101–110 of 158 posts
You'll eventually get over being "too cool" for Facebook. It's ok, I did it too. We'll welcome you back when you change your mind. Life is too short to worry so much about these things.
Facebook is the new television.
Related: "I don't have a Facebook" is the new "I don't have a TV." For some reason, those who either refused to sign up or chose to deactivate their accounts feel the need to share this with everyone everywhere.
On one hand, it feels like junk-food-friendship: it feels like you're connecting and communicating, but in reality the time you spend scrolling lists on your phone could be spent with something far better: closing the FB app and calling a buddy.
On the other hand, so many people use FB that it's tough to completely pull away from it. It's where my generational cohort shares photos, so I can't fully walk away unless I want to miss out on the photos from last week's camping trip, etc.
Hold on. First off, you should have deleted your account years ago. "Connecting with friends" is a terrible point to make: e-mail has been around for decades. However, such a point does intersect with my main goal for making this post. People are lazy. Now programmers are saying it, and now everyone else will realize just how true it is, and being lazy has consequences. So, we've had e-mail for decades. Why won't peo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know people with multi-accounts, and multi-hundreds of friends accounts and they all say they're annoyed by how irrelevant most of the content is by default even with as few as 30-50 friends on an account.
I have ~60 contacts and I don't suffer from that effect. Doesn't mean I don't believe you though, as I know I made sure to force everyone's updates.
Either that, or I just don't care for random, short-form content.
As I see it, the seeds of this user's disappointment were planted as soon as she starting gaming the system: "my posts became more and more filtered as the 'Friend' list increased. Now, they were getting the facade, the highlights because I donned the 'happy' mask. My closer friends were still catching the true story through instant messaging, text messaging and phone calls..." The faint echoes of Gödel and Turing in…
I still see the same problems. When I talk to people, it's always "oh yeah, I saw on Facebook that you got a new job," etc. etc.
I went back and looked through my old e-mails from right before Facebook was becoming popular, early 2004. I once sent out one of those "My e-mail address is changing. Oh btw how are you?" e-mails to my whole list, and got back around 50 genuine responses that turned into conversations. Not "broadcast" style conversations, not public conversations, but real honest person-to-person human communication. It was brilliant.
I realized that I had completely lost that. If I was doing it today, I could send the same e-mail but people would send nothing back; it would just be "Thanks" because they already know everything else there is to know about my life, and I theirs.
It's a very strange and new way of connecting to people. On the one hand I have some deep insights into the lives of friends I might not otherwise talk to, or even those I do; on the other hand, I miss the humanity of one-on-one conversation.
I'm yet undecided if this is a good thing. But overall, I think the article overblows the affect this has on relationships. Personally, I sort of like it. All the trivial stuff is known already. No one cares where you work or what you're doing anymore, they want to hear how you're doing and how your life is really going. It negates some shallowness and small talk. Not necessarily bad.
But it is enormously complex. We still don't know how society will change as people become more connected in so many ways, but we do know it will change. Some might say it's the next level in our evolution; collaborative social evolution is the next step since biological evolution can't keep up. It'll be a fun ride.
I'm considering leaving facebook for the first time, because of the Sponsored Stories thing, which is showing up with disturbing regularity, and frequently winds up as ads for things that make me angry. Nowadays, if you "Like" something, then that something can pay for the privilege to insert whatever stories it likes into your friends' facebook feeds, under the heading "so-and-so likes such-and-such" followed by you…
As I see it, the seeds of this user's disappointment were planted as soon as she starting gaming the system: "my posts became more and more filtered as the 'Friend' list increased. Now, they were getting the facade, the highlights because I donned the 'happy' mask. My closer friends were still catching the true story through instant messaging, text messaging and phone calls..." The faint echoes of Gödel and Turing in…
Her point still stands. I've been Facebooking since the start, so I don't necessarily alter my behavior much, I just use it to keep up with friends, post interesting tidbits about my life, and try to have real conversations happen. I still see the same problems. When I talk to people, it's always "oh yeah, I saw on Facebook that you got a new job," etc. etc. I went back and looked through my old e-mails from right be…
Unless Facebook has made some truly ground-breaking advances in AI, the company's algorithms cannot anticipate how users might modify their behavior in response to the algorithms themselves. AFAIK, that's not possible today.
Over time, this utter lack of 'intelligent auto-incorporation of feedback' might show up as people sharing 'fake' instead of real feelings, or as 'social' graphs diverging significantly from the true state of real-world relationships, or as automatic sharing of 'relevant' information (like ads) that look great to the algorithm but in hindsight are misguided.
(BTW, in my view, this is one of the biggest long-term risks for Facebook's business: that society over time learns to 'route around it' and it gradually loses relevance for day-to-day use.)
FWIW, I do agree with you that no one knows with certainty how society will change as a result of Facebook and its ilk.
Hold on. First off, you should have deleted your account years ago. "Connecting with friends" is a terrible point to make: e-mail has been around for decades. However, such a point does intersect with my main goal for making this post. People are lazy. Now programmers are saying it, and now everyone else will realize just how true it is, and being lazy has consequences. So, we've had e-mail for decades. Why won't peo…
I could use a blog + microblog for a similar way of sharing -- but most people aren't so interested in what I'm doing that they'll go and read some random links I've posted -- but when they have the time and are in the mood to have a look -- facebook works. Additionally I can post semi-private things on facebook -- because it has an authorization infrastructure in place -- I know most of my friends wouldn't be interested in or able to remember a set of credentials just to have a look at my microblog.
Personally I'd like to use a "homepage" (remember those?) for the same things -- and I probably will move to that eventually -- but a lot of people I'd like to keep in touch with simply don't have a reasonable way to "watch" 100s of activity streams from different blogs, microblogs, rss feeds etc. I realize many people use twitter for a similar reason.
My main problem with both of those are the same: the have broken a perfectly good distributed architecture by centralizing it -- and then worked really hard to make it scale again. Still working on a design for something less centralized, but still workable for those that aren't interested in technology.
The Diaspora "pod" concept seems likely to be the way to go -- in essence it's what all "micro communties" such as phpbb boards for teams/groups/clans etc are doing today. I'm not sure if it is feasible to make something "general" that also works -- but it'll be interesting to try. For authentication and authorization openid/google login and optional "local" registration combined with "friend lists"/"circles" should do the trick.
There still remains the problem of discovery -- "friend me on facebook" is usually quite simple if you remember the first name, and know someone in common -- "go to my blog, log in and say hi!" -- doesn't quite work. I do agree "send me an email" works better than both those -- it's a shame a lot of people simply aren't using email much these days.