

Not Sharing Is Caring - grellas
http://www.slate.com/id/2304425/

======
shabble
I'm going to drag out another cstross quote (from _Accelerando_ [1]):

 _"[...] his suitcase is on its way to Mombasa, where it will probably be
pithed and resurrected in the service of some African cyber-Fagin. That's okay
by Manfred — it only contains a statistically normal mixture of second hand
clothes and toiletries, and he only carries it to convince the airline
passenger-profiling expert systems that he isn't some sort of deviant or
terrorist"_

At what point is it going to be statistically abnormal to not be sharing the
minutiae of your life in this way, and what are the consequences to anyone who
wants to retain some level of privacy? Will they be required to maintain some
sort of statistically-average social network profile, occasionally updating it
with something plausible?

[1] [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html)

~~~
fauigerzigerk
That would be terrible but I blieve it's one of those "what if everyone did
x?" situations. The people who refuse to be tracked voluntarily will always be
a large enough group for that kind of profiling to be ineffective.

The friend spam fad will recede eventually and become one of those iconic
crazy things from the past that everyone shakes their head about. Kind of like
the shoe fitting x-ray device:
<http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/shoexray.htm>

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hanibash
The author is completely missing the point. Implicit sharing allows for
everything to go into the graph in a structured way. This is the most
important aspect of implicit sharing and the new Open Graph.

This doesn't mean that you're going to get inundated with meaningless shares.
That would be a horrible user experience. In fact, Facebook put a lot of time
and effort into making sure that is exactly what didn't happen. It's the very
reason why timeline was built. It's why ticker was built. They did this
because they want a place for the increased sharing to go, without degrading
user experience.

But here's the really exciting part. Once all this data is in the graph,
timeline and ticker will pale in comparison to what developers can do with all
of this new, structured data. That is the really important thing here.

Implicit sharing is not so that you can get a notification every time someone
listens to a song. It's so that a talented young developer can come along and
create a beautiful application that visualizes all of your song listens, how
it makes you similar or different from your friends.

Don't worry Farhad. Explicit sharing and taste isn't going away. I will still
pay more attention to the link you posted of that song you love than the song
that blips by in my ticker. I wouldn't criticize the new graph until its
matured and we've seen the next generation of amazing apps that are going to
be enabled.

~~~
RossDM
Not sure why this was voted down.

You make a good point about the possibility of mining all this data, but I'm
not sure I want to give it away. We (well, some of us), go to lengths to
maintain separate online personas. Why do I care if Facebook knows what my
most-played songs are? I can get that info from iTunes, etc.

They're going to need a strong pull (killer app, privacy controls, whatever)
to get my data.

~~~
Tsagadai
So instead of sharing data with your friends, family and a corporation you
just want to share it with a corporation? Someone already has your online data
the only difference is who that someone is. That someone can still choose to
sell your data on to anyone who will buy it in most countries.

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bitops
I agree with a lot of what this article is saying. Sharing everything by
default is pointless and misses the point of sharing.

I want to share something with my friends because I think it might inspire
them or make them happy. Or, in the case of news, let them know about
important stuff that's happening in the world. They do the same thing when
they share with me.

So to blindly share everything just creates a lot of noise. If everything is
shared by default, you'll need to start sifting out the signal from the noise.
Which is annoying because I trust my friends to only share stuff that's
relevant.

We all love lolcats but know how to find them on our own.

~~~
breathesalt
I disagree. I feel we shouldn't have to have an extra step to share what we
search for. The act of searching can be sharing and also in itself what people
search. I do agree facebook is the wrong medium to achieve this though, google
maybe; it needs to be at the browser level and open sourced as much as
possible.

~~~
aangjie
I don't know. I mean imagine google sharing a post in google+ whenever you run
a search query on their search engine? Perhaps, you would like to qualify the
type of search? There are various levels of specificity of searches and you
refer to those deep,precise levels? In that case, i can see the point.

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kwamenum86
I don't agree with everything the author says but I think I agree with the
sentiment. I think frictionless sharing is a departure from how people express
themselves in real life. During real world interactions we present our
carefully tailored selves to the rest of the world. We don't tell everyone
everything we are doing for a reason.

One positive with reducing friction is that it might be easier to find common
ground with someone. But overall im not sure I like it- social grooming is a
good thing

~~~
nostromo
I've personally had this play out with a number of services. LastFM comes to
mind.

I really enjoyed having a persistent record of what I listened to for my own
use and for finding new music.

However, I stopped using the service because, honestly, I'm not exactly proud
of every song that makes it to my most-played list. LastFM let's you remove a
song from your profile if I remember correctly, but it was easier to not share
at all than to remove specific types of sharing.

Facebook has this problem times 100. I try and tell everyone I know that isn't
technical that Facebook knows every website they've been on that has a like
button on it (and then I make a serious face and say _evverry site_ ) most
people have no idea. The idea that Facebook has this kind of info and is going
to start "autosharing" makes me uncomfortable.

~~~
ay
"I'm not exactly proud of every song that makes it to my most-played list."

It would be very interesting for me if you might write up a few lines on
"why", if you can.

~~~
anamax
For me, it goes to the fact that I'm not the same person to different people.
The fact that I'm willing to share some things with certain people does not
imply that I'm willing to share everything with those people.

Very few systems make it easy to manage multiple (and shifting) sharing
relationships, so not sharing by default is the easiest thing to manage.

------
nextparadigms
Google wants to keep real names (just like Facebook) and they get scolded for
it, because some people say they really care about their privacy, and they
want to be able to use a different name than their real one.

Now Facebook wants to automatically share everything about you, essentially
killing whatever privacy you had left on Facebook, and people applaud it.

Maybe not related (yet), but it does remind me of this quote:

 _"Freedom is lost to the sound of thunderous applause."_

This is a great opportunity for Google put a spin on what Facebook is doing
with all this, and say they are going the opposite direction, and instead of
auto-sharing everything about you like Facebook does, Google+ allows you to
choose exactly what you share and to who.

Facebook's features may seem cool today, but they have the potential to turn
into the biggest PR disaster for Facebook, bigger than their "privacy
settings" issue from last year.

~~~
TallTalesOrTrue
Where did you see automatic sharing of everything. From what I read, you will
always have control of what you share. They can't afford to repeat the past
mistakes around sharing. It'd be fatal now.

------
pygorex
Frictionless sharing without proper curation could kill Facebook. Friction
naturally encourages the crowd-sourcing of curation - by having to click a
share button or fill out a simple form I'm forced to think about what I'm
sharing and the context to present it in. Knowing what songs my friends are
listening to right at this moment isn't very useful information. Having a
friend reminisce on their wall or tweet about about the one time they heard
that song live, in-person and the epic good times that followed - THAT is
truly "sharing", that is the "why" and not just the "what" that makes sharing
addictive.

Can a bot or algorithm augment or emulate the magic of crowd-sourced sharing?
Or will it throw Facebook into a Myspace-esque clusterfuck?

~~~
ddw
> Knowing what songs my friends are listening to right at this moment isn't
> very useful information.

It's even more useless when it's from six hours ago. I just checked FB this
morning to see the news that a friend listened to a certain album last night.
I'll make sure to block that so it never comes up again.

------
pyry
It could be that this is just a separate world though. In my world, I wish to
opt in and choose what I share. Perhaps in someone else's world, they wouldn't
even consider not sharing something. Following what my family on Facebook do
certainly convinces me that at least some people think that way.

For me, on the other hand, Facebook has put a ton of friction into sharing.
Although I am a normally candid person, I find myself overconsidering whether
or not I really, _really_ should post what I'm about to. In the end, I go with
self-censorship.

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SurfScore
I agree, I feel like these days people share much more than what is relevant
or necessary. The easier they make it to "share" the more worthless crap were
going to see. Do I really care that my buddy is listening to lady gaga? Nope.
But I figure if he listens to something good he'll TELL me. That "friction"
that Zuckerberg is talking about is the filter that stops worthless
information from getting through.

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resnamen
I worry about the extreme fan-out that goes between content producers,
datacenters packed with algorithms and content mills packed with hacks,
dedicated to rewriting and excerpting that content, and then all these sharing
mechanisms broadcasting this massaged crap out to the world. Is the Internet
getting better from all this? What is the ratio of thought invested in
producing quality content, versus thought invested in simply distributing any
content?

Sorry for the rant :|

~~~
equalarrow
This is true and thanks for the rant. :)

Marco.org just had a post (<http://www.marco.org/2011/09/23/business-insider>)
about how biz insider slices and dices his stories for their benefit. (After
reading and thinking about his post, I removed BI from my morning reading
list).

Honestly, I don't see this getting any better - and I'm usually an optimist. I
think FB will make more of these deals with partners and we'll get more and
more of the reactionary media type broadcast. All bites of info, very little
substance; ADD to the extreme.

I'm in the middle of the argument that FB is bad and FB is here to stay get
over it and assimilate. I developed a few FB apps in 09-10 and at first I
thought it was awesome. The last app I did asked for a bunch of permissions
because we needed access to someone's feed so we could create/read posts that
were specific to our app. That was all good, but then I would look at the logs
in our server for the feed updated callback and not only would it never stop
(was kinda amazing to watch this), but we had access to all these people's
feeds - like everything.

I have to think this is typical now and I _know_ most of my relatives (young
and old) grant this type of access and don't really understand what it means.
In my mind, they clearly do not grep what is possible. And why should they?
They're not programmers, they're just regular people.

This coupled with the FB copyright rules pushed me off the platform. My
girlfriend still uses it (too much imo), my family uses it, and I still have
my profile on there, but I'm not adding any more content. I think at this
point it's more important to me - even as a programmer - to live life and
create my own things. That's the only counterpoint I can see to a world where
it's garbage in, garbage out.

------
TallTalesOrTrue
More than sharing it is closer to broadcasting all my activities to my
friends. But I think Facebook is onto something here. What if this broadcast
in future can be curated and only interesting things get displayed
automatically. What if it looks at what our friends are doing and gets
recommendations? Excessive sharing is just the first steps towards this.

~~~
emilis_info
Exactly. And this is the scariest part that the author and everyone else in
this thread missed.

TL;DR: Facebook is tightening its filter bubble around you and getting more in
between you and your friends.

Ignoring the new features that were added, there is one feature that has
disappeared -- the full list of your friend updates in the News feed.

Previously you could click on "Most recent" and get a list of all updates. Now
they are filtered and it is totally inconvenient to get around this: you must
explicitly check "All updates" from every friends context menu (by default it
is "Most updates").

It may seem like a feature until you realize that you may miss the news that
your friends are OccupyingWallStreet or criticizing Facebook or doing other
twoplusbad things.

Now I am not against filtering and ranking most news (as in media)
automatically. I think it is a great achievement that we are able to do this.
However I am strongly against anyone deciding for me what is important for me
and my friends. There is a line that should be drawn somewhere and you should
not ignore this.

~~~
TallTalesOrTrue
The full list of updates is still there on the left side where you have a live
stream of updates flowing all the time. Of course it fills up real quick but
its still there. Also on the left side they have list tabs using which you can
go to the old familiar UI. I for one like the newer UI better.

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chrischen
While exposing everything will be noisy, I think facebook wants to collect all
your activity so that it can learn and automatically share what you might
manually share... It's the hard way of ultimately removing friction from
manual sharing.

~~~
Helianthus
In other words taking the "you" out of sharing. "You" isn't you, it's
facebook.

~~~
chrischen
But it would be influenced by you.

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vhsd1988
About as Orwellian as you can get

~~~
drdaeman
I'd disagree. Feels more like Zamyatin's "We" or Huxley's BNW.

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neilrahilly
I used to enjoy the way many FriendFeed entries were side-effects of actions
friends were taking elsewhere, e.g., adding a movie to their queue on Netflix.
And often these would spark interesting conversations.

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potomak
This man is crazy. He told us about not sharing but you can find like buttons
everywhere! Shame on you.

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sandieman
Zuck is simply trying to build a site that improves our ability to be social.

~~~
No_privacy
Yes, and to be social, you must. share. everything.

EVERYTHING!

