The Ghetto Called Facebook | Hacker News Reader

The Ghetto Called Facebook

pcmag.com

54 pointsevo_935 comments

That's cool. I'm glad to hear Dvorak's opinion. Here's mine:

Quit whining about Facebook. It's opt-in. People like it, so they opt in. Believe it or not, AOL was actually relevant and somewhat useful to people over a decade ago. Was it the best? No. Did it help people? Yes.

I hate to say this, but people do need training wheels with tech. Facebook makes things simple. I no longer have to sign up for 20 different accounts, figure out which friends use which services, remember different passwords, or have to learn 20 different interfaces -- I can now message, chat, organize, collaborate, send pictures, share links, and do a bunch of stuff at once. It's called having a broad set of features. Facebook is "training wheels" the same way something like the Windows OS is "training wheels." Internet Explorer is bundled, but you are free to download Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Flock, Opera, Seamonkey, etc. It bundles Windows Media Player, but you can download VLC, Miro, iTunes, Foobar2000, MediaMonkey, WinAmp, or hundreds of other things.

Facebook didn't magically kill Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hacker News, Instapaper, or the thousands of other companies and products available. It's called choice. People have choices. They have a lot of choices. Let them decide. If a product is easier to use, by all means use it.

(end of rant)

People had the same choice a decade ago, and chose against AOL.

I think Dvorak is simply pointing out the fact that Facebook is being praised like the second coming of Jesus, while AOL is regarded as an internet backwater and failure, where they both provide/provided very similar functions.

One huge divide between people in the tech community and those outside of it is the meaning of free. Facebook's a walled garden to people who want APIs and generously licensed (or public domain) data, but, to most of everyone else, the only cost with Facebook is creating an account -- something many people want to do anyway for the other features of the site. This is in sharp contrast to AOL, which was very expensive and only offered its data to paid subscribers.

AOL's cost was money. Facebook's cost is your personal privacy. Yes, you don't have to shell out a dollar, but you lose all control over the information you associate with Facebook. In some ways, I'd rather pay real money.

Right, I'm not trying to make a claim either way about what the superior thing is; I'm just saying that your average person would rather get the service for free at the cost of their own privacy, which is one plausible explanation for the difference.

I think it would have been useful to include "Dvorak" in the submission title.

Right. Dvorak is a professional troll.

Divorak needs to get off the internet and realize that the online communication doesn't create some separate place but is a part of real life. This "second class citizenry" rhetoric is harmful and absolutely misses the point. People are relying on Facebook for their online presence (overly so, of course) because there are many benefits to doing so (ease of use, lack of cost, easy mobile access, ability to pester customers etc.). We don't need to end the Facebook "ghetto" as much as we need to make the rest of the internet make as much sense to end users as Facebook.

> Load World of Warcraft and play something that reflects real development efforts rather than cute marketing tricks.

I love that line.

The achievement of WoW is to inflate the importance mouse clicks to an insane level by a more complex mechanism.

That is all.

I mostly agree with your sentiment. I think WoW and Facebook are very similar in function, connecting people socially through software. I don't really think one is any better or worse than the other.

However, I do think something like WoW is a significant artistic achievement as well as a social tool. I really think this artistic product is the "achievement" of WoW.

I really think this artistic product is the "achievement" of WoW.

That's one take. Another is its achievement was taking an entertainment medium that people used to pay for only once, applying Skinnerian behavior modification techniques to keep them coming back and paying for monthly, then scaling that model to an unprecedented massive scale.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-gam...

Granted the social aspects of online games are truly fun, but the nice thing about Facebook is that it (initially at least) succeeded and scaled with just the social part and not the psychological manipulations mmo's like WoW relied on from day 1.

Some of the stuff that's been added recently, like Farmville and whatnot, exploits both the social and psychological, but the core value of FB is that it is still primarily a social experience, a way for people separated by distance and/or life (new baby, etc.) to maintain connections and know what's going on in each others' lives.

You're partly right, but I think a game like WoW would exist even if there weren't a market to exploit (although probably not on the same scale with today's technology). Look back to the 80s and 90s when these types of games existed for cheap or free.

Many of the "psychological manipulations" present in WoW were present in the genre long before someone at Blizzard (or Sony or whoever else) decided those game play mechanics can make a boatload of cash. The tone of your post suggests that games are designed from the bottom up as a psychological manipulation tool. This is most certainly not the case; they are designed to be fun (although I could buy the argument that this stuff is being done consciously with WoW now, and would not be surprised if evidence were presented). For the most part these "manipulative" qualities in games were discovered/researched after gaming became popular, they did not insert these manipulations into games to make them popular. Most of this psychology stuff is pretty new to popular game design.

So far I haven't even addressed the original point of my statement, the artistic merits. WoW is a huge 3d environment created from scratch by a team of talented (and I'm sure very well paid) artists. There are many people who are excited about the lore of WoW the same way others get excited about LotR. To say:

"The achievement of WoW is to inflate the importance mouse clicks to an insane level by a more complex mechanism.

That is all."

Especially with the "that is all" added to the end, this statement dismisses the creative work that went in to WoW to create one of the largest 3d interactive worlds ever made.

Anyway, both services offer value to the user but I'm just sayin' give credit where credits due.

Regarding WoW's artistic achievement, I've read a good observation about that - they've somehow created an art style whose longevity is not dependent on continually increasing gfx capabilities, but maintains an appeal even as other games get higher realism and whatnot. Timeless design in any domain is quite a feat.

I just thing people don't care how technically difficult a game was to make; they just care if it's fun. The issue of these games all relying on the same underlying psychology to cultivate addiction is also relevant, of course

> I think it's brilliant that the boys at Facebook are taking on Netflix by developing their own streaming service

Assuming Dvorak's talking about the newly-announced Dark Nights rentals, he's talking about a third-party app developed by Warner Bros, not a ploy by Facebook itself.

I wouldn't bother bringing up a small factual error like this, but it really digs into the point of his article: it's a lot harder to build up the idea of Facebook as an evil monopolizing force trying to lock people into their platform when it's third-party content producers that are actively pulling people into the FB ecosystem.

You could argue that this is a result of their efforts to attract developers to the FB Credit platform, and that's just an attempt to attract and lock in users. That's definitely true, but you can't really call a neighborhood a 'ghetto' when it's got a posh shopping mall full of big-name department stores.

Spot on. But this is exactly the kind of article that one would expect to get many negative comments on HN. It's critical of a hyped website and the argument isn't even economic.

As I see it, the problem with Facebook is that it is monopolizing a space that we should all desire to see open and dispersed. Is it good to have one company monopolize all online social interactions among all humans on the planet? Of course not. People spend egregious amounts of time on Facebook, which is wonderful for Facebook and stifling for the rest of the internet. If you recognize these problems you should abandon Facebook and reject it on principal. With so many people and business on board, this is actually quite hard to do, which is exactly why it should be done.

Dvorak has a seriously warped view of Facebook and life-in-general IMO. Facebook's main competitor is Second Life? Who on earth thinks that?

There's nothing "fake" about the community on Facebook. Ask Hosni Mubarak.

I don't think he seriously views Second Life as a real competitor - he was just using it to draw an analogy.

As for the community, I believe the "fakeness" he's getting at is the ability of the user to carefully cultivate their likeness and project a version of themselves that may or may not be truly reflective of "reality".

Of course, one could argue that we are always cultivating a "desired image" of ourselves. However, Facebook and similar platforms provide visual and textual clues that allow users to more concretely realize social relationships. This in turn may allow them to go above and beyond the normative level of image moderation. Whether that is "good" or "bad" is another question altogether.

Dvorak hates facebook because it allows people like Dvorak a soap box to stand on.

In reality, my friends, on facebook and in life, are not Dvoraks. They are normal people with jobs, with hobbies, etc... People (usually) too busy to worry about online image or rant about popular internet culture. That's why I like facebook. If I had a bunch of Dvoraks for friends, I'd probably hate it too.

I think if you want to compare Facebook to something outdated or controlling, I'd try the "portals" of the turn of the millennium. It's a pretty natural extension we see with almost anything which subsists on advertisements: more attention means more views means more ad-clicks means more revenue. Of course Facebook and everything else financed by ads with a brain is moving to push as much of your activity onto its platform as possible.

Are all Dvorak's friends on facebook pre-teen girls? It's probably worse than that, they are probably 'writers'

The fake people on facebook, at least on MY facebook, are the people that are fake in real life. Yes, it is easier for them to broadcast how fake they are. Luckily facebook also makes it easy to filter out their broadcasts. It's also much easier for the friends I care about to broadcast important information as well. For those of us without a media site/platform to broadcast our cra... err articles, facebook works great.

Also, I never get along with WoW addicts.

You may be underestimating how many small bits of 'fake' are common. A facebook profile is much more accurately described as "how someone wants themselves to be seen" rather than how they are in reality. Some of it is self-censorship, some is self-promotion, some is subconscious, but the cumulative effect is such that the reality show analogy is quite apt; it's based on real events, but edited and filtered into something misleading.

Think about it this way, an autobiography is probably mostly true, but you're going to read it with the understanding that it's not an impartial, objective viewpoint.

"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from inside is simply a series of defeats."

         -- George Orwell

Er... isn't Facebook's primary feature for, I don't know, social networking? Being a means to connect with people you know?

It's certainly expanding to provide many services besides that, but I don't think anyone is replacing the rest of the internet with just FB.

Would someone like to clue me in on all the hate of this guy named "Dvorak"?

It's the name of the linked article's author.

To add to that... his specialty is intentionally specious and sensationalist arguments that don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny, thus inviting rabid rebuttals from people in the know, driving tremendous traffic well beyond what either A) a plainly idiotic argument or B) a extremely well-honed analysis would produce. In other words, he takes trolling to heights 4chan can only dream of.

This is possibly the most poorly written article I have ever read on HN.

AOL keyword: Facebook

Facebook will too pass....

What the crap?

How is this comment useful?

Divorak hasn't been relevant since the death of floppy disks.

After reading the article, it kinda sounds to me like Dvorak just can't see Facebook's relevance as a communication tool for people who aren't super skilled with computers. I'm not really a fan of Facebook myself, but shantanubala is right; It does help people connect and share information easier. I wouldn't agree with Dvorak that Facebook is a ghetto, then again the definition of the word "friend" seems to be a little different these days.

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