DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon
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For better or for worse: I want to stay in touch with people I've met in the oddest places. In the middle of bumsquash Uruguay, people who had barely ever heard of Europe, but they had Facebook. All of them. The only place on earth where this wasn't true was China, in my experience.
So, no, I won't #deletefacebook. I've stopped using it meaningfully a long time ago, but until something becomes a reliable, multi-decade spanning auto-updating rolodex, I'll have to stay here.
Mastodon will never, ever, not in a billion years fill that gap. And I don't need more alternatives for #1 and #2, so there dies that dream for me.
I know because I have a circle of close friends that I only see once or twice a year, but stay in touch with through email. Guess what: it works. And if you migrate, you just email your friends about it.
Similarly, although I don't know if this is generally possible in every country, but I have diligently carried over my first mobile phone number from carrier to carrier. When I moved abroad to Sweden for a few years, I switched to the absolute cheapest minimal carrier to essentially "invest" in keeping that phone identity. This means that people who met me as far back as the late nineties can still reach me on it. Friends that I have made later even know they can rely on this, that this is my "policy". I'm about to leave Sweden for Germany. Still keeping that Dutch phone number. In fact, I'm leaving it with all of my friends here, and use it for all the messaging apps that rely on phone numbers.
And finally, just claim your own bit of internet and get a website. Your friends can search for you.
This is so far removed from how I interact with the world around me that I have a hard time empathising. I’ll keep it scientific and factual: more than once, I’ve gone back to a place I visited over a decade ago. I went on Facebook, found the person that used to live there, got in touch, and had varying types of “fun”, as humans call it. The crucial point here is that I can’t tell in advance which places, until I decide to go.
I… your suggestion for the future is to “not think about them”? Ehh.. no thank you?
You should have the foresight to write down their contact details. You meet a person, exchange contact details. Save it in your phone or cloud or what ever. Is that too hard? Will you run out of storage space if you save contact info for every person you meet? But hey, that requires a moments thought. Am I going to have to contact this person? No, we can't spent working a couple of neurons for that thought. I think people should use their heads more. To exercise fore sight. To actually remember birth dates etc, to plan things with out constantly "updating" on a mobile phone/social media...
I personally dont use Facebook, but youre not actually painting a realistic picture
What if the other person did all these and didn't update facebook? Tough luck. Move on. Right?
Same thing. If they changed email, and didn't keep phone number etc, then they probably don't want you to contact them anyway...
Maybe. Or maybe you completely misunderstood what I said:
> I… your suggestion for the future is to “not think about them”? Ehh.. no thank you?
I didn't suggest anything of the sort. I claimed that when I lose touch with people, it is because they're not on my mind, and am I not being reminded of them through external means (like Facebook). Per definition you cannot really miss something that is not on your mind, now can you? This isn't a conscious decision, it's just an acceptance of the fact that I cannot know everything, and that everything must pass. If they are on my mind, however, I choose to take action and stay in touch.
So the real reason you can't empathise with me is that you're not understanding me. I am not telling you to not think about friends. I am saying: would you have remembered and missed someone if Facebook hadn't reminded you of their existence? Are you even aware of how many people you have met that you don't remember? Do you miss them? Hint: you don't, again by definition.
Think of advertising and how much of it revolves around creating the feeling that you are missing something and that this void needs to be filled, or that you are missing out on something that really, you don't.
> more than once, I’ve gone back to a place I visited over a decade ago. I went on Facebook, found the person that used to live there, got in touch, and had varying types of “fun”, as humans call it.
Real classy implication that I am a robot there.
Look, I do this all the time myself. Tell me where I am stating anything that would suggest I don't. The only part where I disagree with you is the implication that Facebook is the only way to find old friends.
In fact, the opposite is true: putting in the effort to track someone down is immensely gratifying and builds connections in ways that "staying in touch" via seeing each others Facebook timeline isn't. I put effort into staying in touch with the people I love. Very robotic, clearly.
Meanwhile, Facebook creates this false sense of safety, of still being part of a community we don't actually put effort in, because our brains think that popping up on each others Facebook wall a good enough approximation of actual IRL contact to be nearly fooled by it.
> The crucial point here is that I can’t tell in advance which places, until I decide to go.*
I fail to see how this affects anything about your supposed need for Facebook? I know where most of my old friends live. Whenever know I'm going to visit their city, I send them an email, a text message, or even a hand-written letter on occasion.
For me at least, there is one app that's starting to mitigate #3 (if not specifically "fill" the gap): WhatsApp. Granted, it's also owned by Facebook, so we're almost back at square one, but it's still an interesting case simply because it doesn't fill the gap, but rather works around it. Which gives me a bit more hope that other tools could too.
WhatsApp does two things:
1. Creates a network from your (possibly completely offline) "rolodex" (phone contact list). And augments these contacts with info specific to their ecosystem.
2. Adds discovery. Through groups, I can connect with new contacts. Similar to Facebook's "suggest friend" feature.
My general point here is the an autoupdating rolodex is only required in a closed ecosystem. WhatsApp does do it's level best to close off its ecosystem, but it's a different paradigm to Facebook, and one currently dependent on existing phone numbers, so it ends up a little more open, and for me seems like a nice demo of how hooking into existing networks (people's saved contact lists) can get you pretty far.
Its definitely the latter. Not because there is something inherently bad about staying in touch. It is because you do so despite the knowledge that you are not doing it at zero cost to others who care about their privacy. Analogy: I wish I could just throw all my garbage over into my neighbors premises rather than walk all the way down to the recycle bin. But I don't. I am actually violating their personal space. By using Facebook, you are also violating the privacy of folks who disagree with your view, and this is now open knowledge.
And things don't even out if my neighbors are also doing the same to their neighbors over on the other side (but, but, everyone is on Facebook!). Ultimately, all of us will end up living amidst a pile of stinking garbage, which is an excellent analogy to what is happening with social networks today.
On Leaving Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16640855
It's not just looking at what others broadcast. Facebook keeps track of your likes, your navigation patterns, and let others access that. So not only do they know what your friend broadcast, they know who is watching, when, how frequently.
Finally, there's the social pressure. I have been a victim 2 years back: forced to subscribed to Facebook because my orchestra were using it to communicate loads of important information (I have since deleted that account). By watching your friend's broadcast on Facebook, you contribute to, or at least fail to counter, that social pressure.
That said, I reckon you're probably a victim that social pressure as well. I won't throw the first stone.
Some of them are less technically proficient that rely on whomever their current ISP or employer is for email. Some of them are more technically proficient and use changing email addresses as an Inbox Zero technique or as a nuclear option in spam fighting.
Releasing the cronjob whenever I'm finished making it a chrome extension. I suppose this business is a pretty good inducement towards getting done a bit faster.
It is clearly possible to do without Facebook and the fact that people use the "but how will I stay connected to my friends/how will I know about events" lines so much proves just how good Facebook has gotten at keeping people addicted.
I would encourage you to disable your account and stay off of it for six weeks. I think you'll be surprised at the results.
As usual its the critical mass problem but facebook has done nothing particularly technologically inovative.
Have you considered that maybe there cannot be a facebook replacement that won't suffer the same problems? Deleting facebook isn't a painless thing to do, it requires some sacrifice on your part.
A relatively small group of people saw a problem with Facebook. Of course they have to have some underlying goal to make money. So they set out to create a federated system anyone can host that doesn't depend on some central company that's just out to make a buck. It's a noble goal, but it solves a problem that most users of Facebook simply don't care about. It doesn't do the thing that Facebook does, so it's a non-starter.
I'd also add that Mastodon is more of a Twitter replacement than a Facebook replacement. Facebook is better at isolating your feed into your group of "friends". Mastodon is more of a river of information from folks you follow (many of whom you will never meet in real life.)
If you want to replace Facebook, first figure out what people value about Facebook and expand on that. You'll need to be better than they are (at least until people determine they're that awful.) Then look at how you can federate it or achieving whatever other goal you have.
I noticed this as well, and it's something I've come across in the past when checking out Facebook alternatives. Most seem to only be a replacement on a superficial level.
Most of my family is not very tech-savvy so asking them to use something like Mastodon to see family pictures or whatever is pointless. Even if they did try to use it, all of their other friends and family are on Facebook so asking them to use Mastodon just for me adds one more thing/app to their list that they are probably going to use maybe twice and then just stop.
I really wish there was a good alternative to this but I haven't been able to find anything (yet) :(.
I feel like you used to be able to avoid getting swindled by ignoring the swindler, ex. close the door to the saleman, or ignore the gypsy pear salesmen at the market.
Today, marketing is engineered at such a level that it is difficult to acknowledge it's influence. That, and you are constantly bombarded by ads, either explicitly or implicitly.
I don't think I am saying anything novel. I guess I am curious what this means about society and our political systems. People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?
This isn't meant as a rant. I am curious, because to the best i can tell we don't live in a society where voting matters and we have a say in our governance.
Did you mean pearl?
My point is that you can ignore a salesmen and he can't possibly be THAT good that he can swindle everyone. But modern ads, IMO, are designed for high levels of success. Much more difficult to deal with that on a personal level.
The difference I see is that there is feedback on the ads other than sales and it seems like you could closely tailor ads to specific demographics.
I think this is the risk we pay by reading the Internet? The filtering implicit in things going viral is a mixed bag.
Imagine a billboard, you drive and the content changes because your GPS is close to that billboard and stuff like that - real world changes like that will happen, if not already.
There is also the product placement and as Cambridge Analytica describes entire personas and website being made just to target individuals and change their perception and opinions - this can all be automated at scale with current technology.
Or your Google self-driving car just happens to pick a route past certain billboards and retailers...
It's actually pretty simple. You just don't visit sites with ads that bother you.
Maybe you meant to respond to a different comment thread? You seem to be confused as to the topic of this one.
How can I trust the authority of a news site, when I am also seeing clearly deceptive ads playing right next to their content?
I don't know that you can. I think we live in a great period of time to be a con man.
yeah look at just about any elections in the past few years, not only the usual suspects like the post-soviet bloc...
I'd argue it's still possible to ignore it all, but you need three browser extensions and two mobile apps, a vpn, and probably a few other measures in place to pull it off. I feel like I'm sailing out to war with a well equipped battleship every time I launch my browser.
This is dumb. How did we let technology get so bad? How did we let the web become completely subverted?
Nuclear energy could have been proliferated to move to different energy source, instead it is was weaponized and used as a tool of politics. Cool for those guys i guess.
The same goes for big data. We could have collected data on everyone and mined that shit to gain more insight into all sort of things from medical to societal information that you just can't see in studies. We could have learned so much. But instead some smart guys figured out how to use it to convince you that you need a wi-fi crockpot and gerrymander districts in their favor.
Guns made killing people easier, ok. But you can't kill everyone in the world with one gun. Marketing used to be billboards, now it's in your life. The issue I have is that scale of the whole thing.
I have already deleted my FB account and am encouraging others to do the same.
I have doubts that this happened regularly in the past, usually wealthy/powerful were allowed to be toppled by their enemies. I don't know the details of how Weinstein got toppled after so many years of being protected, but my gut says that the people who were protecting him no longer felt like it was worth it to continue. In revolutions, it's not the people that overthrow the dictator, it's the court/army which allow the people to overthrow the dictator, in order for them to install a new dictator[0].
> How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of?
Become more aware of your vulnerabilities so as to be aware of when you're being exploited. I recommend mindfulness and then making note of when you're being triggered in either a positive or negative way. If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear the result of a thousand battles[1].
> How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?
As these systems become more complex it requires more energy and complexity to maintain the systems, this additional complexity creates a larger attack surface and more internal fragility. Solving these problems requires more energy and complexity, exacerbating the problem and delivering diminishing returns on additional complexity. Systems should to be designed to collapse in a way that minimizes losses of knowledge (especially of why they collapsed) and with mechanisms to recover quickly using the accumulated knowledge to build more robustness into the new system, this would be an anti-fragile system. Centralized, too big to fail, institutions (Facebook, et al) are a major component of fragility in our current systems[2][3][4].
I think you can avoid the marketers and advertisers by learning how they operate, nobody gives away shit for free, so anybody that claims that is either a marketer/advertiser trying to lure you into a bait/switch or is using you as the product (TANSTAAFL). Be flexible and avoid lock-in to any single service/company, always be ready to drop a service when they start acting against your interests or the interests of society as a whole.
[0] CGP Grey, Rules for Rulers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
[1] Sun Tzu, Art of War - https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf
[2] Joseph Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies - http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf
[3] Nassim Taleb, Antifragile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile
[4] JP Crutchfield, The Hidden Fragility of Complex Systems - http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/FOCS.pdf
I know that Tainter has criticized him some for cherry picking in order to support his presuppositions, specifically regarding his Easter Island ideas. I think he talks about it a little bit on this Omega Tau podcast:
http://omegataupodcast.net/184-societal-complexity-and-colla...
It's on my personal list still though, get around to it eventually.
I think that in the past you had to be a very intelligent machiavellian-type dude to stay in power and it was a constant struggle. You probably had to be a very good at reading people and understanding their psyche. But there are only so many such guys and they can only manipulate so many people.
I think technology has given people with power and money the ability to automate influence on a much larger scale for cheap. Not that technology is bad. Technology makes hard problems easier. It can make all those things that a smart person had to constantly work on repeatable and consistent. When i think of data mining the last thing on my mind is product ads. I think gerrymandering. I tip my hat to the evil genius that figured out how to draw districts like that. I bet you could get most of that data from people's facebook. Even without that though, using other data you could get. And even if you dont have any digital data available, you can probably be classified based on a few facts. And......your vote is null now.
What I struggle with is the fact that now influence is global and widespread and I can't for the life of me figure out how that gets reigned in. It's kinda mindblowing.
When high leverage technology is more accessible then it becomes a leveler for the playing field. When it's available only to those who already hold power, then it tips things drastically in whatever direction they wish and typically makes things drastically more uneven (though the Gates Foundation and others do apply their power/tech toward leveling sometimes).
I think this is one of the effects that makes our current society more fragile... bad actors (big and small) can create enormous impacts with minimal resource, and because of the nature of the Second Law, it's far easier to destroy than it is to create.
Just look at this data breach, it took enormous effort (relatively) to create a platform to identify, gather and organize all this personal data, yet look at how easily it slipped into the hands of bad actors. Bad press for FB, less trust in social networks, and who else has access to this data set? A small team who also managed to hack something like 23AndMe or another useful dataset with additional information will be able to create an even more powerful dataset with a laptop and some python scripts. Combine that with more advanced CRISPR technology and I don't even know could be possible, it's the stuff of sci-fi thrillers though.
You're absolutely right to be concerned, but I don't think this can be reigned in. The UN isn't in any position to regulate the global network, and the modern economy/society can't afford to create walled national networks, plus policing them would just be another layer of complexity.
I think the best we can do is get ready. All of this complexity will become a drag on economic growth (which requires constant gains to maintain itself, especially in the face of massive deficit spending), which will continue to lead to societal unrest and political instability... AI and robots will exacerbate the complexity and fragility more than they alleviate it and climate change, with the more volatile weather system, will create increasing opportunities for black swans to create enormous set backs.
It's unfortunate, but Russia and China are going to be in a much better position to take advantage of the increasing uncertainty and chaos than the US and EU (dictators are shitty, but much more efficient in uncertain times). I recommend moving to Australia or New Zealand if you're not looking to get caught up.
> though the Gates Foundation and others do apply their power/tech toward leveling sometimes can you elaborate on this some more?
I like science and technology as much as the next guy and I didn't think I'd say this, but IMO it's contributing to a continually decreasing quality of life. A part of me gets excited with new gadgets, like smartTV and Alexa, and another part of me cringes at it. I kinda get where Ted Kaczynski was coming from when he turned against technology and industry.
> I recommend moving to Australia or New Zealand if you're not looking to get caught up. Why there?
> I like science and technology as much as the next guy and I didn't think I'd say this, but IMO it's contributing to a continually decreasing quality of life.
I get the sentiment, my gut says the same, but in terms of actual progress we're still doing pretty well. I'm in the middle of Pinker's Enlightenment Now and it's hard to argue with his data... however, I do believe he is missing some other effects regarding fragility and complexity that he hasn't addressed (yet).
Every time my phone rings and it's a robot on the other end, pretending to be a human, my world darkens and I also have a brush with Kacynski level thoughts, though.
Australia and New Zealand are just a nice mix of being geographically positioned away from the big flash points of global conflict and having democratically elected governments. NZ also learned a lot about robustness and preparedness from their recent earthquakes.
The class that controls the robots/AI become the de facto enforcement class, a la the army/police/praetorian guard.
If you say that the AI won't be controlled, then I don't have anything left to say on this subject because it's a rabbit hole I've been down too often lately.
You can disconnect while staying connected on your own terms.
Convincing - tried it with just my partner first and smoothed out some rough edges. I then sent a group email to extended family that included a brief justification, some screen shots of it in action, a picture of the actual server, and an offer to create an account for them. Transparency, ease of use, and privacy were all important factors.
Most live far away and have griped about various facets of Facebook but felt like it was a necessary evil. This has been a good alternative for daily communication, discussions about weather and children, and so forth. The closest to game support is sharing crossword solving times with a hashtag.
Does Mastodon have anything similar?
Event Invitations is one of the few uses of FB that I still have. I'm open to alternatives that simplify facilitate threaded discussions between those who were invited, but as with any system convenience is a factor.
Google Calendar does work, yet somehow (and ironically) seems more intrusive than Facebook in that you're communicating directly with emails; the younger the participant, the greater the lack of enthusiasm for emails.
I'm not a data scientist though, so I'd really like to hear why that is/isn't a problem. Basically: assuming one has massive datasets that can be combined, how dangerous can even basic analysis be?
Evaluating something based on its known external traits without discussing the context in which they're used is an incomplete assessment.
Why? History has proven at least a few times that he who controls information can control people, and it never ends well. Even if Facebook is not deliberately trying to implant any ideas or spread misinformation and fake news, its platform can be (and has been, demonstrably) used for this purpose.
Any other social media can be abused in roughly the same way. Twitter has its bot problems, and I'm sure given enough popularity mastodon will face the same issues too.
Now people gladly give up their data for fame/notoriety.
I'd say that's absolutely not true - it's a demonstration that the republic system is broken. He lost the popular vote, yet still won. That's anti-democratic, whilst being pro-republic.
True democracy would still work fine if done pragmatically - have people, when registering to vote, be given a PGP key. Have them send in a cryptographically signed email with their vote - verify that it's from the right person. Maybe package it in a very simple GUI.
Instantly, everything impractical and or wrong about the current "democracy" we have is gone, and actual democracy can start taking place.
I think it is important that our elections use systems that are readily comprehensible to laypeople.
You could make it as simple as downloading an app, going to get you physically registered, having the govt. official input relevant keys into the app, and then:
Type In Your Preferred Candidate Here: [INPUT BOX]
[SEND BUTTON]
With an automatic reply saying "Thank you for voting!" at the end of it.
Paper, managed by trusted humans, really shines in this kind of task. Maybe some of the trusted humans will turn out to be dishonest, but it is much harder to commit large scale fraud and then cover it up.
The reason for crypographically secure voting is to stop any form of election-interference that could happen, because that naturally would be the biggest concern from moving to a digital solution.
Popular vote totals:
62,984,825: Trump 65,853,516: Clinton
Vote weights, per state, due to the electoral college: https://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-t...
Also of course there are things like gerrymandering and voter suppression to consider. Democracy is a pretty complicated mess.
Still democracy in general is exactly "majority rules". In democratic society of 100 people opinion of 51 would be enough to trump and ignore whatever remaining 49 want.
I fear it might all be plaintext, despite the insanity of doing that in the present post-Snowden world, rather than the appropriate end-to-end combined with point-per-point encryption.
Even if both me and my followers do run their own Mastodon servers.
This is terrible indeed. How is this any better than twitter? At least, for private tweets and such, they'd need a court order to get the information from twitter.
Twtxt is minimalist but functional: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt
Unless there's a free / open-source blog system with a decentralized federated SSO system, where everyone can choose to friend up (probably one-way, not two-way) to follow each other's feeds? I suppose like mastodon, but for long-form or free-form writing?
Facebook has this "decisive competitive edge" in that the fact that it is seen as the only alternative is what reinforces it being the only alternative. It's good that these other solutions are free and open source because most commercial competition would dry up and fail.
But for these things that bump along and grow slowly in a sustainable way, they might actually approach an inflection point where things will snowball. At least I hope so!
[1] https://counter.social/about [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist) [3] https://keybase.io/th3j35t3r
No thanks!
Depends on the business model. Wikipedia, for example, is a non-profit.
You can also theoretically have a public benefit corporation that is structured to protect data privacy, but I don't know of any.
The only big PBCs I've ever heard of were hospitals and private colleges. But you are right that the way Mozilla is set up, it is focused more on pushing the technology and mission of the foundation forward rather than on delivering share price increases or dividends to shareholders.
Most people seem to find out about Mastodon from someone, and that someone suggests the instance they're on. That's why a lot of artists end up on Mastodon.art, for example. So far, the admin has a good reputation for being consistent about updates and keeping the community engaged.
People keep trying to find some technological heuristic to establish trust, like requiring legal names or some kind of scoring system. So far, it's even worse because people encode all their cognitive biases into it and none of the mental models or processes people develop for checking those biases.
In this sense, trusting a Mastodon instance with your data is the same as trusting a Bitcoin exchange with your money. Bitcoin is decentralized too, that doesn't make Bitcoin exchanges trustworthy.
It’s like mesh networking.
Maybe they take donations, maybe you run your own instance and pay for the hosting. Not having shareholders that expect profits and growth probably takes a lot of the pressure off, too. All they have to do is not have burdensome costs or break even.
I'm just wondering how they are getting the capital to scale.
The decentralized nature helps the network scale.
And yeah, it's an open source project funded by donations. Plenty of those exist, and if it gets big enough, it'll get more contributors and donations.
Some are also small servers run purely for the hell of it; if you keep the user count low it really doesn’t cost much to keep one running. These instances are of course more vulnerable to their owner being hit by a bus or whatever and not having shared their keys with anyone. Less so once account migration lands, and everyone’s gotten off their butts and upgraded their instances to that version.
(My instance, by example, currently has about 150 accounts, closed registration, and costs about twenty bucks a month to run. It’s also a few versions behind because I’ve been busy with other things.)
Every instance's own business model is often somewhat unique.
My primary instance at this point is on a domain I registered ages ago that I point to a SaaS host that runs and keeps up to date a growing number of small instances. I'm their customer and I expect them to charge me fairly based on my instance usage (CPU, bandwidth, et al) appropriately subsidized by their scale versus if I was booting my own VMs/containers and running it elsewhere.
If the worst happens, I expect I can move my business elsewhere, and given I control my domain itself, I can (use a data backup to bootstrap a new instance somewhere else and just point my domain DNS to the new instance).
There are a variety in business models among instances and the people hosting them.
"You've read over 3 articles this month. Let's make it official. Log in with Facebook or Google."
Facebook and Google have their tentacles in nearly everything. If you want to get a message out, it's going to intersect with their platforms in some way, even if you're directly criticizing them. AFAIK, there are no purist corners at this time that attract enough eyeballs.
Even if it were true that an essay or article couldn't be disseminated effectively without Facebook getting involved at some point, it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing.
IMHO, those comments might as well be "First Post!" for all they add.
> it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing.
The first step to that world is getting people off Facebook so it's not so ubiquitous that making a request like that seems reasonable.
Honest question, do you think the same content with same title with a different domain rather than 'medium.com' could not reach similar popularity on HN?
Any comment pointing out hypocrisy is valuable and interesting in my opinion. I prefer to disregard the opinions of hypocrites.
That's actually a pretty closed minded position. I don't think there's a single person who isn't a hypocrite in some small way, even ascetics living alone in the desert. You'll disregard all of them?
Hypocrisy doesn't logically invalidate anyone's arguments or positions, those need to be evaluated on their own. If they make good points but fail to live up to them, it only demonstrates their own personal moral failings.
But I think it's also a mistake to count "publishing something about deleting Facebook on a website with a Facebook integration" as hypocrisy. Authors usually aren't the ones making implementation decisions of the platforms the publish on, and are probably not even aware of most of them.
> Honest question, do you think the same content with same title with a different domain rather than 'medium.com' could not reach similar popularity on HN?
HN isn't the world.
I think it's a waste of time for an author to make the avoidance of publishing platforms with Facebook integrations a priority. It would be an act of foolish, unpragmatic purism, akin to a lot of the stuff Richard Stallman does. It's more important that they argue persuasively and widely to convince the implementors to avoid such integrations.
If you need to preface a comment with 'IMHO', especially when your HO is just a dressed up and unsubstantiated insult, it's probably an indication that what you're about to say will add zero value to Hacker News.
Dude, you are insufferable. Quit being so pretentious and passive aggressive, and you won't have to nuke your HN account every few months and start fresh.
There you go
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here.
Lacking a very rarefied community capable of self-moderation, like this site has or some specialized reddits and forums, the no-real-name becomes a major drawback. A minority of douche-bags will generate a majority of noise and will come to shape that world in their image.
This is quite visible when browsing Mastodon instances, many of which look like a crossbreed of 4chan with Myspace. Most accounts don't have a real picture. The fact people assumed their real identities, cared about what they said and did, and that you could find real people knowing only their name was one of the key ingredients to the success of early Facebook.
Furthermore, the whole "no data collected" has any value from the perspective of the user only when using real names. Otherwise, I really couldn't care less about data attached to an anonymous account.
What I'm saying is that anonymous accounts will prevent that success in the first place, because of the behavior of non-spam users. At least for a mass market product most regular folk would want to use, like Facebook.
That might be true for you, but I've more than once had to ditch an old nick because over time I'd let slip enough specifics that identifying me would be (theoretically) possible. It's all a matter of degrees, but 'no data collected' is definitely valuable.
I can't use my real name on Facebook because I can't get a legal name change. So I don't use Facebook.