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Comment by wybiral | Hacker News Reader

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wybiral

My user experience report:

1. Opened website

2. Clicked "Demo" to see what this was all about

3. Read "Please, login via Facebook..."

4. No thanks. Closed tab.

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I'm such an "old man" when it comes to Facebook login. I'll happily login to Google/etc (if i want the product of course), but as a non-Facebook'er, i think back to the days of Facebook apps invading the user privacy, posting things, etc, and it built this mental model of worry around linking anything to Facebook. I avoid any type of api interaction with Facebook like the plague.

I only use FB maybe twice a year, and apparently it's not frequent enough to rid this old and overly concerned fear i have.

Alas, no login via Facebook for this mentally old man, apparently.

Do you feel that your privacy is less at risk when you give your data to Google over Facebook?

For me, if it doesn't make sense to link something to my accounts then I'm not going to (Google, Facebook, anyone).

It's not strictly about that, it's an irrational fear of the API growing pains that Facebook went through. That is to say, apps the user installed having more access than the user liked. Whether through malicious means or ignorant users, it was a common trope "back in the day".

I understand it's completely irrational, but i have yet to link my FB to a single thing due to this irrational fear. I'm sure if i used FB more i would have worn away this fear, but there is honestly no page on the internet that makes me feel more old than FB. I go there and all the buttons and overload of "things" makes me feel like i'm looking at a AOL sign-on page from way back.

Mind you i'm 32, so not that old.. but still, there is some type of age and or usage issue going on in my head.

I say this not as a complaint, but more as a curiosity for fellow developers. I'm sure i'm a small minority of FB users, but it seems as if i'm a fringe user who had their trust broken and is very tough to get back.

I'm totally willing to go to FB (albeit, infrequently), just unwilling to link stuff via their API.

Also, to be clear, when i mentioned the trigger word "Privacy", i did not mean Privacy from Facebook. I was referring to spammers/scammers/etc.

I dislike it when I create an account with Facebook on some site, and then can't do basic things like update my email address.

I'm not the parent poster, but I feel similarly about Facebook so I'll take a shot at answering.

Bottom line is that I already use Gmail and a fair number of other Google services. I don't use Facebook at all.

It's not so much about trusting Google over Facebook, but rather an unwillingness to share my personal info with yet another company...and Google beat Facebook to the punch. If Facebook had offered a comparable set of services and had offered them first, the roles would be reversed.

That said, I've been looking at ways I can divorce myself from Google because I trust them about as far as I could throw Larry Page.

>> Do you feel that your privacy is less at risk when you give your data to Google over Facebook?

Yes. Google's place on the internet, particularly in search, and it's greater openness means that Google is more heavily regulated (see the 'right to be forgotten' cases). Making demands and even suing Google is rather straightforward. Their door is open formal complaints. But even finding an email address for a Facebook rep can take years.

For me, it's not something I've thought through or weighed. I just don't like Facebook.

Yes.

Happy to argue this ad infinitum but, basically, nothing (let me repeat that - NOTHING) is private once handed over to Facebook.

And that extends to data your friends upload about you.

I'm not talking about anonymous, aggregated data. I'm talking about actual personal private data.

My personal opinion is that what you've said applies to Google and most other software companies, which is why I asked the question.

I think what made me mad about this is that Facebook makes it seem like your posts are available on the general internet, by calling them "public" but the posts are not actually readable unless you have a direct link. If I post 10 essays on my Facebook and someone tries to scroll past the first few, Facebook will fade the page out and force a log-in.

That feels deceitful to me. They try to create the impression of a public profile, but then put up an artificial boundary in the middle of your content beyond which you must be real-name identified and tracked to read.

It just feels wrong to me. Like they are hijacking the content I licensed to them (for free!) and using it as a carrot to compel people to provide them with personal information.

Why is the top comment on HN nearly always a "saw X, said no thanks, didn't even check out the main part of what you built" comment?

It doesn't help those who actually (unlike you) did not consider X to be a dealbreaker, interacted with the actual service and now want to discuss the other parts. And those who haven't interacted with it want to know about the meat of the product and how well it does what it does, not the superficial color of the bike shed out front. We have to scroll down past ALL the replies to you, and replies to replies.

I recently posted on HN a link to a project I open sourced which I spent 5 years of 10-40 hour weeks working on. I built it for myself, but happened to put effort into open sourcing and documenting it so others can use it. The top comment was: "Saw JS was required to see the website. So I left."

It may be valuable to the person who built the site, but no one else. It's like being invited to a party, and then saying "your door was painted yellow, thats enough for me!"

The issue isn't that a person posts it, but why is it always the top comment?

I think this is less of a problem now that HN supports collapsing subtrees. It'll probably be a while before users internalize it, but if the top comment doesn't interest you, it's one click to hide it and all its replies.

Agreed (I'm surprised it has so many upvotes).

Maybe it's the polarizing effect. The comment wasn't for or against FB but it somehow resulted in FB vs Google subcomments. I've seen the same happen with languages, IDEs, operating systems. I don't get it...

But I'm guessing the snowball from that is why they end up on top.

That wasn't the intention, but there are three other comments on the OP mentioning the same issue so it caught other people off guard for some reason.

If you wanted to point that out and avoid the snowball, what do you think the best approach is?

I think The Onion needs a modernized version of this article: http://www.theonion.com/article/area-man-constantly-mentioni...

"Area Man Constantly Mentioning He's Not On Facebook"

HN comment section user experience report:

1. Looked for some cool indie (bootstrapped, proof-of-concept) experiments on HN frontpage

2. Found it. Enjoyed page and experiment

3. Came back to look for interesting constructive comments

4. Stumbles on pointless bullet point comment complaining about bootstrapped parts of an indie experiment.

Beats Product Hunt at least ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This posting is not a 'Show HN', making this particular style of constructive criticism markedly less pertinent.

The landing page has three paths:

- Github

- Article About

- Demo

The other two provide valuable and intriguing info.

Why is this kind of trash the top comment on HN?

I was going to try the demo if it weren't for the FB login (an unnecessary barrier for some people). The comment was meant as feedback.

Making your demo more accessible might help. I'm not sure how that's "trash".

You shifted the focus away from the library to some implementation detail of the demo. If you didn't like the login feature of the demo you could have read about the library in the linked article or the GitHub page. Instead you chose to complain about something unrelated to the library itself.

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