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The real anti-Facebook is good old email

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Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#101

Post by drvortex »

We all know what keeps Facebook going. Facebook isn't running on well-paid, well-employed family dudes who want to get in touch with relatives. Nor on intelligent commentators on society and tech. It is kept going by gossipy teenagers who want to snoop on their bff, bored housewives and creepy middle-aged men who want more 'social' interaction than they can possibly manage in the physical world.

Google+ failed because of they didn't give anyone a good reason to move away from Facebook where such networks already existed, and they insisted on lack of anonymity. The intelligent commentators are all on Twitter anyway.

But the demographic of teenagers, bored housewives and creepy middle-aged men on the internet is very large, and they are on the side 24/7. Pretty much everyone else who uses the internet uses it for work and hardly uses Facebook. But they trudge along to Facebook a bunch of other people who of course need to stay in the communication loop.

Email is not going away because no other system is a wide-spread. Slack could come close, if only they took away their silly way of logging in. It was a shame that Gmail is rooted in email. Heck, if Gmail changed their backend to something like Dlack, 50% of internet users would be no longer using email and they wouldn't even know it. I dream of a Slack to Email gateway.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#102

Post by wyclif »

lmm wrote: post #90
wyclif wrote: post #42

Now, only a year later, Ello is nearly forgotten, filed away with other would-be Facebook killers like the open source Diaspora and the near-dead Google+ The problem with this statement is that there is a vast difference in number of users between Ello and Google+. The latter is far from "forgotten" or "near dead." Every time I hit G+, it's teeming with activity. I can't say that about Ello, which seems to be populat…

Shrug. Not my experience. Google+ looks deader than disco here.

It's going to if you never circle anybody and none of your friends use it.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#103

Post by e12e »

jsaxton86 wrote: post #12

I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized: 1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons 2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing w…

> I'm not going to post a status update that basically says "My living situation is pretty good right now. I'm renting a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and my commute is fantastic!"

Why not? (Genuine question: why would you not share such a thing on fb, but share it with a large group via email?)

> The biggest downside is that people still try to contact me via Facebook.

While they've gotten worse, fb email notifications aren't all that terrible, especially if you don't participate in discussions on popular fb pages (ie: you only get mail about event invites, new messages).

Nice to hear you've been able to stay connected via email. I'd probably've set up a "private" mailman list, especially now thar mailman3 has a half-decent archive/web interface.

Bit strange to hear you complain about signup though... can't people just send you an email? I'd think word-of-mouth/email would be an improvement over fb in your use-case?

Also interesting to hear how different sub-networks on fb can be. Both in terms of "everyone uses email (sadly, not in my circles - at least for non-work stuff), and wrt what you/others share.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#104

Post by e12e »

libso wrote: post #33
jsaxton86 wrote: post #12

I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized: 1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons 2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing w…

Point 1 is true for me as well. But I take a different approach in doing Point 2. Since everyone has a gmail account (at least my target audience) and hardly have any activity on G+, I created a G+ community with just the right people and post updates there. These updates automatically send notifications via email to the community members. The way content is organized and presented in a community is much better than…

But g+ notifications are still crap? Like fb, they don't contain (all) content and can't be interacted with. So you have the option of running the g+ app, and getting alerts for all g+ activity, or need to remember to check g+ in addition to your email. While with a proper mailing list and filtering you can see with a glance how many unread messages you have, and you can priortize based on list (eg: announce vs discuss vs meetup etc)

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#105

Post by e12e »

jseliger wrote: post #95
copsarebastards wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diaspora was written by a bunch of college students who were unqualified to be implementing the security protocols necessary. Given that one of the biggest reasons people want to move off Facebook is security, that's a no-go. The fact that Diaspora failed at implementing this idea doesn't mean that the idea is bad.

Given that one of the biggest reasons people want to move off Facebook is security, that's a no-go I'm not convinced that anyone apart from readers of Hacker News and Reddit wants to move off Facebook. Discussions about the problems of FB on HN remind me of 2000s-era Slashdot discussions of why Linux is better than Windows and is poised to takeover the desktop: A popular subject for a tiny, passionate minority that h…

I have friends that either didn't join, or moved off facebook - people that are far from the typical hn demographic.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#106

Post by justizin »

libso wrote: post #28

Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his…

> So, the real anti Facebook is Facebook itself with a fresh start.

I did actually start a new Facebook account for a lot of these reasons, because it was difficult to scrub the old account and it felt rude to unfriend people, but there were a lot of people I didn't feel very connected to or interested in, or that they probably were interested in me.

I still don't like how they subtly influence who I am thinking of / in contact with / whatever. The algorithm is creepy.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#107

Post by Philipp__ »

I quit facebook 2 years ago. I found out that Facebook was just another place on internet for wasting time, not for communication and staying in contact with someone.

Now when I meet someone new, and he's like add me on Facebook, I give them my email and always get that look in return.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#108

Post by justizin »

detaro wrote: post #57
estonian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address. You can also remember them easier and communicate with them faster. Most of the people I met this summer didn't have an American phone number so Facebook (or Whatsapp) was the only way to communicate with them.

> But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address. Really depends on the setting. Quite a few people I know would be more comfortable sharing a mail address than their Facebook info, even if we ignore the percentage that doesn't even have Facebook. (For quick messaging contacts the fragmentation of messengers is really annoying. I don't want 4-6 different messengers on my phone just t…

>> But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address. >Really depends on the setting. Quite a few people I know would be more comfortable sharing a mail address than their Facebook info, even if we ignore the percentage that doesn't even have Facebook.

This is part of what's backwards about Facebook. Sometimes I've had a 5-15min conversation with someone at a bar and they're like, "Do you have Facebook?", and I'm like, "Give me your phone", and I will search for myself and send myself a friend request.

If I exchanged phone numbers or e-mail addresses with this person, it would be really odd IMO to ask the sort of questions to which answers are offered to me by facebook, and by its' algorithm, but _less_ odd to personally contact them IMO. So I'm kind of a wierd voyeur in basically a handful of strangers' lives and fairly rarely actually ever again meet up and do things with various people that seem to be a lot of fun to talk to when I meet them.

I've had a lot of interesting friendship circumstances arise, but also just spend a lot of time wondering who the fuck most of the people are, even on the new facebook. Even the people I decided to carry over, I don't know, it's a semi-random distribution based on how Facebook was already filtering my feed, I think. People I like, but I dunno.

It feels like Facebook has more influence over who I think about than I do at times, and I wonder if it isn't influenced by what relationships tell them things they can advertise based on or something.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#109

Post by amelius »

zokier wrote: post #85
amelius wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important issue is that we might want different identities for every protocol. Right now, lots of people prefer to have different identities on youtube than on gmail.

Instead of segregating identities on services I think a better model would be just a good support for multiple identities (which then can span between services).

But you don't want one service being able to link all those identities together.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#110

Post by rdtsc »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #83
rdtsc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think email works better because people perceive it as a more direct message just to them. If say, you send an email and bcc people on it, they feel like they were sent a direct one-on-one personal message (even if they objectively know it is a newsletter). Status updates on Twitter, Facebook, etc, when it was obvious that they are for multiple people not just a one-to-one message don't produce the same effect. Peo…

I think the difference is subtle, but a little different. Status updates on Twitter, Facebook, etc. feel like a part of the service - something that exists on Facebook. By checking your timeline you're only looking at events that exist elsewhere. On the other hand, receiving a mail feels like it came to you . It does not exist as an entity somewhere in the world, it's a message that came to your inbox (and possibly t…

Exactly. I think you put it better into words than me.
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