Imagine how useful it would be if when there is a notification about a friend on Facebook, you could peek it by swiping on the notification in the android drawer like you can with texts, without entering the Facebook app.
Nope. Engineers are dedicated there to increasing other things than the utility of the app. Interests aren't aligned with the users.
Same with removing chronological feeds. Turn things more and more into slot machines.
The most frustrating change for me was FB (or Messenger later) used to send me an email when I received a message, with the message content inside the email. A few years ago they removed the content from the email and forced me to log into FB or Messenger to see the message. It's extremely user hostile.
It's basically turning your friends' messages into clickbait. I got one recently that was "Someone just flagged me down at a..." and it just feels like a really insidious way to get you to go to Facebook and read the rest. It doesn't even show that much in the actual email, only in the Gmail preview - it's just a link to Facebook (the text is set to "color:#FFFFFF;display:none !important;font-size:1px;").
> The most frustrating change for me was FB (or Messenger later) used to send me an email when I received a message, with the message content inside the email. A few years ago they removed the content from the email and forced me to log into FB or Messenger to see the message. It's extremely user hostile.
You also used to be able to reply to the message by replying to the notification email, so you could be a full conversation participant solely through email without ever opening the app.
They won’t even let you view messages on the mobile website either. Instead they restrict that and force you to install the Messenger app. Yelp does the same thing and feels just as scummy of a tactic. Basically both companies try to force you to install an app you don’t actually need so they can mine your contacts and personal data. No thanks to your tricks and traps business model.
You can also tell your browser to view Facebook in desktop mode, and you can then see the messages. Not a pleasant user experience, but fine for the rare times when I need it.
FB frequently sends notifications that is not directly related to me.
e.g.
"A friend has commented on a post in a group that you're a member of."
Why would Facebook think this is of interest to me, is beyond my understanding.
Agreed. At first I thought it was a bug, and was rather taken aback when I realised it was intentional. Of course, as I have an aversion to click-baity emails, I have barely visited FB since...
Not to defend FB on this but I can see them doing this defensively. I've seen doctors offices using FB to keep patients updated with their activities (free 'Healthy Eating' seminar), which has unintentionally been used to sent messages like 'Hey Doc needs to reschedule your colonoscopy appointment'. I'm sure FB doesn't want to get involved with indirect HIPAA violations, even if the fault lies elsewhere.
oh lord yes...like a monstrous, you need to be fired one. You can't put phi on any electronic system which you do not have a signed business associate agreement with. I suppose there's a chance that FB signed a baa, in which case this would be their problem, but it seems pretty unlikely to me.
IANAL, but there is a legal concept of ‘Joint And Several Liability’ — it might be the case that Facebook and the doctor were in violation.
Or it might have been just the doctor until someone complained and from that point on just the fact that Facebook knew about it might make them suddenly and automatically liable for further bad behaviour.
I think perhaps what's being described is akin to a bulletin board with fliers outside the doctors office, with general advice to the public, not specific directed advice to a patient about their specific health issues. I'm not sure that falls afoul of HIPAA, I would imagine it doesn't since it's not specific at all.
At the same time, that also makes it irrelevant to the point at hand, since it's not Facebook messenger at all, just general health posts and items offered by that medical group.
An easy solution would be to offer a "no preview" flag. But this also doesn't make sense because presumably the person's email account (where the preview would appear) is as private as their messenger. People who don't want to send info in email tend to send links to a secure portal, which they could do just as well in Messenger, preview or not.
Last time I checked, ToS had nothing about HIPAA. I even contacted them, wouldn't answer if they where HIPAA compliant or not. Wanted to know, just in case a doctor ever talks about communicating through them.
Any one that does communicate through them with their doctor, most likely doesn't know what HIPAA is or care.
To FB, it is the old "don't ask or tell" scenario.
We just started trialling Facebook Workplace. Unfortunately the same is true of that. It’s all about getting you back into Workplace, rather than actually doing your job.
My employer has been using Workplace for over a year. It took over a year to finally hear it from other colleagues that they don't see some posts, which I started telling from the very first day.
And the reasoning to use it? "People are familiar with it from home". Well.. how about using something else and spend 30 mins on educating people? Oh, that might mean no new yacht for shareholders this year.
<evil thought>Better still, you pay Facebook to _bury_ them. You raise all the important concerns about how the project you're working on is going to completely fuck up, and quietly arrange for Zuck to get a little richer while ensuring none of your cow orkers see these messages. Then you pull them out at the inevitable blamestorming meeting and say "But look! I raised all those big red flag problems on date[1] date[2] and date[3], and was ignored by everybody!"
" Engineers are dedicated there to increasing other things than the utility of the app"
I'll qualify that statement by adding that product management/design team is optimizing for engagement metrics and the engineers are developing from those blueprints. Blame product management for anti-UX decisions. No PO/PM is going to risk their career by spearheading an effort to lower app engagement metrics which results in a loss of advertising revenue.
I get the intent of what you’re saying, but when you have things like this they’re usually representative of the team or company as a whole, rather than a single profession.
Yes! The worst for me was a couple of days ago, I started playing a video, I changed tab and the video stopped! I came back and it started again. I guess one of their main KPI it's time on site, like people are not spending enough time already, and regardless of how people want to use their website.
This might also be a feature of your browser. Firefox and chrome both implemented this a little while ago. If you pin the tab, it shouldn't stop playing video when you switch away. I forget which of the browsers, but it really helps people on bad laptops and what not.
Well, a lot of people use Youtube as a music service, so that makes sense. I think there may be a domain whitelist for non-active page video in chrome, which was brought up and discusses here a while back, but I can't recall. Or maybe it was auto-play? Maybe they share a whitelist though.
Except to show that notification on your phone, Facebook needs to give a 3rd party (Phone Manufacturer) access not only to your data, but data about your friends.
This is something people are currently very upset with them for doing.
So they can make things convenient, or keep your data safe, but its hard to do both.
Their code is executing with a third party kernel, trusting that but not trusting the notification system which sits way above hierarchically seems like a very arbitrary delineation.
> So they can make things convenient, or keep your data safe, but its hard to do both.
Even if your argument made sense with respect to the thing people are currently very upset about (which I disagree that it does), there is absolutely NO inherent right for FB to exist if they're unable to do both (if it's just "hard", well then get busy).
If I want to keep my data safe, they get to "inconvenience" me? That's ridiculous, if they can't keep my data safe, they don't get shit.
It's an API to publish a notification - a similar API to that used to build the core app. There's no additional sharing of data than what's already happening running the app.
Nope. Engineers are dedicated there to increasing other things than the utility of the app. Interests aren't aligned with the users.
Same with removing chronological feeds. Turn things more and more into slot machines.