“Facebook Is the Internet” and Other Things Media People Debate at Dinner | Hacker News Reader

“Facebook Is the Internet” and Other Things Media People Debate at Dinner

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62 pointszbravo39 comments

Related: I was recently in Malaysia for a holiday. I bought a SIM card that promised unlimited internet (protip: unlimited anything usually a red flag, I should have known better)

It turned out that I couldn't use 4G to surf the net. All I could do was read Twitter. I went back to the shop and complained about this breach of contract. It turns out I didn't understand that "unlimited internet" meant "unlimited Facebook, Twitter, whatsapp, and Line". It didn't mean unlimited data.

I then spent the next 30 mins arguing with the shop person in a language that I'm rusty in, that no, I don't care about Whatsapp or Facebook or Instagram. I care that I can browse the web with a bloody browser, and connect to my machines via SSH, and no, what the plan promised was in NO WAY unlimited internet.

Still kinda pissed off over it

I guess they don't have net neutrality. Those are some of the consequences

You could argue we're getting closer to it in the US. Here's a plan advertised in rural Texas I observed during a road trip a few months ago: http://i.imgur.com/70nUeHH.png

looking at their website, you apparently get unlimited facebook at LTE speed, but the data plan for non-facebook data is capped to a varying limit depending on price at 3G speed. They also have a plan that only has talk/text/facebook access.

IANAL but isn't that what this title 2 thing was supposed to prevent? This sounds like the famed "internet fast lane" which we always claimed was going to manifest as the "internet normal lane for a few, slow lanes for all the rest"

> I guess they don't have net neutrality. Those are some of the consequences

It sounds an awful lot like Facebook's plan to give free phones and "data" to developing nations... with restricted access only to Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram.[1]

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-free-internet-access-p...

Or you can go direct to the horse's mouth, e.g.

https://info.internet.org/en/story/developers/

FB is trying really hard to spread the same kind of love with internet.org in developing countries, to "help" the underprivileged.

Sorry for your luck. Just wondering, do ads show up on these sites? With the internet.org or this I'm curious if they have ads that link. It seems they could only go to user pages.

Nah. No ads. I don't use those apps to begin with. What my rant was about was the perception that "whatsapp, facebook and twitter" == the internet, and anything else isn't.

There isn't a concept of net neutrality obviously, but thankfully no malicious preferencing yet (I don't think my experience was a result of malicious preferencing, just a result of marketing and giving the population what they want)

The Internet could be better off if the AOL-ian masses started believing "Facebook is the Internet." Let them all move over there--a Reverse Eternal September [1]! It would be even better if all the crap moved over to Facebook with them. All the spam, trolls, ads, tracking, malware, etc. could follow the masses, leaving the rest of us in peace.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The way I remember "Eternal September" was giving UNIX shell accounts to incoming university students.

The problem is when students graduate; no more shell account. Then what?

The "Eternal September" was when AOL got access to Usenet; a regular September was when the students got their shell accounts. The point of the "Eternal" was that the inrush of noobs never went away once AOL was attached.

Ah. I always thought it was a reference to "ISP's" and the general public getting access to Usenet. Thanks for the clarification.

It was; AOL in particular, but other ISPs as well.

September was always a rough time on Usenet as all the noobs arrived; some old folks took the month off (or at least claimed to), coming back in October when they'd calmed down a bit. Once the public ISPs arrived it became like September the whole year round.

That's the September bit. Frosh would come in, get shell accounts, discover USENET and drive the regulars nuts. Then after a few months they'd acclimate themselves or get bored and USENET would settle into normal, only to repeat the cycle next September.

When AOL flipped the switch enabling USENET newsgroups in the fall of 1993 it was an "eternal September" because AOL had an endless continual stream of chuckleheads getting online foe the first time and not acclimating to existing net culture because they think the network is there to serve THEM.

> because they think the network is there to serve THEM.

I can't tell if you mean to imply that it's there to be served by them, or that it is there to serve "regulars".

I'd say it's there to facilitate communication, but as in all forms of communication, there are norms of etiquette to be observed.

I can't tell if you mean to imply that it's there to be served by them, or that it is there to serve "regulars".

I think he meant that USENET works best as a collaboration between users, whereas the users being complained about see it closer to visiting a restaurant where the other users are the waiters and they are the customer.

It would look a lot like IRC or usenet or mailing lists today, but on a vastly larger scale.

I suspect culturally it would look a lot like amateur radio / ham radio, the majority constantly making leading questions about "does that still exist today for grandpas?" despite actual continuous long term demographic growth.

So the right people would find a way to hang out together while being marginalized by the masses.

Eh, you're already marginalized by the masses (in the US at least) if you don't fit into typical consumer culture. I barely watch TV. I watch sports (on TV) only occasionally, and then only a couple teams. I don't play video games. I do listen to music and go to movies, but generally avoid a lot of the really popular ones because they just don't appeal to me. I don't buy trinkets, nearly everything I own is useful, though I've started collecting some art recently (I like the look, and my home and office feel more comfortable with it around, so that's useful if subjective). I buy enough new clothes that my clothes are in good repair, but I'm hardly fashionable. I can barely relate to many of my peers (professional and otherwise).

I've stopped viewing this as a bad thing, though. I have more time and money than many of them to spend on the things I want to do. And when I complain about not having enough time to do what I want, I can actually list off all the things I'm doing that are filling up my schedule (and they're all productive, at least for personal development if not professional and social goals).

The subset of the internet that I use, and probably many here, is similar. Many of us probably skip Facebook (beyond perhaps casual browsing or maintaining our social network for communication), Buzzfeed and other time sink sites. Though HN can be pretty bad sometimes, hits just the right level of time sink + technical/professional interest.

Again, I don't consider this a bad thing. I have a lot better discussions with people on sites like this or because of the content from sites like this than I do for 99.9999% of what's on Reddit or FB or anything else.

If you feel like you are being marginalized for what you are describing maybe you just live in a shitty place.

I said I don't consider it a bad thing. It's a good first-pass filter. If people can't talk about things beyond what was on TV last night (consistently), then there's probably little of importance that I can discuss with them. And when they can, we usually end up becoming really good friends.

You've described some of your preferences, but you didn't describe at all how you're being marginalized; it sounds more like you're attempting to marginalize everyone else and their interests.

It's hard to effectively communicate with a lot of people when their lives are driven around consumer (media and other) culture. There's just a fundamental disconnect. And (at least around here) that's a large percentage, if not the majority, of folks.

From their perspective, it's more like

"It's hard to communicate when someone is anti-consumer, and thinks the fact I watch TV is a reflection on my values"

Hm, a bunch of relatively shortsighted and narrow-scope bullet points.

I like to summarize the trends and inaccuracies in the article as the "mainstreamization of the internet as the primary mode of life". The internet is now the primary technology for play, work, general communications, commerce, social life, and human knowledge. 10 years ago, the internet still had tinges of being a hobbyist project, and you probably wouldn't be able to find your grandma on Myspace or another equivalent. That era was a smarter, more innocent, and smaller time for the internet, though even then it was vast and deep.

The arrival of the TV cohort to the internet (via Myspace and Facebook's gateways) necessitated a departure from the non-commercialized function-emphatic early days of the net. The media companies correctly view these people as their money farm, and allowing them to escape to the internet isn't acceptable. As a result, we now have internet commodities (user information, paywalled content) that are sustained by the masses. In some ways, the commodification of the internet resulted in unification many smaller content and social sites into a few giants. During this unification, the depth and variety of content on the internet took a huge hit.

At this point, mainstream internet is approaching the locked-down nature of TV, though to the user there is significantly more freedom of customization of content to be consumed. For the most part, people who use the internet for Netflix and Facebook (and probably a few other big name sites) are viewing the same pre-prepared frame of content that they were via the TV, and getting more out of it as they did before in terms of content.

I have to say, there is very little for intelligent/technical people to consume on this mainstream internet relative to the days of yore. Watering everything down for proliterian consumption means that the deep, obtuse, technical, inscrutable, or complex content and discussion is forced far away from the "front pages" so as not to confuse or frighten the primary consumers who are largely treated like children. Of course, there's still bastions of sanity, but you'd need to seek them out or find them via word of mouth. It's not so bad, but effectively places like HN are tiny fiefdoms that are far removed from the reddit/facebook/netflix/whatever dreck that is dominant.

I was with you until you said the depth and variety of content on the internet took a hit. that smacks of back-in-my-dayism and doesn't survive even the most basic sniff test.

I'll grant that perhaps you can't find anything that satisfies you, but I consider that a problem on your end. I find more that interests me than I could ever handle, and I don't even try.

so sure, I'm not surprised you have a way you like to dismissively characterize how billions of people use the Internet, but all you're really doing is explaining your elitism in great detail.

I'm talking about average user experience. The depth and variety is still all there thankfully,(and probably more profligate than ever) but it's more squirreled away from the facebook/netflix audience than it was before as a result of market forces. The audience effectively wanting a customizable and social TV is a different audience from the one chasing brain food-- and the internet as currently envisioned has endless opportunities for both, though in former years it wasn't as optimized for the much larger TV crowd.

I'm normally enthusiastic about new things, but honestly I found it much easier to find deep interesting content back when Geocities was live and Yahoo Directory and webrings existed.

In particular I find blogs encourage a throwaway attitude to content. Almost certainly more information is being written down in blogs now than was being written in people's webspace ten years ago. But webspaces were constructed as a permanent, indexed thing (people even made "site maps" telling you what page was where). Which made them worse for disseminating news or other time-sensitive information, but much better for the "long tail" of information that you now simply can't find, short of trawling through a complete archive.

> basic sniff test

Here's another whiff from a similar perspective.

Back in the day people were using open social media (e.g. Geocities) and posting everything on a public web that was searchable (if poorly) and generally laterally browsable by "web surfers". It was an ocean of content that we meandered in, finding all kinds of goodness and weirdness. Then came myspace, which was like geocities v2, also wildly customizable and completely devoid of any access control. The standard of the day was "put it on the web in the open."

Now, if we all were to go into the lovely walled garden of Facebook and keep our accounts private (AFAIK this is pretty standard), there will be no way for us to stumble into new things. We have to become vetted, to be friends, and then we can start to share. This can only reduce the relative amount of stuff on the open web, and in the extreme will completely destroy it. If we were all only on Facebook with our pages hidden then there would be 0 new things on the internet. From any perspective this would mean that there is less interesting content out there.

This is basically the direction things are going. Yes--- there is a lot more stuff on the net. Yes, this is a good thing. Probably we are overstating things if we say that the internet is shrinking and getting worse, but just imagine if all those people were happily posting in the open. We'd all be surfing on that sea of content.

EDIT: submitted my comment early by accident

Media people ruined the internet.

That happened about 15 years ago when Microsoft made the decision to make computing media-friendly and embrace DRM.

A better outcome would have been to divide computing into business computing and consumer computing, and only allow consumer computing to have components that the owner of the hardware can't control.

Now almost every computing device contains parts not under the owner's control. Even trying to see what those parts are doing could constitute a crime. A network of machines you don't control isn't going to be an engine for positive change.

Facebook is essentially the second coming of AOL.

The person who wrote this could be an alien from the planet Zepton III, for all my ability to relate to him and his opinions.

Agreed, but it's interesting in much the same way that the politics of Zepton III would be, were it capable of obliterating Earth without even thinking about it.

What's amazing to me is how few people nowadays are involved in actual value creation, as opposed to marketing value, taxing value and destroying value.

-- But when people in tech and media company meetings say “social,” they really just mean “Facebook.” --

And when you say "Internet" you actually mean "Web".

Also, you've omitted Google entirely from your somewhat warped mental model of the web.

“Ugh, I only watch like 10% of the stuff on Netflix. Can’t I pay 89 cents instead of $8.99?”

I mean... $8.99 is already 10% of the $89.99+ that you'd have to pay to get a cable subscription with premium channels and HBO, but I think this is still an interesting argument. Does make you think about the power Netflix holds though: little stopping them from expanding services and prices until they are the new old cable company. Personally, I think even Netflix will eventually have to do what people have been demanding from the cable companies: break services into more a la carte (but still all you can eat) options.

Hulu is sort of doing this. They have their baseline Hulu+ ($7.99, IIRC). And now an ad-free (for most content, some licensing means there are commercials at the start and end of a few shows) for an extra few dollars. And now you can get Showtime (?) content for an extra few dollars.

Personally, I think it's brilliant (mostly). A multi-tiered platform with expanding, customizable content access. Add in a sports package and a few more premium content channels, and it's what cable should have become for a fraction of the cost.

I just disagree with so many of the author's points its not even worth refuting them, because that would be an feature length article in itself.

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