Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My friends did use it. But they don't any more.
The real anti-Facebook is good old email
141–150 of 165 posts
Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
An email address feels more intimate - it's something a romantic partner would have but a friend wouldn't necessarily. And asking someone for an email address is asking them to spend thirty seconds spelling things out (particularly in a bar), and another thirty waiting for you to send them an email to confirm. Facebook is just a question of typing their name, which you already know - often it can autocomplete based o…
I appreciate the reply, but I was rather interested in estonian's thoughts on the matter. But, while we're here: > Facebook is just a question of typing their name... Many folks in my peer group used an (often oddly-spelled) nym when they created their Facebook account long, long ago. (Also, many folks in my peer group abandoned their FB account long ago, but that's another matter entirely. ;) ) > ...and another thir…
Your cohort carries business cards? They seem so... old. And wouldn't they have your business email rather than your personal one?
Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email
#143I don't agree with that. The real anti-Facebook is a combination of email and well formatted RSS feeds. Email for actual legitimate notifications and mail, RSS feeds for news and news type bloggy stuff and blogs.
From an external point of view, one doesn't see much difference between email and RSS feeds: both typically end up in your email client. The main visible difference is that with a RSS feed you can retrieve older entries when you subscribe; it's funny how people associate RSS with news when one of its key features is to let you fetch old news. TinyLetter, btw, appears to offer this feature by letting the author resend old letters to new subscribers.
An other difference is that one can reply to an email but not to a RSS feed. Reading the comments here it seems to me it is a key point relevant to TinyLetter versus Twittbook.
TinyLetter is a one-way communication channel. Like a blog with comments disabled. This is to me a major feature for two reasons that are actually one: spam. With comments gone you don't have to deal with spam, trolls, etc. The second reason is "social interaction spam": when feedback is enabled, people may think they have to reply, support, "like", "retweet" etc. Often the reply is void of content.
TinyLetter's key feature is that you are sending a "newsletter", making it clear that no feedback is required, which eliminates the social spam that pervades social networks.
Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I sympathize with the gist of your sentiments: What's in it for FB? Nobody (outside of an HN-type crowd) wants to self-host anything, nor do they know what that means. The 30 yr old+ folks without any technical knowledge think FB is great and see no reason anything should change. You are basically calling for FB to reduce their monopoly to satisfy 0.01% of their addressable market. I believe the force that will…
I wouldn't assume 30+ folks don't care. We have been online since the 90s (at least) and we've seen some bad shit in our lifetime. An interesting survey would be: Are you "creeped out" by Facebook? Try that survey on Facebook (if it doesn't get blocked) and see how that goes ;-)
People might not always agree with you dude and that is okay. Overuse of the wink smiley is patronising.
Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe in your social circles that's true, but everyone I know has started to rely on Messenger for almost all their non-professional communication. It's simultaneously killing both email and SMS.
Messenger == Facebook Messenger? Please specify for those of us that don't use it. There's been several apps known as 'Messenger' over the years.
> Messenger == Facebook Messenger?
Yes. At least among my social circle, it's become the go-to messaging platform.
Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciate the reply, but I was rather interested in estonian's thoughts on the matter. But, while we're here: > Facebook is just a question of typing their name... Many folks in my peer group used an (often oddly-spelled) nym when they created their Facebook account long, long ago. (Also, many folks in my peer group abandoned their FB account long ago, but that's another matter entirely. ;) ) > ...and another thir…
Your cohort carries business cards? They seem so... old. And wouldn't they have your business email rather than your personal one?
The minority of them do, yes. And they never carry work business cards[0]; these are personal "business" cards. (I guess the name is a bit of a misnomer in this case. ;) )
[0] Doing so would be really, really strange for anyone who wasn't in sales [1] (and even then, it would be a little strange).
[1] Or, I guess, one of the founders of a tiny startup.
Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"A popular subject for a tiny, passionate minority that has little relevance relative to the huge number of everyday users out there." Linux did take over Windows. You realize Android is Linux, right? That's 80% of the mobile market right here https://twitter.com/BIIntelligence/status/605748823709859840... And now Microsoft is building Android apps. So that tiny, passionate minority was right ;-)
Linux vs Windows result was that the whole question become pointless, desktop computing was replaced by cloud and mobiles. This will be eventually also fate of FaceBook - we might see no direct FB killer, but something completely different which makes whole class of social networks pointless. Maybe telepathic technology - we could barely guess. Btw, same thing will happen with Google as search engine - generic web search is already less and less relevant, as we do not have "homepages" anymore, relevant stuff is consolidated to few portals which have better direct search. This does not mean that the corporates disappear - if they are well run then they just adopt to new areas.
Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email
#148Now, 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.
I don't see lots of activity, but interesting groups not found elsewhere with regular liveliness still make me peek at G+ from time to time. It's still a weird and non-successful experiment in the sense of the original goal. A kind of Java.
Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you hit the nail on the head. An email is yours in the sense that once sent to you, the sender cannot 'take it away' or 'modify it' or 'delete it'. This is different than many other 'communication protocols' out there such as Facebook Posts, Twitter Posts, Slack comments, Shared Docs etc. which all have the notion of an 'owner' who can retract permissions, modify, delete etc. after 'send'. The email analogy w…
Reminds me that at one point Heinlein requested that any letter etc he had sent people were to be returned, so he could burn them...
Obviously Heinlein had not encountered Facebook where no random thought is too minor to be broadcast to all your 'friends' :)
Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux didn't take over Windows: it took over much of the server space and a specific form of it dominated mobile. Windows still dominates the desktop space as the commenter clearly meant. Further, a single company and product line has been holding its own against Android with profits that made Microsoft and IBM look poor. In the end, all the volunteers and paid programmers combined working on Linux couldn't displace…
I could write several books on that subject (yawn) but my larger point is that this technology affects billions of people now. Maybe it wasn't obvious at the time, but Slashdot was a big deal and so is Hacker News. These people have a lot of influence. It's a small world, after all ;-)
Proprietary technology effects billions of people. Proprietary media has more influence than ever and across the globe. Again, proves nothing while distorting the truth of FOSS. The truth is that it was mostly subverted as a free labor tool for proprietary companies with a tiny percentage contributing something back. Totally opposite of the vision Stallman was preaching long ago when I still read his stuff.
They succeeded at getting stuff built, used and so on. Doing it all volunteers, for the right reasons, displacing proprietary, and so on? Total failures. Only zealots pretend otherwise.
It's why I push paid, open-source models (eg dual-licensing) with charter or contract protections to try to get best of both worlds. Both corporate and FOSS propaganda keep telling developers that it's gotta be paid/closed or free/open when many successful projects did paid/open. A profit incentive tied to respecting users freedoms, esp allowing fixes/extensions, could be a powerful motivator in getting OSS all over the place. Even Microsoft might buy into that for Windows eventually if they could ensure similar profit and tie-in to their ecosystem.