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Comment by philk | Hacker News Reader

It's not that TechCrunch comments were great, it's just the way that Facebook seems to produce really stilted and artificial interaction:

a) Half the comments in my news feed are dull trivia. ("I just ate a ham sandwich").

b) The other half are thinly veiled bragging ("I just ate a ham sandwich in Paris")

c) Weirdly, even friends who are funny in real life tend to be afflicted by the same condition.

Now, it could just be my selection of friends but I think it's actually people self censoring.

Finally, the idea of my posting on an internet site following me around until the end of time is revolting. I don't say anything particularly out there on HN, but if they switched to Facebook comments, I'd leave.

Edit: Looks like you've responded to my previous iteration of this post. Sorry to reword it all on you :)

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At least we're on the same page about TechCrunch comments. :)

Edit: Snipped what I wrote in response to your previous iteration. No problemo.

>Now, it could just be my selection of friends but I think it's actually people self censoring.

I think that's what it is. Everyone has a reason for censoring themselves on FB. I think it's the mix of people we have on there. People in the tech community, real life friends, family, etc. Either you can or cannot get past it -- many people stick to censoring what they write. I gave up on it to an extent. I'll troll my brothers or post a YouTube video but I don't post angry statuses about someone or get all crazy on there.

>Finally, the idea of my posting on an internet site following me around until the end of time is revolting. I don't say anything particularly out there on HN, but if they switched to Facebook comments, I'd leave.

There is a similar comment on this thread that expresses this. It's understandable. I have things on the Web going back to when I was 16. I can't wait until those archives are dug up. I do enough things now that I attach my real identity to that I just had to start thinking about what I really want to say before I say it. There isn't any trolling, though I can still be brash and opinionated at times. My answer to it all was to clean up how I act. If in the future I was really dumb about something I said then at least I was sincere when I said it.

"were the ones who either had a different real account where they let loose"

Not that I would recommend this in the PR 2.0 age, BTW.

Sorry, I rewrote what I said in response to the OP's rewrite, but to anyone interested the context was:

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>The strange thing is that it even afflicts friends who are really funny in person.

That's something I used to struggle with when I was forming my friends list in the beginning. It was a mix between bloggers and other people in the tech community and my IRL friends. For awhile there I was really boring. Then I realized the people being boring were the ones who either had a different real account where they let loose or they really just want to keep the show up. Most normal people aren't all business on Facebook.

I really think there is a HUGE gaping hole for a competitor to step in and really hurt Facebook. If someone brought out something that had sane support for what Facebook calls 'lists', they'd kill it. The biggest problem with facebook is that using lists is really difficult. You can set a default that's really narrow or you can set a default that's really broad. Restricting status updates is really error prone as they provide very little feedback about what you're doing.

If someone built sane grouping with a nice UI to support and built that out as part of a larger privacy play....I think they could go a long ways.

Frid.ge is trying to do something along these lines.

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