Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkincaid | Hacker News Reader

"I don't feel that Facebook told anyone that their data would be private. Maybe I'm just naïve, or a little bit of an exhibitionist."

This was actually how Facebook got popular in the first place. The whole point was that it was more private than the other social networks out there. As the site grew, one of its big selling points was its privacy control panel, which gave you granular control over how your content was shared.

Perhaps the perception has changed in the last year or two, but I think a lot of people signed up under the impression that Facebook is a safe/private site.

View on HN

I think you're conflating privacy with exclusivity. Facebook was originally only for those in college because it was an electronic version of a book that was put out by Zuck's college.

Secondly, I don't think that Facebook's privacy controls were ever a big selling point. The fact that it was for cool kids combined with the fact that all of your friends were on it was a huge selling point. Yes, people use the privacy controls, but never the fine grained stuff, it's all "don't show info to people that aren't my friends."

Or maybe my perception was skewed. Facebook came to my school in September of my freshman year of college, so I'm literally in the exact cohort that grew up with it.

"Yes, people use the privacy controls, but never the fine grained stuff, it's all "don't show info to people that aren't my friends."

Exactly. People didn't care much about the granular stuff, just that only their friends could see what they were posting. With the changes FB has made to its settings (namely, the 'Everyone' setting that is now the default), that's no longer true.

For what it's worth, I was in the exact same group as you — Facebook came out while I was in college and I joined the day it came to my school. Exclusivity definitely played a part in helping it catch on, but I think Facebook's reputation as a "safe" site is what helped it make the jump from high school/college kids to everyone else.

As I said to someone below, though, it's not surprising that Facebook makes everything public by default. Facebook is highly incentivized to get people sharing with each other, and the more public things are, the better it is for them. I'm not sure what the answer is to this, if it needs answering. It's possible that the privacy people are in the minority.

That's another thing, though; we've both really only got data from our own anecdotal experiences and interpretation of our friends' descriptions of what makes Facebook valuable to them. Who knows, maybe we're both outliers, and the vast majority of Facebook's users use their ACL based system heavily.

Well, the "it's for cool kids" selling point took a big hit when they started letting high schoolers on it, and lost all credibility when I started getting friend requests from senior citizens and friends' parents.

And most of my friends don't actively use it, though most of us at least have a FaceBook account. I find that I'm getting bombarded by sheep from weak connections that aren't really doing anything with their lives, while most of the people that I actually care about, I either see in person or they have busy lives and don't spend much time on FaceBook either.

It's true, but by that time, they were so big and huge that it didn't really matter.

I don't actually log on to Facebook that much either. I do have my Twitter hooked up to post status updates, and I generally get as much engagement as I do on Twitter itself, so I log in to continue discussions with people commenting on my status. But that's about it.

If you're getting bombarded by sheep, try clicking the 'block updates from this application' button next time. I've been happily bullshit-notification free for a while now.

I'm similar. I use it to keep in contact with some far-flung family, but without Facebook I'd be using Skype more than I already do, or I'd just go oldschool and pick up a phone and call on a weekly basis.

Facebook is a mild convenience to me, like finding a good time to make an international call was a mild inconvenience. Once it becomes a mild inconvenience, facebook will be long gone.

Hm, if I remember correctly, what made Facebook popular at first, was that it was aimed at a more "mature" audience, as opposed to MySpace which was (and probably still is) infested by teenagers. For example, it didn't, and still doesn't, allow you to configure your page with auto-playing music, videos, custom backgrounds and fonts, and lots of animated GIFs. It also had a higher age limit at first, for what it's worth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com