

Facebook - Culture of Coercion - andrewljohnson
http://www.gaiagps.com/news/article/Facebook%20-%20Culture%20of%20Coercion

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aristus
"devil’s bargain"

"it preys on our children"

"covert influence by their engineers on forums"

Seriously, Andrew? How about this: instead of spending a nice Sunday afternoon
with _my_ wife in the park, I, secret blackops covert Facebook employee, am
reading and trying to understand 30-odd blog posts like this one. :(

You bring up a very good point. Perhaps the permission model is flawed because
it's based on contract law, which usually assumes both informed and motivated
consent. The low stakes of a permission dialog may be a difference in degree
that becomes a difference in kind. Your simpler model, which is a kind of lazy
evaluation of permissions, is interesting but I humbly suggest that it should
be thought out more.

But your point is buried under paragraphs of fear-mongering and attempts to
pre-empt any sort of counterargument or constructive discussion. If you want
to have a reasonable discussion, ok. My email is in my profile or we can have
it here. Otherwise this is just another hasty hitpiece.

~~~
andrewljohnson
EDIT: I tend to agree with the response from Facebook employees that me
claiming there is covert action on this forum is very questionable. I put some
strikethrough in the original post. Now, let's get back to the points that
aren't so ad hominem.

===================

1)devil's bargain - the person offers his or her soul in exchange for
diabolical favors - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_with_the_Devil>

As a Facebook employee, you might not like the analogy, but it's a good
metaphor. I really want what FourSquare has to offer - I want to connect with
all my Facebook friends. However, the catch is that I can literally ONLY get
this by allowing them to post to my wall. How is that not a good parallel to a
devil's bargin?

2) "preys on our children" - As I understand it, minors can use Facebook.
Minors then get tricked into allowing wall posts in order to get gems and
little nothings in games. That's preying on children, much the same way Angry
Birds and the social iPad games prey on children with the Mighty Eagle and
what not.

3\. covert influence by engineers - I just don't believe the sudden rush of
Facebook engineers to comment on Hacker News didn't start with some
conversations in Facebook. I don't really have any proof for this, except I've
never heard from any of you on this forum until recently, and then several
people all at once.

Also, typically commenters who have affiliations will call them out in their
comment - it's nice that you and these other guys list yourselves as Facebook
employees in your profiles, but not doing the disclosure explicitly seems to
smack of the same attitude that makes the Facebook platform so insidious.

I think the article's point is fair - that the Facebook platform basically
mandates developers ask people for all sorts of permissions when they want to
do just once thing. And I don't blame FourSquare.

As for the rhetoric, I regret it - not because I think it's unfair, but
because it didn't get the article the attention I think it deserves, so I
failed.

~~~
aristus
We've gone far off the topic now, but I hope we can come back to it someday.

"I've never heard from any of you on this forum until recently"

I've been an HN user under this handle since it was called "Startup News", and
I've seen your username here and there for years. For what it's worth, I'm a
longtime HN user and I care about what goes on here.

I can't help that you think it's "insidious". If you look at my comments I
often also mention that I work for FB explicitly. Honestly it gets tiresome,
and I feel as though it can hurt what I'm saying as much as it helps, as it
can come across as boosterism.

I really am spending an afternoon on the couch reading these things, because
blooms of posts often occur after feature launches. I care what people think,
and I don't always agree with the things we launch, and there are often very
insightful critiques, eg randomwalker. No one asks me to do it. If someone
makes a claim about, say, security or ads, I might ping a friend who knows
more about that area. We're not omniscient.

I prefer hearing from real people than PR-pasturized stuff two days later. But
now you're giving me stick for doing even that. What would you prefer? No
response at all?

------
aristus
I think you're making two good points, and thank you for engaging.

1) The permission model, ie "ask for everything up front" may be broken. A few
times I've forgotten that I approved some app or another and was surprised
when it pops up. It's depressing how many apps ask for the world because they
think they will need it. This breeds a little fear each time I get that
permissions screen.

Once upon a time I happened to work with Yahoo's OpenMail platform, and we had
exactly the same problems. I don't think this is malice. At most we (FB and
everyone else using this model) are being stupid.

2) The permissions are not granular enough, and the model forces otherwise
good apps to behave badly in order to create a viral loop. I think (hope) this
will get better with the new Open Graph "verbs".

Your proposed solution is interesting. Some mobile apps do this, eg only
asking for access to your GPS info once you hit a feature that uses it. I
don't think it completely solves #1 though it makes the connection between
feature and permission more apparent.

This model can also have "coercion", ie an app asking for nothing up front but
being effectively useless unless you allow it. This is the "crippleware"
model, and you already see it in nominally free mobile apps that don't work
until you make an in-app purchase.

I don't know the right answer either. My question for you: can you imagine a
world exactly as it is, broken perm model and all, that did not result from
concerted evil motivations?

------
andrewljohnson
Most people know that stories can be flagged on Hacker News, but I didn't know
until today that stories can be silently and opaquely de-front-paged. I posted
this op-ed on Facebook, and it eventually caught on and made the front page,
probably because a Facebook engineer commented and called attention to it.

So, there I am hanging out, browsing around the web, watching a little
StarCraft 2, discussing the article and comments with my friends on Gmail and
GChat - when poof, the story is gone. Not dead gone, like it had been flagged
by a moderator or a bunch of users in the normal fashion. Not dead gone like
you could tell someone had flagged it.

Instead, my story has been silently assassinated. It's still live, and it
still shows up under New, but it no longer rates the front page, even though
it outscores other articles.

Lame.

------
gojomo
Wasn't it Foursquare thst in this case pushed you to the wall-post level?
Sure, Facebook provided the tool, but Foursquare made the decision most
proximate to your discomfort - maybe they should get top-billing in the
critique.

~~~
andrewljohnson
FourSquare didn't do this with my GMail or Twitter contacts. It's only because
Facebook allows and encourages it that it happens.

