What does that even mean? Do you even know what you're talking about? I don't pay for a lot of things of which I'm certainly not the product. FYI resorting to such banalities is rather pathetic
Not the original poster, but I think he is quite right.
IF you are getting a product or service for free, continuously, the company providing it usually has a different motive, a different way to make money. Usually that means selling your data, thus you are the product being sold in the statement the original poster made.
Can you explain why you consider the statement a banality instead of a rule of thumb? What kind of things do you not pay for where the company providing it is not gaining something from you using it?
I run several free websites where I don't have any ulterior motives. I do it for fun and have quite a lot of active users. Not saying you're wrong, just giving some examples where it isn't applicable.
It has just reduced to the new "cool kids" thing to say "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product". You are saying it usually means "selling your data" - while most of these websites clearly state in their policies that they DON'T sell your "personally identifiable" data in any manner to third parties. So that's that. Of course, it means they could aggregate the data and sell that, but then it really doesn't void my privacy much. Is Google getting benefited from my data? Definitely. Am I getting benefited from Google's services? Definitely. Does Google know much about me? Yes. Is Google selling my personal data? No. One just needs to be aware of what they are sharing with these service.
Them not selling data doesn't mean you are not "the product". You are being advertised to based on what Google know about you. To use another hyperbolic term, your "eyeballs" are being sold to others. You are the product.
Google not selling personally identifiable information is not out of benevolence, but because it makes their own position stronger. They are optimizing how to sell what you are giving them.
Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that, my point is that "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is usually true. Resigning it to the parenthesized cool-kids corner is (unjustly) diminishing the value of the sentence.
There's just one difference. "You are being advertised" is technically wrong. A product is being advertised to me, and yes, I have to look at it as a cost of using their service. They are advertising masses to the product companies, and product to the masses, but not 'personally me'. There's a huge difference here. I look at it more like a mutual contract between me and the 'free' service. They're not selling "me", it's more like you scratch my back, I scratch yours.
You are being advertised to based on the profile Google has built of you and the profile companies want to advertise to.
As such, your attention your time, based on your life, is being sold to advertisers. I don't see how being aware of this and being okay with this changes this fact? Of course there is a "contract" of sorts (which are always mutual) in play between you and Google, Google provides you with a service and you provide Google with whatever data you want.
Google in turn uses this to sell its product (people like you reading ads) to other parties.
I'm not saying this is inherently bad either. But the sentence is used to make people aware of the fact that companies like Google have something to gain from giving you something for free, which is something a lot of people hadn't thought about before or are aware of (especially when they are internet products). Thus I don't get the pedantry that this statement seems to evoke.
Let me rephrase: if you are not paying for it, you are the product, but you probably don't know it, and even if you did know it, you probably don't care.
If I was to go one step farther, I'd say the entire powerbase of companies like Facebook and Google is founded on a large mass of people not caring about their privacy. Maybe a step too far, but I'm not so sure.
I'd say you are probably right on this - it's interesting to consider how these companies actually function - sometimes the core product has been free - for a long time - and yet for services like YouTube - now there are paid options.
Can you imagine an internet search engine with a paid option? Perhaps a personal search assistant who sorts through all the junk to find what you are actually after? It may well happen.
As someone whose started a company with a "free product", seeing how it's been monetised has certainly been eye-opening.
Not so much not caring, but getting stuck in a vortext.
Free-to-use, privacy-voiding services kill any paid-for, privacy-respecting service. There's a race to the bottom -- Gresham's Law -- and the "good" services can neither gather sufficient users nor revenues to be sustaining.
The leaders, at the same time, have to stay ahead of all three fronts in the game:
1. They need low per-user costs to sustain themselves.
2. They need to exploit user data (or whatever other advertising-based edge) they have to retain advertisers.
3. They've got to retain sufficient network size and quality to keep smaller services from taking off, or from boiling-off the high-quality users who are no longer satisfied by the service.
Google launched G+ to kill Facebook. It failed in that, with a large number of arguments as to why.
But Facebook's initial attraction was that it was literally Harvard. That is: it began as one of the most selective, aspirational, and attractive (to both other participants, and advertisers) cohorts on the planet.
Metcalfe's Law is only so powerful, and it's a strong overstatement. There's both a falling value with additional nodes (Tilly-Odlyzko), and a per-user cost constant (myself). The size of a network is ultimately governed by that per-user cost.
(There is also, if you will a perverse T-O factor -- a subpopulation who are actively detracting from overall site value. This can be addressed by specifically addressing and neutralising those participants. The cost-constant isn't subject to this.)
Which is why a new social network could form, and relatively easily, among some sufficiently large appealing cohort. Throwing some funding money and support to individuals within such contexts might well take down Facebook, eventually.
(Though the replacement would almost certainly eventually present the same problem.)
Usually I don't like these "why I left [company]" post.
However, for this one it struck a nerve. I am not even on Facebook and since about a week ago receive emails along the line "Jan see what [real friend of mine]" has posted.
I flagged is as Spam in this is where the emails now land. But WTF is going on ? This is a severe intrusion of my privacy. What's next. Install camera's wherever I physically go ? Is that the drone plan?
> I am not even on Facebook and since about a week ago receive emails along the line "Jan see what [real friend of mine]" has posted. I flagged is as Spam in this is where the emails now land. But WTF is going on ? This is a severe intrusion of my privacy.
It's just a trap. One of your real friends uploaded all their contacts to Facebook, and when Facebook found you weren't on it, I guess it decided to send you an email in the hope that you'd be enticed to join in and see what your real friends are up to...on Facebook, of course! I wonder if Facebook does this even for any company/organization addresses that get uploaded or if it has some sort of intelligence not to do that (imagine a "payroll@company.com" or "legal@company.com" or "abuse@company.com" getting an email to check out what friends are up to).
As for the severe intrusion of your privacy, Facebook's privacy policy says what applies to its users. You're just a shadow profile who can be monetized in the future or in other ways. You're like an outlaw/alien who doesn't have rights as far as Facebook is concerned.
I was a huge facebook fan early days, I used to own facebook.com/<mylastname>, going as far as using their email address extensively. While I'm somewhat of a privacy activist (Lavaboom, Oakmail) the real reason I deleted my Facebook account (several times...) is that I simply hate the clutter I feel it adds to my life. I barely care for 10-15 people in my life, yet Facebook makes me fill in my boredom with trite details about quasi-strangers.
"Facebook tracks posts and comments even before you post them...sending form data surreptitiously is morally wrong, and everyone knows it..."
protip: you can access FB without javascript via https://mbasic.facebook.com/ and you don't have to worry about such concerns. (I learned this from a Stallman video.)
He doesn't encourage it by no means.
But I have seen him say on one of his "javascript trap" videos (talking like parent telling his teenager if you are going to use sex, use a condom) that if you find you must, then use the mobile site. I can't find the video, but on https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html under the heading "How you can communicate safely with Facebook" he writes:
"To make the site work without the need to run nonfree Javascript code, visit to m.facebook.com rather than facebook.com itself."
FYI, currently m.facebook.com now uses javascript, however mbasic.facebook.com doesn't, and is basically the same as m.facebook.com was at the time of his writing.
And you can even write and read messages on mbasic.facebook.com opposed to m.facebook.com which just re-directs you to the app store in order to install their messenger app.
A lot of people do multiple post a day on facebook and use it as their only private messaging solution, it's as close as you can get to having your whole life archived on the internet.
Maybe you don't, but what about you and the sum of your friends and friends of your friends? That doesn't just mean tagging pictures or facial recognition - that includes collating ips and times - in someone checks into Starbucks with a NATed ipv4 ip from Starbucks wlan and your visit fb from the same external ip...
It's too late to join the Leaving Facebook party. If you were a regular user since 2005 and leave now, it does not make any difference anymore. The collected data about you is enough to interpolate your profile for the next decades.
Of course, decentralization is a valid point and it's really important to get people who are kinda "new" to social media on distributed platforms. Twitter is centralized as well and also tracks with buttons and scripts. We need critical masses for e.g. XMPP and OStatus platforms like Mastodon.
This of course also applies to mobile clients like WhatsApp.
Of course I am exaggerating. But IMO people vastly underestimate how similar their own behaviour is to other people. Meaning, if Facebook "knows" me since 12 years (!) it can very precisely categorize me into a group of people. And those other people do not leave Facebook but feed it more information.
Funny how Facebook can have all of this information about me, my preferences, my social groups, etc., and has not once served me a remotely relevant advertisement.
I think it most likely has but you currently aren't consciously aware of it. Partly this is due to your desire to make a point. Partly due to our inability to off the top of our heads to recall any but a few specific adverts. We see thousands of them. It is very unlikely that none of them have been relevant to you. There are also the adverts that subconsciously manipulate you. The stuff that you aren't aware of.
There's a bias at work too. The ads in the news feed are slip-streamed, if you aren't constantly on the look out for that gray, barely there "Sponsored" they look like "normal" news feed items and scroll past/through them only really noticing the bad ones.
Even worse are the socially slip-streamed ones that started as a Sponsored post in a friend's news feed that they found funny/interesting/whatever and re-shared. Once reshared it loses even that gray, barely there "Sponsored" tag and has "grown up into a real boy" in the news feed.
A lot of the mind games in the last election cycle happened because of that (target ads to people susceptible to reshare them and watch them go viral for relatively cheap). Facebook has said they may try to crack down on that sort of thing, but slip-streaming ads is where they make their most money and they don't have enough financial incentive to really fix that.
I haven't left because I was concerned about the data they were collecting, I left because I realised that I couldn't stop going on facebook, any time my hands were free I would open up my phone and check the feed, scroll through the endless stream of garbage and crap I didn't care about in the slightest. That, and the fact that I was getting really depressed by all the news surrounding brexit, then I would go and read comments and be completely negative about everything, and facebook was just amplifying the negativity tenfold.
I just cut the cord and I am now a lot happier without it, facebook is literally a drug,
I shifted to Twitter for a while and eventually kicked that too. I get the HN daily digest email and generally only visit the links from that, though there are exceptions when I'm looking for something interesting over morning coffee (hence replying to this post at this time). I stopped paying attention to the news media years ago.
I think I'm pretty much free of the 'need' to look at what's 'new' now. You might think this means I have loads more free time to do more important things. I'm still waiting for that to happen.
If you were a regular user since 2005 and leave now, it does not make any
difference anymore. The collected data about you is enough to interpolate
your profile for the next decades.
Does it really matter if you have been on facebook at all? Even if you never
joined, people upload their addressbooks with all of their contacts, they
upload pictures of people never been on facebook and tag them (and share other
information about everyone, which facebook probably is able to use as well). So
essentially facebook builds your social graph no matter if you have ever been a
member or not.
It does make a difference. Just not to care and to give up is no solution
either.
Right exactly. I don't have (and have never had) a Facebook account. But I know that they have much more information about me than I would want them to. They most certainly have some sort of "shadow" account sitting there associating whatever they can to it; friends' address books, photo tagging, etc.
And if you throw in the Instagram wildcard, it gets worse. I signed up for an Instagram account before Facebook purchasing them. I never posted a photo, but I'm sure this still adds to the reach of their shadow profile. People who actively use both Facebook and Instagram, I feel sorry for them.
I do use twitter and google extensively though, so I guess I can't complain or say anything about my social profile. Twitter luckily has a smaller budget, so they can't quite crunch data as hard as Facebook can. But Google owns me, I'm afraid.
I'm not (too) scared about NSA. At least, NSA has some sort of government bureaucracy that slows down their ability and interest in my data; they aren't trying to use me for-profit. I think we should be more scared about what Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al. can do, especially because they are generally bound to whatever their current (and fungible) terms of service and privacy policy stipulates. [edit] i.e. policies written for the sole benefit of the share-holders.
I use RescueTime (primarily because it integrates with a bunch of other services I use for life-logging) in Firefox - can monitor all sites or just a whitelist. Also supports Chrome, I believe.
It is not entirely true that 10 years of past data is enough for fb to draw conclusions on a person. In fact fb is trying more to make people share. You can also try 'tools that fudge info' to confuse fb. If done cleverly, this is a major tool to put fb off the scent.
Also, Quitting fb for mental sanity is a worthwhile reason if not privacy
Yes - Mastodon! I've been there a couple of months now and I never go on Twitter any more. Find an instance you like, hang with like-minded people, or dip your toe into the Fediverse stream for a firehose of toots. Yes, toots. You know, like a Mastodon would toot....oh nvm.
>all those silly games and quizzes people are adding to their account are making off with all sorts of information about you.
But (most) people prefer taking silly quizzes than thinking about potential dark implications of doing that. And it's not like this is a big secret no one has ever talked about (just google 'Facebook quizzes data' for more on that).
When someone leaves FB, he makes a public declaration. But his return years or months later is generally silent.
Not claiming everyone that leaves FB, returns. But Facebook is continuing to expand.
I remember reading here years back that new generation isn't really using FB cause their parents are using it. And they weren't comfortable with that setup. Rather they are switching to other social media.
>I remember reading here years back that new generation isn't really using FB cause their parents are using it. And they weren't comfortable with that setup. Rather they are switching to other social media.
They are mostly using FB for "public" stuff, and the stuff they would only share with their friends is on snapchat and similar applications.
I quit Facebook right around the time my son was born. It wasn't for privacy reasons (and frankly, it never bothered me), but rather for the enormous energy and time sink it had become. Truly, it was as if I was a dopamine junkie and Facebook was the pusher of those sweet, sweet red circles with a number in them that meant someone, somewhere vaguely agreed with something you posted. I noticed I was not present in the moment with my newborn son, but rather my brain was hunting for the next quip to post or cute/smug/humblebragish picture to upload.
I quit cold turkey and have never looked back.
I'm off all social media today (except LinkedIn) and have weeded out a lot "friends" who really were just co-enablers in the dopamine rush hunt.
LinkedIn is perhaps the worst of the bunch though. I see people in "people you may know" that I've already tried to add but LinkedIn will show them to me because I assume they're not the ones spamming if it happens due to me clicking a button. All for a blip in user engagement.
The thing is, with Facebook, we all knew it was mostly public information and that you'd be a dolt to reveal everything sensitive about yourself in your profile. Most people instinctively know to leave certain tidbits about themselves off of their FB profile.
Whereas with LinkedIn, we are willing to give up much more sensitive and accurate profile data, such as all of our past employers, addresses, phone, email, birthdate, professional experience, headshot, school information, coworkers, etc.
The initial content of a typical LinkedIn profile is much more rich than a starter FB profile. There is no need-to-know for Facebook to have as much "real" information about you as LinkedIn has. I feel that LinkedIn got in through the backdoor with the information most people have provided to it. Though Facebook undoubtedly has more of your day-to-day activities than LinkedIn, which might be more dangerous.
I never personally got suckered into a Facebook profile, one of those (lucky) few that have continued to live on planet earth without a FB account. But LinkedIn is another story, I totally got swooped up in that one for sure.
In my experience, people do not always "instinctively leave certain tidbits" off of Facebook - in fact, people often feel like Facebook is in many ways a private space. Like "it's just my friends," even though the friends and friends of friends circles are massive, not to mention privacy controls that make many things public by default. Also, FB prompts for things like employment history and educational history in the same way as LinkedIn, but goes further to ask for personal info, geographic history (where all have you lived), etc.
Combine all this with the fact that there are so many FB users and many of them are children who wouldn't otherwise have a LinkedIn account (and are more comfortable with sharing personal info online).
So, while I agree that LinkedIn is in the group of data collectors, I don't think they're quite on the scale of FB.
Except Linkedin is boring, inane drivel from "thought leaders" so I'm not even tempted to have a look. At least FB has the occasional picture of someone I care about, or a political link (that inevitably agrees with my already-established view of things)
Good point... for this, I'm still using Google+. One circle for immediate family, another for wider family... I don't think I bother sharing photos to any wider circles than that at the moment.
I have all of my family on g+ actually.
In the beginning, we just said "if you want to see baby pictures, sign up here and add us to your family circle".
I too feel exactly this way with almost everything. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Email, Messages ... it's kind of tough to escape. Impossible even.
And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True?
That red circle with a number literally gives more enjoyment than a close friend saying "Heh that's cool". The worst part is that there's likely no cure. Rehab, maybe. But rehab for this shit doesn't exist yet.
Plus try explaining to your boss that you're not reading email and slack and you're never coming back because you're in notification rehab.
Impossible is hard to square with the people in this thread (myself included) that did it.
You don't have to tell your boss you're not reading notifications. You just have to eliminate the notifications that serve no purpose except a high. Facebook still spams my email; it's filtered to the trash. Business carries on.
"You can totally quit heroin! Just stop taking it"
"Oh and if all your friends are doing it and are wondering why you're not having fun with them, just ignore them"
Sure you've quit Facebook. But did you quit dopamine-seeking technology use?
What I've found in myself is that when I pry myself away from Facebook, I spend more time on Twitter. When I pry myself off that as well, suddenly my HN engagement goes up. When I manage to ignore all those, then I check Slack every 2 minutes. If I avoid even that, then I refresh my email all the time.
The medium isn't the problem. The behavior is the problem. There's always another medium you can switch to.
I mean, it's not like I was on Facebook when I got hooked to social media at 14, 15, 16. I was on internet forums and MSN Messenger. The draw was and still is that it broadened my horizons, exposed me to different people, and sometimes I learned really useful things. Hell, it helped me build my entire career.
You're being hyperbolic, and it diminishes your argument. Not everybody in your generation suffers from the same addiction as you. I could be persuaded it's a large problem and is generational, but I don't believe we have the same kind of biological responses to social media as we do to something like sunlight.
I also believe there is another side of the argument, and people just consume media differently today. The internet came and it was the death of media, the TV came and it was the death of books, the books came and they were the death of the bard, etc. Maybe some people actually enjoy Facebook?
Watch the video I linked. Sinek does a good job of explaining how most (many?) of us have a similar problem with social media as alcoholics do with alcohol. For much the same reasons.
Quitting dopamine-seeking is called death. Dopamine is how the brain's reward system works, and eating or parenting is dopamine-seeking just as much as any other behaviour.
It sounds like technology isn't the problem - if you're doing these things with technology you'd be doing the same things without it. Perhaps you'd be spending a lot of time chatting around the water cooler instead of online, but that's not actually any healthier or better. Facebook has brought me a lot of fun in my life - on Tuesday I went to a gig that I only found out about because a casual acquaintance posted it there, and tonight I'm meeting up with another acquaintance because I saw on Facebook we're going to the same gig. I see it as like the gold medal in Cool Runnings - if you're not enough without it, you're not going to be enough with it.
Different activities provide differing reward for differing efforts.
Water cooler chat, which requires active social engagement and is time bounded, is not as addicting as an endless stream of content accessed with a twitch of the finger. You might not use Facebook in that way, and I similarly don't find it that engaging, but I've certainly experienced it with reddit and HN.
And I don't think this is some intractable personality flaw, I think people get used to the comfort of frequent dopamine hits, and find it very difficult to drag themselves away from these sources as a result. Cold turkey can and does make a difference.
Dopamine triggers satisfaction, not happiness. Otherwise we just fond the magic recipe for the whole world to be extremely happy! Instead it turns out that just makes everyone feel miserable.
> Otherwise we just fond the magic recipe for the whole world to be extremely happy! Instead it turns out that just makes everyone feel miserable.
What is it you're saying makes everyone feel miserable? AIUI the artificial substitute for dopamine is cocaine, which only makes people miserable when they run out (and more generally as tolerance kicks in)? Social media seems to make some people miserable, but despite how much people love to throw around "dopamine" in Internet arguments ("skinner box" is another good one) there's no scientifically demonstrated connection AFAIK.
You should maybe read up about what addiction really is. What it is caused by. I think you misunderstand what is meant by "dopamine hit".
Yes dopamine is part of a loop or cycle that is a survival strategy. In a healthy individual in a healthy situation.
When this loop works properly then yes, it is called being happy (there's more things to being happy but a properly functioning dopamine loop is part of it).
Think of a dopamine release and its causes like a particular message in a protocol that runs inside our body.
Our bodies aren't perfect or tested against every possible situation.
Sometimes the combination of the dopamine protocol and the environment causes a weird feedback loop that is no longer beneficial to this survival strategy.
In most of those cases, this results in a state called an addiction. (and in that case we call the dopamine release a "dopamine hit", to emphasize the role of addiction)
Fighting this bad feedback loop can be a constant struggle. A daily, constant struggle that lasts a lifetime once you get stuck in it. If you compare that to "being happy", then I can only assume you've never experienced it (and I hope you never will, but you can still learn compassion).
Sometimes these faults are exploited on purpose, very often for the commercial purposes of the amoral corporations.
It's also the case that certain people are more susceptible to these exploits. For instance ADHD is well-known to be co-morbid with susceptibility to addiction.
> "You can totally quit heroin! Just stop taking it"
"Oh and if all your friends are doing it and are wondering why you're not having fun with them, just ignore them"
The heroin analogy is lazy and irrelevant. The reason people say stuff like "try doing X to quit or cut down" is that, unlike heroin, a fairly large chunk of people who've recognized the problem have been pretty able to easily cut down or stop their "dopamine addiction" to the level that they're comfortable with.
If heroin had such a high success rate from going cold turkey, you can be damn sure that people would be saying "try going cold turkey" or "try this specific path to quitting", because it's worked for so many others. There are successful suggestions on this thread that amount to "I deleted my dealer's number from my phone and poof problem gone".
That isn't to say that these will definitely work for everyone: some people have a more severe problem when it comes to their relationship to dopamine. But it's awfully self-centered to complain about people talking about things that have been successful for them and others.
The question isn't does it work, it's how long does it work for.
For example, diets work. But most have a fall-off-the-wagon rate in the couple of months range.
It's definitely easy to quit a social media platform cold turkey. The hard part is quitting social media. I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.
Social media addiction in the modern world is a lot like food addiction. Sure you're addicted, but you still gotta eat or you die. Sure you're addicted, but without social media you can't be a functioning member of current society.
Hell, I had one of those "I quit the internet" articles on the frontpage of HackerNews a few years ago. You know what happened? I quit all social media, but I needed access to Github to do my work. So I started friending people and being all social media on Github.
> The question isn't does it work, it's how long does it work for. For example, diets work. But most have a fall-off-the-wagon rate in the couple of months range.
Off the top of my head, I have a friend who have been off of Facebook for 9 years, another for 7, and another who never made an account at all. These are all healthy, happy people with robust social lives: their friends just know they need to be texted to be looped into plans. I know still more people (myself included) who have always had a healthy relationship with social media: short periods of "maybe I'm mindlessly browsing this a bit" followed by minor habit tweaks and straight back to a fully healthy relationship. I eat extremely healthy but every once in a while notice that I'm eating a bit of junk food (perhaps due to stress at work or something). I notice it and fix it and go back to eating extremely healthy. It would be completely inaccurate to claim that any lapse means I have an unhealthy relationship with food, and this is exactly the same as with social media et al.
> I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.
This is a beyond-absurd definition of social media, and you're now talking about something that no one else here is talking about. The idea that there's no value in email and texting beyond dopamine addiction is frankly just insane. When I get statements from my bank, or delivery notifications from my package receipt service or laundry service, or an update that my friend wants to move our dinner date back by half an hour, am I feeding my addiction? Because your bizarre definition doesn't leave any room for responsible e-mail/text usage.
Anyone defining "communication with other people" as an addiction that needs to be killed off is battling far worse demons than social media/dopamine-hit addiction. That may be interesting in and enough of itself but it couldn't be less relevant to this thread.
> And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit.
Yeah, I am only a year away, born in 1988. Our family's first home computer was put in my room when I was 6 years old and my parents were hands-off about using it, so I grew up on multi-player gaming, forums, chat rooms, porn, etc. It's difficult to express how strongly the internet shaped the direction of my life, and I'm not even as addicted as most people.
Not having a phone helps with staying off Facebook...
I watched the video and the speaker spends a great deal of time making some very elegant (if somewhat obvious) points. But then at the end he comes to the wrong conclusion, Imo. He blames the corporations where millennials work and passes the responsibility for fixing their attention/relationship deficits off to them! This is totally backwards.
Every generation has their dopamine hits. Of course, as society creates more leisure time, the number and (arguably) complexity of these increase. That is the trend. But, as always, the responsibility should be squarely on your own shoulders! You were not "dealt a bad hand." If that's a truth, then everyone ever born was dealt a bad hand. If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as always, it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need.
> He blames the corporations where millennials work and passes the responsibility for fixing their attention/relationship deficits off to them! This is totally backwards.
He does blames them, but only as part of his point, not as the whole conclusion. He blames the corporations for focusing on reductive, short-term metrics† instead of people, which is precisely what's lead to this[0] and that[1] abusive situations. As a company you're not hiring robots, you're hiring people.
> Every generation has their dopamine hits.
Indeed it has. The trouble starts when it reaches such heights, recurrence and omnipresence that it throws whole lives off balance.
> If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as alway
Strawman. Life expectancy does not invalidate the new challenges we have to face. If anything, with modern discoveries about happiness vs hardship, people may literally have been happier in spite of such matters (shocking!). I'm suddenly reminded of Gladia's tirade in Robots and Empire: would you rather live a long, dull, purposeless life endlessly being bored to no end or a shorter life full of brilliance? But we digress.
> it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need
This is the kind of attitude that reviles me. You can't blame someone for becoming alcoholic/depressive/etc. If you do then you don't understand what those are: illnesses. Nobody breaks his leg or catches a flu on purpose. If a company refuses to take such humane matters into consideration then you're just a tool and it's parasitically just sucking onto you till you're dry. When you're in situations of illnesses, all the good will of the person is not sufficient: help is needed, from everywhere it can come[2].
>This is the kind of attitude that reviles me. You can't blame someone for becoming alcoholic/depressive/etc. If you do then you don't understand what those are: illnesses.
Waaaait a minute. This is another strawman. My comment did not blame illnesses on the individual. But I think we need to define carefully what an illness is. I don't doubt alcoholism is an illness, but I would reasonable argue that browsing Facebook on your phone is not an illness. Do you really believe that? I don't. There may be people at the far end of that spectrum that cannot help themselves, but there are plenty of others that are just bored.
> My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True?
I don't think that's really true. I'm about your age, and you were ~20 when the iPhone came out, right? Facebook was just settling in as the tool of choice for every college student, but even then it was mainly just photo-sharing and event-planning. The fact that we missed out on social networking in our entire teenage and preteen years means that we narrowly escaped this.
If you spend any time around people a bit younger than us, the contrast is particularly stark. My cousins are about a decade younger than me (just started college), and throughout high school, Snapchat/Twitter/etc were simply a must-have. The amount of time they spent sharing content and scrolling through others is insane, and if you talk to them about it, they're very aware that it's somewhere between a chore, an addiction, and good ol' fun.
That's the kind of "hardwired into your formative social years" thing that we never really had to deal with.
I felt the same - I was alarmed when I realised how much time I spent scrolling through a feed of inane posts, and how Cmd-T, f, down, enter had become almost a reflex.
Most of my "real" friends seemed to have stopped posting on there, yet I was still addicted to scrolling through the feed while waiting for code to compile or whatever (clever design on their part, I guess!).
However, also like you, the privacy side doesn't worry me too much (although as time goes by I do start to think about it more), and I still get some value from communicating with certain people on FB Messenger and being able to access photos from events etc., so instead of quitting, I unfollowed everyone (using a bit of Javascript - I'll try and dig it out).
My feed is now totally blank, so I now only visit maybe twice a day for a few seconds to check for messages (I refuse to install their app - mbasic.facebook.com all the way!). I did think I could refollow people if I felt I was missing out, but surprise surprise, I don't at all.
Of course, I've now replaced reading Facebook with reading Twitter while stuff compiles but at least that's relevant to my work ;)
I'd highly recommend this approach if you feel uncomfortable with your use of Facebook but also value your network of friends on there.
What about HN (Reddit and like)? May sound funndy, but there are the also reward mechanisms at play when we visit these sites, and they can be affecting work/private life negatively as well.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of people here are confused by the notion of Facebook addiction because they don't personally find the content on Facebook particularly engaging. I certainly don't, but I have experienced the same time sink addiction on reddit and HN.
I quit my Facebook account around ten years ago, but somehow regretted it because I've got out of touch with many people - especially those I never knew so well. FB is definitely nice to somehow superficially keep in touch with acquaintances and old friends.
However, in my opinion their EULA is totally unacceptable, so I cannot use it.
I'm quite surprised with everything the internet is teaching us on a personal and social level.
I noticed on reddit I seek for shallow agreement too. And if a comment gets 0 I'm a bit disappointed. It also taught me that sometimes you get a few downvotes at first but later some people upvote, some even comment. Patience ..
Like you I also dropped it and never looked back for the following simple reasons:
1. It offers nothing while it takes a lot.
2. When something is free, then YOU are the product.
3. Massive violation of privacy (that "like" button on most websites and any other facebook element which now I block with ABP and NoScript)(and all known FB URLs on my hosts file).
4. I can still be in touch with my friend without informing FB (via facebook, instagram, whatsapp) who is my friend and when are we texting.
> 2. When something is free, then YOU are the product.
Debian Linux, Firefox, gcc, visual studio... The list goes on. I think the "you are the product" quip has become an overplayed meme of late. Mutually beneficial / co dependence and such themes are more applicable in more cases than not when it comes to free products and services, in my own view anyways.
I think it gets twisted partially because the quote is wrong. It should be "if a _service_ is free", not "when something is free." I don't think any of the examples you've listed would be considered a service, but rather either a platform (OS) or product.
The quip is certainly overplayed, but I think the notion still stands. It is important to be aware of what intentions service providers and product sellers have. It's not so much a dig on libre / free software.
The USG provides the GPS service for free. You can argue that connecting to it isn't free (since you need hardware that can do so), but then connecting to Google and Facebook isn't free either.
This took literally two seconds to think of off the top of my head. The quotation is _still_ not accurate. It's a useful perspective on how to think about free services, but it's not a substitute for thought.
Dude, are you kidding me? "If you're not paying for it, you're the product" is taking about free for the user. There's so many ways in which this question is incredibly stupid, but here's an easy one: In what way is usage not free for every one of the billions of people who are untaxed by the USG? Or are you under the impression that GPS only works if you show your US passport first?
It would likely cost more to make GPS non-free because extra users don't increase the cost of running the service and keeping people locked out (until they have paid) would be a potentially very expensive technological arms race.
That doesn't apply to most services like facebook for which each active user creates extra bandwidth and processing load.
> I think the "you are the product" quip has become an overplayed meme of late.
It's been overplayed for years. The problem with pithy phrases, even when true in their original narrow sense, is that they allow those who aren't willing (or capable) of thinking for themselves to substitute something that superficially looks like wit without having to actually think about what they're talking about.
A key difference with something like Debian versus Facebook is profit. Debian is an open-source project supported by a community of volunteers and donors. Facebook is a corporation that banks billions of dollars. That money doesn't materialize out of thin air. It comes from advertising, your personal information and data gathering. We know what something like the Debian project is doing, we don't know what Facebook is doing. Debian and open-source projects are "mutually beneficial", Facebook only benefits Facebook.
I find the posting, sharing, and status updates on Facebook to be not valuable, outside of keeping up to date with some family members. I've found the real value of Facebook to be Messenger and groups.
When I first starting FB, as one of the very first schools as part for the site, it worked really well. Now for some reason there are bugs that allow info I don't want not from my friends. I can't figure out how to turn the junk off. Does anyone know how? All I want is info from my FB friends.
I've stopped using it because of all of this junk.
They took something that worked well and made it not work well. Brilliant.
Heh, I _only_ keep Facebook around because it's the most efficient way to provide images of my daughter to our extended family members. Email is just too unwieldy, with many of our family claiming that they've long since forgotten their account credentials.
> those sweet, sweet red circles with a number in them that meant someone, somewhere vaguely agreed with something you posted
Now, you get those whenever you join a group, save an event, have a friend like a post from someone you don't even know, etc etc etc.
I've seen several of my "friends" leave Facebook over the last year simply because the platform isn't a "face book" anymore, but a rough media consumption platform susceptible to manipulation by advertisers, political opponents, nation states, and [dank memes]. It's basically become internet middle school in terms of post quality, and people are noticing.
This might be an unpopular opinion in the tech-savvy crowd of HN, but while I agree with pretty much 100% of the points brought up in this article, I still disagree that leaving facebook is a net positive. I simply believe that as privacy violating as facebook is, as scary and orwellian their statistical analysis of my life and habits are, they have solved a very real problem for real people: social networking online.
You can argue that facebook benefits from a lock-in effect and you wouldn't be wrong, but facebook hasn't always had that effect. They must have been doing something right from the start to get that effect.
I remember around 2007-ish when facebook was introduced in my life as a kind of cool club for university kids (I think they had already dropped this idea by then, but I still remember "networks" being a thing), and joining I was struck by how it was everything that my other social networks was not. It felt "professional", it allowed a low-frequency update into people's lives that wasn't matched by IM services like MSN/ICQ/whatever back then, and as it developed it turned into a crucial tool for groups in school, events (a major thing for me as a student), and more.
There will always be people that say they don't "get" facebook, that anything you can do on facebook you can do with other technology. Well, if you're one of those people you're probably also one of those people who thought "meh" when you saw Dropbox the first time because you can easily put together the same thing yourself with an FTP server and version control. Well, the kicker is obvious: normal people who don't read HN can not. Facebook changed lives for people who "can not".
If you fast forward to today and look at how non-profits are run, how political organizations are run, how after school-groups are run, you might have a point saying they could use something else. They could, but not without losing functionality. The payoff is always "a worse solution but you get to keep your privacy". The reality is, almost nobody wants that (unless you're politically active in a repressive regime, but facebook does support Tor, so kudos to them). The basic issues from the past linger: who will host it, who will support it, who will pay for it? Are we going to use an e-mail list, a web based forum, how will we communicate and share content?
Like it or not, ad financed networks solve all these issues and people are more than happy to sell their browsing habits for that. I don't think that's changing anytime soon, because even if the minority ("you and me") may be willing to pay for a substitute to buy out our own privacy, most people won't, and then the whole point falls anyway, because the solutions will obviously not integrate.
Ideally could have an "ad financed network" that is open-source and distributed p2p, allowing anyone to install the server in their home on a raspberry pi and still be somewhat in control.
but there is not much money that needs to be made to recoup the basic costs of a raspberry and the energy, and all the profit can be given directly to the users and content creators.
Most people don't know what a raspberry pi is. Even if you pre-packaged it for them to the extent where you only need to plug in the box and literally do nothing else, they would still ask why they'd want it over facebook. What's the answer? There is none. At least none that will convince regular people.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Surely you can't be suggesting that social interaction between human beings is a "manufactured" requirement?
No. Social interaction between human beings has been going on well before these social networks.
The manufactured requirement is the need to reach to every person we ever know and share every little detail of your life with them, possibly multiple times a day, in return for their some kind of acknowledgement...
That is the manufactured need and that is what people are hooked on.
Social interaction between human beings was also severely limited for most of human history as soon as geographical distance was introduced. You don't have to look further back than the massive emigrations to the US from Europe, it completely shattered extended families. The need to communicate with the people you love is not "manufactured", what's always been missing is a well working and easy to use solution for it online. Facebook solves a problem, I don't even see a controversy in that statement. If they didn't, people wouldn't use it.
> The need to communicate with the people you love is not "manufactured"...
Again, the need is not manufactured. But the need for constantly in touch, is manufactured. No one before social network wanted that. There was normal mails, then we had telephones, emails etc etc..all of which have solved this pretty well, even across the globe.
Well, the kicker is obvious: normal people who don't read HN can not. Facebook changed lives for people who "can not".
Agreed! Too many techies are out of touch with "normal" people. "We need to have our own infrastructure!", "Why are you not setting up your own mail server?!" Duh, it's not doable for people outside of the adminsphere!
The payoff is always "a worse solution but you get to keep your privacy".
The reality is, almost nobody wants that
who will host it, who will support it, who will pay for it?
I don't think that's changing anytime soon, because even if the minority
("you and me") may be willing to pay for a substitute to buy out our own
privacy, most people won't, and then the whole point falls anyway, because
the solutions will obviously not integrate.
Agreed as well! But I don't completely follow your reasoning: I think it is our, the IT's, responsibility to build tools that anybody can use on rented infrastructure. You can automate almost everything nowadays, from bootstrapping the OS to installation of packages and administration via web interfaces. The key point is to keep control over generated data.
I kind of feel like you contradict yourself. I agree, it's not doable for "normal people" to set up their own social network services. Not only is it not doable, most people actively do not want to do it, even if they had the knowledge. For this reason, the phrase "rented infrastructure" is like nails on a chalkboard to me. Nobody will rent infrastructure to save their privacy. The only way you'll get people to pay for it is if it has functional superiority over facebook, meaning killer features. They will still want someone else to host it, support it and patch it. That becomes expensive, fast. Expensive for "normal people" who are in "normal groups" like parent/school groups, their kids' football teams etc -- organizations who do not have budget for "information technology privacy initiatives", because nobody understands what it is, nobody cares and nobody sees what the return on investment is (maybe because there is none, which techies will never admit).
I think the unfortunate truth is that people in general don't care about their data. There are people who do, but they normally have very special reasons to and they will never be a majority, unless we have massive social upheaval worldwide. Hopefully that will not happen, but if it does the technology is already there to solve that problem when it comes along.
There are many free and admirable initiatives such as "riseup" who provide communication services free of charge to organizations working for social change. There are frameworks for you if you care about your data and want to disconnect: but most people don't care. And if you care, you will move away from normal people. That's the unfortunate truth, and it's not changing anytime soon. I'm all for educating the masses, but people will not switch facebook for encrypted e-mail. Not because a lack of encryption workshops, but because it's not the same thing, and facebook is as far as functionality goes, objectively better at solving the problem people perceive.
I use Facebook as a Google Reader replacement. I don't care what my contacts share. Twitter was my go-to site for this use case (news consumption). But that platform is too polluted now. Feedly was another site I used regularly.
Is there any good news reader alternative to the platforms mentioned?
Well... no real alternative as many see it. How else can you get updates\aggregate articles from the blogs you want to follow?
>I thought that was a thing from the past
Just like I can't understand how Facebook or something similar can be such a problem for people. Always though that you just keep it to stay in touch (in other words have their contacts info) with some people you met over the time.
I add rss feeds to a new iftt recipe and send new posts to an emailaddress that ends up in my mailbox. In the mailclient I'm using a filter to automatically move these emails to a separate folder. This is as close to Google reader as I could get and it's working quite well.
I regret deleting my original Facebook account. I made it around the time they opened to every college in the US and there was a lot of history there, photos and videos and text. Sure most of it was worthless and maybe even embarrassing but that data is gone now.
I'm sure if you ask REALLY nicely, they'll just 're-activate' your 'deleted' account and magically all the stuff that was 'deleted' will suddenly be back. /sarcasm
I did the same and I regret it too, I wasn't really thinking of the consequences at the time.
I rejoined FB last year or so, but their "recover your deleted data" feature recovered nothing, presumably they do a permanent delete after 2 years or something rather than a soft one.
I felt the same way about my livejournal account from college. I was just really worried at the time, it could be an issue, when just entering the workforce.
I use facebook now, much the same way I used livejournal, keeping track of links, photos, and things I'm working on. At the time I started, search was pretty terrible. But I figured it would improve, which it has. Still, every once and a while, I'll be working on something and go, "Ah man, I had that written down in the livejournal!" Oops.
The crucial argument for me was that I have to trust Facebook forever. Facebook intends to keep your data forever, so you have to trust them for just as long.
I don't think Facebook will go forever without some major data leak. I don't like to count on the competence of corporations in handling secret information.
Similarly, I don't think any human ever looks at Facebook's statistical models for any individual. Facebook likely considers this data of the upmost secrecy. But I'm not sure they'll remain as upstanding decades from now, if they're ever in dire financial straights. In my view, Facebook is only going to get eviler.
There's nothing to stop FB from getting out in front of a leak. They can figure out that someone is writing about a leak and pull a CNN on them before they post it on their blog or whatever.
"... one of the last things that kept me on Facebook—after I had largely stopped posting and reading the News Feed—was simply checking my notifications. I unconsciously craved that little hit of happiness one gets when they see, So-and-so liked your post. But that’s not real happiness. It’s an unhealthy addiction."
This is true, especially of my current use of Facebook.
"... one of the last things that kept me on Facebook—after I had largely stopped posting and reading the News Feed—was simply checking my notifications. I unconsciously craved that little hit of happiness one gets when they see, So-and-so liked your post. But that’s not real happiness. It’s an unhealthy addiction."
This is true, especially of my current use of Facebook.
326 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadIF you are getting a product or service for free, continuously, the company providing it usually has a different motive, a different way to make money. Usually that means selling your data, thus you are the product being sold in the statement the original poster made.
Can you explain why you consider the statement a banality instead of a rule of thumb? What kind of things do you not pay for where the company providing it is not gaining something from you using it?
Google not selling personally identifiable information is not out of benevolence, but because it makes their own position stronger. They are optimizing how to sell what you are giving them.
Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that, my point is that "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is usually true. Resigning it to the parenthesized cool-kids corner is (unjustly) diminishing the value of the sentence.
You are being advertised to based on the profile Google has built of you and the profile companies want to advertise to.
As such, your attention your time, based on your life, is being sold to advertisers. I don't see how being aware of this and being okay with this changes this fact? Of course there is a "contract" of sorts (which are always mutual) in play between you and Google, Google provides you with a service and you provide Google with whatever data you want.
Google in turn uses this to sell its product (people like you reading ads) to other parties.
I'm not saying this is inherently bad either. But the sentence is used to make people aware of the fact that companies like Google have something to gain from giving you something for free, which is something a lot of people hadn't thought about before or are aware of (especially when they are internet products). Thus I don't get the pedantry that this statement seems to evoke.
If I was to go one step farther, I'd say the entire powerbase of companies like Facebook and Google is founded on a large mass of people not caring about their privacy. Maybe a step too far, but I'm not so sure.
Can you imagine an internet search engine with a paid option? Perhaps a personal search assistant who sorts through all the junk to find what you are actually after? It may well happen.
As someone whose started a company with a "free product", seeing how it's been monetised has certainly been eye-opening.
Free-to-use, privacy-voiding services kill any paid-for, privacy-respecting service. There's a race to the bottom -- Gresham's Law -- and the "good" services can neither gather sufficient users nor revenues to be sustaining.
The leaders, at the same time, have to stay ahead of all three fronts in the game:
1. They need low per-user costs to sustain themselves.
2. They need to exploit user data (or whatever other advertising-based edge) they have to retain advertisers.
3. They've got to retain sufficient network size and quality to keep smaller services from taking off, or from boiling-off the high-quality users who are no longer satisfied by the service.
Google launched G+ to kill Facebook. It failed in that, with a large number of arguments as to why.
But Facebook's initial attraction was that it was literally Harvard. That is: it began as one of the most selective, aspirational, and attractive (to both other participants, and advertisers) cohorts on the planet.
Metcalfe's Law is only so powerful, and it's a strong overstatement. There's both a falling value with additional nodes (Tilly-Odlyzko), and a per-user cost constant (myself). The size of a network is ultimately governed by that per-user cost.
(There is also, if you will a perverse T-O factor -- a subpopulation who are actively detracting from overall site value. This can be addressed by specifically addressing and neutralising those participants. The cost-constant isn't subject to this.)
Which is why a new social network could form, and relatively easily, among some sufficiently large appealing cohort. Throwing some funding money and support to individuals within such contexts might well take down Facebook, eventually.
(Though the replacement would almost certainly eventually present the same problem.)
how about camera in your home? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X_fP4pPWPw
It's just a trap. One of your real friends uploaded all their contacts to Facebook, and when Facebook found you weren't on it, I guess it decided to send you an email in the hope that you'd be enticed to join in and see what your real friends are up to...on Facebook, of course! I wonder if Facebook does this even for any company/organization addresses that get uploaded or if it has some sort of intelligence not to do that (imagine a "payroll@company.com" or "legal@company.com" or "abuse@company.com" getting an email to check out what friends are up to).
As for the severe intrusion of your privacy, Facebook's privacy policy says what applies to its users. You're just a shadow profile who can be monetized in the future or in other ways. You're like an outlaw/alien who doesn't have rights as far as Facebook is concerned.
protip: you can access FB without javascript via https://mbasic.facebook.com/ and you don't have to worry about such concerns. (I learned this from a Stallman video.)
"To make the site work without the need to run nonfree Javascript code, visit to m.facebook.com rather than facebook.com itself."
FYI, currently m.facebook.com now uses javascript, however mbasic.facebook.com doesn't, and is basically the same as m.facebook.com was at the time of his writing.
Of course, decentralization is a valid point and it's really important to get people who are kinda "new" to social media on distributed platforms. Twitter is centralized as well and also tracks with buttons and scripts. We need critical masses for e.g. XMPP and OStatus platforms like Mastodon.
This of course also applies to mobile clients like WhatsApp.
Did Facebook recently hire Hari Seldon?
Of course I am exaggerating. But IMO people vastly underestimate how similar their own behaviour is to other people. Meaning, if Facebook "knows" me since 12 years (!) it can very precisely categorize me into a group of people. And those other people do not leave Facebook but feed it more information.
It almost makes me jealous of all the data they have.
Even worse are the socially slip-streamed ones that started as a Sponsored post in a friend's news feed that they found funny/interesting/whatever and re-shared. Once reshared it loses even that gray, barely there "Sponsored" tag and has "grown up into a real boy" in the news feed.
A lot of the mind games in the last election cycle happened because of that (target ads to people susceptible to reshare them and watch them go viral for relatively cheap). Facebook has said they may try to crack down on that sort of thing, but slip-streaming ads is where they make their most money and they don't have enough financial incentive to really fix that.
I just cut the cord and I am now a lot happier without it, facebook is literally a drug,
I think I'm pretty much free of the 'need' to look at what's 'new' now. You might think this means I have loads more free time to do more important things. I'm still waiting for that to happen.
It does make a difference. Just not to care and to give up is no solution either.
And if you throw in the Instagram wildcard, it gets worse. I signed up for an Instagram account before Facebook purchasing them. I never posted a photo, but I'm sure this still adds to the reach of their shadow profile. People who actively use both Facebook and Instagram, I feel sorry for them.
I do use twitter and google extensively though, so I guess I can't complain or say anything about my social profile. Twitter luckily has a smaller budget, so they can't quite crunch data as hard as Facebook can. But Google owns me, I'm afraid.
I'm not (too) scared about NSA. At least, NSA has some sort of government bureaucracy that slows down their ability and interest in my data; they aren't trying to use me for-profit. I think we should be more scared about what Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al. can do, especially because they are generally bound to whatever their current (and fungible) terms of service and privacy policy stipulates. [edit] i.e. policies written for the sole benefit of the share-holders.
I haven't updated my FB account since I graduated college and it feels great.
If FB wants to obsessively and endlessly analyze the profile and posts of my college-self, it's free to do so.
https://www.rescuetime.com/
Also, Quitting fb for mental sanity is a worthwhile reason if not privacy
Any way, it's pretty engaging. Check it out.
http://joinmastodon.org
But (most) people prefer taking silly quizzes than thinking about potential dark implications of doing that. And it's not like this is a big secret no one has ever talked about (just google 'Facebook quizzes data' for more on that).
Certainly has to do with the wave of such posts published lately (Susan Fowler & Uber, Coraline Ada Ehmke & GitHub etc.)
Not claiming everyone that leaves FB, returns. But Facebook is continuing to expand.
I remember reading here years back that new generation isn't really using FB cause their parents are using it. And they weren't comfortable with that setup. Rather they are switching to other social media.
They are mostly using FB for "public" stuff, and the stuff they would only share with their friends is on snapchat and similar applications.
I quit cold turkey and have never looked back.
I'm off all social media today (except LinkedIn) and have weeded out a lot "friends" who really were just co-enablers in the dopamine rush hunt.
Whereas with LinkedIn, we are willing to give up much more sensitive and accurate profile data, such as all of our past employers, addresses, phone, email, birthdate, professional experience, headshot, school information, coworkers, etc.
The initial content of a typical LinkedIn profile is much more rich than a starter FB profile. There is no need-to-know for Facebook to have as much "real" information about you as LinkedIn has. I feel that LinkedIn got in through the backdoor with the information most people have provided to it. Though Facebook undoubtedly has more of your day-to-day activities than LinkedIn, which might be more dangerous.
I never personally got suckered into a Facebook profile, one of those (lucky) few that have continued to live on planet earth without a FB account. But LinkedIn is another story, I totally got swooped up in that one for sure.
Combine all this with the fact that there are so many FB users and many of them are children who wouldn't otherwise have a LinkedIn account (and are more comfortable with sharing personal info online).
So, while I agree that LinkedIn is in the group of data collectors, I don't think they're quite on the scale of FB.
I think you mean "innovators". Even though 9/10 times they claim ownership on things they've contracted out on their parent's cash.
the whole world uses whatsapp exactly for that use case you describe.
Sadly both options are awful.
Blackmail works :)
And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True?
That red circle with a number literally gives more enjoyment than a close friend saying "Heh that's cool". The worst part is that there's likely no cure. Rehab, maybe. But rehab for this shit doesn't exist yet.
Plus try explaining to your boss that you're not reading email and slack and you're never coming back because you're in notification rehab.
Simon Sinek explains it perfectly: https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNU?t=195
You don't have to tell your boss you're not reading notifications. You just have to eliminate the notifications that serve no purpose except a high. Facebook still spams my email; it's filtered to the trash. Business carries on.
"Oh and if all your friends are doing it and are wondering why you're not having fun with them, just ignore them"
Sure you've quit Facebook. But did you quit dopamine-seeking technology use?
What I've found in myself is that when I pry myself away from Facebook, I spend more time on Twitter. When I pry myself off that as well, suddenly my HN engagement goes up. When I manage to ignore all those, then I check Slack every 2 minutes. If I avoid even that, then I refresh my email all the time.
The medium isn't the problem. The behavior is the problem. There's always another medium you can switch to.
I mean, it's not like I was on Facebook when I got hooked to social media at 14, 15, 16. I was on internet forums and MSN Messenger. The draw was and still is that it broadened my horizons, exposed me to different people, and sometimes I learned really useful things. Hell, it helped me build my entire career.
I also believe there is another side of the argument, and people just consume media differently today. The internet came and it was the death of media, the TV came and it was the death of books, the books came and they were the death of the bard, etc. Maybe some people actually enjoy Facebook?
It sounds like technology isn't the problem - if you're doing these things with technology you'd be doing the same things without it. Perhaps you'd be spending a lot of time chatting around the water cooler instead of online, but that's not actually any healthier or better. Facebook has brought me a lot of fun in my life - on Tuesday I went to a gig that I only found out about because a casual acquaintance posted it there, and tonight I'm meeting up with another acquaintance because I saw on Facebook we're going to the same gig. I see it as like the gold medal in Cool Runnings - if you're not enough without it, you're not going to be enough with it.
Water cooler chat, which requires active social engagement and is time bounded, is not as addicting as an endless stream of content accessed with a twitch of the finger. You might not use Facebook in that way, and I similarly don't find it that engaging, but I've certainly experienced it with reddit and HN.
And I don't think this is some intractable personality flaw, I think people get used to the comfort of frequent dopamine hits, and find it very difficult to drag themselves away from these sources as a result. Cold turkey can and does make a difference.
What is it you're saying makes everyone feel miserable? AIUI the artificial substitute for dopamine is cocaine, which only makes people miserable when they run out (and more generally as tolerance kicks in)? Social media seems to make some people miserable, but despite how much people love to throw around "dopamine" in Internet arguments ("skinner box" is another good one) there's no scientifically demonstrated connection AFAIK.
Yes dopamine is part of a loop or cycle that is a survival strategy. In a healthy individual in a healthy situation.
When this loop works properly then yes, it is called being happy (there's more things to being happy but a properly functioning dopamine loop is part of it).
Think of a dopamine release and its causes like a particular message in a protocol that runs inside our body.
Our bodies aren't perfect or tested against every possible situation.
Sometimes the combination of the dopamine protocol and the environment causes a weird feedback loop that is no longer beneficial to this survival strategy.
In most of those cases, this results in a state called an addiction. (and in that case we call the dopamine release a "dopamine hit", to emphasize the role of addiction)
Fighting this bad feedback loop can be a constant struggle. A daily, constant struggle that lasts a lifetime once you get stuck in it. If you compare that to "being happy", then I can only assume you've never experienced it (and I hope you never will, but you can still learn compassion).
Sometimes these faults are exploited on purpose, very often for the commercial purposes of the amoral corporations.
It's also the case that certain people are more susceptible to these exploits. For instance ADHD is well-known to be co-morbid with susceptibility to addiction.
Peace :)
The heroin analogy is lazy and irrelevant. The reason people say stuff like "try doing X to quit or cut down" is that, unlike heroin, a fairly large chunk of people who've recognized the problem have been pretty able to easily cut down or stop their "dopamine addiction" to the level that they're comfortable with.
If heroin had such a high success rate from going cold turkey, you can be damn sure that people would be saying "try going cold turkey" or "try this specific path to quitting", because it's worked for so many others. There are successful suggestions on this thread that amount to "I deleted my dealer's number from my phone and poof problem gone".
That isn't to say that these will definitely work for everyone: some people have a more severe problem when it comes to their relationship to dopamine. But it's awfully self-centered to complain about people talking about things that have been successful for them and others.
For example, diets work. But most have a fall-off-the-wagon rate in the couple of months range.
It's definitely easy to quit a social media platform cold turkey. The hard part is quitting social media. I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.
Social media addiction in the modern world is a lot like food addiction. Sure you're addicted, but you still gotta eat or you die. Sure you're addicted, but without social media you can't be a functioning member of current society.
Hell, I had one of those "I quit the internet" articles on the frontpage of HackerNews a few years ago. You know what happened? I quit all social media, but I needed access to Github to do my work. So I started friending people and being all social media on Github.
[1] https://swizec.com/blog/my-ideas-are-shitty-so-im-going-on-a... [2] https://swizec.com/blog/the-end-of-my-internet-diet-experime...
Off the top of my head, I have a friend who have been off of Facebook for 9 years, another for 7, and another who never made an account at all. These are all healthy, happy people with robust social lives: their friends just know they need to be texted to be looped into plans. I know still more people (myself included) who have always had a healthy relationship with social media: short periods of "maybe I'm mindlessly browsing this a bit" followed by minor habit tweaks and straight back to a fully healthy relationship. I eat extremely healthy but every once in a while notice that I'm eating a bit of junk food (perhaps due to stress at work or something). I notice it and fix it and go back to eating extremely healthy. It would be completely inaccurate to claim that any lapse means I have an unhealthy relationship with food, and this is exactly the same as with social media et al.
> I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.
This is a beyond-absurd definition of social media, and you're now talking about something that no one else here is talking about. The idea that there's no value in email and texting beyond dopamine addiction is frankly just insane. When I get statements from my bank, or delivery notifications from my package receipt service or laundry service, or an update that my friend wants to move our dinner date back by half an hour, am I feeding my addiction? Because your bizarre definition doesn't leave any room for responsible e-mail/text usage.
Anyone defining "communication with other people" as an addiction that needs to be killed off is battling far worse demons than social media/dopamine-hit addiction. That may be interesting in and enough of itself but it couldn't be less relevant to this thread.
Yeah, I am only a year away, born in 1988. Our family's first home computer was put in my room when I was 6 years old and my parents were hands-off about using it, so I grew up on multi-player gaming, forums, chat rooms, porn, etc. It's difficult to express how strongly the internet shaped the direction of my life, and I'm not even as addicted as most people.
Not having a phone helps with staying off Facebook...
Every generation has their dopamine hits. Of course, as society creates more leisure time, the number and (arguably) complexity of these increase. That is the trend. But, as always, the responsibility should be squarely on your own shoulders! You were not "dealt a bad hand." If that's a truth, then everyone ever born was dealt a bad hand. If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as always, it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need.
He does blames them, but only as part of his point, not as the whole conclusion. He blames the corporations for focusing on reductive, short-term metrics† instead of people, which is precisely what's lead to this[0] and that[1] abusive situations. As a company you're not hiring robots, you're hiring people.
> Every generation has their dopamine hits.
Indeed it has. The trouble starts when it reaches such heights, recurrence and omnipresence that it throws whole lives off balance.
> If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as alway
Strawman. Life expectancy does not invalidate the new challenges we have to face. If anything, with modern discoveries about happiness vs hardship, people may literally have been happier in spite of such matters (shocking!). I'm suddenly reminded of Gladia's tirade in Robots and Empire: would you rather live a long, dull, purposeless life endlessly being bored to no end or a shorter life full of brilliance? But we digress.
> it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need
This is the kind of attitude that reviles me. You can't blame someone for becoming alcoholic/depressive/etc. If you do then you don't understand what those are: illnesses. Nobody breaks his leg or catches a flu on purpose. If a company refuses to take such humane matters into consideration then you're just a tool and it's parasitically just sucking onto you till you're dry. When you're in situations of illnesses, all the good will of the person is not sufficient: help is needed, from everywhere it can come[2].
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14703661
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711621
[2]: https://medium.com/@OlarkLiveChat/its-2017-and-mental-health...
† ironically, themselves being addicted to that very same dopamine (or rather its ethereal corporate equivalent) rush.
Waaaait a minute. This is another strawman. My comment did not blame illnesses on the individual. But I think we need to define carefully what an illness is. I don't doubt alcoholism is an illness, but I would reasonable argue that browsing Facebook on your phone is not an illness. Do you really believe that? I don't. There may be people at the far end of that spectrum that cannot help themselves, but there are plenty of others that are just bored.
I don't think that's really true. I'm about your age, and you were ~20 when the iPhone came out, right? Facebook was just settling in as the tool of choice for every college student, but even then it was mainly just photo-sharing and event-planning. The fact that we missed out on social networking in our entire teenage and preteen years means that we narrowly escaped this.
If you spend any time around people a bit younger than us, the contrast is particularly stark. My cousins are about a decade younger than me (just started college), and throughout high school, Snapchat/Twitter/etc were simply a must-have. The amount of time they spent sharing content and scrolling through others is insane, and if you talk to them about it, they're very aware that it's somewhere between a chore, an addiction, and good ol' fun.
That's the kind of "hardwired into your formative social years" thing that we never really had to deal with.
Most of my "real" friends seemed to have stopped posting on there, yet I was still addicted to scrolling through the feed while waiting for code to compile or whatever (clever design on their part, I guess!).
However, also like you, the privacy side doesn't worry me too much (although as time goes by I do start to think about it more), and I still get some value from communicating with certain people on FB Messenger and being able to access photos from events etc., so instead of quitting, I unfollowed everyone (using a bit of Javascript - I'll try and dig it out).
My feed is now totally blank, so I now only visit maybe twice a day for a few seconds to check for messages (I refuse to install their app - mbasic.facebook.com all the way!). I did think I could refollow people if I felt I was missing out, but surprise surprise, I don't at all.
Of course, I've now replaced reading Facebook with reading Twitter while stuff compiles but at least that's relevant to my work ;)
I'd highly recommend this approach if you feel uncomfortable with your use of Facebook but also value your network of friends on there.
It depends on how you consume it. Often, very often, it's only infotainment.
However, in my opinion their EULA is totally unacceptable, so I cannot use it.
You really should quit linkedin as well. Their security is like a screen door on a submarine.
I noticed on reddit I seek for shallow agreement too. And if a comment gets 0 I'm a bit disappointed. It also taught me that sometimes you get a few downvotes at first but later some people upvote, some even comment. Patience ..
1. It offers nothing while it takes a lot.
2. When something is free, then YOU are the product.
3. Massive violation of privacy (that "like" button on most websites and any other facebook element which now I block with ABP and NoScript)(and all known FB URLs on my hosts file).
4. I can still be in touch with my friend without informing FB (via facebook, instagram, whatsapp) who is my friend and when are we texting.
5. FB is the devil :)
Debian Linux, Firefox, gcc, visual studio... The list goes on. I think the "you are the product" quip has become an overplayed meme of late. Mutually beneficial / co dependence and such themes are more applicable in more cases than not when it comes to free products and services, in my own view anyways.
The quip is certainly overplayed, but I think the notion still stands. It is important to be aware of what intentions service providers and product sellers have. It's not so much a dig on libre / free software.
This took literally two seconds to think of off the top of my head. The quotation is _still_ not accurate. It's a useful perspective on how to think about free services, but it's not a substitute for thought.
Other services like that are public radio and TV.
That doesn't apply to most services like facebook for which each active user creates extra bandwidth and processing load.
It's been overplayed for years. The problem with pithy phrases, even when true in their original narrow sense, is that they allow those who aren't willing (or capable) of thinking for themselves to substitute something that superficially looks like wit without having to actually think about what they're talking about.
I've stopped using it because of all of this junk.
They took something that worked well and made it not work well. Brilliant.
Now, you get those whenever you join a group, save an event, have a friend like a post from someone you don't even know, etc etc etc.
I've seen several of my "friends" leave Facebook over the last year simply because the platform isn't a "face book" anymore, but a rough media consumption platform susceptible to manipulation by advertisers, political opponents, nation states, and [dank memes]. It's basically become internet middle school in terms of post quality, and people are noticing.
You can argue that facebook benefits from a lock-in effect and you wouldn't be wrong, but facebook hasn't always had that effect. They must have been doing something right from the start to get that effect.
I remember around 2007-ish when facebook was introduced in my life as a kind of cool club for university kids (I think they had already dropped this idea by then, but I still remember "networks" being a thing), and joining I was struck by how it was everything that my other social networks was not. It felt "professional", it allowed a low-frequency update into people's lives that wasn't matched by IM services like MSN/ICQ/whatever back then, and as it developed it turned into a crucial tool for groups in school, events (a major thing for me as a student), and more.
There will always be people that say they don't "get" facebook, that anything you can do on facebook you can do with other technology. Well, if you're one of those people you're probably also one of those people who thought "meh" when you saw Dropbox the first time because you can easily put together the same thing yourself with an FTP server and version control. Well, the kicker is obvious: normal people who don't read HN can not. Facebook changed lives for people who "can not".
If you fast forward to today and look at how non-profits are run, how political organizations are run, how after school-groups are run, you might have a point saying they could use something else. They could, but not without losing functionality. The payoff is always "a worse solution but you get to keep your privacy". The reality is, almost nobody wants that (unless you're politically active in a repressive regime, but facebook does support Tor, so kudos to them). The basic issues from the past linger: who will host it, who will support it, who will pay for it? Are we going to use an e-mail list, a web based forum, how will we communicate and share content? Like it or not, ad financed networks solve all these issues and people are more than happy to sell their browsing habits for that. I don't think that's changing anytime soon, because even if the minority ("you and me") may be willing to pay for a substitute to buy out our own privacy, most people won't, and then the whole point falls anyway, because the solutions will obviously not integrate.
Isn't this a manufactured problem/requirement?
EDIT: I mean, did people have this problem before social networks?
The manufactured requirement is the need to reach to every person we ever know and share every little detail of your life with them, possibly multiple times a day, in return for their some kind of acknowledgement...
That is the manufactured need and that is what people are hooked on.
Again, the need is not manufactured. But the need for constantly in touch, is manufactured. No one before social network wanted that. There was normal mails, then we had telephones, emails etc etc..all of which have solved this pretty well, even across the globe.
But none of these are 24x7.
The need for 24x7 "networking" is manufactured.
I think the unfortunate truth is that people in general don't care about their data. There are people who do, but they normally have very special reasons to and they will never be a majority, unless we have massive social upheaval worldwide. Hopefully that will not happen, but if it does the technology is already there to solve that problem when it comes along.
There are many free and admirable initiatives such as "riseup" who provide communication services free of charge to organizations working for social change. There are frameworks for you if you care about your data and want to disconnect: but most people don't care. And if you care, you will move away from normal people. That's the unfortunate truth, and it's not changing anytime soon. I'm all for educating the masses, but people will not switch facebook for encrypted e-mail. Not because a lack of encryption workshops, but because it's not the same thing, and facebook is as far as functionality goes, objectively better at solving the problem people perceive.
Is there any good news reader alternative to the platforms mentioned?
>I thought that was a thing from the past
Just like I can't understand how Facebook or something similar can be such a problem for people. Always though that you just keep it to stay in touch (in other words have their contacts info) with some people you met over the time.
2. Go to the actual delete facebook account page.
3. Copy that random string in when it asks your password and the captcha
4. Copy something else
Now you’ve bypassed their arbitrary and nefarious 14 day filter
0. create temporary email account and use it as your facebook email address?
I used that tactic successfully in the past.
Given the current costs of storage, many are skeptical of this.
https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467
Just because you don't value the data FB has now doesn't mean you won't in the future.
I rejoined FB last year or so, but their "recover your deleted data" feature recovered nothing, presumably they do a permanent delete after 2 years or something rather than a soft one.
http://quitfacebook.com/
And it does :)
Ironically, it's got Google tracking and Google Ads on it...
>One New York comedian had a SWAT team break into his house based on a joke post.
could someone find a citation, I'd like to read about that case? I googled what I just quoted and a couple of variations and did not find it.
Thanks.
I don't think Facebook will go forever without some major data leak. I don't like to count on the competence of corporations in handling secret information.
Similarly, I don't think any human ever looks at Facebook's statistical models for any individual. Facebook likely considers this data of the upmost secrecy. But I'm not sure they'll remain as upstanding decades from now, if they're ever in dire financial straights. In my view, Facebook is only going to get eviler.
This is true, especially of my current use of Facebook.
This is true, especially of my current use of Facebook.