441–450 of 454 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the point on which you and I will have to disagree. Theory is useless if it has no bearing on reality.
There's the rub. It can be hard to tell whether theory doesn't have any bearing on reality at the moment due to circumstance, or whether the theory is inherently flawed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I highly doubt you need in your daily life to reach 1.6 billion of people. If you need to talk to your relatives and friends, there are thousands of options. Including, you know, talking to them. If you need to find people with similar interests, there are thousands of places where you can do it, unless your interests require talking to a billion people at once - at which point you are probably an advanced AI which i…
Psy's "Gangnam Style" video has been viewed 2.6 billion times (it broke the YouTube counter). Mind that this is YouTube rather than Facebook, though much of the video's sharing was through Facebook. So the capacity to reach some billions of people is possible and has been attained . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangnam_Style I'm noting this as an example of a widely-shared piece of content that I'm aware of. I'm a…
So? How it's relevant to the discussion at hand? Of course youtube is a great platfrom for pop-artists. But we aren't pop artists. And there were platforms before youtube and undoubtedly would be ones after.
> (it broke the YouTube counter).
It didn't, it was a joke/publicity stunt: http://www.cnet.com/news/gangnam-style-busts-youtubes-view-c...
> In the case you make, of seeking out family, friends, or shared interests, in general, Facebook is that network,
I have varied interests, and virtually none of them I found on Facebook or they depend on Facebook in any significant capacity. True, I can find some materials regarding to my interests on facebook, and some people sharing these interests are present on facebook, but none of it makes facebook irreplaceable. In fact, if facebook disappeared this second, it would be no more than minor inconvenience for any of the interests I share. Beyond certain point, unless your interests are either extremely rare or extremely broad, size of the network matters very little. If another billion people joins Facebook, it won't change my life even a little.
It may make next Psy earn more millions or billions, and make ad makers' profits soar to the skies, but to my life - and, I am sure, life of about 90% of Earth population - nothing would happen.
> "An Anatomy of Large Facebook Share Cascades" mentions a case of 600,000 re-shares
So what? Yes, cat pictures get shared a lot. Picture of Obama winning election probably even more. Information content of either is very close to zero, and neither is necessary for anything - Facebook is a crappy platform for being informed about political matters (even leaving the question of confirmed bias aside) and cat pictures are not something one can't live without anyway.
> Smaller communities with good discussion characteristics (say, Reddit) come close to matching Facebook on actual discussion
Facebook is one of the most crappiest platform in existence for actual discussion. Only twitter is worse, and that is because it's impossible to hold a conversation there at all, by design. Reddit is way better but that's a low bar to clear - most of discussion on Reddit, by volume, is garbage, with small pockets of excellent content if you can find them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't overlook it, it's irrelevant in this context. The Surface Pro and the surface book are both made by Microsoft, they are still competing products that consumers have to choose between.
But we were talking about competition between companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Psy's "Gangnam Style" video has been viewed 2.6 billion times (it broke the YouTube counter). Mind that this is YouTube rather than Facebook, though much of the video's sharing was through Facebook. So the capacity to reach some billions of people is possible and has been attained . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangnam_Style I'm noting this as an example of a widely-shared piece of content that I'm aware of. I'm a…
> Psy's "Gangnam Style" video has been viewed 2.6 billion times So? How it's relevant to the discussion at hand? Of course youtube is a great platfrom for pop-artists. But we aren't pop artists. And there were platforms before youtube and undoubtedly would be ones after. > (it broke the YouTube counter). It didn't, it was a joke/publicity stunt: http://www.cnet.com/news/gangnam-style-busts-youtubes-view-c... > In the…
I wasn't aware of counter/hoax status, though I've bumped into int limits myself, so found it plausible. Thanks for the information.
Your personal experience on any social network is almost never a solid basis for extrapolating to others' experience. That's something my own experience in quantifying the size of active user communities and range of conversation across networks has established quite clearly. It's an argument I've long since tired of.
On G+, the median number of followers for a non-publicly active profile -- 94% of all profiles -- is two. For profiles with any public posting activity at all, it's slightly higher: five.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnKkfTN...
The median friend count on Facebook is 200 as of 2014, and the network is used by 57% of all American adults:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/03/6-new-facts-...
Your original contention was that "There are literally thousands of popular forums that are not facebook." My response was that there are at best very few platforms which can match Facebook for general discussion. Something I've studied directly, in large part because I'm interested in finding good general discussion.
I'm also not a Facebook user, because I find the morals and practices of the company and its founder dispicable. A frequent affliction of mine, as a brief perusal of my G+ profile may indicate.
My larger points are these:
* On any given topic, for any given discussion, odds are far higher of finding a relevant discussion group on Facebook than on virtually any other platform, with the possible exception of Reddit.
* For any mass media online message, such as, say, the Prime Minister of Norway might care to engage in, Facebook is, hands down, it. Nothing else, not Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Usenet, not nothin', will compare. (You've been, I'll note, peculiarly silent on offering specific alternatives.) I'm not saying that this is my specific use case. I am saying that if it were, FB is reigning king.
Your observations on the specifics of conversation on Facebook as opposed to other platforms matches my own direct quantified research to a large extent. You might care to look again (or for the first time?) at the link I posted above. "Tracking the Conversation: FP Global 100 Thinkers on the Web":
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
Yes, Reddit beats out FB, though Metafilter knocks out both on the basis of relevant discussion, albeit at vastly smaller scale. Blogs in particular score exceptionally highly for content, but have a discoverability problem -- again, FB can address that.
I always find it interesting that no level of violence is deemed inappropriate in the US but nudity has to be avoided at any cost.
Blame it on the Puritans. Their moral baggage has been carried along in tandem with our national ethos, for better or worse, over the centuries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's the rub. It can be hard to tell whether theory doesn't have any bearing on reality at the moment due to circumstance, or whether the theory is inherently flawed.
If the theory fails to account for reality in any circumstance, the theory is inherently flawed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blame it on the Puritans. Their moral baggage has been carried along in tandem with our national ethos, for better or worse, over the centuries.
Citation? The Puritans thought sex was a wonderful thing within Christian marriage, and on at least one occasion excommunicated a man for neglecting his wife sexually, based on the Biblical command that a husband's body belongs to his wife and vice versa. Contrast this with Catholics, who still require celibacy of priests in 2016, and who imagine the Virgin Mary remaining a virgin her whole life, despite being marrie…
Ok.
> Contrast this with Catholics
Who also think sex is a wonderful thing within Christian marriage.
> who still require celibacy of priests in 2016
"Celibacy" means "not being married", requiring priests to be celibate (which, strictly speaking, Catholics do not [0]) is orthogonal to beliefs about whether sex is wonderful within Christian marriage.
[0] The Catholic Church does not permit priests to marry, but does not bar married men from ordination to the priesthood (it does bar married men from ordination to the episcopate, however.) The Latin Rite of the Catholic Church has a particular discipline which requires that only unmarried men may be ordained to the priesthood, a discipline that was adopted to deal with particular disciplinary problems that arose during the Middle Ages, but which has never been held to be theologically necessary (and which isn't applied within the Church outside of the Latin Rite.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FB isn't just a specific company. FB has grown to such a size that it has become a large part of the media/press. So it has to be regulated like press.
Er... press isn't supposed to be regulated. Unless that was your point? The first amendment says: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press... Where do you get that we should regulate the press? Obviously you could argue that the constitution is wrong, and that's fine with me. It's just a document,…