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I'm really sick of hearing all of the hatred that facebook gets. It's a useful tool that I use every day for organizing meetups and, in my opinion, is superior

• sp332 14y ago
  People react negatively to FB because they are abusing their usefulness. Want to easily find someone to go to a movie with? Fine, give us your web browsing history, your friends list, your email addresses, your phone numbers, your social calendar, your location history, where you lived, worked, and went to school, many full-text conversations with your close friends, and... oh yeah any pictures of you that all your friends on FB take, plus you should tag your friends in pictures that you take. That way we can correlate your location retroactively even if you don't personally "check-in" with us. Did I mention that your friends list isn't private, law enforcement can get all this data at any time, and we're using all this data for business purposes?
  • crazygringo 14y ago
    But they're not doing it for nefarious reasons. Having all this information together is genuinely useful for users. That's why they do it! People want it, and for good reason. The side-effect that all this information provides an unsettlingly complete snapshot of your life, trusted to a single entity, is an inevitable byproduct. Facebook has certainly made a few mistakes, but the things people complain about aren't specific to Facebook -- they're inherent to any useful, complete social network. Is there a consumer-friendly solution to this dilemma? I'm not sure. Privacy-wise, you can't have your cake (super-connected with your friends) and eat it too (keep the site from knowing about all those connections).
    • sp332 14y ago
      If this were for my benefit, they would either stop tracking me across the web, or somehow make that data available or useful to be. It's currently opaque, so whatever their reason is, it's not for my best interests. Also, I think keeping my friends list more private would be nice. And being able to pay money instead of being shown ads would benefit both me and FB.
      • amirmc 14y ago
        Making the data available to you probably would be interesting but using it to 'improve' your experience probably drives more engagement. Also, having you paying money would probably be less beneficial to Facebook, as I'm sure they can make more money from advertising. I'm not trying to defend FB here but it is worth remembering that they've reached 800million people so they've obviously got something right. The question people should consider is at what cost to themselves.
    • deleted 14y ago
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  • blhack 14y ago
    What the hell are you talking about? I found somebody to go to a movie with because he posted on our film group saying: "This film is playing in Tempe tonight, who wants to go?" And I responded with a "Me". >Did I mention that your friends list isn't private, law enforcement can get all this data at any time No, and I'm glad you didn't, because that sounds like utter bullshit. "At any time"? Do you mean "With a court order"? This "oh no I'm so scared" reaction to facebook is neo-luddism at its finest. The point at which facebook turns into a magical black box is too high for some people, and they get scared of it. Here's the big bad secret: facebook isn't doing linguistic analysis on your messages, and if they're using information about what youtube videos I've "liked" to serve me more relevant ads, then good, I'd rather see information about bands or lecturers I'm interested in visiting Phoenix than I would about penis pills and weight loss "secrets".
    • sp332 14y ago
      I found somebody to go to a movie with because he posted on our film group saying: "This film is playing in Tempe tonight, who wants to go?" And I responded with a "Me". The ads they show you will now be more targeted, about movies and located around Tempe. I've seen ads based on search terms in "private" conversations I've had on FB. They mine your interactions very aggressively. You'll almost certainly see that guy's posts on your "News" feed more often for a while. "At any time"? Do you mean "With a court order"? OK, I was a tad hyperbolic. But LEOs can search FB for "public" information about you and your friends without a court order. I put public in quotes because if you're not keeping on top of your privacy settings, you probably don't realize that some things you thought were private are actually public.
      • blhack 14y ago
        >The ads they show you will now be more targeted, about movies and located around Tempe. Good! >I've seen ads based on search terms in "private" conversations I've had on FB. Why on earth would you think this was "private"? It's private to you and your friend, but you're using a third party (facebook) to facilitate the interaction. Gmail does the exact same thing. So does amazon.
      • 14y ago
• AVTizzle 14y ago
  I agree with you that the Facebook hate - especially from non-techie peers - seems kind of foolish to me. Just thought it was funny though - that your local Reddit group convenes on Facebook. I thought the self-serve subreddit platform was made for that micro-community purpose! ;)
  • blhack 14y ago
    It is, but it's not very good at it. Facebook "bumps" threads when you respond to them, so relevant stuff stays at the top. And people use pictures of themselves as identifiers. It's a lot easier to recognize people based on faces than it is to recognize them based on silly usernames. I mean...these are people that I regularly interact with in real life. I get the pseudo-anonymity for reddit proper, but non-anonymized interactions on facebook are good.
    • AVTizzle 14y ago
      Gotcha. Good point. I was really impressed with Meetup's functionality for these purposes as well - for the same reasons you've mentioned. I'm an organizer too, and when Facebook's new group system came out (Was it a year ago now? Facebook time is it's own reality...) its functionality was just perfect. Little things like Facebook's group system - I feel like there's a million different innovations on Facebook that all blow my mind. We were hacking a jomsocial social network at one time as a hobby project... Every time FB launched something we just couldn't help but laugh at how simple they made it all seem. Guess it all ties back in to your original point. Facebook. Respect.
• deleted 14y ago
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• anigbrowl 14y ago
  None of this stuff would happen if not for facebook You could have said that about AOL or CompuServe or any other of several previous market leaders. for that matter, people managed to have social lives prior to the advent of the internet; the media of communication were things like posters, bulletin boards (as in large pieces of wood), small ads, magazines and so on. I don't think the article is picking on FB particularly, it's just the company that happens to be on top of the social networking pile right now. What the author is getting at is that things have sort of plateaued for the time being and it's not obvious where the fundamental innovation is coming from, so in the meantime you're seeing a lot of cargo cultism. Think of what we have now as a large-scale version of the pre-web internet, which was much more limited in scope than that of today, but internally quite well connected as long as you were content to adopt a unix-y way of looking at things. The advent of the browser upended all that, but at the very beginning it was quite clunky and a lot of people thought it might be a problem in search of a solution. To my mind, the proliferation of APIs and attempts to establish platforms is quite similar to past stages of development. Facebook is not the problem; it's the curremt least bad solution to the problem (for many people). I'll cannibalize a recent comment on another thread [1] to sum up why: Avid Facebook users want their content within Facebook's standardized UI and relatively well-curated system. Like AOL, Facebook is the online equivalent of the mall - somewhat bland, but fairly clean, safe, and above all well-organized. Myspace was just as technically impressive as Facebook back in the day, but because it included a host of customization options it wound up looking like a shopping district that had gone to seed and was covered in bad graffiti and flyposters. You could tell it was doomed when some people were making a business out of selling sparkly animated gifs as page backgrounds. Myspace was so freely customizable that browsing and navigation ended up becoming a chore for visitors; you'd go to someone's page, loud music would start, and you'd be frantically looking for the transport/volume controls - like multimedia Geocities. With Facebook you never get lost as a visitor, and if the site limits a page owner's visual expression somewhat, the same is true for everyone else so you're not at a real disadvantage. 1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850935 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850935 So what is the problem, exactly? Platform fragmentation. I spend most of my social internet time on Hacker News and Metafilter, and on a few other forums to a lesser degree. It's probably not an accident that these are among the least visually crufty and feature-rich social sites on the web; HN doesn't even allow inline hyperlinks. I personally share things mostly by cutting and pasting URLs. I maintain very little presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or (insert your favorite thing here) because of the transactional overhead. All social sites involve Conversations with persistent Communities of People about Stuff, and I've capitalized those 4 elements because they're like the legs of a table and can be captured within relatively simple data structures. Platform fragmentation is the fact of all these different services having distinct identities. From an individual human point of view what matters is this conversation, the social groups we are in, you and I as persons, and this substantive topic. We could be having this conversation on Facebook, G+, Twitter (in very fragmented form) or wherever. What makes HN unique is the stuff people want to talk about and the group of people with overlapping interests. The actual mechanisms of displaying and posting are incidental. to my mind they should be wholly transparent, in the same way that I don't care about exactly which routers this message goes through to reach you, or where those switches and servers are located, or who manufactured them or wrote the firmware. We've abstracted away the hardware layer, and in my perfect world we'd now abstract away the UI layer as well. On the other hand, you could make the argument that NNTP and Usenet have ultimately failed to fulfill their potential because of a tragedy-of-the-commons problem; it's so public that it's hard to curate, and it's not obvious how to make money out of it. PS: also a problem for RSS. The browser is, at its core, a page rendering interface, just as a terminal is a highly interactive text interface. That's great, because we are very clever at putting things on pages. But what we need now is a network traversal interface.