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ShatChat: How Facebook's Bizarre Obsession With Snapchat Is Ruining User Experience On Messenger (500ish.com)
Columnist MG Siegler writes: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." I often find myself pointing to this quote from Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park. It's just so succinctly perfect for so many things. This week's example: Facebook Messenger's new 'Day' functionality. [...] They've [Facebook] decided to weaponize all of these networks [Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram], user experience be damned. On Messenger, people have their list of contacts and/or groups that they chat with. The most recent conversations -- likely the most important -- are at the top of that feed. But if you're anything like me, you're often scrolling down a bit because you have many regular conversations. And so this screen real estate is insanely valuable. And Messenger puked up this new 'Day' nonsense all over it. Yes, people share photos on Messenger. Undoubtedly a ton. That's maybe how you try to justify this move to yourself if you're Facebook. But Messenger is fundamentally about chatting; it's a utility. Photos may be additive, but they're not core. You could try to pivot your service into making them core, but that doesn't mean you should.As of last year, Facebook Messenger has over a billion active users.
No. Messenger is fundamentally about mining data.
Facebook doesn't give a flying fuck what you or anybody else things about Messenger or any of their software, so long as people continue to give them all of their personal information for free.
I don't respond to AC's.
There is an uncomfortable amount of truth in this, especially the comments about Australis Firefox, GNOME 3, and Windows 8 to 10.
Many of them were so taken with the ability to code some interesting or novel UI feature that they never stopped to ask if "interesting" or "novel" was better than what was already in use. In most cases it wasn't.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
And it's Facebook's obsession with the "don't leave the app" paradigm. Youtube links, html5 video links, gifs and even common pic format links, they're all messed up both on preview and on the follow up link. Youtube is particularly obnoxious, you have to click twice: click once and the video preview disappears, gets replaced by the lone link itself, which on second click actually opens something else (which also inconsistently fluctuates between a chrome tab inside Messenger running html5 Youtube, an external similar Chrome tab, or the Youtube app itself).
But the worst of all, even Facebook's own links are f'd up - I'd love it if I could get an FB link from a post, user, comment or live vid link on Messenger that actually previews, loads and/or opens consistently IN THE FB APP instead of the browser or messenger itself. They just got it real bad on the Android implementation. It just seems to behave differently depending on: 1. the device you're using; 2. the device people are using; 3. the way people copied/shared the item on their side. It's stupid, as in pre-html5, pre-Android stupid. There is only one thing that nags me even more tha this Messenger quirks on Android, and it's the share location function of Google Maps, which deliberately ignores providing standardized location data anywhere it goes, only providing links to a gmaps-centered position, without even a pin or "navigate to" options.
And yes, I have messed around with both Messenger and Facebook apps' "always open externally", "don't use internal browser" or "whatever da fck it's called this week's update so we have a reset justification and you get it back again". It still sux, and always falls back to Chrome who will not redirect it to the app Intent because it was already redirected.
Honestly, I was wondering what happened to Facebook Messenger. I hadn't realized that it was trying to compete with SnapChat, which I've never used and I don't think I ever will. I do know that Messenger was, for me, a somewhat unnecessary but tolerable text-messaging application that I used to keep in touch with some Facebook contacts, and it suddenly became an unusable mess. I deleted it after it launched, post-update, and suddenly started asking me for access to all kinds of things (access to location, address book, and other stuff) and kept asking repeatedly after I said "no". That was the 5-ton straw that broke the camel's back.
It seems like every time Facebook "fixes" or "improves" something, I hate the platform more.