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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

A lot of talk in this article about Google capturing the whole web, all valid points, but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS. E-mail is seen as arcane and tricky, lots of these people do no searching, and rarely leave Facebook. If they can't find it through Facebook (or a Twitter feed sometimes) they act bewildered. This may sound like exaggeration, but there really are people like this. I think this is even more problematic.

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Something we (people who work in tech) should be acutely aware of is causing unnecessary distractions from important issues. When there's a discussion about the Google very often the first few comments are about how some other tech company also does something unsavory. This is a thread about how Google's engineers are actively working to take over the web as we know it and become the gatekeepers to all the benefit (not to mention profit) the web has to offer, and now the top comment isn't about what Google are doing.

While your point is valid and reasonable in it's own right, posting it in a discussion about Google isn't really the right place.

I respectfully disagree. The entire point of having a comments section on HN is so that the breadth of conversation can be expanded to encompass more than what just the article linked alone can provide.

As a result the same reportoire of stamped complaints is repeated over and over. This is a well-noted problem of HN comments section and treating this as a feature doesn't bode well.

I actually posted a very similar comment before I saw yours. I totally agree that there's always this sort of redirection going on whenever there's something critical of Google here. And there's so much about Google I like. I just wish we could have more discussion about the original topic.

Eh, the article is about threats to the web as an information resource not controlled by one company. I don't think it's a distraction to put it in context.

Although I guess it becomes one when that becomes like the bulk of what HN viewers see in the first few screens of comments. I guess it could be argued we should have more discipline in HN comments because of the affordances. But that applies to replies to the comment turning it into a big thread of different opinions too, if you just left it alone/non-controversial, it wouldn't do that.

Agreed. Breadth of discussion is important, but engaging in whataboutism and not being able to define a target is a great way to never change anything.

Worth noting that all sorts of entities employ people to do PR on internet forums, and redirecting and deflecting is a crucial part of their tactics.

Not saying that this is happening here, but forums need to be resilent and really focus hard on the issue at hand or be completely played by the professionals.

I see this claim often and while I don't deny its possibility I have yet to see any evidence to substantiate it.

> I see this claim often and while I don't deny its possibility I have yet to see any evidence to substantiate it.

There have been news articles about governments employing this practice [0], so it is not much of a stretch to imagine corporations doing it.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23695896

Try being negative about Amazon (not even AWS) I noticed that’s actually pretty hard.

That’s why it’s so effective. If they do it right you never will.

This is outside of my area of expertise, but I wonder whether it'd be possible to train machine learning models to identify divergent threads of conversation.

Tangential conversation can be useful and constructive sometimes; but other times it'd be nice to apply a contextual overlay to a conversation which emboldens the on-topic discussion items and de-prioritizes side discussions.

It's possible to argue that that's what the HN community itself should do naturally via upvote/downvote behaviour -- but in practice there are various (often valid) reasons why an unrelated thread of commentary can become more popular than on-topic discussion.

It’s much easier to train a globally distributed English speaking workforce to do this for very cheap.

They don't need to be so Machiavellian. This forum is filled with Google and Facebook engineers. Some of them sincerely don't see anything bad in their companies. Others probably want to protect their stock options.

"It's impossible to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." - Mencken

> - Mencken

Rabbit hole[1] successfully descended and eventually escaped. Luckily it was a very shallow one. :)

1: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

I am always amazed that being negative about Amazon is stomped out quickly in general. Just my experience where I wonder if this is by a team or they just have a lot fans.

Probably fans. It’s not easy to get support against Amazon when they are still delivering the majority of people‘a packages.

I don't think we need to be that charitable. Seems well in line with the Amazon ethos to proactively control the narrative around them in online discussions.

It's really impressive how quickly how posts that criticize Google and Facebook are downvoted.

I think a lot of the time this is because people aren't careful about thinking through their additional criticisms and rely on their general feeling of "I'm upset with X and this appears bad on the surface" to suffice. When people call out the obvious faults with the argument, people take it as defending the company rather than pointing out faulty assumptions (probably both).

A simple example of this is 'Google abandons products.' it's been more and less teue at different times, but it's almost always presented as a truism when the reality is more nuanced, and depends on a bunch of factors (is it a paid product, is it out of beta, do they publish a support lifetime, etc.) Google do seem to abandon a lot of stuff, but they also have a lot of stuff which can skew perceptions if you are mostly aware of certain products, and they seem to follow a sort of consistency as to how likely they are to persist.

An overly broad assertion about Google abandoning products may be met with responses like thus, even if the people responding agree that Google does it more than others. That's not defending Google because it's Google, it's adding nuance to a discussion (there are of course just defenders).

Note: I'm not trying to argue this Google criticism, it's used as an example. Even if you think this is a bad example because that's not how you see this argument usually played out, it's probably more constructive to discuss communication strategies and misunderstandings than to rehash a very played out Google criticism here more than I've done.

For me, these submissions are interesting because they surface concerns that my admittedly atypical day to day behaviors shelter me from. For instance, it takes a bit of effort to remember that for some the Facebook app is the internet, and it might be hard to understand the difference between ads and organic search results.

Ultimately though, how I engage with comments is going to be a product of my biases and opinions as an informed technical person, which in cases like this might lend support to countervailing points despite the fact that I find the primary content valuable.

I also find that I'll very frequently close the top couple of comments to look for other perspectives. That approach seems sufficient this this case.

I don't take the OP to be distracting or unnecessary in any way - in fact, I find it highly insightful.

The OP - perhaps without realizing it explicitly - makes an important distinction between the kinds of information-sharing systems that are in place on the modern web. Borrowing from Marshall McLuhan's distinctions between oral and literate cultures [0] we can see that Google and Facebook have a similar relationship. Both engage our hunter-gatherer mindsets in novel ways, but only one clearly does so with utility.

Google's usefulness as a search engine provider is in how it provides relevant information to users who are querying for something specific. Google search users are not sitting and waiting - they're searching and exploring. Google, therefore, plays to our hunter-gatherer mindset by directly aiding us in our searches.

Facebook's usefulness as a social network is in its ability to facilitate individual communications within a vast, centralized ecosystem. Users of Facebook are often searching for something - connections, information, relationships, etc., - but the way it engages its users' hunter-gatherer mindsets is very different. Instead of delivering targeted answers relevant to queries, Facebook forces its users to search through seemingly endless threads of often low-quality conversations, not really doing much of anything to aid in the search. Its users are simply sitting and waiting for the correct information to scroll into view. The search function on Facebook is not like Google's - it doesn't look for information, it simply takes you to a new part of the social square to which you want to go. Facebook, in essence, attaches a hunter-gatherer mindset to the very antithetical gossip found in the social square.

IMO, it is perfectly fine to have this conversation right here. Facebook has added a new dimension to the modern web: the expectation for there to be a well-regulated, always-available social square online. If the outcome of Google's actions are as inevitable as the article states, it would be proper to discuss where Facebook's unique "contributions" to the web fit into this article's analysis.

[0] https://youtu.be/ULI3x8WIxus?t=165

Stop gatekeeping.

This same thing happened on the last thread about Google.

Discourse is full of distractions and side topics and healthy diversions, thats what makes it interesting.

Not everything has to be perfectly efficient like a well run board meeting complete with agenda and minutes taken.

I'm all for a healthy avoidance of bikeshedding and derailment but this isn't a derailment. This is a tangential anecdote entirely valid to bring to the table as it gives insight into what can happen if google continues down this path.

We don't need to postulate what might happen with Google, we can look at Facebook and say, hey, you know what, these same things are going to happen here, let me tell you how that worked out.

If you can't manage to figure out how to bring this conversation back to google without locking the gate on natural discourse that's on you. Not us. Not ap.

Stop gatekeeping.

Calling a request to focus on the substance of the article instead of related issues elsewhere seems a far cry from gatekeeping. Especially given there's no enforcement behind the request.

That's not what gatekeeping means. Also, it is derailment, it's the definition of what-about-ism, In a discussion about Google dominating the web a "what about Facebook's walled garden" is a completely different issue.

Also, what does this have to do with bikeshedding? Both Facebook AND Google are serious issues.

It's easy enough to close the thread and skip to the content you're looking for. At least that approach works for me.

Textbook case of 'whataboutism'. Besides, avoiding Facebook is easy. Avoiding Google is impossible. I am much more worried about Google because of that.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on Chrome or Search.

There's plenty of worry to go around. I would like to put aside the (very understandable) fear about Google for a second because I think the GP makes a good point.

My parents used to use the open web, but have also more or less exclusively started to use Facebook to "surf the web" and get all of their information. The 2016 election was a joke, my mother would constantly tell me about all these things she'd found out about "on Facebook". She'd click these links and keep getting more and more radical misinformation. I was honestly shocked at what her Newsfeed looks like. The worst thing is she isn't an abnormality, she's fairly typical of her generation.

I'm concerned by _any_ closed platform, especially when there isn't enough competition. I realize that's descriptive of many things my employer builds as well. But please don't discount the dangers of other closed ecosystems, it's a certainly related topic. The web by _anyone_ makes it a poorer place to be and there's attackers on all sides.

Nice of you to speak out. If I were working at Google I'd be more worried about Facebook too. Because your paycheck more or less depends on you being able to tell yourself that you are working for 'the good guys'. But in my book both are equally rotten, it's just that this thread is about Google, not about Facebook and that makes these clear attempts at deflection.

Google does plenty to spread misinformation as well, Youtube is a sewer giving outright conspiracy nutcases a platform, they continuously promote Breitbart, infowars and other despicable websites through Google News (the suggestion alone that I would like to see any of that content is revolting), they try to pretend that they care about end user privacy, including plastering all of Brussels' airport Zaventem full of posters and displays proclaiming that, never saw such a poster outside of that airport, just maybe they figured that's a good investment to reach regulators on the hoof.

Google is a dishonest and manipulative company that tries hard to pretend it is a sheep. But the teeth are clearly visible and those bloody pawprints tell a different story. I for one am not buying the 'Facebook is more evil than Google' line for a second, if only because FB at least stays in its lane, Google is everywhere.

> Youtube is a sewer giving outright conspiracy nutcases a platform, they continuously promote Breitbart, infowars and other despicable websites

Well, glad you're not in charge, then. If these publications really are crackpots then surely people will stop reading them? Freedom of speech and all that.

Disclosure: Googler.

This has nothing to do with free speech, if you want to make that argument then please at least familiarize yourself with what the term actually means in this context. Google is actively promoting these sites, which has nothing to do with censoring them.

If you really are a Googler - any anonymous coward can say that - you're not doing Google a service.

Googler but still throw away account? You must not feel too strongly about your convictions.

You also obviously don't understand what free speech means, which is depressing of someone skilled & intelligent enough to work at the big G.

Free speech is not the right to say what ever you want. It's the responsibility to stand behind and defend what you speak with real evidence.

I advocate for my beliefs on public accounts as well as internally - this account just happened to be what I was logged into is all.

The simple fact is these publications are promoted because they are popular, making no comment on accuracy. A massive corporation, even if I trust them as my employer, should never have such massive influence on our public conversation.

Popularity is a poor metric, but at least it's not censorship. I think even putting the thumb on the scales is dangerous.

Edit: I do see what you're saying, and I'm not advocating for a society where anything can be said without social consequence. I just think it's far too dangerous for FAANG companies to have that power all to themselves. The most well intentioned people can do terrible things...

The power to promote is just as dangerous if not more dangerous than the power to suppress because it is much harder to make a case against it but can have the exact same effect.

Promotion of any content results in the suppression of other content (inventory isn't infinite). If you were in charge of the algorithm, what would you promote? Considering half of America views CNN the same way you view Breitbart, do you consider that to be a despicable source too?

It's really not as simple as you think.

How half of America views something doesn't really matter, what matters is that there is an observable factual difference between Breitbart and CNN. I don't have a dog in the race and that's pretty easy to establish. Or do you really believe that CNN also promotes conspiracy theories and outright nonsense? If so I guess the conversation is over.

> CNN also promotes conspiracy theories and outright nonsense

Yeah, I do. These outlets are all as bad as each other. The only difference is a right-leaning individual is biased in favor of Breitbart propaganda and a left-leaning individual is biased in favor of CNN.

YouTube is as big of a purveyor of misinformation as Facebook. I just spent two hours yesterday dissecting all manner of coronavirus misinformation my mom learned from YouTube. The insidious aspect of it is that she never went looking for that - she started off watching legitimate sources like credible media outlets but autoplay took her further and further down the rabbit hole without even realizing she was no longer watching the same source. Outrageous, deliberately deceptive propaganda has weaponized the platform and Google is making billions shovelling that content to unsuspecting people. Everyone gets paid and society has to deal with the fallout of millions of misinformed citizens during a global pandemic.

Respectfully, there's plenty to fix in your own house and you as a Googler have 1,000 times more of a voice to push for change than the average person.

And it is nearly impossible to report those videos. Twitter is the only company so far that seems to have some kind of working moderation but even they could do much better.

YouTube is a _much bigger_ purveyor of misinformation than Facebook IMX. When I scroll down my Facebook feed, its automated suggestions are "maybe you might know this friend-of-a-friend" or "maybe you might want to join this group about choral singing". When I watch a YouTube video, the automated "watch next" suggestions are "Watch Jacob Rees-Mogg DESTROY liberals with one sentence!".

This seems like a weird point when arguing against a closed platform. You are saying that it is hard to report misinformation. If we were using a distributed platform it would be impossible. So in this aspect centralized platforms are superior even if they are closed and not great in an absolute degree.

> If we were using a distributed platform it would be impossible.

Distributed platforms don't prevent moderation; they let you choose your moderator (including no moderator at all).

We could also use a distributed moderator on centralized platforms (in the browser at least, apps are harder) but there seems to be very little interest in doing this.

It's not whataboutism, the first line of my comment included the agreement clause: "all valid points".

Adding a disclaimer like that doesn't change the intent nor the effect of the comment. That's like saying 'With all due respect' just before insulting someone.

Even my 6-yr-old knows starting a sentence with "Not to be rude but..." is surely to be followed by a rude statement. I would hope anyone commenting on HN sees this as well.

I decided to take a break from FB for a few weeks as it was feeling addictive. (Still on Messenger and IG so I'm not a purist.)

I quickly found that many of my local business have an online presence only on Facebook. No web site, no freebie aggregator type thing, nothing, just FB. This in a major European city.

It makes me wonder if it might be useful, as a public service, to have some kind of free business listing that (with your permission) automatically duplicates what you put on Facebook, just to encourage people to at least be discoverable outside that walled garden.

> It makes me wonder if it might be useful, as a public service, to have some kind of free business listing that (with your permission) automatically duplicates what you put on Facebook, just to encourage people to at least be discoverable outside that walled garden.

You know that Facebook would immediately start either offering incentives to keep all your data in the walled garden, or spreading FUD about the duplicator ("how can you trust what happens once your information leaves our loving embrace?").

They can also remove that integration any moment they like, by revoking an app ID. Very likely they'll be able to find a paragraph in their developer program T&C they can claim was violated by GP.

I agree and for these reasons won't be the one to try it.

It's funny (in a sad way) but even for my friends who own restaurants, where I'd be more than happy to give them free hosting or help them upload stuff or whatever, they don't see anything other than FB as worth the effort even to just keep track of.

Obviously that's not universally true, plenty of places (especially higher-end ones, and ones with significant delivery business) have dedicated web sites that are kept up to date.

Of course the public application could just scrape Facebook, as the Supreme Court has ruled that webscraping is not illegal (well, at least in the United States). [0]

[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kek83/linkedin-data-scra...

Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally

What's the difference between hn and a facebook group?

HN does not have 2 billion users and teams of thousands of developers working to exploit psychology and an ad monopoly to keep you on HN.

HN is one website with a very small audience of people who understand how it fits into the broader internet. A FB group is what a much, much larger set of less experienced users have been taught is "how you communicate with your tribe". That's not only very different but chillingly scary, IMO

HN allows you to see all the content without registration. Facebook pushes login pop-ups even on pages of restaurants etc (which often replace independent websites these days)

>What's the difference between hn and a facebook group?

- creating a discussion forum like HN -- whether via PG's custom Lisp programming or installing/hosting software like PhpBB/Vbulletin is way more difficult for non-techie users. Compare that to the easy steps of creating a new Facebook group.[1]

- HN is a mixture of real names, pseudonymous, and anonymous identities. Facebook is mostly real names.

- HN has no integrated calendar of related events, no rich media like photos and videos, no realtime chat with group members. Facebook groups can include that. Yes, HN demographic hates all that distracting "noise" but Facebook demographic does not.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/167970719931213

Yep that is to be expected when for a large part of the population the built-in browser is the Internet, and for many of those persons, AOL, FB are what Internet means on their universum.

AOL at least was pretty strictly a US phenomenon. Here in Canada it wasn't a thing, and it wasn't a thing in Europe or Asia. FB's tendril's are international.

What's worse is it's very walled off, it's not really searchable or properly indexed. FB's search facilities are a joke, such as they are, but they are only available to FB users. Information that goes in there is basically available to FB and to nobody else.

Back in the day, Compuserve was quite popular in the UK, and I had understood the rest of the Europe too.

I never used AOL, but I believe it was similar to Compuserve - a walled garden with forums, file downloads, instant messaging and such.

Like AOL, Compuserve reached popularity during the infancy of the web - the web, viewed through Netscape Navigator at the time, was really rather basic, and comparatively empty, or at least so it seemed to me at the time.

I actually remember thinking Compuserve was far superior to the web, and scoffed that the web would never take off. How wrong I was!

I am not sure but I think I used Compuserve too, in France. AOL came, but later and more as one Internet provider in many, and much like the others.

It was a bit difficult for us to understand the image and all the memes about AOL, so you had to learn that it meant "Internet for noobs / Joe Six-Pack" in American texts.

I did have AOL in the early days of 56k in Germany.

It was the same walled garden as it was in the US, and I was 'locked in' that garden without knowing. I must've been 12 or 14 years old and this was our very first internet.

> Here in Canada it wasn’t a thing...

I sure remember it was a “thing” in Canada, especially before most people were on the internet.

https://youtu.be/iaJsc6DHYkE

No, because most uses back then were not integrated in internet. Parents at school did not rely solely on AOL to get news, communicate with each other, etc.

AOL died off because the world shifted to the open web. The only way Facebook or Google die off is if a similar paradigm shift occurs.

It's about time for true change and the open interweb as Tim Berners Lee et al. conceived it. I currently only see ipfs as a viable alternative, but with another markdown format so we need no chrome browser.

Tim Berners Lee himself has a project aimed at this. I like IPFS but it's still quite clunky to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...

AOL died off, but also Microsoft was faced with antitrust. The combination is best, and our efforts on each are in fact complementary: we need the politicians to understand how the status quo is not workable outcome, and there is a budding alternative ready to flourish if given some breathing room. That will embolden them.

>Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally

AOL was dominant (~30 million dialup subscribers at its 2002 peak) but didn't build any "sticky" products such as Facebook's social graph (a very valuable online Rolodex contacts database of real names). Each dialup user of AOL didn't interact with each other that much back then because the internet wasn't as central to life like today. Thus, switching from AOL access via telephone modems to cable broadband was easier than today's idea of switching away from Facebook's connected contacts. (E.g. Even Google with all its billions and web dominance couldn't get Facebook users to switch to Google+ in 2011.)

That said, I still believe Facebook dominance can be supplanted but it will happen by accident : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15263715

> dialup user of AOL didn't interact with each other that much back then because the internet wasn't as central to life like today.

Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms all day every single day. The kids rooms were packed with at least like 30 instances of them and like 10 to 20 kids in between. Learned what a/s/l meant back then something you dont hear as often these days hah.

MSN Messenger had MSN chat which was IRC esque and MSN Groups had their own instances or chat it was glorious. Anywhere you went with chatrooms the internet attracted people like crazy! AOL was definitely full of those types.

AOL also had annoying (to me) parental control settings. Thankfully I could justify internet access outside the AOL program by stating that games didnt work online otherwise I would be restricted to AOLs trashy browser.

>Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms

My phrase of "interact that much" was relative to today's Facebook type of social penetration. Yes, I also interacted with others on old USENET, BBSs, Compuserve (CIS userid), AOL, etc. Many of us did.

But Facebook's social graph is the phenomenon that bridged the gap of grandparents seeing updates on the grandkids, high school alumni and past coworkers "finding" each other again and extending weak ties ("friend each other"). This type of social interaction is very sticky and difficult to switch away from. USENET/CIS/AOL level of interaction was much weaker.

Ah that's fine, I misunderstood what you said as if it meant that the internet didn't have people talking to one another back then. I think the internet is just scaled out more so it feels like a lot more, but I guess you got a point, most people I knew were not on the internet as much as I was. A lot of them had access, and I would talk to them when they came online.

Honestly, it seems like we never successfully replicated the AOL/Prodigy era chat room paradigm. My family still has friends we met in late-90s AOL chat rooms, and we honestly ended up stuck on their dialup for years longer than would have been sane due to wanting to stick to that community (at the time, I think the bring-your-own-connection service was still an extra fee, so we'd have to pay $15 to a local ISP plus $15 for AOL or whatever, versus paying them $25 in the first place."

There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience.

I also wonder if by tying it to a paid service in the first place gave a bit more ammunition for moderators to handle the "obnoxious 12-year-old" class of troll.

> There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience.

Some clients are nice enough to include a list of common / popular servers, but they don't provide much more context about them. I would love to see some of those modern IRCv3 features but I'm not sure of clients supporting them and IRC networks supporting them.

One way that AOL was sticky was email addresses. I still know a few people, and my parents generation, who pay for AOL because they don't want to lose their aol.com email address.

But I definitely agree that Facebook is a lot stickier: I have the impression that most of my Facebook graph would like to move somewhere else, but the combination of the difficulty of that coordination problem and no strong candidates for a replacement has kept us on Facebook.

At its peak AOL had millions of users and the internet accounted for a tiny fraction of a person's life. The number of people who viewed AOL a "the internet" and the impact it had on them was a rounding error compared to FB's breadth and depth of integration into the very identity of it's userbase.

Remember in 2005-2010 when every geek worth their salt was talking about an open and distributed web?

"The web is open!" they would say. It's a key part of the web. It's part of our core values! We're going to change the world!

Yet 95% of these people are now at Facebook or Google actively trying to rip apart what made the web good, stable, and open.

It's repugnant. Every person you know working at Facebook should be ashamed of themselves and they should be socially ostracized.

I replaced the battery on my grandmothers phone recently (a galaxy s4 or s5 if I recall), and the only 3 apps she used were:

- phone - text messages - Facebook

She has no concept of the internet outside of the Facebook app.

I was very unaware that people use Facebook as their source for forums and groups until my wife started talking about the groups she's in and the wild stuff that goes on.

My facebook experience is similar to how it was in '08. Updates from friends, though those are getting less common.

>but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS

Replace'Facebook' with 'WhatsApp', outside U.S. especially for developing economies, your comment would be completely valid but even more dangerous as unlike Facebook's content WhatsApp's content cannot be put under public scrutiny and much of its users haven't even used a browser before let alone email.

At least in Africa it is quite overwhelming, the whole economy is kind of driven by WhatsApp, at least on the countries I used to visit before we got into the current situation.

It's the equivalent of people who always used the phone, and didnt give a toss about the internet. I 'm not sure why it's alarming

The phone was a public utility, somewhat regulated in the public interest.

I see parent’s general point being that some people work in p2p mode, whatever the medium is.

Here facebook is the tool, but what matters to them is not to get random info through the feed. It’s to ask people and hear what people have to say, often very close people (family, friend, real world connections). In this respect messaging could be the main use actually.

This is the equivalent of some of our parents who wouldn’t open the phone book to find some garagist when they have car issues. They’d phone a friend and ask them for recommendations.

> It's the equivalent of people who always used the phone, and didnt give a toss about the internet. I 'm not sure why it's alarming

People who used the phone weren't deluged by calls designed to make it impossible to distinguish bot-strewn propaganda from organic activity of real-life friends. (We did get plenty of junk calls, but they were easy to distinguish from the real thing, and people were motivated to avoid them, not to get deeper into their filter bubbles by seeking out more of them.)

My favorite part of this comment is the lack of disclaimer for a decade-long career at Google :)

Agreed, worse is groups/websites/mailing lists which you must have FB account to join.

Hi cmrdporcupine, you should also disclose that you actually work for Google.

>but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying.

That's interesting that you do. I can't see it because I just don't go on Facebook. And it isn't a moral stance - I have an account, and occasionally I will respond to a relative or a friend. It's just such a small part of my life that I just don't see the danger you do.

what employment do these people have, given the theory of an increasingly technical workforce?

A vast chunk of the population works in the service sector. Often not really engaging with technology beyond the fixed payment terminals or whatever they need for their jobs.

But mostly now people just use their phones for interacting with the Internet. And 10 years on it is still the case that the open web from a phone kinda sucks. Facebook works great on a phone, as a mostly consumption-only, attention-sucking, twitch-scroll heavy medium.

good point, I find that as I age I fall prey to the same faults as most of humanity, not fully considering how things must be for those I am unfamiliar with, or no longer familiar with. So I had the problem of conceiving of a person in western culture that was not very old and still of such limited technical proficiency.

I see the same thing. I've heard lots of non technical people call facebook posts "e-mails" and they never leave the platform. They use a phone or a tablet to launch Facebook.

Very weird for me to hear this considering I've never been logged into Facebook in my entire life.

I suspect if you did, they would already know who you are.

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