>"We censor a lot of things, why not censor Facebook?"
That seems like a really odd sentiment for the founder of The Pirate Bay. I was hoping he'd have a more creative solution than censorship given the history of his site.
> Mark Zuckerberg is a rich white dude from a really privileged background
Since when does this mean that he knows nothing of culture? I feel like he's making a lot of generalizations: Europe is a giant continent with over 50 countries, most of which contain white people. How can he claim that Zuckerberg is "interfering with our local culture" of ALL of Europe? Seems fishy.
Still, Facebook's privacy policy, as well as its usage, are quite annoying, and comprise the reason that I don't use the service. It's extremely easy to avoid: simply tell people that you know that you don't have a Facebook, and they communicate with you via SMS, calls, etc.
"Our" might be a stretch; the children of Mother Europa are quite diverse unto themselves, so one person claiming to be "European" only begins to make sense under "enemy of my enemy..." conditions.
But "all of Europe" seems feasible to me. Facebook does have a massive outreach coming from the Internet, after all.
"And really you can't opt out of Facebook. I'm not on Facebook but there are a lot of drawbacks in my offline world. No party invitations, no updates from my friends, people stop talking to you, because you're not on Facebook. So it has real life implications."
I've never experienced this. Perhaps if you are some ultra-socialite, yes, but I have a couple close friends and we reach out to each other in various ways which mostly don't involve facebook. I think this is a phrase that just gets repeated without people actually thinking about their own situation.
That isn't a result of Facebook, that's a result of inconsiderate friends. There are a couple friends in my group that aren't on Facebook, so we text them.
If all of my friends (coworkers, work friends, casual acquaintances) are using Facebook for events, and I'm the one insisting they contact me directly, then I feel like I'm being the inconsiderate one.
Agree. My son went through this. A HS sailing team arranged a party on Facebook. My son isn't on Facebook and was left out. Bad? Yes. Should the team not have done that? Sure. Should the coaches have intervened (if they even knew)? Of course.
A reasonable analogy would be someone who didn't accept texts and insisted on party invitations (and communicating) through post or in-person visits. It's easy to say "Well a real friend would make the time to drop by", and that's perhaps a consistent definition of "real friend". But the fact remains that there's a whole host of pleasant social interactions (many of which others would define as "real friends") that you'd miss out on if you only relied on more inefficient communications technologies.
I'm not a heavy Facebook user, and I've considered deleting it multiple times, but each time I couldn't convince myself that there was any advantage to doing so over just using it as an inbox. Particularly with things like the News Feed Eradicator Chrome extension, I can basically pretend that all the irritating parts of Facebook don't exist when I check my messages and events. Having a single place where all the members of a group can see and share information on their own schedules is infinitely more convenient than trying to hack together the same thing over multiple bilateral communication channels (i.e texting/calling). Sure it would be better if it was federated, but given that there is no such widely-used solution, it's not hard to understand how people refusing to participate in FB groups can be fairly perceived as being the inconsiderate one (or else being left out altogether).
What if they didn't have a phone? would you take the time to write them letters? wouldn't your interactions be much different? That's the point.
At what level of saturation does the person opting-out of a communication medium become the more difficult one? The majority of people in the US have a social media account.
Well, it's plausible, but the most natural case is that acquaintances use Facebook as a low-touch way of staying in contact.
I admit if I wanted to be friendly acquaintances with people, then Facebook is probably the best way to do so.
However, close friends share information without using Facebook. I call my close friends on their birthdays. My acquaintances, I'll +1 the long thread of "happy birthday" messages on facebook, just like everyone else.
I am very conscious that I've stopped inviting semi-friends who aren't on Facebook to my events. My closest friends I'll still invite in person, but it's so much more effort to invite someone not via Facebook that in the marginal case it easily tips them from "may as well invite" to "I can't be bothered".
From my friends and family i'm the only one not on FB or Whatsapp,i'm listening every week why i don't join so the can send me update sand invitation cause every time the have to remember that i'm not on their lists/groups and that they have specifically phone/text me about family/friends/celebration/news. I've missed several friends dinners cause no one thought about the "hermit".
If someone stops talking to me or befriending because I'm less on facebook or not visiting the site at all, then by all means please I definitely want to lose that "friend".
When people say "friends", they often don't mean just in the "Friends Will Be Friends" sense, they also mean it to include "acquaintances I'd like to keep in touch with", "cute people I'd like to get to know better", "ex-coworker who I got well along with", etc.
My workplace has said unfriending someone on Facebook is considered bullying. I deactivated Facebook long before that rule for work reasons.
But I do find since then I am socially isolated. I'm not a social person at all (4 years since I went out anywhere) but the one good thing Facebook did was keep me in the social world.
I know I've missed a few wedding invitations, gatherings of friends, lots of things I find out about later but things I'm sure I never will know about.
Doesn't that just mean you have to revert to circa 2000 norms? I.e. call a random friend once a week or so, to catch the news and ensure your social stickiness?
Facebook is a 'free'[1] community and every community has some form of leader. Sometimes those with direction are dictators (sometimes), as in they dictate orders so that others can follow the direction. Facebook is very successful and I don't see how this leadership style is failing them, yet.
[1] Yes, I understand 'you are the product' on free sites like this.
Is this article for real? I start a website and it becomes insanely popular then someone suggests it is wrong that I "wasn't elected" to be the leader of it. Only in Europe...
Facebook has its issues and is ready to be replaced any day now, but it's still a private site with private rules and use of it is optional.
> if you look at it from a democracy standpoint, Mark
Zuckerberg is a dictator. I did not elect him. He sets
the rules
You kind of did, when you signed up.
> And really you can't opt out of Facebook. I'm not on
Facebook but there are a lot of drawbacks in my offline
world. No party invitations, no updates from my friends,
people stop talking to you, because you're not on
Facebook. So it has real life implications.
Oh yes you can. Facebook is just about the worst place for
actually expanding your social life.
When I was there, when I would make a post, it often felt
like I was talking to everyone and no one at the same time.
Problem is many people signed up years ago and I bet they've changed their ToS and privacy policy 100 times since then without people noticing.
Facebook satisfied our needs to connect with our friends when it arrived. Now it's 100% ads. I used to have real discussions with friends, but the comment quality today is basically on par with youtube (if not worse).
> Problem is many people signed up years ago and I bet they've changed their ToS and privacy policy 100 times since then without people noticing.
Honestly that sounds functionally like democracy still.
People (not I) voted for policies years ago have have changed a thousand times since, with or without people noticing.
Officials campaign promising to serve constituents in some way (we can call this their Terms of Service), people elect them, then they change those terms often, sometimes dramatically, sometimes on day 0. Whether people notice or not seems to have little effect.
I agree with your second point. Not being on Facebook affects none of my life, 'real' or not. And as far as I know, even those in my small friend group who are on Facebook don't really use it much.
I don't think Facebook runs the lives of those around me as much as many people seem to think it does. Maybe it does in other social circles, but it's still on you. If you're dependent on Facebook, that's your problem and it's not really hard to put an end to it.
I hear people talking about Facebook a lot in a tone that sounds like they are making excuses. At the end of the day, if you really think you need it, that's fine but it's on you.
I never had a FB account, and I've tried to discourage people from using it every since Beacon came to light, back in 2007/8. FB is a scourge on the web.
That said, I never really understood why here of all places he gets grilled over that phrase. I mean, he was right - they were dumb for uploading personal data and pictures to some unknown site owned by some unknown kid. Should he pretend otherwise? Is hypocrisy or stupidity a requirement for running a social network?
It reminds me of the quote from Red Mars, "It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did."
> That said, I never really understood why here of all places he gets grilled over that phrase. I mean, he was right - they were dumb for uploading personal data and pictures to some unknown site owned by some unknown kid. Should he pretend otherwise?
Because everything he says and everything he indicates about his beliefs is that sharing is a net good and everybody should be doing it as much as possible (I'm simplifying a little bit, of course). Just because you (and many here) feel differently doesn't mean it's impossible that someone could genuinely believe in the mission of connecting everyone, as opposed to thinking people are "dumb fucks" for wanting to do so.
Listen to Larry Page speak enough times and you'll get the same sense: he genuinely believes (to at least some degree) 1) organizing all the world's information from every possible source does powerful good that is more than worth the risks/costs and 2) advertisements are effectively a human-curated addendum to information-seeking and thus entirely consistent with the "organizing information" goal. The fact that you or I may disagree with those ideas doesn't make him a hypocrite for his true-believer status.
> Is hypocrisy or stupidity a requirement for running a social network?
This is a beyond-bizarre assertion. Loudly and constantly extolling the value of less and less barriers to oversharing when you in fact agree with many people that those doing so are dumb _is_ hypocrisy. To use the same analogy, it's as if there were early records of Larry Page saying something like "once everyone gets their information filtered through us, we can nudge them into believing whatever we want". Do you think the absence of such records indicates that LP is a hypocrite?
Well said. The difference between facebook, the new friendster/AOL is night and day compared to Google in terms of so many different metrics including the way it started - based on true algorithmic approaches as opposed to a way to voyeuristically spy on classmates for doxxing purposes and such.
To me, there's a subtlety - though I realize Zuckerberg may not have meant it. One may believe that sharing is good and should be encouraged, while recognizing that there are dumb ways of going about it.
People were uploading their personal data, expecting it not to be completely out in the open (back then, FB was even restricted to colleges), despite the site being run by someone they have never heard about.
It's like believing that people should travel and meet new places, it doesn't mean you can't also believe that entering in an unmarked "taxi" in a foreign country in a high crime area is a dumb move.
That's fair, and I did think of that for a second. The fact remains that he was providing a service while calling his users dumb fucks for using the service; Effectively, he was peddling something that he clearly believed was against the interests of his users.
When the person constantly trying to convince 7 billion people that sharing every aspect of their lives on his platform is a good idea, it seems entirely relevant that he has demonstrated in the past that he will gladly market you something that he believes is damaging or dangerous or whatever. This is part why people are more inclined to think of the guy as a snake than many other tech leaders: while it's obviously in their interest to sell you their product, you can make a much more plausible case that Bezos or Jobs or Page or Brin actually believe in their pitch too.
If I were held responsible for snippets of casual conversations had amongst peers behind closed doors and as a very young adult...best case scenario I'd be flipping burgers, worst case I'd be behind bars.
If Mark Zuckerberg were held responsible for snippets of casual conversations had amongst peers behind closed doors and as a very young adult...best case scenario he'd be flipping burgers, worst case he'd be behind bars.
Well I agree I don't know why people trust big tech companies. I guess most people don't trust them they just put up with the abuse. Even if you trust facebook then you have to trust their employees and the third parties they share your information with. Everything you do online probably exists on many different servers, some of which are insecure, allowing the many world governments (china, russia, five-eyes) to extract everything they want, thus putting it on more insecure servers, where it falls into the hands of criminals and gets sold on the dark web for bitcoin.
That seems like a really odd sentiment for the founder of The Pirate Bay. I was hoping he'd have a more creative solution than censorship given the history of his site.