One thing that the outage really highlighted for me is how much small and medium size businesses rely on Facebook. That 6 hour outage costs somewhere into the billions of dollars lost for SMBs. If there was ever a time to highlight the need for a stand alone website, the great Facebook outage of 2021 is it.
Own your content, so the next time this happens, you aren't up a creek without a paddle.
It honestly is. Thinking from an angle of restaurants, who use Facebook as their one stop shop for everything: hours, location, menu. All of that can be relatively static with a small monthly fee to update content as the menu changes.
Definitely an opening there for a freelancer, or small shop, to get in and build up some basic templates to reuse too.
I'm not sure it is. "Facebook went down for six hours and it was so rare that it made international news. You should consider paying me $100+/hr to build and maintain a website for you as a backup." Doesn't seem like obvious ROI.
"Facebook-Only" ads? Is there no other "as effective" ad platform or method? Is there some sort of cult mentality around Facebook ads [and/or ads on other platforms]?
People in 2021 just don't think "Gee, I wonder if that place has a website"? My local nobody "mom & pop" drycleaner seamstress has a website, or at least is Internet-searchable.
Google search takes me to business' Facebook pages all the time.
I don't have a Facebook account, but end up there pretty often because lots of small businesses only have a web presence on Facebook. Google finds them just fine. IIRC some even set their Google Maps website link to their Facebook page.
I hate social media generally, but it'd be hard to argue that your average small business, craft seller, et c., shouldn't prioritize a Facebook page over a "real" website.
I agree with owning your content. But I don’t think hosting your own is guaranteed to have better uptime than FB.
There are other reasons better than uptime or lost revenue for having control of your presence. On the other hand, the network effect of FB is hard to deny.
It's not like the planet survived, it's more like people went on with other similar services. It's not like the use disappeared for six hours. This service disappeared but people kept doing the same things elsewhere. The problem is more about people's behaviour and our world and expectations.
Well, they did things elsewhere, but were they the same things? Probably some of them: they read news, they texted friends, they checked their favorite forums — but they didn't read news in Facebook's bubble, or provide data to Facebook about what they read, said, or learned. I'm calling that a win for decentralization.
The thing I was pointing is that it's not about facebook: it's just tools; if those tools are removed, people will do the same with other tools (instead of whatsapp it will be telegram, instead of posts it will be twitter/reddit/...), it is just a matter of time until something replaces a void, because people are needing this nowadays
People want to talk to their friends. They want to keep up with what their friends are up to. Sometimes they want to do that in ways that you, specifically, aren't a fan of, but that's fine - different people are different. But they want a place they can go and see "Oh, Dave had a kid. Oh, Agnes got a promotion. Oh, Cameron went to that new pizza place and it looks really tasty!"
This means that either we design something decentralised that's as easy as Facebook to get onto use, or we're going to just end up replacing Facebook with something with essentially all of the same characteristics as Facebook.
It's that or regulate it. In many many different ways across many different countries. That won't be much fun either!
It's not about when it happens, it's about the fact that humans are tribal, and it is immediately scary to be cut off from your tribe. For an older generation that already feels disconnected from their world and have started to lose their social circles, the immediate disconnect from what they had left is traumatizing, regardless of the platform.
Older generation? I'm not even that old and everyone freaking out at communication "reverting" to still much faster and easier than in 2003 and trying to explain why they were so distraught over a few hours of kickin' it like the 90s (except, again, not at all, because the entire rest of the Internet still existed, and everyone still had a texting-capable cell phone on them at all times) has been very funny.
I'm trying to imagine my grandma, who lived through WWII and polio and Korea and the civil rights movement and Vietnam and the oil crisis and decades of worrying about nuclear war et c. and didn't use a communication device more advanced than a home telephone until some time after 2005, having a meltdown over six. hours. without Facebook and WhatsApp. LOL. This is a woman who wouldn't think it's that weird if a house didn't have tap water.
Give it a few weeks or a month and people would mostly get used to it.
It’s like when revolutions happen and all that you depended on pretty much collapses (Afghanistan today) or losing rights (China and maybe Australia), people soon enough get used to not having things. Initially it’s shocking but people get on with life and make do where necessary.
I wonder how soon, if it has not already happened, that people "report" emergencies through "Insta-Tok-Whats-Book" first and/or instead of dialling 911/999/&c.
> Slowing things down could have beneficial effects: less show off. Less bullying, etc.
People are free to choose how they communicate with each other, and that’s great. Nobody has to use Facebook.
If you’re proposing that we start regulating how other people choose to communicate with each other, that’s a different question entirely and not something even worth talking about in a free society.
I recall reading how there are people in the world who conflate Facebook with The Internet. The only Internet they experience is through Facebook. They have have no idea about what is outside Facebook's garden.
Division of labour is introduced in Book 1, Chapter I. However the division-of-labour argument is itself divided, the code occurring in the final part of Wealth of Nations.
Criticisms come in Book 5, Chapter I:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.
Note too that Smith puts the whole of expanded productivity on division of labour, whilst retrospective assessments strongly credit the role of steam power. Curious as one would be left with the impression that Smith was wholly unfamiliar with the concept, and not in fact the man singularly responsible for securing James Watt a position at the University of Edinburgh, for the purpose of improving the university's own steam engine, a decade before publication of Wealth and continuing past that date.
> When a technology forum conflates a brand and a technology, one can feel confident their society is a clueless joke.
This technology forum would benefit from recognizing how out-of-touch and comically alarmist this statement is. Most of the discussions about Facebook here are starting to sound like some bizarre form of group hysteria.
You sound like you’re alarmed the world might change without your permission.
A brand is a mind virus used by aristocrats to capture worker effort for aristocrats.
Go ahead and wave it off with a vague alarmist reaction yourself. I’ll let my real world experience with billionaires who goto Davos, and have plainly discussed with me their goal of leveraging technology to manage the agency of the masses for their gain, they’ll be dead before the environment is an issue or society decides its a problem because society is full of rubes…
Pretend hundreds who don’t know you exist care about your existence specifically.
Sit in your filter bubble and wag fingers at anything that might try to poke through.
Language changes meaning over time. Anchoring ourselves to past meaning is the opposite of disruptive.
A variation of this comment shows up in every FB related post, and it seems completely absurd to me that anyone holds this view seriously.
The idea that interacting on Facebook is somehow "keeping up with friends" is itself perhaps the greatest victory of Facebook's own marketing. The idea that 'liking' a picture and leaving a public comment is a sincere human interaction is ridiculous. It's social noise used to replace interpersonal connections and is being pitched that this is somehow better.
If FB suddenly disappeared people would likely go back to texting each other images and calling each other more often, in private where they could more openly admit their struggles and non-public views. People would stop pretending that they had more than 30 "friends". Daily likes and emojis would be replaced with actual video calls, less frequent but longer, more intimate conversations.
This isn't speculation as it's how everyone I know who isn't active on facebook communicates. When I call my distant friends and family the interactions are entirely different than the public facing, image maintaining, completely non-intimate communication that happens on any "social" media.
You're not keeping up with what's happening when you interaction on facebook, because what's really happening is struggles and concerns that you don't necessarily want to share in public with everyone you know. Real human connections involve being vulnerable around someone you trust, which is fundamentally in opposition to the foundations of how something like facebook works.
> If FB suddenly disappeared people would likely go back to texting each other images and calling each other more often. In private where they could more openly admit their struggles and non-public views. People would stop pretending that they had more than 30 "friends". Daily likes and emojis would be replaced with actual video calls, less frequent but longer, more intimate conversations.
Not really, you assume this is to keep up with current friends. Not past co-workers who you're friendly with. People you were friends with when you were 20-years younger. People you went to college with but were only friends and not still talking 10-years later. Basically, people whose phone number you don't have and can't find.
Actually, no they haven't they lost contact with people. People started to be able to find each other when Facebook took off. Remove Facebook and people will suddenly not be able to do that.
A variation of this comment shows up in every FB related post, and it seems completely absurd to me anyone holds this view seriously.
Before FB, people shared these details once a year with the annual Christmas card or Thanksgiving call. Now, they can share these details with friends and family in essentially realtime, and communicate in realtime. You can say the same things you would in a card, or a call, without waiting months. Hell, if you really want you can call someone through Facebook.
It's crazy that people on HN are so convinced that there aren't people out there with more than 30 friends. Spend more time out of the office away from your computers, and you'll have way more than 30 friends in short order.
It's crazy that people think that emojis have replaced longer intimate conversations. Most of the people I know that use Facebook for sharing with friends can and do have deeper conversations (and plenty of them) with friends IRL (or on the phone) because the minutiae gets shared on FB or Instagram.
Maybe you can't keep up with people through Facebook, but literally billions of people have been using Facebook for this quite successfully.
Whatsapp is heavily used in third world countries as a way to do business. The impact, if not measure properly, will be overlooking how many of those business suffered during the outage. This could have a severe impact in the economy if Facebook quickly disappear. And this is coming from someone who hates Facebook and their entire social destruction of the world.
Then it's good to have smaller, yet more common outages of Facebook properties, so that people are willing to migrate away from it in the long term while preserving their livelihood.
I've been wondering if all the companies who lost out could sue for compensation. Doctrines like detrimental reliance seem to come into play here. Is anything happening on that front?
One big problem I have with Facebook, is that other than poor mental health which they contribute to--that is documented in their own internal documents (e.g. Instagram)--is that as a for-profit corporation they do not seem to have a value statement and get in bed with companies like Cambridge Analytica which actively spread disinformation and destabilize our society.
It's not even an accountable corporation. FB is owned by Zuckerberg. He has majority control over all the shares.
I'd be completely fine with it if it disappeared tomorrow. I'm not dependent on it for anything except for messaging a few people who seem to refuse to use other systems.
If every single piece of data Facebook has was irreversible to destroyed to the point they cannot recover, there might be a bit of chaos, some businesses would suffer greatly, and some people might be completely lost and isolated without it, and yet with all that, society would be in a better shape almost instantly.
Facebook is a cancer to civil discourse (well and Twitter) and to the idea that the best idea should win, not just the loudest idea.
The problem is that if Facebook were to go away entirely today, people would still want another Facebook. It would be difficult if not impossible to change those billions of people's wants by merely trying to convince them by argument. They've already seen that humanity is capable enough to create Facebook once, they've become used to what Facebook offers them, and they aren't going to accept reverting to a previous stage of technological progress. That will create a market that other players will quickly be pressed to fill, and without regulation there will be nothing preventing one them from becoming another Facebook, by virtue of Facebook being a product that a significant portion of the entire population of Earth uses.
Is it possible to decouple Facebook the technology from Facebook the corporation? In the past, there hasn't been a corporation of this size in existence. Where would the finances come from to operate a service on a scale of billions of users, if they're not going to come from dark patterns?
That’s a good point. Facebook can go away, but Facebook only exists because we want it. Or do we want it because it exists. It probably is a negative feedback loop.
Regulating might help, but we’re not going to regulate don’t get in polarizing stupid internet arguments, so the root cause wouldn’t even be fixed by that. Regulating might even make things worse, because regulations, while often made with good intentions, do not guarantee good outcomes (as Thomas Sowell has repeated often), and then there are a huge amount of regulations that essentially close off competitors from entering into the market.
Once I found out that you could un-follow everyone last week, I did - even without the help of a Chrome extension! Turns out I did not have to see every little thing.
I did this years ago and it’s great. The only thing worth noting is that only the people I still follow ever engage with the rare post I do make. It’s presumably a feature of their algorithm.
I think one important piece that's missing from this conversation is just how essential FB is to many people who don't otherwise have Internet access. In many less fortunate countries, FB has sweetheart deals with telcos to provide access to it's services at lower rates than general internet access, and many people can only afford FB.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 83.8 ms ] threadOwn your content, so the next time this happens, you aren't up a creek without a paddle.
Definitely an opening there for a freelancer, or small shop, to get in and build up some basic templates to reuse too.
People don't Google-search them?
Bad/no SEO or similar?
"Facebook-Only" ads? Is there no other "as effective" ad platform or method? Is there some sort of cult mentality around Facebook ads [and/or ads on other platforms]?
People in 2021 just don't think "Gee, I wonder if that place has a website"? My local nobody "mom & pop" drycleaner seamstress has a website, or at least is Internet-searchable.
Google search takes me to business' Facebook pages all the time.
I don't have a Facebook account, but end up there pretty often because lots of small businesses only have a web presence on Facebook. Google finds them just fine. IIRC some even set their Google Maps website link to their Facebook page.
I hate social media generally, but it'd be hard to argue that your average small business, craft seller, et c., shouldn't prioritize a Facebook page over a "real" website.
There are other reasons better than uptime or lost revenue for having control of your presence. On the other hand, the network effect of FB is hard to deny.
People want to talk to their friends. They want to keep up with what their friends are up to. Sometimes they want to do that in ways that you, specifically, aren't a fan of, but that's fine - different people are different. But they want a place they can go and see "Oh, Dave had a kid. Oh, Agnes got a promotion. Oh, Cameron went to that new pizza place and it looks really tasty!"
This means that either we design something decentralised that's as easy as Facebook to get onto use, or we're going to just end up replacing Facebook with something with essentially all of the same characteristics as Facebook.
It's that or regulate it. In many many different ways across many different countries. That won't be much fun either!
Emergencies should go through other media. Family and friendship updates can happen on a different schedule.
Slowing things down could have beneficial effects: less show off. Less bullying, etc.
I'm trying to imagine my grandma, who lived through WWII and polio and Korea and the civil rights movement and Vietnam and the oil crisis and decades of worrying about nuclear war et c. and didn't use a communication device more advanced than a home telephone until some time after 2005, having a meltdown over six. hours. without Facebook and WhatsApp. LOL. This is a woman who wouldn't think it's that weird if a house didn't have tap water.
Give it a few weeks or a month and people would mostly get used to it.
It’s like when revolutions happen and all that you depended on pretty much collapses (Afghanistan today) or losing rights (China and maybe Australia), people soon enough get used to not having things. Initially it’s shocking but people get on with life and make do where necessary.
I wonder how soon, if it has not already happened, that people "report" emergencies through "Insta-Tok-Whats-Book" first and/or instead of dialling 911/999/&c.
People are free to choose how they communicate with each other, and that’s great. Nobody has to use Facebook.
If you’re proposing that we start regulating how other people choose to communicate with each other, that’s a different question entirely and not something even worth talking about in a free society.
The technology matters. The brand does not.
Depressed dads can share bird pics with dozens of protocols.
When a technology forum conflates a brand and a technology, one can feel confident their society is a clueless joke.
Adam Smith was right to warn about the extreme division of labor creating humans dumber than the lowliest animal.
Book and chapter at least would be much preferred.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2550924
Division of labour is introduced in Book 1, Chapter I. However the division-of-labour argument is itself divided, the code occurring in the final part of Wealth of Nations.
Criticisms come in Book 5, Chapter I:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...
Note too that Smith puts the whole of expanded productivity on division of labour, whilst retrospective assessments strongly credit the role of steam power. Curious as one would be left with the impression that Smith was wholly unfamiliar with the concept, and not in fact the man singularly responsible for securing James Watt a position at the University of Edinburgh, for the purpose of improving the university's own steam engine, a decade before publication of Wealth and continuing past that date.
This technology forum would benefit from recognizing how out-of-touch and comically alarmist this statement is. Most of the discussions about Facebook here are starting to sound like some bizarre form of group hysteria.
A brand is a mind virus used by aristocrats to capture worker effort for aristocrats.
Go ahead and wave it off with a vague alarmist reaction yourself. I’ll let my real world experience with billionaires who goto Davos, and have plainly discussed with me their goal of leveraging technology to manage the agency of the masses for their gain, they’ll be dead before the environment is an issue or society decides its a problem because society is full of rubes…
Pretend hundreds who don’t know you exist care about your existence specifically.
Sit in your filter bubble and wag fingers at anything that might try to poke through.
Language changes meaning over time. Anchoring ourselves to past meaning is the opposite of disruptive.
This speaks to how more people need to know about sites alike to "Is It Down Or Just Me".
But that would take using The Google.
The idea that interacting on Facebook is somehow "keeping up with friends" is itself perhaps the greatest victory of Facebook's own marketing. The idea that 'liking' a picture and leaving a public comment is a sincere human interaction is ridiculous. It's social noise used to replace interpersonal connections and is being pitched that this is somehow better.
If FB suddenly disappeared people would likely go back to texting each other images and calling each other more often, in private where they could more openly admit their struggles and non-public views. People would stop pretending that they had more than 30 "friends". Daily likes and emojis would be replaced with actual video calls, less frequent but longer, more intimate conversations.
This isn't speculation as it's how everyone I know who isn't active on facebook communicates. When I call my distant friends and family the interactions are entirely different than the public facing, image maintaining, completely non-intimate communication that happens on any "social" media.
You're not keeping up with what's happening when you interaction on facebook, because what's really happening is struggles and concerns that you don't necessarily want to share in public with everyone you know. Real human connections involve being vulnerable around someone you trust, which is fundamentally in opposition to the foundations of how something like facebook works.
Not really, you assume this is to keep up with current friends. Not past co-workers who you're friendly with. People you were friends with when you were 20-years younger. People you went to college with but were only friends and not still talking 10-years later. Basically, people whose phone number you don't have and can't find.
Before FB, people shared these details once a year with the annual Christmas card or Thanksgiving call. Now, they can share these details with friends and family in essentially realtime, and communicate in realtime. You can say the same things you would in a card, or a call, without waiting months. Hell, if you really want you can call someone through Facebook.
It's crazy that people on HN are so convinced that there aren't people out there with more than 30 friends. Spend more time out of the office away from your computers, and you'll have way more than 30 friends in short order.
It's crazy that people think that emojis have replaced longer intimate conversations. Most of the people I know that use Facebook for sharing with friends can and do have deeper conversations (and plenty of them) with friends IRL (or on the phone) because the minutiae gets shared on FB or Instagram.
Maybe you can't keep up with people through Facebook, but literally billions of people have been using Facebook for this quite successfully.
It's not even an accountable corporation. FB is owned by Zuckerberg. He has majority control over all the shares.
I'd be completely fine with it if it disappeared tomorrow. I'm not dependent on it for anything except for messaging a few people who seem to refuse to use other systems.
FB is not a utility or a public good.
Facebook is a cancer to civil discourse (well and Twitter) and to the idea that the best idea should win, not just the loudest idea.
Is it possible to decouple Facebook the technology from Facebook the corporation? In the past, there hasn't been a corporation of this size in existence. Where would the finances come from to operate a service on a scale of billions of users, if they're not going to come from dark patterns?
Regulating might help, but we’re not going to regulate don’t get in polarizing stupid internet arguments, so the root cause wouldn’t even be fixed by that. Regulating might even make things worse, because regulations, while often made with good intentions, do not guarantee good outcomes (as Thomas Sowell has repeated often), and then there are a huge amount of regulations that essentially close off competitors from entering into the market.
I shall save that for a rainy day.