I feel like people on HN just want Facebook to fail. (Or be "disrupted.")
Facebook lets me chat with my girlfriend, my grandparents, and my college roommate all at the same time. It lets me upload pictures of my new apartment for people to see. It lets me comment with a bunch of other angry misanthropes about how the Heat are gonna blow it this year. Until another service lets me do that in one browser tab, I'm fine with sticking with Facebook.
(I notice a huge correlation, too, with people's feelings about Facebook and people's level of extroversion/social aptitude in general. I think some people, website or no website, are going to want to keep to themselves -- and no app is ever going to change that.)
This is Hacker News; the audience is comprised of people who could re-write the core of Facebook in a heartbeat and they are extremely critical. They're also quite smart; they know Facebook lets you chat with your girlfriend.
What they're saying is that Facebook is not working the way it should. It's partially due to its popularity, but it has diminished its usefulness.
Try this: Open it up right now and read the first 10 to 20 status updates and then count how many you care about, then count how many are important in any way. After doing that a few times (and trying to manage what updates I see, to improve things), I closed my account. (And I'm an extrovert!)
We are Hacker News. We know that technology and its uses is in a constant dialectic. Our members include Zuckerberg and very probably his successor. It's nothing personal; it's just how this works.
> "This is Hacker News; the audience is comprised of people who could re-write the core of Facebook in a heartbeat"
I'd amend that to say it's compromised of people who think they could rewrite the core of Facebook in a heartbeat.
The everyday life of HN involves criticizing people and things without domain knowledge, vastly underestimating problems and people, and vastly overestimating oneself.
> "Try this: Open it up right now and read the first 10 to 20 status updates and then count how many you care about"
Then why are you friends with these people?
I see this criticism a lot, but I don't understand it. Facebook is what you make of it. If you friend a bunch of people who post nothing but inanities, of course your news feed is going to be a morass of awfulness.
The best way to get a feed that you care about is to friend people you care about.
And you can do this without being a socially awkward penguin also. I fried lots of people I'm not particularly close with. Some of them turn out to post interesting things to Facebook, others don't, and it's two clicks to deprioritize them from your feed. From that point forward you will hear about them dramatically less, if ever.
In my top 10 posts on my feed right now, I care to know about 9 of them. That's pretty damned good.
The value in facebook for me and most of my friends is in communication. Facebook is the only channel I use for group messaging. It acts as my social calendar. It lets me share things with friends that I think they'd like. The news feed is such a small part of facebook for me (and I'd imagine for most of my friends).
I've lived in quite a few countries and cities. Mobile phones come and go, but facebook has for the last 6 years provided a constantly up-to-date directory of all my friends. Interactions across facebook mean that I have ongoing social contact with friends in Australia and Canada that I otherwise wouldn't have.
If your friends are all nearby, and always easy to get hold of, then the value may well be diminished.
Are you sure that's not a consequence of what your friends are posting and of facebook? Or are you implying that facebook promotes sharing banal information.
Sometimes it is more subtle than that, sometimes people want it to be what it could be rather than what it is. Those can be the hardest things to accept. (it's a stereotypical parent angst "You could be a doctor and you want to be a park ranger?" kinds of things)
Facebook has a huge user base, .001% of them whining about how it sucks is a whole bunch of people.
If Facebook is changing it feels like that's happening at a snails pace, people are just getting complacent with how bad it is. Stockholm syndrome is setting in, so many people still refuse to just use better alternatives.
Facebook lets me chat with my girlfriend, my grandparents, and my college roommate all at the same time. It lets me upload pictures of my new apartment for people to see. It lets me comment with a bunch of other angry misanthropes about how the Heat are gonna blow it this year. Until another service lets me do that in one browser tab, I'm fine with sticking with Facebook.
(I notice a huge correlation, too, with people's feelings about Facebook and people's level of extroversion/social aptitude in general. I think some people, website or no website, are going to want to keep to themselves -- and no app is ever going to change that.)