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Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick
- paul 16y agoClearly someone who "once handrolled his own html code and then uploaded it using UNIX commands" is simply too Awesome for Facebook.
- link2009 16y agoI found his stance to be quite smug but he got his opinions across. I agree with him that it helps the 'normal' people interact with each other without jumping through loops but I think that is more a benefit than a critique.
- MartinCron 16y agoOnly if he uploaded it via his own hand-crimped ethernet cables.
- spiffworks 16y agoI did that in 2007.
- copper 16y agoIf it helps, he's the author of a rather nice series of science-fiction books.
- jedsmith 16y agoIn the face of the way he worded that, not really.
- juiceandjuice 16y agoThe reason he doesn't like facebook... FNU
- pak 16y agoWell he was apparently doing that in 1993... What did you build on the web in 1993? NCSA Mosaic had literally just come out.
- wardrox 16y agoI was 7. I probably built something with Lego that was way cooler than a website.
- spacehaven 16y agoYou can continue that legacy with the open source 3D printing movement that's growing, and potentially continue building things that are way cooler than most web sites.
- arethuza 16y agoNitpick - NCSA Mosaic wasn't the first generally available web browser, Viola was around at least six months before Mosaic.
- dabent 16y agoI'm thinking the person you replied to knows a thing or two about "Awesome" on the web. I'm not sure he was old enough to have done much on or off the web in 1993.
- pak 16y agoI think Paul was just about to enter college then, so he was old enough. My point is that it was actually quite forward-thinking to try out anything on the web in 1993.
- patricklynch 16y agoYes, that line came off as egotistical posturing. We got it. But I don't like that your snarky quip--which distorts the fact that the author continues to use facebook out of a sense of social obligation, and which I don't think adds much to the discussion--is the most upvoted comment here. Sure, you can be cynical and mock the guy, but I'd rather see you address his arguments. I'm not so much annoyed that you took the obvious potshot, just disappointed that the rest of HN is currently voting this the most important takeaway from the essay.
- ramanujan 16y agoThe reason this is the most important takeaway is that Scalzi is calling the people at Facebook "stupid", despite the fact that they are much smarter than him. "there’s very little Facebook does, either as a technological platform or as a company, that doesn’t remind me that “banal mediocrity” is apparently the highest accolade one can aspire to at that particular organization." Scalzi has never heard of Hiphop, Thrift, or Haystack. He hasn't heard about them because he is not really capable of understanding the technical problems involved with doing something as hard as Facebook. It is really hard to make something look this easy.
- antihero 16y agoAlso the fact that Facebook have made accessing vast amounts of information, organising events, and communicating far more simple and intuitive than any system previously available. Much as there are things to improve - there is no place on the internet better suited as a portal to your life.
- mbreese 16y agoFirst, he wasn't calling the people who work at Facebook stupid. Second, I have no idea how smart John Scalzi is... and you probably don't either. He was criticizing the idea of Facebook. Facebook is a very well implemented system. But that doesn't mean that you can't question the validity of the system. Just because it's hard to build doesn't mean that it is worthwhile to use.
- trustfundbaby 16y ago
- Tichy 16y agoOr the threshold for "Facebook is not for me" is rather low.
- esmooov 16y agoWait, don't people do this anymore? Oh no, am I the last person to handroll html code and upload it using UNIX commands? I just typed "scp" the other day. I should have charged myself admission to an internet museum where I was on display.
- efsavage 16y agoI send all my mail through raw, unadulterated, hand-typed SMTP. I compute mime attachments on my TI-85 and type them in on my clicky keyboard. I've taught my parrot to simulate the first 8 seconds of a fax machine handshake, and yet, without facebook, nobody would know!
- chopsueyar 16y agoParent comment deserves more votes. A true badass send his emails using a telnet connection to the smtp server. Bonus points for using a HP-48GX instead of a TI-85.
- true_religion 16y agoHe's basically saying he has hipster tastes in technology, and while those tastes may not be strictly superior to any others---they're his, and they make him an unhappy consumer on Facebook. Don't dislike him because he likes vanilla whereas everyone else likes raspberry.
- MJR 16y agoI wish I could sign on to the damn thing and not have the first thing I feel be exasperation at the aggressive dimness of it UI and its functionality. People use Facebook because they see past the "website" and read the content. They communicate with their friends and family. How many non-technical people have you ever heard complain about email apps? They don't because they use email to communicate, not to use an email app. If the first thing you feel is "exasperation at the aggressive dimness of it UI and its functionality" then you need to find some new people to connect with so that you're actually interested in reading what they have to say.
- waterlesscloud 16y agoYeah, horrible UI. Just has 500 million people using it voluntarily.
- sophacles 16y agoGood come back! Nothing in the history of mankind has ever been chosen by the masses because its good qualities turn out to outweigh its bad qualities and aesthetic ugliness. hahahaha! You sure did make that guy eat his hat.
- mbreese 16y ago> How many non-technical people have you ever heard complain about email apps You should pick a better analogy. Every single non-technical person I know has complained about their email app. Usually it's some stupid Outlook/Exchange quirk...
- MJR 16y agoYou're right - my intention was to get simpler than that, and I wasn't thinking about Outlook or Exchange which are filled with problems because I don't use them. I was thinking along the lines of reply, compose, forward, signatures, etc. Simple concepts that people learn and apply with ease.
- eru 16y agoThe technical person are also complaining about Outlook and Exchange, if they have to use it.
- japherwocky 16y agoHe's smarter than "normal" people, and jealous that they're making Facebook lots of money.
- erik_landerholm 16y agoMore and more I find that for people I see in real life facebook has become fairly redundant. And facebook has just clarified the reason that I don't see most of my other 'friends' in real life; I'm not really friends with them anymore.
- bitskits 16y agoAs time passes, and the users of the internet get more sophisticated, this wont seem so much like a rant, it'll seem like an opportunity for the next social networking phenomenon. The thing that replaces Facebook wont look much like Facebook. It will need to cater to what today seems like the power user. Just my .02
- hugh3 16y agoYou think the users of the internet are getting more sophisticated? I'd say the users of the internet are getting less sophisticated. In the 1970s nobody without a PhD used the internet. In the early 90s you still needed a helluva lot of technical skill. In the late 90s the internet was still a bit geeky. Nowadays everybody and everything is on the internet and we've gone from Eternal September to.... some more extreme version of Eternal September (I'm tempted to say Eternal April, but that would entirely destroy the point of the metaphor).
- juiceandjuice 16y agoThere should be some study on this relationship... the more the web gets sophisticated, the more unsophisticated people use it.
- tsotha 16y agoBut that's true of every maturing technology. People who owned cars in the early 1900s had to be able to fix them - they broke down constantly. A hundred years later how many people can do repair work on their own car? I've owned a car for ten years and it's never broken down.
- bitskits 16y agoCounterpoint: In the 1970's software engineering wasn't a common major, or career path. Back then, you had to have a PhD because the building blocks of the internet, and microcomputing were still being developed. Since then, the amount of people who actually know how the internet works (or have a PC in the house) has exploded. A simple comparison of graduates in technology from the 70's to now would tell the story. The older generation didn't grow up with this stuff in their houses and schools (at least my parents didn't). As time passes, that will not be the case. We have a whole generation of kids who are growing up with the internet fairly mature. I have to think that will drive a more sophisticated user base. Maybe I'm just an optimist. Just because things get simpler to use doesn't mean they are less sophisticated.
- davidmathers 16y agoZuckerberg is in fact not a genius; he’s an ambitious nerd who was in the right place at the right time So the guy who created Orkut must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Too bad for him. His Google stock probably only made him a millionaire. Totally uncool.
- Lewisham 16y agoThe author thinks that it was just "PR and faffery", while discounting the actual value of PR and faffery. Never discount these things. MySpace was practically built on it.
- davidmathers 16y agoYes MySpace was created by marketing people, but that's the reason for both its initial rise and ultimate stagnation. Marketing people think "features" is the name of the game. Zuckerberg, like a good nerd, had the understanding that "platform" is really the name of the game. Plus Zuckerberg's massive anti-privacy bias caused him to push the product in the right (superior product/market fit) direction in the face of significant user complaints (i.e. beacon). And the speed at which facebook has been able to re-invent itself multiple times (e.g. platformization and twitterization) has been very impressive.
- al_james 16y agoExactly. "PR and faffery" are the secret sauce that will make or break your business. You can have the best product in the world, but without "PR and faffery" you will never get beyond a handful of early adopters. More than that, any site that looks like it has become successful without "PR and faffery" has just done the "PR and faffery" in a subtle way so that it looks like it has not happened!
- Psyonic 16y agoTautology? You've just defined a successful site as one that used PR and faffery to succeed (even if we can't see it), making it impossible to argue otherwise.
- Lewisham 16y agoA mail system that doesn’t have a Bcc function doesn’t belong in the 21st Century. This reminds me of a comment that we almost always get on HN when Facebook comes up, and its almost always right: it's not for you. If you want Bcc, it's not for you. The millions of people who are younger than you don't think to CC, let alone BCC. They want to communicate, and they want to do it now, and email is just that formal thing Dad uses. That's their terms, and Facebook gives it to them. The author also discounts Facebook as being some sort of Neo-AOL. It is that, but where AOL faltered was being a completely walled garden. Facebook as a development platform, and, perhaps more importantly, an online identity to all sorts of other sites, makes Facebook use even more in-grained. I would love to see some stats from sites that allow Facebook Connect on how much their user registration went up. Facebook offers a portal, but also a wider identity, and they do it well. If Facebook isn't for you, then that's that. But it doesn't mean what they're doing is wrong.
- trustfundbaby 16y ago> If Facebook isn't for you, then that's that. But it doesn't mean what they're doing is wrong. reposted for emphasis, because this is the perfect one sentence rebuttal to that entire artic ... sorry ... rant.
- antihero 16y agoAye, that comment stuck for me as being absolutely absurd. I'm a coder, nerd, etc, but I use Facebook to organise people/events, and as a simple way of reaching lots of people at once (for events), peruse comical photos etc. I've never used Bcc in my life and just because I like going out and having fun with friends it doesn't make me "stupid".
- gaius 16y agoWell, it is a problem with FB mail that once you mail a list of people, you can't add someone to the list unless you start a new thread. Normal people do want to do that.
- al_james 16y agoTrue. But they will fix that with a little time.
- evanreyn 16y agoFacebook is not made for smart people. It's not made for the readers of Hacker News, this guy's blog, or even the throngs on Reddit. It's made for everyone else. I work in a place with some people who will work/have worked minimum wage jobs their whole life (not that there's anything wrong with that). But these same people are on the internet all the time, and you know what they do? Check facebook. Facebook chat. Look through facebook pictures. Maybe browse craigslist for a few minutes looking for a used car or a new job. But 95% of the time? Facebook. I'm not saying this type of person represents the majority of facebook users, but it is this type of internet "familiarity", for lack of a better word, that makes up the majority of facebook users, and the world's population.
- brown9-2 16y agois not made for smart people I strongly disagree with this. I might read HN and reddit for programming stories all day long but I still find Facebook immensely useful for keeping in contact with friends and contacts. I don't see at all how these things are mutually exclusive. It's made for people who want to connect to other people. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jinushaun 16y agoGeeks are just angry because there is now more regular people using the internet than geeks. It's no longer restricted to the elites. As a business idea, it just makes much more sense to target the 80% of society instead of the 20%. (Made up numbers)
- nicpottier 16y agoJust for the record, I was uploading my own website back in '93 too, and I use Facebook and quite enjoy it, for the same reason the author does, because not all my friends were in the same boat. Calling other people stupid for not building and maintaining their own website strikes as bit elitist, just as saying that people that don't design and build their own houses are lazy. We specialize. To him it is easy / fun / rewarding to build his own blog, photo sharing, thingamabob. Sure, it has been for me too in the past. But it isn't anymore, especially because Facebook wins on the front of notifying my friends of things of mine they might find interesting. In short, he is really missing the point, that Facebook has allowed millions upon millions of people to participate on the web in a way they couldn't before. Were they the first to try? No, but they are the first to do so so successfully across such a wide strata of users. I also find it super ironic that he seems to think highly of Twitter (talk about lack of features!!) while gives Facebook a hard time for missing functionality. At least I can comment on 'status' messages on Facebook without changing my own status. :)
- samic 16y agoI just delete all my information (which wasn't lot!) last night! and I wrote my email on first page so if anyone really wants to contact me there is a way!
- pilif 16y agoI don't get this Facebook rage every year. Last year it was about the open social graph API and the third-party like buttons. Everyone was mad at Facebook. Calls for boycotts, mainstream press picking it up, Diaspora, etc. Then it dies down and everybody seems happy about Facebook. Until a year later, HN is full of hate-posts again. So, if history is to repeat itself, I'd say that the hate will have died down by June and I'll get my hate-blogpost ready for next year, having missed this years Facebook-hating-season
- bhavin 16y agoI don't think its all in vain. Each hate-cycle creates some residual hostility towards facebook. When eventually it crosses threshold (and some better option is available), so many people might jump the ship in a short time.
- jaysonelliot 16y agoAbout a year and a half ago, I was thinking the same thing - Facebook = AOL. I did make a cute graphic out of it, if you want it: http://jaysonelliot.com/blog/2009/06/13/what-does-facebook-remind-me-of%E2%80%A6/ http://jaysonelliot.com/blog/2009/06/13/what-does-facebook-r...
- yason 16y agoSounds like he uses Facebook mainly to stay in contact with his friends but hates that Facebook doesn't do everything he needs. Facebook doesn't have to do that and the rest of the internet is still there.
- tsotha 16y agoI think it's more that he feels like he has to maintain a presence on facebook because everyone else does. And it galls him because he can't stand facebook.
- thingie 16y agoSome time ago, a friend of mine told me that he had a great idea, something like Facebook, but, you know, for the "geeks" and all ze teknischen peepers, blogging, photo sharing, video, everything. At that point, it had simply occurred to me a very simple (and obvious) question: "Well, isn't that exactly the world wide web?"
- bhavin 16y agoWe had a stream of google-sucks/googles-dead kinda articles everyday just before while now. And now, suddenly all the bad attention turns to facebook since about a week. I mean facebook had the same UI/policies/uglyness since quite some time, why sudden surge of facebook-bashing articles (followed by google)? I wonder how much of the content from above articles was written genuinely and not with alterior motives.
- michael_dorfman 16y agoFacebook shouldn’t be telling me how many “friends” I should have, especially when there’s clearly no technological impetus for it. Does Facebook do that? I get recommendations of people I might know, but I don't recall ever being told how many friends I should have.
- inklesspen 16y agoThere's a maximum limit.
- gildur 16y agoEverything is getting more and more simple, isnt that good? Lots of ranting towards Facebook here of late, I must say. Facebook is a great way of telling your friends that HTML5 has got a logo, for example. Also, this way your friends that arent on sites like linkedin will get an idea of what you're up to. I'm sure people who are interested in programming and building webpages will go their own way in the end anyway. Maybe I misunderstood this article and the previous about Facebook rants, in that case I apologize.
- bartl 16y agoMy favorite quote: > Its grasping attempts to get its hooks into every single thing I do feels like being groped by an overly obnoxious salesman.
- transition 16y agoI don't use Facebook because I think it's social circle-jerking occupied by a majority of people who are only interested in inflating their own perceived image.
- sigzero 16y agoNo, Facebook is what happens when you make something easy for Joe Public to grok.
- Vivtek 16y agoI honestly hadn't expected this outpouring of vitriol here against John Scalzi, of all people. The things I'm reading here - that he's "just jealous" or what have you - are frankly blowing my mind. I thought his point was pretty clear: FB is rolling in cash and is the target of the latest 15-minute hype and 50 billion dollars of Goldman-Sachs paper valuation, but isn't really breaking new ground in providing the best possible platform for the Web, and he predicts that this will cause it to fail, like other non-ideal repackaging efforts in the past, because it is limited. And he has some experience in this, because he was an employee of AOL in the day. And weirdly, here at HNN, of all places, I am witnessing a deluge of rabid Facebook fanboys, many of whom apparently think he's just an old fogie who doesn't understand the new generation. The world never ceases to amaze me. EDIT: more words are always good, right?
- phlux 16y agoUmm, in case you haven't noticed, HN is full of FB echo-chamber fanbois who have a combined age still in the 2 digits.
- alexgartrell 16y agoI don't really think your snarky attitude is adding to the discussion, but, more than that, it's not even correct. The vast majority of replies here are decidedly anti facebook, and the ones that arent tend to be luke warm at best. Additionally, if you look at the front page over the last couple days, he popular facebook related articles have been very anti facebook. I'm not trying to make any claims about face book's virtue (as a future facebook engineer, I doubt I would have much credibility anyway), but it is unfair to be so dismissive about people who might argue that it isn't completely awful, when they certainly aren't just part of hn groupthink (as you seem to have suggested.)
- phlux 16y agoFine, ill add some detail to my snarky comment. There is so much going on in the valley and in tech right now that frankly has all happened before. Given the market conditions now are far more ripe for all these services, which allows them to be made and more successful now. The problem I see, and the point of my comment is that we truly aren't seeing too much that is new - but when a company comes along that is hyper successful and full of young talented engineers - people forget history. That is fine - but I think people need to take a step back sometimes. Point taken, however. (I'll take my own advice about taking a step back :) )
- marknutter 16y agoFacebook is top dog right now, so I get that every highly intelligent hacker out there is going to take their potshots at it. I think everyone needs to take a step back and seriously thank Facebook, Myspace, AOL, etc. Why? Because they got normal people to use the internet. Grandma is now a customer for us hackers thanks to Mark Zuckerberg. We can all remember a time when the internet was our personal nerd playground, and yes it was awesome; but it wasn't very profitable. Now, everyone and their mother is on the internet, and their chosen platform of choice right now is Facebook. Yes, things have been dumbed down, yes privacy isn't what it used to be, but us geeks are now pulling down 6 figure salaries for doing the same stuff we'd be doing for fun in our free time anyways. We can't have our cake and eat it too..
- dcdan 16y agoBut the idea that it’s doing something better, new or innovative is largely PR and faffery. Facebook is incredibly innovative at growing its user base. No other social network has concentrated on and succeeded at this like Facebook.