
The Ghetto Called Facebook - evo_9
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381827,00.asp
======
shantanubala
That's cool. I'm glad to hear Dvorak's opinion. Here's mine:

Quit whining about Facebook. It's opt-in. People like it, so they opt in.
Believe it or not, AOL was actually relevant and somewhat useful to people
over a decade ago. Was it the best? No. Did it help people? Yes.

I hate to say this, but people do need training wheels with tech. Facebook
makes things simple. I no longer have to sign up for 20 different accounts,
figure out which friends use which services, remember different passwords, or
have to learn 20 different interfaces -- I can now message, chat, organize,
collaborate, send pictures, share links, and do a bunch of stuff at once. It's
called having a broad set of features. Facebook is "training wheels" the same
way something like the Windows OS is "training wheels." Internet Explorer is
bundled, but you are free to download Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Flock, Opera,
Seamonkey, etc. It bundles Windows Media Player, but you can download VLC,
Miro, iTunes, Foobar2000, MediaMonkey, WinAmp, or hundreds of other things.

Facebook didn't magically kill Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hacker News, Instapaper,
or the thousands of other companies and products available. It's called
choice. People have choices. They have a lot of choices. Let them decide. If a
product is easier to use, by all means use it.

(end of rant)

~~~
narkee
People had the same choice a decade ago, and chose against AOL.

I think Dvorak is simply pointing out the fact that Facebook is being praised
like the second coming of Jesus, while AOL is regarded as an internet
backwater and failure, where they both provide/provided very similar
functions.

~~~
alexgartrell
One huge divide between people in the tech community and those outside of it
is the meaning of free. Facebook's a walled garden to people who want APIs and
generously licensed (or public domain) data, but, to most of everyone else,
the only cost with Facebook is creating an account -- something many people
want to do anyway for the other features of the site. This is in sharp
contrast to AOL, which was very expensive and only offered its data to paid
subscribers.

~~~
hrunting
AOL's cost was money. Facebook's cost is your personal privacy. Yes, you don't
have to shell out a dollar, but you lose all control over the information you
associate with Facebook. In some ways, I'd rather pay real money.

~~~
alexgartrell
Right, I'm not trying to make a claim either way about what the superior thing
is; I'm just saying that your average person would rather get the service for
free at the cost of their own privacy, which is one plausible explanation for
the difference.

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sandofsky
I think it would have been useful to include "Dvorak" in the submission title.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Right. Dvorak is a professional troll.

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devtesla
Divorak needs to get off the internet and realize that the online
communication doesn't create some separate place but is a part of real life.
This "second class citizenry" rhetoric is harmful and absolutely misses the
point. People are relying on Facebook for their online presence (overly so, of
course) because there are many benefits to doing so (ease of use, lack of
cost, easy mobile access, ability to pester customers etc.). We don't need to
end the Facebook "ghetto" as much as we need to make the rest of the internet
make as much sense to end users as Facebook.

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drivingmenuts
> Load World of Warcraft and play something that reflects real development
> efforts rather than cute marketing tricks.

I love that line.

The achievement of WoW is to inflate the importance mouse clicks to an insane
level by a more complex mechanism.

That is all.

~~~
zinkem
I mostly agree with your sentiment. I think WoW and Facebook are very similar
in function, connecting people socially through software. I don't really think
one is any better or worse than the other.

However, I do think something like WoW is a significant artistic achievement
as well as a social tool. I really think this artistic product is the
"achievement" of WoW.

~~~
SkyMarshal
_I really think this artistic product is the "achievement" of WoW._

That's one take. Another is its achievement was taking an entertainment medium
that people used to pay for only once, applying Skinnerian behavior
modification techniques to keep them coming back and paying for monthly, then
scaling that model to an unprecedented massive scale.

[http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-
gam...](http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-
trying-to-get-you-addicted.html)

Granted the social aspects of online games _are_ truly fun, but the nice thing
about Facebook is that it (initially at least) succeeded and scaled with just
the social part and not the psychological manipulations mmo's like WoW relied
on from day 1.

Some of the stuff that's been added recently, like Farmville and whatnot,
exploits both the social and psychological, but the core value of FB is that
it is still primarily a social experience, a way for people separated by
distance and/or life (new baby, etc.) to maintain connections and know what's
going on in each others' lives.

~~~
zinkem
You're partly right, but I think a game like WoW would exist even if there
weren't a market to exploit (although probably not on the same scale with
today's technology). Look back to the 80s and 90s when these types of games
existed for cheap or free.

Many of the "psychological manipulations" present in WoW were present in the
genre long before someone at Blizzard (or Sony or whoever else) decided those
game play mechanics can make a boatload of cash. The tone of your post
suggests that games are designed from the bottom up as a psychological
manipulation tool. This is most certainly not the case; they are designed to
be fun (although I could buy the argument that this stuff is being done
consciously with WoW now, and would not be surprised if evidence were
presented). For the most part these "manipulative" qualities in games were
discovered/researched after gaming became popular, they did not insert these
manipulations into games to make them popular. Most of this psychology stuff
is pretty new to popular game design.

So far I haven't even addressed the original point of my statement, the
artistic merits. WoW is a huge 3d environment created from scratch by a team
of talented (and I'm sure very well paid) artists. There are many people who
are excited about the lore of WoW the same way others get excited about LotR.
To say:

"The achievement of WoW is to inflate the importance mouse clicks to an insane
level by a more complex mechanism.

That is all."

Especially with the "that is all" added to the end, this statement dismisses
the creative work that went in to WoW to create one of the largest 3d
interactive worlds ever made.

Anyway, both services offer value to the user but I'm just sayin' give credit
where credits due.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Regarding WoW's artistic achievement, I've read a good observation about that
- they've somehow created an art style whose longevity is not dependent on
continually increasing gfx capabilities, but maintains an appeal even as other
games get higher realism and whatnot. Timeless design in any domain is quite a
feat.

------
lazerwalker
> I think it's brilliant that the boys at Facebook are taking on Netflix by
> developing their own streaming service

Assuming Dvorak's talking about the newly-announced Dark Nights rentals, he's
talking about a third-party app developed by Warner Bros, not a ploy by
Facebook itself.

I wouldn't bother bringing up a small factual error like this, but it really
digs into the point of his article: it's a lot harder to build up the idea of
Facebook as an evil monopolizing force trying to lock people into their
platform when it's third-party content producers that are actively pulling
people into the FB ecosystem.

You could argue that this is a result of their efforts to attract developers
to the FB Credit platform, and that's just an attempt to attract and lock in
users. That's definitely true, but you can't really call a neighborhood a
'ghetto' when it's got a posh shopping mall full of big-name department
stores.

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codeup
Spot on. But this is exactly the kind of article that one would expect to get
many negative comments on HN. It's critical of a hyped website and the
argument isn't even economic.

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kaiwen1
As I see it, the problem with Facebook is that it is monopolizing a space that
we should all desire to see open and dispersed. Is it good to have one company
monopolize all online social interactions among all humans on the planet? Of
course not. People spend egregious amounts of time on Facebook, which is
wonderful for Facebook and stifling for the rest of the internet. If you
recognize these problems you should abandon Facebook and reject it on
principal. With so many people and business on board, this is actually quite
hard to do, which is exactly why it should be done.

------
sixspeed
Dvorak has a seriously warped view of Facebook and life-in-general IMO.
Facebook's main competitor is Second Life? Who on earth thinks that?

There's nothing "fake" about the community on Facebook. Ask Hosni Mubarak.

~~~
FlemishBeeCycle
I don't think he seriously views Second Life as a real competitor - he was
just using it to draw an analogy.

As for the community, I believe the "fakeness" he's getting at is the ability
of the user to carefully cultivate their likeness and project a version of
themselves that may or may not be truly reflective of "reality".

Of course, one could argue that we are always cultivating a "desired image" of
ourselves. However, Facebook and similar platforms provide visual and textual
clues that allow users to more concretely realize social relationships. This
in turn may allow them to go above and beyond the normative level of image
moderation. Whether that is "good" or "bad" is another question altogether.

------
bluehat
I think if you want to compare Facebook to something outdated or controlling,
I'd try the "portals" of the turn of the millennium. It's a pretty natural
extension we see with almost anything which subsists on advertisements: more
attention means more views means more ad-clicks means more revenue. Of course
Facebook and everything else financed by ads with a brain is moving to push as
much of your activity onto its platform as possible.

------
juiceandjuice
Are all Dvorak's friends on facebook pre-teen girls? It's probably worse than
that, they are probably 'writers'

The fake people on facebook, at least on MY facebook, are the people that are
fake in real life. Yes, it is easier for them to broadcast how fake they are.
Luckily facebook also makes it easy to filter out their broadcasts. It's also
much easier for the friends I care about to broadcast important information as
well. For those of us without a media site/platform to broadcast our cra...
err articles, facebook works great.

Also, I never get along with WoW addicts.

~~~
ARobotics
You may be underestimating how many small bits of 'fake' are common. A
facebook profile is much more accurately described as "how someone wants
themselves to be seen" rather than how they are in reality. Some of it is
self-censorship, some is self-promotion, some is subconscious, but the
cumulative effect is such that the reality show analogy is quite apt; it's
based on real events, but edited and filtered into something misleading.

Think about it this way, an autobiography is probably mostly true, but you're
going to read it with the understanding that it's not an impartial, objective
viewpoint.

~~~
gnosis
_"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A
man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when
viewed from inside is simply a series of defeats."_

    
    
             -- George Orwell

------
Apocryphon
Er... isn't Facebook's primary feature for, I don't know, social networking?
Being a means to connect with people you know?

It's certainly expanding to provide many services besides that, but I don't
think anyone is replacing the rest of the internet with just FB.

------
shortlived
Would someone like to clue me in on all the hate of this guy named "Dvorak"?

~~~
idle_processor
It's the name of the linked article's author.

~~~
dasil003
To add to that... his specialty is intentionally specious and sensationalist
arguments that don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny, thus inviting rabid
rebuttals from people in the know, driving tremendous traffic well beyond what
either A) a plainly idiotic argument or B) a extremely well-honed analysis
would produce. In other words, he takes trolling to heights 4chan can only
dream of.

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rgejman
This is possibly the most poorly written article I have ever read on HN.

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genera
AOL keyword: Facebook

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talleyrand
Facebook will too pass....

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nod
What the crap?

~~~
stanleydrew
How is this comment useful?

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jawngee
Divorak hasn't been relevant since the death of floppy disks.

~~~
zi
After reading the article, it kinda sounds to me like Dvorak just can't see
Facebook's relevance as a communication tool for people who aren't super
skilled with computers. I'm not really a fan of Facebook myself, but
shantanubala is right; It does help people connect and share information
easier. I wouldn't agree with Dvorak that Facebook is a ghetto, then again the
definition of the word "friend" seems to be a little different these days.

