
When Facebook was Fun - gammarator
http://bellm.org/blog/2012/12/02/when-facebook-was-fun/
======
bhntr3
Will we ever solve the niche appeal vs. universal acceptance problem? Lots of
stuff has this problem: Movies, TV, music, games (all entertainment really
including Facebook.)

That's what this article highlighted the most to me. It's hard to make
something that feels small and personal and quirky yet appeals to everyone. If
you make something beautiful and targeted inevitably someone says "Hey! You
should expand!"

I had this conversation with the owner of a tiny Japanese steakhouse in Tokyo
where I had the best steak of my life. There were only like 8 tables and I was
there alone so he sat down with me and we talked for a half hour. He told me
how many times he had been approached to expand to other cities or the US over
the 30 years they'd been open. But he didn't want the stress and he didn't
think he could deliver the quality of meal if he did. Sushi and ramen places
are like this in Japan too. They may be the best but they often stay small.

I think we've lost track of that in the USA and particularly Silicon Valley
(or maybe we never had it.) Would we be happier if Facebook had stayed elite
university only and there were 100 social sharing websites for different
niches? I dunno. Probably not. But I think we're also learning that one size
fits all social is not as interesting on a massive scale as we thought it
would be. Path isn't doing that well either though. Maybe the best we can do
is subreddits. God save us.

~~~
DanBC
> Maybe the best we can do is subreddits. God save us.

Sub reddits are just Usenet on the web but worse, rather than anything social.

Maybe if Reddit added a profile page with some social stuff (for paying
users?) they could destroy Facebook.

~~~
artursapek
Eh, I feel like most people on reddit like being anonymous on reddit.

~~~
DanBC
Well, those people wouldn't be affected. Even those people with a profile
could still create throwaway accounts for those other subreddits.

There are a few sub reddits where people are sharing real life information, so
maybe confirmed profiles would be beneficial for them. I don't know if that
just adds a bunch of cost and not much revenue.

~~~
artursapek
I really think it would just ruin the simple, anonymous beauty of reddit to
start involving identities. Leave that for IAmA :)

People go to reddit to get away from reality.

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craigc
I was a freshman at NYU in 2004 when Facebook launched there. I really miss
Facebook in those days. It was so minimalistic but that was part of its charm.
If Facebook looked and acted like it did today in the early days there is NO
way it would have caught on. In fact, I may be in the minority, but I barely
use Facebook at all these days.

One of the core ideas that I think really made it great was there were only
two privacy options (if I remember correctly). Make your profile visible to
just your friends, or just people in your network (nyu.edu email in my case).
You could see pictures and names of other people, and you could see a limited
profile if they sent YOU a friend request, but that was it.

Another thing is it was really easy to find people with common interests. For
example if you listed a certain movie or book you liked, you could click on it
in your profile and it would show you everyone else who also liked it (ordered
by your friends first, then people in your network ordered by friends in
common, then locked profiles of people outside your network).

It's a shame that they have gotten so far away from what they once stood for.

~~~
lmm
>Another thing is it was really easy to find people with common interests. For
example if you listed a certain movie or book you liked, you could click on it
in your profile and it would show you everyone else who also liked it (ordered
by your friends first, then people in your network ordered by friends in
common, then locked profiles of people outside your network).

I was surprised by the claim that it was more private in those days, for just
that reason. It was much easier to search for complete strangers (within your
university) based on quite specific criteria.

------
TravisLS
Ah, I remember those days - or the days right after those days (I was at NYU
and got Facebook in late '04). It was so much fun to friend someone you met,
see where they were from, all their interests (some real, some comical), what
crazy comments happened to be on their wall, and what "groups" they belonged
to.

The Facebook of today is still valuable, but in an entirely different way.
Facebook in 2004 had nothing to do with sharing content, it was just a
database of people that you'd met in college that was exceptionally fun to
browse. That database of people aspect is almost entirely hidden now in favor
of the feed (useful but different), and what you "like" (the pages where you
clicked "like" to get a $2 coupon).

I recall reading somewhere PG saying there may be an opportunity now for a
"Facebook for college students", which I'd imagine as a realization of the
early value of Facebook. I've batted around the idea of setting up
oldfacebook.com, just as a copy of that early version. Heck, you could even
let people sign up by connecting with Facebook.

~~~
AgentConundrum
> _I've batted around the idea of setting up oldfacebook.com_

I wouldn't recommend using that domain name.

------
jval
I honestly think that Facebook has gone backwards pretty quickly over the last
few years. I'm not sure what their internal metrics look like, but I would
hazard a guess and say that long term users tend to spend far less time on the
site as the years pass.

Anecdotally, most of the people I know are looking for an excuse to stop using
Facebook because they no longer enjoy browsing the site, but they are locked
in because people use it for event planning and they have a fear of missing
out.

I think the site can continue to rely on these kinds of network effects to
keep users active and signing in, but whether it keeps the company insulated
from competition or profitable with users spending enough minutes on the site
is another question entirely.

~~~
brc
I agree with your sentiments. It's actually completely broken for my uses now.
The only use it has for me is looking at things my friends have been up to -
photos, updates, that sort of thing.

But now the weird algorithm they have gets it completely wrong. I get treated
to an endless feed list of stupid cat photos from someone I haven't spoken to
since high school, and yet a close friend posts a picture of them with the
kids at the beach and it never shows up, probably because they only post once
per month.

I try and click 'most recent' for my feed and then the dates get inverted and
I end up seeing something posted a month ago.

Notwithstanding all the inserted sponsored stories (whatever, I get that they
need to pay the bills), the fact that the newsfeed isn't any longer a
newsfeed, but an algorithmically curated list of what it thinks I might like
means that it has become useless and unreliable. Sure I can probably tweak
settings to get it to work again, but why not just have it the way it was?

I check it less and less and I will probably drop off altogether in the next
year or so. The network effect can work in reverse - if none of your friends
are using it any longer, there is less incentive to use it yourself.

I much prefer Twitter as it is right now - it just shows your feed and it's up
to you to add/remove people who contribute to your feed. Add some simple
innovations to Twitter like an easy way to make a group of followers private
for tweets, and the ability to load albums rather than single photos for
tweets, and it would completely replace Facebook for my personal use.

The other problem Facebook faces is like that of any fashion label, movie
franchise or performer - becoming old hat. There will become a point where
Facebook is something that your parents use, and therefore to be avoided at
all costs. But when the parents feel like using it less, and the kids won't go
there, I can see lots of trouble heading down the pike.

~~~
im3w1l
You know that there exists a manual override -- see less/more/no updates from
a certain user, right?

~~~
brc
To quote Mark Zuckerberg 'what we found is that users hate making lists'.

The problem is not that one person posts too much spam - it's that I don't
ever get to see other peoples posts at all. I don't want to have to make a
list of my 'important friends'. I want to see it all, I can easily work the
scroll bar to get past the bits I don't want to see.

------
Shenglong
Facebook gets a lot of criticism, and while there are issues, overall I think
the folks there have done quite well. Changes bother me for a bit, just like
they do everyone, but over the years I've found that I've had to think less
and less about what I want to see.

In fact, now I can just go to Facebook, scroll down and skim a few hundred
stories in a few seconds. Facebook isn't mean to be _fun_ \- it's meant to be
a tool to enhance our daily lives; I think it's done just that.

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frooxie
In 2000-2002 I was a member of LunarStorm, a (now defunct) Swedish community
where at one time 90 percent of Sweden's high school students were members.
What I liked about it was that it gave you much more opportunities to interact
with - and get to know - new people; Facebook mostly keeps the interaction to
people you know, and you can't really start talking to anyone who seems
interesting, or reading what they write and commenting on it without
officially becoming "friends" first. But following the writing of interesting
people and commenting on it was how I _made_ friends on LunarStorm, many of
which I still know ten years later. I miss that. And I don't think you can
easily recreate it in the panopticon that is Facebook; having every
conversation broadcast to everyone you know doesn't make for a relaxing
atmosphere.

(I haven't tried Google+, so I don't know how it works in that respect.)

~~~
im3w1l
Joining groups could be a solution.

------
majormajor
Honestly, it's a lot more _useful_ to me now. It's not as novel, naturally,
but would I be happier if it was still just limited to people I knew from
college and I still had to visit their profiles individually to see their
updates? I don't think so.

If it hadn't evolved I bet it would've been "killed" already—for instance, if
FB didn't have the news feed, Twitter would become a lot more attractive to
me.

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conradfr
I signed up five years ago and yes it was more fun back then.

But was it because of the stupid boxes on your profile (e.g "Which dictator
are you"), because it was new, because my parents weren't on it, or because
every next show or communication of my favorite band didn't appeared on my
home page back then ? I don't know.

~~~
thirdsun
I agree, today my facebook feed is a collection of bad jokes, pictures
containing bad jokes written in comic sans and stupid polls and question in
desperate need for likes and comments ("like of you remember this guy!").

------
rayiner
Hipster HN-er liked Facebook before my grandma got on.

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slash-dot
If you think about it, the fact that facebook has so many users makes it quite
cool. Practically everyone I know is on facebook. Though I do see the appeal
of a private university network it would eventually end because the people
running it would want to make more money. Also adoption to a new more
exclusive network wouldn't be as fast since we already have facebook.

~~~
joering2
> Also adoption to a new more exclusive network wouldn't be as fast since we
> already have facebook.

We also had "everyone" on MySpace. And before Friendfeed. And in times when
most did not know what "internet" is, geocities.

Its not a rocket science to realize that to your users its all about cost of
adoption versus reward they will get. Said that, if there is some new cool
feature that Facebook does not have, and that feature is so awesome that is
worth me spending my time on creating just another account, then I will do so.
If that new website and new cool feature keep me away from Facebook, then
Facebook will be in trouble. But so far, noone has come, just yet, with some
universal cool feature that would be much cooler than socializing online with
people I know offline via site that has mostly everyone signed in.

But rest assured internet will evolved because at the end of the day, its run
by humans and their behavior offline/online evolves too. The "new Facebook",
whatever it will be, will have nothing to do with whether current Facebook
succeed or not (it did), as it made plenty of people millionaires, gave
thousands jobs, and served it purpose of "connecting everyone in the world
together".

~~~
graue
> We also had "everyone" on MySpace. And before Friendfeed. And in times when
> most did not know what "internet" is, geocities.

I understand where you're coming from, but people forget about scale when they
make comparisons like this. Myspace at its peak had around 100 million users,
mostly teens and young adults. Your parents and aunts and uncles and grandma
were never on Myspace, but for many people, all of the above are on Facebook,
which has a billion users. Far more people are on the internet in general, as
well as a broader and more representative sample of the population, compared
to the days of GeoCities. “Everyone” was not on GeoCities or Myspace to nearly
the extent that “everyone” is on Facebook today. It's not at all impossible
that Facebook will be replaced, but the task is a much harder one because
compared to Myspace at its peak, Facebook's reach is an order of magnitude
greater.

~~~
joering2
ok, I didnt make myself clear. By "everyone" I meant everyone that knew what
Internet is.

In terms of penetration and reach-wise, there is no difference between MySpace
and Facebook. While there may be 100MM on MySpace and 800MM on Faceook, the
difference is that back then much fewer people were aware that internet
exists.

If anything, I dont find "facebook killer" to be harder to achieve just
because FB reach is so great. Things go viral nowadays; if something cooler
comes along, then it will be spread across FB. I rather find it hard to find
something that users would value more than hanging out with friends online.

~~~
graue
> the difference is that back then much fewer people were aware that internet
> exists

That's pretty much the point. In the time that Facebook got big, hundreds of
millions of people were beginning to use the internet to socialize for the
first time. They didn't have to unlearn how Friendfeed worked, or abandon
their contacts on Myspace, because they had never used these services. It was
all new and Facebook snapped them up.

There aren't hundreds of millions more for the next social network to snap up.
In the developed world, the internet is done growing. Every North American or
European who is ever going to use the internet already does. Everyone who
would be interested in using a social network is already on Facebook.

Not literally everyone (we all know a few people who aren't on Facebook), but
close enough that the trick they pulled off can't be repeated.

------
steele
Maybe what you miss is not old facebook but the time in your life when you
happened to start using it. Consider the amount of time you spent there versus
slashdot; then compare that to the time you spend on facebook now and how much
more of your life network, not just social, is reflected there today.

------
jrogers65
I found one of the articles this one links to to be very insightful -
[http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-
creato...](http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-
survives-ad-board-the/)

> Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 said he was accused of breaching security, violating
> copyrights and violating individual privacy by creating the website

> The charges were based on a complaint from the computer services department
> over his unauthorized use of on-line facebook photographs, he said.

> “Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable,” he
> wrote at that point. “I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.”

------
ErikAugust
"Part of Facebook’s appeal in those first days was that it was clean,
protected space very different from the all-too-public hurly-burly of MySpace
[10]." That's it, really. It was an elite college kid social network. Now,
anything but.

~~~
jff
At least you still can't add custom HTML to your profile. That was, beyond a
doubt, the worst part of MySpace.

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mfreemanassatan
I have a theory that perception of anonymity is directly related to long-term
enjoyability; as social networks become larger and more people you know join,
you feel less anonymous, and less likely to post original content or espouse
the controversial views that lead to interesting discussion.

On the other hand, you have much more anonymous (remember, I'm talking about
how anonymous users _feel_ ) venues like reddit, 4chan, or IRC, which have a
rather large niche that is relatively stable and full of engaged users.

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iterationx
No one seems to notice the obvious... that his life and his friends lives were
certainly more exciting when he was a Junior at Harvard.

This reminds me of a study that found that many East Germans were nostalgic
about East Germany before the wall came down, but the researchers concluded
that it was because it was because the interviewed people had been in there
20s at that time, not because of any particular aspect of the East German
society.

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chimeracoder
> a hidden record of who you aspired to be, as you became who you are now
> instead.

Substitute "public" for "hidden", and that line could describe most social
media these days.

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tgrass
Nobody goes there anymore, it's way too crowded. -Berra

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Rhymenocerus
I love how people act like MySpace never even existed now. Watching "The
Social Network" you'd think that Mark invented the entire concept.

