Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
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Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
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Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
#2[deleted]
Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
#3It might be unpopular to say it out loud, but I would bet most HN readers have at least one person on their Facebook page they would not hire base on what they've seen posted there - people they might have otherwise considered hiring. I hope the scenario posted in that article doesn't play out on that scale, but it's surely already happening at an individual level. Great read though!
Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
#4I simply don't see the benefits of Facebook as outweighing the creepiness and totalitarian potential. What do I get from Facebook that I don't get from "analog" social interaction, that is worth giving them information on a good portion of the websites I visit, the social interactions I have, the pictures I take, etc.?
Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
#5So what? Company A does not want you because of some stupid unscientific mumbo-jumbo, you just head to Company B on the other side of the street.
This is only a problem if no employer wants you at all - if they have enough safe applicants so they can reject anybody even slightly unsafe.
But that, even if it would happen, not a Facebook fault.
Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
#6I don't think this scenario could play out that way.
- Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends. People who post pictures of themselves naked and using drugs use this feature.
- The hypothetical conclusions drawn are only possible if users post extremely frequently and in great detail. Otherwise, the predictive analytics will suffer from garbage-in-garbage out. Huge companies spend millions of dollars collecting decent data, and the claim here is that a 16 yr-old's facebook profile will have high quality data.
- If the situation presented in the article gets even close to coming true, people will know about it and compensate. The end game won't be all-knowing companies, it'll be SEO for social media profiles that make people look good for a fee.
[edit: removed meanness]
Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
#7It might be unpopular to say it out loud, but I would bet most HN readers have at least one person on their Facebook page they would not hire base on what they've seen posted there - people they might have otherwise considered hiring. I hope the scenario posted in that article doesn't play out on that scale, but it's surely already happening at an individual level. Great read though!
Well, I wouldn't have hired those people regardless of their Facebook postings.
Facebook just mirrors what I see in reality. If someone is so short sighted that they post things that will keep them from being hired, they are likely engaging in a number of behaviors which are not helpful to them getting hired.
Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
#8I think this is a little pessimistic. If you have the capability to be able to predict a persons life, personality, etc. for the capability of hiring someone, you also have the capability to match people with their dream jobs. Ones that they would excel at.
Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
#9I simply don't see the benefits of Facebook as outweighing the creepiness and totalitarian potential. What do I get from Facebook that I don't get from "analog" social interaction, that is worth giving them information on a good portion of the websites I visit, the social interactions I have, the pictures I take, etc.?
Just a few weeks ago I was checking out my feed on my phone at lunch and saw a post from an old friend I hadn't talked to in years saying he was visiting town for a few days. I sent him a message and we ended up hanging out one night that week, and we had a blast.
Or, last year, there was an old friend who'd seen one of my updates pop up in her feed, and decided to send me a quick message to see what I was up to these days. We ended up talking and hanging out quite a bit, and now she's become one of my closer friends, after we had drifted out of touch for years due to moving away.
Without Facebook, would we have been on each other's email list or blog or whatever non-social-network method of sharing info? Probably not.
Those aren't the only things it's done for me, either -- and just two days ago I got another one of those sorts of messages, though it's too early to know if anything more than a quick "oh here's what I'm up to these days, how about you" exchange will come of it. But I think even that's worthwhile.
I'm also not particularly concerned about them having cookied me and learning a bunch of sites I've visited through that. There it's mostly a numbers thing -- out of all the millions of users, I'm not too worried about someone deciding to try to hassle me with my info somehow. Compare that risk with how easy it's made it to reconnect with all those old friends.
(I'll talk about the nightmare scenario of this post in a separate comment, this is just meant to illustrate the positives vs the current negatives.)
Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare
#10I simply don't see the benefits of Facebook as outweighing the creepiness and totalitarian potential. What do I get from Facebook that I don't get from "analog" social interaction, that is worth giving them information on a good portion of the websites I visit, the social interactions I have, the pictures I take, etc.?
The advantage for me at least is volume. In online interaction you can connect with a large number of people at once. For example, it's easy to carry a chat conversation with 2 or 3 people whereas in real life you'd need to actually have everyone in the same room, interested in the same topic, etc. Of course the trade off is usually depth (and as you mentioned, privacy) so it's not always the best thing. But it is very helpful for short updates with people you don't talk to otherwise.