Facebook the Devourer

In other words, Facebook provides more usable and discoverable interfaces for the tasks you list. But you omitted a few tasks that are not practical at all using the tools e-mail, XMPP and IRC provide:

Passive broadcasting / timeline: Share a status update with your friends, without putting it in an inbox or otherwise forcing them to actively dismiss it. People read your update if they happen to see it, but are not obligated to.

Events: Invite people to an event and let everyone see a convenient headcount and list of all the Yes/Maybe RSVPs.

Friends of friends: Discover new connections among the people you already know—for example, that Bob and Sally are acquainted even though you've never seen them together.

Photo tagging: Label each person in a group photo in a listable, searchable way. By viewing photos others have tagged, refresh your memory of who someone is.

At current there is no integrated, open protocol that would solve the above use-cases in an even remotely adequate manner, even if everyone on earth used it. We're left with two options. Surrender control to centralized social networks like Facebook, who have solved the above problems, but only within their walled gardens. Or simply go without these benefits and opportunities.

Both choices are unacceptable to me, and long-term, I suspect most hackers will feel the same way. That's why I strongly hope for the Tent protocol, or something like it, to succeed. https://tent.io/blog/tent-basics

I'm guessing you long ago hid messages from Farmville and similar games and forgot about it. There's no way you know 340 people who don't play Facebook games.

Yet I can use Facebook today to find out about meat specials at my butcher, or someone selling artisanal pickles, or a new theater company, or someone making custom knives as their hobby hoping to try to make a living doing it. And because of the stupid blue "like" button this article rails against, these hopeful businesses can do that without paying for pointless terribly-performing ads in major newspapers or on radio stations, and can have actual conversations with their customers.

I used to "like" local businesses. But... every day I get ads in my news stream reminding me that my friends "like" Wal-Mart. And Amazon.com. Mostly Amazon.com, actually. Sometimes I think that if I just clicked "like" I'd get fewer ads from Amazon than I currently get for Amazon. Because on Facebook, even the ads have ads.

Now I hesitate to "like" anything because I feel complicit in helping Facebook spam my friends. I think it's cool when a single item goes into my friends' feeds saying that I "like" a local restaurant, but I DON'T want them to see recurring ads in their news feed with my name attached. I have one friend who posts very infrequently, and she is apparently one of the only Facebook friends I have who has "liked" Wal-Mart, so most of her appearances in my feed are promotions for Wal-Mart. If I only knew her from my feed, I'd know her as that girl who shills for Wal-Mart.

I admit it's irrational to avoid the "like" button when it comes to local businesses, because I've never seen Facebook promote a cool local business to me; it's too busy telling me about this awesome new thing called Wal-Mart that I might not have heard of. When I "like" the coffee shop down the street, I suppose Facebook applies powerful machine-learning algorithms to that information to determine that they should lace my friends' news feeds with slightly more ads for Amazon.com and slightly fewer ads for Wal-Mart. No real harm done, then, since my name won't be used, but it isn't something I'm thrilled to be part of.

I feel like this has been hashed out a million times on HN. Yes, e-mail works. I could e-mail a photo album to people. But what if they want to comment on it? Either everyone gets spammed with hundreds of e-mails, or there's no group conversation. Add to that, being tagged in other people's albums. Facebook provides value to people. Not all people, but that's the way the world works.

And of course there is a value in passive communication. I want to see the photos my friend posted of his holiday. I don't want to have to look at them right now, though- I'm busy. So I'll look later. Ta-da: passive communication.

> Sure, someday there'll be a "new Facebook", and then people can complain about that walled garden.

I'm of the opinion that Facebook isn't going to get trumped by anything but an NGO. :(

yeah usually it takes about 12 months for facebook to overhaul any previous design.