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>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 versi

>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."
  - intended 8y ago
    It’s irrelevant whether they had a functional business model or not - the issues with this system were known. And Facebook isn’t the only threat in the world. It was obviously privacy invasive and the harm type any of those systems could do was obvious. They didn’t have a business model when they started out - but that’s only because they had the runway to ignore it. Otherwise there was an obvious way they were going to make money and that was Ads. Powered by data harvested about you. I mean that’s the whole point of the site? What else is it going to do? This is facebooks business model - it’s also the business model for many other sites. And yes those other sites are also a problem. Hey, I’m not stating an opinion, I’m stating a fact. I don’t have a Facebook account and always viewed it as a threat to privacy. I’m not the only one. All that’s happening now is one of many adversarial uses of this information is being made known to people who Don’t visit slashdot and hacker news. Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you. This has happened. The business model for other parts of the web is the same. Those parts are going to cause similar issues but at smaller scales.
    - naravara 8y ago
      >Otherwise there was an obvious way they were going to make money and that was Ads. Powered by data harvested about you. Google has the same model, but takes data privacy more seriously than Facebook does. It's disingenuous to conflate any data harvesting with the most unscrupulous and casino-inspired iterations of it. Arguably, the micro-targeting model of advertising Facebook goes after is more faddish than effective anyway. Google uses the data analytics as much to build more salable products as it does to serve advertising, so the volume of collection serves some kind of function. But facebook's actual business need for most of its data is dubious at best. >Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you. It's not really the use of personal information that's the harm though. It's the addiction mechanisms they leverage to make you keep giving them personal information and the lack of protections or responsibility they put around it. It's not at all "obvious" that it's going to be harmful to anyone, and arguably it's not even harmful to anyone individually so much as harmful to society and the body politic generally. You can't have those problems at "smaller scales" because those problems don't exist at small scales, they're an emergent property of scale itself.

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."
- intended 8y ago
  It’s irrelevant whether they had a functional business model or not - the issues with this system were known. And Facebook isn’t the only threat in the world. It was obviously privacy invasive and the harm type any of those systems could do was obvious. They didn’t have a business model when they started out - but that’s only because they had the runway to ignore it. Otherwise there was an obvious way they were going to make money and that was Ads. Powered by data harvested about you. I mean that’s the whole point of the site? What else is it going to do? This is facebooks business model - it’s also the business model for many other sites. And yes those other sites are also a problem. Hey, I’m not stating an opinion, I’m stating a fact. I don’t have a Facebook account and always viewed it as a threat to privacy. I’m not the only one. All that’s happening now is one of many adversarial uses of this information is being made known to people who Don’t visit slashdot and hacker news. Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you. This has happened. The business model for other parts of the web is the same. Those parts are going to cause similar issues but at smaller scales.
  - naravara 8y ago
    >Otherwise there was an obvious way they were going to make money and that was Ads. Powered by data harvested about you. Google has the same model, but takes data privacy more seriously than Facebook does. It's disingenuous to conflate any data harvesting with the most unscrupulous and casino-inspired iterations of it. Arguably, the micro-targeting model of advertising Facebook goes after is more faddish than effective anyway. Google uses the data analytics as much to build more salable products as it does to serve advertising, so the volume of collection serves some kind of function. But facebook's actual business need for most of its data is dubious at best. >Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you. It's not really the use of personal information that's the harm though. It's the addiction mechanisms they leverage to make you keep giving them personal information and the lack of protections or responsibility they put around it. It's not at all "obvious" that it's going to be harmful to anyone, and arguably it's not even harmful to anyone individually so much as harmful to society and the body politic generally. You can't have those problems at "smaller scales" because those problems don't exist at small scales, they're an emergent property of scale itself.