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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

#81

Post by jtwebman »

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 just removed the app from my phone. That way I can still access stuff my PC and get invites and see photos but I do it far less often. Saves lots of time but still allowing me to connect with others or see photos.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#82

Post by nnfy »

Despite having deleted my little used Facebook months ago, Facebook still finds ways to remind me of its authoritarian intrusiveness; I have a fake account which I use for commenting, and I was asked to upload a copy of a photo ID. I was given a list of options, which included a driver's license and a passport.

This level of privacy invasion is simply unnaceptable to me, and I wish people online were more guarded with what amounts to their identity...

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#83

Post by 5ilv3r »

adtac wrote: post #24
tantalor wrote: post #6

> I don’t know what your privacy settings are. So if I point to your post, it’s possible a lot of people might not be able to read it Easy: open the page in an incognito window.

I'm sure Facebook is still tracking you in some way. Some low hanging fruits: IP address, user agent, screen resolution, network speed based tracking, geo location, presence of various web technologies. With all this and Facebook's backend data, I'm absolutely sure they'll be able to narrow you down to at most 5-10 people.

I went to a great talk at linuxfest with a mozilla developer talking about ways you could prevent tracking, and some of the means were mind blowing. For example, they can process an audio clip using your audio hardware without playing it to you, and then based on the artifacts introduced, they can figure out if you are using the same sound card as a previous sample they collected. The firefox property that allows this is 'dom.webaudio.enabled', and it is not related to playback.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#84

Post by guelo »

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"?

Part of the Facebook problem is that they mostly took control of the feed away from users. They now surface the more "engaging" posts at the top and more frequently. This leads to the overemphasis of viral images and videos. If you post a simple personal status message without an image and Facebook's sentiment analysis considers it to be non-engaging many of your friends won't even see it as Facebook will favor marketing spam over your actual personal post. Users also become trained over time by the number of likes they receive to tailor their posts to conform to Facebook's whims.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#86

Post by nnfy »

MachinShinn- wrote: post #74

I'm baffled by some of the comments here... Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on? You can still sign into random sites that require it that way, arrange meetups, etc but without 'scrolling your life away' I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumpt…

My problem with an idle Facebook account is at least twofold: my activity is still being tracked against my will, and out of principle I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#87

Post by res0nat0r »

steveadoo wrote: post #52
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…

Can't you just have Facebook and only use it for the events/photos? I've got a Facebook but never use it for posting/looking at other people's posts. Every now and then I'll get an invitation to an event which is really all I use it for.

I've cut out Facebook without 99% of the hand wringing here. I just stop browsing the site.

If someone wants to talk to me I get a popup on my Messenger app on my phone, and if I get an event invite it shows up there too.

Problem solved.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#88

Post by noir_lord »

steventhedev wrote: post #64
korzun wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Agreed with everything you said except

> keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency.

Users do care about data size since there are still a lot of people on data limited contracts even in the UK which has a fairly healthy mobile market.

What people don't necessarily realise is the connection between the two, I'd quite like it if the mobile browsers had a running total of the total amount of data transferred in that tab on each new visit/refresh.

I'm a programmer and I still don't know which pages are heavy or not (given fixed bandwidth the time to interaction would be a clue but mobile internet latency is all over the map so you can't tell if it's a big site/page or just the mobile internet shitting the bed).

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#90

Post by exergy »

nnfy wrote: post #86
MachinShinn- wrote: post #74

I'm baffled by some of the comments here... Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on? You can still sign into random sites that require it that way, arrange meetups, etc but without 'scrolling your life away' I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumpt…

My problem with an idle Facebook account is at least twofold: my activity is still being tracked against my will, and out of principle I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space.

Mine is even more simplistic. I lack self control. With an account, even a deactivated one, I've been guilty of logging back in at 2 AM on a Wednesday morning just to stalk an old acquaintance from high school.
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