Every time a Facebook usage topic comes up there's the usual round of scorn usually backed up by a strange display of plumage involving the sentence, "I just deleted my facebook yesterday/last month/last year/never used it."
And that's okay. But I want to point out to my fellow HN-goers why facebook is so wonderful. There's also a note about privacy at the bottom[1] since that seems to be a big reason people stay away. I feel as if a lot of people here missed the point and doesn't understand what the average person sees in this system. I'll try to relay my experience in the hopes that you see the utility.
To most people, especially a shy person, the usefulness of the site is astronomical.
Among others I am friends with my boss, my mother, my little cousins. Facebook lets shy people like me keep in touch with a massive amount of people where I can write them the modern equivalent of letters very quickly and easily, as well as let them broadcast their life's updates to me. I can keep in touch with all manner of people. I love writing letters, people love getting letters. Facebook is not far off.
Without facebook, I'd have no idea cousin X is having a baby, or that Y is having apartment trouble that I can help them with, or that Z got a new game we can play together, or person A is considering selling their car, and so on.
If I meet someone at an event and really hit it off (romantically or not), I can go on facebook the next day and look them up by name and add them. No exchanging phone numbers or emails or anything like that. I just search for them and find them. In college it was enormously useful for making friends and I still find it useful now that I've graduated.
I made a page for my hometown (90K population city in NH). I broadcast events going on around the city (fireworks, beer festival, city meetings). In this way I help my community learn about the goings-on of the town. It's a surprisingly popular page (more popular than the local newspaper's facebook page).
These functions in times past were done with the laborous process of making a million letters or phone calls or in many cases (like my hometown page) scarcely made or not made at all.
Literally, facebook is a modern "An open letter to my friends" system. And it's great at it.
~~~~~~
Okay that's off my chest.
Sadly as of late its getting a little less great at its function. A lot of the reason for the downturn in usage, sadly, is probably due to the fact that every ad, every sponsored story and sponsored "like" is adding to a signal/noise ratio that will make people frown. It's a shame that facebook's financial success as the model is right now is directly competing with its utility[2], but oh-well. We may have to sigh a bit more, but its still extremely useful to the casual user and has the usage stats to show it.
[1] I don't think privacy alone is enough to negate the utility of fbook. All of my privacy options are on the lowest possible setting. I treat anything that occurs on the site as if it were public. I don't see why not, I'm not going to pretend that photos of myself or my wall postings are anywhere near interesting enough to hide. In fact I'm not sure why people who put things on facebook want privacy at all. I never worry that something I say might be picked up on by the wrong person because I'd never say anything that I wouldn't want the world to hear.
[2] It may be worth pointing out that I love facebook but would never invest in it for a few reasons, and this is one of them. One could argue Google ads make Google searches more useful. Facebook ads, as they are today, directly impinge on the utility of the platform. But thats a separate topic
> These functions in times past were done with the laborous process of making a million letters or phone calls or in many cases (like my hometown page) scarcely made or not made at all.
Or with Geocities? FB hardly invented the concept of a page on the internet where events are listed. I'm sure it provides some nice functionality around calendaring and networking, but we didn't go from xeroxed fliers to Facebook with nothing in between.
Personally, I didn't delete my FB account because of privacy issues, I deleted it to make FB less useful to people who know me. Using the site was a constant exercise in using the site, rather than gaining utility out of it -- hiding apps, hiding people, keeping up with baby photos. Now that I don't have an account, nobody tries to message me or expects me to see something they posted; the social obligation's gone. I don't have to wade through 50 Farmville clone updates to get to an important message someone sent me. It's in my email now.
> I don't have to wade through 50 Farmville clone updates to get to an important message someone sent me. It's in my email now.
And no offense, but you suck at Facebook then. Blocking apps is a two click operation. Sending a message to your friends/relatives along the lines of "Don't send me game requests" isn't difficult either.
None taken, but this is exactly my point. I don't want to be "good at Facebook," I just want to know what's going on. Constantly having to complete "two click operations" to hide new games in order to find the one piece of information I actually care about sucks; I don't want to do it.
>FB hardly invented the concept of a page on the internet where events are listed.
They however popularized and refined it, which is what really matters. Look at Apple and the iPod. MP3 players existed, but they were weak and relatively unknown.
Who cares about the page on the internet where events are listed unless all your friends are there too?
Nobody other than you is forcing you to use it. You don't have to do keep hiding apps, photos etc. You don't have to "keep up" with anything. The social obligation is all in your head.
I have Facebook. I find it incredibly useful for keeping track of people. And yet I only use it when I feel the urge to.
Couldn't disagree more with this. The day I deleted my Facebook account was the day that I lost many real-life friends.
Those friends weren't willing to maintain those relationships with me outside of facebook.
Sure, they won't ever say that.
But I phrase it like that because they're so used to keeping up with their other friends on Facebook that keeping up with me was (comparatively) a chore, so I faded from that circle.
You see, Facebook has lowered the cost of keeping up with friends. The flipside is that people expect not to have to spend more effort to keep up with friends. Thus, it raises the (relative!) cost of connecting in meaningful ways (over the phone, in person, ...)
Many social circles start out treating Facebook as a tool. Then it becomes the norm, and they're less willing to take extra time to connect with anyone who does not use it.
You couldn't be bothered to read two more sentences that demonstrate that he gets the difference, yet you could take the time to write a response?
Some of us simply take issue with the revisionist history where we went from the stone age to this new concept of socialization brought to us by Facebook.
You're confusing "without facebook" with "without the internet". Without facebook, yourself, your family and friends - would just be using something else.
People leaving facebook are not doing so to become socially isolated. But because there's other means to keep in touch without the whole facebook stream overhead.
IMHO privacy alone IS enough to negate the utility of Facebook. Privacy is not about just your name, gender and address. Nor even about what movies, music and books you enjoy. It's down to how you express yourself in words and what can be inferred by them. Your pics might seen harmless, but there's plenty you can infer from them too.
Sure, there's controls on which groups of facebook friends can see things, but in the end, this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily. Might not matter to you in particular.
On the flip side perhaps, humans might not be easily categorized and predicated like bits of data. That we become ok with reading about things that weren't intended for our demographic profile. But if I were to bet money on it, I'd bet against that.
IMHO privacy alone IS enough to negate the utility of Facebook. Privacy is not about just your name, gender and address. Nor even about what movies, music and books you enjoy. It's down to how you express yourself in words and what can be inferred by them. Your pics might seen harmless, but there's plenty you can infer from them too.
Sure, there's controls on which groups of facebook friends can see things, but in the end, this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily. Might not matter to you in particular.
On the flip side, maybe from a philosophical point of view humans might not be easily categorized and predicated like bits of data. That we become ok with reading about things that weren't intended for our demographic profile. But if I were to bet money on it, I'd bet against that.
I guess, I can say this since I've never been a heavy FB user and I see little of the benefits from it. Maybe I need to upgrade my friends. They say that to many, FB is the internet to them -- we'll see how this lasts in the long run.
> this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily.
Are you being ironic with a statement like this, or are you serious?
The second there's even so much as a bug that affects some obscure privacy setting, the TechCrunch pitchforks are out, and the brand is on the line. Do you really think that FB is just gonna let anyone rummage through their user's private data, just, you know, for fun? Can you even imagine how damaging that would be? Why do you think FB blows millions of dollars on engineer salaries to work on privacy features — which you just dismiss in a sentence like they're nothing?
The way I see it, you're already in a database somewhere, many of them, but the difference is you don't have access to that data — you don't even know what data exists, where. Facebook comes along and says "OK, fine, we'll play along, except we'll let the users decide what data they provide, and we'll try to help them benefit from it as much as possible" — and suddenly, Facebook's the bad guy. All the government, banking, insurance, direct mail databases out there and people have to go after FB, where every click has an associated privacy setting. It boggles the mind.
I believe that it's within reason that FB's internal controls are lax (like any other company) depending on what sort of access you have as an employee, contractor or family member of an employee ... or even a friend. It's totally possible for an internal employee to forget to encrypt a drive, or leave a backup somewhere of something. Or if a friend borrowed the password of an employee. I even think it's totally within reason that an employee could be paid off if the (extreme) situation deemed it necessary.
"OK, fine, we'll play along, except we'll let the users decide what data they provide, and we'll try to help them benefit from it as much as possible"
...sure that applies to the outer shell of it, and the official public stance. What else happens internally?
Disclaimer: my comments just are a result of trying to think critically. I could be totally/partially incorrect or correct. I do believe there is a truth out there about it, but that it's not in FB's interest to be super upfront.
I took time to word what I said, to match what I mean. It seems that what you read, were ones that you seem to have injected in.
It would be nice to know exactly what precautions are taken to prevent access from insiders. You may work for FB, but is storage or backups part of your role? Not that I think you have to be, how would I know as an outsider. Maybe as a developer you know how things are setup, and how well people adhere to policies.
And I'm curious, what are those? If users' data is taken seriously then wouldn't they make difficult to prevent casual snooping across the database? So that even if you had root access you couldn't get to it as an insider?
Probably not. The data is meant to feed an ad/marketing machine so, how locked down could the data be internally?
I don't expect these questions to be answered, but just throwing them out there in an attempt to reason things out.
The way I see it is this: Would I invite Mark Zuckerberg to be permanently and pervasively privy to my friends, my conversations with them, and all of my pictures?
Seriously - Facebook is Zucker's brain-child in that it face-scans, categorizes, and picks apart your words and photos. Its like inviting Zucker himself into your photo-album, allowing him to think and learn more about you while you are away.
Facebook is fucking creepy. I want a place I can go to have conversations with my friends privately, not a place I can put all of my friends conversations and hope that it doesn't get disclosed somehow later.
You could well need help with paranoia this strong.
Mark Zuckerberg is not going through your friends, conversations and photos. Nor is anybody else other than you and your friends. In fact due to its design your emails would be far easier to 'read' than Facebook would be.
Just because he isn't going it personally, doesn't mean that backend processes and features designed by him aren't fully automated. Thats almost worse - a robot Zuckers spying on me. At least if he was doing it himself he wouldn't be doing it perfectly and constantly.
Personally, I dont want a middle man for every social interaction. Then I don't own my relationships, Facecbook does.
> Without facebook, I'd have no idea cousin X is having a baby...
You mean you can't use a phone to stay in contact with your family and friends? That's a bit strange...
What bothers me the most is that a lot of the comments have totally forgotten about MySpace. That was a site where you could truly customize your homepage with a little html knowledge. And they didn't force things like retarded timelines where I can basically see your entire Facebook history recorded on your page. Now that's creepy...
you are missing the point of the facebook privacy complaints. it's not that i have any expectation that what i do on fb is secret - it's there on a public website, after all, with multiple people reading and commenting. i do have the expectation that any given conversation i have is mostly noticeable by the people involved in that conversation. having facebook aggregate my activity across the site and make it trivially accessible using my username as the key (and even worse, actively pushing updates to that activity to my friends' streams) violates that expectation violently, and is the main reason i reduced my interaction with facebook to a brief trawl through my friendstream once every day or two.
here's an analogy. suppose i'm at a party, standing in a group of people and having a conversation. this is by no means a private conversation - it is taking place in the middle of a large, open room, and anyone is welcome to come by and participate. i'd still be pretty annoyed if i found out that someone had a hidden microphone broadcasting that conversation to the poolside, despite the fact that anyone sitting by the pool could in theory walk by and listen in any time they wanted to.
Yes, despite the purported technical rigor of this community there are an awful lot of comments here of the form, "Facebook is doomed, I stopped using it."
That's like saying because you don't drink soda/use tampons/own a gun that Coca-Cola/Tampax/Remington are doomed companies.
> Literally, facebook is a modern "An open letter to my friends" system. And it's great at it.
I actually think this is Twitter (warning: I stopped using it a year ago). Usually if you have followers you can assume that they read your stuff sometimes. Not so with Facebook. You may have been purged from your best buddy's newsfeed just because you usually have little interaction on FB.
I sometimes feel the urge to post a cat picture just so that people who don't care about politics will Like it and thus keep me in their newsfeed. :( (Assuming that this is how it works.)
The privacy argument invariably turns to someone talking about their privacy settings being perfect.... The elephant in the room is that you have no privacy FROM FACEBOOK, and they OWN YOUR DATA.
Soon enough, they'll be leveraging it in order to stay afloat....
Do they own the data they trick out of you, when your browser sends a request to Facebook for every page with a 'like' button or similar feature unless you're doing crazy-adblock?
Do they own any data your friends and relatives give them about you?
Are you going to pretend that there is much difference between owning it and having a license to use it however they want?
Your last point is noted, hence why I do not use their site... It's the most interesting point in that most people never think about it. That's why Facebook is evil.
Every time a Facebook usage topic comes up there's the usual round of scorn usually backed up by a strange display of plumage involving the sentence, "I just deleted my facebook yesterday/last month/last year/never used it."
And that's okay. But I want to point out to my fellow HN-goers why facebook is so wonderful. There's also a note about privacy at the bottom[1] since that seems to be a big reason people stay away. I feel as if a lot of people here missed the point and doesn't understand what the average person sees in this system. I'll try to relay my experience in the hopes that you see the utility.
To most people, especially a shy person, the usefulness of the site is astronomical.
Among others I am friends with my boss, my mother, my little cousins. Facebook lets shy people like me keep in touch with a massive amount of people where I can write them the modern equivalent of letters very quickly and easily, as well as let them broadcast their life's updates to me. I can keep in touch with all manner of people. I love writing letters, people love getting letters. Facebook is not far off.
Without facebook, I'd have no idea cousin X is having a baby, or that Y is having apartment trouble that I can help them with, or that Z got a new game we can play together, or person A is considering selling their car, and so on.
If I meet someone at an event and really hit it off (romantically or not), I can go on facebook the next day and look them up by name and add them. No exchanging phone numbers or emails or anything like that. I just search for them and find them. In college it was enormously useful for making friends and I still find it useful now that I've graduated.
I made a page for my hometown (90K population city in NH). I broadcast events going on around the city (fireworks, beer festival, city meetings). In this way I help my community learn about the goings-on of the town. It's a surprisingly popular page (more popular than the local newspaper's facebook page).
These functions in times past were done with the laborous process of making a million letters or phone calls or in many cases (like my hometown page) scarcely made or not made at all.
Literally, facebook is a modern "An open letter to my friends" system. And it's great at it.
~~~~~~
Okay that's off my chest.
Sadly as of late its getting a little less great at its function. A lot of the reason for the downturn in usage, sadly, is probably due to the fact that every ad, every sponsored story and sponsored "like" is adding to a signal/noise ratio that will make people frown. It's a shame that facebook's financial success as the model is right now is directly competing with its utility[2], but oh-well. We may have to sigh a bit more, but its still extremely useful to the casual user and has the usage stats to show it.
[1] I don't think privacy alone is enough to negate the utility of fbook. All of my privacy options are on the lowest possible setting. I treat anything that occurs on the site as if it were public. I don't see why not, I'm not going to pretend that photos of myself or my wall postings are anywhere near interesting enough to hide. In fact I'm not sure why people who put things on facebook want privacy at all. I never worry that something I say might be picked up on by the wrong person because I'd never say anything that I wouldn't want the world to hear.
[2] It may be worth pointing out that I love facebook but would never invest in it for a few reasons, and this is one of them. One could argue Google ads make Google searches more useful. Facebook ads, as they are today, directly impinge on the utility of the platform. But thats a separate topic