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Facebook is an attack on the open web

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Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#291

Post by maksimum »

always_good wrote: post #207
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. You can have a Facebook account and just... Not use it unless you need it for something. All the benefits of the 'I deleted Facebook' crowd without the downsides.

Almost all of these quitting posts just read like people coming to terms with their addiction. Good for them, but they seem to mistake it as some sort of universal lifehack.

> Good for them, but they seem to mistake it as some sort of universal lifehack.

Does it have to be universal to be useful? Helping 0.01% of the US Facebook userbase save 1 hour every week is still huge...

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#292

Post by __jal »

s73ver wrote: post #199
gthtjtkt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy: Stop littering the feed with pictures, videos and articles. Exclude them altogether or show them very rarely. You can also easily identify "viral" content that doesn't belong to the user and remove it. Eventually they'll learn not to waste their time posting those things because they'll get no responses. And if someone posts an article, leave it as a plain old text link instead of creating a massive preview of…

But, there's a reason people post those things. Excluding the viral repost content for a second, people post their pictures and videos of what they're doing because they want to share it with people and have others see it.

...Which is reason #387 I don't use FB.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#293

Post by niftich »

Look, there's no dispute that Facebook is an assault on the 'open web' because it's a walled garden where the data only flows in. In fact, on the HN thread for Gruber's previous post about Google's AMP, I defended [1] some aspects of AMP because at least it tries to be distributed vs. Facebook, and in that post I echo much of what Gruber would later say.

But sadly, today's so-called 'open web' is just as much of an assault on the open web: trackers, cookies, and cross-correlated advertisements follow the user everywhere; every new link is literally a crapshoot which may execute arbitrary code placed there by the webmaster or their delegates. It's the devil you know vs. the devil that's brand-new every time: do I want my browsing habits aggregated to help them better target ads and content for me inside some walled garden, or do I want my browsing habits across the 'open web' to be aggregated by a dozen third parties to help them better target ads for me on the outside, while I blissfully extoll the virtues of decentralization and pretend I'm better off?

Until recently, the only way to avoid this was to spin off a clean incognito session in a browser running only one window, then close it after every pageview. Who does that? Short of a very particular few, no one.

The web is a wonderful, versatile medium of referencible documents and multimedia that we've turned into an application delivery platform; and the one thing that content silos like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Apple News get right is that not everyone cares to visit unvetted content solely judged by its URL.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14384607

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#294

Post by __jal »

Groxx wrote: post #156
MachinShinn- wrote: post #74

I'm baffled by some of the comments here... Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on? You can still sign into random sites that require it that way, arrange meetups, etc but without 'scrolling your life away' I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumpt…

fwiw that's basically what I do. My account pretty much just says "I'm not active here, email me" and I only friend people who I want to show my email address. I actually visit the site every month or three, and that's about it. But that's under protest. Facebook is super hostile to its users, but doing so makes their metrics go up, so it's gonna keep happening.

I did exactly the same thing, only I never visit. (I block FB at the router, along with other surveillance shops.)

The net is so much nicer when you block out the evil.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#295

Post by Clubber »

rezistik wrote: post #243
Chaebixi wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook was great in the early years. That seems to be depressingly true of any social website. There seems to be a sort, sweet spot that exists briefly between the implementation of a good idea and when the parasites catch on and move in to ruin it.

Eternal September is the term for that. When the social site begins to accept too much trash because of it's size.

For those that don't know, September was when all the freshmen would get their first access to the non-commercial internet in college. It was a pain because they (we) had to learn all the nuances of how to interact with the people already on it. Newgroups, IIRC, etc. Eternal September is the term for when the internet went commercial in 1995.

Wow that happened 27 years ago. Time does fly.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#296

Post by snug »

Tossrock wrote: post #19

I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I…

I had the same problem, but I found out there is an app "Events for facebook," It means less endless scrolling for me. And then I use the messenger app to communicate with some friends.

So far it's been about a week, and it's been 90% great, and 10% meh. I just logged out of facebook on all of my devices and don't save the password, so it at least makes me think before putting in my password. The meh part is the services I use "login with facebook" on, but it's not that big of a deal.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#297

Post by andersonmvd »

Tossrock wrote: post #19

I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I…

I wonder why people are so extremist. Just like 'mobile phones are the new cigarette' you don't need to throw them out. You just need to know where to draw the line.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#298

Post by snug »

inostia wrote: post #283
Tossrock wrote: post #19

I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I…

I'm a part of the local Bay Area music scene and Facebook events has basically become the standard for posting about shows. Without a Facebook I just don't hear about them. I'm considering making a dummy account with a few friends just for the purpose of finding out about events. Side note, does anyone know of a service that allows you to track FB events without having to be in the Facebook app? Not sure if there's a…

Posted about this above, but check out the app "Events for facebook"

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#299

Post by transpy »

inostia wrote: post #283
Tossrock wrote: post #19

I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I…

I'm a part of the local Bay Area music scene and Facebook events has basically become the standard for posting about shows. Without a Facebook I just don't hear about them. I'm considering making a dummy account with a few friends just for the purpose of finding out about events. Side note, does anyone know of a service that allows you to track FB events without having to be in the Facebook app? Not sure if there's a…

I feel you. Facebook virtually grants a certificate of existence. It's almost unimaginable why someone that wants to play music wouldn't have a facebook presence. (Don't know if that last sentence was correct, non native here).

My point is the following: I was one day on the street and saw a flyer glued onto a wall, it looked kinda funky and hand-drawn, interesting; some DJ's were going to throw a party and spin salsa, funk, latin jazz, cumbia... And I didn't recognize any of the names or the venues, I was mildly shocked because I believed I knew the local scene pretty well.

Almost always I can contextualize a music genre/scene, and see their connections and collaborations. But this random flyer I came across was so obscure! No relations, no known names, and the mix of styles and originality was very interesting! For the first time in many years I felt again what is like to find an underground scene, which I like a lot (like when dancing drum&bass in a basement in Berlin or listening to rap in Mexico).

This is a magic that is sometimes lost in the believed omniscence and omnipresence of online/facebook. I bet people soon will want to have those kind of experience, and the new thing will be to find scenes that people don't even know about online.

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