How Facebook Promotes Conflict in Discussions
Facebook discussions have become the preferred way to have a group discussion (this is an observation, not an endorsement). But the terrible software design promotes misunderstandings that lead to conflict and makes it harder to reach mutually beneficial conclusions.
1 - It is never clear what the Enter key does. In some cases it starts a new line. In some cases in sends the note without further prompt - no chance to reread your note, maybe notice that you forgot "not" at a critical point, maybe notice that your automatic spell checker made your note confusing or meaningless by changing a critical word. You can edit the note after it's been posted, but that may be too late.
2 - You can change your note, even after it has been responded to, with no "edited" notice. Pretty easy to make a responder look stupid, intentionally or accidentally, by changing the note after he/she has responded to it.
3 - Responses can be directed at a note and indented under that note, with the author of the first note included. But a quote of the note that is being responded to is not included. Indentation attaches the response to the original note, but it also makes it more difficult for readers to find the response. In long discussions, I have been informed that there are several new notes in the discussion, but have been unable to find the new notes because they are indented multiple levels and hidden.
4 - If you don't have the cursor in the right place when you start a response, you don't get the indentation and author of the note that you are responding to. I have seen many notes of agreement or disagreement with no indication of what they are agreeing or disagreeing with.
5 - If a person deletes a note that has an indented response, the note and all of its indented responses are removed without notice. Any important information within an indented response is deleted, but not by the person that wrote the response. Why are you allowed to delete someone else's note?
6 - To counter issue 5, it is useful to respond to a note without making it an indented response. But then, as previously noted, there is no connection between the first note and the response.
How did such a system get put into place? My guess is that the people who designed it have never used it for a real discussion.
Why did this system become the most commonly used forum software? It's convenient. And because so many people don't understand or don't care about how it warps a discussion.
Why does Facebook keep this system in place? My guess is that what Facebook cares about is advertising revenue. Promoting conflict gets more participants. Facebook has no interest in people resolving the issues raised in the discussions.
And one more thing - you can post animated GIFs in discussions. These are ANNOYING and add NOTHING to the discussion.
PS 12/09/2021- Point 5 can be applied to the entire thread. Don't like how a discussion thread that you started is going? Delete your original note and the entire discussion will be deleted. There is no indication that it ever existed. Anyone who was following it is cut off from any further access and any responses that they hadn't read yet.
PS 12/16/2021 - And another issue that I just noticed. Facebook defaults shown comments to "Most relevant". In other words - we will hide comments that our artificial "intelligence" thinks are not important. You have to explicitly turn on "All comments", every time that you enter the discussion, to see the complete discussion. If you forget? - it's easy to overlook the small indication that you are not getting all the comments.
PS 4/18/2022 - Now the discussion comments default to "Top comments". Bad enough that they are leaving important comments out. But now the comments are not in chronological order. I first noticed this because bids on auctions were not in increasing value. Why are people bidding lower than the previous bid? Have the bidders gone insane? NO - Facebook has gone completely insane.
