
Facebook’s dark matter: “secret” groups - hartleybrody
http://toph.me/2012/12/27/facebooks-dark-matter-secret-groups/
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ryguytilidie
Could I ask a simple question, not because I want to mock people or anything,
but because I've been experiencing a similar phenomenon lately.

Why does facebook make you hate people you know?

I do generally find that most people I'm not actively great friends with at
the moment tend to annoy the shit out of me with either bragging, illogical
nonsense about things like politics, or just passive-aggressive teenager
posts. I see friends post good content sometime, but honestly it seems more
and more rare. I'm not sure if people are worse at posting or if its that
these type of posts have worn on me and I've gotten more and more annoyed by
them over time. What has it been like for everyone else?

~~~
seiji
You know that Adams quote about the universe being bigger than you can
impossibly imagine? Like, really, really big?

Well, people are like that. Our brains kinda blur the world together and,
without realizing it, our brains map other people onto our own experiences so
we think people are kinda like us. Except they really aren't. Really, really,
really aren't. In every day interactions, we gloss over, ignore, and excuse
little things that don't gel with us (without even knowing we do it). But
being presented with their innermost inconsistent idiocracy in writing, in our
face, and in our pockets -- it's too much. We start to realize they aren't us.
They are them. Them ain't us. And we can't stand it.

It's the same reason sharing an office with someone possessing your exact
anti-personality will enrage you daily. It's the same reason visiting a highly
population dense foreign land where people live by their own customs will
begin grating on you quickly. "Stop exploding fireworks on my front door you
irredeemable kids! I don't care if it _is_ your yearly festival of annoying
neighbors into threatening you with axes!"

Two solutions: get much better (more complete, more self-actualized, more
authentic) friends or tune them out. They're the same they've always been, but
being exposed to every one of their inner most thoughts will drive you batshit
insane.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mending_Wall>

~~~
Tuvaloon
>Two solutions: get much better (more complete, more self-actualized, more
authentic)

Reading your whole post, I think you mean 'more exactly like your favorite
part of yourself', but otherwise, spot on. On FB you have to listen to
everything everyone says to everyone, not just what they would choose to say
to you to accommodate your sensibilities.

~~~
graue
> _On FB you have to listen to everything everyone says to everyone, not just
> what they would choose to say to you to accommodate your sensibilities._

What I find really interesting is that this communication model is a totally
novel one. Clay Shirky observed[1] that before the internet, all communication
mediated by technology was either one-to-one (telephone, telegraph) or one-to-
many (newspaper publishing). Only now with Facebook can we type up casual
remarks that are instantly seen by potentially 100 or more of our real-world
acquaintances. I can't think of any form of offline conversation that's
analogous.

This is exciting to me because it suggests that how Facebook works is not the
final form of online communication. There's still plenty of room to discover
new forms of interaction that more closely model what humans find comfortable.
Maybe the secret groups discussed in the OP (which I'd never heard of until
now) are an example of that.

[1] <http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

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tytso
So now Facebook isn't passe because of secret groups, which aren't visible
outside the group of people who are communicating privately? That was the same
argument which pro-Facebook partisans pooh-poohed when it was made about
Google+, interestingly enough.

The only difference was that G+ started with private circles, and later added
circles which could be shared and public communities, whereas Facebook started
with the "let it all hang out" model and then grafted privacy on later. The
problem with this, though, as Randi Zuckerberg discovered to her discomfort,
is that like security, grafting privacy onto a product design afterwards is
fraught with peril and often doesn't work well (if at all).

~~~
graue
> _Facebook started with the "let it all hang out" model and then grafted
> privacy on later_

That's not actually correct history. Facebook started with most data visible
only to your friends, and gradually increased the visibility (given default
settings) over time. You can track the changes here:

<http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/>

Also, when Facebook launched it was exclusive to Harvard, and then to Ivy
League colleges, and then to all colleges, and even for a while after they
opened it up it was still mostly young people. Your friends list was a closer
match to your peer group. So it's possible that the audience people used to
get with a friends-only post a few years ago isn't all that different from the
audience you get with a secret group today. I remember when I was first
finding out about Facebook around early 2009, it had the distinct feel of a
private social club.

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webwanderings
I use FB only for groups.

I think the reason people are not moving off of FB to G+ is because of the
groups. These secret/closed groups are heavily organized and ingrained and it
is practically impossible for people to make a move to anywhere else. These FB
groups are like Yahoogroups (the old fashioned email listserv) which are still
going strong as far as I know.

~~~
joe_the_user
Now wait a second.

I am in a highly organized secret Facebook group mah-self. The thing is that
this highly organized quality means that they could jump anywhere if they
really wanted to. Perhaps you "semi-organized".

Basically, I think lock-in to any social networking pretty much has to come
through a group _disorganization_ , through the fact that a given setup works
for some members of the group but these members are not so committed that
they'd actually jump from one group to another.

But there are other factors, I think G+ only has traction with early adopters.
By starting at Harvard, Facebook itself spread from high-social-prestige
people to the rest of us. G+, for whatever reason, may be spreading the same
way but that kind of effect only works with the tenuous connections you want
to have with people who aren't wholly committed. The cohesive connection you
with people in a set group don't require any given medium to happen.

Anyway, personally I'm not going to G+ due it's even-more-draconian-than-
Facebook anonymity policy (Facebook's policy is pretty much that they only say
they care).

~~~
tytso
Actually, G+ does support pseudonyms, although there are some subtleties with
how they work and the approval process involved with them. See this very long
thread for the details, and some really interesting discussion about names,
pseudonyms, "core identities", "peripheral identies"/hats, "firewalled
identies", and more:

<https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/YJbzDptWGQt>

~~~
joe_the_user
I don't think your statement accurately describes the text in your link.

The only thing I see here is the ability to add a nicknames - your "alternate
names" - _to_ your "real" name. That is not _at all_ the same thing.

Edit: Comment on the page - "I'm sorry, but the only difference I see here is
that you're now listing the nickname field on the hovercard and profile. I see
no substantive policy change. Fame was already an obvious and hypocritical
exception to the policy; now you're just open about it." That's what I read.

~~~
webwanderings
G+ totally allows pseudo names.

But that's not really a game changer. Whether you are at FB or G+, if you are
using pseudo name to protect your identity, than you are rendering yourself
useless because you can't be hiding and expect to be networking authentically
with the people you know for real. What would make sense for FB/G+ to provide
is the ability to have each person choose his/her self-identity based on
different situations, i.e, provide complete autonomy to the people on how they
wish to portray themselves to the different sets of people. I can be a real
name in front of my family and co-workers, but at the same time, projecting
and sharing different sets of updates based on who am I sharing with. At the
same time, I can be a pseudo name in front of the strangers and/or people I
may only know online.

~~~
tytso
Are you trying to make these identities to be firewalled from each other?
i.e., do you not want your family to know that you go by "Master Dan" in
certain BDSM communities? Or for someone who is transgener, but isn't yet
ready to let a set of friends/family/coworkers know yet by the choice of a
differently-gendered name?

It turns out this is extraordinarily difficult, and if users think they can
maintain this separation using a single account, and then they get burned,
they are very likely to blame the social network involved. Which is a pretty
good reason why the architects at FB or G+ would probably think very, very
carefully before implementing such a feature.

~~~
webwanderings
But isn't this how people live their life in the offline world?

------
alan_cx
Odd one this for me.

I recently closed my FB account, and it was exactly because of: “Twitter makes
me love people I've never met; Facebook makes me hate people I know.”

Not the Twitter bit as I don't use it, but the FB part was exactly what
happened to me. I just ended up loathing almost every one I "knew". So,
coupled with the constant rumblings about FB's privacy attitudes and all that,
I closed my FB account. However, the reason I ended up loathing all my
"friends" was because of the secret groups. It was in the groups where I began
to really not like them. But it is true that the vast majority of my FB time
was spent in those groups.

So, I go with the initial point, but also agree with the parts that are
supposed to disprove it.

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pdog
People seriously didn't know about this? "Secret" Groups are probably the only
reason that I and any of the friends I care about are still using Facebook.

~~~
gurkendoktor
I would guess that the extroverted people who make up the blogosphere/tech
journalism don't think about it because they post/tweet everything publicly by
default.

It's a bit like lucid dreaming. I don't know how often I've heard "what, other
people can't control their dreams? Really?" :)

------
batgaijin
Can some people talk about example secret groups? I quit using facebook/never
had the friends to discover these.

~~~
temiri
The only secret group that I am in is for an organization which is, in turn, a
secret.

I can't imagine why you'd want a truly secret group otherwise. Not just
closed, where non-members can't see the content, but secret, where non-members
don't know the group exists.

~~~
Tuvaloon
Tautology? Of course no one would want a non-secret secret group.

------
jwdunne
This is very true, as I've observed with a small community of programmers I
founded.

I created a FB page called "I Live Prograaming" and played with FB ads, which
gave the page about 1000 likes in a short doace if time, a few years ago and
the old format for pages worked quite well for a community, which timeline
destroyed. We (three others were helping me at this point) discovered that
groups are actually exactly what we needed.

We started creating groups and each turned into fairly active communities,
seeded from our growing page. We found the demography of our groups matched
that of our page, which seems obvious but found it interesting.

We have many that are secret with hundreds of members - past a certain member
count you are unable to change this setting with your member's privacy as the
reason against , which makes a lot of sense.

Our format is fairly simple: I Love X, where X is anything technical, which
began with I Love Programming.

Some groups hold over 200 members each and there are groups for most common
programming languages and platforms (I Love C is fairly popular).

I'm not trying to plug though, I've refrained from linking, but more to show a
full picture of what the article refers to.

Facebook, for me, had been a great way to build a community based around my
passions.

------
drivebyacct2
I love "secret" groups. It's great for my close group of friends to share
pictures that we would otherwise not put on the Internet (and no I don't need
a lecture, I'm aware that's "risky". If my employer wants to fire me if a
picture leaks out of there, their priorities aren't set correctly)

