Live data from Hacker News

How Facebook makes us dumber

bloombergview.com

71–80 of 124 posts

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#71
post #2

As a search provider, DuckDuckGo tries to prevent the "gated community" syndrom: http://dontbubble.us/

Yeah, too bad it fails at some searches and falling back to google is needed For controversial stuff, the bubble is definitely a minus. For factual queries, it just makes things easier (yes, when I type 'python' I don't mean the reptile)

How does it fail for you?

I persisted and find that although the results are different, they are often just different. Once I became used to DDG it's started to seem like Google is the broken one.

It did take a while for me to switch, maybe 3 tries before it was working right.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to say that spanking isn't an effective way to discipline a child. I can also understand if a 3 year old walks into a street to feel like spanking the child. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that other forms of discipline for small children are more effective at correcting behavior and children who are spanked are often more violent towards other children with other developmental and learning p…

OK it sounds like you are actually of the belief that spanking should be rare, rather than never. In this I agree, but I do think from personal experience that spanking is a useful "thermonuclear" option to stop dangerous behaviour in young children. To give you an example, I once caught one of my children at the age of two inserting objects into electrical power points. I gave him a good spank on the bottom and he n…

I strongly agree with this author: Spanking and Child Development: We Know Enough Now To Stop Hitting Our Children[1]

> Spanking remains a common, if controversial, childrearing practice in the United States. In this article, I pair mounting research indicating that spanking is both ineffective and harmful with professional and human rights opinions disavowing the practice. I conclude that spanking is a form of violence against children that should no longer be a part of American childrearing.

My stance is consistent with the recommendations of the American Psychological Association [2] and the American Academy of Pediatrics [3].

The issue is can we have a discussion about it without unfriending each other on Facebook building protective bubbles.

[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/

[2]http://www.apa.org/about/policy/corporal-punishment.aspx

[3]https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/family-d...

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#74
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No. First of all, it doesn't matter. Facebook is not your competitor, so you're not harming yourself. Secondly, Facebook is an immensely popular communications platform . Even if for some reason you dislike them because they're privately owned, it doesn't change the fact that that's where people are . If you want…

> First of all, it doesn't matter. Facebook is not your competitor, so you're not harming yourself. You start by saying that Facebook is not a competitor, but in taking over part of your core business--- keeping track of potential customers--- it could be seen as that. > Secondly, Facebook is an immensely popular communications platform. Even if for some reason you dislike them because they're privately owned, it doe…

> You start by saying that Facebook is not a competitor, but in taking over part of your core business--- keeping track of potential customers--- it could be seen as that.

I never checked it out personally, but from what I heard, Facebook allows for integration with various third-party CRMs and stuff, so you still get to track potential and existing customers to your heart's content.

Your points are valid in a long-term view. Facebook monopolizing communication is not a good thing. But since when do most businesses care about that? It won't affect their bottom-line at all. It's a worry for consumers.

> Your support for them is so superlative that I have to ask: Do you have a stake in Facebook?

I have no stake in Facebook and I'm not affiliated with the company in any way. My support being "so superlative" is because as a user and customer, I hate business communication. Most of the stuff companies send is a waste of time for me, and I value my time. I'd like businesses to use Facebook more precisely because it makes spamming me harder. :). That, and since it's all engineered so that it is in company's interest to allow people to comment on their stuff, suddenly you can communicate with them under public view of other customers - so you won't be ignored so easily when you have a legitimate complaint.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#75

Yes, everybody has always been like this, but tech has changed the social nature of interaction. It's not just Facebook. Any online community (including HN) has a desire to limit conflict -- you want people enjoying themselves and contributing. That means "Don't show me stuff that I disagree with" There's a natural conflict of interest. In the real world, we are forced to live with and confront those of widely varyin…

Call me biased, but pretty much every on-line community I've seen in the past 15 years had no desire to limit disagreements. All they wanted is to get rid of assholes . It's the same on HN and on your Facebook feed, as it was on the old topical boards and mailing lists. You can argue for any controversial position you like as long as you do this in a civil and substantial way. What ends up happening is people getting…

While I agree with you, this did have me giggling a bit: > and assholes who just want to call people names.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#76
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is totally by design and again, very much a feature. No, it wasnt like that when most of the Pages acquired the bulk of their followers, they could reach all their audience freely. It was a shitty idea solely to make money, it didn't "add value" to users. There were other, more meaningful ways to implement this, e.g. show Page posts on a separate tab, have limits of posts/day etc. Paying for views is a bad str…

You can still reach some of your audience freely. You can argue that Facebook is rent-seeking, but consider the problem that it solves: if every fanpage could reach all their audience for free, every user's timeline would turn into a product catalog. Just go and count how many things you've liked so far. I have 821 "items" liked, most of them fanpages. If every one of them would be able to reach me with all their pos…

I am not using facebook anymore, but i had a page that had organically grew its audience and brought a lot of traffic to facebook. I agree that pushing updates every day would clog users' timeline, but there are better ways to fix that. The fact that they chose to take your followers and basically resell them back to you is so dumb that i never bothered to pay up. Shows lack of vision on their part.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#78
post #34

What I don't get is dumb companies who post a link to their FB(or some other social media) page on their site: 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No. 2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there. If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you'v…

At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished, nevertheless I do think that it is better than having an e-mail. There are several reasons for that: - First (at least for me), an unsolicited e-mail goes directly into trash and I seek the unsubscribe button. Under no circumstances I am interested in additional stuff somebody…

Facebook likes have become almost useless to us. We have 61,000+ likes on one page and we're lucky if we "reach" (show up somewhere down their timeline) 1/12 of them in a week or month. "Boosting" every post is prohibitively expensive. So for 55,000 or so people, we'll never be able to interact with them in any way.

So, not worth much anymore.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to say that spanking isn't an effective way to discipline a child. I can also understand if a 3 year old walks into a street to feel like spanking the child. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that other forms of discipline for small children are more effective at correcting behavior and children who are spanked are often more violent towards other children with other developmental and learning p…

OK it sounds like you are actually of the belief that spanking should be rare, rather than never. In this I agree, but I do think from personal experience that spanking is a useful "thermonuclear" option to stop dangerous behaviour in young children. To give you an example, I once caught one of my children at the age of two inserting objects into electrical power points. I gave him a good spank on the bottom and he n…

You subjected your child to violence because you failed in your duty to keep him safe?

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#80
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still reach some of your audience freely. You can argue that Facebook is rent-seeking, but consider the problem that it solves: if every fanpage could reach all their audience for free, every user's timeline would turn into a product catalog. Just go and count how many things you've liked so far. I have 821 "items" liked, most of them fanpages. If every one of them would be able to reach me with all their pos…

I am not using facebook anymore, but i had a page that had organically grew its audience and brought a lot of traffic to facebook. I agree that pushing updates every day would clog users' timeline, but there are better ways to fix that. The fact that they chose to take your followers and basically resell them back to you is so dumb that i never bothered to pay up. Shows lack of vision on their part.

I guess they could've simply tied the post range to the inverse of posting frequency - i.e. if you post once a month, you reach everyone, if you post daily, you'll reach some random subset, etc.

But then again, Facebook has to get the money for their servers from somewhere (or at least enough of it to attract more investors). They could've chosen worse monetization strategies.

Post reply on HN