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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

#401

Post by AlexAffe »

thinkling wrote: post #288
criddell wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I should have clarified that deleting the cookie and staying signed out is about the same as not having a Facebook account. Even if you block them 100% online, as soon as you use a credit card or loyalty card, you are letting them track you again.

Deleting cookies isn't enough anymore to prevent tracking. Facebook knows your home IP address, your browser user-agent, and likely your browser finger print. Should they care to, they don't need a cookie to connect you with data they already have about you.

I use noscript and a cookie manager (protection of wanted cookies, deletion of all others upon shortcut). I havent seen facebook tracking pixels by now, are they being used? From an img src request they could still see my IP and user agent, plus knew which site I am on, but as far as I can tell they just use script src, and that gets blocked.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#402

Post by notacoward »

claytoneast wrote: post #246
notacoward wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook posts being inherently (mostly) simple text is 'killing the web'? I don't buy it. It's also misleading. If you want something more like a blog, then use notes instead of posts. The notes editing interface is actually better than most blog platforms, and IMO the results look just as pretty too. Then your notes appear in your timeline, searchable (within Facebook), with comments, etc. Is it everything an "op…

The difference is that Facebook articles are searchable by no one. Free web pieces are searchable and accessible via any search engine.

So two billion Facebook users are "no one" to you?

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#403

Post by AlexAffe »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #13

>> Facebook going out of business seems unlikely Is it? Because it seems to me that they are having plenty of issues with gaining the trust of advertisers too. Considering that advertising is the bread and butter of their business, this would normally be something of a mini-crisis. A quick search for "do advertisers trust facebook" gives me https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/facebook-needs-accountabil... https://ventu…

There is a relevant xkcd, that calculates FBs lifetime to end at ~20 years from now.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#405

Post by niutech »

gthtjtkt wrote: post #50
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…

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.

There is still convenient Google+ with its Communities.

Or you can make your own social network with Diaspora* (https://diasporafoundation.org) or GNU Social (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757)

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#406

Post by niutech »

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…

Muut (https://muut.com) is another alternative to Facebook comments.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#408

Post by jansho »

claytoneast wrote: post #137
iamatworknow wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and Twitter I get, but you were being angered and stressed by Instagram? It's the only social media I actively use precisely because it's not stressful or rage inducing. I'm into photography so it gives me an outlet that way (even though taking a picture with a real camera, editing it on a computer, then sending it to my phone to post on Instagram is a bit of a pain), and the annoying content from other peop…

I feel that pretenses of the life you pretend to live are more evident on Instagram than anywhere else -- the site is all about portraying yourself in the best light possible, or at least, that is how many of the people I know seem to use it. Having not had it for a couple years, I can safely say that when I do want to be on it again, it's usually just a play on the part of my ego that wants some attention from the l…

Hey it depends who you're following. For designers, artists and wannabe bakers, it's a goldmine of inspiration. Cat accounts are good for the soul too ;)

Same social media rule applies: if you don't like it, just unfollow. I'd argue that it's easier to do that on IG than FB as it feels less personal.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#409

Post by dilap »

slackoverflower wrote: post #372
dilap wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is where Google's AMP succeeds. As much as people don't want to be in Google's walled garden and for them to destroy the open web, they have made visiting websites and reading articles much more pleasant. Their incredible engineering talent has done a great job tackling the problems you mentioned.

AMP does do an excellent job of showing just how slow many normal pages are. But even an old-fashioned web-page will load very quickly if designed to a similar visual style as AMP! I'd imagine that with HTTP/2 this should be even faster.

Other things about AMP are pretty annoying to me -- the URL getting hijacked, the way on mobile safari the URL bar never shrinks when scrolling (how do they even break that?), and the ribbon with the fake URL bar that keeps popping in and out of view as you scroll.

You think Google basically replacing the entire web for news sites because their sites are so shitty might encourage them to focus more on basic usability and speed, but so far, no...

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#410

Post by camillomiller »

makecheck wrote: post #282
camillomiller wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Especially if the expression of such ignorance comes with a sense of pride and entitlement. It's easy to get entitled and proud, because nobody in real life would give you 200 nods to your racist musings while in line at Walmart. But 200 people press a stupid like button, and suddenly you feel like your idiotic and uneducated opinion has a great meaning. This is straightforward dangerous for representa…

The interesting thing to me is how online numbers are nowhere near statistically significant and yet they "matter" to people. There are billions of people, thousands just in your neighborhood (probably) and yet most people interact with a few dozen network links and the few dozen comment posts they are likely to read. That skew is gigantic , and it should terrify people that they are not relying on more professionall…

What makes the difference, I guess, is the fact that you can actually measure "agreement" in a direct way, with numbers of "agreement units" such as likes. Very easy to misread and blew it out of proportion. Facebook KNOWS that and definitively leverages that. The mission of the company is inherently broken and Mark Zuckerberg, if he's really being honest when he talks about it, well then he's in full blown denial.
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