Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

stallman.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 376 posts

Re: Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

#41

Post by george_ciobanu »

Brexit for Facebook - really? Is that all we learned from this recent referendum?

Yes, it is weird to have this much personal information about so many people in the world in the hands of a corporation. But Facebook serves a real need - to connect. And they do it well. The problem is real - we need to have a non-commercial entity run this. But if Facebook dies tomorrow another company will take its place. How do we solve the need while addressing these issues? Should the government take it over? Which one? Should it become a non-profit? How should it be run? The problem is real but the solution is not to shut it down, but to work together to find the best way to serve all users. So Facebook is now a political issue - an international one. For all the bad things that came out of Facebook, there is also a lot of good - some would argue more. Let's address it by working together instead of shutting off.

Re: Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

#42

Post by gst »

rubiquity wrote: post #23
gjdimitrov wrote: post #18

Uh, yet another lecture on how to live my life by his omniscience

You forgot to sign your post: Written from a computer running a bunch of software written by his omniscience

Just because you are using someone's software doesn't mean that you need to agree to that person's political views.

Re: Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

#43

Post by drdaeman »

babuskov wrote: post #13
vonklaus wrote: post #6

I turned off ublock so that I could load the stylesheet. Nope, stallman's site just looks like that. It's actually refreshing, just a radical departure from the status quo. Although, it is RMS so should've expected that...

If only the paragraph width was set to something reasonable (say, 33em) it would be great.

At first, I thought "hmm, the site (or, actually, its visitors) would probably benefit from some piece of CSS that just does a bit of nicer-looking typography - to be easier for the readers' eyes."

But then I had also thought "nope, I suspect I'm misdirecting my wishes - it's the browsers (and their users) that should benefit from a default stylesheet that looks better than the current not-so-nice defaults."

Re: Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

#44

Post by dlnovell »

sghi wrote: post #37
dlnovell wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, and also - this morning FB suggested I may know the Lyft driver from last night. I wasn't even the one who ordered the Lyft, I just rode in it. I don't have the FB app installed on my phone. WTF?

For that, I was under the assumption that the 'People you may know' on facebook was also who had been looking at you on Facebook, so the driver might have been looking you up.

How would he look me up? He didn't know my name. Can lyft drivers see the full name of the people who they pick up, or just the first name? If they can see the full name, then MAYBE he looked up my friend, then looked at his friends list and found me. I find that extremely unlikely. I've also seen a lot of very, very strange "you may know" suggestions for people that I've only met in passing, and again without full names.

Re: Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

#45

Post by weinzierl »

vonklaus wrote: post #17
fwr wrote: post #7

I couldn't help but cringe every time the word "used" was used for "user" after the first occurence.

He's not wrong. edit: Per emsy's suggestion: I mean that he is just articulating that if something is free, you are the product , except he(stallman) articulates it by changing the noun to reflect his viewpoint. also, I just deleted facebook.

If you are referring to the Lebowsky quote:

I used to believe that to be true about Stallman too. Now I believe he is just right, what makes him so obnoxious is just that his truths are so inconvenient.

Re: Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

#46

Post by gjdimitrov »

mwfunk wrote: post #34

If someone can't state their point without warping the very language they use to support their point, it makes it very hard to feel like anything they're saying is credible. Example 1: someone is trying to convince me to vote Republican. They go through the Republican platform issue by issue, and compare/contrast it to the Democrats' stand. However, every time they use the word "Democrat" they instead say "Democrap"…

couldn't agree more :)

Re: Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

#47

Post by oldmanjay »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #36
Fajita_Mane wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's going to take someone with greater... ahem ...social intelligence than rms to convey the dire reality of facebook's omniscience.

So you're understanding the grave seriousness of the considerations, but still waiting for somebody different to convey that to you?

No. The point is well understood and so poorly expressed that is actually repellent. It's not the "somebody" so much as the way "somebody" insists on using transparently manipulative rhetoric. It's very off-putting even to those of us who agree.

Re: Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

#48

Post by guard-of-terra »

oldmanjay wrote: post #47
guard-of-terra wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're understanding the grave seriousness of the considerations, but still waiting for somebody different to convey that to you?

No. The point is well understood and so poorly expressed that is actually repellent. It's not the "somebody" so much as the way "somebody" insists on using transparently manipulative rhetoric. It's very off-putting even to those of us who agree.

Sometimes off-putting is what your need.

They don't put unicorns kindly asking you to quit on cigarette packs. There they put lung cancer pics.

Stallman's points are digital equivalent of cancer pics. "Quit or you'll see more, every day".

And no, I'm not 100% sure that works. Regulations surely do, tho.

Re: Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

#49

Post by guard-of-terra »

dlnovell wrote: post #32

Recently my girlfriend discovered the depth of the program FB started to listen to the microphone, even if the app isn't on. She never installed the FB app on her new phone. Multiple times in the last month, some VERY specific topic of conversation IRL has shown up as an ad in her FB stream. Most recently, a coworker told her about a "Custom Martin" guitar he had just bought. Later that day there was an ad for a cust…

If it's indeed so - where I live is this stupid law that makes eavesdropping devices illegal.

Maybe they should sue Samsung & FB tandem for listening to conversations, write them a fine the size of small country budget. Make it useful even if just once.

Post reply on HN