The One Change Which Would Stop Me Loathing Social Networking

[emanix]

Or 'I can't be arsed to wade through all the crap'

I have to confess, I hate Facebook. I hate Twitter. I hate Livejournal too, though not quite so much. I disabled Google Buzz without even looking at it. I utterly detest every networking site out there designed to keep us all up to the minute on the minutiae of other people's lives. I've been hating them for a long time, with an almost unreasoning passion, and yet the light bulb as to exactly why I do only went on last night after I was in bed.

I was lying awake the other night, feeling utterly worn out, suffering from information overload. Ironically from nothing to do with social networking, but the thought was in my head 'I want all this information weeded out and only the important points left, preferably in a digestible format' – and 'bing!' suddenly the light went on about exactly why it is I am so attracted to, yet frustrated by all of the above sites. There is no system in place to weed out the crap and only see the important details – and there could be.

A lot of my friends insist that the only way to inform the rest of us about new additions to their family, house moves, impending marriages, starts and ends of relationships, new jobs etc. is by posting details on one networking site or another, and I guess that's okay. That's pretty much what these sites are for, after all. If I care about my friends then, I'm supposed to read these – and I *want* to read them.
The trouble is that to get to the important updates, I also have to wade through dozens of posts about 'I just had a really nice cup of tea', or 'I just gained/lost a random animal in this online game I'm playing', or chatty responses to other users (or whatever), and that is bloody hard work. It makes me feel deathly tired just thinking about it.*

This is the bit that drives me utterly crazy, though: I go offline for a few days because I have work to do and then there's no way to find out what I missed because there's way too much information to struggle through – but my friends have posted it, therefore they expect me to know.

What I want is an 'importance' rating on posts, and the ability to filter by it.

I imagine it working like newspaper headlines. Posts rated with high importance sit on the front page in bold type, and the chatty little editorials about how much you love digestive biscuits take a little more finding, for those who have the time. Alternatively they display in chronological order, and the reader just gets to filter out the less important posts.

Just imagine, it's the end of a hard day, you have ten minutes to spare, and you want to see if anything important's been going on – so you click on the 'show me the headlines' button, and there they are! All of the things that your friends really want you to know – without any of the nonsense. Got half an hour? Set the importance rating to 'Medium' and check the things your friends think you might find useful. Wouldn't that be wonderful? No need to be connected all day every day. No panicky feeling that you're missing something when you go offline, or guilty feeling when you don't go back to check what you've missed after a holiday – you know you can catch up on the important things at any time!

In database terms it's stunningly easy to code - I can do it myself (and I'm no great expert), which makes me wonder why it hasn't already been implemented. Can it really be that, like me, nobody quite thought of it before? Perhaps the owners of these sites feel that the knowledge that somewhere in amongst all that wittering there are some things you really ought to know is what forces us reluctant users to keep coming back? I for one would be a whole lot less reluctant if there was an easier way just to dip one's toe in, rather than total immersion being the only option.

So to my friends – I love you, I really do, but there are a lot of people I care about, and I just don't have the time or energy to read everything you write. Until this happens, do me a favour, and when you see me, assume I don't know, and *tell* me what's going on in your life.

Dreaming of the day when I don't have to sweat the small stuff.

M.

*Update for clarity, and to highlight just_becky's comment:

"Having said all that though, sometimes I do like to read the posts about the minutiae of my friend's lives. Sharing in the daily trivia can make me feel less isolated and more a part of their lives than geography currently allows."

(Me) Totally. That's why I want the importance rating system, not a cutting out of all the minutiae entirely. Sometimes I really *do* want to hear about that sandwich (ooh, sausage and gherkin! sounds yummy, actually ;-)), and I do want to feel included - without the worry of missing something vital.

In other words, I have no problem with the general gossip and silliness being there, I just want to have the option to skip it and get to the 'meat' when I'm pushed for time.

Comments

[xmakina.livejournal.com]

Hey - guess which one of your friends is not only a social networking junkie but a web developer with a healthy disdain for Web 2.0? Quick question: was this a rant or an opening for a conversation on the matter? Both are fine with me, I just want to know before I write an unwanted comment *smile*

However, and I'm sure you spotted it, but there's a hide button on Facebook. The last time I saw a Farmville post was 2 days after my first friend started playing. Good times, good times. "Hiding" every game/fortune/spam app as soon as it appears means reading through 48 hours of purely status updates only takes about 10 minutes, maximum.

[emanix.livejournal.com]

was this a rant or an opening for a conversation on the matter?

Yes :D Rant, but always open for conversation - particularly on the technical side. :)

I do indeed use the hide button. I still find though, that because I'm not hooked up constantly, every time I go back there's generally several new apps or several that I have to hide - take farmville, I hide that, but then there's a host of copycat games, fanclubs and so on which takes time and energy I don't usually have, on top of the reading mostly about what people had for dinner and who they drank cocktails with last night y'know.

*Feels a bit like Victor Meldrew this morning*

[xmakina.livejournal.com]

Prologue: I've been writing this piecemeal over the course of today so apologies for repetition on any other peoples ideas

every time I go back there's generally several new apps or several that I have to hide
This is the trade-off people have to work with. You either end up with a heavily stagnated site (like MySpace had become when Facebook first launched) or you end up with lots and lots of apps doing more-or-less the same thing. It's a business decision and, sadly, the market suggests you gain more people from allowing apps than you lose...

This is stuff that's personal to each person though so I'm gonna move my focus over to the "Importance" idea you pitched:
Whilst a fabulous idea in principle, in practice the results are wildly variable because of the reliance on humans, the most unreliable things in the world.

Essentially, there are two ways to implement "Importance". The poster tells you, or the friends of the post decide. Both are fraught with problems because you either rely on honesty or are at risk to stupidity.

Let's say the user specifies importance. Great for people who stick to it but a few basic problems:
1) It's an extra button to push. I'd love to find some numbers on how many people stop clicking after x number of buttons, or even when they have to pick between 3 or 1. I suspect it's pretty high, either way.
2) You trust people to have the same idea of "important" as you. Some people really do think "just ate a sandwich" is of the utmost importance and others think "just had her first counselling session" is of no importance to anyone.

Then you get into the more advanced issues of assigning importance to thing like application posts (because a lot of apps rely on these being made to boost their exposure), wall-to-wall updates and any number of extra bits and pieces. Asking a user to assign an importance to each of these then nothing will get done or the user will become bored of assigning importance and just start defaulting to the same option each time.

So what of the idea of using "the community"? The most clear problem with this is seen in sites like Reddit. Sometimes it works and a breaking story that very few agencies are covering comes to light, but 99% of the time it's either some forced agenda, people getting an incentive to vote a story, people deliberately pumping the numbers or just plain-and-simple bots. The headline story is regularly nothing more than the latest cute-cat video or a viral that is doing the rounds. You're "priority" list would quickly degrade into "Vote This To Get 1000 Pigs On Farmville" or "OMG THIS CAT IS SO FUNNI!!!!!!LOLOLOLOL" that the feature becomes redundant.

There is also the issue of deciding what is "important" when quantifying it. Even keeping it at a personal status level, someone with 1000 friends will become more "important" than someone with 100 if you go off simple numbers. If you go into more complex algorithms you start to put a lot more load on the server - every status needing a calculation that takes even a fraction of a second quickly multiplies into a massive additional load when scaled to the size of sites like Facebook.

It's a fascinating subject though and scalability is one of those fantastic things where there is no right or wrong way to do it. I'd love to hear any ideas you've got :D

[emanix.livejournal.com]

Heya, nice response. I had thought of a couple of those things, but didn't want to make my post into war and peace!

1. I'd expect all posts to have a default value of 'low', on the assumption that if a user can't be bothered to make the extra mouse click so that people really notice what they say, it can't be all that important.

2. All of these sites already give you the option to unfollow or ignore individuals who post only crap you don't want to read - if a person really has a different idea of importance you can stop reading them entirely, or add them to a different priority list, just as one might now. Even better, I love the idea that softfruit suggested below about a multiplier, so you might be more interested when your primary partner has a great sandwich than when the schoolfriend you haven't seen in ten years gets married, and can reflect that in your filtering system. That would rock!

Apps-wise, I get that developers may want to give apps a slightly higher priority because they make money through this, so they could always default to a slightly higher priority than standard posts (as long as nobody takes away the 'ignore' option!)

Other users rating importance level could potentially work too, I think. I have seen several news sites in particular use a rating system for comments that relies on user response - where positively rated comments rise to the top, and negatively rated comments are dropped down the page or filtered out - and it works fine. It's statistically based, I believe, so that comments that get an 80% positive response have the same ranking whether that's from 10 people, or 1000. It might still devolve into lolcats having the highest rankings though, so I still lean towards posts being ranked (or not ranked and left at default low importance) by the original poster.

Other sites use the 'karma' system, for example, where individual posters are ranked on the quality of their posts, but in terms of what I'm wanting to achieve I don't think it's quite as useful.

[just-becky.livejournal.com]

Yes I am really glad to have found how to hide my Farmville spammery. It was far from obvious how to do it and even now I know, it still takes 4 mouse clicks, a keystroke, another mouse click, tabbing twice and final mouse click just to publish updates to Farmville friends only.

Talking of which is it working from your end? Hopefully you no longer see anything but witty comments and insightful discourse from me now? :-D