

Ask HN: Who is already sick of all of these "Like" buttons plastered everywhere? - theli0nheart

I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly, because it's already starting to get ridiculous even just a couple days after being introduced.
======
cpr
I completely ignore all that social networking stuff; my brain sees them as
ads and blocks them subconsciously.

~~~
Batsu
I'm the same way. I often read articles that I would like to share with
people, but since I'm more interested in the ensuing discussion, I'd rather
directly link a person during a conversation (or as a way to start one) rather
than throw it at my Facebook page or similar.

I consider sites like HN quite different, as that is their sole purpose :)

~~~
whalesalad
Yea that stuff is totally blocked out of my mind. I use Facebook to connect
with my friends and family, and will share a link occasionally if it really
pertains to me. For the most part, though, I don't like spamming mass amounts
of data to friends. The only benefit I see to things like delicious and other
"social bookmarking" tools is the fact that they're "up in the cloud", aka,
backed up somewhere away from my browser config folder.

Has anyone noticed the new Mahalo-esque stuff they're doing? All of your
hobbies, movies, music, etc... that they're making part of this social graph
is now linked together a lot better.

Example, one of my interests (for fun) is "underwater basket weaving" which
now links to a page like this, [http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Underwater-
basket-weaving/1...](http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Underwater-basket-
weaving/111910742153434)

"Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared
knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for Underwater basket weaving,
sign up and we'll let you know when we're ready for your help."

Pretty crazy.

~~~
dmoney
Do people really use the whole "social bookmarking" part of Delicious? I mean,
I've tagged a few things for:whomever, but 99% of my usage has been
bookmarking stuff for myself, or looking for stuff I've bookmarked.

~~~
rgrove
I use it pretty heavily. It's one of the main ways I share links with friends.

------
bprater
Can we re-phrase the question in less of a reddit-style way?What's the
discussion we want to have behind this?

~~~
resdirector
I can't agree more. Look at the first comment: 20 karma points, and no real
substance, hackerish or otherwise.

I'd like to see a discussion about (a) what it actually means to "like"
something, (b) what demographics currently use the "like" buttons (c) are
there any startup ideas to revolutionize the distribution of information etc.

~~~
what
Clicking "like" is like saying I have nothing to actually contribute but I
want to feel like I'm participating. Also, I guess it stops the thousands of
comments that would just say "I agree," "Yeah" or whatever?

But what good is a "like" button if there is no "dislike/hate" button?

~~~
evanrmurphy
> But what good is a "like" button if there is no "dislike/hate" button?

That's how HN is if you're under the karma threshold.

------
Detrus
Poor digg, that was supposed to be their trick

~~~
peterzakin
People may end up preferring liking to digging (though who knows at this
point), but when it comes to actively looking for interesting content, digg's
still got something to hang onto. It begs the question, however, whether
facebook will ever make an attempt to organize all of the outside links users
promote so that such content becomes discoverable by topic and not just
incidental lines on the newsfeed?

~~~
elblanco
On some pages, the number of affiliate aggregator upvote links takes up some
significant portion of the page (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.). It would
make sense for somebody to aggregate the aggregators, a meta-aggregator if you
will, and just have one button on the page that sends it to all of them.

------
tdmackey
Can't say I've noticed one yet. :(

~~~
ElbertF
Surely you mean ":)"?

------
imurray
I added the following rule to Adblock plus:

    
    
       * facebook.com/plugins*
    

The iframes disappear seamlessly.

------
asdflkj
Is "Who else" a legitimate question that you can "ask HN" nowadays? I've been
gone for a while.

------
metamemetics
Simple solution: Complainbook.com. The web is viewed through a frame that that
adds Dislike buttons to every piece of content. It aggregates what people are
disliking and recommends things to the user that they will be sure to hate. It
will instantly gain a high market share amongst content degregators, and
Facebook will see everyone disliking their Like buttons with the Dislike
button and be less evil.

It would also include _location based_ features where users upload geotags of
places they've never been, nor would want to go to.

------
asnyder
Not only are they bad, they slow down the rendering speed of the pages they're
on.

<http://twitter.com/SlexAxton/status/12663859611>

~~~
aschobel
We use it via FBML and JavaScript SDK and the slow down seems to be minimal.
We load their script right before </body>.

Biggest annoyance is that it doesn't degrade very gracefully when FB has
availability problems, you get a white square in the page in Firefox.

~~~
woid
I think they can solve it when using Javascript SDK on modern browsers. IFRAME
could be loaded offscreen and when it finishes then it does postMessage to
notify the parent window. Javascript SDK injector then unhides the IFRAME.

Easy to do, but they are probably busy doing other stuff.

------
chaosmachine
_"I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly"_

<http://www.openlike.org/>

------
andrewcooke
You can block them in Firefox by using the RequestPolicy plugin. At least, I
assume that you can, because I am not actually seeing any ;o)

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9727>

At first it seems like overkill, because it blocks sites from accessing data
from other sites, but you can enable certain sites (either globally or on a
per-site basis) and it remembers those, so after a little playing around,
sites you visit frequently look quite normal.

It's also very interesting seeing how people assemble sites these days...

------
pedalpete
I thought things were getting ridiculous with all the buzz, digg, sphere,
reddit buttons already. From what I can see, those are being replaced with a
single option (though I admit, I haven't seen many of the facebook
implementations yet).

It is nice to have a 'standard' rather than voting for multiple items. At the
same time, how much is liking something really doing for ya?

I don't think it has the benefit of a community like HN, so Facebook doesn't
have it all yet.

~~~
alexro
Do you think reddit (or twitter or digg or stumbleupon) users will start
liking the "like" and prefer it to replace other buttons? Completely agreeing
about the ridiculous aspect of so many buttons though.

~~~
pedalpete
I don't know that it has to be an if/else situation. I do suspect sites will
start putting only the 'like' button, as it is cleaner, likely loads the page
faster, and has such a larger audience.

At the same time, I suspect people will still visit digg, reddit, etal to find
new articles, and up vote them there.

However, I wouldn't be surprised to see sites like Digg get significantly less
posts added.

I hope we don't see the same suspected decline here on HN, as my friends on FB
aren't HN types.

------
kevinh
I haven't noticed this yet. Would someone kindly point me towards an example?

~~~
j-g-faustus
<http://techcrunch.com/>

Every story has a Like, a Buzz and a Retweet button.

~~~
Tichy
The first story I checked had 422 retweets and only 10 likes. Maybe FB is not
taking over the internet yet.

------
jambo
I'm just seeing a lot of broken iframes because I've now blocked facebook &
their subdomains on my personal machine.

------
petercooper
Why do we need all these buttons to do things we already all have our own
specific ways of doing?

If you want to bookmark something, bookmark it in the way you know how (in
browser, Delicious, etc). If you want to tweet about something, go tweet about
it in the client of your choice.

------
resdirector
I don't care for the unnormalized "number of diggs/tweets/karma" etc.

I'd actually use the "like" buttons if they _learned_ what I liked/disliked,
rather than just being there to show off an unnormalized and somewhat
meaningless figure.

------
throwthisaway
It's the new "tweet this" -- a stupid trend people will wonder about in a few
years.

------
Raphael
Or any kind of sharing widgets, for that matter. If only web admins would
trust visitors to have their own bookmarklets or extensions, so that pages
wouldn't have all the cruft.

------
barredo
I actually like them.

But someone could make a quick userscript to hide them :-)

Edit:

    
    
      // ==UserScript==
      // @name           I-Dont-Like-The-New-Facebook-Like
      // @namespace      I-Dont-Like-The-New-Facebook-Like
      // @description    Hide all Facebook 'Like' buttons
      // @include        *
      // ==/UserScript==
      
      (function () {
      	var i = document.getElementsByTagName('iframe');
      	if(i) {
      		for(e in i) {
      			if(i[e].src.match(/http\:\/\/www.facebook.com\/widgets\/like.php/gi)) {
      				i[e].style.display = 'none';
      				i[e].style.visibility = 'hidden';
      			}
      		}
      	}
      })();

------
alexro
"food and shows"- that's what the masses want, unfortunately

~~~
jff
I think "bread and circuses" is more standard :)

------
aw3c2
I have iframes globally disabled with only few websites allowed to use them.
Try it.

------
inboulder
<\--- What, you mean like that?

------
elblanco
I wish there was a "Like" button on this post.

------
larsberg
I wish this topic had a Like button!

~~~
superrobot
Try this one; <http://youlik.es/l/4f> (this site lets you create a like button
things on the web)

------
cmelbye
What do you mean by "less evil"? The whole point of the "Like" button is that
it's universal. Something being mildly annoying is not "evil" by any stretch
of the imagination.

