's really not what it sets out to do.

After MSN went bad with WLM and Skype(its awful, online list seems to be random), it is last place where most people talk. And it is mainly used as messenger/email hybrid platform. Around my friends, it is main reason why we are still there...<p>So I kinda agree. Almost no stories what pick my intrest. Only win-to-share post and not relevant post.

Facebook evolves. It used to be a directory of school mates, then a place for self expression, then an amplification system and address book, and then a messaging platform and identity layer. Who knows what it's going to be next but one thing's for sure. It won't stay the same.

I think it cans be interesting to see the links people are sharing, just Facebook doesn't do a good job deciding what to show you. If they put a greater effort into really knowing what topics interets you, they could only show you links on those topics.

I think what this author may be feeling is that "sharing" things that already happened isn't very useful to one's life. That's the major shortcoming not just of facebook but other online forums for sharing things you found / saw / thought.

This is a good article. A good point of view. Not everyone will and needs to agree.

The solution to this problem was G+ and that failed too. I find myself using Facebook less and less. I'm not bitter about it and I'm not making a conscious decision to stay away. I just am finding less and less value in it.

I think Twitter suffers the same issue, that's the reason why I built an app which allows me to focus only on the people I really care about: <a href="http://EssenceApp.com" rel="nofollow">http://EssenceApp.com</a>

I love the naive assumption many Facebook users have that, "everyone is on Facebook." It's much like Redditors who believe their beloved site is the homepage of the Internet.<p>Really, <i>it's just you</i>.<p>A great many people is still not everyone.

So the OP is friends with people who bore them, and that's Facebook's fault?

I have the same experience as the author and so do many of my friends. My solution is to simply unfollow every single friend I have on Facebook. Effectively disable the Timeline. Highly recommended.

I stick to private groups on FB for most of my activity. I get a lot more meaningful conversations and closer personal connections through those groups than the author thinks possible.<p>The Wall-stream is a bonus.

I mostly just read the updates from my Close Friends list. At some point I had to sort out my friends to acquaintances, friends, and close friends, and that has sort of fixed the glitch for me.

It's very simple.<p>80% of the crap is from 20% of the people.<p>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".<p>Problem (mostly) solved.

I think most people probably don't use facebook to see what their loudmouth acquaintances have to say. They use it look at photos of their friends and family.

&#62; An ideal Facebook would have been a directory of people and their connections. People can message each other, post text updates and pictures.<p>And that's LiveJournal.

Yahoo was a first attempt at web search, Google got it right.<p>Facebook was a first attempt at social networks, another company (in the future) will get it right.

1. Create Lists. 2. Change everyone's settings to only see important updates. 3. Instead of following your front page, follow your lists.

Kids don't use facebook anymore, mainly because their entire family is on it.<p>Most kids I know just use whatsap and instagram/twitter they won't go near fb

Can a dislike button improve the quality of Facebook content? That can be used to demote most of the spam users are complaining about.

Haters gonna hate.

"Facebook is godsent for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say." - oh the irony.<p>useless article.. a bad workman always blames his tools.

Am I the only one who has <i>no</i> issue with Facebook whatsoever? I love it. It's free. I find incredible value in it.<p>People need to get a grip.

Most of the times Facebook appears to be a'Show off book'. With so many friends lot of sharing with little of interest.

Facebook is not meant to be for creating ideas. It is meant to entertain you by knowing what your friends are doing.

Finally someone writes an article about this! I've been thinking the exact same thing for some time now.

while a lot of the problems he describes can be solved with unbaby.me and hiding the loud mouths, i am really impressed with the way this blog integrated comments. i love how they are tied directly to a paragraph and hidden away via ghostly counter icon!<p>is this standard with any theme??

I upvoted the OP because I'm curious about the discussion it will generate here on HN.

The Instagram experiment is working well, always remember Facebook bought Instagram

Tl;dr: my newsfeed on facebook is spamed and I'm too lazy to manage subscriptions.

&#62; Facebook is godsent for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say.<p>Hilarious. So true.

offtopic, but is three-fourths, as opposed to three-quarters, a cultural thing? I've always been taught/read quarters as, well, quarters rather than fourths, but I see the use of fourths regularly as well

Facebook is the Central Limit Theory for awfulness applied to the internet

What's all those comments on Medium, how is it done?

typical sensational link bait.<p>medium.com is spamming hacker news with a lot of articles with no real content. ev's probably A/B test optimizing link baits

fackbook might not be useful to some, but I met my wife there.

Works great for me for all purposes required. I don't have any specific needs in this area, so it's a fun website for when I want a diversion. None of the author's complaints make sense to me, except yes, I do notice advertising.<p>The original post author seems to have specific interests and needs that are not being fulfilled? That sounds like a personal problem. My suggestion would be to move to another social media platform that better fits his needs.<p>But, in reality, I think the author's problem is PEBKAC. If he doesn't like the website, he should make one that he does like. Nobody is stopping him.

Oh whatever.