Users protest over 'creepy' Facebook update (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Users protest over 'creepy' Facebook update (2006)

theregister.co.uk

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One part of this still infuriates me and restricts my behavior on the platform (which I barely interact with anymore): showing my friends what I click like on if it's a public post. I've had politically-impassioned relatives attack me for liking candidates they don't like or if I comment on a public post and Facebook points my comment out to them.

It also works the other way too. I really didn't need to know that my friend's septuagenarian father liked a video titled, "Booty-Jiggling Showdown."

So there are aspects of this we've come to accept, but I think most people have also modified their interactions with platforms like this to protect themselves.

My word, I remember years back when I didn't realise that this was a thing, and it took my mate showing me his feed filled with me liking a whole load of random sexy filth pages. I remember commenting wondering if my mum could see all the shit I'd liked, to which she responded "yep.". Absolutely mortified mate.

That is exactly why I ended up leaving Twitter. As soon as Twitter started showing me everything my friend marked with a “like” (Favourite? Star?), I started seeing explicit examples of my friends’ kinks.

Rule 1 of social networks: use a different account for NSFW content.

.. which doesn't help unless you tell all your friends to do that as well, and unfollow those that don't.

(I've managed to kill the bringing of other's likes into my feed somehow, which keeps it usable)

Who did you think the likes were being shown to?

The poster. It used to be that shares/retweets were used to put a post on your friends feed and likes were used to express support/appreciation to the poster/creator.

Twitter always had the problem where faves (now likes) were public but people didn't always realize – they were used as a combo of bookmarks and upvotes. But even then, there was a difference between having your likes viewable on your profile and when they started randomly showing your likes on followers' feeds.

For a long time you could see a friends like history on Instagram.

When you told friends that, a fair number of them would look like, “oh fuck.”

Thats exactly the problem with Facebook - no firewalls between the various personas of an individual.

I'd say that's not really the problem with Facebook (well it is but bear with me): long ago, at the end of the 90's, it was highly recommended to use pseudonyms on the Internet because `you never know who's who` and well.. it was right and we didn't know what the Internet could really do.

When Facebook/Gmail happened and people were nudged to use their real names... because we need `real` connections. Well, that didn't tipped enough of us. Facebook was the tinder of the day, right ?

But then the whole privacy thing came back to bite us hard (and will bite harder in the coming years).

So we are back to using pseudonyms (which according to my friend's 11yo daughter's guide to the Internet everyone should use anyway) as the default. Except for professional things. We need a professional Internet presence, hello LinkedIn and $name $familyname + 'pro' Facebook account.

Now there was an argument that with everything in the open then people would get more tolerant about other's mischievings and out-of-the-accepted-norm behavior. Big nope as a whole it turned out.

Anyway, youth of today have figured it out years ago and just have multiple personas with different accounts.

With different accounts, not with different circles or different sharing settings. And of course with silly names.

Like you said Facebook isn't designed around the various personas of an individual but increasingly during the last decade the whole Internet community makers (software builders and evangelists and users) were misled on the `true identity` thing and we are only slowly assessing the damage and recovering.

What I mean to say is: everyone was on board with not having various personas. Latest large scale attempt to overcome this failed hard (Google's circles) because people don't want to micro-manage their online Rolodex and it turns out you can't trust Google to respect that firewall anyway (see the cases about people being outed as transgenders).

Only pseudonyms and different accounts can alleviate that and it's going to happen more because most of people will get back to that mindset.

I've considered taking pseudonymity one step further by moving it into the real world, and having one name for legal documents and another (or two) for personal use (think Earthsea rules). Seems to work for a few hackers I know, and the best part is that it doesn't require any legal name change rigamarole, since nobody can stop you from just start calling yourself whatever you want whenever you want.

For me anyway, it was quite surprisingly freeing to realize that there's no reason that the name on my birth certificate has to have anything to do with the name I choose to present to people.

Huh, I guess I already do this in a small way: I'm "Dan" socially and "Daniel" for anything that requires my signature. I don't think I'd be brave enough to take it further though. Most systems/companies/govt agencies are flexible enough that it doesn't matter if I put the wrong one down, but making a mistake with two completely different names could be problematic.

Yes, when providing your name to an entity it takes manual consideration to decide whether or not that entity has any good reason to try to associate you with the name the government knows you by (your legal name). I'd give my legal name when setting up a bank account, but not when setting up a Facebook or Twitter account (who might ask for legal ID, but then I don't need those accounts anyway).

I always took at least part of Zuck's infamous "dumb fucks" comment to be prompted by people violating what were such basic rules of social Internet behavior at the time: do not post real, identifiable shit about yourself, do not use your real name, and so on. They were "dumb fucks" because they were, and were acting like, such Internet n00bs.

Now that stuff's normal, in large part thanks to Facebook, and it causes all kinds of problems.

Completely agree. My persona at work and at university are two separate things. My persona when I come home and interact with my kids is different to my persona when I'm arguing with a colleague about database schematics. My political views are relevant with my friends but could cause problems with my employer. In reality we have many hats but Facebook restricts us to one and lets all our friends and family know our every interaction, too, promoting a false sense of ourselves. Zuckerberg said, in the OP's article, that (to paraphrase), it's only friends and family that know what you like/what you've been doing. Do you ring your nan every time you take a dump? Or text your brother when you're feeling horny? No. Facebook is blind to the individual facets of our characters.

The technical name for this is "context collapse", and it's not just Facebook, but social media more generally.

https://indieweb.org/context_collapse http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/12/08/coining... https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/01/10/context-c...

I block anyone on FB that cause any real life drama because of what they see.

I’ve even blocked my own mom for lecturing me about the silly memes that I post.

If someone attacks you for having political views different from his, then that seems like a problem with him, and not with Facebook.

Same here, Facebook's belief that maximising public interaction would be good for their product is basically killing it for me. It's not even just controversial content like politics or nsfw stuff, it begins with banalities like I know that various loved ones would be annoyed if I filled their timelines with geekery over a hobby they don't share or internet banter like this.

I'm not particularly pro or anti Facebook, but my engagement with the platform is severely curtailed by the need for self-censoring due to their public first mentality. Essentially I learned to treat everything with that tiny globe symbol as read-only (and every closed audience potentially public, but that's a different story, more about self-preservation than about courtesy).

> showing my friends what I click like on if it's a public post

Why did you publicly like a post if you didn’t want people to see that?

The idea of a like feature on a platform that's supposed to be for you, your friends and family is kind of fucked in general. Likes, contrarily enough, encourage you to not give a fuck. Why bother responding to your friends or family when you can just click like, give them acknowledgment and move on to the next thing. It's bad enough on random internet forums, but if it's your friends and family you should put the effort in to actually respond to something if you actually care, otherwise don't. I think the discourse and posts on Facebook would be radically different without the like feature.

Yes, yes, yes! This has been bothering me lately, I see a friends picture on Instagram, tap twice, move on. This means, at best, that I acknowledge seeing that photo but it tricks my mind into thinking I did "something" better than that.

I myself don't even check the likes I receive so I suppose some people out there don't too, that reinforces my feelings towards liking stuff being shallow substitutes of real interactions. I will make a point of writing a comment now, if I can't come up with something then I guess I don't really care and there is nothing to like about it.

I noticed yesterday that I've stopped clicking the like button on anything that I don't want to be broadcast to other people, on any platform. It's no longer about what I like, it's about what I like that is also palatable to my friends, family, coworkers, and any future employers.

Does anyone remember that FB feature when you were able to cross search people? "Men between 20 and 30 who likes football and lives in NYC"

It was available for a few months, I don't remember exactly. That was around 2011-12. That was the craziest thing I've ever seen

It was available from March 2013 to June 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Graph_Search

They dramatically reduced it after a few months however.

To see how creepy and invasive this was, see the 'Actual Facebook Graph Searches' that Tom Scott compiled: https://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/

I don't recall that I did this, but I remember a very smart ER doctor I used to work with running some basic statistics against Facebook in 2006-2008 which identified singles by gender and age categories.

The year may be wrong, but based on what I was studying at the time, and my relationship status, that's probably the timeframe.

You can target these users with Facebook's advertisement settings if you're buying ads from them

I was very sad when they removed it. Current Facebook user search is gimped and simply disappointing. So bad that for some time I wondered if I was part of the bad group of an A/B test.

It was also very good when you could look up people by email or telephone.

"Calm. down. breathe. We hear you," site founder Zuckerberg wrote in a message responding to the protests.

They heard, they just didn't care. Condescending as well.

That's infuriating.

This was probably the beginning of the end of Facebook, at least for me. I started interacting with Facebook much less and started to forget about it, because I didn't want everybody to see how addicted I was to Facebook. The same happened with Instagram when everybody was able to see what I was liking. This is turned off now, but the damage was already done, I became too paranoid to get addicted to social media again. I'm clean now for almost 2 years, thank you.

Haha, Zuck telling everyone to calm down and breathe. How 2006 of him.

There’s a recent WIRED article [0] where this is discussed in some depth. I wasn’t a Facebook user at the time, but it’s interesting how everyone was against this and then ... wasn’t. Facebook called their users’ bluff and won. This really was the beginning of Facebook’s culture of doing whatever the hell they want and weathering the storm when users push back, because most of the time, users will come to accept it, even come to love it. I can’t imagine Facebook without a timeline anymore, and I kind of hate that.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-lost-no...

The introduction of new features on social network site Facebook has sparked a backlash from users. Design changes to the site violate user privacy and ought to be scrapped, according to disgruntled users who have launched a series of impromptu protests. One protest site is calling for users to boycott Facebook on 13 September in opposition against a feature called News Feed, which critics argue is a Godsend for stalkers.

I remember when the "News Feed" came out. Everyone (including myself) was outraged and demanded the Old Facebook be restored. There were petition groups "5 million likes and they'll bring back the old Facebook!!"... but it didn't matter and people got used to it.

You can imagine the same outrage if they changed Hacker News over night...

I am not 100% sure that people got over it. Facebook lost me over changes to their feed:

1. Linear to non-linear

2. You need to pay to reach all your subscribers.

3. News, ads, noise in general.

I think is very common for free apps to reduce the user experience quality after they reach a certain size. Quora lost me in a similar way.

Would have been more interesting to link to complaints about the Friends API.

Check out this post for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9454734

Reply on news.ycombinator.com