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I would actually consider using Facebook if I could pay for it and not be tracked or datamined. There is a let a legit use case for sharing photos, personal sto

I would actually consider using Facebook if I could pay for it and not be tracked or datamined. There is a let a legit use case for sharing photos, personal stories, and discussing news and information with a curated list of your friends and family.

ben_w 5y ago
Sure, but “and not be tracked” is the part @Maarten88 (and I) don’t believe will happen even if you do pay.
Sleepytime 5y ago
I see this often, but the trust problem still exists. There's no universe where I can trust Facebook (or Google or...) To not track me. Others have their own standards, but I don't feel like it's unreasonable to consider them APTs no different than the spyware of old. They have datacenters dedicated to exactly that. How can my data be reliably segregated so that it's not 'accidentally' included later? Even if the data stays all first-party, they make so many copies and it gets put in so many datasets across the world that co-mingling and abuse of it just feels inevitable at that scale.
- BTCOG 5y ago
  Uploading your daily business, personal photos, and down to what you eat to a profile on someone else's servers was never a good idea from the very start. I find it pretty amusing how it becomes outrage and parroting after the fact that bad news comes out about Facebook. We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then.
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    I've always taken Zuck's infamous "dumb fucks" comment to come from a place of astonishment, more than malice. Posting tons of private info under your own name online was strongly against Web norms at the time, but all those newbies didn't know that. FB and others made it normal, but the reasons it was a bad idea to begin with didn't go away.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      >against Web norms at the time I would even say it was against social norms. Don't talk to strangers. Don't give away your phone number. Don't give away your address. Don't tell state your mother's maiden name. It was such a simple thing to get all of those new people on social media to give up all of that very personal information without hesitation. Yet, if some random person at the supermarket asked you any of those questions in person you'd definitely raise an eyebrow and walk away. SocialEngineering++
    - BTCOG 5y ago
      Exactly. If you used the internet from the beginning you clearly saw how Facebook is a data harvesting scam. By late 2010 I'd chatted with several engineers at Facebook about how they were clearly storing all chats/messages indefinitely, even if you deleted your PMs. So to the dude up there downvoting me, yes, many of us in tech knew this very early on. It was literally the goal of Facebook from the time you ever heard about Facebook.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then. We didn't know that Facebook was compiling dossiers on every human being on the planet, even the ones without Facebook accounts.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Everyone paying attention when Path et al were uploading whole phone address books (which lead to Apple adding it as a specific permission in the next iOS) knew this data was getting stored indefinitely.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      There were plenty of greybeards making claims about FB tracking etc, they just got written off as crackpots. The below link describes the history of some of FBs tracking and includes publicised examples from 2010 and 2011. To me it’s just that we believed FB back then when they claimed ‘it’s a bug’, ‘a limited number of users were affected’ or ‘we don’t don’t do that’. https://www.propublica.org/article/its-complicated-facebooks-history-of-tracking-you https://www.propublica.org/article/its-complicated-facebooks...
      - TheDauthi 5y ago
        I created a fake account for testing a fix to a bug for my company. I used a fake email, fake name, fake location, etc. I used a photo of something I was given for graduation and a date of birth that was within 6 months of my real one. They started recommending my friends from my high school. I went to a magnet school for my junior and senior years, and Facebook even recognized that. I graduated 10 years before I signed up. And the one piece I made sure I faked was the school I went to. I'm shy. If I wanted to communicate with someone I figured I'd add them myself. Nothing magical to it. They had some other piece of data from someone else (or me from some other source) that matched up (the data was fake, but I had used it previously; I don't make that mistake anymore). But it showed me just how dedicated to getting all of this data they were.
        5y ago
Guest42 5y ago
I think for me that a pay model without advertising would've been enough to prevent me from quitting, but now that I no longer have to put that energy into the website and my emotional associations with it, I am gone.
intergalplan 5y ago
"Social" should be an Internet protocol. The only reason it's not is that we basically stopped making protocols (well, ones that gain any meaningful traction, anyway—I'm aware there are some lightly-used efforts at social protocols) because all the companies in a position to push them to a meaningful number of users are better served by making interoperability difficult. The "free" services spyvertising economy, where captive non-paying user count & eyeball time is what matters, is why things are this way.
- karmelapple 5y ago
  When you say a protocol, do you mean in the same way http is a protocol? Like a new way to communicate that web browsers would start adopting? Because in my opinion the browsers would need to make it as easy to use as any other website or phone app if it were ever to gain traction.
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    Usenet, email, http, XMPP, IRC, et c. Yes, just like those. In combination, that bunch is already not too far off. The trouble is that anything trying to do that is competing with "free" spyvertising services, which have no incentive to integrate with them (i.e. implement the protocol), unless it's to do it temporarily to eat their meager market share before cutting them off. IMO that dynamic is why protocols have stagnated for decades. Working on a client or server for some new protocol is thankless when you know it'll be niche at best, and more likely DOA. Making a go at a business with one is insane in this market. So they stagnate. No new ones catch hold, and old ones make slow progress at best, or gradually die.
- nactivint 5y ago
  ActivityPub is more than lightly used, it just isn't used by people you want to associate with. You pretty much have to either accept radical leftism and hang out with tankies or you get to hang out with the actual Nazis that are blocked by the "mainstream" leftist servers Yes yes, there's radicalization for everyone! God forbid you want to use social media for something besides political fighting though

ben_w 5y ago

Sure, but “and not be tracked” is the part @Maarten88 (and I) don’t believe will happen even if you do pay.

Sleepytime 5y ago

I see this often, but the trust problem still exists. There's no universe where I can trust Facebook (or Google or...) To not track me. Others have their own standards, but I don't feel like it's unreasonable to consider them APTs no different than the spyware of old. They have datacenters dedicated to exactly that. How can my data be reliably segregated so that it's not 'accidentally' included later? Even if the data stays all first-party, they make so many copies and it gets put in so many datasets across the world that co-mingling and abuse of it just feels inevitable at that scale.

BTCOG 5y ago
Uploading your daily business, personal photos, and down to what you eat to a profile on someone else's servers was never a good idea from the very start. I find it pretty amusing how it becomes outrage and parroting after the fact that bad news comes out about Facebook. We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then.
- intergalplan 5y ago
  I've always taken Zuck's infamous "dumb fucks" comment to come from a place of astonishment, more than malice. Posting tons of private info under your own name online was strongly against Web norms at the time, but all those newbies didn't know that. FB and others made it normal, but the reasons it was a bad idea to begin with didn't go away.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >against Web norms at the time I would even say it was against social norms. Don't talk to strangers. Don't give away your phone number. Don't give away your address. Don't tell state your mother's maiden name. It was such a simple thing to get all of those new people on social media to give up all of that very personal information without hesitation. Yet, if some random person at the supermarket asked you any of those questions in person you'd definitely raise an eyebrow and walk away. SocialEngineering++
  - BTCOG 5y ago
    Exactly. If you used the internet from the beginning you clearly saw how Facebook is a data harvesting scam. By late 2010 I'd chatted with several engineers at Facebook about how they were clearly storing all chats/messages indefinitely, even if you deleted your PMs. So to the dude up there downvoting me, yes, many of us in tech knew this very early on. It was literally the goal of Facebook from the time you ever heard about Facebook.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then. We didn't know that Facebook was compiling dossiers on every human being on the planet, even the ones without Facebook accounts.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Everyone paying attention when Path et al were uploading whole phone address books (which lead to Apple adding it as a specific permission in the next iOS) knew this data was getting stored indefinitely.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    There were plenty of greybeards making claims about FB tracking etc, they just got written off as crackpots. The below link describes the history of some of FBs tracking and includes publicised examples from 2010 and 2011. To me it’s just that we believed FB back then when they claimed ‘it’s a bug’, ‘a limited number of users were affected’ or ‘we don’t don’t do that’. https://www.propublica.org/article/its-complicated-facebooks-history-of-tracking-you https://www.propublica.org/article/its-complicated-facebooks...
    - TheDauthi 5y ago
      I created a fake account for testing a fix to a bug for my company. I used a fake email, fake name, fake location, etc. I used a photo of something I was given for graduation and a date of birth that was within 6 months of my real one. They started recommending my friends from my high school. I went to a magnet school for my junior and senior years, and Facebook even recognized that. I graduated 10 years before I signed up. And the one piece I made sure I faked was the school I went to. I'm shy. If I wanted to communicate with someone I figured I'd add them myself. Nothing magical to it. They had some other piece of data from someone else (or me from some other source) that matched up (the data was fake, but I had used it previously; I don't make that mistake anymore). But it showed me just how dedicated to getting all of this data they were.
      - 5y ago

Guest42 5y ago

I think for me that a pay model without advertising would've been enough to prevent me from quitting, but now that I no longer have to put that energy into the website and my emotional associations with it, I am gone.

intergalplan 5y ago

"Social" should be an Internet protocol. The only reason it's not is that we basically stopped making protocols (well, ones that gain any meaningful traction, anyway—I'm aware there are some lightly-used efforts at social protocols) because all the companies in a position to push them to a meaningful number of users are better served by making interoperability difficult. The "free" services spyvertising economy, where captive non-paying user count & eyeball time is what matters, is why things are this way.

karmelapple 5y ago
When you say a protocol, do you mean in the same way http is a protocol? Like a new way to communicate that web browsers would start adopting? Because in my opinion the browsers would need to make it as easy to use as any other website or phone app if it were ever to gain traction.
- intergalplan 5y ago
  Usenet, email, http, XMPP, IRC, et c. Yes, just like those. In combination, that bunch is already not too far off. The trouble is that anything trying to do that is competing with "free" spyvertising services, which have no incentive to integrate with them (i.e. implement the protocol), unless it's to do it temporarily to eat their meager market share before cutting them off. IMO that dynamic is why protocols have stagnated for decades. Working on a client or server for some new protocol is thankless when you know it'll be niche at best, and more likely DOA. Making a go at a business with one is insane in this market. So they stagnate. No new ones catch hold, and old ones make slow progress at best, or gradually die.
nactivint 5y ago
ActivityPub is more than lightly used, it just isn't used by people you want to associate with. You pretty much have to either accept radical leftism and hang out with tankies or you get to hang out with the actual Nazis that are blocked by the "mainstream" leftist servers Yes yes, there's radicalization for everyone! God forbid you want to use social media for something besides political fighting though