[mosqutip]

Typical overzealous and incorrect analysis. Facebook may have failed for the author, but Facebook is not a failure. Its user base, advertising base and page traffic paint quite the opposite picture.

Also, "people can message each other, post text updates and pictures". This is exactly what I use Facebook for, and it works pretty well for me. I get updates and pictures from my friends and family, and I have tuned it such that I can see more content from people with whom I don't interact on a regular basis. Sounds like a case of user error to me.

[mindcrime]

and I have tuned it

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the vast, vast majority of Facebook users (like, 90%+ is my SWAG) don't do any tuning at all. I'm also going to guess that a large percentage of users "friend" people they aren't friends with in real-life, due to just "shared common interest" or whatever. IF both of these assumptions hold, then the scenario the author of TFA is painting, could well be true for a significant portion of Facebook users.

Whether that's actually the case or not would be hard to measure. But to share one more anecdote: find my Facebook feed to be less and less interesting over time. With little "tuning" on my part, FB is doing a pretty crap job of figuring out what I actually want to see.

So... I could do the work to go in, delete less-than-useful "friends", tune my preferences, etc... or I could just slowly begin to drift away from Facebook, logging in less and less frequently and using Twitter and/or G+ more. Guess which one is more likely?

[mattpardee]

Good lord, man. How do you deal with people you meet in real life? Do you walk around responding "What you just said is irrelevant to me."?

What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.

Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me). And with what, maybe one of those people hidden every few months, I otherwise actually have a pleasant experience catching up on what my friends & family have been up to. It's not that complicated...

[mindcrime]

It seems that you think we disagree about something fundamental here, but I can't figure out what it is. Especially since I could easily have written this bit myself:

What if the algorithm you think you want is actually the opposite of what you might find interesting tomorrow? Most people are complex, interesting creatures finding new inspirations and communicating them on a daily basis. People grow, change, they find out what is interesting to post. We're in the baby stages of this whole online social experiment.

Regardless of that: I find it's generally _people_ I can choose to hide from my news feed (usually because they constantly post things that annoy me).

Right, and I think this is the wrong approach. There's not an absolute correlation between who said something and whether or not the subject is of interest to me. If I have a friend who I share political beliefs with, I may care about his post on, say, gun control... but if that same friend is a religious fundamentalist, I absolutely don't want to see any "pro Jesus" crap. I think this assumption, that content should be selected / filtered based on provenance, is one of the most broken things about online social networking.

Also, Facebook just isn't important enough to me, for me to spend any time "tuning" things to try and tailor my stream to what I want it to be. Like most of us, I have about a bazillion things competing for my time and attention. If Facebook isn't delivering a desirable experience (regardless of the reason), then I, for one, am likely to just drift away from it and let something else entertain me.

[johnjlocke]

If the goal of Facebook is to collect a lot of users and advertising revenue, then sure it's a success. Just not as much as was forecast on the day of its IPO.

As a an actual social network, where friend go to exchange information with their other close friends, it jumped the shark some time ago. The EdgeRank algorithm helped to render a lot of online communication dead. When part of the goal is to keep people on your site in order to pitch advertising, that's not a good sign.

I've been thinking for a while now that the whole vibe around Facebook feels exactly like MySpace did about 4-5 years ago. The only thing preventing its demise is the lack of anything else that resembles it that everyone can latch onto.

Twitter has more of an information sharing vibe,and many people don't jibe with it. Many people dismiss Pinterest or don't get that either. Tumblr up until a week ago really felt like LiveJournal did back in the day, but I don't have a ton of high hopes for it lasting the next few years.

I find it ironic that having capitalized on the mistakes of the social networks that preceded it, Facebook is on the verge of repeating many of those same errors.

[andyhmltn]

When the pictures and the status updates are lost In a sea of spammy adverts and shares, the messaging becomes the only feature that I can use anymore.

[onedev]

My FB feed is phenomenal. I hide people that post spam, and unfollow pages that spam me.

What's left is the people I care about and the content from pages I care about (e.g. The Economist posts really good content every day, so does Rap Genius, and brands like Nike/Adidas; all of which I like-- in the traditional sense).

It's basically my "newspaper". I even follow HN and it feeds me the newest stuff from HN alongside other publications, pictures of my friends from around the world, and status updates from people I care about.

I also have AdBlock so I don't get the sidebar ads which I do agree are a bit spammy.

This article is just a bunch of bullshit. It has no real critical analysis and doesn't really say much at all. It's very shallow and a repost to boot (it was on here just days ago). Let's not upvote this garbage.

[andyhmltn]

You're a very lucky person then! Sadly I'm at around the 1,000 friends mark and I have a feeling it'd be a bit too much work to make my timeline useful again.

[scholia]

So why did you friend a load of people you don't really know?

It's like going to a great restaurant, ordering five times as much as you can eat and then complaining about the food.

[onedev]

It doesn't take any work at all.

Just look at your feed. As soon as you see someone you don't care about just one click hide them or unfriend them (if socially possible).

If you see a post from a page you don't care about, then one click unfollow them.

It's really simple. Their newsfeed algorithms are actually really awesome at figuring out the rest once you give it a tiny bit of feedback like I mentioned above.