Just boycott Facebook already. 'but everyone uses it', yes but you have a choice. If you don't like the Facebook, then gtfo and make the effort to build something to replace it. But I guess that is too much work. People whine about Facebook, yet they do nothing to change the situation. You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.
I don't have a facebook account. Never had one (apart from some experiments and trials which were never under my own name or known aliases). Don't need it. Don't care for it.
I also don't have a Linkedin account. (Well, maybe i do now, because i have a hotmail account). Don't need it. Don't care for it.
According to others it is a bloody miracle i survive in IT :)
No. Small publishers have no choice. They have to be where their readers are. All they can do is try to diversify as much as possible, but it won't mean a whole lot if one of the world's oligopolists cuts them off overnight.
Exactly this. The benefit of small newspaper services is just too small for most of their readers to bother making sure to actually receive the news.
If they are gone, other content will fill the gap. That's pretty bad for those current content creators, sure. It also enables a local news revival as soon as people realise that there might be huge value in some forms of local publishing.
So what are you gonna do in Venezuela and Cambodia (also on this experiment) where people have and use Free Basics? Cut yourself off completely from your potential market because you don't want to have Facebook?
It's not too much work, it's too costly. Boycotts themselves are almost never successful or effective at all. The only way for any boycott to fully work is if a critical mass of people join the boycott, and that critical mass is almost never reached. For individuals to boycott without the critical mass accomplishes nothing.
For those people where leaving FB is just individually positive, absolutely they should do it. For those doing, e.g. political organizing where most of their audience is on FB, they are stuck in a terrible conundrum.
Personally, I think FB should be used where effective to reach people on FB, and everyone should try to make at least 70% of their posts be specifically discussions of what's wrong with Facebook. As much as possible, every comment and discussion should include a side reference criticizing the platform. If enough people get the problem, maybe some day we'll have critical mass for a boycott that might work.
These countries' leaders would like nothing better than for people to boycott Facebook. The less information the "voter" has in these places the better for them.
It's not West where we can assume benevolence or at least competence in our leadership (ok, we... used to be able to do that, which makes this even scarier).
These people take everything they can until their caught, and if you're a small organization you can bet that you'll never be on a newsstand or build an audience without going to where people already are (hint: it's Facebook)
Reminds me of a scene in "The Social Network" movie (2010):
Lawyer: What are you doing?
Mark Zuckerberg: Checking in to see how it's going in Bosnia.
Lawyer: Bosnia? The don't have roads. But they do have Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg: [stops typing and looks up from his notebook]
If life is a formal system, then it needs postulates. Obviously humans can’t agree on postulates. Do you have a useful scheme of postulates that you’re sure all humans will agree on? If so, please share. You’ll be able to clear up tens of thousands of years of misunderstandings if so.
Is life a formal system ? I prefer to say that we need to make hypothesis, and this is part of life. But religion is not simply a collection of hypothesis.
In my view, religion is a cultural spine of a community that defines the rules for living together. It also comes with a set of assumptions (beliefs) that are used to justify the rules, make the whole hold together, and enforce their acceptance.
Calling back into question the assumptions lead to question the rules. This puts the community at risk. As a consequence religions establish protective measures. Some of them are swift and brutal. I hope you understand what I'm referring to.
Some religions are much less toxic, but there is still the problem of their assumptions that introduce a bias in the act and decision making. People who adhere to a religion tend to forget to put a weight of confidence in the assumptions with the rational to not put the community in danger. Anything that represent a threat to the religion is considered bad, and this includes calling back into question assumptions and rules.
Science did not work that way. And this is why it evolves so fast toward a better understanding of the world we are living in. I'm not saying science is a religion or an acceptable religion substitute. I'm just comparing the effectiveness and benefit of a faster evolution of knowledge.
I'm convinced by multiple personal experiences that any community (e.g. startups, forums) needs a cultural spine and community rules, but I don't think that religions is the appropriate answer to it. The rule and the knowledge must be able to evolve and this is only possible when they can be called back in question by anyone anytime, and an objective method is used to decide. Assumptions and beliefs should be considered as mere hypothesis. Religions tend to obstruct evolution for their survival and the survival of the community. And of course many humans use religions as leverage to manipulate people, not only for the good of the community.
The real problem of religions are their beliefs that we can't call back into question. People brain washed through all their childhood with these beliefs, that we are requested to respect, can't make the difference with was is true and not, can't call back into question the beliefs and are prone to integrate similar irrational beliefs. This put humanity at risk.
That is a summary of my current view of religions. Note that it may still evolve because it is only based on my current knowledge and past experience.
That's a misrepresentation of Buddhist beliefs. The whole reincarnation thing is a teaching about karma than a literal belief that you will come back as a bedbug if you're naughty.
Off-topic: because the Buddha explicitly favours reason and testability over blind belief. Granted most Buddhists have developed rituals akin to other religions over the millennia (and also a lot of mythology that demands blind belief), but core Buddhism (as given in the suttas) is almost not a religion. In fact calling it a philosophy of life is a better description.
There's 7.6 billion people in the world. That's a substantially larger "US" if you are going to reframe the OPs comments as implying "US vs Them."
Also given the recent velocity and volume of bad PR for Facebook, it's possible that public sentiment is irreparably turning against them.
Lastly, technology has no shortage of once popular products that have been relegated to the dustbin of history - see AOL, Nokia, Friendster, etc. Today's dominance is far from a guarantee.
I don’t have a Facebook account, but I also don’t believe that simply boycotting them is where action against them should end. We need stronger, ethics-based privacy laws that greatly check their psychological manipulation and mass surveillance.
The solution is not to build FB killer. The solution is to decentralise the web. Let's embrace newsletters and RSS feeds once again.
I recently came back to using RSS feeds and it feels great. The problem is that many websites don't maintain their feeds properly. Broken links, missing content and whatnot.. I guess nobody ever uses them aside from weirdos.
In other words, confine computer use to research and communication in sci-tech alone?
Not bad. It's probably how things should have been, but that boat has sailed long, long back.
Point is, efforts to make decentralisation and independent content creating, hosting and sharing should go on simultaneously with other social steps that you have enumerated. Neither can replace the other.
That sentiment is why 99.9999 of programmers like us never made facebook. Normal humans don't want to maintain seperate feeds and RSS readers for every possible interest etc along with a seperate message client along with a place to post photos, etc. They want something simple and human, like fb.
Humans are lazy by design. That's why most laws inconvenience on individual level for the sake of greater good. Getting rid of FB may soon reach that level.
I've also done the same. Invested the last 2 weeks more time in my theoldreader account and using twitter bridges (even instagram bridges exist) for not supporting entities like http://twitrss.me/
What an uneducated answer from what I assume is a techy. Facebook is a treat to democracies. There are more articles on this than the other way around.
Funny that you should mention education in your comment, since commentary based on the lack of it is a real threat to democracy.
> There are more articles on this than the other way around.
Appeal to popularity. Facebook might indeed be a threat to democracy, in the same way that radio or TV were in their heyday. It's for us to deal with it and turn it into something positive, not try to turn back the technological clock.
One of the most annoying things to me about HN, or any forum site in general, is when people jump on obvious typos or grammar errors when they could easily ignore them and respond to the actual content of the comment instead.
Use context. It's so incredibly obvious that this person didn't mean treat, and yet here it is, a little jab to say "I'm just a little bit better than you" because I noticed a missing h and just couldn't help but point it out to everyone else, who also noticed it but didn't care.
Is it obvious though? I thought maybe they were being funny or clever by perhaps meaning to use the word treat. Responded further here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703788
No jab intended. I think assumptions are dangerous as well, and lead to more problems - including internal distress - instead of perhaps putting inquiry forward to ask for intentions instead. Obviously you're getting an answer from me now, however you still may not believe my intentions.
The first poster says Facebook "[is] not [a] concern for democracy".
The responder says "What an uneducated answer from what I assume is a techy. Facebook is a treat to democracies. There are more articles on this than the other way around."
The first two sentences seems to imply that they disagree with what has just been said, that is except for the word "treat", which implies that they actually agree. If they are saying "treat" then they're saying not only is Facebook not a concern for democracy, but it is actively beneficial.
However this argument is then immediately negated by saying "There are more articles on this than the other way around." Ignoring the ridiculously false logic of the statement, there are objectively more articles about Facebook being a threat to democracy than there are about Facebook being a benefit to it.
Thus I concluded the person meant "threat", which I found to be a very obvious conclusion given the context of the statement.
I think you're not understanding me. If "Facebook is a treat for democracy" is said sarcastically, it has the same meaning as "Facebook is a threat to democracy."; sarcastic might be the wrong term, I can't think of the right one at the moment.
Maybe if s/he hadn't just accused other people of being uneducated (without repercussions despite the obvious lack of respect), the typo wouldn't have stood out as hypocritical. You too need to use context.
What? You couldn't guess what he was at least trying to get at? If you were really confused, you could have substituted each word and then disregarded the substitution that makes absolutely no sense.
Honestly I wasn't sure what point the commenter was making, and was looking for clarification. Perhaps they were being sarcastic by seriously meaning to say that FB is a treat for "democracies" - in the sense that for targeting and accessing voters to potentially manipulate is a piece of cake with FB's ad targeting. It would act as a way to point out otherwise if it was a typo or not as well.
I would basically avoid this simply by reading his idea of what makes good educational content: tests, repetition, memorization and boring predetermined projects. If you know anything about educational theory, you will quickly discover that constructivist education, or constructionism as Seymour Papert coined, is a way more effective and motivational way to learn computer science and coding. There are basic understandings of computering which is beyond specific language, eg loops or logic. You are not doing yourself any favors by memorizing the entire syntax of a language. This happens while you do personal and engaging coding projects.
I often experience that ddg gives me results from really old websites. In cases this is OK, but when used for tracking down bugs or software errors it can be frustrating.
I believe that this has more has to do with it being built into almost all CMS's than it being a conscious decision.
I remember creating a couple of years back a simple script where you input a subdomain or a top level domain and it would try loading the most common feed locations (like /rss, /feed etc.) and returns the location of the feed if it gets 200 as a response. All I had to do was to check for like 10 different locations (think: one or two for every major CMS) and it worked in like 98% of the time.
Having played around with diaspora* (awful name), I don't think it can replace Facebook, unfortunately. Like Twitter it doesn't rely on people's real names nor are there good options for chat or making private or public groups or events. However, it could potentially be a good replacement for twitter. We need a good decentralized social network that has good design all around, code, gui, ux etc. which is hard to find atm. Ello is also quite nice, but not free, open and decentralized as diaspora which is a deal breaker for me when discussing new social media services.
Btw, could anyone enlighten me on why jabber (xmmp?) never took off in any major way? It seems nice?
Yes I like that you can choose whatever name you want, but ask your family members or old friends from school how they use Facebook. Being enable to find old friends and connect with far relatives is a huge reason for why Facebook is so popular. I am having a hard time time figuring out how to solve this problem if there aren't any constraints, culture or expectations for using real names. Maybe it's just a matter if time. Online aliases is more second nature to the coming generations. And still, the group and chat thing is very important imho. That's why I asked about XMPP. Would love if we could get a modern chat system as widely and universally used as email.
Thing is, people who want to be found will use their real or well-known names. Those who don't, won't - no matter what rules a given service wants to impose.
