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A Facebook Sixth Sense

kirszenberg.com

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Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#71

Post by dasyatidprime »

Freak_NL wrote: post #25
dasyatidprime wrote: post #5

So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand,…

Facebook users are apparently broadcasting the fact that they are typing to their conversation partners, why should you ignore that information? If you don't like that, disable that feature, or complain to Facebook if it is not something you can disable yourself (or don't use Facebook). It can't hurt to raise some awareness of what you are invisibly broadcasting in terms of data on-line. (I always liked how this feat…

Well, firstly, because they are not in a similar position to yours with regard to this fact unless they are of a similar attitude and skill for promoting these transmissions to human-side visibility. (If you know that they do have the same attitude as the one you expressed, then the "you know they're okay with it" exception applies.) There are a lot of things people "broadcast" in the physical world which are socially expected to be politely ignored as well.

Put another way, your statement makes perfect sense if you assume all software is actually a User-Agent in the traditional, ideal sense. But this isn't so, because even programmers don't generally have the spare cycles to rewrite everything they come in contact with, and non-programmers have an even more vanishingly small chance to do anything about it. Agency in the digital world is inevitably shaped by other people's decisions as represented in software, and social agency is shaped by how that software presents itself not just to you but to the people you're communicating with through it. When the state of the software doesn't exactly match the state as visible to the participants, the latter state prevails in a social context, and it's the responsibility of a polite conversation partner to not mess around behind the curtain unless you already know you're welcome.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#72

Post by dasyatidprime »

draw_down wrote: post #69
dasyatidprime wrote: post #5

So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand,…

This reminds me of how people get arrested for pointing out security flaws in important systems, trying to help. Let's don't shoot the messenger.

I think there's a big difference between being arrested and being considered to be acting rude. There's also a big difference between pointing out a security flaw and continuing to actively exploit it. That's why I said I think it's fine as a code example, and I think it's fine to raise awareness. Just be careful about keeping this around in your main browser while you're chatting with many people; you might be risking trust if they find out.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#73

Post by dasyatidprime »

ifdefdebug wrote: post #29
dasyatidprime wrote: post #5

So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand,…

Not a fb user, but I partially agree with you here, in that you should already send this information to all your fb friends, so they can learn that their "social expectations" are not backed by what facebook gives away about them to tech-savvy users.

I mostly agree with that, yes, though I worry about message saturation too early on. Currently there's very little many users can do about it. If they have the idea shoved into their faces too many times while that's true, will they keep the information around and be more willing to change habits later if that will help, or will the shock just get muted to a dull roar so that they get used to it? Or will they decide to believe that this is okay in order to avoid the current-day social consequences of trying to act according to the opposite?

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#74

Post by slig »

alanwatts wrote: post #48
jtmarmon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this really a contrarian opinion? i feel like this is a pretty obvious fact that it's easier to read network requests to scrape a website than parsing html

Is there a specific tool you would recommend for doing this?

Chrome Dev Tools is pretty awesome. You can right-click a request and get an 'curl' request with cookies and everything that can be replayed on a terminal.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#75

Post by RRRA »

I've been using pidgin for this feature for years, people freak out when they don't see you typing but you say something before they even start... ;)

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#76

Post by yeahmaybe »

IshKebab wrote: post #41

Ha I remember the same thing used to be possible with MSN if you used a third party client. You could have it open a window when someone started typing to you, before they sent their message.

I also immediately thought about the MSN customization days! Is fb the customizable platform of this time?

For MSN it was also non-officially supported and it grew quite a community of devs who tinkered around things like this, would be interesting to see a renaissance of such projects.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#77

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #46
sdp wrote: post #19

A little while ago, someone used Facebook's last active time to track their friends' sleep: https://medium.com/life-tips/how-you-can-use-facebook-to-tra...

I remember a bunch of friends being upset about this. Apparently it's an outrage that your friends can do this, and perfectly fine that facebook probably does it all the time.

Having somebody intentionally look into your life, individually, because of some possibly perverse or unwanted interest in you is extremely creepy.

Having a large company store some data you generated in a server farm somewhere while a mindless algorithm does some math with that data to shuffle a few ads around for you to see is utterly banal and not creepy.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#78

Post by kilroy123 »

danatkinson wrote: post #42
dasyatidprime wrote: post #5

So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand,…

Psychic mode is/was amazing. I used to love freaking people out when I saw the 'You feel a disturbance in the force...' message and quickly type 'Hi!'.

Agreed. I would do the same thing.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#79

Post by gertef »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #77
Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a bunch of friends being upset about this. Apparently it's an outrage that your friends can do this, and perfectly fine that facebook probably does it all the time.

Having somebody intentionally look into your life , individually, because of some possibly perverse or unwanted interest in you is extremely creepy. Having a large company store some data you generated in a server farm somewhere while a mindless algorithm does some math with that data to shuffle a few ads around for you to see is utterly banal and not creepy.

> Having a large company store some data you generated in a server farm somewhere

... and make it a available for somebody to intentionally look into your life, individually, because of some possibly perverse or unwanted interest in you

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#80

Post by dang »

autism_detector wrote: post #39

beep beep beep

We've banned this account. Personal attacks aren't allowed here, novelty accounts aren't allowed here, and snark is deprecated here, so please don't do these things on HN.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11805831 and marked it off-topic.

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