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Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."

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Re: Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."

#11

Post by Udo »

evgen wrote: post #5

Outspoken misanthrope with poor social skills and a tendency towards an absolutist black/white view of the world dislikes social networking? Color me surprised...

I agree about the absolutist black/white world view but it is unclear to me how RMS is a misanthrope. Skimming the whole discussion on that mailing list it's also apparent to me that - while RMS did go offtopic by advising people to not use Facebook - poor social skills were in fact exhibited by the next commenter who replied to him in a very sarcastic and hostile way.

Taking the subject matter into account it would have made sense to instead chastise Stallman for exploiting an entirely different discussion (apparently about some student project) and injecting his own absolutist view into the original story that was at best only tangentially connected to Facebook.

Re: Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."

#12

Post by mc32 »

I feel it more a mutualistic (symbiotic?) relationship. If it were not, I believe people would abandon the platform --which they may, at soem point when something else proves more beneficial to them. Kind of like gut fauna --but more optional than gut fauna.

Parasitic, seems a bit strong --but I guess, to make a point, the analogy kind of works --just not for me.

Re: Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."

#15

Post by smashing »

I just thought Facebook was a way for millennials to share photos online. It is likely riding on a wave of "easy enough for anyone" that technology provides. Nevertheless, it is a company out to make a profit, so it does provide lessons for people who use this site. Anyway, that's me defending Facebook for the day. Have a good one ;)

Re: Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."

#16

Post by Estragon »

jpeterson wrote: post #3

This is the only time I've ever agreed with RMS. Facebook is a disease. Please do not require me to log in to it for your cause.

Came back from a talk by a Facebook Data Team member a little while ago. Don't have time to look it up now, but he cited Bakshy et al 2012 as a paper describing Facebook research in which a proportion of "Likes" from friends were censored for selected users in order to gather information on a social science question. The talk was pretty incoherent on what question they were investigating; I get the impression that it was pretty innocuous, something like "more activity in your feed makes you share more," maybe. Still, it makes me wonder why people are signing up for this fishbowl.

Re: Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."

#17

Post by fudged »

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, closed platforms, and information gathering. People can volunteer time and effort into building free systems, but nobody is going to donate data centers and storage space. I think there are limitations to the free mentality for widely adopted services.

Re: Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."

#18

Post by psawaya »

AznHisoka wrote: post #14

Dunno what is the point of this article, but I definitely agree with what he says.. did the OP post this to embarrass this dude? it did the opposite for me.

Not at all. I sympathize with what rms is saying, and hoped it would provoke discussion about the daily tradeoffs of using Facebook.

Re: Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."

#19

Post by IsTom »

evgen wrote: post #5

Outspoken misanthrope with poor social skills and a tendency towards an absolutist black/white view of the world dislikes social networking? Color me surprised...

That's what I've thought for a long time too, until I realized that the person writing http://www.osnews.com/story/25469/Richard_Stallman_Was_Right... has a point.

Re: Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."

#20

Post by derefr »

> In other words, the question of comparing the good of these projects against the harm of Facebook arises because someone made an snap choice.

Who says it was a snap choice? For X project that needs viral promotion to achieve critical mass (either in support--like a donation drive--or just participation--like a vote), you can rank places to put that mechanism by how viral and well-connected the networks that "flow through" that place are. Facebook frequently tops such rankings, if there isn't a specific niche hang-out available where you can target all the "super-connector" nodes at once.

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