We All Work for Facebook
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Also most social websites were designed on free labor by users like Quora and Reddit (at least the new corporatist reddit)
let's not forget Pinterest, the image aggregator slash image search destroyer
Various companies from AOL to Apple tried this in the 90’s (e.g. eWorld) - it’s the natural tendency for large corporations to corral their users. Arguably the windows attenpt to kill the web, and later mobile app stores are a continuation of this trend.
They all failed in the end, as the open web is more attractive, but there will always be gatekeepers, because most people don’t want to build their own platforms, they just want to read and share their stuff.
Then just let them be upset. Try to explain it to them, but if they don't accept it, then let them be upset. If you back down they will never ever learn it. Never. Not a chance.
My parents are as paranoid as I am (grew up in a US enabled dictatorship) so it was easy to get them to use Signal. If they weren’t so cool, I’d use FB or WhatsApp
But my aunts and uncles and cousins (who, ironically also grew up in this dictatorship) laugh and use Facebook.
That’s cool. I don’t talk to them often. They know I love them. And they know I won’t use FB.
You wouldn't be cutting them off. They'd be cutting you off by refusing to use any of the myriad other communications methods.
These grandpeople had to have been using something else 10 years ago to communicate with their grandkids... and then over these 10 years then simultaneously learned how to use FB, forgot how to use that other technology they'd used their whole life, and also lost the ability to learn how to use any other communication technology?
Not impossible with cognitive deterioration, but probably a lot more rare than this excuse.
If my grandparents were still alive today I'd just tell them that Facebook was controlled by the Democrats and we should use X,Y, or Z instead of effectively donating to Obama's campaign. They'd have deleted the app and gone back to text messages and phone calls by the end of dinner.
This blows my mind. I mean having Whatsapp implies one has a phone which implies one can receive SMS messages or God forbid, a phone call.
I don't understand this... are jobs and the source of peoples social validation not options? I used to derive social validation from drinking and kicking ass in video games, but then I found out you could get it from other places that were more productive, and less physically deteriorating.
If there are really people out there who are wholly dependent on Facebook for their social validation then that is a tragedy akin to finding out that there is an entire population of people who can't metabolize food without a special compound found only in White Castle burgers.
Facebook is a highly imperfect solution for them — but it exists, and there aren’t always better options.
Just like how some parts of the country are food deserts where people actually don’t have access to anything much more nutritious than White Castle.
This actually reminds of the military, which is another service that provides a way for people to escape tragic home or community situations for a new situation where they might find a sense of shared purpose and unity.
Pacifists and others opposed to US militarism would likely also say that anyone participating in the military is perpetuating evils and insist there must be a better way to escape these situations that also aligns with their sense of morality...
Really all these exceptions exist and are absolutely valid (imo) but I'd be curious what percentages we're talking about here... what proportion of people would be dead or worse off (vs alive or better off) today if not for the existence of FB?
For everyone in a who found their sense of community online, how many found contempt and ostracization from a mob 1000x the size of their physical community? How many physical communities (and families) are being divided along lines drawn up by online communities?
The social credit score in China is based on state-sponsored gamification and the latest psychological insights. This takes things to a completely different level.
I stopped using it based on advocacy by others.
You can too.
Let them. In fact, let them continue to escalate all that means.
It is all on a path to greater regulation.
And, once it gets there, I will very gladly point out they got what they deserve.
No.
I'm not going to do nothing while people hit me in the face just because the law might, at some point, give them what they deserve for it.
I'm going to do what I can to make the face-punching stop first.
I don't use these services, and put up as many security barriers against the data collection they engage in as I can, through the use of VPNs, firewalls, avoiding the execution of Javascript, etc. But I can't stop everything.
Even so, I'm going to stop as much as I can. I refuse to just lay down and surrender.
In my view, it all counts. Surround the problem.
Rain isn't very wet: it's only tiny drops
I wouldn’t know what to do with my life if Facebook suddenly disappeared.
/s
I weakened Facebook in my life by reducing my reliance on it, to the point where I stopped using it entirely.
The last thing I'd want is for governments to get involved in choices that I should be making for myself. This one is too easy.
You don't like how they make money(X)? Don't use it. No one is forcing you.
> but if I don't use them I'm at a disadvantage
Then they are useful for you, use them.
I don't use fb, twitter, reddit, etc. I only use Google search, Youtube and Hacker news, and do so voluntarily. I'm happy with the value I get, I take measures to diminish the amount of data they get (use fake names, use VPN, etc.)
Living in a system based on freedom means that if someone succeeds through their own effort, they are entitled to that success. You can't just come and take it away because you don't like that person, or how much money they make.
(X) If your copyrighted content is being used without your permission, there are legal mechanisms to stop it. But I doubt reddit users posting in a humor sub care about their joke being used in a Youtube video.
You say "you can't just come and take it away because you don't like that person". This is not about animosity toward any person or company (or it shouldn't be). We have stopped people or issued government control when people are close to having monopolies over oil, monopolies over power, telecommunications, etc.
You should make a huge stink about this. At a minimum, schools and other public services should always provide a means to interact with them that doesn't involve such things.
This narrative would be compelling if there was a way to stop Facebook from collecting data on me and using it anyways. There is not. Facebook trackers, pixels, and plugins exist on a huge number of popular sites and apps. The legislative gap is that Facebook is allowed to collect data from me even if I explicitly don’t want them to through dark patterns and their myriad partnerships. Not to mention that they may, at any moment, acquire whatever alternative to Facebook’s products I choose to use and drag me in again (see WhatsApp).
Edit: by the way, I’ve been using computers for ~25 years and would describe myself as “extremely online”. If I feel helpless in the face of Facebook’s and Google’s tracking technology I have no idea how the average user must feel.
I'm not arguing for one course of action or another, just saying, technical solutions exist. For example, an alternative to government regulation could be government funding of libre software and tools that block ads, trackers, third-party cookies, etc.
This is an arms race that I’ve watched privacy advocates slowly lose for the last 15 years. Between dom randomization, browser fingerprinting, and the extremely popular reCaptcha Google’s tracking feels especially inescapable by technological means. On phones the situation is often even worse[1] because of a more opaque and restricted OS environment.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.com/these-apps-send-data-facebook-withou...
Again, my point isn't that it's easy, my point is that it's possible, therefore, we have hope of someday making it easy. As a society we haven't even tried yet, only some fringe people donating their time, so perhaps we should support them instead of or in addition to clamoring for regulation.
Truly top-tier malice also puts tracking logic behind a reverse proxy that delivers randomised URLs, so you also cannot filter network requests.
If every shop on your street had a security camera, and all cameras were run by a single company, the fact that you explicitly don’t want to be recorded would be much more about the shops on your street, and much less about the company selling security cameras. (Or, in the case of Facebook, perhaps paying the shopowners to install security cameras?)
I disagree. Saying "don't like it? don't use it" is in a very real sense equivalent to advocating for unethical practices to continue - because that is what past experience shows will happen.
There are countless companies with unethical business practices, with extremely complex, ever changing ownership webs (and looking at the actual people who own the shares makes it even more complex). Figuring out which companies to boycott is much more than a full-time job, and has been shown to rarely work (e.g. there wasn't much of a boycott even in the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Aiding_an...) - the complexity of organizing a boycott for every unethical company is simply too great.
You're excused for this ignorant opinion if you are naive enough to actually believe this is going to work.
I do have some reading material for you though
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/31/facebook-...
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/05/10/15-ways-g...
You will realise that "don't use it" quickly becomes "use elaborate methods to block it wherever possible" and even if you do that, your data is still being misused through third parties who sell it. FB, Google etc. are not simply opt-in websites with obscene privacy policies. They are data dealers and advertising businesses whose reach extends far beyond their own web properties to a large part of the Internet.
If you're unfortunate enough to have used Facebook, the situation gets worse since Facebook's anti-privacy settings are a continuing nightmare and they routinely deceive their users and misuse personal information (for example collecting phone numbers for 2FA and then using them as keys to connect you with advertisers.)
Quitting Facebook does nothing to remove their tracking assets from the web, or to regulate their partnerships with data brokers and advertisers, or to remove the contact lists that they've ingested from people you may have interacted with at some point.
Something can be extremely useful but still too expensive to justify. Facebook, etc. count as "too expensive" in my book.
The production of the shows my kids enjoy goes something like this: Unpaid redditors post original material to amuse their online friends. Unpaid moderators keep the subreddit functioning by cleaning out spam and abuse. Reddit gets a little money from ads posted on the subreddit. Then a YouTube channel called Sorrow TV—apparently a one-man operation run by a 20-something guy—harvests the best posts and creates the video. YouTube, which is part of Google, runs more ads, while collecting valuable data about the viewing patterns of users like my kids. YouTube shares some of the money it makes with SorrowTV, based on a formula that Google controls and can alter at any time.
Except that:
The barriers to entry to breaking-out in the screen writing or acting biz are much higher than it is to upload YouTube videos. Anyone can post to Facebook or Reddit, so why should the pay be higher than more selective and prestigious jobs that have a more rigorous screening processes?
YouTube allows content creators to profit from their work through ad revenue sharing, premium subscriptions, and super-chats.
Facebook allows content creators to post external links to their websites, such as stores.
Reddit moderators, especially for popular subs, have an enormous amount of power and influence, and such postilions are highly sought after. If being a Reddit mod is so bad, why is there so much competition for mod spots? They are not the victims at all. The users are much more likely to be victims by having to adhere to arbitrary rules and censorship imposed by mods.
Someone in Facebook at a high level is a psychopath, or maybe multiple people
What I find interesting, though, is that Facebook feels like an entirely unknown part of the internet for me as a result. A lot of the links and what not on Facebook are like closed doors for me.
The thing that really pisses me off, though, is the way Google has gone downhill. I remember when they launched, in a world of Lycos and Alta Vista, how refreshing it was to have a simple text box for search, that took you to a list of blue links. After awhile, there were clearly-labeled text ads along the right side, which was much better than the flashing banners on other sites. Now, the ads are mixed in with the search results and designed to confuse, and Google boosts its own properties into the carousel on top. I still sometimes use Google, but always vaguely dreading what new clutter or dark pattern they have added to the SERP since my last visit.
In both cases, a once-useful product was A/B-tested to within an inch of its life, maximizing engagement/surveillance while keeping it just bearable enough for not too many users to leave.
The important detail about the story concerning boiling frogs, is that to stop them from jumping out, first of all their brains were removed. Though I am not sure whether in this instance it makes the metaphor more accurate, or less.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/07/guest...
I don't think that's true. The history of Facebook and Zuckerberg really makes it hard to make the case that either of them were ever anything approaching ethical or good.
Adsense isn’t Google’s main revenue or profit source either. That would be AdWords and specifically ads on their own properties.
Most people use facebook to satisfy vices such as outrage addiction, vanity, and jealousy/noseyness.
Even cable news runs an uplifting story every now and then, but for the most part simply magnifies and profits from the worst in society.
As a follow-up question, what are your thoughts on this longitudinal study from 2017[1], which found that "the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being", such that any form of engagement with Facebook was negatively correlated with a wide range of self-reported mental, emotional, and physical health indicators? Does the Facebook PR page you linked contradict that somehow?
Do you think it’s a good strategy to try to undermine somebody’s position by “just asking questions” about why they hold an unpopular opinion on HN? Why not address their position directly rather than just sic a downvote mob on them?
Disclaimer because you’ll undoubtably go through my comment history: I used to work at Facebook.
I have never understood why this is considered to be bad form.
Going through someone's comment history often provides useful context and is often one of the quickest ways to try and find out if they are discussing something in bad faith or not.
Plus it can often just be interesting.
To try and assert that it is impolite for people to read what you have chosen to post on a public forum, purely because it happens to be from a previous discussion, is to attempt to enforce a social stigma on base curiosity.
Luckily it has about as much sway as farting into a thunderstorm, but why try it in the first place?
Nobody would take an author seriously if they tried to insist that people reviewing their new book aren't allowed to read the old ones and I feel the same logic applies here.
It's not even a reasonable accusation; the comments from the user supposedly supporting facebook is actually just three fairly thought out, nuanced comments.
edit - also, where is this downvote mob? Are you saying that the comment in question should have far more ego points than it does? The comment is not greyed out. And if so, how do you know?
I'm not saying that Facebook is Darth Vader. I am saying you're logic is flawed. What you wrote is not a serious discussion.
Regarding Facebook, I enjoy using it, its better than Twitter for less toxicity.
The constant stream of notifications makes it easier. Instructions can be presented as „tips”: upload a new photo, greet new users on your fanpage, reply to this message.
Some users are getting paid in just likes, but an increasing number receives very tangible business opportunities or direct compensation.
This is getting very close to employment territory. But unlike real employment, social media get to set the rules.
There’s no point in talking about Whatsapp as a tiny company charging $1 to a small percent of its user base. No one had any intention of keeping it that way.
I also don’t think billionaires like the founders saying they regret stuff after they’ve become billionaires from Whatsapp’s sale should count as a counter argument. I doubt they’d be fine giving back their billions for a few million a year salary while being worried about what their future will hold.
It is like turning into a penniless bum by spending all your money partying, and then blaming all the party hosts for your predicament and asking them to pay you money for each visit so you can keep partying forever into the future.
Why not stop attending the parties?
Why not a) remove the mobile app and use it only on a desktop/laptop to reduce the amount of time you spend on Facebook b) monitor how much time you spend on FB and slowly cut it down c) pick up the phone and pay a few damn dollars to talk to close friends - in case you don't have a way to call for free d) meet people in real life and put your mobile phone away and actually pay attention to the other person e) spend your time educating everyone you know about the problem of FB addiction f) volunteer for some community service where you actually get to meet your friends and neighbors?
But NO! "I want to bum around on Facebook, I want my minute-by-minute dopamine hit, and I want to distort the issue so no one figures out that my FB addiction is actually my fault in the first place"
If you don't like Facebook, don't use Facebook, try not to run their code, try not to connect to their hosts, and don't send data to their partners. Most importantly, live the life that makes the people around you not want to use Facebook either.
If there's somewhere humans don't do that, sign me up. Not that I'd probably pass the entrance test but my failure would be enlightening.
Face it, humans (you, me, bigshot CEOs) all act primarily based on simple emotional wants and desires, most of the time. I can guarantee you that there are a great deal of CEOs, maybe even some of whom you look up to, that spend too much time on facebook/linkedin/playing golf etc, know it, and yet do nothing about it.
Some people are mentally disabled and can not regulate a desire to use Facebook, but if you tell all the able people that they're incapable of reasoning themselves out of it, they will become less able.
Facebook works on network effects, if people still healthy enough to quit can do so, Facebook becomes inherently less attractive. If you tell people that they are inevitably ruled by their passions, many will just take the faustian bargain and hope somebody swoops in to save them from themselves.
I don't think this is a good strategy, especially if you're not proposing any actual solution (and no, swift legislation is not a practical way to deal with this situation, given how divisive that is).
Generally speaking, being shamed or otherwise punished is counter-effective when it comes to changing something, especially when it comes to addictions of various kinds.
There's a huge difference between on the one hand a friend telling you that you can do it, and offering help and strategies, and on the other hand a shitty internet commenter telling you that you're simply not trying hard enough.
Tough love has its time and place, but usually it mostly benefits the giver of it.
I do all that. The problem is that all that insufficient.
If the like of Facebook, Google, etc., would actually leave me out of things when I don't use their services, I wouldn't care nearly as much about what they do.
Capitalism is ridiculous, yes.
I think Facebook is toxic for some people I know personally. I decided that by posting on Facebook I’m helping create reasons for those people to keep checking Facebook. A while back I deleted everything from my profile except my phone number and email address. In the rare occasions I look at the news feed I never like or interact with posts. I miss the good things about Facebook but it just isn’t worth the cost.
I still do however work for Google because their "solve 10 machine learning challenges or be well tracked" service is integrated by so many fucking idiotic services.
I just call it the Google tax.
I don't, for the most part. If I have to solve a captcha for something, I usually don't use that thing. I will make the occasional exception for captchas that are part of signing up for a service if it's important enough to me, as long as the captcha never appears again.
And this makes it rather interesting to hear complaints about working for exposure or free or what not. Yes, that's a bad deal, but it's really also the same deal you're agreeing to when you heavily use these 'social media' sites and platforms. You're saying you'll provide a ton of content for free on the assumption that just maybe, some of those millions/billions of users will check it out on your own site and help you make money.
And YouTube and other sites with monetisation requirements may actually be worse in some extent. Think about it, YouTube's basically like a bad internship; work for free for a few months, then if you're good enough maybe we'll decide to pay you.
But hey, I guess those millions/billions of users are too tempting for many.
Yes, you all hate Facebook and want Mark Zuckerberg's head on a pole (literally). You also want every single employee to be executed for treason against humanity. HN has really lost any chance of sensible discussions around this.
I have to use google for daily searching, along with gmail, I now migrate my primary email to outlook and my goal is to use google only for searching under anonymous mode, i.e. not all eggs in one basket, to mitigate privacy concerns
[1] http://interconnected.org/home/2012/04/11/instagram_as_an_is...
1) No one would bother creating these free services if they could not draw massive revenue streams out of it. If the returns disappear, it'd all be shut down.
2) If you create content on an online platform, you get paid in emotions you feel, the popularity you might get or the money you get through your own advertising if you are popular. If you contribute the data, you also benefit from a better service which is free.
P.S. I am thinking of building an RSS reader app with the built-in discussions. If it sounds interesting, please fill out a survey https://forms.gle/9V85Eb8PZnBXKaFr6
You may have missed all the free forums on the Internet, financed by hobbyists or a few unobtrusive banner ads. It used to be the norm. Surely most of the development efforts of FB go into maximizing revenue through use(misuse?) of private data, but this is a "free service" nobody asked for.
On the positive side, running your own website or a forum is now easier than ever. I think more people should do it.
No. Windows is not free. Perhaps your interpretation of "these free services" is a bit far from mine. The topic was FB and the services it offers, which, for the majority of users (sans advertisers) isn't overwhelmingly different from other free social networks, which aren't disappearing because they're not making billions in profits.
Oh boy I don’t miss the flash animated pop up ads, but that has less to do with forums vs social media and more to do with how the tech has evolved.
That said fb and google ads are pretty unobtrusive because they exert so many restrictions on businesses. If you’ve ever tried to run ads you’d find user friendly restrictions like “no all caps text” or “limit to text in an image”.
That depends on how you count. "Unobtrusive", maybe, but those ads are intolerably intrusive, because of the tracking.
Between the two, I'd rather have those old "spank the monkey" banners any day of the week. But I also fondly remember a time before even those existed.
In many ways, advertising has really ruined vast swaths of the internet.
This reminds me of a parallel discussion of how much businesses leaders should benefit vs employees, the spectrum ranging from full socialist worker control to naked capitalism.
Maybe a hint lies in the ranges of accepted offers in the ultimatum game
Most, maybe, but certainly not all.
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to this argument is Facebook and the like weren't imposed on my against my will.
"While obviously people use HackerNews, I just don't get it. Had a account and deleted it years ago. What does it add? I see no value in it."
The same reason anyone does anything social. To discuss with friends and others topics of mutual interest, to find out about things that have happened to people and orgsnisations I care about. And sometimes to get validation by publicising things relevant to you personally and seeing the reaction.
Quite why HN seems to have such a collective hatred of Facebook specifically, far above all other organisations running social/content sharing platforms I don't understand. It's worse than /. and MS back in the day.
I cant' speak for anybody but me, but my personal animosity towards these organization is purely because they work so hard to spy on me.
I've spent a lot of time on pseudonymous online communities - slashdot, reddit, hacker news and others - and although there is always interesting discussion, I don't feel anything like the same interest in other posters as I do in say my housemate from 2003-2005.
Don't get me wrong, Facebook-the-company and Facebook-the-algorithmically-generated-feed are fairly vile, but the USP, the network effect is something that has emotional worth to a lot of people.
This place is jacked up. Even hackers don't think right anymore.
The value is in the traffic, not necessarily the content. The traffic is what allows them to sell advertising.
They could have billions of submitted photos, reviews and comments about potholes, but if they failed to get enough daily traffic, the business would fail.
Imagine if web users retrieving each others' content were each visiting different websites controlled by different people (different domain name owners); the traffic would be more evenly distributed. Advertisers would be faced with different choices. They could not all choose to advertise with a small number of disproportionately high traffic websites. One website could not so easily generate billions in revenue from ad sales.
When so many web users all visit the same website, they create a highly valuable entity to advertisers. Why do they all visit the same website? They do so because that is the only source of the content. Exclusivity. "Walled garden."
What if a web user could retrieve those same photos, reviews and comments from many different websites, instead of just one? What if it was the author that mattered and not necessarily the source? What if we reimagined the way content was distributed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking
If users are the ones generating this "content", and they retain ownership, then it stands to reason that if provided with the technical means, they can choose make it available on any website they choose. It is their choice.
Open source operating systems use mirrors to make software available to users from multiple websites. The goal in that case is to distribute traffic more evenly across multiple websites, not to send all users to one controlled by a single owner.
When traffic is distributed across disparate websites it reduces the likelihood that web advertisers will fund the creation of monopolistic web-based companies like the ones that are causing so many unnecessary problems today.
Is there a technical barrier that prevents user-generated content from being mirrored at many different sites, with servers located around the globe? Perhaps it already is? Is there a technical requirement that all these sites be controlled by the same entity?
The disproportionate traffic to a single domain name is what allows one owner to monopolise and generate disproportionate wealth. What if we could distribute the traffic to other owners? After all, it is the user's content. Whether it is exclusively available from one website or available from multiple mirrors should be the user's decision.
Of course the author here may see no problems with the existence of these monopolies. Maybe all he really wants is a piece of the enormous ad revenue. He wants a multi billion dollar enterprise to pay him. Absent a lawsuit, what are the chances of that? Websites will not pay for content. Howeverthey will pay for traffic.
YouTube is a money losing enterprise. Or at least not profitable one. So going that far is probably too much.
The Adsense argument is better but that’s for stuff not on Google’s properties. It might be a good idea for Facebook to do revenue sharing. But they’re a public company now. They can’t do something too big. They need their profits. Just like Google.