I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions).
The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I don't really get invited to those anymore. It's also harder to organize events where you casually invite people you don't know as well.
It's also occasionally annoying not being able to dig up a certain photo you wanted for reference. Even if you have a copy of the photo somewhere, if you don't have it hosted online then you can't really bring it up to show it to someone.
Still, frustrations aside, it's 90% great, and I recommend everyone try it for themselves.
I've enjoyed roughly the same experience but without the downsides.
As far as events go, the neckbeard in me hasn't actually minded. I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events.
Photos I just conveniently had solved by having all my photos on Google Photos anyways (I stopped trusting offline storage long ago).
I think my Facebook account is reactivated at the moment (due to logging in to search for something) but I disabled notification when I'd originally left and haven't looked back. Life's easier (and way more productive) without the Book.
Interestingly, I still find a lot of value in Messenger. But they've split concerns so you can use that without reactivating your FB account.
I was probably one of the first 1000 to join Facebook beyond the American borders, back when it was still a University-only endeavor. I've been off Facebook for more than 4 years.
Life is generally more rewarding. I'm much more in contact with the life that I want to live, instead of the life that I want to portray. People I know have "unlearned" Facebook - I actually receive emails and phone calls to catch up.
I think that Facebook must be dealing with some unknown human behavior. Back when I was on it, everyone I knew (myself included) would have registered as psychopathic. Photos in relationships revolved around posting to Facebook, not creating a treasury of memories. "Not being official until you're Facebook official" was a thing; such a belief was acceptable back then, even though it's absurd and cold in retrospect. It really brought out the most disgusting part of me and everyone that I knew.
Being off the Book is great. From day one it doesn't get easier; life gets better - especially in terms of avoiding the lower quality riff raff.
I'm kind of surprised to see these posts describing how it's possible to get off Facebook. For me, it doesn't really make much of a difference whether I'm on or off. I barely ever log in, barely ever use it, and things don't really spread through Facebook.
However, that just may be that I don't live in the US, and it just might be more pervasive there.
It's... it's not that Facebook itself is the issue. It's the resulting network effects and how you interact with people while still on it.
For example: not being on Facebook means you actually have to keep in touch with people to know what they are doing. That sounds like a "duh" moment, but it's also key to how FB is replacing real social interaction with "social interaction".
The knock on effects of this are deep, because without it you have to have meaningful and importantly intentioned social interaction with people.
I get that it's the network effects, but I guess I don't understand how your relationships are structured. I have a core group of friends with whom I talk every day on IM or the phone or face to face, then a larger group with whom I talk a few times a week, and then the rest are acquaintances I talk to rarely.
If anything happens in any of the first two groups, I hear about it because I'm directly invited. There aren't things that I hear about from Facebook, unless it's some club organizing an event or something similar.
How do you* interact with people, generally? Do you talk to them less but see what they post on Facebook?
* By "you" I mostly mean "people who use Facebook for socialization".
I am a student and I think I can answer how I use Facebook and it provides "some" value to me.
I also have the same three tiered social circle. The first circle I have regular contacts with on the phone, WhatsApp or in person. The second circle tells me when something happens in their life like them getting placed, winning a competition or getting into a relationship.
Facebook helps me immensely with the third group. I can get to know when people are placed in jobs and can then call them up to rekindle the acquaintance (so that I can later get them to introduce me to other people to expand my professional network). If I call regularly (like maybe once each two months) then it quickly turns into silence because we don't know what the other person is doing at the moment, where they are or even what has lately happened in their lives. I can't also talk about common acquaintances due to the same lack of information.
Personally for me Facebook events serve no purpose because if any of us want to plan a meeting we can do so by phone, email or WhatsApp. It does help to plan school reunions though. Facebook's utility to me exists because the people on Facebook keep posting parts of their life on it and I can keep interacting with them without too much effort of having the pain of keeping track of over a 100 acquaintances.
I see, thank you, that makes sense. My problem is that I'll go on Facebook, and see people posting stuff I don't care about, and unfollow them (and obviously lose their important updates as well). Pretty quickly, I have nobody in my timeline, and I just talk to people to see how they're doing.
I agree. Facebook either needs to allow more fine control on what we want to see (education updates, work updates, photos but no text statuses) or improve it's algorithm so that a new comment on a month old content doesn't make it conquer my feed.
I deal with it slightly by checking the "See updates from these people first" for certain people. It causes them to appear in a cluster at the top of my feed. The best thing is that the cluster is collapsed to show just two stories and I can then expand if there are more.
Your core group of friends may use Messenger for IM and FB events for meeting up. You can still probably catch up but it will take a _lot_ more effort.
0riginal neckbeard here - I have none of these problems, I have no friends, personal network, relationships, photos, or social interactions. I have never had Facebook, and I feel absolutely fantastic.
> I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events.
Just to run a counterpoint to this, there are Facebook groups that have opened up whole new social circles for me and provide opportunities. I'm into whitewater kayaking and the "Where's the Whitewater at?" group has people planning informal trips at a few hours notice when someone drives by and notices a river is runnable. You go out and paddle with people you haven't met before, make new friends who share your interests, etc.
Also, it is great for learning about new hazards in a river, i.e. fallen trees, that make a certain trip either possible or much more dangerous.
Yes, I go to a few underground dance parties a year and it would be a lot harder to find those events (let alone discern which ones I'd prefer to attend, who of my friends will be there, etc) without the networks I have on FB.
Putting my old photos on Google Photos is a good idea and I think I'll do that - thanks. Although it doesn't fully solve the issue of photos that had me tagged but were uploaded by someone else, which FB doesn't give you a copy of when you download your data (afaik).
Funnily enough, I found Messenger to be the worst of all their offerings. The lack of searchable history, the terrible (terrible) scroll-back, the default always-on-screen notification bubble, the way they forced the standalone app down users' throats by disabling messages in both the FB app and the mobile web version, all really turned me off to it.
A long time ago I used to setup IFTTT to automatically backup Facebook photos with me tagged to a Dropbox folder. This included photos posted by others with me tagged.
I've long since abandoned Facebook, but I wouldn't be surprised if a similar IFTTT feature exists to export tagged photos into Google Photos. If I recall this only works for 'new' photos posted that you are tagged in, it doesn't appear to pull images from before you enabled the IFTTT service. At any rate, this lets you see photos you are tagged in without ever having to actually use your Facebook account.
I never installed Messenger mainly because I was satisfied with using Facebook app's messaging feature. When it was disabled in the app, I moved to using Facebook in the browser (uninstalled the app). They later removed messaging support in the browser as well so now I request "Desktop mode" when I want to read/write a message. What started as "I don't want to install another app I don't need" became "I will uninstall all apps by Facebook" and now I'm happy I never receive FB-related notifications, I only browse it when I feel like it :)
wow used to use this one before having the app back in the day, good to know it still exists and a perfect alternative for m.facebook.com with messenger support.
If you _deactivate_ account you can keep using Messenger, and you are able to reactivate account in the future. Facebook doesn't delete your data. If you _delete_ account then Facebook will delete all your data and Messenger will be gone too.
Thanks! I didn't know this was possible. I was locked in Facebook because of the Messenger: that's how I communicate with most of my friends. I just deactivated my Facebook account and kept the Messenger.
No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out.
If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.
That seems to be depressingly true of any social website. There seems to be a sort, sweet spot that exists briefly between the implementation of a good idea and when the parasites catch on and move in to ruin it.
For those that don't know, September was when all the freshmen would get their first access to the non-commercial internet in college. It was a pain because they (we) had to learn all the nuances of how to interact with the people already on it. Newgroups, IIRC, etc. Eternal September is the term for when the internet went commercial in 1995.
I'd say that's depressingly true of any software that's in continuous development. The only difference is the relative proportion of the parasites that do the damage (users, product managers, and developers) to each other. Apache, I feel, is a counterexample, software with continuous development that hasn't turned to shit yet despite being around for quite some time. Some videogame series are also often quite strong over time. Most everything else is subject to this 'rule', sadly.
I'm not sure I'd blame Facebook's problems on it's users. You can always unfriend someone. No, it's Facebook itself that has changed for the worse (by far).
> I'm not sure I'd blame Facebook's problems on it's users.
I am blaming Facebook. The parasites I was thinking of are the people and impulses that pervert the successful formula to push some agenda (e.g. push for some "engagement" metric, push people to use this or that app, unscrupulous monetization, etc).
What was great about Facebook, especially compared to other social networks, is that you had real control over privacy. It was made to communicate with your "real life" friends and family, and keep control with who can see what.
But year after year they've stepped back on privacy, while still being a completely closed platform compared to the open web.
Part of the Facebook problem is that they mostly took control of the feed away from users. They now surface the more "engaging" posts at the top and more frequently. This leads to the overemphasis of viral images and videos. If you post a simple personal status message without an image and Facebook's sentiment analysis considers it to be non-engaging many of your friends won't even see it as Facebook will favor marketing spam over your actual personal post. Users also become trained over time by the number of likes they receive to tailor their posts to conform to Facebook's whims.
I tried to write an extension that would hide all video/photo/link posts and only show pure text posts from my friends. It was really nice, although there wasn't much to the feed once all the garbage was hidden...
I'm kind of in the opposite camp. The way-too-excited responses from people reacting to the silly video of my kid just remind me how I often don't like the FB-version of my friends and family. So I really avoid interacting with them there.
Easy: Stop littering the feed with pictures, videos and articles. Exclude them altogether or show them very rarely. You can also easily identify "viral" content that doesn't belong to the user and remove it. Eventually they'll learn not to waste their time posting those things because they'll get no responses. And if someone posts an article, leave it as a plain old text link instead of creating a massive preview of the article (complete with title, picture, lede, etc.).
Facebook does the opposite now, which leads people to use it as a content consumption platform rather than a social network. Obviously that's what Facebook wants, since content consumption is infinitely more profitable than people posting on each other's walls all day.
But, there's a reason people post those things. Excluding the viral repost content for a second, people post their pictures and videos of what they're doing because they want to share it with people and have others see it.
Allow people to tag their posts, and have friends who tag their posts. Then have an option to not see posts of type X (link, photo, text, video, audio) tagged with Y by contact Z. Have further options to display little icons with some info for hidden posts to easily expand them inline. And so on.
Yes, you'd have to manually curate some things, but otherwise I think it's mostly just a matter of not hiring any marketing people, and creating the features first and looking how to make them easily usable second. Especially if the goal isn't to "kill FB", but simply offer an alternative to those who want the good bits and actually like, uhh, reading manuals and being proficient with the tools they use.
They can't come if there is nowhere for them to come to, and then it's easy to pretend they don't exist. But they do, even among the old and young and not so technical.
UI can help with that. If there wasn't a share button or URL previews, the percentage of original content would be greater.
AI can help with that. Facebook already has automatic alt text for images, for example:
* Image may contain: 1 person, standing, selfie and phone
* Image may contain: cat
* Image may contain: food
And for an end-user, simple filtering can help with that. I sometimes use the FBPurity browser extension to hide everything that's a link or shared post, leaving almost exclusively original content. It can filter on that automatic alt text too if you hate cats, but I don't mind frivolous posts that are original content from my actual friends.
> If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.
Make your own.
Here's what I did for my local network of friends (who also all hate Facebook). Install Wordpress, add the free Buddypress plugin, purchase $50 BuddyPress theme. Throw on a server.
There you go, your own private social network in under a week.
This. I tried the exact same thing for a family network a couple of years ago (but the network did not hate Facebook intensely, so it was a bit of an uphill battle). Before I could get them all fully on board, I got sucked into some large gigs so no business resulted in the end. I still hope to revive it some day.
Actually I spent 5 years building a social networking platform to let people design and host their own social networks and apps. And no it isn't as simple as just Wordpress + BuddyPress.
High activity when planning events or gaming sessions, low otherwise. We already did all of our talking and planning in a Facebook group, so this allow us to expand on that without the privacy issues. The Facebook group itself was similar in activity.
> No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out.
> If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.
Get into the world of finstas, that's basically the concept behind them.
If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today
Lots of people have. There was for example Ello a couple of years ago. Me and many of my Facebook friends created accounts, used it for a couple of weeks and slowly kind of ended up back on facebook. Apparently no one else stuck around either since Ello seems to have turned itself into something else.
The picture of what your friend ate for dinner sticks out as something that doesn't belong here. That actually _is_ a means of connecting directly with our friends/family. The other things you list are not. I'd still signup, even if I saw food pics occasionally.
You cannot exactly enforce the nice-ities though. You would have to structure the community around using your service like that, but that still can be broken down.
Manipulative algorithms can be taken out though, I suppose.
you know you can sort your newsfeed to "most recent" right? And mute your obnoxious friends from appearing in your newsfeed. You can also hide posts from particular websites from appearing on your newsfeed.
In a short period of time, that would solve 90% of your problems.
> you know you can sort your newsfeed to "most recent" right?
Just looked through settings and wasn't able to find anything for order of posts in news feed.
> And mute your obnoxious friends from appearing in your newsfeed.
Yep this is pretty easy to do.
> You can also hide posts from particular websites from appearing on your newsfeed.
This isn't helpful since you cannot block the entire class of "transitive" posts. Eg a Honda ad because a friend of mine liked a Honda page. Sure I can block Honda. But Toyota or Volkswagen can still show up until I block them individually...
I can't help but laugh when I imagine what this would've looked like before the internet existed.
"Look, honey, we got something in the mail from Katie and John! It's... oh... just a bunch of pictures of food. That's odd."
Meanwhile Katie and John are still at home, furiously stuffing envelopes with the same food pictures so they can send one to everybody in their address book.
I always figured photos of cocktails and food were a standard part of the after vacation slideshow you'd invite your friends to. A few once a year isn't bad. People complained about those slideshows also though.
I deleted the app last year. Kept the account because as far as I can tell it's the same difference and I haven't summoned the strength to go retrieve my photos yet. Haven't missed it at all. Meanwhile my wife is increasingly addicted...
If you made a nice meal, yeah, show it off. If you bought a nice meal, I fail to see the point in showing it off, unless you are specifically saying "wow, this place has great food!".
> If you bought a nice meal, I fail to see the point in showing it off, unless you are specifically saying "wow, this place has great food!".
I don't understand your comment at all. What else would you be saying when you show a picture of nice food other than "this food is great"? I'm not in the habit of posting food photos but I've never understood the hysteria around it on places like HN.
Prison costs too much. Corporal punishment would fit this crime, and besides lots of people would just volunteer to swing the cane upon hearing the phrase "posted pictures of food".
This sounds to me like nothing so much as the setup for a Milgram-esque study of just how willing people are to inflict violence upon one another for engaging in trivial but annoying behaviors like ... posting pictures of food on the internet.
Because, yeah. Caning is totally commensurate with that.
Can't you just have Facebook and only use it for the events/photos? I've got a Facebook but never use it for posting/looking at other people's posts. Every now and then I'll get an invitation to an event which is really all I use it for.
I do this as well. No app on my phone (including messenger) and I purposely only use the site in one browser on one device (Safari on my Macbook), and only check it maybe once per day. Added bonus is that Facebook isn't getting all of that tracking cookie info from me (or at least not as easily) since I don't use Safari for anything else.
I do the same thing (but more than once a day; sigh), but I still see creepy tracking ads. Recently I saw ads on FB for an item that my wife had been shopping for on a different computer. I'd be curious to know how they're making this connection — based on IP address, or using something like Drawbridge? https://www.drawbridge.com/
Oh I'm sure they've got plenty of info on me and have their ways of collecting more. I used Facebook pretty regularly from 2005 to 2013 or so, so they know stuff about me I've long since forgotten (as evidenced by looking at some of my old posts from college...yeesh, don't ever do that unless you want to be embarrassed about what the you of 10 years ago was like).
Yeah I'm just curious how they're tracking my family in real-time across devices. And geez, what a way to ruin birthday/xmas/etc presents. I expect to see a preview of my father's day gift in the sidebar any day now....
Indeed. You can have a Facebook account and just... Not use it unless you need it for something. All the benefits of the 'I deleted Facebook' crowd without the downsides.
Facebook will still learn which websites you visit (provided they have the "like" widget) and what articles you read on the NYT, unless you use a good tracking blocker.
Additionally, on macOS you can use Fluid.app to create a Facebook-only browser with separate cookies, etc. Keeps it isolated from the general web. Do the same for google apps.
This is exactly what I do. I use Facebook for a few "Close friends" that are across the world and I still like to know what they're up to.
There's a few communities that I'm in that I wouldn't even know about, event-wise, if I wasn't on Facebook. I can't imagine missing those- I'm surprised others don't use Facebook more for events.
As others have mentioned, I also use News Feed Eradicator, so I don't even see anything on Facebook, unless it's one of my close friends. It's fantastic, and my time on the site is probably less than 2 minutes/day.
I started thinking of FB more as a channel to publish notifications of content I keep on other sites, like blog entries, Flickr photos, etc. Once I started thinking of it as more of a pub/sub layer for the content I manage externally, I felt better about staying on it.
I'm a part of the local Bay Area music scene and Facebook events has basically become the standard for posting about shows. Without a Facebook I just don't hear about them.
I'm considering making a dummy account with a few friends just for the purpose of finding out about events.
Side note, does anyone know of a service that allows you to track FB events without having to be in the Facebook app? Not sure if there's an API for that.
I feel you. Facebook virtually grants a certificate of existence. It's almost unimaginable why someone that wants to play music wouldn't have a facebook presence. (Don't know if that last sentence was correct, non native here).
My point is the following: I was one day on the street and saw a flyer glued onto a wall, it looked kinda funky and hand-drawn, interesting; some DJ's were going to throw a party and spin salsa, funk, latin jazz, cumbia... And I didn't recognize any of the names or the venues, I was mildly shocked because I believed I knew the local scene pretty well.
Almost always I can contextualize a music genre/scene, and see their connections and collaborations. But this random flyer I came across was so obscure! No relations, no known names, and the mix of styles and originality was very interesting! For the first time in many years I felt again what is like to find an underground scene, which I like a lot (like when dancing drum&bass in a basement in Berlin or listening to rap in Mexico).
This is a magic that is sometimes lost in the believed omniscence and omnipresence of online/facebook. I bet people soon will want to have those kind of experience, and the new thing will be to find scenes that people don't even know about online.
I miss the old message board days where everything was really DIY and local, just a table with location and bands. People would post to some homegrown site maintained by a devoted local fan. Also miss the days of fliers!
Now I have to scroll through ads and a bunch of irrelevant "local events for you" just to find what I'm looking for.
Facebook and Twitter I get, but you were being angered and stressed by Instagram? It's the only social media I actively use precisely because it's not stressful or rage inducing. I'm into photography so it gives me an outlet that way (even though taking a picture with a real camera, editing it on a computer, then sending it to my phone to post on Instagram is a bit of a pain), and the annoying content from other people is very rare.
I will say, however that they've stepped up their ad insertion and display algorithm a bit recently, in a bad way, which is unfortunate. But I certainly see much less of the spammy ideological content that I do on Facebook and Twitter.
I feel that pretenses of the life you pretend to live are more evident on Instagram than anywhere else -- the site is all about portraying yourself in the best light possible, or at least, that is how many of the people I know seem to use it. Having not had it for a couple years, I can safely say that when I do want to be on it again, it's usually just a play on the part of my ego that wants some attention from the like notifications. I can't divorce my use of Instagram from my inner cravings of external validation. It can't just be about what I'm posting, it's always about something that's me me me. This may be true of all interactions, I don't know, but when it's systematically in front of me on my phone every waking hour, it becomes problematic.
In other words, most of what I saw on Instagram was people trying to get followers and likes, trying to be like some "adventure photographer", whatever the hell that means. The feeds became clogged with homogenous shots of feet over the same beaches, curving roads, VW vans, etc. It became about the aesthetic you show, rather than the person and events that you are.
>In other words, most of what I saw on Instagram was people trying to get followers and likes, trying to be like some "adventure photographer", whatever the hell that means. The feeds became clogged with homogenous shots of feet over the same beaches, curving roads, VW vans, etc.
That still happens, and it can be a pain, but it's also easy to ignore.
And I do play the hashtag game; not to garner followers or likes but for the rare occasion where another photographer with a similar interest in "real photography" happens to be checking that same hashtag and comes across my photos, or vice versa.
On average I'm getting about 100 likes and 4 or 5 followers per shot. A lot of that is noise, but some of them are real photographers with an interest in the hobby and it's nice to meet people based solely on their photos. I've had conversations with some folks on Instagram local to me suggesting what parks I should shoot at, and I've chatted with others different film development techniques, and so on. For those situations it's worth it.
I will say that Instagram's saving grace is that it's hard to blindly share content since it requires a separate app currently. If that ever changes, and it probably will, I'll be gone.
I should add that very few of the people I follow post anything about themselves. Lazy selfies get them unfollowed. I'm in it because it's a more active photographer community than flickr/500px/whatever.
Hey it depends who you're following. For designers, artists and wannabe bakers, it's a goldmine of inspiration. Cat accounts are good for the soul too ;)
Same social media rule applies: if you don't like it, just unfollow. I'd argue that it's easier to do that on IG than FB as it feels less personal.
"Hey all, look at this amazing new thing I just got (for free from the company that sponsors me that I don't disclose)!" Maybe it's the same on the rest, but it seems there's a larger portion of it on Instagram.
Maybe I'm unique in my usage of Instagram but I only follow people I know in real life or other photographers, amateur or otherwise, and they typically aren't posting sponsored content. I've only ever seen one person post sponsored content out of hundreds I follow, and it was pretty easy to unfollow them.
Unfortunately it does happen. One of my coworker's mothers writes a food blog and he asked if she could follow me because she likes my photos. I said of course, and that she didn't need my permission. I followed her back out of courtesy, but then I started seeing occasional posts about "Certified Angus Steaks" and said nope. Good for her for getting money, I guess, but I don't want any of that.
I see 0 ads on Instagram. When it first started, I just blocked and reported every account that posted an advert. And I marked every advert as uninteresting (or whatever the function was called) and I haven't seen an Instagram ad in over a year.
The same was true for me until about a week or two ago. These aren't sponsored content that I'm seeing -- it's actual Instagram ads, and I've been marking every one as irrelevant with the hope (in vain) that eventually they'll go away.
I wonder why people are so extremist. Just like 'mobile phones are the new cigarette' you don't need to throw them out. You just need to know where to draw the line.
I'm not sure why it has to be deactivated though. I've had a FB account for a long time and maybe check it once every few days if that. My main use case is to upload shared photos. I would prefer everyone use Google Photos, but that hasn't happened yet.
for whatever reason, I have a mental hang up about just checking once every few days or something. I'm incapable ofjust ignoring communications that I get. De-activating is much, much simpler for me.
What's the downside to keeping the account but just not posting to it or checking your news feed? That's roughly what I do, and so can still use it for events and such. I also have it set to email me if my wife or my mom posts a picture. (My mom posts about once a month, and it's more often than not a picture of one of my kids... ;) ) Anyone else I care about (and only the people I really care about) I have on Instagram, which I check every day. But my Facebook feed I view approximately never.
I had the same problem, but I found out there is an app "Events for facebook," It means less endless scrolling for me. And then I use the messenger app to communicate with some friends.
So far it's been about a week, and it's been 90% great, and 10% meh. I just logged out of facebook on all of my devices and don't save the password, so it at least makes me think before putting in my password. The meh part is the services I use "login with facebook" on, but it's not that big of a deal.
this has been my experience almost exactly. It's not my nature to be part of an online community where I don't actively participate, so the idea of having a facebook account which I "never check" wasn't appealing to me at all.
And while my reasoning was less idealistic than Gruber's, I think he makes a bunch of great points and I very much agree with the spirit of his post.
I haven't deactivated my Facebook but I've used it much less over the past few years. Same for Instagram. I've actually moved back to MMS, WhatsApp, and email to communicate with people I care about the most. I end up using Google Photos to host and quickly share individual and groups of photos. It's not perfect but does the trick for the most part.
> It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos.
I was almost done with college when FB suddenly became a cross-generational phenomenon and started being about more than photo sharing and event planning; I still fondly remember those days.
The one advantage I would add is the rare occasion when someone needs to get in touch with me easily: I've had extended family who lives on the other side of the world get in touch with me through FB on short notice when they were visiting my city. I could definitely imagine that some of these cases wouldn't have happened without Facebook, since they would be required to 1) know that I happened to live in this city and 2) go through probably three separate people across different continents to get my phone number. This is infinitely harder than searching their FB friends for my city and going "oh dang! wutbrodo lives there now? I haven't seen him since we were kids, I should reach out!".
That being said, all of the 90% downsides of keeping Facebook are, to some extent, within your control. I won't pretend that I'm congenitally immune to them, but all it took was a little discipline and a little time and it really wasn't that difficult to avoid the timesuck/endless scrolling/notification issues.
I've never really been able to relate to the idea of completely deactivating Facebook and losing the 10% benefits, with the possible exception of the few people who have a completely insurmountable psychological compulsion to use Facebook. This is especially true because of all of the levels of FB exposure you can have without going all-or-nothing: Chrome extensions to remove the newsfeed, disabling notifications on your phone, only visiting FB on the web and not the app, etc.
I deleted my Facebook account in 2011 as I was graduating high school. I do not miss it one bit, and I am glad I do not have an account. Although, I have missed out on social events. However, if someone is not going to go out of there way to invite me because I don't have a FB, I probably don't want to be a going anyways.
What you miss are pretty much the only things I do on FB anymore. I'm just not sure why you had to deactivate to make that happen. I guess it has never sucked me in and wasted my day because I just don't find browsing FB very interesting.
I have an account for a long time now, because some groups, people and activities require it. But I've disabled notifications for a long time, and rarely log in except to check on events. I don't see a reason to deactivate it complete.
I have to say though, FB tries really hard to reactivate your notifications. It's especially annoying when it hooks into your mobile Chrome browser notifications (took me a while to figure that out!). And the fact it can't be uninstalled on Samsung devices - at least you don't have to login.
A lot depends on the geographic distribution of your friend network. Many of my closest friends live on the other side of the country. Not to mention that I got to know them through FB.
I'm really not that worried about it any more. FB is gufe, but so was AOL. It will in turn be disrupted by a future innovation.
I kept my Facebook account but deleted all my friends and most of my personal content (and locked down the privacy settings to prevent people from finding me). This lets me access content on Facebook without using it as a social network. I did this years ago and I have no regrets.
Ability to exercise self-control most likely varies significantly among people. It's not like the ability to breath. Also Facebook is explicitly designed to "engage" people, meaning that a piece of information shared on Facebook is going to engage a larger fraction of people than that same piece of information in ... a newspaper (for example). Engagement/attention hacking is a different issue than the walled-garden issue for the most part though.
I just removed the app from my phone. That way I can still access stuff my PC and get invites and see photos but I do it far less often. Saves lots of time but still allowing me to connect with others or see photos.
Been 4-5 years without Facebook. Life for me has definitely been better than without. Same goes with Instagram. Something toxic about both of these platforms.
If u can stop using facebook when u deactivate it, cant u just not deactivate it, and use it for the 10% to stop ur frustration?
I treat facebook like i treat my phone. Its a tool. Not a way of life. Been on the internet since '95, back when i was at school i was the only one who would spend hours on the computer, they called us nerds. Now its the opposite, i use the computer at work everyday, and when im home, i stay away from it, my phone, tv, as much as possible and call everyone else geeks who need to stop obsessing over there hands (cause they dont know about computers, they just use them)
You've ever been to one of those pages that embed Facebook's comment engine? Yeah, those are the worst. I did some analysis on a random page with just three Facebook comments. Requests to Facebook's servers accounted for 1.5 MB of the 2.4 MB tranfered by the ENTIRE page. 87 network requests, 35 javascript files injected and it didn't even load all the comments! (I had to click on a "Load more comments" button to load the rest of the comments.)
Why the hell do you need 37 javascript files and 1.5 MB to load three comments?
(Shameless plug to my own open source, lightweight and tracking-free comment engine alternative to Facebook, Disqus and the rest: https://github.com/adtac/commento)
Oh god, the shit where incredibly overweight pages make you click the slow "load more" buttons just to load a few more kb of text that could've been immediately shown to you for basically no extra cost drives me crazy.
And as much as facebook sucks, most web sites suck. It's amazing to me how many sites I read on my phone are basically unusable until I fall back on Safari's reader mode.
Javascript handlers that fuck up scrolling speed, tons of popups obscuring the content, just all kinds of shit. It's like the last thing the website wants you to do is actually read it. (This is probably true, from some sort of limited penny-wise, pound-foolish ad-driven perspective.)
Those "show more" buttons aren't about not loading text--they bring the ads below the content into your viewport sooner. The content is there the whole time.
I think this is where Google's AMP succeeds. As much as people don't want to be in Google's walled garden and for them to destroy the open web, they have made visiting websites and reading articles much more pleasant. Their incredible engineering talent has done a great job tackling the problems you mentioned.
AMP does do an excellent job of showing just how slow many normal pages are. But even an old-fashioned web-page will load very quickly if designed to a similar visual style as AMP! I'd imagine that with HTTP/2 this should be even faster.
Other things about AMP are pretty annoying to me -- the URL getting hijacked, the way on mobile safari the URL bar never shrinks when scrolling (how do they even break that?), and the ribbon with the fake URL bar that keeps popping in and out of view as you scroll.
You think Google basically replacing the entire web for news sites because their sites are so shitty might encourage them to focus more on basic usability and speed, but so far, no...
There are sites that have a "Load Comments" button and the comments are already loaded, embedded in the page! All the button does is trigger a bit of javascript to populate a previously-hidden div.
Not to hard to understand, i think, its bureaucracy, incremental changes and not dealing with the technical debt from the changes, having a farm of coders that just need to check off the that requirements were met.
Now add a continuous stream of revenue and the only people that notice or care are technically oriented people.
Tangentially related: I don't mind the bells and whistles (such as bloated commenting systems) on desktop where my machine has resources to waste, but I wish more news sites made available a bare-bones, text-only version of their web site for browsing on mobile (e.g., http://thin.npr.org/).
Aside from the bureaucratic inertia that all large groups ultimately accumulate have you ever thought that this is by design? Facebook investing resources into really polishing and optimizing the web experience of comments doesn't really get people to use Facebook more. What they really want is for you to post your content, comment on it, and share it all from within the Facebook, and ideally from a highly-optimized Facebook app they completely control.
Facebook Comments aren't designed to be a great experience. They're designed to funnel users into Facebook's ecosystem and to get them to use Facebook more. It's a marketing tool for Facebook.
The core issue here is spam, and whether or not it's possible to make a non-centralized open source self-contained spam figthing engine is still unanswered.
Disqus isn't much better. I suggest that everyone look into not loading their Disqus comments by default but loading them when a Load Comments button is clicked. I did this recently on my blog and the request count and page weight went down an amazing amount. :)
> Requests to Facebook's servers accounted for 1.5 MB of the 2.4 MB tranfered by the ENTIRE page. 87 network requests, 35 javascript files injected and it didn't even load all the comments! (I had to click on a "Load more comments" button to load the rest of the comments.)
This is an issue for a really small segment of users. Not really a cause for concern in 2017. Especially when most of that stuff is already cached.
> Why the hell do you need 37 javascript files and 1.5 MB to load three comments?
That's oversimplifying it. You are loading 37 assets to support a social commenting platform.
> This is an issue for a really small segment of users.
Not really. I'm from India; while my home network connection is pretty good, when I'm travelling anywhere outside the metros, the mobile network speed is abysmal. However quite a few news outlets employ Facebook's comment system. You can imagine what a nightmare it'll be for users to load all that with a 2G connection.
> You are loading 37 assets to support a social commenting platform.
37 Javascript files out of which, I'm willing to bet, most are tracking agents employing every trick in the book to record all activity. Wasn't there a recent article that discovered that FB continuously sent home the position of your cursor when you're scrolling through your newsfeed so that they can place ads better?
Basically, what it comes down to is that if all 37 requests are done in parallel, then you're only loading the page as slowly as the slowest. Sadly, this is rarely the case. Most browsers will only make 6 concurrent requests from a server, which you can see in Firefox via the about:config page and the network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server. Worse, some of that JS is probably downloading more JS, which means that you will have multiple requests going out.
On mobile, this means you're running 8-30 second delays for each "group" of requests, especially if you have poor reception. Good news is that after that initial latency, the actual transfer should go fairly fast.
On the other hand, a social commenting program should need at a minimum 1 JS file, 1 CSS file, 1 for the actual data (3 comment texts, 3 base64 encoded profile pics at a small resolution). So FB is running at ~30x the optimum (87 assets, of which 35 are JS).
If you think it's not that big a deal, I'd suggest taking a trip abroad or just out to some smaller towns in your area, and really experience why users feel the internet has not really gotten faster since the 90s (keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency).
> keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency.
Users do care about data size since there are still a lot of people on data limited contracts even in the UK which has a fairly healthy mobile market.
What people don't necessarily realise is the connection between the two, I'd quite like it if the mobile browsers had a running total of the total amount of data transferred in that tab on each new visit/refresh.
I'm a programmer and I still don't know which pages are heavy or not (given fixed bandwidth the time to interaction would be a clue but mobile internet latency is all over the map so you can't tell if it's a big site/page or just the mobile internet shitting the bed).
You are quite correct. Data caps do make users concerned with the amount of data transferred, but only post hoc, or as a proxy for latency.
Thinking about it, there's got to be a plugin for firefox/chrome that show the data size of each page. For mobile, you can install firefox which allows you to install plugins (pretty much essential for blocking ads in mobile browsing).
I use Chroma Android variant and it has the option to show inbound/outbound traffic on the status bar updated a few times per second (and finally battery state as an actual percentage) that stupid little battery picture is bloody useless (hmm, it's just below halfway, so around 45% I guess..checks 27%..bad UX).
For me that is enough, if I load a page and see it sit at 200kb/s for more than a second or two I'll often nuke the page. I have 1Gb of data on my phone package (simply don't use mobile data much, I have unlimited fiber at home and the office).
> Basically, what it comes down to is that if all 37 requests are done in parallel, then you're only loading the page as slowly as the slowest
Doesn't apply here. Facebook is using async and downgrades the experience for mobile clients.
> Most browsers will only make 6 concurrent requests from a server, which you can see in Firefox via the about:config page and the network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server.
The limitation is per host not per server.
> On mobile, this means you're running 8-30 second delays for each "group" of requests, especially if you have poor reception.
We are talking about an asynchronous implementation.
> On the other hand, a social commenting program should need at a minimum 1 JS file, 1 CSS file, 1 for the actual data (3 comment texts, 3 base64 encoded profile pics at a small resolution). So FB is running at ~30x the optimum (87 assets, of which 35 are JS).
That's the payload for the desktop clients. Furthermore, try finding a website that follows 'the optimum' standard you are describing.
> If you think it's not that big a deal, I'd suggest taking a trip abroad or just out to some smaller towns in your area, and really experience why users feel the internet has not really gotten faster since the 90s (keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency).
If you are still using 90's technology, you won't be able to consume most of the current websites.
An asynchronous widget will not be the 'breaking point,' far from it.
The scenarios you are describing will not trigger the loading of these widgets.
You are correct, but I will be a little more terse with words, per hostname (domain). There is also a max connections limit as well which is generally 10-17.
I know, it's not like huge numbers of people view web pages on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection.
> I know, it's not like huge numbers of people view web pages on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection.
Love the sarcasm. What devices are you talking about here?
Name ten popular websites that will function on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection.
Heck, give me a site that will properly work on Motorola Razr.
I posted this comment a few weeks ago, but this seems super relevant to extend the author's point. I agree that Facebook is a walled garden. But in the developed world, Facebook is just part of the internet that people use. However, in some parts of the developing world, Facebook is the only internet people use.
------
Facebook's dominance is even more pronounced in parts of the developing world. I've met people in Asia (Myanmar and Nepal) who have just accessed the internet for the first time in the past 12-24 months (through their Android smartphones).
But they don't know the true internet - they only know the internet through the Facebook app. They use it like we use Google and web browsers.
To them, Facebook is the internet. They don't have email accounts. They don't use the browser. They don't search the web. I met someone in a small town who never even used the maps feature. I tried to think of what value the true internet might bring them, but when I suggested that "you can search for news and read other things", the response was that they already did that with the Facebook App.
One guy handed me his phone, so I could add myself as a friend on his Facebook. While I started typing my name, I noticed his search history... and to him, Facebook was even a substitute for what people in the USA might use Incognito mode for!
I would call Facebook their internet portal, but it's not really a portal to anything - Facebook is just the entire internet to them.
“Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”
Folk from Myanmar (but working in Singapore) here. People in my country, they regard Facebook as "The Internet". They walked into the mobile phone shop, they asked for "open Facebook for 3$" which comes with a FB account, followed the celebrity pages etc. They do everything you can imagine on FB.
Now there are "digital agencies" who take care of the celebrity/company FB pages, post click-bait articles, run campaigns and throw money for advertising.
I don't think these things are going to change anytime soon and I don't have an answer. So, either promote yourself, things you are doing, on FB or your online presence is mere. Just sad.
Do you think this will change overtime as people become familiar with technology and the internet?
Like do people start with Facebook and it later becomes a gateway to the internet, or do they start within only Facebook and stay within only Facebook?
I also assume people in the bigger cities (especially Yangon, but also Mandalay) use computers+the actual web for work, university and pleasure... right?
Facebook's zero rating programs are being implemented to discourage these people from ever finding out that Facebook isn't "the internet". They even went as far as to use the name "internet.org".
> Do you think this will change overtime as people become familiar with technology and the internet?
Maybe. I can't say for sure. People start with Facebook and they stay with Facebook for now. Most businesses (tech agencies or startups) are also forming around Facebook. Of course, a few companies are doing okay by doing games, marketplace, and entertainment related apps/websites. For them, a big problem is an online payment method and non-existent infrastructure. For the government, there are just more important problems for the government. Eventually, online safety and education are necessary, I think.
Yeap. I see people, especially younger folks, use laptop/desktop computers for work, school and for entertainment. The margin of mobile users are desktop users is still a big gap, I suppose.
Not everything on the internet needs to be public (or part of the "open web" as the article calls it). Facebook is a fantastic place for web content that isn't meant to be public.
This idea of posting "public content" on Facebook is inherently flawed. I agree with the article on that much.
However, what I haven't figured out yet is if this is actually an evil-Facebook issue or just a user issue. Is Facebook actively encouraging this web breaking behaviour or is it a "mis-use" of what the tool originally intended (e.g., a safe place to post content/blog/etc. with privacy restrictions)?
However, what I haven't figured out yet is if this is actually an evil-Facebook issue or just a user issue.
I have a side rant that has been bubbling in me for a long time on this issue. My city's alternative weekly paper, The Dallas Observer, switched from Livefyre to Facebook's commenting system about two years ago. Livefyre was bad but the Facebook comment system is worse. With Facebook forcing "real" people accounts, comments plummeted on stories that presented alternate takes on local stories that didn't fall into line with the Dallas Morning News's traditional power structure patriarchs (mostly land developers).
The editor's suggestion to people that wanted to comment on a story without using their "real name" was to create a separate Facebook account. Un-fucking real.
My conspiracy theory is that The Dallas Observer, and probably all Village Voice Media properties, were promised better exposure in Facebook user's news feeds if they used the Facebook comment engine. Seems like a devil's bargain to me.
I put the Facebook comment system squarely in the evil-Facebook pile.
Facebook comments and real name policy are really bad IMO:
it discourages thoughtful users who happens to have dissenting views and exposes groupthink, people who care to create fake accounts as well as people who don't care.
Livefyre and Disqus both have tools for moderation and spam control, probably better than Facebook since comments are the primary business of Livefyre and Disqus. Regarding contents of comments, I would think the Safe Harbor act and/or First Amendment protections would be sufficient for a news organization.
So I'm going to be generous and agree with your statement at face value, it probably did have nothing to do with any of the things you mentioned.
> Not everything on the internet needs to be public (or part of the "open web" as the article calls it).
Indeed, and since the beginning of the web there have been ways to create private content. The old-fashioned solutions give real control to the user.
> Facebook is a fantastic place for web content that isn't meant to be public.
Not really, because: a) you have no control over the platform -- the notion of private can change on a FB's whim and there is nothing you can do -- and b) you have no control over whom your content actually reaches, FB's opaque algorithm does.
> Is Facebook actively encouraging this web breaking behaviour or is it a "mis-use" of what the tool originally intended
Can you remember FB ever complaining that people should use the open web for some of the stuff that goes on in there? I don't mean to offend you, but I would say that you have to be a bit naive to believe that they do not desire to turn the web into a walled garden under their complete control.
Yes, I don't understand why the web needs to be "open" per the original post for it to be deemed good. If FB wasn't a nasty platform and simply didn't let Google index (mooch and profit from) its content, that would be fair in my opinion. Why should I start a company and then give that content away for free to Google to profit from? It's not like Google is performing some altruistic public service. Neither is DuckDuckGo, or any other company.
FB is horrible because it nurtures psychological pathology, not because it's not open. Everything you need to know about FB can be summarized from Zuck's generous offer to let employees freeze their eggs so that instead of having kids and leading normal lives they can work for him. Dude is gross, and so is his platform.
Personally, I would be impressed with a company that provided that benefit and seriously consider it. Am I gross for finding that to be an attractive offer?
It's not as though Facebook is coercing people to do this in order to lengthen their careers. People will do it anyway due to a culture that already exists and because they want to; from that perspective, Facebook is providing a nice benefit for people who don't want to compromise their career. It's not for you to say that this decision constitutes "abnormal" behavior - its characteristic of a lot of peoples' rational career optimization.
I'm not claiming it's altruistic, but I am claiming it's a poor heuristic for judging a company.
I'm sorry. I mean that Facebook could provide more lifestyle benefits and corporate culture in which an employee would not be compromising their career or need to career optimize around family planning opportunities. Maybe this is too utopian to expect.
I believe the main issue is that people use facebook as if it were the open web. People aren't posting because they want to keep their content in a silo, but rather because they don't know of / have an alternative publishing vector.
Nobody is saying don't have private silos, but I believe Gruber and co are saying don't pretend like a private silo is public, when it isn't.
Facebook in fact is engaged in web breaking behavior. Look at what they recently tried to do with internet.org and Free Basics. Basically calling their walled garden the internet and giving it away for free to developing countries.
> Facebook is in fact involved in web breaking behavior.
>...internet.org and Free Basics...
Last week I met someone who spent the better part of two years in Mozambique and other parts of Africa for the Peace Corps. He spent most of his time in areas that had little to no internet access.
He used Free Basics a lot while he was there and considered it integral to his work and sanity (in his words). Based on his experience, I would consider your specific example web enabling, not web breaking. There are many people who want to connect to the internet even if it's not the open, platonic ideal that is passionately endorsed message boards like HN.
From what he told me, his alternative to using Free Basics was climbing a tree and waiting for a signal so he could send emails for work. It's not a perfect system, but it's fairly uncharitable to call it web breaking just because you don't believe one company should have control over it.
"Well, it's better than nothing" exhibits a level of resignation that essentially concedes the Internet as we knew it to whatever dominant company wants it.
As well, it literally is "web breaking" when one company has control over the entire network. This is not a matter of mere dissatisfaction with the current state of events; it's a description of the seismic shift in control.
You bring up a point where facebook net helped someone.
But the longer term risks of facebook net far outweigh the help for your friend in Africa.
I don't believe one company should have control over the internet. In fact, I really really don't believe this. Attempting to be the sole gatekeeper of information in the modern world is in my estimation something that should not be allowed. Anywhere. Ever. I guess I can't blame facebook for trying to do this. But I recoil in moral disgust at the implications.
I'd argue that Facebook defines content that's "public" in a way that some — perhaps many — would not, so it's a potential point of confusion. I don't consider it evil, but it certainly results in a sort of Facebook-first inclusiveness. Gruber hits on this with Facebook's intent that posts not be indexable by search engines.
This makes sense. I think it's an inherent challenge to the domain.
In Facebook's defence, there is a difference between "public" and "discoverable". They don't go out of their way to make things discoverable. That's their business and may be evil or not depending on someone's given values.
But "public" content on Facebook could potentially be seen by anyone - and that's staying true to the definition.
They've been openly attacking the open web since day one. I think the problem now is that they've been too successful.
Zuckerberg was on to something. He saw the web connecting pages, but not people. So he created a web connecting people and now it has grown to what it is. With both MySpace and Google+ practically buried, Facebook has no competition.
We desperately need an alternative, and not just one for the sake of not being facebook, but something that works. The open web needs a way to connect people.
When I was in college (in 2002-2005), everybody had blogs. Girls who wanted to appear intellectual had blogs; cliques had blogs. I remember being heartbroken that I hadn't been invited to a little friend group's group blog. Comments worked, we linked to each other constantly, etc.
But frankly this still was at a time when the internet was more nerdish. Writing blogs was work -- intellectual work -- for reward that was only tangible because we saw everyone everyday and could physically high five or thumbs-up.
So of course blogs declined because of Facebook. I myself find myself periodically using Facebook as a blogging platform -- to write and read and debate long takes; but also because most people are not nerdish enough to have blogs. I think we're watching horrified at the de-nerding of the internet.
---
Relatedly. I'm really really jealous of kids and their snapchats. I wish my generation used some such platform. I remember when we used IM status lines as short-lived messages into the world -- "Hi friends, I feel sad", maybe with some song lyric. For a very brief while (like a week, maybe less), Messenger Stories started picking up steam in my network -- until it was integrated on Facebook. Facebook has too many people.
Disappearing stories encapsulate the whole reason someone my age (I'm 34) needs online social networks: you drift away from your great friends from yesteryear, have less and less time and energy and emotional need for new ones -- at least at the investment it takes -- and everyone in your cohort is either doing the same or trying too hard to be artificially social.
If, instead, I could access a significant section of my circle of acquaintances/quasi-friends/might-have-been-friends-if-I-had-met-them-earlier-in-life, etc. and just take a picture of a really good fresh-squeezed OJ I had somewhere or a pretty sunset or some Counting Crows lyrics? In such a way that everyone who is kind of paying attention is aware, but everyone else just misses? It would make a significant dent at this need for a semi-social life. Maybe I could even make a couple of really fucking great friends out of the interesting acquaintances I have.
I'm rambling, of course. But hey, startup people. Make Snapchat for adults, please!
What does an alternative look like that does not eventually lead to another Facebook? I've seen decentralized platforms, platforms that do not sell your data or target you with ads - how are they sustainable?
Amen. There are dozens of very good reasons for righteous anger toward Facebook, and only a handful are in this article. But just those are enough. And enough is enough.
I'm no Facebook fanboy but this article feels like a "why does my square peg not fit into their round hole" type of complaint. Facebook is a social network, not a public blogging platform.
Here is my interpretation of the complaints. Please point out what I am missing.
>It's impractical...
Square peg round hole.
>It's supporting their downgrading and killing the web...
Facebook posts being inherently (mostly) simple text is 'killing the web'? I don't buy it.
>Facebook might go out of business.
Just a generic SaaS complaint. Nothing unique to Facebook about this.
Yes, you are. The argument is that facebook has become something that causes the rest of the web to be worse off. Less open, more bloated, more central.
I think the main argument of the article is a little murky. The notion that you shouldn't write an article to be shared around the web on Facebook is simple enough and pretty obvious to a technically savvy audience. But the argument is baked inside of this very emotional claim that because of this Facebook is "killing" the open internet. While that may or may not be true, the fact that I shouldn't write blog posts inside of Facebook doesn't map directly to "Facebook is killing the web!"
> Facebook posts being inherently (mostly) simple text is 'killing the web'? I don't buy it.
It's also misleading. If you want something more like a blog, then use notes instead of posts. The notes editing interface is actually better than most blog platforms, and IMO the results look just as pretty too. Then your notes appear in your timeline, searchable (within Facebook), with comments, etc. Is it everything an "open web" activist could want? No, but it's sure not just plain text.
BTW, I can't help but shake my head at people (like Gruber) who say Facebook is evil but also think absolutely everything should be searchable and monetizable by Google. That's just not logically consistent.
As far as I can tell, you aren't able to search for specific articles on Facebook. You can view them as they go through your feed, but you can only access them again after that by scrolling through your feed or the content creators feed until you locate it. And you must have an account for much of this.
Nope. Like you, I'm no fanboy (more an active hater), but this article seems like a general sense of unease about Facebook wrapped into a stream-of-consciousness argument.
I have a feeling that Facebook will be on the decline. My teenagers and early-20 year-olds and their friends (not just local, but all over the US) think Facebook is for old people. I actually heard a 16 year old recently giving a speech where he mentioned Snapchat Stories, then, as an aside, said, "That's like Facebook or Pintrest for you old people."
The 16 year old is saying you probably don't know what SnapChat is if you are "old." But you can't assume that he doesn't use Facebook based on that quote.
But who will move to it? It's not like the 16 year old will magically start using Facebook just because he is 26 or 36 when all of his friends still aren't using it. Facebook has such a negative connotation among young adults that I can't see them moving to it just because they are getting older. It's not like Facebook is required to get by as an adult. I'm in my mid-40s and I've yet to use Facebook and I haven't suffered any negative repercussions (though I will admit that I was glad that I had a sister who was keeping tabs and reporting to me on my kids Facebook usage back before they abandoned it).
I tried deleting Facebook once, but I've got family there and ... the big problem is that I haven't gotten my time spent online back.
I'm on Twitter, I'm on Hacker News, I'm on Reddit, I'm on Gitter, I send/receive dirty jokes on WhatsApp, etc. Plenty of opportunity to waste time, no need for FB to be in the picture at all. I've been composing this stupid message for the past 5 minutes.
But I'm using Facebook less and less. For me the "open web" is a necessity, not a moral high ground or anything like that. I don't like opening Facebook blog posts because Facebook sucks for blog posts. TFA mentions the Internet Archive or Google not indexing articles. Hell yeah, those are really good concerns.
Also, forget the open web ... how about the fact that if you give them permissions to access your photos, on iOS at least, they are uploading your photos to their services for making photo collages, without you explicitly allowing this.
I know this because I opened the app a week ago and I was proposed a collage with animated transitions and music in the background, titled "Your Sunday evening in Bucharest", that couldn't have been processed on my phone - especially since iOS restricts background activity, plus it would be pretty bad for battery life.
And I freaked out, so now Facebook is gone from my phone. Article mentions an all out assault on the open web. Sure, but it's also an all out assault on people's privacy.
I was 7 when Ceaușescu was shot and communism fell in 1989 and before that paranoia was at an all times high. People were afraid for example that their phones were tapped and that their neighbours were listening. Which was in fact true, but oh boy, that's nothing compared with what happens today.
ah a "Why FB is evil" article, here come the slew of HN'ers to proclaim their deletion of FB years ago. I myself have no issues with the social network, I keep up with friends, family and it isn't a time suck for me anymore than HN.
And contrarians who revel in their "I'm not snobbish like you all" Regular Joe aura. At least the ones who talk about why they quit stick to their own experiences rather than belittling others who still find value in it.
Pretty soon we're going to need an "Anti-Facebook Evangelism Strike Force" or an "Open Web Evangelism Strike Force." Judging by the way people throw the word "evil" around here, you'd think Facebook was murdering kittens and using human batteries to power Free Basics, as Zuckerberg sat on a throne of acquired-company logos laughing to himself.
How dare Facebook provide limited internet to the developing world instead of nothing at all...
"How dare Facebook provide limited internet to the developing world instead of nothing at all..."
Agreed. The intent and likely outcome of that was pretty evil.
You may be fine with Facebook controlling the flow of information. I'm not. I don't live in the developing world but am delighted to see efforts to that end stifled (where it has happened).
Other than that, as a social network, I don't have a hard issue with Facebook. I'm sure it's fine for lots of people. Friends and family use it and seem to get something out of it. It's not my type of thing so never had an account but I don't perceive it as evil.
I guess I perceive Facebook something like a used car salesman or owner of a dive bar in a bad neighborhood or a porn aggregator. A little shady, probably not to be intrinsically trusted and not the kind of thing I want to be around, but not necessarily evil.
All this open-web bitching sounds oddly familiar from back when AOL was a tech monstrosity with nearly everything inside its walled-garden. Facebook is basically just a worldwide version of AOL, and plenty of people are tiring of it, just as they tired of AOL's dialup shenanigans and obnoxious floppy disk marketing.
And Facebook, too, will eventually crust away when the underlying tech improves (universal 5G? who knows?) and the next Steve Case / Mark Zuckerberg visionary builds the next generally-centralized service for most internet users. But the open web will survive just fine.
It's a bit of tough comparison. When I used AOL, it was literally my "portal" to the internet. I may have even used a browser embedded in AOL? Facebook is not that for most of it's users.
But that being said, if we are just concerned with statistics, obviously Facebook's user numbers are much larger than AOL ever saw but I wonder what percentage of people using the internet use Facebook today vs. AOL "back in the day"?
I'm in a small minority of people who want to pay money to get on FB and can't.
I've been trying for months to advertise on there but there's no such thing as a business-only FB acct, you need an organic personal account. And some combination of my activity (not friending anyone, not using FB for anything, using an incognito tab, my IP address? I don't know) looks like trouble to the powers that be so my account keeps getting shut off.
I hate them just as much as these other guys but for 2x the reasons.
It's incredibly obnoxious - the first time my dad showed me I couldn't believe how much space it took up. He has no interest in joining Facebook but his friend promotes his business via pictures on there
The open web is an attack on the average user. It's unremittingly hostile as a place to go to if you aren't part of the culture that spawned it. Facebook does a very poor job of sheltering people from the worst of the open web, but it's about a billion times more bearable than the open web scaled up to modern adoption rates would be.
Finding the open web hostile is a sign of a dangerously sheltered mind. The last thing such a person needs is to be restricted to a relatively sanitized space like Facebook. Far healthier in the long term to engage with ideas that aren't tightly curated and learn to filter out trolls.
And why would "learning a culture" before getting to be a part of it be any bad? Why should we be entitled to a free pass to some place that needs a culture to be grasped?
This is exactly facebook problem: lowering the bar is not a good thing per se, especially if you then pretend to run away from the responsibilities that come with it (i.e. being a fucking awesome amplifier for the worst shit ever)
> And why would "learning a culture" before getting to be a part of it be any bad?
Because they don't want to. They don't want to learn it, they don't want to be a part of it. So they stay in a walled garden where they can participate in groups they want to participate in, with their own culture. And they're not the ones complaining about it, the open web advocates are complaining about their voluntary association with each other.
Before FB, my email was clogged with trivial crap that family members and aquaintances forwarded to everyone in their address book, including me. Now that never happens. Based on everyone else's complaints, it sounds like that stuff has moved to FB leaving my inbox a much more useful place.
Facebook is an attack on society itself. Ignorance of other people's stupidity, bigotry, and pettiness is a necessary lubricant for society to function.
Totally agree. Especially if the expression of such ignorance comes with a sense of pride and entitlement. It's easy to get entitled and proud, because nobody in real life would give you 200 nods to your racist musings while in line at Walmart. But 200 people press a stupid like button, and suddenly you feel like your idiotic and uneducated opinion has a great meaning.
This is straightforward dangerous for representative democracies, which are founded on the subtle concept of an elite of better people that have a mandate to lead society.
The fact that this mandate has been misused so many times is no excuse to suddenly drop all the good that comes from having someone who knows more in a position of power.
The interesting thing to me is how online numbers are nowhere near statistically significant and yet they "matter" to people. There are billions of people, thousands just in your neighborhood (probably) and yet most people interact with a few dozen network links and the few dozen comment posts they are likely to read. That skew is gigantic, and it should terrify people that they are not relying on more professionally-edited sources.
What makes the difference, I guess, is the fact that you can actually measure "agreement" in a direct way, with numbers of "agreement units" such as likes.
Very easy to misread and blew it out of proportion. Facebook KNOWS that and definitively leverages that. The mission of the company is inherently broken and Mark Zuckerberg, if he's really being honest when he talks about it, well then he's in full blown denial.
Look, there's no dispute that Facebook is an assault on the 'open web' because it's a walled garden where the data only flows in. In fact, on the HN thread for Gruber's previous post about Google's AMP, I defended [1] some aspects of AMP because at least it tries to be distributed vs. Facebook, and in that post I echo much of what Gruber would later say.
But sadly, today's so-called 'open web' is just as much of an assault on the open web: trackers, cookies, and cross-correlated advertisements follow the user everywhere; every new link is literally a crapshoot which may execute arbitrary code placed there by the webmaster or their delegates. It's the devil you know vs. the devil that's brand-new every time: do I want my browsing habits aggregated to help them better target ads and content for me inside some walled garden, or do I want my browsing habits across the 'open web' to be aggregated by a dozen third parties to help them better target ads for me on the outside, while I blissfully extoll the virtues of decentralization and pretend I'm better off?
Until recently, the only way to avoid this was to spin off a clean incognito session in a browser running only one window, then close it after every pageview. Who does that? Short of a very particular few, no one.
The web is a wonderful, versatile medium of referencible documents and multimedia that we've turned into an application delivery platform; and the one thing that content silos like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Apple News get right is that not everyone cares to visit unvetted content solely judged by its URL.
>Look, there's no dispute that Facebook is an assault on the 'open web' because it's a walled garden where the data only flows in.
I dispute that. I don't feel like my 'open' WordPress blogs are being attacked by Facebook.
Does Facebook's lack of full-blown openness constitute an attack on anything? I don't think it does.
It seems open web advocates resent that FB successfully competes against their offering. I have a fondness for the open web. I'd rather see us learn from FB, and compete, rather than whine about losing market share.
> Until recently, the only way to avoid this was to spin off a clean incognito session in a browser running only one window, then close it after every pageview.
What other solution are you implying by "until recently"?
> Who does that? Short of a very particular few, no one.
I'm probably one of the particular few, but I've found it very painless to
1) Install and use firefox's containers experiment
2) Install the "private tab" addon
3) In about:config, remap <Ctrl-t> to open a new private tab
Now new tabs are private by default (although they share cookies within a browser session), and if I want to keep cookies or history I open a new container tab... with nearly zero change in my workflow.
Reminder to self that I should put in my LICENSE files:
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person ...
(the usual stuff, followed by ...)
It is the express wish of the author that this software shall not be used in derived products or services to collect or spread information about users against their will for any purpose other than the main functionality of the product or service. Users will need to explicitly "opt-in" to such use of information if desired. The functionality of the derived product or service should be sufficiently broken down to avoid an all-or-nothing proposition to the user.
Suggestions for extensions and/or better phrasing welcome.
The rationale is that, while this will not have meaning or uphold in a court of law, the least we can do as developers is to send a message of our disapproval for the way big companies are treating the web and its users.
Probably not a good idea. If you include vaguely-worded restrictions like that in your license you're 1) using a non-standard license, and 2) breaking Freedom 0 of GNU's Free Software Definition.
Personally I feel that it'd be better to put that sort of statement in the README; especially if you're not concerned with whether its legally-enforceable or not.
> Personally I feel that it'd be better to put that sort of statement in the README; especially if you're not concerned with whether its legally-enforceable or not.
You're probably right. And the README would be better, because the message would be visible on the main page in Github :)
Another option could be to have the text "The following is not part of the license, but expresses the wishes of the author regarding use of this software ..." in the LICENSE file.
I'm hoping we could have a standard phrasing for this kind of thing (just like we have standard licenses). Perhaps the EFF could develop one.
Perhaps then EFF can develop a way of giving companies that might use these libraries a reason to care that this language is present. "The following is not part of the license" is just a long-winded way of saying "Feel free to ignore what follows this clause even harder than you feel free to ignore what precedes it."
I mean, full marks for cooperative nature, but being real here, the licenses in your Github repositories mean exactly as much as you're willing to pay a lawyer to enforce them, assuming you even find out they're being violated in the first place. It would be nice if the world were otherwise, but pretending that is so doesn't seem to me likely to help much of anything. Perhaps I am wrong in so thinking.
The law departments of these companies probably couldn't care less, I agree. But I think such license addendum could have a very significant impact.
These companies employ people who generally have a warm heart for open source. These people have been contributing to open source projects themselves. So if part of the community starts disapproving their way of doing business, they will take note. And internal discussions will take place.
Further, if these companies misbehave, it hurts their image.
And a bad image among developers (both internal and external) is probably the last thing these companies want.
By altering the title, you've taken something deliberately strong and watered it down. This isn't a situation where a different title better conveys the authors intent or content...this is explicitly an opinionated essay expressing exactly what the title summarizes. It is unnecessary censorship. Sure it is a word that commonly is considered vulgar, but it is also a word that has significant visceral meaning. HN shouldn't censor words just because they're strong enough to be offensive.
I disagree that it is a form of censorship. I think the title of the post linked is more click-baity than the HN title. I am more interested in this article as it's presented on HN than I would have been if I had stumbled on an article named 'Fuck Facebook'.
Whenever I see Gruber talking about openess and standards I smell hipocrysy - same way we can say iOS ecosystem is an attack on open computing (walled garden).
I agree that Gruber is leaning a lot towards Cupertino, but when it comes to open Web standards he's always been praising Google's approaches and had critics for Apple's Safari and WebKit approach.
Let's not start pointing fingers about being hypocritical, tho, otherwise I would really hear for example how exactly is Google stance on openness not hypocritical.
(I know you didn't name Google directly, but it's the easiest example)
iOS apps being a walled garden doesn't really have anything to do with the open web. Apple has long embraced the open web, so there's nothing hypocritical about this.
Apple embraces the open web, but I think what people get upset about is their lack of effort in moving it forward. For example, adopting "PWA" browser APIs in mobile Safari.
People should just use Facebook for what it's good at, for example event planning. In a social context Facebook is often the only social platform "everyone" is on - that's a killer feature. No matter how good a competing specialized app is - if you e.g invite people by email it's not even close to the power of Facebook.
People (and corporations) should STOP using all the other features and the web will be a much better place. Don't put articles on Facebook like a blog. It's not a blog. Don't make Facebook your only site for your restaurant. A static html page with your address and opening hours is better. And whatever you do, don't ever click a facebook ad or "like" a company on Facebook.
Facebook has become successful because for the first time in history it materialized the ungraspable matter that is the concept of relationship. It's like a magic device that shows the invisible treads that link the individuals in their own monadic lives. It's like a fucking superior level of intercommunication.
And it's scary, and too powerful, and way over the point of no return. Plus, I don't think it's making the world a better place in any meaningful way.
I deleted my facebook account in highschool and have never looked back. The melodrama and immature antics are hilarious to observe, I'm so glad that I'm not a part of all that.
Another way to say that is "I'm glad I'm not in high school anymore" ;)
I'd say what you're describing isn't symptomatic of Facebook, but of the relationships themselves. For the most part my Facebook feed is comprised of 30-somethings and melodrama basically doesn't exist. Political rants, on the other hand...
I took the route with facebook, just like in real life, that I culled out the people who are immature and melodramatic. But if I ever get the hankering for some melodrama, I can count on the inevitable "I deleted facebook" replies to any post about Facebook. :-)
Too relevant...Trump tweets out a link to the livestream for his announcement on the Paris accord, and Facebook bugs me with a banner, and then informs me after clicking on the stream: "Please log in to continue"
Google has taken over search, web browsing, advertising, and has the largest mobile platform. They hold your email, maps, search history, personal docs, office suite, and calendar. They authenticate you to services all over the web. All of your actually important data (you really can live without pictures, unless you are a photographer or model) resides with them. They have created several new protocols that the web uses regularly, and influences new standards. They influence how most web content is created. They have leverage over most of the companies doing business on the web. They handle domains, cloud computing, business services, and a range of other products I don't remember. And they control how you use the web with their browsers and OSes.
There is no other company that single-handedly controls so many aspects of the web. Facebook is just a social platform; Google is everything else.
First off, the open net is dead, people not giving a fuck killed it when they simply said yet to the shitty deals the unscrupulous companies offered. Those tech savvy should have lead the way away from these sites to alternatives - that didn't happen.
If that wasn't enough the knowledge of EchelonV killed it. People will never again act truly honestly on the net, which hopefully will offset any short sighted plans google and NSA has to premeptively steer public opinion.
The last real breath was drawn as people kept on using google and that breath was drawn precisely when google "modified" their algorithm to kill off private sites who came in high on rankings.
Since then any site that has arisen to challange google seems to have magically have been killed or taken over (suddenly swapping to using google coding for unexplained reasons). Oh to mention a few; scroogle, qwant, lycos, zapmeta, qwant, wn, millionshort, gigablast, xirkle...
You can still search through the old altavista pile if u want but yeah. Most other motors gives u a shitstorm of companies that you do not care for before you can read private sites off enligthened people who strive to improve x thing.
The next terryfying thing is as what happens when large sites get taken over and the large libraries of knowledge falls into informal hands or simply disappears (IMDB boards to mention a recent setback, and i meant the positive discussions not the large clusterfks of idiots and astroturfers et al).
And of before i forget - as someone who saw through FB before it took off (previous avid user of ICQ, AIM, newb at IRC etc) i fucking told you (if any of those i actually told would stumble across this).
Localised meshnets could have been the future (with "netbrowsers" as the tool to reach em), though with the thought of all that information being in the hands of normal people governments are "finally" reacting and starting to spread fibre as far as i know through some of europe (scandinavia) which could effectively kill that effort.
So start taking political action for a free future of information \/.
I have used FB since 2004. It became less and less of a place I wanted to spend time in when they started filling the feed with junk. First it was Farmville updates and other social games, then viral videos, then ads, then links to news articles and clickbait that I had no interest in clicking on. I must have blocked hundreds of apps, sites, and clickbait generators shared by friends in the last few years alone.
However, I won't disconnect FB as long as it's the primary way for me to check on/communicate with/share photos with relatives and friends from years ago. But it's hardly an addictive time-suck for me, and also for some of my friends judging by how seldom they post updates.
It's almost like Facebook is a new AoL in web's clothing, trying to trick less sophisticated users that it's "the internet" when it's really just a single corporations's closed system.
Facebook succeeds because the open web is a UX nightmare for anyone without a tech background. FB is the usccessor to AOL is the successor to [prodify, genie, whichever] is the successor to text-based bulletin board software.
People primarily use social media to connect with and make new friends. They do not want to deal with a million and 1 different user interfaces in the name of openness. That's why Usenet worked so well until people like Canter & siegel killed it with commercial spam.
The open web is great for the same reason that magazines and TV are great, but it's also shit for the same reason that magazines and TV are shit - too much shallow design competing for people's attention, with everyone trying to differentiate themselves from everyone else via style and gimmicks. That's the same thing that made myspace unusual, an impossible excess of visual cruft that far outweighed its substantive communication value.
The open web is fine, but the web is not the right platform for social networking. For social you want a fast, clean, boring interface...like the one on HN. If you think FB is the problem (and it's very very problematic but plenty of other people are already making that case), stop rabbiting about web standards and get to work on NNTP 2.0.
NNTP was fucking awesome. Gopher was fucking awesome. the semantic web is/was awesome. The web is not for social.
The "open web" is really an Eden-like myth, as there has and always will be stakeholders with various agendas chicaning the free exchange of information. Sorry, yes, but we really are opportunistic fucks. Not to Gordon Gecko levels, but an element of it will always be there and we need to collectively acknowledge and integrate it if we are to evolve.
Either way, Facebook's obfuscation of data is justifiably a cause for the concern due to the mass adoption of its platform. Yet, it's easy to focus on the machinations and fuckery that Facebook engage in to hold our gaze and numb our minds. What's more difficult is to question the agency of its hundreds of millions of users, who each have a slab of skull-encased smartmeat that gifts them with relative free will in their lives. Rather predictably, it comes down to a question of agency and personal responsibility: if you don't like the site, get off it.
But were only it so simple. Facebook is so deeply entrenched in the infrastructure of our personal lives, that it's very difficult for a lot of 'normies'(sic) to just pack up and fuck off. While the HN community may be au fait with the finer points of privacy, mass surveillance, and the founding principles of our nascent virtual civilisation - Dave from softball in Akron or Juliette who has a duck farm in the south of France do not. While they'd be concerned about those things if they were explained and they grokked the implications, their fucks lie elsewhere and, hence, Big Social Media remains a fringe idea.
The irony, I think, is that Facebook tends to be too open. There are pictures or posts or status updates I'd like hidden from the world. Facebook isn't necessarily an attack on the open web, it's an attack on content ownership. When it comes to my personal blog, I can create, alter, and delete as I see fit. On Facebook, I'm sure that posts from my early 20s still linger somewhere in the abyss of their data centers.
I'm sure that some embarrassing or unflattering picture of me is somewhere out there. And I think that's the crux of this problem: Facebook is the gatekeeper; it decides whether or not it wants to open or close the door on content. Of course, this has an implication as far as its openness is concerned, but the far more dangerous aspect is, as I mentioned, the fact that I should be the gatekeeper for my own content.
At least that's the way I see it. I agree with the idea that as a social platform, Facebook is dying. People contribute less and less personal and intimate content in lieu of linking articles or throwaway memes. Nowadays, I mostly use it as a news feed.
I think there's a vacuum out there ripe for disruption; a combination between Snapchat and Tumblr. A sort of MySpace for the new decade and a platform where people can be themselves again.
That popup that takes up a third of the page is ridiculous (I actually think it's a bit more on my screen).
Whenever I get a link to facebook for something I sigh, because that sort of stupid, hostil UX won't get them anywhere.
If people wanted an account, they'd have one. It's not like visiting the link is going to be my first time ever hearing of facebook, and that's probably true for 99% of the people visiting one.
My experience with Facebook was that it made me a lot less fond of people that I used to call friends. I'm a bit of a nomad, so I have clusters of friends and family that exist in places I've long since left behind. At first, I was curious about what they were up to, but the reality of their curated online selves was more disappointing than enlightening.
I was getting a lot of annoying politics and boring photos of kid play dates, pets, dinners, sporting events, etc. Obviously, the quality of your feed depends on the quality of the people you connect with, but I found myself more disconnected from people who previously occupied a nostalgic fondness in my mind.
On the other hand, the people who I cared the most about were routinely the quietest people on Facebook because--let's face it--smart, productive people don't waste time on things like that.
I'm relatively old (40's), so my experience is also skewed by that.
I left by editing my hosts file to block all FB-related servers and never looked back.
The (real) title of this post is exactly how I feel about Facebook. Facebook is AOL, if AOL had won.
But the question is: what can we do about it? Resist certainly helps (never had a Facebook account and hopefully never will -- although I did get on Whatsapp two months ago). I will also prevent my kids to have Facebook while under my roof.
Is it? Because it seems to me that they are having plenty of issues with gaining the trust of advertisers too. Considering that advertising is the bread and butter of their business, this would normally be something of a mini-crisis.
A quick search for "do advertisers trust facebook" gives me
Of course, no one actually believes anything Facebook says with regards to privacy, and probably never did.
I would seriously doubt if there is anyone who actually looks at their practices who doesn't think they conduct large scale psychological experiments on the human lab rats who continue to use FB.
In other words, seems like there are enough ingredients here for an implosion. Something has to give.
facebook has a certain level of monopoly over people's attention. i don't think a little snafu like this is suddenly going to make advertisers think they should stop advertising on facebook.
The popover doesn't seem as big an issue as the fact that you can't browse the archive of public posts unless you are logged in.
John Carmack posts public reviews of VR games frequently on Facebook. Here's one: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1717273305... But if you want to browse previous reviews, there is no mention of them on his public Facebook page. Look at these two screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/wal8p If you log in, Facebook is all of the sudden like "look at all this public content!"
Facebook solved some real problems and thus pointed out weakness with the open web as it is. The way to combat this is not to wring our hands but to improve the web so it solves the same problems.
Things like spam/moderation. Is it possible to have a distributed, open solution to this problem?
I switched to Observer Only mode on Facebook after Trump got elected because I did not want to be stopped and e-frisked at airports. It turned out that that was the best way to use Facebook: stay on top of happenings with your friends and relatives but let them reach out to you on other communication channels if they miss you or wish to communicate some news. All the sudden, I'm having more meaningful, coherent dialog over email and text as opposed to stupid Facebook comments and likes.
Idea for startup: Compete with Facebook on one item: meetings for groups and organizations. Allow users to join groups without having to join Facebook.
Facebook is the AOL of the 21st Century. There will always be these closed gardens, walled-off. (Could've been CompuServe.)
The point is, the open web is the open web. This also needs to be common. Eventually, kiddos grow up and escape the pretty gardens - at least lets have something out here that they can clutch on to, in awe, at all the non-curated, non-owned, non-manipulated/-manipulative content ..
I closed my FB in 2013 and time passes so quick. I created a dummy account to have access to certain pages but I dont use it. But a lot of people have created thousands of dummy accounts to show how many friends they have. They sell on the market fake accounts/followers.
And I dont want to be part of such a group. Plus other reasons like the ones in the article like this.
There's a string of submissions critical of Facebook on HN recently. I agree and approve.
But one thing interests me: doesn't Facebook have something like that, but in reverse ? I mean updates along the lines "We need more Facebook", "Open internet is for nerds", "Why more websites need to migrate to Facebook"... ? Unless you have a Facebook account, you don't know what's going on on the other side of the barricade.
One puzzling fact - stars on github:
jquery/jquery - 45k,
angular/angular - 25k,
facebook/react - 68k,
twbs/bootstrap - 111k,
On my local job market (I live in a 500k city), react is the least popular JS framework. I keep seeing jquery and especially angular over and over. Meanwhile react, the facebookiest of JS frameworks, shows up least frequently. Yet React is the most popular JS framework and by a large margin! I suspect it's because job offers with 'react' are mostly circulated via facebook. I also see very little job offers with the 'facebook' keyword - mostly for non-technical people, like marketing, salesmen, assistants, various misc jobs.
Hypothesis: we, outside Facebook, live in our own filterbubble. We don't get the whole picture.
> Hypothesis: we, outside Facebook, live in our own filter bubble. We don't get the whole picture.
I have a Facebook account, because I have non-nerd people I need to contact somehow and it seems like email is forgotten.
Facebook offers one things: an extermely simple way to waste you time. Do not underestimate this! It's better, than TV, because you can even join cults claiming the world is lead by evil lizarmen - people actually do this, for "fun", because they are bored.
That is all you'll find on the other side: bored people wasting time.
> doesn't Facebook have something like that, but in reverse?
Probably not. Your hypothetical headlines look like a parody.
Also, I don't understand your comparison of jQuery and React. That really has nothing to do with Facebook being a walled garden or an attack on the open web.
I suspect the lower number of job postings related to react has to do with the legal language in the repository concerning patents[1] and the uncertainty that generates for many businesses, especially those in the 'social' space. Legal concerns often have as much weight as technical merits when deciding which framework to use for a project within a company.
But it could be way more open without ruining those usecases. It is just so hostile to non-facebook users.
The primary example being the one cited in the article: The only reason to block 1/3 of a page to nonlogged in users is to convince you to either sign up or log in. There is no user-based reason to do so.
That is open-web hostile.
There is no need to make the all the content non-searchable, except to convince you to log in and search locally.
That is open-web hostile.
I used to think Google was bad for its intrusive "No really, you should log-in" campaigns, but facebook makes Google look so reasonable on this score.
For people who are privacy obsessed, just create a fake account. You'll find that all your friends are sympathetic and are more than happy to friend you. I know several people who do this and I happily friend them. My bday and location information is all fake, for example. I click on ads sometime when they peak my interest. I think once I actually bought something based on what I saw on Facebook, but I can't remember if it was because someone shared it or it was sponsored. I honestly don't know whether it matters or what the big deal is.
Admittedly my profile picture is there. I worry about that sometimes and is probably my biggest concern. But it's not facebook's fault i posted a picture. There's no rule you can't see your friends posts if you don't post your own photo, and I have friends who just use a picture of their dog or something instead and it never bugs me.
Honestly, Facebook is just a business and in return you look at ads now and then. If people had to pay I don't think it'd be very popular.
I think the reason it seems so strange is because they do let some things be "public." There was a time when you could see zero content without being logged in to an account. I would prefer if Facebook were a 100% walled garden. It would make the usage more simple. But then Zuckerberg wouldn't have as much money, I suppose.
Google is murky too but they were coming from the 100% open side of things.
I just wish everyone would go back to their corners!
I'd be willing to offer a different take: You life in a smaller-ish job market. I'd be willing to bet you have fewer of the hip, "bleeding edge" startups, and places that hop on the newest technologies right away. I'm guessing most of the companies are more technologically conservative. I'm not saying that as a bad thing, by any means. More that, they would rather work with proven technologies where the problems are known. That way, they can concentrate on whatever it is they want to do, rather than on the bugs of the alpha build of the flavor of the month.
Love the post(s), the reasons mentioned are precisely why I took the time to make my own site. There are so many unexplored opportunities with custom components that will never work on platforms, but too few are doing it. Alan Kay's talks completely changed my way of thinking - you need to take control of your tools.
Besides Facebook banning search engine indexing of itself the search functionality of Facebook itself is terrible. I belong to several groups and I've seen numerous examples of content, which I know is in the group, not showing up in search results while using very straight forward and matching searches.
Facebook is evil. They knew people would be posting videos killing themselves and let others watch. If you know anything about psychology; trauma and copycats. [1]
Facebook retains your data, and you can't do anything about it. I don't know how any engineers can work there knowing in their mind the delete button is a ruse -- or "incomplete functionality". From what i've observed there is active censorship especially in regards to negative statements of facebook (of which i'm sure they are aware of copycats).
This company has brought out the worst of society and they are deserving of justice -- or at least balance.
Facebook would be good if they didn't keep shoving more and more services into it. I don't want to order food from Facebook and don't want to sell anything. Ad blocker takes care of ad spam.
Is it that you don't want to sell anything at all? or just on Facebook? When facebook launched this feature I had a bunch of old iPhones lying around and I sold them through facebook really fast. I actually liked it a lot. Identity was not an issue (never felt like I would get ripped off). It was easy to take a photo, set a price and publish within 10 seconds. I started to sell things I didn't even think about selling because it was so easy.
In Ultima Online you could write books. While those were fun to find, would you say they were part of the open web?
What if those books were in Ilshenar, guarded by two stone gargoyles?
Hey, let's just meet and talk there. I sure love to go to Ilshenar. I'm sure my friends from all walks of life/culture/class would also love to go to Ilshenar see what I am talking about.
I think the future of social networks will be turning them into a protocol, the same way we use e-mail. Everyone is connected through e-mail but nobody technically owns it.
Oh boy, so many users disliking Facebook in this thread.
> — a full one-third of my window is covered by a pop-over trying to get me to sign in or sign up for Facebook.
I get that John is clearly annoyed by a certain aspects of Facebook, but, I feel like it's unfair to say "Fuck Facebook" based on that. Facebook posts are primarily meant to be shared on the social network and not on the web. You can, of course, share it on the web, if the author of the post wishes to. But, Facebook has an amazing Notes features, which basically acts like a personalized blog. Long posts are meant to be shared via Notes and not the regular status update posts.
They don't put a pop-over that takes up 1/3 of your page.
Also, I see a lot of people complaining about timesuck and how getting off of Facebook has improved their lives. How is any of it Facebook's fault? If anything, it means that it's a win for Facebook since they're providing good content that interests you, the user.
Also, stating that Facebook is trying to kill the open web is a bit ridiculous to say. Facebook's main sell is their content. They're not a search engine. They don't have to let non-Facebook users access their protected content. Yes, they do have a search engine that searches across the Facebook platform, but, you'd have to be a Facebook user in order to be able to search for it. Facebook got a lot of heat a few years ago for the lack of proper privacy features. Now, people complain about not having access to somebody else's content? There is no way everybody in this world can be satisfied.
Also, expecting Facebook to allow Internet Archive to index Facebook's content is unfair. Why should Facebook allow Internet Archive to index their protected content? The content is for the users to share with whoever they wish to share with, which may not necessarily be everybody in the world.
Fuck Facebook! Stop wasting cycles and bytes discussing over something obvious, while making "dumb" excuses why you need to go back and get fucked back.
I'm sure Facebook is still tracking you in some way. Some low hanging fruits: IP address, user agent, screen resolution, network speed based tracking, geo location, presence of various web technologies. With all this and Facebook's backend data, I'm absolutely sure they'll be able to narrow you down to at most 5-10 people.
I went to a great talk at linuxfest with a mozilla developer talking about ways you could prevent tracking, and some of the means were mind blowing. For example, they can process an audio clip using your audio hardware without playing it to you, and then based on the artifacts introduced, they can figure out if you are using the same sound card as a previous sample they collected. The firefox property that allows this is 'dom.webaudio.enabled', and it is not related to playback.
That's insane. http://webkay.robinlinus.com/ has some more interesting methods. One of my favourites is querying every IP address in your local network and seeing which ones are up to generate a profile on you.
Facebook is probably the last place I go looking for quality blog-type content. Also, the title and tone of this piece both seem intensely hyperbolic to me.
I agree with the authors points about blogging on facebook and having a decent logged out experience, but I want to push back against him lumping in anti-adblock pop overs.
Every publisher of high quality content is dependent on advertising to stay in business. When you are using adblock, your eyeballs are freeloading off of all the users who are using the website as intended.
I certainly understand the urge to use adblock, but it's amazing to me that people would feel entitled enough to actually expect publishers not to try to prevent this.
And he is a publisher of content too, with ads, and you didn't notice what he does differently? All text, simple links, and usually a nice blurb describing the company/product. I have read 2000% more of those than I have ever cared about any pushy, animated, noisy ad on any other site. His system works, without being obnoxious.
I think it's hilarious that the comments in here suggest Facebook gets in the way of quality of life because of the way it captures your attention. Yet, then they spend a large amount of time on this site practicing another form of toxicity.
I get that some people, here especially it seems, have very strongly held beliefs about privacy and personal space that Facebook will never accommodate for. Nor should they be expected to. Clearly those people will never be the target audience and that's 100% okay.
> Facebook forbids search engines from indexing Facebook posts. Content that isn’t indexable by search engines is not part of the open web.
When you make an argument like this, you need to acknowledge that tons people want the opposite thing you want. That doesn't make you wrong, but leaving it out makes it so much harder to have a good discussion.
Facebook has done wonders to get people creating and consuming content on the internet. However, Facebook has grown to the point where it has no competition and is no longer innovating in ways that benefit us. Facebook should split into Facebook the aggregator and Facebook the content hoster. You could talk about a third piece that is Facebook the content provider, which is for providing things like gifs, templates, memes, emoji, games, and other stuff like that. Because Facebook hasn't completely broken from open web standards those types of content providers already exist today.
Aggregators would be where you go to set up your friend list and see your feed. It could look and feel like Facebook does now. It would have an open standard protocol that content hosters would use if they wanted to be aggregated. This could still be an add driven business, but subscription, self hosted, and DIY solutions could exist too.
Content hosters could either charge a monthly hosting fee, or they could serve up their own adds. Self hosted and DIY solutions could also exist.
The big benefit to this would of course be the competition. Since it's an open standard anyone could be a content host, and anyone could be an aggregator.
To make extra sure there is competition, and this could come in a phase two after the initial splitting up of Facebook, there should be open standards for exporting and importing friends, follows, likes, etc. to and from aggregators, and open standards for importing and exporting content from the hosters.
Speaking of follows and likes, there could also be aggregator aggregators (AAs). People could opt in to publicly and anonymously share their likes and follows and the AAs would consume those and report on trends that cross aggregator boundaries. Anonymity could be much more protected this way while still giving us that interesting information about what is trending.
One tricky part of this is how do I as a content author only allow my friends to see certain posts of mine? It would have to be with encryption. My content provider could keep public keys of my friends and only my friends (well, their aggregators) would be able to decrypt my posts using my friends' private keys. I can see some challenges and holes in this, but it doesn't seem any worse overall than how Facebook protects privacy now. Open implementations and peer review could get us to better-than-Facebook privacy quickly.
Facebook would ideally recognize their stagnation and initiate this split themselves. We as their user base can and should help them understand the importance of this. Hopefully it doesn't have to come down to government enforcement of anti-trust laws, but that could be a useful tool to apply here as well.
I'm baffled by some of the comments here... Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on? You can still sign into random sites that require it that way, arrange meetups, etc but without 'scrolling your life away'
I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumption to make...
Seems like my feed encourages me to do less scrolling than ever. My feed has become a haven for linked and sponsored content, and there's the occasional spatter of original content from friends. I don't see a lot of the stuff I actually care about (photos of friends, their newborns, lengthy posts, etc.) without going straight to their pages.
I swear some of these personal posts never hit my home feed, they just get buried. This is odd as the personal stuff is the content I'm most likely to interact with. This is doubly confounding because the posts I don't see usually have a lot interaction among my close network, especially compared to the noise that's topping my feed.
More and more I find myself going directly to a handful of profiles and spending less time on FB because of the feed's noise.
I think it's Facebook trying to cover that actual interest in the site and keeping it alive by the users themselves is actually dwindling. I recently unliked a lot of old pages I didn't want to see anymore and it was amazing how much it tried to figure out what I liked, rather than just show me what my friends posted. Why? Because my friends didn't post nearly as often enough to keep my timeline full of news. I have ~80 friends/acquaintances there, everyone from adults to kids, various jobs and interests, personalities.
Facebook is doing well as an ad platform to keep the revenue up but I'm not sure Facebook is honestly... doing well, you know?
I've seen them recently try to be Snapchat with the stories. I haven't seen one person use them yet despite being active on Snapchat. Also stickers, the new attention grabbing personal status posts with huge text, etc. It's as if they are lately trying to make people post more personal status updates on the site?
Is it possible there's a social network ad bubble that, once it pops when the realization of how much attention people actually pay on that site rather than just mindlessly scroll through like a heroin addict sinks in, will cause their stock to crash? I honestly don't think Facebook is one a nice trajectory either for us or for them.
This is my biggest problem with Facebook, as of late. It's all advertisements, and sponsored stories. My friends don't spam me with pictures of food, but the signal-to-noise ratio is too damn low.
I tweet and have all tweets go to facebook automatically. So people will engage sometimes with those posts. Other than that, I only use facebook for certian facebook groups.
I deactivated my Facebook mostly because I have a hard time controlling myself. It's not the only thing I find difficult to control in the digital realm (I'm still a regular on Reddit and here), but I've found I intellectually get a lot more out of using Reddit and HN over Facebook. Maybe its confirmation bias, but I come from a family with addictive tendencies and even though I don't have a problem with substances, I definitely see it show up in my life with digital products.
I also found that spending more time on Facebook made me focus on the wrong things in life. I spent a lot of time thinking about what photos I wanted to post to garner interest (in reality few look or care about them). I spent a lot of time checking in on people that I haven't talked to in years, which satisfies my interest without actually ever communicating with them. It just became sort of depressing after a while. It's low effort to become friends with someone on Facebook, and I don't think its healthy to be constantly reminded of these connections you've made in life through various events and never actively continue in real life. You just spend a lot of time thinking about the past or what could have been. I was expending so much energy and getting back nothing but fleeting dopamine hits.
I truly believe I'm better off without it, despite the difficulty coordinating events with people and being invited to things. I communicate more with people in real life now. I find I am more motivated to text or call people to check in. I also use other communication services more because I'm not satisfying my social needs through passive consumption anymore.
>"I'm baffled by some of the comments here... Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on? You can still sign into random sites that require it that way, arrange meetups, etc but without 'scrolling your life away'"
Some of the smartest people in the world work hard to make the site more addictive. You could just as easily say, "Is it so difficult for you to just have a needle and heroin on your desk and shoot up?"
It might be easy for you or me to have it there within reach, but for those who have already had their mental pathways significantly affected by the daily or more frequent hits of dopamine, it's not easy at all.
>Some of the smartest people in the world work hard to make the site more addictive.
This is a truth most people seem naively oblivious to, they seem to have this idea in their mind that they are immune to persuasion. It is simply not the case, if you are human you are suceptible to unconscious and conscious persuasion.
A famous result concerning this is the 1984 book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robart Cialdini.
* Facebook now requires I send them a copy of my ID when I try to open an account. I don't want to facilitate them.
* I assume tracking becomes more aggressive when you have an account. For instance, Facebook could connect you to everyone viewing your account page to create a shadow social network for you.
* Skirting real-name policy is against TOS. Using real-name opens you up to crawlers from governments, trolls, collection agencies, and data brokers/analytics companies. Besides governments can request all your data. You also have another account to keep separate /track of, when doing proper OPSEC.
* Even if for you your account is just used once a month, people you are connected to may have different expectations ("you have an account, why didn't you reply?"), and you have to micro-manage this.
* You miss events, while still having an account or invite, and it is bad social form.
* You are forced to combat social persuasion tactics: Facebook is carefully design to maximize clicks and time-on-site. It's like trying to quit drinking while going to the bar once a week: your determination is actively attacked.
* People can tag your account in photos. A high school teacher I know got in trouble because she was tagged in a photo where people around her were drinking alcohol.
This is a good question. I bet some people can control their degree of engagement of with FB without deactivating. And I think I, too, could achieve this with some effort.
But my experience has been that peak FB enjoyment is simply not having FB. Everything about FB feels toxic to me, not just the service itself but its pervasive tendrils throughout the web. Complete, total exclusion of FB and related services—including social sign on, etc—has really improved my QOL.
that aside, i deleted my facebook account over seven years ago and even though my real life friends give me some grief over that every now and again, i haven't missed it a single day.
apart from the couple of live streamed murders and abuse cases, there's no actual news on there which isn't accessible through another site with public access. and if i long for cat pictures or funny videos there's always imgur and youtube.
facebook, like many other "social media" sites, is more a habit than a necessity and, as far as i'm concerned, highly overrated in it's purpose
My problem with an idle Facebook account is at least twofold: my activity is still being tracked against my will, and out of principle I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space.
Your activity is being tracked irrespective of whether or not you have a Facebook account. Google and Facebook will track you anyway and then correlate your browsing patterns with those of other people (about whom they know more) and infer everything there is to know about you.
That doesn't mean we should just roll over and give it all to them.
You're not obliged to hand this data over when you don't use their services, and ideally, they wouldn't track you if you didn't want to be tracked, but facebook is pretty close to being ethically void, so they'll do whatever scummy thing they want, so you should by all means make it as difficult as possible for them to get data on you.
>> That doesn't mean we should just roll over and give it all to them.
Unless you run an ad blocker and/or EFF Privacy Badger, that's exactly what you're doing. Your consent is not required. There are literally _dozens_ of companies that do this, Facebook and Google are just two of them. There were some initiatives in some states to apply a stiff tax to companies that trade in user data, but I don't know if they went anywhere. That's one tax I'd be in favor of, even though I'm not in favor of more taxes in general.
The point is that regardless of whether or not consent is required, it's a question of principle to not give consent (and personally I do use LibreJS and the other various tools to improve the shitty state of affairs).
Companies acting unethically shouldn't be given extra leeway to act even more unethically.
> I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space.
I suppose you have no cell phone and live in a place with no government then, because Facebook can't hold a candle to telcos and governments when it comes to disregarding your personal space.
Some forms of intrusion are more difficult to avoid than others; obviously that doesn't make it irrational to avoid as much as you realistically can.
Also, Facebook holds a significantly broader type of information than uncle Sam or T-Mobile. And Facebook also provides an avoidable vector for government surveillance. Analogy: no machine is totally secure, that doesn't mean we give up, turn off all security software and stop patching exploits.
Pretty sure protecting your personal space is the government's job. At least in the US. Not saying they are doing a good job in particular, but it's in the mission statement.
People have to pick their battles based on their resources and level of concern. While the tracking that you bring up is important to keep in mind, its existence does not justify that kind of nefarious privacy invasion that Facebook operates as part of its business plan.
Mine is even more simplistic. I lack self control. With an account, even a deactivated one, I've been guilty of logging back in at 2 AM on a Wednesday morning just to stalk an old acquaintance from high school.
Adding to this: If you have an idle Facebook account, people will use it to invite you to events and tag you in photos, so Facebook will have a much better idea of who you're interacting with and when offline.
I'm sure Facebook will still track you (this applies even if you don't have a Facebook account). You'd need to block their domain and any ad domains that may be related. (Edit: Also mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463127)
Deleting cookies isn't enough anymore to prevent tracking. Facebook knows your home IP address, your browser user-agent, and likely your browser finger print. Should they care to, they don't need a cookie to connect you with data they already have about you.
I wonder if there's a good way to get around some of these problems.
In my country, and with my ISP we have dynamic IP's, so I don't have a 'home IP' as such. Browser user agent's are pretty easy to spoof/mock/etc. Browser fingerprinting is super hard to work around though - especially stuff like the canvas fingerprinting, because blocking it outright can also be used as a unique identifier when combined with other data.
Would it be possible to build some kind of public repository of canvas fingerprints, then whenever a site tries to build one, rather than outright blocking it, you return one of the public fingerprints from the repository. Get the repo big enough and used by enough people (especially if you could extend it out to other identifiers like fonts) and I imagine you would have a good chance of driving down one's uniqueness in a privacy conscious manner.
I'm not familiar with JS or the mechanics of how these fingerprints are generated, so I don't know if this is possible, but I imagine that if you can block them (Firefox 'Canvas Blocker' extension, you could intercept them?
I use noscript and a cookie manager (protection of wanted cookies, deletion of all others upon shortcut). I havent seen facebook tracking pixels by now, are they being used? From an img src request they could still see my IP and user agent, plus knew which site I am on, but as far as I can tell they just use script src, and that gets blocked.
I wrote an example of how to reduce privacy exposure by blocking ubiquitous domains using uBO's point-and-click "firewall" pane, and used Facebook as an example:
I do the same thing. Funny how they won't let u use direct messaging on the mobile web client anymore and force you to download the messenger app. I refuse to ha e Facebook on my phone.
fwiw that's basically what I do. My account pretty much just says "I'm not active here, email me" and I only friend people who I want to show my email address. I actually visit the site every month or three, and that's about it.
But that's under protest. Facebook is super hostile to its users, but doing so makes their metrics go up, so it's gonna keep happening.
If you create your own shadow profile, you can sort of "Graffiti" your own shadow profile, right? Like a bunch of weird, random nonsense. Become friends with every single bot and every single bots' friends. Hell, you could help make shadows that aren't there.
Yeah, but when you stand up to snoops and crooks, you don't have to contort yourself in ways that are a.) undignified and b.) futile anyways, and c.) waste your own resources of which you have fewer than the server rooms of megacorps, so why not do that.
Yep, there is this thin line in between that requires a little bit of self discipline where everything's fine. Still, the problem is with illiterates in technical fields or general privacy that let everything go to hell. People can't control facebook in general I'll shamelessly state without citing sources.
I recently downloaded everything in my profile (which they make easy) and ran a userscript to delete everything. I still use Facebook Messenger and add friends I meet when I travel.
> I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumption to make...
That is a terrible assumption to make!! Why would you think that everyone thinks the same way you think?!?
I deleted my facebook and to answer your question: Yes, it was that difficult. I have tried multiple times to do what you did, just leave it alone, but I couldn't. So I deleted it, have not missed it for a second.
I think this is more an indictment that people don't actually know how to use FB.
YOU control what you want to see and who you interact with, spending to much time there? Take charge of your own life and click off. Seeing something you don't want to see? Hide it. It's not rocket science.
Personally I get a great deal of value from it. It's a tool like any other, but you have to know how to use it.
I don't actually find it too ironic that HN is missing the point that Facebook is a cultural phenomenon. The way people communicate has changed, culturally, and Facebook facilitates that.
I have an account that I only use to get notifications from long lost family members and friends etc.
Despite having deleted my little used Facebook months ago, Facebook still finds ways to remind me of its authoritarian intrusiveness; I have a fake account which I use for commenting, and I was asked to upload a copy of a photo ID. I was given a list of options, which included a driver's license and a passport.
This level of privacy invasion is simply unnaceptable to me, and I wish people online were more guarded with what amounts to their identity...
The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I don't really get invited to those anymore. It's also harder to organize events where you casually invite people you don't know as well.
It's also occasionally annoying not being able to dig up a certain photo you wanted for reference. Even if you have a copy of the photo somewhere, if you don't have it hosted online then you can't really bring it up to show it to someone.
Still, frustrations aside, it's 90% great, and I recommend everyone try it for themselves.