Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature
#2My distaste for Facebook grows deeper every time they do this crap.
Re: Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature
#3Today Facebook is really asking for bad press about its default user settings. This just made it to the BBC: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1711973
Re: Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature
#4My distaste for Facebook grows deeper every time they do this crap.
But why? They only want to make the world a more "open and honest" place, right? :)
Re: Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature
#5My distaste for Facebook grows deeper every time they do this crap.
I don't see any actual problem with those exact changes — well, actually, I don't get all that "oh noes, information I've specifically made public, is being read by others! my privacy is being violated!1" thing.
I believe when one publishes something as visible for everyone he must assume that everyone and his mom will read that. Being "public but private" is logical nonsense, possible just because most of time nobody cares about your data.
The real crap they do is when some part of data I've made private becomes publicily visible. I remember about Perl's excellent "taint mode" each time they do this. Or when there's a new hard-to-notice opt-out feature which may expose something I didn't explicitly wanted to show.
What they really added this time is a somehow useful ability to completely "not notice" someone's request. Or I'm wrong?
Re: Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature
#6My distaste for Facebook grows deeper every time they do this crap.
I don't see any actual problem with those exact changes — well, actually, I don't get all that "oh noes, information I've specifically made public , is being read by others! my privacy is being violated!1" thing. I believe when one publishes something as visible for everyone he must assume that everyone and his mom will read that. Being "public but private" is logical nonsense, possible just because most of time nobo…
I think what your argument centers on is when you say "must assume" it will be viewable by everyone. The way I see it, Facebook started as a private communication channel: only my friends can see what I write. Over time this has evolved into a very public channel but users are not aware about the changes.
To me, this is a bait and switch move much like Scribd's switch to a paywall. See this discussion from yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709308 , particularly this thread about why such a switch is perceived as a betrayal of trust by users http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709593 .
Re: Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature
#7[deleted]
Re: Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature
#8The privacy angle looks like a non-issue to me.
Your public items get added to their news feed. They could view that information even if they didn't issue a friend request.
Re: Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature
#9And the stalkers rejoiced.
Re: Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature
#10The privacy angle looks like a non-issue to me. Your public items get added to their news feed. They could view that information even if they didn't issue a friend request.
Agreed. I suspect people have their newsfeeds set to "friends only", in which case the "de-facto follow feature" shouldn't work unless the friend request is accepted.