Facebook the Devourer
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All of these people could, instead of sharing details of their lives with their friends, instead be spending time on 4chan anonymously grinding out memes. I gather from this post that I am supposed to feel bad about that.
Meanwhile: in a major city in the US, in a market dominated by the likes of McDonalds and Walmart, your odds of successfully starting a small business that depends on a retail channel are significantly worse than 50/50. Most people don't get a shot at starting any kind of business like that, and only a vanishingly small few get multiple bites at that apple. Yet I can use Facebook today to find out about meat specials at my butcher, or someone selling artisanal pickles, or a new theater company, or someone making custom knives as their hobby hoping to try to make a living doing it. And because of the stupid blue "like" button this article rails against, these hopeful businesses can do that without paying for pointless terribly-performing ads in major newspapers or on radio stations, and can have actual conversations with their customers. And again, I gather from this post that I am supposed to feel like this is a bad thing.
So I guess I'm saying: I'm not getting the author's point.
I would say the Pages product is one of Facebook's strongest value points outside all of the peer-to-peer social networking. Small businesses don't have the time, energy, or money to host a custom websites and mailing lists to communicate with their fans. Pages make it incredibly easy -- deals, announcements, and advertising all wrapped into a single product.
Yet I can use Facebook today to find out about meat specials at my butcher, or someone selling artisanal pickles, or a new theater company, or someone making custom knives as their hobby hoping to try to make a living doing it. And because of the stupid blue "like" button this article rails against, these hopeful businesses can do that without paying for pointless terribly-performing ads in major newspapers or on radio stations, and can have actual conversations with their customers.
I used to "like" local businesses. But... every day I get ads in my news stream reminding me that my friends "like" Wal-Mart. And Amazon.com. Mostly Amazon.com, actually. Sometimes I think that if I just clicked "like" I'd get fewer ads from Amazon than I currently get for Amazon. Because on Facebook, even the ads have ads.
Now I hesitate to "like" anything because I feel complicit in helping Facebook spam my friends. I think it's cool when a single item goes into my friends' feeds saying that I "like" a local restaurant, but I DON'T want them to see recurring ads in their news feed with my name attached. I have one friend who posts very infrequently, and she is apparently one of the only Facebook friends I have who has "liked" Wal-Mart, so most of her appearances in my feed are promotions for Wal-Mart. If I only knew her from my feed, I'd know her as that girl who shills for Wal-Mart.
I admit it's irrational to avoid the "like" button when it comes to local businesses, because I've never seen Facebook promote a cool local business to me; it's too busy telling me about this awesome new thing called Wal-Mart that I might not have heard of. When I "like" the coffee shop down the street, I suppose Facebook applies powerful machine-learning algorithms to that information to determine that they should lace my friends' news feeds with slightly more ads for Amazon.com and slightly fewer ads for Wal-Mart. No real harm done, then, since my name won't be used, but it isn't something I'm thrilled to be part of.
I just don't see the controversy here.
One issue I have with it is that promoted content makes no attempt at being valuable to users at all. I get endless reminders that so-and-so "likes" Wal-Mart or Amazon, but nothing about businesses I've never heard of. It's the opposite of being friendly to the tenuous, fledgling businesses for whom Facebook can be so helpful. People do their best to be interesting and to promote businesses they love that their friends might want to learn about. They don't endlessly shill brands that all of their friends already know about. Promoted content is a way for big boring brands to muscle their way in, through sheer advertising dollars, into a medium that naturally favors novelty and underdogs. Also, since companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon use their Facebook pages to direct advertising to users, promoted content is advertising advertising. Ads for ads. I don't know if I can articulate a reason why advertising for advertising makes me feel like a line of absurdity has been crossed (or a shark has been jumped) but it doesn't feel right.
Another thing that bothers me is that they use my friends' names. My friend may truly like Wal-Mart, but is she okay with her name being used to suggest a page to me over and over again in the hopes that the fifth or tenth or twentieth time I see it, I might relent and click "like?" I'm not cool with Facebook using my name that way. If Facebook wants to suggest one of my likes to a friend of mine, because Facebook believes that friend is likely to be interested, that's great. That makes me actually feel kind of good about Facebook having so much data about us. If Facebook wants to nag my friend to check out a page because that advertiser is paying Facebook to nag him, well, maybe that's the price of using Facebook, but please don't use my name. I'm sure the TOS says they can, but common courtesy should apply. Perhaps it is public information that you support a particular candidate in the presidential election, but it would be out of line for me to send hundreds of emails to HN users saying, "THOMAS H. PTACEK THINKS YOU SHOULD VOTE FOR MITT HUSSEIN JOHNSON." The opinion might be yours, but the obnoxious style wouldn't be, so it wouldn't be fair to invoke your name.
It produces something of value to me. I live in CA, my parents live in NY. We're in different worlds. I can't possibly communicate what my world is like to them via a daily phone call. But I can share bits and pieces of info on Facebook that they see, and it's a wonderful medium for us to have shared experiences for things that otherwise would be extremely difficult to share.
It's a new mode of communication. Without it, I'd be alienated from my friends and family across the continent and in a few years we would have easily grown completely apart. With it, when I go back to visit, it's as if I never left. I can actually exchange pictures with my grandparents, and they can actually be a part of my life every day. Facebook seriously impacts the direction of my life, with respect to family and friends.
One billion people realized this, consciously or unconsciously, and made Facebook a multibillion dollar company. At this point saying Facebook produces nothing of value is as delusional as saying that about Microsoft, or Apple, or Proctor and Gamble.
His rant doesn't touch this because that is the perceived value to individuals that facebook provides. Cannot really argue against that and I am glad people are able to use it like this. However, there is something in this "value" that bothers me and why I do not use facebook. From the facebook ad link at the beginning of his post:
"We make the tools and services that allow people to feel human, get together, open up. Even if it's a small gesture, or a grand notion -- we wanted to express that huge range of connectivity and how we interact with each other,"
The ad does not show that. It shows people doing things together. It shows real people interacting in a physical world. It shows physical, tangible, things. Not pictures of things, or short quips and a link to an article or an emoticon. The feeling the ad tries to carry across to the viewer is the exact reason that facebook is a terrible medium to "connect" in the human sense. Lets compare it to Apple's FaceTime ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k). Not only is the product in almost every scene, but the ad shows exactly how it directly integrates and impacts peoples lives. The last scene with the sign language drives home the technology empowering humans to connect in an almost surreal new way. Another example is the Kodak Carousel scene from Mad Men (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus). How facebook goes from their Timeline ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzPEPfJHfKU) to "Chairs are like Facebook" is incredible to me. The commonality in all of these is capturing intiment moments between individuals. That is where the value proposition falls down with facebook. There is no sense of intimacy in the communication channel. A photo of your mom and dad probably has a different value to you than to your other facebook friends. It has very little to do with the photo itself as the photo has no intrinsic value either. It is the memories and emotions tied to it. That is the extent of it. Your mom doesn't need you to like the photo. Your friends don't need to see your comment saying your dad looks like a dork in that sweater. I argue that the passive nature and resulting noise to signal ratio makes facebook insufficient to build real human connections. For these things, not sure how facebook is better than email... it is no where close to live voice or video chat. Having a billion people on it means nothing when you only really want to communicate with 50 of them on a regular basis and only 1-4 of them at a time. Everything else on facebook is just self absorption and ego.
But I digress. His rant is really about how facebook is trying to make everything a part of its ecosystem. I can barely get older generations on email or MMS messaging let alone facebook. Trying to include facebook in every website serves no one but facebook and to what end? It definitely isn't user experience. Facebook is going the way of AOL as a ubiquitous term describing what the internet is and that is a scary thought.
We make the tools and services that allow people to feel human
We need tools and services to feel human? I know it's marketing speak but geez.
> If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, nobody would give a shit.
There are plenty of people who would give a shit. You may not be one of them, but there are countless people who rely on Facebook to communicate with family members on the other side of the globe, or share their private pictures and memories with their loved ones, or just to keep in touch with friends who no longer live nearby. If that's not one of the best definitions of value, by touching people's lives where it matters to them the most, then I don't know what is.
You may not use Facebook for any of those things, and that's fine, but when a billion people log into Facebook every month to communicate with their friends and family, you can't possibly think that your usage is indicative of everyone else.
Facebook doesn't need to produce new knowledge or culture to provide tangible, long-term value.
They can try e-mail, IM, SMS, picking up the telephone, smoke signals. Let's stop pretending Facebook is so ingrained in people's lives that they cannot live without it. We're talking about a website that's merely a time waster.
> a billion people log into Facebook every month
I'd bet that number is way off once you account for spam profiles and how Facebook defines 'active' [1]
Edit: to satisfy ghost downvoters (HN, go figure) here is previous discussion on the billion users
And of course there is a value in passive communication. I want to see the photos my friend posted of his holiday. I don't want to have to look at them right now, though- I'm busy. So I'll look later. Ta-da: passive communication.
The number of people who "switched" from doing all of these things (blogging, IM, photo-posting, online gaming) on other sites to using Facebook for them is a tiny tiny minority compared to the number of people who never did any of them before.
It assumes that if Facebook went away, that all of these people would just go "back" to using Blogger, or Flickr, or AIM, or Armor Games, and the internet at large would be a better place.
I don't think that's even remotely true. Nerds can happily continue to use those services, and regular people will keep using Facebook.
Sure, someday there'll be a "new Facebook", and then people can complain about that walled garden.
People whining about Facebook feels very much like people whining about American Idol (or stupefying-ly popular CBS sitcoms). Like if 2.5 Men was suddenly cancelled, people would all start watching Mythbusters or assembling Arduinos.
Providing "free" online services to a billion people seems like a giant win for society.
I'm of the opinion that Facebook isn't going to get trumped by anything but an NGO. :(
OP works for a company named Instrument that does work on several things for Google. Google is a competitor to Facebook.
My name is Thomas Reynolds. I'm a Technical Lead at Instrument, lucky denizen of Portland, active Crossfitter, a foodie, a cocktail enthusiast and all-around nerd.
http://weareinstrument.com/work/
In late 2011, Google came to Instrument and tasked us with designing an online product experience for the global launch of Google's first phone with Android 4.0, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
Partnering with Google, we crafted a new identity for their “Developers” brand to educate and inspire those who embrace their open-source platforms.
To welcome the arrival of one of the biggest days in sports, we created “Game Day”, in partnership with Google, to speak directly with football fans around the world about the many helpful features of Google Search.This delusion that Facebook is somehow dramatically more replaceable than Google or Amazon is kinda amusing. There are plenty of other places to buy online and plenty of other places to search. I can't imagine the mental contortions that are required to hold both of these beliefs at once: "Facebook is replaceable," and, "Google is irreplaceable." They are both replaceable, but it would be tough in both cases.
Facebook is a website that lets you share text and images with your friends. Their only value proposition is that they have a lot of customers: the value of facebook is not provided by facebook. What makes them valuable is simply inertia, and if they lose that inertia they are dead. They have no technical advantage to the competition.
If a notably better competitor comes along tomorrow, within a year the whole money empire could crumble. People would just go to the new place, one at a time.
Facebook has TREMENDOUS lock-in. For any new place to have value, it's got to have the majority of the people Facebook has change over in a very short timeframe.
The problem with technical advantage is that when it's gone, it's gone.
Eh. I quit it a few years ago and honestly, no one cared. I kept up with the people I kept up with, they did the same.
it completely vanished with nary a ripple.
How can a website lock you in to only being able to share things with your friends through their website? Do they lock you out of your friendships if you quit the site? This is a very bizarre notion to me. Facebook accounts have no value, the people behind the accounts and the relationships have the value. Facebook disappearing wouldn't prevent you from communicating with them. Is this real life?
> and companies with real technical prowess will fail because they rely on producing something new
Err, what? Do you mean that smart people working on hard problems are destined to fail? That facebook has some how consumed all of the available users and prevented them from existing any where else on the internet?
Consider this web ad from three days ago from Microsoft:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNWuOJXP-R4
It makes the claim that in blind tests people choose Bing to Google nearly 2:1. Which is a pretty bold and substantial claim. Question: Do you believe that? Does this new info make you want to try it and set bing even one week as your default search engine? Do you even care? (Notice also that I linked to the bing account on Youtube, a subsidiary of Google, and the chances are high that you are either browsing with Chrome or use Safari/Firefox which use Google as default search.)
I'd say, though, that the ads network is the bigger lock-in for Google, because it's vastly superior than alternativea.
But marginally better doesn't matter much, which is why I was careful to say "notably" better.
Search now is nothing like what it will be in a decade, and someone is going to make that leap. Might be Google, might not.
What happens when someone makes that quantum leap in delivering the information you want?
If it's not Google, the ad network disintegrates at least as fast as the search users vanish.
I would argue that Youtube has the most lock-in of any Google product, with Gmail second. Neither is invulnerable, but Youtube in particular will be hard to pull folks away from. Moving video around is tedious, and people largely just won't do it.
Everything from source discovery, to unearthing basic facts, to hypertextual excursions through human knowledge is so much easier and more fruitful now, it's hard to imagine going back to the way things were before.
Life would be a lot worse without my Kindle, but in terms of a website that changes the world in itself, I can only think of arXiV. I remember what trying to look up actual research papers as a high school student was like before it.
Incidentally, ill thought features like the timeline or apps like the Washington post that try to turn the site to a news site or a personal mausoleum will fail and be retracted few months later
The Washington Post app has been around longer than a few months.
If facebook disappeared overnight, it would cause millions of people to come unglued. People are addicted to the connected/sharing nature of facebook and the level of withdrawal would be dangerous.
1. Thomas Reynold's post comes across as a pathetic childish rant.
2. If you don't think connecting with your friends is valuable then don't write a blog post about it, keep it to yourself, because I don't give a shit what you think.
Anytime I see an update in my feed that is either inane, useless, irritating, cloying, etc., I simply update the settings for that user's updates to "Only Show Important". After over a year of cultivating my feed, I am treated to a birds-eye view of the experiences of important people in my life every time I log into Facebook. This is nothing short of miraculous to me.
The thing is, most non-technical users won't be able to do it. Can you imagine your grandma using irc?
The value of facebook and similar social networks is that they unlock the power of internet communication for people who would otherwise be unable to use it.
Passive broadcasting / timeline: Share a status update with your friends, without putting it in an inbox or otherwise forcing them to actively dismiss it. People read your update if they happen to see it, but are not obligated to.
Events: Invite people to an event and let everyone see a convenient headcount and list of all the Yes/Maybe RSVPs.
Friends of friends: Discover new connections among the people you already know—for example, that Bob and Sally are acquainted even though you've never seen them together.
Photo tagging: Label each person in a group photo in a listable, searchable way. By viewing photos others have tagged, refresh your memory of who someone is.
At current there is no integrated, open protocol that would solve the above use-cases in an even remotely adequate manner, even if everyone on earth used it. We're left with two options. Surrender control to centralized social networks like Facebook, who have solved the above problems, but only within their walled gardens. Or simply go without these benefits and opportunities.
Both choices are unacceptable to me, and long-term, I suspect most hackers will feel the same way. That's why I strongly hope for the Tent protocol, or something like it, to succeed. https://tent.io/blog/tent-basics
That's what IRC is all about
>Events: Invite people to an event and let everyone see a convenient headcount and list of all the Yes/Maybe RSVPs.
Easy with calendaring
>Friends of friends: Discover new connections among the people you already know—for example, that Bob and Sally are acquainted even though you've never seen them together.
Yes, that's fair. Is that actually useful though?
>Photo tagging: Label each person in a group photo in a listable, searchable way. By viewing photos others have tagged, refresh your memory of who someone is.
Perfectly doable with traditional online photo galleries.
I don't think facebook makes much possible that is impossible without it; the value is all in the integration, as well as the convenient interface you mention.
So why keep it around, Facebook?* From my vantage point, it's kinda evil, and it's anti-user. Why can't you stop being Twitter and just be an awesome private network?
* (rhetorical question)
The majority of it's use seems to be for very short term things, like friends sharing what they are currently doing.
There is little value in most FB posts that are years old. As opposed to wikipedia which is a gradually building blob of knowledge.
Let's say FB was down for a week, many people would use G+ instead for their social networking needs and how many would come back?
Would Plus receive more traffic? Well, yeah. But so would Twitter and other social networks. My mom, for one, would return to sending email jokes instead of resharing Facebook stuff. She doesn't know what Google Plus is. I imagine a large number of other individuals are in the same boat.
Would people return to Facebook after a week? Assuming the connections between users aren't broken, I imagine so. It'd take more than a week to reconnect to that coworker from seven years ago, but who I still enjoy talking politics with about once a month.
So, in other words: Facebook's biggest asset is that it has a crapton of momentum. Keeps its one billion users on the site more and more is going to keep that momentum up. Switching from Facebook to the new thing would be more of a collective hassle than the demise of MySpace. That doesn't mean it won't happen, though.
actually never thought of it so simply like this, thanks for that,
Unlike say, Google, who started their massive empire by solving a technical problem; search.
Staying connected to the things that matter. Remembering your life.
Maybe your friend's more technical, but for many people the easiest way to send a piece of information to several of their friends/family at once (at least if it includes a picture or something) really is facebook.
The combination of HTTP, Browsers, HTML, etc provides a broad canvas for artists, designers and makers to paint on. Facebook and Twitter are trying hard to take all of these amazing experiences, content and sites and package them up into a wall post or tweet. This is going to get boring for the majority of users and another solution for finding great content will catch our collective interest.
If anything I think the greatest counter is the rise of twitter bootstrap, giving lots of content across the rest of the web a minimal, consistent look.
Now think at Facebook as this exact process on steroids. Facebook is different because almost all the other sites on the internet where there is production of user-generated content is frequented by the elite of the internet users.
Facebook is different, a big percentage of facebook users are not really internet literate, they think the internet is confined into facebook, a few common sites they visit, plus searching with google when needed. They don't have a blog, don't write into forums, don't know reddit, they don't even know how to properly use a search engine.
So the quality of Facebook reflects a lot the average quality of their users, and with 1 billion users this quality is not exactly very high. Sorry, average people may be good at parenting, at helping you, at getting their work done, but the process of content production is something the belongs to an elite. Most people will just share pictures, write non-sensical status messages, and so forth.
Can't think of anywhere else that would let me know that a guy I played club frisbee with in college recently got married. I never would have found out otherwise. You can argue that I didn't need to know that, but you can't argue that it keeps certain people on your extended network closer.
A lot of his argument is against the silly stuff they made for kids: farmville, frequent status updates, apps, gifts, etc. I can relate. Facebook has continually lost value since the year I joined, 2004, as a college freshman. This does coincide with their opening it to high school students, then the general population, apps, games, etc.
All that aside, what a fantastic URL! Slartibartfast would be proud.
Terrible business model, "shadiness", and being part of an ongoing mass of wealth evaporation (Zynga, as we speak) is what bothers me the most about Facebook.
It's the push for users to overshare/go frictionless/"Like" the internet etc/viral gaming stuff that makes me uncomfortable.
If nothing else, Facebook is obviously entertaining to many people, so this is a bit like arguing that entertainment has no value and we should just work all the time.
Wouldn't work itself be pointless in that case?
"At the dissolution of things, it is Kāla [Time] Who will devour all" (Mahanirvana-tantra, cited in David Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas, p. 122.)
Better known is Krishna's theophanic revelation to Arjuna on the sacred plain of Kurukṣetra: "Behold, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," which is also translated, "I am terrible time [Kalo, from "Kala"] the destroyer of all beings in all worlds" (Bhagavad-Gita, 11:32). Oppenheimer reportedly quoted this very line immediately after first nuclear detonation in history at Trinity Site, New Mexico in 1945.
Surely Facebook is too trivial to merit such cosmic appellations and apocalyptic titles as "the Devourer." Such language is best left to poets, seers, prophets, and mystics. In the context of discussing the technology industry, it is wildly hyperbolic.
I don't even keep a Facebook account, so to them I must be just about the worst moocher ever. :P
The point of the blog post is clear. There are other methods to do what people, such as middle-aged ones, now use Facebook for: sharing photos and text blurbs.
Knowing this, Facebook is pretty silly since you're posting all your private stuff on some kid's website. You do not know him and he doesn't know you. To him, you are just "Dumb fucks".
Can photos be shared by email? Can photos be shared via peer-to-peer? What is Skype? It's peer-to-peer. But it's not used for sharing "files". Years ago Google had something called the HELLO protocol. Anyone remember that? There are many ways to share personal photos and private text blurbs, not all of them are widely used. Posting your private photos and text blurbs on some kid's website seems like one of the dumbest ways to do it, especially when the kid calls people "[d]umb fucks" for doing so.
You know why people share these things by posting them on someone else's website? Because it's orders of magnitude easier than the alternatives. It lets millions of people do something valuable they otherwise couldn't, not because it would be technically impossible for them to do it but because they don't have the skills. That's the value facebook provides.
If what you say is true (and I believe it is), then the solution is not FB but better skills, i.e. education.
True value would be teaching people the skills they need so they do not have to subject themselves to someone like Zuckerberg and a "company" like FB.
While you may see altenatives as difficult, that is only your opinion. It is not fact. Stop making assumptions about what users can and cannot do. Stop tricking them like FB does. Let's teach them.
Let's deliver real value.
A lot of hacker/geek types seem 1. to hate facebook and 2. to be unable to empathize with anyone who doesn't share their dogmatic technological beliefs. Can we stop this already? Most people on facebook enjoy using it. Most people on facebook get tons of value from it. Most people on facebook aren't on reddit or hacker news, so they get a lot of new content from things lifted from those sites and posted to facebook. I don't understand why it eats at people so much that other people enjoy something they don't like.
This is just a cynical blog post by someone angry that something he doesn't like is popular.
No we can't.
Imagine yourself going back to the 80s and explaining the Web to someone. It's as close to utopia as you can get. Most people probably wouldn't believe it. But it's real, it's here and it's amazing.
I'd argue that Facebook undermines a lot of what makes the Web great. And since it's being confused with the Web itself, by being so popular and pervasively devouring, it could be a treat to it.
Us nerds have failed, for whatever reason, to provide a decent competitive way to share stuff that's more aligned with the ethos of the Web. But that's not a reason to excuse Facebook.
But I disagree no one would give a shit if Facebook went away tomorrow. I for one would throw a big fucking party.
Thankfully, my parents are too old to have any interest in FB, and my siblings are equally as cynical (aka "weird").
It's really not. That's like blaming people for driving cars before autonomous cars came out.
They're supporting a company that is, in our eyes, committing a moral wrong. The difference, in the case of Facebook, is that they aren't necessarily aware of this moral wrong.
The hardest part in my opinion is not the users experience per se, Facebook's not that great. It's getting the traction and the cool factor that's needed to beat the chicken-egg conundrum (I use FB because everybody else does).