7 ms·

The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time

116 points by samizdis 5y ago

mostertoaster 5y ago
If every single piece of data Facebook has was irreversible to destroyed to the point they cannot recover, there might be a bit of chaos, some businesses would suffer greatly, and some people might be completely lost and isolated without it, and yet with all that, society would be in a better shape almost instantly. Facebook is a cancer to civil discourse (well and Twitter) and to the idea that the best idea should win, not just the loudest idea.
- nonbirithm 5y ago
  The problem is that if Facebook were to go away entirely today, people would still want another Facebook. It would be difficult if not impossible to change those billions of people's wants by merely trying to convince them by argument. They've already seen that humanity is capable enough to create Facebook once, they've become used to what Facebook offers them, and they aren't going to accept reverting to a previous stage of technological progress. That will create a market that other players will quickly be pressed to fill, and without regulation there will be nothing preventing one them from becoming another Facebook, by virtue of Facebook being a product that a significant portion of the entire population of Earth uses. Is it possible to decouple Facebook the technology from Facebook the corporation? In the past, there hasn't been a corporation of this size in existence. Where would the finances come from to operate a service on a scale of billions of users, if they're not going to come from dark patterns?
  - mostertoaster 5y ago
    That’s a good point. Facebook can go away, but Facebook only exists because we want it. Or do we want it because it exists. It probably is a negative feedback loop. Regulating might help, but we’re not going to regulate don’t get in polarizing stupid internet arguments, so the root cause wouldn’t even be fixed by that. Regulating might even make things worse, because regulations, while often made with good intentions, do not guarantee good outcomes (as Thomas Sowell has repeated often), and then there are a huge amount of regulations that essentially close off competitors from entering into the market.
rocketpastsix 5y ago
One thing that the outage really highlighted for me is how much small and medium size businesses rely on Facebook. That 6 hour outage costs somewhere into the billions of dollars lost for SMBs. If there was ever a time to highlight the need for a stand alone website, the great Facebook outage of 2021 is it. Own your content, so the next time this happens, you aren't up a creek without a paddle.
- po1nt 5y ago
  Good sales pitch for a freelance web developer
  - rocketpastsix 5y ago
    It honestly is. Thinking from an angle of restaurants, who use Facebook as their one stop shop for everything: hours, location, menu. All of that can be relatively static with a small monthly fee to update content as the menu changes. Definitely an opening there for a freelancer, or small shop, to get in and build up some basic templates to reuse too.
    - esc861 5y ago
      Isn't that essentially the value prop. of Squarespace and similar services?
      - rocketpastsix 5y ago
        yes, essentially. However you still have to get small business to lessen their over reliance on Facebook.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    I'm not sure it is. "Facebook went down for six hours and it was so rare that it made international news. You should consider paying me $100+/hr to build and maintain a website for you as a backup." Doesn't seem like obvious ROI.
- 5y ago
gregoriol 5y ago
It's not like the planet survived, it's more like people went on with other similar services. It's not like the use disappeared for six hours. This service disappeared but people kept doing the same things elsewhere. The problem is more about people's behaviour and our world and expectations.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  Well, they did things elsewhere, but were they the same things? Probably some of them: they read news, they texted friends, they checked their favorite forums — but they didn't read news in Facebook's bubble, or provide data to Facebook about what they read, said, or learned. I'm calling that a win for decentralization.
  - prirai 5y ago
    And then everything was back to usual again.
  - gregoriol 5y ago
    The thing I was pointing is that it's not about facebook: it's just tools; if those tools are removed, people will do the same with other tools (instead of whatsapp it will be telegram, instead of posts it will be twitter/reddit/...), it is just a matter of time until something replaces a void, because people are needing this nowadays
AndrewDucker 5y ago
It's a big deal when Facebook goes down. This is why: https://www.stonekettle.com/2021/10/recap-october-4-2021.html?m=1 https://www.stonekettle.com/2021/10/recap-october-4-2021.htm... People want to talk to their friends. They want to keep up with what their friends are up to. Sometimes they want to do that in ways that you, specifically, aren't a fan of, but that's fine - different people are different. But they want a place they can go and see "Oh, Dave had a kid. Oh, Agnes got a promotion. Oh, Cameron went to that new pizza place and it looks really tasty!" This means that either we design something decentralised that's as easy as Facebook to get onto use, or we're going to just end up replacing Facebook with something with essentially all of the same characteristics as Facebook. It's that or regulate it. In many many different ways across many different countries. That won't be much fun either!
- mc32 5y ago
  But does all of that need to be near real time? Emergencies should go through other media. Family and friendship updates can happen on a different schedule. Slowing things down could have beneficial effects: less show off. Less bullying, etc.
  - drdeadringer 5y ago
    > Emergencies should go through other media. I wonder how soon, if it has not already happened, that people "report" emergencies through "Insta-Tok-Whats-Book" first and/or instead of dialling 911/999/&c.
  - eddieroger 5y ago
    It's not about when it happens, it's about the fact that humans are tribal, and it is immediately scary to be cut off from your tribe. For an older generation that already feels disconnected from their world and have started to lose their social circles, the immediate disconnect from what they had left is traumatizing, regardless of the platform.
    - pupppet 5y ago
auadix 5y ago
Whatsapp is heavily used in third world countries as a way to do business. The impact, if not measure properly, will be overlooking how many of those business suffered during the outage. This could have a severe impact in the economy if Facebook quickly disappear. And this is coming from someone who hates Facebook and their entire social destruction of the world.
- lpcvoid 5y ago
  Then it's good to have smaller, yet more common outages of Facebook properties, so that people are willing to migrate away from it in the long term while preserving their livelihood.
- hkt 5y ago
  I've been wondering if all the companies who lost out could sue for compensation. Doctrines like detrimental reliance seem to come into play here. Is anything happening on that front?
Sunspark 5y ago
One big problem I have with Facebook, is that other than poor mental health which they contribute to--that is documented in their own internal documents (e.g. Instagram)--is that as a for-profit corporation they do not seem to have a value statement and get in bed with companies like Cambridge Analytica which actively spread disinformation and destabilize our society. It's not even an accountable corporation. FB is owned by Zuckerberg. He has majority control over all the shares. I'd be completely fine with it if it disappeared tomorrow. I'm not dependent on it for anything except for messaging a few people who seem to refuse to use other systems. FB is not a utility or a public good.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
beardyw 5y ago
>strip-mining of societal values for profit I shall save that for a rainy day.
brassattax 5y ago
Once I found out that you could un-follow everyone last week, I did - even without the help of a Chrome extension! Turns out I did not have to see every little thing.
- emerged 5y ago
  I did this years ago and it’s great. The only thing worth noting is that only the people I still follow ever engage with the rare post I do make. It’s presumably a feature of their algorithm.
jhanschoo 5y ago
I think one important piece that's missing from this conversation is just how essential FB is to many people who don't otherwise have Internet access. In many less fortunate countries, FB has sweetheart deals with telcos to provide access to it's services at lower rates than general internet access, and many people can only afford FB.

116 points by samizdis 5y ago

If every single piece of data Facebook has was irreversible to destroyed to the point they cannot recover, there might be a bit of chaos, some businesses would suffer greatly, and some people might be completely lost and isolated without it, and yet with all that, society would be in a better shape almost instantly. Facebook is a cancer to civil discourse (well and Twitter) and to the idea that the best idea should win, not just the loudest idea.

nonbirithm 5y ago
The problem is that if Facebook were to go away entirely today, people would still want another Facebook. It would be difficult if not impossible to change those billions of people's wants by merely trying to convince them by argument. They've already seen that humanity is capable enough to create Facebook once, they've become used to what Facebook offers them, and they aren't going to accept reverting to a previous stage of technological progress. That will create a market that other players will quickly be pressed to fill, and without regulation there will be nothing preventing one them from becoming another Facebook, by virtue of Facebook being a product that a significant portion of the entire population of Earth uses. Is it possible to decouple Facebook the technology from Facebook the corporation? In the past, there hasn't been a corporation of this size in existence. Where would the finances come from to operate a service on a scale of billions of users, if they're not going to come from dark patterns?
- mostertoaster 5y ago
  That’s a good point. Facebook can go away, but Facebook only exists because we want it. Or do we want it because it exists. It probably is a negative feedback loop. Regulating might help, but we’re not going to regulate don’t get in polarizing stupid internet arguments, so the root cause wouldn’t even be fixed by that. Regulating might even make things worse, because regulations, while often made with good intentions, do not guarantee good outcomes (as Thomas Sowell has repeated often), and then there are a huge amount of regulations that essentially close off competitors from entering into the market.

rocketpastsix 5y ago

One thing that the outage really highlighted for me is how much small and medium size businesses rely on Facebook. That 6 hour outage costs somewhere into the billions of dollars lost for SMBs. If there was ever a time to highlight the need for a stand alone website, the great Facebook outage of 2021 is it. Own your content, so the next time this happens, you aren't up a creek without a paddle.

po1nt 5y ago
Good sales pitch for a freelance web developer
- rocketpastsix 5y ago
  It honestly is. Thinking from an angle of restaurants, who use Facebook as their one stop shop for everything: hours, location, menu. All of that can be relatively static with a small monthly fee to update content as the menu changes. Definitely an opening there for a freelancer, or small shop, to get in and build up some basic templates to reuse too.
  - esc861 5y ago
    Isn't that essentially the value prop. of Squarespace and similar services?
    - rocketpastsix 5y ago
      yes, essentially. However you still have to get small business to lessen their over reliance on Facebook.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  I'm not sure it is. "Facebook went down for six hours and it was so rare that it made international news. You should consider paying me $100+/hr to build and maintain a website for you as a backup." Doesn't seem like obvious ROI.
5y ago

gregoriol 5y ago

It's not like the planet survived, it's more like people went on with other similar services. It's not like the use disappeared for six hours. This service disappeared but people kept doing the same things elsewhere. The problem is more about people's behaviour and our world and expectations.

JasonFruit 5y ago
Well, they did things elsewhere, but were they the same things? Probably some of them: they read news, they texted friends, they checked their favorite forums — but they didn't read news in Facebook's bubble, or provide data to Facebook about what they read, said, or learned. I'm calling that a win for decentralization.
- prirai 5y ago
  And then everything was back to usual again.
- gregoriol 5y ago
  The thing I was pointing is that it's not about facebook: it's just tools; if those tools are removed, people will do the same with other tools (instead of whatsapp it will be telegram, instead of posts it will be twitter/reddit/...), it is just a matter of time until something replaces a void, because people are needing this nowadays

AndrewDucker 5y ago

It's a big deal when Facebook goes down. This is why: https://www.stonekettle.com/2021/10/recap-october-4-2021.html?m=1 https://www.stonekettle.com/2021/10/recap-october-4-2021.htm... People want to talk to their friends. They want to keep up with what their friends are up to. Sometimes they want to do that in ways that you, specifically, aren't a fan of, but that's fine - different people are different. But they want a place they can go and see "Oh, Dave had a kid. Oh, Agnes got a promotion. Oh, Cameron went to that new pizza place and it looks really tasty!" This means that either we design something decentralised that's as easy as Facebook to get onto use, or we're going to just end up replacing Facebook with something with essentially all of the same characteristics as Facebook. It's that or regulate it. In many many different ways across many different countries. That won't be much fun either!

mc32 5y ago
But does all of that need to be near real time? Emergencies should go through other media. Family and friendship updates can happen on a different schedule. Slowing things down could have beneficial effects: less show off. Less bullying, etc.
- drdeadringer 5y ago
  > Emergencies should go through other media. I wonder how soon, if it has not already happened, that people "report" emergencies through "Insta-Tok-Whats-Book" first and/or instead of dialling 911/999/&c.
- eddieroger 5y ago
  It's not about when it happens, it's about the fact that humans are tribal, and it is immediately scary to be cut off from your tribe. For an older generation that already feels disconnected from their world and have started to lose their social circles, the immediate disconnect from what they had left is traumatizing, regardless of the platform.
  - pupppet 5y ago

auadix 5y ago

Whatsapp is heavily used in third world countries as a way to do business. The impact, if not measure properly, will be overlooking how many of those business suffered during the outage. This could have a severe impact in the economy if Facebook quickly disappear. And this is coming from someone who hates Facebook and their entire social destruction of the world.

lpcvoid 5y ago
Then it's good to have smaller, yet more common outages of Facebook properties, so that people are willing to migrate away from it in the long term while preserving their livelihood.
hkt 5y ago
I've been wondering if all the companies who lost out could sue for compensation. Doctrines like detrimental reliance seem to come into play here. Is anything happening on that front?

Sunspark 5y ago

One big problem I have with Facebook, is that other than poor mental health which they contribute to--that is documented in their own internal documents (e.g. Instagram)--is that as a for-profit corporation they do not seem to have a value statement and get in bed with companies like Cambridge Analytica which actively spread disinformation and destabilize our society. It's not even an accountable corporation. FB is owned by Zuckerberg. He has majority control over all the shares. I'd be completely fine with it if it disappeared tomorrow. I'm not dependent on it for anything except for messaging a few people who seem to refuse to use other systems. FB is not a utility or a public good.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

beardyw 5y ago

>strip-mining of societal values for profit I shall save that for a rainy day.

brassattax 5y ago

Once I found out that you could un-follow everyone last week, I did - even without the help of a Chrome extension! Turns out I did not have to see every little thing.

emerged 5y ago
I did this years ago and it’s great. The only thing worth noting is that only the people I still follow ever engage with the rare post I do make. It’s presumably a feature of their algorithm.

jhanschoo 5y ago

I think one important piece that's missing from this conversation is just how essential FB is to many people who don't otherwise have Internet access. In many less fortunate countries, FB has sweetheart deals with telcos to provide access to it's services at lower rates than general internet access, and many people can only afford FB.