Yes, it's a footgun. Don't even start using FB as an identity provider.
What do you propose instead? And before you answer, consider that many systems only let you sign in with Facebook or Google.
Well I think Google is a better choice than FB, but I can't think of any services I use where one or both of those are the only options and email signup isn't.
The only one that comes to mind (and that annoyed me the other day) is ProductHunt, which has 4 options for signup, but not email.
People can still be banned on Mastadon, it changes absolutely nothing. In a world where Mastadon becomes more popular than FB people will complain about being banned from the most popular node instead of the most popular http website.
Mastadon is federated, so you can be banned from someone else's instance but you can always start your own instance, or join one where you're not banned.
Right, just like how you can start your own website if you get banned from someone else's, it's servers all the way down. The people complaining about being banned don't care that they can create their own instance, they care about losing access to the popular instance.
That's a short-sighted statement. On a personal level, I completely agree with you. Facebook is a giant waste of time for the typical user and a big +1 for your life if you ditch it. For many business, however, it's critical. My local Snap-on Tools dealer uses it to announce where his truck will be each day and what tools and equipment he's running on special. He hates Facebook but told me the other day that he condu…
I run a business and don’t use Facebook. It’s not necessary.
I deleted my Facebook in July 2019 and my business still runs. So, for me, it was neither water nor air.
I am not so sure about candidates for public offices, though. Especially in majority voting systems. Not having a social network presence may be crippling for their electability.
I find the idea of Facebook being "necessary" for anyone quite spectacularly laughable. This isn't, air or water. You can live without it, and many people happily do. Facebook is about as essential as essential oils.
That's a short-sighted statement. On a personal level, I completely agree with you. Facebook is a giant waste of time for the typical user and a big +1 for your life if you ditch it. For many business, however, it's critical. My local Snap-on Tools dealer uses it to announce where his truck will be each day and what tools and equipment he's running on special. He hates Facebook but told me the other day that he condu…
Businesses just like fb so they can post stuff and pretend they aren't attention whoring.
Sure you can, just require interoperability with similar services and prevent them from straight up buying the competition and watch their "popularity" fade away.
I think preventing FB from buying competitors is perfectly reasonable, but that doesn't really mean much with respect to FB's popularity. It's not as if users have to choose "should I use FB or instagram" they can and do use both, and that would still be possible whether FB owned instagram or not.
How about the other part of the comment that you've ignored? If people could use Alternative X without losing their Facebook/Instagram connections, Facebook would fade into irrelevance. There's absolutely no technical reason for everyone to have a separate Facebook/Instagram/Twitter account with dozens of other IM services instead of picking one and communicating with others regardless of what they've picked.
That future is only one regulation away. The most common reason for staying on Facebook ("all my friends are there") disappears.
I think FB has a fundamental issue here, which is that: 1) they don't feel they can NOT police content 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually 3) any AI they train to police content, is not going to be able to state clearly why a given post/account was banned, and anyway... 4) if you state objective, clear rules that are automated, it will be pretty easy to game them (e.g. using euphemisms or code word…
If only someone had figured out hundreds of years ago that policing speech is the purview of idiots and the dictators who refuse to educate them.
Something particularly concerning about this incident is buried further down in the article. Under the heading "Why Facebook Doesn't Ban Everyone", Lincoln explains how social network theory can identify individuals in networks that are influential. This isn't an exaggeration - basic graph heuristics (such as comparing in/out degree of an individual relative to other parts of the social graph) can easily identify suc…
That's interesting. The disgorzation produced by all the bans will probably impact votes for conservatives for a long time despite not censoring that many people indeed.
I think FB has a fundamental issue here, which is that: 1) they don't feel they can NOT police content 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually 3) any AI they train to police content, is not going to be able to state clearly why a given post/account was banned, and anyway... 4) if you state objective, clear rules that are automated, it will be pretty easy to game them (e.g. using euphemisms or code word…
> 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually To be more exact: they do not want to spend money on competent policing. They probably have capability to employ ten times as many human moderators as they do now, thus reducing the blatant error rate (at least in the case of highly influential pages and people), but that would eat into their profits.
Assuming a user:moderator ratio of 10,000:1, they would need to hire 200,000 moderators to cover their 2 billion users. Then at that scale, they’d need to hire thousands of meta-moderators and meta-meta-moderators too.