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Mark Zuckerberg is Person of the Year? Where's the "dislike" button?

259 points by tjr 16y ago

jrockway 16y ago
I wish the Free Software Foundation would only focus on Free Software. I don't like Facebook, but I'd prefer that my donation money be spent on paying someone to work on Emacs rather than making "Dislike" buttons. Facebook is harmful, but people don't care about being harmed or losing their freedom. Educating them is just a waste of money.
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  One year ago, I used Gmail. So, even if you used free software and hosted your mail server at home, writing an e-mail allowed Big Google to watch you. Facebook is similar, though easier to avoid. Now I host my mail server on a virtual machine on a small hosting provider that I somewhat trust. I'll host it myself soon (I've just received my new Sheeva Plug). So, if you write to me now, your privacy will be enhanced compared to one year ago. So, me quitting Gmail could be a direct improvement to your privacy. And that's partly thanks to the FSF's advocacy.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a "don't let big corporations spy on you" foundation... I'm just saying that it hurts the Free Software message when all the Free Software Foundation talks about is why everything is bad except gNewSense. I will just mentally pretend that the FSF is just GNU, then I am happy :)
malkia 16y ago
Time's Man of the year no longer matters. Clearly it should've been Assange.
muloka 16y ago
According to the popular vote Mark is ranked #10 where as Julian Assange is ranked #1: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2028734_2029036_2029037,00.html http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2... Even if it wasn't Julian Assange... any of the other individuals in the top 10 list except for Mark Zuckerberg would of made a much better "Person of the Year."
- hugh3 16y ago
  I think we're all well aware that internet votes are not a particularly good way of deciding anything. This is why Hank, The Angry Drunken Dwarf was not in fact selected as Who Weekly's most beautiful person in... whatever year that was. Seriously though, you reckon Lady Gaga and the Chilean Miners are more man-of-the-year material than Zuckerberg? One is a random pop star, the other is a feel-good story which nobody will remember in 2012. It's true that Zuckerberg's impact may have been more in 2008 or 2009 than 2010, but since he wasn't honoured in either of those years I think he's a fair choice this year.
krschultz 16y ago
There were so many other stories this year bigger than both Facebook and Wikileaks. What about the engineers who stopped the BP oil well? (Or it could negative about the engineers that screwed up the BP oil well? Or Healthcare Reform? I know Republicans love to hate her but can anyone deny Nancy Pelosi's impact on passing that law? It will have the biggest long term effect on American's lives of anything that happened this year.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Unless it gets repealed circa 2012, which is what I'm betting on. (Or if not a full repeal, a major dismantling of large sections.)
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Remember the massive uphill process, complete with 60-40 supermajorities in the Senate, horse trading, and earmarks that was needed to get health care reform passed? Any repeal would have the exact same uphill struggle.
JoeBracken 16y ago
Someone should give the PR Team at Facebook a big fat bonus for making this happen for 2010.
a904guy 16y ago
http://a904guy.com/dislike?url=http://www.fsf.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-is-time-magazines-person-of-the-year-wheres-the-dislike-button http://a904guy.com/dislike?url=http://www.fsf.org/facebook/m...
- pshirishreddy 16y ago
  That is one disturbing site, though it tries to make its point on how much it dislikes the article :)
  - a904guy 16y ago
    The product of a bored afternoon... The article seemed like a prime target for its usage :)
pshirishreddy 16y ago
Not that I like or hate zuckerberg or face book, but just a point to think upong I wonder why it wants to use the facebook - analogy of (dis)Like on the facebook founder itself. If it wants to downrate the article, why didn't it use some other means to do it ? The image itself shows the impact of facebook.
yock 16y ago
I think the FSF is off here. Time's Person of the Year was never about positive or negative influences, just influences. To prove my point, former honorees include Deng Xaioping, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. Honoring Zuckerberg as POTY only indicates that they see him as the single most influential person of 2010 with regards to world events.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Even under that criteria, though, I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice. Most of the stuff FaceBook did to change the world happened around 2007. Heck, the fact that the movie's coming out now indicates that the important stuff happened long ago.
  - robryan 16y ago
    If they were recognizing a person in a particular year, but took into account there past accomplishments also I think he is a decent choice. Just this year though nothing person of the year ground breaking has happened, with the movie coming out it's almost delayed recognition, when it was all happening not many actually knew it.
  - greyman 16y ago
    Can you specify in more details what you think is the scale of Julian's impact? From media coverage it looks like the impact has been huge, but is it really? I am not against Julian, I would not object if they selected him instead of Mark, I am just not sure that until now the real impact (of Wikileaks) on how the world operates was that big.
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      I believe he's a harbinger of things to come. Not necessarily in the sense of new leaks coming from WikiLeaks, which has been fairly tame so far. I think, though, that Julian's basically validated the idea that a.) it's possible to collect, vet, and release potentially damaging information about powerful entities and b.) people care when you do. We've had time periods like this in the past (eg. the Muckraker era at the turn of the 1900s, the Pentagon Papers from the early 70s, Watergate), but the last such era seems to have been over 30 years ago. In the last 10+ years, we seem to have accepted the idea that it's okay for government and corporations to spy on us, but not okay for us to spy on them. Julian was just the guy who had the balls to say "Umm, two can play at this game" and follow through on it. He's validated the market. It's like Napster and Friendster: the services themselves failed, but they paved the way for iTunes and FaceBook, which have become huge. Can you imagine what'll happen when some enterprising anarchist hacker hooks up spyware, a botnet, and a spam network? It's not terribly difficult to write malware that scans each infected computer for any documents and posts them as spam comments to blogs or sends them out as spam emails. The thing is - once the information is out there, it naturally gets collaboratively-filtered. The interesting tidbits will be forwarded on or posted to Reddit, while the boring stuff will be deleted as garden-variety spam. I suspect that there's already malware out there that does exactly this, but instead of posting confidential info to random blogs, it just uplinks it to the Chinese government or some Russian mafia syndicate. The impact of WikiLeaks is that it's turned a spotlight on the damage that can be done - and more important, the attention that can be gained - by leaking information. That makes it far more likely that some bright, naughty teenager is going to think "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if everything was out there?" and dump everything out there.
robryan 16y ago
If nothing else the FSF is persistent. I think it's hard with social, social to be useful generally has to be all inclusive, so for a more complicated free version of social to take off everyone would have to be a lot more into programming and tech. I think there will always be a small set of companies at the center of social, is Facebook a good gatekeeper? Questionable, we could have a lot worse though.
greyman 16y ago
If FSF is right and Mark really "set a terrible precedent for our future", then something like that is exactly what makes a candidate for a "Time's Person of the Year". They basically admit that the choice was reasonable. If we are talking about disliking something, what I dislike about FSF is their arrogance showed by criticizing various software creations, without being able to create worthwhile alternative.
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  While the choice itself is reasonable by that standard, I doubt Times did it to criticize Zuckerberg. Most likely, they praise him. One of the core principles of the FSF is that proprietary software is worthless regardless of its other merits. And they do work on alternatives. It's just more expensive and less visible than advocacy.
jessriedel 16y ago
I understand that the people involved with advocacy organizations like the FSF, ACLU, and NRA are going to be unusually passionate about the respective issues. But articles like this make me hesitant to support the organization. Paraphrased: "This individual/company/group is the root of all evil and is against every thing this organization fights for. You should boycott everything they do and cover your personal space with warnings about them. Tell all your friends." Rather than doing this, I wish advocacy organizations like the FSF would take (and project) a measured response. ("Facebook in useful to a huge number of people, but we are very concerned that they are using their market clout to seriously infringe on the privacy of their users. To improve, Facebook should...")
- greyman 16y ago
  I agree with you about being hesitant to support FSF. I think that they should primary working on providing free software alternatives to closed software, not to fight closed software or promote dislike towards them.
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    Definitely, but I also think that one of their most important roles is policy advocacy. Most voters aren't technologically educated, so there are few lobbying counterweights to the tech industry, which will naturally lead to entrenchment of the industry incumbents at the expense of privacy and freedom.
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  Let's be rational and look at the facts. Facebook has the technical ability to spy on all it's users, and more. Their revenues are ad-based. Targeted ads are all the rage. Conclusion: Facebook's very existence rely on massive spying. There is no measured response. The facts themselves are too unbalanced for the FSF to appear measured without being overly generous to Facebook.
  - flyt 16y ago
    Let's be rational and look at the facts. Google has the technical ability to spy on all it's users, and more. Their revenues are ad-based. Targeted ads are all the rage. Conclusion: Google's very existence rely on massive spying.
edanm 16y ago
IMO, this is a terribly-written piece, giving a very false impression of reality. "Because so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other" Nope - it just hurts our ability to connect privately. Not the same thing. "The fact that Facebook's code is hidden from view means that its users are not connecting directly with each other. They are speaking to Mr. Zuckerberg [...]" What does Facebook being open-source or not have anything to do with it? Does Word being closed-source mean that everything I write in Word is really a communication to Microsoft? Even worse, that sentence leads to this: "witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging service blocking messages based on the words and links in them, because those links point to services which Facebook would prefer we not discuss." I'm assuming this is about Facebook blocking links to Lamebook. According to Tech Crunch, this went on for only a few hours. It was probably a bug/mistake - I can imagine the same thing happening from Gmail or any other mail provider. TC article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/
- wakeup 16y ago
  "Nope - it just hurts our ability to connect privately. Not the same thing." But very fucking essential anyways. "What does Facebook being open-source or not have anything to do with it? Does Word being closed-source mean that everything I write in Word is really a communication to Microsoft?" Thats exactly what it means! "I'm assuming this is about Facebook blocking links to Lamebook. According to Tech Crunch, this went on for only a few hours. It was probably a bug/mistake - I can imagine the same thing happening from Gmail or any other mail provider. TC article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/ The point is: an arbitrary company has too much power. And thats why your are the bitch in the first place.
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  The lack of privacy do hurt our ability to freely connect, if only because of self censure. Surely you wouldn't tell the same things to your loved one if you were in public? Facebook code being unknown let Zuckerberg be the man in the middle of every Facebook based communications. Facebook could log everything, for all we know. The sentence is accurate. Censorship is a rather minor issue. It's ineffective because there are other channels, and it's risky because people are loud about that. I mostly worry about Spying, which is way less risky, way more effective, and way more dangerous.
nir 16y ago
I think we're starting to need a "dislike" button for HN submissions. How does this get to #1? Time is a private publication. If you don't like its choices, don't read it. If you have to vent about it, you'll find a lot of friends in Reddit.
- tome 16y ago
  There's a certain irony in what you just wrote.
  - nir 16y ago
    I don't think so - in HN we create the content. If Time editors have a discussion about the magazine's choice for Man of the Year, it's different then when readers do. (BTW how many commenters here actually read Time?)
gnok 16y ago
I suspect one really good choice would have been Steve Jobs. 2010 was the year that tablets really took off. 2010 was also the year Apple's market capital exceeded Microsoft's. Perhaps next year, if Apple crosses Exxon Mobil's market cap? (I realize market cap isn't a great metric in itself, but bringing Apple out of the 90s slump to where it is today, is a feat in itself. Becoming part of our culture and daily life, is quite another.)
danenania 16y ago
This Person of the Year thing is like Obama's Nobel Prize on a lesser scale. An organization with a fairly high level of public respect bestows an award/recognition that is unmerited and reeks of political bias. This causes many to question the organization's integrity, which upon further investigation never existed in the first place.
chunkbot 16y ago
Would FSF really use a "dislike" button if it were available?
brlewis 16y ago
I support the FSF's overall philosophy, and they raise important privacy issues here, but the "control over our data" part is dated. Things improved a lot this year. I think the FriendFeed acquisition had a lot of influence. Thanks, Bret Taylor et al!
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  Last time I checked, Facebook stills stores your data on their own data centres, unencrypted (or at least they have the keys). You still have zero control over that data. By the way, the same goes for web based e-mail.
  - flyt 16y ago
    What kind of control over the data on Facebook's servers do you need? If they rsync some of your photos from one place to another in their data centers do they need to drop you a note? Keep in mind that you can always export all the data on your Facebook profile as a .zip file on demand. It's your data at the end of the day.
    - jeffdavis 16y ago
      Honest question: does that really include all of your data? All the messages, comments, friends, any friend ID or contact info (email addresses, IM names, phone numbers, addresses, etc.)? In other words, is it enough data that you can just export and jump ship to another social network without much interruption (assuming some reasonable transformation effort for the data)?
    - loup-vaillant 16y ago
      I need to be able to guarantee the privacy of my data when appropriate (assuming I trust my friends, of course). With Facebook I can't, because (1) they can read everything, and (2) I don't trust them not to. To fix that problem, Facebook needs to become a-centred. But that would be throwing away their busyness model along with their data-centres.
  - brlewis 16y ago
alexophile 16y ago
It seems that we're skirting the elephant in the room here - the POTY issue of Time is a huge deal for them. There's tremendous amounts of ad revenue associated with it and there's a lot of pressure on them to put together an issue people want to read. Yes, Assange made a distinct impact on the news and world events this year, but his face has been all over for this reason and that for weeks, and I think people are kind of sick of it. On top of that, he's hardly what one would call media friendly. Facebook may seem like old news to us but, IIRC, it was this year that they crossed the 500M user mark. That's a pretty big deal. It sucks up 700 billion man-minutes a month, and that's only getting more out of control. In hopes of avoiding a rant, let's just say this: if you had to write a major, year-defining (culturally, and for your publication) profile of someone, would you do it about the media figure with a hit movie "about" his life or the guy who has a tendency to walk out on interviews when he doesn't like a question?
- danenania 16y ago
  Your argument seems backwards. The reason Wikileaks and Assange have been plastered all over everything is that there is a huge demand for information about them. There is no doubt that Time could have created a lot more interest and controversy and by extension sold more issues (thereby pleasing advertisers more) if they had been honest and ethical and put Assange on their cover, but evidently they have other priorities.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Assange is a media darling now because he gave them a constant feed of semi-interesting stories in a slow time of the year. They love that. So I suspect you'll never see any proper coverage of the rape allegations against him.
  - alexophile 16y ago
    Honest and ethical? This isn't the Nobel Prize. The criteria for POTY is set by Time and can be bent and justified however they see fit. In 2006, it was everybody. It has also been "The Endangered Earth," "Middle Americans," and "The Computer." They also opted to not include Hussein or Bin Laden. In 2001, it was Giuliani for his response to 9/11, and not anyone actually involved. Suffice it to say, they have a vested interest in avoiding the more contentious choices. They are becoming less relevant every year, and it seems likely that a lot of their readership still thinks facbook is cool.
Garbage 16y ago
Do we really care about who is person of the year?
- hugh3 16y ago
  The inevitable debate of someone-else-should-have-been-Man-Of-The-Year is part of the December news cycle. I doubt Time will ever pick anyone that nobody complains about, and if they ever did then they'd probably be disappointed to find that their circulation was way down. I think Zuckerberg is about as good a pick as any. If it were Assange then I'd accuse Time of recentism, since hardly anyone even know who he was back in June, and we may mostly have forgotten by next June.
Bvalmont 16y ago
Not sure why inventing the electronic equivalent of crack cocaine is a good reason to become POTY.. Assange is no doubt more important and would have been the best choice.
kierank 16y ago
Where's the FSF dislike button?
ewoks 16y ago
Jealous much?
binaryfinery 16y ago
Perhaps in the past Time might have been a reputable news organization, but its just part of the corporate oligarchy now. Of course they awarded it to one of their biggest link feeds. Hell they probably negotiated some kind of kick-back.
julius_geezer 16y ago
One can put together a very fair rogue's gallery from Time Magazine's persons of the year. For the top dozen or so, Mark Zuckerberg is not fit to unlace their jackboots.
beefman 16y ago
Close, but they failed to discuss the real problem with Facebook. Privacy is less than a nonissue. The real problem is that it is a black hole: anything more than 2 weeks old is basically irretrievable ('download your information' includes only wall posts, not comments). They also failed to mention why Facebook is successful: something like it is practically required for most women to communicate over the internet.
- jeffdavis 16y ago
  "something like [Facebook] is practically required for most women to communicate over the internet." Can you please elaborate? I honestly don't know what you mean. Do you mean that women prefer to communicate in this particular medium?
  - beefman 16y ago
    From the '80s until today, BBSs, the usenet, mailing lists, and other online interest groups have been overwhelmingly male. Myspace was the first large forum to achieve a high female/male ratio. The key ingredients seem to be: 1. photographs to identify correspondents (rather than addresses) 2. reciprocal relationships - women don't want anybody to be able to contact them 3. many:many conversations (such wall posts)
technomancy 16y ago
As usual, Wondermark said it best: http://wondermark.com/368/ http://wondermark.com/368/
isomorph 16y ago
Bradley Manning? Or do they have to wait until he goes mad in solitary?
JCTony 16y ago
So does Zuckerberg have to give 200 million in "facebook stock" to Detroit schools to win the award next year?
away 16y ago
Facebook is popular. So what? Internet porn is also very popular and changed the way many people live their lives. People use Facebook primarily to upload pictures of themselves drunk at some party and leave trivial comments on their friends' pages. How exactly is this a worthwhile contribution to society?
mjmitche 16y ago
You can comment dislike at www.mzuckerberg.com

259 points by tjr 16y ago

I wish the Free Software Foundation would only focus on Free Software. I don't like Facebook, but I'd prefer that my donation money be spent on paying someone to work on Emacs rather than making "Dislike" buttons. Facebook is harmful, but people don't care about being harmed or losing their freedom. Educating them is just a waste of money.

loup-vaillant 16y ago
One year ago, I used Gmail. So, even if you used free software and hosted your mail server at home, writing an e-mail allowed Big Google to watch you. Facebook is similar, though easier to avoid. Now I host my mail server on a virtual machine on a small hosting provider that I somewhat trust. I'll host it myself soon (I've just received my new Sheeva Plug). So, if you write to me now, your privacy will be enhanced compared to one year ago. So, me quitting Gmail could be a direct improvement to your privacy. And that's partly thanks to the FSF's advocacy.
- jrockway 16y ago
  I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a "don't let big corporations spy on you" foundation... I'm just saying that it hurts the Free Software message when all the Free Software Foundation talks about is why everything is bad except gNewSense. I will just mentally pretend that the FSF is just GNU, then I am happy :)

malkia 16y ago

Time's Man of the year no longer matters. Clearly it should've been Assange.

muloka 16y ago

According to the popular vote Mark is ranked #10 where as Julian Assange is ranked #1: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2028734_2029036_2029037,00.html http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2... Even if it wasn't Julian Assange... any of the other individuals in the top 10 list except for Mark Zuckerberg would of made a much better "Person of the Year."

hugh3 16y ago
I think we're all well aware that internet votes are not a particularly good way of deciding anything. This is why Hank, The Angry Drunken Dwarf was not in fact selected as Who Weekly's most beautiful person in... whatever year that was. Seriously though, you reckon Lady Gaga and the Chilean Miners are more man-of-the-year material than Zuckerberg? One is a random pop star, the other is a feel-good story which nobody will remember in 2012. It's true that Zuckerberg's impact may have been more in 2008 or 2009 than 2010, but since he wasn't honoured in either of those years I think he's a fair choice this year.

krschultz 16y ago

There were so many other stories this year bigger than both Facebook and Wikileaks. What about the engineers who stopped the BP oil well? (Or it could negative about the engineers that screwed up the BP oil well? Or Healthcare Reform? I know Republicans love to hate her but can anyone deny Nancy Pelosi's impact on passing that law? It will have the biggest long term effect on American's lives of anything that happened this year.

hugh3 16y ago
Unless it gets repealed circa 2012, which is what I'm betting on. (Or if not a full repeal, a major dismantling of large sections.)
- philwelch 16y ago
  Remember the massive uphill process, complete with 60-40 supermajorities in the Senate, horse trading, and earmarks that was needed to get health care reform passed? Any repeal would have the exact same uphill struggle.

JoeBracken 16y ago

Someone should give the PR Team at Facebook a big fat bonus for making this happen for 2010.

a904guy 16y ago

http://a904guy.com/dislike?url=http://www.fsf.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-is-time-magazines-person-of-the-year-wheres-the-dislike-button http://a904guy.com/dislike?url=http://www.fsf.org/facebook/m...

pshirishreddy 16y ago
That is one disturbing site, though it tries to make its point on how much it dislikes the article :)
- a904guy 16y ago
  The product of a bored afternoon... The article seemed like a prime target for its usage :)

pshirishreddy 16y ago

Not that I like or hate zuckerberg or face book, but just a point to think upong I wonder why it wants to use the facebook - analogy of (dis)Like on the facebook founder itself. If it wants to downrate the article, why didn't it use some other means to do it ? The image itself shows the impact of facebook.

yock 16y ago

I think the FSF is off here. Time's Person of the Year was never about positive or negative influences, just influences. To prove my point, former honorees include Deng Xaioping, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. Honoring Zuckerberg as POTY only indicates that they see him as the single most influential person of 2010 with regards to world events.

nostrademons 16y ago
Even under that criteria, though, I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice. Most of the stuff FaceBook did to change the world happened around 2007. Heck, the fact that the movie's coming out now indicates that the important stuff happened long ago.
- robryan 16y ago
  If they were recognizing a person in a particular year, but took into account there past accomplishments also I think he is a decent choice. Just this year though nothing person of the year ground breaking has happened, with the movie coming out it's almost delayed recognition, when it was all happening not many actually knew it.
- greyman 16y ago
  Can you specify in more details what you think is the scale of Julian's impact? From media coverage it looks like the impact has been huge, but is it really? I am not against Julian, I would not object if they selected him instead of Mark, I am just not sure that until now the real impact (of Wikileaks) on how the world operates was that big.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    I believe he's a harbinger of things to come. Not necessarily in the sense of new leaks coming from WikiLeaks, which has been fairly tame so far. I think, though, that Julian's basically validated the idea that a.) it's possible to collect, vet, and release potentially damaging information about powerful entities and b.) people care when you do. We've had time periods like this in the past (eg. the Muckraker era at the turn of the 1900s, the Pentagon Papers from the early 70s, Watergate), but the last such era seems to have been over 30 years ago. In the last 10+ years, we seem to have accepted the idea that it's okay for government and corporations to spy on us, but not okay for us to spy on them. Julian was just the guy who had the balls to say "Umm, two can play at this game" and follow through on it. He's validated the market. It's like Napster and Friendster: the services themselves failed, but they paved the way for iTunes and FaceBook, which have become huge. Can you imagine what'll happen when some enterprising anarchist hacker hooks up spyware, a botnet, and a spam network? It's not terribly difficult to write malware that scans each infected computer for any documents and posts them as spam comments to blogs or sends them out as spam emails. The thing is - once the information is out there, it naturally gets collaboratively-filtered. The interesting tidbits will be forwarded on or posted to Reddit, while the boring stuff will be deleted as garden-variety spam. I suspect that there's already malware out there that does exactly this, but instead of posting confidential info to random blogs, it just uplinks it to the Chinese government or some Russian mafia syndicate. The impact of WikiLeaks is that it's turned a spotlight on the damage that can be done - and more important, the attention that can be gained - by leaking information. That makes it far more likely that some bright, naughty teenager is going to think "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if everything was out there?" and dump everything out there.

robryan 16y ago

If nothing else the FSF is persistent. I think it's hard with social, social to be useful generally has to be all inclusive, so for a more complicated free version of social to take off everyone would have to be a lot more into programming and tech. I think there will always be a small set of companies at the center of social, is Facebook a good gatekeeper? Questionable, we could have a lot worse though.

greyman 16y ago

If FSF is right and Mark really "set a terrible precedent for our future", then something like that is exactly what makes a candidate for a "Time's Person of the Year". They basically admit that the choice was reasonable. If we are talking about disliking something, what I dislike about FSF is their arrogance showed by criticizing various software creations, without being able to create worthwhile alternative.

loup-vaillant 16y ago
While the choice itself is reasonable by that standard, I doubt Times did it to criticize Zuckerberg. Most likely, they praise him. One of the core principles of the FSF is that proprietary software is worthless regardless of its other merits. And they do work on alternatives. It's just more expensive and less visible than advocacy.

jessriedel 16y ago

I understand that the people involved with advocacy organizations like the FSF, ACLU, and NRA are going to be unusually passionate about the respective issues. But articles like this make me hesitant to support the organization. Paraphrased: "This individual/company/group is the root of all evil and is against every thing this organization fights for. You should boycott everything they do and cover your personal space with warnings about them. Tell all your friends." Rather than doing this, I wish advocacy organizations like the FSF would take (and project) a measured response. ("Facebook in useful to a huge number of people, but we are very concerned that they are using their market clout to seriously infringe on the privacy of their users. To improve, Facebook should...")

greyman 16y ago
I agree with you about being hesitant to support FSF. I think that they should primary working on providing free software alternatives to closed software, not to fight closed software or promote dislike towards them.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  Definitely, but I also think that one of their most important roles is policy advocacy. Most voters aren't technologically educated, so there are few lobbying counterweights to the tech industry, which will naturally lead to entrenchment of the industry incumbents at the expense of privacy and freedom.
loup-vaillant 16y ago
Let's be rational and look at the facts. Facebook has the technical ability to spy on all it's users, and more. Their revenues are ad-based. Targeted ads are all the rage. Conclusion: Facebook's very existence rely on massive spying. There is no measured response. The facts themselves are too unbalanced for the FSF to appear measured without being overly generous to Facebook.
- flyt 16y ago
  Let's be rational and look at the facts. Google has the technical ability to spy on all it's users, and more. Their revenues are ad-based. Targeted ads are all the rage. Conclusion: Google's very existence rely on massive spying.

edanm 16y ago

IMO, this is a terribly-written piece, giving a very false impression of reality. "Because so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other" Nope - it just hurts our ability to connect privately. Not the same thing. "The fact that Facebook's code is hidden from view means that its users are not connecting directly with each other. They are speaking to Mr. Zuckerberg [...]" What does Facebook being open-source or not have anything to do with it? Does Word being closed-source mean that everything I write in Word is really a communication to Microsoft? Even worse, that sentence leads to this: "witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging service blocking messages based on the words and links in them, because those links point to services which Facebook would prefer we not discuss." I'm assuming this is about Facebook blocking links to Lamebook. According to Tech Crunch, this went on for only a few hours. It was probably a bug/mistake - I can imagine the same thing happening from Gmail or any other mail provider. TC article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/

wakeup 16y ago
"Nope - it just hurts our ability to connect privately. Not the same thing." But very fucking essential anyways. "What does Facebook being open-source or not have anything to do with it? Does Word being closed-source mean that everything I write in Word is really a communication to Microsoft?" Thats exactly what it means! "I'm assuming this is about Facebook blocking links to Lamebook. According to Tech Crunch, this went on for only a few hours. It was probably a bug/mistake - I can imagine the same thing happening from Gmail or any other mail provider. TC article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/ The point is: an arbitrary company has too much power. And thats why your are the bitch in the first place.
loup-vaillant 16y ago
The lack of privacy do hurt our ability to freely connect, if only because of self censure. Surely you wouldn't tell the same things to your loved one if you were in public? Facebook code being unknown let Zuckerberg be the man in the middle of every Facebook based communications. Facebook could log everything, for all we know. The sentence is accurate. Censorship is a rather minor issue. It's ineffective because there are other channels, and it's risky because people are loud about that. I mostly worry about Spying, which is way less risky, way more effective, and way more dangerous.

nir 16y ago

I think we're starting to need a "dislike" button for HN submissions. How does this get to #1? Time is a private publication. If you don't like its choices, don't read it. If you have to vent about it, you'll find a lot of friends in Reddit.

tome 16y ago
There's a certain irony in what you just wrote.
- nir 16y ago
  I don't think so - in HN we create the content. If Time editors have a discussion about the magazine's choice for Man of the Year, it's different then when readers do. (BTW how many commenters here actually read Time?)

gnok 16y ago

I suspect one really good choice would have been Steve Jobs. 2010 was the year that tablets really took off. 2010 was also the year Apple's market capital exceeded Microsoft's. Perhaps next year, if Apple crosses Exxon Mobil's market cap? (I realize market cap isn't a great metric in itself, but bringing Apple out of the 90s slump to where it is today, is a feat in itself. Becoming part of our culture and daily life, is quite another.)

danenania 16y ago

This Person of the Year thing is like Obama's Nobel Prize on a lesser scale. An organization with a fairly high level of public respect bestows an award/recognition that is unmerited and reeks of political bias. This causes many to question the organization's integrity, which upon further investigation never existed in the first place.

chunkbot 16y ago

Would FSF really use a "dislike" button if it were available?

brlewis 16y ago

I support the FSF's overall philosophy, and they raise important privacy issues here, but the "control over our data" part is dated. Things improved a lot this year. I think the FriendFeed acquisition had a lot of influence. Thanks, Bret Taylor et al!

loup-vaillant 16y ago
Last time I checked, Facebook stills stores your data on their own data centres, unencrypted (or at least they have the keys). You still have zero control over that data. By the way, the same goes for web based e-mail.
- flyt 16y ago
  What kind of control over the data on Facebook's servers do you need? If they rsync some of your photos from one place to another in their data centers do they need to drop you a note? Keep in mind that you can always export all the data on your Facebook profile as a .zip file on demand. It's your data at the end of the day.
  - jeffdavis 16y ago
    Honest question: does that really include all of your data? All the messages, comments, friends, any friend ID or contact info (email addresses, IM names, phone numbers, addresses, etc.)? In other words, is it enough data that you can just export and jump ship to another social network without much interruption (assuming some reasonable transformation effort for the data)?
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    I need to be able to guarantee the privacy of my data when appropriate (assuming I trust my friends, of course). With Facebook I can't, because (1) they can read everything, and (2) I don't trust them not to. To fix that problem, Facebook needs to become a-centred. But that would be throwing away their busyness model along with their data-centres.
- brlewis 16y ago

alexophile 16y ago

It seems that we're skirting the elephant in the room here - the POTY issue of Time is a huge deal for them. There's tremendous amounts of ad revenue associated with it and there's a lot of pressure on them to put together an issue people want to read. Yes, Assange made a distinct impact on the news and world events this year, but his face has been all over for this reason and that for weeks, and I think people are kind of sick of it. On top of that, he's hardly what one would call media friendly. Facebook may seem like old news to us but, IIRC, it was this year that they crossed the 500M user mark. That's a pretty big deal. It sucks up 700 billion man-minutes a month, and that's only getting more out of control. In hopes of avoiding a rant, let's just say this: if you had to write a major, year-defining (culturally, and for your publication) profile of someone, would you do it about the media figure with a hit movie "about" his life or the guy who has a tendency to walk out on interviews when he doesn't like a question?

danenania 16y ago
Your argument seems backwards. The reason Wikileaks and Assange have been plastered all over everything is that there is a huge demand for information about them. There is no doubt that Time could have created a lot more interest and controversy and by extension sold more issues (thereby pleasing advertisers more) if they had been honest and ethical and put Assange on their cover, but evidently they have other priorities.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Assange is a media darling now because he gave them a constant feed of semi-interesting stories in a slow time of the year. They love that. So I suspect you'll never see any proper coverage of the rape allegations against him.
- alexophile 16y ago
  Honest and ethical? This isn't the Nobel Prize. The criteria for POTY is set by Time and can be bent and justified however they see fit. In 2006, it was everybody. It has also been "The Endangered Earth," "Middle Americans," and "The Computer." They also opted to not include Hussein or Bin Laden. In 2001, it was Giuliani for his response to 9/11, and not anyone actually involved. Suffice it to say, they have a vested interest in avoiding the more contentious choices. They are becoming less relevant every year, and it seems likely that a lot of their readership still thinks facbook is cool.

Garbage 16y ago

Do we really care about who is person of the year?

hugh3 16y ago
The inevitable debate of someone-else-should-have-been-Man-Of-The-Year is part of the December news cycle. I doubt Time will ever pick anyone that nobody complains about, and if they ever did then they'd probably be disappointed to find that their circulation was way down. I think Zuckerberg is about as good a pick as any. If it were Assange then I'd accuse Time of recentism, since hardly anyone even know who he was back in June, and we may mostly have forgotten by next June.

Bvalmont 16y ago

Not sure why inventing the electronic equivalent of crack cocaine is a good reason to become POTY.. Assange is no doubt more important and would have been the best choice.

kierank 16y ago

Where's the FSF dislike button?

ewoks 16y ago

Jealous much?

binaryfinery 16y ago

Perhaps in the past Time might have been a reputable news organization, but its just part of the corporate oligarchy now. Of course they awarded it to one of their biggest link feeds. Hell they probably negotiated some kind of kick-back.

julius_geezer 16y ago

One can put together a very fair rogue's gallery from Time Magazine's persons of the year. For the top dozen or so, Mark Zuckerberg is not fit to unlace their jackboots.

beefman 16y ago

Close, but they failed to discuss the real problem with Facebook. Privacy is less than a nonissue. The real problem is that it is a black hole: anything more than 2 weeks old is basically irretrievable ('download your information' includes only wall posts, not comments). They also failed to mention why Facebook is successful: something like it is practically required for most women to communicate over the internet.

jeffdavis 16y ago
"something like [Facebook] is practically required for most women to communicate over the internet." Can you please elaborate? I honestly don't know what you mean. Do you mean that women prefer to communicate in this particular medium?
- beefman 16y ago
  From the '80s until today, BBSs, the usenet, mailing lists, and other online interest groups have been overwhelmingly male. Myspace was the first large forum to achieve a high female/male ratio. The key ingredients seem to be: 1. photographs to identify correspondents (rather than addresses) 2. reciprocal relationships - women don't want anybody to be able to contact them 3. many:many conversations (such wall posts)

technomancy 16y ago

As usual, Wondermark said it best: http://wondermark.com/368/ http://wondermark.com/368/

isomorph 16y ago

Bradley Manning? Or do they have to wait until he goes mad in solitary?

JCTony 16y ago

So does Zuckerberg have to give 200 million in "facebook stock" to Detroit schools to win the award next year?

away 16y ago

Facebook is popular. So what? Internet porn is also very popular and changed the way many people live their lives. People use Facebook primarily to upload pictures of themselves drunk at some party and leave trivial comments on their friends' pages. How exactly is this a worthwhile contribution to society?

mjmitche 16y ago

You can comment dislike at www.mzuckerberg.com