William Shatner reviews Facebook Mentions | Hacker News Reader

William Shatner reviews Facebook Mentions

williamshatner.tumblr.com

286 pointscityzen83 comments

William Shatner is 83. That is amazing to me. I hope I'm that with it and well put together if I make it to 83. I suppose being worth $100 million doesn't hurt, but it still gives me some hope.

> William Shatner is 83

Median age for FB users, it seems.

Do we know that William Shatnet wrote the text himself? It seems unlikely …

Why? He occasionally gets into flame wars on reddit. Maintaining a blog doesn't seem that unlikely.

Saw him on stage about a year ago and he was the most lucid and sensible person there (of the 5 other captains). Avery Brooks certainly was not with it at all.

Hm. I would guess Patrick Stewart would be more lucid and sensible, since he is still an active actor.

Because actors are famous for being "lucid and sensible"...?

(This is not a dig at Sir Stewart, I'm just pointing out that the two concepts "working actor" and "lucid/sensible person" are not necessarily linked -- as demonstrated by Brando, Depardieu etc.)

It's Sir Patrick. (Should he ever be elevated to the peerage, he would be addressed as Lord Stewart.)

That's in the UK. And only for those who care about that antiquated royalty system.

For us, fans of the french revolution and the beheading of kings, it's just "Patrick".

I think the point is simply that if using the title (which is purely optional) then it is standard to use the first name. So Sir Stewart would be somebody else.

A, ok! Missed that nuance!

Full Nuance Here:

http://www.debretts.com/forms-address/titles/knight

Was that down-vote launched from the barricades you were manning? :)

Accuracy is independent of politics. Or, if you prefer to think of it this way, Know Your Enemy.

Well I recall AB getting into some kind of self compelled nonsense and the only person to step up and start talking and change the subject was WS, everyone else was just sitting there gawping.

That's great! And reminds me of a 93-year old guy who gave a great presentation at TEDxZurich some time ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGgoCm1hofM

Shatner even drops by his subreddit quite frequently in person.

And how we know that William Shatner himself is on reddit? Or is it somebody who work for him?

How do we know that you're not William Shatner?

Because i boldly go where someone has gone before ! ;)

It reads like his style, anyway. I feel like any lackey he hired to write it for him would be more timid in expressing opinions.

I still can't get over the, "I need more face time!" Yea, another generation, but selfish, narcissism is never cool. He does look good for his age though, but so do most leading men who didn't lose their hair?

I believe he wears a wig.

He's been wearing a wig for longer than most of Hacker News has been alive.

George Takei is 77, clearly an old man, but no one seems surprised by how "with it", humorous, and interesting he is. Why does Shatner get a double-standard?

77 or 83 is longer than any male in my family has lived that I know of. It seems to me that a lot of Hollywood types are under a lot of pressure to stay thin, stay good looking, etc and often go to the gym religiously and eat healthily. I imagine if we followed that model we'd all be that sharp and good-looking at that age.

This is a broad social generalization so please take it with a grain of salt, but I do think there is an element of truth to the notion that Japanese people take good care of their elderly maintaining their dignity and keeping a healthy respect for their elders. The perception is that they age more gracefully. In western / european cultures, growing old is treated like a shameful disease. Hence the double standard.

Takei maintains one of the most popular Facebook pages. Shatner is much more well known in other mediums.

You may be correct regarding a Hollywood lifestyle, but I think there's a bit of confirmation bias here. There's only a relatively small number of elderly celebs who are still active in the public eye, and those actors who have suffered the typical problems of aging get little attention until the inevitable obituary.

Probably has more to do with wealthy access to the best medical care/prevention. As for being 'with it' I'm sure having a wife 27yrs younger helps. Plus he already had a handheld device in the 1960s so second nature to him :P

Having plenty of money and flexible "work" schedules helps achieve those goals (staying good looking, focusing on health, going to the gym a lot).

I can't believe Facebook would force celebrities to follow other celebrities, It seems like their contempt for users is universal regardless of how important you may be.

Another way to put it is Facebook knows getting you to click a couple of buttons to "get started" is something a very very high percentage of people will do to interact with facebook, especially if they've already gone through the friction of downloading the app.

Except in this case, it prompted Shatner to leave a soso-to-negative review of the app and service.

Exactly.

If there's one app where they shouldn't uselessly annoy users just to boost their statistics, it's in the app targeted at influencers.

Being important != being a celebrity.

Celebrities are important to Facebook, enough so in fact that they made an entire app for them.

A small part of Facebook is dedicated to celebrities -- the bulk of it is dedicated to (people like) me. QED ... :)

Celebrities are important?

Is that really Shatner writing that?

The level of technical understanding, including jargon (even trivial and casual to us, like "header image"), and familiarity with posting (custom screenshots, etc), is phenomenal for a celebrity, and at that age!

That's Denny Crane level cool!

I saw his one-man show when it came to town about a year ago. After watching him alone on stage for 90 minutes, I have no doubt that he is still "with it" enough to not only comprehend modern tech (if that's what we're calling Facebook), but to provide this level of insight and understanding.

Denny Crane? Denny Crane!

... and was I ... the only one ... reading it to myself in the Shatner voice???

There's an Internet for celebrities and an Internet for the rest of us.

Facebook has this.

Wikipedia has notability requirements.

Twitter has verified accounts, which only celebrities can have because no one gives a shit if your account is real or not.

The Hacker's Manifesto is a bit turned on its head.

That is just the difference between a producer and a consumer. These sites need content for the consumers so they provide services to the producers. It's completely uncontroversial if you ask me.

I can't comment on Wikipedia.

>Twitter has verified accounts...

Which is something else that William Shatner has strong opinions about:

http://mashable.com/2014/06/24/william-shatner-twitter-verif...

The Internet for television and film celebrities is a walled echo chamber by design. The tools written for them are probably not useful or necessary for anyone not interacting under the same volume conditions with the same level of technical proficiency.

I expect social apps for celebrities to interact with thier audience typically have: a simplified/focused interface, filters for negative comments and spam, filters to resort the most "pr friendly" content to the top, an enhanced search interface to quickly filter content according to their current promotional/contractual obligations (allow easily responding to a comment about new movie x, when most of the comments are about 20 year old movie y), ml tools to track diehard fans, some kind of secondary user interface for thier assistant or PR manager to play puppet master or perform additional filtering and prepping...

In the end, these entertainers are paying for their "enhanced access" and tools by using them to promote the services that are building tools for them. Hence, Cap'n TJ Hooker's tumblr post about a fb service.

There's a lot of "internet for Xs". Part of the point of the internet is you can set up your own area for anyone you like.

I wonder if the George Takei suggestion was intelligent situational awareness ... or if everyone has him as the first suggestion because he's basically the platonic form of a Facebook celebrity?

If you are not aware, Shatner doesn't like Takei.

If it wasn't a Facebook app, I wouldn't expect it to know that.

And Takei doesn't like Shatner.

I didn't know that, so I dug around for the cause. From a recent NYP article:

  Takei married his husband in 2008 and Shatner became enraged when 
  he claimed he wasn’t invited. He ranted against Takei in an 
  online interview. [...]

  Shatner called Takei’s wedding a publicity stunt and hypothesized 
  that their feud stemmed from Takei’s unwillingness to playing 
  second fiddle to Shatner on “Star Trek.”

It seems to be mostly based on petty, even comical stuff like this. This may sound paradoxical, but as someone who always had a lot of respect for both of them, this is disappointing and a bit of a relief at the same time.

That wasn't the cause. According to Takei, they didn't get along even during Star Trek. "Petty, comical stuff" is what the media narrative consists of because they're two amusing personalities, and we want to be amused by them. Also they're two old men who wouldn't have spoken for the last 50 years if it weren't for an avalanche of fan-cash that has forced them into continued contact and some civility.

From what I can tell he's had a bad relationship with a number of the other cast members since the original series's filming, since they thought he was too self-centered and kept trying to minimize screentime given to the supporting cast. The feud became kind of well known among fans, because four of the actors (Walter Koenig, James Doohan, Nichelle Nicols, and Takei) often aired their dislike of Shatner at Star Trek conventions. Though for his part Shatner claims it was a one-sided feud he didn't even know about until 1993: he says he discovered the issue when he tried to interview a bunch of the old cast for his memoir, and several wouldn't talk to him, or did but had negative things to say.

>Though for his part Shatner claims it was a one-sided feud he didn't even know about until 1993

Which, of course, humorously confirms all of the casts' characterizations of him as a selfish egomaniac in a wig and a girdle. I think that Shatner is aware of this (within the past 20 years, not at the time) and plays into it for the humor value and a media bump if he's currently selling something. He's always selling something.

Which basically sums up the setup for the film Galaxy Quest, which lampoons the Star Trek cast archetypes masterfully.

I'm just glad that he's annoyed that he wasn't invited rather than annoyed at gay marriage

I suspect it's a very simple calculation based on mutual followers.

The latter. George Takei makes Facebook money by making it more engaging. Facebook wants more celebrities to see what George Takei is doing so they do it too.

Sure this is good for facebook cause pageviews but all the Takei shares that show up on my feed are almost invariably reddit frontpage reposts. I guess he adds volume to facebook, but it's not very quality volume imo, if anyone else shared the stuff he did, it wouldn't collect thousands of upvotes/likes/etc.

Plus if he really has a staff doing it, then the whole "wow what a zany old man who is "relevant" and reads reddit/9gag/wherever people think the content comes from" thing kinda falls apart.

I think it's the vast AI that runs Facebook saying this madness has gone too far. ;-)

I remember back in 2005-6 when I thought that News Feed, Events and other stuff introduced to Facebook was a bunch of cluttered junk. If I could have seen into the future then... the horror, the horror!

Events is pretty much the only thing Facebook has going for it now.

Even Facebook events now seem tacky for anything other than massive events in my social circles.

Are new users joining Facebook? I hear from more and more people that either they have left or "wish [they] could", if it weren't for "everyone" with which they wish to stay in contact[1].

I myself deactivated my account 6 months ago. The only time I regret it is after I've been drinking and want to troll someone. So actually all around a good thing.

Are new people actually, really, honestly joining Facebook? I know the "delta new accounts" number is positive, but do they represent real people, rather than just spam bots?

I just have this feeling that, given a certain plateauing of new users, there comes an associated stagnation of follow-actions. No, I certainly don't have data to this issue, but I know that I personally only spend effort following people when A) I first join a site, or B) I think there is a good chance the person will follow me back[2]. So, for your everyday Joe-blow user who has is more than a month old, it seems like they are either already following William Shatner or never will.

My own observations in blogging have been that engagement with users is highly dependent on novelty. You either grind out finding new followers who haven't experienced your content yet, or you post radically new things all of the time--which could backfire and alienate your established followership, though honestly by that point they are probably ignoring your posts. Either way, you write off anyone who has been following you for more than 6 months. 90% of the time, that person is unretrievable.

I guess I just see followers as a limited, unsustainable resource, sort of akin to oil, except much easier to deplete. But it seems like Facebook, et. al., are banking on it being more like solar. IDK, I've seen reports saying FB has 1.3 billion users. There are only 7 billion people in the world. Do I really believe FB has almost 20% of the entire world's population? Do I really believe they could get more?

[1] Apparently "everyone" doesn't know how to use email or a telephone or text messaging.

[2] Incidentally, a policy that works for about 50% of cases. And for 90% of people, they will be unfollowed within a week, regardless of whether or not they follow me back. I don't need their crappy animated GIFs of Sherlock or Dr. Who clogging up my dashboard.

> Are new users joining Facebook?

Yes.

> I guess I just see followers as a limited, unsustainable resource, sort of akin to oil, except much easier to deplete

New people are born every minute. Facebook has reached a massive scale, at which scale nearly everyone in the world has heard about it and will join at some point.

Also, FB really isn't built around following the way Twitter is. If all you did with Facebook was interact with your friends, that'd be just fine (since they can always inject business ads into that stream).

>> Are new users joining Facebook? > Yes.

I think more eastern people join, while more and more western quit. (some month ago it was in the news that their are less US users).

Last time i use facebook is.... i think 4 or 5 weeks ago.

"I know the "delta new accounts" number is positive, but do they represent real people"

Recently my son became old enough to get a legal account, so he got one. Kids are famous for fad behavior, so FB is already dead for him and his friends, but for a couple months it was a big deal. His account dragged me back into creating an account and my friend-ing everyone I had back in 2010 plus some more. Its a wasteland compared to 2010, there's like two attention seeking women posting every couple hours just like half a decade ago, some folks doing the "post pix of kids" and thats it other than brand spam and other corporate spam. FB is like one of those giant D+D beasts where they're already dead but still thrashing around. Someday wall street will figure that out about FB and that will be amusing to watch. ("wait, you're telling me no one uses this service anymore other than attention seeking women who haven't found out about /r/gonewild somehow, the NSA, and bots... and its priced in the billions, up till now?")

Facebook Mentions seems like an ill-conceived way of making a move against Twitter.

Facebook has probably had a less than 10 percent success rate with product launches in the past few years.

> I’m already following those who I want to follow - why insist I follow that short list of others?

Money.

Edit: If you think about it, it's a poorly implemented solution to some problem. What was the problem?

Things against Facebook rarely fail to rise to the top of HN. Anything not favoring Facebook gets up here quickly. Why am I surprised.

There are a lot of Facebook employees on HN, just like there are a lot of Google employees here. Those employees will do some level of astroturfing. Unless HN prevents us from voting on topics where there is a conflict of interest, it's hard to keep the bias out.

Why would employees vote up negative articles? I think you misread what HBSisBS said.

Employees vote up anything related to their employer.

Facebook has made a lot of questionable or incite-ful moves lately (Fwd.us, Slingshot, many acquisitions without a coherent vision) while it's quality and usefulness to many has become of marginal importance.

This isn't 2009/2010, where Iranians and Tunisians were using FB to coordinate peaceful protests. Instead, fear of the encroaching security-industrial-complex revealed by Snowden has people concerned about posting stuff to FB.

Fwd.us is questionable? I'd like to know a solid reason other than "get foreign workers bs". Also note that fwd.us has nothing to do with Facebook. Its a personal initiative.

> I'd like to know a solid reason other than "get foreign workers bs".

The way companies use and abuse the H1B visa program and what that does to domestic wages is controversial. You can dismiss it but then don't demand more things to dismiss.

http://allthingsd.com/20130510/elon-musk-and-david-sacks-dep...

Buying influence can look dirty, especially when it runs opposed to your stated goals.

I thought this was going to be a tumblr where William Shatner critiques the actual FB posts that mention him.

fb paid him

Not many other users of this app feel this way

Right, which is why it's titled "William Shatner reviews Facebook Mentions".

It would be titled the same even if a lot of other users felt that way.

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