The real problem with Facebook is "sharing". I want to see what my friends are doing, and have zero interest in their "sharing". Sharing is spamming.
Facebook’s war on free will
161–170 of 284 posts
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#162> The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines. This is the money quote of this article, and it's been on my mind quite a bit as of late. More than ever, we live in a world where there are many forces ready to take full advantage of our laziness. It takes a bit of introspection to really understand the tradeoffs that are appr…
This, from Dune: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
With the bozos running things in Dune, it might have been better with machines in charge.
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like marketing speak. It's a website; yes it's a very sophisticated one, but the crux of all that sophistication (for the user) comes down to a web page with posts on it. There are pros and cons to everything so I'm not sure that's a very useful observation, but, once again, Facebook is nothing special compared to e.g. services provided by google, microsoft or amazon. I think that is the reason you see so…
facebook is as much just a website as the catholic church is just some buildings with a book. there is a lot behind it.
I suppose that makes Zuckerberg god in your analogy.
This is a terrible comparison. A decade old tech company is not at all comparable to one of the oldest and most powerful and influential institutions in history.
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course they don't care about people. The social network that the members enjoy is merely a side-effect of the true business. Sort of like the fact that a cow pasture is not really about the cows' enjoyment but, when you get down to it, hamburgers. Amazingly most people are still as oblivious to this concept as cows are before becoming hamburgers. What I am wondering about is the possibility of a social network tha…
I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a couple of months now. I really like the idea of an open-source social network, maybe supported in part or in full by crowdfunding via something like Patreon. If the intention is connection rather than profit, you'd mostly just need to cover server/hosting fees. Of course, that's still not a cheap proposition. But I'd rather have a small network focused on good connect…
Open source social networks already exist, for example GNU Social and Mastodon which form part of the Fediverse.
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#165> The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines. This is the money quote of this article, and it's been on my mind quite a bit as of late. More than ever, we live in a world where there are many forces ready to take full advantage of our laziness. It takes a bit of introspection to really understand the tradeoffs that are appr…
This is probably the main reasoning behind the "crazy" valuation of some companies that have seemingly simple business model of selling ad views. People who talk about some kind of tech bubble often dismiss the indirect value, the value beyond the basic economics of their business models.
Google?
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#166> The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines. This is the money quote of this article, and it's been on my mind quite a bit as of late. More than ever, we live in a world where there are many forces ready to take full advantage of our laziness. It takes a bit of introspection to really understand the tradeoffs that are appr…
Moreover, the machines in question becomes more and more capex intensive, therefore they are less and less reachable for organizations which don't have the financial resources. The winners-takes-it-all means that the winner gets a lot of control...
Like everyone using Amazon AWS just makes them (Amazon) bigger.
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#167“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” Zuckerberg has said. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
Mark Zuckerberg lecturing us about integrity is quite a hoot -- particularly when his argument is completely self-serving. What's next, lessons in Gandhian pacifism from Kim Jong-un? Anyway, he's flat wrong. Having multiple identities, in the sense that we adapt our behavior and interests somewhat to the people we're interacting with, is inevitable, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Integrity is something deeper.
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Immediately preceding sentence: "The heroes of his adolescence were the original hackers. These weren’t malevolent data thieves or cyberterrorists. Zuckerberg’s hacker heroes were disrespectful of authority. They were technically virtuosic, infinitely resourceful nerd cowboys, unbound by conventional thinking." I think you're reading a sarcasm into it that I'm not seeing? > "Plenty of companies have similarly appropr…
>I think you're reading a sarcasm into it that I'm not seeing? It's possible - I've also read his book and some other work of his. He's a very good writer, though, so if it's there, it's almost certainly intentional. If you follow that paragraph, 'With their free time, they played epic pranks, which happened to draw further attention to their own cleverness – ' is then followed up by Foer's description of them as the…
but it's a valid point too. The 'hacker ethos' is inherently childish in a way that can be both seen negatively and positively.
The disregard for rules, the commons and so forth is what makes it so easy for Zuckerberg to turn it into a pseudo-subversive marketing reel. It's easy to twist it that way, and Zuckerberg is not the only guy doing it.
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if you remember the internet before Google, but finding stuff was significantly more difficult. Other search engines were either based off of manually curated indexes or were simple keyword searches and you'd often need to scroll pages of results to find a match that was actually relevant to what you wanted. People used to buy printed books with lists of useful websites to help find things. So yes, the i…
A better search was inevitable. Google achieved it first and snowballed into a monopoly. Same with Facebook – many social networks went extinct just because it was spreading faster. These companies appropriated the natural course of evolution of information exchange between humans.
"A better search was inevitable."
I see it this way too.
As usual, most of this confused brain dump by yet another technology-challenged journalist could be reduced, per the "engineering mindset", to few lines: Facebook is a website protected by a password. There is a backend database. It contains photos, among other things. (Including personal data no web user would have shared with some random website in the 1990's.)
How to explain a website's popularity? Not easily. Do not be fooled by ex post facto "explanations" by those pontificating about already popular websites. If we knew the reasons why before the fact then we would not be having these discussions about the perplexity of network effects.
Does every web user really want to visit the same website, all day, every day? Do they set out to do that? ("Where do you want to go today?") If they do, then why even have a "web" of different sites? Why not stay on the same site and just visit its many pages (e.g. "profiles")?
For example, as a technical matter, do all web users need to log in to the same college drop out's website in order to share photos, or send messages to each other? The engineering mindset says no. The engineering mindset says there are many ways to accomplish this using a variety of methods. The most popular method may not be the best method, from an engineering perspective.
According to the journalist the engineering mindset yearns for a mathematical formula that proves why and how things become popular (cf. became or stay popular). But there is none.
The Google employee states that "web search" was cumbersome and slow back in the early 1990's. True.
Today, thanks to networking and hardware advances it is much faster.
But today's "search" is also manipulated to an extent not seen in the early 1990's. And increasingly, the web of "different" sites are (not obviously) owned by the same company, perhaps the same one providing the "search". Users are in some cases literally searching from among a selection of websites all part of the same enity, though it does not appear to them that way.
Indeed, in some aspects we have come a long way from the web of the 1990's.
How to explain a website's continued popularity? Manipulation of existing users and acquiring all potential competition. The list of methods is too long for an HN comment.
Needless to say, copying all the web's data and allowing access only by slow, small scale querying (with each query being recorded and used for advertising purposes) is not clearly an advance for users. It is just a tradeoff.
No technical barriers exist to opening up the web's data in bulk to every web user, and that would certainly be an advance for users.
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#170I wish people would stop contributing to the Facebook mythos that elevates a social media platform into some kind of software based deity. It's just a website, it's not a threat to "free will" any more than a cigarette or coke addiction is a threat to "free will". People recite grand expositions regarding how "I stopped using facebook and it changed my life forever! I've never looked back!"... wonderful, but I want t…
Strictly speaking, Facebook is a screen ('screen' being a technical term for the physicality of a digital experience). We can say that, to a good approximation, the sum total of our experience of the world beyond our immediate experience comes through screens. In this way, we say that all media is a screen. So, there is your first order experience - your apartment, your car, the road on the way to work, your office,…
> It is THE screen that represents THE most valuable, pleasurable part of their life - their friendly and familial relationships.
I disagree. Millions of people use Facebook, but not nearly as many people rely on Facebook as "THE" preeminent gateway to their loved ones. Most people use Facebook on a spectrum somewhere between "post a few times a day" and "lurk when I'm bored". People who centralize their entire lives around Facebook are pretty rare and are usually regarded as somewhat unhealthy in that regard unless they engage Facebook as part of their business or something similar. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, people would groan for a few days but rapidly switch to SMS/Hangouts/WhatsApp/Snapchat or any of the other myriad communication services. The worst case scenario is that some people would lose some valuable contacts that they didn't already have backed up through iCloud or Google, but this isn't a life-changing event as anyone who has ever lost a cell-phone prior to 2007 can attest to.
> When you see a group of kids at a cafe hunched over their phones, or a couple on a date hunched over their phones, what do you think they are looking at?
People browse a variety of applications on their phone of which Facebook is only one fraction, especially among "kids" who are much more active on networks other than Facebook. Beyond that, "being haunched over" one's phone is more a sign of accessibility than necessity; if people could only access Facebook on a PC they'd just open up some other crap on their phone.
Seriously... it really is just a website.