I just deleted my Facebook profile a couple of weeks ago. I'm not one of those tinfoil hat privacy nazis who worry a lot about that kind of stuff, I just simply don't enjoy Facebook anymore and there's too much shady stuff going on. If you don't mind this then go ahead and use it to "connect with your friends" but personally I think Facebook became seriously uncool recently and I don't think that's going to change. I'm not boycotting or anything, I'm not mad at them, I just simply don't enjoy it anymore.
It's complicated and should really be written as a long blogpost rant and not as a comment but I will try to summarize it. Basically the problems are twofold: things that are inherent to all social networks and things that are Facebook-specific.
One thing I noticed on social networks with a very large userbase (the definition of a social network having a very large userbase is my mum being registered on it) is that the more life you have, the less likely that you're using it, hence the more boring person someone is, the more they post/comment on social networks, hence most of the user-generated "content" on Facebook is incredibly boring. This is very different from "small" networks where most users are "cool", "trendsetter" people. Obviously this is an oversimplification and I have really interesting friends who are on Facebook all the time, but it's still a generic rule none the less and it makes the whole experience more boring.
My particular problem with Facebook is that I simply don't get what's going on; who can see what. I mean, which action of mine will be posted on my wall, who will be able to see it, etc. This may not sound very humble but I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person but still with all that brainpower I just can't tell whether my theoretical ex-girlfriend can see the photos of me that my theoretical current girlfriend of mine posted and if she can, how to disable it. I mean, these are everyday trivial problems that average people living a normal life face, this is not just being afraid of the government / snake headed aliens mining your super secret personal data. Do I really want to show my theoretical drunk party photos with my old headmistress from my elementary school? But then how do I share them with my closest friends? The whole thing is just too much hassle so I wouldn't ever bother posting interesting stuff. Which leads to most people (or at least the intelligent ones) only posting boring, "politically correct" things that wouldn't offend even their old headmistress. Which leads to boring content.
"My particular problem with Facebook is that I simply don't get what's going on; who can see what. I mean, which action of mine will be posted on my wall, who will be able to see it, etc."
Given their track record it is safe to assume that everything you do will be public. If not now, then at some point in the future.
This is pretty much what it's come to. But it's confusing in the midst of this slow bait-and-switch.
When I signed up for facebook, a big reason was the confirmation of "real-life" friends. Facebook was different than blogs or myspace because the network was "real". We were sharing with our real friends. This is becoming less and less the case. Which means privacy is slowly eroding in a non-obvious way. Sure I can just start assuming everything is completely public but 1) my friends/contacts don't always realize it and 2) without the real privacy, why not just move to blogs, etc. where it's clear?
Yes, sorry, you're absolutely right, wrong choice of words. (in my first language we have the same word for 'hypothetical' and 'theoretical' hence I sometimes mix these two words up)
I still have mine, but I only use it for mobile applications which need to be able to share on it. Now that my mom has a Facebook for our dog that has more pictures than I do, I just stopped.
The reasoning here is the same as photo tagging, or wall posts. Friends can tag "you" in photos without your explicit acceptance of the tag. You have a much more powerful tool for preventing "prank" photo tags/wall posts/group joins than Facebook could ever invent technologically: social pressure. To wit, these people are nominally your friends; even if you've been somewhat promiscuous, and they're just your coworker, or acquaintance, or distant family member, you still have much more leverage over their behavior than Facebook ever will.
So, if Joe Idiot tags you in a photo of a goat, or joins you in an embarassing group: a) untag/unjoin yourself, and b) tell Joe THAT WAS NOT COOL. Optionally, unfriend Joe. I.e., exactly what you would have done if Joe wrote a blog post about your embarrassing medical problem, or put you on a mailing list you do not like.
I can choose in the privacy settings who sees what I'm tagged in. Specifically, I can say that tags are only seen by me, which would effectively turn off tagging. Can I do this with groups? I've tried, but can't seem to find it anywhere in the settings. If anyone knows, please share, I'm very interested in turning it off.
However, being tagged in a photo and joined to a group is COMPLETELY different. I think people know that you can be tagged in a photo without approval, but the underlying idea of groups are opt-in. This should have have happened!
Why does Facebook have such a history of bad decisions like this?
I -just- rejoined Facebook yesterday due to the fact that I seemed to be missing out on too many opportunities by boycotting it, and my 6-month-long boycott has made absolutely no dent in their popularity.
I once went to a info session that Facebook put on at our school (this was trying to attract coop students). One of the things that the previous coops, as well as the recruiters/presenters emphasized was the lack of formality and 'set' procedures. One coop recalled how he was directly responsible for a 20 minute downtime in facebook because he pushed something to production after testing it locally a bit.
Yeah, no real testing servers (they exist, but aren't actually required), no real dedicated QA, none of the usual trappings. The coop laughed it off. And the recruiter did too, and pointed out that a lot of responsibility is placed directly on whoever is coding the code. They're even the flexibility and freedom to do what they think they should do, and if it causes a little downtime? As long as its short, and nothing is lost, no problem. It's something to laugh at at the bar.
Now, I'm sure there's some embellishing going on there to ensnare more young minds, but I even if its half true, I think this anecdote provides a lot of insight into how facebook works. Perhaps many of the little privacy things isn't the result of Zuckerberg deciding that everyone doesn't need control, it's just the individual programmer placing it lower on their priorities to even think about, and there being no real overarching structure to impose these privacy concerns.
Until it gets released to production and 'blows up' in their face.
While it's not my primary means of communications, my Facebook account gets near 0 spam (both literal spam and "mailing lists which are fairly boring but every now and again I should check") which means that while I made everything else in my smartphone just give a little "pop" sound, Facebook messages (and SMSs) actually make a "pring-pring" (more noticeable) sound -- if my Facebook mailbox has something in it, there's a high likelihood it's a real person, needing something real from me (and there's a high likelihood that I want to give them that, since I actually know them...)
My point: It's actually rational to assume FB messages are more valuable, and given people who do that, it's equally rational to send them messages on FB :)
A friend of a friend offered me an opportunity recently for some development. They (who own the business) are big into Facebook and that the the first method of contact that they offered.
It's not a huge money-making opportunity, but it's the first step towards a path I've been wanting to take for quite some time.
It's not that I'm mining Facebook for jobs any more than I mine my phone for jobs... It's that by boycotting it, I cut off a means of contact that others might prefer. (And I could also appear childish or out-of-touch as well.)
Nothing against communicating via Facebook, if that is your thing. But it is definitely not childish to not communicate via Facebook. Boycott is too strong, perhaps, but if you simply see no use for it.
Personally I am just old fashioned in that way, I still run my own email server. I don't feel too happy about my communications belonging to some mega corporation.
Also, I don't like having to log in to FB to get my messages, and in turn to be trackable by all the sites that partner with FB.
That's just my reasons - but I don't boycott it. If somebody messages me on FB, I usually reply. I just don't initiate communication on FB.
For me, it's timely knowledge of friends doing things I might want to join in on, keeping up with a few groups and organizations that post things there, and cheaply signalling my affiliation with just about anything by joining a group named after it.
I also found a great band called "The 21st Century Monads" because I was looking through famous people's profiles, and it's the only music group on David Chalmers' page.
A good first test to see whether something is possibly a bad idea is to give it to a 13 year old boy and see if he makes dick jokes with it.
This feature seems ripe for the picking.
Not only that, but he also spells the acronym two different ways "NABLA" and "NAMBLA", don't know which one is the actual name. You'd think he'd mildly proofread his writing right?
People playing pranks like this was the first thing I thought of when I read the headlines about Facebook "streamlining" group membership. And yes, some of my actual friends would invite me to some very silly in-joke groups that I wouldn't voluntarily join.
The potential problems are reduced if these groups are private and _will remain_ private in future versions of Facebook.
Only your friends can add you into groups. You also don't have to participate in the group and they have made it very easy to leave. Jason is not a typical user and probably has a lot of crappy friends due to accepting requests from anyone. Adding an accept option would only add an unnecessary layer without changing much.
And how many of your "friends" are ACTUALLY your "friends"? As much as it was once fun to reconnect with somebody I shared an elementary-school classroom with, that's a connection I'll need to revisit if they're given the power to latch my profile onto whatever cause they want ... implying my support of that movement.
Facebook seems to have created Groups as their implementation of Twitter Lists. I can create a list and call it whatever I choose ... adding whomever I choose to it. But my sense is that the perception of a Facebook Group is different than a Twitter List because Facebook already has/had the concept of groups, and they DID require opt-in.
Do you remember what Zuckerberg said with this announcement? The 'pristine' social graph?
That's the whole point. He's trying to restore the meaningfulness of saying someone's a friend. Friends don't enroll friends in NAMBLA. I have to say, for the second day in a row I kind of agree with Zuckerberg. This isn't going to be popular, but it could actually lead to Facebook being less of a distraction and more of a genuine form of communication.
>"And how many of your "friends" are ACTUALLY your "friends"?"
By this token, I feel kind of sorry for those friends of mine who have gotten all MySpace about it and have 1,000 friends. They're the ones who are going to be most affected by this change. Perhaps the net effect will be that people will start unfriending more and honing their friend lists down to those who they actually know or who are not annoying. This would have an added benefit of increasing the quality of peoples' friend lists, or in other words, to more-tightly integrate users with their friends.
Yeah, this seems kind of silly. I think of facebook friends as people I might have met once, not people I would trust to add information to my profile.
So don't friend them on Facebook? No snark intended, I don't understand why that's always off the table in Facebook discussions.
I have 95 friends, they are all family or friends or coworkers. I previously had a lot more friends, but what's the point? I'm not friends with them, I don't care what's happening in their lives nor they in mine. I'm not even leaving room for the 'trust to add information to my profile argument'. Your perception of Facebook is kind of irrelevant, Facebook is giving you a platform that does one thing. You don't get the option to disagree with what it does based on a perception of what you think it does or should do -- aside from not engaging with their product or engaging in a way based on what the platform actually does.
Facebook is giving you a platform that does one thing
But that one thing keeps changing at the whim of Facebook. The service 'evolves' and expects the users to do the same.
As a user adjusts to the facebook eco-system, some arbitrary fundamental change comes out, making the user constantly reevaluating their 'friend' relationships.
> Adding an accept option would only add an unnecessary layer without changing much.
How about making a privacy option that allows you to set whether you automatically opt-in into groups or whether you want to be asked for a confirmation? I don't know about you, but I want to be in control of which groups I join, even if only my friends are able to force-join me.
Making public groups opt-in is probably a good idea. However opt-in wouldn't change much for private groups because no one else can see the private groups that you have been added to.
Except, given Facebook's history, I'm assuming we'll have to visit each and every one of those groups separately to unjoin them. That certainly would change my relationship to Facebook as a service if there is increased overhead in cleaning up the effects of unwanted features that are imposed on me.
Sorry, but I don't want my friends to be able to add me to groups without my permission anymore than I want people I don't even know to be able to do so. Whether somebody really thinks you'd like to be a part or decides to do so as a joke, it's still something I should have full control over.
I'm not outraged that people can do that with email because I know how email works at a technical level, and I'm comfortable trading that control for a standard decentralized communication medium that I understand the implications of. I do get annoyed when people actually do it, though, and that's why filters exist.
Facebook is different. They solely control the medium, and can actually fix it if people complain. Also, the implications are not as readily apparent as with email - this aspect was certainly not played up in the announcement yesterday - and posts like this help people understand exactly what's going on, so they can figure out how to use the system correctly.
And, really, if a feature isn't going to offer a meaningful improvement over email, why does it exist? "It's just like email" just tells me I'm going to keep using email.
Unlike mailing lists, groups on Facebook have hitherto been used mainly to _signal_ agreement with a particular sentiment or membership of a particular organisation.
Mailing lists with outrageous titles won't become directly linked to a prominent profile theoretically controlled by you or part of an "open graph" of your interests should Facebook ever decide to make them publically viewable (which their track record strongly suggests they might)
I left Facebook after their feature rollout at the beginning of the summer, so I can't check these things for myself. Do you really not receive notification when someone adds you to a group? If not, how is it easy to leave, given that you may not even know you're a member? And is there any way to know who added you, so that if someone keeps doing this to you, you'll know you need to tell them to stop or unfriend them?
Keep in mind that these "groups" are different from the previous version of groups that facebook use to have.
You get a notification when added to a group and can easily leave with one click. Groups are private by default which means that nobody outside of the group can see your private groups or any of the content.
This has made facebook a lot more interesting for me. Essentially it's a great way to have private discussions between my close group of friends without broadcasting to all my "friends".
My guess is Calacanis gets lots of notifications and he probably just missed it.
The group creator controls when the group is made public, and given Facebook's track record, you should probably assume anything you write in Facebook (except private messages) may eventually be public. Also I believe you can be "force joined" to non-private groups.
"identical amount of control that you're surrendering."
Not at all. If you send me an email without me asking, there is no public effect. One example of how this is bad with groups is what if I happen to be on a job search and someone adds me to the "I steal office supplies from my employer and sell them on eBay" group. Let's say a prospective employer is a friend of a FB friend of mine and looks at my profile and sees this. Job offer gone.
Counterpoint: you can remove yourself from a Facebook group, you can't remove yourself from a webpage or mailing list that someone else has control of. How's this so terrible again?
Facebook takes common words and redefines them -- so that on Facebook, the 'like' button mean 'subscribe to updates', not 'I think this is good'. Facebook makes more sense when you realise the work is misappropriated.
I wonder if we should just mentally translate the work 'Friend' on Facebook as 'person I allow to post about me on the internet'. Only friend that those people you trust to speak for you, and to you. You aren't declaring a public friendship, but delegating your privacy to them.
I'm sure Zuck and Sandberg went straight for the delete button on that email. "Oh its linkbait Calcanis ranting about something stupid and trolling for an Adviser gig."
Its so odd, I do really like JCal's stance on other issues (paid pitching groups) but his fb rants are annoying.
He should have wrote them a thank you letter for delivering an easy to use tool for exporting all content rather than just a simple PS mention.
fb's is following their social design process of solving problems. the solution to someone joining you to a sketchy group is also solved by social design - you un-join, un-friend the person, and post quick status update stating you think the group is crap and call out the person that signed you up. Its not totally ideal but there are clear social repercussions for such bad behavior, which is an advantage of social design.
I'm not sure if this is related. I clicked "like" on an article someone posted (or I thought was an article) and now new articles from that company seems to be showing up in my news feed. What's the deal with that?
