8 ms·

Facebook’s dark matter: “secret” groups

49 points by hartleybrody 14y ago

webwanderings 14y ago
I use FB only for groups. I think the reason people are not moving off of FB to G+ is because of the groups. These secret/closed groups are heavily organized and ingrained and it is practically impossible for people to make a move to anywhere else. These FB groups are like Yahoogroups (the old fashioned email listserv) which are still going strong as far as I know.
- veb 14y ago
  I discovered groups quite recently, and colour me surprised at the kind of stuff that goes in on some of them. I joined this local car club group, and there's literally hundreds of people every day posting up pictures of their cars asking for... swaps. SWAPS?! This happens in the real world?! On more investigation there's local groups like "Under $50"... to "Under $1000" - and my gods, they're soooo suspect. I can understand why they're a big part of people's lives, because they've got a wealth of content!
  - tomrod 14y ago
    I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you said, but you piqued my interest. What do you mean by "suspect"? What are swaps? What is under $50? What kind of content do they have?
    - JimmyAustin 14y ago
      I think the implication was that a large degree of the products available were stolen and Facebook was being used as a method of finding buyers without leaving a paper trail.
- joe_the_user 14y ago
  Now wait a second. I am in a highly organized secret Facebook group mah-self. The thing is that this highly organized quality means that they could jump anywhere if they really wanted to. Perhaps you "semi-organized". Basically, I think lock-in to any social networking pretty much has to come through a group disorganization, through the fact that a given setup works for some members of the group but these members are not so committed that they'd actually jump from one group to another. But there are other factors, I think G+ only has traction with early adopters. By starting at Harvard, Facebook itself spread from high-social-prestige people to the rest of us. G+, for whatever reason, may be spreading the same way but that kind of effect only works with the tenuous connections you want to have with people who aren't wholly committed. The cohesive connection you with people in a set group don't require any given medium to happen. Anyway, personally I'm not going to G+ due it's even-more-draconian-than-Facebook anonymity policy (Facebook's policy is pretty much that they only say they care).
  - tytso 14y ago
    Actually, G+ does support pseudonyms, although there are some subtleties with how they work and the approval process involved with them. See this very long thread for the details, and some really interesting discussion about names, pseudonyms, "core identities", "peripheral identies"/hats, "firewalled identies", and more: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/YJbzDptWGQt https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/YJbzDptWGQt
    - joe_the_user 14y ago
      I don't think your statement accurately describes the text in your link. The only thing I see here is the ability to add a nicknames - your "alternate names" - to your "real" name. That is not at all the same thing. Edit: Comment on the page - "I'm sorry, but the only difference I see here is that you're now listing the nickname field on the hovercard and profile. I see no substantive policy change. Fame was already an obvious and hypocritical exception to the policy; now you're just open about it." That's what I read.
      - 14y ago
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  An organized group is surprisingly mobile (and can be fairly robust over time as well). I've known a few groups which have survived / persisted across multiple platforms over the years. In one case, migrating first from one hosted forum to another, then self-hosting, then that imploded, a "temporary" forum was constructed (and persisted for years), and finally the original self-hosting platform was resurrected. Bits of the group survived all of that. What didn't survive were several members (death trumps all social stickyness), and some political and group-dynamics interactions, including a few fairly spectacular flame-outs. But a core element has survived. If a group were, as a whole, to decide that FB was no longer where its interests were best served, then a migration elsewhere would be trivial to arrange. Despite my own interest in archives, it's not the depth of social media history that matters so much to most users as the breadth of now. Facebook is where "now" is for most people, though this could change (and has for all prior social network giants of the past: Geocities, Usenet, Orcutt, Xanga, The WELL, ...).
batgaijin 14y ago
Can some people talk about example secret groups? I quit using facebook/never had the friends to discover these.
- CleanedStar 14y ago
  I am in several regular groups and one secret group. The regular groups I am in - one is a local group, one is a memorial group for someone who died young, one was started by a friend for his hobby. The secret group has a lock on its tab and says "Secret Group - Only members see the group, who's in it, and what members post". No one who I am friends with knows I'm in the group aside from people in the group. Not sure what more to say - it has a wall which is somewhat active, although content was better and more diverse when the group started, now it is mostly 1-2 boring friend-of-friend chatterboxes. It also had a chat room, although Facebook killed group chat rooms a few months ago.
  - webwanderings 14y ago
    Imagine if you are using your FB and you have other people around you peeking at your PC screen. Now this secret FB group is not really secret, is it? There is actually no technical way possible for having a truly secret group.
    - JimmyAustin 14y ago
      This is like saying you can't have a secure bank account online because people can just look over at your screen while you do it. Just don't go on when people are around.
      - webwanderings 14y ago
        You are right. What I am saying is that secrecy of an online group is totally dependent on human choice and decisions. When Facebook (or anyone else) claim that they have secret group ... they are not technically secret because their secrecy is dependent upon non-technical aspect, i.e, humans. BTW, the analogy of bank website isn't equally applicable because people don't hang out at their bank websites most of the time.
pdog 14y ago
People seriously didn't know about this? "Secret" Groups are probably the only reason that I and any of the friends I care about are still using Facebook.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  I would guess that the extroverted people who make up the blogosphere/tech journalism don't think about it because they post/tweet everything publicly by default. It's a bit like lucid dreaming. I don't know how often I've heard "what, other people can't control their dreams? Really?" :)
alan_cx 14y ago
Odd one this for me. I recently closed my FB account, and it was exactly because of: “Twitter makes me love people I've never met; Facebook makes me hate people I know.” Not the Twitter bit as I don't use it, but the FB part was exactly what happened to me. I just ended up loathing almost every one I "knew". So, coupled with the constant rumblings about FB's privacy attitudes and all that, I closed my FB account. However, the reason I ended up loathing all my "friends" was because of the secret groups. It was in the groups where I began to really not like them. But it is true that the vast majority of my FB time was spent in those groups. So, I go with the initial point, but also agree with the parts that are supposed to disprove it.
tytso 14y ago
So now Facebook isn't passe because of secret groups, which aren't visible outside the group of people who are communicating privately? That was the same argument which pro-Facebook partisans pooh-poohed when it was made about Google+, interestingly enough. The only difference was that G+ started with private circles, and later added circles which could be shared and public communities, whereas Facebook started with the "let it all hang out" model and then grafted privacy on later. The problem with this, though, as Randi Zuckerberg discovered to her discomfort, is that like security, grafting privacy onto a product design afterwards is fraught with peril and often doesn't work well (if at all).
- Tuvaloon 14y ago
  Everyone, stop harping on Randi's picture as some horrible Facebook bug. One of her sister's friends leaked a photo, which could happen just as easy in any online medium, like email or smugmug.
- graue 14y ago
  > Facebook started with the "let it all hang out" model and then grafted privacy on later That's not actually correct history. Facebook started with most data visible only to your friends, and gradually increased the visibility (given default settings) over time. You can track the changes here: http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ Also, when Facebook launched it was exclusive to Harvard, and then to Ivy League colleges, and then to all colleges, and even for a while after they opened it up it was still mostly young people. Your friends list was a closer match to your peer group. So it's possible that the audience people used to get with a friends-only post a few years ago isn't all that different from the audience you get with a secret group today. I remember when I was first finding out about Facebook around early 2009, it had the distinct feel of a private social club.
ryguytilidie 14y ago
Could I ask a simple question, not because I want to mock people or anything, but because I've been experiencing a similar phenomenon lately. Why does facebook make you hate people you know? I do generally find that most people I'm not actively great friends with at the moment tend to annoy the shit out of me with either bragging, illogical nonsense about things like politics, or just passive-aggressive teenager posts. I see friends post good content sometime, but honestly it seems more and more rare. I'm not sure if people are worse at posting or if its that these type of posts have worn on me and I've gotten more and more annoyed by them over time. What has it been like for everyone else?
- seiji 14y ago
  You know that Adams quote about the universe being bigger than you can impossibly imagine? Like, really, really big? Well, people are like that. Our brains kinda blur the world together and, without realizing it, our brains map other people onto our own experiences so we think people are kinda like us. Except they really aren't. Really, really, really aren't. In every day interactions, we gloss over, ignore, and excuse little things that don't gel with us (without even knowing we do it). But being presented with their innermost inconsistent idiocracy in writing, in our face, and in our pockets -- it's too much. We start to realize they aren't us. They are them. Them ain't us. And we can't stand it. It's the same reason sharing an office with someone possessing your exact anti-personality will enrage you daily. It's the same reason visiting a highly population dense foreign land where people live by their own customs will begin grating on you quickly. "Stop exploding fireworks on my front door you irredeemable kids! I don't care if it is your yearly festival of annoying neighbors into threatening you with axes!" Two solutions: get much better (more complete, more self-actualized, more authentic) friends or tune them out. They're the same they've always been, but being exposed to every one of their inner most thoughts will drive you batshit insane. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mending_Wall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mending_Wall
  - Tuvaloon 14y ago
    >Two solutions: get much better (more complete, more self-actualized, more authentic) Reading your whole post, I think you mean 'more exactly like your favorite part of yourself', but otherwise, spot on. On FB you have to listen to everything everyone says to everyone, not just what they would choose to say to you to accommodate your sensibilities.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
I love "secret" groups. It's great for my close group of friends to share pictures that we would otherwise not put on the Internet (and no I don't need a lecture, I'm aware that's "risky". If my employer wants to fire me if a picture leaks out of there, their priorities aren't set correctly)
HannibalLecter 14y ago
This is nothing more than the reinvention of Roman confession; the fallacy that you're operating in the guise of secrecy when in fact everyone who could ruin you is listening.
jwdunne 14y ago
This is very true, as I've observed with a small community of programmers I founded. I created a FB page called "I Live Prograaming" and played with FB ads, which gave the page about 1000 likes in a short doace if time, a few years ago and the old format for pages worked quite well for a community, which timeline destroyed. We (three others were helping me at this point) discovered that groups are actually exactly what we needed. We started creating groups and each turned into fairly active communities, seeded from our growing page. We found the demography of our groups matched that of our page, which seems obvious but found it interesting. We have many that are secret with hundreds of members - past a certain member count you are unable to change this setting with your member's privacy as the reason against , which makes a lot of sense. Our format is fairly simple: I Love X, where X is anything technical, which began with I Love Programming. Some groups hold over 200 members each and there are groups for most common programming languages and platforms (I Love C is fairly popular). I'm not trying to plug though, I've refrained from linking, but more to show a full picture of what the article refers to. Facebook, for me, had been a great way to build a community based around my passions.

49 points by hartleybrody 14y ago

I use FB only for groups. I think the reason people are not moving off of FB to G+ is because of the groups. These secret/closed groups are heavily organized and ingrained and it is practically impossible for people to make a move to anywhere else. These FB groups are like Yahoogroups (the old fashioned email listserv) which are still going strong as far as I know.

veb 14y ago
I discovered groups quite recently, and colour me surprised at the kind of stuff that goes in on some of them. I joined this local car club group, and there's literally hundreds of people every day posting up pictures of their cars asking for... swaps. SWAPS?! This happens in the real world?! On more investigation there's local groups like "Under $50"... to "Under $1000" - and my gods, they're soooo suspect. I can understand why they're a big part of people's lives, because they've got a wealth of content!
- tomrod 14y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you said, but you piqued my interest. What do you mean by "suspect"? What are swaps? What is under $50? What kind of content do they have?
  - JimmyAustin 14y ago
    I think the implication was that a large degree of the products available were stolen and Facebook was being used as a method of finding buyers without leaving a paper trail.
joe_the_user 14y ago
Now wait a second. I am in a highly organized secret Facebook group mah-self. The thing is that this highly organized quality means that they could jump anywhere if they really wanted to. Perhaps you "semi-organized". Basically, I think lock-in to any social networking pretty much has to come through a group disorganization, through the fact that a given setup works for some members of the group but these members are not so committed that they'd actually jump from one group to another. But there are other factors, I think G+ only has traction with early adopters. By starting at Harvard, Facebook itself spread from high-social-prestige people to the rest of us. G+, for whatever reason, may be spreading the same way but that kind of effect only works with the tenuous connections you want to have with people who aren't wholly committed. The cohesive connection you with people in a set group don't require any given medium to happen. Anyway, personally I'm not going to G+ due it's even-more-draconian-than-Facebook anonymity policy (Facebook's policy is pretty much that they only say they care).
- tytso 14y ago
  Actually, G+ does support pseudonyms, although there are some subtleties with how they work and the approval process involved with them. See this very long thread for the details, and some really interesting discussion about names, pseudonyms, "core identities", "peripheral identies"/hats, "firewalled identies", and more: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/YJbzDptWGQt https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/YJbzDptWGQt
  - joe_the_user 14y ago
    I don't think your statement accurately describes the text in your link. The only thing I see here is the ability to add a nicknames - your "alternate names" - to your "real" name. That is not at all the same thing. Edit: Comment on the page - "I'm sorry, but the only difference I see here is that you're now listing the nickname field on the hovercard and profile. I see no substantive policy change. Fame was already an obvious and hypocritical exception to the policy; now you're just open about it." That's what I read.
    - 14y ago
dredmorbius 14y ago
An organized group is surprisingly mobile (and can be fairly robust over time as well). I've known a few groups which have survived / persisted across multiple platforms over the years. In one case, migrating first from one hosted forum to another, then self-hosting, then that imploded, a "temporary" forum was constructed (and persisted for years), and finally the original self-hosting platform was resurrected. Bits of the group survived all of that. What didn't survive were several members (death trumps all social stickyness), and some political and group-dynamics interactions, including a few fairly spectacular flame-outs. But a core element has survived. If a group were, as a whole, to decide that FB was no longer where its interests were best served, then a migration elsewhere would be trivial to arrange. Despite my own interest in archives, it's not the depth of social media history that matters so much to most users as the breadth of now. Facebook is where "now" is for most people, though this could change (and has for all prior social network giants of the past: Geocities, Usenet, Orcutt, Xanga, The WELL, ...).

batgaijin 14y ago

Can some people talk about example secret groups? I quit using facebook/never had the friends to discover these.

CleanedStar 14y ago
I am in several regular groups and one secret group. The regular groups I am in - one is a local group, one is a memorial group for someone who died young, one was started by a friend for his hobby. The secret group has a lock on its tab and says "Secret Group - Only members see the group, who's in it, and what members post". No one who I am friends with knows I'm in the group aside from people in the group. Not sure what more to say - it has a wall which is somewhat active, although content was better and more diverse when the group started, now it is mostly 1-2 boring friend-of-friend chatterboxes. It also had a chat room, although Facebook killed group chat rooms a few months ago.
- webwanderings 14y ago
  Imagine if you are using your FB and you have other people around you peeking at your PC screen. Now this secret FB group is not really secret, is it? There is actually no technical way possible for having a truly secret group.
  - JimmyAustin 14y ago
    This is like saying you can't have a secure bank account online because people can just look over at your screen while you do it. Just don't go on when people are around.
    - webwanderings 14y ago
      You are right. What I am saying is that secrecy of an online group is totally dependent on human choice and decisions. When Facebook (or anyone else) claim that they have secret group ... they are not technically secret because their secrecy is dependent upon non-technical aspect, i.e, humans. BTW, the analogy of bank website isn't equally applicable because people don't hang out at their bank websites most of the time.

pdog 14y ago

People seriously didn't know about this? "Secret" Groups are probably the only reason that I and any of the friends I care about are still using Facebook.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
I would guess that the extroverted people who make up the blogosphere/tech journalism don't think about it because they post/tweet everything publicly by default. It's a bit like lucid dreaming. I don't know how often I've heard "what, other people can't control their dreams? Really?" :)

alan_cx 14y ago

Odd one this for me. I recently closed my FB account, and it was exactly because of: “Twitter makes me love people I've never met; Facebook makes me hate people I know.” Not the Twitter bit as I don't use it, but the FB part was exactly what happened to me. I just ended up loathing almost every one I "knew". So, coupled with the constant rumblings about FB's privacy attitudes and all that, I closed my FB account. However, the reason I ended up loathing all my "friends" was because of the secret groups. It was in the groups where I began to really not like them. But it is true that the vast majority of my FB time was spent in those groups. So, I go with the initial point, but also agree with the parts that are supposed to disprove it.

tytso 14y ago

So now Facebook isn't passe because of secret groups, which aren't visible outside the group of people who are communicating privately? That was the same argument which pro-Facebook partisans pooh-poohed when it was made about Google+, interestingly enough. The only difference was that G+ started with private circles, and later added circles which could be shared and public communities, whereas Facebook started with the "let it all hang out" model and then grafted privacy on later. The problem with this, though, as Randi Zuckerberg discovered to her discomfort, is that like security, grafting privacy onto a product design afterwards is fraught with peril and often doesn't work well (if at all).

Tuvaloon 14y ago
Everyone, stop harping on Randi's picture as some horrible Facebook bug. One of her sister's friends leaked a photo, which could happen just as easy in any online medium, like email or smugmug.
graue 14y ago
> Facebook started with the "let it all hang out" model and then grafted privacy on later That's not actually correct history. Facebook started with most data visible only to your friends, and gradually increased the visibility (given default settings) over time. You can track the changes here: http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ Also, when Facebook launched it was exclusive to Harvard, and then to Ivy League colleges, and then to all colleges, and even for a while after they opened it up it was still mostly young people. Your friends list was a closer match to your peer group. So it's possible that the audience people used to get with a friends-only post a few years ago isn't all that different from the audience you get with a secret group today. I remember when I was first finding out about Facebook around early 2009, it had the distinct feel of a private social club.

ryguytilidie 14y ago

Could I ask a simple question, not because I want to mock people or anything, but because I've been experiencing a similar phenomenon lately. Why does facebook make you hate people you know? I do generally find that most people I'm not actively great friends with at the moment tend to annoy the shit out of me with either bragging, illogical nonsense about things like politics, or just passive-aggressive teenager posts. I see friends post good content sometime, but honestly it seems more and more rare. I'm not sure if people are worse at posting or if its that these type of posts have worn on me and I've gotten more and more annoyed by them over time. What has it been like for everyone else?

seiji 14y ago
You know that Adams quote about the universe being bigger than you can impossibly imagine? Like, really, really big? Well, people are like that. Our brains kinda blur the world together and, without realizing it, our brains map other people onto our own experiences so we think people are kinda like us. Except they really aren't. Really, really, really aren't. In every day interactions, we gloss over, ignore, and excuse little things that don't gel with us (without even knowing we do it). But being presented with their innermost inconsistent idiocracy in writing, in our face, and in our pockets -- it's too much. We start to realize they aren't us. They are them. Them ain't us. And we can't stand it. It's the same reason sharing an office with someone possessing your exact anti-personality will enrage you daily. It's the same reason visiting a highly population dense foreign land where people live by their own customs will begin grating on you quickly. "Stop exploding fireworks on my front door you irredeemable kids! I don't care if it is your yearly festival of annoying neighbors into threatening you with axes!" Two solutions: get much better (more complete, more self-actualized, more authentic) friends or tune them out. They're the same they've always been, but being exposed to every one of their inner most thoughts will drive you batshit insane. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mending_Wall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mending_Wall
- Tuvaloon 14y ago
  >Two solutions: get much better (more complete, more self-actualized, more authentic) Reading your whole post, I think you mean 'more exactly like your favorite part of yourself', but otherwise, spot on. On FB you have to listen to everything everyone says to everyone, not just what they would choose to say to you to accommodate your sensibilities.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

I love "secret" groups. It's great for my close group of friends to share pictures that we would otherwise not put on the Internet (and no I don't need a lecture, I'm aware that's "risky". If my employer wants to fire me if a picture leaks out of there, their priorities aren't set correctly)

HannibalLecter 14y ago

This is nothing more than the reinvention of Roman confession; the fallacy that you're operating in the guise of secrecy when in fact everyone who could ruin you is listening.

jwdunne 14y ago

This is very true, as I've observed with a small community of programmers I founded. I created a FB page called "I Live Prograaming" and played with FB ads, which gave the page about 1000 likes in a short doace if time, a few years ago and the old format for pages worked quite well for a community, which timeline destroyed. We (three others were helping me at this point) discovered that groups are actually exactly what we needed. We started creating groups and each turned into fairly active communities, seeded from our growing page. We found the demography of our groups matched that of our page, which seems obvious but found it interesting. We have many that are secret with hundreds of members - past a certain member count you are unable to change this setting with your member's privacy as the reason against , which makes a lot of sense. Our format is fairly simple: I Love X, where X is anything technical, which began with I Love Programming. Some groups hold over 200 members each and there are groups for most common programming languages and platforms (I Love C is fairly popular). I'm not trying to plug though, I've refrained from linking, but more to show a full picture of what the article refers to. Facebook, for me, had been a great way to build a community based around my passions.