Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

He's right in that Facebook was helpful by auto-creating certain "groups" of friends for you based on profile information. Where this completely breaks down is once you move past the trivial task of auto-populating categories for your location, school, and work.

As I see it there are three modes of sharing:

The first is where my post is quite innocent and generic, so I just want to declare it to the world. This goes in public.

The second is where my post is pretty irrelevant to most of my friends, and is really only directed at a portion of them. So to prevent clogging the feeds of the rest of my friends, I submit it to a specific group like "Biking Buddies." Facebook can't learn this or automatically set it up. On the other hand, I rarely care enough to only post to a group instead of public.

The third situation is the opposite of the second: there is a very specific group of people that I don't want to see what I'm about to post. Planning a surprise party or uploading party photos from the night before fall here. In that circumstance I only choose to post to a specific group of close friends. Again, something that Facebook can't deduce from my profile.

You can't get around #3 without doing shit work, except by not posting it to begin with. As a developer you can't avoid this: sometimes manual labor really is the only solution to a problem. Until we invent mind-reading, of course.

Reading your three situations, I have another one which I've been thinking about: a post which is informative and in some way beneficial to the public, but which a significant portion of the people you know simply do not care about.

For example, you may have an excellent piece of commentary about the history of Unix and the state of X, Y, Z in modern operating system design. Most of your non-technical friends, along with your family, in all likelihood do not care about this and will not find it interesting, so it's just noise to them. If you post it publicly, it's worthwhile to the Internet at large, but annoying to a select group. If you post it so that only the relevant individuals see it, and no one else, then the public potentially lose out.

Is there a simple solution here which I'm just not seeing? Is there a social network that deals with this appropriately? With Facebook, you can "unsubscribe", which means hiding a user's posts from your feed, but that seems like overkill. How do prominent developers deal with this? Do they just make their posts more generic and mainstream, and move the technical discussion elsewhere? Or do they just let their non-technical friends and family Deal With It?

Perhaps one solution is to mark a post with "Family don't need to see this", then skip the post for anyone in Family who views their stream/feed/timeline/whatever, probably with an unobtrusive notice which says "post skipped". But then there's added complexity, and — getting back to Zach's main point — it's more shit work.

While I find the use case relevant, I think ultimately, the point is that a post like that simply does not belong on Facebook. Sure one could argue that you should be able to post whatever you want, but the reason it seems so convoluted and confusing is because you've made it that way.

A post like that belongs on a blog. I like to think of a blog a place for people to learn about a specific topic. Facebook is for people trying to learn about people.

What about the case where it isn't a long-form post, but something more casual like a retweet or a link to some website? I can see the blog solution working out there, too (cf. Daring Fireball), but you might not want to have that full setup for more ephemeral (yet interesting) stuff. There also might not be one specific topic. I'm not disagreeing with you, I just wonder if there is a way to use a social network like Google+ for Everyone, as they market it, which is sensible. Maybe not.

To be honest, even retweets and links to blogs I wouldn't show interest in on Facebook. It's not a matter of a post being too long for me to read on Facebook, or I would. It's a matter of expectation. On Facebook I expect to see a personal opinion about the way politics is being run, not a link to a professional discussion about politics. Both happen, but the second is likely to see much more action on a medium like Twitter.

If you really just think about what you're sharing, it's likely going to fall into one of three categories.

1. I want to share this with my friends and family, it's ephemeral, will interest them, and expresses more about who I am.

2. I want to share this with my coworkers and colleagues, it is relevant to our professional interests. This category also happens to be the "Public" category for me in a lot of cases, because anything I share professionally, doesn't need to remain private.

3. Anything off topic here. Something that lands in this category (while interesting and relevant to you) is, for the most part, uninteresting to the audiences you've made yourself available to.

I see statuses all the time I really don't care about. It's not necessary for someone to restrict me from the group able to see it for that reason - if your friends dislike seeing posts they don't care for, why are they browsing the newsfeed?

I see what you mean.

My personal "solution" is that I typically share personal stuff exclusively on Facebook (non-public posts) and what is more "technical" (comments or questions on tech, products, etc.) on Twitter. (and HN)

For example, I didn't announce the birth of my daughter on Twitter, because I've known the people who follow me in mostly professional settings. Some of those might be friends too, but if they are, they're probably on Facebook too.

Works well for the most part, except when I'd be interested in the opinion of Facebook friends that are not on Twitter… But it won't work for everyone either.

I realize that it's possible that I am missing out on opportunities to create stronger personal relationships with people on Twitter by not discussing personal matters there, but that's honestly getting too complicated. :)

I think that's the easiest solution. Twitter and Facebook have two different atmospheres - you don't get 20,000 followers because you have 20,000 friends, but because you have 20,000 people interested in your role as a professional authority and your posts about product trends, etc. Similarly, Facebook isn't tailored to disseminating a lot of information to a lot of people quickly and consistently - the number of people who'd really care about your personal life is almost always much lower than the number of people interested in new product information from your company (presuming they have a professional stake in it).

Though, in my case, I'm still working on establishing my professional authority on Twitter… :) As a matter of fact my number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers are dangerously close.

I see a couple things needing to happen, then this sort of thing will largely be dealt with automatically.

1 - determining the type of content based on words, size, etc. based on the type of content the system would automatically filter it on the receiver's end. if the receiver has typically ignored or deleted 'history of unix' type stuff from me, the receiver/reading app will file it away, and note to the receiver that something's been received, but it's probably not important. Like 'spam/ham' filtering, but as another dimension. (yam? tasty for some, untasty for others?)

2 - using signals of other people in the ecosystem as more signals in the 'spam/ham/yam' algorithm. If I post something that all my geek friends read/share/comment about, those interactions should count towards an 'interest' score on that piece when it's presented (or not) to my mom, for example.

I think the answer is what I call 'subscribable circles' in this blog post: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/12261287667/in-defense-of-the...

Which actually works a lot like RSS. You have certain named feeds, e.g. "Unix." Then people looking at your profile can subscribe to that feed if they're interested in what you have to say about Unix.

Back in the day, we called that "Usenet".

I'm constantly annoyed by this on twitter. 1 in 100 tweets are on the topic I'm interested in.

Two possible solutions:

Channels: You create a few outlets, for example "technical", "personal", "food-i-ate-today". Then I could subscribe to your "technical" channel and ignore the res. Guess this is close to what joebadmo posted.

Tags: Almost the same, but a post can have many tags.

The problems with these "solutions" is: what heppens when you create a new tag/channel? Maybe one should auto-subscribe to all of them, and then ppl could remove those they don't want. Might be shit work though.

joebadmo

So to prevent clogging the feeds of the rest of my friends, I submit it to a specific group like "Biking Buddies." Facebook can't learn this or automatically set it up.

I think Facebook already does this. No, they don't setup actual groups, but the ratio of stuff your friends (and pages you've liked) post to what ends up in your feed is probably 10:1. That might be way off, but the point is that FB is filtering the feed based on your relationship with the person, how often they post, the content of the post, etc. At least this is what I've gleaned from reading about this in various places, but I'd love to be corrected or get more detail if anyone has it.

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