

Facebook Home – What Can Go Wrong - andrewmunsell
http://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/facebook-home-gone-wrong/

======
gvb
_Your Facebook Home experience, like the website itself, is solely determined
by your freinds' activity._

Term: Facebook IQ

Definition: The floor function of the IQ of the set containing all of your
Facebook "friends"... and all of _their_ friends.

In plain terms, on Facebook you can never be any smarter than the stupidest of
your friends (to the second degree).

~~~
tokenadult
_In plain terms, on Facebook you can never be any smarter than the stupidest
of your friends (to the second degree)._

Do you think that is invariably true? I learn a lot from a lot of my Facebook
friends. One of those friends calls my wall the "PBS of Facebook" (a reference
to the public television network in the United States) because we mostly
discuss links (some of which I see first here on HN) and have thoughtful
discussions of research and policy issues. Sure, once in a while one of us
passes around a photoshopped picture with a silly caption, but most of the
time we keep things intellectually engaging and civil, much like HN at its
best. (Just a few of my Facebook friends are also members of the HN
community.) I think the atmosphere of a group of Facebook friends can be
shaped by example, just like any other local culture.

~~~
fakeer
>> _Do you think that is invariably true? Do you think that is invariably
true?_

I guess he is not referring to an entire time-line of incidents and taking an
average out of that. But the isolated lows and highs. Minimums and maximums.
Read it as a friend posting an image with a sensational and stupid caption
posing it as a video which leads to a link to a spam site, now imagine that
friend doing it again again(marking it spam/hiding doesn't work - Facebook
gives you the option just to screw with you). Now, imagine a friend posting
sth _not stupid_ , like an informative link or a question or s statement or
his thoughts that sparks a very healthy discussion - this is extremely rare on
Facebook, unlike HN and Quora(better still). You've got your high and low.

It's an entirely different aspect if you have a highly curated list of
Facebook friends. Spam haters, privacy aficionados(can't think why they would
be on Fb), thinkers, minimalists etc etc. Or simply your (all, without even
curating the friend list) friends are just what I have mentioned above. You
are lucky because mine aren't and I don't know anyone whose are.

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0majors
You guys know that you can unfollow people while staying friends on FB, right?
I personally enjoy 90-100% of the updates on my wall thanks to unfollowing
everyone who regularly post rubbish. I wish Twitter would allow it too!

~~~
epidemian
What would be the purpose of "following" someone on Twitter if you don't want
to read what they say? Genuinely curious; i'm not a Twitter user, but AFAIK
the "following" relation there is unidirectional (i.e. you don't have to
follow people that follow you).

~~~
0majors
I like to have my friends on Twitter so I can shoot them @ messages but as
soon as the number of people I follow goes above around 100 the signal to
noise ratio turns me off. I don't have the time or the interest to read all of
that to find couple of good tweets. I'm a light Twitter user due to this; I
assume creating lists can help.

~~~
jarek
If only there were any other ways of messaging people on the internet

~~~
jamesrcole
So? Why do you even need the Internet? You could just SMS them? or why do you
even need SMS? Why not just send them snail mail letters or see them in
person?

There are certain pros and cons -- differeing levels of convenience being one
of them -- of every communications medium and your response completely ignores
that.

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tonycoco
Isn't this just due to the fact that your friends are clowns and not the fact
that Facebook Home can _go wrong_?

~~~
sukuriant
None of your friends clown around on FB? I don't have a FB account, but I
figured it'd be full of things like that

~~~
jamesaguilar
I don't remember ever seeing poop on my Facebook (N=sufficient). Maybe it's an
age thing.

~~~
sukuriant
Fair; but, what about other things you wouldn't want your boss, or your mom,
or anyone you know to see?

Your friend completely trashed with markings on him? His friend like that?

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krcz
Hard mode: make it take pictures from reddit.com/r/FiftyFifty.

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jiggy2011
This sort of thing is why I want some form of account switching on my phone.
Ideally with a guest account that allows basic web browsing and phone
functionality but all my personal stuff requires authentication of some kind.

I had a situation like this where I was away on business, and ended up at a
bar with a guy I worked with. He asked to borrow my phone for a minute to
check something online.

So I give him the phone without thinking, I would feel like a bit of a dick
saying no.

When he hands me the phone back and I go to the homescreen I find I have a new
message, turns out it's a colourful message from a lady friend.

Then it suddenly hits me that whenever I receive a new message it
automatically scrolls across the top of the screen..

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babuskov
Looks like another chicken and egg problem. Your friends won't learn to behave
unless they see a reason for it. Knowing that you use Facebook Home might
become that reason if they also start using it and see other crap (pun
intended) on the screen.

~~~
rococo
Right, so drunk people at 3AM are going to say "Oh wait, what if one of my
friends has Facebook Home?"? Not likely.

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taopao
Great, now my entire phone can be monopolized by the bored spouses of my
friends.

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ibudiallo
I don't know about you guys, but there is a lot of gore on facebook. When i
was a regular user i constantly had to flag some content. So yeah, have fun
with that on your phone screen.

~~~
magicarp
Never seen gore on Facebook, was it by your friends or shared?

~~~
ibudiallo
it was shared. and i happened to have many friends in Egypt, so think about
the situation in Egypt and the kind of pictures that go through my feed.

These of course is not the case for everyone, but everyone has different
experience, but most of the time we don't want to see what our friends post on
our homepage. Either people will get used to it, like Timeline, or the app
will be a failure.

------
mikecx
Sounds to me like you need to have a discussion with your friends or pare down
your friends list. If you are old enough to have a boss and a schedule, your
friends should be old enough to not post a photo of their morning
accomplishment. Problem solved.

~~~
gfodor
The problem is that the weakest link in the chain is the problem. Also,
alcohol.

------
littlemerman
It would be pretty easy for Facebook to filter out inappropriate content.

~~~
bentcorner
Define "pretty easy". How is FB supposed to know if something is inappropriate
for you?

~~~
mongol
It's pretty easy to state that on Hacker News. It just takes a few keypresses.

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vowelless
You have a typo 'freinds' in the third paragraph

~~~
andrewmunsell
Thanks, pushing a fix.

