
Facebook is redesigning its core app - pgodzin
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523265/facebook-events-groups-redesign-news-feed-features-f8-2019
======
js2
I can't get over how incoherent the mobile app has become. To give a recent
example. Yesterday, I had commented on another person's post. I later wanted
to get back to add to the comment. So I navigated to it from my activity log.
This took me to the post, but wouldn't display any of the comments on the
post. The screen was clearly rendered differently than when I pulled up the
person's wall, found the post, then clicked on the comments to find my
comment. My guess is that "activity log > post" was written by a different
engineers than "wall > post". This is the latest, updated iOS app.

That's just one minor example. There's crap like this throughout the app. The
web site is also glitchy as hell these days. When I brought up m.facebook.com
the other day and went to type a status update, for every space I typed, two
spaces were inserted.

~~~
asark
I tried Facebook in, IDK, 2009 or so, for a month or two.

I have productively used, for significant amounts of time: every desktop
Windows since 3.1, maybe a half-dozen Linux window managers under almost as
many distros, BeOS, Solaris CDE, and more, a half-dozen GUI word processing
programs, at least as many instant message programs, forums of all sorts,
maybe a dozen image and WYSYWG HTML editors combined, and so on off to the
horizon. I've figured out how to use obtuse UIs for games like Shadow
President and Crusader Kings II.

Facebook's UI was too confusing so I stopped using it. I couldn't figure it
out at all. Recently I've been exposed to "Facebook Work" or whatever, and
it's just as bad. What's this? Where does this post _go_? To whom? Why are
these in this order? Is this thing the same as that other thing with the same
name, and if so why's it on the page twice and grouped with different things?
WTF.

~~~
sneak
I may suggest that you are an outlier; many hundreds of millions have
successfully figured out everyday use of Facebook’s UI since 2009.

~~~
asark
Rather, from observation, I think most people are used to not understanding
what _any_ of their software is doing and to seeing what looks like random,
unpredictable, or otherwise weird behavior from it constantly, so Facebook's
not unusual from their perspective.

------
manmal
I find it frustrating that communities are using FB. Notifications and
mentions go missing left and right, and its UI is not (yet?) ideal for proper
discussions - I much prefer the plain forums that have always existed. I get
that FB is convenient because most people have an account already, but a FB
login button would also do the trick for most communities. We surely don’t
need a multi-billion company to host events and groups for us. Lock-in (social
graph etc) is actually quite low for these features, so I think this is a bit
of a desperate move from them.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Forums are nerdy and almost nobody wants to check N number of different forums
to keep up with any groups they want to be part of.

FB isn't convenient because people have an account that works with "Login with
Facebook." It's convenient because it's a one stop shop for your members.

Whether FB is ideal is going to vary per community though.

~~~
rad_gruchalski
On the contrary, there is a growing number of people who, when faced with a
facebook link, simply move on.

~~~
perl4ever
I'm beginning to realize that there are a lot of ordinary small businesses
that do things through Facebook. I tried asking a mechanic what to do with my
car, and they answered...on a weekend! No other form of communication
substitutes. The same people don't seem to respond to email, and I prefer
written communication to phone calls.

------
andykx
I'm 26 now, and I first got into Facebook 12 years ago as a Freshman in high
school.

It was cool at first because I actually spent time with my "friends" on there,
or at least saw them on a daily basis at my small high school. It's changed in
a couple key ways over time:

1\. Family joining Facebook. It used to be a funny place I could goof around
with my friends, posting whatever I wanted. Now I have to filter everything I
say because my grandparents can see it. I concede that that's probably not a
concern for many people, but I noticed the "vibe" changed significantly when
Facebook's popularity grew beyond high school/college age people.

2\. Sharing. Virtually everything on my timeline came from pages that post
short "viral" videos for people to share. No one was posting anything unique
or interesting. It was like a heavily bastardized version of Reddit without
any interesting content. Anecdotally, this content seems to appeal to older
people, who don't know of ways to see more interesting content.

Privacy concerns aside, those are the main reasons that I no longer care about
Facebook. I deleted mine 6 months ago and I don't miss it at all.

~~~
the_pwner224
> 1\. Family joining Facebook. It used to be a funny place I could goof around
> with my friends, posting whatever I wanted. Now I have to filter everything
> I say because my grandparents can see it.

Google+ nailed this perfectly. You could place connections into Circles, and a
post could be shared to specific circle(s). It let teenagers be teenagers,
allowed professionals to separate their personal life and maintain a
professional appearance, and so on.

In reality we do maintain separate personas for different groups of people we
know, and it's ridiculous that no social network reflects this. The closest
anyone else has come to this is Reddit where you can use multiple pseudonyms,
so someone recognizing your posts/comments on one account does not get access
to all of your posts/comments.

~~~
mefsb
I wouldn't say they nailed it perfectly, as the UX was stupidly confusing to
use.

Also I'm pretty sure you can create lists of your friends and share certain
posts or images with "everybody but X, Y, and Z" or "X and Z only" where [XYZ]
are either lists or specific friends.

~~~
bradleyhb
While this is a viable “fix” it once was buried 2 or 3 levels deep in your
settings and not modifiable on the fly, if I recall correctly.

Even if it had been implemented in its current form 5 years ago, filtering
post audiences still seems to involve a level of added complexity not readily
tractable for your run of the mill user.

------
maxaf
I’d like to challenge the implied premise that the world needs Facebook to
begin with. This is the premise under which Facebook seems to operate, but it
doesn’t seem to concern with marketing the premise to users. What’s in it for
any human person with a smartphone or computer? What value could possibly be
extracted by such a person from being “on” Facebook?

Any redesign or other change made to the platform is pointless without a clear
narrative concerning the underlying value proposition. How does the change
affect that value proposition? My take is that the value of Facebook is zero
in the best case, and possibly a net negative for society at large and for
individuals. Isn’t Facebook supposed to convince us that their premise isn’t
all evil, that there’s something in it for us beyond participation in mass
data collection?

~~~
djohnston
i suppose they either tricked 2 billion people to use an app that does nothing
for them or you're wrong and the value prop is obvious

~~~
Barrin92
how many people on the planet do you think smoke cigarettes?

I mean sure you can argue, in circular fashion, that everything people do
provides net value to them or else they wouldn't do it, in which case there's
no actual way to falsify that claim, but in a more genuine sense it's not at
all clear that social media consumption has long term, net individual or
social benefits.

It is an extremely new technology that has entered our society without much
oversight and there's no reason to believe we have a good grip on its mid and
long term effects. The evidence we have, for example concerning mental health
of adolescents, in particular girls, is quite devastating.

~~~
djohnston
my counterpoint would be that cigarettes also have an obvious value prop: they
give you a nicotine high that users find satisfying. having a value prop
doesn't imply an absence of negative consequences, otherwise cars are also
devoid of value prop.

~~~
asdff
People get addicted to social media too. Next time you get in an elevator
notice how many people immediately whip out the phone and start scrolling the
minute they are standing still. It's completely subconscious, like what are
you going to read in the 20 second elevator ride, yet people do it all the
same because there's a dopamine hit.

~~~
djohnston
well.. imo also because 20 years ago they just would have been staring into
corners or something

~~~
asdff
There's value in staring into corners imo. Try forgetting your phone at home
one day. No longer are you instinctively reaching for it the minute you have
20 seconds to spare, you allow yourself to daydream again.

I ended up being way more focused that day just from cutting out those >30
second moments on the phone. Instead of my brain just shutting off and tuning
out, I was actually thinking about my day and what I'm working on. I felt like
a Buddhist monk!

------
YeahSureWhyNot
I quit FB more than a year ago but stared going in my profile again because I
had to create a page for my app and I am shocked how slow and cluttered fb
desktop site has become. its alarmingly bad, like terrible and yet I read on
the news that their advertising revenue has increased. did people start using
fb more? who clicks on these ads? who buys stuff on fb.

~~~
superpie
Facebook sort-of-recently introduced measures to defeat ad blockers, which I
think has greatly increased the number of clicks.

~~~
the_af
Surely any clicks resulting from adblocker-defeating measures are
unintentional clicks by frustrated users?

People who install adblockers are people who do not want to click on ads.

~~~
taormina
Well, some of us do: [https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)

~~~
perl4ever
Is there any benefit to that? I mean, does it convince anyone of anything,
like that you're not using an ad-blocker? Or is it a pure public service?

~~~
r3bl
I don't use it myself, but as far as I understand it, the idea is to increase
the noise you make so that any signal you make would get lost.

Ads can't be tailored to you if you click on every ad ever shown to you (in
the background of course).

------
ttepasse
A fun thing you'll see sometimes in rants about other websites is the
screenshot where someone coloured the content part of the website from all the
other stuff, UI, sidebars and ads. The obvious labels are "stuff I'm
interested in" vs. "stuff I'm not interested in".

Facebook was always bad in that regard. Friends posts are small boxes, crammed
between sidebars. This redesign seems to think that the stuff we're not
interested in, the sidebars, needs even more enlargement.

~~~
asdff
Because there's ads in the sidebars.

------
inlined
This seems like a brilliant move to help manage their public image. Groups and
events seem like much more purpose-driven and thus value-generating
interactions with Facebook.

I absolutely see why Facebook would want to be seen as the place where one
goes to grow their community rather than the current stigma of fake news and
inflammatory pieces on the feed.

------
minimaxir
As someone who works with Facebook Pages for my job, my concern that
Facebook's new emphasis on Groups and Events will deemphasize Pages, which
will lead to even more trouble for Pages which rely on that traffic (the
absolute lack of discussion about Pages in the F8 keynote in favor of
Messenger-based alternatives is concerning).

~~~
dependsontheq
I have the 20 people on a team that work with Facebook Pages and we have been
telling all our clients for years that Facebook Pages are either dead already
or will be dead soon. From a strategic perspective for Facebook they only made
sense as a cheap gateway to get brands on board the platform. Time to saddle
your horse!

------
yash1th
I was listening to the MZ’s keynote and it felt to me that the facebook groups
moving towards more like the concept of subreddits, although with limited
functionality (like moderating)

------
amiune
Plastic surgery for the aging facebook. Death is coming, smartly it adopted
two children, instagram and whatsapp

------
divan
It still hard to believe that one of the largest tech giants can't handle UI
and UX of their main product right. I would normally assume it's an inherently
hard problem them, but there is a counter-example to compare with – VKontakte,
the most popular russian social network. It started basically as 1-to-1 clone
of Facebook, but somehow managed to evolve into social network with one of the
best user experiences I've seen. Now, I'm not using it anymore for political
reasons, but I truly wish Facebook hired Vk's UI/UX folks or just cloned their
design :)

------
quarkral
Regardless of how people feel about Facebook in general, I think this is a
step forward. Groups and messenger are what I primarily use, and both of those
are completely in my control with no mysterious recommender algorithm deciding
what I get to look at today. I bookmark my Facebook to go straight into
Messenger and get notifications from groups that I care about.

------
chrisandchips
I mean these changes make sense to me; anyone who uses facebook actively can
tell how much people gravitate to groups and events (and little else). Since
groups have really picked up I've found myself using Facebook more than ever
before.

I think the main benefit is that a lot of people have a facebook account,
including those who would never have thought or bothered to join forums in the
pre facebook era, so now we're seeing a ton of really great communities. Then
again, I wasn't on the internet for all that much of the pre-facebook era, so
maybe I don't really know how things were before.

------
xtracerx
oh boy, I'm sure everyone is going to have a totally rational response and not
freak out at all when it launches.

------
return1
Their redesign reminds _a lot_ of google plus, which incidentally was used by
many communities because it was convenient and relatively uncluttered.

i dont think people can get excited by this anymore though. Facebook is in a
decline trajectory thats going to take a long time. The friends networks have
become stale, and people are learning to move to other platforms. Like all
other facebook's redesigns, this will create a massive backlash when it
launches, but unlike previous times, it will most likely be seen as an excuse
to quit the site.

------
sky_projektor
Facebook needs a good thought on the user, friends of Zuckerberg, before doing
anything fruitful to their core app. More than minor cosmetic changes, what is
required is the experience of staying in touch with 'friends' not advertisers
throwing a net of posts for potential catches, likers! For that, people &
their faces should be more visible on the screens rather than that big repost
of the day, that is going viral.

------
mi100hael
From the screen shots, it looks a lot more like Instagram now. I wonder how
long it takes them to merge IG into the mothership at this point.

~~~
mtgx
The merger began a while ago.

------
bromuro
So much negativity here. I like using Facebook and I am excited for the new
design and to read about it has been implemented!

------
azr79
Why do people still use the mobile facebook app? I've just added the web app
shortcut on my phone and it's more than enough, plus it doesn't bother you
with useless updates, doesn't track you when you're not running the app, and
doesn't drain your battery.

------
bouncing
Non-paywall article discussing the same thing:
[https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523265/facebook-
events-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523265/facebook-events-
groups-redesign-news-feed-features-f8-2019)

I'd speculate that Facebook is emphasizing events and groups because, quite
frankly, those are the two things people are still on Facebook for. (It isn't
your baby pics!)

~~~
paxys
It isn't quite speculation when that is the exact reason Facebook has given,
and is right there in the article you linked.

~~~
bouncing
Well, they're saying it's "meaningful."

I'm saying, it's the only reason at least 3 people I know haven't completely
deleted Facebook.

~~~
paxys
You have data on 3 users, Facebook has it for 2.3 billion

------
new_guy
Facebook are losing their core competency. Just this morning I had a post
removed for 'violating community guidelines'. I have a number of pages most of
which automatically post content, and I have absolutely no idea which post was
removed, from which page, or why, the notification just didn't say.

This move reeks of desperation, Facebook needs to forget about 'redesign' and
garbage like 'workspace' and just work on fixing it. The best way to do that
is to get the people building it actually using it again.

~~~
the_af
If it's any consolation, sometimes the relevant facebook team doesn't
understand what triggers the censorship algorithms they themselves built.
Source: I asked them, via a friend who works there and had access to them, in
order to understand a particular case, and they were baffled (and probably
overworked and my question was low priority, sure -- but had it been obvious,
they would have answered it).

------
theNJR
Is anyone part of a Facebook group that they like? I've never seen a modern
place online with better discourse than HN.

~~~
NoPiece
There are lots of Facebook groups I like. No one is talking about my
neighborhood on HN! But besides interesting local groups, there are amazing
niche technical groups on Facebook that would crossover with HN. A few I find
useful:

Apple ][ Enthusiasts:
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/5251478676/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/5251478676/)

BMW i3 Worldwide:
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/BMWi3/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/BMWi3/)

Monoprice Mini (3d printer group)
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/710952782398723/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/710952782398723/)

Commodore Amiga:
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga/)

------
hackbinary
Will they make away to disable stories?

------
stesch
The design needs a bit more of the typical Facebook blue. People won't
recognize it otherwise.

------
thanatropism
Facebook appears as an advertiser - sometimes even with video - in Duolingo
for iOS.

------
cutler
Will PHP/Hack still power the back-end or is it finally being retired?

------
tempodox
The only bit of news about FB that could possibly interest me is if they
miraculously stopped collecting data about everyone who's not a user (hence
never gave their consent). The tortures and abuses their users are willing to
endure are really none of my business.

------
Chazprime
They should really roll the site back to its 2010-2013 iteration. It was much
easier to search for content in your/your friend’s feeds, the UI was much less
cluttered with sponsored content and news and the site actually felt like…
_social_ media.

------
dezzeus
IMHO enforcing public groups is probably just a way to collect data from
user’s public activity, which allows for better targeted advertising without
boring (themself) with privacy. Which is fine if used in a good way.

------
miguelmota
It's like a combination of Reddit and Google+ Circles

------
xiaolingxiao
do you guys think there's room for another big social mobile app, maybe
unbundling some of facebook/instagram's features?

~~~
theNJR
Yes. Facebook says the future is private, and I agree. I just don't think
they're the ones that will do it right.

~~~
morenoh149
could you elaborate on this? when did they say this and what did they mean?
like apple?

------
IloveHN84
They got some spaghetti code in it for sure. I don't know if React is the
cause of it.

Anyway I hope they will not introduce some other spying/backdoors in the app
(more than now)

------
Moxdi
so facebook is becoming reddit without anonimity?

------
agumonkey
tweestagram

------
paxys
There are a million articles about this all over the internet. Why does a
paywalled one (that too from a non-tech focused publication) make the front
page?

~~~
president
It used to be that copying the url and pasting through Google would allow you
to see the content. This has since stopped working. Does anyone know why wsj
doesn't get penalized for this anymore?

~~~
CharlesColeman
They also seem to have blocked the archive.is and outline.com paywall
bypasses.

------
killjoywashere
Yawn ... let me know when they redesign their core business.

------
willand31
Facebook's design isn't the problem. The unethical use of our data is the
problem.

------
josteink
Looking at the screenshots, it’s not too bad looking. It looks much simpler.

But I doubt they’ll actually simplify the underlying data-model, which makes
the design a lie.

A lie at best, a confusing UX at worst. Time will tell.

Either way, as a quitee, I’m entirely unaffected and very happy about that.

------
ssss11
The truly sad part is that continual media theatrics like this will make 99%
of the public believe FB has changed and is now privacy conscious.

------
akshayB
It feels like they redesigned the website and the app with less blue on it.
But there is no indication or emphasis of security of the user data. End to
end encryption is good but what happens when data ends getting stored
somewhere, there is nothing been talked about it?

~~~
gaogao
Mark mentioned the work on using formal methods for tracking user data usage
and storage in his keynote. This is a project I'm working on, so it's nice to
see it out there.

