19
votes
Which social media design features you find to be pet peeves?
Most social media users enjoy some design features and dislike others. However, there are often things that, while minor, significantly worsen these users' experience.
What are your social media design pet peeves?
For me, the most infuriating thing is the inability to set the default sort to chronological.
On Reddit, this makes subreddit subscriptions next to useless as I need to always remember to re-sort by new. For some subreddits, there is one time I might want to see the "top" or "best" view: when I visit the subreddit first. Otherwise, I return to check what is new, and for news-type subreddits this is the only mode I am interested in.
There are even (SFW—!) subreddits that I still browse while logged out: I had made browser bookmarks to those subreddits including
sort=newbefore I registered on Reddit, and it is more convenient for me to use those bookmarks.Yes, I use reddit and do this all the time. And I think reddit is the best one I've found. The other is the algorithmic feed. I understand the need for an algorithm, but really that's all the different sorts are is an algorithm. So an enhancement would be an algorithmic slider, or filter slider. Are you listening, Zuck? I would even prefer this over taking all the ads out, I can skip over them.
You can make a multi and then bookmark the multi and add /new to the html such as
https://www.reddit.com/me/m/<multi>/new/and you'll have a chronologically sorted list of "subscriptions"While this is a partial solution, given the wide range of topics I am interested in, there would be a dozen of such multis… and I will still need to re-sort, or to add
/new, or to contaminate browser bookmarks.Anyway, Reddit is going in the direction away from my interests.
I mean if you're comparing it to a subscription list, having them all in one big multi would accomplish the same.
Also, apparently this is a feature they want to implement
I know it kind of defeats the point, but the publicity is the biggest reason why I hate social media. I just want to talk to the people I want to talk to. It's fine when I am speaking to the public as a whole (as I am here and now), but when I am actually interacting with the people I care about I don't want it to be a pageant.
I feel that the publicity angle of social media is bad for society as a whole as it breeds new social expectations that I don't think are healthy. You get people scolding others because they don't read their status updates. This pagentry is also one of the main reasons why social media is so addictive; it's using the suffocating force of peer pressure.
Yeah-- I'm honestly not interested in broadcasting much of anything to my friends, family, colleagues, and people who sat 20 feet away from me in calculus all at the same time.
Honestly, this is the one thing G+ got right. You put acquaintances in circles, then you can share family-related stuff with your family, memes and stuff with your friends, and nothing with your coworkers while making it seem like you want to share with them.
That's why I generally stick to group chats, reddit, and tildes. Group chats are super localized-- everything I say in there is explicitly directed at everyone in the room. On reddit, nobody very much cares about who I am so I'll joke around and post stuff that doesn't necessarily need to be tied to my name. I also use tildes as a more focused discussion board as many of you do as well.
Essentially-- I'd love a social network where I can easily selectively share with people I know. For now, I'll stick to my current ways.
When they announced Google+, I was pretty excited about the functionality of that circles feature, as I'm the same way--I actually rarely use Facebook or Instagram because I hate sharing things with everyone I'm "friends" with. The problem was, though, that no one used G+, so I didn't use G+, ... and the rest is history.
The upside to this is that, instead of sharing things via social media, I send pictures or messages directly to people. If I take a cute picture or video of my son, I'll just send it directly to my family via email or a Facebook Messenger group. It's a nicer way of communicating. I don't miss sending pictures or messages to those people I didn't talk to in high school who for some reason wanted to "reach out" to me now (I'm 36) without actual communication.
No RSS. I won't visit 10 apps to see my news for the day. It either has an RSS feed or a proper newsletter (not too frequent, at least), or it doesn't exist for me. I've a twitter account which I started because I wanted to follow some local playhouses and theatre troupes, but I never remember to do that. If at least a feed for my timeline was available maybe I could've made use of it.
Not only, but what I hate with Twitter is that, not only what you see in your timeline is not cronological, but also infuriatingly repetitive. IDK if this is a local thing, but these account that belong to reputable groups of artists or to reputable institutions keep reposting stuff all the time. It's impossible to follow what's new since I last visited because I have to remember what I saw some days ago and dig out from the pile of useless pictures and dense text infested with hash tags and links the stuff that's relevant, and it's hard enough for me with 20-ish accounts I follow (I don't tweet or follow anybody I know, just these few stuff that I wan't news from).
Forcing me to download an app. I get that apps can do all sorts of stuff that websites can’t wrt notifications and animations, but that doesn’t mean you have to intentionally degrade the mobile site’s UX.
This is the main reason I avoid all reddit or twitter links at all cost. They purposely cripple their websites to get you to install the app. They want you to install the app because that lets them distract you all day with pointless notifications.
Anything that violates the idea of user choice. NOBODY intended to share anything they "liked" or "commented on". If they did, they'd press 'share'. But it's OK, because you're going to do it for them.
Do you not realize what a massive fuckoff invasion of privacy that is? Do you even fucking care? At what point do we realize these sites (and I'm mostly talking about Facebook) are run by psychopaths? You take a website which was good in the beginning, get a bunch of people to join it, and then slowly over the years introduce privacy violating features. We can't just "delete our accounts", the network effect is too useful. Fuck you for ever taking advantage of us like that.
They're so restrictive! Looking back at sites like myspace, it's hard not to drool a little, even if there were problems.
I want social media to be a place for expression! You can't express shit through any popular social media platform now, it sucks. That's most of the appeal for me.
I never used myspace but from what I have heard the customization was letting you embed custom CSS on the page right?