Facebook

I've tried to do a limited profile for some people, but I can't seem to anymore. Is that option gone? There's people who I added for various reasons, but would rather they not see everything.

Ugh. I hate that if I update my status, and my friends like or comment on it, their friends can also like my status even though I'm not friends with them. Stupid Facebook.

eventide82 wrote:Ugh. I hate that if I update my status, and my friends like or comment on it, their friends can also like my status even though I'm not friends with them. Stupid Facebook.

I find it so weird that people even do that for a person they don't know. If someone on my list posts something and a friend of theirs that I don't know makes a funny comment, I chuckle at it and move along. I would feel weird liking or commenting on a status of a stranger. Hell, I even feel weird liking or commenting on statuses of people from this site who have actually accepted or extended friend requests, I only do it if I absolutely can't resist what's been posted.

Urgh! I've commented on strangers statuses before because I didn't realise it wasn't my friends status update. It's a little embarrassing after you realise the fact.

paablish wrote:Urgh! I've commented on strangers statuses before because I didn't realise it wasn't my friends status update. It's a little embarrassing after you realise the fact.

Same - sometimes Facebook doesn't make it clear. But I've also had it where they did and didn't care. I just don't always know how to tell. Same thing with pictures - did they share the picture or am I about to comment on some random person's picture?

I tend to do it the most with pictures that my friends are tagged in. It's not obvious! If I realize it's someone else's picture then sometimes I look to see if anyone ELSE I know has commented/liked before I do. Silly but true.

It's kind of annoying that Facebook is set up so you have to constantly check to make sure you're not overstepping bounds. Just because you can see your friend's comment on someone else's post doesn't mean it's necessarily polite to jump into the conversation, BUT, Facebook defaults for you to be able to see it. And I'm sure not everyone uses it the same way and there are hordes of college students, etc. who daily realize Mark Zuckerberg's vision of a privacy-less free-for-all online social utopia where everyone is automatically friends with everyone else's friends. I think among folks who are *cough* slightly older, it's not as true.

A key reason why I have all my settings on "public", so I have no delusions of the "privacy" of what I'm posting.

So Facebook is changing the News feed again, behind the scenes.  The tweak will bump older stories that you may have missed, apparently.

I thought that was what "Top Stories" already did, so this doesn't seem like a change at all for the end user.  

But reading the articles about it made me laugh.  The "problem" they are trying to solve, which would be a long, chronological list of friends' activity that I have to read through if I don't want to miss anything, is exactly what I want back.  I don't need Facebook picking and choosing for me what they think I want to see.  It's nice they're so concerned I might miss something, but I would rather miss 10 things than see 1 thing over and over again.  I hide the stories/people/games that I don't want to see.  THAT is how I make my News feed more manageable.  I wish there was still an option for crazies like me who want items posted in the actual order in which they happened.

Sheli wrote:I wish there was still an option for crazies like me who want items posted in the actual order in which they happened.

Indeed. I, too, am one of those crazies.

I swear the newsfeed gets more Goldbergian with every "fix." You make me tired, hotshot Facebook engineers.

So Facebook is changing the News feed again, behind the scenes. The tweak will bump older stories that you may have missed, apparently.

Has this change already rolled out? If so, it would explain why I'm suddenly seeing posts bumped up to the top when there have been no additions or new comments and I had already selected the "Most recent" option. I was a little baffled by that.

Ugh, sigh. They've never gotten the automagically select important posts thing right (or people would love it, which they don't), so whenever I see old posts up top, it makes me think there's a bug in the system again.

You know, there are times when I start thinking, "ok, so, I must just be really out of step with what the majority of FB users want. They wouldn't keep messing with the timeline in a desperate attempt to keep things from just being a chronological list if it wasn't what people wanted." But then I see conversations like this and elsewhere and it seems to me that what the majority of users want is, in fact, a simple, straightforward, chronological list of their friends' posts. So why do they keep messing with it? Argh.

I have an unrelated question. FB used to have an option where you could set up your profile so that you were unfindable by people who weren't already on your friends list. Did they take that away? We were talking to my MIL about getting her set up with a limited profile so she can see cute baby pics and stuff I am most likely going to post, but she doesn't want anyone else (particularly from work) to find her -- even though theoretically she doesn't have to accept friend requests, as we all know sometimes declining a friend request causes great drama, and she'd like to avoid that. We have talked about setting her up under a fake name, and we'll lock her privacy settings down as tightly as we can, but is the "make me unfindable" option gone?

MLIS, under privacy settings they have options for "Who can find me" and "Who can look me up".

MLIS wrote:You know, there are times when I start thinking, "ok, so, I must just be really out of step with what the majority of FB users want.  They wouldn't keep messing with the timeline in a desperate attempt to keep things from just being a chronological list if it wasn't what people wanted."  But then I see conversations like this and elsewhere and it seems to me that what the majority of users want is, in fact, a simple, straightforward, chronological list of their friends' posts.  So why do they keep messing with it?  Argh.

I can't speak to FB's exact motivations, but Silicon Valley is rife with this sort of thought process:

1. "Users don't know what they really want."
2. "The last time we did a feature everyone complained at first, and now they love it, so when they complain, just ignore it."
3. "The next big thing in shopping/social media/entertainment won't fit the current models, because those models already exist, so we need to throw away all the rules and do something completely new."
4. "They don't like it? They don't understand innovation. Just keep doing it."

I'm one of the people in the biz who asks users what they think about stuff and then reports back to the people who are trying to innovate. Every time one of them brings up that one damn Henry Ford quote -- "If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse" -- they are usually using it as an excuse to ignore what consumers are actually saying.

In short: feh.

The article made it sound to me like you would still have the endless scroll option, but you might also see some old things bumped back up if they're still "active" or being looked at a lot or something. Is that right? I don't really mind that, except that I don't think a lot when I look at Facebook, and when I see something I've seen before, I just stop scrolling, and assume I've reached the point I last left off.

I agree that FB probably will never be able to really figure out what people want to see most in any accurate or effective way, so I wish they would just back off. I don't know anyone who's like, "UGH, all this crap to look at just to get to the five things I care about!" If you feel that way, you've probably never used the "hide" functions. That's a user issue, and it sucks for everyone else to have their experience worsened because of the lowest common denominator.

At any rate, I like to try to figure out what the real goal is when Facebook makes these changes, and it always comes down to money, right? So, what will bring the most pageviews? I'm guessing they want their users to "engage" more with these exciting "popular" posts so that they'll comment more, click through a photo album, etc. And I wonder how advertisers or companies' pages will be affected. Will it be possible to have a post popped back to the top of your fans' pages?

Instant Monkeys wrote:

Sheli wrote:I wish there was still an option for crazies like me who want items posted in the actual order in which they happened.

Indeed. I, too, am one of those crazies.

I swear the newsfeed gets more Goldbergian with every "fix." You make me tired, hotshot Facebook engineers.

Let me join you both in this fantasy land of wanting items being listed in reverse CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. God, Facebook, It's really not that hard.

I just got a friend request from a kid I've never heard of, who has 2 FB friends, and 2 FB pages he likes. one we have in common (a singer). The other page he likes? Japanese pornography.

Arrrgh, I HATE it when well-intentioned, intelligent people accidentally share satirical articles without knowing they're satire.  It's like people think that as long as it didn't come from The Onion, it's truth.  You don't want to be the person who publicly embarrasses them with a "This article is satire, please see this link for proof" at the end of the super long comments thread, but everybody freaking out in that comments thread NEEDS TO KNOW this article isn't true.  Eeesh.  I hope they have friends who correct them in person or private message, because the second-hand embarrassment is too much.

I hate that too, but I also hate how many second-rate news-parody sites are out there now. I know everyone always jokes about how the Onion is so close to reality that it is reality, but a good satire site is actually NOT supposed to be indistinguishable from reality. If it's SO deadpan that there's no way to know it's fake besides just already happening to know that it's fake, it's not really successful.

That of course doesn't mean there aren't many idiots out there who believe Onion stories like zombie Bin Laden returns from dead to raise taxes or whatever, but there are also plenty of satire articles that are less satire and more "a thing someone made up for some reason."

This one was pretty obvious.  There was a split second when I believed the headline, then I was like, "Wait.  What?"  So I googled the site in the link, and it said it was satire.  This morning I went back and actually read the article, and there is just no way any of that could be mistaken as fact.  It was very Onion-like in its over-the-topness.  So that just made me feel worse for these people, because come on.  But somebody corrected them (publicly, unfortunately), so it's over now.

But yes, I agree.  There are a lot of sites right now where "satire" is really "stuff we just made up", and that makes it hard to figure out what's real and what isn't.  You have to be very cautious before you hit share, and sometimes you don't always think you need to do your research first.  My second biggest Facebook fear is posting an article like this one that turns out to be untrue and embarrassing myself.  My first biggest Facebook fear has to do with the search bar and status update bar being so close together.  Sometimes I'll accidentally type the person I'm searching for in the status update bar, and one day I'm afraid I'm going to post a random person as a status update.  I am terrified that this will happen when I'm searching for someone I shouldn't be searching for.  I know I can delete it almost right away, but someone will still see it!  I'm sure of this.

I did think this compilation of people thinking The Onion is real was pretty funny.  My favorite was: "The Onion is a joke newspaper." "okay, well that is your opinion."

Also, I thought I was the only one who was terrified of mixing up the search bar and the status update bar. God, imagine the potential for humiliation; and it's basically guaranteed you'd mess it up when you were Facebook stalking your ex-boyfriend or whatever.

Also, I thought I was the only one who was terrified of mixing up the search bar and the status update bar.  God, imagine the potential for humiliation; and it's basically guaranteed you'd mess it up when you were Facebook stalking your ex-boyfriend or whatever.  

Yes!  You could be searching for the most banal of reasons.  "It ended well, I still like him as a person, I just want to see how he's doing," and then BOOM.  Suddenly you're the girl who just made her ex-boyfriend's name a status update.  Then you look crazy, and anything you say to try to make it better just makes it worse.  Yes.  Big fear.

Ha ha, me too! Why doesn't Facebook fix THAT, in one of its many series of "improvements"?

Oh, thank God I'm not the only one who types into the status bar when trying to search. I've never actually posted a search, but it's going to happen someday, I just know it.

My first biggest Facebook fear has to do with the search bar and status update bar being so close together.  Sometimes I'll accidentally type the person I'm searching for in the status update bar, and one day I'm afraid I'm going to post a random person as a status update.  I am terrified that this will happen when I'm searching for someone I shouldn't be searching for.  I know I can delete it almost right away, but someone will still see it!  I'm sure of this.

Ha, I have totally done this, only it was on LinkedIn and not Facebook, and was just the name of an old boss and not an old boyfriend. I didn't realize I'd done it until I saw a friend's LinkedIn email where they compile "what your connections are saying..." There was my name and picture with just "name of old boss" in the quote section. Embarrassing for sure, but could have been SO much worse.

I did think this compilation of people thinking The Onion is real was pretty funny.  My favorite was: "The Onion is a joke newspaper." "okay, well that is your opinion."

I just saw that too. I loved all of the "Oh, so my newspaper doesn't agree with your beliefs so you say it's fake, huh?" responses. Hahahaha.

But my hands-down favorite was the one about "whatever % of the American population doesn't know the dance moves to the national anthem" and the resulting "that is just a disgrace, where is our national pride" outrage.