> If anything, Live further exposes Facebook’s active, seemingly unquenchable thirst for more ways to become the middleman in your digital interactions. It literally wants you to broadcast your life on the platform. But, as noted earlier, being caged doesn’t come that naturally to humans.
From "The Circle" by Dave Eggers - a "fiction" novel about a Facebook-like mega infoglomerateorporation.
> Lionel can give me access to any of the cameras he wants. It's just like friending someone, but now with access to all their live feeds. Forget cable. Forget five hundred channels. If you have one thousand friends, and they have ten cameras each, you now have ten thousand options for live footage.
...
The words dropped onto the screen:
ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN.
"Folks, we're at the dawn of the Second Englightenment. And I'm not talking about a new building on campus. I'm talking about an era where we don't allow the majority of human thought and action and achievement and learning to escape as if from a leaky bucket."
I'm less interested in Facebook. With this, I'm even less interested as I were.
After deleting the account (which was 6 years old), I came back after 6 months and added a close group of people I actually care about now and in the foreseeable future. I don't like things, don't follow, don't publicly comment on businesses, only use the events and chat. The only app on mobile in use is Messenger with all the data collection turned off, for the site I use a wrapper app.
This seemed to me as a reasonable use of FB. All the rest is junk.
I know you see it as a reasonable "middle ground" solution but you have to be aware that you are still telling FB a lot about yourself. The fact that you only added your actual friends the second time may even make it easier for them to extract profit from your account.
True, I'm willing to let them have that data for the services I actually benefit from. But regarding data, those friends have probably uploaded my contact details using the FB app anyway, so the Facebook had a shadow profile about me, nevertheless me being registered there. At least this way I can foresee what gets posted online about me and somehow control it.
In an ideal world this wouldn't be happening, but I saw that for the mental health sake, it's better to let loose sometimes and just find some compromises.
Oh and on the desktop I only login in incognito mode every couple days, since they use the login cookie to track you online. For Messenger, there's a cool Electron app [1], which brings native notifications.
But if you take your center of activity away from FB and participate in other online communities, then in a way FB has lost, even if you maintain a token presence. You can enjoy different forms of social networking.
I sometimes wonder if there is no 'After Facebook'.
I use different services for different community focuses - like YouTube and Twitch for gaming videos/streams I watch with friends. Instagram for incidental activity picture stuff. Twitter for talking directly "to" companies. Signal for IM stuff. I do actually use Google Hangouts for board game nights and talking about projects sometimes - kinda silly. :-)
I just find Facebook a mess with the ads and disorganization looking at so many facets of my friends' lives. Google did good identifying the need for putting people in circles, but Facebook was so well-established by then. I only want to view things my friends are doing if its a mutual interest, really. Facebook is like manually filtering through several streams of consciousness - it's more exhausting than rewarding.
I don't think Facebook is ever going to fail and be the next MySpace, but I do think social attitudes have changed about using a 'general' social networking site.
The truth is Facebook pretty much has it all when it comes to social networking. It's UI design also speaks well to non technical people (read: most of the world), as it looks like a cluttered newspaper which people are familiar with.
'After Facebook' would likely be on new hardware that gets adopted, such as AR/VR in the next 10 years.
Currently there is no FB alternative. There will be eventually. There is nothing that I can think of that has no alternative. Even Google has Bing which is viable. FB has none.
Read 'More Awesome Than Money,' by Jim Dwyer. It's a history of Diaspora. It was technically OK, but had no use case.
Here's something that might work. FratNet. Get major fraternities and sororities at a big party school to use Diaspora nodes. The pitch is that the frat controls who can get on, and there's no snooping by Facebook. Expand this to frats nationally, creating a big distributed network of frat members, and, over time, alumni.
Twitter and Telegram were all I needed for keeping up with people during a convention last weekend. I can't imagine any of Facebook's services working as well.
People do not stay on Facebook because of its technology or features. They stay on Facebook because of the people they are connected to. I was in my 30s when Facebook came around, which was young enough to still care about, and be excited by re-connecting with old friends from school. The thought of losing touch with them all again made leaving Facebook a difficult choice. I eventually did so, but had to come to terms with the fact that I was dropping a large set of "friends" for the second time in my life.
It just seems unhealthy keeping in contact with that many people who were resigned to the past. Never mind all the game-theory-esk psychological manipulation that social networks push on us.
If people want to keep in contact with their past friends, then get their phone numbers or become pen pals (email or post). There's no dodgy third party trying to manipulate with those methods, just enthusiasm from the participants.
What compels people to use Facebook? That's a genuine question, I don't think I fully understand it.
Speaking personally, the only value it has for me is in keeping some form of connection to people I would otherwise have lost contact with. I don't use it for people I keep in contact with in other ways. For me the staying power of Facebook is that it places low demands on staying connected. The setting also seems to add to the informality, I could see myself preferring to email long time friends (and I sometimes do), but perhaps the directness of connection is off putting for some people who are used to sharing amongst an audience.
Does anyone here have any views about why people continue to use Facebook?
Before Edgerank it was handy to keep in touch with more distant contacts, as you say. Now it's frankly damaging to friendships. Many people I'd once have been on a phone call with once every 3 or 6 months now "keep it to facebook" and barely talk. Edgerank ensures you no longer see those updates from those distant contacts reliably.
Now it's a low budget reality show - over sharing of wonderful or terrible lives - far removed from those people's actual lives. Sharing of politics, grinding axes, in the place of actually doing something, and endless memes. It's the low budget replacement of friendships, but I genuinely don't understand the point or attraction of the new incarnation.
For the most part (there are a few exceptions of people who talk on Facebook regularly) I have gone back to emailing and phone friends, and they do similar.
Ubiquity. Before Facebook there was Email as the ubiquitous communication platform. My family kept in contact using a group, then there was Facebook and now there's a Whatsapp group. In that light it's blindingly obvious why Facebook acquired Whatsapp.
Low friction broadcast to the people that you care about. Emotions and the sustenance of emotions is how you trap human beings. Any other features merely drive us to feel more connected. Businesses want to participate in social media because, ultimately, they can benefit from being included in this emotional process.
I can't move my whole family and my friends off the current ubiquity because it would mean moving all of their emotional properties (friends) off as well.
The move to video makes complete sense: other players have already demonstrated how much more powerful video is as an emotional platform.
While I enjoy Facebook (largely treating it as entertainment) it's Events that's the killer feature for me. Nothing else is as comprehensive for my hobby as a consumer. As a promotor its free (at my usage level) and has the audience. Without this feature I'd probably be elsewhere by now.
Loss of the fb timeline historical data is psychologically very hard to accept even for people wanting to close their accounts.
I've talked about this with friends, relatives and co-workers and while most of them have considered closing their accounts at some point, almost all of them feel like they would be erasing an irreplaceable documented view into their past self.
For me personally I don't post or read since a few years ago, and while I wouldn't mind seeing my timeline erased, what has kept me from deleting y account is simply that i "need" facebook as a contacts /messaging app. Although I would prefer to handle my communication needs exclusively on email, I have people in my life that simply do not reply to email, the only way to reach them is via a facebook message.
> Although I would prefer to handle my communication needs exclusively on email, I have people in my life that simply do not reply to email, the only way to reach them is via a facebook message.
This is a big one. A lot of people I know simply don't send or reply to e-mail anymore. And people don't use messenger services like they used to. So for a lot of people, you're probably going to only message them on Facebook, or lose contact with them.
I definitely think that email and messenger programs are better, since you seem to have actual conversations with people (most Facebook conversations I've had are pretty shallow). But they're not an option in a lot of cases. Also, there's a good chance that you probably should lose contact with most of the people you've met, but that's understandably hard for most people.
Is there some interface that makes the timeline usable? Maybe all these features exist and I just don't know where they are or how to use them but basically I find facebook impossible to find anything but the last 3-10 days of stuff. If I want to find posts from 2013/11-2013/12 from me is there a clear way to do that? Search just seems to so much fail.
It's good for things like "who wants to do <X> tomorrow?" where you're looking to get a crowd together that includes people beyond your close circle of friends.
It's good for tracking what photos are uploaded of you. People don't think for a second that somebody might not want their photo online and they're going to do it anyway. I might as well know what's out there.
Most useful for me, it's good for finding out what's going on in my city. A lot of people just forget to invite somebody if they're not on FB.
>I don't use it for people I keep in contact with in other ways.
Seems to me that the "other ways" is the key barrier for most people. The "other ways" works for you; it doesn't for most others.
The typical answer of alternatives to Facebook is "email" and "what about picking up the phone and calling?" etc but those are not low-friction broadcasting mechanisms. You can't post a "status" via email -- unless you create a "mailing list" of friends or carbon-copy email to a bunch of people. That would be a very nerdy way of doing it. That's also a "push" mechanism instead of the "pull" mechanism of others following your newsfeed on Facebook.
Email also doesn't have a built-in calendar mechansim for coordinating meetups/events. Email also isn't great for sharing a set of vacation photos. (Oops, forgot to attach my photos in my previous email. Or, error message, your free email account is limited to 10MB attachment limit, etc)
For typical non-HN readers of 1+ billion people, the altenatives to Facebook using combination of email + geocities web pages + voice calls is way clunkier. As for the other option of using alternative social networking websites such as Google+, the answer has been covered numerous times: "network effects".
To me, the massive use of Facebook by so many is very logical consequence of how everything else that is not Facebook doesn't work as well.
Personally, my favorite method of keeping in touch is email but I recognize that a billion other people don't think like me.
Because it's the best discussion platform we have on the web, like a less nerdy version of Reddit. Politicians post on it and actually interact with their followers (with proper threads and without dumb character limits). There are groups for funny cat pictures that many people follow. You can ask "hey what do you think of this thing?" and get email-length responses from people you actually know. It's like a centralised comment section for the internet.
Its messenger also works on all platforms. It boggles the mind that this is still the exception. iMessage only works on Apple devices, WhatsApp only supports one device per user, Skype is run by idiots. Messenger has all users, devices and features covered. It's the new IMAP, although WhatsApp/LINE/kik etc are more popular with the mobile-only crowd.
I seem to be kind of unusual here in that I like Facebook. Liked it from day one, still like it and have no major problems with it. The reason is to keep in touch with what friends and family are up to, let them know what I'm up to and message them easily.
No where else I can do that as my friends and family are not on G+, snapchat et al and only a very small percentage on Twitter. I genuinely have a bit of a problem understanding why most people here dislike Facebook. It's a messaging and social news service. If you don't like it use something else. If your friends and family are on it it's probably because they like it.
That said I spend more time on HN as there is more interesting content here on the whole.
As a service used by billions, Facebook is not just some inconsequential site we can ignore; just like major TV channels, it has influence over society at large, and promotes what some of us consider pernicious and unsafe behaviors and expectations. For example, the idea that we should always use our "official" name was relatively uncommon back in 2005/6 when it came about.
But more than that, you can't choose to use something else. Their whole approach right from the start was to get as much info from everyone as possible, tracking people even on third-party sites[1]. Their all-seeing "Like buttons" are everywhere, and only naive people believe they aren't tracking non-users.
Quoting Mr. Zuckerberg himself, "They trust me. Dumb fucks."
Facebook's appeal is a bit like reality television. The horror of the timeline and voyeuristic nature of peering into the intimacies of other people's lives, some of whom you barely know, seems to have appeal for many. The same way watching some C-grade celebrity eat insects on a remote island appeals to many.
I haven't logged into Facebook now for months, and have no compelling reason to do so. Like you, everyone I wish to keep in contact with I have other means to do so, via a good old fashioned telephone call, email or some messaging application (Telegram and to a lesser extent WhatsApp). I can see a time in the future where I do log into Facebook just to obtain the contact details of someone, but that is the extent of it.
The social aspects of Facebook are just another time sink, eating precious minutes which could be better spent on other things (like HN!).
The only way in which my lack of Facebook use has had a negative impact on my life is that a local sports club solely uses a private Facebook group to organise things like training, match transport and events. I just ended up drifting away from the club and don't have much involvement anymore. This is a bit of a shame, and I'm sure I would be more motivated to stay involved if information was distributed via email or published directly on their website.
In my opinion, the most compelling reason is that many people are there. There's nothing Google or Microsoft can't do that facebook is doing, technologically, what they lack is people. I still feel facebook is a good platform for running private groups. For others it gives an audience to show off, not necessarily a bad thing.
Facebook is what every individual wants but is hesitant of accepting.
> In my opinion, the most compelling reason is that many people are there.
Yes, I've seen this in action with real-world groups that form a Facebook group to replace a mailing list, or ( shudder ) a Yahoo Group. 99.99% of their recipients are already on Facebook, it's free-at-point-of-use and it supports group functions.
So they go ahead, freezing-out the ones who aren't on Facebook with quotes like 'just create an account, it's free'.
I'd join Facebook if I could pay a subscription fee each month so as not to be analysed and advertised-to, just to rejoin many groups that have moved there.
I'm a member of a cycling club, 19 of my 20 odd facebook friends are in that club.
It's superb for organising rides, handling new members and generally organising rides since it's near ubiquitous, everyone knows how to work it and it has reasonable features in that direction.
I prefer the UI of Messenger over Email, all my friends use Messenger, some of them couldn't tell me their Email address. The timeline stuff is almost entirely terrible (I'd probably say 1% of it are things I care about, and there's probably nothing I wouldn't find out some other way), but you don't have to look at it - messenger.com and the Messenger app don't push any of it on you.
Because everybody else uses it, that's herd thinking at it's best. There are many features that people use it for, private groups for example. It's great for spreading gossip and what have you.
I just added this extension, but in your experience, how common is this method by sites? I received 11k+ on newyorker, is that a lot in comparison to some other sites?
"We study how the fence weaves into and out of the trees. And one day, when the sun has gone down and the guards are asleep, we catapult over to the other side, and see all the things we couldn’t see before."
Yep, and some of us even see the fence being built and make sure we stay on the outside. It's easy to fence-in dopey ruminants, but wily canids prefer to keep their options a little more flexible.
I refuse, as much as possible, to be herded around, sheep-like, and am repulsed at the thought of being used, as do these "social" sites seeking to "monetize" me, as grist for their psychological-manipulation-for-profit mills. No product, I!
I use it to keep in touch with friends around the world, for free. I don't spend more than a few minutes on it a week. I do use the messenger app as the main way i keep in touch with people around the world though. I guess that makes me one those dopey sheep.
They've got their friends and "friends" in a walled off room, socially connected by leisure activities with questionable value to the residents. It's more of a slum filled with degenerates and graffiti... but hey, people come for the high not the scenery. The heavy users are there for life but even the occasional users keep coming back.
Then of course there's the dealer managing the place... they're the only one to actually benefit from the operation.
I'm being a little facetious, but in short: no. There are a multitude options for chat that provide a better experience, keeping in contact was not a problem in the first place, and all that's left are games or wanting to show off/snoop on lives. I would argue it provides a largely negative value if you consider filter bubbles and their impact on society. Shareholders are the only ones that derive value from FB.
> There are a multitude options for chat that provide a better experience
"Better", huh? One of those opinion words. They like it, you don't. Some people like IRC. It's a funny old world.
"keeping in contact was not a problem in the first place"
A bit simplistic, this. You could have said the same about email when it replaced snail-mail for most people, most of the time. But now email has been largely abandoned, thanks to spam and "better" alternatives which let you know when someone has received, then read, your message. Facebook messenger is amongst the most popular of these because they've listened to what people want, and responded.
> and all that's left are games or wanting to show off/snoop on lives.
I don't spend more than a few minutes a week on facebook itself (i only really got an account for messenger, because just about everyone is on facebook so it was easier than convincing them to get a google+ account, or installing 4 or 5 other apps) but I understand that the gaming thing is waning. Showing off - well, if you're talking about people talking about what they do, sharing holiday photos etc then I guess you could use that description, I suppose. Is there a way of sharing holiday photos in a way which you personally would not describe as showing off?
"I would argue it provides a largely negative value if you consider filter bubbles and their impact on society."
I think very carefully before installing apps or using web services so as to avoid anything that makes me part of the problem. Nah, just kidding. I've heard this sort of thing before. You're one of these people who believe that people all used to read the same newspapers and watch the same tv and got exposed to differing opinions, and now people can choose their sources they'll just choose stuff they already agree with, and facebook is part of that? I think you'd have to go back a long, long way for that to have ever been true, and even when it was there are endless studies to show that people reject/ignore stuff they don't agree with, and give sources they do agree with the benefit of the doubt. And in any event, it's not like many people are using facebook as their main news source. And even if they did, it sounds like you're above all that, so your use of facebook would have a positive impact on some of the sheeple on there, and can help to make the world a better place.
Or you could just use it, like I do, to keep in touch with your mates.
I'm going to dissent with the majority of commenters here and say yes, it provides a lot of value to its users. Why do you think so many startups are squashed because they're just subsets of Facebook functionality?
With the network effects of having over a billion people (and most of the developed world) on Facebook in mind, consider that all of these people now have free and highly functional voip/video calling wherever they have internet. They have a group and event management web apps with sophisticated privacy controls. Facebook also serves as an event and news discovery app. It's also an effective publishing platform, though the line between statuses and articles can be blurry.
Note that I'm not listing things that Facebook users can do, but things that I've seen Facebook users actively employ.
And all of this for the small (dollar) cost of giving up your email address and personal information. Which, for most people, as we've discovered, is an acceptable trade. Most people's personal information is not that valuable to them, given an agent that is trustworthy enough. Consider that most Americans give up their social security numbers on things as trivial as a job application.
In summary, outliers like HN commenters may disagree, but most people get a lot more value out of Facebook than they sacrifice.
In a sense that addictions provide value while simultaneously extracting event more, all with the willful participation of the user (consent seemed like the wrong word).
Not op, but no. It's an absolute time-sink with no value to anyone but advertisers, and anyone involved in an actual "group" that performs work or collaboration.
Outside of that it's a meme sharing, conspiracy fueling, agenda line toeing shithole.
When I check my Facebook feed, as I do once every 3 months or so, I find literally nothing from my friends and a whole lot of sponsored posts or posts from groups I follow. I've shared this with friends and basically confirmed that Facebook has become this place you don't really have much use for anymore but you can't really leave because of years of shit you've dumped into it and connections you've made. So now you just sort of quietly linger, read some spam and close the tab for a while.
For me it would be as simple as an alternative messenger that followed me around from page to page. It could be injected like a Greasemonkey script or browser extension, even.
Facebook is the 90s/00s Oracle of social media software. Horrifically evil, impossible to get rid of and only hipsters use the alternatives. Open source eventually got enough strength to rival the functionality and everyone who could jumped ship. If you continue the analogy, the only way to beat Facebook is for an open protocol like email or something else to gain traction among Facebook detractors. Because mobile is a walled garden, we are going through the IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, all-in-one is better phase. I am optimistic that there is some as-yet unindentified format for open communication that will win in a way that allows everyone to access it exactly how they want to (like email). Sure, the most fearful, slow moving among us might stick to the tried and true. But at least my parents and high school friends will have an account with the open protocol, allowing me and everyone else not to have to choose between social inclusion and using Facebook.
If Facebook and Oracle are "horrifically evil", I'm at a loss for what you'd call atrocities of war.
I don't mean to pick you out personally, but considering that this is the top comment in the thread, the anti-BigCo sentiment on Hacker News is getting a little ridiculous.
Are atrocities of war the only things that can be called evil? If so, then clearly nothing Facebook does is evil.
However, Facebook does alot of things that by any other definition are evil. They perform questionably ethical experiments on their users, prey on users' ignorance of the data Facebook can see and use, are at the forefront of manipulative advertising (using fabricated social proof of friends, for example), and show a continual disregard for ethics that suggests worse in the future.
This is a company that has essentially tricked people into handing over a treasure trove of data that is unprecedented in human history, and they're only starting to figure out how they can take advantage of that. How can any good come of it?
No one here is comparing this to actual war crimes, but the fact remains that they are in a position to take advantage of over a billion people. Even if in a small way, that adds up.
OP's point was that using the term "horrifically evil" is horrifically hyperbolic.
What do you mean by "tricking people" to hand over a treasure trove of data? Ignoring the many benefits that FB provides (reconnecting with old friends, easy group communication, meeting people, convenient logins for newer applications, discovering good content, etc....), what they are doing with advertising isn't "evil" in any sense.
Facebook is a /free/ service that delivers targeted ads. Would you rather ads be untargeted? Millions of people benefit from having advertisements displayed to them showing stuff that they actually want to buy. Also, millions of businesses benefit from being able to target niche markets due to FB's data collection.
People WANT to find products that are relevant to them, and so many businesses have become successful by being able to reach those customers through FB's platform.
Facebook doesn't actually sell the data to advertisers. They just allow customers to blindly target demographic groups through their platform. It doesn't violate people's privacy in the slightest.
Have they done some unethical psychological experiments? Yes. But come on, I wouldn't call that evil... especially when they do so much good. By that measure, any university that has been around for 50+ years must be evil too!
> are at the forefront of manipulative advertising (using fabricated social proof of friends, for example)
I don't know about good and evil but war and megacorps both redraw the map; in that respect they're similar.
I think facebook gets a lot of hate because it's a community tool designed to organize communities around external influences. Alexis de tocqueville talked about americans dropping everything at work to go build a church or school (community goods). Facebook is people dropping work to look at bikini photos or 'engage with brands'.
The alternative is communities like kickstarter, where like-minded people get together to invent something new. It's niche and local; if you want to only support kickstarters in your city or neighborhood, you can. Many kickstarter projects have supporters who are involved in the project IRL.
If you could choose between the facebook economy and the kickstarter economy, which do you pick?
If I accept the premise that attempting to quantify "evil" is coherent, I'm willing to agree that there are different axes to do so. But I honestly can't see Facebook as an entity being very far along any of them.
I think this is half true. Really, we are not measuring evil, we are measuring character. And evil as a metric of character is different from evil as a metric of war crimes. Doing things because you can instead of because it is the right thing to do. Highly subjective all around.
I'd invite you to read "IBM and the Holocaust"[0] if you'd like a good analysis of how a corporation can commit atrocities of war through the types of data gathering Facebook and Oracle do daily.
the reason twitter beat rss is because
1) it was a directory of things to follow
2) it offered a public comment layer
for something like rss to overtake twitter, you need a technorati/yahoo/dmoz to index it, and you need an annotation layer like reddit comments or hypothesis
> If anything, Live further exposes Facebook’s active, seemingly unquenchable thirst for more ways to become the middleman in your digital interactions. It literally wants you to broadcast your life on the platform. But, as noted earlier, being caged doesn’t come that naturally to humans.
From "The Circle" by Dave Eggers - a "fiction" novel about a Facebook-like mega infoglomerateorporation.
> Lionel can give me access to any of the cameras he wants. It's just like friending someone, but now with access to all their live feeds. Forget cable. Forget five hundred channels. If you have one thousand friends, and they have ten cameras each, you now have ten thousand options for live footage. ... The words dropped onto the screen: ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN. "Folks, we're at the dawn of the Second Englightenment. And I'm not talking about a new building on campus. I'm talking about an era where we don't allow the majority of human thought and action and achievement and learning to escape as if from a leaky bucket."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)