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When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Media is blowing everything out of proportion. Replaci

When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Media is blowing everything out of proportion. Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you do tell Facebook about you and others. Its interactive and solves a pain point - keeping in touch and interacting with others, your community. Feedly does not do that.

sarreph 9y ago
Not only do (our) family and friends have no idea what Feedly is, most of them would have no idea where to start with the websites / content providers they’d want to add to their feeds. This is clearly a huge appeal of social media sites, as they act as content aggregators that do the ‘dirty work’ (oftentimes very poorly) in getting relevant content to chosen eyeballs. As much as I want there to be a reversion to more ‘vanilla’ content consumption, I’m completely in agreement with your refutation that Feedly would indeed be a nonesense bet to make on where we should be headed.
jen729w 9y ago
One of the few times I’ve heard a counter to this was an old fisherman who took us out on a boat here in Melbourne, Australia. Proper bloke, skin like leather from the sun, done nothing but run fishing trips his whole life. He was lamenting the loss of a particular forum with one of the other guys. “All just on Facebook now”, he said, and he said it with sadness. He missed that old forum.
- icc97 9y ago
  Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook. Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand. Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentials of the original forum that you signed in from. Edit: I know discourse [0] is kind of working along these lines, but I don't think they're designed to have activity between forums. Perhaps it could just be called 'Friend Forums'. [0]: https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Sounds like subreddits.
    - ElCapitanMarkla 9y ago
      I was reading something the other day about how reddit has killed the community feel of forums. And thinking about it I agree, I can remember pre reddit I used to be reasonably active on a few forums, made friends etc. Reddit interactions feel a lot more ephemeral if that’s the right word.
      - klokoman 9y ago
        Because there aren't avatars and signatures. Those are essential to recognize users and also find out what they're about (signatures with links to other sites helped everyone). Also even a little personalization will be an incentive to invest a little more time in the community.
        mynewtb 9y ago
        Also the concept of voting and strictly time-based decaying.
        always_good 9y ago
        Yeah, without bumping threads on new posts, there's almost no reason to even comment on older topics on HN/Reddit. If it's not on the first two pages, nobody is going to see it. Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting. This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online. The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
- ataturk 9y ago
  What is most disgusting about Facebook is how, like the telcos, they are feeding the data directly to the intelligence agencies. This is not theoretical, this is a sweeping change of how western governments treat their so-called citizens. If everything is tracked, what's different about us vs. East Germany or the Soviet Union? You know, those countries that we always despised as being total hellholes? The US is running up towards some very violent times because the soft-gloved oppression always gives way to the iron fist.
return1 9y ago
it's also a fault of the websites themselves. In the off chance that an average facebook user uses google to search and end up in a website outside facebook, they 'll be typically be pestered with signing up to a newsletter and then with a popup to get browser notifications (along with a cookie popup in europe). The User experience will be usually atrocious, with content hidden way behind the ads. At that point the user is not only lost in the UI, but has lost all trust to the website itself and runs back to its trusted facebook. Why would they ever want to subscribe to such monstrosities? It's a tragedy of the common monetization "secrets" that marketers promised equally to everyone. If webmasters and bloggers realized the benefit of a honest , dead simple user experience, they might earn themselves a bookmark (which is currently the only alternative to social media that average users can probably understand)
- XorNot 9y ago
  The huge number of forums which have that Tapatalk insanity pop up on mobile...
- jsilence 9y ago
  yeah, wholeheartedly agreed. and it is also sometimes the peoples fault when they forget civility and humility in discussions and behave like a$$holes. othertimes sane and healthy online communities fail to defend themselves against those and against more sneaky trolls. on top of that communication manners seem to degrade more and more with social media usage. I am often appauled by the tight lipped one line responses to contact messages on $craigslist-like-service. a friendly message asking about the availability of an item on sale is met with "yes it is still available.". no "hello", no end greeting, nothing along the lines of "if you'd like to buy, give me a call at $number".
- herbst 9y ago
  I think both Facebook and poorly used screen space are good indicators for low quality content. Makes it incredible easy to just move along.
macspoofing 9y ago
>When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. This scandal is so incredibly overblown it's crazy. I've been arguing this since the beginning. Media blew this up because it's loosley connected to Trump and because there's no better story than when you tear down a high flyer. Facebook was/is an American success story.
- ahartmetz 9y ago
  What is overblown is the "sudden realization" of facts the have been long known to anybody who cared.
  - macspoofing 9y ago
    Yes. But even with that the underlying 'crime' (i.e. a not-an-actual-crime) is a nothing-burger.
skummetmaelk 9y ago
50 years ago people who smoked didn't care about the adverse effects mainly because they didn't know the dangers. As people who know the dangers of poor privacy choices we should protect those who have not had the opportunity to consider it yet.
- arvinsim 9y ago
  And yet a lot of people smoke.
  - skummetmaelk 9y ago
    In the US there has been a steady decline: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig_smoking/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/ci... Almost three quarters of all smokers in the US want to quit: http://news.gallup.com/poll/163763/smokers-quit-tried-multiple-times.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/163763/smokers-quit-tried-multip... I think it is pretty clear that the information and social stigma campaigns run by people who care about the health of their fellow citizens have been effective.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      in many other countries smoking is on the increase so it hasnt been as nearly effective as you think.
      - klez 9y ago
        Can you give some data please? What I found was current data, but not trends.
    - pferde 9y ago
      That doesn't mean much. I know several people who have wanted to quit smoking for 20+ years now.
      - isostatic 9y ago
randomsearch 9y ago
> When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Another anecdote: a few days ago my Mum mentioned she was going to cut down on Facebook and move to other social media in light of what's been happening. And she's about as non-technical a user as you get.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  > cut down on Facebook and move to other social media Thanks for sharing, but I wonder if she realizes this isn’t going to help...
throw2016 9y ago
There is nothing wrong with Facebook. Its a legitimate use of the web. We just need to tweak the advertising model to disable micro targeting by both advertisers and platforms. Google is a far worse offender here. This will kill the incentives for surveillance and stalking at source.
- JackFr 9y ago
  > We just need to tweak the advertising model to disable their entire business model. FTFY
  - throw2016 9y ago
    Nope. That's a false argument. Advertising does not in any way depend on micro targeting. People stalk others because they want to, because there are no rules against it yet, because they are greedy and don't care about externalities, because they are happy to profess and expect ethical behavior from others in society when they can't demonstrate it themselves. Advertising existed and thrived long before the existence of the internet. Advertising by textual context and immediate location will retain their business model. The hoovering up of data, stalking and building profiles for micro targeting is unethical and has to go.
    - JackFr 9y ago
      > Advertising does not in any fundamental way depend on micro targeting. Advertising existed and thrived long before the existence of the internet. I get that. The comparative advantage of Google and Facebook was that they could provide a demographic with greater specificity than anyone before, by a lot. There is an old saying, "I know half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half." Google and FB were going to end that.
- jimmaswell 9y ago
  What's wrong with micro targeting?
erikb 9y ago
The goal of course is that technology like RSS is presented in a way to non-technical users so that they are happy to use it without needing too learn all about it.
herbst 9y ago
Right now privacy is such a big deal with 'older' people around me. Nearly every friend of my parents will ask random questions in the last weeks and months. I agree that RSS and Feedly are no replacement. But other replacements (closed media enabled chats) are happening right now and people happily switch because they see their privacy in danger. Tl:dr: it's in the point of view.

sarreph 9y ago

Not only do (our) family and friends have no idea what Feedly is, most of them would have no idea where to start with the websites / content providers they’d want to add to their feeds. This is clearly a huge appeal of social media sites, as they act as content aggregators that do the ‘dirty work’ (oftentimes very poorly) in getting relevant content to chosen eyeballs. As much as I want there to be a reversion to more ‘vanilla’ content consumption, I’m completely in agreement with your refutation that Feedly would indeed be a nonesense bet to make on where we should be headed.

jen729w 9y ago

One of the few times I’ve heard a counter to this was an old fisherman who took us out on a boat here in Melbourne, Australia. Proper bloke, skin like leather from the sun, done nothing but run fishing trips his whole life. He was lamenting the loss of a particular forum with one of the other guys. “All just on Facebook now”, he said, and he said it with sadness. He missed that old forum.

icc97 9y ago
Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook. Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand. Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentials of the original forum that you signed in from. Edit: I know discourse [0] is kind of working along these lines, but I don't think they're designed to have activity between forums. Perhaps it could just be called 'Friend Forums'. [0]: https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/
- freehunter 9y ago
  Sounds like subreddits.
  - ElCapitanMarkla 9y ago
    I was reading something the other day about how reddit has killed the community feel of forums. And thinking about it I agree, I can remember pre reddit I used to be reasonably active on a few forums, made friends etc. Reddit interactions feel a lot more ephemeral if that’s the right word.
    - klokoman 9y ago
      Because there aren't avatars and signatures. Those are essential to recognize users and also find out what they're about (signatures with links to other sites helped everyone). Also even a little personalization will be an incentive to invest a little more time in the community.
      - mynewtb 9y ago
        Also the concept of voting and strictly time-based decaying.
        always_good 9y ago
        Yeah, without bumping threads on new posts, there's almost no reason to even comment on older topics on HN/Reddit. If it's not on the first two pages, nobody is going to see it. Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting. This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online. The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
ataturk 9y ago
What is most disgusting about Facebook is how, like the telcos, they are feeding the data directly to the intelligence agencies. This is not theoretical, this is a sweeping change of how western governments treat their so-called citizens. If everything is tracked, what's different about us vs. East Germany or the Soviet Union? You know, those countries that we always despised as being total hellholes? The US is running up towards some very violent times because the soft-gloved oppression always gives way to the iron fist.

return1 9y ago

it's also a fault of the websites themselves. In the off chance that an average facebook user uses google to search and end up in a website outside facebook, they 'll be typically be pestered with signing up to a newsletter and then with a popup to get browser notifications (along with a cookie popup in europe). The User experience will be usually atrocious, with content hidden way behind the ads. At that point the user is not only lost in the UI, but has lost all trust to the website itself and runs back to its trusted facebook. Why would they ever want to subscribe to such monstrosities? It's a tragedy of the common monetization "secrets" that marketers promised equally to everyone. If webmasters and bloggers realized the benefit of a honest , dead simple user experience, they might earn themselves a bookmark (which is currently the only alternative to social media that average users can probably understand)

XorNot 9y ago
The huge number of forums which have that Tapatalk insanity pop up on mobile...
jsilence 9y ago
yeah, wholeheartedly agreed. and it is also sometimes the peoples fault when they forget civility and humility in discussions and behave like a$$holes. othertimes sane and healthy online communities fail to defend themselves against those and against more sneaky trolls. on top of that communication manners seem to degrade more and more with social media usage. I am often appauled by the tight lipped one line responses to contact messages on $craigslist-like-service. a friendly message asking about the availability of an item on sale is met with "yes it is still available.". no "hello", no end greeting, nothing along the lines of "if you'd like to buy, give me a call at $number".
herbst 9y ago
I think both Facebook and poorly used screen space are good indicators for low quality content. Makes it incredible easy to just move along.

macspoofing 9y ago

>When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. This scandal is so incredibly overblown it's crazy. I've been arguing this since the beginning. Media blew this up because it's loosley connected to Trump and because there's no better story than when you tear down a high flyer. Facebook was/is an American success story.

ahartmetz 9y ago
What is overblown is the "sudden realization" of facts the have been long known to anybody who cared.
- macspoofing 9y ago
  Yes. But even with that the underlying 'crime' (i.e. a not-an-actual-crime) is a nothing-burger.

skummetmaelk 9y ago

50 years ago people who smoked didn't care about the adverse effects mainly because they didn't know the dangers. As people who know the dangers of poor privacy choices we should protect those who have not had the opportunity to consider it yet.

arvinsim 9y ago
And yet a lot of people smoke.
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  In the US there has been a steady decline: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig_smoking/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/ci... Almost three quarters of all smokers in the US want to quit: http://news.gallup.com/poll/163763/smokers-quit-tried-multiple-times.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/163763/smokers-quit-tried-multip... I think it is pretty clear that the information and social stigma campaigns run by people who care about the health of their fellow citizens have been effective.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    in many other countries smoking is on the increase so it hasnt been as nearly effective as you think.
    - klez 9y ago
      Can you give some data please? What I found was current data, but not trends.
  - pferde 9y ago
    That doesn't mean much. I know several people who have wanted to quit smoking for 20+ years now.
    - isostatic 9y ago

randomsearch 9y ago

> When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Another anecdote: a few days ago my Mum mentioned she was going to cut down on Facebook and move to other social media in light of what's been happening. And she's about as non-technical a user as you get.

ryandrake 9y ago
> cut down on Facebook and move to other social media Thanks for sharing, but I wonder if she realizes this isn’t going to help...

throw2016 9y ago

There is nothing wrong with Facebook. Its a legitimate use of the web. We just need to tweak the advertising model to disable micro targeting by both advertisers and platforms. Google is a far worse offender here. This will kill the incentives for surveillance and stalking at source.

JackFr 9y ago
> We just need to tweak the advertising model to disable their entire business model. FTFY
- throw2016 9y ago
  Nope. That's a false argument. Advertising does not in any way depend on micro targeting. People stalk others because they want to, because there are no rules against it yet, because they are greedy and don't care about externalities, because they are happy to profess and expect ethical behavior from others in society when they can't demonstrate it themselves. Advertising existed and thrived long before the existence of the internet. Advertising by textual context and immediate location will retain their business model. The hoovering up of data, stalking and building profiles for micro targeting is unethical and has to go.
  - JackFr 9y ago
    > Advertising does not in any fundamental way depend on micro targeting. Advertising existed and thrived long before the existence of the internet. I get that. The comparative advantage of Google and Facebook was that they could provide a demographic with greater specificity than anyone before, by a lot. There is an old saying, "I know half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half." Google and FB were going to end that.
jimmaswell 9y ago
What's wrong with micro targeting?

erikb 9y ago

The goal of course is that technology like RSS is presented in a way to non-technical users so that they are happy to use it without needing too learn all about it.

herbst 9y ago

Right now privacy is such a big deal with 'older' people around me. Nearly every friend of my parents will ask random questions in the last weeks and months. I agree that RSS and Feedly are no replacement. But other replacements (closed media enabled chats) are happening right now and people happily switch because they see their privacy in danger. Tl:dr: it's in the point of view.