4 ms·

This is the only time I've ever agreed with RMS. Facebook is a disease. Please do not require me to log in to it for your cause.

Estragon 15y ago
Came back from a talk by a Facebook Data Team member a little while ago. Don't have time to look it up now, but he cited Bakshy et al 2012 as a paper describing Facebook research in which a proportion of "Likes" from friends were censored for selected users in order to gather information on a social science question. The talk was pretty incoherent on what question they were investigating; I get the impression that it was pretty innocuous, something like "more activity in your feed makes you share more," maybe. Still, it makes me wonder why people are signing up for this fishbowl.
- ben1040 15y ago
  http://www.scribd.com/facebook/d/78445521-Role-of-Social-Networks-in-Information-Diffusion http://www.scribd.com/facebook/d/78445521-Role-of-Social-Net... This looks like it could be the paper in question.
freehunter 15y ago
I agree that Facebook login should not be mandatory, but I do like the option to not have to create another account with every site just to leave a comment or try their service. Facebook and OpenID should be standard options, as well as local accounts. Although I dislike some of Facebook's policies, I don't hate them.
- salgernon 15y ago
  I deleted my facebook account because I determined that what it cost me to host my data there (and to consume their services) was more than I was willing to spend - and that this cost was creeping up over time without giving me the opportunity to decline. The currency in this case is the information that I'm providing them, either explicitly through postings and 'Like's on external sites, or implicitly by their plumbing of my social graph. I would actually feel much better if facebook were a paid service, since then they would have an incentive to maintain me as a customer. I'd rather that a third party with whom I've already established a financial relationship (Apple, Amazon, UPS or Fedex, etc) could provide an authentication token that could be used as a universal login.
bmj 15y ago
I had the same reaction (though I can sympathetic to some of rms' opinions). It's a false dichotomy to say "do you hate Facebook more than you care about $fixing_some_big_global_problem? I reckon if your cause really, really wants to recruit people, they would look beyond Facebook.
daenz 15y ago
> Please do not require me to log in to it for your cause. The worst part about it is oftentimes it makes the most sense to require Facebook for login. The gains are: 1) development and maintenance of only one login system. and 2) Easy integrated sharing/liking to expand support for your cause. You can't really expect to win a rational argument with a site owner who sees how the benefits of requiring Facebook outweigh the perceived costs.
glesica 15y ago
I agree heartily. In the late '90s AOL had millions of users. At the end of many movie trailers there was an AOL keyword instead of a web site URL. I knew many people who had AOL, but I also knew many people who did not. But it always struck me as absurd that film studios would bet their entire online effort on AOL's walled-garden instead of taking slightly more time to develop a web site as well. (As an aside, unrelated to my point, the "Space Jam" web site is still live, where are all those AOL keyword pages?) There is something similar happening today. No one would go back to the days of AOL, yet people find it perfectly reasonable to rely on Facebook to be the sole online presence for businesses and organizations. This isn't a story about a local coffee shop having a poll to find out which roast is the most popular and doing it using tools that Facebook conveniently provides. This is Intel (based on the linked thread) developing a Facebook "app", with all the energy, money and time that entails in order to hold a contest of sorts. Would it really have been that much more difficult to do it themselves on the open Internet? They could have still used Facebook to promote it even. This is AOL all over again in the worst-possible way. I don't hate Facebook, and I didn't hate AOL. I just don't understand the logic behind companies and organizations that lock themselves into a walled-garden when they have other, better, options.

Estragon 15y ago

Came back from a talk by a Facebook Data Team member a little while ago. Don't have time to look it up now, but he cited Bakshy et al 2012 as a paper describing Facebook research in which a proportion of "Likes" from friends were censored for selected users in order to gather information on a social science question. The talk was pretty incoherent on what question they were investigating; I get the impression that it was pretty innocuous, something like "more activity in your feed makes you share more," maybe. Still, it makes me wonder why people are signing up for this fishbowl.

ben1040 15y ago
http://www.scribd.com/facebook/d/78445521-Role-of-Social-Networks-in-Information-Diffusion http://www.scribd.com/facebook/d/78445521-Role-of-Social-Net... This looks like it could be the paper in question.

freehunter 15y ago

I agree that Facebook login should not be mandatory, but I do like the option to not have to create another account with every site just to leave a comment or try their service. Facebook and OpenID should be standard options, as well as local accounts. Although I dislike some of Facebook's policies, I don't hate them.

salgernon 15y ago
I deleted my facebook account because I determined that what it cost me to host my data there (and to consume their services) was more than I was willing to spend - and that this cost was creeping up over time without giving me the opportunity to decline. The currency in this case is the information that I'm providing them, either explicitly through postings and 'Like's on external sites, or implicitly by their plumbing of my social graph. I would actually feel much better if facebook were a paid service, since then they would have an incentive to maintain me as a customer. I'd rather that a third party with whom I've already established a financial relationship (Apple, Amazon, UPS or Fedex, etc) could provide an authentication token that could be used as a universal login.

bmj 15y ago

I had the same reaction (though I can sympathetic to some of rms' opinions). It's a false dichotomy to say "do you hate Facebook more than you care about $fixing_some_big_global_problem? I reckon if your cause really, really wants to recruit people, they would look beyond Facebook.

daenz 15y ago

> Please do not require me to log in to it for your cause. The worst part about it is oftentimes it makes the most sense to require Facebook for login. The gains are: 1) development and maintenance of only one login system. and 2) Easy integrated sharing/liking to expand support for your cause. You can't really expect to win a rational argument with a site owner who sees how the benefits of requiring Facebook outweigh the perceived costs.

glesica 15y ago

I agree heartily. In the late '90s AOL had millions of users. At the end of many movie trailers there was an AOL keyword instead of a web site URL. I knew many people who had AOL, but I also knew many people who did not. But it always struck me as absurd that film studios would bet their entire online effort on AOL's walled-garden instead of taking slightly more time to develop a web site as well. (As an aside, unrelated to my point, the "Space Jam" web site is still live, where are all those AOL keyword pages?) There is something similar happening today. No one would go back to the days of AOL, yet people find it perfectly reasonable to rely on Facebook to be the sole online presence for businesses and organizations. This isn't a story about a local coffee shop having a poll to find out which roast is the most popular and doing it using tools that Facebook conveniently provides. This is Intel (based on the linked thread) developing a Facebook "app", with all the energy, money and time that entails in order to hold a contest of sorts. Would it really have been that much more difficult to do it themselves on the open Internet? They could have still used Facebook to promote it even. This is AOL all over again in the worst-possible way. I don't hate Facebook, and I didn't hate AOL. I just don't understand the logic behind companies and organizations that lock themselves into a walled-garden when they have other, better, options.