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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

#251

Post by bad_user »

I tried deleting Facebook once, but I've got family there and ... the big problem is that I haven't gotten my time spent online back.

I'm on Twitter, I'm on Hacker News, I'm on Reddit, I'm on Gitter, I send/receive dirty jokes on WhatsApp, etc. Plenty of opportunity to waste time, no need for FB to be in the picture at all. I've been composing this stupid message for the past 5 minutes.

But I'm using Facebook less and less. For me the "open web" is a necessity, not a moral high ground or anything like that. I don't like opening Facebook blog posts because Facebook sucks for blog posts. TFA mentions the Internet Archive or Google not indexing articles. Hell yeah, those are really good concerns.

Also, forget the open web ... how about the fact that if you give them permissions to access your photos, on iOS at least, they are uploading your photos to their services for making photo collages, without you explicitly allowing this.

I know this because I opened the app a week ago and I was proposed a collage with animated transitions and music in the background, titled "Your Sunday evening in Bucharest", that couldn't have been processed on my phone - especially since iOS restricts background activity, plus it would be pretty bad for battery life.

And I freaked out, so now Facebook is gone from my phone. Article mentions an all out assault on the open web. Sure, but it's also an all out assault on people's privacy.

I was 7 when Ceaușescu was shot and communism fell in 1989 and before that paranoia was at an all times high. People were afraid for example that their phones were tapped and that their neighbours were listening. Which was in fact true, but oh boy, that's nothing compared with what happens today.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#252

Post by hyperdunc »

cwyers wrote: post #37

The open web is an attack on the average user. It's unremittingly hostile as a place to go to if you aren't part of the culture that spawned it. Facebook does a very poor job of sheltering people from the worst of the open web, but it's about a billion times more bearable than the open web scaled up to modern adoption rates would be.

Finding the open web hostile is a sign of a dangerously sheltered mind. The last thing such a person needs is to be restricted to a relatively sanitized space like Facebook. Far healthier in the long term to engage with ideas that aren't tightly curated and learn to filter out trolls.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#253

Post by praisewhitey »

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.

Adding to this: If you have an idle Facebook account, people will use it to invite you to events and tag you in photos, so Facebook will have a much better idea of who you're interacting with and when offline.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#254

Post by daddyo »

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…

* Facebook now requires I send them a copy of my ID when I try to open an account. I don't want to facilitate them.

* I assume tracking becomes more aggressive when you have an account. For instance, Facebook could connect you to everyone viewing your account page to create a shadow social network for you.

* Skirting real-name policy is against TOS. Using real-name opens you up to crawlers from governments, trolls, collection agencies, and data brokers/analytics companies. Besides governments can request all your data. You also have another account to keep separate /track of, when doing proper OPSEC.

* Even if for you your account is just used once a month, people you are connected to may have different expectations ("you have an account, why didn't you reply?"), and you have to micro-manage this.

* You miss events, while still having an account or invite, and it is bad social form.

* You are forced to combat social persuasion tactics: Facebook is carefully design to maximize clicks and time-on-site. It's like trying to quit drinking while going to the bar once a week: your determination is actively attacked.

* People can tag your account in photos. A high school teacher I know got in trouble because she was tagged in a photo where people around her were drinking alcohol.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#255

Post by Zak »

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"?

UI can help with that. If there wasn't a share button or URL previews, the percentage of original content would be greater.

AI can help with that. Facebook already has automatic alt text for images, for example:

* Image may contain: 1 person, standing, selfie and phone

* Image may contain: cat

* Image may contain: food

And for an end-user, simple filtering can help with that. I sometimes use the FBPurity browser extension to hide everything that's a link or shared post, leaving almost exclusively original content. It can filter on that automatic alt text too if you hate cats, but I don't mind frivolous posts that are original content from my actual friends.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#256

Post by korzun »

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…

> 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

Doesn't apply here. Facebook is using async and downgrades the experience for mobile clients.

> 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.

The limitation is per host not per server.

> On mobile, this means you're running 8-30 second delays for each "group" of requests, especially if you have poor reception.

We are talking about an asynchronous implementation.

> 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).

That's the payload for the desktop clients. Furthermore, try finding a website that follows 'the optimum' standard you are describing.

> 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).

If you are still using 90's technology, you won't be able to consume most of the current websites.

An asynchronous widget will not be the 'breaking point,' far from it.

The scenarios you are describing will not trigger the loading of these widgets.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#258

Post by semi-extrinsic »

sirfz wrote: post #227
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I never installed Messenger mainly because I was satisfied with using Facebook app's messaging feature. When it was disabled in the app, I moved to using Facebook in the browser (uninstalled the app). They later removed messaging support in the browser as well so now I request "Desktop mode" when I want to read/write a message. What started as "I don't want to install another app I don't need" became "I will uninstal…

Protip: try mbasic.facebook.com for messaging, or the "Toffeed" app on Android which is just a thin wrapper around this.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#259

Post by thanatropism »

unabst wrote: post #223

They've been openly attacking the open web since day one. I think the problem now is that they've been too successful. Zuckerberg was on to something. He saw the web connecting pages, but not people. So he created a web connecting people and now it has grown to what it is. With both MySpace and Google+ practically buried, Facebook has no competition. We desperately need an alternative, and not just one for the sake o…

When I was in college (in 2002-2005), everybody had blogs. Girls who wanted to appear intellectual had blogs; cliques had blogs. I remember being heartbroken that I hadn't been invited to a little friend group's group blog. Comments worked, we linked to each other constantly, etc.

But frankly this still was at a time when the internet was more nerdish. Writing blogs was work -- intellectual work -- for reward that was only tangible because we saw everyone everyday and could physically high five or thumbs-up.

So of course blogs declined because of Facebook. I myself find myself periodically using Facebook as a blogging platform -- to write and read and debate long takes; but also because most people are not nerdish enough to have blogs. I think we're watching horrified at the de-nerding of the internet.

---

Relatedly. I'm really really jealous of kids and their snapchats. I wish my generation used some such platform. I remember when we used IM status lines as short-lived messages into the world -- "Hi friends, I feel sad", maybe with some song lyric. For a very brief while (like a week, maybe less), Messenger Stories started picking up steam in my network -- until it was integrated on Facebook. Facebook has too many people.

Disappearing stories encapsulate the whole reason someone my age (I'm 34) needs online social networks: you drift away from your great friends from yesteryear, have less and less time and energy and emotional need for new ones -- at least at the investment it takes -- and everyone in your cohort is either doing the same or trying too hard to be artificially social.

If, instead, I could access a significant section of my circle of acquaintances/quasi-friends/might-have-been-friends-if-I-had-met-them-earlier-in-life, etc. and just take a picture of a really good fresh-squeezed OJ I had somewhere or a pretty sunset or some Counting Crows lyrics? In such a way that everyone who is kind of paying attention is aware, but everyone else just misses? It would make a significant dent at this need for a semi-social life. Maybe I could even make a couple of really fucking great friends out of the interesting acquaintances I have.

I'm rambling, of course. But hey, startup people. Make Snapchat for adults, please!

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#260

Post by korzun »

zelos wrote: post #70
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…

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.

> 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.

Love the sarcasm. What devices are you talking about here?

Name ten popular websites that will function on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection.

Heck, give me a site that will properly work on Motorola Razr.

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