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Ask HN: Who is already sick of all of these "Like" buttons plastered everywhere?
I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly, because it's already starting to get ridiculous even just a couple days after being introduced.
- Detrus 17y agoPoor digg, that was supposed to be their trick
- peterzakin 17y agoPeople may end up preferring liking to digging (though who knows at this point), but when it comes to actively looking for interesting content, digg's still got something to hang onto. It begs the question, however, whether facebook will ever make an attempt to organize all of the outside links users promote so that such content becomes discoverable by topic and not just incidental lines on the newsfeed?
- elblanco 17y agoOn some pages, the number of affiliate aggregator upvote links takes up some significant portion of the page (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.). It would make sense for somebody to aggregate the aggregators, a meta-aggregator if you will, and just have one button on the page that sends it to all of them.
- ugcblog 17y agoHa people are probably dreaming about the good old days of myspace, when you could leave a website behind.
- alexro 17y ago"food and shows"- that's what the masses want, unfortunately
- jff 17y agoI think "bread and circuses" is more standard :)
- cpr 17y agoI completely ignore all that social networking stuff; my brain sees them as ads and blocks them subconsciously.
- Batsu 17y agoI'm the same way. I often read articles that I would like to share with people, but since I'm more interested in the ensuing discussion, I'd rather directly link a person during a conversation (or as a way to start one) rather than throw it at my Facebook page or similar. I consider sites like HN quite different, as that is their sole purpose :)
- whalesalad 17y agoYea that stuff is totally blocked out of my mind. I use Facebook to connect with my friends and family, and will share a link occasionally if it really pertains to me. For the most part, though, I don't like spamming mass amounts of data to friends. The only benefit I see to things like delicious and other "social bookmarking" tools is the fact that they're "up in the cloud", aka, backed up somewhere away from my browser config folder. Has anyone noticed the new Mahalo-esque stuff they're doing? All of your hobbies, movies, music, etc... that they're making part of this social graph is now linked together a lot better. Example, one of my interests (for fun) is "underwater basket weaving" which now links to a page like this, http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Underwater-basket-weaving/111910742153434 http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Underwater-basket-weaving/1... "Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for Underwater basket weaving, sign up and we'll let you know when we're ready for your help." Pretty crazy.
- dmoney 17y agoDo people really use the whole "social bookmarking" part of Delicious? I mean, I've tagged a few things for:whomever, but 99% of my usage has been bookmarking stuff for myself, or looking for stuff I've bookmarked.
- 17y ago
- asnyder 17y agoNot only are they bad, they slow down the rendering speed of the pages they're on. http://twitter.com/SlexAxton/status/12663859611 http://twitter.com/SlexAxton/status/12663859611
- aschobel 17y agoWe use it via FBML and JavaScript SDK and the slow down seems to be minimal. We load their script right before </body>. Biggest annoyance is that it doesn't degrade very gracefully when FB has availability problems, you get a white square in the page in Firefox.
- woid 17y agoI think they can solve it when using Javascript SDK on modern browsers. IFRAME could be loaded offscreen and when it finishes then it does postMessage to notify the parent window. Javascript SDK injector then unhides the IFRAME. Easy to do, but they are probably busy doing other stuff.
- woid 17y agoWell it depends how you look at it. It definitely adds to network traffic and CPU load. But IFRAME content and javascript-injected IFRAME are both loaded asynchronously. Browsers are pretty good in progressive rendering of page content these days. So user should see the main page first and then it starts loading these additional resources. So no big deal IMHO. The button should not degrade user experience during page loading.
- throwthisaway 17y agoIt's the new "tweet this" -- a stupid trend people will wonder about in a few years.
- tdmackey 17y agoCan't say I've noticed one yet. :(
- ElbertF 17y agoSurely you mean ":)"?
- Popcorn 17y agoI've already spotted one on a website I frequently visit. Do webmasters just assume they have to plaster this stuff on without any thought?
- pedalpete 17y agoI thought things were getting ridiculous with all the buzz, digg, sphere, reddit buttons already. From what I can see, those are being replaced with a single option (though I admit, I haven't seen many of the facebook implementations yet). It is nice to have a 'standard' rather than voting for multiple items. At the same time, how much is liking something really doing for ya? I don't think it has the benefit of a community like HN, so Facebook doesn't have it all yet.
- alexro 17y agoDo you think reddit (or twitter or digg or stumbleupon) users will start liking the "like" and prefer it to replace other buttons? Completely agreeing about the ridiculous aspect of so many buttons though.
- pedalpete 17y agoI don't know that it has to be an if/else situation. I do suspect sites will start putting only the 'like' button, as it is cleaner, likely loads the page faster, and has such a larger audience. At the same time, I suspect people will still visit digg, reddit, etal to find new articles, and up vote them there. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see sites like Digg get significantly less posts added. I hope we don't see the same suspected decline here on HN, as my friends on FB aren't HN types.
- jambo 17y agoI'm just seeing a lot of broken iframes because I've now blocked facebook & their subdomains on my personal machine.
- larsberg 17y agoI wish this topic had a Like button!
- superrobot 17y agoTry this one; http://youlik.es/l/4f http://youlik.es/l/4f (this site lets you create a like button things on the web)
- cmelbye 17y agoWhat do you mean by "less evil"? The whole point of the "Like" button is that it's universal. Something being mildly annoying is not "evil" by any stretch of the imagination.
- kevinh 17y agoI haven't noticed this yet. Would someone kindly point me towards an example?
- j-g-faustus 17y agohttp://techcrunch.com/ http://techcrunch.com/ Every story has a Like, a Buzz and a Retweet button.
- barredo 17y agoIMDb updated with the button the same day FB announced it
- philf 17y agoCannot find any FB integration on IMDb. Care to explain?
- asdflkj 17y agoIs "Who else" a legitimate question that you can "ask HN" nowadays? I've been gone for a while.
- chaosmachine 17y ago"I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly" http://www.openlike.org/ http://www.openlike.org/
- bprater 17y agoCan we re-phrase the question in less of a reddit-style way?What's the discussion we want to have behind this?
- resdirector 17y agoI can't agree more. Look at the first comment: 20 karma points, and no real substance, hackerish or otherwise. I'd like to see a discussion about (a) what it actually means to "like" something, (b) what demographics currently use the "like" buttons (c) are there any startup ideas to revolutionize the distribution of information etc.
- what 17y agoClicking "like" is like saying I have nothing to actually contribute but I want to feel like I'm participating. Also, I guess it stops the thousands of comments that would just say "I agree," "Yeah" or whatever? But what good is a "like" button if there is no "dislike/hate" button?
- evanrmurphy 17y ago> But what good is a "like" button if there is no "dislike/hate" button? That's how HN is if you're under the karma threshold.
- petercooper 17y agoWhy do we need all these buttons to do things we already all have our own specific ways of doing? If you want to bookmark something, bookmark it in the way you know how (in browser, Delicious, etc). If you want to tweet about something, go tweet about it in the client of your choice.
- barredo 17y agoI actually like them. But someone could make a quick userscript to hide them :-) Edit: // ==UserScript== // @name I-Dont-Like-The-New-Facebook-Like // @namespace I-Dont-Like-The-New-Facebook-Like // @description Hide all Facebook 'Like' buttons // @include * // ==/UserScript== (function () { var i = document.getElementsByTagName('iframe'); if(i) { for(e in i) { if(i[e].src.match(/http\:\/\/www.facebook.com\/widgets\/like.php/gi)) { i[e].style.display = 'none'; i[e].style.visibility = 'hidden'; } } } })();
- Raphael 17y agoOr any kind of sharing widgets, for that matter. If only web admins would trust visitors to have their own bookmarklets or extensions, so that pages wouldn't have all the cruft.
- resdirector 17y agoI don't care for the unnormalized "number of diggs/tweets/karma" etc. I'd actually use the "like" buttons if they learned what I liked/disliked, rather than just being there to show off an unnormalized and somewhat meaningless figure.
- imurray 17y agoI added the following rule to Adblock plus: * facebook.com/plugins* The iframes disappear seamlessly.
- metamemetics 17y agoSimple solution: Complainbook.com. The web is viewed through a frame that that adds Dislike buttons to every piece of content. It aggregates what people are disliking and recommends things to the user that they will be sure to hate. It will instantly gain a high market share amongst content degregators, and Facebook will see everyone disliking their Like buttons with the Dislike button and be less evil. It would also include location based features where users upload geotags of places they've never been, nor would want to go to.
- aw3c2 17y agoI have iframes globally disabled with only few websites allowed to use them. Try it.
- andrewcooke 17y agoYou can block them in Firefox by using the RequestPolicy plugin. At least, I assume that you can, because I am not actually seeing any ;o) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9727 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9727 At first it seems like overkill, because it blocks sites from accessing data from other sites, but you can enable certain sites (either globally or on a per-site basis) and it remembers those, so after a little playing around, sites you visit frequently look quite normal. It's also very interesting seeing how people assemble sites these days...
- elblanco 17y agoI wish there was a "Like" button on this post.
- inboulder 17y ago<--- What, you mean like that?