91–100 of 300 posts
I agree with many of Stallman's views to some extent, but it's very hard to ignore that he is willing to sacrifice anything and everything for what are essentially minor decisions. It's good that we have him around to consider the utopian extremist viewpoint, even if it's rarely the favorable option. We aren't all made of money... the benefits outweigh the risks for most services where we pay with our ad-viewing, clo…
Stallman is right. What Facebook provides is a completely unoriginal set of social networking tools wrapped in a mediocre presentation layer that requires you to surrender some of your most precious human rights in order to access it. Their users are their product. They sell you to advertisers and even more unsavory corporations like Zynga that are looking to lure you into a constant dopamine feedback loop to sucker…
I'm genuinely curious, which human rights? I created an account, don't really use it... and don't feel like I've had any human rights taken away.
I was an outspoken Facebook-hater for a long time. Perhaps my most quotable moment on HN to date was saying "I have no love for their product or their business model, but their engineering is diesel." My wife recently convinced me to give it another try. I didn't use my complete name, and was judicious about the information I associated with my profile. And yet, I proceeded to connect in a deep and healthy way with s…
> connect in a deep and healthy way with some people that I'd fallen out of touch with You must have had fallen out of touch for a reason, hadn't you? I think this is the major reason why I am not using Facebook to find and connect with my old friends. If those connection would have been worth keeping up with, I am sure I wouldn't have lost them at the first place. Now, of course there are stories when some family me…
1) I have a product that users want to use with Facebook, so I need to use FB APIs etc and understand how it works for real users
2) I have a product that can benefit from viral-ness on Facebook
I wonder how many other developers share such ambivalence about being forced to use a tool that you might otherwise abandon.
Stallman is right. What Facebook provides is a completely unoriginal set of social networking tools wrapped in a mediocre presentation layer that requires you to surrender some of your most precious human rights in order to access it. Their users are their product. They sell you to advertisers and even more unsavory corporations like Zynga that are looking to lure you into a constant dopamine feedback loop to sucker…
> that requires you to surrender some of your most precious human rights in order to access it I'm genuinely curious, which human rights? I created an account, don't really use it... and don't feel like I've had any human rights taken away.
What if those governments had preexisting intelligence about the social graph? In World War II, Germans used paper punch cards to collate information about the so called "undesirable" residents of France and other occupied countries, and rounded most of them up in a matter of days. Just having most of the social graph in digital form would be devastating intelligence to be used by an oppressive government.
I hope the engineers at Facebook have put together a "self destruct button" for Mark Zuckerburg, and that he would have the courage to use it if the government turned oppressive. In all likelihood, this did not/will not happen, however.
When I was a kid, my parents sent me to camp, even though all I wanted to do was sit home and write text adventures in BASIC. I hated camp. I hated the kids, and the counselors, and most of all I hated how everyone acted like if you didn't like it, if you weren't having fun, then there was something messed up about you . Facebook = camp. The most oppressive and authoritarian thing about it is, at root, that most peop…
Come on. You didn't have much choice going to camp because your parents forced you but the only thing forcing you to use Facebook is peer pressure. If you give in to it, it's because you see more pros than cons. Not feeling sorry for you. As for the age old myth that people are migrating away from Facebook, dream on. Facebook is scheduled to have a billion users in the next few months, it's going to be around for a v…
I agree with your overall point, but no need to be so rude here.
When I was a kid, my parents sent me to camp, even though all I wanted to do was sit home and write text adventures in BASIC. I hated camp. I hated the kids, and the counselors, and most of all I hated how everyone acted like if you didn't like it, if you weren't having fun, then there was something messed up about you . Facebook = camp. The most oppressive and authoritarian thing about it is, at root, that most peop…
Yes, there's a lot wrong with Facebook, but you do realize that you act exactly like those kids in camp - if people don't enjoy what you do, or have the same preferences you do, there's something messed up about them.
Maybe most people don't want private space, I don't know. It's certainly a good idea to point out what the privacy implications of FB are, but you should be prepared to hear that people simply don't care.
(Me? I think privacy will inevitably die, or at least become a radically different concept. I might be wrong, and I'm open to debate. I won't treat the outcome of that debate as a sign for civilization either way ;)
When I was a kid, my parents sent me to camp, even though all I wanted to do was sit home and write text adventures in BASIC. I hated camp. I hated the kids, and the counselors, and most of all I hated how everyone acted like if you didn't like it, if you weren't having fun, then there was something messed up about you . Facebook = camp. The most oppressive and authoritarian thing about it is, at root, that most peop…
I for one think it's a great analogy (having been in a camp I can definitely say that I didn't enjoy it and I was rejected based on that). I silently deleted my facebook account about two years ago because I didn't like losing my time looking at stupid stuff. I found out that falling into the Facebook time vortex was too much of an inconvenience and the only way around that was to delete Facebook. Now when I say that…
If you didn't like camp, you probably weren't very fun to be around at camp. If kids from camp ostracized you at school six months later saying "Oh, he didn't have fun at camp so he's uncool" then there is something up, but I can't blame kids for not wanting to hang out with someone who is NOT enjoying themselves. Someone who is NOT having fun, is not fun to be with.