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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 frie

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.
- natrius 16y ago
  By that standard, the vast majority of everything posted on Facebook is spam. I happen to enjoy glancing through the pile of stuff that's on people's minds but I'd never hear face-to-face.

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.

natrius 16y ago
By that standard, the vast majority of everything posted on Facebook is spam. I happen to enjoy glancing through the pile of stuff that's on people's minds but I'd never hear face-to-face.