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>It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotely work? This is just hindsi

>It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotely work? This is just hindsight talking. It was hardly obvious from the beginning because it was hardly obvious how big the market for granular private data was going to be. Facebook, in the beginning, was functionally just a stripped down personal page with a status update feature analogous to AIM. It didn't really ask for any information that you wouldn't have gleaned from a 10 minute conversation with a person and almost everything it got about you had to be volunteered (e.g. favorite music, movies, etc.) The News Feed didn't get introduced until a few years in and it prompted massive outcry from Facebook users for how invasive it seemed, but even then most people assumed the problem was going to be that it violated some implicit social consensus where people should have to go looking for information about you, not have it sent to them in an notification blast. In other words: "stalking should be hard." The ad-supported business model at the time didn't rely so heavily on micro-targeting by "revealed preferences," it was assumed they would target based on the declared preferences that you gave them (e.g. favorite movies, music, etc.) The idea that Facebook (or even data analytics as a field) would eventually become sophisticated enough to devour the news media in general and tailor you a bespoke reality based on your implied tendencies and personal weaknesses to manipulate you was, at best, fodder for some speculative cyberpunk fiction in the early days. In fact, Facebook didn't really even make forays into being a news clearinghouse/media aggregator until the mid 2000s when "going viral" became the hot trend in media, which is what ultimately led to the media world putting themselves over a barrel to social media companies by myopically chasing traffic in lieu of building an audience.

fsck_tw 8y ago
I for one should have realized what it was more or less immediately, but as a young kid in college, didn't. I don't claim that it was particularly hard to see at that point as it was well into the mid 2000s, but I wasn't particularly tech savvy or worldly yet. By the time I deleted my facebook, no one even saw my goodbye post on their "feed." It was a different internet than the one on which I naively signed up. I, and a host of others, enabled that new internet. I have much less interest in this one.
intended 8y ago
Dude that’s BS. The day FB was announced was the day I said “this is a bad idea.” I and many others on HN have NEVER made a FB account, and my life seems to generally have been better for it. But it was obvious then, and it is obvious now. Matter of fact it frankly looks even worse today, since there really seems to be no solution, and the granularity of tools and regulation is too coarse to deal with this scenario. The only real option I’ve seen seems to be to drop off the internet.
- naravara 8y ago
  >The day FB was announced was the day I said “this is a bad idea.” The "day FB was announced" it was exclusive to Harvard students and was just a cleaner version of MySpace and Friendster. It's unlikely you would have had strong opinions about Facebook, in particular, that you didn't also extend to those two, as well as AOL and sites like Digg.
  - intended 8y ago
    To ding me for using the term announced is to find issue in semantics. My position is the same - I had the chance to be part of FB at some of the earliest stages and thought it was a bad idea as did many others. And people clearly saw and pointed out the issues with privacy back then. I had few issues with Aol, but it was still a simple service play - and had/has little at all in common with Facebook. DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall.
    - naravara 8y ago
      >To ding me for using the term announced is to find issue in semantics. Not pure semantics. It is important to focus on what you're actually talking about when you say "the beginning." Facebook has evolved over time, both in its service as well as its business model. So when you talk about "the beginning" it's important to know the beginning of what? >DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall. Nothing was ever at the same scale or range as Facebook. If they were, they'd have been as much of a threat as Facebook is now. That's kind of the point. A lot of the LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, etc. stuff from back then was all groping towards a functioning business model and it was Facebook's news feed that actually created one. But even in the early stages the News Feed wasn't really about extracting data, just about creating a UI paradigm that made it easy to shove native advertising in your face. What really made the big data analytics game take off was when SEO and viral marketing started getting big, which wasn't really on Facebook's radar in the early days. Advertising is different from Ad Tech. Ad Tech is about more than just Facebook's collection. People couldn't really have predicted the extent to which the media industry (new and old) was going to go whole hog into Facebook's platform. It has been their complicity that elevates Facebook's data collection from being "Wow The Facebook is nosy and annoying" to "Wow Facebook is a threat to the public sphere."

fsck_tw 8y ago

I for one should have realized what it was more or less immediately, but as a young kid in college, didn't. I don't claim that it was particularly hard to see at that point as it was well into the mid 2000s, but I wasn't particularly tech savvy or worldly yet. By the time I deleted my facebook, no one even saw my goodbye post on their "feed." It was a different internet than the one on which I naively signed up. I, and a host of others, enabled that new internet. I have much less interest in this one.

intended 8y ago

Dude that’s BS. The day FB was announced was the day I said “this is a bad idea.” I and many others on HN have NEVER made a FB account, and my life seems to generally have been better for it. But it was obvious then, and it is obvious now. Matter of fact it frankly looks even worse today, since there really seems to be no solution, and the granularity of tools and regulation is too coarse to deal with this scenario. The only real option I’ve seen seems to be to drop off the internet.

naravara 8y ago
>The day FB was announced was the day I said “this is a bad idea.” The "day FB was announced" it was exclusive to Harvard students and was just a cleaner version of MySpace and Friendster. It's unlikely you would have had strong opinions about Facebook, in particular, that you didn't also extend to those two, as well as AOL and sites like Digg.
- intended 8y ago
  To ding me for using the term announced is to find issue in semantics. My position is the same - I had the chance to be part of FB at some of the earliest stages and thought it was a bad idea as did many others. And people clearly saw and pointed out the issues with privacy back then. I had few issues with Aol, but it was still a simple service play - and had/has little at all in common with Facebook. DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall.
  - naravara 8y ago
    >To ding me for using the term announced is to find issue in semantics. Not pure semantics. It is important to focus on what you're actually talking about when you say "the beginning." Facebook has evolved over time, both in its service as well as its business model. So when you talk about "the beginning" it's important to know the beginning of what? >DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall. Nothing was ever at the same scale or range as Facebook. If they were, they'd have been as much of a threat as Facebook is now. That's kind of the point. A lot of the LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, etc. stuff from back then was all groping towards a functioning business model and it was Facebook's news feed that actually created one. But even in the early stages the News Feed wasn't really about extracting data, just about creating a UI paradigm that made it easy to shove native advertising in your face. What really made the big data analytics game take off was when SEO and viral marketing started getting big, which wasn't really on Facebook's radar in the early days. Advertising is different from Ad Tech. Ad Tech is about more than just Facebook's collection. People couldn't really have predicted the extent to which the media industry (new and old) was going to go whole hog into Facebook's platform. It has been their complicity that elevates Facebook's data collection from being "Wow The Facebook is nosy and annoying" to "Wow Facebook is a threat to the public sphere."