
“Facebook Is the Internet” and Other Things Media People Debate at Dinner - zbravo
https://redef.com/original/facebook-is-the-internet-and-13-other-things-media-people-debate-at-dinner
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chewxy
Related: I was recently in Malaysia for a holiday. I bought a SIM card that
promised unlimited internet (protip: unlimited anything usually a red flag, I
should have known better)

It turned out that I couldn't use 4G to surf the net. All I could do was read
Twitter. I went back to the shop and complained about this breach of contract.
It turns out I didn't understand that "unlimited internet" meant "unlimited
Facebook, Twitter, whatsapp, and Line". It didn't mean unlimited data.

I then spent the next 30 mins arguing with the shop person in a language that
I'm rusty in, that no, I don't care about Whatsapp or Facebook or Instagram. I
care that I can browse the web with a bloody browser, and connect to my
machines via SSH, and no, what the plan promised was in NO WAY unlimited
internet.

Still kinda pissed off over it

~~~
kristopolous
I guess they don't have net neutrality. Those are some of the consequences

~~~
Alupis
> I guess they don't have net neutrality. Those are some of the consequences

It sounds an awful lot like Facebook's plan to give free phones and "data" to
developing nations... with restricted access only to Facebook, Twitter,
WhatsApp, and Instagram.[1]

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-free-internet-
access-p...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-free-internet-access-
program-in-developing-countries-provokes-backlash-1443119580)

~~~
Tloewald
Or you can go direct to the horse's mouth, e.g.

[https://info.internet.org/en/story/developers/](https://info.internet.org/en/story/developers/)

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ryandrake
The Internet could be better off if the AOL-ian masses started believing
"Facebook is the Internet." Let them all move over there--a Reverse Eternal
September [1]! It would be even better if all the crap moved over to Facebook
with them. All the spam, trolls, ads, tracking, malware, etc. could follow the
masses, leaving the rest of us in peace.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

~~~
loginusername
The way I remember "Eternal September" was giving UNIX shell accounts to
incoming university students.

The problem is when students graduate; no more shell account. Then what?

~~~
bitwize
That's the September bit. Frosh would come in, get shell accounts, discover
USENET and drive the regulars nuts. Then after a few months they'd acclimate
themselves or get bored and USENET would settle into normal, only to repeat
the cycle next September.

When AOL flipped the switch enabling USENET newsgroups in the fall of 1993 it
was an "eternal September" because AOL had an endless continual stream of
chuckleheads getting online foe the first time and not acclimating to existing
net culture because they think the network is there to serve THEM.

~~~
angrow
> because they think the network is there to serve THEM.

I can't tell if you mean to imply that it's there to be served by them, or
that it is there to serve "regulars".

~~~
Goronmon
_I can 't tell if you mean to imply that it's there to be served by them, or
that it is there to serve "regulars"._

I think he meant that USENET works best as a collaboration between users,
whereas the users being complained about see it closer to visiting a
restaurant where the other users are the waiters and they are the customer.

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cryoshon
Hm, a bunch of relatively shortsighted and narrow-scope bullet points.

I like to summarize the trends and inaccuracies in the article as the
"mainstreamization of the internet as the primary mode of life". The internet
is now the primary technology for play, work, general communications,
commerce, social life, and human knowledge. 10 years ago, the internet still
had tinges of being a hobbyist project, and you probably wouldn't be able to
find your grandma on Myspace or another equivalent. That era was a smarter,
more innocent, and smaller time for the internet, though even then it was vast
and deep.

The arrival of the TV cohort to the internet (via Myspace and Facebook's
gateways) necessitated a departure from the non-commercialized function-
emphatic early days of the net. The media companies correctly view these
people as their money farm, and allowing them to escape to the internet isn't
acceptable. As a result, we now have internet commodities (user information,
paywalled content) that are sustained by the masses. In some ways, the
commodification of the internet resulted in unification many smaller content
and social sites into a few giants. During this unification, the depth and
variety of content on the internet took a huge hit.

At this point, mainstream internet is approaching the locked-down nature of
TV, though to the user there is significantly more freedom of customization of
content to be consumed. For the most part, people who use the internet for
Netflix and Facebook (and probably a few other big name sites) are viewing the
same pre-prepared frame of content that they were via the TV, and getting more
out of it as they did before in terms of content.

I have to say, there is very little for intelligent/technical people to
consume on this mainstream internet relative to the days of yore. Watering
everything down for proliterian consumption means that the deep, obtuse,
technical, inscrutable, or complex content and discussion is forced far away
from the "front pages" so as not to confuse or frighten the primary consumers
who are largely treated like children. Of course, there's still bastions of
sanity, but you'd need to seek them out or find them via word of mouth. It's
not so bad, but effectively places like HN are tiny fiefdoms that are far
removed from the reddit/facebook/netflix/whatever dreck that is dominant.

~~~
oldmanjay
I was with you until you said the depth and variety of content on the internet
took a hit. that smacks of back-in-my-dayism and doesn't survive even the most
basic sniff test.

I'll grant that perhaps _you_ can't find anything that satisfies you, but I
consider that a problem on your end. I find more that interests me than I
could ever handle, and I don't even try.

so sure, I'm not surprised you have a way you like to dismissively
characterize how billions of people use the Internet, but all you're really
doing is explaining your elitism in great detail.

~~~
lmm
I'm normally enthusiastic about new things, but honestly I found it much
easier to find deep interesting content back when Geocities was live and Yahoo
Directory and webrings existed.

In particular I find blogs encourage a throwaway attitude to content. Almost
certainly more information is being written down in blogs now than was being
written in people's webspace ten years ago. But webspaces were constructed as
a permanent, indexed thing (people even made "site maps" telling you what page
was where). Which made them worse for disseminating news or other time-
sensitive information, but much better for the "long tail" of information that
you now simply can't find, short of trawling through a complete archive.

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Sven7
Media people ruined the internet.

~~~
Zigurd
That happened about 15 years ago when Microsoft made the decision to make
computing media-friendly and embrace DRM.

A better outcome would have been to divide computing into business computing
and consumer computing, and only allow consumer computing to have components
that the owner of the hardware can't control.

Now almost every computing device contains parts not under the owner's
control. Even trying to see what those parts are doing could constitute a
crime. A network of machines you don't control isn't going to be an engine for
positive change.

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deadowl
Facebook is essentially the second coming of AOL.

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NoMoreNicksLeft
The person who wrote this could be an alien from the planet Zepton III, for
all my ability to relate to him and his opinions.

~~~
zeveb
Agreed, but it's interesting in much the same way that the politics of Zepton
III would be, were it capable of obliterating Earth without even thinking
about it.

What's amazing to me is how few people nowadays are involved in actual value
creation, as opposed to marketing value, taxing value and destroying value.

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butler14
\-- But when people in tech and media company meetings say “social,” they
really just mean “Facebook.” --

And when you say "Internet" you actually mean "Web".

Also, you've omitted Google entirely from your somewhat warped mental model of
the web.

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bicknergseng
“Ugh, I only watch like 10% of the stuff on Netflix. Can’t I pay 89 cents
instead of $8.99?”

I mean... $8.99 is already 10% of the $89.99+ that you'd have to pay to get a
cable subscription with premium channels and HBO, but I think this is still an
interesting argument. Does make you think about the power Netflix holds
though: little stopping them from expanding services and prices until they are
the new old cable company. Personally, I think even Netflix will eventually
have to do what people have been demanding from the cable companies: break
services into more a la carte (but still all you can eat) options.

~~~
Jtsummers
Hulu is sort of doing this. They have their baseline Hulu+ ($7.99, IIRC). And
now an ad-free (for most content, some licensing means there are commercials
at the start and end of a few shows) for an extra few dollars. And now you can
get Showtime (?) content for an extra few dollars.

Personally, I think it's brilliant (mostly). A multi-tiered platform with
expanding, customizable content access. Add in a sports package and a few more
premium content channels, and it's what cable should have become for a
fraction of the cost.

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soared
I just disagree with so many of the author's points its not even worth
refuting them, because that would be an feature length article in itself.

