It's interesting to see how many people make excuses for still using Facebook because it makes event organizing and the like easier. I'm 26 and never used Facebook. My friends organize group events all the time, I'm always kept in the loop because I text my friends and ask what they are doing this weekend and/or meet with my friends regularly enough that they let me know what's going on. It's become well known that I don't get updates through FB so my friends will text me invites if I haven't asked for an update.
People act as if Facebook is the only way to keep up with friends but it's just not the case. Every phone can still receive SMS and you can gasp meet your friends personally to catch up.
Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does Facebook status updates really make me feel more connected to this person? My answer would be no, and I accept the fact that I just wont see my friends who live in other locations as much as I'd like, and I simply try to make it a habit of catching up when I'm in town.
There was life before Facebook and there can be life without Facebook, stop making excuses.
Hey folks, John Biggs here. I wrote this as a reaction to reason news and it comes at the end of a slow boil. I think we can make better tools than this one and I believe Facebook - and other social media - were originally quite useful and have now devolved due to market pressure. I'm definitely a hypocrite, as well. I still use most things to _broadcast_ not communicate and that's primarily because I've spent 20 years journalizing and am used to the constant, one-sided flow of information.
That said I deleted all social apps except for Twitter and, for some masochistic reason, LinkedIn and am ready to tear it all out of my life step by step. It's a poison.
I killed my account somewhere around 4 years ago. Overall, I am probably a better person (interpersonally / socially) because I have to actually talk to people in order to "catch up". However, there are some difficult downsides. For instance, given that basically everyone else that I know still uses it, all of my friends now have to single me out with a text when they create an event and want me there or post about something they wanted to get the news out about. Basically, being the one (or one of the few) non-facebook user(s) in my friend group effectively shifts the burden of communicating with me to the person communicating, from the app that was specifically designed for mass communication. So expect to be left out of the loop a lot. Expect to lose some friends (because you won't communicate with all of them anymore). Expect to have to put more effort into maintaining your friendships (since you won't have that constantly opened communication transport that you can easily use).
That being said, I'll never go back to using Facebook. It changed my behavior patterns too much and I was just not happy.
I really appreciate the fact you call yourself out as a hypocrite. A hypocrite can still be completely correct (we are all sinners, after all) and I think society would be more well right now if people understood that fact.
I too have been slowly weaning myself off Facebook. Step 1 for those who want to but can't bring themselves to is to just be logged in on your phone or tablet. Has done wonders for me.
What are your opinions on less personal social media sites like Hacker News and Reddit?
My enjoyment with Facebook ceased the moment Edward Snowden became a household name. I realized then how naked my information was in a world of bad actors. I only use Facebook as a simple contacts list these days.
But it’s harder to wean myself off HN/Reddit, as I get more value of useful information from the former and entertainment from the latter, than I have ever received from Facebook, even though both sites can lend themselves to mindless consumption and propaganda/manipulation, like FB.
Is there a “right” way for social media to be? Or are we resigned to a muddy middle ground forever?
That's the truth. I quit Facebook and most similar sites, and my social life improved quickly. I also get a lot more done without those distractions.
I block all of their companies in my hosts file and avoid their software libraries (React, etc.) whenever possible too. The company is having a terrible effect on the world and should not be supported. It was fundamentally broken from the start. A platform that connects all the world's people already exists -- it's called the WWW.
I know people who are desperately trying to quit, but they can't, because the site has locked their social connections within the platform, and they are addicted.
I must be part of an A/B test where I only see baby pictures from friends and family, updates from local businesses, and videos of cool construction equipment from TechInsider.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels could improve on the margin, but realistically, the problem with social is us. Ask friends and family to go back to sharing their unhinged political views in the form of badly punctuated emails, as God intended. If they continue to share, unfollow.
Social media can be as polarizing or as pleasant as you make it. Foisting blame on Facebook might feel good, but it won't solve the problem.
I've largely stopped using Facebook, but my experience had nothing in common with the author's.
The content was fine, I followed things and people I actually liked and made adjustments when that changed. I felt no addiction loop, my usage time was limited, and it was honestly quite a nice site. Sentiments like "In the absence of human interaction we cling to whatever dark simulacrum is available" are absolutely alien to me; Facebook was a source of real social interaction, and almost entirely additive with other sources of real interaction.
I stopped because advertisements, autoplay videos, and timeline changes slowly made Facebook unusable as a site. Content I liked was consistently buried in favor of content I didn't like, in ways I couldn't fix with settings or following preferences. The discussions of Facebook usage time rising baffle me; my experience was of a good, usable site that destroyed its usability by trying to monetize.
No. Facebook proudly does specific psychological experiments on its users. Facebook intentionally decides that it will make some users sad or depressed, just to see if it can. And it can. And it is proud of it. Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression.
Facebook is a fucking poison. The problem is not with us. The problem is with large scale propaganda networks and centrally-controlled social networks with misaligned incentives. The problem is Facebook and the core problem is the structure and incentives of corporations in our current not-well-enough-regulated capitalism.
realistically, the problem with social is us. Ask friends and family to go back to sharing their unhinged political views in the form of badly punctuated emails, as God intended. If they continue to share, unfollow.
This is certainly a problem, but I think more important than this is the illusion of having control over what you see on social media.
You may think you can curate your social media feeds by unfollowing people who share things you don't want to see, but as long as a social media service's feed/timeline (and primary revenue stream) is still based on an easily gamed algorithm and paid ads, you're mistaken.
Social media sites will cater access to their API's to groups who are willing to pay for it. So, even if you can unfollow your uncle who shares "unhinged political views", you can't hide cleverly disguised, hyper targeted, ads, advertising both products and ideas.
This is true. The psychological effects of anything are due to how one uses it. It doesn't matter how addictive something is made to be because a good deal of the addiction is psychological. Opioids are very addictive, but most hospital patients don't use outside of the hospital after their pain has been treated. It's because their pain is not psychological. People can become addicted to Facebook, and yes it was designed to be this way, but I can use Facebook for the purpose I intend if only I am self-aware and know my limits and can stay within those limits.
It's really like anything you can do-- anything. The threshold is defined by the person. The absolutist claim that anything is 100% bad is dangerous and false.
The tools we make and use are defined by us individually. The "mob" is the collection of people in certain echo chambers, and I'm sorry but if those people don't realize they're in an echo chamber, it's not the fault of the tools. We can't be going around limiting everything because the majority don't know how to use it. The majority will always be that way-- though I will note that I think this "mob" majority are better-equipped psychologically with each passing generation.
I was talked into creating a FB account by some friends a long time ago. I found that I was losing respect for my friends, as it brought out the parts of them I did not want to know about.
I also noticed a disturbing pattern straight away. FB was pushing these little games at me. The questions in each of the little games were nearly identical to the questions in psych and personality tests I was required to take in the military. To the best of my knowledge FB does not have the clearance for this data, so I deleted my FB account and blocked their domains.
AFAIK, I have not really missed out on anything important by not being a member of that system.
it's not just facebook doing this. twitter, pinterest, reddit and countless others do the same. heck... there is even a story today about google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610088
and yes, i know some people will say... but that google story is about law enforcement using warrants... which i will counter with, doesn't matter, it shows that these companies don't care about your privacy and will fold in "defending" it when challenged.
if you care about your privacy, don't give _any_ company, _any_ information about you, in _any_ way.
While I agree, there is a huge difference in impact. Facebook has more users, reach a way bigger demographic and has access to a much, much, much broader range of data. Not to mention is has instagram and whatsapp too.
It's two order of magnitude bigger than twitter, reddit, pinterest, etc.
The only ones that compares is Google.
But while I have no problem living without a Facebook account, living without Google is way harder.
E.g:
- no hangout is the easiest. I hated it.
- dropping calendar was easy. It was not that good anyway. I missed the integration with a lot of 3rd party though.
- I leaved gmail. It tooks years and many problems with accounts came with it. The competitors UI are worse.
- I tried to leave gmap. But competitors don't have street view, shop open shedules or nearly as accurate traveling times. And waze eventually got bough by google. Maps.me is alright for when I don't have internet, but it's nowhere close to gmap for big cities if you have internet.
- I tried, very hard, to quit google search. Bing. DuckDuckGo.Qwant. They are ok. But I do hundreds of queries a day. Ok doesn't cut it. And if you are looking for result in another language than english, forget about it.
- now for the phone. Well, I won't go apple. Mozilla and MS are no longer here. I tried SailOS for a year. I don't recommend it. So android is what's left if you want a smartphone. I tried rooting, but it's dangerous, and takes time. So now I just avoid using a google account on the phone, which is, well, something at least. And make it extra hard to install apps.
That's a lot of trouble for so-so results.
Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?
So to me, no facebook + ublock + no google account is like when I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. It's 80/20, but for privacy instead of sanity.
However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.
Facebook's raison d'être is to be a reflection of your real life identity. In that way it is unlike all those other social media sites you mentioned. Sure you could use your real identity on those sites but it's not required and many people opt not to and it has no impact on their ability to use the platform.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I know black and white thinking is very appealing but we don't need to go back to living in a yurt in the wilderness just because facebook is a net drain on society. I've been participating on forums all over the internet for the past 20 years and it's been the catalyst for some of the greatest things in my life.
The top comment on that story about google points out the main problem:
> 2. On multiple recent occasions, police in North Carolina have quietly been successful in obtaining search warrants that force Google to turn over these records. Rather than "standard" search warrants asking for the location of a particular suspect in a crime, these "reverse" or "area based" warrants ask for time and location data for all users who have entered a geographical area during a time of interest. The records returned are initially anonymous account numbers, and the police then make followup requests for identifying information of the subset of accounts that they think are of interest to the case.
Sure you can delete your account on reddit. They'll still track you as if you have one just like the facebook buttons or all those creative new tracking shit we regularly read about here.
In the end, you don't have to be an extremist. Just don't post everything and keep in mind that you are being tracked. This is the internet for you today.
I deleted my Facebook account in 2012. Haven't missed it. Let's hope this poor soul can finally be brave enough to find the close account button. Might not even need to write a script to do that.
I deleted mine around the same time, but it was easy for me because a) I was pressured into having one in the first place by work colleagues, and 2) I don't actually have much of a social network. The few months I spent with FB was like most human social interaction is to me: vapid, meaningless, and utterly tedious.
My understanding, though, is that others don't have this same experience with real life social interaction, so might not as easily notice how much FB amplifies it.
Agreed. I deleted my account 2 weeks ago and haven't looked back either. Instagram on the other hand is still one of my favorite ways to share photos with my friends.
I think the facebook(.com) product has some serious soul-searching to do and if they continue to ignore their monumental problem -- it will not end well for them, nor their stockholders.
I think it's too useful a tool for managing my social network to delete. Event planning, group chats etc are actually pretty HARD to organize without something like it. The impressive bit is the reach. Even my non technical friends and relatives know it.
I try to suggest people just stop giving facebook their information. Don't share anything, don't like anything, absolutely never install "apps" or click ads. Avoid facebook as a sign on provider to other sites. Use good privacy tools in your browser and never hit fb "like" buttons on another site. Avoid linking your accounts to facebook from other applications (instagram, spotify, ...).
I'd love to see a browser plugin that did all this that I could recommend to friends and relatives. A plugin that simply made a visit to facebook completely useless to facebook.
Maybe you're in a different situation than me but I can easily round up all of my friends with a few phone calls. "Hey Tony. I'm planning a party on the first at 6:00pm. Would you mind letting Sue and Mark know they're invited?" That also easily works by email and text if I insist on using technology.
Humans have been organizing into social groups and gatherings for tens of thousands of years without the aid of technology. Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook?
I apologize if my candor is overly blunt, but your comment is an excuse to continue your addiction. Nothing more.
Have you looked at GroupMe? It has the ability to do all the "Social Planning" you need and you don't even need the app to participate in it.
I know it's more common with younger people (at my university there's not a single undergrad who doesn't have it on their phone), but I know some actual adults use it too.
I got rid of Facebook years ago. Finding a useful app for planning an event is very difficult, but just using email works fine. I just use calendar invites and I follow up with chat / SMS if needed.
I can't think of any reason FB is better for chat than any other platform, but SMS group chat is available as a last resort.
"It is a cancer." Spoken like someone who has to spend 6 months working up the nerve to delete his account. There's no need to get all ugly and overstated about it, like an overgrown teenager yelling & saying nasty things to his mom instead of moving out. Just do it and walk away.
Not that it's not a cancer. (Although it's more like obesity or type 2 diabetes, in that it's you doing it to yourself through many small bad choices.) But if it's a cancer now, then it always was one, Captain Newsflash.
Just walk away. Yes it is that easy. You'll never see half those assholes again and you'll be glad not to have to try to please them anymore. The rest that you keep around, well we call those your "friends."
People far away, you're not meant to "connect" with them. They're far away. Pull your head out of your butt and be where you are. If it was good enough for Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to be completely unable to converse with somebody in New Jersey then it's good enough for me and you.
> Facebook simply replaced the tools we once used to tell the world of our joys and sorrows and it replaced them with cheap knock-offs that make us less connected, not more.
This resonnates with what I've been observing. Instead of birthday card, a call or even a text message, we now simply write a note on someone's wall, between two out-of-context thoughts. It's the path of least resistance. Like fast food, it takes a bit of effort to fight, until the brain hijack starts to fade and new purposeful habits are formed (or reinstated).
Is there a reasonable, open-source, distributed Facebook alternative?
I presume built on top of RSS / Atom / something feeds that are available only on authentication (so I can share with limited sets of people.)
I presume I have to keep running a server to host content. Maybe I can host encrypted content for my friends, too? So, federated. Maybe it even makes it easy for me to bill them, if the costs are prohibitive?
I'm pretty sure I'd want an Android App to talk to it. The Android app would talk to all of the servers that host my friends' contents.
It doesn't let me share with "Friends of Friends" directly. My friends would have to Reshare, I guess. And then I guess I can't interact with them.
Not sure how I want conversations to work. It'd be hard for me to offer a server to my friends, without me having access to their social data.
Diaspora[0] and Hubzilla[1] exist, but never really caught on for various reasons, possibly nothing more than that they came out too soon.
There is a project to build a Facebook replacement that federates with ActivityPub[2], which would make it to Facebook what Mastodon[3] is to Twitter. However, I don't want to link it because it's in too early a stage to face HN levels of scrutiny.
There is also Patchwork[4], a peer-to-peer social application built on top of the Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol. It doesn't have all the features you'd want yet, but ticks off the boxes some people care about.
Most people won't host their own server. I am not speaking for the HN crowd. In general, people just are not interested enough in learning how to do this or stay on top of patches.
To answer your question though, honestly any blogging software that support good ol' fashion RSS feeds would be fine. Your group of friends could link to each others feeds. With a little effort, you could probably do this server side using some fashion of RPC call. Each language has it's own way to accomplish this.
I don't think everyone needs their own facebook server (or diaspora in this case).
I'm more in favor of the federated approach where a couple people run servers for their community (I run a server for a fandom community I participate in regularly).
People that use my server play by my house rules, if they don't like that they can pick another server or run their own.
To quote from the clip "Cambridge Analytica went to Facebook and said we’re conducting academic research with this app. Facebook apparently said O.K. and didn’t do a lot of diligence and through that, because they were able to get sort of the direct access from the people who installed the quiz app and then gather all the information from the friends of the people that had installed the app and that includes likes, you know their various posts, the pages that they subscribe to, just a ton of information. They were able to gather really detailed profile information on 50 million Americans."
The quiz was only a ruse to obtain much more valuable information. Sure FB recently ended their relationship with Cambridge Analytica, but they have probably known about this for months. There's a lot of anger at FB these days and deservedly so.
I deleted my facebook a few months ago. It's been great. I've spent a lot more time studying new things since I did. I feel cut off from the most toxic people I know and toxicity in general, which is also great. I still use instagram, which has become a more negative experience lately as ads have increased. Hoping an alternative to that pops up sometime soon - I use it now because I have a performance hobby where it's heavily used by my friends in the community. Never really got into any other social media. Have a LinkedIn where I get annoyed by recruiters but don't post or do anything useful, don't use twitter.
Your adversaries can always do more harm with information than friends can do good. This is because information "warfare" is fundamentally asymmetric: one incident, presented a particular way and targeted to a particular group can do great harm: someone somewhere will take offense to what you did or what you said, if a certain actor facilitates the travel of information to paint you in a bad light. Look no further than Twitter, whose functionality is effectively tailor-made for this behavior.
Facebook's original purpose stems from a time of naïveté: put all your interests and factoids about you here, where you can be yourself. As if anyone would use any of this to market you products, target you political ads, toy with your emotions by running A/B tests on your feed, or dox you to grief you in real life -- right?
So you pare down your friend list, you put your best face forward on Insta, keep your silly stuff on Snap, move your chats to WhatsApp, at which point your Facebook is nothing more than meme reposts, a rolodex of your acquaintances, and that one relative who always picks a fight with your friends on your political reblogs, yet you can't delete them because you have to see them at Thanksgiving. Your feed is 60% ads, but you don't care, because all posts are out of order, so you can scroll down until stuff looks vaguely familiar, then x out and return in a few hours when you're bored.
The author's points ring true, but Facebook is already past its prime, infested by overcommercialization, and no more harmful to the average person than the fifty thousand Google cookies they carry with them from their Android to their browsing with Chrome, or Amazon's uncanny ability to show ads for the exact thing you looked up from a different device yesterday. People deride the filter bubble, but what's the alternative; your private space full of people's stuff you can't stand?
Ten years ago when Facebook was gaining momentum, I chose to stay away, and remain so today. In recent years a new mantra has emerged: "I wish we could live without Facebook, but that's not practical anymore." Not true. It is practical, and infinitely more desirable.
Social media was never a meaningful way to present ourselves to the public or interact with others.
I deleted Facebook 5 years ago. In earlier days technology used to increase productivity but now technology reduces productivity, Facebook is one of the productivity killer.
It’s more likely the author created his own echo chamber.
My Facebook friends span the political spectrum 70% liberal and the rest some degree of conservative.
I would venture to say, 99% of political post come from my liberal friends. Some of which I will comment on, most of the time I get responses that aren’t logical and mostly insinuate I’m not a good person because I disagree.
For those people, I usually just remove from my feed. Not because I don’t care for their politics, but because they only want a one way conversation.
That is how an echo chamber is created and it’s their own doing, not Facebooks.
Can't help but disagree a bit with the premise that these awful properties of Facebook are something new.
> Facebook is using us. It is actively giving away our information. It is creating an echo chamber in the name of connection. It surfaces the divisive and destroys the real reason we began using social media in the first place – human connection.
I think it has always been more about "broadcasting ego" than "human connection", as the author admits two paragraphs later.
What's different today than when Facebook first launched?
While I applaud the effort to delete all your old posts and eventually the account itself, I wish the tone of this were more "we should be ashamed we let this happen" rather than "the good Facebook has been replaced by the evil one".
Broadcasting your ego--in fact your entire life--and selling it to random companies has always been your choice, not something Facebook recently started doing to you.
I would like to share my experience here because I think it was creepy on their part.
I only had <50 friends after 2015 on my facebook account. So, I would get notifications 1-2 times every week, "X is new to facebook, Since he is new to facebook, You should introduce him to more friends", Problem is,
1. I have no clue who X is! Sometimes I found that X lived in the same city that I lived in, Sometimes there was no visible co-relation.
2. X was automatically added to my friends list without my permission!
On several occassions, There were some people who were added as my friend but I couldn't find them on my friends list. The only way I figured they were my friends was when I received a notification and then visited their profile.
On 5-10 occassions every month, facebook will randomly send friend requests to people I don't even know and then some day I am just browsing and I get a notification that "Y has accepted your friend request" and I just couldn't recall sending friend request to that person.
So, Yeah, They were literally forcing me to be friends with people I don't even know, presumably, because I never clicked on ads and if I have less friends, That just means there is little activity in my circle and there is little information they can collect about me, IDK.
Whenever this happened, I usually took a screenshot, It probably doesn't do a solid job of proving my claim but it's something.
And before someone here starts running down a list of possible things that might have happened, Like someone hacked into my account, apps that had access to my account etc. I just want to say, I was a member of official 2600 magzine group, I posted all of this multiple times there and they did helped me a lot to prevent me from a lot of ways that someone might be accessing my account. I followed everything and it 6 months later it still didn't stop.
[+] [-] 40acres|8 years ago|reply
People act as if Facebook is the only way to keep up with friends but it's just not the case. Every phone can still receive SMS and you can gasp meet your friends personally to catch up.
Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does Facebook status updates really make me feel more connected to this person? My answer would be no, and I accept the fact that I just wont see my friends who live in other locations as much as I'd like, and I simply try to make it a habit of catching up when I'm in town.
There was life before Facebook and there can be life without Facebook, stop making excuses.
[+] [-] jdbiggs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmpb|8 years ago|reply
That being said, I'll never go back to using Facebook. It changed my behavior patterns too much and I was just not happy.
[+] [-] scotchmi_st|8 years ago|reply
I too have been slowly weaning myself off Facebook. Step 1 for those who want to but can't bring themselves to is to just be logged in on your phone or tablet. Has done wonders for me.
[+] [-] bwag|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edibleEnergy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rconti|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|8 years ago|reply
My enjoyment with Facebook ceased the moment Edward Snowden became a household name. I realized then how naked my information was in a world of bad actors. I only use Facebook as a simple contacts list these days.
But it’s harder to wean myself off HN/Reddit, as I get more value of useful information from the former and entertainment from the latter, than I have ever received from Facebook, even though both sites can lend themselves to mindless consumption and propaganda/manipulation, like FB.
Is there a “right” way for social media to be? Or are we resigned to a muddy middle ground forever?
[+] [-] JoshMnem|8 years ago|reply
That's the truth. I quit Facebook and most similar sites, and my social life improved quickly. I also get a lot more done without those distractions.
I block all of their companies in my hosts file and avoid their software libraries (React, etc.) whenever possible too. The company is having a terrible effect on the world and should not be supported. It was fundamentally broken from the start. A platform that connects all the world's people already exists -- it's called the WWW.
I know people who are desperately trying to quit, but they can't, because the site has locked their social connections within the platform, and they are addicted.
[+] [-] ibdf|8 years ago|reply
"Will you delete Facebook? Probably not. Will I? I’m working on it." So much drama.
I can help:
How to delete fb account: https://www.facebook.com/help/250563911970368?helpref=hc_glo...
You can also download your data before deleting it: https://www.facebook.com/help/1701730696756992/?helpref=hc_f...
I will delete mine when you delete yours: https://www.facebook.com/johnbiggs
[+] [-] replicatorblog|8 years ago|reply
Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels could improve on the margin, but realistically, the problem with social is us. Ask friends and family to go back to sharing their unhinged political views in the form of badly punctuated emails, as God intended. If they continue to share, unfollow.
Social media can be as polarizing or as pleasant as you make it. Foisting blame on Facebook might feel good, but it won't solve the problem.
[+] [-] Bartweiss|8 years ago|reply
I've largely stopped using Facebook, but my experience had nothing in common with the author's.
The content was fine, I followed things and people I actually liked and made adjustments when that changed. I felt no addiction loop, my usage time was limited, and it was honestly quite a nice site. Sentiments like "In the absence of human interaction we cling to whatever dark simulacrum is available" are absolutely alien to me; Facebook was a source of real social interaction, and almost entirely additive with other sources of real interaction.
I stopped because advertisements, autoplay videos, and timeline changes slowly made Facebook unusable as a site. Content I liked was consistently buried in favor of content I didn't like, in ways I couldn't fix with settings or following preferences. The discussions of Facebook usage time rising baffle me; my experience was of a good, usable site that destroyed its usability by trying to monetize.
[+] [-] cryptoz|8 years ago|reply
No. Facebook proudly does specific psychological experiments on its users. Facebook intentionally decides that it will make some users sad or depressed, just to see if it can. And it can. And it is proud of it. Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression.
Facebook is a fucking poison. The problem is not with us. The problem is with large scale propaganda networks and centrally-controlled social networks with misaligned incentives. The problem is Facebook and the core problem is the structure and incentives of corporations in our current not-well-enough-regulated capitalism.
[+] [-] dfxm12|8 years ago|reply
This is certainly a problem, but I think more important than this is the illusion of having control over what you see on social media.
You may think you can curate your social media feeds by unfollowing people who share things you don't want to see, but as long as a social media service's feed/timeline (and primary revenue stream) is still based on an easily gamed algorithm and paid ads, you're mistaken.
Social media sites will cater access to their API's to groups who are willing to pay for it. So, even if you can unfollow your uncle who shares "unhinged political views", you can't hide cleverly disguised, hyper targeted, ads, advertising both products and ideas.
[+] [-] creep|8 years ago|reply
It's really like anything you can do-- anything. The threshold is defined by the person. The absolutist claim that anything is 100% bad is dangerous and false.
The tools we make and use are defined by us individually. The "mob" is the collection of people in certain echo chambers, and I'm sorry but if those people don't realize they're in an echo chamber, it's not the fault of the tools. We can't be going around limiting everything because the majority don't know how to use it. The majority will always be that way-- though I will note that I think this "mob" majority are better-equipped psychologically with each passing generation.
[+] [-] LinuxBender|8 years ago|reply
I also noticed a disturbing pattern straight away. FB was pushing these little games at me. The questions in each of the little games were nearly identical to the questions in psych and personality tests I was required to take in the military. To the best of my knowledge FB does not have the clearance for this data, so I deleted my FB account and blocked their domains.
AFAIK, I have not really missed out on anything important by not being a member of that system.
[+] [-] thrownaway954|8 years ago|reply
it's not just facebook doing this. twitter, pinterest, reddit and countless others do the same. heck... there is even a story today about google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610088
and yes, i know some people will say... but that google story is about law enforcement using warrants... which i will counter with, doesn't matter, it shows that these companies don't care about your privacy and will fold in "defending" it when challenged.
if you care about your privacy, don't give _any_ company, _any_ information about you, in _any_ way.
[+] [-] sametmax|8 years ago|reply
It's two order of magnitude bigger than twitter, reddit, pinterest, etc.
The only ones that compares is Google.
But while I have no problem living without a Facebook account, living without Google is way harder. E.g:
- no hangout is the easiest. I hated it.
- dropping calendar was easy. It was not that good anyway. I missed the integration with a lot of 3rd party though.
- I leaved gmail. It tooks years and many problems with accounts came with it. The competitors UI are worse.
- I tried to leave gmap. But competitors don't have street view, shop open shedules or nearly as accurate traveling times. And waze eventually got bough by google. Maps.me is alright for when I don't have internet, but it's nowhere close to gmap for big cities if you have internet.
- I tried, very hard, to quit google search. Bing. DuckDuckGo.Qwant. They are ok. But I do hundreds of queries a day. Ok doesn't cut it. And if you are looking for result in another language than english, forget about it.
- now for the phone. Well, I won't go apple. Mozilla and MS are no longer here. I tried SailOS for a year. I don't recommend it. So android is what's left if you want a smartphone. I tried rooting, but it's dangerous, and takes time. So now I just avoid using a google account on the phone, which is, well, something at least. And make it extra hard to install apps.
That's a lot of trouble for so-so results.
Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?
So to me, no facebook + ublock + no google account is like when I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. It's 80/20, but for privacy instead of sanity.
However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.
[+] [-] verylittlemeat|8 years ago|reply
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I know black and white thinking is very appealing but we don't need to go back to living in a yurt in the wilderness just because facebook is a net drain on society. I've been participating on forums all over the internet for the past 20 years and it's been the catalyst for some of the greatest things in my life.
[+] [-] jdbiggs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fibers|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aluhut|8 years ago|reply
> 2. On multiple recent occasions, police in North Carolina have quietly been successful in obtaining search warrants that force Google to turn over these records. Rather than "standard" search warrants asking for the location of a particular suspect in a crime, these "reverse" or "area based" warrants ask for time and location data for all users who have entered a geographical area during a time of interest. The records returned are initially anonymous account numbers, and the police then make followup requests for identifying information of the subset of accounts that they think are of interest to the case.
Sure you can delete your account on reddit. They'll still track you as if you have one just like the facebook buttons or all those creative new tracking shit we regularly read about here.
In the end, you don't have to be an extremist. Just don't post everything and keep in mind that you are being tracked. This is the internet for you today.
[+] [-] blacksite_|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] andypi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staplers|8 years ago|reply
I have actually strengthened my friendships and moved quickly up in my career as a result of deleting most social media.
Social media is like the dessert of the internet. Use it sparingly.
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|8 years ago|reply
My understanding, though, is that others don't have this same experience with real life social interaction, so might not as easily notice how much FB amplifies it.
[+] [-] smpetrey|8 years ago|reply
I think the facebook(.com) product has some serious soul-searching to do and if they continue to ignore their monumental problem -- it will not end well for them, nor their stockholders.
[+] [-] alkonaut|8 years ago|reply
I try to suggest people just stop giving facebook their information. Don't share anything, don't like anything, absolutely never install "apps" or click ads. Avoid facebook as a sign on provider to other sites. Use good privacy tools in your browser and never hit fb "like" buttons on another site. Avoid linking your accounts to facebook from other applications (instagram, spotify, ...).
I'd love to see a browser plugin that did all this that I could recommend to friends and relatives. A plugin that simply made a visit to facebook completely useless to facebook.
[+] [-] Zelphyr|8 years ago|reply
Humans have been organizing into social groups and gatherings for tens of thousands of years without the aid of technology. Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook?
I apologize if my candor is overly blunt, but your comment is an excuse to continue your addiction. Nothing more.
[+] [-] kaennar|8 years ago|reply
I know it's more common with younger people (at my university there's not a single undergrad who doesn't have it on their phone), but I know some actual adults use it too.
[+] [-] dade_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manjushri|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wheresvic1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdiddly|8 years ago|reply
Not that it's not a cancer. (Although it's more like obesity or type 2 diabetes, in that it's you doing it to yourself through many small bad choices.) But if it's a cancer now, then it always was one, Captain Newsflash.
Just walk away. Yes it is that easy. You'll never see half those assholes again and you'll be glad not to have to try to please them anymore. The rest that you keep around, well we call those your "friends."
People far away, you're not meant to "connect" with them. They're far away. Pull your head out of your butt and be where you are. If it was good enough for Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to be completely unable to converse with somebody in New Jersey then it's good enough for me and you.
AND GET OFF MY LAWN!
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|8 years ago|reply
I wouldn't say that. It looked pretty benign back at the beginning. And then the noose started tightening, and tightening.... Frog slowly boiled.
[+] [-] athenot|8 years ago|reply
This resonnates with what I've been observing. Instead of birthday card, a call or even a text message, we now simply write a note on someone's wall, between two out-of-context thoughts. It's the path of least resistance. Like fast food, it takes a bit of effort to fight, until the brain hijack starts to fade and new purposeful habits are formed (or reinstated).
Working on it but not there yet... :(
[+] [-] VikingCoder|8 years ago|reply
I presume built on top of RSS / Atom / something feeds that are available only on authentication (so I can share with limited sets of people.)
I presume I have to keep running a server to host content. Maybe I can host encrypted content for my friends, too? So, federated. Maybe it even makes it easy for me to bill them, if the costs are prohibitive?
I'm pretty sure I'd want an Android App to talk to it. The Android app would talk to all of the servers that host my friends' contents.
It doesn't let me share with "Friends of Friends" directly. My friends would have to Reshare, I guess. And then I guess I can't interact with them.
Not sure how I want conversations to work. It'd be hard for me to offer a server to my friends, without me having access to their social data.
Maybe everyone needs their own server?
[+] [-] NoGravitas|8 years ago|reply
There is a project to build a Facebook replacement that federates with ActivityPub[2], which would make it to Facebook what Mastodon[3] is to Twitter. However, I don't want to link it because it's in too early a stage to face HN levels of scrutiny.
There is also Patchwork[4], a peer-to-peer social application built on top of the Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol. It doesn't have all the features you'd want yet, but ticks off the boxes some people care about.
[0]: https://diasporafoundation.org/
[1]: https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project
[2]: https://activitypub.rocks/
[3]: https://joinmastodon.org/
[4]: https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
[+] [-] LinuxBender|8 years ago|reply
To answer your question though, honestly any blogging software that support good ol' fashion RSS feeds would be fine. Your group of friends could link to each others feeds. With a little effort, you could probably do this server side using some fashion of RPC call. Each language has it's own way to accomplish this.
[+] [-] zaarn|8 years ago|reply
I'm more in favor of the federated approach where a couple people run servers for their community (I run a server for a fandom community I participate in regularly).
People that use my server play by my house rules, if they don't like that they can pick another server or run their own.
[+] [-] geogra4|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julienchastang|8 years ago|reply
To quote from the clip "Cambridge Analytica went to Facebook and said we’re conducting academic research with this app. Facebook apparently said O.K. and didn’t do a lot of diligence and through that, because they were able to get sort of the direct access from the people who installed the quiz app and then gather all the information from the friends of the people that had installed the app and that includes likes, you know their various posts, the pages that they subscribe to, just a ton of information. They were able to gather really detailed profile information on 50 million Americans."
The quiz was only a ruse to obtain much more valuable information. Sure FB recently ended their relationship with Cambridge Analytica, but they have probably known about this for months. There's a lot of anger at FB these days and deservedly so.
[+] [-] ashelmire|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temp-dude-87844|8 years ago|reply
Facebook's original purpose stems from a time of naïveté: put all your interests and factoids about you here, where you can be yourself. As if anyone would use any of this to market you products, target you political ads, toy with your emotions by running A/B tests on your feed, or dox you to grief you in real life -- right?
So you pare down your friend list, you put your best face forward on Insta, keep your silly stuff on Snap, move your chats to WhatsApp, at which point your Facebook is nothing more than meme reposts, a rolodex of your acquaintances, and that one relative who always picks a fight with your friends on your political reblogs, yet you can't delete them because you have to see them at Thanksgiving. Your feed is 60% ads, but you don't care, because all posts are out of order, so you can scroll down until stuff looks vaguely familiar, then x out and return in a few hours when you're bored.
The author's points ring true, but Facebook is already past its prime, infested by overcommercialization, and no more harmful to the average person than the fifty thousand Google cookies they carry with them from their Android to their browsing with Chrome, or Amazon's uncanny ability to show ads for the exact thing you looked up from a different device yesterday. People deride the filter bubble, but what's the alternative; your private space full of people's stuff you can't stand?
[+] [-] gizmogwai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbuchanan|8 years ago|reply
Social media was never a meaningful way to present ourselves to the public or interact with others.
[+] [-] master_yoda_1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IanDrake|8 years ago|reply
It’s more likely the author created his own echo chamber.
My Facebook friends span the political spectrum 70% liberal and the rest some degree of conservative.
I would venture to say, 99% of political post come from my liberal friends. Some of which I will comment on, most of the time I get responses that aren’t logical and mostly insinuate I’m not a good person because I disagree.
For those people, I usually just remove from my feed. Not because I don’t care for their politics, but because they only want a one way conversation.
That is how an echo chamber is created and it’s their own doing, not Facebooks.
[+] [-] apeace|8 years ago|reply
> Facebook is using us. It is actively giving away our information. It is creating an echo chamber in the name of connection. It surfaces the divisive and destroys the real reason we began using social media in the first place – human connection.
I think it has always been more about "broadcasting ego" than "human connection", as the author admits two paragraphs later.
What's different today than when Facebook first launched?
While I applaud the effort to delete all your old posts and eventually the account itself, I wish the tone of this were more "we should be ashamed we let this happen" rather than "the good Facebook has been replaced by the evil one".
Broadcasting your ego--in fact your entire life--and selling it to random companies has always been your choice, not something Facebook recently started doing to you.
[+] [-] ishanjain28|8 years ago|reply
I only had <50 friends after 2015 on my facebook account. So, I would get notifications 1-2 times every week, "X is new to facebook, Since he is new to facebook, You should introduce him to more friends", Problem is,
1. I have no clue who X is! Sometimes I found that X lived in the same city that I lived in, Sometimes there was no visible co-relation. 2. X was automatically added to my friends list without my permission!
On several occassions, There were some people who were added as my friend but I couldn't find them on my friends list. The only way I figured they were my friends was when I received a notification and then visited their profile.
On 5-10 occassions every month, facebook will randomly send friend requests to people I don't even know and then some day I am just browsing and I get a notification that "Y has accepted your friend request" and I just couldn't recall sending friend request to that person.
So, Yeah, They were literally forcing me to be friends with people I don't even know, presumably, because I never clicked on ads and if I have less friends, That just means there is little activity in my circle and there is little information they can collect about me, IDK.
Whenever this happened, I usually took a screenshot, It probably doesn't do a solid job of proving my claim but it's something.
And before someone here starts running down a list of possible things that might have happened, Like someone hacked into my account, apps that had access to my account etc. I just want to say, I was a member of official 2600 magzine group, I posted all of this multiple times there and they did helped me a lot to prevent me from a lot of ways that someone might be accessing my account. I followed everything and it 6 months later it still didn't stop.