Ask HN: Who is already sick of all of these "Like" buttons plastered everywhere?

[theli0nheart]

I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly, because it's already starting to get ridiculous even just a couple days after being introduced.

[cpr]

I completely ignore all that social networking stuff; my brain sees them as ads and blocks them subconsciously.

[Batsu]

I'm the same way. I often read articles that I would like to share with people, but since I'm more interested in the ensuing discussion, I'd rather directly link a person during a conversation (or as a way to start one) rather than throw it at my Facebook page or similar.

I consider sites like HN quite different, as that is their sole purpose :)

[jimmyjim]

Not to worry, there'll soon be plenty of Greasemonkey scripts that take care of this well enough for you that your brain can tend to other tasks.

[anigbrowl]

Same here...there are so mamy of them they are shrinking down all the time. Makes me feel a bit sorry for bloggers, watching their retweet and like and digg scores all the time.

[bprater]

Can we re-phrase the question in less of a reddit-style way?What's the discussion we want to have behind this?

[resdirector]

I can't agree more. Look at the first comment: 20 karma points, and no real substance, hackerish or otherwise.

I'd like to see a discussion about (a) what it actually means to "like" something, (b) what demographics currently use the "like" buttons (c) are there any startup ideas to revolutionize the distribution of information etc.

[Detrus]

Poor digg, that was supposed to be their trick

[peterzakin]

People may end up preferring liking to digging (though who knows at this point), but when it comes to actively looking for interesting content, digg's still got something to hang onto. It begs the question, however, whether facebook will ever make an attempt to organize all of the outside links users promote so that such content becomes discoverable by topic and not just incidental lines on the newsfeed?

[tdmackey]

Can't say I've noticed one yet. :(

[ElbertF]

Surely you mean ":)"?

[imurray]

I added the following rule to Adblock plus:

   * facebook.com/plugins*

The iframes disappear seamlessly.

[asdflkj]

Is "Who else" a legitimate question that you can "ask HN" nowadays? I've been gone for a while.

[metamemetics]

Simple solution: Complainbook.com. The web is viewed through a frame that that adds Dislike buttons to every piece of content. It aggregates what people are disliking and recommends things to the user that they will be sure to hate. It will instantly gain a high market share amongst content degregators, and Facebook will see everyone disliking their Like buttons with the Dislike button and be less evil.

It would also include location based features where users upload geotags of places they've never been, nor would want to go to.

[asnyder]

Not only are they bad, they slow down the rendering speed of the pages they're on.

http://twitter.com/SlexAxton/status/12663859611

[woid]

Well it depends how you look at it. It definitely adds to network traffic and CPU load. But IFRAME content and javascript-injected IFRAME are both loaded asynchronously.

Browsers are pretty good in progressive rendering of page content these days. So user should see the main page first and then it starts loading these additional resources. So no big deal IMHO. The button should not degrade user experience during page loading.

[aschobel]

We use it via FBML and JavaScript SDK and the slow down seems to be minimal. We load their script right before </body>.

Biggest annoyance is that it doesn't degrade very gracefully when FB has availability problems, you get a white square in the page in Firefox.

[andrewcooke]

You can block them in Firefox by using the RequestPolicy plugin. At least, I assume that you can, because I am not actually seeing any ;o)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9727

At first it seems like overkill, because it blocks sites from accessing data from other sites, but you can enable certain sites (either globally or on a per-site basis) and it remembers those, so after a little playing around, sites you visit frequently look quite normal.

It's also very interesting seeing how people assemble sites these days...

[chaosmachine]

"I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly"

http://www.openlike.org/

[pedalpete]

I thought things were getting ridiculous with all the buzz, digg, sphere, reddit buttons already. From what I can see, those are being replaced with a single option (though I admit, I haven't seen many of the facebook implementations yet).

It is nice to have a 'standard' rather than voting for multiple items. At the same time, how much is liking something really doing for ya?

I don't think it has the benefit of a community like HN, so Facebook doesn't have it all yet.

[alexro]

Do you think reddit (or twitter or digg or stumbleupon) users will start liking the "like" and prefer it to replace other buttons? Completely agreeing about the ridiculous aspect of so many buttons though.

[kevinh]

I haven't noticed this yet. Would someone kindly point me towards an example?

[j-g-faustus]

http://techcrunch.com/

Every story has a Like, a Buzz and a Retweet button.

[barredo]

IMDb updated with the button the same day FB announced it

[_ouxp]

I'm just seeing a lot of broken iframes because I've now blocked facebook & their subdomains on my personal machine.

[petercooper]

Why do we need all these buttons to do things we already all have our own specific ways of doing?

If you want to bookmark something, bookmark it in the way you know how (in browser, Delicious, etc). If you want to tweet about something, go tweet about it in the client of your choice.

[throwthisaway]

It's the new "tweet this" -- a stupid trend people will wonder about in a few years.

[resdirector]

I don't care for the unnormalized "number of diggs/tweets/karma" etc.

I'd actually use the "like" buttons if they learned what I liked/disliked, rather than just being there to show off an unnormalized and somewhat meaningless figure.

[Raphael]

Or any kind of sharing widgets, for that matter. If only web admins would trust visitors to have their own bookmarklets or extensions, so that pages wouldn't have all the cruft.

[alexro]

"food and shows"- that's what the masses want, unfortunately

[jff]

I think "bread and circuses" is more standard :)

[barredo]

I actually like them.

But someone could make a quick userscript to hide them :-)

Edit:

  // ==UserScript==
  // @name           I-Dont-Like-The-New-Facebook-Like
  // @namespace      I-Dont-Like-The-New-Facebook-Like
  // @description    Hide all Facebook 'Like' buttons
  // @include        *
  // ==/UserScript==
  
  (function () {
  	var i = document.getElementsByTagName('iframe');
  	if(i) {
  		for(e in i) {
  			if(i[e].src.match(/http\:\/\/www.facebook.com\/widgets\/like.php/gi)) {
  				i[e].style.display = 'none';
  				i[e].style.visibility = 'hidden';
  			}
  		}
  	}
  })();

[aw3c2]

I have iframes globally disabled with only few websites allowed to use them. Try it.