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Comment by mattberg | Hacker News Reader

i am confused, why would you want to do that to your own Facebook account???

As someone who is older than the college age crowd, it seems pretty inane. I'm sick of political posts so would probably ignore those in someone else's feed. Having kids or dropping out of school to do a startup don't sound like crazy ideas to me, either. I actually think the idea is pretty funny, but the options are unimaginative, or perhaps I'm just too far distant from the target demographic.

We've had a pretty good response so far with our current options while at the same time being able to stay away from any profane, offensive, or really malicious content; however, we would love to have expanded options for other target demographics outside of college students.

Do you have any ideas for options that would be more well-targeted at your demographic?

We already personalize options to some of the user's basic fb info, but have yet to come up with buttons that we think other specific age groups would be more likely to use.

I probably don't have any real gems but generally, non-sequitur stuff that clearly wasn't an intentional post is the most funny, as it jumps out an makes you wonder what the hell is going on. Promotion of weird/bad products, i.e. spam. The 4chan FB hacks from that christian message board a couple years back were actually pretty funny, albeit juvenile and insulting. Maybe the heuristic would be that a good percentage of one's friends think you were hacked without you knowing about it, but nothing too shocking or harmful. Just my $.02, I did think it was a neat idea.

Agree about the options. When I have "hacked" one of my friends Facebook accounts when they left their phone around, I definitely had different thoughts on what to write. And maybe that is where my disconnect is, I can't imagine wanting to write what I would put on someone else's account as a joke on my own account. The idea is much funnier to me when used on someone else's account (their original idea I guess).

I had the same reaction. However, I've learned that different people use and see computers, the internet, and these social tools differently. It goes beyond not seeing the implications of posting certain types of content or exposing too much personal information, sites like Facebook are there to entertain themselves, their friends, and family. People have grown up with enough virus infections, identity theft and other digital shenanigans that it is a part of their life.

Try it. It's hilarious. Also, if you read the TIME article, originally it was intended to be used on your friends Facebook's when they left it open at your house or left their laptop for a moment when you were working next to them.

Then we got a lot of backlash about that; we realized it was even funny to do one of the hack flavors to yourself. For some reason, people enjoy being hacked on Facebook as long as it isn't malicious.

so i assume the app could be used in a similar method to your previous concept, but with all of the backlash (especially from Facebook) you had to make it seem like you would want to hack yourself?

We highly condone misuse of the app, but yes it can still be used in that way.

condemn

It was originally called Buddy Hack (to be used if a friend leaves Facebook logged in), but I presume someone made them change it to Hack My Facebook. More confusing, less liability.

Facebook banned the app when the point was to hack another account.

They put the app back up under a new name / context to comply and demo the app.

Exactly...we realized that people were even using Buddy Hack to mess with their friends by "hacking" their own Facebook's, so we pivoted to Hack My Facebook.

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