After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends.
Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.
Eventually it took me telling FB I didn't want to see posts from 90% of my 'friends', and then going to her feed and 'engaging' with her posts, for it to start showing them to me.
I've never actually used Facebook in any serious way; I'll log in and scroll through my feed once every few months, but I've always hated it. The other day I put my finger on why: it's the mobile equivalent of turning on the TV and flipping through channels looking for something to watch, something you do as an alternative to doing something with your time.
I feel like the general trend of UI simplification and a/b testing everything has companies chasing after anything that will push their general metrics up in the short term, at the expense of slowly disenfranchising a large portion of their users.
I interviewed at Netflix recently for a position on their UI team, and I questioned the interviewer about a lot of annoying aspects of the Netflix interface. He was aware of every complaint, and his explanation for every one of them was he wishes he could change it but the a/b testing shows they get higher engagement with it the way it is. So, for example, they show you movies you have already said you don't like, because enough people give a thumbs down and then later watch the movie. In the short term very few people are going to cancel Netflix because of this, but enough of these decisions in succession is erosive to customer goodwill.
Personally, these kind of decisions wouldn't bother me that much if apps and websites made it easy to customize your experience. Facebook makes it difficult by opaquely shaping your newsfeed and giving you what seems like hundreds of options across a half dozen settings pages. Netflix makes it difficult by just giving you practically no options, but there's enough demand that's there a tiny industry in just making websites and plugins to make Netflix usable.
The “auto preview” is so unpleasant that I’ve essentially stopped using Netflix entirely. I’ve no doubt that their testing shows it increases engagement, but I find it so jarring and abrasive that I rarely open the app any more. I’m sure they still have content I want to watch, but I can’t stand the experience of trying to find it.
I would love to have more insight into their A/B engagement metrics. I’m sure they capture if immediate engagement goes up when a feature is enabled, and probably the same over time periods of days or weeks. Do they also capture if total app usage declines 75% over 6 months after a feature is enabled?
Netflix already seems to have no problem getting people to watch hours and hours of shows as a result of having high quality content. Why do they need to perform cheap tricks like auto-preview to bump up user stats, as others have pointed out, at the expense of user happiness/preference?
It doesn't help that their website is a laggy piece of shit with miserable discover-ability. But, you know. Ugh.
The website doesn't autoplay, but per Ntrails, it's "a laggy piece of shit with miserable discover-ability". I don't actually use the website so don't have an opinion there.
If you find a lower powered device such as the previous generation of Amazon Fire TV, it does not auto-preview or auto-run trailers at the top of the screen - instead you just get a static image of the show.
Now if only I could get it to do that on my PS4 :(
A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.
Right. But if you were already selling Teslas, and along came a smooth-talking product designer with a dream to "improve" it by building a horse instead, A/B testing would make sure that change never saw the light of day.
A/B testing is not a way to get out of having to come up with good ideas yourself. It's a way to validate that your ideas are any good in the first place before betting the whole company on them.
A/B testing is most critical when evaluating big changes to a product, because those are the changes most likely to completely blow up the business. Otherwise it's left up to the opinion of the highest paid person in the room, and people are notoriously bad at guessing how customers will respond to change.
There’s something very powerful just talking to the user, feeling their pain and working with them to fix it until they say “this is awesome”.
How do you think the eyeball arose from unicellular eukaryotes?
You’re not going to get to a global optimum driven by human choice of what to test (only local optima at best) unless the human setting up the tests is some sort of sage.
For a trivial and well-known example, there is now no developmental or evolutionary pathway that will lead to a vertebrate eye where the nerves run behind the retina. As a result every last vertebrate has a blind spot where all of the nerves dive through the retina. This makes our eyes less efficient because the nerves block out light.
We're therefore stuck with the first design of the vertebrate eye and can't change it. There is no pathway to the more sensible design of the mollusk eye.
This is but one of many examples. For another one, relative developmental timing of growth is fixed across vertebrates. For example the "hand" grows before the "arm". The result is that pterodactyls, whose wings are entirely hands, could fly from birth. But birds (whose wings are arms) and bats (a mix of the two) can't fly from birth. No matter how desirable an evolutionary trait that may be.
No. At least not in the way described. Optimal as considered by whom? Us? We look at something and say this would function better than that, but is something that is optimal perfect? Basic microeconomics shows that perfection is sub-optimal due to the law of diminishing marginal return. Perfection is wasteful and unsustainable. What do we know to be optimal? From what I know, “adequate enough to reproduce” may not be perfect, but it might be brushing up against optimal in its “good enough and no more” / lagom nature. Mollusks have mollusk eyes. Can we know that humans would be better off with mollusk eyes without rewriting our evolutionary lineage for us to be more like mollusks in other imperfect ways?
Eyeballs are nowhere near optimal either.
I'm not necessarily against that as a valid way to measure job performance if it's done intelligently (for one, realizing that there's a lot of blind luck and variance, and it takes time to smooth out) - I mean, if you're in sales and you're not booking any sales, you don't get to hide from that. But it's also really easy to get ranking and evaluation schemes wrong, so I understand why people would be nervous about it and prefer soft-skill-based evaluations instead.
The upshot of this is that if Netflix or Facebook _do_ see a slow drift of users away from the platform, they are institutionally incapable of understanding why. Engagement is not the same thing as satisfaction, which is far harder to measure.
(I'm also now wondering how static the results of A/B testing really are - if an idea fails AB even once does the company abandon it forever?)
So I'm pretty sure that they are institutionally incapable of understanding why for a very good reason.
I hate using Facebook. The only reason I haven't removed my account is because it's the only way to keep up with certain friends and family. I feel like I am forced to use it simply because there isn't anything better for them to broadcast on.
I'd suggest considering whether this is really true.
The posts I actually want to see on Facebook are from my friends that are far away. For me though, FB weights posts that are geographically closer to you higher. When I moved to Australia, I discovered through Facebook that I had 3 or 4 friends from high school here in Melbourne, purely because their posts started showing up on my newsfeed.
Or trying to find something you saw in your feed, which then disappeared for no obvious reason. I can't decide whether I'm a pigeon in a Skinner box run by humans, or a human in one run by pigeons, but either way, the experience is unpleasant.
The reason is the time you subsequently spend looking for it is “engagement” in their metrics.
I haven't logged into facebook a while, and it's not because of recent changes, it's because of existing frustrations, all of which are captured in these comments.
Sometimes it's right here on my phone, third post in my feed. I want to leave a lengthy comment, but it's nowhere to be found on the desktop browser.
Glad I'm not the only one. I once set up a list for viewing posts just from family etc. It would only show me 24 hours worth! There seemed to be nothing I could do to adjust it. Everything about facebook is a usability shitshow.
I got "engaged" to a girl for a laugh a while back. Everyone saw it, it had almost 200 likes before I took it down. It was really awkward to explain to my grandma that no, I'm not actually getting married and it was all a joke.
Its all about friends commenting someones name on some memes and then getting to see a meme or a viral video instead. Which is definitely not what I want to be spending my time with.
Cutting off fb is way easier.
A problem that can be rectified by Facebook, literally 11 years after some of the things you talk about, tweaking news feed weights towards personal posts from friends and other changes to allow users to spend time on the site more efficiently is not a serious problem.
And the analysis of photos is spectacular nonsense. First, albums existed very very early in the time you were talking about. Second, the photo uploading features you mention (including hi-res photos) were added at most a billion daily actives ago. Third, building a platform that allowed "a dozen apps" to get created was pretty clearly higher leverage. And finally and most damningly, Instagram doesn't have high-resolution photos or albums and certainly didn't at the time of acquisition: how are those the features that FB had to buy to win users back?
Disclosure: I worked there for 8.5 years, including writing Facebook Chat.
I’ve had a Facebook account since the days of needing a edu email account to register. During my college years Facebook was a very important thing and all of my friends were very active and it was nice being able to see what people were up to and doing.
Over time Facebook started optimizing away to whatever it is now. I’ve deleted the Facebook app because it’s simply garbage. My friends don’t really post personal things anymore (most don’t even post anything anymore) and the influx of users and this “retweet” culture has made it so my Facebook feed is essentially spam. Why should I have to bother and waste time to curate what I see? Why should I have to hide so many individual pages?
Furthermore, the recent(?) addition of these marketplaces made it just way worse. My news feed activity is constantly telling me about new things for sale here and I just don’t care. I thought I’ve disabled these notifications but apparently I haven’t because they still show up. To be honest I don’t even know how to disable these messages because everything is hidden under 20 layers of options.
Not to mention the whole age/generation issue:
I’m 30, and my sister is 20. I’m at that age where I don’t really meet a lot of new people anymore, so my friends list has been very stagnant. I really just keep a Facebook profile just to let the occasional old friend/family contact me or find me. My sister and her friends look at Facebook and think it’s something old people use. For her everything is Snapchat.
I'm also 30 and registered in 2005. Lots of my friends post frequently. Curating by hiding people I don't want to see takes a negligible amount of time and effort. I've barely even noticed the marketplace. The idea that 30 is "that age" where you don't meet many new people is bizzare to me. I regularly make new friends and the standard way of exchanging contact info is FB.
Even adding the experience of a dozen HN users (and discounting the ones that disagree) still represents a small and very biased sample. And have you honestly gathered that much information about the experience and usage of your friends' friends? Or is it possible you are applying a combination of projection and confirmation bias? Also, the news cycle is currently mostly negative about FB, so it's popular to be bashing it, but many of those people continue to use it daily anyway.
I just think there is a very common pattern here on HN of people acting like "this product/service doesn't really work for me, therefore it is shit/out of touch/etc," when there are likely many people who do actually get value out of using it.
Luckily I'm quite "friend light" on there, but most of my social interaction has moved to WhatsApp (including groups for nights out/sharing photos, organising, and engaging with different people - all of the things I used FB for). Guessing one of the main reasons they bought them.
What I believe keeps people on Facebook is Messenger. Even people who never post on Facebook is available via Messenger and given that Facebook makes it pretty easy to find people, it's slowly devolving to a "better phonebook".
I'm skeptical that tweaking newsfeed weights will make the people I care about start posting regularly again. I doubt the evaporative cooling is reversable.
In my book this is equivalent to saying you worked for Philip Morris for 8.5 years and worked on campaigns to bring in new smokers.
The reason I mentioned it was because it was rather relevant to my having the incentive to remember the timelines of FB launching various features almost a decade ago.
https://www.vodafone.ro/shop/abonamente-de-date#tab-1
-> "Detalii abonament"
-> Social Pass: [...] (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, Pinterest, Twitter, Viber)
It's widespread around the world, except for the US, until recently.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/01/12/birdcage-liners/
The key question here is: does self-regulation work for social media? I'm not sure it does. Their end goal is to create a Skinner box. That's all there is to it. And that goal definitely conflicts with what we actually want/need.
(And before anyone inevitably objects: yes, I get that you might actually like the downsized version better. Personally I didn't like a random reddish hue being added to the golden scene, but it's obviously a matter of taste, so let's not judge me here. The point isn't which one looks better, but that they shouldn't look so dramatically visibly different in the first place.)
Also note that there is a resizing (downwards, not upwards) I had to do in Photoshop to make them the same dimensions, since Facebook both lowers the quality and the dimensions, so it was impossible to match up the pixels without that. If it did any sharpening along with that I have no idea, but I don't notice any changes on Photoshop's side.
Read-only client violates 4.1, as it replicates news feed. Changing how news feed is formed is a violation of 4.4.
Earlier API versions used to allow posting, but of course they took it out.
I was getting frustrated with all the junk, but still used it regularly.
Now when I get that dopamine craving and am flipping through app screens on my phone looking for something novel, I often completely forget that Facebook is even there.
The changes they made are absolutely in the direction I want them to go, but perhaps it's too late?
It's funny, because of Facebook Messenger, I have completely moved off SMS and now use Facebook Messenger for all my communication. The only reason why I use SMS is that I Am not connected to that person on Facebook (and probably wouldn't).
In their zeal to gain IM users, they replaced messages with chat, removing the inhibition that kept people from using messages for one liners. Then they made you always online, supplanting Facebook itself entirely with something that could be replaced by any other real-time communication app. Once phones became nicer to use and there were alternatives to the lag and limitations of SMS, people had no reason to log into Facebook to chat with their friends because Facebook has trained non-IMers to IM and they no longer needed Facebook to do it.
Users would have killed for high-resolution photos (Facebook would make pictures so tiny and so low resolution that they’d become unrecognizable and all talent that went into composing them or editing them would be lost, and they couldn’t contain text or captions because that would be compressed away) or the ability to create albums. A dozen apps existed to shoehorn that functionality in via the Flickr api. Then they had to go buy Instagram to win those users back.
Now people just post major life events to share with people they didn’t bother communicating them to via another, more personal means of communication once a year or so.