Facebook is not an attack. It's just a website people. If you don't like it, don't type that URL in your browser software.
Facebook is an attack on the open web
361–370 of 440 posts
Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web
#362The (real) title of this post is exactly how I feel about Facebook. Facebook is AOL, if AOL had won.
But the question is: what can we do about it? Resist certainly helps (never had a Facebook account and hopefully never will -- although I did get on Whatsapp two months ago). I will also prevent my kids to have Facebook while under my roof.
But what else?
Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Folk from Myanmar (but working in Singapore) here. People in my country, they regard Facebook as "The Internet". They walked into the mobile phone shop, they asked for "open Facebook for 3$" which comes with a FB account, followed the celebrity pages etc. They do everything you can imagine on FB. Now there are "digital agencies" who take care of the celebrity/company FB pages, post click-bait articles, run campaigns…
Do you think this will change overtime as people become familiar with technology and the internet? Like do people start with Facebook and it later becomes a gateway to the internet, or do they start within only Facebook and stay within only Facebook? I also assume people in the bigger cities (especially Yangon, but also Mandalay) use computers+the actual web for work, university and pleasure... right?
Facebook's zero rating programs are being implemented to discourage these people from ever finding out that Facebook isn't "the internet". They even went as far as to use the name "internet.org".
Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web
#364They'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…
The only thing Zuckerberg was on to was someone else's idea that he took for himself.
Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web
#365Earlier 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.
> If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today. Make your own. Here's what I did for my local network of friends (who also all hate Facebook). Install Wordpress, add the free Buddypress plugin, purchase $50 BuddyPress theme. Throw on a server. There you go, your own private social network in under a week.
This. I tried the exact same thing for a family network a couple of years ago (but the network did not hate Facebook intensely, so it was a bit of an uphill battle). Before I could get them all fully on board, I got sucked into some large gigs so no business resulted in the end. I still hope to revive it some day.
Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 marke…
I'm kind of in the opposite camp. The way-too-excited responses from people reacting to the silly video of my kid just remind me how I often don't like the FB-version of my friends and family. So I really avoid interacting with them there.
Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web
#367It's really very simple. Facebook was able to become a huge success because it could compete freely on the open web. Now that Facebook has become so powerful, it is trying to destroy the open web so no one can compete with it. Speaking of which, what wonder what its position is on net neutrality.
Facebook and Google both have differing "public and private stances" on issues like mass surveillance and net neutrality.
Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook is really nice for many usecases. But it could be way more open without ruining those usecases. It is just so hostile to non-facebook users. The primary example being the one cited in the article: The only reason to block 1/3 of a page to nonlogged in users is to convince you to either sign up or log in. There is no user-based reason to do so. That is open-web hostile. There is no need to make the all the co…
For people who are privacy obsessed, just create a fake account. You'll find that all your friends are sympathetic and are more than happy to friend you. I know several people who do this and I happily friend them. My bday and location information is all fake, for example. I click on ads sometime when they peak my interest. I think once I actually bought something based on what I saw on Facebook, but I can't remember…
Your "fake account" isn't fooling Facebook if you're adding all of your real friends to it.. Nor is your fake information.
Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web
#369You'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.
Didn't tried it, since I don't use Facebook, but if it is as lightweight as I image, it would be very great.
Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web
#370I'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…
I recently downloaded everything in my profile (which they make easy) and ran a userscript to delete everything. I still use Facebook Messenger and add friends I meet when I travel.