Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet
twitter.com
twitter.com
Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC.
Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass. Facebook was the first platform that actually worked for people. Every subsequent social network took their cues from Facebook, it was a veritable sea change in the state of the Internet.
The problem here isn't Facebook, you'd be having these growing pains with any useful social networking technology platform. It's the unintended consequences of Facebook's universal accessibility. Anybody can use Facebook, and so everybody will. It's the story of technology all over again. Technology is invented, we have a honeymoon phase, then the real marriage begins. We're in the "just had a baby, now we need to get it to a year old so we can all relax" phase.
It'll get better.
As more and more of our seemingly public discourse moves online, we are congregating in very much non-public spaces that have their own motives that are often at odds with the public good.
I know Facebook, Twitter and co. need to make money somehow, that's fine, but there's more to this..
How do we reconcile US-based for-profit corporations becoming the stewards of public discourse for an ever-growing part of the world's population?
However watch-out, things will get better when the baby turns 1, until about 13, then it will get worse... much worse!!!
That said, I disagree with your conclusion. The issues that have come from Facebook and others are due to centralization, commodification of user data, the proliferation of echo chambers and advertising. Universal accessibility isn't the culprit, although that has generated issues on it's own as well.
There were like 20 years in between what you describe and Facebook's dominance.
Before Facebook there were thousands of thriving independent forums on wide varieties of topics. I spent large portions of my teenage years on them and got way more value out of them than I have out of any Facebook group.
Facebook democratized social networking.
At that time I don't recall the social networks being about your local community, friends and family like Facebook is today. It was about people you would never have met - because that's what made the Internet magical at the time. It could easily have morphed into forums of friends and family - not that it would have rivaled Facebook but it could have met the need.
Socially speaking, I think the Internet is much less interesting now than it was 20 years ago.
They solve different problems. Usenet of my youth provided way more value, both social and otherwise, to me than Facebook ever will. However Usenet would never have let me serendipitously reconnect with the good friend from high school I hadn't spoken to for over 10 years.
Facebook has the advantage of being a passive social network. If I stopped posting to Usenet (or twitter) for a month I essentially disappeared. With Facebook I don't have to do anything, people can still just as easily find and contact me if they want to.
To use your marriage analogy, this is a MESSED UP marriage. FB is like a spouse preventing you from even socializing with other people of their own gender if they even are a minor threat (i.e. Insta and Whats App getting bought up). FB is a partner who snoops on all your apps without permission. FB is a partner who manipulates your behavior with ads. What kind of marriage is this? Would you marry someone who has been the subject of numerous scandals?
In my view, FB's small upsides of meeting up with distant friends who I honestly don't care for, that's not even 50% recompense for its downsides for me.
Facebook is a partner who snoops on your Facebook without permission!
- Next, they expanded it, but only to other US schools with .edu domains. That's when I joined, around 2005.
- Finally, they opened it up to the general public everywhere, and by that time they were almost a household name globally.
fb is one of the first social implementation of b.j. fogg's behavior model + and engineered addiction, and the subsequent commoditization of likes and shares
> fb is one of the first social implementation of b.j. fogg's behavior model + and engineered addiction, and the subsequent commoditization of likes and shares
Not rushing into generating revenue helped. Handling scaling up well, compared to its social media competitors, helped.
That was not exactly a Facebook thing really.
Even today, Facebook and Linkedin are the only social networks where you have a decent chance of finding someone by searching their real name. It's very powerful.
Did you just drop off the planet between 1995 - 2005? Poor Myspace... everybody just forgot it ever existed. And AIM... ICQ... MSN... Yahoo... not to mention the endless forums on every single conceivable subject. Nobody I knew in the late 90s and early 2000s wasn't using AIM or some other comparable program. It wasn't hard to keep in touch with people.
Facebook didn't invent social networking. All it did was give people a platform to vomit out their every thought for all their friends to see at once.
Facebook is easy to use and accessible everywhere. This is coming from someone that hasn't had a Facebook account since 2009. GP makes great points and the title to this submission is pure clickbait.
MSN being killed is still so weird to me, I get that The Netherlands is a small country, but they had full 100% market dominance, after MSN got killed I bet some researcher could have seen people in The Netherlands just had a communication dip for a year or two.
But it was insular, normal people didn't care for it. Facebook was the first social network everybody used.
The only platform that 'everbody' kinda fits may is Whatsapp, but then again there is Asia and Line/WeChat.
It was still not at all what Facebook is. I did school works on MSN but there was no history or always on conversations. We scheduled being on MSN to works on something. MSN was the equivalent of a room.
Facebook is the equivalent of a board, you put it there and you let people read it whenever they want, whenever they can. This is game changer. In University, most of the times, we didn't have to schedule time to works on it at the same time, it was and stayed in the Facebook conversation. It was actually quite rare that we were all on it at the same time.
Same goes for events organization. Never ever would I consider doing that on an IM. The difficulty of an events organization is finding time for all people to come together, you can't do that on an IM. Email could do that sure, but it's a clusterfuck, much more slow paced and people are much more prone to ignore them.
So yeah, IM was part of the solution but their ephemeral natures were a huge issue. Yes there were alternative, but they all came down with pretty issues themselves and one of the biggest, is simply that it wasn't used enough by others. I was barely able to convince people to switch from Facebook to Slack for school projects.
I think this is the key that separates Facebook from group emails. Facebook got people into the habit of checking something regularly, so regularly that you could expect that if you post something today, they'll see it within a few days. People never had that habit with email, which is a lot more like mail: you check it when you're waiting for something specific. But you check Facebook when you're bored and want to be entertained with short paragraphs or videos or by participating in gossip.
The messengers were different beasts; in fact, Facebook didn't get instant messaging for quite some time.
Facebook had two things going for it over the other early social networks - the UI was comparatively good, and they platform-ized early. Nowadays folks get angry about "apps that steal your data" but back in that era the apps were the interesting thing. Facebook itself didn't have an event planning system; you relied on third party apps for that.
Facebook also executed well in a way that the other platforms didn't. Friendster just outright failed to scale. But even the other platforms were stuck following the conceptual model of a dating website - they were all about customizing your "page". Zuckerberg gets credit for recognizing the value of a "feed of what your friends are up to" and shifting the core interaction, despite angry protests from entrenched users.
Saying "Facebook didn't invent social networking" is far too dismissive.
At some level, much of the criticism of Facebook (especially DHH) don't even try to put into words what Facebook "breach" they're upset about. Is it Cambridge Analytica? Is it one of the drummed up NYT pieces? If you care about this problem, yelling and waiting for someone to break up Facebook isn't a solution. We need discourse to identity what realistic changes we as a community expect.
Had it stayed merely as a way for people to connect then I don't think they would be seeing nearly the same amount of backlash.
Social networking was NOT an enormous pain in the ass. Everybody had, and still has email - it was the gateway to the internet. Roughly since the beginning of the internet. And all the people that joined. Email got used in almost all of the ways that Facebook did.
In addition to email, there were ways to do "roughly" everything Facebook did with varying levels of difficulty - some roughly unobtainium for the "later billions" of people that Facebook drew - not just email based listservs, but USENET before that, self hostedweb forums starting in the 90's, Craigslist in the commercial space.
The problem IS Facebook (and in a different but related way, Google).
UNlike Craigslist (for example), Facebook is a public company. But it is not accountable to the public, as we've seen over and over again. It's users are a commodity and are not stakeholders in any meaningful way. But - even the shareholders are not. Zuck owns AND controls it almost entirely. And unlike Craig Newmark (who isn't perfect), Zuck appears to have been deeply flawed from the very beginning, and the poison of unearthly money and power have only made it worse.
providers came and went and custom domains for emails were extremely rare... at least in my circles
thats how it was in my circles until ~05-06. everyone kept switching emails and used a different address on each service/forum. until gmail came along. suddenly everyone used their gmail address for everything. and even that got phased out when facebook came along.
Not at all. On the consumer level they were typically associated with your ISP account. So you'd get to be <version-of-your-name>@<isp-net.com>
My parents still have the email they set up with the minuscule local cable company in the early 2000's. That's only the second email they've ever had outside of the dialup provider email they had in the late 90's (when internet finally came to our small town)
It is amazing how lazy at socializing everyone is, how if you aren't on the platform they happen to be using you are an afterthought, if you're a thought at all.
Bear with me here... Was that such a terrible thing? I always dreamed about reconnecting with old friends, and then I did, and many times reality did not live up.
BTW even IRL, knowing my secrets would be more indicative of close family and close friends, a wider circle of people can still be my friend without that level of intimacy.
I don't have any problem with networking or keeping in touch.
Those are artificial excuses to use a tool optimized and abused for faking ones life and lurking on others.
Complete with loud screaming, soiled diapers, puke on the shoulder, and so on.
I was nodding along at this until I read your second paragraph, then had to go back. Apparently you think this was a bad thing?
Losing touch with people is natural. Having to explicitly sever a relationship is awkward. But without a natural pruning function, it's easy to end up with a thousand shallow relationships and not enough deep ones.
People are being hyper-socialized. Its not normal and no doubt causes people increased mental stress.
And chances are you are never going to speak to that person again even if you are friends on facebook.
The only thing that facebook invented is how to increase user engagement by finding loopholes in our psychology and get us addicted to their products.
Facebook did not invent anything other than making this world more chaotic.
It's fine to lose touch with people. Some people are meant to drift away as you move forward in life, you can't have everything all the time. Those people still drift away even with facebook, you just have this illusion that they're still in your life. Often you have to watch their bizarre posts as they get old and go nuts. Or some arbitrary algo hides them from you anyway, and you forget they are even in your friends list. This is just me, but I think I'd rather have the fuzzy memories of some high school friend and the closure; the certainty of knowing that chapter of life is done. If both of us can't be bothered to put forth the minimum required effort to keep in touch, so be it. Is it really of any value to have a purely symbolic attachment to this person forever? Look through your full friends list and contemplate this for a while.
It's not certain yet, but the social cost of facebook could potentially be enormous and damaging. In the end will it really prove worthwhile? Should we put up with the "real marriage" after the honeymoon? If it's a sufficiently rocky marriage--if it's a one-sided and abusive relationship--the rational thing to do is not to hold tight, ignore it and ride it out. The right thing to do is plan for divorce. I think this is yet to be determined, but I'm starting to lean towards the opinion that near-exclusively digital socialization was a mistake.
Not really. Chances are, I knew someone who knew that person and could ask them for the contact information. Before Facebook, how do you think people coordinated class reunions decades after graduation, decades after having spoken with most of the people in their class? Sure, it's easier now, but it wasn't as difficult as you make it out to be.
> Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC.
Again, it really wasn't that hard. You found where the groups you wanted to hang out with were online. It wasn't restricted to mailing lists or IRC. There were forums, etc... And no, you never needed to know a sysadmin to do any of that. That's just silly.
> Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass.
No it wasn't. You talked to people through the channels you had available to you or, even better, in person!
All Facebook, and social media in general, has done is centralize all of that. I'd argue we're now seeing that such centralization isn't a good thing.
You're right that the problem isn't necessarily Facebook's fault, it's how people are using it and we're just not good at using it. However, I counter that Facebook knows this and is taking full advantage of it for their own benefit. They're purposely showing things to people that they know will get them riled up so they will comment and spend more time on the site. That's just unethical.
It will not get better as long as current management and thinking is leading Facebook.
google.com
maps.google.com
youtube.com
wikipedia.org
weather.gov
stackoverflow.com
On the other hand, I've never needed to create accounts for Facebook or LinkedIn. Unlike google/wikipedia/stackoverflow, I think of Facebook as my adversary that's reckless with personal data and harming me. I assume they are developing more unethical uses of personal data but we don't know about them yet because an ex-Facebook employee hasn't publicized them. The questionable ethics starts at the top with Mark Z.
I do think humanity would be served by a "real names" database by an entity we could trust to help us connect with each other. Unfortunately, that valuable info is currently held by an unethical company like Facebook. (My previous comment about this.[0]) They abuse their stewardship of the social graph which is why I adamantly avoid them.
Facebook was a bad actor even before all the revelations about Russian funded political ads to hijack the election.
What data from me does Google steal? I don't have a Google account. I can be anonymous at a Starbucks coffee shop and search google for "Paul Graham" and get back useful results. If they coalesce search queries on my home ip address, that's unavoidable and a tradeoff I knowingly make.
>And as an alternative to YouTube, there are free public libraries with similar DIY books
In the last month, I needed to replace a side mirror of a Lexus car and also disassemble a Moen faucet. No, my library does not have the manuals to show how to do it. But youtube did have the videos uploaded by nice people. Both of those procedures had tricky steps that weren't obvious and Youtube saved me hundreds of dollars in fees from car dealerships and plumbers.
The "Google WiFi"?
> I assume they are developing more unethical uses of personal data
Why not make the same assumption about Google? They could jot down the MAC address of your device, and track you all over the place (not that they need to, since you already use Google maps).
Yes but a wifi MAC address is not my real name. I'd be more concerned if Google bought a telecom company like AT&T/Verizon and linked phones' IMEI/ESN hardware numbers to search queries. The IMEI is absolutely linked to a real identity because it's the billing address of the person paying for the phone.
The MAC address correlation seems more useful for targeted ads rather than abusing personal real names data like Equifax & Facebook.
I've been using DuckDuckGo lately and haven't noticed a drop in search quality.
But I've always maxed out Google privacy settings so maybe I don't know what I'm missing.
The only reason to use Facebook instead of anything else is the amount of people on there, it's not unique and also by far not better than other similar products.
It's hard to say the same about Googles services.
If you visit a country where you don't speak the native language, Google maps will help navigate through the country or city. Even help with public transport. Youtube helps with DIY videos or programming talks. I wouldn't have discovered Khan academy without google. And before you say DuckDuckGo is an alternative, i have DuckDuckGo installed and i prefix my query with "!g" around 90% of the time.
Also the silliness about russian election meddling has got to stop. The "russians" also spent a few thousand on google/youtube too. A few thousand in ad spending isn't going to affect an election where billions are spent.
This seems to be a constant here for some odd reason. Facebook does X hence facebook is evil. Google does the same X hence google is good.
I've never had a facebook account and never will. Never had a linkedin. I don't use google search ( switched to DDG ), though I do use youtube ( but willing to switch whenever a viable alternative shows up.
To me they are all equally bad and equally good. They all provide a service for your data.
Yes, there are stories[0] that say they track more data but the difference is Facebook's track record for abuse. So far, I'm unaware of any harm Google has done with my history of search queries tied to my wifi MAC address (as another poster commented I should worry about).
>Google does the same X hence google is good.
No, I don't buy Google's "don't be evil" slogan.
>To me they are all equally bad and equally good.
I disagree. They are different in severity. I think Facebook in particular has repeatedly demonstrated a track record of unethical behavior. So far, I think the evidence shows Mark Z has a different set of ethics and principles than folks like Larry Page and Tim Cook.
This doesn't mean I give Google a free pass or that I'm not wary of them. So far, my "trade" with using Google's search engine seems fair and I will stop using them when proven otherwise. I can't say the same for Facebook.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-has-more-of-your-personal-d...
Also, what evidence shows that Zuckerberg has different set of ethics and principles than Page or Tim Cook? You make general claims but you haven't provided any concrete examples. As far as I can tell, they are all equally greedy billionaires trying to make as much money as possible. Of the 3, Tim Cook probably has more to answer for considering Apple's long history in china and the use of sweatshops.
The only thing concrete you provided is a a wsj article which supports my argument. So I'm confused why you included that.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=list+of+mark+zuckerberg%27s+apolog...
here, answered that for you.
You mean like the phone book?
They of course don't have unlisted cell phone numbers by default, so it's not of much use these days. Couldn't find myself in Toronto.
This is me trying to read the message: https://tmp.shroom.party/twitter.ogv
I wonder how much better the world would be if Twitter itself posted this video or something like it, every year, once a year. It might be amazing.
Products can have both utility and be a danger. It's possible to criticise something and still understand it's utility but simply feel that the danger is worse.
When the internal combustion engine was criticised as the worst invention of all time, it wasn't because people thought it wasn't useful, it was because it was insanely useful and incredibly bad for the environment.
In fact, there's little need to criticise things that aren't useful as very few people use them.
Sure so long as it's OK to come to a different conclusion. Since utility of these things are basically unquantifiable, an objectively correct answer cannot happen. All I ask is that those closest to the tech and the current anti-big-web-tech narrative recognize that the benefits differ by user group. Too often, it's presented as an obvious fact sans rebuttal that FB is overall a negative.
Someone appearing to speak on my behalf with a position I don't agree with always bugs me too.
What can they do?
Proposed solutions to their various problems:
- Make the timeline less addictive, to prevent people overusing it. Won't work, as soon as facebook loses its relevance another, more addictive site will take its place (reddit, instagram). In any case, they've already tried this.
- Introduce moderation, to prevent abuse of the platform. They're already frantically hiring moderators--they cannot find enough people to moderate the platform. And competitors are emerging in any case (whatsapp and other messaging apps)
- Stop collecting data on people. Not going to happen, since they rely on this for revenue. Asking them to do this is like asking someone to violate their survival instinct. This has to happen from some force external to Facebook. And in any case, people's data is valuable, so saying "stop collecting data" is like saying "don't pick up $100 that you find on the ground."
I guess I'm trying to say that this problem is so much bigger than just Facebook. It's a problem with mankind that will prove to be more and more intractable as time goes on, regardless of who is a player and who is pointing fingers.
This will realign Facebook's interests with the interests of their userbase.
There are paid social networks out there. Nobody uses them.
Edit: Is it also possible to have better moderation by having an upvote downvote system? That seems to be how communities like Reddit and Hackernews scale.
Much more controversially, I think it's a problem in the English speaking world as well. A lot of disinformation could be removed from the platform with human moderators and the will to enforce. But again, even if we wanted to do that, there are big unanswered moral questions.
If he really was serious about hating the free social network / paid for by targeted advertising model, he would have gotten off Twitter. But he has a lot of followers there and it's an effective marketing tool for him.
Edit: Also consider that Twitter doesn't enforce a real-name policy. This means you can often maintain your own anonymity/privacy on Twitter simply by not using your real name.
Any world where a search engine exists, people are going to try to do what ranks best. I would argue the world is better with a search engine (and these side effects) than without one.
If you forced me to choose just one that was the absolute worst, I'd probably choose Google. Google is definitely the "patient zero" or the "Typhoid Mary".
* JavaScript on web pages
* Flash
2. Misguided government regulation
3. Corporate greed
Honorable mention goes to malware.
I expect the same will be the case for BGP hijacking. There'll be some high-profile hack (higher profile than the ones that have already happened) and finally people will get the hint and implement secure BGP like when everybody was in a panic over Heartbleed and Spectre.
I can very easily remove Facebook from my life. Even though I still have an account, I can easily restrict it to only using Messenger for group chats and maybe checking the feed for less than 1 minute every few days (my usage statistics can confirm this).
With Twitter, I am constantly bombarded with people soapboxing their opinions, trying to start arguments, virtue-signalling, trying to force group outrage, witch-hunting... all manner of things. Even news articles have started using Twitter as sources. Its ridiculous.
I can't get away from it, despite not even having a Twitter account.
What stops you from removing Twitter from your life just as easily as Facebook?
- Spam and online ads (same thing really)
- Free platforms monetized by analytics.
On Facebook I want to follow friends, but I can't mute topics, which means I get a ton of crab.
People complain about Twitter because they don't block enough, or because they can't stand the idea that some people out there have different opinions than they do; which will cause them a ton of grief, but if you can't figure out how to use a tool, does that make it a bad tool?
However, with work at it, I think it is possible to leave both the Facebook/Google bubble.
If that is #1, #2 is definitely what Twitter has done to distort the news cycle and cause "social media" storms. Twitter seems to make it much easier for that to happen, and worse, you will never get the full story from Twitter. And the worst part? you don't even have to have a Twitter account to be subject to that.
FB ads don't have 0 utility for consumers. A lot of products just couldn't reach the people who want them without it.
Not to mention that it gets more expensive and less effective every year. And all those 'bugs' where clicks count from the wrong countries and all the other horrible stuff the Facebook adverser forum is filled with.
FB is the only online player with any significant scale in that bottom right quadrant. And that's pretty much the ballgame for putting products in front of specific audiences.
I would argue Facebook is the easiest but I doubt its the most efficient in any way.
Edit:// before anyone thinks locked means I did something unethical. No they locked it because I travelled to different countries and I wasn't able to open it again. After I spend thousands of dollars on ads they didn't help.
Facebook allows you to mark ads as interesting, but unfortunately I can't mark ads as insulting, or just a bad product.
The irony is that I have money and an interest in gadgets, but I don't think I have ever seen an ad for them. Did see an ad for the local bus company though, because they wanted to "reach those 18 or above and living in $COUNTRY", aka marketing can't set up a Facebook campaign.
Then they suggest I get my masters at the university I already had one from, which they know because I put it into my profile...
>What do you think of Facebook-owned products? IG started out like a mobile Flickr in the early days, a place for personal creativity and documentation, but now has become an ad-filled place to peacock, gather likes, and promote. I wonder about the psychological impact on people.
His response:
>Plenty of studies have confirmed that Instagram is having a terrible effect on the psychology of many people. Also, Instagram gave us The Influencer. That's gotta be up there in the top 10 of worst gifts to the world.
TIL that apparently IG used to be a mobile Flickr. But even if that line of thought advanced, would it not have still turned into "an ad-filled place to peacock, gather likes, and promote" personal creativity and documentation?
https://nypost.com/2018/03/03/my-quest-for-instagram-stardom...
I don't understand what value they really provide to the public. They almost exist to inspire envy.
I ended up deleting most of my social media accounts this year, starting with Instagram, the moment I noticed that I keep getting drawn in by a rush of excitement after I uploaded each photo and kept checking for notifications.
A lot of these social media sites require high levels of awareness and self-control to use responsibly, in my opinion. I myself struggle with that.
As for the internet, they've consistently closed off integrations so as to become a closed platform that benefits from the internet but does not give back:
- APIs closed
- Integrations with other services: closed
- Hyperlinks to posts: hard to find for sharing and bookmarking.
They've become the new AOL (the kid on the block that doesn't play with others unless they have a toy he wants to steal from them).
Having said this, the closed platform may end up being a blessing in disguise, making it easier to cut off facebook from habits altogether.
We came to the conclusion that the vast majority of feeds are filled with posts from sites that other like-minded people also have in their feeds. This causes the comments on those posts on your feed to mostly be filled with people whose feelings align with your own.
I think that's dangerous, maybe mainly because the general population doesn't realize this. Everyone, no matter how 'distorted' their views are - feels vindicated in those views.
Every time I feel like removing my Facebook, I just take a few steps back and only use it to stay in touch with family and/or friends that I have moved away from - which soon morphs back into the constant checking for new posts and then reading those comments, which tend to align and solidify my own feelings.
I think the world would be a better place without Facebook - and I also think the world would be worse off in some regards without it. In either event, if Facebook vanished tomorrow, I wouldn't complain.
This is pretty well-trodden territory, cf. 'filter bubbles'.
I used to believe in the original Facebook mission -- connecting the world. I've worked remotely my entire life so I've had the opportunity to work with people all over the world from different cultures and backgrounds. It's given me a great perspective on humanity that I think a lot of people could benefit from, especially the ones that are in small towns (like I was) and don't venture out much beyond their borders in their life. But the internet allowed those connections to take place for me, not Facebook. We don't need Facebook to do any of these things, we just need to embrace the power of the internet.
Facebook brought together a lot of people from very different groups with very different opinions about the world and just slammed them together in an informal way, an awkward way. I have uncles that I find to be abhorrent and I had no interest in connecting to them before Facebook in any way, but Facebook thinks because we have genetic connection, that must mean we want to have a social connection, right? And they push those connections extremely hard.
I hate being "one of those people" but I deactivated my FB account early this month and it will be deleted in early February. I've definitely felt better without it, even though I know I'm missing some things. But if anything, it's encouraged me to be more proactive in reaching out to the people I actually want to keep up-to-date with, either via text message or real life meetings. It has also pushed me to blog more, and I appreciate that it's on a site I control and own, not for Facebook to manipulate and de-prioritize.
All of the fixes, and improvements are simply retuning maneuvers to match the propaganda of the day, I wholeheartedly believe that cuckerborg will go down in history as one of the most despicable thought criminals of this existence.
Facebook's features have had far-reaching effects and it's not that easy to classify them as positive or negative. Getting in touch with people is easier. Thoughtlessly sending things to all your "friends" is probably too easy, but there are also announcements you do want to read.
Now I think that company ( in terms of fb product) should focus how to be still facebook of the first years with innovations.
Because right now my traction to use facebook is just read news or to follow some companies that I like.
FB is a tool. Their mistake was deciding to mix politics into an app people liked for family/friend connections by trying and succeeding to increase monitization/engagement:
The News Feed
(I stopped using FB after the news feed started dominating my engagment in 2016)
Is facebook the worse? It's bad, and there have been many things it's done badly. I would say there are far worse actors on the internet. (I.e. mpaa, agressive marketers etc) People have been screaming from the rooftops during the whole time. Many of the worse-case predictions have come true (considering the info leak/cambridge etc). However they're far from the only one doing that.
They've really brought on the walled garden there. That imo has been the worse. It's no surprise that you're getting all these negative effects when there is no competition. Thankfully they haven't taken the full-on paid censor.
We're lacking in rights about our data and ways to stand up to this.
I'm not quite sure why, but DHH has chosen "antagonizing and negative" as his calling card. It seems to be working out, as he's the go-to guy that has enough street cred to be negative about high-growth VC fueled startups.
I wish WhatsApp IPO’d instead of selling out to FB. Good for consumers. Founders would have made more money too.
* Twitter has always been easier to avoid (more people/groups/places expect you to have a Facebook account if you want to know about stuff)
* real-name policy
* Anything related to payment, due to not selling anything to end users, e.g. the recent story about charges caused by kids https://www.revealnews.org/blog/a-judge-unsealed-a-trove-of-...
On the other hand, Twitter is more public, which brings issues not so much on Facebook.
Now you can perhaps make the case that their effort to monetize was an unethical bait-and-switch. Get people on the service, then keep them engaged via promotion of provocative and unhealthy behaviors, which ultimately fuels an advertising money-printing machine the likes of which we’ve never seen before, save Google.
My runner up is Youtube, now infested with piles of crap, and when finding something decent it's infested with ads. What an innovation! It's now just like cable TV!
But yeah, you definitely have to wear some goggles to see through the noise.
---
My rules for youtube:
* Don't read the comments
* Don't participate in the comments
* Ignore many of the suggestions—they tend toward right-wing extremist and conspiracy theory ramblings
* Stick to music, favoured clips from shows (I do love that I can watch some old Mitchell and Webb Look), DIY/How-Tos, old lectures and interviews (Feynman's are fantastic), and the like.
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Grievances:
* The aforementioned suggestions that I keep up on my extremist ideology lessons and conspiracy theories about Clinton and her child slave moon base on Mars
* I now know what Peppa Pig is, kind of.
Interesting, the suggestions I get are mostly sailing vlogs, featuring scantily clad ladies. I sarcastically wonder why...
I have no idea why I'm getting the kinds of suggestions I am. Thankfully they're an increasing minority as I get more music these days. And Trailer Park Boys haha.
Seriously that guy is big mouth about this and that but instead of contributing something meaningful he is just spewing non sense all the time.