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What Happened to the Facebook Killer? It's Complicated
- josephcooney 14y agoDoesn't 'facebook killer' have a number of other, very unfortunate meanings? http://www.google.com.au/search?q=facebook+killer http://www.google.com.au/search?q=facebook+killer
- pdx 14y agojosephcooney hellbanned 4 days ago.
- chm 14y agoWhat does that/do you mean?
- vyrotek 14y agoThe user josephcooney left a comment on this post but it's invisible to everyone. This is called 'hell banning'.
- dickbasedregex 14y agoI've never seen an example of this where other users are made away of it though. Is it to serve as a warning?
- zheng 14y agoIt's generally so that the person in question knows they've been hellbanned, as it can be difficult to tell if you have been without someone mentioning it.
- LiveTheDream 14y agoThe purpose of hellbanning is precisely so the person in question doesn't know.
- tedunangst 14y agoThe purpose of hellbanning is to prevent people from ruining the site. How exactly josephcooney was ruining HN by posting "The question didn't seem rude to me at all, either. Why is plain communication so often taken as cynicism/sarcasm?" is a mystery to me.
- LiveTheDream 14y agoI don't know why he was hellbanned; I was just explaining the purpose of hellbanning. FWIW after skimming through josephcooney's history, I am also mystified as to why it happened.
- rangibaby 14y agoThe first thing that came my mind is a mod or bot might have seen his handle and considered it a troll account b/c of it's similarity to Joseph Kony
- carmen 14y agoemotional responses by weird aspies is not particularly surprising to me
- Baba_Chaghaloo 14y agoTesting
- drpancake 14y agoI can't see how it's justified, his comment history isn't so bad: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=josephcooney http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=josephcooney A hellban should be a last resort - it's rather a cruel punishment.
- icelancer 14y agoHow do you know?
- tedunangst 14y agoClick on your name to go to prefs page, turn on show dead.
- josephcooney 14y agoWeird. And sad. I like HN. I don't suppose anyone else will see this.
- OJ 14y agoThis seems like a rather unjustified and wanton punishment to me. I can't see anything in his history that is worthy of such treatment. I scan around other areas of HN and see people who are blatant trolls appearing everywhere and they aren't hallbanned. Yet someone, like josephcooney, who appears to have a brain and attempts to be actively involved in moderate and reasonable discussion is axed? Just goes to show that HN is becoming a ghetto, that's if it isn't already one. Poor form if you ask me.
- shawabawa3 14y agoMy first account was hellbanned after my first comment (I was stupid enough to make a joke). I had no idea for weeks, and hellbanning also makes the site incredibly slow. I only realised after I logged out and the site was fast. It's absolutely absurd to hellban someone after 1 comment (and it wasn't racist, aggressive, etc). What's wrong with warnings, or at least telling me I was banned?
- nc17 14y agoIt's not that complicated, especially if you have been following Diaspora here. Too much spotlight, not enough traction, a suicide, no more money.
- dickbasedregex 14y agoIs it complicated? Diaspora was a nice idea but if I recall correctly it was a group of kids with no experience or evidence of being able to execute who happen to catch a great marketing wind.
- troymc 14y ago"A group of kids with no experience or evidence of being able to execute who happen to catch a great marketing wind" describes many organizations that did become successful (including Facebook).
- zalew 14y agoyeah, but when you position yourself as a facebook killer from the start, you better kill facebook or you lose the hype and die.
- mseebach 14y agoNo. There's an important distinction as to when you catch the marketing wind. Facebook was executing like there was no tomorrow before they got any kind of attention like Diaspora had before they wrote any code.
- nostrademons 14y agoFacebook was Mark Zuckerburg's 3rd company. His second, Synapse Media Player, was a machine-learning-based music player that got 7-figure buyout offers from Microsoft and AOL when Zuckerburg was 17.
- seunghomattyang 14y agoHow often does "something" killer actually kill its target?
- jamesbritt 14y ago"Mosiac killer" comes to mind.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoZodiac killer
- tedunangst 14y agowas the zodiac, didn't kill the zodiac
- donebizkit 14y agoWhy do we overcomplicate our analysis of social media and web 2.0? We all got on Facebook because it was new, it was fun, we shared pictures, we poked each other, we implicitly pried on our friends. Some of us got on Google+ because we were intrigued by what new it can bring to the table. The answer was none. Some of us stuck with Facebook because we're too lazy to manage two networks. Some of us continued on Google+ just to brag about having a Google+ account. Most of us didn't care about privacy, freedom, human rights or whatever mambo jumbo the media pundits were talking about, and who the hell cares who owns the data. it's just pictures and stupid text. we're just having fun at the end of the day. No need for philosophical analyses. It's just a game and once we get bored we'll move on.
- 18pfsmt 14y agoThis sounds like a specific, personal experience. It certainly doesn't describe anything I, myself, experienced. If I were to guess, I would say you are in your early 20s?
- donebizkit 14y agoYou surely understand that the description is a caricature of social media use. I am not saying, you or I have that experience but the point that I was making is that the majority of Facebook users, the teens and early 20s, as you're pointing, don't take any of this seriously. It's just one way of having fun until something else comes up. And that's why any competitor that enters this competition with a serious face i.e. we want to decentralize social interaction doesn't have a chance. The next Facebook killer will be something that's more FUN to use.
- PakG1 14y agoIt's just a game and once we get bored we'll move on. This is why I never believed in Zynga. Casual games are casual. I never thought that they can capture the imagination of people over the long-term. It'd be really interesting of that axiom applies to the bigger picture of social also. It probably wouldn't, but who can tell what the future holds 10 years from now?
- 14y ago
- olalonde 14y agoMaybe not the most constructive comment but what the hell is that picture? They are (were) a startup, not a boy band... Is this a new trend I was not aware of?
- troymc 14y agoMaybe there won't be one big Facebook killer, but a thousand "niche" social networks, each with an average of a million active users, each hyper-serving its community. Hacker News, Second Life, Metafilter, deviantART, Ravelry (for knitters), and on and on...
- te_chris 14y agoPeople seem to miss this. Eventually people will supplement different niche activities on a monolith for something else, and then suddenly they don't need the main thing that much anymore. A gourmet supermarket just opened near where I live, between that, the local fruit shop and local butcher (with the odd trip to an asian supermarket to top up on that type of thing), my visits to the supermarket (which is also close to me) are probably down to a 3rd of what they once were. Without me realising it or doing anything conscious to reduce my patronage, the amount of money I give the supermarket has drastically plummeted through small, cumulative changes in behaviour.
- mseebach 14y agoBut those (or similar) communities existed long before Facebook did - they serve a vertical of common interests, rather than a horizontal of people you know. Some of them might be replaced by Facebook groups, but plenty of them will and can continue to exist outside of Facebook. For any kind of specialized discussion on computer stuff and startups, I'll take a bunch of perfect strangers on HN over friends on Facebook any day. On the other hand, posting pics of my new apartment or from my holiday would be (let's say) underappreciated here. On the other hand, people I share friendship or family ties with cares about this stuff, even if we have no interests relevant to the matter in common.
- rat87 14y agodexter killed him? maybe? I haven't seen the recent seasons.
- krichman 14y agoIt's not complicated. It's that there is no other option that gives more benefit (to the average user) than having all your contacts in one system. It's not going down until the privacy issue becomes enough to make average users quit, something with greater benefit appears, or something gets users to switch services en masse overnight.
- grey-area 14y agoFacebook won't be killed by another product, but by the growing data-mining and exploitation of its data (probably not even by Facebook itself). If you post often enough, Facebook (and/or twitter and g+) provides a map of all your activities, affiliations and even aspirations in great detail (often with geolocated photos, and cross-linked posts by people you have confirmed as friends), which is a treasure trove of information for companies which want to find out more about you. Facebook has privacy controls to pretend that they're hiding your data, but in the words of its founder, those who trust in them are 'dumb fks' - they are there to encourage more sharing, not less, and are constantly undermined by the company itself. That data has not been exploited properly at all yet, but when the great data-mining scandal of 2021 hits, and people are regularly being denied services (insurance,travel,benefits,jobs) because of risky activities in their youth, or confronted with just how much anyone can find out about the last 30 years of their life with a trivial search, there will probably be a swing back to much tighter personal control of information, treatment of all data posted to any service as already in the public record, and a general acceptance that maybe we shared too much. Perhaps our concept of privacy will shift, but I doubt it will extend to letting corporations and governments mine the highlights and interstices of our life for every salient fact, which is where we are headed if people continue to use Facebook or similar services their entire life. One thing I do think might change gradually is that we'll stop believing that pseudonyms on a forum or privacy controls on a sharing website can protect your identity in any meaningful way, and start accepting that anything posted anywhere can and will be traced back to us.
- hayksaakian 14y agoPerhaps facebook's reluctance to roll out a proper people search is a reluctance to scaring it's user base.
- danso 14y agoMuch scarier data (to most laymen) can be found in a public records search, such as through Spokeo.
- grey-area 14y agoI think in aggregate the data over a span of 10 years would be much scarier than name,address tel no. etc. at a given point in time, however Spokeo is actually making this point anyway right now - they look like they're collecting exactly the sort of data I'm talking about, if you want to call it 'public records' that's fine - most people aren't thinking through the implications of leaving a public trail like this. Not all the data will be available for everyone, but when the data-mining becomes advanced enough, and if you've left a trail on social media, you're talking about possibilities like: Your exact coordinates at say 20,000 points in the last 10 years (from pics or posts by you or others) Your meetings with, relationships with, and messages to friends over that time (again posts by you or others) Your activity at work/home, when you worked, when you didn't (again posts by you or others) Your use of alcohol and other drugs (legal or not) Your opinions on almost every topic (culled from various linked postings via your Facebook ID say) Your membership of hundreds of websites (again culled from links to Twitter/FB logins say) NB This doesn't just apply to Facebook but I think it will trigger real hesitations about opening up your data to them or similar sites when this sort of scandal first hits in a big way. It also applies in a smaller way even to forums like this. Of course if someone can mine your email or your bank accounts (i.e. your gov), they'd hit a similar treasure trove of information, so the change with social media is that a lot of your activity is public or only semi-private (and therefore likely to become public), and innocuous in isolation, but possibly very useful/dangerous in aggregate if you and your friends post enough of it.
- oelmekki 14y agoThere is a very good reason peer to peer social networks can't work nowadays (not even considering diaspora quality). It's not about internet overlords. It's not about ad industry pressure. It's not about governments pressure. It's about internet access providers. Most of them provide unbalanced bandwidth : you have high speed download and low speed upload. Which user would want his peers to watch a video streaming at a few hundreds kb/sec ? P2P social networks can only fail until we have decent upload bandwith. Granted, if it's really P2P, people you authorize seeing it can then participate in its sharing, but it still is not acceptable on very first minutes after posting : you may have something like 10 people trying to download your content from your ridiculous upload speed, which, btw, can greatly affect your browsing experience meanwhile.
- andreasvc 14y agoThe US may be an exception but here in Europe I think most people have 1 mbit upload; that seems plenty to me. Video might be tricky, but typically you use YouTube for that anyway. FB isn't in the business of hosting videos so why should a p2p social network be?
- oelmekki 14y ago> FB isn't in the business of hosting videos so why should a p2p social network be? Remember that the whole point of using P2P social network was to avoid centralized service and keep control of one data.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]