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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

#91

Post by gthtjtkt »

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"?

Easy: Stop littering the feed with pictures, videos and articles. Exclude them altogether or show them very rarely. You can also easily identify "viral" content that doesn't belong to the user and remove it. Eventually they'll learn not to waste their time posting those things because they'll get no responses. And if someone posts an article, leave it as a plain old text link instead of creating a massive preview of the article (complete with title, picture, lede, etc.).

Facebook does the opposite now, which leads people to use it as a content consumption platform rather than a social network. Obviously that's what Facebook wants, since content consumption is infinitely more profitable than people posting on each other's walls all day.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#92

Post by nicolasd »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #31
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've enjoyed roughly the same experience but without the downsides. As far as events go, the neckbeard in me hasn't actually minded. I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events. Photos I just conveniently had solved by having all my photos on Google Photos anyways (I stopped trusting offline storage long ago). I think my Fa…

> Interestingly, I still find a lot of value in Messenger. But they've split concerns so you can use that without reactivating your FB account.

Afaik when you deactivate your Facebook account, you have the option to keep the Messenger account, but just deactivate/delete the Facebook account.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#93

Post by SloughFeg »

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…

Use mbasic.facebook.com. It can access any URL the heavy webclient can and uses no JS at all.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#94

Post by dilap »

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…

Oh god, the shit where incredibly overweight pages make you click the slow "load more" buttons just to load a few more kb of text that could've been immediately shown to you for basically no extra cost drives me crazy.

And as much as facebook sucks, most web sites suck. It's amazing to me how many sites I read on my phone are basically unusable until I fall back on Safari's reader mode.

Javascript handlers that fuck up scrolling speed, tons of popups obscuring the content, just all kinds of shit. It's like the last thing the website wants you to do is actually read it. (This is probably true, from some sort of limited penny-wise, pound-foolish ad-driven perspective.)

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#95

Post by criddell »

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.

Sign out of Facebook and delete the cookie. You should be fine after that.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#96

Post by patrickaljord »

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.

> I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space.

I suppose you have no cell phone and live in a place with no government then, because Facebook can't hold a candle to telcos and governments when it comes to disregarding your personal space.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#97

Post by Cozumel »

I think this is more an indictment that people don't actually know how to use FB.

YOU control what you want to see and who you interact with, spending to much time there? Take charge of your own life and click off. Seeing something you don't want to see? Hide it. It's not rocket science.

Personally I get a great deal of value from it. It's a tool like any other, but you have to know how to use it.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#98

Post by MikusR »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #34
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #5

Not everything on the internet needs to be public (or part of the "open web" as the article calls it). Facebook is a fantastic place for web content that isn't meant to be public. This idea of posting "public content" on Facebook is inherently flawed. I agree with the article on that much. However, what I haven't figured out yet is if this is actually an evil-Facebook issue or just a user issue. Is Facebook actively…

However, what I haven't figured out yet is if this is actually an evil-Facebook issue or just a user issue. I have a side rant that has been bubbling in me for a long time on this issue. My city's alternative weekly paper, The Dallas Observer, switched from Livefyre to Facebook's commenting system about two years ago. Livefyre was bad but the Facebook comment system is worse. With Facebook forcing "real" people accou…

Probably had nothing to do with them being liable for the content of comments, need for moderation, spam.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#99

Post by criddell »

irrational wrote: post #11

I have a feeling that Facebook will be on the decline. My teenagers and early-20 year-olds and their friends (not just local, but all over the US) think Facebook is for old people. I actually heard a 16 year old recently giving a speech where he mentioned Snapchat Stories, then, as an aside, said, "That's like Facebook or Pintrest for you old people."

Your 16 year old will eventually be old too. Facebook will still be there.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#100

Post by jessaustin »

zelos wrote: post #61
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.

> 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.

Prison costs too much. Corporal punishment would fit this crime, and besides lots of people would just volunteer to swing the cane upon hearing the phrase "posted pictures of food".
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