My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site
medium.com
medium.com
I love it, good luck.
Facebook is terrible. Ditch it entirely. Or do like I do and leave up a bare bones page with a bit of contact information for old friends and never visit.
And then...? What? Try to get people to invite you to events on Google Hangouts or whatever Google has?
I don't mean as some theoretical exercise, I mean practically speaking. In fact, a lot of totally public events are only listed on Facebook anyway. The easiest thing to do is to invite people via FB. The bar is raised dramatically by making people send an unsolicited text message or email, if they even have your email address.
I just coordinated a meetup via email. Unbelievably awkward and high-friction.
It would make Facebook enormously fun as opposed to a large interconnected network of corporate brands and homogenized identities.
A communal reflection of the minds eye. The current perpetual thanksgiving dinner is fun but I'd rather talk about dreams. Exploration over documentation.
Assigning the right amount of power for an automatic filter is a science itself, though. Heuristic AV scanners and spam filters suffer from the same issues.
For example even big telco providers (Ay Yildiz Germany) get caught up for now MONTHS in Gmails spam filter with no way to change this. Their emails are discarded already at SMTP delivery...
1.1bn gives a pretty exhaustive list of common names for a given country region.
> 1.1bn gives a pretty exhaustive list of common names for a given country region.
If the last name is a person with a Wikipedia entry then their pretty exhaustive list is not very exhaustive.
> Cynics will tell you that using your “real name” is so they can sell your details to advertisers. That’s not the case.
Facebook is selling access to their profile of a person for targeted ads and tracking across the web - which includes a real name. No, I haven't worked at FB, but I get the business side from a Product Management perspective.
Yes, ad impressions can factor into it, but one could argue that there would be more engagement using a name that a person is currently using or known by, resulting in increased time on the newsfeed, not less.
It's all about a story to sell advertisers though. Facebook is an advertising platform. We use "real names" is just a marketing bullet FB can hold up to advertisers in glossy material and sales pitches.
Real name policies are indeed a made up solution mistakenly used by some to address trolling issues as well. The thing is, that argument has been proven false, time and time again.
Ello, that underdog social community, is proving right now that pseudonymity can work.
I guess the real question is, "Are we willing to walk the talk and support the companies that are standing up for users on this issue as well as privacy?"
Of course we might have to sacrifice some features we are used to, but ultimately it's the only way to send a message that will be heard.
Google, afterall didn't change it's stand on real names just out of some epiphany or random act of kindness. That story is a little more complex for sure, yet our eyes and where they spend time is the ultimate metric in today's ad model.
My eyes choose Ello these days.
An interesting question.
So on one hand we see that we have some kinds of companies that can provide useful global services (facebook, google, wikipedia, sourceforge (before ads), mozilla, github, etc), but it is impractical, unsavory or counter productive to make "users" pay (because we're not only passive "users", but active contributors to the services facilitated by those companies.
The "solution" found by those companies is to extract the needed money from other companies in exchange for advertisement.
On the other hand, we can print money to give to banksters only to satisfies their shareholders, and with no benefit whatsoever to the general population, on the contrary.
What if, instead, we printed money to give to those internet companies and associations providing useful services? They wouldn't then have to use advertisements, and therefore could better protect the privacy of the users/contributors.
Nope. Not inappropriate. Not derogatory. Not hate speech. Different cultures treat names different ways. Here, "WASP" is a reference to the dominant American culture. I didn't bat an eye when I read it.
In fact, ironically, one of the characteristically WASPy things that comes to mind immediately is the prevalence of unusual names -- "Leslie" as a man's name; "Van" as a legit first name; people with three or four middle names; whole lines of firstborn men with the same formal name leading to ubiquitous uses of nicknames, etc.
And given that the term originated among sociologists, some of them WASPs themselves, I think calling it "unquestionably slang" is strong. Ditto "offensive". If you're offended, you can just say, "I'm offended" without trying to cast it as some sort of false objectivity.
White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are not the inventors of names nor does it seem like that group in particular is radically defensive of how naming works.
I'm not sure it is hate speech, but it was meant to cast negativity on one group.
I think, as Wikipedia says [1], "The term applies to a group believed to control disproportionate social, political, and financial power in the United States. It describes a group whose family wealth, education, status, and elite connections allow them a degree of privilege held by few others. [...] When the term appears in writing, it usually indicates the author's disapproval of the group's excessive power in society."
It seems like a legitimate label here. Our notion of what a "proper" name looks like comes out of that cultural tradition. And as one of our own notes, that notion is often painfully wrong. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestant
[2] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
> Facebook likes to think of names as a one-to-one mapping. You have one name, and that name is how people refer to you at all times. It’s a very WASP notion of how names work, and the reality is far more complex.
Facebook, as an American company, inherited its ideas about names from mainstream American (i.e., WASP) culture. This was a poor choice, because those ideas do not also cover how some other cultures treat names. That's all this is saying. Your interpretation of this as "inflammatory" and "mischaracterizing history" is frankly baffling.
Characterizing the issue as one caused (and the inference is only protestant Anglo culture would cause) this kind of names requirement is disconnected from reality. Companies in non Anglo and non protestant places have similar and even more restrictive policies. And also this idea of names is not an Anglo concept, as it was characterized.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/good-men-project/why-its-so-ha...
What is being said is that our particular notion of names comes out of that WASP tradition. (Which, if you'll take 30 seconds to read Wikipedia, has important class and wealth connotations.) And therefore it doesn't apply perfectly to an extremely diverse society of immigrants, one with a long history of cultural, religious, and social experimentation.
It's an accident of history that a dominant strain in our culture is "protestants from the British isles". But it's still a pretty important accident. It leaves a mark. We still call that part of the country "New England", for example.
One can go over to nominally catholic and gaellic France and find much more state control over accepted personal names[1] A name new to France has to be proven to exist, if its not an indigenous name in France. The are other countries with similar control over names some of which require names to be gender specific and unambiguous, in that respect.
Is this not a solved issue? How do women who change their name upon marriage use Facebook? Does Facebook recognize legal name changes? Is that not in effect here?