

Facebook could reboot and we'd mess it up again - kul
http://www.hunterwalk.com/2012/01/sorry-mike-facebook-could-reboot-and.html

======
shadowfiend
The trouble is this assumption that Facebook as it is now is “messed up”. What
if it's not messed up? What if, for the simple majority, even the vast
majority of people, Facebook is actually just fine? Maybe we _like_ the fact
that we see updates from people we don't know as closely. Maybe we _enjoy_
being able to stay in touch with people we maybe weren't that close with in
person? What if perhaps we're interested in hearing at least the stuff they
post on Facebook? Maybe we establish relationships that couldn't have been
established otherwise, because of circumstances, distance, opportunity,
whatever? Maybe we're willing to deal with the noise, because we end up with
signal we wouldn't have otherwise? Maybe it's just an appeal to a base desire
for gossip?

In short, maybe Michael Arrington's (and the author's) aspect of what could
make Facebook better is just... Wrong? Maybe the reason Facebook is so
successful is because they picked the _right_ path, not the wrong one.

~~~
hunterwalk
The question of "is this assumption even right for most people" is certainly a
fair one. My observations which were driven from personal experience as well
as various data/user research suggest that at least SOME meaningful percentage
of people find utility decay in social network design.

My main point is that just restarting these systems won't solve this problem
for those who have it, because we'll rush towards this same race condition.
Rather my product suggestions allow for release valves without fundamentally
altering the value that a Facebook, G+, Twitter, etc deliver.

~~~
crag
"...that at least SOME meaningful percentage of people find utility decay in
social network design."

Define "Some"? I mean, you can never please 100% of your user base. Ever.

And to be crude, who cares if 5% of the user base doesn't like the service?
Then leave. You don't _have_ to be on Facebook. You don't _have_ to be on
Twitter. Or do you?

I mean, people want to be popular.

~~~
hunterwalk
my hypothesis is that (a) no one likes "noise" (b) everyone has a different
notion of what "noise" is and (c) these systems are designed to amplify noise
(but there are ways to create noise dampeners).

Personally I find my direct usage of some mature social networks decreasing
for the reasons that Mike and I outlined.

~~~
henrikschroder
But it's also important to know that the tools are there in all service sto
decrease the noise and increase the signal.

You can unfriend people. You can unfollow. You can unsubscribe. You can
hide/block/remove almost everything you don't like.

I get your point that human nature makes it a lot harder to do these things,
but the tools are there. Every time I meet people who complain about some
social services I tell them that the services are exactly what you make them,
and not the other way around. They are so broad, so general, and so open that
you can make your experience exactly as you want it.

And that's important to remember. If Facebook sucks for you, it's mostly
because YOU made it suck. :)

~~~
aGHz
That doesn't mean we can't look for ways to make the situation better. To cut
along the grain of human nature, so to speak.

------
akkartik
_"we say we love high signal, low noise services but then proceed to bring the
noise."_

I wrote about this 2 years ago:

 _"People will jump to the next great thing, somewhere along the facebook-
twitter-friendfeed trajectory, and they'll find it works so much better!
They'll think it's because of some shiny new feature in the new tool. They'll
never realize it's just that they're subscribed to less crap. So they'll start
subscribing to crap again, and the cycle will repeat."_

<http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-05-19-21-30-46-soc>

~~~
hunterwalk
right on! thanks for sharing

------
jonnathanson
_"Imagine Twitter without public follower/following counts..."_

I suspect it wouldn't work -- due in some part to vanity, and in a large part
to the well established social-psychological phenomenon of "social proof." As
a species, we like things that are popular. Conversely, we are hesitant to
sample things, let alone subscribe to them, until they've been validated by
others. Ideally, we seek things that have been validated by others of high
social status. But in a pinch, validation by a large number of people will do
the trick.

We keep social score. And, even if we don't consciously realize or even accept
it, we want others to know our own score.

I tend to agree with most of your points, though. As you very eloquently put
it, our natural tendency is to accumulate noise -- even if we claim to want
signal clarity. Google+'s circles are a great attempt to let us have our cake
(noise) and eat it, too (signal). But over time, I imagine that the act of
constant social curation and message-filtering will grow more tiresome than
it's worth for many users. That's just a hunch, and it's totally
unsubstantiated by any data I have, or could ever hope to get my hands on. At
least for now.

~~~
hunterwalk
i had heard, and don't know how credible this is, that early on there was
discussion at Twitter about hiding follower/following counts from public view.
The notion was they were designing a system w constraints (140 characters) and
were willing to buck convention. Would love to hear from Jack or Ev on this
one day.

~~~
jonnathanson
If such a discussion was had, I'd also be very curious to hear the details of
it. I imagine the followers display was carefully considered, and I'd love to
have been a fly on the wall for the conversations on reasons why vs. reasons
why not.

Part of me thinks, well, maybe they could just split the difference and make
the display an opt-outable feature.

But I think the genie is well out of the bottle at this point. We now inhabit
a world in which a lot of people make their livings based on Twitter fanbase
reach (or, really, on the public display thereof, given that they're not
_actually_ capable of engaging every single follower with every single tweet).
And I think there'd be an interesting psychological game afoot if various
people started opting out of the display. Would others see that as some sort
of admission of lower status? Would they see it as somehow antisocial?
Personally speaking, I think it would be a nice feature to have, and I
wouldn't care about who did and did not display his counts. But if I've
learned anything in my life, it's that my preferences are atypical.

------
temuze
> When he invented the telephone, Thomas Edison called Watson, not someone he
> barely met at the town bar.

I think the author meant Alexander Graham Bell :)

Also, Google Plus added a "Volume Control" feature to control noise. I've got
high hopes for it - you can increase or decrease the output from one circle
into the main stream. [http://www.simplyzesty.com/google/have-google-cracked-
the-bi...](http://www.simplyzesty.com/google/have-google-cracked-the-biggest-
problem-in-social-media/)

~~~
hunterwalk
yeah, duh, fixed that now. You should be proud that thousands of other people
didn't catch that. Or maybe we should be scared thousands of other people
didn't catch that :)

------
baddox
I have quite literally never heard anyone brag even jokingly, or for that
matter even mention their friend count on Facebook. The few friend counts I've
noticed and remembered, including my own, have all hovered around 150-200. I
think his claim that Facebook friend count is a motivating popularity metric
like Twitter's follower count is spurious.

~~~
hunterwalk
Really? That's certainly not my experience. I'd be curious to hear from other
folks on this thread. I bet your view here is pretty unique.

~~~
henrikschroder
I have about 200 friends, I have met all of them in real life, I occasionally
add new people, but I also remove people when I realize I don't care about
them and what they do. I care about my friend count, but in the opposite way,
I want to keep it low, and meaningful. The same is true for most of my
friends. Most of them only add other people they actually know.

As for posting, neither me nor my friends use Facebook for chatting. It's
photos and status updates about what we are doing or going to do. It's almost
never questions, only statements. Then again, me and my friends are in our
mid-thirties, none of us "grew up" with Facebook, none of us used it at
university, and the common topics are work and kids and vacations.

I have a number of friends on Facebook that are younger around 20, extended
family and the like, and they use it in a completely different way: They add
more friends. They never remove friends. They have no critera for friends
other than "doesn't dislike", it doesn't matter if they don't know the person
well or not.

They also use it a lot more for public chatting. Someone posts a status
update, and then two or three people have an unrelated conversation in the
comments to that, because... it's an input field and it was there and they
know the relevant friends will see it.

And that's just two different ways of using it, I'm sure there are a myriad
more and I have absolutely no idea which way is the most common. But it's
pretty clear from your post, and from the piece by Arrington that both of you
bring your own biases into it. You both think that most other people have the
same Facebook experience as you do.

So Arrington goes "Facebook sucks for me, therefore all of Facebook is
broken!". You're much, much less egocentric, but still, I wouldn't make the
bet that you did that the grandparent post's view was unique. :-)

------
DirkScheuring
_Hunter's rule: Any communication service which publicly displays a metric
serving as a proxy for popularity will cause users to take steps to increase
that number._

I'm sorry, but as a "ground rule", this seems just wrong to me.

There are many ways and many reasons to use e.g. Facebook as a communication
service that have nothing to do with "being popular". Let me describe just
one: I have a pseudonymous Facebook profile which gathers a number of people I
have worked and played with before; some of them I know for more than 30 years
already. Additions to this group happen, but are rare; these people are
special to me, a status which is not for everybody. Each one in there is an
important voice in my life, representing their values as they post their daily
findings to my feed. Since I'm also all locked down against games and other
apps, I have no problems with my signal-to-noise ratio being low.

------
hunterwalk
thanks for adding this to hacker news. I wrote it and happy to discuss if
folks have comments

~~~
kul
you're welcome :). I personally miss the early 2006 days of Twitter. Twitter
now is a fundamentally different product than what it used to be. Alas.

------
richardburton
I have got _really_ into Path since leaving Facebook. I have been very strict
about who I accept and it has given me the best parts of Facebook without all
the dross. I am in love with social networking again. You can follow me on
twitter here: www.twitter.com/ricburton ;)

------
muppetman
Isn't this obvious? This is the human ego at play. We all like to imagine we
have a lot of friends. To feel important. So we add lots of people, bigger
numbers, more people, more contacts etc. It's just human nature, isn't it?

~~~
mushishi
I don't care if I have a lot of friends. I actually have actively prevented
forming potential friendships. I think you are overgeneralizing.

------
jfornear
Twitter/Facebook need a "refresh" button that would unfollow/unfriend everyone
and let you start over.

~~~
hunterwalk
of all the services, Twitter makes it the easiest to unfollow albeit at the
individual level. Try severing a LinkedIn connection w someone - astoundingly
challenging.

------
nemik
Anyone watch that South Park episode with Walmart?

