

Poll of Facebook Users Finds 94% Hate Redesign - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/19/facebook-polls-users-on-redesign-94-hate-it/

======
mdasen
The issue with the new Facebook is that people used Facebook as a way to
connect with random people they kinda met. Random people you've kinda met
often have pictures you might find interesting or contact info you'd like to
look up. You don't want to be updated on what they're doing every day - you
just don't care. And so now people are inundated with information they just
don't want because they really only care about a small subset of their
friends. Twitter, on the other hand, being based around this philosophy
doesn't require two-way relationships and people "followed" others knowing
that they wanted this data flying at them.

I don't know whether this stat is valid or anything, but I think Facebook just
has a different social graph than sites like Twitter and that Facebook's graph
isn't people you want these style updates on.

~~~
unalone
That's why it's so great that they let you X out on anybody you don't want to
see. Once you realize it's there, it's almost an impulse click.

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jfarmer
This is probably worth reading: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias>

~~~
gamache
Selection bias exists, but it doesn't explain away numbers like "700,000" and
"94%". The fact is that Facebook pissed off a _huge_ number of their users,
for seemingly no good reason, as the previous design was quite popular and
functional.

~~~
jfarmer
First, 700,000 isn't "huge" for Facebook. They gain about that many new users
in a day.

Second, the number of respondees or the proportion responding a certain way
are irrelevant if the sample is biased. The poll is designed in a way that
practically guarantees bias: a self-selected sample, a hot-button issue where
one side cares much more strongly than the other, and the viral hooks of
Facebook to make sure it gets spread far and wide.

It's worthless if you're looking to draw any real conclusions about how
Facebook users feel about the new homepage. It's not worthless if you're
looking to exploit people's confirmation bias and get an article all over the
web.

So, YMMV, I guess.

~~~
fixie
Reference for ~700,000 new users per day

[http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/12/16/facebook-now-
growin...](http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/12/16/facebook-now-growing-by-
over-600000-users-a-day-and-new-engagement-stats/)

~~~
gamache
Thank you for this link.

It also reports 13 million users log in once per day. That, in the context of
Facebook, is what I'd call an "active user". These, overwhelmingly, are the
people who are taking this poll. 700,000 therefore represents about 5% of the
core userbase.

~~~
teej
> 700,000 therefore represents about 5% of the core userbase.

Your math here is really flawed. Facebook's daily uniques are a magnitude
smaller than their weekly and monthly uniques. Since this survey has been up
since the redesign, you would have to compare 700k to the number of uniques
over that period of time. I can assure you that number is much greater than
13M.

~~~
gamache
I'd bet you a dollar that at least 3/4 of the poll-takers are dailies. These
are the users who really are taking this personally.

~~~
teej
The whole point of this argument has been over statistical invalidity. Your
guesses are pointless without data.

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joshwa
<http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=68992161659>

> This application was _not_ developed by Facebook.

~~~
catone
Yeah, another semi-misleading headline from TechCrunch. It's not a "Facebook
Poll" (since only Facebook itself can actually run polls these days, iirc),
it's a third party app that is polling Facebook users.

Edit: Looks like Arrington updated the headline after someone pointed that
out... still not a very clear headline since it misleadingly labels this a
"Facebook Poll," when it is in fact a Facebook app that is polling users.

Perhaps semantics, but an important distinction given that actual Facebook
polls are only available to Facebook.

~~~
pg
Fixed.

------
Dauntless
The new Facebook is horrible and confusing, the main page is just a rubbish of
“what country you are” or “what language would you be” from different friends,
but I can’t see any useful information in a see of stupid game scores and
crazy app stuff. This stuff is not even chronological, and I can’t remove a
story to clean it up, I can only block all stories from a user (which is a bit
much). Anyway, it’s garbage.

Edit: also only 9 big stories on home page... wtf. And older posts returns
"There are no more posts to show right now" after just two clicks.

~~~
electromagnetic
They don't even stack posts by the same people, I've got 4 messages from one
person, all within the space of an hour and no other posts between. Yet all
four are displaying, why?

The highlights, display new photo groups... yet a selection of the photos are
displayed on the home page anyway. The entire highlight section is completely
moronic, it just displays less information in a _less_ convenient way and
there's no way to control, remove or filter any of this.

I _really_ don't need to know my wife's cousin has joined the 'I Love Sex'
group when I've already removed her stuff from my homepage.

I also have serious problems with Facebook's 'People You May Know' crap,
because it's completely unintelligent. There's no way to prioritize your
relationships with people, so I'm suggested friends of my wife's cousins who
live like a 28 hour drive away. My wife doesn't have the person on, I'm not
down as living anywhere near the person... so why does it suggest them to me
off of 2 people I know who know them, but doesn't suggest a single one of my
wifes friends?

It failed to suggest a family friend who comes over for coffee like 4 days a
week, yet it has suggested me someone from a different country before despite
having less mutual friends.

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psranga
For what it's worth, I like the new layout.

In particular, I like that I can just type whatever I want as a status message
instead of Facebook deciding that my message should be 'XYZ is <fill in>".

~~~
cookiecaper
This feature is quite old ... statuses have been "is"-free since roughly the
last overhaul, which was what, a year or so?

~~~
sounddust
Yeah, but you still had to start it with your name, and it's really difficult
to make correct sentences that start with your name in some languages (it can
even be difficult in English depending on what you're trying to say).

You can tell that this update had a lot to do with simplifying localisation,
in fact. A lot of text is gone. Instead of saying that someone was "tagged in
4 photos", it just says their name and shows the photos.

~~~
kiwidrew
For what it's worth, that was the one thing I really liked about the Facebook
status messages -- the last bastion of the old IRC /me command.

Somehow, having your name at the start of the textbox (and not being able to
erase it) seemed to force status updates to be terse and, well, third-person.
I've noticed that just in the last few days, this beautiful brevity has
completely disappeared.

[Edit: but I concede that it probably didn't work so well for other
languages...]

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tokenadult
I guess the awkward phrase "Facebook poll users" is a workaround for saying,
"Respondents to a voluntary response unscientific poll." We have no idea what
the majority of Facebook users feel about the new design. (I'm still deciding
what I think about it.) The usual FAQ applies:

VOLUNTARY RESPONSE POLLS

One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP
statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary
response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not
imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this
phrase.

[quote=Paul Velleman]

\-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu] Sent:
Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson Cc:
mmbalach@mtu.edu Subject: Re: qualtiative study

Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are _worthless_. One
excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses
from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are
roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only
qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous
example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response
is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a
substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a
biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all
about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description"
because they describe nothing but themselves.[/quote]

[http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...](http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tstart=36420)

~~~
Brushfire
I cant say whether you are the one, or someone else, but I see this exact,
word for word quote posted in almost any news story or post that relates to
polls or voluntary response data. I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment,
just the fact that you (or whoever) post the same comment/reference in many
stories. Wouldnt it just be easier to link, instead of perpetually pasting
this whole thing? I know it would annoy me less. /rant

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noamsml
Every redesign gets the same response.

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electromagnetic
I joined Facebook for Facebook, not for a twitter clone because I already have
an account for that.

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Loopy
I might just be cynical but i reckon that they are having problems getting
people to click on their ads. The redesigns seem to be attempts to fix that
problem.

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syntactic
All these missteps by Facebook sounds eerily like the MLS in the real estate
industry: a closed database that started as private property (belonging to
Realtors) and slowly being pried open by lawsuits and by companies who do a
much better job presenting the data (Zillow, Trulia, etc). Maybe Facebook
isn't a "platform", it's just a database, and eventually people will stop
using the site all together and access the database from a completely
different site that's customized to suit their needs/ tastes. People argued
that everyone had a right to listing info with houses (even though the MLS has
some confidential info, that was resolved), so why not with our personal data
(with privacy safeguards, of course)?

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neilo
"Hate" is a fairly strong reaction, no? My casual FB experience led me to be
lost, again, when trying to figure out how to set my status ... but I couldn't
muster enough reaction to go beyond: "meh". All my weird acquaintances are
still there and new/old friends/associates still find me through it, so the
value is less the UI and more Facebook's ubiquity. Personally, I prefer this
to Classmates.com, don't you?

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kwamenum86
"I hate it and if it doesn’t change I will only check it once in awhile"

Way to take a hard stance. </sarcasm> I think that this redesign, like the
others, will face opposition from nearly everyone at first and once people get
used to it they will like it or at the very least accept it. I think that
quote says it all. The user is unwilling to stop using the site despite hating
the design.

------
jacoblyles
It's Twitter, now, but a little better. It's okay.

~~~
gamache
Yeah, maybe it's better than Twitter, but it's not as good as it was a month
ago. They have removed the organizational features which brought me back to
the site after several years of avoiding it.

I can't see why they would want to "catch up" with Twitter, a distant second
place in the social networking race.

Another good article is "Facebook's Lousy Facelift" here:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-willman/facebooks-
lousy-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-willman/facebooks-lousy-
facelift_b_175358.html)

~~~
jacoblyles
Yeah, it is kind of weird to copy someone less successful than you. On the
other hand, it seems more addicting now with a more constant stream of
updates.

~~~
tokenadult
_Yeah, it is kind of weird to copy someone less successful than you._

Good general principle.

On my part, Facebook is less addictive to me than it was before the change. I
could easily forget that I'm a member, as nothing interesting is happening
there.

~~~
dotcoma
it is indeed weird to copy someone less successful than you, but very often in
software and web services, the simpler service wins - think wordpress over the
bloated CMSs of a decade ago, or SalesForce over SAP, or Adwords over
Doubleclick - so maybe it makes sense.

------
dbul
Don't use facebook, but when I hear about things like this I am baffled.
Haven't any of these engineers taken human factors courses? One of my brothers
works for Honda, and I asked him about the ergonomics of car design. His
response: at Honda, it is imperative that you design for 95% of the
population. It looks like facebook did the exact opposite.

~~~
dasil003
First of all, Facebook is not just engineers. Believe me, they have plenty of
interfacers designers, and they are masters of UI. Very very few sites have
the kind of depth and subtlety that Facebook has built in its recent
iterations.

What the users say about their opinion of the new design is completely
irrelevant. Users who are used to something will _always_ resist change that
removes something they are used to. The proof will be in the usage statistics.
Eventually Facebook will saturate the market and at that point they may end up
with more to gain by maintaining some level of familiarity. But for now I
think they are making the right moves to increase engagement, and I believe
the numbers will bear me out.

~~~
dbul
I hope that bet is right. Even so, there _must_ be a way to avoid this kind of
response. Sometimes debate to get into the news is good, but I think in this
case it would make more sense to have the response be "Facebook releases
awesome interface!" Apple was able to do it with the iPhone and while there
were people who didn't like the pseudo keyboard, the raves far outweighed the
complaints.

~~~
dasil003
The iphone was a new product, that's the difference.

The only thing comparable in the Apple world is the release of OS X. At the
time there was A LOT of complaint, much of it extremely well-reasoned.
Diehards clung to OS 9 for years for pure interface reasons. Of course Apple
didn't take quite as big a public opinion hit as Facebook due to the technical
benefits and the horrible obsolescence of OS 9.

Does Facebook need to avoid this backlash? Only if people actually stop using
it, which seems unlikely.

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gamache
It's worth noting that those of us with the Facebook for iPhone app can just
decline to update it, and retain an interface more like the pre-redesign
Facebook. I find it much more useful.

~~~
electromagnetic
Yet they've never given this option for people using Facebook on the PC. I
mean even windows when they came out with all the Live crap allowed hotmail
users to retain the original design.

------
quizbiz
Facebook has mastered the platform but failed the interface.

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dan_sim
94% of users are afraid to change.

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keltecp11
This is stupid and Bias... only people who 'dislike' the new layout would add
the application AND people don't like change. It is much easier to say 'I
don't like something' than to admit that it could be amazing! This riff raff
will die down in a week, watch.

~~~
gamache
Is it wrong to dislike when features are removed from a website? Is removal of
features and reinstating the single stream of everything, a la Facebook circa
2004, "amazing"?

~~~
unalone
There never was a "single stream of everything." There were always filters.
Facebook's stream is live for the very first time now.

