What Happened to the Facebook Killer? It's Complicated | Hacker News Reader

What Happened to the Facebook Killer? It's Complicated

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131 points001sky82 comments

Why do we overcomplicate our analysis of social media and web 2.0? We all got on Facebook because it was new, it was fun, we shared pictures, we poked each other, we implicitly pried on our friends. Some of us got on Google+ because we were intrigued by what new it can bring to the table. The answer was none. Some of us stuck with Facebook because we're too lazy to manage two networks. Some of us continued on Google+ just to brag about having a Google+ account. Most of us didn't care about privacy, freedom, human rights or whatever mambo jumbo the media pundits were talking about, and who the hell cares who owns the data. it's just pictures and stupid text. we're just having fun at the end of the day. No need for philosophical analyses. It's just a game and once we get bored we'll move on.

This sounds like a specific, personal experience. It certainly doesn't describe anything I, myself, experienced. If I were to guess, I would say you are in your early 20s?

You surely understand that the description is a caricature of social media use. I am not saying, you or I have that experience but the point that I was making is that the majority of Facebook users, the teens and early 20s, as you're pointing, don't take any of this seriously. It's just one way of having fun until something else comes up. And that's why any competitor that enters this competition with a serious face i.e. we want to decentralize social interaction doesn't have a chance. The next Facebook killer will be something that's more FUN to use.

It's just a game and once we get bored we'll move on.

This is why I never believed in Zynga. Casual games are casual. I never thought that they can capture the imagination of people over the long-term. It'd be really interesting of that axiom applies to the bigger picture of social also. It probably wouldn't, but who can tell what the future holds 10 years from now?

It's a lot more than pictures and text.

Jane goes to a party but doesn't want anyone who wasn't there to know. Jane's friends post pictures of her at said party. Now everyone who checks Facebook before Jane sees that she's been tagged in these pictures. Until now, Jane's never really considered that she should screen tags for approval first.

Jane has her profile available to anyone who is a friend of a friend. Jane's never considered that people who might have an interest in her may add any of her loose acquaintances or work friends. Any undesirable who happens to add one of her 'friends' now has access to her political beliefs, check-ins, address, cell phone number, favorite books, movies, music.

The problem is that the average person doesn't consider the implications of over-sharing or of Facebook's oversights in terms of privacy. Jane doesn't consider a _timeline of every major event in her life_ to be a problem because only 'friends of friends' can see it anyway.

It's foolish of you to believe this is just a game and that boredom is all it will take to pass. People put their lives on social media without a second thought.

if you put your life on social media without understanding the consequences, that is your own fault. i agree the average person doesnt understand the implications, but it is out of laziness that they do not (it's really not that complicated).

(if facebook changes their settings, that is one, thing, but if you are too lazy to look at what settings exist, that is not facebook's problem)

i totally agree that social media and facebook has become much more than pictures and text - it has a created a generation of people who want to take a picture every 5 minutes no matter how insignificant the event and upload them to "look cool". it has also created a generation of people that pour their heart and emotions out onto facebook to try to gain attention, likes, etc.

if that type of behavior comes back to bite them in the ass, im not sure it is possible to feel sorry for them though....

I don't pity the individual who gets bitten by his or her ignorance. I fear for consequences on a much larger scale. This ignorance, well, false sense of security, will likely have broader implications in the long run. The scale and where this leads is a much bigger problem than the individual being bitten.

Example: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/twitter-hands-ove...

Not only are there issues like this, but there are also various changes in privacy policies that lead to exposed information. That can't really be blamed on individual ignorance.

Jane didn't put her life on social media; her friends did.

The problem with Facebook is not what it enables or what settings it has -- it's the cultural shift, engineered by a single company, that it's socially acceptable to take pictures of your friends, post them publicly, identify them by name in a worldwide, searchable database, and preserve those pictures for eternity, all without Jane's consent.

That would have been an unthinkable invasion of privacy not twenty years ago, against an individual, and now we do that to everyone in society.

If people want to preserve their own actions, that's one thing, and it's fine not to feel sorry for them. If they want to preserve other people's actions without their consent, that's another thing entirely.

Real life anecdote.

I just use FB for saying yay/nay to events people organise, turned off tagging ages ago, etc. Tried shutting it down, but missed a couple of events or had to turn them down as I heard about them too late.

However somehow I still get tagged in stuff. Worse than this at some point I got tagged as going to Hooters, not once, but three times. All stag dos in my local city (popular stag do location).

So now FB reports that my favourite place in the world is Hooters. I keep meaning to figure out how to kill it, but seriously, WTF? I didn't do a thing but apparently I'm tit-obsessed according to FB.

Am I set to friend of friends? Probably.

>take pictures of your friends, post them publicly, identify them by name in a worldwide, searchable database

Facebook's data is only public if you want it to be.

No. It's also public if anyone you interact with wants it to be. I have no way to prevent someone else from taking a picture of me and uploading it to Facebook with my name attached.

This is the sort of behavior that used to be the realm of tabloid journalists and paparazzi and viewed as ethically uncool; now it's expected of everyone.

If you do it voluntarily, that's your own fault. But there's no way to prevent everyone you know from tagging you in photos even if you do your personal best to be private.

i have avoided being in photos at public events for this very reason for the past two years - it's really not that hard to avoid - more of a habit at this point

Well, I do that too, but I shouldn't have to. I also tend to get pressured into being in pictures. Some people have a tendency to get offended and/or being really persistent when someone doesn't want to be in a picture. I just hate being put in that position and my point is, I really shouldn't have to.

This is an impossible task. The more you go out in public, the more likely you are to be photographed and have that photo placed in a publicly viewable place online. Even untagged photos will be fair game with facial recognition running against public photos.

Thats a bit unfair, not everyone around the world understands the privacy implications, especially compared to a subsection of people on HN who've been awoken to this issue since the dawn of the net.

Yes that doesn't preclude people from being dense either - some people should and do know better as well.

I am saying that its a spectrum, and your point is valid for one chunk of that spectrum, but not its entirety.

> Jane goes to a party but doesn't want anyone who wasn't there to know.

Jane is an outlier.

Funnily, with even minor tweaking of circumstance, we are all outliers or base normal.

Let me finish that story for you ... Jane is embarrassed for couple of weeks. Jane realizes that she's not the first one in the world who lied about going to a party. A month later no one gives a damn about the story. Jane doesn't understand why the hell everyone in the media was talking about it as if it were the end of civil rights as we know them.

I see you neglected to read the rest of my post and didn't consider any of the possible implications of said party. A party unwittingly attended can cost many opportunities. Employment, friends, standing with family, and the party was only one example of many other potential problems. Look up the "girls around me" app. It's entirely feasible for a stalker to make use of information in these ways, and that's one of the more pleasant possibilities.

Friends can inadvertently reveal private data about other friends due to a mistaken sense of security by both parties. I don't understand how anyone can deny that this is a serious problem.

it is a problem - but it's not facebook's problem, it's your problem for not understanding the settings (obviously i do not mean you, i mean users). projects like beacon were facebook's problem, and they were wrong for doing that. if your using a product and dont understand how it works, then you only have yourself to blame. example (dated, i know):

Edit, I found a better example:

http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=playing+hooky...

I disagree that it isn't Facebook's problem or that you have only yourself to blame.

Facebook is aware of this problem, and it's good for their bottom line. It's not in their best interest to encourage privacy, so they don't. In fact, they actively work to encourage (or, in some cases, force) more sharing, less private behavior.

As there are serious risks, even dangers, involved in over-sharing (not just your over-sharing but your friends' over-sharing as well), I would say that Facebook has some responsibility to protect its users and inform them on the implications of playing fast and loose with privacy.

Cool, link!

"if your using a product and dont understand how it works, then you only have yourself to blame"

Don't we all do this each and every day? And even if you do understand how everything works, predicting the long-term consequences and ramifications can be impossible.

>> "Jane goes to a party but doesn't want anyone who wasn't there to know. Jane's friends post pictures of her at said party. Now everyone who checks Facebook before Jane sees that she's been tagged in these pictures. Until now, Jane's never really considered that she should screen tags for approval first."

There are privacy settings for this (which I use). You turn on an option that all tags (photos and posts) have to be approved by you before they appear on your timeline (and thus visible to your friends).

Exactly that

Or you make tagged photos of you not appear on your timeline (set their privacy to "Only you")

If you found out about this after a photo has already been tagged, you can just untag yourself

I address this. It was something of a weak example, but I do mention that Jane realizes her privacy settings were inadequate, at least for tagging. It's already too late at this point. That particular example was one of oversight on the part of the user. I considered it to be a good starting point.

If only that setting was enabled by default, so that Jane would be protected from having her privacy abused so that a company can make a nickel.

Ha ha! I know, crazy talk.

I'm betting most people don't care about this (this is what I see from my friends anyway). They want to be tagged. Therefore it makes sense that Jane would have to enable it. There's no point inconveniencing the majority of your users to satisfy the minority. If you really care about your privacy the first thing you would do using a service like Facebook is check your privacy settings.

There are privacy settings for this (which I use). You turn on an option that all tags (photos, posts, and check-ins) have to be approved by you before they appear on your timeline (and thus visible to your friends).

> Jane goes to a party but doesn't want anyone who wasn't there to know.

It's unnecessary to present this as a problem of social media. In fact anyone with a camera will present a problem to Jane, as they can make photos and show them to anyone, in real life. At least in the case of social media there are some technical solutions to limit that, but you can't go preventing arbitrary people from accidentally divulging that you were at some party.

Perhaps social media do amplify this situation because the information is more readily concentrated and reproduced, but the fundamental problem you present is the expectation of being able to control information when it can't be.

The problem I present is that Jane doesn't want anyone to know because she doesn't want undesirables, such as coworkers or family, to know. It's not likely that someone will vindictively send pictures of Jane having what they, if they were at the party to take pictures in the first place, likely consider to be harmless fun. The problem is unintentional damage, which, as you say, is amplified by social media.

That said, the party example was weak. I opened with it because it was an easy example of oversight on the part of the user.

This is a problem with social media, though. Before it, there would be a picture of me at a party that no one ever saw. Now, there is a searchable by name picture of me at a party that has been tagged along with every other picture of that party, with times, location, and other attendees determinable in the same way for each.

By the way, this will also be a picture that no one will see, except for the people that are interested in the fact that I'm going to parties, the people that I wanted to hide that fact from. The picture hasn't been made more interesting, it has just been attached to 100 or more indexes, with no lifespan.

A game you can usually walk away from without experiencing life altering change.

These social giants have mountains of information about millions (billions?) of people on this planet, and a legal right to keep it and do pretty much whatever they want with it.

This "game" will never end. Your save data will never be erased. You will likely be reminded of that for years to come.

It's all fun and games until people get hurt: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/109ipi/no_faceboo... & http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/facebook_is_making_us_misera...

No, gosh no. Google+ has shared an album of mine entitled 'My Love and I', with a few snapshots of my girlfriend and I going for a walk by the river, with the people I met at a Hacker News meetup. Embarrassing.

It also recently inappropriately shared another photo with somebody who should only have seen one photo.

Google+ brought really shitty privacy to the table!

tl;dr: google+'s privacy settings are outstandingly bad.

Facebook won't be killed by another product, but by the growing data-mining and exploitation of its data (probably not even by Facebook itself). If you post often enough, Facebook (and/or twitter and g+) provides a map of all your activities, affiliations and even aspirations in great detail (often with geolocated photos, and cross-linked posts by people you have confirmed as friends), which is a treasure trove of information for companies which want to find out more about you.

Facebook has privacy controls to pretend that they're hiding your data, but in the words of its founder, those who trust in them are 'dumb fks' - they are there to encourage more sharing, not less, and are constantly undermined by the company itself.

That data has not been exploited properly at all yet, but when the great data-mining scandal of 2021 hits, and people are regularly being denied services (insurance,travel,benefits,jobs) because of risky activities in their youth, or confronted with just how much anyone can find out about the last 30 years of their life with a trivial search, there will probably be a swing back to much tighter personal control of information, treatment of all data posted to any service as already in the public record, and a general acceptance that maybe we shared too much. Perhaps our concept of privacy will shift, but I doubt it will extend to letting corporations and governments mine the highlights and interstices of our life for every salient fact, which is where we are headed if people continue to use Facebook or similar services their entire life.

One thing I do think might change gradually is that we'll stop believing that pseudonyms on a forum or privacy controls on a sharing website can protect your identity in any meaningful way, and start accepting that anything posted anywhere can and will be traced back to us.

Perhaps facebook's reluctance to roll out a proper people search is a reluctance to scaring it's user base.

Much scarier data (to most laymen) can be found in a public records search, such as through Spokeo.

I think in aggregate the data over a span of 10 years would be much scarier than name,address tel no. etc. at a given point in time, however Spokeo is actually making this point anyway right now - they look like they're collecting exactly the sort of data I'm talking about, if you want to call it 'public records' that's fine - most people aren't thinking through the implications of leaving a public trail like this. Not all the data will be available for everyone, but when the data-mining becomes advanced enough, and if you've left a trail on social media, you're talking about possibilities like:

Your exact coordinates at say 20,000 points in the last 10 years (from pics or posts by you or others)

Your meetings with, relationships with, and messages to friends over that time (again posts by you or others)

Your activity at work/home, when you worked, when you didn't (again posts by you or others)

Your use of alcohol and other drugs (legal or not)

Your opinions on almost every topic (culled from various linked postings via your Facebook ID say)

Your membership of hundreds of websites (again culled from links to Twitter/FB logins say)

NB This doesn't just apply to Facebook but I think it will trigger real hesitations about opening up your data to them or similar sites when this sort of scandal first hits in a big way. It also applies in a smaller way even to forums like this.

Of course if someone can mine your email or your bank accounts (i.e. your gov), they'd hit a similar treasure trove of information, so the change with social media is that a lot of your activity is public or only semi-private (and therefore likely to become public), and innocuous in isolation, but possibly very useful/dangerous in aggregate if you and your friends post enough of it.

"Public records" means data generated by the government that are available to anyone. Drivers license registration, voter registration and participation, county auditor databases, arrest records, etc are all accessible to anyone (usually a nominal fee is involved, may also vary slightly by jurisdiction). People aren't "actively" creating these, it's a byproduct of government transparency and public oversight.

That's what I'd take it to mean too, but the parent mentioned spokeo, which made me unsure if they were redefining the term to include anything public as they appear to harvest data from social media too. Official records are for most people pretty static, more familiar and more predictable than social media, and thus less dangerous, at least imho.

And how is this ANY different from Google which knows far more about you then Facebook ?

Oh that's right. It isn't. Which makes this idea that Facebook is going to die as realistic as Google is going to die.

If you mean G+, of course it's no different. If you mean email, typically only governments and courts can get access to that without hacking. I don't feel it's as insidious as daily public postings.

Google knows an awful lot more about my interests, but a hell of a lot less about my associations, or things that I have actually done, than facebook.

Between gmail and google voice, they know quite a bit about a lot of people's associations.

True, but most facebook friends rarely, if ever, merit an actual email. And when they do, unless they are also in gmail, it won't trigger as large a cascade of edges gaining weight in a massive social graph.

Is it complicated? Diaspora was a nice idea but if I recall correctly it was a group of kids with no experience or evidence of being able to execute who happen to catch a great marketing wind.

"A group of kids with no experience or evidence of being able to execute who happen to catch a great marketing wind" describes many organizations that did become successful (including Facebook).

yeah, but when you position yourself as a facebook killer from the start, you better kill facebook or you lose the hype and die.

No. There's an important distinction as to when you catch the marketing wind. Facebook was executing like there was no tomorrow before they got any kind of attention like Diaspora had before they wrote any code.

Facebook was Mark Zuckerburg's 3rd company. His second, Synapse Media Player, was a machine-learning-based music player that got 7-figure buyout offers from Microsoft and AOL when Zuckerburg was 17.

It's not that complicated, especially if you have been following Diaspora here. Too much spotlight, not enough traction, a suicide, no more money.

Maybe not the most constructive comment but what the hell is that picture? They are (were) a startup, not a boy band... Is this a new trend I was not aware of?

Let me introduce you to a concept called "hype"...

dude on the left is a total bro-grammer

Maybe there won't be one big Facebook killer, but a thousand "niche" social networks, each with an average of a million active users, each hyper-serving its community. Hacker News, Second Life, Metafilter, deviantART, Ravelry (for knitters), and on and on...

People seem to miss this. Eventually people will supplement different niche activities on a monolith for something else, and then suddenly they don't need the main thing that much anymore.

A gourmet supermarket just opened near where I live, between that, the local fruit shop and local butcher (with the odd trip to an asian supermarket to top up on that type of thing), my visits to the supermarket (which is also close to me) are probably down to a 3rd of what they once were. Without me realising it or doing anything conscious to reduce my patronage, the amount of money I give the supermarket has drastically plummeted through small, cumulative changes in behaviour.

But those (or similar) communities existed long before Facebook did - they serve a vertical of common interests, rather than a horizontal of people you know. Some of them might be replaced by Facebook groups, but plenty of them will and can continue to exist outside of Facebook.

For any kind of specialized discussion on computer stuff and startups, I'll take a bunch of perfect strangers on HN over friends on Facebook any day. On the other hand, posting pics of my new apartment or from my holiday would be (let's say) underappreciated here. On the other hand, people I share friendship or family ties with cares about this stuff, even if we have no interests relevant to the matter in common.

There is a very good reason peer to peer social networks can't work nowadays (not even considering diaspora quality).

It's not about internet overlords. It's not about ad industry pressure. It's not about governments pressure.

It's about internet access providers. Most of them provide unbalanced bandwidth : you have high speed download and low speed upload.

Which user would want his peers to watch a video streaming at a few hundreds kb/sec ? P2P social networks can only fail until we have decent upload bandwith.

Granted, if it's really P2P, people you authorize seeing it can then participate in its sharing, but it still is not acceptable on very first minutes after posting : you may have something like 10 people trying to download your content from your ridiculous upload speed, which, btw, can greatly affect your browsing experience meanwhile.

The US may be an exception but here in Europe I think most people have 1 mbit upload; that seems plenty to me. Video might be tricky, but typically you use YouTube for that anyway. FB isn't in the business of hosting videos so why should a p2p social network be?

> FB isn't in the business of hosting videos so why should a p2p social network be?

Remember that the whole point of using P2P social network was to avoid centralized service and keep control of one data.

How often does "something" killer actually kill its target?

"Mosiac killer" comes to mind.

Zodiac killer

was the zodiac, didn't kill the zodiac

josephcooney hellbanned 4 days ago.

What does that/do you mean?

The user josephcooney left a comment on this post but it's invisible to everyone. This is called 'hell banning'.

I've never seen an example of this where other users are made away of it though. Is it to serve as a warning?

It's generally so that the person in question knows they've been hellbanned, as it can be difficult to tell if you have been without someone mentioning it.

The purpose of hellbanning is precisely so the person in question doesn't know.

The purpose of hellbanning is to prevent people from ruining the site. How exactly josephcooney was ruining HN by posting "The question didn't seem rude to me at all, either. Why is plain communication so often taken as cynicism/sarcasm?" is a mystery to me.

I don't know why he was hellbanned; I was just explaining the purpose of hellbanning. FWIW after skimming through josephcooney's history, I am also mystified as to why it happened.

The first thing that came my mind is a mod or bot might have seen his handle and considered it a troll account b/c of it's similarity to Joseph Kony

emotional responses by weird aspies is not particularly surprising to me

I can't see how it's justified, his comment history isn't so bad: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=josephcooney

A hellban should be a last resort - it's rather a cruel punishment.

How do you know?

Click on your name to go to prefs page, turn on show dead.

This seems like a rather unjustified and wanton punishment to me. I can't see anything in his history that is worthy of such treatment. I scan around other areas of HN and see people who are blatant trolls appearing everywhere and they aren't hallbanned. Yet someone, like josephcooney, who appears to have a brain and attempts to be actively involved in moderate and reasonable discussion is axed?

Just goes to show that HN is becoming a ghetto, that's if it isn't already one.

Poor form if you ask me.

My first account was hellbanned after my first comment (I was stupid enough to make a joke). I had no idea for weeks, and hellbanning also makes the site incredibly slow.

I only realised after I logged out and the site was fast. It's absolutely absurd to hellban someone after 1 comment (and it wasn't racist, aggressive, etc). What's wrong with warnings, or at least telling me I was banned?

It's not complicated. It's that there is no other option that gives more benefit (to the average user) than having all your contacts in one system. It's not going down until the privacy issue becomes enough to make average users quit, something with greater benefit appears, or something gets users to switch services en masse overnight.

dexter killed him? maybe? I haven't seen the recent seasons.

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