4 ms·

I was one of Facebook's earlier adopters, back when it was still restricted to a handful of universities. I found it to be a useful tool for getting to know cl

by dfranke 16y ago

I was one of Facebook's earlier adopters, back when it was still restricted to a handful of universities. I found it to be a useful tool for getting to know classmates. Then the feature creep started and it turned into a product that I have no use for, so I left. I never at any point gave a damn what their privacy policy was, because it would never have crossed my mind to post something there if I didn't want it to be public.

CaptainMorgan 16y ago
Early adopter here too. I fully enjoyed the linked university concept - before universities started to engage more in their online departments, facebook was the only way outside of email or class to connect to a classmate about the course in question. I was deeply disappointed when they removed the university/courses currently taking, feature.
- rphlx 16y ago
  But, now there are probably over 18,000 apps providing that!
  - shaddi 16y ago
    And not a one does it as well as Facebooks did, not the least because none of those apps have near-universal adoption. I actually hadn't thought about that feature in a few years now. I completely forgot there was a time when I found Facebook genuinely useful. Now I never feel like I'm actually doing anything when I use it.
pak 16y ago
The problem with Facebook was never what you posted about yourself. The more nefarious thing was that other people, in theory your friends but more like people you know for whatever reason, could post information that was linked directly to your tangibly real identity. In the era of the freeform Wall this was pretty silly stuff, but by the time it expanded to picture tagging and the news feed it started to get quite a bit out of your control. You could opt out of some of these things, but doing so generally made you seem a little asocial. The real diabolical thing about Facebook was that it combined general social anxiety with on-by-default feature rollouts to coerce its userbase into feeding more and more personal info to the datamine. Expect it to only get worse as the userbase grows to epic proportions... they are sitting on a Scientology-scale vault containing the personal details of people's lives.
- dfranke 16y ago
  I forget whether picture tagging came along before or after I left, though I know I've seen the feature. It was probably some time in the grey area between when I stopped using it regularly and when I actually deactivated my account. Anyway, I see your point about how you could easily get creeped out about Facebook making it so easy to datamine that stuff. It doesn't bother me personally because I just take the McNealyesque view that any information that I don't make a deliberate effort to control access to is already public. But that's just because I'm a security guy and my brain is correspondingly warped; I make no claim that this mindset is normal or even healthy.
thestoicattack 16y ago
I am in a similar situation. My school was among the first couple of expansions, if I recall. They pretty much lost me when they stopped requiring a dot edu email address to sign up. I had kept a completely unmaintained presence there since then, but I deactivated my account last night thanks to Open Graph.
- Estragon 16y ago
  I'm in pretty much the same boat, except I deactivated mine a while back. (Maybe 2008?)

by dfranke 16y ago

CaptainMorgan 16y ago

Early adopter here too. I fully enjoyed the linked university concept - before universities started to engage more in their online departments, facebook was the only way outside of email or class to connect to a classmate about the course in question. I was deeply disappointed when they removed the university/courses currently taking, feature.

rphlx 16y ago
But, now there are probably over 18,000 apps providing that!
- shaddi 16y ago
  And not a one does it as well as Facebooks did, not the least because none of those apps have near-universal adoption. I actually hadn't thought about that feature in a few years now. I completely forgot there was a time when I found Facebook genuinely useful. Now I never feel like I'm actually doing anything when I use it.

pak 16y ago

The problem with Facebook was never what you posted about yourself. The more nefarious thing was that other people, in theory your friends but more like people you know for whatever reason, could post information that was linked directly to your tangibly real identity. In the era of the freeform Wall this was pretty silly stuff, but by the time it expanded to picture tagging and the news feed it started to get quite a bit out of your control. You could opt out of some of these things, but doing so generally made you seem a little asocial. The real diabolical thing about Facebook was that it combined general social anxiety with on-by-default feature rollouts to coerce its userbase into feeding more and more personal info to the datamine. Expect it to only get worse as the userbase grows to epic proportions... they are sitting on a Scientology-scale vault containing the personal details of people's lives.

dfranke 16y ago
I forget whether picture tagging came along before or after I left, though I know I've seen the feature. It was probably some time in the grey area between when I stopped using it regularly and when I actually deactivated my account. Anyway, I see your point about how you could easily get creeped out about Facebook making it so easy to datamine that stuff. It doesn't bother me personally because I just take the McNealyesque view that any information that I don't make a deliberate effort to control access to is already public. But that's just because I'm a security guy and my brain is correspondingly warped; I make no claim that this mindset is normal or even healthy.

thestoicattack 16y ago

I am in a similar situation. My school was among the first couple of expansions, if I recall. They pretty much lost me when they stopped requiring a dot edu email address to sign up. I had kept a completely unmaintained presence there since then, but I deactivated my account last night thanks to Open Graph.

Estragon 16y ago
I'm in pretty much the same boat, except I deactivated mine a while back. (Maybe 2008?)