10 ms·

> it's that there are very different faces of ourselves that we show to the professional world, to our friends, to partners, and to the world at large I think

> it's that there are very different faces of ourselves that we show to the professional world, to our friends, to partners, and to the world at large I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. It seems like a mistake. If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career and ironically it feels more stiflingly conformist. Just my personal feelings on the matter, though. I'm not trying to call out anyone who likes that way of life (and perhaps has a personality that's well suited for it), just that it should not be imposed on everyone. I kind of like the old model where you pretend to be conservative at work, and are free to be as weird as you want to in your own time.

beowulfey 7y ago
>To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. It makes a ton of sense from their business perspective, which is to sell highly personalized ads. If you have one single internet persona, it is far easier to tailor ads to you.
- adamc 7y ago
  If the service is unappealing, I will not use it, or use it less. So, there are trade-offs.
- roblabla 7y ago
  Not really no. If you have only one online persona, then you'll only show one angle of your life, and the rest will simply become invisible to facebook. People are unlikely to change how they are, they'll just change how they use the tool. Letting people show different angles of themselves through differently branded websites makes it much easier for facebook to build complete, thorough profiles of people.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    > then you'll only show one angle of your life, and the rest will simply become invisible to facebook. I feel like the opposite may happen? I.e. instead of only showing one angle of their life, the idea is that people share _all_ angles of their lives. Either way you end up with the same result "one persona". The only people who care this deeply I think are the same ones who block ads or don't use facebook anyway.
- RobertDeNiro 7y ago
  Seems like a much smarter approach would be to make it seems like you have different personas, but behind the scenes you can tie them together.
paggle 7y ago
The whole Maven / Damore stuff at Google shows the strengths and weaknesses of this “one persona” approach. People in Silicon Valley bring their entire selves to work, they protest their own company when they feel it is not having properly, there’s something to admire about that but most people elsewhere are happy to keep work at work and not get too worked up about what their company is or isn’t doing.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  And also no one with strong conservative beliefs can really survive or rise to prominence there. If I brought my whole self to my job in Houston it would not go smoothly.
- LyndsySimon 7y ago
  > they protest their own company when they feel it is not having properly You're right, but I don't understand that perspective. If my company is doing something that I think is morally wrong, I'm going to be finding employment elsewhere and telling them why. I might even speak out about it... after I leave. If we're doing something that I think it's great but doesn't justify my quitting, then I'm going to be speaking up internally about it. Going public with a grievance against your employer just strikes me as being counter-productive - you're risking being fired, you're damaging your future prospects for advancement there, and you're potentially damaging the entity to which you've tied your financial future. The way I see it, when I work for a company I'm part of their public face. Even though I may not (certainly don't, actually) represent the company, my actions and statements still influence people's impression of the brand. If I'm upset about something enough that I'm willing to damage the company's brand to speak out about it, then I'm upset enough that I don't want to be providing material support to them by continuing to work there.
  - paggle 7y ago
    I think the calculus for most people is: This job is paying me a lot and I don't want to leave it, and I do think that this company can be a net force for good in this world (easier to believe at Google than at Facebook). But I don't want it to do bad things, and if I damage the brand publicly, the company will still survive, but will think twice about doing something like this in the future since they won't be able to just contain it internally. The people who are just purely about the money won't care enough to protest at all. I think the protesters' intentions are in the right place.
scythe 7y ago
>It seems like a mistake. If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career and ironically it feels more stiflingly conformist. With a name like "Facebook Dating", it doesn't sound like they're trying to enter the Tinder-esque hookup space. If the product is focused on long-term relationships, the dating profile and the career profile probably won't have that many differences. At least not for most people, and Facebook (the website) is clearly aimed at "most people". After all, a Tinder-like app would already face huge competition, whereas the market for online dating services that work for older and/or more conservative people has been largely stagnant and is currently fragmented across sites like "FarmersOnly". You don't gain traction by solving a problem someone else already solved. Old people are lonely too.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
LyndsySimon 7y ago
> If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career and ironically it feels more stiflingly conformist. I understand where you're coming from, but this statement isn't necessarily a truism. You can wear who you are on your sleeve and even be quite extreme, if you're a reasonable person who can build and maintain professional relationships. I do almost everything online under my real name, and am not optimized for career purposes. It's just me. As a result, I've had my political beliefs and such come up in interviews on multiple occasions. In one case - as I found out a year or so after being laid off - my interview process took a couple of weeks longer than was typical because one of the executives/partners at the company was concerned specifically about my politics. On the other hand, I did in fact get that job (and loved it!) and I've gotten several connections and invitations to apply based upon my discussions. Surprisingly, they seem to be about evenly split between people who agree and who disagree with my stances. I'm passionate about political issues, but I do my best to be accommodating to others and not be aggressive about them. It would be fair to say that my positions are pretty extreme, too. I'm a political anarchist; Anarcho-Capitalist / Voluntaryist, to be more precise. I am open about that even in professional settings because it has such an influence on how I approach relationships and the world in general. I tend to be a "systems thinker", and see everything as a balance of competing forces. I see the whole world through this lens; everything is influenced by incentives and disincentives. I have exactly one tattoo, a stylized graph of supply and demand.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  Okay, try putting "Card-carrying gun owner and anti-abortion activist" on your resume and apply for big tech companies. Or hell, even start a personal blog using your real name talking about opinions that are anathema to coastal dwellers. Watch your callback rate dramatically decline. I grew up in a suburb of a conservative state, and I learned early on when to show "who I am and what I really believe" and when to be low-key about it. Others like me who did not learn that skill were bullied relentlessly. I got along pretty well. If you actually had opinions many people disagreed with strongly, you'd be bullied and held back as well.
  - deleted 7y ago
andreilys 7y ago
>To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. In China WeChat is synonymous with both your business and personal life. When networking and meeting business contacts you don’t give out your LinkedIn, you give out your WeChat.
- chomp 7y ago
  Do people have multiple WeChat accounts in China?
  - mgbmtl 7y ago
    I don't know from within China, but from outside China, you can link it to a VoIP account.
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
    You need to provide government ID to unlock many features of WeChat, so that's likely difficult.
- mdpye 7y ago
  Is WeChat a social network or a messaging platform? I realise it is expanding, but I'd have no problem doing talking business on WhatsApp (which is the closest analogue to what I understand it to be for).
  - r00fus 7y ago
    The answer is both. Look at FB - major usage is FB messenger.
    - mdpye 7y ago
      Which is a separate app and doesn't leak much to the people you talk to (does it? I don't really use FB or Messenger anymore, I don't remember if you have to be friends to get messages delivered) Obviously, it leaks loads to Facebook.
mc32 7y ago
Not only that but if things don’t work out (most people will have to meet multiple people before finding someone to go steady with), it can get awkward. I think this thing has to have some ephemeral nature to it (delete account, create new one if need be later) to avoid harassers and or those who get infatuated or attached; people who just fell out in a bad way, etc. I mean, you definitely don’t want to expose your friends and your work to new and to you unknown people. They may use your FB friends network and work and whatever other info to harass and follow, etc. also your ex-es can see activity, etc. I don’t see much good in this product.
eli_gottlieb 7y ago
It's not just you! I have a Facebook (relatively unfiltered, friends-and-comrades-only), a Twitter (kept "academic casual"), and a LinkedIn (kept really stiflingly conformist and corporate). I'm married, so I don't have to worry about dating or dating apps, but dear God, if someone wanted me to use the same persona for every social profile, I'd just shut all of them down. Hell, I already deleted my reddit account last year just because.
- core-questions 7y ago
  I deleted my Facebook account ages ago because I needed different personas for different groups of friends, never mind coworkers. Just too much work to try to maintain separation. Terrible place for honest discussion.
watwut 7y ago
I think that has to do with long hours and expectation that you are so passionate, that you spend off time in workplace related social functions. There is no relevant "out of work" for many people.
- core-questions 7y ago
  This goes hand in hand with our atomized modern existence: we don't know our neighbours, we don't have anything occupying the place churches used to have in terms of community building with the people who live around us, etc. so we replace it with workplace relationships. Thing is, workplace colleagues are seldom actually your friends in the true meaning of the term. Many of us lose contact with 99% of the people we worked with when we switch jobs. A friend is someone whom you have an ongoing relationship with independent of where you live or work, I think.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  And that is exactly the world I do not want to live in.
basch 7y ago
It wouldnt be as big a deal, had facebook started as your "public" identity, like linkedin. But instead everybody who signed up 10 years ago was using it as their "private identity with a couple friends."
- drewzero1 7y ago
  I'm glad it's not just me. I've pretty much abandoned my facebook account because it's full of all my stupid high school personal stuff, and doesn't really feel relevant any more. Yesterday a colleague had me link a third-party application to a business-related page using my personal account, and it felt like a huge invasion of my personal sphere to have pages for a band I was in ten years ago appear on the list next to the business' pages. (Not to mention giving this third party access to all of my personal information in order to allow it to help manage a few public pages.) Do social media workers have some kind of strategy for managing their public and private identities? I'm considering creating an alternate account just for business pages, but that seems a bit disingenuous to me.
  - jonathankoren 7y ago
    I have three email addresses not counting my work email. It’s me for professional stuff, a private one, and a junk one for accounts and mailing lists. (Ironically, only my professional one gets spam.) Not counting work, I guess have three or four Google accounts. (Ironically, none of them are gmail.) Frankly, I never use the social media sign ons if I can avoid it.
  - _jal 7y ago
    > Do social media workers have some kind of strategy for managing their public and private identities? Got me, I'm a social media refusenik. I have only encountered one third party application for work that was lazy and broken enough to require FB login, and I made up a throwaway account specifically for it. (I also had to remove all the 127.0.0.1 entries for FB names in /etc/hosts, but that's different.) Does doing that feel disingenuous to you because of Facebook's expectations, or a different reason? (I personally have zero problems with lying to FB, given that FB routinely and consistently lies to the rest of the world in order to decrease others' ability to not do business with them.)
samlevine 7y ago
> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. I'm from Seattle so I'm not knee deep in that, but I just don't understand how someone can actually have one persona that they represent to the world. Different situations have different requirements and norms. You're going to have to act differently in different situations. One might pretend that you're the same in person at work as in close social situations, but this just doesn't seem practical.
- Diederich 7y ago
  I only have a single, global persona. It's why my username for various sites is either 'dana' (my first name) or 'diederich' (my last name), with very few exceptions. I've been using the Internet almost daily since 1988, and for the first 8 or 9 years, I embraced being pseudo-anonymous. I really can't say why, it was just what everybody was doing. If all of the online activity of all of my different personas was mixed in public, it would have been no big deal. Having said that, I understand and respect that, I presume, most people need to be able to maintain different personas. > You're going to have to act differently in different situations. While I certainly don't say exactly the same kinds of things to everyone, everywhere, I do generally act the same in every situation. And I think that's kind of unusual. Feel free to ask any clarifying questions if you like.
jlg23 7y ago
> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. Indeed. I live in a muslim country and here everyone uses dual-sim phones with 2 sims for the sole purpose of having 2 accounts at everything: one for the conservative part of the family, another for the modern.
- doubleunplussed 7y ago
  How does having two sims help with that? I switch out my SIM when I travel internationally, but I am still logged into all my accounts.
  - coryrc 7y ago
    Many accounts are tied to a phone number.
    - mgbmtl 7y ago
      I use VoIP numbers for that, although I understand it's not an option for all countries.
    - dahfizz 7y ago
      I still don't understand. Occasionally you need a phone number to sign up, but I've never needed a phone number to log in to something unless 2FA get triggered. But in any case, nobody else knows what phone number I used to create an account.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - Myrmornis 7y ago
        WhatsApp
        7y ago
Lammy 7y ago
> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. It's the other way around, in my experience, not a "goal" but a reflection of the people who built it. It made them absurdly rich, and all they know how to do is double down on what makes the numbers go up.
kelnos 7y ago
> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. I disagree with this characterization. I live in SV and literally everyone I've talked to about privacy/anonymity on the internet sees the value in being able to partition one's life into different buckets for different audiences, and many of them actively maintain such partitions. This has nothing to do with culture; this is about technology limitations and laziness. Companies like FB want to make it easier to track people online and tie everything you do to a single identity. They can certainly do a lot to link supposedly-unrelated personas through various forms of fingerprinting, but it's never perfect, and they'd love for things to be simpler. There's also the issue of anon/pseudonymity: companies like FB don't like that because they want an indentifiable real-world person to be accountable for the things they do online. (Really, think about it: the idea that the people who live in Silicon Valley have some magical weirdo culture where social and professional partitioning doesn't exist... well, that's absurd and doesn't even pass the smell test.)
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  What individual SV tech workers want, and what SV CEOs and VC pursue, are two wildly different things. Using SV as a synecdoche for "movers and shakers in the information technology / adtech worlds", the statement stands.
  - georgek 7y ago
    As a Greek person I love it when people use our ordinary words as fancy words!
  - kelnos 7y ago
    Not sure if the point you're trying to make. The parent called it a "cultural thing unique Silicon Valley", which to me implied that it's pervasive in people's thinking. But it's not. The fact that some few CEOs seem to think that way does not make it a "cultural thing" by any stretch of the imagination. It's a scheme to make money and gain market share, not commentary on social values.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career People are human beings before being little money-making machines. (At least outside of HN...)
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  I don't need to know the random opinions of my coworkers. The job is just a job, and if I only know them through work then all I need to see about them is work-related stuff. Leave the personal life at the door.
novok 7y ago
Being in silicon valley, I don't think the single persona thing is something that tech people like at all, but rather something unique to facebook or more specifically zuck and his fans. We might recognize that the internet never forgets and just don't put much out there, but that is a bit different than embracing a single persona life.
- chongli 7y ago
  I'm not even sure Zuck likes it. It just makes things easier for him and his team of data miners to monetize your information.
dheera 7y ago
> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. How is that Facebook's goal? Considering the available per-post privacy settings and all, I feel like it facilitates having a different persona to different people. > To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. I feel like "one persona to everyone" is almost the cultural opposite of Silicon Valley. Like at every birthday party you go to, every person asks "How's your startup going?", it seems that the cultural norm is you're supposed to say "It's going fantastic, how's your startup?" except if they are a close friend, when you say the truth.
dredmorbius 7y ago
When I was researching early history of Google+, I ran across mention of NSTIC, the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Source was Kristine Schachinger's G+ post-mortem: In the years between 2009-2015 (loosely speaking), there was a push by corporate entities and governments around the world to build an online ecosystem that could replace passwords. Not only did they want to replace passwords, but they wanted to help better identify the person behind the log-in as a real human, a verified person. This “verified” identity was to make it, so users were known to the companies they interacted with online. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-death/283685/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-deat... That inquiry was sparked by Andy Carvin's infamous Q&A with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt: G+ was built primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names https://mashable.com/2011/08/28/google-plus-identity-service/ https://mashable.com/2011/08/28/google-plus-identity-service... The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace proposal itself: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112hhrg73124/pdf/CHRG-112hhrg73124.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112hhrg73124/pdf/CHRG-112... (PDF) (p.26) (Other Trusted Identity providers included ... Equifax: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/10/14/advancing-national-strategy-trusted-identities-cyberspace-government-early-adopter https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/10/14/advanci...) The project was defunded in 2015. Alex Howard wrote an excellent O'Reilly Radar piece, "A Manhattan Project for Online Identity" http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-privacy.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-pri... My sense is that the entire social media push had a strong national policy agenda behind it. Which appears to have backfired somewhat. Disclaimer: I helped organise migration off Google+, under the pseudonymous identity of a space alien cat. Dogs are so passe.
dontbenebby 7y ago
>I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley Reminds me more of DC.
matchagaucho 7y ago
Without seeing the actual FB dating app, I'm assuming it masks the dating persona, much like joining a FB group, until a true "friend" connection is made. FB is acutely aware that "[X] is in a relationship with [Y]" is a strong social signal in today's world. So the implication is that genuine identities ultimately should connect via any dating app.
yagni 7y ago
It looks like the Dating profile is separate from your main facebook profile (see the announcement). But that might not give you much comfort since they're still both under the facebook umbrella.

beowulfey 7y ago

>To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. It makes a ton of sense from their business perspective, which is to sell highly personalized ads. If you have one single internet persona, it is far easier to tailor ads to you.

adamc 7y ago
If the service is unappealing, I will not use it, or use it less. So, there are trade-offs.
roblabla 7y ago
Not really no. If you have only one online persona, then you'll only show one angle of your life, and the rest will simply become invisible to facebook. People are unlikely to change how they are, they'll just change how they use the tool. Letting people show different angles of themselves through differently branded websites makes it much easier for facebook to build complete, thorough profiles of people.
- penagwin 7y ago
  > then you'll only show one angle of your life, and the rest will simply become invisible to facebook. I feel like the opposite may happen? I.e. instead of only showing one angle of their life, the idea is that people share _all_ angles of their lives. Either way you end up with the same result "one persona". The only people who care this deeply I think are the same ones who block ads or don't use facebook anyway.
RobertDeNiro 7y ago
Seems like a much smarter approach would be to make it seems like you have different personas, but behind the scenes you can tie them together.

paggle 7y ago

The whole Maven / Damore stuff at Google shows the strengths and weaknesses of this “one persona” approach. People in Silicon Valley bring their entire selves to work, they protest their own company when they feel it is not having properly, there’s something to admire about that but most people elsewhere are happy to keep work at work and not get too worked up about what their company is or isn’t doing.

asdfman123 7y ago
And also no one with strong conservative beliefs can really survive or rise to prominence there. If I brought my whole self to my job in Houston it would not go smoothly.
LyndsySimon 7y ago
> they protest their own company when they feel it is not having properly You're right, but I don't understand that perspective. If my company is doing something that I think is morally wrong, I'm going to be finding employment elsewhere and telling them why. I might even speak out about it... after I leave. If we're doing something that I think it's great but doesn't justify my quitting, then I'm going to be speaking up internally about it. Going public with a grievance against your employer just strikes me as being counter-productive - you're risking being fired, you're damaging your future prospects for advancement there, and you're potentially damaging the entity to which you've tied your financial future. The way I see it, when I work for a company I'm part of their public face. Even though I may not (certainly don't, actually) represent the company, my actions and statements still influence people's impression of the brand. If I'm upset about something enough that I'm willing to damage the company's brand to speak out about it, then I'm upset enough that I don't want to be providing material support to them by continuing to work there.
- paggle 7y ago
  I think the calculus for most people is: This job is paying me a lot and I don't want to leave it, and I do think that this company can be a net force for good in this world (easier to believe at Google than at Facebook). But I don't want it to do bad things, and if I damage the brand publicly, the company will still survive, but will think twice about doing something like this in the future since they won't be able to just contain it internally. The people who are just purely about the money won't care enough to protest at all. I think the protesters' intentions are in the right place.

scythe 7y ago

>It seems like a mistake. If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career and ironically it feels more stiflingly conformist. With a name like "Facebook Dating", it doesn't sound like they're trying to enter the Tinder-esque hookup space. If the product is focused on long-term relationships, the dating profile and the career profile probably won't have that many differences. At least not for most people, and Facebook (the website) is clearly aimed at "most people". After all, a Tinder-like app would already face huge competition, whereas the market for online dating services that work for older and/or more conservative people has been largely stagnant and is currently fragmented across sites like "FarmersOnly". You don't gain traction by solving a problem someone else already solved. Old people are lonely too.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

LyndsySimon 7y ago

> If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career and ironically it feels more stiflingly conformist. I understand where you're coming from, but this statement isn't necessarily a truism. You can wear who you are on your sleeve and even be quite extreme, if you're a reasonable person who can build and maintain professional relationships. I do almost everything online under my real name, and am not optimized for career purposes. It's just me. As a result, I've had my political beliefs and such come up in interviews on multiple occasions. In one case - as I found out a year or so after being laid off - my interview process took a couple of weeks longer than was typical because one of the executives/partners at the company was concerned specifically about my politics. On the other hand, I did in fact get that job (and loved it!) and I've gotten several connections and invitations to apply based upon my discussions. Surprisingly, they seem to be about evenly split between people who agree and who disagree with my stances. I'm passionate about political issues, but I do my best to be accommodating to others and not be aggressive about them. It would be fair to say that my positions are pretty extreme, too. I'm a political anarchist; Anarcho-Capitalist / Voluntaryist, to be more precise. I am open about that even in professional settings because it has such an influence on how I approach relationships and the world in general. I tend to be a "systems thinker", and see everything as a balance of competing forces. I see the whole world through this lens; everything is influenced by incentives and disincentives. I have exactly one tattoo, a stylized graph of supply and demand.

asdfman123 7y ago
Okay, try putting "Card-carrying gun owner and anti-abortion activist" on your resume and apply for big tech companies. Or hell, even start a personal blog using your real name talking about opinions that are anathema to coastal dwellers. Watch your callback rate dramatically decline. I grew up in a suburb of a conservative state, and I learned early on when to show "who I am and what I really believe" and when to be low-key about it. Others like me who did not learn that skill were bullied relentlessly. I got along pretty well. If you actually had opinions many people disagreed with strongly, you'd be bullied and held back as well.
- deleted 7y ago

andreilys 7y ago

>To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. In China WeChat is synonymous with both your business and personal life. When networking and meeting business contacts you don’t give out your LinkedIn, you give out your WeChat.

chomp 7y ago
Do people have multiple WeChat accounts in China?
- mgbmtl 7y ago
  I don't know from within China, but from outside China, you can link it to a VoIP account.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  You need to provide government ID to unlock many features of WeChat, so that's likely difficult.
mdpye 7y ago
Is WeChat a social network or a messaging platform? I realise it is expanding, but I'd have no problem doing talking business on WhatsApp (which is the closest analogue to what I understand it to be for).
- r00fus 7y ago
  The answer is both. Look at FB - major usage is FB messenger.
  - mdpye 7y ago
    Which is a separate app and doesn't leak much to the people you talk to (does it? I don't really use FB or Messenger anymore, I don't remember if you have to be friends to get messages delivered) Obviously, it leaks loads to Facebook.

mc32 7y ago

Not only that but if things don’t work out (most people will have to meet multiple people before finding someone to go steady with), it can get awkward. I think this thing has to have some ephemeral nature to it (delete account, create new one if need be later) to avoid harassers and or those who get infatuated or attached; people who just fell out in a bad way, etc. I mean, you definitely don’t want to expose your friends and your work to new and to you unknown people. They may use your FB friends network and work and whatever other info to harass and follow, etc. also your ex-es can see activity, etc. I don’t see much good in this product.

eli_gottlieb 7y ago

It's not just you! I have a Facebook (relatively unfiltered, friends-and-comrades-only), a Twitter (kept "academic casual"), and a LinkedIn (kept really stiflingly conformist and corporate). I'm married, so I don't have to worry about dating or dating apps, but dear God, if someone wanted me to use the same persona for every social profile, I'd just shut all of them down. Hell, I already deleted my reddit account last year just because.

core-questions 7y ago
I deleted my Facebook account ages ago because I needed different personas for different groups of friends, never mind coworkers. Just too much work to try to maintain separation. Terrible place for honest discussion.

watwut 7y ago

I think that has to do with long hours and expectation that you are so passionate, that you spend off time in workplace related social functions. There is no relevant "out of work" for many people.

core-questions 7y ago
This goes hand in hand with our atomized modern existence: we don't know our neighbours, we don't have anything occupying the place churches used to have in terms of community building with the people who live around us, etc. so we replace it with workplace relationships. Thing is, workplace colleagues are seldom actually your friends in the true meaning of the term. Many of us lose contact with 99% of the people we worked with when we switch jobs. A friend is someone whom you have an ongoing relationship with independent of where you live or work, I think.
asdfman123 7y ago
And that is exactly the world I do not want to live in.

basch 7y ago

It wouldnt be as big a deal, had facebook started as your "public" identity, like linkedin. But instead everybody who signed up 10 years ago was using it as their "private identity with a couple friends."

drewzero1 7y ago
I'm glad it's not just me. I've pretty much abandoned my facebook account because it's full of all my stupid high school personal stuff, and doesn't really feel relevant any more. Yesterday a colleague had me link a third-party application to a business-related page using my personal account, and it felt like a huge invasion of my personal sphere to have pages for a band I was in ten years ago appear on the list next to the business' pages. (Not to mention giving this third party access to all of my personal information in order to allow it to help manage a few public pages.) Do social media workers have some kind of strategy for managing their public and private identities? I'm considering creating an alternate account just for business pages, but that seems a bit disingenuous to me.
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  I have three email addresses not counting my work email. It’s me for professional stuff, a private one, and a junk one for accounts and mailing lists. (Ironically, only my professional one gets spam.) Not counting work, I guess have three or four Google accounts. (Ironically, none of them are gmail.) Frankly, I never use the social media sign ons if I can avoid it.
- _jal 7y ago
  > Do social media workers have some kind of strategy for managing their public and private identities? Got me, I'm a social media refusenik. I have only encountered one third party application for work that was lazy and broken enough to require FB login, and I made up a throwaway account specifically for it. (I also had to remove all the 127.0.0.1 entries for FB names in /etc/hosts, but that's different.) Does doing that feel disingenuous to you because of Facebook's expectations, or a different reason? (I personally have zero problems with lying to FB, given that FB routinely and consistently lies to the rest of the world in order to decrease others' ability to not do business with them.)

samlevine 7y ago

> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. I'm from Seattle so I'm not knee deep in that, but I just don't understand how someone can actually have one persona that they represent to the world. Different situations have different requirements and norms. You're going to have to act differently in different situations. One might pretend that you're the same in person at work as in close social situations, but this just doesn't seem practical.

Diederich 7y ago
I only have a single, global persona. It's why my username for various sites is either 'dana' (my first name) or 'diederich' (my last name), with very few exceptions. I've been using the Internet almost daily since 1988, and for the first 8 or 9 years, I embraced being pseudo-anonymous. I really can't say why, it was just what everybody was doing. If all of the online activity of all of my different personas was mixed in public, it would have been no big deal. Having said that, I understand and respect that, I presume, most people need to be able to maintain different personas. > You're going to have to act differently in different situations. While I certainly don't say exactly the same kinds of things to everyone, everywhere, I do generally act the same in every situation. And I think that's kind of unusual. Feel free to ask any clarifying questions if you like.

jlg23 7y ago

> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. Indeed. I live in a muslim country and here everyone uses dual-sim phones with 2 sims for the sole purpose of having 2 accounts at everything: one for the conservative part of the family, another for the modern.

doubleunplussed 7y ago
How does having two sims help with that? I switch out my SIM when I travel internationally, but I am still logged into all my accounts.
- coryrc 7y ago
  Many accounts are tied to a phone number.
  - mgbmtl 7y ago
    I use VoIP numbers for that, although I understand it's not an option for all countries.
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    I still don't understand. Occasionally you need a phone number to sign up, but I've never needed a phone number to log in to something unless 2FA get triggered. But in any case, nobody else knows what phone number I used to create an account.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - Myrmornis 7y ago
      WhatsApp
      - 7y ago

Lammy 7y ago

> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. It's the other way around, in my experience, not a "goal" but a reflection of the people who built it. It made them absurdly rich, and all they know how to do is double down on what makes the numbers go up.

kelnos 7y ago

> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. I disagree with this characterization. I live in SV and literally everyone I've talked to about privacy/anonymity on the internet sees the value in being able to partition one's life into different buckets for different audiences, and many of them actively maintain such partitions. This has nothing to do with culture; this is about technology limitations and laziness. Companies like FB want to make it easier to track people online and tie everything you do to a single identity. They can certainly do a lot to link supposedly-unrelated personas through various forms of fingerprinting, but it's never perfect, and they'd love for things to be simpler. There's also the issue of anon/pseudonymity: companies like FB don't like that because they want an indentifiable real-world person to be accountable for the things they do online. (Really, think about it: the idea that the people who live in Silicon Valley have some magical weirdo culture where social and professional partitioning doesn't exist... well, that's absurd and doesn't even pass the smell test.)

dredmorbius 7y ago
What individual SV tech workers want, and what SV CEOs and VC pursue, are two wildly different things. Using SV as a synecdoche for "movers and shakers in the information technology / adtech worlds", the statement stands.
- georgek 7y ago
  As a Greek person I love it when people use our ordinary words as fancy words!
- kelnos 7y ago
  Not sure if the point you're trying to make. The parent called it a "cultural thing unique Silicon Valley", which to me implied that it's pervasive in people's thinking. But it's not. The fact that some few CEOs seem to think that way does not make it a "cultural thing" by any stretch of the imagination. It's a scheme to make money and gain market share, not commentary on social values.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

> If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career People are human beings before being little money-making machines. (At least outside of HN...)

blaser-waffle 7y ago
I don't need to know the random opinions of my coworkers. The job is just a job, and if I only know them through work then all I need to see about them is work-related stuff. Leave the personal life at the door.

novok 7y ago

Being in silicon valley, I don't think the single persona thing is something that tech people like at all, but rather something unique to facebook or more specifically zuck and his fans. We might recognize that the internet never forgets and just don't put much out there, but that is a bit different than embracing a single persona life.

chongli 7y ago
I'm not even sure Zuck likes it. It just makes things easier for him and his team of data miners to monetize your information.

dheera 7y ago

> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. How is that Facebook's goal? Considering the available per-post privacy settings and all, I feel like it facilitates having a different persona to different people. > To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want. I feel like "one persona to everyone" is almost the cultural opposite of Silicon Valley. Like at every birthday party you go to, every person asks "How's your startup going?", it seems that the cultural norm is you're supposed to say "It's going fantastic, how's your startup?" except if they are a close friend, when you say the truth.

dredmorbius 7y ago

When I was researching early history of Google+, I ran across mention of NSTIC, the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Source was Kristine Schachinger's G+ post-mortem: In the years between 2009-2015 (loosely speaking), there was a push by corporate entities and governments around the world to build an online ecosystem that could replace passwords. Not only did they want to replace passwords, but they wanted to help better identify the person behind the log-in as a real human, a verified person. This “verified” identity was to make it, so users were known to the companies they interacted with online. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-death/283685/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-deat... That inquiry was sparked by Andy Carvin's infamous Q&A with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt: G+ was built primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names https://mashable.com/2011/08/28/google-plus-identity-service/ https://mashable.com/2011/08/28/google-plus-identity-service... The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace proposal itself: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112hhrg73124/pdf/CHRG-112hhrg73124.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112hhrg73124/pdf/CHRG-112... (PDF) (p.26) (Other Trusted Identity providers included ... Equifax: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/10/14/advancing-national-strategy-trusted-identities-cyberspace-government-early-adopter https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/10/14/advanci...) The project was defunded in 2015. Alex Howard wrote an excellent O'Reilly Radar piece, "A Manhattan Project for Online Identity" http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-privacy.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-pri... My sense is that the entire social media push had a strong national policy agenda behind it. Which appears to have backfired somewhat. Disclaimer: I helped organise migration off Google+, under the pseudonymous identity of a space alien cat. Dogs are so passe.

dontbenebby 7y ago

>I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley Reminds me more of DC.

matchagaucho 7y ago

Without seeing the actual FB dating app, I'm assuming it masks the dating persona, much like joining a FB group, until a true "friend" connection is made. FB is acutely aware that "[X] is in a relationship with [Y]" is a strong social signal in today's world. So the implication is that genuine identities ultimately should connect via any dating app.

yagni 7y ago

It looks like the Dating profile is separate from your main facebook profile (see the announcement). But that might not give you much comfort since they're still both under the facebook umbrella.