281–290 of 300 posts
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Actually, 'information you give them' is always within your control.
Unless it's 'zero becaue i don't have an account,' I disagree. I don't know until I land on a site whether they're using fb connect.
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"carefully select privacy settings (which are quite extensive)" That's ridiculous. Maybe you'll try a couple of times to keep up with their changes, but eventually you'll just give up. Besides, they will constantly tempt you to share more (that is how they grow).
Then that's your own fault. I check my privacy settings every couple months, or when I hear about or see large changes to the interface or offering getting rolled out. I've been on Facebook since April 2004, only a few months after they launched, so clearly I haven't eventually given up. Using the "View As" feature and looking at your profile page while logged out is a good idea too. If you care about your privacy an…
It's grandparent's fault for not being enslaved to FB's pain-in-the-ass purposefully exploitative system the way you are? No, it is FB's fault for being a purposefully exploitative pain-in-the-ass.
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Actually, 'information you give them' is always within your control.
Unless it's 'zero becaue i don't have an account,' I disagree. I don't know until I land on a site whether they're using fb connect.
I am somewhat surprised to find that apparently I am just about the only one who has nothing but complete ambivalence to Facebook. I don't see it as the parasitic pariah Stallman makes it out to be, nor do I dote on every status update of a friend or family member that scrolls across my screen. If you were to ask me if I hate Facebook, I might agree. But the truth is I hardly use it enough to muster up much of a reac…
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email is not a private company looking for using you as their product.
"Using" - more like you provide information which is the price of admission. Same as it is with any other company providing a free service. Characterizing Facebook as "evil" for this is quite silly. And much like email, you can roll your own. It's much harder, but it's possible.
As for you can roll your own facebook, this is absolutely false. Facebook tries to get the whole planet registering with them, and don't have and probably will never have a protocol letting a fully featured "facebook bis" integrate with them (except maybe if legally bound to).
e-mail is a completely distributed service. People using gmail are not segregated from the others.
Now I'm also not pretending that facebook is evil for all that. I was initially reacting at your comparison between facebook and e-mail, which made little sense.
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There is a world of difference between citizens complaining how their governments are corrupt, and husbands complaining how their wives boss them around. The former is a macro problem - if you're unhappy there's very little you can do to make a difference, you really need everyone to get behind your cause but because of weird behavioral science quirks this happens very rarely. The latter is a micro problem - learn to…
There are a few "weird" kids who cannot understand how people could possibly like Facebook, so they make it a personal crusade to make it known all the time. "I don't have a Facebook account" is the new "I don't even own a TV".
Only in the last half-decade or so have we started to fight the datavores.
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You tried camping and it was awesome. It was fun getting a group together and having a lot of interaction with them. Working on projects together, sharing gossip at meals and in tents, going on day trips and coming back with pictures and stories. Great stuff. People who spend time camping together share a bond and become potential lifelong friends. When camping was new, relatively few people went camping. The most ex…
If camping is a metaphor for social interaction, then wouldn't picking up the phone, or writing a letter, or sending an email, or a text, or driving over to your friends' houses and saying, "Hey, let's go to a coffee shop" be the real camping you're looking for? You're setting up a zero sum analogy, assuming that everyone is so busy on Facebook that they no longer interact or share photos/jokes/memes in other ways. N…
But we can fight back. Quoting Dave Winer:
> BTW, I get invited to events that say check out the Facebook page for details about where to be and when. If I care about the event, I write back to them telling them I don't use Facebook, and would read about it if they put up a blog post. Otherwise I can't come. If people hear that a few times, it'll start changing behavior. It's not the kind of thing you need a lot of people to do to force change. It's kind of like Apple refusing to put Flash on their iPhone and iPad. I don't imagine too many events would get reconceived just for me, but if a few more people do it, that could be enough to make the change.
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…
Your wife and kids are in your registers. You see them all the time, and generally they're either a room away or (at the most) a phone call away.
Your best friends are in your L1 cache. Sometimes they come up to the registers after you've been hanging out with them for a while, but even if not, they're only a phone call or text away in the L1 cache.
...
Your friend from elementary school you haven't talked to for years is on disk swap. He lives in Japan, and you might want to contact him if you're traveling there.
In that world, it's still very cheap to access your most frequently-accessed connections--your wife, kids, best friends. However, as you go down the memory hierarchy it becomes very expensive to access them. And so, you contact them less often.
Enter Facebook. Now your friend from Japan is only a post away. You don't have time to have email threads with all of your friends, down to that friend from elementary school. But you can occasionally keep up with that friend by browsing to his timeline, occasionally seeing some major events "X got engaged", and maybe sending a light message. Suddenly your disk became an SSD and it became much cheaper to keep in contact.
Your registers and L1 caches haven't changed much. Now you can contact them in the medium that's most convenient at the time. You can message them from your phone (fb messenger), or skype them on your computer, but you can also just call them or talk to them. Facebook gives you more options for accessing the most-accessed friends. As a result, it both expands the size of your caches and main memory, but also makes each level faster to access so you can keep in touch with more of them.
So I don't think the right approach is to think of friends in a binary fashion: Worth keeping in touch with, and not worth keeping in touch with.
Instead, it's a gradient, and communication platforms like Facebook just improve the gradient so it's worthwhile (i.e. possible and easy) to keep in touch with a lot more of your friends.
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If the freedom you are most concerned about losing is the freedom to lead other people into believing they are your friends when you really don't care about them, you might be a sociopath.
Maybe he wants to be nice? Facebook fails at nice, that's mostly why I quit. Seems the guy who made it is probably a bit of a sociopath, your only two options are "Friend!" or "Fuck off!" and I think that contributes a lot to the general loathing of the site.
I'm starting to think people here are just overanalyzing.
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…
There is a world of difference between citizens complaining how their governments are corrupt, and husbands complaining how their wives boss them around. The former is a macro problem - if you're unhappy there's very little you can do to make a difference, you really need everyone to get behind your cause but because of weird behavioral science quirks this happens very rarely. The latter is a micro problem - learn to…
If you read the information on http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/en.html, you should understand that FB uses individuals' data without their permission or even their knowledge - in clear breach of EU privacy laws.