Comment by CoffeeDregs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CoffeeDregs | Hacker News Reader

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Wow. When Graph Searches were announced, I thought "meh, I'm tired of FB...". I never thought to explore what Graph Searches actually meant. And I would never have done so or will do so, but I'm very glad that someone has investigated the system.

>it will always lead to situations like that which are [bad]

I wonder if there isn't some definition analogous to "Turing complete" for social graphs? i.e. with a sufficiently powerful API, any question can be answered. Just as Turing complete-ness leads to viruses, worms, etc, might "XYZ complete" social networks lead directly and predictably towards A, B and C bad outcomes?

>Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable

Perhaps. I'm not versed in them well enough to know. But I wonder if he isn't a bit Bill-Gates-eyan in his perspective of pushing the border between X-Y quite hard to see what bends and what breaks. For Microsoft, it was Code-Data and, while there were certainly people saying don't mix Code and Data!, people happily used their Excel spreadsheets and we suffered mightily from the resulting viruses. Whereas "viruses" were the unintended consequence of mixing Code-Data, are "outings" the result of mixing Social-Search?

Zuckerberg thinks people complain about privacy because they're old-fashioned and scared of the future. He thinks in the future we're all going to be extremely open, share shit all the time, aaaand basically the whole world is going to be one big chat room where people don't really hide things any more.

Personally I think he's probably right. It has shades of that old totalitarian argument, 'why should you be worried about privacy if you don't have anything to hide?' but hopefully it'll be a little more... forgiving than that.

Zuckerberg hopes that we're open to facebook*

I don't see all this "open" information, because I don't have a facebook account.

>He thinks in the future we're all going to be extremely open, share shit all the time, aaaand basically the whole world is going to be one big chat room where people don't really hide things any more.

He claimed to believe that after he had make everyone's private account information public again for about the fifth time. I'm not sure if he really believes something so ridiculous and nonsensical or he simply decided to claim to have a motto that would explain why he kept revealing everyone's secrets other than the obvious one: it makes him more advertising money to do so.

It's worth noting that it's in Zuckerberg's financial interest should such a No Secrets reality come to pass.

Which should give one pause about whether he's giving an honest, objective assessment of the available information. One would expect quite a bit of confirmation bias when billions are on the line.

As to whether there will be a time without secrets: I don't see how that's even possible. Humans are social and tribal but they're also political. Politics is all about the tactful (mis)application of lies to swing tribal balance.

There will always be something people want to keep 'private'. Always something that the tribes disagree on and judge one another over. Regardless of whether those feelings and beliefs are substantiated in objective reality.

I don't think so either. But I do prefer people use their real name online if possible. I know it is not always possible right now, but do want these problems to be fixed.

> aaaand basically the whole world is going to be one big chat room where people don't really hide things any more.

Does this include Corporations and Governments? Or just the users of pathetic chat rooms like Facebook?

Sorry, "pathetic chat rooms"? What are you trying to say? And why are you saying whatever it is so bitterly?

Does this even include Zuckerberg?

> I wonder if there isn't some definition analogous to "Turing complete" for social graphs? i.e. with a sufficiently powerful API, any question can be answered. Just as Turing complete-ness leads to viruses, worms, etc, might "XYZ complete" social networks lead directly and predictably towards A, B and C bad outcomes?

This graph search is just a fancy database interface, it's basically "SELECT name, age, etc from users WHERE location = 'Teheran' AND looksfor = 'men'" (massively over-simplified).

So, no it can not answer _any_ question, because it's limited by _what_ and _how_ you ask _and_ the data. You can't ask it something it doesn't already know.

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