Roger McNamee says the 'like' button was 'beginning of the end'
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Facebook didn't have to build a surveillance machine, it didn't have to extract every possible penny out of it's user's data, Facebook didn't have to stop being "cuddly"...until it raised money at an outrageous valuation and had an outrageous IPO.
Blaming the Like button for actions necessitated by Facebook selling out their users for a higher valuation/money seems a bit rich coming from one of the investors.
1. the reciprocity effect started (photo-tagging) and then;
2. social validation started (the like button)
And Facebook's privacy issues and general sociopathic business attitudes predated all of it.
I don't think the like button is to blame as such, it's just an indicator of where the purpose of the company started to move in the direction of mining its users for profit.
What do you think that does to behavior and thinking?
No effect?
Lots of companies go public without developing a psychopathic culture. As Tim Cook has said, supposed conflicts between privacy-versus-profits or privacy-versus-innovation are false choices [1].
These are strategic choices Zuckerberg made and which his employees fell into step to execute. They are strategic choices investors profit from and voters tolerate. Each of these constituencies could, relatively unilaterally, knee-cap Facebook.
McNamee is making good points. This is a classic case of ad hominum.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/7fafec06-1ea2-11e9-b126-46fc3ad87...
Tom Cook is picturing Apple as a privacy guard, while they deploy icloud servers in China. Take with a grain of salt everything that's said by people who want to sell you things.
That's literally a requirement of the Chinese government for anyone offering web services in China. What exactly would you suggest they do as an alternative?
So Apple just shouldn’t do business anywhere then?
Actually it pretty much did, in order to attain the revenue goals it was after.
Which has been its core flaw since the very beginning.
I'm mostly at peace with net scores on my replies, though I feel a bit confused when the scores down without explanation. I think it is healthy to some extent to seek validation, but in order for it to be productive, I think we ought to know why people feel the way they do about what we say.
"+1 funny" "-1 Reeee"
stuff, and that'd just add noise to the thread, but not add to the discussion.
Why not just remove the vote altogether? So commenters have to say something about why they agree/disagree/feel the need to comment.
And then maybe allow interest groups to form naturally. With a standardised protocol for exchanging messages, so there was no centralised owner of all data. And everyone pays for it implicitly through their ISP fees, like they do for other basic services like email or DNS. Instead of having their data milked, processed and fed back like some grotesque combination of Orwellian fiction and mad cow disease.
That sounds like a much more civilised way to Use the Net. Maybe we could call it something like, I dunno, Usenet....?
I'd probably participate in some discussions if I couldn't see and wasn't involved in the likes, up/downvotes, brownie point scramble. If I just saw similarly inclined people there would be a different kind of discussion.
A downvote takes the place of tiresome rebuttals to tedious arguments. If somebody posts "vaccines do cause autism" in a discussion about health care costs, I can just downvote and move on. Without downvotes, people are tempted to make the diversion worse by posting retorts ranging from "go away, troll" to several paragraphs of carefully cited rebuttal. Or if everyone manages to refrain from Feeding the Troll, then the bad comment appears to be just as worthy as every other comment that wasn't rebutted.
From what I've seen of relatives who get sucked into lengthy arguments on Facebook, they can't break away because there is no downvote, and letting bad arguments sit otherwise-unchallenged looks like a (weak) endorsement from other participants.
If there are only 5 participants in a thread though it is different. Traditional forums would be read like this, but were almost always at a much lower scale.
Yes, and at too large scales communication becomes less meaningful, you can't scale it to millions of people without getting something else. Even in large cities or at giant festivals, people tend to mingle in smaller groups, there's just more of those groups the larger the city or festival is, it's not like people stand around in ever larger circles, shouting louder and louder. Groups that get too big break up into smaller ones naturally because they start to noticeably suck.
The problem is people have substituted their own critical thinking for a metric of varying quality (upvotes)
I don't think zero feedback is a good goal. Even with voting, forums exhibit a level of trolling and asshattery you'd never find if you had to watch people's live reactions to your statements. And not that much grandstanding, compared to, say, politicians in the media.
That said, should HN add an option in your profile to hide comment scores? You could always get around it with some effort, but maybe not seeing the score right there would encourage you to comment for truth, beauty, and posterity, rather than upvotes.
That's the problem IMO, it's not just mild, it's nothing, yet weight is attached to it. In the real world, when you make a good argument and someone just rolls their eyes disapprovingly and grunts, you can go "What? What's your problem with what I just said?", and they can't possibly just pretend they're not there or didn't roll their eyes -- like people who downvote without reply often do, which gives them the false impression of having said something.
When we don't like something, yet can't find any solid argument against it, that should do something with us, maybe teach us something, and votes are like the most optimized form of memes and other ways to not have to actually think, distilling it to the minimal essence, just a click. I'm not saying nobody thinks when voting, but the only requirement is an account and an input device, not actually thinking. Not so for "using one's words".
It's amazing what original thought can do for a person. That little button has more power than most people think.
Reddit and Facebook and Twitter are chalk full of people ready to have a low quality debate, but there are some rare instances where you'll get some genuine insight from interlocutors.
HN seems to be a good source, but in general on any given subject it's very difficult to find a good faith, intellectually honest, substance-based disagreement on the Internet.
As you say, it seems better for one's IQ and eIQ to lose Reddit and Facebook and Twitter, but it'd still be nice to have a place to sanity-check new ideas.
But, I did have a tendency to get into arguments on forums of other sites, including YouTube of all places. Most were news/political sites, though. I stopped commenting on any sites other than this one for many of the same reasons. It's just not worth it and is a giant time suck to comment elsewhere. I absolutely love not seeing asinine responses to my comments where I get enraged and then feel obligated to respond to counter that idiocy. I hated that feeling but was obsessed with proving myself. I do not miss that at all whatsoever.
Keep in mind, that you're posting that on a different social network (with different rules, but still - social network), that also has exactly the same system, with upvoting.
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; next
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; then
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been months since I've cared to log into Facebook. Feels more like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox, now, than anything compelling.)
Glad you finally kicked the habit, though, and are more productive because of it.
It's reasonable to characterize the American population as being debilitatingly addicted to social media. (Rome's leaden pipes come to mind.)
Anything that is measured will influence behaviors.
It was when original content got pushed aside to non-stop sharing and re-sharing of memes and propaganda.
"I want to show you this, with no expectation of a return." would make Instagram a lot more interesting and less fake.
It's okay for people to enjoy Instagram. It's okay for people to not enjoy Instagram. It's okay to make one of your hobbies getting Instagram famous. Trying to put some value judgement on why one is _better_, and going out of your way to justify your own is a waste of time.
Not depending on Instagram's algorithms and the opinions of its marketing department and your followers is _better_, for everyone. Dependency in general is rarely a good thing.
Judging is a different issue. But not giving a shit about what other people think usually goes hand in hand with not giving a shit about what they do either.
Some people want to release products and not pay for advertising, some people want to watch football.
What would your ideal version of a social network be? From comments here, it seems so far:
->no selling users out
->no likes/dislikes (but then how do you filter out bad content?)
->no sharing 3rd party content?
Edited: formatting
EDIT: HN filtered out my emoji :S
Like: 1. See no likes. 2. Filter out comments that are deeply nested quotes. 3. Filter out specific people on a specific subject that I don't need to read again. 4. Switch off all adverts. 5. Never see a public post. 6...
The issue isn't decentralization or issues like upvoting.
The issue is one of economics.
As long as we don't address the core fundamental flaw with capitalism - that capital flows towards central actors, we will never have a decentralized and fair communications structure.
What's sad is that I think it might actually be impossible without major efforts to understand the problem.
It just happens naturally and without some sort of aggressive taxation policy it's just going to keep happening over and over again.
Not so sure what the difference is with Twitter, but maybe it's one of granularity. There are no boundaries there, so people have to police things themselves with block lists, or appeal to Twitter itself to get people banned. It's also clearly ripe for exploitation by sociopaths.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI
(What of HN? HN is moderated.)