Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

#41

Post by al_james » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:15 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #35

Lewisham wrote: post #21

A mail system that doesn’t have a Bcc function doesn’t belong in the 21st Century. This reminds me of a comment that we almost always get on HN when Facebook comes up, and its almost always right: it's not for you. If you want Bcc, it's not for you. The millions of people who are younger than you don't think to CC, let alone BCC. They want to communicate, and they want to do it now, and email is just that formal thin…

Well, it is a problem with FB mail that once you mail a list of people, you can't add someone to the list unless you start a new thread. Normal people do want to do that.

True. But they will fix that with a little time.

Re: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

#42

Post by yason » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:16 AM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #21

A mail system that doesn’t have a Bcc function doesn’t belong in the 21st Century. This reminds me of a comment that we almost always get on HN when Facebook comes up, and its almost always right: it's not for you. If you want Bcc, it's not for you. The millions of people who are younger than you don't think to CC, let alone BCC. They want to communicate, and they want to do it now, and email is just that formal thin…

I haven't used Bcc many times but generally Facebook messages seem all phony to me. It doesn't seem to be a real conversation; I don't "own" the messages the same way I do when I use a real email program. Even gmail offers me tools to work with the messages themselves: on Facebook there's very little I can do with the messages. Basically I can just reply or delete the thread: exactly the same options that I have with a status with comments.

Re: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

#43

Post by arethuza » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:27 AM UTC

pak wrote: post #18

paul wrote: post #2

Clearly someone who "once handrolled his own html code and then uploaded it using UNIX commands" is simply too Awesome for Facebook.

Well he was apparently doing that in 1993... What did you build on the web in 1993? NCSA Mosaic had literally just come out.

Nitpick - NCSA Mosaic wasn't the first generally available web browser, Viola was around at least six months before Mosaic.

Re: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

#44

Post by axod » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:34 AM UTC

al_james wrote: post #41

gaius wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it is a problem with FB mail that once you mail a list of people, you can't add someone to the list unless you start a new thread. Normal people do want to do that.

True. But they will fix that with a little time.

why reinvent the wheel badly?

They should just give users @facebook.com email addresses and put in a webmail UI.

Re: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

#45

Post by thingie » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:35 AM UTC

Some time ago, a friend of mine told me that he had a great idea, something like Facebook, but, you know, for the "geeks" and all ze teknischen peepers, blogging, photo sharing, video, everything. At that point, it had simply occurred to me a very simple (and obvious) question: "Well, isn't that exactly the world wide web?"

Re: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

#46

Post by bhavin » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 10:06 AM UTC

We had a stream of google-sucks/googles-dead kinda articles everyday just before while now. And now, suddenly all the bad attention turns to facebook since about a week.

I mean facebook had the same UI/policies/uglyness since quite some time, why sudden surge of facebook-bashing articles (followed by google)? I wonder how much of the content from above articles was written genuinely and not with alterior motives.

Re: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

#47

Post by bhavin » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 10:13 AM UTC

pilif wrote: post #34

I don't get this Facebook rage every year. Last year it was about the open social graph API and the third-party like buttons. Everyone was mad at Facebook. Calls for boycotts, mainstream press picking it up, Diaspora, etc. Then it dies down and everybody seems happy about Facebook. Until a year later, HN is full of hate-posts again. So, if history is to repeat itself, I'd say that the hate will have died down by June…

I don't think its all in vain. Each hate-cycle creates some residual hostility towards facebook. When eventually it crosses threshold (and some better option is available), so many people might jump the ship in a short time.

Re: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

#48

Post by varjag » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 10:14 AM UTC

axod wrote: post #44

al_james wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. But they will fix that with a little time.

why reinvent the wheel badly? They should just give users @facebook.com email addresses and put in a webmail UI.

That makes it too easy to communicate with non-facebooked rest of the world.

Re: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

#49

Post by tsotha » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 10:23 AM UTC

yason wrote: post #39

Sounds like he uses Facebook mainly to stay in contact with his friends but hates that Facebook doesn't do everything he needs. Facebook doesn't have to do that and the rest of the internet is still there.

I think it's more that he feels like he has to maintain a presence on facebook because everyone else does. And it galls him because he can't stand facebook.

Re: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

#50

Post by tsotha » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 10:27 AM UTC

juiceandjuice wrote: post #13

hugh3 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think the users of the internet are getting more sophisticated? I'd say the users of the internet are getting less sophisticated. In the 1970s nobody without a PhD used the internet. In the early 90s you still needed a helluva lot of technical skill. In the late 90s the internet was still a bit geeky. Nowadays everybody and everything is on the internet and we've gone from Eternal September to.... some more extre…

There should be some study on this relationship... the more the web gets sophisticated, the more unsophisticated people use it.

But that's true of every maturing technology. People who owned cars in the early 1900s had to be able to fix them - they broke down constantly. A hundred years later how many people can do repair work on their own car? I've owned a car for ten years and it's never broken down.