
Facebook the Devourer - hellosmithy
http://awardwinningfjords.com/2012/10/04/facebook-the-devourer.html
======
tptacek
I have 340 Facebook friends (I feel like this is on the middle-lower end of
typical). I scrolled down several "pages" on my timeline and saw zero evidence
of any those people --- who are predominantly friends and family, or people I
went to high school with --- were playing anything like Farmville. Most
updates on my timeline are people sharing pictures of the city they're
visiting, or of their kids.

All of these people could, instead of sharing details of their lives with
their friends, instead be spending time on 4chan anonymously grinding out
memes. I gather from this post that I am supposed to feel bad about that.

Meanwhile: in a major city in the US, in a market dominated by the likes of
McDonalds and Walmart, your odds of successfully starting a small business
that depends on a retail channel are significantly worse than 50/50. Most
people don't get a shot at starting any kind of business like that, and only a
vanishingly small few get multiple bites at that apple. Yet I can use Facebook
today to find out about meat specials at my butcher, or someone selling
artisanal pickles, or a new theater company, or someone making custom knives
as their hobby hoping to try to make a living doing it. And because of the
stupid blue "like" button this article rails against, these hopeful businesses
can do that without paying for pointless terribly-performing ads in major
newspapers or on radio stations, and can have actual conversations with their
customers. And again, I gather from this post that I am supposed to feel like
this is a bad thing.

So I guess I'm saying: I'm not getting the author's point.

~~~
dkarl
I'm guessing you long ago hid messages from Farmville and similar games and
forgot about it. There's no way you know 340 people who don't play Facebook
games.

 _Yet I can use Facebook today to find out about meat specials at my butcher,
or someone selling artisanal pickles, or a new theater company, or someone
making custom knives as their hobby hoping to try to make a living doing it.
And because of the stupid blue "like" button this article rails against, these
hopeful businesses can do that without paying for pointless terribly-
performing ads in major newspapers or on radio stations, and can have actual
conversations with their customers._

I used to "like" local businesses. But... every day I get ads in my news
stream reminding me that my friends "like" Wal-Mart. And Amazon.com. Mostly
Amazon.com, actually. Sometimes I think that if I just clicked "like" I'd get
fewer ads _from_ Amazon than I currently get _for_ Amazon. Because on
Facebook, even the ads have ads.

Now I hesitate to "like" anything because I feel complicit in helping Facebook
spam my friends. I think it's cool when a single item goes into my friends'
feeds saying that I "like" a local restaurant, but I DON'T want them to see
recurring ads in their news feed with my name attached. I have one friend who
posts very infrequently, and she is apparently one of the only Facebook
friends I have who has "liked" Wal-Mart, so most of her appearances in my feed
are promotions for Wal-Mart. If I only knew her from my feed, I'd know her as
that girl who shills for Wal-Mart.

I admit it's irrational to avoid the "like" button when it comes to local
businesses, because I've never seen Facebook promote a cool local business to
me; it's too busy telling me about this awesome new thing called Wal-Mart that
I might not have heard of. When I "like" the coffee shop down the street, I
suppose Facebook applies powerful machine-learning algorithms to that
information to determine that they should lace my friends' news feeds with
slightly more ads for Amazon.com and slightly fewer ads for Wal-Mart. No real
harm done, then, since my name won't be used, but it isn't something I'm
thrilled to be part of.

~~~
tptacek
How does it harm small businesses when people "like" Walmart on Facebook? You
can't buy artisanal marshmallows at Walmart, and it's no cheaper for Walmart
to collect "likes" on Facebook than it is for Hipster Marshmallow Factory.

I just don't see the controversy here.

~~~
sjg007
it ruins your hipster cred.

~~~
nealabq
Not if you "like" ironically.

------
coffeemug
_It devours everything it touches and produces nothing of value,
including—ironically—their stock price._

It produces something of value to _me_. I live in CA, my parents live in NY.
We're in different worlds. I can't possibly communicate what my world is like
to them via a daily phone call. But I can share bits and pieces of info on
Facebook that they see, and it's a wonderful medium for us to have shared
experiences for things that otherwise would be extremely difficult to share.

It's a new mode of communication. Without it, I'd be alienated from my friends
and family across the continent and in a few years we would have easily grown
completely apart. With it, when I go back to visit, it's as if I never left. I
can _actually_ exchange pictures with my grandparents, and they can _actually_
be a part of my life every day. Facebook _seriously_ impacts the direction of
my life, with respect to family and friends.

One billion people realized this, consciously or unconsciously, and made
Facebook a multibillion dollar company. At this point saying Facebook produces
nothing of value is as delusional as saying that about Microsoft, or Apple, or
Proctor and Gamble.

~~~
jlujan
>it's a wonderful medium for us to have shared experiences for things that
otherwise would be extremely difficult to share.

His rant doesn't touch this because that is the perceived value to individuals
that facebook provides. Cannot really argue against that and I am glad people
are able to use it like this. However, there is something in this "value" that
bothers me and why I do not use facebook. From the facebook ad link at the
beginning of his post:

"We make the tools and services that allow people to feel human, get together,
open up. Even if it's a small gesture, or a grand notion -- we wanted to
express that huge range of connectivity and how we interact with each other,"

The ad does not show that. It shows people doing things together. It shows
real people interacting in a physical world. It shows physical, tangible,
things. Not pictures of things, or short quips and a link to an article or an
emoticon. The feeling the ad tries to carry across to the viewer is the exact
reason that facebook is a terrible medium to "connect" in the human sense.
Lets compare it to Apple's FaceTime ad
(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k>). Not only is the product in
almost every scene, but the ad shows exactly how it directly integrates and
impacts peoples lives. The last scene with the sign language drives home the
technology empowering humans to connect in an almost surreal new way. Another
example is the Kodak Carousel scene from Mad Men
(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus>). How facebook goes from their
Timeline ad (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzPEPfJHfKU>) to "Chairs are
like Facebook" is incredible to me. The commonality in all of these is
capturing intiment moments between individuals. That is where the value
proposition falls down with facebook. There is no sense of intimacy in the
communication channel. A photo of your mom and dad probably has a different
value to you than to your other facebook friends. It has very little to do
with the photo itself as the photo has no intrinsic value either. It is the
memories and emotions tied to it. That is the extent of it. Your mom doesn't
need you to like the photo. Your friends don't need to see your comment saying
your dad looks like a dork in that sweater. I argue that the passive nature
and resulting noise to signal ratio makes facebook insufficient to build real
human connections. For these things, not sure how facebook is better than
email... it is no where close to live voice or video chat. Having a billion
people on it means nothing when you only really want to communicate with 50 of
them on a regular basis and only 1-4 of them at a time. Everything else on
facebook is just self absorption and ego.

But I digress. His rant is really about how facebook is trying to make
everything a part of its ecosystem. I can barely get older generations on
email or MMS messaging let alone facebook. Trying to include facebook in every
website serves no one but facebook and to what end? It definitely isn't user
experience. Facebook is going the way of AOL as a ubiquitous term describing
what the internet is and that is a scary thought.

~~~
tambourine_man
Exactly. And this I hadn't seen:

 _We make the tools and services that allow people to feel human_

We need tools and services to feel human? I know it's marketing speak but
geez.

------
nuclear_eclipse
> _Facebook ... produces nothing of value_

> _If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, nobody would give a shit._

There are plenty of people who would give a shit. You may not be one of them,
but there are countless people who rely on Facebook to communicate with family
members on the other side of the globe, or share their private pictures and
memories with their loved ones, or just to keep in touch with friends who no
longer live nearby. If that's not one of the best definitions of _value_ , by
touching people's lives where it matters to them the most, then I don't know
what is.

You may not use Facebook for any of those things, and that's fine, but when a
_billion_ people log into Facebook every month to communicate with their
friends and family, you can't possibly think that your usage is indicative of
everyone else.

Facebook doesn't need to produce new knowledge or culture to provide tangible,
long-term value.

<http://www.facebookstories.com/>

~~~
clobber
> there are countless people who rely on Facebook to communicate

They can try e-mail, IM, SMS, picking up the telephone, smoke signals. Let's
stop pretending Facebook is so ingrained in people's lives that they cannot
live without it. We're talking about a website that's merely a time waster.

> a billion people log into Facebook every month

I'd bet that number is way off once you account for spam profiles and how
Facebook defines 'active' [1]

Edit: to satisfy ghost downvoters (HN, go figure) here is previous discussion
on the billion users

1\. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611734>

~~~
drumdance
None of those are good for passive communication. No one said they "can't live
without it." But it certainly adds value to a lot of people's lives.

~~~
clobber
Disagree. I feel e-mail can serve the same purpose but then some would argue
the usefulness or value in 'passive' communication.

~~~
untog
I feel like this has been hashed out a million times on HN. Yes, e-mail works.
I could e-mail a photo album to people. But what if they want to comment on
it? Either everyone gets spammed with hundreds of e-mails, or there's no group
conversation. Add to that, being tagged in other people's albums. Facebook
provides value to people. Not all people, but that's the way the world works.

And of course there is a value in passive communication. I want to see the
photos my friend posted of his holiday. I don't want to have to look at them
right now, though- I'm busy. So I'll look later. Ta-da: passive communication.

------
m0nastic
The thing I find myself hating about all of these anti-Facebook rants is that
they all seem to operate under the assumption that Facebook has "subsumed" all
of this functionality from the internet at large, which seems spectacularly
false.

The number of people who "switched" from doing all of these things (blogging,
IM, photo-posting, online gaming) on other sites to using Facebook for them is
a tiny tiny minority compared to the number of people who never did any of
them before.

It assumes that if Facebook went away, that all of these people would just go
"back" to using Blogger, or Flickr, or AIM, or Armor Games, and the internet
at large would be a better place.

I don't think that's even remotely true. Nerds can happily continue to use
those services, and regular people will keep using Facebook.

Sure, someday there'll be a "new Facebook", and then people can complain about
that walled garden.

People whining about Facebook feels very much like people whining about
American Idol (or stupefying-ly popular CBS sitcoms). Like if 2.5 Men was
suddenly cancelled, people would all start watching Mythbusters or assembling
Arduinos.

Providing "free" online services to a billion people seems like a giant win
for society.

~~~
saraid216
> Sure, someday there'll be a "new Facebook", and then people can complain
> about that walled garden.

I'm of the opinion that Facebook isn't going to get trumped by anything but an
NGO. :(

------
engtech
Nitpicking, but missing disclosure:

OP works for a company named Instrument that does work on several things for
Google. Google is a competitor to Facebook.

    
    
       My name is Thomas Reynolds. I'm a Technical Lead at Instrument, lucky denizen of Portland, active Crossfitter, a foodie, a cocktail enthusiast and all-around nerd.
    
       http://weareinstrument.com/work/
    
       In late 2011, Google came to Instrument and tasked us with designing an online product experience for the global launch of Google's first phone with Android 4.0, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
    
       Partnering with Google, we crafted a new identity for their “Developers” brand to educate and inspire those who embrace their open-source platforms.
    
       To welcome the arrival of one of the biggest days in sports, we created “Game Day”, in partnership with Google, to speak directly with football fans around the world about the many helpful features of Google Search.

~~~
flocial
How does Google and Facebook compete directly? Also, why does working for a
creative agency that does occasional work for Google merit disclosure?

~~~
Karunamon
Err.. you are aware of Google+ yes?

~~~
flocial
I feel that's a bit like saying a heavyweight boxer and a lightweight boxer
are competitors

------
jamesaguilar
> Remember Facebook?

This delusion that Facebook is somehow dramatically more replaceable than
Google or Amazon is kinda amusing. There are plenty of other places to buy
online and plenty of other places to search. I can't imagine the mental
contortions that are required to hold both of these beliefs at once: "Facebook
is replaceable," and, "Google is irreplaceable." They are both replaceable,
but it would be tough in both cases.

~~~
notatoad
Google has a search algorithm that outperforms any other. Their value
proposition is that they can help you find what you are looking for better
than their competitors can. Amazon has a vast network of suppliers and
infrastructure. Their value proposition is that they can provide better
selection and delivery than their competition. In both cases, the value is
provided by the company.

Facebook is a website that lets you share text and images with your friends.
Their only value proposition is that they have a lot of customers: the value
of facebook is not provided by facebook. What makes them valuable is simply
inertia, and if they lose that inertia they are dead. They have no technical
advantage to the competition.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Google has almost no lock-in at all for their main economic engine, search.

If a notably better competitor comes along tomorrow, within a year the whole
money empire could crumble. People would just go to the new place, one at a
time.

Facebook has TREMENDOUS lock-in. For any new place to have value, it's got to
have the majority of the people Facebook has change over in a very short
timeframe.

The problem with technical advantage is that when it's gone, it's gone.

~~~
ralfd
I want to argue that the lock-in for Google is pretty huge.

Consider this web ad from three days ago from Microsoft:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNWuOJXP-R4>

It makes the claim that in blind tests people choose Bing to Google nearly
2:1. Which is a pretty bold and substantial claim. Question: Do you believe
that? Does this new info make you want to try it and set bing even one week as
your default search engine? Do you even care? (Notice also that I linked to
the bing account on Youtube, a subsidiary of Google, and the chances are high
that you are either browsing with Chrome or use Safari/Firefox which use
Google as default search.)

~~~
xyzzyz
I was working at Google when this Bing campaign went live. People didn't
believe this, so they spent some money on Mechanial Turk, so that people do
the "Bing challenge" and report results. I recommend doing that, if you have
some disposable money.

I'd say, though, that the ads network is the bigger lock-in for Google,
because it's vastly superior than alternativea.

~~~
ralfd
Uh, nice. What was the result of the Turk people?

------
zerostar07
I don't see what's bad about Facebook. 99 percent of the content is gossip,
siloed, tucked neatly in a corner of the Internet, covered with ads. Would you
rather have any idiot's rants and raves about their boy/girlfriend all over
you search engine results? Long live chit chat, but keep it where it belongs.

Incidentally, ill thought features like the timeline or apps like the
Washington post that try to turn the site to a news site or a personal
mausoleum will fail and be retracted few months later

~~~
saraid216
> Incidentally, ill thought features like the timeline or apps like the
> Washington post that try to turn the site to a news site or a personal
> mausoleum will fail and be retracted few months later

The Washington Post app has been around longer than a few months.

~~~
zerostar07
yeah usually it takes about 12 months for facebook to overhaul any previous
design.

------
uptown
I'm interested to see how future generations perceive Facebook. For many in
the current generation, Facebook became the place to reconnect with people
they'd lost touch with since school ... sometimes a few years apart, but
sometimes even longer. Today's children will grow up with those connections
in-place. They won't need to re-connect because they'll always have been
connected, so will it have the same appeal, or be used the same way?

------
frogpelt
I dislike facebook myself and for a lot of the same reasons but this guy is
dead wrong that no one would miss it.

If facebook disappeared overnight, it would cause millions of people to come
unglued. People are addicted to the connected/sharing nature of facebook and
the level of withdrawal would be dangerous.

------
wyck
Why on earth does this have upvotes.

1\. Thomas Reynold's post comes across as a pathetic childish rant.

2\. If you don't think connecting with your friends is valuable then don't
write a blog post about it, keep it to yourself, because I don't give a shit
what you think.

~~~
clobber
Damn straight. They'll have to pry your right to emote, see baby pictures and
gain acceptance from peers out of your _cold, dead hands_!

------
lightyrs
I reap enormous value from Facebook and frankly feel that the tradeoff is well
worth it.

Anytime I see an update in my feed that is either inane, useless, irritating,
cloying, etc., I simply update the settings for that user's updates to "Only
Show Important". After over a year of cultivating my feed, I am treated to a
birds-eye view of the experiences of important people in my life every time I
log into Facebook. This is nothing short of miraculous to me.

------
10098
Of course we can replace facebook. If you think about it, we don't really need
a "social network" - all these things can be done via e-mail, xmmp and irc
(all of which are standard open protocols). Use mail groups instead of "pages"
and "communities", set up your mail client to neatly arrange incoming messages
in folders and voila. Use xmmp for private conversations. Use irc for group
conversations. It's easy.

The thing is, most non-technical users won't be able to do it. Can you imagine
your grandma using irc?

The value of facebook and similar social networks is that they unlock the
power of internet communication for people who would otherwise be unable to
use it.

~~~
graue
In other words, Facebook provides more usable and discoverable interfaces for
the tasks you list. But you omitted a few tasks that are not practical at all
using the tools e-mail, XMPP and IRC provide:

Passive broadcasting / timeline: Share a status update with your friends,
without putting it in an inbox or otherwise forcing them to actively dismiss
it. People read your update if they happen to see it, but are not obligated
to.

Events: Invite people to an event and let everyone see a convenient headcount
and list of all the Yes/Maybe RSVPs.

Friends of friends: Discover new connections among the people you already
know—for example, that Bob and Sally are acquainted even though you've never
seen them together.

Photo tagging: Label each person in a group photo in a listable, searchable
way. By viewing photos others have tagged, refresh your memory of who someone
is.

At current there is no integrated, open protocol that would solve the above
use-cases in an even remotely adequate manner, even if everyone on earth used
it. We're left with two options. Surrender control to centralized social
networks like Facebook, who _have_ solved the above problems, but only within
their walled gardens. Or simply go without these benefits and opportunities.

Both choices are unacceptable to me, and long-term, I suspect most hackers
will feel the same way. That's why I strongly hope for the Tent protocol, or
something like it, to succeed. <https://tent.io/blog/tent-basics>

~~~
lmm
>Passive broadcasting / timeline: Share a status update with your friends,
without putting it in an inbox or otherwise forcing them to actively dismiss
it. People read your update if they happen to see it, but are not obligated
to.

That's what IRC is all about

>Events: Invite people to an event and let everyone see a convenient headcount
and list of all the Yes/Maybe RSVPs.

Easy with calendaring

>Friends of friends: Discover new connections among the people you already
know—for example, that Bob and Sally are acquainted even though you've never
seen them together.

Yes, that's fair. Is that actually useful though?

>Photo tagging: Label each person in a group photo in a listable, searchable
way. By viewing photos others have tagged, refresh your memory of who someone
is.

Perfectly doable with traditional online photo galleries.

I don't think facebook makes much possible that is impossible without it; the
value is all in the integration, as well as the convenient interface you
mention.

------
Apocryphon
Facebook, at its core, is about private (hah!) networks of one's friends and
families. It was always designed to be insular, to form self-selecting groups.
It's a platform that's inward looking. The inability to create and publicize
new content with it to the Net at large is a feature, not a bug.

~~~
alphang
That's the thing that's been bugging me for the past year or so. I don't know
about other people, but it's clear to me that Facebook's default privacy
settings — the way it's nicely set up so that you overshare with the whole
world — is NOT how most users would use it.

So why keep it around, Facebook?* From my vantage point, it's kinda evil, and
it's anti-user. Why can't you stop being Twitter and just be an awesome
private network?

* (rhetorical question)

~~~
lmm
Most users want to be able to share with their friends with zero friction, and
put a higher value on this than keeping things private. I really think
facebook's defaults are reasonable for the vast majority of their users.

------
jiggy2011
This is one thing that has always made me skeptical about FBs survival.

The majority of it's use seems to be for very short term things, like friends
sharing what they are currently doing.

There is little value in most FB posts that are years old. As opposed to
wikipedia which is a gradually building blob of knowledge.

Let's say FB was down for a week, many people would use G+ instead for their
social networking needs and how many would come back?

~~~
NegativeK
For an individual, Facebook's value is in the connections that people have
formed on the site. If Facebook was down for a week, there'd be people
searching confusedly for the next social platform That Everyone Uses.

Would Plus receive more traffic? Well, yeah. But so would Twitter and other
social networks. My mom, for one, would return to sending email jokes instead
of resharing Facebook stuff. She doesn't know what Google Plus is. I imagine a
large number of other individuals are in the same boat.

Would people return to Facebook after a week? Assuming the connections between
users aren't broken, I imagine so. It'd take more than a week to reconnect to
that coworker from seven years ago, but who I still enjoy talking politics
with about once a month.

So, in other words: Facebook's biggest asset is that it has a crapton of
momentum. Keeps its one billion users on the site more and more is going to
keep that momentum up. Switching from Facebook to the new thing would be more
of a collective hassle than the demise of MySpace. That doesn't mean it won't
happen, though.

~~~
hellosmithy
Metcalfe's law. This is really pretty valuable though. Not many people are
likely to hang around on an empty social network no matter how great the UI.
Personally I'm pretty fed up with Facebook, but living abroad it is still
quite simply the easiest way for me to stay in touch with a lot of my friends.

------
azmenthe
I totally agree with this, Facebook solved purely a social problem and this
makes them subject to being at an existential risk of no longer being socially
relevant ("cool").

Unlike say, Google, who started their massive empire by solving a technical
problem; search.

------
jonathanehrlich
Umm. Really? \- the arab spring \- a father sharing his son's first steps with
the world \- learning of the death of an old, lost friend \- telling the world
you are ok after your hotel has been bombed in Mumbai \- watching your nephew
learn to ride a horse. \- learning about steve job's death and feeling the
entire world grieve \- discovering a new book to read \- trash talking your
friends about just how bad the Montreal Canadians really are

Staying connected to the things that matter. Remembering your life.

~~~
schrijver
The thing is that Facebook doesn’t connect me to things that matter, it just
connects me to lots of things. If my best friend would have been in Mumbai, he
would have let me know he was fine through other means. If some acquaintance
was in Mumbai, if it weren’t for Facebook, I wouldn’t even know they were
there in the first place. And I don’t want to! I mean, I really don’t feel the
need to know the lives of 400 different people! I don’t have the emotional
energy to actually empathise with all of them. If my brother has a kid, I’ll
make sure to visit, but I really couldn’t care less about the kids of all
these people I met once in a bar.

~~~
lmm
>If my best friend would have been in Mumbai, he would have let me know he was
fine through other means.

Maybe your friend's more technical, but for many people the easiest way to
send a piece of information to several of their friends/family at once (at
least if it includes a picture or something) really is facebook.

------
jjacobson
People get bored of looking at the same thing for too long.

The combination of HTTP, Browsers, HTML, etc provides a broad canvas for
artists, designers and makers to paint on. Facebook and Twitter are trying
hard to take all of these amazing experiences, content and sites and package
them up into a wall post or tweet. This is going to get boring for the
majority of users and another solution for finding great content will catch
our collective interest.

~~~
lmm
I found the greatest advantage of facebook - particularly in contrast to
myspace - was that it presented the same set of information consistently. No
personalized theme, no background music - everyone's page looks the same,
which makes it so much easier to see the content (which is what's important).
The rest of the web can look like an explosion in a paint factory by
comparison.

If anything I think the greatest counter is the rise of twitter bootstrap,
giving lots of content across the rest of the web a minimal, consistent look.

------
antirez
Think at the problem of communities like HN: as more users are arriving the
quality of submissions and comments inevitably starts to be impacted.

Now think at Facebook as this exact process on steroids. Facebook is different
because almost all the other sites on the internet where there is production
of user-generated content is frequented by the elite of the internet users.

Facebook is different, a big percentage of facebook users are not really
internet literate, they think the internet is confined into facebook, a few
common sites they visit, plus searching with google when needed. They don't
have a blog, don't write into forums, don't know reddit, they don't even know
_how_ to properly use a search engine.

So the quality of Facebook reflects a lot the average quality of their users,
and with 1 billion users this quality is not exactly very high. Sorry, average
people may be good at parenting, at helping you, at getting their work done,
but the process of content production is something the belongs to an elite.
Most people will just share pictures, write non-sensical status messages, and
so forth.

------
bernardom
I'm not sold on this post's content; despite my bias against facebook, it a
convenient place to share common photos with friends, invite friends and
acquaintances to parties, and it does keep me appraised of acquaintances' life
events.

Can't think of anywhere else that would let me know that a guy I played club
frisbee with in college recently got married. I never would have found out
otherwise. You can argue that I didn't need to know that, but you can't argue
that it keeps certain people on your extended network closer.

A lot of his argument is against the silly stuff they made for kids:
farmville, frequent status updates, apps, gifts, etc. I can relate. Facebook
has continually lost value since the year I joined, 2004, as a college
freshman. This does coincide with their opening it to high school students,
then the general population, apps, games, etc.

All that aside, what a fantastic URL! Slartibartfast would be proud.

------
tatsuke95
If you want to hate on Facebook there should be less focus on Facebook the
tool, which is a useful communication service, and more focus on Facebook the
company, which is horrible.

Terrible business model, "shadiness", and being part of an ongoing mass of
wealth evaporation (Zynga, as we speak) is what bothers me the most about
Facebook.

~~~
alphang
That's a good point. I miss the "social utility" days of the service. In that
sense it's hugely valuable. (One of the best things about the internet,
really.)

It's the push for users to overshare/go frictionless/"Like" the internet
etc/viral gaming stuff that makes me uncomfortable.

------
arbuge
Misleading analysis.

If nothing else, Facebook is obviously entertaining to many people, so this is
a bit like arguing that entertainment has no value and we should just work all
the time.

Wouldn't work itself be pointless in that case?

------
jfmercer
It is amusing how this title Facebook "the Devourer" reminds one of some dark
Hindu deity, such as Kala [Time] the Devourer:

"At the dissolution of things, it is Kāla [Time] Who will devour all"
(Mahanirvana-tantra, cited in David Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine
Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas, p. 122.)

Better known is Krishna's theophanic revelation to Arjuna on the sacred plain
of Kurukṣetra: "Behold, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," which is
also translated, "I am terrible time [Kalo, from "Kala"] the destroyer of all
beings in all worlds" (Bhagavad-Gita, 11:32). Oppenheimer reportedly quoted
this very line immediately after first nuclear detonation in history at
Trinity Site, New Mexico in 1945.

Surely Facebook is too trivial to merit such cosmic appellations and
apocalyptic titles as "the Devourer." Such language is best left to poets,
seers, prophets, and mystics. In the context of discussing the technology
industry, it is wildly hyperbolic.

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stephang56
I agree absolutely and have been trying to delete my Facebook account, but to
no avail. How does one delete his Facebook account? If you know, please tell
me. I have asked facebook to do it more than once, but they won't even respond
to me. The best I have been able to do its deactivate my account, but it gets
reactivated frequently and I have to go deactivate it again. Any help out
there? Please respond via email stephang56@hotmail.com as I do not frequent
this forum enough to see a reply.

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madprops
It's either this or HTTP. I like the current level of abstraction the net has,
I wouldn't like seeing it transforming in a closed platform on a single
domain. I made radnation.com to be another place to be or thing to do in the
internet, what we need is more indie sites like these creating different
dynamics of use and features that are unique enough that copying all of them
would be hard for a site like Facebook, then letting FB do one thing and stick
to it.

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dwoldrich
Facebook (and now DataStax) has given me Apache Cassandra, and for that, I
will be eternally grateful. Why did Zuck release it? It's so valuable and
disruptive, feels like a "becuz I can" move.

I don't even keep a Facebook account, so to them I must be just about the
worst moocher ever. :P

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gogetter
Another top comment that makes no sense. Alas, karma does not necessarily
correlate with intelligence.

The point of the blog post is clear. There are other methods to do what
people, such as middle-aged ones, now use Facebook for: sharing photos and
text blurbs.

Knowing this, Facebook is pretty silly since you're posting all your private
stuff on some kid's website. You do not know him and he doesn't know you. To
him, you are just "Dumb fucks".

Can photos be shared by email? Can photos be shared via peer-to-peer? What is
Skype? It's peer-to-peer. But it's not used for sharing "files". Years ago
Google had something called the HELLO protocol. Anyone remember that? There
are many ways to share personal photos and private text blurbs, not all of
them are widely used. Posting your private photos and text blurbs on some
kid's website seems like one of the dumbest ways to do it, especially when the
kid calls people "[d]umb fucks" for doing so.

~~~
lmm
Ease up on the hate pal.

You know why people share these things by posting them on someone else's
website? Because it's orders of magnitude easier than the alternatives. It
lets millions of people _do something valuable they otherwise couldn't_ , not
because it would be technically impossible for them to do it but because they
don't have the skills. That's the value facebook provides.

~~~
gogetter
Hate? I'm not the one who called users "Dumb fucks."

If what you say is true (and I believe it is), then the solution is not FB but
better skills, i.e. education.

True value would be teaching people the skills they need so they do not have
to subject themselves to someone like Zuckerberg and a "company" like FB.

While you may see altenatives as difficult, that is only your opinion. It is
not fact. Stop making assumptions about what users can and cannot do. Stop
tricking them like FB does. Let's teach them.

Let's deliver real value.

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hackermani
You my dear chap make a lot of sense. (really) I would like to friend you on
Facebook ;-)

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auggierose
Just one thing: If they were the best and brightest, they would not have let
themselves lured into Facebook :-) Maybe another reason why not much
interesting stuff is coming out of Facebook!

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ZanderEarth32
There are plenty of reasons Facebook sucks, but you didn't hit on any of them.
The one thing Facebook does well is allow people to share stuff and produce
some value to those who receive it.

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tvladeck
the dig at the stock price is so ridiculous. i mean, yes it's dropped since
the IPO, but it's still valued at over USD 40B. which is a lot.

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tech77
Good rant. I draw the line at booty calls.

~~~
Darkbubba
right, ok, but on what side of line are you standing?

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chris_wot
If I were to share this on my Timeline, do you think the author's head would
explode?

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timpeterson
say what you will about the post, but that new FB commercial is an embarassing
joke

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robodale
At least someone had the motherfucking balls to write this article. Good for
him.

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benihana
Oh look. Another blog post decrying the evils of facebook that is in reality
saying "I don't like facebook, therefor it offers no value whatsoever to
anyone else," like it's some universal truth.

A lot of hacker/geek types seem 1. to hate facebook and 2. to be unable to
empathize with anyone who doesn't share their dogmatic technological beliefs.
Can we stop this already? Most people on facebook enjoy using it. Most people
on facebook get tons of value from it. Most people on facebook aren't on
reddit or hacker news, so they get a lot of new content from things lifted
from those sites and posted to facebook. I don't understand why it eats at
people so much that other people enjoy something they don't like.

This is just a cynical blog post by someone angry that something he doesn't
like is popular.

~~~
tambourine_man
_Can we stop this already?_

No we can't.

Imagine yourself going back to the 80s and explaining the Web to someone. It's
as close to utopia as you can get. Most people probably wouldn't believe it.
But it's real, it's here and it's amazing.

I'd argue that Facebook undermines a lot of what makes the Web great. And
since it's being confused with the Web itself, by being so popular and
pervasively devouring, it could be a treat to it.

Us nerds have failed, for whatever reason, to provide a decent competitive way
to share stuff that's more aligned with the ethos of the Web. But that's not a
reason to excuse Facebook.

But I disagree no one would give a shit if Facebook went away tomorrow. I for
one would throw a big fucking party.

~~~
18pfsmt
While I generally agree with you, I think people like us are somewhat to blame
for not providing an alternative to FB that is as easy to use. I also blame my
friends, relatives and acquaintances that have been so easily seduced, but I'm
not sure that's fair.

Thankfully, my parents are too old to have any interest in FB, and my siblings
are equally as cynical (aka "weird").

~~~
saraid216
> I also blame my friends, relatives and acquaintances that have been so
> easily seduced, but I'm not sure that's fair.

It's really not. That's like blaming people for driving cars before autonomous
cars came out.

~~~
nsmartt
It's more like blaming people for eating at Chick-fil-A.

They're supporting a company that is, in our eyes, committing a moral wrong.
The difference, in the case of Facebook, is that they aren't necessarily aware
of this moral wrong.

