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Comment by TsiCClawOfLight | Hacker News Reader

I think I start to get it, thank you. So facebook basically replaces blogs/microblogging and photo sharing websites? i.e. blogs for the passive or peripheral involvement. Regarding your second point, mailing lists and group emails combined with personal emails are a good medium of social interaction IMO.

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It's more like having RSS feeds in your reader for blogs that are rarely updated and you may have forgotten about (although not quite as you have to actively mark feeds as read).

An email (whether direct or via a mailing list) is an interruption (at least to me), whereas a Facebook post just drops off the bottom of the page if I ignore it.

EDIT: Sorry, that was poorly worded.

The discovery side of it is more like an RSS reader (or maybe a group email). But the key distinction (for me at least) is that I can be totally passive - I don't even need to mark things as read - or I can engage.

Moreoever, it's socially acceptable to be passive whereas ignoring an email (even a group email) is considered more like wilfully ignoring them (e.g cold-shoulder, blanking, etc)

Isn't there an old saw about every big "Web 2.0" business being something that took what people were already doing but made it "social"? So Facebook made blogging social, Twitter made texting social, etc.

10+ years ago I knew a bunch of people who had personal blogs, but of course most of them were filled with "sorry for the lack of posts recently" type posts.

I'm not on Facebook, but I understand why it's popular. The more people who might be reading, the more reason there is to post stuff. So it makes sense that everyone winds up in the same network.

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