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I suspect they didn't realize how many people, when faced with the mangling of their profiles, replacing all of their interests with poorly and inconsistently g
by DrSprout 16y ago
I suspect they didn't realize how many people, when faced with the mangling of their profiles, replacing all of their interests with poorly and inconsistently guessed 'likes,' would simply get rid of all that data.
It's really interesting looking at Facebook in Spanish, their localization with these roll-outs is pretty slipshod. "Mark as read" showed up in English for over a month after the big PHP-compiling to C++ shift, which otherwise was pretty good.
Likewise, though my profile is written in English, Facebook took it upon itself to guess what everything meant, and translate it into actual books and such. The result was actually remarkably effective, but still imperfect, and plain text is simply a better data model for what should be a simple "here's who I am."
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- natrius 16y ago> plain text is simply a better data model for what should be a simple "here's who I am." I disagree. Plain text is ambiguous. Links to pages aren't. The links also create a graph of people and their interests, which could have useful applications. The changes that Facebook has made will make it more useful. Other than Instant Personalization, the privacy implications of the changes have been clearly communicated, and it's easy to choose what you do or don't want to share. The parts of the profile that can't be made private weren't very private in the first place.
- jfarmer 16y agoThey're only ambiguous to machines. Humans can read it just fine.
- natrius 16y agoIf someone lists "curling" as an interest, it's ambiguous even to humans. Weightlifting or obscure winter sport? Even if it were only ambiguous to machines, there are probably useful things that can be done by machines with the data that will now be disambiguated, which sounds like a plus to me.
- bonaldi 16y agoThey linked LaTeX to a page for fans of latex. What was that about ambiguity?
- natrius 16y agoMy point wasn't that their auto-linking would be great. My point is that after the changes sort themselves out and people fix things that Facebook got wrong, the data will be more useful to work with than plain text.
- bruceboughton 16y agoI'm not sure there could be two more different interests...
- indigoviolet 16y agoYou're wrong about too many people getting rid of their data. [I work at Facebook]
- dpritchett 16y ago[citation needed]
- nostrademons 16y agoYou know that he probably can't provide that info, right?
- jacquesm 16y agoOf course. But that's the GPs whole point, he can't be providing info, either to confirm or to deny so it is relatively moot. We can choose to believe him because he's a HN'er of long and good standing (which I am inclined to do) or not (because there is no way to prove it and he does work for the company mentioned and that is not always the best source of information for things like this). I'm quite sure he speaks the truth in an absolute sense. Maybe 50,000 or 100,000 people have canceled, maybe even only 10,000. But that was how every other social network that preceded facebook died off, by the first relatively large group of users that said 'enough'. What goes up quickly can go down just as fast, if any social network that is perceived as 'more secure' and 'less evil' in combination with 'nice to the users' gains traction with those leaving now then this could very well follow the exact same graph that caused FB to grow so fast. This is not a 'sure thing' by any means, though probably the effect will be limited. Once it starts feeding back on itself or if facebook has one or two more security booboos all bets are off.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- andreyf 16y agoSeriously? Aside from a minority fraction of the techies, do you really think facebook users care about this?
- jf 16y agoI replaced my interest with SQL injection statements.