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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

#431

Post by jrcplus »

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 kept my Facebook account but deleted all my friends and most of my personal content (and locked down the privacy settings to prevent people from finding me). This lets me access content on Facebook without using it as a social network. I did this years ago and I have no regrets.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#432

Post by claytoneast »

notacoward wrote: post #402
claytoneast wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As far as I can tell, you aren't able to search for specific articles on Facebook. You can view them as they go through your feed, but you can only access them again after that by scrolling through your feed or the content creators feed until you locate it. And you must have an account for much of this.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#433

Post by yla92 »

tuna-piano wrote: post #352
yla92 wrote: post #351

Earlier 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?

> Do you think this will change overtime as people become familiar with technology and the internet?

Maybe. I can't say for sure. People start with Facebook and they stay with Facebook for now. Most businesses (tech agencies or startups) are also forming around Facebook. Of course, a few companies are doing okay by doing games, marketplace, and entertainment related apps/websites. For them, a big problem is an online payment method and non-existent infrastructure. For the government, there are just more important problems for the government. Eventually, online safety and education are necessary, I think.

Yeap. I see people, especially younger folks, use laptop/desktop computers for work, school and for entertainment. The margin of mobile users are desktop users is still a big gap, I suppose.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#434

Post by benoliver999 »

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.

It was like MySpace but without the shitty customisation, and without the need to pick a list of your top friends.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#435

Post by machine-wisdom »

niutech wrote: post #405
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.

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 )

The only problem is that it takes a group of people to make the move, you can't go their without convincing your friends to tag along

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#436

Post by StavrosK »

hashhar wrote: post #395
StavrosK wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 see, thank you, that makes sense. My problem is that I'll go on Facebook, and see people posting stuff I don't care about, and unfollow them (and obviously lose their important updates as well). Pretty quickly, I have nobody in my timeline, and I just talk to people to see how they're doing.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#438

Post by hashhar »

StavrosK wrote: post #436
hashhar wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 see, thank you, that makes sense. My problem is that I'll go on Facebook, and see people posting stuff I don't care about, and unfollow them (and obviously lose their important updates as well). Pretty quickly, I have nobody in my timeline, and I just talk to people to see how they're doing.

I agree. Facebook either needs to allow more fine control on what we want to see (education updates, work updates, photos but no text statuses) or improve it's algorithm so that a new comment on a month old content doesn't make it conquer my feed.

I deal with it slightly by checking the "See updates from these people first" for certain people. It causes them to appear in a cluster at the top of my feed. The best thing is that the cluster is collapsed to show just two stories and I can then expand if there are more.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#439

Post by bthallplz »

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…

Disqus isn't much better. I suggest that everyone look into not loading their Disqus comments by default but loading them when a Load Comments button is clicked. I did this recently on my blog and the request count and page weight went down an amazing amount. :)

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#440

Post by tempodox »

abritinthebay wrote: post #270
StavrosK wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kind of surprised to see these posts describing how it's possible to get off Facebook. For me, it doesn't really make much of a difference whether I'm on or off. I barely ever log in, barely ever use it, and things don't really spread through Facebook. However, that just may be that I don't live in the US, and it just might be more pervasive there.

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,…

> That changes things.

No, that's exactly what it doesn't. Rather, it leaves them as they were before this stupid and insufficient replacement was invented.

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