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Facebook is an attack on the open web

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Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#61

Post by zelos »

gthtjtkt wrote: post #50
Tossrock wrote: post #19

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…

Facebook was great in the early years. 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.

> no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner

Posting pictures of your food should be a criminal offence. Nothing too serious, just a couple of years in prison or something.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#63

Post by ksenzee »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #56
gthtjtkt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook was great in the early years. 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.

Excluding the "ads", how would you prevent users from posting "political spam", "viral garbage", and "pictures of what your friend ate for dinner"?

You'd get most of the way there by making it possible not to see things your friends have shared.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#64

Post by steventhedev »

korzun wrote: post #23
adtac wrote: post #14

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…

> 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…

You're being downvoted because a large segment of HN is engineers who prefer sites like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://evenbettermotherfucking.website

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).

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#65

Post by ed312 »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #56
gthtjtkt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook was great in the early years. 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.

Excluding the "ads", how would you prevent users from posting "political spam", "viral garbage", and "pictures of what your friend ate for dinner"?

You'd only let people in with a .edu email and marketing as a hookup app

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#66

Post by leepowers »

adtac wrote: post #14

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…

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.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#67

Post by matwood »

Tossrock wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#68

Post by donatj »

Tossrock wrote: post #19

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…

There's the half way option of having a Facebook and only using it for invites/events, which is what I do for the most part.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#69

Post by 5ilv3r »

exergy wrote: post #54
joshbaptiste wrote: post #30

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.

That is naturally what gated community members seem to do to outsiders...

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#70

Post by zelos »

korzun wrote: post #23
adtac wrote: post #14

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…

> 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…

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.
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