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All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed thanks to Facebook...
- sandroyong 15y ago...more so for the people who collect user's personal data. Funny, I haven't had that many telemarkerters since FB. Yes, we are all that much more connected (whatever that means; I don't use FB at all so I wouldn't know), but there must be a better way than to dump our personal lives into servers 'out there'. I hope 'profoundly changed' means that it has taught some of us to think twice before we give out our personal data. Startups around FB have benefited from its existence, so I should balance my comments with some positives. A debatable issue that will surely continue...
- technoslut 15y agoI have no problem with Facebook or how they monetize their business but I know the average user aren't aware of it and they should be. What I also I hope is that algorithms get better so it can know how a photo, video or post should be shared so the user won't have to think about it.
- dasil003 15y agoIs this funny? Seems a bit pointless to me, but maybe no more so than any of the other schlock people are writing about FB these days.
- majika 15y agoYes, it is. The blog seems to be The Onion of the tech world.
- zalew 15y agoand that url is huge
- gpjt 15y agoIt's by the guy who used to do the Fake Steve Jobs.
- technoslut 15y agoYou are discrediting The Onion. They have eerily posted articles that have later come to fruition.
- flarg 15y ago"Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life." No thanks.
- kennu 15y agoI think Facebook's new features are good. They made me realize how much of my old crap (status updates, comments, etc) Facebook has stored. So I deleted everything older than one month, using the new Activity Log view and some Selenium scripts.
- tommi 15y agoI'm sure you didn't delete those. You only hid them from the timeline. There's a huge difference. I have hid many the old stuff too, but sometimes, especially with timeline transition, few old items kept popping up and wouldn't hide until fifth or so times clicking the hide button.
- kennu 15y agoI didn't hide them, I clicked "Remove Post", "Remove Comment" etc. for each. Of course, Facebook probably archives them somewhere anyway.
- pedrolll 15y agoI did the same thing. Delete everything. Although, some actions you can only "hide", like comments on other people's walls and such. At least that's my understanding.
- jarek 15y agoFor what it's worth, I routinely delete status updates and have never had one come back in a redesign. Other activity might not be as fortunate.
- sek 15y agoSame experience, i think they delete nothing at all.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- vimalg2 15y agoI did the same for my posts and photos, except it was the final act BEFORE i deleted my Facebook profile 3 months ago. Its not like i trust Facebook to honour the deletes, but one must try one's best.
- Tichy 15y agoThe biggest irony in my opinion is the existance of the "mute" feature on facebook. I am not a FB user, but apparently, the more you share, the higher the likelihood of somebody muting you. So in the end we will share everything with our friends, but our friends will only pretend to listen.
- majika 15y agoTechnical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty. MySpace was destroyed by cultural problems. The technology wasn't at fault. If it was populated with HN-types, we'd see clean typography and beautiful blogs - not the epileptic-fit-causing profile pages that caused everyone to migrate to Facebook. Culture is the difference between MySpace and Tumblr. Building a community is everything. That's my thesis, at least.
- gambler 15y agoTechnical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty. Very, very true. I would even expand on this. Problems people encounter online can be divided into technical, social (involving groups) and interpersonal. Problems from one category cannot be effectively solved via methods from another. Attempting to do so inevitably results in many undesirable side-effects.
- Terretta 15y agoSometime try listing Tweets by geo proximity when you're downtown. The MySpace culture is alive, well, and on Twitter in numbers that far outweigh the "HN-types". Twitter seems no worse for it, and a failure to cater to elitists wasn't MySpace's problem either. MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, HP -- their problems are cultural, but not their users' culture, their managements'.
- Raphael 15y agoMySpace had a great community. The software was slow and ugly. Now it's faster and a little less ugly, but the community is gone.
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- napierzaza 15y agoIf this keeps happening, you'll start asking someone about their early life and they'll just suggest you add them on Facebook and read about it yourself. I had a similar experience talking to a friend who had just started blogging. We hit a discussion point he had apparently already covered and if I just read it instead of talking... Facebook should just be there to remind you of people's birthdays, but it doesn't really do that very well either.
- Astrohacker 15y agoFunny. I just disabled my account this week and don't have plans to go back. Facebook never made much of an impact on my life and I've finally decided the loss of privacy is no longer worth staying on. Edit: Now after having read the post I realize it is sarcastic. So maybe I'm not so different after all.
- suivix 15y agoI tried this too, but got pulled back from all the websites and apps that need Facebook logins.
- darksaga 15y agoInteresting. I have a fake Facebook account, but I never like or recommend anything using any of the Facebook tools on every website these days. I've bee using the same account for years and all the information is completely inaccurate. I'm wondering how much longer I can go before I get cut off.
- reinhardt 15y agoI found out my blatantly fake account was disabled this week, after more than a year of using it. Oh well, (almost) nothing of value was lost. Wondering if I can make a new one (also fake, of course) with the same email.. probably not I'd guess.
- sologoub 15y agoReading this article was very very painful... and honestly, everyone here is hitting the nail on the head - they are just exposing how much info they are collecting about people. Facebook is the next Experian/TransUnion/Equifax. In the past (I worked in corp. security and investigations) you had to go to ChoicePoint and have law enforcement-like credentials to get a good background profile and picture of someone else. As more and more of this info is aggregated by Facebook, investigators will go to them for a much richer profile that could have ever hoped for. Onion really has a great parody of this: http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/ http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...
- felipemnoa 15y agoMy gut is that this is just a trend right now. Eventually people will pull back once it gets old. And trust me, things get old. Remember chat? Everybody was crazy about it. There have been many trends that have gotten old too. Just like in fashion,music,video, trends change.
- hackinthebochs 15y agoI'm not sure what you mean here. Chat isn't "old", its just taken for granted now. What's more likely is that sharing every bit of irrelevant data about your life will go the way of chat, in that it becomes so commonplace that isn't not even thought about anymore.
- duck 15y agoI think the parent was referring to anonymous chat rooms like MSN. Those don't really exist now, yet they were extremely popular fifteen years ago.
- felipemnoa 15y agoYes, I was referring to anonymous chat rooms.
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- itswindy 15y ago"All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed thanks to Facebook..." Ummmm...not mine. I use it sometimes but total posts under a dozen. Google knows way more than FB about me but that's changing little by little.
- jcfrei 15y agois this guy tripping or what? facebook extended a few features (eg. not just liking, but reading and eating and whatever) and introduced timeline, which is gonna be quite creepy for all those very active facebookers out there. seriously, what's the big deal?
- translocation 15y agoIf I'm not mistaken, the linked article employs the rhetorical device known as sarcasm. The point being that Timeline is not, in fact, a world-changing feature.
- jcfrei 15y agodang, you're right
- ltamake 15y agoDid you even read the whole article? It has a sarcastic tone.
- ams6110 15y agoAnd fairly well done, as the first few paragraphs have you thinking he's being straight.
- jawngee 15y agoI understand the article is sarcastic, but let's look at what Facebook actually is doing for humanity: recording the individual histories of hundreds of millions of people. From a wide angle view, this is pretty significant. Imagine if you had the capability of examining your great-great-grandfather's life at the daily level. How amazing would that be? To localize this, imagine yourself in your 80's being able to zoom to any day of your life at any point to relive and review how you thought, what you thought at that particular moment. This is what I use Facebook for. Sure, I use it to connect with my friends, but I also use it so that when I'm knocking on death's door, I'll have something concrete to look back at that is more stable than my ailing memory will be. I'll also be able to hand it down to my spawn and their spawn. I've always considered Facebook a new kind of public utility, just as revolutionary as the post office used to be.
- gaving 15y agoWow. Just wow. :/
- jawngee 15y agoWhy the long face?
- aw3c2 15y agoIn the old days people wrote diaries. That way they could choose whom to share their story with, they could burn them or they could hand them to their spawns.
- jawngee 15y agoI don't see how that is any different with the privacy settings in Facebook. And I think it's superior to a diary in that it's not only recording my thoughts on something, but also the minutiae of my day to day, whom I've associated with and my interactions with them, etc. I'm a little surprised at the responses my original post received actually. Am I the only one that uses Facebook for this purpose?
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- veyron 15y agoI'm sorry, but I feel I need to ask: am I alone in not using Facebook since graduating college? Every time I see an article, every time I watch the news, I get the impression that Facebook has somehow weaved itself into our daily lives, yet the only times I think of Facebook is when someone posts an article like this on HN (and yes I'm aware the article is sarcastic, but there are many more articles which are serious)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- calebmpeterson 15y agoI'm in that same boat...
- veyron 15y agoI figure its worth asking: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034871 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034871
- henrikschroder 15y agoRemember that Facebook started out being available only at US colleges, and the users that got in then will have different usage patterns than those of us that got in later when it was generally available. My friends on Facebook are real friends, family, coworkers, and classmates from high school and university, so it's not just a subset of people I want to stay in touch with, it's pretty much all of them.
- njharman 15y agoEven though sarcastic and well-played this is just more hype. It should not be encouraged.
- scrame 15y agoPrediction: Lyons will soon start a "Fake Mark" account.
- pumainmotion 15y agoThe best way to deal with this new 'release' is to just ignore it. Can't believe the amount of attention this has garnered. We all need to wake up.
- pumainmotion 15y agoThe best way to deal with this new 'release' is to just ignore it. Can't believe the amount of attention this has garnered. We all need to wake up.