John Biggs can use TechCrunch's platform to deliver his message without necessarily agreeing with everything TechCrunch does (such as advertising for Facebook via those buttons).
Additionally, if you're encouraging people to delete Facebook, your target audience is people on Facebook, so...
From Facebook's perspective, dissatisfied users who delete their accounts are a sort of immune system response. The spread of contagious memes like "Facebook is a pointless, addictive time suck" are contained because those "infected" with them take themselves out of the population.
Rather than just deleting your Facebook account, if you spend some time using it to push articles and posts out onto your feed describing your position, then the memetic contagion can spread over Facebook. If enough people do that, it could hasten their collapse (unless they actually manage a heroic effort to successfully address the critics, not just a PR band-aid).
> Oh, and don't forget to share our article using the little facebook widget at the bottom...
These kind of comments add no value and rest on incorrect belief that either:
1) authors control the marketing tech stack on the major sites they write for or
2) they can afford to sacrifice audience for their messages, etc. in order to be hyper-picky in order to forestall internet heckles.
The truth is that neither of those things are true. Writers will write, activists will get their messages out, and that's their job. Sometimes they will criticize something so ubiquitous that even they can't avoid it totally, but that doesn't make them hypocrites. In fact, criticizing bad things that literally everyone does is the first step towards fixing those things. If stupid insinuations of hypocrisy like yours had any value, it would be impossible to make progress on many fronts.
I generally agree with this point, in the same way that I think that people are far too ready to call "hypocrisy" when the deed that is 'hypocritical' is just a small subset of the original 'evil'.
Having said that, I also think it's worthy to highlight the impact of the facebook sharing button, which isn't dealt with in the original article. The point is that it's not enough to say to individuals "don't use facebook"; you're still 'at risk' if you visit a site that uses the sharer widget, even if you don't have a facebook account.
As an aside to the aside, techcrunch has to be the first site I've encountered that redirects you when you scroll beyond a certain point of the article, or when you try to search in-page (unless that's a bug, of course).
it's not just facebook doing this. twitter, pinterest, reddit and countless others do the same. heck... there is even a story today about google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610088
and yes, i know some people will say... but that google story is about law enforcement using warrants... which i will counter with, doesn't matter, it shows that these companies don't care about your privacy and will fold in "defending" it when challenged.
if you care about your privacy, don't give _any_ company, _any_ information about you, in _any_ way.
i know you meant for that to be funny, but you are correct in a scary way. github has become _the_ place for sharing code and they (as you already have seen multiple times) have no problem in deleting or locking out repos when the first hit of a DCMA gets into their hands (without any verification to the legitimacy of the DCMA mind you).
The top comment on that story about google points out the main problem:
> 2. On multiple recent occasions, police in North Carolina have quietly been successful in obtaining search warrants that force Google to turn over these records. Rather than "standard" search warrants asking for the location of a particular suspect in a crime, these "reverse" or "area based" warrants ask for time and location data for all users who have entered a geographical area during a time of interest. The records returned are initially anonymous account numbers, and the police then make followup requests for identifying information of the subset of accounts that they think are of interest to the case.
Sure you can delete your account on reddit. They'll still track you as if you have one just like the facebook buttons or all those creative new tracking shit we regularly read about here.
In the end, you don't have to be an extremist. Just don't post everything and keep in mind that you are being tracked. This is the internet for you today.
While I agree, there is a huge difference in impact. Facebook has more users, reach a way bigger demographic and has access to a much, much, much broader range of data. Not to mention is has instagram and whatsapp too.
It's two order of magnitude bigger than twitter, reddit, pinterest, etc.
The only ones that compares is Google.
But while I have no problem living without a Facebook account, living without Google is way harder.
E.g:
- no hangout is the easiest. I hated it.
- dropping calendar was easy. It was not that good anyway. I missed the integration with a lot of 3rd party though.
- I leaved gmail. It tooks years and many problems with accounts came with it. The competitors UI are worse.
- I tried to leave gmap. But competitors don't have street view, shop open shedules or nearly as accurate traveling times. And waze eventually got bough by google. Maps.me is alright for when I don't have internet, but it's nowhere close to gmap for big cities if you have internet.
- I tried, very hard, to quit google search. Bing. DuckDuckGo.Qwant. They are ok. But I do hundreds of queries a day. Ok doesn't cut it. And if you are looking for result in another language than english, forget about it.
- now for the phone. Well, I won't go apple. Mozilla and MS are no longer here. I tried SailOS for a year. I don't recommend it. So android is what's left if you want a smartphone. I tried rooting, but it's dangerous, and takes time. So now I just avoid using a google account on the phone, which is, well, something at least. And make it extra hard to install apps.
That's a lot of trouble for so-so results.
Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?
So to me, no facebook + ublock + no google account is like when I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. It's 80/20, but for privacy instead of sanity.
However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.
I've had the opposite experience with DDG. While DDG itself resolves about 85% of my searches just fine, getting the hang of the !bang syntax has really elevated my search game without compromising a whole lot. I've been 6-months free of Google as my primary search engine, and see no reason to go back.
Insofar as other steps, I shut down my Twitter account (with a dictionary word username) last year as an experiment to see if I'd care enough to resurrect it before the account was deleted--a 30-day span. I didn't come back to check again for ~40-45 days, and I don't especially miss it. That was enough for me to realize how little value it provided me.
(Never really bothered with Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and the like.)
This year I'm looking into non-Google alternatives for my family's email and common functions (calendaring, etc). It's a slow slog in between a ton of other priorities, but the importance of decentralizing again is growing non-trivially.
Also, I plan to resurrect my blog/personal site for the first time in, spitballing here, about 8 years now. Putting my content back on my terms and reversing the tide in my own way.
> While I agree, there is a huge difference in impact.
It's like the difference between a turd or a piece of rubber in regards to how great they are as a food item; they're BOTH waaaaay beyond the limits of reasonable quality. Period. The difference in between them matters only to them.
> Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?
What is the point of that question? The people who "don't care" don't have good arguments for why they don't care, and by extension for why I shouldn't care either. The fact that they don't care, again, is only interesting to them. We can't organize with those who do care if we constantly put those who don't care (yet) on this pedestal.
> now for the phone
You mentioned smartphones, but not phones. As someone who thinks even laptops are toys I'm really bored of people talking about how hard it is to live without a smartphone. With the stakes as they are, I'm not willing to make such things the condition of our survival. If we can't make the gadgets and gimmicks compatible with freedom and the ability to think critically, I'd rather have no gadgets than no freedom and only zombies attached to feeds to "talk to".
> However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.
A niche where we talk all the time about people who aren't in it, instead of simply making our own individual positions clear and discussing them. In other words, even a lot of the people who supposedly care actually talk less about that, than about how it's all futile, or how someone I couldn't care less about (and who doesn't even speak for themselves) doesn't care.
Maybe let's instead all remember that going down that route, where doomed, that that doom includes the physical and psychological torture and murder of humans, and that the decisions we make in this shrinking window of opportunity could shape the future for time spans we can't even imagine. There is no coming back from some failure modes. Look into the eye of the great minds of humanity, into the eye of history, don't look for the guidance of sleepwalking lunatics. It's about as hard as not putting your hand on a burning stove once you started to ponder the potential outcomes of various routes. Yeah, it's uncomfortable to be a party pooper, but it's a screaming horror to dance at that party.
I deleted my Reddit accounts this weekend, after three years on the site. I knew it was bad when I could predict the top n comments before even heading to the comments section.
I don't care as much about these companies having my data - I care more about the value they actually provide to me, which is very little in most cases. FB is garbage; Reddit is a bonafide circlejerk; LinkedIn's value is marginal, outside of connecting and following-up with potential new colleagues/business partners (the content on LinkedIn could be some of the worst on the Internet... talk about clickbait).
In the few days since I deleted just Reddit, my thinking has been clearer (even though it was the weekend, I still worked both days), and I am thus far able to accomplish and focus better.
Although, here I am on HN, writing this comment still...
Facebook's raison d'être is to be a reflection of your real life identity. In that way it is unlike all those other social media sites you mentioned. Sure you could use your real identity on those sites but it's not required and many people opt not to and it has no impact on their ability to use the platform.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I know black and white thinking is very appealing but we don't need to go back to living in a yurt in the wilderness just because facebook is a net drain on society. I've been participating on forums all over the internet for the past 20 years and it's been the catalyst for some of the greatest things in my life.
Worth noting. Some users have found they are unable to delete their Facebook account because, when they are asked to enter their password on the final screen, FB says the password is incorrect.
Seems FB has a bug where you must enter your password in all lower case on the final screen.
Imagine, big company like FB, having still not caught that bug....
That certainly makes more sense for desktop users. But remember the UX dark pattern for mobile touch screen devices: default is to capitalize the first letter of every sentence. On particularly old devices even in password fields have this.
No caps-lock key on many of those keyboards. And, no warning that the shift key has been single-key or perma-pressed.
They can accomplish that feature using 3 separate hashes for various common mistakes, and it will still accept the normal case, but what GP is describing is that only a lowercase version of the password will work for account deletion.
Reminds me of when I try to unsubscribe to a random newsletter. If it seems tedious to do so, even in the slightest, I don’t even bother googling or looking through the source’s website and ultimately move on. Wonder if this is what fb is trying to do.
I must be part of an A/B test where I only see baby pictures from friends and family, updates from local businesses, and videos of cool construction equipment from TechInsider.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels could improve on the margin, but realistically, the problem with social is us. Ask friends and family to go back to sharing their unhinged political views in the form of badly punctuated emails, as God intended. If they continue to share, unfollow.
Social media can be as polarizing or as pleasant as you make it. Foisting blame on Facebook might feel good, but it won't solve the problem.
This is true. The psychological effects of anything are due to how one uses it. It doesn't matter how addictive something is made to be because a good deal of the addiction is psychological. Opioids are very addictive, but most hospital patients don't use outside of the hospital after their pain has been treated. It's because their pain is not psychological. People can become addicted to Facebook, and yes it was designed to be this way, but I can use Facebook for the purpose I intend if only I am self-aware and know my limits and can stay within those limits.
It's really like anything you can do-- anything. The threshold is defined by the person. The absolutist claim that anything is 100% bad is dangerous and false.
The tools we make and use are defined by us individually. The "mob" is the collection of people in certain echo chambers, and I'm sorry but if those people don't realize they're in an echo chamber, it's not the fault of the tools. We can't be going around limiting everything because the majority don't know how to use it. The majority will always be that way-- though I will note that I think this "mob" majority are better-equipped psychologically with each passing generation.
No. Facebook proudly does specific psychological experiments on its users. Facebook intentionally decides that it will make some users sad or depressed, just to see if it can. And it can. And it is proud of it. Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression.
Facebook is a fucking poison. The problem is not with us. The problem is with large scale propaganda networks and centrally-controlled social networks with misaligned incentives. The problem is Facebook and the core problem is the structure and incentives of corporations in our current not-well-enough-regulated capitalism.
Thanks. I'm aware of this report and it's definitely awful what they did and they should be shamed for many years forward.
But there is big difference between comparing moods induced by negativity and "Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression."
OP statement is misleading and tabloid worthy. The goal was not to cause depression. It lasted one week and they didn't try make someone depressed or kill him.
I've largely stopped using Facebook, but my experience had nothing in common with the author's.
The content was fine, I followed things and people I actually liked and made adjustments when that changed. I felt no addiction loop, my usage time was limited, and it was honestly quite a nice site. Sentiments like "In the absence of human interaction we cling to whatever dark simulacrum is available" are absolutely alien to me; Facebook was a source of real social interaction, and almost entirely additive with other sources of real interaction.
I stopped because advertisements, autoplay videos, and timeline changes slowly made Facebook unusable as a site. Content I liked was consistently buried in favor of content I didn't like, in ways I couldn't fix with settings or following preferences. The discussions of Facebook usage time rising baffle me; my experience was of a good, usable site that destroyed its usability by trying to monetize.
realistically, the problem with social is us. Ask friends and family to go back to sharing their unhinged political views in the form of badly punctuated emails, as God intended. If they continue to share, unfollow.
This is certainly a problem, but I think more important than this is the illusion of having control over what you see on social media.
You may think you can curate your social media feeds by unfollowing people who share things you don't want to see, but as long as a social media service's feed/timeline (and primary revenue stream) is still based on an easily gamed algorithm and paid ads, you're mistaken.
Social media sites will cater access to their API's to groups who are willing to pay for it. So, even if you can unfollow your uncle who shares "unhinged political views", you can't hide cleverly disguised, hyper targeted, ads, advertising both products and ideas.
All good points. I would take issue with "cleverly disguised, hyper targeted, ads" as it relates to a lot of the discussion around FB's influence on the election. I'm guessing the person "swayed" by an ad depicting Jesus arm wrestling Satan to settle the 2016 election was not really on the fence to begin with.
Why not? My grandparents love looking through old photo albums. I don't see why I couldn't do the same with Facebook.
> It’s an advertiser’s dream and it is wildly expensive in terms of privacy lost and cash spent to steal that privacy.
A few problems with this. Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing it?
The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most people believe the benefits are worth it and op hasn't proved we don't get benefits from Facebook.
Lastly.. the article assumes allowing advertisers to use your data is inherently evil. I'm not arguing either way, but it's never explained. Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call advertisers "the devil" without an explanation. Why is op harmed by data collection (outside of nonsensical hypthotheticals, like getting his house robbed when he posts that he's on vacation?)
> I don't see why I couldn't do the same with Facebook.
Because it very likely won't be there anymore. Your grandparents had full control over their photo albums. You have nothing.
> Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing it? The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most people believe the benefits are worth it
Most people don't grasp the _extend_ of what they give to the advertisers. Not even in the slightest way. They still think that as long as they don't fill out a questionnaire, "they" won't know. Or what I give to Facebook, stays with Facebook and so on.
> Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call advertisers "the devil" without an explanation.
Their sneaky methods, lack of information and the whole attention stealing industry it is, is bad. Just the basic normal ad on the street is already exploiting us. The digital versions are even able to infect our tools. It's an uncontrolled mess. An anarchy of people who don't give a damn because they can. We'll never know the full extend of misuse happening with our data on daily bases. I don't see a reason to trust them. Do you?
Yeah Facebook might not be around, but I'm sure there is an app that will archive everything so you could store it locally.
I don't understand your view though - you believe billboards are an exploiting everyone who sees them? That would mean all advertising should be stopped. I think many people, you included, misunderstand the economic benefit of advertising. It enables commerce that wouldn't take place if it was gone. If a Spotify competitor started out today with zero advertising it would never make it - how would you hear about it? How would anyone learn about it?
I work in digital advetising and see no reason to distrust the industry. Nobody is abusing data about you.. you are tossed into groups that contains millions of people similar to you. No advertisers cares who you are, about any of your data, any of your Facebook posts. They care that you just bought a razor and might want to try their new shaving cream.
I'm not sure what you mean by sneaky methods, but it's as simple as you visited a website or talked online about shaving, so now they know you're interested in shaving. Basic text analysis is most of it.
Edit - very true that most people don't understand it. But then again most people don't understand anything they use daily (the internet, any app, etc).
> Yeah Facebook might not be around, but I'm sure there is an app that will archive everything so you could store it locally.
You've forgotten that those pictures belong to Facebook. So whoever buys them out from the remains of Facebook will do whatever they want with it. They may share it with you. They may not. Maybe they'll use it to train some AI and then discard it altogether. Maybe they'll put your head onto some porn star. Maybe China will buy it. Can you imagine, a Chinese man coming to your grandparents house and taking away their photo album? What would your grandpa do?
> I don't understand your view though
It's not a view. It's a fact. Did you even learn your job somewhere? Any scientific background to this "work in digital advertisement"? Ads steal your attention. You can't do anything about it and most of the time you don't even have any kind of profit from it. To say it in the new cultures terms: it's mind rape.
> I think many people, you included, misunderstand the economic benefit of advertising.
Please spare me that marketing talk. I do accept that there are ads on the internet. Sure. Some people even watch and click them. But just like the part you ignored in my previous comment you seem to intentionally forget about _extend_ here too. There is a huge difference between a cookie and a canvas fingerprint. There is a difference between a picture advertising a product and an autoplay video or malware infected script. There is an difference between an IP in your HPs log and a live track of a user.
The internet would have not gone bankrupt without the higher extend of advertisement intrusion. It's a lie to make advertising companies make even more money because that's what you do on the market. Their new product is data, profiles build upon that data (the more data about a single user, the more worth it is) and the continuous lie about the customer who WANTS their tips on where to spend money. I don't want those tips. I don't know anyone who wants them just like I don't know anyone who didn't want an adblocker installed. Think about it. The trust is gone. Forever.
> I work in digital advetising and see no reason to distrust the industry.
Of course you do...it's soothing for me though because such an amount of ignorance would be frightening.
> I'm not sure what you mean by sneaky methods,
Then you are a pretty shitty digital advertiser. You need to get some updates fast.
Edit@Edit:
> Edit - very true that most people don't understand it. But then again most people don't understand anything they use daily (the internet, any app, etc).
So you assume that this gives you a carte blance? I mean, this attitude by people from the ad industry is just another reason nobody trusts you.
Imagine, that I'd be tricking your grandparents into letting me into their apartment by brabbleing some tech bullshit about their cable. I wouldn't do any kind of work. They'd have no benefit at all but I'd have stolen their photo album.
With your world view, I had the justification to do it because they didn't understand a single word I told them to get in their house.
If a Spotify competitor started out today with zero advertising it would never make it - how would you hear about it?
I can remember when one of the killer advantages of online retail vs B&M was that in the former you didn't need to spend any dollars on TV and magazine and billboard advertising - word of mouth was sufficient. So I think that they would be fine.
Most people don't grasp the _extend_ of what they give to the advertisers. Not even in the slightest way. They still think that as long as they don't fill out a questionnaire, "they" won't know.
Right, it's like if you think about searching for some controversial thing and get as far as typing it into the search bar then think I don't want this in my permanent record and close the tab. Too late, every keystroke was already sent as you were typing! Surprise! Or an angry message that you think better of sending, the recipient might not have it, but it's still recorded and may or may not be used against you in some way in the future.
That's one diddle that can't be undone. Does the author really think deleting his old posts is going to somehow cover all the cached copies of his data? Not to mention all the little picadillos in the metadata Axiom has on him that they gleaned from said data? Articles like this make me fear for tech journalism.
It can't necessarily be undone, but if you're among the people who is skeeved out by surveillance capitalism, you can at least try to reduce future level of exposure going forward.
Also, if you're worried about the long-term psychological impact of social media, with all its dark patterns designed to get you to spend more and more time distracted by their sites and apps, then all you really have to do there is switch the distractions off. Deleting one's Facebook account isn't the only way to do that, but it's certainly an effective option.
> Facebook simply replaced the tools we once used to tell the world of our joys and sorrows and it replaced them with cheap knock-offs that make us less connected, not more.
This resonnates with what I've been observing. Instead of birthday card, a call or even a text message, we now simply write a note on someone's wall, between two out-of-context thoughts. It's the path of least resistance. Like fast food, it takes a bit of effort to fight, until the brain hijack starts to fade and new purposeful habits are formed (or reinstated).
30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope. Whatever dumb thing they posted in their teens will be brought to light.
It's probably going to raise a lot of discussions about what constitutes normal human behavior. We might finally stop pretending they are perfect humans.
After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.
It might also be a bad thing because society would expect oversharing as the norm and would consider anyone who doesn't put their private lives on display, to be hiding something.
Either way social media is here to stay. But it will change, this is version 1.
I see it like a credit report. Have a bad credit report, it makes you look bad. Have no credit report, it means you're a risk because there is no data on your behaviour. As the world leans in to using social as a form of credit check, we will have to learn the right way to use it for a very different purpose than it was designed for.
I also see it like a credit report, but for a different reason: some companies make money by recording your activity and selling your data. They use their profits to corner the market and create an oligopoly so powerful that people just accept it as a fact of life. Finally, when people realize the power they've given these companies and the danger they're in (see: Equifax), they are outraged, but the companies are basically an institution at this point.
Legacy TV during non-prime time is full of commercials about credit cleaning services and similar; perhaps that's the future of social media.
I would be willing to pay a modest sum of money to a startup willing to provide bland and inoffensive social media "filler" content. This is already the norm for celebrities, but at some point it can be automated for the masses. Give me a giant list of checkboxes to select the message I'd like to provide to corporate data miners, then I never have to be bothered with facebook again...
It's really funny when people bring up things people said or did 10 years ago as way to knock them down a peg. If anything, it should show that a person has the capacity to change and mature if they are no longer acting the embarrassing way. It does bother me that people are expected to behave perfectly their entire lives in order to be a leader. It creates a situation that caters to psychopaths.
What makes it even worse is that there are always people who will try to put forward the worst possible (mis)interpretation of what you said, ie: in the guise of social "justice", and the domain of what constitutes acceptable discourse (the overton window) is constantly shrinking. There is a fair chance that some of what you posted, which was considered perfectly acceptable and maybe humorous 10 years ago, is now considered toxic / harmful / triggering / misogynistic / oppressive / etc.
Heck, what you say now can put you in trouble today. There are a number of opinions that I hold which I consider to be fairly balanced and mild, but am afraid to discuss online, because I think they could put me at risk. If you upset the online twitter mob, they're not going to fight you with coherent arguments and thoughtful discourse. They're going to insult you, threaten you, publicly shame you, and maybe get you fired from your job.
And further to that point, the way it works for partisans, is that if someone from their side did/said something terrible in the past, then presumably they have learned from it and should be forgiven; if someone on the other side did/said something terrible in the past, then it should still be used against them today. The political landscape in the US today is overflowing with that style of aggressive hypocrisy.
What's Orwellian is being publicly lynched for wrongthink. The far-left is just as authoritarian as the far-right, IMO. The left accuses the right of living in a bubble, but they're completely unaware of their own dogmatic echo chamber.
I'm queer. I'm in favor of universal access to abortion and socialised healthcare, but there are a few things I could say that would quickly get me labelled as right-wing and all sorts of bad things. It used to be that being liberal, being left stood for freedom of speech and the open discussion of ideas.
Ah yes, the ever-famous both sides argument. I always hear this alongside arguments from people using the word Lynch in an incredibly inappropriate context.
The term Orwellian is usually used in allusion to the book 1984, in which the official terms for institutions are direct opposites of what they actually are - e.g., the Ministry of Plenty oversees rationing, the Ministry of Truth oversees propaganda, and so on, and in which thoughts are strictly controlled and unapproved, unorthodox ideas are labeled "wrongthink."
You say that the word 'justice' is being used in a Right-Wing Authoritarian (I assume that is what you mean by RWA) context. Here is a definition of RWA from Wikipedia (original source from "The Kinds of Conservatism" by Karen Stenner, Psychology Press 2009): "Right-wing authoritarians are people who have a high degree of willingness to submit to authorities they perceive as established and legitimate, who adhere to societal conventions and norms and who are hostile and punitive in their attitudes towards people who do not adhere to them. They value uniformity and are in favour of using group authority, including coercion, to achieve it."
Merriam-Webster's first definition for 'justice' is "the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments." Now, that's a bit of a circular definition given that it contains the word 'just' in it, but the 'especially' clause is substantial.
I think that the common objection that people have to 'social justice' types is that they strongly reject those whose ideas do not fall in line with orthodoxy, and are quick to brand anyone who disagrees with them with labels like 'misogynistic', 'Nazi', 'alt-right', etc. The phenomenon of 'outrage mobs' (I find the term 'lynch mob' to be distasteful and inaccurate here) is a common example of this trait. Outspoken supporters of 'social justice' engage passionately in public shaming, in 'no-platforming' (i.e., suppression of free speech), and demand that targets lose their jobs. They seek to punish dissenters outside of the formalized system of justice (the courts; imperfect as their implementation of justice may actually be, they are certainly fairer than the mob rule and/or sovereign edict that they have replaced), and minimize the presumption of innocence before guilt is proven, preferring instead to encourage believing in victims unquestioningly. These tactics seem to be in direct contradiction to our definition of justice: 'the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims,' and sound more like the use of coercion to achieve uniformity.
I think that most people agree that in our society people should have equal access to opportunities, that unfair discrimination is bad, that it is good to help the disenfranchised, and that pervasive systemic injustices exist which should be rectified (reasonable people disagree on the degree to which the government is the entity responsible for implementing remedies, and how it should do so - but that is a separate discussion). Thus, it's difficult to argue against something which on its face bears the name of the concept of justice. Just like it's difficult to argue against something like 'The Patriot Act' which bears the unassailable concept of patriotism in its name, even though in reality it is unpatriotic. Those who oppose 'social justice' and 'political correctness' I think more specifically oppose the policing of discourse and the silencing of dissenters.
Thus, I implore you to reexamine your usage of the term Orwellian and consider that what is Orwellian is not the 'demonization of the words social justice,' but rather the usage of that very term by a group of people whose tactics are decidedly the opposite of justice in practice.
To me all this hints at an emerging religion like idea that data is important and of value. I think society is going into quant/science/algo because of a mix of trend, boredom, distress, desire to control and predict more (probably caused by distressing times). And now everybody is scrutinizing every little fact, piece of text, "citing sources"; because many believe it's truer than just babbling around as most of us do.
Side note: after diving into a lot of research topics (as a semi educated newb), I realized that there's a focal point of science, above it you're ignorant, on it you know the mainstream accepted battle tested science of the day, after that you enter another domain of blur where a lot of things are "maybes" including possible refutation of accepted ideas (maybe not in physics, but medical domains for instance).
I think you may be exaggerating a tad. I think it is hardly a significant phenomenon, people getting fired from their jobs for saying stuff online. As for insults and threats, well that's a consequence of being able to say what you want to people halfway across the word. 99% of people saying mean stuff on social media wouldn't say it to people's faces.
The problem is that people don't usually switch opinion completely, just moderate them. If 10 years ago you wrote about the proletariat rising up and now you just want universal healthcare, your opponents will still call you a communist.
>it should show that a person has the capacity to change and mature if they are no longer acting the embarrassing way.
I mean, it can show that, or it can show that they have gotten better at image cultivation. And the latter is much easier to believe about a person running for office. (I'm not saying that is good.)
I guess my point was, who is capable of being honest and not being embarrassing at some point? A lot of comments seemed to assume I was talking about Trump, probably because that's all some people know how to talk about. But I'm talking about everyone. The only people who never say or do anything imperfect online have some sort of complex or maybe afraid of being punished by their Scientology buddies. Our brains don't finish developing until we're 26.
Exactly - a decade is a long time; you can be a youth of just 60 years old and make locker room comments about women and furniture shopping that are captured on a hot mike!
People should realise that we mature when we reach 70 and change our opinions :)
It's hard to tell when something like that is a deeply revealing character flaw that the subject will never turn around, or more along the lines of what you described. I think a lot of people's instincts, perhaps informed by life experience, is to assume the former. How often do you really see people improve on their character flaws?
2) Technological privacy from customer profiling, data brokers, etc.
The OP who was channeling Mark Zuckerberg circa 2010 was talking about the first kind of privacy, "surveillance monetizers" are the second. I think people are much more comfortable with violations of their "technological privacy" by "surveillance monetizers" because they're so secretive and behind the scenes. It's harder to understand the violations, let alone be bothered by them.
We've already come to terms with human imperfection in politics. Clinton was known as "slick willie" for his philandering. Obama wasn't known for much personal impropriety but his last name was Hussein Obama which is phonetically similar to both Saddam Hussein and Osama. Trump... well... my god Trump... the guy is such a walking scandal and fountain of political incorrectness he's just overflowed the integer and nobody cares. I mean his team is not even really denying the whole porn star thing.
The thing that concerns me about social media is the way it can be used as a training data set to train propaganda bots. Now that is scary.
This new fear around propaganda bots seems unwarranted. I've gotten mail advertising specific political newsletters or products for as long as I've been an adult. Someone was aggregating information and targeting me long before social media was around.
I feel as if the political class is just upset that they are not protected by the usual gatekeepers and that this is a non-issue.
I think we're in the early stages of the development of what I've termed the propaganda doomsday machine. Think of it as the PR equivalent of the hydrogen bomb.
What I'm concerned about is the combination of AI and big data to generate autonomous personalized intelligent agents that can actually converse with you, or at least can tailor propaganda to your specific cognitive profile with an incredible degree of insight and accuracy. Think of it as the ability to dispatch an army of billions of con artists with each tasked to work on an individual target person and with the benefit of "fleet-wide learning." I've heard this called "AI-assisted demagoguery."
Keep in mind that it doesn't need to work on everyone. A system like that with a ~10% success rate at changing peoples' minds could allow its wielders to quite literally conquer any democratic nation. That would be enough to sway nearly every election. Non-democratic nations wouldn't be immune either as such technologies could be used to foment revolutions, though I suspect that the smarter autocrats would invest as much as it took to make sure they were the wielders and not others. You can see this in China right now where its autocrats are deploying a system very much like this against their population.
5-10% success rates could just be the beginning. As we say in information security: "attacks only get better." Iterative development and the ensuing arms race could eventually yield systems that exploit tremendous insight about the structure and function of the human mind down to the neurological level. Unfortunately unlike software we cannot patch our brains to fix vulnerabilities. Eventually it may not be possible to engage in honest public discourse at all, since any person in the public square would have a high chance of not being a person at all but an AI-powered con artist attempting to sell you something or change your mind.
I"ve also thought that this -- not Terminators shooting people with lasers -- is what an AI takeover would look like. The ultimate intelligences behind it might be AIs but are more likely to be super-wealthy and politically powerful humans wielding AI as a tool to cognitively enslave the rest of humanity to themselves.
Also what's this "the political class" stuff? If you're talking about Trump vs. Clinton, both of them are incredibly wealthy and highly connected insiders. Trump has somehow managed to pose as an outsider but 10 minutes of reading about his background and connections will disabuse you of that. He's as much an insider as Clinton, albeit in a different clique of the global superclass. The people who funded Cambridge Analytica were also members of the global superclass. What we're seeing here is not insiders assaulting the elite but different camps of elites waging propaganda wars against each other. It's the haves vs. the haves, not the haves vs. the have-nots.
Your fears are noted and valid. However, this propaganda hydrogen bomb already happened once to humanity with the advent of mass media. The wealthy were (and are) using mass media to sway the same 5-10% (and likely more) that you're referring to.
Maybe the future brings us more personalized and targeted propaganda, but the number of sources will likely be more varied. The propaganda distribution cost is lower. Moreover, I think much of humanity will adapt and counter propaganda as part of an ongoing cat-and-mouse game in the persuasion and disinformation business.
I only referred to the political class because I think this topic is only getting attention currently because of political games being played. However, I believe the current beneficiaries of the last propaganda hydrogen bomb (the current mainstream media) dislike the new market entrants and don't want to compete -- that is why they are vilifying the owners/controllers/developers of the AIs that you are also concerned about.
Clinton was first called Slick Willy by journalists who thought he misrepresented his politics on the campaign trail:
As best as I can determine, thanks to the help of the Pine Bluff public library, it had it's origin on September 27, 1980, shortly after Bill Clinton gave a speech before the state Democratic convention in which he depicted himself as in the tradition of progressive governors in this state, an assertion that offended us at the Pine Bluff Commercial because we thought of him as more of a trimmer who had broken this succession of reform governors, from Winthrop Rockefeller, to Dale Bumpers, to David Prior. And so we used the sobriquet, Slick Willy on that occasion and it caught on.
Use of social media seems to be a exponential or power law distribution where a tiny fraction of people are responsible for most posting, then the next one percent down are half as active, then the next percent down is another half lower yet, and so forth. Not entirely different than criminal activity or any other hobby.
Similar to criminal activity, a very small number of very active social media people will simply be disqualified from office, and it won't really matter to most people.
"Either way social media is here to stay." Like CB radio, or telegrams, or pro sports, or newspapers, or TV, or vinyl records, or magazines, etc. Note that none of those have entirely disappeared, but have gone from utterly culturally dominant and universal, to "is that still around?".
> 30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope. Whatever dumb thing they posted in their teens will be brought to light.
In 30 years, the candidates for president will either be bizarre freaks like Trump, or the kind of people who locked down their social media profiles early or were good at covering their tracks.
> After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.
People have been saying stuff like this for ages, I've seen no evidence things will play out that way. In fact, you're literally parroting points Mark Zuckerberg made circa 2010 [1], when he was trying to push more public content to increase "engagement" with Facebook.
However, many, many people are reacting to social media by caring about their privacy more. Facebook's original selling point was that was restricted to your peer group. Snapchat's selling point was self-destructing messages. People are locking down the privacy settings on their social media accounts private or deleting them entirely.
I definitely don't support the guy, but to an extent we're already here with Trump. If that guys twitter feed didn't kill his political ambitions it probably points to the fact that people don't really care about their politicians presenting themselves as squeaky clean. It will probably take a decade for this to become the new normal though.
Have you seen how Trump supporters treat other politicians? Trump gets a pass on anything because he's on "their team", opponents are under a hyper-partisan microscope where even reasonable normal behavior is criticized.
That's completely normal in partisan politics. This stuff occupies the same headspace as cheering on a football team for most people.
Which is to say, when you make being a member of a political group part of your identity, you are inclined to defend it as you would yourself: with irrational non-objective gusto.
Of course people are always going to use social media for ammo, I just think the era where politicians can reasonably expect to curate a public image that's wildly different from their personal lifestyle is essentially over. And honestly that might be a good thing -- much like mutually assured destruction with nuclear missiles, if every politician knows their opponents can dig up bad stuff about them easily it might elevate the discourse since low blows will lead to a vicious cycle for everyone
I suspect that this was linked to people seeing Trump as different to the status quo. Yeah, he was rude, made incoherent outbursts, etc. etc. but that set him apart from the career politicians that had gone before.
I'm pretty sure that any "regular" candidates for political office in the future will still be judged harshly by what they have done in the past. I think that what Trump stood for got him a pass.
>You're assuming the United States elects its leader by popular vote.
We do currently, albeit indirectly. I could see a future where we no longer hold elections and have the electoral college pick the president without any pretense of voting.
> 30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope. Whatever dumb thing they posted in their teens will be brought to light.
Considering that the leader of the free world is currently using twitter the same way as some of my friends do it, I really doubt that the social media will be such a significant way to check politicians.
More or less it will happen the opposite ( already happening ), where the politicians will judge the "average" citizen, by analysing tons of social media posts and reactions to them.
That title was only valid from 1940 until around the end of the cold war. How can the "Free World" be free if it is dominated by a single foreign nation? If anything, that title should be given to an organization.
The title isn't: dominator of the free world. It's leader of the free world. You can lead without conquering or dominating. Ideally in this use concept, the free world willingly follows. Whatever the most powerful nation in the so called free world is, that will always be the leader (even if people don't like it), particularly if there's an outsized difference in economic & military capability as is the case with the US vs everybody else.
It's very clearly not less true, even if Trump's critics like to discredit him with that (Merkel being the new leader of the free world).
The sole thing presently keeping Russia from invading Eastern Europe and taking more territory, is the US military presence in Europe. The sole thing keeping North Korea from invading South Korea and attempting to annex it, is the US. The sole thing (maybe temporarily) keeping China from officially annexing Taiwan, is the US military presence in Asia.
Not Germany, not France, not the UK, not Australia, not Canada, not New Zealand, not Japan, not the UN.
Here are your realistic alternative choices: China, expansionist dictatorship with minimum human rights; Russia, expansionist dictatorship with minimum human rights. And then for 'free world' choices: Germany, UK, France, Japan - which of those has any kind of global power today, economically or militarily? None. Germany doesn't even have its own currency, and their military capabilities can barely push beyond their own borders, not to mention they have no nuclear umbrella capability to bring the rest of the free world under.
The US is all the world has on that side of the board in terms of an actual superpower. It's going to remain that way for the forseeable future. Like it or not. I fully understand why people don't like Trump and I understand why they'd wish for a different President to be in there. Nixon mostly sucked too (despite a few significant domestic & foreign policy accomplishments). The US will, from time to time, elect bad and or mediocre leaders. And then Trump's term will be over.
> The sole thing presently keeping Russia from invading Eastern Europe and taking more territory, is the US military presence in Europe. The sole thing keeping North Korea from invading South Korea and attempting to annex it, is the US. The sole thing (maybe temporarily) keeping China from officially annexing Taiwan, is the US military presence in Asia.
I don't now about Taiwan, but I doubt it as the other points are utter nonesense. China is the only reason why NK still exists. And China 'protects' NK because the US wants it.
And I have no idea where you got the russian thing from. That makes simply no sense. It was true about ... 40 years ago? and thats stretching it. The economic sanctions from the EU had a way bigger impact on their last 'invasion'
> Not Germany, not France, not the UK, not Australia, not Canada, not New Zealand, not Japan, not the UN.
I agree on that front. None of them deserve that title. Nor does the US though.
The position of 'leader of the free world' is - in my opinion - vacant at the moment.
Russia invaded Crimea with NATO and the US watching. It's not a stretch at all to imagine that Russia would be much more active if The US didn't spend more than anyone else in the world on their military many times over. You are drastically underestimating just how big the US military presence is. Either European nations would have to spend much more on their military (and lose some of their social democratic nature), or they'd be under constant threat.
Japan, Taiwan, and SK the same. Just look at the numbers.
Here's military expenditures for 2017 if you'd like facts:
And that is exactly why the rest of the free world is so upset with the americans choosing Trump as their president. Trump doesn't seem to understand this role of the US, and he may very well be in the pockets of rusia.
The US may still well be the protector of the free world, but we've otherwise abdicated our global leadership role. And, with Trump's coyness on US commitment to Article 5 of NATO, whether or not we'll continue to even be the protector in the future is anyone's guess.
There's not a small portion of US society which believes that Trump is a moron and a disaster. I'd wait until after his term to determine whether this is a 4 year fluke or the sign of something bigger.
Nations operate in terms of centuries not 4 years.
The "leader of the free world" stops being coincident with the officeholder of the US presidency the instant someone devoid of positive leadership qualities steps into it. It is entirely possible that there no longer is a "leader of the free world" now, or that it might change hands on an ad hoc basis, depending on who was particularly brilliant on a given day.
One might be able to make a case for Angela Merkel or (metonymically) Brussels, Belgium, in it's role as headquarters for NATO and host of the EU parliament, but I'm inclined to believe the title is still awaiting someone worthy of it.
Please don't isolate the most flamebaity bit of a comment and then respond to that. It paves the way for full flamewar below. We're all responsible for fire safety here.
In a way you can think of this as a variant of the site guideline which asks:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
It's not what we originally had in mind when we added it, but "strongest plausible" can be taken to include "least flame-prone".
"A new study on the personal values of Trump supporters suggests they have little interest in altruism but do seek power over others, are motivated by wealth, and prefer conformity."
Yeah, can you imagine how stupid it would be to have the leader of the free world post ridiculous status updates for everyone to see, and it would get dissected for hours on end by CNN? Man, I sure am glad I didn't wake up in that world this morning.
> 30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope.
At least it's public, people will eventually accept no body is perfect, let alone when they were teenagers.
I concern more about Google. They monitor everything users did, they memorize everything users did even you delete your account, they use data for everything that may not benefit users.
The leaders of tomorrow are the leaders of today. Prescott Bush groomed his son to be president and the same with W and H.W. Obama was most likely sifted out of the pool in U Chicago by all the Strauss followers. The Clintons are a pretty powerful family and had Hillary won, it would have been a continuation of the Bush Clinton dynasty.
Trump might seem like an outlier, but he's more like Reagan: an actor. He's a puppet on stage and the corporations actually running the show know they can play him. He's there to distract America from all the interest groups that really run things and they selected him because he's so out there.
Make no mistake, the future leaders will either be groomed from an early age to be very careful with their public image or the puppet masters will latch onto actors who will be bombastic to keep America distracted.
The rules are different for the rich. Their PR departments build worlds around them that use social networking. If there's any doubt, remember Obama joked about predator droning people interested in his daughter and people laughed.
I don't see it man. I think this was the most democratic election in US history, where the people finally got what they really wanted - a blustering populist without a shred of actual policy experience. I mean, come on - the wall, tariffs, and now the death penalty for drug dealers? Is there any mainstream academic/intellectual on either side of the aisle that's really "running the show" here? I don't think so.
That would be very unfair. Obama was Illinois senator for 3 terms, elected to US Senate in landslide, president of Harvard Law School, attorney, professor, liked by everyone who knew him, great listener, worked across the aisle, etc. So yes, almost stark opposites.
He was a STATE senator for ~2.5 terms. He was only elected to the US senate once. It was a landslide mostly because it's Illinois and also because he outspent his opponent $14m to $2.5m. He served half of that term most of which was spent running for president.
Worked across the aisle? Have you ever read how his major legislation was passed? Sure the Republicans were basically obstructionists, but I've never heard him to be known as "working across the aisle."
I mean, he was a professor of constitutional law at one of the top law schools, a community organizer, a state senator, and a US senator.
Also, Republicans in the 2008 election cast him as only having "hope and change," but his campaign website had detailed policy proposals, with like, tables and charts and stuff.
> Wasn't Obama a "blustering populist without a shred of actual policy experience", either? And, no business experience.
I think it is a stretch to say Obama didnt have a shred of policy experience[1]. Without trying to delve too much into politics here, but I would like to know how Trump's business experience is helping him. I haven't heard about too many terribly good decisions he has made in office regarding the economy.
I think we had an election where misinformation was being spread like wildfire and used to inflame passions to support a populist candidate against the mainstream academics / elite. But the divisions were already there and had been growing for decades; but they hit a turning point during the (very uneven) recession recovery where middle America saw wages and unemployment stagnate, while the top 10% of the country reaped almost all the rewards of the recovery in the form of stock market gains.
I think any other Democrat besides Hillary would have won easily; but a lot of Dems stayed home because they felt a shitty Trump presidency was better than setting a precedent for dynastic politics. I voted for her, but grudgingly for that reason — she’s totally qualified, she has the experience, but there are other people who are qualified and had the experience too; Hillary beat them in the primaries because lots of people owed her favors due to her influence with her husband. She ingratiated herself to the party elites (unelected “superdelegates” who cast a huge percentage of the votes that determine the candidate to represent the party) and won that way.
Hillary ran a tone-deaf campaign, but I think her loss really highlighted how the Democrats lost because they were basically telling people in rural areas that their problems weren’t really problems, and if they were smarter they could figure that out. The Dems need to realize that wealth inequality has disproportionately hit these rural areas, and all the issues we see with Trumpism (Nazis, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment) are essentially borne out of frustration that individuals feel they have less control over their lives than they used to.
Can't speak for the nation, but in Colorado Sanders won the primary by a landslide yet received exactly 0 super deligate votes. Anyone who lived in a state where this happened could feel the elitism the previous comment was talking about
Yeah, Trump picked up a lot of votes simply because he addressed it as a problem while Hillary said “everything’s fine”. That was pretty insulting for a lot of people, and I don’t think the Democrats realized they were alienating their blue collar base.
One of the reasons that the Russia thing is such a big deal is that nobody, including Trump, expected Trump to win. Laser targeted ads deployed in a few swing states turned the election much more effectively than anticipated, and the impact of Trump's investments there were amplified by the other social media fodder.
There was also alot of specific targeting of disaffected union guys that moderated the GOTV efforts that are usually fruitful for democratic candidates.
End of the day Hillary was a machine candidate, except the machine broke down.
Having read the Mueller report, I'm not ready to jump quite that far yet. But I do know it's certainly changed my view of what's possible, from Russia messing with the US election being "total conspiracy level stuff" to "they probably interfered, but it's not clear how effective it was".
I think the bigger point is exactly what you said though, the machine is broken. The candidates are going "direct to voter" and bypassing the "intermediaries" of the party.
What do you actually mean when you say “most democratic”. How “much more” was last election versus previous now.
From what I see coming out more and more evidence is that this was the most sophisticly hacked election in the modern times. The genius behind electing Trump seems to be his success with social media.
Just few days ago Facebook admit their info was not properly used. Basically voters were swayed to vioe Trump because they were unaware the been targeted based on their music taste and all other types of likes they feed Facebook with over the years. Brillian probably not illegal but totally unmorral. Hence stock is negative 5 today (for a stock this size that significiant move)
I say probably not illegal because what comes out is that Russia paid in most for Facebook pro-Trump advertising. And thats illegal to the tune of $20 mil. Will see if anything comes out of it but obviously dont hold your breath if you think current administration will investigate itself if it won illegally.
The genius behind social hack of our election goes deeper than just purchasing large stock of flashy ads and using trillion data points to target with surgeons knife precision.
Take the recent story done by CNN of some older lady that voted Tump and ran a rally for him with other “trump voters” (im on mobile i cant add links).
What turned out is the group she belonged to was started by russians and feed by russians. Basically what it was she was meeting other americans that have been duped by the same group, believing to her core the group is started and run by caring and loving patriotic americans. Even pressed by CNN with evidence said group was started by Russian advertising company, she refused to believe! This is a classic form of foreign romance scam taken to the new levels!
In romance scam, someone from third world country starts conversation with vulnerable women on Facebook telling her how much in love he is... Until he needs $1k to get out of hospital he just got in. Or bail his son from immigration jail, etc. such women after losing all her savings and 401 and pensions, when faced with truth that they been just scammed, rarely can believe in facts, and simply believe the offshore love of her life was stuck in hospital or had some other problems because she didnt send him the money! Its trully evil-brillian how this century old scam was used to shway recent election, at least when it comes to Facebook.
It's not just about being able to discredit candidates. An even bigger issue is using this data to manipulate voters, which is the main thing revealed about Cambridge Analytica in the story.
The problem with social media isn't that we aren't sure how much privacy we want to have or how long the things we say should stick around. The problem is that social media is a gamification of social interaction, and it causes us to behave in ways that we normally wouldn't.
In normal life, people don't take turns loudly stating their political opinions to a room of people and then looking to see how many people agree with them. They also don't have product placements or subtle advertising injected into their normal conversations. They also don't obsessively and continuously call up other people to see if they have any interesting new content to share.
Social Media is not just a tool that we use to communicate with each other along the lines of a phone or messaging service. It is a platform that is designed to be addictive and to carefully meter out hits of dopamine to keep people coming back. The current popular social media platforms aren't popular because they provide a nice service that people enjoy, they're popular because they exploit weaknesses in human behavior and cause people to use them obsessively and unhealthily. The customers that are funding these platforms and driving the design are not the people that use them, they are advertisers that want their ads to be as targeted, subtle, and as widely viewed as possible.
I agree that social media is not going away, but unless there is a fundamental shift in the way it's designed it may be "here to stay" in the way that gambling is "here to stay". Okay in moderation, but dangerous and fundamentally designed to take something from you.
> After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.
Online privacy isn't just about hiding the stupid stuff you post online. Do you wear a name tag on your shirt with PII at all times when you go out in public or interact with others in a public setting? Why not?
I'd love for everyone who says "I don't care about online privacy" to start wearing badges in public with a unique identifier and all the information available about them on the internet for others to see.
This could become a reality forced upon us by technological means with applications like FindFace (A Russian face recognition app which matches strangers' faces to their VK profiles). Unfortunately, I can imagine this just becoming the new normal.
There's an interesting case going on in Norway right now. The head of the Justice Ministry is being impeached because she made a post on Facebook saying that the police should be able to withdraw the passports of suspected terrorists without a court case.
When the labour party objected publicly, she accused them of being "in favour of terrorism" (again on Facebook I believe), which was very unfortunate seeing that their youth division were the target of the 2011 terror attack on Utøya.
So right now other parties in government are questioning her ability to serve as Minister of Justice and Public Security and she will likely have to leave her post this week.
I deleted my Facebook account in 2012. Haven't missed it. Let's hope this poor soul can finally be brave enough to find the close account button. Might not even need to write a script to do that.
I log on to Facebook twice a year, to let people know that I'm still alive, and to delete older posts and tags.
My concern is that if I shut down my account completely, someone else--possibly Facebook itself--could credibly impersonate me on the platform and thus use the idea of me as a means to target my friends and acquaintances that use it more frequently.
Agreed. I deleted my account 2 weeks ago and haven't looked back either. Instagram on the other hand is still one of my favorite ways to share photos with my friends.
I think the facebook(.com) product has some serious soul-searching to do and if they continue to ignore their monumental problem -- it will not end well for them, nor their stockholders.
I deleted mine around the same time, but it was easy for me because a) I was pressured into having one in the first place by work colleagues, and 2) I don't actually have much of a social network. The few months I spent with FB was like most human social interaction is to me: vapid, meaningless, and utterly tedious.
My understanding, though, is that others don't have this same experience with real life social interaction, so might not as easily notice how much FB amplifies it.
Hey folks, John Biggs here. I wrote this as a reaction to reason news and it comes at the end of a slow boil. I think we can make better tools than this one and I believe Facebook - and other social media - were originally quite useful and have now devolved due to market pressure. I'm definitely a hypocrite, as well. I still use most things to _broadcast_ not communicate and that's primarily because I've spent 20 years journalizing and am used to the constant, one-sided flow of information.
That said I deleted all social apps except for Twitter and, for some masochistic reason, LinkedIn and am ready to tear it all out of my life step by step. It's a poison.
I'm curious, what are you primarily using LinkedIn for, that you find it difficult to have already gotten rid of it (in the process of stripping out the other social products)?
I've stalked LinkedIn for years looking for a way to undercut them with a superior competing product. I've never really found what I consider to be a very high value angle of attack that looked like it could cause a big enough wound to bring down the beast.
This is fascinating to me - I know LinkedIn is valuable, and lots of people describe it as an essential account they can't get rid of. Meanwhile, I can't work out what LinkedIn is even for.
I update my profile there occasionally, but only to not have out-of-date info being spread. It occasionally produces a low-quality contact or recruiter spam. That's about it. My peers don't keep theirs up to date, my employers don't use it as a major hiring source, I don't trust endorsements there as meaningful or predictive. The interface is enormously frustrating, and it's not even a particularly good job board.
Is there just a parallel ecosystem of people who engage with LinkedIn so deeply and consistently that it forms a real network? Is software just a low-LinkedIn-use field? What on earth are people doing on that site?
I feel the same way. None of the people with whom I work directly make use of linkedin at all, yet whenever I attend a business event or networking something or other, people look at me as though I just sprouted a tail when I tell them I have derived zero use from linkedin. It has only annoyed me with its spammy emails and pernicious alerts to invite people I might know, I can't fathom how it is an enjoyable experience to use for anybody.
For a journalist the answer is simple: Finding sources. Many of us have accounts solely to find an expert in a field or a person within a company to talk to.
I use LinkedIn exclusively as an online resume with the occasional message to contacts asking for advice or asking about details for a job. The social aspect is lost on me, as well.
I've had an account on LinkedIn basically since it was available to the public. I stripped my account bare years ago and never use it for anything. I log in about once per year to check privacy type settings and maybe change a password.
From my observation, LinkedIn has had three relatively distinct eras for the product.
In the early days it was very simple work & business networking, as you'd expect it to be. A profile + connection between people.
Then it tried to evolve into a more general purpose tool, including publishing content, some communication, etc.
Then having fully captured its market, and with limited upside growth potential on users, it went full spam abuse engine. They kept ratcheting up the user monetization focus regardless of the damage to the product quality, and it has never turned back from that path.
I think LinkedIn is a social hole, where people deposit an account and information out of perceived necessity, and then rarely engage the product again until they change or update their job situation. There appears to be a shield of social-work pressure that keeps it alive and updating. People use it, so people use it. The value proposition certainly appears to be mediocre over time. I've known very, very few people that have gotten much value from it, yet almost everyone I know (that is non-retired) keeps and maintains a profile at a minimum level.
I suspect now that social media has reached a point in the last ~5 years of all-connected status (just speaking of the US here), it's going to become increasingly socially acceptable to quit platforms that were previously regarded as necessary. More and more people will experiment with rejecting the pressure that has been maintaining these networks artificially. I've seen that happen increasingly on Facebook, and LinkedIn often seems to be a graveyard these days.
I don't see where LinkedIn can go from here, in terms of increasing its value to people. They're very clearly not going to return the product to a less annoying, basic use case that sparked the user build-out in the first place. They may find a few more clever ways to monetize their hostages though.
> I think LinkedIn is a social hole, where people deposit an account and information out of perceived necessity, and then rarely engage the product again until they change or update their job situation. There appears to be a shield of social-work pressure that keeps it alive and updating. People use it, so people use it.
This is a fantastic summary, and something I'm going to think about with non-LinkedIn contexts as well. At this point, I update LinkedIn so it won't be out of date, and keep it alive so I'm not confused with other people. (And because deleting the thing looks like more of a pain than having it...)
It's an entirely defensive posture, and I only go to LinkedIn to pour information in, rather than to take anything valuable out.
Actually, it makes me think of those stupid "communication for recipient only" email disclaimers. They probably don't carry any legal weight, but once they got common some companies worried that if they didn't use them it could be brought up in court as evidence that the communication was shareable - so now everyone adds 5-10 lines to their emails just to get back to where they were before the meme ever started.
Indeed, this summary seems fair.
I've been keeping a profile up to date mainly because I thought that potential employers might look me up and probably think me too weird if they couldn't find me on either Facebook or LinkedIn. I definitely don't want a Facebook account.
This seems pretty on point. Personally, I deleted my LinkedIn account ~a month or two ago after realising it serves no useful purpose for me, and earlier today deleted my Twitter account (also mostly unused). Never had a Facebook account, so no action to take there.
GitHub is the only "social" platform I still have involvement with, and that's because it's actually useful. ;)
In developing countries like India and Eastern Europe, there are many posts with hundreds and thousands of likes and comments. There IS an ecosystem of users who engage with linkedin deeply. HR recruiters and entrepreneurs publish long insightful/motivational pieces which give them leads and publicity. Then there are also those '+1 if you're interested in this job' posts, which garner plenty of comments.
entrepreneurs publish long insightful/motivational pieces which give them leads and publicity
Serious question: does this actually work? I'm considering a "content strategy" to build brand trust, and one option is to publish on LinkedIn. I'm pretty new to using the ecosystem for anything meaningful though. I'm in the middle of my "free trial" of the +1 level (Pro? I forgot- whatever they try to get you to sign up for...).
But if published content actually gets read, or if at least people search there when trying to learn more about somebody, then I'll consider it.
I was skeptical for years, nervous that I was now broadcasting even more info about myself than I already gave to the likes of Facebook and Google before it was too late. I was worried about now giving my employment history. Well, I finally did and got a ton of interviews out of it, much more quality recruiters than Dice which has become a spam nightmare.
I killed my account somewhere around 4 years ago. Overall, I am probably a better person (interpersonally / socially) because I have to actually talk to people in order to "catch up". However, there are some difficult downsides. For instance, given that basically everyone else that I know still uses it, all of my friends now have to single me out with a text when they create an event and want me there or post about something they wanted to get the news out about. Basically, being the one (or one of the few) non-facebook user(s) in my friend group effectively shifts the burden of communicating with me to the person communicating, from the app that was specifically designed for mass communication. So expect to be left out of the loop a lot. Expect to lose some friends (because you won't communicate with all of them anymore). Expect to have to put more effort into maintaining your friendships (since you won't have that constantly opened communication transport that you can easily use).
That being said, I'll never go back to using Facebook. It changed my behavior patterns too much and I was just not happy.
I've experienced the same things and believe that the requirement to put more effort into maintaining friendships has been a large positive for me. Particularly given that I have been a poor communicator my entire life. The phone calls that I have been forced to have with friends since I stopped using social media have drawn us much closer -- at least in part because a phone call is far more intimate than a series of text messages.
Nevertheless, I do think some people are perfectly capable of using both social media and more traditional forms of communication. I don't think I'll ever attempt to achieve that balance given the other ills of social media that I've found myself susceptible to, but to each their own.
Can you provide any additional detail about that? I can’t tell if you’re referring to FB mining the contents of the messages, or the app doing unscrupulous things in the background.
The NSA says they only monitor communication metadata. But that's already a lot of information. Let's imagine a scenario where FB can't read your messages, so it doesn't know what you talk about. But if you talk to people who are mostly Trump critics according to their Facebook activity, Facebook can probably categorize you as a liberal. If you added a new friend of the appropriate gender for dating, and your communication intensifies, Facebook can probably guess what's going on. If it intensified and goes quiet some evenings (predominantly weekend evenings), well, guess who's seeing each other (each guess come with probability percentages).
The latter. I don't have specific examples in mind, just that if you do not trust a company's data collection policies, the collection capabilities of an installed program are much greater than when viewed through a web browser. See [1] for an example from a few of years ago.
When you think about it, it's kind of alarming that FB, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram are all owned by the same company. I can't even imagine the amount of data they have about us.
What are your opinions on less personal social media sites like Hacker News and Reddit?
My enjoyment with Facebook ceased the moment Edward Snowden became a household name. I realized then how naked my information was in a world of bad actors. I only use Facebook as a simple contacts list these days.
But it’s harder to wean myself off HN/Reddit, as I get more value of useful information from the former and entertainment from the latter, than I have ever received from Facebook, even though both sites can lend themselves to mindless consumption and propaganda/manipulation, like FB.
Is there a “right” way for social media to be? Or are we resigned to a muddy middle ground forever?
Did you say Reddit? I'm really curious how to tolerate it, since the comments seem oriented more around feelings and me too or kneejerk anger than anything substantive. Also the comments are one-liners. Are there particular subreddits with intelligent people you'd recommend?
Honestly I just use Reddit for entertainment. I know there are substantive subreddits out there, somewhere, but most of the subjects I care about understanding and discussing come through HN anyway.
The defaults are cesspools. Just plan on nasty things being said back and forth to each other. In reality, the defaults are worse than 4chan, which is saying something.
However, the moment you start getting into tech subs and narrow hobby subs, the SN ratio cleans right up. Yeah, there might be a single spam, or some rude person, but they are the exception.
Reddit's like Usenet. The more people in a general group, the worse behaved they are. Go look up "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory" -- so true..
Not the parent but every time this question gets asked here it usually gets a few responses along the lines of "the more specific the topic the better the content/community generally is" and I'd agree. A few I enjoy are r/homelab, r/programming, r/Economics, r/networking, r/AskHistorians, and r/ColorizedHistory.
This. Killed mine 7 years ago. Nobody died. Still fully employed. Still getting invited to more-than-enough social events. And my family appreciate getting hand-written Christmas cards once a year.
I really appreciate the fact you call yourself out as a hypocrite. A hypocrite can still be completely correct (we are all sinners, after all) and I think society would be more well right now if people understood that fact.
I too have been slowly weaning myself off Facebook. Step 1 for those who want to but can't bring themselves to is to just be logged in on your phone or tablet. Has done wonders for me.
Do you mean you only are logged in on your phone or tablet? This seems like the antithesis of what you want. I have removed it from my phone so now I can only log in on a computer. It has made me so much more happy to not have that temptation there with me all the time.
My approach was to simply delete the Facebook app. I can still use facebook.com in my mobile browser once a week if I want and I don't get any push notifications.
I'm not going to necessarily disagree. My wife and I don't use twitter. Except when 'something is going on'.
When there is a local event or situation, Twitter is pretty valuable. For example, when there is a Caltrain strike, it's almost always more efficient getting details on Twitter.
Can anyone suggest alternatives for such use cases?
> When there is a local event or situation, Twitter is pretty valuable
That seems like a perfectly fine use of Twitter. Not sure why you'd need an alternative?
You don't have to maintain a list of people to follow and watch your feed to get utility out of it.
I mostly interact with Twitter on a case-by-case basis. Either via events, looking at a specific users profile, or coming across tweets via the media or on Reddit.
Yup, this is absolutely my only use of twitter -- realtime events, following hashtags (which of course the native client still (probably) doesn't support, conferences, etc.
I believe the main alternative is to drastically cut down on the amount of news that's consumed - which may or may not be something you need to do. Otherwise, how about listening to local radio for a short while when you're getting ready for the day or doing chores?
I'd say for most people, there's really not much true value that comes from news (compared to books). Sure, it makes us feel more informed and provides topics of conversation for friends and strangers but really, it produces so little nearly all of the time.
Unless your job or hobby is closely linked with news or activism, so much of it is simply consumed as entertainment to idle time away.
However, if your usage of it is so infrequent and only for finding out about transport disruptions; maybe it's not such a problem that needs an alternative? Or perhaps not knowing wouldn't really inconvenience you that severely anyway - that's entirely up to you.
Personally, I have the opposite experience. It's likely because few of my IRL friends are on Twitter, but I like the commentary of the tech folks I follow. They seem to be on Twitter rather than Facebook. And since few of my friends use it, I don't feel the same "ego projection" pressure as I did on FB.
Sure, maybe I'm better off without either, but I think if you exercise some diligence you can craft a useful experience on most social platforms.
>Why "except twitter?" I find Twitter to be 100x more toxic, 1% as useful, and infinitely worse design.
Twitter is all about your filter. I have mine curated to an amazing list of intelligent thoughtful, creative people who I enjoy seeing post every day, completely devoid of politics. As soon as you leave that bubble though, it's an absolute nightmare.
unfortunately, twitter seems determined to ruin this for users, with features like "* liked this" and "You might like" showing up in users' timelines with no ways to turn them off.
As much as I think most of Twitter's userbase comprises one of the worst cesspools on the Internet (yes, really), you can fit a hyperlink and short commentary to something well worth reading within a tweet.
Its function as a personal RSS feed can still be pretty valuable, and I see no reason why you can't be judicious with your follows and entirely avoid the toxic majority.
I have a Twitter account that's barely more than domain squatting from the early days of the service; at this point I follow probably five people and have logged in a dozen times in almost a decade. But when I do, my feed is dense with fascinating stuff. If I were to spend a little time curating, I could probably get to a lot more volume and still keep the high quality of the feed.
As a very light user of Twitter, I undoubtedly follow far fewer people than most power users, and I'm still overwhelmed by retweets of poorly threaded and displayed conversations that are wholly without context.
I've tried dipping my toe into following this F1 driver or that tech star, but it seems like the content is 100% tangents and 0% relevant to anything I might care about. I just can't get past that hump. And again, that's following very few people.
> I've tried dipping my toe into following this F1 driver or that tech star, but it seems like the content is 100% tangents and 0% relevant to anything I might care about. I just can't get past that hump. And again, that's following very few people.
Again, quality over quantity. I don't follow anyone with more than a few thousand followers because then it becomes a weird hierarchical, pub-sub, "celebrity" kind of relationship, rather than just communication between peers. Follow the guy
with 300 stars on GitHub making weird new stuff, not whatever "online personality" is pushing their blog and building a huge follower base.
Twitter is indeed quite the mixed bag - I don't recommend for anyone to take the habit up but I think I'm starting to see why it's still so popular:
It can sometimes be more toxic, but I've heard it can also be really great and lead to more real-life interactions compared to Facebook if you can build some trust. The breadth and depth of talent is also much larger, because you're not limited to "friends" from your own past. Because you'll encounter more strangers directly, you're free to follow random people a lot more without expecting them to reciprocate it (compare this to the obligation of accepting friend requests on Facebook).
There's also a bigger endorphin rush when someone with many more followers acknowledges one of your replies or tweets (through a like, or even retweet) - this just never happens on Facebook, and Facebook Likes from "friends" pale significantly in comparison because everything (including reshares) blurs together. To get better at Twitter (and not end up on the losing side of debates), you really have to strive for it and learn from the quality of other well-liked replies. Usually humor goes a long way and there are often some genuinely funny and original posts on Twitter (again, because of the greater pool of talent to bump into).
As others have said, if you follow the right people your feed improves significantly but there is quite the learning curve and trial & error until you get there (I'm still working on this part). It's remains primarily a procrastination tool for me, so I don't recommend those who aren't already using Twitter a lot to try harder at getting hooked.
Breaking news of all forms happens lot faster on Twitter due to the number of journalists present as well as normal users "on the ground" (the search works really well), however I think we should ask the question of how much news we really need in our daily lives and whether it affects us / changes our lives all that much. It's pointless if we're not prepared to act on it and becomes just another form of procrastination.
After I deactivated Facebook earlier this year, I found myself focusing more on Twitter - so far that's actually been a better experience overall. But based on that, I'm thinking from this week that I should just fire up a computer game every time I feel like idly opening Twitter - it could turn out to be a more productive experiment if I can segment my time better. Replacing one habit with another slightly-better and enjoyable one always works. I need to learn to shut down the information-hungry part of my brain more often so that it can stay focused on stuff that I really do need to know (almost never news).
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I can see how you're much more likely to grow and gain friendships and professional connections through Twitter the way you describe it. I agree, I use Facebook almost exclusively for connections with real-life friends, which is what I like about it.
I can't say I don't get some level of enjoyment from approval of Likes and so on, but it has more to do with the enjoyment of the connections I already have. I don't have the desire to seek out new people or get liked/appreciated by people I don't know. I don't really mean this as a judgement, perhaps I would once I got rolling on it, but from where I sit it's not something I desire/seek out. It sounds like you didn't, either, though -- until it happened naturally as you moved away from Facebook.
> I think we can make better tools than this one and I believe Facebook - and other social media - were originally quite useful and have now devolved due to market pressure.
That also applies to media and you as well.
> except for Twitter and
Why? Why did you keep twitter?
> and am ready to tear it all out of my life step by step.
Good for you. But who cares? What makes you so special that we should waste our time with your nonsense?
> It's a poison.
No offense, but so is techcrunch and the media.
I've never used facebook. But what "market pressures" are causing the sudden media hysteria over facebook? I wonder.
Also, what you are doing isn't journalism. It's advocacy. It's propaganda.
I do agree that the world would be better without facebook. But it also applies to techcrunch and your article. Facebook, social media, traditional media, your article are ultimately just waste of people's time.
That's the truth. I quit Facebook and most similar sites, and my social life improved quickly. I also get a lot more done without those distractions.
I block all of their companies in my hosts file and avoid their software libraries (React, etc.) whenever possible too. The company is having a terrible effect on the world and should not be supported. It was fundamentally broken from the start. A platform that connects all the world's people already exists -- it's called the WWW.
I know people who are desperately trying to quit, but they can't, because the site has locked their social connections within the platform, and they are addicted.
You're deleting old posts, yet you're keeping all the messages from Messenger. And even if you would delete them, your friends would still have a copy, which means Facebook has one too.
Does anyone know if deleting posts and likes actually removes the post from Facebook?
Even if it does, what’s the likelihood it hasn’t already been sold and a shadow profile of ourselves exists with facebooks marketing partners in a place where we can’t reach the delete button?
I think the best thing it's for is sending a message to Facebook. They surely have statistics on post deletion. It's one thing to just stop using Facebook or delete your account using their (hard to find) mechanism. It's another to systematically delete, post-by-post, your contribution.
Not really. In some countries, you can submit a request to download everything facebook knows about you, and for deleted posts, it just toggles a flag that removes it from public view instead of removing it from the database.
"Until we find them, however, it’s probably better for us to delete the ones we use today."
This is a really dangerous, reactionary notion. If there's something inherent in our social formations that are translating themselves into our public spaces and we are unhappy with, let's work to change them together. This is a thoughtful piece and I think there are great reasons to delete your posts from long ago because, well, people change! Other commenters here have made good supporting arguments for this.
But we must be very, very careful not to demonize tools where their users need to be taken into consideration: unless there is something specific about facebook, unique among other social networks, that is toxic (this may be the case!) then we need to be wary of these arguments because they are very easy to apply to all social media which, imo, is a copout.
Why is it a dangerous notion? For the sake of argument, if everyone went completely over the top and deleted all their social media accounts, the world would go back to looking like it did around 2006. A few corporations would go broke. A few other corporations values would increase. Mass psy-ops would become more difficult and expensive.
So in the extreme case that you're talking about it's not dangerous in any way I can think of at the moment. One of the big reasons I called it dangerous was that the effect only a portion of the users leaving the platform is dangerous and more subtle. To my eye, it's a social critique which leads to people who agree with it voluntarily removing themselves from the 21st century version of the "public square." I worry that this leads to disenfranchisement on their part as I've seen such isolation result in those feelings.
I guess the spirit of my claim is that the shape of group conversation will always come to resemble the cultural context of that conversation, regardless of the medium. While the medium can and should be critiqued, calling for total abstention from the medium is effectively self-censorship and I don't think that'll lead to the desired result.
I would like to share my experience here because I think it was creepy on their part.
I only had <50 friends after 2015 on my facebook account. So, I would get notifications 1-2 times every week, "X is new to facebook, Since he is new to facebook, You should introduce him to more friends", Problem is,
1. I have no clue who X is! Sometimes I found that X lived in the same city that I lived in, Sometimes there was no visible co-relation.
2. X was automatically added to my friends list without my permission!
On several occassions, There were some people who were added as my friend but I couldn't find them on my friends list. The only way I figured they were my friends was when I received a notification and then visited their profile.
On 5-10 occassions every month, facebook will randomly send friend requests to people I don't even know and then some day I am just browsing and I get a notification that "Y has accepted your friend request" and I just couldn't recall sending friend request to that person.
So, Yeah, They were literally forcing me to be friends with people I don't even know, presumably, because I never clicked on ads and if I have less friends, That just means there is little activity in my circle and there is little information they can collect about me, IDK.
Whenever this happened, I usually took a screenshot, It probably doesn't do a solid job of proving my claim but it's something.
And before someone here starts running down a list of possible things that might have happened, Like someone hacked into my account, apps that had access to my account etc. I just want to say, I was a member of official 2600 magzine group, I posted all of this multiple times there and they did helped me a lot to prevent me from a lot of ways that someone might be accessing my account. I followed everything and it 6 months later it still didn't stop.
I've definitely seen some weirdness happen with FB.. like I was following a favorite band of mine for a number of years, but suddenly they were gone from my list of follows and some photographer that had taken pictures for them somehow replaced them. Very weird.
If you are the only person seeing this behaviour, it is likely a bug in their system.
Many ages ago, on one of the most popular mail and news systems of the day, it turned out that myself and another person both managed to register the same username, each with a different password, but were assigned to the same account.
After a couple of weeks in which each of us would log in, see the changes the other did, undo them, change our own password, and mail the abuse team (which kept replying "no, we see that you did it yourself on xxxx"), we both realized what had happened, and started talking by emailing ourselves. Eventually, the other guy left the account to me (I had it for 2 years when he managed to register it).
Is there a reasonable, open-source, distributed Facebook alternative?
I presume built on top of RSS / Atom / something feeds that are available only on authentication (so I can share with limited sets of people.)
I presume I have to keep running a server to host content. Maybe I can host encrypted content for my friends, too? So, federated. Maybe it even makes it easy for me to bill them, if the costs are prohibitive?
I'm pretty sure I'd want an Android App to talk to it. The Android app would talk to all of the servers that host my friends' contents.
It doesn't let me share with "Friends of Friends" directly. My friends would have to Reshare, I guess. And then I guess I can't interact with them.
Not sure how I want conversations to work. It'd be hard for me to offer a server to my friends, without me having access to their social data.
I don't think everyone needs their own facebook server (or diaspora in this case).
I'm more in favor of the federated approach where a couple people run servers for their community (I run a server for a fandom community I participate in regularly).
People that use my server play by my house rules, if they don't like that they can pick another server or run their own.
Diaspora[0] and Hubzilla[1] exist, but never really caught on for various reasons, possibly nothing more than that they came out too soon.
There is a project to build a Facebook replacement that federates with ActivityPub[2], which would make it to Facebook what Mastodon[3] is to Twitter. However, I don't want to link it because it's in too early a stage to face HN levels of scrutiny.
There is also Patchwork[4], a peer-to-peer social application built on top of the Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol. It doesn't have all the features you'd want yet, but ticks off the boxes some people care about.
Most people won't host their own server. I am not speaking for the HN crowd. In general, people just are not interested enough in learning how to do this or stay on top of patches.
To answer your question though, honestly any blogging software that support good ol' fashion RSS feeds would be fine. Your group of friends could link to each others feeds. With a little effort, you could probably do this server side using some fashion of RPC call. Each language has it's own way to accomplish this.
I agree with the RSS point. There were complaints about content being hard to monetize with RSS but the way that social media spreads links seems possible (just put a summary and make the feed entry a link to the main content where you can have ads).
Some kind of feed specification like that and a diversity of publishing and aggregation platforms would be healthier than this walled-garden approach.
For those cases, I have used software such as phpBB. Getting people to create a login is unpopular however. Some friends and I shared things similar to what one might find on FB. The distinct advantage was that our photos belonged to us and FB did not have access. The advantage and disadvantage is that my friends had to create accounts on my server. Centralized authentication services are low friction and high risk. If we move such things to another centralized service, it will just become the next target for snooping.
... until they want it. And then they just give themselves an auth token and access the data.
"Unfortunately, ", said Facebook's spokesman, "we had a bug in our system that authorized our webcrawler to login and crawl every single phpBB or other OAuth site. We will surely delete the data within the next year", he added while winking at the intelligence community representatives in the crowd. -- a few years from now.
I suppose one sensible way to handle this would be if a group of technical friends ran a distributed group of OpenLDAP servers with OAuth and SAML2 providers in front of them. That way, if whomever was running the master could not maintain it any more, another friend could convert their replica to master and people opt out of the defunct auth provider.
The collective group of friends could then host services that use the common authentication framework. Between OpenLDAP, OAuth and SAML2, that should cover most self hosted applications.
I've been Social Sober for 20 days now. I didn't delete any content from FB, since I had been using a fake name on there for 5 years. I just deactivated the account and haven't logged back in since.
I honestly haven't noticed much of a difference in my life. I still work all day, come home and watch Netflix or play my Switch.
It's ok to not "know" what's happening. Just do it!
I did the same with my facebook account last fall. I haven't missed it either. I admit I still use instagram and messenger though. I think most people on my facebook list had pretty much stopped using it regularly anyway, it was basically all ads by the time I left. Twitter I never really used to start with, its primary use-case for me is I'm walking around somewhere and something's going on and i search Twitter to see if someone who knows more about it than me has mentioned anything. Although even that use-case has gotten pretty hit-or-miss recently.
To quote from the clip "Cambridge Analytica went to Facebook and said we’re conducting academic research with this app. Facebook apparently said O.K. and didn’t do a lot of diligence and through that, because they were able to get sort of the direct access from the people who installed the quiz app and then gather all the information from the friends of the people that had installed the app and that includes likes, you know their various posts, the pages that they subscribe to, just a ton of information. They were able to gather really detailed profile information on 50 million Americans."
The quiz was only a ruse to obtain much more valuable information. Sure FB recently ended their relationship with Cambridge Analytica, but they have probably known about this for months. There's a lot of anger at FB these days and deservedly so.
If you go here https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications you can see all your logins. You can migrate each login, one by one, using an app like 1Password to generate new passwords that you don't have to remember.
> I like that Facebook is now a glorified version of OAuth
I don't. One company should not have the power to decide whether I should be recognised as a legitimate individual or not, and they should not act as a gatekeeper between me and my online identity. I don't care how benevolent that one company genuinely is.
If an intermediary is necessary (like an email provider for mere mortals), I should be able to choose a service provider.
Some services/apps may be able to transfer stuff to a new account. When I deactivated my Facebook account, I had Spotify linked to it. I created a new Spotify account with an email and contacted their support to transfer everything to the new account and deactivate the old one, it was quick and worked flawlessly.
I think it's too useful a tool for managing my social network to delete. Event planning, group chats etc are actually pretty HARD to organize without something like it. The impressive bit is the reach. Even my non technical friends and relatives know it.
I try to suggest people just stop giving facebook their information. Don't share anything, don't like anything, absolutely never install "apps" or click ads. Avoid facebook as a sign on provider to other sites. Use good privacy tools in your browser and never hit fb "like" buttons on another site. Avoid linking your accounts to facebook from other applications (instagram, spotify, ...).
I'd love to see a browser plugin that did all this that I could recommend to friends and relatives. A plugin that simply made a visit to facebook completely useless to facebook.
I would recommend Privacy Badger over Ghostery - It's made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (non-profit) and is open source. Ghostery is proprietary and still collects & sells your data.
I got rid of Facebook years ago. Finding a useful app for planning an event is very difficult, but just using email works fine. I just use calendar invites and I follow up with chat / SMS if needed.
I can't think of any reason FB is better for chat than any other platform, but SMS group chat is available as a last resort.
Maybe you're in a different situation than me but I can easily round up all of my friends with a few phone calls. "Hey Tony. I'm planning a party on the first at 6:00pm. Would you mind letting Sue and Mark know they're invited?" That also easily works by email and text if I insist on using technology.
Humans have been organizing into social groups and gatherings for tens of thousands of years without the aid of technology. Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook?
I apologize if my candor is overly blunt, but your comment is an excuse to continue your addiction. Nothing more.
Yea this excuse comes up all the time. Friends won’t invite you to parties unless you’re on Facebook? I’ve got some bad news for you: they might not be really good friends.
I stopped using FB so long ago I forget when it was, and I assure you it’s totally possible to have a robust social life without it... just like only a decade or so ago when FB didn’t even exist.
I don't use it either for trivial things. But for example, we are 14 friends from 4 different cities that have been planning a trip for a couple of months now. Deciding where to go. Dates, Hotel choices, flight bookings etc are discussed. People have been added along the way that weren't in to begin with. That kind of thing that's ongoing for a long time, and has input from tons of people is terrible to do in e.g. an email thread, and can't be done by just getting together. Group discussions (long, persistent) like those is what I use it for mostly.
I'd switch to anything reasonably convenient for event planing - but phone and email just aren't replacements for all scenarios.
> Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook?
I never had that feeling. But I would find it inconvenient to plan a few kinds of events. I'd create a group skype chat. Or even throw up a discourse VM. But send a mass email to a large group asking for "so, where do we go on this years trip?" I would not...
Have you looked at GroupMe? It has the ability to do all the "Social Planning" you need and you don't even need the app to participate in it.
I know it's more common with younger people (at my university there's not a single undergrad who doesn't have it on their phone), but I know some actual adults use it too.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadAdditionally, if you're encouraging people to delete Facebook, your target audience is people on Facebook, so...
From Facebook's perspective, dissatisfied users who delete their accounts are a sort of immune system response. The spread of contagious memes like "Facebook is a pointless, addictive time suck" are contained because those "infected" with them take themselves out of the population.
Rather than just deleting your Facebook account, if you spend some time using it to push articles and posts out onto your feed describing your position, then the memetic contagion can spread over Facebook. If enough people do that, it could hasten their collapse (unless they actually manage a heroic effort to successfully address the critics, not just a PR band-aid).
These kind of comments add no value and rest on incorrect belief that either:
1) authors control the marketing tech stack on the major sites they write for or
2) they can afford to sacrifice audience for their messages, etc. in order to be hyper-picky in order to forestall internet heckles.
The truth is that neither of those things are true. Writers will write, activists will get their messages out, and that's their job. Sometimes they will criticize something so ubiquitous that even they can't avoid it totally, but that doesn't make them hypocrites. In fact, criticizing bad things that literally everyone does is the first step towards fixing those things. If stupid insinuations of hypocrisy like yours had any value, it would be impossible to make progress on many fronts.
Having said that, I also think it's worthy to highlight the impact of the facebook sharing button, which isn't dealt with in the original article. The point is that it's not enough to say to individuals "don't use facebook"; you're still 'at risk' if you visit a site that uses the sharer widget, even if you don't have a facebook account.
As an aside to the aside, techcrunch has to be the first site I've encountered that redirects you when you scroll beyond a certain point of the article, or when you try to search in-page (unless that's a bug, of course).
it's not just facebook doing this. twitter, pinterest, reddit and countless others do the same. heck... there is even a story today about google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610088
and yes, i know some people will say... but that google story is about law enforcement using warrants... which i will counter with, doesn't matter, it shows that these companies don't care about your privacy and will fold in "defending" it when challenged.
if you care about your privacy, don't give _any_ company, _any_ information about you, in _any_ way.
> 2. On multiple recent occasions, police in North Carolina have quietly been successful in obtaining search warrants that force Google to turn over these records. Rather than "standard" search warrants asking for the location of a particular suspect in a crime, these "reverse" or "area based" warrants ask for time and location data for all users who have entered a geographical area during a time of interest. The records returned are initially anonymous account numbers, and the police then make followup requests for identifying information of the subset of accounts that they think are of interest to the case.
Sure you can delete your account on reddit. They'll still track you as if you have one just like the facebook buttons or all those creative new tracking shit we regularly read about here.
In the end, you don't have to be an extremist. Just don't post everything and keep in mind that you are being tracked. This is the internet for you today.
It's two order of magnitude bigger than twitter, reddit, pinterest, etc.
The only ones that compares is Google.
But while I have no problem living without a Facebook account, living without Google is way harder. E.g:
- no hangout is the easiest. I hated it.
- dropping calendar was easy. It was not that good anyway. I missed the integration with a lot of 3rd party though.
- I leaved gmail. It tooks years and many problems with accounts came with it. The competitors UI are worse.
- I tried to leave gmap. But competitors don't have street view, shop open shedules or nearly as accurate traveling times. And waze eventually got bough by google. Maps.me is alright for when I don't have internet, but it's nowhere close to gmap for big cities if you have internet.
- I tried, very hard, to quit google search. Bing. DuckDuckGo.Qwant. They are ok. But I do hundreds of queries a day. Ok doesn't cut it. And if you are looking for result in another language than english, forget about it.
- now for the phone. Well, I won't go apple. Mozilla and MS are no longer here. I tried SailOS for a year. I don't recommend it. So android is what's left if you want a smartphone. I tried rooting, but it's dangerous, and takes time. So now I just avoid using a google account on the phone, which is, well, something at least. And make it extra hard to install apps.
That's a lot of trouble for so-so results.
Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?
So to me, no facebook + ublock + no google account is like when I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. It's 80/20, but for privacy instead of sanity.
However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.
Insofar as other steps, I shut down my Twitter account (with a dictionary word username) last year as an experiment to see if I'd care enough to resurrect it before the account was deleted--a 30-day span. I didn't come back to check again for ~40-45 days, and I don't especially miss it. That was enough for me to realize how little value it provided me.
(Never really bothered with Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and the like.)
This year I'm looking into non-Google alternatives for my family's email and common functions (calendaring, etc). It's a slow slog in between a ton of other priorities, but the importance of decentralizing again is growing non-trivially.
Also, I plan to resurrect my blog/personal site for the first time in, spitballing here, about 8 years now. Putting my content back on my terms and reversing the tide in my own way.
But as for why not iOS, it's more a choice of brand. I don't like apple products, they restrict to much for my taste.
It's like the difference between a turd or a piece of rubber in regards to how great they are as a food item; they're BOTH waaaaay beyond the limits of reasonable quality. Period. The difference in between them matters only to them.
> Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?
What is the point of that question? The people who "don't care" don't have good arguments for why they don't care, and by extension for why I shouldn't care either. The fact that they don't care, again, is only interesting to them. We can't organize with those who do care if we constantly put those who don't care (yet) on this pedestal.
> now for the phone
You mentioned smartphones, but not phones. As someone who thinks even laptops are toys I'm really bored of people talking about how hard it is to live without a smartphone. With the stakes as they are, I'm not willing to make such things the condition of our survival. If we can't make the gadgets and gimmicks compatible with freedom and the ability to think critically, I'd rather have no gadgets than no freedom and only zombies attached to feeds to "talk to".
> However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.
A niche where we talk all the time about people who aren't in it, instead of simply making our own individual positions clear and discussing them. In other words, even a lot of the people who supposedly care actually talk less about that, than about how it's all futile, or how someone I couldn't care less about (and who doesn't even speak for themselves) doesn't care.
Maybe let's instead all remember that going down that route, where doomed, that that doom includes the physical and psychological torture and murder of humans, and that the decisions we make in this shrinking window of opportunity could shape the future for time spans we can't even imagine. There is no coming back from some failure modes. Look into the eye of the great minds of humanity, into the eye of history, don't look for the guidance of sleepwalking lunatics. It's about as hard as not putting your hand on a burning stove once you started to ponder the potential outcomes of various routes. Yeah, it's uncomfortable to be a party pooper, but it's a screaming horror to dance at that party.
I don't care as much about these companies having my data - I care more about the value they actually provide to me, which is very little in most cases. FB is garbage; Reddit is a bonafide circlejerk; LinkedIn's value is marginal, outside of connecting and following-up with potential new colleagues/business partners (the content on LinkedIn could be some of the worst on the Internet... talk about clickbait).
In the few days since I deleted just Reddit, my thinking has been clearer (even though it was the weekend, I still worked both days), and I am thus far able to accomplish and focus better.
Although, here I am on HN, writing this comment still...
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I know black and white thinking is very appealing but we don't need to go back to living in a yurt in the wilderness just because facebook is a net drain on society. I've been participating on forums all over the internet for the past 20 years and it's been the catalyst for some of the greatest things in my life.
Seems FB has a bug where you must enter your password in all lower case on the final screen.
Imagine, big company like FB, having still not caught that bug....
https://security.stackexchange.com/a/68014/47800
No caps-lock key on many of those keyboards. And, no warning that the shift key has been single-key or perma-pressed.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels could improve on the margin, but realistically, the problem with social is us. Ask friends and family to go back to sharing their unhinged political views in the form of badly punctuated emails, as God intended. If they continue to share, unfollow.
Social media can be as polarizing or as pleasant as you make it. Foisting blame on Facebook might feel good, but it won't solve the problem.
It's really like anything you can do-- anything. The threshold is defined by the person. The absolutist claim that anything is 100% bad is dangerous and false.
The tools we make and use are defined by us individually. The "mob" is the collection of people in certain echo chambers, and I'm sorry but if those people don't realize they're in an echo chamber, it's not the fault of the tools. We can't be going around limiting everything because the majority don't know how to use it. The majority will always be that way-- though I will note that I think this "mob" majority are better-equipped psychologically with each passing generation.
No. Facebook proudly does specific psychological experiments on its users. Facebook intentionally decides that it will make some users sad or depressed, just to see if it can. And it can. And it is proud of it. Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression.
Facebook is a fucking poison. The problem is not with us. The problem is with large scale propaganda networks and centrally-controlled social networks with misaligned incentives. The problem is Facebook and the core problem is the structure and incentives of corporations in our current not-well-enough-regulated capitalism.
Or did you just made that all up, hmm?
Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, Jeffrey T. Hancock
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jun 2014, 111 (24) 8788-8790; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1320040111
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111
But there is big difference between comparing moods induced by negativity and "Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression."
OP statement is misleading and tabloid worthy. The goal was not to cause depression. It lasted one week and they didn't try make someone depressed or kill him.
I've largely stopped using Facebook, but my experience had nothing in common with the author's.
The content was fine, I followed things and people I actually liked and made adjustments when that changed. I felt no addiction loop, my usage time was limited, and it was honestly quite a nice site. Sentiments like "In the absence of human interaction we cling to whatever dark simulacrum is available" are absolutely alien to me; Facebook was a source of real social interaction, and almost entirely additive with other sources of real interaction.
I stopped because advertisements, autoplay videos, and timeline changes slowly made Facebook unusable as a site. Content I liked was consistently buried in favor of content I didn't like, in ways I couldn't fix with settings or following preferences. The discussions of Facebook usage time rising baffle me; my experience was of a good, usable site that destroyed its usability by trying to monetize.
This is certainly a problem, but I think more important than this is the illusion of having control over what you see on social media.
You may think you can curate your social media feeds by unfollowing people who share things you don't want to see, but as long as a social media service's feed/timeline (and primary revenue stream) is still based on an easily gamed algorithm and paid ads, you're mistaken.
Social media sites will cater access to their API's to groups who are willing to pay for it. So, even if you can unfollow your uncle who shares "unhinged political views", you can't hide cleverly disguised, hyper targeted, ads, advertising both products and ideas.
Why not? My grandparents love looking through old photo albums. I don't see why I couldn't do the same with Facebook.
> It’s an advertiser’s dream and it is wildly expensive in terms of privacy lost and cash spent to steal that privacy.
A few problems with this. Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing it?
The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most people believe the benefits are worth it and op hasn't proved we don't get benefits from Facebook.
Lastly.. the article assumes allowing advertisers to use your data is inherently evil. I'm not arguing either way, but it's never explained. Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call advertisers "the devil" without an explanation. Why is op harmed by data collection (outside of nonsensical hypthotheticals, like getting his house robbed when he posts that he's on vacation?)
Because it very likely won't be there anymore. Your grandparents had full control over their photo albums. You have nothing.
> Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing it? The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most people believe the benefits are worth it
Most people don't grasp the _extend_ of what they give to the advertisers. Not even in the slightest way. They still think that as long as they don't fill out a questionnaire, "they" won't know. Or what I give to Facebook, stays with Facebook and so on.
> Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call advertisers "the devil" without an explanation.
Their sneaky methods, lack of information and the whole attention stealing industry it is, is bad. Just the basic normal ad on the street is already exploiting us. The digital versions are even able to infect our tools. It's an uncontrolled mess. An anarchy of people who don't give a damn because they can. We'll never know the full extend of misuse happening with our data on daily bases. I don't see a reason to trust them. Do you?
I don't understand your view though - you believe billboards are an exploiting everyone who sees them? That would mean all advertising should be stopped. I think many people, you included, misunderstand the economic benefit of advertising. It enables commerce that wouldn't take place if it was gone. If a Spotify competitor started out today with zero advertising it would never make it - how would you hear about it? How would anyone learn about it?
I work in digital advetising and see no reason to distrust the industry. Nobody is abusing data about you.. you are tossed into groups that contains millions of people similar to you. No advertisers cares who you are, about any of your data, any of your Facebook posts. They care that you just bought a razor and might want to try their new shaving cream.
I'm not sure what you mean by sneaky methods, but it's as simple as you visited a website or talked online about shaving, so now they know you're interested in shaving. Basic text analysis is most of it.
Edit - very true that most people don't understand it. But then again most people don't understand anything they use daily (the internet, any app, etc).
You've forgotten that those pictures belong to Facebook. So whoever buys them out from the remains of Facebook will do whatever they want with it. They may share it with you. They may not. Maybe they'll use it to train some AI and then discard it altogether. Maybe they'll put your head onto some porn star. Maybe China will buy it. Can you imagine, a Chinese man coming to your grandparents house and taking away their photo album? What would your grandpa do?
> I don't understand your view though
It's not a view. It's a fact. Did you even learn your job somewhere? Any scientific background to this "work in digital advertisement"? Ads steal your attention. You can't do anything about it and most of the time you don't even have any kind of profit from it. To say it in the new cultures terms: it's mind rape.
> I think many people, you included, misunderstand the economic benefit of advertising.
Please spare me that marketing talk. I do accept that there are ads on the internet. Sure. Some people even watch and click them. But just like the part you ignored in my previous comment you seem to intentionally forget about _extend_ here too. There is a huge difference between a cookie and a canvas fingerprint. There is a difference between a picture advertising a product and an autoplay video or malware infected script. There is an difference between an IP in your HPs log and a live track of a user.
The internet would have not gone bankrupt without the higher extend of advertisement intrusion. It's a lie to make advertising companies make even more money because that's what you do on the market. Their new product is data, profiles build upon that data (the more data about a single user, the more worth it is) and the continuous lie about the customer who WANTS their tips on where to spend money. I don't want those tips. I don't know anyone who wants them just like I don't know anyone who didn't want an adblocker installed. Think about it. The trust is gone. Forever.
> I work in digital advetising and see no reason to distrust the industry.
Of course you do...it's soothing for me though because such an amount of ignorance would be frightening.
> I'm not sure what you mean by sneaky methods,
Then you are a pretty shitty digital advertiser. You need to get some updates fast.
Edit@Edit:
> Edit - very true that most people don't understand it. But then again most people don't understand anything they use daily (the internet, any app, etc).
So you assume that this gives you a carte blance? I mean, this attitude by people from the ad industry is just another reason nobody trusts you.
Imagine, that I'd be tricking your grandparents into letting me into their apartment by brabbleing some tech bullshit about their cable. I wouldn't do any kind of work. They'd have no benefit at all but I'd have stolen their photo album.
With your world view, I had the justification to do it because they didn't understand a single word I told them to get in their house.
Would you like that?
I can remember when one of the killer advantages of online retail vs B&M was that in the former you didn't need to spend any dollars on TV and magazine and billboard advertising - word of mouth was sufficient. So I think that they would be fine.
Right, it's like if you think about searching for some controversial thing and get as far as typing it into the search bar then think I don't want this in my permanent record and close the tab. Too late, every keystroke was already sent as you were typing! Surprise! Or an angry message that you think better of sending, the recipient might not have it, but it's still recorded and may or may not be used against you in some way in the future.
Also, if you're worried about the long-term psychological impact of social media, with all its dark patterns designed to get you to spend more and more time distracted by their sites and apps, then all you really have to do there is switch the distractions off. Deleting one's Facebook account isn't the only way to do that, but it's certainly an effective option.
This resonnates with what I've been observing. Instead of birthday card, a call or even a text message, we now simply write a note on someone's wall, between two out-of-context thoughts. It's the path of least resistance. Like fast food, it takes a bit of effort to fight, until the brain hijack starts to fade and new purposeful habits are formed (or reinstated).
Working on it but not there yet... :(
It's probably going to raise a lot of discussions about what constitutes normal human behavior. We might finally stop pretending they are perfect humans.
After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.
It might also be a bad thing because society would expect oversharing as the norm and would consider anyone who doesn't put their private lives on display, to be hiding something.
Either way social media is here to stay. But it will change, this is version 1.
I would be willing to pay a modest sum of money to a startup willing to provide bland and inoffensive social media "filler" content. This is already the norm for celebrities, but at some point it can be automated for the masses. Give me a giant list of checkboxes to select the message I'd like to provide to corporate data miners, then I never have to be bothered with facebook again...
But the concept of social norms will not go away.
There will always be some norms that society deems taboo to violate.
Therefore, there will always be reputational risks to someone by having a long record of social behavior in the public domain.
Heck, what you say now can put you in trouble today. There are a number of opinions that I hold which I consider to be fairly balanced and mild, but am afraid to discuss online, because I think they could put me at risk. If you upset the online twitter mob, they're not going to fight you with coherent arguments and thoughtful discourse. They're going to insult you, threaten you, publicly shame you, and maybe get you fired from your job.
"Justice" is literally the last word in America that I thought would be used in some RWA-type context.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin
If you are against the patriot act, are you against patriotism? If you are against no child left behind, would you prefer to leave children behind?
I suggest you reconsider what end you define as Orwellian.
How do you feel about despotic regimes that prefix themselves "Democratic"? People have been hiding behind benign-sounding words for a very long time.
I'm queer. I'm in favor of universal access to abortion and socialised healthcare, but there are a few things I could say that would quickly get me labelled as right-wing and all sorts of bad things. It used to be that being liberal, being left stood for freedom of speech and the open discussion of ideas.
You say that the word 'justice' is being used in a Right-Wing Authoritarian (I assume that is what you mean by RWA) context. Here is a definition of RWA from Wikipedia (original source from "The Kinds of Conservatism" by Karen Stenner, Psychology Press 2009): "Right-wing authoritarians are people who have a high degree of willingness to submit to authorities they perceive as established and legitimate, who adhere to societal conventions and norms and who are hostile and punitive in their attitudes towards people who do not adhere to them. They value uniformity and are in favour of using group authority, including coercion, to achieve it."
Merriam-Webster's first definition for 'justice' is "the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments." Now, that's a bit of a circular definition given that it contains the word 'just' in it, but the 'especially' clause is substantial.
I think that the common objection that people have to 'social justice' types is that they strongly reject those whose ideas do not fall in line with orthodoxy, and are quick to brand anyone who disagrees with them with labels like 'misogynistic', 'Nazi', 'alt-right', etc. The phenomenon of 'outrage mobs' (I find the term 'lynch mob' to be distasteful and inaccurate here) is a common example of this trait. Outspoken supporters of 'social justice' engage passionately in public shaming, in 'no-platforming' (i.e., suppression of free speech), and demand that targets lose their jobs. They seek to punish dissenters outside of the formalized system of justice (the courts; imperfect as their implementation of justice may actually be, they are certainly fairer than the mob rule and/or sovereign edict that they have replaced), and minimize the presumption of innocence before guilt is proven, preferring instead to encourage believing in victims unquestioningly. These tactics seem to be in direct contradiction to our definition of justice: 'the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims,' and sound more like the use of coercion to achieve uniformity.
I think that most people agree that in our society people should have equal access to opportunities, that unfair discrimination is bad, that it is good to help the disenfranchised, and that pervasive systemic injustices exist which should be rectified (reasonable people disagree on the degree to which the government is the entity responsible for implementing remedies, and how it should do so - but that is a separate discussion). Thus, it's difficult to argue against something which on its face bears the name of the concept of justice. Just like it's difficult to argue against something like 'The Patriot Act' which bears the unassailable concept of patriotism in its name, even though in reality it is unpatriotic. Those who oppose 'social justice' and 'political correctness' I think more specifically oppose the policing of discourse and the silencing of dissenters.
Thus, I implore you to reexamine your usage of the term Orwellian and consider that what is Orwellian is not the 'demonization of the words social justice,' but rather the usage of that very term by a group of people whose tactics are decidedly the opposite of justice in practice.
Side note: after diving into a lot of research topics (as a semi educated newb), I realized that there's a focal point of science, above it you're ignorant, on it you know the mainstream accepted battle tested science of the day, after that you enter another domain of blur where a lot of things are "maybes" including possible refutation of accepted ideas (maybe not in physics, but medical domains for instance).
I mean, it can show that, or it can show that they have gotten better at image cultivation. And the latter is much easier to believe about a person running for office. (I'm not saying that is good.)
People should realise that we mature when we reach 70 and change our opinions :)
This is good thing. Once everyone will be embarased by his history,
> We probably will stop caring about online privacy.
This would be bad, I would rather this to happen: "We probably will stop pretending of being perfect and become more honest."
1. “We” never did care about online privacy to begin with, that's what made social media and all the other surveillance monetizers what they are.
2. Caring about online privacy is about much more than “posting stupid things”.
1) Social privacy from your peers and the public.
2) Technological privacy from customer profiling, data brokers, etc.
The OP who was channeling Mark Zuckerberg circa 2010 was talking about the first kind of privacy, "surveillance monetizers" are the second. I think people are much more comfortable with violations of their "technological privacy" by "surveillance monetizers" because they're so secretive and behind the scenes. It's harder to understand the violations, let alone be bothered by them.
The thing that concerns me about social media is the way it can be used as a training data set to train propaganda bots. Now that is scary.
I feel as if the political class is just upset that they are not protected by the usual gatekeepers and that this is a non-issue.
What I'm concerned about is the combination of AI and big data to generate autonomous personalized intelligent agents that can actually converse with you, or at least can tailor propaganda to your specific cognitive profile with an incredible degree of insight and accuracy. Think of it as the ability to dispatch an army of billions of con artists with each tasked to work on an individual target person and with the benefit of "fleet-wide learning." I've heard this called "AI-assisted demagoguery."
Keep in mind that it doesn't need to work on everyone. A system like that with a ~10% success rate at changing peoples' minds could allow its wielders to quite literally conquer any democratic nation. That would be enough to sway nearly every election. Non-democratic nations wouldn't be immune either as such technologies could be used to foment revolutions, though I suspect that the smarter autocrats would invest as much as it took to make sure they were the wielders and not others. You can see this in China right now where its autocrats are deploying a system very much like this against their population.
5-10% success rates could just be the beginning. As we say in information security: "attacks only get better." Iterative development and the ensuing arms race could eventually yield systems that exploit tremendous insight about the structure and function of the human mind down to the neurological level. Unfortunately unlike software we cannot patch our brains to fix vulnerabilities. Eventually it may not be possible to engage in honest public discourse at all, since any person in the public square would have a high chance of not being a person at all but an AI-powered con artist attempting to sell you something or change your mind.
I"ve also thought that this -- not Terminators shooting people with lasers -- is what an AI takeover would look like. The ultimate intelligences behind it might be AIs but are more likely to be super-wealthy and politically powerful humans wielding AI as a tool to cognitively enslave the rest of humanity to themselves.
Also what's this "the political class" stuff? If you're talking about Trump vs. Clinton, both of them are incredibly wealthy and highly connected insiders. Trump has somehow managed to pose as an outsider but 10 minutes of reading about his background and connections will disabuse you of that. He's as much an insider as Clinton, albeit in a different clique of the global superclass. The people who funded Cambridge Analytica were also members of the global superclass. What we're seeing here is not insiders assaulting the elite but different camps of elites waging propaganda wars against each other. It's the haves vs. the haves, not the haves vs. the have-nots.
Maybe the future brings us more personalized and targeted propaganda, but the number of sources will likely be more varied. The propaganda distribution cost is lower. Moreover, I think much of humanity will adapt and counter propaganda as part of an ongoing cat-and-mouse game in the persuasion and disinformation business.
I only referred to the political class because I think this topic is only getting attention currently because of political games being played. However, I believe the current beneficiaries of the last propaganda hydrogen bomb (the current mainstream media) dislike the new market entrants and don't want to compete -- that is why they are vilifying the owners/controllers/developers of the AIs that you are also concerned about.
As best as I can determine, thanks to the help of the Pine Bluff public library, it had it's origin on September 27, 1980, shortly after Bill Clinton gave a speech before the state Democratic convention in which he depicted himself as in the tradition of progressive governors in this state, an assertion that offended us at the Pine Bluff Commercial because we thought of him as more of a trimmer who had broken this succession of reform governors, from Winthrop Rockefeller, to Dale Bumpers, to David Prior. And so we used the sobriquet, Slick Willy on that occasion and it caught on.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice/bill/g...
I'm sure others had their own reasons for using it.
Similar to criminal activity, a very small number of very active social media people will simply be disqualified from office, and it won't really matter to most people.
"Either way social media is here to stay." Like CB radio, or telegrams, or pro sports, or newspapers, or TV, or vinyl records, or magazines, etc. Note that none of those have entirely disappeared, but have gone from utterly culturally dominant and universal, to "is that still around?".
In 30 years, the candidates for president will either be bizarre freaks like Trump, or the kind of people who locked down their social media profiles early or were good at covering their tracks.
> After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.
People have been saying stuff like this for ages, I've seen no evidence things will play out that way. In fact, you're literally parroting points Mark Zuckerberg made circa 2010 [1], when he was trying to push more public content to increase "engagement" with Facebook.
However, many, many people are reacting to social media by caring about their privacy more. Facebook's original selling point was that was restricted to your peer group. Snapchat's selling point was self-destructing messages. People are locking down the privacy settings on their social media accounts private or deleting them entirely.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6966628/Face...
Which is to say, when you make being a member of a political group part of your identity, you are inclined to defend it as you would yourself: with irrational non-objective gusto.
I'm pretty sure that any "regular" candidates for political office in the future will still be judged harshly by what they have done in the past. I think that what Trump stood for got him a pass.
You're assuming the United States exists in 30 years, and that it still elects its leader by popular vote :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
We do currently, albeit indirectly. I could see a future where we no longer hold elections and have the electoral college pick the president without any pretense of voting.
Considering that the leader of the free world is currently using twitter the same way as some of my friends do it, I really doubt that the social media will be such a significant way to check politicians.
More or less it will happen the opposite ( already happening ), where the politicians will judge the "average" citizen, by analysing tons of social media posts and reactions to them.
nit: I think you are referring to Trump, the president of the USA. But I doubt he is the "leader of the free world", whatever that means.
That is less true today but the term remains.
The sole thing presently keeping Russia from invading Eastern Europe and taking more territory, is the US military presence in Europe. The sole thing keeping North Korea from invading South Korea and attempting to annex it, is the US. The sole thing (maybe temporarily) keeping China from officially annexing Taiwan, is the US military presence in Asia.
Not Germany, not France, not the UK, not Australia, not Canada, not New Zealand, not Japan, not the UN.
Here are your realistic alternative choices: China, expansionist dictatorship with minimum human rights; Russia, expansionist dictatorship with minimum human rights. And then for 'free world' choices: Germany, UK, France, Japan - which of those has any kind of global power today, economically or militarily? None. Germany doesn't even have its own currency, and their military capabilities can barely push beyond their own borders, not to mention they have no nuclear umbrella capability to bring the rest of the free world under.
The US is all the world has on that side of the board in terms of an actual superpower. It's going to remain that way for the forseeable future. Like it or not. I fully understand why people don't like Trump and I understand why they'd wish for a different President to be in there. Nixon mostly sucked too (despite a few significant domestic & foreign policy accomplishments). The US will, from time to time, elect bad and or mediocre leaders. And then Trump's term will be over.
I don't now about Taiwan, but I doubt it as the other points are utter nonesense. China is the only reason why NK still exists. And China 'protects' NK because the US wants it.
And I have no idea where you got the russian thing from. That makes simply no sense. It was true about ... 40 years ago? and thats stretching it. The economic sanctions from the EU had a way bigger impact on their last 'invasion'
> Not Germany, not France, not the UK, not Australia, not Canada, not New Zealand, not Japan, not the UN.
I agree on that front. None of them deserve that title. Nor does the US though. The position of 'leader of the free world' is - in my opinion - vacant at the moment.
The sanctions didn't hit until after that happened.
Japan, Taiwan, and SK the same. Just look at the numbers.
Here's military expenditures for 2017 if you'd like facts:
1 United States 611.2 billion
2 China 215.7
3 Russia 69.2
4 Saudi Arabia 63.7
5 India 55.9
6 France 55.7
7 United Kingdom 48.3
8 Japan 46.1
9 Germany 41.1
10 South Korea 36.8
Nations operate in terms of centuries not 4 years.
One might be able to make a case for Angela Merkel or (metonymically) Brussels, Belgium, in it's role as headquarters for NATO and host of the EU parliament, but I'm inclined to believe the title is still awaiting someone worthy of it.
In a way you can think of this as a variant of the site guideline which asks:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
It's not what we originally had in mind when we added it, but "strongest plausible" can be taken to include "least flame-prone".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No matter the amount of stupid or disrespectful stuff someone says on (social) media, many voters actually don't seem to care that much about it.
http://www.psypost.org/2018/03/study-trump-voters-desire-pow...
Online privacy is not about posting rude stuff on Twitter, come on
At least it's public, people will eventually accept no body is perfect, let alone when they were teenagers.
I concern more about Google. They monitor everything users did, they memorize everything users did even you delete your account, they use data for everything that may not benefit users.
But I doubt it, because we have an oversupply of friends / job candidates / political aspirants, all vying for a piece of us.
Trump might seem like an outlier, but he's more like Reagan: an actor. He's a puppet on stage and the corporations actually running the show know they can play him. He's there to distract America from all the interest groups that really run things and they selected him because he's so out there.
Make no mistake, the future leaders will either be groomed from an early age to be very careful with their public image or the puppet masters will latch onto actors who will be bombastic to keep America distracted.
The rules are different for the rich. Their PR departments build worlds around them that use social networking. If there's any doubt, remember Obama joked about predator droning people interested in his daughter and people laughed.
Wasn't Obama a "blustering populist without a shred of actual policy experience", either? And, no business experience.
Also, Trump's message (however controversial) was more concrete than "hope and change".
Worked across the aisle? Have you ever read how his major legislation was passed? Sure the Republicans were basically obstructionists, but I've never heard him to be known as "working across the aisle."
- IL Senator 1997–2004
- US Senator 2005-2008
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
Also, Republicans in the 2008 election cast him as only having "hope and change," but his campaign website had detailed policy proposals, with like, tables and charts and stuff.
I think it is a stretch to say Obama didnt have a shred of policy experience[1]. Without trying to delve too much into politics here, but I would like to know how Trump's business experience is helping him. I haven't heard about too many terribly good decisions he has made in office regarding the economy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama#Legislative_caree...
I think this backs up djsumdog's point that Trump's purpose, or the one for which he's being used, is misdirection.
I think any other Democrat besides Hillary would have won easily; but a lot of Dems stayed home because they felt a shitty Trump presidency was better than setting a precedent for dynastic politics. I voted for her, but grudgingly for that reason — she’s totally qualified, she has the experience, but there are other people who are qualified and had the experience too; Hillary beat them in the primaries because lots of people owed her favors due to her influence with her husband. She ingratiated herself to the party elites (unelected “superdelegates” who cast a huge percentage of the votes that determine the candidate to represent the party) and won that way.
Hillary ran a tone-deaf campaign, but I think her loss really highlighted how the Democrats lost because they were basically telling people in rural areas that their problems weren’t really problems, and if they were smarter they could figure that out. The Dems need to realize that wealth inequality has disproportionately hit these rural areas, and all the issues we see with Trumpism (Nazis, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment) are essentially borne out of frustration that individuals feel they have less control over their lives than they used to.
One of the reasons that the Russia thing is such a big deal is that nobody, including Trump, expected Trump to win. Laser targeted ads deployed in a few swing states turned the election much more effectively than anticipated, and the impact of Trump's investments there were amplified by the other social media fodder.
There was also alot of specific targeting of disaffected union guys that moderated the GOTV efforts that are usually fruitful for democratic candidates.
End of the day Hillary was a machine candidate, except the machine broke down.
I think the bigger point is exactly what you said though, the machine is broken. The candidates are going "direct to voter" and bypassing the "intermediaries" of the party.
From what I see coming out more and more evidence is that this was the most sophisticly hacked election in the modern times. The genius behind electing Trump seems to be his success with social media.
Just few days ago Facebook admit their info was not properly used. Basically voters were swayed to vioe Trump because they were unaware the been targeted based on their music taste and all other types of likes they feed Facebook with over the years. Brillian probably not illegal but totally unmorral. Hence stock is negative 5 today (for a stock this size that significiant move)
I say probably not illegal because what comes out is that Russia paid in most for Facebook pro-Trump advertising. And thats illegal to the tune of $20 mil. Will see if anything comes out of it but obviously dont hold your breath if you think current administration will investigate itself if it won illegally.
The genius behind social hack of our election goes deeper than just purchasing large stock of flashy ads and using trillion data points to target with surgeons knife precision.
Take the recent story done by CNN of some older lady that voted Tump and ran a rally for him with other “trump voters” (im on mobile i cant add links).
What turned out is the group she belonged to was started by russians and feed by russians. Basically what it was she was meeting other americans that have been duped by the same group, believing to her core the group is started and run by caring and loving patriotic americans. Even pressed by CNN with evidence said group was started by Russian advertising company, she refused to believe! This is a classic form of foreign romance scam taken to the new levels!
In romance scam, someone from third world country starts conversation with vulnerable women on Facebook telling her how much in love he is... Until he needs $1k to get out of hospital he just got in. Or bail his son from immigration jail, etc. such women after losing all her savings and 401 and pensions, when faced with truth that they been just scammed, rarely can believe in facts, and simply believe the offshore love of her life was stuck in hospital or had some other problems because she didnt send him the money! Its trully evil-brillian how this century old scam was used to shway recent election, at least when it comes to Facebook.
oxymoron
It was originally titled "Bush Clinton Dynasty" then the "Bush Clinton Era" and now it's been deleted entirely.
Really. The fact that the comments in this thread hardly talk about the actual issue is concerning..
In normal life, people don't take turns loudly stating their political opinions to a room of people and then looking to see how many people agree with them. They also don't have product placements or subtle advertising injected into their normal conversations. They also don't obsessively and continuously call up other people to see if they have any interesting new content to share.
Social Media is not just a tool that we use to communicate with each other along the lines of a phone or messaging service. It is a platform that is designed to be addictive and to carefully meter out hits of dopamine to keep people coming back. The current popular social media platforms aren't popular because they provide a nice service that people enjoy, they're popular because they exploit weaknesses in human behavior and cause people to use them obsessively and unhealthily. The customers that are funding these platforms and driving the design are not the people that use them, they are advertisers that want their ads to be as targeted, subtle, and as widely viewed as possible.
I agree that social media is not going away, but unless there is a fundamental shift in the way it's designed it may be "here to stay" in the way that gambling is "here to stay". Okay in moderation, but dangerous and fundamentally designed to take something from you.
Online privacy isn't just about hiding the stupid stuff you post online. Do you wear a name tag on your shirt with PII at all times when you go out in public or interact with others in a public setting? Why not?
I'd love for everyone who says "I don't care about online privacy" to start wearing badges in public with a unique identifier and all the information available about them on the internet for others to see.
When the labour party objected publicly, she accused them of being "in favour of terrorism" (again on Facebook I believe), which was very unfortunate seeing that their youth division were the target of the 2011 terror attack on Utøya.
So right now other parties in government are questioning her ability to serve as Minister of Justice and Public Security and she will likely have to leave her post this week.
I could not find any sources in English, but it's the headline of any .no news sites at the moment: https://www.nrk.no/norge/krf-har-holdt-skjebnemote-om-mistil...
I have actually strengthened my friendships and moved quickly up in my career as a result of deleting most social media.
Social media is like the dessert of the internet. Use it sparingly.
My concern is that if I shut down my account completely, someone else--possibly Facebook itself--could credibly impersonate me on the platform and thus use the idea of me as a means to target my friends and acquaintances that use it more frequently.
I think the facebook(.com) product has some serious soul-searching to do and if they continue to ignore their monumental problem -- it will not end well for them, nor their stockholders.
My understanding, though, is that others don't have this same experience with real life social interaction, so might not as easily notice how much FB amplifies it.
I've stalked LinkedIn for years looking for a way to undercut them with a superior competing product. I've never really found what I consider to be a very high value angle of attack that looked like it could cause a big enough wound to bring down the beast.
I update my profile there occasionally, but only to not have out-of-date info being spread. It occasionally produces a low-quality contact or recruiter spam. That's about it. My peers don't keep theirs up to date, my employers don't use it as a major hiring source, I don't trust endorsements there as meaningful or predictive. The interface is enormously frustrating, and it's not even a particularly good job board.
Is there just a parallel ecosystem of people who engage with LinkedIn so deeply and consistently that it forms a real network? Is software just a low-LinkedIn-use field? What on earth are people doing on that site?
Why anyone else uses it I have no idea.
From my observation, LinkedIn has had three relatively distinct eras for the product.
In the early days it was very simple work & business networking, as you'd expect it to be. A profile + connection between people.
Then it tried to evolve into a more general purpose tool, including publishing content, some communication, etc.
Then having fully captured its market, and with limited upside growth potential on users, it went full spam abuse engine. They kept ratcheting up the user monetization focus regardless of the damage to the product quality, and it has never turned back from that path.
I think LinkedIn is a social hole, where people deposit an account and information out of perceived necessity, and then rarely engage the product again until they change or update their job situation. There appears to be a shield of social-work pressure that keeps it alive and updating. People use it, so people use it. The value proposition certainly appears to be mediocre over time. I've known very, very few people that have gotten much value from it, yet almost everyone I know (that is non-retired) keeps and maintains a profile at a minimum level.
I suspect now that social media has reached a point in the last ~5 years of all-connected status (just speaking of the US here), it's going to become increasingly socially acceptable to quit platforms that were previously regarded as necessary. More and more people will experiment with rejecting the pressure that has been maintaining these networks artificially. I've seen that happen increasingly on Facebook, and LinkedIn often seems to be a graveyard these days.
I don't see where LinkedIn can go from here, in terms of increasing its value to people. They're very clearly not going to return the product to a less annoying, basic use case that sparked the user build-out in the first place. They may find a few more clever ways to monetize their hostages though.
This is a fantastic summary, and something I'm going to think about with non-LinkedIn contexts as well. At this point, I update LinkedIn so it won't be out of date, and keep it alive so I'm not confused with other people. (And because deleting the thing looks like more of a pain than having it...)
It's an entirely defensive posture, and I only go to LinkedIn to pour information in, rather than to take anything valuable out.
Actually, it makes me think of those stupid "communication for recipient only" email disclaimers. They probably don't carry any legal weight, but once they got common some companies worried that if they didn't use them it could be brought up in court as evidence that the communication was shareable - so now everyone adds 5-10 lines to their emails just to get back to where they were before the meme ever started.
GitHub is the only "social" platform I still have involvement with, and that's because it's actually useful. ;)
Serious question: does this actually work? I'm considering a "content strategy" to build brand trust, and one option is to publish on LinkedIn. I'm pretty new to using the ecosystem for anything meaningful though. I'm in the middle of my "free trial" of the +1 level (Pro? I forgot- whatever they try to get you to sign up for...).
But if published content actually gets read, or if at least people search there when trying to learn more about somebody, then I'll consider it.
I guess everything has a price.
That being said, I'll never go back to using Facebook. It changed my behavior patterns too much and I was just not happy.
Nevertheless, I do think some people are perfectly capable of using both social media and more traditional forms of communication. I don't think I'll ever attempt to achieve that balance given the other ills of social media that I've found myself susceptible to, but to each their own.
[1]: https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-messenger-app-logs-way-more-da...
(I'm sure they're still analyzing the messages I send and how I interact with the app, of course.)
Do you know if it's the same for WhatsApp?
When you think about it, it's kind of alarming that FB, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram are all owned by the same company. I can't even imagine the amount of data they have about us.
My enjoyment with Facebook ceased the moment Edward Snowden became a household name. I realized then how naked my information was in a world of bad actors. I only use Facebook as a simple contacts list these days.
But it’s harder to wean myself off HN/Reddit, as I get more value of useful information from the former and entertainment from the latter, than I have ever received from Facebook, even though both sites can lend themselves to mindless consumption and propaganda/manipulation, like FB.
Is there a “right” way for social media to be? Or are we resigned to a muddy middle ground forever?
The defaults are cesspools. Just plan on nasty things being said back and forth to each other. In reality, the defaults are worse than 4chan, which is saying something.
However, the moment you start getting into tech subs and narrow hobby subs, the SN ratio cleans right up. Yeah, there might be a single spam, or some rude person, but they are the exception.
Reddit's like Usenet. The more people in a general group, the worse behaved they are. Go look up "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory" -- so true..
I too have been slowly weaning myself off Facebook. Step 1 for those who want to but can't bring themselves to is to just be logged in on your phone or tablet. Has done wonders for me.
When there is a local event or situation, Twitter is pretty valuable. For example, when there is a Caltrain strike, it's almost always more efficient getting details on Twitter.
Can anyone suggest alternatives for such use cases?
That seems like a perfectly fine use of Twitter. Not sure why you'd need an alternative?
You don't have to maintain a list of people to follow and watch your feed to get utility out of it.
I mostly interact with Twitter on a case-by-case basis. Either via events, looking at a specific users profile, or coming across tweets via the media or on Reddit.
I'd say for most people, there's really not much true value that comes from news (compared to books). Sure, it makes us feel more informed and provides topics of conversation for friends and strangers but really, it produces so little nearly all of the time.
Unless your job or hobby is closely linked with news or activism, so much of it is simply consumed as entertainment to idle time away.
However, if your usage of it is so infrequent and only for finding out about transport disruptions; maybe it's not such a problem that needs an alternative? Or perhaps not knowing wouldn't really inconvenience you that severely anyway - that's entirely up to you.
Sure, maybe I'm better off without either, but I think if you exercise some diligence you can craft a useful experience on most social platforms.
Twitter is all about your filter. I have mine curated to an amazing list of intelligent thoughtful, creative people who I enjoy seeing post every day, completely devoid of politics. As soon as you leave that bubble though, it's an absolute nightmare.
Its function as a personal RSS feed can still be pretty valuable, and I see no reason why you can't be judicious with your follows and entirely avoid the toxic majority.
I have a Twitter account that's barely more than domain squatting from the early days of the service; at this point I follow probably five people and have logged in a dozen times in almost a decade. But when I do, my feed is dense with fascinating stuff. If I were to spend a little time curating, I could probably get to a lot more volume and still keep the high quality of the feed.
I've tried dipping my toe into following this F1 driver or that tech star, but it seems like the content is 100% tangents and 0% relevant to anything I might care about. I just can't get past that hump. And again, that's following very few people.
Again, quality over quantity. I don't follow anyone with more than a few thousand followers because then it becomes a weird hierarchical, pub-sub, "celebrity" kind of relationship, rather than just communication between peers. Follow the guy with 300 stars on GitHub making weird new stuff, not whatever "online personality" is pushing their blog and building a huge follower base.
It can sometimes be more toxic, but I've heard it can also be really great and lead to more real-life interactions compared to Facebook if you can build some trust. The breadth and depth of talent is also much larger, because you're not limited to "friends" from your own past. Because you'll encounter more strangers directly, you're free to follow random people a lot more without expecting them to reciprocate it (compare this to the obligation of accepting friend requests on Facebook).
There's also a bigger endorphin rush when someone with many more followers acknowledges one of your replies or tweets (through a like, or even retweet) - this just never happens on Facebook, and Facebook Likes from "friends" pale significantly in comparison because everything (including reshares) blurs together. To get better at Twitter (and not end up on the losing side of debates), you really have to strive for it and learn from the quality of other well-liked replies. Usually humor goes a long way and there are often some genuinely funny and original posts on Twitter (again, because of the greater pool of talent to bump into).
As others have said, if you follow the right people your feed improves significantly but there is quite the learning curve and trial & error until you get there (I'm still working on this part). It's remains primarily a procrastination tool for me, so I don't recommend those who aren't already using Twitter a lot to try harder at getting hooked.
Breaking news of all forms happens lot faster on Twitter due to the number of journalists present as well as normal users "on the ground" (the search works really well), however I think we should ask the question of how much news we really need in our daily lives and whether it affects us / changes our lives all that much. It's pointless if we're not prepared to act on it and becomes just another form of procrastination.
After I deactivated Facebook earlier this year, I found myself focusing more on Twitter - so far that's actually been a better experience overall. But based on that, I'm thinking from this week that I should just fire up a computer game every time I feel like idly opening Twitter - it could turn out to be a more productive experiment if I can segment my time better. Replacing one habit with another slightly-better and enjoyable one always works. I need to learn to shut down the information-hungry part of my brain more often so that it can stay focused on stuff that I really do need to know (almost never news).
I can't say I don't get some level of enjoyment from approval of Likes and so on, but it has more to do with the enjoyment of the connections I already have. I don't have the desire to seek out new people or get liked/appreciated by people I don't know. I don't really mean this as a judgement, perhaps I would once I got rolling on it, but from where I sit it's not something I desire/seek out. It sounds like you didn't, either, though -- until it happened naturally as you moved away from Facebook.
reason news?
> I think we can make better tools than this one and I believe Facebook - and other social media - were originally quite useful and have now devolved due to market pressure.
That also applies to media and you as well.
> except for Twitter and
Why? Why did you keep twitter?
> and am ready to tear it all out of my life step by step.
Good for you. But who cares? What makes you so special that we should waste our time with your nonsense?
> It's a poison.
No offense, but so is techcrunch and the media.
I've never used facebook. But what "market pressures" are causing the sudden media hysteria over facebook? I wonder.
Also, what you are doing isn't journalism. It's advocacy. It's propaganda.
I do agree that the world would be better without facebook. But it also applies to techcrunch and your article. Facebook, social media, traditional media, your article are ultimately just waste of people's time.
I'm guessing he meant "recent news." Perhaps it was auto-incorrected or faulty speech-to-text.
That's the truth. I quit Facebook and most similar sites, and my social life improved quickly. I also get a lot more done without those distractions.
I block all of their companies in my hosts file and avoid their software libraries (React, etc.) whenever possible too. The company is having a terrible effect on the world and should not be supported. It was fundamentally broken from the start. A platform that connects all the world's people already exists -- it's called the WWW.
I know people who are desperately trying to quit, but they can't, because the site has locked their social connections within the platform, and they are addicted.
Even if it does, what’s the likelihood it hasn’t already been sold and a shadow profile of ourselves exists with facebooks marketing partners in a place where we can’t reach the delete button?
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/20/law-student-trig...
This is a really dangerous, reactionary notion. If there's something inherent in our social formations that are translating themselves into our public spaces and we are unhappy with, let's work to change them together. This is a thoughtful piece and I think there are great reasons to delete your posts from long ago because, well, people change! Other commenters here have made good supporting arguments for this.
But we must be very, very careful not to demonize tools where their users need to be taken into consideration: unless there is something specific about facebook, unique among other social networks, that is toxic (this may be the case!) then we need to be wary of these arguments because they are very easy to apply to all social media which, imo, is a copout.
Doesn't sound dangerous at all to me.
I guess the spirit of my claim is that the shape of group conversation will always come to resemble the cultural context of that conversation, regardless of the medium. While the medium can and should be critiqued, calling for total abstention from the medium is effectively self-censorship and I don't think that'll lead to the desired result.
I only had <50 friends after 2015 on my facebook account. So, I would get notifications 1-2 times every week, "X is new to facebook, Since he is new to facebook, You should introduce him to more friends", Problem is,
1. I have no clue who X is! Sometimes I found that X lived in the same city that I lived in, Sometimes there was no visible co-relation. 2. X was automatically added to my friends list without my permission!
On several occassions, There were some people who were added as my friend but I couldn't find them on my friends list. The only way I figured they were my friends was when I received a notification and then visited their profile.
On 5-10 occassions every month, facebook will randomly send friend requests to people I don't even know and then some day I am just browsing and I get a notification that "Y has accepted your friend request" and I just couldn't recall sending friend request to that person.
So, Yeah, They were literally forcing me to be friends with people I don't even know, presumably, because I never clicked on ads and if I have less friends, That just means there is little activity in my circle and there is little information they can collect about me, IDK.
Whenever this happened, I usually took a screenshot, It probably doesn't do a solid job of proving my claim but it's something.
And before someone here starts running down a list of possible things that might have happened, Like someone hacked into my account, apps that had access to my account etc. I just want to say, I was a member of official 2600 magzine group, I posted all of this multiple times there and they did helped me a lot to prevent me from a lot of ways that someone might be accessing my account. I followed everything and it 6 months later it still didn't stop.
Many ages ago, on one of the most popular mail and news systems of the day, it turned out that myself and another person both managed to register the same username, each with a different password, but were assigned to the same account.
After a couple of weeks in which each of us would log in, see the changes the other did, undo them, change our own password, and mail the abuse team (which kept replying "no, we see that you did it yourself on xxxx"), we both realized what had happened, and started talking by emailing ourselves. Eventually, the other guy left the account to me (I had it for 2 years when he managed to register it).
It could just be a bug, rather than malice.
Search for "Facebook adding friends without my approval" on google and you'll a lot of threads where people have had similar experience like me.
Here is one, https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=9079047...
I presume built on top of RSS / Atom / something feeds that are available only on authentication (so I can share with limited sets of people.)
I presume I have to keep running a server to host content. Maybe I can host encrypted content for my friends, too? So, federated. Maybe it even makes it easy for me to bill them, if the costs are prohibitive?
I'm pretty sure I'd want an Android App to talk to it. The Android app would talk to all of the servers that host my friends' contents.
It doesn't let me share with "Friends of Friends" directly. My friends would have to Reshare, I guess. And then I guess I can't interact with them.
Not sure how I want conversations to work. It'd be hard for me to offer a server to my friends, without me having access to their social data.
Maybe everyone needs their own server?
I'm more in favor of the federated approach where a couple people run servers for their community (I run a server for a fandom community I participate in regularly).
People that use my server play by my house rules, if they don't like that they can pick another server or run their own.
There is a project to build a Facebook replacement that federates with ActivityPub[2], which would make it to Facebook what Mastodon[3] is to Twitter. However, I don't want to link it because it's in too early a stage to face HN levels of scrutiny.
There is also Patchwork[4], a peer-to-peer social application built on top of the Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol. It doesn't have all the features you'd want yet, but ticks off the boxes some people care about.
[0]: https://diasporafoundation.org/
[1]: https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project
[2]: https://activitypub.rocks/
[3]: https://joinmastodon.org/
[4]: https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
To answer your question though, honestly any blogging software that support good ol' fashion RSS feeds would be fine. Your group of friends could link to each others feeds. With a little effort, you could probably do this server side using some fashion of RPC call. Each language has it's own way to accomplish this.
Some kind of feed specification like that and a diversity of publishing and aggregation platforms would be healthier than this walled-garden approach.
And, no, I don't want to broadcast info the everyone. A blog won't cut it.
I want to restrict content to some people with authorization.
"Unfortunately, ", said Facebook's spokesman, "we had a bug in our system that authorized our webcrawler to login and crawl every single phpBB or other OAuth site. We will surely delete the data within the next year", he added while winking at the intelligence community representatives in the crowd. -- a few years from now.
The collective group of friends could then host services that use the common authentication framework. Between OpenLDAP, OAuth and SAML2, that should cover most self hosted applications.
(Faceboook still sends me stalker/spam mails)
I honestly haven't noticed much of a difference in my life. I still work all day, come home and watch Netflix or play my Switch.
It's ok to not "know" what's happening. Just do it!
It's funny how people are just now realizing this.
To quote from the clip "Cambridge Analytica went to Facebook and said we’re conducting academic research with this app. Facebook apparently said O.K. and didn’t do a lot of diligence and through that, because they were able to get sort of the direct access from the people who installed the quiz app and then gather all the information from the friends of the people that had installed the app and that includes likes, you know their various posts, the pages that they subscribe to, just a ton of information. They were able to gather really detailed profile information on 50 million Americans."
The quiz was only a ruse to obtain much more valuable information. Sure FB recently ended their relationship with Cambridge Analytica, but they have probably known about this for months. There's a lot of anger at FB these days and deservedly so.
I'm just dreading migrating all of those logins
I don't. One company should not have the power to decide whether I should be recognised as a legitimate individual or not, and they should not act as a gatekeeper between me and my online identity. I don't care how benevolent that one company genuinely is.
If an intermediary is necessary (like an email provider for mere mortals), I should be able to choose a service provider.
I try to suggest people just stop giving facebook their information. Don't share anything, don't like anything, absolutely never install "apps" or click ads. Avoid facebook as a sign on provider to other sites. Use good privacy tools in your browser and never hit fb "like" buttons on another site. Avoid linking your accounts to facebook from other applications (instagram, spotify, ...).
I'd love to see a browser plugin that did all this that I could recommend to friends and relatives. A plugin that simply made a visit to facebook completely useless to facebook.
Humans have been organizing into social groups and gatherings for tens of thousands of years without the aid of technology. Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook?
I apologize if my candor is overly blunt, but your comment is an excuse to continue your addiction. Nothing more.
I stopped using FB so long ago I forget when it was, and I assure you it’s totally possible to have a robust social life without it... just like only a decade or so ago when FB didn’t even exist.
I'd switch to anything reasonably convenient for event planing - but phone and email just aren't replacements for all scenarios.
> Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook?
I never had that feeling. But I would find it inconvenient to plan a few kinds of events. I'd create a group skype chat. Or even throw up a discourse VM. But send a mass email to a large group asking for "so, where do we go on this years trip?" I would not...
I know it's more common with younger people (at my university there's not a single undergrad who doesn't have it on their phone), but I know some actual adults use it too.