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Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet

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Re: Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet

#31

Post by monksy »

I don't understand the hero worship that goes on with DHH. He seems to make some blunt, uninformed and lacking arguments and people take it as gospel. (His offhand tweet is on the front page of hacker news).

Is facebook the worse? It's bad, and there have been many things it's done badly. I would say there are far worse actors on the internet. (I.e. mpaa, agressive marketers etc) People have been screaming from the rooftops during the whole time. Many of the worse-case predictions have come true (considering the info leak/cambridge etc). However they're far from the only one doing that.

They've really brought on the walled garden there. That imo has been the worse. It's no surprise that you're getting all these negative effects when there is no competition. Thankfully they haven't taken the full-on paid censor.

We're lacking in rights about our data and ways to stand up to this.

Re: Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet

#32

Post by beezischillin »

personlurking wrote: post #3

Top reply: >What do you think of Facebook-owned products? IG started out like a mobile Flickr in the early days, a place for personal creativity and documentation, but now has become an ad-filled place to peacock, gather likes, and promote. I wonder about the psychological impact on people. His response: >Plenty of studies have confirmed that Instagram is having a terrible effect on the psychology of many people. Als…

I used to use it to put 1:1 crops up of the photos I took because it simply seemed like a pleasant little place to leave my memories.

I ended up deleting most of my social media accounts this year, starting with Instagram, the moment I noticed that I keep getting drawn in by a rush of excitement after I uploaded each photo and kept checking for notifications.

A lot of these social media sites require high levels of awareness and self-control to use responsibly, in my opinion. I myself struggle with that.

Re: Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet

#34

Post by ham_sandwich »

In what sense did Facebook ‘happen’? People chose to join; they weren’t forced to. Facebook qua social network is a valuable tool for many people.

Now you can perhaps make the case that their effort to monetize was an unethical bait-and-switch. Get people on the service, then keep them engaged via promotion of provocative and unhealthy behaviors, which ultimately fuels an advertising money-printing machine the likes of which we’ve never seen before, save Google.

Re: Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet

#36

Post by derivatives »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #6
personlurking wrote: post #3

Top reply: >What do you think of Facebook-owned products? IG started out like a mobile Flickr in the early days, a place for personal creativity and documentation, but now has become an ad-filled place to peacock, gather likes, and promote. I wonder about the psychological impact on people. His response: >Plenty of studies have confirmed that Instagram is having a terrible effect on the psychology of many people. Als…

Sorta, it had filters you could add to pictures iirc was the biggest thing going for IG. I can't recall if those came from the getgo or after the fact it looked like Flickr.

Very accurate, but most of all, Instagram is where the girls are. The filters Instagram supplied to the common end-user brought girls in by the truckload. All of the people that recommended Instagram to me, begore it was well known, before they were acquired by Facebook, all of the people that pushed Instagram by word of mouth were girls, and almost without fail, photogenic girls, or there somewhat less-so friends. This class of girls also went to Snapchat, but for obviously different reasons, in particular, as a pseudo-forward security toy (sexting via app). Something they presumed to be, mostly “secure enough” for the moment. This split, of forward security contrasted against accessible cookie-cutter photoshop filters that place many images on a sentimental pedistal or permit the ability glamourize one-handed, were what precipitated the viral runaway growth hack the differentiated each from other varieties of photo sharing, like flickr.

Re: Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet

#37

Post by Artemis2 »

rafiki6 wrote: post #22

So he's talking about the Web not the Internet. Counter argument, the web was never that great to begin with and maybe let's stop pretending that some large companies we all don't like for whatever reason are responsible? Social media is opt-in. It is not a requirement to use the Internet and communicate effectively with it. If you hate it so much, start a new web. But then you quickly realize the Web is what it is d…

Unfortunately, with trackers such as the Like button embedded in every web page and shadow profiles, social media is definitely not opt-in.

Re: Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet

#38

Post by sephoric »

vinceguidry wrote: post #20

Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have so…

I think the "have everyone learn how to use something like IRC" solution would have been a lot more feasible if the technology behind it (servers and clients) didn't stagnate and cater only to technophiles. Most of the concepts of Facebook were around already in UNIX, such as having your own mailbox in your own user account and being able to check it for new mail, wherever it was sent from. Imagine something like AOL in 1995 except instead of real-time chat and single-person email, it also had the few features of Facebook. They weren't missing the technology, they were just missing the imagination and the realization that connecting groups over longer term (followable status updates) was higher priority than connecting individuals over a longer term (email) or connecting groups in the immediate term (chat).

Re: Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet

#39

Post by wronnng »

vinceguidry wrote: post #20

Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have so…

Facebook was NOT the first platform that actually worked for people.
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