

Facebook is Big and Boring - rachelbaker
http://rachelbaker.me/facebook-big-boring/
A trend I have noticed among my friends is the decreasing number of status updates posted to Facebook. Just six months ago my news feed would have been filled with the daily dribblings of my friends. Now there are less than a handful of status updates in my newsfeed, often from the same 5 people.
======
ihumanable
I think what facebook does for a lot of people is allows them to have an
online presence without having to:

1) Buy a domain name 2) Pay for hosting 3) Install WordPress, etc.

This is really great for people who don't want to deal with the complexities
of hosting their own site but still want to be able to post stuff.

The problem is that with 600m users everyone's presence online starts to feel
the same, cookie cutter, boring. It's like if everyone in the world had to use
the same stylesheet. If you look at things like the profile image strip hack,
people are dying to be unique (even if the only way they can do that is by
copying other people's hacks).

I think there will always be a place for Facebook, my mom isn't going to head
on over to namecheap to register a domain anytime soon. But I think that
facebook is homogenization of the internet, and I think it's boring.

~~~
coryl
Most people don't really care about having a "presence" online (if they did,
they'd already have a blog out there). Facebook is about your friends and
social network; your mom is on Facebook because her friends and family are,
not because she has great opinions and stories to tell the world. Facebook's
success has very little to do with being a platform to post things on, those
are simply features it evolved into.

Although I do find it humorous you would mention profile customization as
something people want or care about. I personally hated the disorganization
and tacky pages on networks like MySpace.

~~~
naqabas
Agreed, I think the other point is that people hardly go to people's facebook
pages anymore. When I first add a friend, I might go check out their profile.
But after that, it's all about the news feed and what everyone is doing at the
moment. When you can comment from the news feed on whatever post your friend
just put out there, why is there a need to even go to the facebook page?

------
jonmc12
I've run into many stats lately on women's use of facebook: 1\. "Sheryl
Sandberg, COO of Facebook, has talked about how women are not only the
majority of its users, but drive 62% of activity in terms of messages, updates
and comments, and 71% of the daily fan activity." 2\. "Women aged 35-54 are
the most active group in mobile socialization" 3\. "Most women — 83% of
respondents in this survey — are annoyed at one time or another by the posts
from their Facebook connections."

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/why-women-rule-the-
internet...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/why-women-rule-the-internet/)
[2] [http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/mobile-by-the-numbers-
infogrp...](http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/mobile-by-the-numbers-infogrpahic/)
[3] <http://mashable.com/2011/03/30/women-facebook-survey/>

So, I started talking to the women in my life about facebook. And I have a
speculative theory - sorry that this is a theory based on gender and its kind
of vague.. but facebook makes so much more sense to me when I look at it this
way, and I find it an interesting discussion.

Basically, you have mother types and you have single women types. Single women
are the early adopter social photo sharers - this is fun for them, and it
strengthens reputation and attracts men. Meanwhile, mothers are off doing what
they do - strengthening their family and social relationships through chat,
gossip, hobbies, etc - it forms a safety net for their family.

Then there are men. Single men chase the single women. This forms a crowd.
This crowd attracts married men / fathers and mothers alike (including people
like me who are standing around saying 'wtf?'). Further, the crowd attracts
social capitalists who leverage the crowd's attention to promote themselves,
their business or their cause.

But, the _average_ single female may have 2-7 years of her status as a single
woman. Whereas the average mother will have her role for 18yrs+. So, you end
up with this crowd mass, in the center is hookup activity. However, the
majority of the crowd becomes family-centric and cause-centric security nets.
And yea, when you look at this from a distance, its big and boring.

~~~
josefresco
Masses of single-folks 'hooking up' on Facebook is equally if not more boring
close-up and from afar than masses of family-centric people.

It's better to say "Masses are boring". Just read the comments at CNN.com or
YouTube which mostly read like meaningless chatter.

~~~
jonmc12
I totally agree that social interaction quality declines as group size
increases - interactions will always approximate the lowest common denominator
of a group over time.

However, I was not trying to imply or judge what is boring on facebook. Just
trying to point out that the interaction activity around single women is more
dynamic and less predictable than the interaction activity around mothers /
families, and further that social security blankets are beginning to rule fb,
by the numbers. Networks for the purpose of social security, by definition,
are risk averse and less dynamic.

That being said, I'd love to see some analytics around unique page views of
single women vs the rest of facebook users to see what facebook users on
average consider interesting / boring.

------
wh-uws
I was visiting some friends at a major US university last weekend, a few who
are a Djs and party promoters when they said something that struck me. "The
freshman aren't really using facebook [to find parties] anymore."

We went on to talk about how there was a very low signal to noise ratio on it
nowadays with too many promoters sending to many unwanted messages and how
having family on it has changed things as well.

Apprently they're moving more to twitter and tumblr to a certain extent

this does not bode well for facebook

Also I think it was a big mistake to take status updates from the center of
the header on profile pages. It let you broadcast more about how you are at a
moment vs who in general

~~~
akkartik
I find myself nodding along with you, then unable to reconcile myself with the
reality: that facebook is a high-growth company, and it's unlikely to become
the next AOL for another decade.

Perhaps the answer is raganwald's comment below
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2397934>): people find use in it, it's
just not the same use we found.

~~~
bmelton
It's likely that it's so fast-growing because it's bringing in the outliers,
The unfashionable 'late adopters' that most services would kill to have, and
to keep.

This doesn't bode well for Facebook because a huge part of their growth
strategy was in getting the exclusive college crowd, then growing that circle
to the early adopters, then growing THAT circle to everybody else. Even if
they never lose their core demographic (which is to say, the students that
made facebook popular, which have almost certainly graduated by now) -- if the
exclusive college crowd moves to somewhere else, even just for one of FB's
core services, it's a very bad sign.

What FB wants, rather, what it needs, is for people to rely on it for
everything. If portions of its service become decentralized elsewhere, and
heaven help them if they're able to integrate with each other, then they lose
the power they currently have, which is in being able to get a pretty clear
picture of your social circle from visiting just one site.

~~~
akkartik
They would want to shoot for what you describe, yes. Any company would want to
be all things to all people, to relentlessly accumulate users, never lose one.
But nobody will achieve that idealized goal. They'll be faced with choices
where they can grow their userbase more aggressively at the cost of some
fraction of their faithful early adopters.

Losing early adopters never causes immediate loss of growth. If you play your
cards right you will make them up manyfold. Neither does their loss cause
immediate exposure to competitors. Early-adopters who left apple, or reddit,
or google usually scattered to the winds, spreading out over lots of competing
services.

Peter Drucker said the goal of a company is to create a customer. Rephrased,
the goal of a company to organize a coherent market out of disparate customer
needs. I imagine companies as engines that suck up diverse users one end,
cause them to behave in a common manner, and emit users out the exhaust,
hopefully at a far lower rate. Discarded users still have to be sucked up by a
different coherent engine, which is hard.

Let me know if this comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever :)

~~~
bmelton
It makes sense, but I don't really know if I agree with all of it. Rather, I
don't necessarily disagree, because what company wouldn't want everybody on
the planet as a customer -- but I think most companies (at least early on)
prefer to have a niche, and dominate within that niche.

The less precise your niche is, or the larger your demographic, the harder it
is to precisely deliver anything to them. You can't possibly be all things to
all people, and once you've expanded beyond a demographic that you can
effectively meet the needs of, then you stop being 'kick ass' for any one
person, and start being 'okay' for more people.

For services like Facebook, I think this is the death knell of their offering.
What they still have, of course, is the zillions of users. So long as they
have everybody, it buys them time.

What I was trying to allude to earlier though, is that if the early adopters
that got them popular start going elsewhere, then eventually, so will
everybody want to be.

The catch though, is that just like nobody is taking on Craigslist head-on, I
don't think anybody can take on Facebook head-on. But, just as Twitter is a
viable alternative for status updates, if other, really awesome little things
start cropping up for other aspects of FB service, they'll eventually start to
erode FB's offerings.

The best thing that FB has going for it in defense of that is their platform,
which means that likely, much of what might otherwise usurp FaceBook may well
end up just integrating with them instead.

------
gammarator
_"A trend I have noticed among my friends is the decreasing number of status
updates posted to Facebook. Just six months ago my news feed would have been
filled with the daily dribblings of my friends. Now there are less than a
handful of status updates in my newsfeed, often from the same 5 people."_

I wonder if this was an algorithmic change by Facebook in their "Top News"
section. I noticed an extremely sharp decline in the number of new stories I
see when I log in, starting a couple of months ago. There's plenty in "Most
Recent," however, so it's just getting filtered out.

For me personally, it's made Facebook seem much less interesting and decreased
my usage. I'm sure they're watching the numbers, though...

~~~
entangld
Facebook friends are not really friends. There is a huge level of distrust in
the community when you can't speak your mind for fear of being fired or tagged
in compromising photos.

These are not real concerns I have when I'm among real friends.

~~~
mryall
One of my colleagues has a very strict rule that he does not become friends
with current work colleagues on Facebook or any other social network. Seems
like a good idea to me, although there is sometimes a blurry line when you
work with some of your good friends. I'm sure having such a rule makes him
less concerned about the compromising photos or status postings.

------
joebadmo
So, what does the future look like?

Will everyone abandon Facebook en masse, just like they did AOL and Myspace?
Or did Facebook really win?

Will Google finally do something interesting in the space?

Will any of these open source distributed/federated interoperative social
networks catch on? All of them?

I sort of hope for a combination the last two. It doesn't look like any of the
big players have an incentive to open up and become interoperable, and it
doesn't look like any of the new open/distributed upstarts are getting any
sort of real traction. Google's the only big player that has a history of
demonstrating a willingness to push open/distributed/interoperable data
because an open web is a crawlable web is an advertisable web.

Once the social networking/identity thing is more open and distributed, I
imagine networks like Facebook becoming more like a place to go to hang out
with certain people and share certain things, with various other places for
different contexts and different appropriate activities, and different degrees
of privacy, but all working from a single, centralized identity.

~~~
farlington
What's the advantage of open information in the context of social
applications? Excluding of course social networks built on mutual interest,
like twitter or quora. With real-world friends, family, contacts, etc., the
closed nature of facebook is what makes it attractive to me. And I think
that's true for most users. It's probably why there's massive outrage every
time they relax their privacy defaults.

Maybe data portability? But data on facebook is portable enough, and even if
it weren't, what are you going to import it in? Some hypothetical future rival
social network? I imagine for a majority of users, simply viewing a friend's
profile to remember an email address, phone number, etc, is enough.

~~~
joebadmo
I think privacy is actually a good reason for strong data portability. If
users can easily leave your service for another, you have a strong incentive
not to violate their privacy expectations. To extrapolate that point out:
strong data portability and interoperability encourage a competitive
environment.

I think you're conflating "closed" with "private." An open social networking
environment can still harbor private (I would argue more private) sharing
contexts.

~~~
farlington
You're absolutely right, I did conflate 'closed' and 'private'.

But what about my second point? You can download your facebook data. Or is it
not 'strongly portable' enough, in your opinion?

~~~
joebadmo
From what I understand, it's not an easy process and you can't download
important stuff, like your social graph (I think you only get plaintext names,
not email addresses, etc.)

~~~
farlington
It's a one click download. OK, actually two clicks, but it's a very clean,
unconfusing process. <https://www.facebook.com/download/>

Not to mention the graph api. They're very good about giving you all the
information you as a user might want (photos, links, messages, wall posts)
What it doesn't give you is the kind of data that a competitor might want.

------
dstein
Back in the olden times people built personal websites, customized them to
their liking, and posted creative things they made, their photography and
other hobbies, and writings (which eventually got renamed "blogs"). Some of
these websites had interesting private discussion forums that were separate
from the rest of the internet. It was a glorious time... and then Blogger, and
Facebook, and Twitter came along and normalized everything, leaving only
status updates and pictures and useless ramblings.

There must be some sort of law that the internet's signal to noise ratio drops
proportionately to the growth of social networks.

~~~
raganwald
_There must be some sort of law that the internet's signal to noise ratio
drops proportionately to the growth of social networks._

Here it is: "The signal is highly concentrated in the early adopters of every
publishing technology."

That is to say, the people most likely to have something interesting to share
are the ones busy trying to find new ways to share it. Thus, when the Internet
first became available to the masses, the early adopters were people with
things to say but no easy way to share their ideas with people interested in
what they had to say. So they put up home pages and essays.

Then the masses came on board and businesses catered to them and we got
FrontPage and GeoCities and the signal dropped to zero. We can see the same
thing in every forum, in Slashdot, in Reddit, and here. Early adopters are
invariably chagrined to see the laggards driving the signal to noise down,
some leave in search of new media with an opportunity to enjoy the high signal
of halcyon days. Eventually the older media have an Eternal September, and the
combination of high signal early adopters leaving and a sudden wave of new
laggards joining the signal down to nearly zero, and suddenly everyone is
dissatisfied.

While not every early adopter has something interesting to say and not every
laggard is taciturn, the proportion of writers to readers is higher amongst
the early adopters of any communication medium than it is amongst the
laggards, which creates the phenomenon you observed.

~~~
saturdayplace
_That is to say, the people most likely to have something interesting to share
are the ones busy trying to find new ways to share it._

That can't be entirely right, can it? A medium's early adopters are _really_
the most likely to have interesting things to say? How can the two possibly be
correlated? I agree that there's an obvious pattern between signal:noise ratio
and community size, but my gut tells me the _reason_ is likely more than "the
early adopters were more interesting."

I can't find the source now, but I recall reading an article that posed
another explanation: communities start out small, and the members know the
rules/mores/norms and abide them. When a newb steps out of line, the
graybeard:newb ratio is small enough that it's not hard for the community's
graybeards to reinforce the rules with the him. As the community grows, the
definition of what's interesting to it gets more vague and distorted, like a
drawing on a balloon that's continually inflated. And if it grows quickly, the
graybeard:newb ratio drops. Both factors make it harder to enforce the
interesting-ness norms.

~~~
jdminhbg
"A medium's early adopters are really the most likely to have interesting
things to say? How can the two possibly be correlated?"

Since you are asking for a possible explanation, and not a provable one:

People with lots of good things to say naturally seek out places where what
they say is not drowned out by meaningless noise. This means that whenever a
new publishing medium is established, they jump on it in order to say their
good things before Zynga figures out how to use it to broadcast pleas for help
milking virtual cows or whatever.

------
sobbybutter
I think what made facebook appealing in the beginning was the "post an update,
get an immediate reaction" phenomenon. The number of posts was small enough
and the number of friendly eyes high enough that the probability of even the
smallest discourse was high. Add to that the fact that one's list of "friends"
starts relatively small and encompasses a higher ratio of people who are
actual friends. Over time, one's list of "friends" expands to the point where
a user's feed is comprised of non-relevant information. For me at least, it
lessens the desire to contribute content knowing that that content will be
diluted in the huge sea of updates. The same holds true for reading my news
feed; I don't want to comb through lots of posts to find a few that are
interesting.

Note: I write this post from my own experience as a college student. It may
very well be different from how others use facebook.

------
aridiculous
This thread is making me reflect on my 7-8 years of using Facebook.

To be honest, I'm surprised I'm still on it, but I am. It's the best way for
me to send media bits to people I like. It's easier than email for me.

However, I'm a sharer, and many people I know aren't. I don't really have a
clue why they're on Facebook then (if they are). It does seem kind of dry.

In college, it was awesome because it was a community setting where you could
find out about acquaintances (i.e. stalking) in a trusted network setting. It
was OPEN within a CLOSED off system. I could see that still being the case to
a certain degree in some social groups or large companies.

But the stripping down, deemphasis and normalization of the profile, turning
it from a 'face book' into a social news tool was the inflection point for me.
Facebook was great when you could surf people, not news. The funny thing is,
Facebook was catalyzed tremendously by their decision to go into social news
(i.e. news posted by people you know), and it'd be weird to see it causing
their downfall (like a huge investment that looks great at first).

I doubt that's going to be the case, as the social graph infiltrates through
the internet and 'like' buttons show up on every e-commerce site in innovative
ways. I don't think Facebook truly has much to worry about as they're
basically becoming the ID gatekeeper to the internet. I just don't think
social news is something particularly interesting, and I'd like to see them
deemphasize that part of their business. I think they should focus on making
the news feed less of a potpourri of news (Twitter, HN, microforums, NY times,
CNN, and so on own that already) and try to innovate ways to emphasize
microcommunities on Facebook. The groups feature was an attempt, but didn't
really strike gold. I'd like to see them try out more things like that.

I could be way off. I suspect Facebook is just losing touch with nerdy people
who are more interested in things, not people. It's probably doing well with
people who generally like smalltalk.

------
zinssmeister
I think the biggest part of this change in facebook usage is that we all just
grew out of this college network and started adding co-workers and all sorts
of other mature audience. This then causes you to tread facebook as a
different kind of communication tool. I guess you can say the experience on
facebook just matured all together and people are using it differently.
Everyone is more cautious about the way they come across on the social graph
and what they make public.

After all thanks to Zynga we now all got our mothers, relatives and what not
as facebook friends. And like the article says, who has time to setup lists?!

------
bergie
I found Facebook useful back when I was single - less creepy than real dating
sites, and much better coverage of people from my circles. But even that
utility is diminishing, as people appear to do less there.

Of course, I know many people who practically live on Facebook, but I suppose
that is mainly due to boring desk jobs instead of actual gossip addiction.

If Facebook starts winding down, it will be interesting to see how all those
millions of sites relying on FB for their social features and authentication
cope.

------
kin
With 600 million users you can't just generalize a noticeable trend in your
personal account to reflect that of others. If anything, my Facebook feed has
been more active than ever.

View a friend's profile and FB will know you show interest in that person,
putting that person's stream on a higher rank to show up on your feed. The
feed becomes more relevant the more you use it I suppose.

There may be a lot of small talk on Facebook, but for me that normally leads
to longer discussions in person.

------
erikpukinskis
Cachey-cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BEkQRiU...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BEkQRiUb2hgJ:rachelbaker.me/facebook-
big-boring/+http://rachelbaker.me/facebook-big-boring/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1)

~~~
rachelbaker
Site should be back up in a few minutes.

------
kariatx
I can't help but wonder if the "Hide" button has sucked all the meaningful
engagement out of Facebook. I don't know about anyone else, but I have about
80% of my "friends" hidden. Over the past year, Facebook has pretty much
become a ghost town for me compared to a few years ago.

~~~
alextp
I'm in the same situation, but unhiding friends to recover sense is just not
practical, with all the app-spam going around facebook these days.

I might be the only one in here who can't stand viral-app-spam, but in my
social circle there's a sharp division between people who can and who can't
stand it, and I think this is in part responsible to the huge drop in
interaction in facebook.

------
lazylland
There are so many updates that I miss from people I care about, and chance
upon them much later !

* There doesn't seem to be a way to _explicity_ follow all the updates of a person

* If I manage to get my friends into a group, their updates still don't show up in the group

* The current News Feed algorithm is weighed a little too tightly to the people I interact with often

Hmm .. maybe I should try writing a client with these features ;)

------
osamet67
Facebook taught the world what's social networking - now it's time for
interest groups and niche SNs. It's just natural progression.

------
dsplittgerber
Back in the times of Geocities, everyone's site was unique(ly ugly). Today,
everyone's facebook page looks exactly the same. Geez, and you wonder why
rate-of-use will probably decline over time?

Facebook et al. will not be the end of connecting with people online. Now that
everyone's been pressed into a one-size-fits-all and the lowest common
denominator has been found (satisfying your curiosity what your hs buddies are
up to, who got fatter last year etc.), the game will start anew for the new
shiny thing - connecting people while at the same time bringing out their best
sides.

------
BrandonM
The article makes some very good points, but I would love to make a copy-
editing pass over it.

------
alexsb92
I think the biggest fallacy of all of these articles is that people don't seem
to give any thought to the fact that they only see updates from a handful of
people. The reason why that is, is because FB has algorithms to figure out who
you are talking to most of the time, and basically only shows updates form
people who you talk to, or people whose profile you have visited. I deduced
this by myself over a year ago, and recently I was watching some interviews
with Sean Parker and he was actually talking about this.

So it's just like in real life, the way you have good friends with whom you
talk a lot, and just friends you talk to every once in a while, FB does the
same thing.

------
amanuel
This has happened to every social network that has come before and it will
happen again.

Facebook like its predecessors Myspace, Friendster et al., is not the
destination but rather the current milestone in the evolution of the Internet,
the real Social Network.

------
Legion
"Big and boring"... I thought this was going to be another one of those posts
about writing "boring" code instead of being excessively clever, as boring is
well tested and boring is easily maintained.

Instead, it's another "I don't like using Facebook" post.

Joy.

------
dotme
by the end of this year people will realise that there is life outside fb.

~~~
rachelbaker
Where will they go? I guess that is what I am wondering.

~~~
forensic
They don't have to go anywhere. Most communication will continue to happen
through gossip, as it should.

Facebook is stupid because it has become a social obligation to "friend"
people on it, and like you pointed out, way too hard to set up effective
privacy measures.

Normal people are scared of public speaking.

------
mmurph211
Couldn't agree more with the post

~~~
rachelbaker
Thank you for reading!

------
Vmabuza
Couldnt see the article the site is down.Nevertheless i think Facebook has
become more about ''Likes and Comments Hunting'' and photo Viewing and sooner
or later we will get tired of this.There will come a time where being on
facebook is such a lame thing to do and is as shame as being caught by your
friends viewing Adultfinder.

~~~
rachelbaker
I am sorry the site was down. I agree, soon being on Facebook will be equal to
still being on Friendster

------
amitraman1
Facebook is not boring but I do think the Fan pages have way too many updates.
They get in the way of updates from my friends.

~~~
lurker19
Monetization will always interfere with user experience in a system whose
value is amplified by network effects.

------
tokenadult
I read the fine blog post submitted here (by the author of the blog post). I
then posted the link to my Facebook profile, with the question "Does Facebook
bore you?" Then I read the comments here on HN. In just that short span of
time, three of my friends replied to my question, saying,

1) "Not with friends like mine!"

2) no

3) "Not yet."

I find Facebook interesting, because I take care to put interesting people on
my friends list. (I have removed one person from my friends list for only
participating in online games with total strangers and never interacting with
anyone he actually knows in real life. I have blocked three other persons from
my home page feed, but still allow them to comment on things I post, for
similar overuse of online games.)

To comment on some of the issues brought up in the interesting comments here,
one good use case on Facebook is a group of friends with a defined commonality
forming a "private group."

(Again, I try to Google up the page on Facebook's help about creating private
groups, and again Facebook has an epic fail of making that link prominent. But
here it is,

<https://www.facebook.com/groups>

found after I drilled into Facebook's Help Center a bit. The Help Center page
about groups features

<https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=414>

is perhaps even more helpful.) I have a THRIVING private group including a
whole bunch of friends who are currently or were formerly subscribers to the
national email list of a membership organization we have all been part of. The
official email lists of the organization have gone increasingly quiet, as
everyone moves over to Facebook, where the atmosphere is at once more fun
(more light-hearted topics) and more serious (gut-wrenching intimate topics
that are easier to share to a specific group of friends than to all
subscribers to an email list).

Facebook is also working very well in reconnecting me with old classmates whom
I have not seen in more than thirty years but whom I look forward to seeing in
a massive multi-class reunions this summer that has mostly been organized on
Facebook. That has been very enjoyable.

I have to agree that it's a bit odd that status updates are no longer
prominent even on people's own profiles, but I think Facebook has figured out
by analysis of user behavior that most Facebook readers are even more
interested in links (my favorite thing to post, which brings me a big
readership on Facebook and elicits many fun discussions) or photos (some of
some of my friends' favorite things to post).

P.S. I have to agree with the comments below that if you want to post on a
site without a "house style," Geocities used to have that market covered, and
MySpace still does. It does improve usability of Facebook that some of the
basic page design decisions are made by a small group of evidently
professional designers rather than by the whole population of Facebook users.
Profiles pages show individuality by the actual content posted by each
Facebook user, and that is good enough for me.

P.P.S. By the time I finished typing this, two more friends had replied to my
question:

4) "I agree - with the right friends, how could it be boring?"

5) "I believe it was Samuel Johnson who said, "When a man is tired of
Facebook, he is tired of life."

~~~
bostonvaulter2
You do realize that the people that responded are a very self-selecting group
right?

------
bostonvaulter2
It would be really cool if Facebook was able to suggest groupings for your
friends. They probably have enough data to do a half-decent job of it.

Also, they should make some sort of more visual method to sort people into
lists. Maybe like a venn-diagram.

------
orph
Are you kidding me? Facebook just contributed to toppling a dictatorship in
Egypt.

We are still seeing the rippling effects that this form of social interaction
brings to people's lives. I don't think that's boring at all.

------
jacoblyles
I have too many friends on Facebook because it is impolite to refuse a friend
request. Now I don't feel comfortable sharing things with the wide network of
"friends" that I have there.

------
jcfrei
I'm sure one amongst us will come up with something that brings down fb. no
single company will _ever_ be able to grasp the whole social experience.

------
sabat
So invent something better. Don't just complain. OP has taken what is actual
innovation and groundswell for granted. Not enough? Then innovate.

~~~
MostExtremeCake
It is not the responsibility of the critic to fix problems.

Often, these kinds of articles are met with the "Well YOU build something and
then you can talk" responses. This kind of response is an attack on the person
making the argument (or at least their qualifications) and not on the argument
itself.

~~~
sabat
_It is not the responsibility of the critic to fix problems._

I strongly disagree, obviously, and find it disconcerting that you've gotten
upvotes. This is a community of makers, and apparently it's becoming a
community of bitchers and whiners. The OP's argument is the equivalent of
Beavis and Butthead: "this place used to be cool, but now it sucks." It's
useless and unhelpful.

Thinking of joining Jacques in going silent.

 _This kind of response is an attack on the person_

No, this is not _argumentum ad hominem_. I'm not attacking the person, just
suggesting that if she feels that strongly, she she should go build something.
Bitching is useless.

