Facebook is an attack on the open web
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I don't really get invited to those anymore. It's also harder to organize events where you casually invite people you don't know as well.
It's also occasionally annoying not being able to dig up a certain photo you wanted for reference. Even if you have a copy of the photo somewhere, if you don't have it hosted online then you can't really bring it up to show it to someone.
Still, frustrations aside, it's 90% great, and I recommend everyone try it for themselves.
And while my reasoning was less idealistic than Gruber's, I think he makes a bunch of great points and I very much agree with the spirit of his post.
I also use Google photos, which has all of my photos, not just the ones I've uploaded to Facebook. Plus the search is great.
Maybe these suggestions could help your problem and clear that 10%.
I will say, however that they've stepped up their ad insertion and display algorithm a bit recently, in a bad way, which is unfortunate. But I certainly see much less of the spammy ideological content that I do on Facebook and Twitter.
In other words, most of what I saw on Instagram was people trying to get followers and likes, trying to be like some "adventure photographer", whatever the hell that means. The feeds became clogged with homogenous shots of feet over the same beaches, curving roads, VW vans, etc. It became about the aesthetic you show, rather than the person and events that you are.
That still happens, and it can be a pain, but it's also easy to ignore.
And I do play the hashtag game; not to garner followers or likes but for the rare occasion where another photographer with a similar interest in "real photography" happens to be checking that same hashtag and comes across my photos, or vice versa.
On average I'm getting about 100 likes and 4 or 5 followers per shot. A lot of that is noise, but some of them are real photographers with an interest in the hobby and it's nice to meet people based solely on their photos. I've had conversations with some folks on Instagram local to me suggesting what parks I should shoot at, and I've chatted with others different film development techniques, and so on. For those situations it's worth it.
I will say that Instagram's saving grace is that it's hard to blindly share content since it requires a separate app currently. If that ever changes, and it probably will, I'll be gone.
I should add that very few of the people I follow post anything about themselves. Lazy selfies get them unfollowed. I'm in it because it's a more active photographer community than flickr/500px/whatever.
Same social media rule applies: if you don't like it, just unfollow. I'd argue that it's easier to do that on IG than FB as it feels less personal.
As far as events go, the neckbeard in me hasn't actually minded. I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events.
Photos I just conveniently had solved by having all my photos on Google Photos anyways (I stopped trusting offline storage long ago).
I think my Facebook account is reactivated at the moment (due to logging in to search for something) but I disabled notification when I'd originally left and haven't looked back. Life's easier (and way more productive) without the Book.
Interestingly, I still find a lot of value in Messenger. But they've split concerns so you can use that without reactivating your FB account.
Funnily enough, I found Messenger to be the worst of all their offerings. The lack of searchable history, the terrible (terrible) scroll-back, the default always-on-screen notification bubble, the way they forced the standalone app down users' throats by disabling messages in both the FB app and the mobile web version, all really turned me off to it.
I've long since abandoned Facebook, but I wouldn't be surprised if a similar IFTTT feature exists to export tagged photos into Google Photos. If I recall this only works for 'new' photos posted that you are tagged in, it doesn't appear to pull images from before you enabled the IFTTT service. At any rate, this lets you see photos you are tagged in without ever having to actually use your Facebook account.
Use https://m.me - It's the web app just for Messenger; on my desktop I launch it via Chrome with the --app= param so it runs in it's own window.
Click on the ⓘ that's located in the top right of a conversation, and you'll see the search option (among other things).
https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...
No more accidental or ambiguous re-activation...
Filtering: not just for censorship.
Life is generally more rewarding. I'm much more in contact with the life that I want to live, instead of the life that I want to portray. People I know have "unlearned" Facebook - I actually receive emails and phone calls to catch up.
I think that Facebook must be dealing with some unknown human behavior. Back when I was on it, everyone I knew (myself included) would have registered as psychopathic. Photos in relationships revolved around posting to Facebook, not creating a treasury of memories. "Not being official until you're Facebook official" was a thing; such a belief was acceptable back then, even though it's absurd and cold in retrospect. It really brought out the most disgusting part of me and everyone that I knew.
Being off the Book is great. From day one it doesn't get easier; life gets better - especially in terms of avoiding the lower quality riff raff.
However, that just may be that I don't live in the US, and it just might be more pervasive there.
For example: not being on Facebook means you actually have to keep in touch with people to know what they are doing. That sounds like a "duh" moment, but it's also key to how FB is replacing real social interaction with "social interaction".
The knock on effects of this are deep, because without it you have to have meaningful and importantly intentioned social interaction with people.
That changes things.
If anything happens in any of the first two groups, I hear about it because I'm directly invited. There aren't things that I hear about from Facebook, unless it's some club organizing an event or something similar.
How do you* interact with people, generally? Do you talk to them less but see what they post on Facebook?
* By "you" I mostly mean "people who use Facebook for socialization".
I also have the same three tiered social circle. The first circle I have regular contacts with on the phone, WhatsApp or in person. The second circle tells me when something happens in their life like them getting placed, winning a competition or getting into a relationship.
Facebook helps me immensely with the third group. I can get to know when people are placed in jobs and can then call them up to rekindle the acquaintance (so that I can later get them to introduce me to other people to expand my professional network). If I call regularly (like maybe once each two months) then it quickly turns into silence because we don't know what the other person is doing at the moment, where they are or even what has lately happened in their lives. I can't also talk about common acquaintances due to the same lack of information.
Personally for me Facebook events serve no purpose because if any of us want to plan a meeting we can do so by phone, email or WhatsApp. It does help to plan school reunions though. Facebook's utility to me exists because the people on Facebook keep posting parts of their life on it and I can keep interacting with them without too much effort of having the pain of keeping track of over a 100 acquaintances.
I deal with it slightly by checking the "See updates from these people first" for certain people. It causes them to appear in a cluster at the top of my feed. The best thing is that the cluster is collapsed to show just two stories and I can then expand if there are more.
No, that's exactly what it doesn't. Rather, it leaves them as they were before this stupid and insufficient replacement was invented.
Afaik when you deactivate your Facebook account, you have the option to keep the Messenger account, but just deactivate/delete the Facebook account.
Do you trust online storage? Meaning, do you have backups of your photos offline somewhere, or are you only in the cloud?
Just to run a counterpoint to this, there are Facebook groups that have opened up whole new social circles for me and provide opportunities. I'm into whitewater kayaking and the "Where's the Whitewater at?" group has people planning informal trips at a few hours notice when someone drives by and notices a river is runnable. You go out and paddle with people you haven't met before, make new friends who share your interests, etc.
Also, it is great for learning about new hazards in a river, i.e. fallen trees, that make a certain trip either possible or much more dangerous.
They scrape Facebook events, allowing you to browse them without a Facebook account. It's not perfect but it's better than nothing.
No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out.
If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.
Manipulative algorithms can be taken out though, I suppose.
Facebook does the opposite now, which leads people to use it as a content consumption platform rather than a social network. Obviously that's what Facebook wants, since content consumption is infinitely more profitable than people posting on each other's walls all day.
Yes, you'd have to manually curate some things, but otherwise I think it's mostly just a matter of not hiring any marketing people, and creating the features first and looking how to make them easily usable second. Especially if the goal isn't to "kill FB", but simply offer an alternative to those who want the good bits and actually like, uhh, reading manuals and being proficient with the tools they use.
They can't come if there is nowhere for them to come to, and then it's easy to pretend they don't exist. But they do, even among the old and young and not so technical.
AI can help with that. Facebook already has automatic alt text for images, for example:
* Image may contain: 1 person, standing, selfie and phone
* Image may contain: cat
* Image may contain: food
And for an end-user, simple filtering can help with that. I sometimes use the FBPurity browser extension to hide everything that's a link or shared post, leaving almost exclusively original content. It can filter on that automatic alt text too if you hate cats, but I don't mind frivolous posts that are original content from my actual friends.
Posting pictures of your food should be a criminal offence. Nothing too serious, just a couple of years in prison or something.
Because, yeah. Caning is totally commensurate with that.
"Look, honey, we got something in the mail from Katie and John! It's... oh... just a bunch of pictures of food. That's odd."
Meanwhile Katie and John are still at home, furiously stuffing envelopes with the same food pictures so they can send one to everybody in their address book.
http://www.jaruzel.com/files/look-honey.png
:)
I also miss the "going to the beach", "this was a nice day" etc.
I don't miss "join me on farmville", "1000 reasons why Trump and/or Hillary are dumb" etc.
I deleted the app last year. Kept the account because as far as I can tell it's the same difference and I haven't summoned the strength to go retrieve my photos yet. Haven't missed it at all. Meanwhile my wife is increasingly addicted...
I don't understand your comment at all. What else would you be saying when you show a picture of nice food other than "this food is great"? I'm not in the habit of posting food photos but I've never understood the hysteria around it on places like HN.
I cannot remember thinking that about others but maybe I don't follow the same people as you.
"Look what I'm doing right now!"
Isn't this just like a smaller version of Show HN?
I mean: you make something, you post it and someone else chimes in with ideas or (hopefully) constructive criticism?
Is there any reason that I cannot see why making food isn't a form of making that we can be proud of?
No, but we were talking about why people post pictures of food that they buy, not that they make.
> If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.
Get into the world of finstas, that's basically the concept behind them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finstag...
That seems to be depressingly true of any social website. There seems to be a sort, sweet spot that exists briefly between the implementation of a good idea and when the parasites catch on and move in to ruin it.
Wow that happened 27 years ago. Time does fly.
I am blaming Facebook. The parasites I was thinking of are the people and impulses that pervert the successful formula to push some agenda (e.g. push for some "engagement" metric, push people to use this or that app, unscrupulous monetization, etc).
But year after year they've stepped back on privacy, while still being a completely closed platform compared to the open web.
Make your own.
Here's what I did for my local network of friends (who also all hate Facebook). Install Wordpress, add the free Buddypress plugin, purchase $50 BuddyPress theme. Throw on a server.
There you go, your own private social network in under a week.
In a short period of time, that would solve 90% of your problems.
Just looked through settings and wasn't able to find anything for order of posts in news feed.
> And mute your obnoxious friends from appearing in your newsfeed.
Yep this is pretty easy to do.
> You can also hide posts from particular websites from appearing on your newsfeed.
This isn't helpful since you cannot block the entire class of "transitive" posts. Eg a Honda ad because a friend of mine liked a Honda page. Sure I can block Honda. But Toyota or Volkswagen can still show up until I block them individually...
And I think after a couple weeks hiding posts you'll significantly reduce the variety of content hitting your newsfeed.
Or you can make your own social network with Diaspora* (https://diasporafoundation.org) or GNU Social (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757)
Lots of people have. There was for example Ello a couple of years ago. Me and many of my Facebook friends created accounts, used it for a couple of weeks and slowly kind of ended up back on facebook. Apparently no one else stuck around either since Ello seems to have turned itself into something else.
If someone wants to talk to me I get a popup on my Messenger app on my phone, and if I get an event invite it shows up there too.
Problem solved.
So, that's one downside, I think.
Good for them, but they seem to mistake it as some sort of universal lifehack.
Does it have to be universal to be useful? Helping 0.01% of the US Facebook userbase save 1 hour every week is still huge...
With your help? The moment you declare (or any friend declares) a relationship in the profile, they 'have' you both.
There's a few communities that I'm in that I wouldn't even know about, event-wise, if I wasn't on Facebook. I can't imagine missing those- I'm surprised others don't use Facebook more for events.
As others have mentioned, I also use News Feed Eradicator, so I don't even see anything on Facebook, unless it's one of my close friends. It's fantastic, and my time on the site is probably less than 2 minutes/day.
I was almost done with college when FB suddenly became a cross-generational phenomenon and started being about more than photo sharing and event planning; I still fondly remember those days.
The one advantage I would add is the rare occasion when someone needs to get in touch with me easily: I've had extended family who lives on the other side of the world get in touch with me through FB on short notice when they were visiting my city. I could definitely imagine that some of these cases wouldn't have happened without Facebook, since they would be required to 1) know that I happened to live in this city and 2) go through probably three separate people across different continents to get my phone number. This is infinitely harder than searching their FB friends for my city and going "oh dang! wutbrodo lives there now? I haven't seen him since we were kids, I should reach out!".
That being said, all of the 90% downsides of keeping Facebook are, to some extent, within your control. I won't pretend that I'm congenitally immune to them, but all it took was a little discipline and a little time and it really wasn't that difficult to avoid the timesuck/endless scrolling/notification issues.
I've never really been able to relate to the idea of completely deactivating Facebook and losing the 10% benefits, with the possible exception of the few people who have a completely insurmountable psychological compulsion to use Facebook. This is especially true because of all of the levels of FB exposure you can have without going all-or-nothing: Chrome extensions to remove the newsfeed, disabling notifications on your phone, only visiting FB on the web and not the app, etc.
You're not able to exercise self control? I have Facebook, but I never use it apart from the events and Messenger for chatting with certain friends.
Ability to exercise self-control most likely varies significantly among people. It's not like the ability to breath. Also Facebook is explicitly designed to "engage" people, meaning that a piece of information shared on Facebook is going to engage a larger fraction of people than that same piece of information in ... a newspaper (for example). Engagement/attention hacking is a different issue than the walled-garden issue for the most part though.
I'm considering making a dummy account with a few friends just for the purpose of finding out about events.
Side note, does anyone know of a service that allows you to track FB events without having to be in the Facebook app? Not sure if there's an API for that.
My point is the following: I was one day on the street and saw a flyer glued onto a wall, it looked kinda funky and hand-drawn, interesting; some DJ's were going to throw a party and spin salsa, funk, latin jazz, cumbia... And I didn't recognize any of the names or the venues, I was mildly shocked because I believed I knew the local scene pretty well.
Almost always I can contextualize a music genre/scene, and see their connections and collaborations. But this random flyer I came across was so obscure! No relations, no known names, and the mix of styles and originality was very interesting! For the first time in many years I felt again what is like to find an underground scene, which I like a lot (like when dancing drum&bass in a basement in Berlin or listening to rap in Mexico).
This is a magic that is sometimes lost in the believed omniscence and omnipresence of online/facebook. I bet people soon will want to have those kind of experience, and the new thing will be to find scenes that people don't even know about online.
Now I have to scroll through ads and a bunch of irrelevant "local events for you" just to find what I'm looking for.
So far it's been about a week, and it's been 90% great, and 10% meh. I just logged out of facebook on all of my devices and don't save the password, so it at least makes me think before putting in my password. The meh part is the services I use "login with facebook" on, but it's not that big of a deal.
I treat facebook like i treat my phone. Its a tool. Not a way of life. Been on the internet since '95, back when i was at school i was the only one who would spend hours on the computer, they called us nerds. Now its the opposite, i use the computer at work everyday, and when im home, i stay away from it, my phone, tv, as much as possible and call everyone else geeks who need to stop obsessing over there hands (cause they dont know about computers, they just use them)
I have to say though, FB tries really hard to reactivate your notifications. It's especially annoying when it hooks into your mobile Chrome browser notifications (took me a while to figure that out!). And the fact it can't be uninstalled on Samsung devices - at least you don't have to login.
I'm really not that worried about it any more. FB is gufe, but so was AOL. It will in turn be disrupted by a future innovation.
Why the hell do you need 37 javascript files and 1.5 MB to load three comments?
(Shameless plug to my own open source, lightweight and tracking-free comment engine alternative to Facebook, Disqus and the rest: https://github.com/adtac/commento)
This is an issue for a really small segment of users. Not really a cause for concern in 2017. Especially when most of that stuff is already cached.
> Why the hell do you need 37 javascript files and 1.5 MB to load three comments?
That's oversimplifying it. You are loading 37 assets to support a social commenting platform.
Not really. I'm from India; while my home network connection is pretty good, when I'm travelling anywhere outside the metros, the mobile network speed is abysmal. However quite a few news outlets employ Facebook's comment system. You can imagine what a nightmare it'll be for users to load all that with a 2G connection.
> You are loading 37 assets to support a social commenting platform.
37 Javascript files out of which, I'm willing to bet, most are tracking agents employing every trick in the book to record all activity. Wasn't there a recent article that discovered that FB continuously sent home the position of your cursor when you're scrolling through your newsfeed so that they can place ads better?
> 37 Javascript files out of which, I'm willing to bet, most are tracking agents employing every trick in the book to record all activit
You would lose that bet.
Basically, what it comes down to is that if all 37 requests are done in parallel, then you're only loading the page as slowly as the slowest. Sadly, this is rarely the case. Most browsers will only make 6 concurrent requests from a server, which you can see in Firefox via the about:config page and the network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server. Worse, some of that JS is probably downloading more JS, which means that you will have multiple requests going out.
On mobile, this means you're running 8-30 second delays for each "group" of requests, especially if you have poor reception. Good news is that after that initial latency, the actual transfer should go fairly fast.
On the other hand, a social commenting program should need at a minimum 1 JS file, 1 CSS file, 1 for the actual data (3 comment texts, 3 base64 encoded profile pics at a small resolution). So FB is running at ~30x the optimum (87 assets, of which 35 are JS).
If you think it's not that big a deal, I'd suggest taking a trip abroad or just out to some smaller towns in your area, and really experience why users feel the internet has not really gotten faster since the 90s (keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency).
> keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency.
Users do care about data size since there are still a lot of people on data limited contracts even in the UK which has a fairly healthy mobile market.
What people don't necessarily realise is the connection between the two, I'd quite like it if the mobile browsers had a running total of the total amount of data transferred in that tab on each new visit/refresh.
I'm a programmer and I still don't know which pages are heavy or not (given fixed bandwidth the time to interaction would be a clue but mobile internet latency is all over the map so you can't tell if it's a big site/page or just the mobile internet shitting the bed).
Thinking about it, there's got to be a plugin for firefox/chrome that show the data size of each page. For mobile, you can install firefox which allows you to install plugins (pretty much essential for blocking ads in mobile browsing).
For me that is enough, if I load a page and see it sit at 200kb/s for more than a second or two I'll often nuke the page. I have 1Gb of data on my phone package (simply don't use mobile data much, I have unlimited fiber at home and the office).
Doesn't apply here. Facebook is using async and downgrades the experience for mobile clients.
> Most browsers will only make 6 concurrent requests from a server, which you can see in Firefox via the about:config page and the network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server.
The limitation is per host not per server.
> On mobile, this means you're running 8-30 second delays for each "group" of requests, especially if you have poor reception.
We are talking about an asynchronous implementation.
> On the other hand, a social commenting program should need at a minimum 1 JS file, 1 CSS file, 1 for the actual data (3 comment texts, 3 base64 encoded profile pics at a small resolution). So FB is running at ~30x the optimum (87 assets, of which 35 are JS).
That's the payload for the desktop clients. Furthermore, try finding a website that follows 'the optimum' standard you are describing.
> If you think it's not that big a deal, I'd suggest taking a trip abroad or just out to some smaller towns in your area, and really experience why users feel the internet has not really gotten faster since the 90s (keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency).
If you are still using 90's technology, you won't be able to consume most of the current websites.
An asynchronous widget will not be the 'breaking point,' far from it.
The scenarios you are describing will not trigger the loading of these widgets.
You are correct, but I will be a little more terse with words, per hostname (domain). There is also a max connections limit as well which is generally 10-17.
2014: http://sgdev-blog.blogspot.com/2014/01/maximum-concurrent-co...
Love the sarcasm. What devices are you talking about here?
Name ten popular websites that will function on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection.
Heck, give me a site that will properly work on Motorola Razr.
Now add a continuous stream of revenue and the only people that notice or care are technically oriented people.
Facebook Comments aren't designed to be a great experience. They're designed to funnel users into Facebook's ecosystem and to get them to use Facebook more. It's a marketing tool for Facebook.
And as much as facebook sucks, most web sites suck. It's amazing to me how many sites I read on my phone are basically unusable until I fall back on Safari's reader mode.
Javascript handlers that fuck up scrolling speed, tons of popups obscuring the content, just all kinds of shit. It's like the last thing the website wants you to do is actually read it. (This is probably true, from some sort of limited penny-wise, pound-foolish ad-driven perspective.)
It didn't even make sense from a layout perspective. It was a comment with one reply, and in place of the reply, was text that said, "show one reply".
Maybe they're doing it to drive analytics.
Other things about AMP are pretty annoying to me -- the URL getting hijacked, the way on mobile safari the URL bar never shrinks when scrolling (how do they even break that?), and the ribbon with the fake URL bar that keeps popping in and out of view as you scroll.
You think Google basically replacing the entire web for news sites because their sites are so shitty might encourage them to focus more on basic usability and speed, but so far, no...
The core issue here is spam, and whether or not it's possible to make a non-centralized open source self-contained spam figthing engine is still unanswered.
I'm not going to go into details, but I invite you to read this article for some background: https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780....
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Facebook's dominance is even more pronounced in parts of the developing world. I've met people in Asia (Myanmar and Nepal) who have just accessed the internet for the first time in the past 12-24 months (through their Android smartphones). But they don't know the true internet - they only know the internet through the Facebook app. They use it like we use Google and web browsers.
To them, Facebook is the internet. They don't have email accounts. They don't use the browser. They don't search the web. I met someone in a small town who never even used the maps feature. I tried to think of what value the true internet might bring them, but when I suggested that "you can search for news and read other things", the response was that they already did that with the Facebook App.
One guy handed me his phone, so I could add myself as a friend on his Facebook. While I started typing my name, I noticed his search history... and to him, Facebook was even a substitute for what people in the USA might use Incognito mode for!
I would call Facebook their internet portal, but it's not really a portal to anything - Facebook is just the entire internet to them.
Buzzfeed (yes, Buzzfeed) did an excellent writeup of Myanmar, that mirrors what I saw there: https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-tru...
“Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”
Now there are "digital agencies" who take care of the celebrity/company FB pages, post click-bait articles, run campaigns and throw money for advertising.
I don't think these things are going to change anytime soon and I don't have an answer. So, either promote yourself, things you are doing, on FB or your online presence is mere. Just sad.
Like do people start with Facebook and it later becomes a gateway to the internet, or do they start within only Facebook and stay within only Facebook?
I also assume people in the bigger cities (especially Yangon, but also Mandalay) use computers+the actual web for work, university and pleasure... right?
Maybe. I can't say for sure. People start with Facebook and they stay with Facebook for now. Most businesses (tech agencies or startups) are also forming around Facebook. Of course, a few companies are doing okay by doing games, marketplace, and entertainment related apps/websites. For them, a big problem is an online payment method and non-existent infrastructure. For the government, there are just more important problems for the government. Eventually, online safety and education are necessary, I think.
Yeap. I see people, especially younger folks, use laptop/desktop computers for work, school and for entertainment. The margin of mobile users are desktop users is still a big gap, I suppose.
This idea of posting "public content" on Facebook is inherently flawed. I agree with the article on that much.
However, what I haven't figured out yet is if this is actually an evil-Facebook issue or just a user issue. Is Facebook actively encouraging this web breaking behaviour or is it a "mis-use" of what the tool originally intended (e.g., a safe place to post content/blog/etc. with privacy restrictions)?
In Facebook's defence, there is a difference between "public" and "discoverable". They don't go out of their way to make things discoverable. That's their business and may be evil or not depending on someone's given values.
But "public" content on Facebook could potentially be seen by anyone - and that's staying true to the definition.
I have a side rant that has been bubbling in me for a long time on this issue. My city's alternative weekly paper, The Dallas Observer, switched from Livefyre to Facebook's commenting system about two years ago. Livefyre was bad but the Facebook comment system is worse. With Facebook forcing "real" people accounts, comments plummeted on stories that presented alternate takes on local stories that didn't fall into line with the Dallas Morning News's traditional power structure patriarchs (mostly land developers).
The editor's suggestion to people that wanted to comment on a story without using their "real name" was to create a separate Facebook account. Un-fucking real.
My conspiracy theory is that The Dallas Observer, and probably all Village Voice Media properties, were promised better exposure in Facebook user's news feeds if they used the Facebook comment engine. Seems like a devil's bargain to me.
I put the Facebook comment system squarely in the evil-Facebook pile.
So I'm going to be generous and agree with your statement at face value, it probably did have nothing to do with any of the things you mentioned.
it discourages thoughtful users who happens to have dissenting views and exposes groupthink, people who care to create fake accounts as well as people who don't care.
Indeed, and since the beginning of the web there have been ways to create private content. The old-fashioned solutions give real control to the user.
> Facebook is a fantastic place for web content that isn't meant to be public.
Not really, because: a) you have no control over the platform -- the notion of private can change on a FB's whim and there is nothing you can do -- and b) you have no control over whom your content actually reaches, FB's opaque algorithm does.
> Is Facebook actively encouraging this web breaking behaviour or is it a "mis-use" of what the tool originally intended
Can you remember FB ever complaining that people should use the open web for some of the stuff that goes on in there? I don't mean to offend you, but I would say that you have to be a bit naive to believe that they do not desire to turn the web into a walled garden under their complete control.
FB is horrible because it nurtures psychological pathology, not because it's not open. Everything you need to know about FB can be summarized from Zuck's generous offer to let employees freeze their eggs so that instead of having kids and leading normal lives they can work for him. Dude is gross, and so is his platform.
It's not as though Facebook is coercing people to do this in order to lengthen their careers. People will do it anyway due to a culture that already exists and because they want to; from that perspective, Facebook is providing a nice benefit for people who don't want to compromise their career. It's not for you to say that this decision constitutes "abnormal" behavior - its characteristic of a lot of peoples' rational career optimization.
I'm not claiming it's altruistic, but I am claiming it's a poor heuristic for judging a company.
Nobody is saying don't have private silos, but I believe Gruber and co are saying don't pretend like a private silo is public, when it isn't.
>...internet.org and Free Basics...
Last week I met someone who spent the better part of two years in Mozambique and other parts of Africa for the Peace Corps. He spent most of his time in areas that had little to no internet access.
He used Free Basics a lot while he was there and considered it integral to his work and sanity (in his words). Based on his experience, I would consider your specific example web enabling, not web breaking. There are many people who want to connect to the internet even if it's not the open, platonic ideal that is passionately endorsed message boards like HN.
From what he told me, his alternative to using Free Basics was climbing a tree and waiting for a signal so he could send emails for work. It's not a perfect system, but it's fairly uncharitable to call it web breaking just because you don't believe one company should have control over it.
But the longer term risks of facebook net far outweigh the help for your friend in Africa.
I don't believe one company should have control over the internet. In fact, I really really don't believe this. Attempting to be the sole gatekeeper of information in the modern world is in my estimation something that should not be allowed. Anywhere. Ever. I guess I can't blame facebook for trying to do this. But I recoil in moral disgust at the implications.
As well, it literally is "web breaking" when one company has control over the entire network. This is not a matter of mere dissatisfaction with the current state of events; it's a description of the seismic shift in control.
Zuckerberg was on to something. He saw the web connecting pages, but not people. So he created a web connecting people and now it has grown to what it is. With both MySpace and Google+ practically buried, Facebook has no competition.
We desperately need an alternative, and not just one for the sake of not being facebook, but something that works. The open web needs a way to connect people.
I haven't checked the landscape in a minute, but I wonder if there are any new projects out there.
But frankly this still was at a time when the internet was more nerdish. Writing blogs was work -- intellectual work -- for reward that was only tangible because we saw everyone everyday and could physically high five or thumbs-up.
So of course blogs declined because of Facebook. I myself find myself periodically using Facebook as a blogging platform -- to write and read and debate long takes; but also because most people are not nerdish enough to have blogs. I think we're watching horrified at the de-nerding of the internet.
---
Relatedly. I'm really really jealous of kids and their snapchats. I wish my generation used some such platform. I remember when we used IM status lines as short-lived messages into the world -- "Hi friends, I feel sad", maybe with some song lyric. For a very brief while (like a week, maybe less), Messenger Stories started picking up steam in my network -- until it was integrated on Facebook. Facebook has too many people.
Disappearing stories encapsulate the whole reason someone my age (I'm 34) needs online social networks: you drift away from your great friends from yesteryear, have less and less time and energy and emotional need for new ones -- at least at the investment it takes -- and everyone in your cohort is either doing the same or trying too hard to be artificially social.
If, instead, I could access a significant section of my circle of acquaintances/quasi-friends/might-have-been-friends-if-I-had-met-them-earlier-in-life, etc. and just take a picture of a really good fresh-squeezed OJ I had somewhere or a pretty sunset or some Counting Crows lyrics? In such a way that everyone who is kind of paying attention is aware, but everyone else just misses? It would make a significant dent at this need for a semi-social life. Maybe I could even make a couple of really fucking great friends out of the interesting acquaintances I have.
I'm rambling, of course. But hey, startup people. Make Snapchat for adults, please!
Here is my interpretation of the complaints. Please point out what I am missing.
>It's impractical...
Square peg round hole.
>It's supporting their downgrading and killing the web...
Facebook posts being inherently (mostly) simple text is 'killing the web'? I don't buy it.
>Facebook might go out of business.
Just a generic SaaS complaint. Nothing unique to Facebook about this.
Am I missing a core argument here?
I think the problem is not really Facebook but its users.
Sharing a blog post on Facebook is as wrong as sharing your travel photos on HN.
It's also misleading. If you want something more like a blog, then use notes instead of posts. The notes editing interface is actually better than most blog platforms, and IMO the results look just as pretty too. Then your notes appear in your timeline, searchable (within Facebook), with comments, etc. Is it everything an "open web" activist could want? No, but it's sure not just plain text.
BTW, I can't help but shake my head at people (like Gruber) who say Facebook is evil but also think absolutely everything should be searchable and monetizable by Google. That's just not logically consistent.
I'm on Twitter, I'm on Hacker News, I'm on Reddit, I'm on Gitter, I send/receive dirty jokes on WhatsApp, etc. Plenty of opportunity to waste time, no need for FB to be in the picture at all. I've been composing this stupid message for the past 5 minutes.
But I'm using Facebook less and less. For me the "open web" is a necessity, not a moral high ground or anything like that. I don't like opening Facebook blog posts because Facebook sucks for blog posts. TFA mentions the Internet Archive or Google not indexing articles. Hell yeah, those are really good concerns.
Also, forget the open web ... how about the fact that if you give them permissions to access your photos, on iOS at least, they are uploading your photos to their services for making photo collages, without you explicitly allowing this.
I know this because I opened the app a week ago and I was proposed a collage with animated transitions and music in the background, titled "Your Sunday evening in Bucharest", that couldn't have been processed on my phone - especially since iOS restricts background activity, plus it would be pretty bad for battery life.
And I freaked out, so now Facebook is gone from my phone. Article mentions an all out assault on the open web. Sure, but it's also an all out assault on people's privacy.
I was 7 when Ceaușescu was shot and communism fell in 1989 and before that paranoia was at an all times high. People were afraid for example that their phones were tapped and that their neighbours were listening. Which was in fact true, but oh boy, that's nothing compared with what happens today.
> I myself have no issues with the social network, I keep up with friends, family and it isn't a time suck for me anymore than HN.
How dare Facebook provide limited internet to the developing world instead of nothing at all...
Agreed. The intent and likely outcome of that was pretty evil.
You may be fine with Facebook controlling the flow of information. I'm not. I don't live in the developing world but am delighted to see efforts to that end stifled (where it has happened).
Other than that, as a social network, I don't have a hard issue with Facebook. I'm sure it's fine for lots of people. Friends and family use it and seem to get something out of it. It's not my type of thing so never had an account but I don't perceive it as evil.
I guess I perceive Facebook something like a used car salesman or owner of a dive bar in a bad neighborhood or a porn aggregator. A little shady, probably not to be intrinsically trusted and not the kind of thing I want to be around, but not necessarily evil.
And Facebook, too, will eventually crust away when the underlying tech improves (universal 5G? who knows?) and the next Steve Case / Mark Zuckerberg visionary builds the next generally-centralized service for most internet users. But the open web will survive just fine.
But that being said, if we are just concerned with statistics, obviously Facebook's user numbers are much larger than AOL ever saw but I wonder what percentage of people using the internet use Facebook today vs. AOL "back in the day"?
Recommender reading: How to confuse a Facebook user (2010) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/feb/11/face...
I've been trying for months to advertise on there but there's no such thing as a business-only FB acct, you need an organic personal account. And some combination of my activity (not friending anyone, not using FB for anything, using an incognito tab, my IP address? I don't know) looks like trouble to the powers that be so my account keeps getting shut off.
I hate them just as much as these other guys but for 2x the reasons.
But could you see an alternative that doesn't leave a single entity in control?
Because they don't want to. They don't want to learn it, they don't want to be a part of it. So they stay in a walled garden where they can participate in groups they want to participate in, with their own culture. And they're not the ones complaining about it, the open web advocates are complaining about their voluntary association with each other.
Before FB, my email was clogged with trivial crap that family members and aquaintances forwarded to everyone in their address book, including me. Now that never happens. Based on everyone else's complaints, it sounds like that stuff has moved to FB leaving my inbox a much more useful place.
THANK YOU ZUCK!
But sadly, today's so-called 'open web' is just as much of an assault on the open web: trackers, cookies, and cross-correlated advertisements follow the user everywhere; every new link is literally a crapshoot which may execute arbitrary code placed there by the webmaster or their delegates. It's the devil you know vs. the devil that's brand-new every time: do I want my browsing habits aggregated to help them better target ads and content for me inside some walled garden, or do I want my browsing habits across the 'open web' to be aggregated by a dozen third parties to help them better target ads for me on the outside, while I blissfully extoll the virtues of decentralization and pretend I'm better off?
Until recently, the only way to avoid this was to spin off a clean incognito session in a browser running only one window, then close it after every pageview. Who does that? Short of a very particular few, no one.
The web is a wonderful, versatile medium of referencible documents and multimedia that we've turned into an application delivery platform; and the one thing that content silos like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Apple News get right is that not everyone cares to visit unvetted content solely judged by its URL.
I dispute that. I don't feel like my 'open' WordPress blogs are being attacked by Facebook.
Does Facebook's lack of full-blown openness constitute an attack on anything? I don't think it does.
It seems open web advocates resent that FB successfully competes against their offering. I have a fondness for the open web. I'd rather see us learn from FB, and compete, rather than whine about losing market share.
What other solution are you implying by "until recently"?
> Who does that? Short of a very particular few, no one.
I'm probably one of the particular few, but I've found it very painless to
1) Install and use firefox's containers experiment 2) Install the "private tab" addon 3) In about:config, remap <Ctrl-t> to open a new private tab
Now new tabs are private by default (although they share cookies within a browser session), and if I want to keep cookies or history I open a new container tab... with nearly zero change in my workflow.
Apologies for lack of links; I'm on mobile.
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person ...
(the usual stuff, followed by ...)
It is the express wish of the author that this software shall not be used in derived products or services to collect or spread information about users against their will for any purpose other than the main functionality of the product or service. Users will need to explicitly "opt-in" to such use of information if desired. The functionality of the derived product or service should be sufficiently broken down to avoid an all-or-nothing proposition to the user.
The rationale is that, while this will not have meaning or uphold in a court of law, the least we can do as developers is to send a message of our disapproval for the way big companies are treating the web and its users.
Personally I feel that it'd be better to put that sort of statement in the README; especially if you're not concerned with whether its legally-enforceable or not.
You're probably right. And the README would be better, because the message would be visible on the main page in Github :)
Another option could be to have the text "The following is not part of the license, but expresses the wishes of the author regarding use of this software ..." in the LICENSE file.
I'm hoping we could have a standard phrasing for this kind of thing (just like we have standard licenses). Perhaps the EFF could develop one.
I mean, full marks for cooperative nature, but being real here, the licenses in your Github repositories mean exactly as much as you're willing to pay a lawyer to enforce them, assuming you even find out they're being violated in the first place. It would be nice if the world were otherwise, but pretending that is so doesn't seem to me likely to help much of anything. Perhaps I am wrong in so thinking.
These companies employ people who generally have a warm heart for open source. These people have been contributing to open source projects themselves. So if part of the community starts disapproving their way of doing business, they will take note. And internal discussions will take place.
Further, if these companies misbehave, it hurts their image.
And a bad image among developers (both internal and external) is probably the last thing these companies want.
Let's not start pointing fingers about being hypocritical, tho, otherwise I would really hear for example how exactly is Google stance on openness not hypocritical. (I know you didn't name Google directly, but it's the easiest example)
People (and corporations) should STOP using all the other features and the web will be a much better place. Don't put articles on Facebook like a blog. It's not a blog. Don't make Facebook your only site for your restaurant. A static html page with your address and opening hours is better. And whatever you do, don't ever click a facebook ad or "like" a company on Facebook.
Facebook was able to become a huge success because it could compete freely on the open web.
Now that Facebook has become so powerful, it is trying to destroy the open web so no one can compete with it.
Speaking of which, what wonder what its position is on net neutrality.
I'd say what you're describing isn't symptomatic of Facebook, but of the relationships themselves. For the most part my Facebook feed is comprised of 30-somethings and melodrama basically doesn't exist. Political rants, on the other hand...
Google has taken over search, web browsing, advertising, and has the largest mobile platform. They hold your email, maps, search history, personal docs, office suite, and calendar. They authenticate you to services all over the web. All of your actually important data (you really can live without pictures, unless you are a photographer or model) resides with them. They have created several new protocols that the web uses regularly, and influences new standards. They influence how most web content is created. They have leverage over most of the companies doing business on the web. They handle domains, cloud computing, business services, and a range of other products I don't remember. And they control how you use the web with their browsers and OSes.
There is no other company that single-handedly controls so many aspects of the web. Facebook is just a social platform; Google is everything else.
And yet, many people spend upward of 3 hours/day with the screen showing Facebook. They actively have google in front of their eyes for much less.
First off, the open net is dead, people not giving a fuck killed it when they simply said yet to the shitty deals the unscrupulous companies offered. Those tech savvy should have lead the way away from these sites to alternatives - that didn't happen. If that wasn't enough the knowledge of EchelonV killed it. People will never again act truly honestly on the net, which hopefully will offset any short sighted plans google and NSA has to premeptively steer public opinion.
The last real breath was drawn as people kept on using google and that breath was drawn precisely when google "modified" their algorithm to kill off private sites who came in high on rankings. Since then any site that has arisen to challange google seems to have magically have been killed or taken over (suddenly swapping to using google coding for unexplained reasons). Oh to mention a few; scroogle, qwant, lycos, zapmeta, qwant, wn, millionshort, gigablast, xirkle... You can still search through the old altavista pile if u want but yeah. Most other motors gives u a shitstorm of companies that you do not care for before you can read private sites off enligthened people who strive to improve x thing.
The next terryfying thing is as what happens when large sites get taken over and the large libraries of knowledge falls into informal hands or simply disappears (IMDB boards to mention a recent setback, and i meant the positive discussions not the large clusterfks of idiots and astroturfers et al).
And of before i forget - as someone who saw through FB before it took off (previous avid user of ICQ, AIM, newb at IRC etc) i fucking told you (if any of those i actually told would stumble across this).
Localised meshnets could have been the future (with "netbrowsers" as the tool to reach em), though with the thought of all that information being in the hands of normal people governments are "finally" reacting and starting to spread fibre as far as i know through some of europe (scandinavia) which could effectively kill that effort. So start taking political action for a free future of information \/.
However, I won't disconnect FB as long as it's the primary way for me to check on/communicate with/share photos with relatives and friends from years ago. But it's hardly an addictive time-suck for me, and also for some of my friends judging by how seldom they post updates.
Or, maybe worse, altering visibility for something that is private today such that it is public tomorrow.
People primarily use social media to connect with and make new friends. They do not want to deal with a million and 1 different user interfaces in the name of openness. That's why Usenet worked so well until people like Canter & siegel killed it with commercial spam.
The open web is great for the same reason that magazines and TV are great, but it's also shit for the same reason that magazines and TV are shit - too much shallow design competing for people's attention, with everyone trying to differentiate themselves from everyone else via style and gimmicks. That's the same thing that made myspace unusual, an impossible excess of visual cruft that far outweighed its substantive communication value.
The open web is fine, but the web is not the right platform for social networking. For social you want a fast, clean, boring interface...like the one on HN. If you think FB is the problem (and it's very very problematic but plenty of other people are already making that case), stop rabbiting about web standards and get to work on NNTP 2.0.
NNTP was fucking awesome. Gopher was fucking awesome. the semantic web is/was awesome. The web is not for social.
Either way, Facebook's obfuscation of data is justifiably a cause for the concern due to the mass adoption of its platform. Yet, it's easy to focus on the machinations and fuckery that Facebook engage in to hold our gaze and numb our minds. What's more difficult is to question the agency of its hundreds of millions of users, who each have a slab of skull-encased smartmeat that gifts them with relative free will in their lives. Rather predictably, it comes down to a question of agency and personal responsibility: if you don't like the site, get off it.
But were only it so simple. Facebook is so deeply entrenched in the infrastructure of our personal lives, that it's very difficult for a lot of 'normies'(sic) to just pack up and fuck off. While the HN community may be au fait with the finer points of privacy, mass surveillance, and the founding principles of our nascent virtual civilisation - Dave from softball in Akron or Juliette who has a duck farm in the south of France do not. While they'd be concerned about those things if they were explained and they grokked the implications, their fucks lie elsewhere and, hence, Big Social Media remains a fringe idea.
TLDR: We get the social media we deserve.
I'm sure that some embarrassing or unflattering picture of me is somewhere out there. And I think that's the crux of this problem: Facebook is the gatekeeper; it decides whether or not it wants to open or close the door on content. Of course, this has an implication as far as its openness is concerned, but the far more dangerous aspect is, as I mentioned, the fact that I should be the gatekeeper for my own content.
At least that's the way I see it. I agree with the idea that as a social platform, Facebook is dying. People contribute less and less personal and intimate content in lieu of linking articles or throwaway memes. Nowadays, I mostly use it as a news feed.
I think there's a vacuum out there ripe for disruption; a combination between Snapchat and Tumblr. A sort of MySpace for the new decade and a platform where people can be themselves again.
He was an Apple fanboy for the longest time, and didn't see that eco-system as an attack on interoperability?
The only difference I see here is he doesn't like FB.
Whenever I get a link to facebook for something I sigh, because that sort of stupid, hostil UX won't get them anywhere.
If people wanted an account, they'd have one. It's not like visiting the link is going to be my first time ever hearing of facebook, and that's probably true for 99% of the people visiting one.
I was getting a lot of annoying politics and boring photos of kid play dates, pets, dinners, sporting events, etc. Obviously, the quality of your feed depends on the quality of the people you connect with, but I found myself more disconnected from people who previously occupied a nostalgic fondness in my mind.
On the other hand, the people who I cared the most about were routinely the quietest people on Facebook because--let's face it--smart, productive people don't waste time on things like that.
I'm relatively old (40's), so my experience is also skewed by that.
I left by editing my hosts file to block all FB-related servers and never looked back.
But the question is: what can we do about it? Resist certainly helps (never had a Facebook account and hopefully never will -- although I did get on Whatsapp two months ago). I will also prevent my kids to have Facebook while under my roof.
But what else?
Is it? Because it seems to me that they are having plenty of issues with gaining the trust of advertisers too. Considering that advertising is the bread and butter of their business, this would normally be something of a mini-crisis.
A quick search for "do advertisers trust facebook" gives me
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/facebook-needs-accountabil...
https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/10/facebook-verification-ad-...
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/01/31/will-facebook-chip-aw...
http://www.adageindia.in/digital/40-of-marketers-say-they-pl...
http://marketingland.com/facebooks-measurement-errors-impact...
Of course, no one actually believes anything Facebook says with regards to privacy, and probably never did.
I would seriously doubt if there is anyone who actually looks at their practices who doesn't think they conduct large scale psychological experiments on the human lab rats who continue to use FB.
In other words, seems like there are enough ingredients here for an implosion. Something has to give.
It would, if there were an alternative.
John Carmack posts public reviews of VR games frequently on Facebook. Here's one: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1717273305... But if you want to browse previous reviews, there is no mention of them on his public Facebook page. Look at these two screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/wal8p If you log in, Facebook is all of the sudden like "look at all this public content!"
Totally skeezy.
Things like spam/moderation. Is it possible to have a distributed, open solution to this problem?
Modern Social Media Platforms Are Kicking Your Blog’s Ass. Here Is How You Can Fight Back.
http://blogenhancement.com/blog/2017/03/28/modern-social-med...
The point is, the open web is the open web. This also needs to be common. Eventually, kiddos grow up and escape the pretty gardens - at least lets have something out here that they can clutch on to, in awe, at all the non-curated, non-owned, non-manipulated/-manipulative content ..
And I dont want to be part of such a group. Plus other reasons like the ones in the article like this.
But one thing interests me: doesn't Facebook have something like that, but in reverse ? I mean updates along the lines "We need more Facebook", "Open internet is for nerds", "Why more websites need to migrate to Facebook"... ? Unless you have a Facebook account, you don't know what's going on on the other side of the barricade.
One puzzling fact - stars on github: jquery/jquery - 45k, angular/angular - 25k, facebook/react - 68k, twbs/bootstrap - 111k,
On my local job market (I live in a 500k city), react is the least popular JS framework. I keep seeing jquery and especially angular over and over. Meanwhile react, the facebookiest of JS frameworks, shows up least frequently. Yet React is the most popular JS framework and by a large margin! I suspect it's because job offers with 'react' are mostly circulated via facebook. I also see very little job offers with the 'facebook' keyword - mostly for non-technical people, like marketing, salesmen, assistants, various misc jobs.
Hypothesis: we, outside Facebook, live in our own filter bubble. We don't get the whole picture.
But it could be way more open without ruining those usecases. It is just so hostile to non-facebook users.
The primary example being the one cited in the article: The only reason to block 1/3 of a page to nonlogged in users is to convince you to either sign up or log in. There is no user-based reason to do so.
That is open-web hostile.
There is no need to make the all the content non-searchable, except to convince you to log in and search locally.
That is open-web hostile.
I used to think Google was bad for its intrusive "No really, you should log-in" campaigns, but facebook makes Google look so reasonable on this score.
Google is murky too but they were coming from the 100% open side of things.
I just wish everyone would go back to their corners!
Admittedly my profile picture is there. I worry about that sometimes and is probably my biggest concern. But it's not facebook's fault i posted a picture. There's no rule you can't see your friends posts if you don't post your own photo, and I have friends who just use a picture of their dog or something instead and it never bugs me.
Honestly, Facebook is just a business and in return you look at ads now and then. If people had to pay I don't think it'd be very popular.
Probably not. Your hypothetical headlines look like a parody.
Also, I don't understand your comparison of jQuery and React. That really has nothing to do with Facebook being a walled garden or an attack on the open web.
I have a Facebook account, because I have non-nerd people I need to contact somehow and it seems like email is forgotten.
Facebook offers one things: an extermely simple way to waste you time. Do not underestimate this! It's better, than TV, because you can even join cults claiming the world is lead by evil lizarmen - people actually do this, for "fun", because they are bored.
That is all you'll find on the other side: bored people wasting time.
Facebook retains your data, and you can't do anything about it. I don't know how any engineers can work there knowing in their mind the delete button is a ruse -- or "incomplete functionality". From what i've observed there is active censorship especially in regards to negative statements of facebook (of which i'm sure they are aware of copycats).
This company has brought out the worst of society and they are deserving of justice -- or at least balance.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/21/facebook-users-... "Experts have told us what’s best for these people’s safety is to let them livestream as long as they are engaging with viewers."
I haven't had a Facebook account for over a year and I'm incredibly happy about it. The only downside is now I don't hear about local events.
The thought of potential employers searching though Facebook posts I made when I was a teenager terrifies me.
If they ever made this possible I'd stop using their service immediately
The is empirical evidence that any one who pays for it, can has access to it, not even to mention nation-states, can has access.
I'm not really sure what this means, but my knee-jerk reaction is that the 'open web' exists without search engines.
What if those books were in Ilshenar, guarded by two stone gargoyles?
Hey, let's just meet and talk there. I sure love to go to Ilshenar. I'm sure my friends from all walks of life/culture/class would also love to go to Ilshenar see what I am talking about.
> — a full one-third of my window is covered by a pop-over trying to get me to sign in or sign up for Facebook.
I get that John is clearly annoyed by a certain aspects of Facebook, but, I feel like it's unfair to say "Fuck Facebook" based on that. Facebook posts are primarily meant to be shared on the social network and not on the web. You can, of course, share it on the web, if the author of the post wishes to. But, Facebook has an amazing Notes features, which basically acts like a personalized blog. Long posts are meant to be shared via Notes and not the regular status update posts.
Check out this awesome note created by Kent Beck: https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/mastering-programmi...
They don't put a pop-over that takes up 1/3 of your page.
Also, I see a lot of people complaining about timesuck and how getting off of Facebook has improved their lives. How is any of it Facebook's fault? If anything, it means that it's a win for Facebook since they're providing good content that interests you, the user.
Also, stating that Facebook is trying to kill the open web is a bit ridiculous to say. Facebook's main sell is their content. They're not a search engine. They don't have to let non-Facebook users access their protected content. Yes, they do have a search engine that searches across the Facebook platform, but, you'd have to be a Facebook user in order to be able to search for it. Facebook got a lot of heat a few years ago for the lack of proper privacy features. Now, people complain about not having access to somebody else's content? There is no way everybody in this world can be satisfied.
Also, expecting Facebook to allow Internet Archive to index Facebook's content is unfair. Why should Facebook allow Internet Archive to index their protected content? The content is for the users to share with whoever they wish to share with, which may not necessarily be everybody in the world.
Promoting this literally proves his argument. No one even needs a web browser anymore! Just download facebook! /s
Easy: open the page in an incognito window.
The best thing I can think of is Apple Photos and Messages.
Every publisher of high quality content is dependent on advertising to stay in business. When you are using adblock, your eyeballs are freeloading off of all the users who are using the website as intended.
I certainly understand the urge to use adblock, but it's amazing to me that people would feel entitled enough to actually expect publishers not to try to prevent this.
I get that some people, here especially it seems, have very strongly held beliefs about privacy and personal space that Facebook will never accommodate for. Nor should they be expected to. Clearly those people will never be the target audience and that's 100% okay.
This is not how you win hearts and minds.
When you make an argument like this, you need to acknowledge that tons people want the opposite thing you want. That doesn't make you wrong, but leaving it out makes it so much harder to have a good discussion.
Aggregators would be where you go to set up your friend list and see your feed. It could look and feel like Facebook does now. It would have an open standard protocol that content hosters would use if they wanted to be aggregated. This could still be an add driven business, but subscription, self hosted, and DIY solutions could exist too.
Content hosters could either charge a monthly hosting fee, or they could serve up their own adds. Self hosted and DIY solutions could also exist.
The big benefit to this would of course be the competition. Since it's an open standard anyone could be a content host, and anyone could be an aggregator.
To make extra sure there is competition, and this could come in a phase two after the initial splitting up of Facebook, there should be open standards for exporting and importing friends, follows, likes, etc. to and from aggregators, and open standards for importing and exporting content from the hosters.
Speaking of follows and likes, there could also be aggregator aggregators (AAs). People could opt in to publicly and anonymously share their likes and follows and the AAs would consume those and report on trends that cross aggregator boundaries. Anonymity could be much more protected this way while still giving us that interesting information about what is trending.
One tricky part of this is how do I as a content author only allow my friends to see certain posts of mine? It would have to be with encryption. My content provider could keep public keys of my friends and only my friends (well, their aggregators) would be able to decrypt my posts using my friends' private keys. I can see some challenges and holes in this, but it doesn't seem any worse overall than how Facebook protects privacy now. Open implementations and peer review could get us to better-than-Facebook privacy quickly.
Facebook would ideally recognize their stagnation and initiate this split themselves. We as their user base can and should help them understand the importance of this. Hopefully it doesn't have to come down to government enforcement of anti-trust laws, but that could be a useful tool to apply here as well.
I'm not a like whore either. I'm pretty happy to just post and get zero likes. I wonder if anyone reads my posts? O well.
Blockchain will also help kill FB :D
www.hellolyra.com
I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumption to make...
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-to...
Even if you block them 100% online, as soon as you use a credit card or loyalty card, you are letting them track you again.
In my country, and with my ISP we have dynamic IP's, so I don't have a 'home IP' as such. Browser user agent's are pretty easy to spoof/mock/etc. Browser fingerprinting is super hard to work around though - especially stuff like the canvas fingerprinting, because blocking it outright can also be used as a unique identifier when combined with other data.
Would it be possible to build some kind of public repository of canvas fingerprints, then whenever a site tries to build one, rather than outright blocking it, you return one of the public fingerprints from the repository. Get the repo big enough and used by enough people (especially if you could extend it out to other identifiers like fonts) and I imagine you would have a good chance of driving down one's uniqueness in a privacy conscious manner.
I'm not familiar with JS or the mechanics of how these fingerprints are generated, so I don't know if this is possible, but I imagine that if you can block them (Firefox 'Canvas Blocker' extension, you could intercept them?
Why, you may ask? Because mining data about the pages you visit after Facebook allows for targeted advertisement, at the very least.
I suppose you have no cell phone and live in a place with no government then, because Facebook can't hold a candle to telcos and governments when it comes to disregarding your personal space.
Also, Facebook holds a significantly broader type of information than uncle Sam or T-Mobile. And Facebook also provides an avoidable vector for government surveillance. Analogy: no machine is totally secure, that doesn't mean we give up, turn off all security software and stop patching exploits.
You're not obliged to hand this data over when you don't use their services, and ideally, they wouldn't track you if you didn't want to be tracked, but facebook is pretty close to being ethically void, so they'll do whatever scummy thing they want, so you should by all means make it as difficult as possible for them to get data on you.
Unless you run an ad blocker and/or EFF Privacy Badger, that's exactly what you're doing. Your consent is not required. There are literally _dozens_ of companies that do this, Facebook and Google are just two of them. There were some initiatives in some states to apply a stiff tax to companies that trade in user data, but I don't know if they went anywhere. That's one tax I'd be in favor of, even though I'm not in favor of more taxes in general.
The point is that regardless of whether or not consent is required, it's a question of principle to not give consent (and personally I do use LibreJS and the other various tools to improve the shitty state of affairs).
Companies acting unethically shouldn't be given extra leeway to act even more unethically.
I swear some of these personal posts never hit my home feed, they just get buried. This is odd as the personal stuff is the content I'm most likely to interact with. This is doubly confounding because the posts I don't see usually have a lot interaction among my close network, especially compared to the noise that's topping my feed.
More and more I find myself going directly to a handful of profiles and spending less time on FB because of the feed's noise.
FB without an ad-blocker is simply unreadable.
I tweet and have all tweets go to facebook automatically. So people will engage sometimes with those posts. Other than that, I only use facebook for certian facebook groups.
Facebook is doing well as an ad platform to keep the revenue up but I'm not sure Facebook is honestly... doing well, you know?
I've seen them recently try to be Snapchat with the stories. I haven't seen one person use them yet despite being active on Snapchat. Also stickers, the new attention grabbing personal status posts with huge text, etc. It's as if they are lately trying to make people post more personal status updates on the site?
Is it possible there's a social network ad bubble that, once it pops when the realization of how much attention people actually pay on that site rather than just mindlessly scroll through like a heroin addict sinks in, will cause their stock to crash? I honestly don't think Facebook is one a nice trajectory either for us or for them.
But my experience has been that peak FB enjoyment is simply not having FB. Everything about FB feels toxic to me, not just the service itself but its pervasive tendrils throughout the web. Complete, total exclusion of FB and related services—including social sign on, etc—has really improved my QOL.
that aside, i deleted my facebook account over seven years ago and even though my real life friends give me some grief over that every now and again, i haven't missed it a single day.
apart from the couple of live streamed murders and abuse cases, there's no actual news on there which isn't accessible through another site with public access. and if i long for cat pictures or funny videos there's always imgur and youtube.
facebook, like many other "social media" sites, is more a habit than a necessity and, as far as i'm concerned, highly overrated in it's purpose
But that's under protest. Facebook is super hostile to its users, but doing so makes their metrics go up, so it's gonna keep happening.
The net is so much nicer when you block out the evil.
That is a terrible assumption to make!! Why would you think that everyone thinks the same way you think?!?
I deleted my facebook and to answer your question: Yes, it was that difficult. I have tried multiple times to do what you did, just leave it alone, but I couldn't. So I deleted it, have not missed it for a second.
I also found that spending more time on Facebook made me focus on the wrong things in life. I spent a lot of time thinking about what photos I wanted to post to garner interest (in reality few look or care about them). I spent a lot of time checking in on people that I haven't talked to in years, which satisfies my interest without actually ever communicating with them. It just became sort of depressing after a while. It's low effort to become friends with someone on Facebook, and I don't think its healthy to be constantly reminded of these connections you've made in life through various events and never actively continue in real life. You just spend a lot of time thinking about the past or what could have been. I was expending so much energy and getting back nothing but fleeting dopamine hits.
I truly believe I'm better off without it, despite the difficulty coordinating events with people and being invited to things. I communicate more with people in real life now. I find I am more motivated to text or call people to check in. I also use other communication services more because I'm not satisfying my social needs through passive consumption anymore.
Yes. Is that so difficult for you to accept? Tough shit.
So ugly and oldschool you won't miss in, unless you need to get something done there.
* I assume tracking becomes more aggressive when you have an account. For instance, Facebook could connect you to everyone viewing your account page to create a shadow social network for you.
* Skirting real-name policy is against TOS. Using real-name opens you up to crawlers from governments, trolls, collection agencies, and data brokers/analytics companies. Besides governments can request all your data. You also have another account to keep separate /track of, when doing proper OPSEC.
* Even if for you your account is just used once a month, people you are connected to may have different expectations ("you have an account, why didn't you reply?"), and you have to micro-manage this.
* You miss events, while still having an account or invite, and it is bad social form.
* You are forced to combat social persuasion tactics: Facebook is carefully design to maximize clicks and time-on-site. It's like trying to quit drinking while going to the bar once a week: your determination is actively attacked.
* People can tag your account in photos. A high school teacher I know got in trouble because she was tagged in a photo where people around her were drinking alcohol.
Some of the smartest people in the world work hard to make the site more addictive. You could just as easily say, "Is it so difficult for you to just have a needle and heroin on your desk and shoot up?"
It might be easy for you or me to have it there within reach, but for those who have already had their mental pathways significantly affected by the daily or more frequent hits of dopamine, it's not easy at all.
>Some of the smartest people in the world work hard to make the site more addictive.
A famous result concerning this is the 1984 book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robart Cialdini.
YOU control what you want to see and who you interact with, spending to much time there? Take charge of your own life and click off. Seeing something you don't want to see? Hide it. It's not rocket science.
Personally I get a great deal of value from it. It's a tool like any other, but you have to know how to use it.
I don't actually find it too ironic that HN is missing the point that Facebook is a cultural phenomenon. The way people communicate has changed, culturally, and Facebook facilitates that.
I have an account that I only use to get notifications from long lost family members and friends etc.
This level of privacy invasion is simply unnaceptable to me, and I wish people online were more guarded with what amounts to their identity...
Conglomeration in general isn't great for the open web. That's where we are though.