4 ms·

Facebook’s ‘Like’ button makes me lonely

41 points by fogus 16y ago

ryanjmo 16y ago
The other week we were looking into the Facebook like buttons for a client who was thinking about installing them on their website. The conclusion we came to was the same as this article and we calculated it using almost the same route. For cnn if 1,000 people like a story, given that there are 400,000,000 Facebook users and if we assume my friends visit cnn with equal probability as other Facebook users and that I have 300 friends, we get that their is a ~1/1000 probability that my friends like a cnn story. Sum up over 10 major stories that day, we get that I only have a 1/100 chance of seeing any activity at cnn.com from my friends. And this is the case for cnn, one of the largest websites in the country; the probability of seeing any friend activity on a smaller site will be much much lower. The numbers just don't work out for mainstream adoption of the Facebook like button. This does however work better on a site like yelp or pandora, where if my friend ever liked a restaurant it will stay relevant for a longer period of time. Still, I think that the Facebook like button will only make sense for a few websites on the entire web (and likely not one that anyone who is reading this is working on).
- indigoviolet 16y ago
  Here's where I'd guess you're wrong: "my friends visit cnn with equal probability as other Facebook users". CNN visitors are likely to be highly grouped, plus you can share these stories back to Facebook and with your friends, increasing this clusteredness.
  - Lewisham 16y ago
    Yeah, and I would expect the clustering becomes tighter when you move from a general site like CNN to a much more focused site like HN. I guess the value depends on the content and who your friends are!
  - zck 16y ago
    Also, consider this: you share an article with your 300 friends on Facebook, liking it before you do. Your friends see the article, and of the first 20, 4 of them also like it. The next one of your friends will to see the article will have at least one friend (you!) who liked it, up to five. Not bad that way. If you're randomly browsing, of course you're going to find fewer articles that your friends have liked -- it's random!
- natrius 16y ago
  Clicking a like button publishes a link to that article in your friends' news feeds and on your profile page. Like buttons are free advertising with little downside. It's not about seeing your friends show up under the button or on the most recommended box. Those are just bonuses. If you want to see how it pans out on a smaller site, you can check out http://www.texastribune.org http://www.texastribune.org.
  - gjm11 16y ago
    They're "free advertising with little downside" in the same way that spam is.
    - randallsquared 16y ago
      You consider it spam when your friends tell you about something they liked? Okay. I think most people, however, talk about almost nothing else with their friends.
      - gjm11 16y ago
        No, I don't consider it spam when my friends tell me about something they liked. Is it really not obvious what the differences are? No? Well: 1. When someone tells a friend "I really liked X", that usually indicates (a) that they liked X enough to be worth bringing up in conversation, and (b) that they thought X might be of specific interest to that friend. 2. When someone clicks a "like" button, it usually indicates that they liked X enough to be worth clicking a button when someone asked them to; and it doesn't involve any discrimination among their friends at all. 3. "Friend" on social networking sites typically means something more like "acquaintance" in other contexts; it's common to have "friends" on BuzzMyFace.com whom one hardly knows. Put these together: clicking on one of those "like" buttons "tells" more people than you would likely talk to about such things (3) including ones to whom you'd never mention it because they wouldn't be interested (2) and ones with whom you wouldn't bother bring it up because it wasn't important enough to take up conversation time (1,2). Yeah, the signal-to-noise ratio from these things is better than from spam. It's still much lower than from recommendations in actual human conversation. And it's "without downside" in the exact same way as spam is, although to a lesser degree: the downside is real, but gets shared among all the people whose daily lives get just a little bit more clogged with irrelevant stuff.
cmelbye 16y ago
move across web sites and allow you to Like any page without logging in. It set off all sorts of privacy alarms Why would this set off privacy alarms? It's just an iframe. It's not like the site owner can see what's going on inside of it; they still have to follow the cross domain rules in the browser.
- natrius 16y ago
  Normal people don't know what iframes are. They just think Facebook gave CNN their information without their permission, which isn't the case.
  - cmelbye 16y ago
    Do they really think that, though? Or is it FUD? I'm just playing devil's advocate here.
    - natrius 16y ago
      I don't see how they could think otherwise. You pretty much have to have a deeper knowledge of the technology at work to come to the conclusion that no data is being passed to CNN. I think technical people underestimate how much people understand their privacy settings on Facebook, but I don't see how any normal person could understand this case.
      - robryan 16y ago
        I've seen people mentioning instant personalisation is a privacy problem, but that's mainly people just copying and pasting those statues that do the rounds. Haven't had anyone on my facebook question the external like buttons, apart from the last few days when people discovered the title/ website had massive max name lengths, since fixed.
- steadicat 16y ago
  To me it’s a privacy alert because Facebook now potentially knows every site I visit. I ended up adding "127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net" to my /etc/hosts.

41 points by fogus 16y ago

The other week we were looking into the Facebook like buttons for a client who was thinking about installing them on their website. The conclusion we came to was the same as this article and we calculated it using almost the same route. For cnn if 1,000 people like a story, given that there are 400,000,000 Facebook users and if we assume my friends visit cnn with equal probability as other Facebook users and that I have 300 friends, we get that their is a ~1/1000 probability that my friends like a cnn story. Sum up over 10 major stories that day, we get that I only have a 1/100 chance of seeing any activity at cnn.com from my friends. And this is the case for cnn, one of the largest websites in the country; the probability of seeing any friend activity on a smaller site will be much much lower. The numbers just don't work out for mainstream adoption of the Facebook like button. This does however work better on a site like yelp or pandora, where if my friend ever liked a restaurant it will stay relevant for a longer period of time. Still, I think that the Facebook like button will only make sense for a few websites on the entire web (and likely not one that anyone who is reading this is working on).

indigoviolet 16y ago
Here's where I'd guess you're wrong: "my friends visit cnn with equal probability as other Facebook users". CNN visitors are likely to be highly grouped, plus you can share these stories back to Facebook and with your friends, increasing this clusteredness.
- Lewisham 16y ago
  Yeah, and I would expect the clustering becomes tighter when you move from a general site like CNN to a much more focused site like HN. I guess the value depends on the content and who your friends are!
- zck 16y ago
  Also, consider this: you share an article with your 300 friends on Facebook, liking it before you do. Your friends see the article, and of the first 20, 4 of them also like it. The next one of your friends will to see the article will have at least one friend (you!) who liked it, up to five. Not bad that way. If you're randomly browsing, of course you're going to find fewer articles that your friends have liked -- it's random!
natrius 16y ago
Clicking a like button publishes a link to that article in your friends' news feeds and on your profile page. Like buttons are free advertising with little downside. It's not about seeing your friends show up under the button or on the most recommended box. Those are just bonuses. If you want to see how it pans out on a smaller site, you can check out http://www.texastribune.org http://www.texastribune.org.
- gjm11 16y ago
  They're "free advertising with little downside" in the same way that spam is.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    You consider it spam when your friends tell you about something they liked? Okay. I think most people, however, talk about almost nothing else with their friends.
    - gjm11 16y ago
      No, I don't consider it spam when my friends tell me about something they liked. Is it really not obvious what the differences are? No? Well: 1. When someone tells a friend "I really liked X", that usually indicates (a) that they liked X enough to be worth bringing up in conversation, and (b) that they thought X might be of specific interest to that friend. 2. When someone clicks a "like" button, it usually indicates that they liked X enough to be worth clicking a button when someone asked them to; and it doesn't involve any discrimination among their friends at all. 3. "Friend" on social networking sites typically means something more like "acquaintance" in other contexts; it's common to have "friends" on BuzzMyFace.com whom one hardly knows. Put these together: clicking on one of those "like" buttons "tells" more people than you would likely talk to about such things (3) including ones to whom you'd never mention it because they wouldn't be interested (2) and ones with whom you wouldn't bother bring it up because it wasn't important enough to take up conversation time (1,2). Yeah, the signal-to-noise ratio from these things is better than from spam. It's still much lower than from recommendations in actual human conversation. And it's "without downside" in the exact same way as spam is, although to a lesser degree: the downside is real, but gets shared among all the people whose daily lives get just a little bit more clogged with irrelevant stuff.

cmelbye 16y ago

move across web sites and allow you to Like any page without logging in. It set off all sorts of privacy alarms Why would this set off privacy alarms? It's just an iframe. It's not like the site owner can see what's going on inside of it; they still have to follow the cross domain rules in the browser.

natrius 16y ago
Normal people don't know what iframes are. They just think Facebook gave CNN their information without their permission, which isn't the case.
- cmelbye 16y ago
  Do they really think that, though? Or is it FUD? I'm just playing devil's advocate here.
  - natrius 16y ago
    I don't see how they could think otherwise. You pretty much have to have a deeper knowledge of the technology at work to come to the conclusion that no data is being passed to CNN. I think technical people underestimate how much people understand their privacy settings on Facebook, but I don't see how any normal person could understand this case.
    - robryan 16y ago
      I've seen people mentioning instant personalisation is a privacy problem, but that's mainly people just copying and pasting those statues that do the rounds. Haven't had anyone on my facebook question the external like buttons, apart from the last few days when people discovered the title/ website had massive max name lengths, since fixed.
steadicat 16y ago
To me it’s a privacy alert because Facebook now potentially knows every site I visit. I ended up adding "127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net" to my /etc/hosts.