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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

#391

Post by thesmok »

nicolasd wrote: post #92
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…

> 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.

If you _deactivate_ account you can keep using Messenger, and you are able to reactivate account in the future. Facebook doesn't delete your data. If you _delete_ account then Facebook will delete all your data and Messenger will be gone too.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#392

Post by eloisant »

Chaebixi wrote: post #174
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.

> Facebook was great in the early years. That seems to be depressingly true of any social website. There seems to be a sort, sweet spot that exists briefly between the implementation of a good idea and when the parasites catch on and move in to ruin it.

What was great about Facebook, especially compared to other social networks, is that you had real control over privacy. It was made to communicate with your "real life" friends and family, and keep control with who can see what.

But year after year they've stepped back on privacy, while still being a completely closed platform compared to the open web.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#393

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

A lot depends on the geographic distribution of your friend network. Many of my closest friends live on the other side of the country. Not to mention that I got to know them through FB.

I'm really not that worried about it any more. FB is gufe, but so was AOL. It will in turn be disrupted by a future innovation.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#394

Post by EGreg »

Raphmedia wrote: post #198
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.

> 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.

Actually I spent 5 years building a social networking platform to let people design and host their own social networks and apps. And no it isn't as simple as just Wordpress + BuddyPress.

https://qbix.com/platform

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#395

Post by hashhar »

StavrosK wrote: post #286
abritinthebay wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's... it's not that Facebook itself is the issue. It's the resulting network effects and how you interact with people while still on it. For example: not being on Facebook means you actually have to keep in touch with people to know what they are doing . That sounds like a "duh" moment, but it's also key to how FB is replacing real social interaction with "social interaction". The knock on effects of this are deep,…

I get that it's the network effects, but I guess I don't understand how your relationships are structured. I have a core group of friends with whom I talk every day on IM or the phone or face to face, then a larger group with whom I talk a few times a week, and then the rest are acquaintances I talk to rarely. If anything happens in any of the first two groups, I hear about it because I'm directly invited. There aren…

I am a student and I think I can answer how I use Facebook and it provides "some" value to me.

I also have the same three tiered social circle. The first circle I have regular contacts with on the phone, WhatsApp or in person. The second circle tells me when something happens in their life like them getting placed, winning a competition or getting into a relationship.

Facebook helps me immensely with the third group. I can get to know when people are placed in jobs and can then call them up to rekindle the acquaintance (so that I can later get them to introduce me to other people to expand my professional network). If I call regularly (like maybe once each two months) then it quickly turns into silence because we don't know what the other person is doing at the moment, where they are or even what has lately happened in their lives. I can't also talk about common acquaintances due to the same lack of information.

Personally for me Facebook events serve no purpose because if any of us want to plan a meeting we can do so by phone, email or WhatsApp. It does help to plan school reunions though. Facebook's utility to me exists because the people on Facebook keep posting parts of their life on it and I can keep interacting with them without too much effort of having the pain of keeping track of over a 100 acquaintances.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#396

Post by jug »

rcjones wrote: post #104
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…

Seems like my feed encourages me to do less scrolling than ever. My feed has become a haven for linked and sponsored content, and there's the occasional spatter of original content from friends. I don't see a lot of the stuff I actually care about (photos of friends, their newborns, lengthy posts, etc.) without going straight to their pages. I swear some of these personal posts never hit my home feed, they just get b…

I think it's Facebook trying to cover that actual interest in the site and keeping it alive by the users themselves is actually dwindling. I recently unliked a lot of old pages I didn't want to see anymore and it was amazing how much it tried to figure out what I liked, rather than just show me what my friends posted. Why? Because my friends didn't post nearly as often enough to keep my timeline full of news. I have ~80 friends/acquaintances there, everyone from adults to kids, various jobs and interests, personalities.

Facebook is doing well as an ad platform to keep the revenue up but I'm not sure Facebook is honestly... doing well, you know?

I've seen them recently try to be Snapchat with the stories. I haven't seen one person use them yet despite being active on Snapchat. Also stickers, the new attention grabbing personal status posts with huge text, etc. It's as if they are lately trying to make people post more personal status updates on the site?

Is it possible there's a social network ad bubble that, once it pops when the realization of how much attention people actually pay on that site rather than just mindlessly scroll through like a heroin addict sinks in, will cause their stock to crash? I honestly don't think Facebook is one a nice trajectory either for us or for them.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#397

Post by Aissen »

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…

I think you're underestimating the issue.

The core issue here is spam, and whether or not it's possible to make a non-centralized open source self-contained spam figthing engine is still unanswered.

I'm not going to go into details, but I invite you to read this article for some background: https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780....

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#400

Post by muninn_ »

StavrosK wrote: post #286
abritinthebay wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's... it's not that Facebook itself is the issue. It's the resulting network effects and how you interact with people while still on it. For example: not being on Facebook means you actually have to keep in touch with people to know what they are doing . That sounds like a "duh" moment, but it's also key to how FB is replacing real social interaction with "social interaction". The knock on effects of this are deep,…

I get that it's the network effects, but I guess I don't understand how your relationships are structured. I have a core group of friends with whom I talk every day on IM or the phone or face to face, then a larger group with whom I talk a few times a week, and then the rest are acquaintances I talk to rarely. If anything happens in any of the first two groups, I hear about it because I'm directly invited. There aren…

The question is why then keep an account?
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