New Facebook Feature Empowers the Dangerous "Comment Nazis"
lauren.vortex.com
lauren.vortex.com
It's not a lack of integrity - what people say and how people act is always based on the context it's in. There are things you'd say to your friends that you wouldn't say to your family or even other friends. It's always been this way, and it's pretty arrogant for Mark and, consequently, Facebook to assume otherwise.
This has actually pretty much pushed me off Facebook, as the only stuff I post is what falls in the relatively small subset of stuff I'd tell to my family, coworkers, boss, friends, and people that I know online.
I manage different identities online, depending on what I've got invested in the community. Some places, I'm the voice of reason, such as it is. Some places, I'm anonymous, because there are not entirely sane people and its a local forum, and people could know where I live. It's not dishonest, it's real. I do try to avoid having multiple personalities in one community though, since that's just rude.
So, I'm not using facebook's facet flattening system.
People should, in an ideal world, behave with integrity. But it's not an ideal world. My boss shouldn't care what I'm doing in my own time, but he might. The military shouldn't care if a potential recruit once tried pot at a college party, but they might. No employer should care about sexual orientation, but they probably do.
It's not about integrity. It's about living in a hypercritically judgemental society.
Choosing to remain slightly anonymous is one way to maintain your integrity. It's better than treating every statement like a PR release. Like Mark does, if he has the integrity to say everything using his own name, like he tells us to.
any proof?
>Choosing to remain slightly anonymous is one way to maintain your integrity.
or just my personal choice to utilize such a freedom. The freedom to have multiple personalities. Internet provides the ability to have such virtual personalities, the ability the real world clearly lacks.
I don't think FB is making itself a good app when it's actively trying to make itself the bottom of a social circle. Not the foundation of a social circle, but the scum sucking parasite that's only in your social circle because it just happens to be in everyone else's too.
You state a lot of things that people shouldn't do. Isn't it kinda sad that the one thing we shouldn't be doing, being ourselves, isn't on that list? That's what this discussion is essentially about. Freedom to think what we want, be who we are?
Maybe the goal shouldn't be to hide from everyone, but to expose everyone for who we all really are? Maybe if everyone realizes how messed up everyone really is, we'll stop being so judgemental? So maybe the best way to do that is have a single identity, a single being. Sure, how you act might be different between different social groups, but that doesn't change who you are.
Maybe this is an idealist outlook, but isn't it an ideal we should be working for, not hiding from?
> Often people are discouraged to talk their mind until they feel that enough people thinks the same way.
This is the case because people are so judgemental. As I posted in my original comment, eliminating the judgemental attitude of the majority of people would help with this.
Current revolutions or cannabis are counter-examples.
I'd also suggest to think about the asymmetry of responses. You might express your opinions in public, but someone could choose to anonymously not to hire you because of them.
Regardless of how sincere and honest those conversations may be?
If not, then this idea that "the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know" is very much not over.
The fact is, people have private interactions with other people all the time and they expect it to be private and society accepts that it's perfectly alright and natural for this to happen.
When I'm with someone else and they get a call from someone close to them, I excuse myself from the conversation in some way. That's just the polite thing to do.
This idea that all this is coming to an end is just wishful fantasy on the part of the owner of a site who's existence and popularity probably depends on this being true.
The argument is valid, but doesn't apply in this case.
> Would you want every conversation you have with your spouse/child/parent to be available to every single other person you know?
No, of course not. However, this is forcing private stuff public. Nothing is being forced here. Certain sites will require you to log in with your Facebook identity. You choose to interact with them in this manner, or you choose not to. If you comment in Facebook comments, you are doing so in a public forum.
> The fact is, people have private interactions with other people all the time and they expect it to be private and society accepts that it's perfectly alright and natural for this to happen.
This doesn't change anything. The proposal isn't to share your private life. Simply to make public comments just that, public. If you want things to remain private, keep them private.
Basically, you're arguing for something that isn't a problem.
This incorporation by Facebook, to my understanding, is just a way of legitimizing these mediums of communication. It will help keep spammers at bay and maybe discourage people from reviewing a product as "a stupid piece of shit" and instead contribute something of value.
I agree that the vision of Facebook becoming a worldwide identity database is unsettling, but this particular development makes some sense. Remember that not ALL conversations need to occur online and we can still use the phone or even gasp speak face to face. On what grounds should a person posting to a public space not be held accountable for what they are saying? Besides, in this case the only comments your boss would gain access to are ones like "The Toast-Matic is a fantastic toaster, and I like it for the following reasons: blah blah...". If my boss really wants to waste time sorting through that crap, party on.
On the other hand, I agree with the sentiment that comments should have a public identifiable handle attached to it for the reasons you've said.
I've printed it out and posted it on my desktop monitor with a trollface picture next to it.
You learn very quickly when you or someone else gets hell rained down upon them from a boss who decides they did or said something inappropriate - no matter what the context or meaning was. I know I've seen people get fired, or come close to it, for saying something that I never before would have given a second thought to, but I definitely did after that.
So when it comes down to it, there is no way I'm going to risk my professional career by letting my Facebook identity be my public persona. Hell, I even have a rule against having family members friend me on Facebook.
It's not about being a different person in each setting, it's about being able to act appropriately in each setting. --Being someone who is viewed as a dependable, professional expert at work, being able to have a serious discussion with my father about my mother's Alzheimer's at home, or being able to relax and let out my inner child a bit with friends. These are all parts of me, but there's a time and place for everything. Zuckerberg doesn't understand that.
Think about your own rules that you posted about. How is Facebook going to successfully deal with them? What happens when you decide that some friends get to see the "inner child" and some don't? There are probably ways to accomodate these things, but they are complicated, and 80% of the hundreds of millions of users will screw it up and blame Facebook.
So Facebook deals with it by pushing it down to you and making your problems your problem. Don't want your boss to see the pictures of you doing body shots on Spring Break? Don't want your parents to know your sexual orientation? Fine -- don't post it on Facebook, or don't invite people to read it.
It's not that Facebook doesn't get it -- they just choose not to get involved.
In Appleseed, you create an "inner child" friends circle, and post it only to them. Nobody else would know that friends circle even exists.
It's a challenge, from a UI/UX perspective, but if I could fix it in a way that is generally intuitive, with barely any funds, working in my spare time, then surely Facebook, with all it's engineers and funding can do the same.
Which is part of why I use Dreamwidth. Under a pseudonym, of course. :-)
They're smart enough never to post anything on Facebook about anything they do together, but a few months ago they went out for an evening on their motorcycles, and the friend and my niece posted about riding bikes on the same day.
Management talked to both of them the next morning, and pointedly threatened my nephew's job.
That is the world Mark Zuckerberg is proud of. That is the world he considers to have integrity. Instead of decrying the spread of petty fascism, he figures he can get rich selling the tools. The man is a sociopath.
But while I wipe this egg off my face, allow me to reassert that Menard's definitely does do this monitoring, even if Facebook doesn't specifically enable it - and that's the basic problem with this notion of abolishment of all anonymity.
I made some comments last week pooh-poohing the "single point of failure" aspect of Facebook identity management - but Zuckerberg's ambition certainly seems to be the single point of failure of society as a whole.
Therefore, I deleted my Facebook account.
imo a desire for privacy is not the same thing as a "lack of integrity".
"every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites."
Possibly apocryphal or taken out of context if HoPo is the best reference I can find: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/16/google-ceo-eric-sch...
(conspiracy theory: I _did_ search Google - unsuccessfully - to try and find authoritative sources for that quote...)
Exactly. Some people say "Google does not get social", but this Google UX researcher, at least, got it:
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... (discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867807)
I have wonderful, deep conversations with my wife. I also have deep conversations with my best friend. I love them both, and I'm not hiding anything from either one. But the intimacy and tone of either conversation would be ruined by the presence of the other person. This isn't about duplicity; it's about the nature of friendship. The sense of humor between us, the shared memories, the references we don't have to explain - those are all different.
Public conversation like wall posts lacks all of that. It's not inimate; it's self-conscious. It inherently lacks depth because it's dumbed down to the lowest common denominator for everyone who will see it. It's more like performance art than real conversation.
That's why I'll take email over wall posts any day. I want to hear what you have to say to ME, not what you want everyone else seeing you say to me. It's not about secrets, it's about real, personal contact.
(How much of it is still him, and how much (to what extent) is he, at this point, simply along for the ride?)
Stop and look at some of the simple, dumb statements you see in a typical advertising or political campaign.
The value of Facebook's users is that the overwhelming majority of them are real. People use their real names, and hook up with their real friends, resulting in a real social graph.
But if Facebook becomes the single-sign-on provider, the identity provider, for a majority of blogs and forums and other venues where people today participate anonymously, then Facebook will start seeing a huge number of fake profiles appear as people make multiple identities to preserve their privacy and anonymity, and the more those fake profiles are used, the less the real userbase will be worth, which ultimately threatens their bottom line.
This sounds awfully like:
Mr. Anderson, it seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you... help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias "Neo" and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.
We all have profiles in some NSA database somewhere, just waiting to be expunged and used against us when someone important decides we're a Homeland Security threat.
That being said, I work on anti-abuse systems at Facebook and I'm pretty sure we don't "plug all your comments into NSA supercomputers." What evidence do you have that indicates we do such a thing?
In any case, it looks like facebook are trying to monopolise the internet, and that in itself is a bad thing ...
You don't need to plug them into the NSA. Since Facebook pays your salary it wouldn't be your job. NSA employees would do all the work.
I'm sure they have circumventing the privacy measures down to a well oiled system by now. The NSA loves to illegally wiretap everything. This is their obsession. Justification: all the foreigners who use Facebook being a potential national security threat. All the communication on Facebook (e.g. Egyptian revolution) being invaluable data to CIA analysts. Etcetera. It's naive to think that these agencies don't have large teams focused solely on extracting value from Facebook.
Zuckerberg, being the guy with control over everyone's data now, is way too friendly with the various alphabet soup agency heads to believe that Facebook is hindering their never-ending investigations. You don't see FBI directors kissing the feet of Larry and Sergey.
It's sad, but I miss the "old" internet days where I felt I was really anonymous and could be as politically-incorrect as I wanted to.
I mean what I say, but I can't rely on every stranger out there to treat me rationally afterward, so I intentionally limit who knows it was me. In venues like Facebook (and now linked forums), solely because I can't do that, I never say anything beyond the inoffensively vacuous when I bother to use them at all.
Don't underestimate lengths people will go, to cover their inner feelings.
I really wonder what Zuckenberg's daddy and mommy issues are.
Unfortunately many people - even in the US - don't have this luxury. I saw the way the one person in my high school was brave enough to come out was ostracized, and given that I was already a target, I knew there was no way I could put up with what he had to go through. For Facebook to be working this hard to strip away the ability for people to have one image in public and another in private, well, it could end up hurting a lot of people.
There are some disadvantages. Your fake identity will probably need to be reused across sites, since creating a new account involves getting an email address, which takes a few extra minutes per identity. But choose a generic enough name, and it is less of a problem...
Though this is different from users who intentionally impersonate others, never really understood that ... especially when no humour came from it.
Anonymity and privacy are like punk rock. People have been saying it's dead since its inception, but look around and you'll find it all over the place.
Why? Because I am a "fake" person? I mean heck, I post a lot more than that over here.
Nope, because my FB feed includes stuff like friends of my grandmother, or my 14-year-old son, or my HS buds. Each of these audiences has completely different standards and measurements of civility.
There was an online petition and a massive cry of dissent from the users. There was even a moderator who tried to justify Blizzard's position by posting his real name and saying he "didn't care". Much of his personal life information was displayed and if I remember correctly he had to change his FaceBook account due to all the trolls.
Blizzard did not put this idea into effect.
Associating identities with views online can have massive repercussions regardless of how much "integrity" that person has. Trolls and stalkers would have an absolute field day due to the loss of anonymity.
And now, for some humor to wash down the pessimism, s/fb/blizzard or vice versa:
So for me, TechCrunch doesn't have a comment system anymore. That's too bad, as I liked the previous system and found the commentary interesting. I'm not alone -- 4,000 people a week install this browser extension.
The end result for TechCrunch is that a small, but growing minority of readers will be less engaged with the site. In the grand scheme of things, not a big deal for them I suppose.
A website is a private property.
You have no more right to leave a comment on my website than I have to come to your house and bore you with a speech on politics.
My free speech rights allow me to publish my thoughts on my blog or publish them in my newspaper. Free speech, however, is not about allowing me to publish my thoughts on your blog or giving me right to publish an op-ed in New York Times, anonymously.
So saying:
"But to force all comments into the realm of "single real identity" public exposure -- as Facebook now appears intent on doing -- is unacceptable, reprehensible, dangerous, and utterly at odds with basic free speech rights in the United States at least."
,as dire and dramatic as it sounds, is, frankly, utter bullshit.
Today we have unprecedented ability to exercise our rights to free speech, anonymous or otherwise, so let's not fall for demagogy of people who want to pollute web with worthless comments while hiding behind principles of free speech (while completely misunderstanding those principles).
In no way is any government or monopolistic entity forcing them to do this.
Even if this really was a question of integrity, why does he feel the need to enforce it on our behalf?
This for me is a pronouncement that is fit for a dictator.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Generalization_from_fictional_e...
The related discussion from ramchip (though a great read) is only weakly related again to the first sentence. I could tell my girlfriend I love her very much or I can tell her every ounce of annoyance she gives to me, first comment versus what you actually want to impart to produce a constructive and stable relationship. I want to be thoughtful and sincere not quick to the punch (Nothing at all to do with with whether the medical condition is real or not because the morals and values are learned).
In case this derailed, I am talking about users who leave the first thing that came to mind and had no thought of the consequences since under anonymity.
he became an engineer? :P
As for the people in Egypt there will always be outlets for anonymous communication. However, it won't be found on some tech blog.
Putting faces behind the comments provoke people to consider their opinions more carefully, just like we do in real life. And if you are one of those people who want to lash out, but don't have the guts to do it in face then you should just tell your best friend or keep it to yourself.
Just my thoughts.
I admit it doesn't look good for privacy for now. But 20 years ago, a lot of smart forward thinking people, including global intelligence organizations, thought it was going the opposite direction. What they didn't anticipate is that we'd all be convinced to voluntarily give it up ourselves.
You're absolutely right. KGB and Stasi had achieved a lot of success in putting faces behind the comments, and as a result people were considering their opinions extremely carefully.
yes. It is one of the reasons people may like to remain anonymous - to avoid dealing with consequences when comments are taken out of context, incorrectly interpreted and/or understood. Why should i spend extra effort dealing with morons who aren't able or inclined to understand a simple logical idea?
>Also you would have to assume that the people hosting the comments where either KGB or Stasi...
not necessary. Just reading/listening to have been enough.
Realistically, people's convictions change over time. The internet on the other hand is mostly undated. A Google search doesn't return a persons online activity in reverse chronological order. In a traditional environment the absurd things we might say as a result of past convictions will fade as time goes by. Consequently the perception people have of us is biased towards the present. This isn't true for the internet and anonymity is the only way to keep our identities from stagnating.
Disagree.
Possibly the only people benefitting from this are companies, especially those with good CRM systems. And don't jump to the idea that being anonymous is no good either. Imagine sites would begin to ask for your identification before you were allowed access to content or features, like commenting systems. Imagine you are a kid again and were trying to access hacking information that were behind a over-18 wall, or just trying to post a comment on HN, but you have to be either a hacker or an entrepreneur to do so...
Also, transparency will never stop hackers or crackers from doing what they do, neither it will stop terrorists, piracy or <insert-your-digital-threat-here>. Hopefully, transparency will fail.
I'm guessing the main attraction is to have the comments automatically propagated to the commentator's Facebook friends (that IS how it works, right?)
Personally I'd like to see a similar system for Hacker News - you'd get a much better comment moderation while keeping the discussion in one place and not having to worry about running a commenting system yourself.
However, before you do, ask yourself: would you have the same opinion if you were gay and 15 years old in a fundamentalist family? In a middle eastern country? If you were transgendered but only in the beginning stages of transitioning? If you were polygamous in a community that disapproved?
How about if you were conservative in a liberal university?
How about talking about how you had an abortion? That's an important view, with policy implications, but you never know who would fire you if they knew.
Should everyone with non-normative views be forced into silence?
Absolutely not, and I agree with you. But help me out - isn't the root cause of all the examples you list a lack of information? Case in point of many: don't people in general become less bigoted the more educated they become?
Call me a naive idealist, but I wonder if the information barriers erected by people to protect themselves, are, on a wider scale, actually what keeps bigotry and hatred alive?
Zuckerberg isn't a saint, so I'm not suggesting that there is any altruistic motive behind his moves. I'm just questioning if greater transparency is inherently a bad thing.
That doesn't hold for a kid in a religious household, the same exact kid who needs to find a community in which she or he can be heard. It was that anonymous community that allowed me to find the resources I needed.
Now, to be fair, the LGBT community is largely going to know better than to force people to name themselves, and the blogger always holds the choice. I'm more concerned about the overarching issue. I'm concerned about governments forcing their citizens to blog and comment using their own names. And Facebook's move is exactly the type of thing that will give them ideas.
This might be an unpopular statement... but IMO, Google seems to get this on some level (even though they haven't figured out a way to package it.) There is a recurring theme in the occasional bits that leak out of Google about their high level thoughts on what they could contribute to the social web around understanding and helping people separate their personas -
http://mashable.com/2010/07/13/google-social-slide-deck/ (update: creator of this deck now works at FB... wonder if he took his opinions with them, or if this is still indicative of the thinking at Google?)
https://profiles.google.com/ (notice the language around managing what the world sees when it searches for you...)
I had a coworker arrested on some very serious and character destroying charges. It was hard enough to having to relay that privately to our executives. I couldn't imagine that spiraling out on my network and remaining there forever.
A former coworker now has a very interesting business, that isn't very PC. Should I screen her because of what that will look like to business and/or community contacts?
No, in both contexts I wish to shape how others reflect on my identity. I shouldn't be constrained to one very public identity.
And concerning Zuckerberg, how does a billionaire, twenty something have a clue about a normal user of his system? And besides does he really sounds like a press release to his friends in real life?
you have a single sign on that allows you to create multiple persona's e.g. public, family and friends
when posting you would have the ability/requirement to tag content as being accessible to individuals in groups you have associated with each persona.
sounds like a bit of a pain in the ass that would become very unwieldy beyond a few groups.
Not only for facebook, but the same applies to Google and other trackers. Many sites link to your Google account. This is possible because your cookies can be shared/accessible by scripts communicating between sites (and checking referers).
To isolate them you'd essentially need something like firefox profiles -- isolating cookies and credentials per persona. But to be more usable it needs to be more integrated into the browser somehow, and more lightweight, as running multiple firefox profiles is a bit clunky.
That said, despite his perspective, he clearly has a financial motive to turn Facebook further into the dominant identity system in the web. Actually, I'll take that back, it's not clear to me that he has any motive personally to make it any more dominant, because he's now into the discretionary billions range of wealth. Perhaps his motive is to increase ROI for all the sub-one-percent shareholders. I dunno. I've just never gotten this whole sort of unbounded ambition that thinks it's not good enough to be the 3rd best thing in the entire world -- we're talking the entire world here, it's not like coming in 1000th place, and it's not even truly a race. If anything, it's a race to stand still, and then you die, no matter what.
It's interesting to think that there are now more people with a Facebook identity than most meatspace nations have citizens. More Facebookians than Brits, for example. Than French. Japanese. I don't know the exact count of total Facebook users offhand but I wouldn't be surprised to find it's already surpassed the number of US citizens as well.
Reminds me of something...
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
And falls on th'other.All criminals crave anonymity Socrates craves anonymity Therefore Socrates is a criminal
I think the point Zuckerberg is attempting to make is that in an ideal society, Socrates would have nothing to fear and thus no reason to crave anonymity. But fear is only one among several legitimate reasons to speak without identity.
One might wish others to evaluate facts or arguments on their own merits, rather than by the reputation of the speaker - this is one reason the Economist newspaper does not print the names of its writers. One might wish to get frank opinions uncolored by social norms - hence the many stories about gods and monarchs who disguise themselves to learn what people really think of them. One might wish the simple freedom to be wrong when exploring a new concept.
Zuckerberg has fallen into a common pitfall of the well intentioned (and one I've spent time in myself) which we might call a militant consequentialism. His conception of Facebook is essentially a 21st century version of Bentham's panopticon. It's not so much that the idea is inherently bad or unworkable, as that for it to work everyone has to adopt the same ethical standard as the person advocating the idea. It might well be a better world if we all had the same ethical standards as Zuckerberg currently happens to hold - no joke or sarcasm intended. The problem is that if your vision of a better world depends on everyone adopting a new pattern of behavior before the rewards appear, then it won't happen. It's like communism; it might actually be a great system if everyone were honest and unselfish, and once we could see the benefits people would want to empower each other as fully as possible because of the potential gains. But in reality everyone is inclined to hedge their bets, and attempts to implement communism across whole societies quickly end up in failure or repression.
Consequentialism itself has its place; without it, leadership or personal morality aren't possible, and one is just an obedient automaton, mindlessly enforcing some religious or legal or social code. On the other hand, the reason codes exist in the first place is because we tend to have extremely limited foresight in most regards, perhaps especially in ethical matters. If the people who don't share your consequentialist vision can only be brought into compliance by inflexible rules, then you tend to end up with a nonlinear feedback system. These tend to lurch to abrupt extremes, or else display periodic or chaotic behavior.
tl;dr attempts to legislate morality fail, usually ignominiously.
He's trolling people because they're trying to stop trolling.
Requesting real accounts for comments on personal business websites isn't a violation of the Freedom of Speech. It's the equivalent of asking politicians to reveal what bills they voted for. Transparency means accountability, not the destruction of everything good online. Geese.