Not only that, Facebook is designed to lock users inside their services as long as possible. The web, to billions of users now, is simply Facebook. The only way to make people leave Facebook and visit your website or app is to PAY Facebook to promote your page and posts so that users visit your services. It's the biggest carefully designed theft of time and effort of all time. Facebook must be destroyed or at least weakened by the power of governments now or never.
Also most social websites were designed on free labor by users like Quora and Reddit (at least the new corporatist reddit)
Just stop using it then. I’ve never used it as they are amoral, and don’t feel I missed much. Facebook will fade away in time, like MySpace,yahoo,aol,etc.
Various companies from AOL to Apple tried this in the 90’s (e.g. eWorld) - it’s the natural tendency for large corporations to corral their users. Arguably the windows attenpt to kill the web, and later mobile app stores are a continuation of this trend.
They all failed in the end, as the open web is more attractive, but there will always be gatekeepers, because most people don’t want to build their own platforms, they just want to read and share their stuff.
The analogy to this is saying, “if you don’t like climate change, just stop using fossil fuels”. Great as far as it goes, but the problem still exists beyond the bubble of my own consumer preference. We’re moving towards big FB regulation in Europe - I hope - which would set a precedent for it globally. Although my choice would be the Chinese solution...
I don't use these services, and put up as many security barriers against the data collection they engage in as I can, through the use of VPNs, firewalls, avoiding the execution of Javascript, etc. But I can't stop everything.
Even so, I'm going to stop as much as I can. I refuse to just lay down and surrender.
Maybe not but Facebook could be looked at as a resource to fulfill or strengthen a basic human need: human connection (like electricity can fulfill or strengthen climate control so we can survive harsher weather).
Oh no. I meant kicking FB out altogether. Anyway, we already have a form of social credit in the West. It’s called your credit score, and you can’t buy a house without being a good boy.
"a form", yes. But it is a very superficial similarity. As long as you have enough money and as along as you pay people on time, no one will care about what else you do with your life.
The social credit score in China is based on state-sponsored gamification and the latest psychological insights. This takes things to a completely different level.
I think AOL had a classic tagline 'So easy to use no wonder we're number one' which resonated with non-techies coming online in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Suddenly you had all these people wanting the internet and AOL made it easy with flooding the mailboxes of people with CDs. It was a sequence of events for which they just happened upon the massive uptake due to their marketing. I don't think this was particularly planned by AOL since if they truly understood what they were doing then they'd have known dialup was limited due to the uptake of broadband. It's analogous to Apple realizing the iPod was limited and music players would merge into cell phones as people only want to carry one device. Apple launched the iPhone at exactly the right time. AOL didn't have any answer to broadband.
I wish I could, but my elderly parents live on Facebook. They’ll never send me a text, never call my phone, never send me an email. It’s always a Facebook message or call, and they’re upset and confused if I don’t answer.
If you got rid of your facebook account, they will find another way to contact you. And then they are also more likely to leave facebook, or at least use it less. I had people complain when I dropped whatsapp and say that they wouldn't be able to get hold of me if I stopped using it. I just told them it crashed my phone too often and then they found other ways to contact me.
Exactly. This line of reasoning is just an excuse that people use to justify maintaining the status quo rather than doing some hard work to change it.
These grandpeople had to have been using something else 10 years ago to communicate with their grandkids... and then over these 10 years then simultaneously learned how to use FB, forgot how to use that other technology they'd used their whole life, and also lost the ability to learn how to use any other communication technology?
Not impossible with cognitive deterioration, but probably a lot more rare than this excuse.
If my grandparents were still alive today I'd just tell them that Facebook was controlled by the Democrats and we should use X,Y, or Z instead of effectively donating to Obama's campaign. They'd have deleted the app and gone back to text messages and phone calls by the end of dinner.
Interesting tactic. I have started telling people that I have joined the technological wing of the Amish and that Facebook was built by the devil. It gets very little push-back compared to listing more concrete reasons, complete with examples, of Facebook's actual documented behaviour. Doing that gets me nowhere fast, but if I use exaggerated nonsense people seem to just go along with it while nodding sagely.
Not if they’re not well-off in a country that has Free Basics. Hard to say no to free when not just your friends and family, but pretty much your culture, uses Facebook as it’s the de facto standard.
>and they’re upset and confused if I don’t answer.
Then just let them be upset. Try to explain it to them, but if they don't accept it, then let them be upset. If you back down they will never ever learn it. Never. Not a chance.
My parents are as paranoid as I am (grew up in a US enabled dictatorship) so it was easy to get them to use Signal. If they weren’t so cool, I’d use FB or WhatsApp
But my aunts and uncles and cousins (who, ironically also grew up in this dictatorship) laugh and use Facebook.
That’s cool. I don’t talk to them often. They know I love them. And they know I won’t use FB.
You could. Try it and see. Being on Facebook is probably incredibly damaging for them in terms of what news they are exposed to anyway, you’d be doing them a favour.
For some people, because of their jobs or their need for social validation, this is just not an option. You cannot impose this decision on personal willpower or morality because it's more complicated than that.
> because of their jobs or their need for social validation, this is just not an option.
I don't understand this... are jobs and the source of peoples social validation not options? I used to derive social validation from drinking and kicking ass in video games, but then I found out you could get it from other places that were more productive, and less physically deteriorating.
If there are really people out there who are wholly dependent on Facebook for their social validation then that is a tragedy akin to finding out that there is an entire population of people who can't metabolize food without a special compound found only in White Castle burgers.
How about anybody who belongs to a marginalized minority group in their own (physical) community? For example, there are plenty of parts of the US where LGBTQ folks have to reach out beyond their physical location to find a community that will truly accept them (not to mention countries where their existence is criminalized).
Facebook is a highly imperfect solution for them — but it exists, and there aren’t always better options.
Just like how some parts of the country are food deserts where people actually don’t have access to anything much more nutritious than White Castle.
That is a good point, and an even greater tragedy.
This actually reminds of the military, which is another service that provides a way for people to escape tragic home or community situations for a new situation where they might find a sense of shared purpose and unity.
Pacifists and others opposed to US militarism would likely also say that anyone participating in the military is perpetuating evils and insist there must be a better way to escape these situations that also aligns with their sense of morality...
Really all these exceptions exist and are absolutely valid (imo) but I'd be curious what percentages we're talking about here... what proportion of people would be dead or worse off (vs alive or better off) today if not for the existence of FB?
For everyone in a who found their sense of community online, how many found contempt and ostracization from a mob 1000x the size of their physical community? How many physical communities (and families) are being divided along lines drawn up by online communities?
I don't think the scarcity of options is due to any shortage of potential communities on the internet--there's a perpetual scarcity of extant communities due to naturally-monopolizing network effects. If Facebook weren't the place, it would be somewhere else. Any old forum would do if it were where the people are.
At least reddit lets you get some pageviews without forcing you to pay. Facebook's pages and likes are a total scam. It's impossible to reach users without paying, while it takes a lot of effort to create the network of likes. That's double effort for zero benefit.
I agree that reddit is still the fairest social website even after the many changes they did to monetize their services, which isn't wrong btw since it's in the end a business, Quora is now nothing but a big spam and self promotion website but fortunately they don't have the power to force users to stay in their circle of influence like Facebook. ProductHunt doesn't need a comment, it's a shameless cheesy website designed as "pay for shilling" scheme.
I would have wholeheartedly agreed with this post had its thesis been "Don't use Facebook, Twiter, Youtube, etc.", but instead I got "Use Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, but complain to your govt. because they make too much money".
You don't like how they make money(X)? Don't use it. No one is forcing you.
> but if I don't use them I'm at a disadvantage
Then they are useful for you, use them.
I don't use fb, twitter, reddit, etc. I only use Google search, Youtube and Hacker news, and do so voluntarily. I'm happy with the value I get, I take measures to diminish the amount of data they get (use fake names, use VPN, etc.)
Living in a system based on freedom means that if someone succeeds through their own effort, they are entitled to that success. You can't just come and take it away because you don't like that person, or how much money they make.
(X) If your copyrighted content is being used without your permission, there are legal mechanisms to stop it. But I doubt reddit users posting in a humor sub care about their joke being used in a Youtube video.
> You don't like how they make money(X)? Don't use it. No one is forcing you.
This narrative would be compelling if there was a way to stop Facebook from collecting data on me and using it anyways. There is not. Facebook trackers, pixels, and plugins exist on a huge number of popular sites and apps. The legislative gap is that Facebook is allowed to collect data from me even if I explicitly don’t want them to through dark patterns and their myriad partnerships. Not to mention that they may, at any moment, acquire whatever alternative to Facebook’s products I choose to use and drag me in again (see WhatsApp).
Edit: by the way, I’ve been using computers for ~25 years and would describe myself as “extremely online”. If I feel helpless in the face of Facebook’s and Google’s tracking technology I have no idea how the average user must feel.
I disagree. Saying "don't like it? don't use it" is in a very real sense equivalent to advocating for unethical practices to continue - because that is what past experience shows will happen.
There are countless companies with unethical business practices, with extremely complex, ever changing ownership webs (and looking at the actual people who own the shares makes it even more complex). Figuring out which companies to boycott is much more than a full-time job, and has been shown to rarely work (e.g. there wasn't much of a boycott even in the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Aiding_an...) - the complexity of organizing a boycott for every unethical company is simply too great.
Pragmatically you have a good point, but technically it's wrong. There are technical solutions to almost all of these issues, and if not, or you can avoid using these sites and apps.
I'm not arguing for one course of action or another, just saying, technical solutions exist. For example, an alternative to government regulation could be government funding of libre software and tools that block ads, trackers, third-party cookies, etc.
> ...tools that block ads, trackers, third-party cookies, etc.
This is an arms race that I’ve watched privacy advocates slowly lose for the last 15 years. Between dom randomization, browser fingerprinting, and the extremely popular reCaptcha Google’s tracking feels especially inescapable by technological means. On phones the situation is often even worse[1] because of a more opaque and restricted OS environment.
Aside: can you (or someone) elaborate on or describe "DOM randomization" as it pertains to tracking? Googling that phrase seems to only take me in the direction of Javascript Math.random() documentation and other generic information on randomness as a whole.
It means they set the page up in such a way that all the classes/ID's are hashes are unique on every page load. This means you cannot have display filtering rules for these things (at least, not easily).
Truly top-tier malice also puts tracking logic behind a reverse proxy that delivers randomised URLs, so you also cannot filter network requests.
I agree, but I face and overcome these issues every day via browser plugins, not installing sketchy apps, and not going to sites locked behind reCaptcha.
Again, my point isn't that it's easy, my point is that it's possible, therefore, we have hope of someday making it easy. As a society we haven't even tried yet, only some fringe people donating their time, so perhaps we should support them instead of or in addition to clamoring for regulation.
For websites, there are tools that don't give the site the option unless asked. There are also firewalls and things like that blocking all traffic to certain trackers.
What's the technical solution to Facebook creating shadow profiles of non-users based on data collected from users (friends/family/associates), data brokers, public records, etc?
Great point -- that's why I put the "almost" in "almost all". Nothing you change on your own device prevents other people giving information about you. On the other hand, if we move toward a world where being secure and protective of one's own data is the technological default, I expect we would see a lot less of things like "give Facebook access to my contact list".
I think your beef is with those partnering sites and Facebook, not Facebook alone.
If every shop on your street had a security camera, and all cameras were run by a single company, the fact that you explicitly don’t want to be recorded would be much more about the shops on your street, and much less about the company selling security cameras. (Or, in the case of Facebook, perhaps paying the shopowners to install security cameras?)
You will realise that "don't use it" quickly becomes "use elaborate methods to block it wherever possible" and even if you do that, your data is still being misused through third parties who sell it. FB, Google etc. are not simply opt-in websites with obscene privacy policies. They are data dealers and advertising businesses whose reach extends far beyond their own web properties to a large part of the Internet.
It's next to impossible to opt out of various entities (data brokers, internet companies, merchants, etc.) vacuuming up as much information about you as they possibly can in order to monetize it.
If you're unfortunate enough to have used Facebook, the situation gets worse since Facebook's anti-privacy settings are a continuing nightmare and they routinely deceive their users and misuse personal information (for example collecting phone numbers for 2FA and then using them as keys to connect you with advertisers.)
Quitting Facebook does nothing to remove their tracking assets from the web, or to regulate their partnerships with data brokers and advertisers, or to remove the contact lists that they've ingested from people you may have interacted with at some point.
The problem is that people want to converge on one system, so opting out often isn't viable. I don't use Facebook, for example. But when my school makes an announcement, or creates some kind of bulletin board or sign up, they often use Facebook. Most people are on it. If I want to advertise a mobile app it is really hard without using Facebook or Instagram.
You say "you can't just come and take it away because you don't like that person". This is not about animosity toward any person or company (or it shouldn't be). We have stopped people or issued government control when people are close to having monopolies over oil, monopolies over power, telecommunications, etc.
> But when my school makes an announcement, or creates some kind of bulletin board or sign up, they often use Facebook.
You should make a huge stink about this. At a minimum, schools and other public services should always provide a means to interact with them that doesn't involve such things.
The production of the shows my kids enjoy goes something like this: Unpaid redditors post original material to amuse their online friends. Unpaid moderators keep the subreddit functioning by cleaning out spam and abuse. Reddit gets a little money from ads posted on the subreddit. Then a YouTube channel called Sorrow TV—apparently a one-man operation run by a 20-something guy—harvests the best posts and creates the video. YouTube, which is part of Google, runs more ads, while collecting valuable data about the viewing patterns of users like my kids. YouTube shares some of the money it makes with SorrowTV, based on a formula that Google controls and can alter at any time.
Except that:
The barriers to entry to breaking-out in the screen writing or acting biz are much higher than it is to upload YouTube videos. Anyone can post to Facebook or Reddit, so why should the pay be higher than more selective and prestigious jobs that have a more rigorous screening processes?
YouTube allows content creators to profit from their work through ad revenue sharing, premium subscriptions, and super-chats.
Facebook allows content creators to post external links to their websites, such as stores.
Reddit moderators, especially for popular subs, have an enormous amount of power and influence, and such postilions are highly sought after. If being a Reddit mod is so bad, why is there so much competition for mod spots? They are not the victims at all. The users are much more likely to be victims by having to adhere to arbitrary rules and censorship imposed by mods.
I think what pisses me off the most about FB is they used to be legitimately good, then over time slowly boiled the frog, less and less privacy, more features people don't want, so people begrudgingly put up with it now rather than truly enjoy it. They can't leave, not that everyone they know is on FB due to the first mover phenomenon. And if they were honest with themselves or us, they'd admit that. And even if people get sick of FB and migrate to another platform, guess what, they own Instagram and Whatsapp.
Someone in Facebook at a high level is a psychopath, or maybe multiple people
I would argue they were never good. He called people who gave FB data "... dumb f#@$s" back when he was 19. It was just that in the beginning they weren't pushing the monetization yet. Now that is all it is about and people are starting to understand how they are being exploited. The only thing that has changed is that you are aware. I still don't think any of the people in my family give a crap. They are more than happy in their echo chamber and free service.
Facebook was indeed always like that, and it even became apparent as time went on. Yet people did not care until the media decided that Facebook was bad (instead of acting like their minds were blown by it 24/7), and even at that most people continue to use it. Facebook could be spying on people in the shower and they'd continue using it because their platform is one of a plethora of distractions that allow people to not have to think about the truth while practicing both apathy and recreational outrage.
A friend tried getting off Facebook back in 2011. It was basically impossible, it took a lot of deliberate effort and even then it merely interrupted your account activity.
I echo your statement. I knew of Facebook rather early on and even back then it seemed like a bad idea to sign up.
What I find interesting, though, is that Facebook feels like an entirely unknown part of the internet for me as a result. A lot of the links and what not on Facebook are like closed doors for me.
I find the biggest issue to be events. About the only thing I have been excluded from by not using facebook is some of the more hippy end of events where sometimes the only access is through facebook and people are seemingly too high to realise that this may in fact be somewhat against their own stated ethos.
Agreed. Back when FB started, it was a convenient way to keep in touch with school friends. You could go over to their pages and see what they were up to lately. Then they added a chronological news feed, and while some people objected, I didn't mind. By the time I left last year, it was an inscrutable Skinner box full of ads.
The thing that really pisses me off, though, is the way Google has gone downhill. I remember when they launched, in a world of Lycos and Alta Vista, how refreshing it was to have a simple text box for search, that took you to a list of blue links. After awhile, there were clearly-labeled text ads along the right side, which was much better than the flashing banners on other sites. Now, the ads are mixed in with the search results and designed to confuse, and Google boosts its own properties into the carousel on top. I still sometimes use Google, but always vaguely dreading what new clutter or dark pattern they have added to the SERP since my last visit.
In both cases, a once-useful product was A/B-tested to within an inch of its life, maximizing engagement/surveillance while keeping it just bearable enough for not too many users to leave.
The important detail about the story concerning boiling frogs, is that to stop them from jumping out, first of all their brains were removed. Though I am not sure whether in this instance it makes the metaphor more accurate, or less.
Why can't they leave? Lots of us have and have continued to lead successful lives. I've been off and on Facebook for a number of years, but left last year and have absolutely no desire, or need, to subscribe again.
I don't think that's true. The history of Facebook and Zuckerberg really makes it hard to make the case that either of them were ever anything approaching ethical or good.
“Facebook makes just a hair under $635,000 in profit for each of its 25,000 employees. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, makes about $158,000 per worker. (At Walmart, it’s $4,288.) These calculations often get spun as representing a victory for automation and algorithms—machines, rather than humans, creating value. But the truth is, these media companies have billions of people working for them—they’re just not on staff.”
The difference is that the vast majority of users are unaware that their content is making other users stay within Facebook as long as possible and feed it with more data to make money for Facebook alone.
Most people pick Adsense because it’s the de facto service to use. Name a competitor to Adsense for your average small site that doesn’t take a lot of work or pay a lot less in aggregate. It’s not the same as truly voluntarily using it.
Adsense isn’t Google’s main revenue or profit source either. That would be AdWords and specifically ads on their own properties.
Google Maps is community driven as well. I contributed to it, then I was like "wait, why am I not contributing to OSM instead?" Google does give rewards for the contributions but they're laughable compared to the amount of time you put into the work.
If you want to know why people use Facebook it is for all of the positive it brings, rather than the negative which is portrayed consistently on HN. Check out this FB page where FB accumulates stories that show FB making a meaningful and positive impact on people’s lives.
Why are your only comments on this site rebutting negative stories about Facebook?
As a follow-up question, what are your thoughts on this longitudinal study from 2017[1], which found that "the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being", such that any form of engagement with Facebook was negatively correlated with a wide range of self-reported mental, emotional, and physical health indicators? Does the Facebook PR page you linked contradict that somehow?
The study you linked does nothing to imply a causal relationship.
Do you think it’s a good strategy to try to undermine somebody’s position by “just asking questions” about why they hold an unpopular opinion on HN? Why not address their position directly rather than just sic a downvote mob on them?
Disclaimer because you’ll undoubtably go through my comment history: I used to work at Facebook.
>Disclaimer because you’ll undoubtably go through my comment history
I have never understood why this is considered to be bad form.
Going through someone's comment history often provides useful context and is often one of the quickest ways to try and find out if they are discussing something in bad faith or not.
Plus it can often just be interesting.
To try and assert that it is impolite for people to read what you have chosen to post on a public forum, purely because it happens to be from a previous discussion, is to attempt to enforce a social stigma on base curiosity.
Luckily it has about as much sway as farting into a thunderstorm, but why try it in the first place?
Nobody would take an author seriously if they tried to insist that people reviewing their new book aren't allowed to read the old ones and I feel the same logic applies here.
"Just asking questions" in the form of "So, why are your comments all <about this>" isn't impolite; it's engaging in bad-faith tactics to silence a point of view, and an implication that the user is a shill.
It's not even a reasonable accusation; the comments from the user supposedly supporting facebook is actually just three fairly thought out, nuanced comments.
Looking through, seeing as you are now amusingly encouraging me to analyse another person's post history; Only 3 posts, posted over the course of a year, all only in support of facebook. I wouldn't confidently mark the account as subtle astroturfing, could be an extremely lazy but also seemingly enthusiasic facebook fan, but it raises an eyebrow now you draw my attention to it. I mean, shilling does exist. As to your closing point, the existence of some nuance to an argument doesn't have any real bearing on the possibility of a given account indulging in shilling. It may be unreasonable, but if it is, it is not because of that.
I never said it was bad form to just look at comment history. What’s bad form is the users tactic to sic a downvote mob on them for having an unpopular opinion.
So it's bad because by mentioning someone's comment history it somehow deprives another entirely seperate group of people from having personal agency and tricks them into downvoting? Does this make sense?
edit - also, where is this downvote mob? Are you saying that the comment in question should have far more ego points than it does? The comment is not greyed out. And if so, how do you know?
One can always cherry pick good or bad elements of FB use, but the vast majority of users and the average use case would not have anything to do on the Community Voices page.
Most people use facebook to satisfy vices such as outrage addiction, vanity, and jealousy/noseyness.
Even cable news runs an uplifting story every now and then, but for the most part simply magnifies and profits from the worst in society.
Hacker news ain't that different. Pretty much every article I see here that mentions Facebook or any other company is full of outrage. Just 2 days ago there was an article on the Facebook fine [0] and half the people were demanding that Facebook should have been dismantled and the executives should have gone to jail.
I think a better comparison would be if Vader supported Pride week on his planets and promoted gender neutral toilets for his employees. Something that's morally right not just nice like cake.
Regarding Facebook, I enjoy using it, its better than Twitter for less toxicity.
So you'd be supporting Darth Vader is he "supported Pride week on his planets and promoted gender neutral toilets for his employees"? Wow, it's clear we're not on the same page.
Facebook and other social media rely on that heavily and make their users do as much work for them as possible.
The constant stream of notifications makes it easier. Instructions can be presented as „tips”: upload a new photo, greet new users on your fanpage, reply to this message.
Some users are getting paid in just likes, but an increasing number receives very tangible business opportunities or direct compensation.
This is getting very close to employment territory. But unlike real employment, social media get to set the rules.
This is completely backwards. I get free, undisturbed, superb quality communication with all my friends and family via WhatsApp. I used to pay a fortune for that and now it's FREE. So OP suggests I should be paid for the suffering of using a 100% free super useful service?
What? WhatsApp was $1/yr before Facebook bought it, which is hardly a "fortune." A lifetime of WhatsApp would have cost you less than one month's internet bill.
Did most people pay more than $1/yr plus data rates? My point was that WhatsApp was apparently a legitimate, independent business where people paid a small fee for the equivalent of international SMS.
But no one was happy with that. So that was never how it was going to stay. The people making Whatsapp were mostly much happier getting millions and billions for the app.
There’s no point in talking about Whatsapp as a tiny company charging $1 to a small percent of its user base. No one had any intention of keeping it that way.
I also don’t think billionaires like the founders saying they regret stuff after they’ve become billionaires from Whatsapp’s sale should count as a counter argument. I doubt they’d be fine giving back their billions for a few million a year salary while being worried about what their future will hold.
I would certainly like Facebook the company to completely fail, but the WagesforFacebook website is probably the most idiotic thing I have seen in a long time.
It is like turning into a penniless bum by spending all your money partying, and then blaming all the party hosts for your predicament and asking them to pay you money for each visit so you can keep partying forever into the future.
Why not stop attending the parties?
Why not a) remove the mobile app and use it only on a desktop/laptop to reduce the amount of time you spend on Facebook b) monitor how much time you spend on FB and slowly cut it down c) pick up the phone and pay a few damn dollars to talk to close friends - in case you don't have a way to call for free d) meet people in real life and put your mobile phone away and actually pay attention to the other person e) spend your time educating everyone you know about the problem of FB addiction f) volunteer for some community service where you actually get to meet your friends and neighbors?
But NO! "I want to bum around on Facebook, I want my minute-by-minute dopamine hit, and I want to distort the issue so no one figures out that my FB addiction is actually my fault in the first place"
This is HN, where it is presumed that people who absolutely have the willpower to exert personal responsibility instead convince themselves that they don't, so that they can play the victim.
If you don't like Facebook, don't use Facebook, try not to run their code, try not to connect to their hosts, and don't send data to their partners. Most importantly, live the life that makes the people around you not want to use Facebook either.
What makes you think that everyone has this mythical willpower? Is it the same belief as belief in rational market actors, or that eveyone makes decisions after carefully considering all of the concequences?
Face it, humans (you, me, bigshot CEOs) all act primarily based on simple emotional wants and desires, most of the time. I can guarantee you that there are a great deal of CEOs, maybe even some of whom you look up to, that spend too much time on facebook/linkedin/playing golf etc, know it, and yet do nothing about it.
> Face it, humans (you, me, bigshot CEOs) all act primarily based on simple emotional wants and desires, most of the time.
Some people are mentally disabled and can not regulate a desire to use Facebook, but if you tell all the able people that they're incapable of reasoning themselves out of it, they will become less able.
Facebook works on network effects, if people still healthy enough to quit can do so, Facebook becomes inherently less attractive. If you tell people that they are inevitably ruled by their passions, many will just take the faustian bargain and hope somebody swoops in to save them from themselves.
I don't think this is a good strategy, especially if you're not proposing any actual solution (and no, swift legislation is not a practical way to deal with this situation, given how divisive that is).
Focusing on willpower and self-empowerment is a great strategy when applied to oneself. When applied to others it's often 1) shitty 2) self-congratulatory, 3) lacking in empathy and ignorant of the particulars of another's situation, and 4) useless, because clearly these others seem to not find themselves able to do that thing that you are able to do.
Generally speaking, being shamed or otherwise punished is counter-effective when it comes to changing something, especially when it comes to addictions of various kinds.
There's a huge difference between on the one hand a friend telling you that you can do it, and offering help and strategies, and on the other hand a shitty internet commenter telling you that you're simply not trying hard enough.
Tough love has its time and place, but usually it mostly benefits the giver of it.
> If you don't like Facebook, don't use Facebook, try not to run their code, try not to connect to their hosts, and don't send data to their partners
I do all that. The problem is that all that insufficient.
If the like of Facebook, Google, etc., would actually leave me out of things when I don't use their services, I wouldn't care nearly as much about what they do.
> This is HN, where it is presumed that people who absolutely have the willpower to exert personal responsibility instead convince themselves that they don't, so that they can play the victim.
If there's somewhere humans don't do that, sign me up. Not that I'd probably pass the entrance test but my failure would be enlightening.
Bumming around on Facebook is how Facebook makes money. It's a form of labor and has monetary value for Facebook. Yes, that's ridiculous, but that's how capitalism works.
I used to post photos on google maps, sometimes at the prompting of the Maps app. It was cool to get emails saying a 100,000 people had seen my photo. But I quit “contributing” when it finally occurred to me that I was doing free work for a billion dollar company.
I think Facebook is toxic for some people I know personally. I decided that by posting on Facebook I’m helping create reasons for those people to keep checking Facebook. A while back I deleted everything from my profile except my phone number and email address. In the rare occasions I look at the news feed I never like or interact with posts. I miss the good things about Facebook but it just isn’t worth the cost.
I still do however work for Google because their "solve 10 machine learning challenges or be well tracked" service is integrated by so many fucking idiotic services.
> I still do however work for Google because their "solve 10 machine learning challenges or be well tracked" service is integrated by so many fucking idiotic services.
I don't, for the most part. If I have to solve a captcha for something, I usually don't use that thing. I will make the occasional exception for captchas that are part of signing up for a service if it's important enough to me, as long as the captcha never appears again.
Yep, all these services basically exist off the back of their userbases, and practically all their value comes from the content submitted by the people that use them for free.
And this makes it rather interesting to hear complaints about working for exposure or free or what not. Yes, that's a bad deal, but it's really also the same deal you're agreeing to when you heavily use these 'social media' sites and platforms. You're saying you'll provide a ton of content for free on the assumption that just maybe, some of those millions/billions of users will check it out on your own site and help you make money.
And YouTube and other sites with monetisation requirements may actually be worse in some extent. Think about it, YouTube's basically like a bad internship; work for free for a few months, then if you're good enough maybe we'll decide to pay you.
But hey, I guess those millions/billions of users are too tempting for many.
Every post about Facebook comes with the same lynch mob in the comments and it's getting tiresome.
Yes, you all hate Facebook and want Mark Zuckerberg's head on a pole (literally). You also want every single employee to be executed for treason against humanity. HN has really lost any chance of sensible discussions around this.
At least not me, as I don't use facebook at all, life is good without it.
I have to use google for daily searching, along with gmail, I now migrate my primary email to outlook and my goal is to use google only for searching under anonymous mode, i.e. not all eggs in one basket, to mitigate privacy concerns
This reminds me of Matt Webb's piece titled "Instagram as an island economy"[1] where he writes about the concept of encoded labour: "Every "user" of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos -- this is valuable, it means there is something for people to look it. There are some people who only produce comments or "likes," the virtual society equivalent of apes picking lice off other apes."
I feel the entire post is missing the two main points:
1) No one would bother creating these free services if they could not draw massive revenue streams out of it. If the returns disappear, it'd all be shut down.
2) If you create content on an online platform, you get paid in emotions you feel, the popularity you might get or the money you get through your own advertising if you are popular. If you contribute the data, you also benefit from a better service which is free.
P.S. I am thinking of building an RSS reader app with the built-in discussions. If it sounds interesting, please fill out a survey https://forms.gle/9V85Eb8PZnBXKaFr6
> 1) No one would bother creating these free services if they could not draw massive revenue streams out of it. If the returns disappear, it'd all be shut down.
You may have missed all the free forums on the Internet, financed by hobbyists or a few unobtrusive banner ads. It used to be the norm. Surely most of the development efforts of FB go into maximizing revenue through use(misuse?) of private data, but this is a "free service" nobody asked for.
Oh boy I don’t miss the flash animated pop up ads, but that has less to do with forums vs social media and more to do with how the tech has evolved.
That said fb and google ads are pretty unobtrusive because they exert so many restrictions on businesses. If you’ve ever tried to run ads you’d find user friendly restrictions like “no all caps text” or “limit to text in an image”.
> That said fb and google ads are pretty unobtrusive
That depends on how you count. "Unobtrusive", maybe, but those ads are intolerably intrusive, because of the tracking.
Between the two, I'd rather have those old "spank the monkey" banners any day of the week. But I also fondly remember a time before even those existed.
In many ways, advertising has really ruined vast swaths of the internet.
> So you are saying, basically, if there was Unix why do we have Windows since no one asked for it.
No. Windows is not free. Perhaps your interpretation of "these free services" is a bit far from mine. The topic was FB and the services it offers, which, for the majority of users (sans advertisers) isn't overwhelmingly different from other free social networks, which aren't disappearing because they're not making billions in profits.
At the end of the day, your contribution to a site, any site, any contribution has a finite limited time value to you, but has a much longer, and multidimensional value to the receiving site. The value shared is asymmetric.
I’m hoping people can come to an agreement over the degree of asymmetry.
This reminds me of a parallel discussion of how much businesses leaders should benefit vs employees, the spectrum ranging from full socialist worker control to naked capitalism.
Maybe a hint lies in the ranges of accepted offers in the ultimatum game
Whether Facebook should be paying people to work or not, the decision should be made by Facebook and those people voluntarily, not imposed on them by the government. If some people think they should be paid for the work, they should refuse to do it for free...the fact that in such a case other people might do the same work for free instead doesn't still entitle the government to dictate the terms of a voluntary relationship.
That sounds fair but nothing the government does works that way. If you asked us all we would pay zero taxes ourselves and enjoy social benefits paid by others.
FB's biggest problems are about market saturation and maintaining that position. If they lose the youngest generation then they will gradually decrease in value as their legacy userbase ages. This is why FB constantly has to buy up and coming social media style tech so that they can constantly reinvigorate the youth demographic into the fold. It's a constant battle for FB to avoid becoming obsolete.
Not all of us. Some of us avoid the products and services of surveillance-based companies like Facebook, Google, etc., and block traffic to them to the greatest degree possible.
"While obviously people use HackerNews, I just don't get it. Had a account and deleted it years ago. What does it add? I see no value in it."
The same reason anyone does anything social.
To discuss with friends and others topics of mutual interest, to find out about things that have happened to people and orgsnisations I care about. And sometimes to get validation by publicising things relevant to you personally and seeing the reaction.
Quite why HN seems to have such a collective hatred of Facebook specifically, far above all other organisations running social/content sharing platforms I don't understand. It's worse than /. and MS back in the day.
> Quite why HN seems to have such a collective hatred of Facebook specifically, far above all other organisations running social/content sharing platforms I don't understand
I cant' speak for anybody but me, but my personal animosity towards these organization is purely because they work so hard to spy on me.
People can do those discussions and information sharing without Facebook. e.g. They would have their own blog and read feeds from friends from RSS reader. Maybe they think it's easier to do that with Facebook.
It's a link to people I know from real life, by their real names. Family and friends. People I have some level of emotional connection to such that I have some level of interest in seeing pictures of what they do in their leisure time, how their kids are growing up and so on. Staying in touch with them by the many other forms of communication available would be such a pain, just because there are so many.
I've spent a lot of time on pseudonymous online communities - slashdot, reddit, hacker news and others - and although there is always interesting discussion, I don't feel anything like the same interest in other posters as I do in say my housemate from 2003-2005.
Don't get me wrong, Facebook-the-company and Facebook-the-algorithmically-generated-feed are fairly vile, but the USP, the network effect is something that has emotional worth to a lot of people.
Facebook is in the ad business. If you pay, you can post ads. Its "free tier" gives the ability to exchange your time and personal network into visibility.
"Whenever you post a photo on Instagram, write an Amazon review, or skim through complaints about potholes on your neighborhood's Facebook group, you're helping generate profit for the world's richest corporations. A growing movement is making the case that you ought to get paid for it."
The value is in the traffic, not necessarily the content. The traffic is what allows them to sell advertising.
They could have billions of submitted photos, reviews and comments about potholes, but if they failed to get enough daily traffic, the business would fail.
Imagine if web users retrieving each others' content were each visiting different websites controlled by different people (different domain name owners); the traffic would be more evenly distributed. Advertisers would be faced with different choices. They could not all choose to advertise with a small number of disproportionately high traffic websites. One website could not so easily generate billions in revenue from ad sales.
When so many web users all visit the same website, they create a highly valuable entity to advertisers. Why do they all visit the same website? They do so because that is the only source of the content. Exclusivity. "Walled garden."
What if a web user could retrieve those same photos, reviews and comments from many different websites, instead of just one? What if it was the author that mattered and not necessarily the source? What if we reimagined the way content was distributed?
If users are the ones generating this "content", and they retain ownership, then it stands to reason that if provided with the technical means, they can choose make it available on any website they choose. It is their choice.
Open source operating systems use mirrors to make software available to users from multiple websites. The goal in that case is to distribute traffic more evenly across multiple websites, not to send all users to one controlled by a single owner.
When traffic is distributed across disparate websites it reduces the likelihood that web advertisers will fund the creation of monopolistic web-based companies like the ones that are causing so many unnecessary problems today.
Is there a technical barrier that prevents user-generated content from being mirrored at many different sites, with servers located around the globe? Perhaps it already is? Is there a technical requirement that all these sites be controlled by the same entity?
The disproportionate traffic to a single domain name is what allows one owner to monopolise and generate disproportionate wealth. What if we could distribute the traffic to other owners? After all, it is the user's content. Whether it is exclusively available from one website or available from multiple mirrors should be the user's decision.
Of course the author here may see no problems with the existence of these monopolies. Maybe all he really wants is a piece of the enormous ad revenue. He wants a multi billion dollar enterprise to pay him. Absent a lawsuit, what are the chances of that? Websites will not pay for content. Howeverthey will pay for traffic.
I operate a number of websites that are free for users, no catch. No advertising, no tracking, no nothing. There's not even any way to make voluntary donations.
Facebook should have a revenue sharing program for its users. Google and youtube have kinda bern doing that and it helped create some kind of synnergy.
YouTube is a money losing enterprise. Or at least not profitable one. So going that far is probably too much.
The Adsense argument is better but that’s for stuff not on Google’s properties. It might be a good idea for Facebook to do revenue sharing. But they’re a public company now. They can’t do something too big. They need their profits. Just like Google.
Also most social websites were designed on free labor by users like Quora and Reddit (at least the new corporatist reddit)