
Dear Facebook: You Suck - Killswitch
https://www.refheap.com/ee96f4d90abd10b643cee0448
======
patrickaljord
Reminds me of this article from a week ago about how google maps sucked
because it failed at a particular coffee shop query in SF a gentleman that
happens to be a techcrunch writer did. Google Maps and Facebook are amazing
services that try to guess what's more relevant to you and most of the time
get it write. This in itself is a pretty amazing achievement. This is what we
should be amazed at, not these few times those services get it wrong. The
level of self-entitlement is high here, especially that we're talking free web
services here. The day they always get it right is the day we get human like
(edit: or rather god like mind reading) perfect AI, not happening any time
soon guys. So in the meantime, relax and enjoy the show. Or stop using these
services if they're that bad, or even better, build your own.

~~~
frostmatthew
> The day they always get it right is the day we get human like perfect AI

I agree with the majority of your comment, but not that line. Accomplishing
that feat would not be "human like perfect AI" \- it'd be mind-reading. My
very closest friends could probably do a better job filtering my newsfeed than
Facebook, but no way they would ever get it _always_ right.

~~~
patrickaljord
Thanks, edited.

------
matthewmacleod
Okay - you've identified one particular scenario where Facebook didn't
correctly work out what was important to you. But I'm curious to to what you
think "let it be natural" actually means.

We can immediately discount a naïve timeline of events. Say events will appear
in the timeline when they originally happen – that's not going to work,
because it's be buried within an hour or two, regardless of the importance.

Maybe events' places in the timeline could be based on when they were last
"updated", as in liked, commented on etc. – that's probably more appropriate,
but raises prioritisation questions. And let's say somebody catches up after a
week, and comments on an older status - does everybody need to see it again?

So something more complex is required - the simple timeline's no longer
appropriate, even in relatively straightforward cases, given the volume of
friends that many users have. It seems pretty obvious then to build something
like a friend graph, with edges weighted based on e.g. frequency of
interaction and mutual friend count, and use that to weight news items. As far
as I know, that's what Facebook is doing.

Personally, I do prefer the simple timeline – but that's because I've been
using Facebook since it was first available at my university, and I don't have
a huge friend list. But I appreciate that's probably not applicable to most
users, and when I do look at my news feed, it does seem to do a pretty good
job of prioritising things I'm interested in - especially if you engage a
little bit and downrank/hide posts that you don't want to see.

~~~
moultano
A better way to say what he's saying is that facebook is being too smart by
half. Any reasonable algorithm should have shown him this post. It's the
obvious thing to do from a simple use of the signals available, so either the
algorithm is broken or there's a bug.

~~~
dade_
I have experienced the same thing, important content missing from the
presented list. I actually prefer Facebook on my BlackBerry Playbook because
the app is old and doesn't seem to support the ranking feature. I think their
algorithm is worse than useless and they should provide an option to turn it
off. I have considered getting rid of my Facebook account because people keep
assuming I am aware of their posts and at least they would know that I am not.

------
calinet6
I realized a while ago that they're really _not_ trying to provide a good UX
anymore. There are some complainers, but most people are locked in and mostly
enjoy it. If you're smart you block people and prune your friends list wisely.

But then that damn news feed sort order keeps popping back to the default sort
order... "Top Stories." It's a tiny little link; just large enough to exist.
When the default is selected it just says "Sort". It's designed to be ignored.
A UI anti-pattern used with intention. If they could remove it without a
revolt, they surely would.

Facebook doesn't want you to have a good user experience: Facebook wants you
to have a Facebook Experience. One that they control and provide, with
information they get to choose, and other people get to buy. News stories are
bought and sold and "Top Stories" is just another way to let them insert
whatever the hell they want above the fold. That space goes to the highest
bidder, or the highest generator of ad revenue, or the most viral stories
they've algorithmically decided to enhance. It's a method of control designed
not to improve the experience, but to forge the great machine and make it a
more efficient way to guarantee a value proposition.

It's simple really. And it's not so bad, in the end. People have been
complaining about TV commercials since their inception, but they're widely
accepted and more valuable than ever. Facebook is just taking its place in the
economic reality of media. They've grown up.

~~~
5555624
>Facebook doesn't want you to have a good user experience: Facebook wants you
to have a Facebook Experience. One that they control and provide, with
information they get to choose, and other people get to buy.

This. They want to control not just your experience, but your information, so
they can package it up neatly and sell it. Advertisers can get both your
information, but they also know how advertising -- at least on Facebook --
will be presented.

------
moron4hire
I think we're stuck in a culture of "friend scarcity". When meeting people in
meat-space, you don't have the time capacity to be able to make deep,
meaningful relationships with a lot of people. Facebook gives the illusion of
giving you more time to engage friends on a deep level. You're not socializing
in a work setting, you're chewing the fat over goofy cat pictures. You're
(ostensibly) keeping up with "how are the wife and kids". And because our
brains are wired to expect that to be a scarce resource, we gather as many
"friends" as we can on Facebook.

It's also probably a learned response from us having gone through the early
days of social networking. There just weren't as many people _total_ on the
internet back then. If there was a person you knew _and_ they also had
internet access, _and_ they also used Facebook, it was somewhat more of a rare
thing than it is today. You friended them because, again, you understood the
Facebook friend to be a semi-scarce resource and human brains are hardwired to
hoard scarce resources.

So now that we live in an era where sugary, salty, fatty foods and Facebook
friends are no longer scarce resources, we gorge ourselves on them and have
become obese as a result. "Facebook-friend-fat".

Sounds like it's time to cut out the empty calories and start exercising. Get
rid of the people who post vapid shit, regardless of how well you think you
know that person (how many times do we hear people make excuses for not eating
better because it's uncomfortable?). And start posting better content of your
own. One tends to get out what one puts in.

------
hawkharris
There are two types of social networks: the ones that everyone complains
about, and the ones that no one uses.

~~~
kbar13
google+ kinda sucks in that Google's trying way too hard to push everyone into
it, but I actually prefer it to Facebook, if not only because the design is
cleaner and I don't see as many duckface pics on my feed each day.

~~~
nextstep
I bet if google tries hard enough, Google+ can be both complained about my
everyone AND barely used (in any real way which a user would consider "use").

~~~
_delirium
I feel that way about LinkedIn. My use of it consists exclusively of clicking
"accept" on connection requests. I'm not sure I've ever used it for anything
else, though presumably _someone_ must.

------
moron4hire
If only there were a messaging system that was A) standardized, B) available
world wide, C) decentralized from the control of one corporation, D) available
on every platform, D.2) with instant notification on mobile devices, and E)
everyone was already signed up for.

 _cough_ EMAIL _cough_.

As far as I'm concerned, the only reason people like Facebook is because the
email listserv is not very discoverable. Sometimes, you want to be included in
the stream by default but don't want to participate right away. An email chain
is too easy to exclude people.

I use Facebook only insomuch as I have friends who use it and send me messages
through it. Most of my "social" interactions through the internet are through
email now, with groups of friends setup on lists so we can tune in and out as
we want. It's easier to search than Facebook's past, too.

------
k-mcgrady
Facebook ranking posts is something that IS needed - they just need to do a
better job. I bet you'd see a lot more shit if they didn't bother ordering
stuff.

>> "Stop what you're doing and just let it be natural."

If they did that you would probably miss a lot more stuff. Nobody wants to
have to scroll back through their timeline to catch up on the important stuff
they missed, and they don't want to have to wade through a ton of crap to find
the important stuff.

~~~
kamjam
The problem I find is this:
[http://imgur.com/nEUGq6p](http://imgur.com/nEUGq6p) I prefer the newsfeed to
be sorted by "most recent", a chronological list of the postings. Facebook in
it's infinite wisdom keeps deciding that is not the best way to consume the
content and keeps reverting me back to "top stories". I think this is a more
recent change, because it used to remember my selection. It's a little
annoying it doesn't remember this.

~~~
tehwalrus
I read somewhere, I think here, that they use the "temporarily switch to
chronological" button as a signal to update your parameters for "top stories".
They show you the chronological stuff for that session and try to do it better
next time - it's not supposed to be a default mode.

------
jdabgotra
You knock it off :)

Facebook is a for-profit company and you've agreed to their user agreements.
They use proprietary software, they store your data, and they aren't liable to
what happens to your data, much less liable for keeping you happy in exchange
for you doing absolutely nothing but consume.

You aren't entitled to anything from them. Stop using it if you don't like it.
Use something else or create something else. Life is not going to be served up
for you on a platter without you doing anything for it, from the government,
much less a large corporation which has no accountability towards you, who so
blindly signed up, supported and agreed to let over all your personal content
and social connections over to a for profit company. I'm confuse as to how
people can feel this entitled without deserving anything due to not putting
any work or ethical and moral reflection on how you use the Internet. Knock it
off.

Sorry, your letter pissed me off. It pisses me off that it is #1 on Hacker
News right now. Knock it off, everyone. I am a very liberal person but this
sense of entitlement from middle class Internet users has to stop. It is the
reflection of a society that consumes far more than in produces.

Excuse my rant.

------
xpose2000
Sounds like the author wants facebook to improve its popular posts algorithm
and gave a great example of where it failed.

Very fair point, but why not just say that?

------
BrandonRead
I have always loved computers and the internet.

But now I am frustrated with my use of the internet and the interconnectedness
of everything. I don’t like being a node in a graph full of properties,
incoming, and outgoing edges. I don’t like being inspected everyday, by the
companies with the wealth to do so, like I am an anonymous bug in an
experiment.

I don’t like brands anymore. Even if the companies have great people, I still
loathe a brand name. It’s embedded; they spread it like an infectious disease.
It pervades all spaces of the web. Of my web—my web personalized for me. They
tell me what I need. I don’t tell them. Because the algorithms are smart,
really, they are. But they are blind to what matters—to what matters to me.

Maybe I am the sum of my likes. Maybe my interests help them learn so they can
bring me the things they think I’ll like.

It only makes it worse. Everything is too familiar, too formulaic, and all
very much the same. For communication, I love the formula. Messages are sent
to every different type of person you can imagine, and they can all understand
perfectly well. But it is the message that is the problem. The message, as I
said, is always the same. It’s a tagline, a ‘service’, and a subscription fee.

Our technology is a burden to psychology. Within our society, it is a weapon.
It’s a tool. And it’s digging up and targeting you. The technology needs a
divorce if it will help. It needs to divorce itself from corporate wealth,
from unregulated self-interest that harms people. People are hurting and
people or mourning, and people wake up in the morning with no hope for a
future but keep on going because that’s what they were told to do.

 __I wrote this yesterday and I was so delighted to see something so similar
at the top of HN this afternoon. __

------
rebel
This is why I've started using Twitter more. All I want from my social media
feed is a quick update on what my friends are doing. Twitter is simple and to
the point. Facebook has evolved to a point where it's terrible for real-time
communication, but it's the absolute best way to see someones history over a
longer period of time. If I meet someone new I'd learn a lot more about them
from their Facebook compared to their Twitter. I believe there's room for more
than one social network and I think Twitter and FB have found non-competing
paths.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "Facebook has evolved to a point where it's terrible for real-time
communication"

Can't you use Facebook Messenger for that?

~~~
rebel
I'm referring to social networking. For private messaging I stick to SMS.

------
sakopov
I'd have to agree. Facebook is becoming the same trash that Myspace used to be
a few years back. They seem to struggle even with ads. I don't know how many
times I've logged into my Facebook account to see a Software Developer ad with
a picture of a big ass/boobs next to the description. Their suggested posts
are nothing but advertisement spam which has nothing to do with my likes and
interests. Enter Google+. An entirely different experience. If anything, G+
feels more personal. Suggested posts are from users like me posting something
worthwhile and interesting. My newsfeed consists of great content every single
day. It seems like Facebook is already losing teens. If they don't realize
that the chase for money has gone too far, they'll start dropping everyone
else as well.

------
mcgwiz
The root problem is not that Facebook is trying to maximize it's
sustainability, or that this guy wants something for nothing, it's simply that
_for years, Facebook effectively set very clear expectations in the minds of
users, and then stopped meeting them._

This, of course, is common with consumer web startups, where the prevailing
wisdom is "grow Grow GROW!! ...and worry about monetization later". That's
great only if you're gunning for a flip or acquihiring. Good to signal
monetization intent, and how that might affect the experience, early. (Best to
actually try monetizing early.)

------
foresterh
I don't understand why people are "friends" with people they don't care about
seeing updates on. Or why they don't ignore them. But I don't really use
Facebook anymore so maybe that's not an option?

Try Google+... You choose who you want to see, and they don't have to choose
to see you. Such a better way to get information you want. And circles and
communities make that so much more useful.

Of course it probably helps that most of the people that spam Facebook with
games they play and emotions they describe don't use Google+. Or I should say
most people don't use Google+.

~~~
_delirium
> Or why they don't ignore them. [...] maybe that's not an option?

It is; you can click the [V] in the corner of a post in your feed, and choose
"Hide all from [username]". I'm not sure how widely known that is, though.

------
kalleboo
I find Facebook's bozo filter actually works pretty well to filter out the
crap I don't care about. That shift along with a few hints of "don't show this
person on my news feed" has turned my Facebook from a cesspit to something
that's not a chore to browse through.

The thing is, one one hand you have people complaining about all the trivial
stuff they don't want to read invading their news feed, and on the other hand
you have people complaining that Facebook are filtering their news feed too
heavily and they want to see EVERYTHING. It's a difficult balance to make, and
I'm sure they're continually tweaking it back and forth to find an
equilibrium. The filtering/ranking has also gotten a LOT better since they
first introduced it, when I was reaching for the "show in chronological order"
button all the time.

------
tomasien
Anytime Facebook and Myspace get compared, I tune out immediately.

They have nothing in common, Facebook ate Myspace's lunch when it was 10
million users, this has nothing to do with what may kill a network with the
entire US and 1 billion ACTIVE users. We have no idea what, if anything, will
kill Facebook.

------
jeffehobbs
Well, yeah. It's awful. Don't use it.

~~~
lignuist
But... how are we supposed to keep in touch with our friends and families???

~~~
sramov
You can't, Facebook is the only way.

~~~
lignuist
Yeah, thanks for the confirmation. I never believed in this crap about email,
phone, letters and personal visits (WTF?)!

~~~
sramov
What's sad is that many people will read comments like ours and not get it.

------
hvass
There is no reason this should be trending as #1 on HN. A quip about
Facebook's algorithm not getting a post right on time in front of you - and?
What's the takeaway? What are the insights?

------
bostonscott
I agree with the author, and i'd like to add privacy management to the list of
things they suck at. The privacy setting experience is convoluted and not
intuitive. It seems they've just continued to add new privacy features without
thinking through the goals and objectives of various user-segments. Who has
60-minutes of free time to sort through all their options and nuances?

------
cormacrelf
I'm still a teenager, and though I have deactivated my account for exams,
Facebook has been a large part of the culture among my friends and within my
school.

I maintain that the best thing about it was text posts. People had a go at
being witty or relevant or informative, and it seems everywhere you go on the
site these qualities are suppressed. Text posts are truncated and offer a See
More button, and images and other easily digestible content are prioritised.

This has two important effects:

=> News feeds are much quicker to skim, and are much less substantial, which
leaves you unsatisfied even when you've seen everything new, so you stick
around. I admit this is pretty good monetising strategy on Facebook's behalf.

=> People start moving to services which imitate the fast flash of attention
model promoted by the news feed. That's Snapchat, for example. I feel
similarly dissatisfied finding out that Alice and Sally got fake-Facebook-
married-but-really-just-BFFLs-still for the sixth time as I do seeing some guy
who's not really my friend doing a random snapchat of his mock-surprised face.

It strikes me that so few of my daily interactions online make me feel in any
way connected. The best ones are still just talking to people via text or
chat, and frankly I feel more connected to @ryanpequin, the comic artist who
tweets with brutal honesty from the other side of the world, than most of the
friends I see a few times a week.

I think Facebook almost hit the nail on the head regarding what teenagers
wanted. They live in highly structured communities (schools) and Facebook made
it easy to keep thoughts vaguely within communities simply by showing them to
people via algorithms. Unfortunately now it doesn't have the same charm, and
many of the people I know feel the same. But all our friends are on it, so we
stay.

------
chrisweekly
What is the deal w the horizontal scrolling required to read the text on that
site? "I'm a web developer" creds badly damaged if you can't present static
text legibly on an iphone 4s. Didn't read the whole article, annoyed by both
content and presentation. FB might suck but you aren't convincing anyone.

~~~
Killswitch
It's a pastebin, I posted it there because it's not covered in advertisements
like pastebin.com is, and the site was built by a user in my irc channel, I'll
let him know this, but in the mean time, if you want to read my rant, here's
the raw text:
[https://www.refheap.com/ee96f4d90abd10b643cee0448/raw](https://www.refheap.com/ee96f4d90abd10b643cee0448/raw)

------
ibudiallo
Recently I was using google and facebook and despite all the whining we do,
these are pretty good services. I even wrote about it[1]. Sure there is the
privacy issue but cases like this post just make me angry a little. They find
the tiniest error and make a very big deal about it.

[1] [http://idiallo.com/blog/2013/11/privacy-aside-damn-good-
serv...](http://idiallo.com/blog/2013/11/privacy-aside-damn-good-service)

------
forgottenpaswrd
Dear Nobody:

There are two kinds of people: people that do things(good or bad) and people
that don't.

People that don't do anything love to criticize those that do. You will find
them criticizing how bad other person dances in a party, but of course you
won't find them dancing as is risky for them.

Well, yes, facebook sucks, but as the most important social network on earth,
they suck less than the alternatives. If you have a better idea you are free
to do something about it.

~~~
throwaway2048
Ah yes, i am upset about the NSA, what i clearly need to do is quit bitching
and found my own country.

------
wickedOne
just wondering how good a "best friend" is when you rely on facebook status
updates to keep in touch with her… i might be old fashioned, but what happened
with speaking to / seeing people irl?

"My 3rd cousin whom I haven't seen since a family reunion 10 years ago" so why
is she in your feed to begin with?

to me this all sounds like a rant from someone blaming a website s/he's
socially awkward

~~~
Killswitch
Because we both are on Facebook, and check it quite a bit, and despite
everyone saying "just pick up a phone" Well, sometimes when I am free, she's
not, or vice versa, and it's easier to just make a post on their wall and say
"Hey, how's your day going?" and let them respond when they get time? Plus in
her situation it's a lot easier to let everyone know that her mother had
passed by posting a status on Facebook than it is to call/text every single
person.

We're not teenagers, we have our own lives, we meet up when we can, not every
day.

------
vacipr
It's your own damn fault.This is what happends when you have too many useless
friends on facebook.Start managing your newsfeed.

~~~
michh
No it's not. It'll show a friend commented on something irrelevant in a public
group I'm not a member of in the morning and not show the same friend broke up
with their fiancee who is also a friend later that day. Removing them as a
friend wouldn't have solved that. It's impossible to correctly guess the
'importance' of these types of things 100% of the time but surely they can do
better than they are doing now.

~~~
vacipr
As far as I can remember you can choose what updates you receive from
different persons and you can also prioritize this by creating groups like
"close friends",but as you said they can do better than this.

------
sTevo-In-VA
Before I ditched facebook I got really good at using 'Adblock Plus Select an
element to hide'.

After my class reunion I thought to myself, 'Do I really care about Mary's
crafts, Farmville, and do I need people I hate prying into my private life?'.

So I am currently facebookless, lindedinless, & twitterless and don't miss the
noise for a second.

------
sidcool
It's a very subjective article. I don't disagree totally with the sentiment
behind it, but facebook is working hard pon retaining people. It surely do not
want to lose users to messaging apps like WhatsApp etc., as reported by a
recent article. I am sure they have the talent to bring something out new to
keep people hooked.

------
siliconviking
I highly recommend this: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-
eradicat...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-
for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en)

------
camus2
Dear OP: you sound like a spoiled teenager. i'm not even going to read your
blogpost.

------
joebo
Is it possible to sort my feed by # of likes or # of comments in facebook? I
see "sort by top stories", but I don't think that does it. It seems like more
control over sorting and filtering would help.

------
circa
I feel very similar to this post. I used to enjoy browsing Facebook. I rarely
bother with it other than messaging.

Twitter I have used since 2006 and still use it just as frequently as a few
years ago.

------
cmac2992
Wait... You want it to to be natural? That means you would likely have never
seen that post with all the likes. The likes would have been irrelevant on a
chronological news feed.

------
joeblau
Sounds like you need the Facebook 300 diet or #FB300D. Delete all but the 300
people you actually care about. I cut my users down from 900 and my feed has
been a lot better.

~~~
philwelch
300!? That's way too much.

------
darkbot
This the reason why I too hate Facebook. I've switched to Diaspora*, while
being far from perfect it does at least not bury important stuff with some
shady algorithm.

------
Havoc
Not much money in dying moms unless you're an oncologist.

------
djhworld
This is why I deleted my facebook account about 8 months ago.

Never looked back.

------
dysinger
Dear posters that post things like this: Did you delete your account? No? You
Suck. Just delete your FB account. You'll feel better.

------
babuskov
It seems to me that the first "mother" on line 17 should be changed to
"friend".

------
slvn
facebook? i have never been on facebook, but i happened to access my g+ 'home'
page today (from another computer) and it was full... i usually don't go there
it did not feel like 'home' at all...

------
bestest
it's funny how people rant about things they don't understand and don't even
try to understand them.

getting relevant stuff on your news feed is trivially simple on facebook, you
don't even need to major in anything.

------
bestest
on the other hand though, it looks like someone needs to create a "Facebook
Manual", for the ones unable to configure their news-feeds.

------
benihana
I hate these kinds of posts. It's a guy who thinks he knows more than he does
trying to tell the most successful social network in history how to make
things 'better' for an extremely tiny sample size that he thinks is much more
significant and representative. It's just so arrogant and short sighted and
comes at it from such a limited perspective. That's bad enough, without it
being coupled to the fact that facebook is completely free and optional and no
one is forcing you to use it.

~~~
abus
Damn I accidentally upvoted you before I got to the end. Facebook is not
optional, you are forced to use it or be left out of a huge amount of social
interaction, and it's not because Facebook is good, it's because everyone uses
it.

Not to mention my college literally requires you to use it.

~~~
mhurron
> you are forced to use it or be left out of a huge amount of social
> interaction

That is still optional.

~~~
jobu
So is basic hygiene, but you can't expect to be successful in life without
that either. That may sound somewhat hyperbolic, but as Facebook increases
it's reach it is becoming true.

Your personal network is often critical for finding spouses, or jobs; it can
provide helping hands when things go wrong, and for most people it's a source
of happiness.

For better or worse, Facebook has appropriated the personal networks of a
majority of people in our society. It is possible to opt out of Facebook, just
like you can opt out of society and go live in a shack in the woods.

~~~
mhurron
>So is basic hygiene, but you can't expect to be successful in life without
that either.

An option does not mean that something is exactly equivalent or that it does
not come with side effects.

>It is possible to opt out of Facebook, just like you can opt out of society
and go live in a shack in the woods.

Definitely not in a shack, definitely not on Facebook.

You, like a lot of people in the thread, see Facebook as required because
'everyone' uses it, except everyone uses it because it is required. Your own
hangups or how it will be perceived by others makes you look on it as if it
was required and not just something you chose to do one day.

Honestly a friend that won't interact with you unless you have a Facebook
account isn't someone I would call a friend.

~~~
jobu
It's not that Facebook is required to have social interactions, but you're
effectively cutting yourself off from a majority of society because it has
become an expected norm. I have "real friends" that I used to talk to over the
phone somewhat regularly. Facebook has taken over that network of people and
now we post or chat on Facebook.

~~~
holri
I experience that not using Facebook has positive filter effects. People that
do not understand that I do not like FB are not my friends. Facebook is
therefore a good knife to cut me off drivel.

~~~
lowkeykiwi
If I didn't use facebook in London then I would simply miss every social
invitation that I am given. Many people only use it because of this and would
drop it otherwise.

