Thoughts on the Facebook interface
During my long and fruitful technogic life, I have seen many user interfaces. Very, very much, if without too much modesty. I communicated with computer systems using punched cards, punched tapes, magnetic tapes, address and data switches on the panel, typewriter, first alphanumeric terminals the size of a good table. I witnessed the birth of interactive computer systems, graphic and color monitors, and progress, in just a few years, from a roll of tape with a “Consul” machine to Turbo-C, never ceased to amaze me. By virtue of the background, mindset and profession, I am able to deal with any device, understand its logic and capabilities even in the absence of instructions, a minimum of controls and the complexity of the state machine.
When I changed the technology and concept. Touchscreens, voice control, motion sensors, touchpads, not to mention all sorts of mice - all this organically fit into my world of interaction with devices, and there was not any special upheavals or revolutions along the way. I calmly and naturally considered myself a typical early adopter. I was in the networks of Fido and Compuserve, wrote emails before the Internet Epoch, talked in chat rooms and conferences years before the advent of ICQ, kept files in the cloud almost until the birth of some of the current startups in the trendy Cloud area. I even had my own blog for several years long before today's blog-craziness and dozens of available blogging platforms.
And so on and so forth.
')
All this boastful introduction is necessary for me for the following statement: I can not figure out Facebook . No, I understand perfectly well what it is, why it exists, where it goes and how it is monetized. I do not understand its interface! I never know what Facebook will show me at any particular time, I don’t understand the principle of tape formation, I don’t understand what photos will be chosen for the post with the album and which ones will be shown on a mobile device. I have no idea whether I like the post, photo or album. I feel like a dumbass in its settings, especially privacy settings and notifications. I do not know who will read my posts, and most importantly, why he will read them. I do not know what is happening with the posts that remain deep below. I do not feel the logic of the product, despite several unsuccessful attempts and, in general, quite a live account for photos of children and a cat. I do not leave the feeling that Facebook was written by Martians.
Curious to find out why this is so. The argument "made for a new generation" is not accepted. Possess a new generation of Martian logic, it would be felt in everything, and not just Facebook. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, the “new generation” finds it convenient that I find it convenient and that is convenient according to all standard canons. It can be easily explained why the younger generation chooses capacitive screens instead of resistive screens, or why it prefers communication in Whatsapp, rather than Usenet. But the concept of a convenient, logical, good interface, like a nightmarish and illogical, has not changed! Facebook is a nightmare and illogical.
What is even more interesting, there seems to be no need for its illogicality. By discarding the billionth client base, which is of interest only to the exchange with investors, and the technical (also invisible and not very interesting to end users) problem of scalability and fault tolerance of the service that accompanies it, we get a rather trivial script program. Well, in fact, “post-like-photo” - what could be more elementary in implementation, this is exactly the task for the conditional weekend in the student hostel! The added cost of Facebook is given by 100,500 servers, zettabytes of data and coverage of all the inhabitants of the earth two times, but the script itself could be made / completed logical so that Zuckerberg's sister did not get confused with the concept of “share with friends”?
My only explanation is that this is done on purpose. Not only do we not have to know what kind of information Facebook collects from our actions and how it is then used for advertising and other purposes, we don’t need to know what our actions lead to! You write a post with a photo of a wet pussy, carefully put down tags, give Facebook a dozen more links and potential preferences. And if other platforms in exchange for this offer at least a relative obligation to publish a post for your chosen circle of people, then Facebook does not even offer this. The post will appear for an obscure time period in your timeline and in the tape it is unclear what friends (in mobile clients you cannot be sure even with the tape of "close friends"). Being non-addressable, the post will be lost forever after time t, controlled by the same Facebook. If you want to hide the post, you will not even know from whom it was hidden and what will happen during sharing. It will be easier for you to learn access rights in Linux, rather than understand how privacy is inherited on Facebook, and whether the “Friends of Friends of Friends” subset is included in the set of “Friends of Friends”.
Confusing the interface logic, Facebook practically gets the right to show (or not show) your post to anyone outside your nearest circle. Instead of the usual transition to posts in notifications, you may have the installation of the stupidest - to match the Facebook application - “Birthdays” application (or whatever it is there), which with the ensigning directness and anecdotism of the “Moldavian virus” asks you to send yourself around the world . Oh, you thought that the notification icon can go only to posts, not to applications? Think further, and better - do not think at all! Unselfishly add links and advertising skills to Facebook, in it you are not just not a consumer, but a product, you are also a disenfranchised product: instead of your pussy, friends of friends will easily slip the adware.
Well, okay, Facebook is not scolded just lazy. In fact, I do not scold - it is foolish to scold the platform that has become popular just as it is - just talking out loud about such a demonstrative alogicality. For hundreds of millions of Facebook users, it is absolutely indifferent, which means only one thing: for hundreds of millions of users, their own content is indifferent. He is one-day , he is worth nothing. Easy come, easy go, as the English say. No one’s unnecessary “pussies” appear in useless posts that they collect, without reading, no one needs likes, and then disappear without a trace, since they are completely unnecessary to anyone. It does not matter why this happens, out of boredom or for fun. What is important is the strange persistence with which Facebook continues to cultivate such an approach, because the mobilization of the planet’s population has long been completed, an IPO has been carried out and there is no longer a reason for generating traffic for the sake of traffic.
Having added the last paragraph, I was thinking about how to better formulate the idea of ​​the future of the platform, built on one-day content, when suddenly here and there articles appeared on the loss of Facebook popularity among teenagers. What a slop, you say, was honored to write about Facebook when others have already forgotten about it. But the fact is that the conflict of traffic for the sake of traffic (read, advertising) with user content exists in any social network, and Facebook is only a vivid example of such a conflict.
Ideally, I don’t tell the service any personal information, I want to store my unlimited content for an infinitely long time, to share it only with those I explicitly indicated, and in turn see the content only of those who are directly interested. Ideally, the service I tell him absolutely everything, including the names of those with whom I sat on the pot in kindergarten, I do not have stored content (well, except maybe a few compressed-squeezed pictures), and I’m showing ads, one advertisement and nothing but advertising, Moreover, tags, friends and all that is called the beautiful word social, serve only to customize this advertisement.
The reality, as always, is somewhere in the middle, because advertising revenue allows you to pay for the platform. It should be tolerated, but only as long as it complements social communication, and does not replace it with itself. You will never be angry at the 5-minute block of advertising in an hourly series of interesting, high-quality series. But if you realize that the whole purpose of a worthless, meaningless series is in that ad unit, 5 minutes of advertising will annoy you a lot.
Facebook is much farther from the user ideal than it could and should have been. With all its globality and fantastic number of users, it turns out to be empty, since it cannot boast of any content, nor, as it turned out, the post of social coherent. You can blame windy fashion, you can argue about whether the form for the post will be more complicated than the status of “I went to the toilet” for inexperienced users, you can ask why there are no tree comments, but if the post of a person does not appear in the tape of his real-life friends, what else can speak?! This is the hell of the most basic, primary functionality!
I am skeptical about social networks and I'm not close to the rampage of exhibitionism. At the same time, I cannot fail to recognize their practical benefit. Only thanks to Facebook my mom can see photos of her granddaughters at the time of the event, and not a year or two after it. Once (during the time of manual compression of images, their archiving and sending by e-mail), I sent a friend photos taken at the 3rd birthday of his son exactly to his ... sixth birthday. Convenience of downloading content and integration with mobile platforms is a great thing. For this, you can forgive both the network of a billion people, and a little advertising, and the intrusiveness of the form “do you not have enough friends?”. But only if you are at least minimally in control of the process, if you feel that you are an individual in society, and not an anonymously wordless part of it. Interestingly, G + or LinkedIn gives me that feeling, but Facebook doesn't. And he does it on purpose. Why?
When I changed the technology and concept. Touchscreens, voice control, motion sensors, touchpads, not to mention all sorts of mice - all this organically fit into my world of interaction with devices, and there was not any special upheavals or revolutions along the way. I calmly and naturally considered myself a typical early adopter. I was in the networks of Fido and Compuserve, wrote emails before the Internet Epoch, talked in chat rooms and conferences years before the advent of ICQ, kept files in the cloud almost until the birth of some of the current startups in the trendy Cloud area. I even had my own blog for several years long before today's blog-craziness and dozens of available blogging platforms.
And so on and so forth.
')
All this boastful introduction is necessary for me for the following statement: I can not figure out Facebook . No, I understand perfectly well what it is, why it exists, where it goes and how it is monetized. I do not understand its interface! I never know what Facebook will show me at any particular time, I don’t understand the principle of tape formation, I don’t understand what photos will be chosen for the post with the album and which ones will be shown on a mobile device. I have no idea whether I like the post, photo or album. I feel like a dumbass in its settings, especially privacy settings and notifications. I do not know who will read my posts, and most importantly, why he will read them. I do not know what is happening with the posts that remain deep below. I do not feel the logic of the product, despite several unsuccessful attempts and, in general, quite a live account for photos of children and a cat. I do not leave the feeling that Facebook was written by Martians.
Curious to find out why this is so. The argument "made for a new generation" is not accepted. Possess a new generation of Martian logic, it would be felt in everything, and not just Facebook. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, the “new generation” finds it convenient that I find it convenient and that is convenient according to all standard canons. It can be easily explained why the younger generation chooses capacitive screens instead of resistive screens, or why it prefers communication in Whatsapp, rather than Usenet. But the concept of a convenient, logical, good interface, like a nightmarish and illogical, has not changed! Facebook is a nightmare and illogical.
What is even more interesting, there seems to be no need for its illogicality. By discarding the billionth client base, which is of interest only to the exchange with investors, and the technical (also invisible and not very interesting to end users) problem of scalability and fault tolerance of the service that accompanies it, we get a rather trivial script program. Well, in fact, “post-like-photo” - what could be more elementary in implementation, this is exactly the task for the conditional weekend in the student hostel! The added cost of Facebook is given by 100,500 servers, zettabytes of data and coverage of all the inhabitants of the earth two times, but the script itself could be made / completed logical so that Zuckerberg's sister did not get confused with the concept of “share with friends”?
My only explanation is that this is done on purpose. Not only do we not have to know what kind of information Facebook collects from our actions and how it is then used for advertising and other purposes, we don’t need to know what our actions lead to! You write a post with a photo of a wet pussy, carefully put down tags, give Facebook a dozen more links and potential preferences. And if other platforms in exchange for this offer at least a relative obligation to publish a post for your chosen circle of people, then Facebook does not even offer this. The post will appear for an obscure time period in your timeline and in the tape it is unclear what friends (in mobile clients you cannot be sure even with the tape of "close friends"). Being non-addressable, the post will be lost forever after time t, controlled by the same Facebook. If you want to hide the post, you will not even know from whom it was hidden and what will happen during sharing. It will be easier for you to learn access rights in Linux, rather than understand how privacy is inherited on Facebook, and whether the “Friends of Friends of Friends” subset is included in the set of “Friends of Friends”.
Confusing the interface logic, Facebook practically gets the right to show (or not show) your post to anyone outside your nearest circle. Instead of the usual transition to posts in notifications, you may have the installation of the stupidest - to match the Facebook application - “Birthdays” application (or whatever it is there), which with the ensigning directness and anecdotism of the “Moldavian virus” asks you to send yourself around the world . Oh, you thought that the notification icon can go only to posts, not to applications? Think further, and better - do not think at all! Unselfishly add links and advertising skills to Facebook, in it you are not just not a consumer, but a product, you are also a disenfranchised product: instead of your pussy, friends of friends will easily slip the adware.
Well, okay, Facebook is not scolded just lazy. In fact, I do not scold - it is foolish to scold the platform that has become popular just as it is - just talking out loud about such a demonstrative alogicality. For hundreds of millions of Facebook users, it is absolutely indifferent, which means only one thing: for hundreds of millions of users, their own content is indifferent. He is one-day , he is worth nothing. Easy come, easy go, as the English say. No one’s unnecessary “pussies” appear in useless posts that they collect, without reading, no one needs likes, and then disappear without a trace, since they are completely unnecessary to anyone. It does not matter why this happens, out of boredom or for fun. What is important is the strange persistence with which Facebook continues to cultivate such an approach, because the mobilization of the planet’s population has long been completed, an IPO has been carried out and there is no longer a reason for generating traffic for the sake of traffic.
Having added the last paragraph, I was thinking about how to better formulate the idea of ​​the future of the platform, built on one-day content, when suddenly here and there articles appeared on the loss of Facebook popularity among teenagers. What a slop, you say, was honored to write about Facebook when others have already forgotten about it. But the fact is that the conflict of traffic for the sake of traffic (read, advertising) with user content exists in any social network, and Facebook is only a vivid example of such a conflict.
Ideally, I don’t tell the service any personal information, I want to store my unlimited content for an infinitely long time, to share it only with those I explicitly indicated, and in turn see the content only of those who are directly interested. Ideally, the service I tell him absolutely everything, including the names of those with whom I sat on the pot in kindergarten, I do not have stored content (well, except maybe a few compressed-squeezed pictures), and I’m showing ads, one advertisement and nothing but advertising, Moreover, tags, friends and all that is called the beautiful word social, serve only to customize this advertisement.
The reality, as always, is somewhere in the middle, because advertising revenue allows you to pay for the platform. It should be tolerated, but only as long as it complements social communication, and does not replace it with itself. You will never be angry at the 5-minute block of advertising in an hourly series of interesting, high-quality series. But if you realize that the whole purpose of a worthless, meaningless series is in that ad unit, 5 minutes of advertising will annoy you a lot.
Facebook is much farther from the user ideal than it could and should have been. With all its globality and fantastic number of users, it turns out to be empty, since it cannot boast of any content, nor, as it turned out, the post of social coherent. You can blame windy fashion, you can argue about whether the form for the post will be more complicated than the status of “I went to the toilet” for inexperienced users, you can ask why there are no tree comments, but if the post of a person does not appear in the tape of his real-life friends, what else can speak?! This is the hell of the most basic, primary functionality!
I am skeptical about social networks and I'm not close to the rampage of exhibitionism. At the same time, I cannot fail to recognize their practical benefit. Only thanks to Facebook my mom can see photos of her granddaughters at the time of the event, and not a year or two after it. Once (during the time of manual compression of images, their archiving and sending by e-mail), I sent a friend photos taken at the 3rd birthday of his son exactly to his ... sixth birthday. Convenience of downloading content and integration with mobile platforms is a great thing. For this, you can forgive both the network of a billion people, and a little advertising, and the intrusiveness of the form “do you not have enough friends?”. But only if you are at least minimally in control of the process, if you feel that you are an individual in society, and not an anonymously wordless part of it. Interestingly, G + or LinkedIn gives me that feeling, but Facebook doesn't. And he does it on purpose. Why?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/172263/
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