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.
>>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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
@ mentions have certain properties - it's a semi-open form of communication. Other friends who follow you both can see your communications. That can be handy
If you and others prefer to communicate (for certain purposes) via twitter, and there's another person, X, that you'd like to also include in the communication... sure you can send them a message by some other means, but it'd be more convenient to be able to just include them as well.
>The argument can be turned around - you could just follow people whose updates you don't care about on Twitter so they can message you
As I said, the discussion was not about DMs, but anyway the original point was about how software might be changed to make things more convenient... you seem to be treating less-convenient compromises as the only option that should be considered.
He's referring to Facebook-- there's a feature where you can still be friends with someone and not see anything (or just some things) they post. It's good for obsessive Farmville/Words with Friends types to hide that activity.
Technically, you can only DM people who follow you. Whether you follow them is irrelevant.
Twitter is a pub sub model, it doesn't really make sense to want to sub but not sub. Twitter follows aren't like friendships at all, they're a "I want to see your content" marker.
The problem comes when you realize if you unfollowed everyone who posts unteresting stuff on facebook you would end up with an almost literally empty feed.
I have gone from facebook for coming up on two years, but I see some of the pictures posted on my girlfriends feed. A good portion (she is a college student) are pictures of fairly messy nights out.
Even if its not toilet pictures, a picture of a drunk, scantily clad teenager may not look any better, and these pictures dominate facebook. At least the feeds of young people that I know.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, college age is the time where some people have bosses, and others post photos of what they did last night. I have a pretty small friends list, to be honest-- it's just some of the people I know don't always think before they post ;)
It's definitely not a problem with Home, but it's definitely exaggerated when you use Home.
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).