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Facebook the Devourer

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Re: Facebook the Devourer

#71

Post by adgar2 »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #49
notatoad wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has a search algorithm that outperforms any other. Their value proposition is that they can help you find what you are looking for better than their competitors can. Amazon has a vast network of suppliers and infrastructure. Their value proposition is that they can provide better selection and delivery than their competition. In both cases, the value is provided by the company. Facebook is a website that lets…

Google has almost no lock-in at all for their main economic engine, search. If a notably better competitor comes along tomorrow, within a year the whole money empire could crumble. People would just go to the new place, one at a time. Facebook has TREMENDOUS lock-in. For any new place to have value, it's got to have the majority of the people Facebook has change over in a very short timeframe. The problem with techni…

Just to be clear: you are agreeing with your parent poster. Here's your response: Facebook's value IS lock-in, and companies with real technical prowess will fail because they rely on producing something new.

Re: Facebook the Devourer

#72

Post by hellosmithy »

NegativeK wrote: post #15
jiggy2011 wrote: post #6

This is one thing that has always made me skeptical about FBs survival. The majority of it's use seems to be for very short term things, like friends sharing what they are currently doing. There is little value in most FB posts that are years old. As opposed to wikipedia which is a gradually building blob of knowledge. Let's say FB was down for a week, many people would use G+ instead for their social networking need…

For an individual, Facebook's value is in the connections that people have formed on the site. If Facebook was down for a week, there'd be people searching confusedly for the next social platform That Everyone Uses. Would Plus receive more traffic? Well, yeah. But so would Twitter and other social networks. My mom, for one, would return to sending email jokes instead of resharing Facebook stuff. She doesn't know what…

Metcalfe's law. This is really pretty valuable though. Not many people are likely to hang around on an empty social network no matter how great the UI. Personally I'm pretty fed up with Facebook, but living abroad it is still quite simply the easiest way for me to stay in touch with a lot of my friends.

Re: Facebook the Devourer

#73

Post by hakaaak »

tptacek wrote: post #12

I have 340 Facebook friends (I feel like this is on the middle-lower end of typical). I scrolled down several "pages" on my timeline and saw zero evidence of any those people --- who are predominantly friends and family, or people I went to high school with --- were playing anything like Farmville. Most updates on my timeline are people sharing pictures of the city they're visiting, or of their kids. All of these peo…

I spend more time on Facebook than I do any other social networking site. I wouldn't be on it if it weren't interesting. My friends aren't on Twitter or G+, I've never intentionally gone on 4chan, and I just go on youtube for the free music and funny clips. Facebook is where it's at, so I also disagree with the author.

Re: Facebook the Devourer

#74

Post by tambourine_man »

jlujan wrote: post #50
coffeemug wrote: post #20

It devours everything it touches and produces nothing of value, including—ironically—their stock price. It produces something of value to me . I live in CA, my parents live in NY. We're in different worlds. I can't possibly communicate what my world is like to them via a daily phone call. But I can share bits and pieces of info on Facebook that they see, and it's a wonderful medium for us to have shared experiences f…

>it's a wonderful medium for us to have shared experiences for things that otherwise would be extremely difficult to share. His rant doesn't touch this because that is the perceived value to individuals that facebook provides. Cannot really argue against that and I am glad people are able to use it like this. However, there is something in this "value" that bothers me and why I do not use facebook. From the facebook…

Exactly. And this I hadn't seen:

We make the tools and services that allow people to feel human

We need tools and services to feel human? I know it's marketing speak but geez.

Re: Facebook the Devourer

#75

Post by thewarrior »

tambourine_man wrote: post #43
benihana wrote: post #18

Oh look. Another blog post decrying the evils of facebook that is in reality saying "I don't like facebook, therefor it offers no value whatsoever to anyone else," like it's some universal truth. A lot of hacker/geek types seem 1. to hate facebook and 2. to be unable to empathize with anyone who doesn't share their dogmatic technological beliefs. Can we stop this already? Most people on facebook enjoy using it. Most…

Can we stop this already? No we can't. Imagine yourself going back to the 80s and explaining the Web to someone. It's as close to utopia as you can get. Most people probably wouldn't believe it. But it's real, it's here and it's amazing. I'd argue that Facebook undermines a lot of what makes the Web great. And since it's being confused with the Web itself, by being so popular and pervasively devouring, it could be a…

As a young internet user I would like to know what this utopia was like ..

Re: Facebook the Devourer

#76

Post by dkarl »

tptacek wrote: post #66
dkarl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you long ago hid messages from Farmville and similar games and forgot about it. There's no way you know 340 people who don't play Facebook games. Yet I can use Facebook today to find out about meat specials at my butcher, or someone selling artisanal pickles, or a new theater company, or someone making custom knives as their hobby hoping to try to make a living doing it. And because of the stupid blue "l…

How does it harm small businesses when people "like" Walmart on Facebook? You can't buy artisanal marshmallows at Walmart, and it's no cheaper for Walmart to collect "likes" on Facebook than it is for Hipster Marshmallow Factory. I just don't see the controversy here.

I didn't have an issue with "liking" businesses until Facebook decided to let the highest bidder influence how users' likes are presented to their friends.

One issue I have with it is that promoted content makes no attempt at being valuable to users at all. I get endless reminders that so-and-so "likes" Wal-Mart or Amazon, but nothing about businesses I've never heard of. It's the opposite of being friendly to the tenuous, fledgling businesses for whom Facebook can be so helpful. People do their best to be interesting and to promote businesses they love that their friends might want to learn about. They don't endlessly shill brands that all of their friends already know about. Promoted content is a way for big boring brands to muscle their way in, through sheer advertising dollars, into a medium that naturally favors novelty and underdogs. Also, since companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon use their Facebook pages to direct advertising to users, promoted content is advertising advertising. Ads for ads. I don't know if I can articulate a reason why advertising for advertising makes me feel like a line of absurdity has been crossed (or a shark has been jumped) but it doesn't feel right.

Another thing that bothers me is that they use my friends' names. My friend may truly like Wal-Mart, but is she okay with her name being used to suggest a page to me over and over again in the hopes that the fifth or tenth or twentieth time I see it, I might relent and click "like?" I'm not cool with Facebook using my name that way. If Facebook wants to suggest one of my likes to a friend of mine, because Facebook believes that friend is likely to be interested, that's great. That makes me actually feel kind of good about Facebook having so much data about us. If Facebook wants to nag my friend to check out a page because that advertiser is paying Facebook to nag him, well, maybe that's the price of using Facebook, but please don't use my name. I'm sure the TOS says they can, but common courtesy should apply. Perhaps it is public information that you support a particular candidate in the presidential election, but it would be out of line for me to send hundreds of emails to HN users saying, "THOMAS H. PTACEK THINKS YOU SHOULD VOTE FOR MITT HUSSEIN JOHNSON." The opinion might be yours, but the obnoxious style wouldn't be, so it wouldn't be fair to invoke your name.

Re: Facebook the Devourer

#77

Post by jlujan »

adgar2 wrote: post #71
waterlesscloud wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has almost no lock-in at all for their main economic engine, search. If a notably better competitor comes along tomorrow, within a year the whole money empire could crumble. People would just go to the new place, one at a time. Facebook has TREMENDOUS lock-in. For any new place to have value, it's got to have the majority of the people Facebook has change over in a very short timeframe. The problem with techni…

Just to be clear: you are agreeing with your parent poster. Here's your response: Facebook's value IS lock-in, and companies with real technical prowess will fail because they rely on producing something new.

> Facebook has TREMENDOUS lock-in. For any new place to have value, it's got to have the majority of the people Facebook has > Facebook's value IS lock-in

How can a website lock you in to only being able to share things with your friends through their website? Do they lock you out of your friendships if you quit the site? This is a very bizarre notion to me. Facebook accounts have no value, the people behind the accounts and the relationships have the value. Facebook disappearing wouldn't prevent you from communicating with them. Is this real life?

> and companies with real technical prowess will fail because they rely on producing something new

Err, what? Do you mean that smart people working on hard problems are destined to fail? That facebook has some how consumed all of the available users and prevented them from existing any where else on the internet?

Re: Facebook the Devourer

#78

Post by tubbo »

Facebook is about events. It will always be valuable as long as it remains the center of the entertainment industry for finding out about when the next party or show is.

Re: Facebook the Devourer

#79

Post by dwoldrich »

Facebook (and now DataStax) has given me Apache Cassandra, and for that, I will be eternally grateful. Why did Zuck release it? It's so valuable and disruptive, feels like a "becuz I can" move.

I don't even keep a Facebook account, so to them I must be just about the worst moocher ever. :P

Re: Facebook the Devourer

#80

Post by alphang »

Apocryphon wrote: post #5

Facebook, at its core, is about private (hah!) networks of one's friends and families. It was always designed to be insular, to form self-selecting groups. It's a platform that's inward looking. The inability to create and publicize new content with it to the Net at large is a feature, not a bug.

That's the thing that's been bugging me for the past year or so. I don't know about other people, but it's clear to me that Facebook's default privacy settings — the way it's nicely set up so that you overshare with the whole world — is NOT how most users would use it.

So why keep it around, Facebook?* From my vantage point, it's kinda evil, and it's anti-user. Why can't you stop being Twitter and just be an awesome private network?

* (rhetorical question)

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