It’s Not Me, It’s You, FriendFeed

In late 2008, my use of FriendFeed changed dramatically and it’s about to change again.

I used to be very active in political discussions on FriendFeed until it got to the point where it was making it no longer enjoyable to use FriendFeed. Although it started out really fun, I began to tire of having to keep up with posts I was involved in and shepherding the ones I had started myself. I wanted to log into FriendFeed and have good time but when every discussion I got into degenerated into ad hominem attacks or semantic tedium, FriendFeed stopped being fun. So, I disengaged. I blocked some people who deserved being blocked and moved on with trying to change my experience on FriendFeed to something that wasn’t necessarily more enjoyable but something that was at least less intensive and exhausting. Sure, I still got involved in some heated discussions but at least I was choosing topics that—other than religion—don’t make people want to strangle each other.

Now it’s 18 months later and FriendFeed is no longer fun again and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

First thought is that it’s because of the Facebook thing. FriendFeed’s running on fumes, everyone’s pronounced it dead, and many people’s use of the service has dwindled significantly or disappeared all together. So it must be because my feed has slowed down, no one’s talking, and nothing’s going on. Yet most of the people I interacted with daily 18 months ago are still around and are still active. So, as far as I can tell, at least for me (and these other people), it isn’t because there’s nothing to comment on or like. The place is still busy. So what could it be then?

Over the past few weeks, in the back of my mind, a dark voice began snickering and then one day a thought surfaced that made my skin crawl. I hated the thought and my first instinct was to deny it vehemently but it kept coming back to me again and again as I chewed on this problem:

FriendFeed has become the stagnant backwater of social networking.

Just… pause there for a second. Now, catch your breath. All right, let’s go.

In the wake of the Facebook acquisition, people have been attributing the main cause of the so-called death of FriendFeed to the post-acquisition mass exodus: that many of the most influential tech people abandoned the site and that without these people, the site couldn’t possibly survive. I believed this too but stuck to my guns along with some other FriendFeed stalwarts like Louis Gray, Jesse Stay, and Johnny Worthington. We argued passionately for the community and that FriendFeed didn’t need the likes of the early adopters to survive. I firmly believed that the exodus of people wouldn’t kill FriendFeed. And I was right. Yet… FriendFeed is no longer fun for me. Again: why?

The mantra of FriendFeed has always been to put yourself in control: subscribe only to those people who enrich your experience, unsubscribe from those who don’t, hide the stuff that doesn’t interest you, and block the people who truly bother you. This one thing which makes FriendFeed so awesome is the one thing that kept so many people from really investing in the site: it takes time and a continued effort to shape your FriendFeed experience into something fantastic. Those who surmounted this steep learning curve were highly rewarded; those who didn’t take the time were the ones who didn’t get it and left (surprisingly, this was a lot of the smartest people in tech, too, which proves that laziness and intelligence are by no means mutually exclusive).

What I had to come to terms with is some of the content of my feed was no longer entertaining and interesting to me. This is a tough thing to admit because I consider a lot of these people to be actual friends and I don’t mean to be insulting. Of course, part of it is because my interests and my expectations of the social networking experience have changed; and part of it is because the quality of posts from some of those people have declined significantly; but, I think that the biggest part of it is due to another and far more interesting sociological phenomenon.

You see, the thing that makes FriendFeed great—that constant reshaping and honing of your experience like wood on a lathe—only works if there is a constant influx of new users; it doesn’t matter who is currently still using the service heavily. If your feed’s starting to bore or irritate you, you can always fold in new, interesting people. And, back in the day, you didn’t have to even search for these people: they’d just appear through Friend of a Friend, your friends having vetted them and now providing you with a preview. Without those new users, though, you’re kind of stuck with who you have. And if you have any group of people who constantly interact with each other in what has become an essentially closed environment, you end up with the social networking equivalent of cabin fever.

To put it another way, it’s like going to back to grade school every day and having to interact with a group of people not necessarily because you want to or because you even like them but because you have to by proximity: you see them every day in class, they’re always there, and they’ve always got something to say; and even if they don’t say it directly to you, you’ll hear about it soon enough. Sound familiar?

When people first meet, they’re usually on their best behavior: they replace personal comfort with social graces, honesty with civility, and they generally work fairly hard to be accepted and have people like them. At the very least, they at least go out of their way to not purposefully cause trouble.

However, once people become more comfortable, they tend to start letting it all hang out. Personal boundaries begin to blur and people stop trying to conceal the less genteel aspects of their character. At the same time, people’s level of social tolerance begins to decline and they start finding it increasingly difficult to look past the irritating aspects of other people’s personalities. What you may have initially took as curious eccentricity has become a grating aspect of someone whom you now find difficult to stand. At first, it’s probably a tough thing to deal with because this might have been someone you thought you had liked and perhaps even bonded with but now each time this person posts, you seriously want to kill them. So either you block them or you try to be amicable. However, most people, regardless of their intentions, find it difficult to be so forgiving in the face of repeated offenses. So people either start ignoring them or becoming increasingly hostile toward them. And, of course, the same goes right back toward you and your posts.

When you unsubscribe from someone (or block them), goodwill is maintained and peace prospers. However, without the constant influx of new users, the more you unsubscribe, the less activity you have with which to interact and the less activity you have, the more bored you’re likely to become. And so some people tend to try and tolerate those they probably should have unsubscribed from which eventually cause fermenting hostilities to begin to percolate upward and out.

One way that these hostilities—and I’m using the term not very seriously here—has begun to manifest itself in many users, at least as seen from my feed, is through senseless bickering. Maybe my rose-colored glasses have burned up on re-entry but it seems to me that a lot of FriendFeed’s once spirited and intelligent debates have been replaced with endless, petty bickering; the same kind of petty bickering you encounter between, say, siblings who probably like each other but have generated such a history of strife that they can’t help but to needle each other to death when the opportunity presents itself. In some ways, FriendFeed these days is like a family reunion that just won’t end. So all of the little irritations that have been festering through all of these years of reading and commenting on each other’s posts, through all of the arguments and frustrated snarking, have begun to negatively affect how some people are treating each other on a daily basis.

And, well, this kind of thing is not only uninteresting to me but it’s repellant. I don’t mind getting into discussions but the incessant bickering is just too irritating for me to tolerate. More and more often, I’m seeing innocent threads completely derailed by some unnecessary argument over something completely trivial. It’s like FriendFeed has gone from some sterling example of discussion and debate on the Internet to a very unfunny version of Monty Python’s Argument Sketch. It’s getting to where I don’t want to get involved in or start any discussions because it probably won’t take more than five comments or so before I’m having to write essentially one explanatory footnote after another over because someone got offended over not what I wrote but over some subtext that they made up themselves. Or someone decides that it’s more relevant to argue word choice than the topic itself. It’s no longer interesting and it’s no longer fun. It seems that so much of FriendFeed is stricken by this social networking cabin fever.

Of course, I need to write a disclaimer that not everyone I interact with on FriendFeed is guilty of this nor am I guilt-free nor are all threads so easily described here. There have been and still are a lot of good discussions on FriendFeed and there are a lot of really good users left (and I want to stress that this post isn’t picking on anyone in particular). However, it seems to me that the ratio of good to bad, of rational discussion to ridiculous bickering, of LOLcats to substance leaves a lot to be desired. Seriously, if I wanted updates on how much you’ve cried today, I’d join MySpace.

So my use of FriendFeed is changing and, indeed, has already been changing which explains why I haven’t been as active lately. I don’t plan on blocking or unsubscribing from anyone (although I expect some particularly thin-skinned people will probably block me faster than a sneeze after they read this) but I do plan on being far more selective in what I post and in which posts I get involved. I also plan on unceremoniously withdrawing as soon as what was once a good discussion begins to deteriorate into insipid redundancy. It’s the best I can do to stop me from quitting the service entirely. And I don’t want to quit FriendFeed: there are still plenty of great posts and great people to keep me around even if not as engaged as before (and I suspect this will make quite a few people rather happy). As I’ve written many times before, I’ll be on FriendFeed until they pull the plug. It’s just is now as it was in 2008: I need to change how I use FriendFeed to make FriendFeed enjoyable to me again.

FriendFeed has become a stagnant backwater of the social networking scene and it’s because we don’t have enough churn to keep things dynamic. This cabin fever combined with a sometimes appalling sprawl of over-emphasized personal comfort has lead a lot of people to behave rather barbarically toward each other and where there was once a lot of civility, there’s now just a lot of personal bullshit being put up shamelessly for all to see. If I were a new user who was curious about FriendFeed and who happened to wander by during last week’s almost USENET-worthy flamewar about race (argued, ironically enough, mostly by white guys) or watching one particular user get practically shredded for using a local (and contextually harmless) colloquialism or having petulant teenagers throwing daily temper tantrums about who-knows-what, I probably wouldn’t want to stick around either. Oh, wait, I forget: some of those teenagers are actually in their thirties.

Welcome to the New FriendFeed:

Tagged as: FriendFeed