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Comment by unlinker | Hacker News Reader

>Maybe it is me, but I am having really difficult time understanding why people take Facebook so seriously and add so much value to it.

Yeah, it's you. Spend more time thinking of it and you'll realise there's a big chunk of the population that gets their news from Facebook. Then you'll realise how this is sort of a big deal, in its own way.

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Remember way back when people had a blog with an RSS feed and anyone could subscribe to your blog with their browser or some app to read what you had to say instead of going through Facebook or Twitter? Remember when all that slowly went away because people went to Facebook and Twitter? Well this is what you get when people collectively decide apps and platforms with walled gardens are better than the open web. Enjoy your nice and tasty shit sandwich. It's all our own fault really.

I don't really think people made that choice consciously because they thought walled gardens were better, there was a major push to redirect people and content creators to those platforms.

I was very happy with the way things were until Google pulled the plug on Reader and made it harder to follow "decentralized" content.

> there was a major push to redirect people

Would love to hear more about this theory. Who was behind this push? How did the achieve it?

They made the move because walled gardens are much easier to use, require far less effort and have nicer friendly UIs built by large teams of UI/UX people who have the goal of keeping people captive via browser sessions and their mobile apps.

I am in complete agreement with you. If you care about something, publish it yourself. The sad fact is that Facebook's walled garden allows people with literally no technical clue whatsoever to set up a 'page', it's not nearly as difficult as buying a domain name and paying $5/mo to a hosting company. Then when the magical friendly service they're paying nothing for and have no service contact with disappears, goes bankrupt, gets acquired and shutdown by a larger company or decides to block them for arbitrary (automated abuse prevention) reasons, the first cry is "censorship".

Liking pages on Facebook is easier than adding RSS feeds to an RSS client.

Thinking about it, lead me to a question: "Why? Why is there a big chunk of the population that gets their news from Facebook?"

We are talking about the internet here, where anybody can put up a server and publish anything they want with a very limited budget. It is not like TV, where you have to have a license, and only so many can be issued. Or a newspaper, where you need a large budget.

So I wonder why these people you mention choose to get their new from Facebook?

Is it that the don't care enough about politics to get them from another source?

Is it that they are uneducated and easy to manipulate?

Something else?

It sounds to me like Facebook is the symptom and not the disease.

It's because people crave social approval at a very basic mammalian level. If you live in Portland and are a vegan political science major, your Facebook news feed will reinforce your world view through most of the posts coming from your friends. And vice versa for other locales and perspectives. At a certain point it becomes an echo chamber of endlessly repeated "news".

It is still socially acceptable to be "not any good with computers".

Being on the absolute user side of the knowledge spectrum for any ecosystem, technical or otherwise, will completely control your interpretation, use, and comprehension of that system.

Cars come to mind. If you are exclusively a user of automobiles, you will happily pay for someone to fill your washer fluid. To anyone with even basic automotive literacy, that would seem almost crazy.

"It is still socially acceptable to be 'not any good with computers'."

Getting access to high-quality journalism on the web isn't difficult. How much do you need to know about computers to open your browser and go to www.nytimes.com, or to install the NY Times app on your phone?

I know your question was rhetorical, but an example is that a portion of Facebook users specifically do not even know they are on the internet. This level of domain knowledge, or slightly better, is the norm not the exception.

http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-ide... http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/20/facebook-touts-its-ec... http://lirneasia.net/2012/05/facebook-internet/

People getting theirs news from Facebook are not people who, in the absence of Facebook, are magically going to become functional people.

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