Is Facebook the AOL of 2021? (zdnet.com) 134
A new article at ZDNet argues that "The 1990s had a word for being trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact: AOL."
"Facebook and its ilk are the rebirth of that limited vision." Once upon a time, roughly thirty years ago, there was a computer network called America Online... There was already an Internet, but most people didn't know how to use it or even that it existed. AOL, and a couple of competitors, Compuserve and Prodigy, offered people online things they could do, such as chat with other people... The services had only one drawback, which was that they were limited. People couldn't do just whatever they wanted, they could only pick from a small menu of functions, such as chat, that the services provided... As it grew and grew, the World Wide Web became an amazing place in contrast to AOL... People were so excited by the World Wide Web, they never wanted to go back to AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy. The three services withered...
People got excited about Facebook because it was a place where they could find real people they knew, just like MySpace, but also because it had some features like AOL, like the game Farmville. Business people were even more excited because Facebook started to generate a lot of advertising revenue. Advertisers liked Facebook because it not only knew who was talking to whom, it also knew a little bit about the hobbies and interests of people. Advertisers liked that because they could use the information to "target" their ads like never before. Smart people said that Facebook had what are known as "network effects." It became more powerful the more people joined it...
There were just a couple problems with Facebook. Facebook was a lot like AOL. It limited people by telling them with whom they could communicate.... One of the bad things was that people no longer had control. They had given so much information about themselves to Facebook and its competitors that it was like those companies owned people when they were in Cyberspace. The services didn't seem to do a great job of handling people's information, either.
What's interesting about this article is it even tells you how the story ends: Then one day, someone smart built a new technology that didn't require people to sign away their information. Now, people could meet anyone they wanted and talk about whatever they wanted, not just what Facebook or its competitors said was okay. People felt more relaxed, too, because even though there were ads, people could meet up in Cyberspace without every single action they took being used to fuel an advertising machine.
People got excited again, like the first time they found the Web and gave up on AOL.
But there our story ends, because that chapter has not yet been written.
"Facebook and its ilk are the rebirth of that limited vision." Once upon a time, roughly thirty years ago, there was a computer network called America Online... There was already an Internet, but most people didn't know how to use it or even that it existed. AOL, and a couple of competitors, Compuserve and Prodigy, offered people online things they could do, such as chat with other people... The services had only one drawback, which was that they were limited. People couldn't do just whatever they wanted, they could only pick from a small menu of functions, such as chat, that the services provided... As it grew and grew, the World Wide Web became an amazing place in contrast to AOL... People were so excited by the World Wide Web, they never wanted to go back to AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy. The three services withered...
People got excited about Facebook because it was a place where they could find real people they knew, just like MySpace, but also because it had some features like AOL, like the game Farmville. Business people were even more excited because Facebook started to generate a lot of advertising revenue. Advertisers liked Facebook because it not only knew who was talking to whom, it also knew a little bit about the hobbies and interests of people. Advertisers liked that because they could use the information to "target" their ads like never before. Smart people said that Facebook had what are known as "network effects." It became more powerful the more people joined it...
There were just a couple problems with Facebook. Facebook was a lot like AOL. It limited people by telling them with whom they could communicate.... One of the bad things was that people no longer had control. They had given so much information about themselves to Facebook and its competitors that it was like those companies owned people when they were in Cyberspace. The services didn't seem to do a great job of handling people's information, either.
What's interesting about this article is it even tells you how the story ends: Then one day, someone smart built a new technology that didn't require people to sign away their information. Now, people could meet anyone they wanted and talk about whatever they wanted, not just what Facebook or its competitors said was okay. People felt more relaxed, too, because even though there were ads, people could meet up in Cyberspace without every single action they took being used to fuel an advertising machine.
People got excited again, like the first time they found the Web and gave up on AOL.
But there our story ends, because that chapter has not yet been written.
Yes but... (Score:5, Insightful)
What got people of AOL was the greater range of 0-cost applications outside their walled garden. Acheiving the article's glorious nirvana, given Facebook is alreade "free", requires some killer app outside that walled garden. Facebook are well aware, and every time a new idea sprouts, they leap to copy or envelop it. Perhaps the only thing what will limit Facebook will be the anti-trust laws.
Compuserve (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Compuserve (Score:4, Insightful)
The real story here is that people migrate to follow their friends. As everyone on AOL moved to the web and used the AOL services less and less it snowballed. Eventually the same will happen to Facebook.
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The real story here is that people migrate to follow their friends. As everyone on AOL moved to the web and used the AOL services less and less it snowballed. Eventually the same will happen to Facebook.
There was somewhere for people to go outside of AOL (the "world wide web"). There is nowhere for people to go outside of the WWW.
Re:Compuserve (Score:4, Interesting)
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Except, you know, outside?
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There was somewhere for people to go outside of AOL (the "world wide web"). There is nowhere for people to go outside of the WWW.
IRC?
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NBC has been trying with a bunch of fluff on CNBC to fill "prime time" when the US financial markets are closed:
American Greed
Back in the Game
Billion Dollar Buyer
Blue Collar Millionaires
Cash Pad
Cleveland Hustles
Deal or No Deal (since 2018)
The Deed
Five
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I think the answer to if you are right about this is 'it depends.'
If by facebook, you mean the 'facebook.com' property, than sure I think it will happen, if you mean Facebook the company I am less certain. So far they been both fairly aggressive and at least somewhat canny when it comes to buying the 'next big thing' I think there is a very good chance wherever people go next be it a 1:1 replacement like myspace -> facebook, or if certain groups with shared interests move to more tailored/target platform
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This isn't what happened. In its heyday (2002), AOL by this time was a web browser as well as its branded services. It was one application you opened, were able to browser the web and got access to all these AOL services, as well as a friends list, chat rooms, and instant messaging.
AOL's problem was that it's "main" service was as a dial-up internet provider. As broadband became available, it was a tough value proposition for people to continue paying AOL just to use its services, especially when its instan
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AOL's problem was that it's "main" service was as a dial-up internet provider. As broadband became available, it was a tough value proposition for people to continue paying AOL just to use its services, especially when its instant messenger was already free.
People paid for AOL (or Internet access)?
I had AOL back in the day and every time I tried to leave because there wasn't much to do, they'd offer me another free ____ hours to stay and try them out again.
When AOL stopped extending my free trial, I'd just go through with the cancellation, and then jump to Prodigy, CompuServe, MSN, MindSpring, Earthlink, etc.
Rinse, repeat.
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I always gauged the @aol.com email address as an idiot detector. Too bad FB users dont have to wear a marker like that :-)
Ahhhh! I'm going to report you to AOL for violating the TOS! Ahhh! (Commonly heard every time someone was mean to some idiot who had written something like "u need to see that 4 sum of us aol is da best ftw!" to USENET.)
Re:Yes but... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Perhaps the only thing what will limit Facebook will be the anti-trust laws."
I'd wager boredom.
As is, much of the thrill and promise of the early web has given way to drudgery and co-dependency, to which you have to wonder why people even bother?
That was the hallmark of AOL towards the end, and even with the overweening ambition of the Time-Warner merger, it ultimately fizzled when people decided they'd rather do something else.
Same with /. Better than most social media, but the divergent voices has normalized to blandness, mostly. And beyond the occasional time killer of old stomping grounds, most have moved on to something else.
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I'd wager boredom.
This.
Facebook, no matter how big and powerful they are, ultimately can't compete with the invention, thrill and movement of the larger Internet. They've already reached the point where their new features are things that they're copying from elsewhere. Sooner or later, they'll fall behind.
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I'd wager boredom.
This.
LOL!
Boredom is what keeps people going back for more hits.
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Two different kinds of boredom.
Yes, FB is essentially a short-term gratification machine. But it delivers the same kind of hit, and there are other exciting thing in the world. The variety on FB is much larger than, say, playing Pong, but at least among people who've been using it for a long time, the feeling of "more of the same" eventually sets in. The same way that MMORPGs keep you hooked and grinding away for hours, but sooner or later you realize that it's just the same quest with different words and d
Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Facebook is starting to become worse and worse, as a service. There is, in my opinion, one root cause for this. I'll summarize the best I can:
The decision factors at Facebook, whoever they might be, have come to the conclusion that people, in general, are not bright, and need to be handheld. As a result, the set of services provided by Facebook have slowly but surely "evolved" in such a way that they no longer wait for the user to configure this and that, instead they preemptively configure stuff based on some generic algorithms which benefit Facebook (or, at least, that's their assumption).
Chronologically sorted posts, from newest to oldest? Bah, who needs that. let's sort them by recent activity.
Alphabetically sorted groups? Nah. Maybe based on member count? Nah. Posting frequency? Nah. Geolocation? Nah. In fact, I have no idea how groups are sorted, my take is: randomly.
If you want Facebook to stop pushing "People you might know" in your face, good luck with that. It conflicts with their interest, they'd have none of your preferences. Fuck what you want.
Ads are completely fucked up. Most ads they push my way have nothing to do with my (pretty wide) areas of interest.
Everything concerning sorting is buggy as fuck. Sorting by "oldest comments first" won't work. "Most relevant"? Result is a bunch of crap. Any sorting is FUBAR.
Good luck trying to search for anything. Even your own content is difficult to search for.
I could go on and on, point is: the whole platform is a total mess.
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The decision factors at Facebook, whoever they might be, have come to the conclusion that people, in general, are not bright, and need to be handheld.
Almost. They've discovered that most people are dumb and easily led, so they're leading them to whatever produces the most ad impressions.
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These are good points and if they keeping messing up their UI people might leave. But I don't think they will leave becasue of privacy. Most people don't care about privacy.
AOL was fundamentally different. You paid by the month for it, so when people didnt need dialup, they cancelled to stop the billing and moved on. Facebook is free (ignoring the cost to your privacy) and ISP agnostic, so it doesn't have the impetus that caused people to dump AOL.
If they get their UI act together Facebook is in no danger.
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Yeah. In their desire to "drive engagement" or whatnot with random people or businesses I neither know or care about has been steadily reducing its utility for what I for use it (And Myspace before it, Tribe before Myspace, Friendster before Tribe, and Livejournal before Friendster.) for: keeping up and in touch with actual friends I do care about but don't see in-person every day and whose time I don't want to monopolize by being rude enough to drag them into a non-urgent voice call. Oh, it's still possi
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I'll wager this of the vaccinated population there is a LARGER percentage of unthinking dopes that got a shot because widely fallacious reasoning based on either misinformation or inadequate information to make an informed decision, than among the dissenters. You'll find no shortage of true stupidity in either group there is no monopoly on dumb in either camp.
Sure, in most groups there a lot of dumb people. I don't care about that.
It doesn't matter if people get vaccinated for right reasons or wrong, because they know what they're doing or not. As long as they get vaccinated.
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Let me translate what you wrote just so its clear to YOU.
"As long as I get my way fuck everyone else."
You clearly don't care about the rights or well being of others not really. You pretend to, probably even try and convince yourself you do but ultimately it comes down to in the case of the pandemic anyway - that you just want to go back to your normal. You don't actually care about the social costs, you don't actually care about the morality of how vaccines are come by. You don't really care the reasons f
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It's true that my 10-year-old's life is more important to me than your freedom to cough germs on her, but I wasn't even talking about freedom. I didn't support using jackbooted thugs to forcibly inject people who keenly want Darwin Awards.
My friend of 40 years died in the ICU last week after refusing intubation. I respected his rights to the last. But I desperately wish he had gotten vaccinated a few months ago when he had that option. He would almost certainly still be alive.
Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Social costs"? Oh, boo goddamned hoo. It's two one-hour breaks three weeks apart to pop in and get the shots. Yeah, times 300+ million people, that's a lot of lost productivity and there's a cost to that. But so what? Two hours of my time is trivial versus dying, or transmitting COVID to someone who might die, or the health repercussions (in myself or others) of a major but non-fatal case, or just getting a minor case and having to stay home sick for a day or two, or the gigantic fucking quagmire of misery that has been this last year and a half that's already been taken away, and possibly the next whole fucking year that you lot obviously want to steal from us.
And morality? Yeah, GTFO with that BS. I've read the same WHO pleas about not getting boosters until the 3rd world gets their initial shots. And I'm not unsympathetic to where they're coming from. But the boosters wouldn't be necessary in the first place if you people cared a whit about anyone or anything but "muh freedumbs" to spread disease like a plague rat from the middle ages; and had exercised a bare minimum of social and civic responsibility by taking two hours out of a month to run out and get your damn shots before Delta broke out. So don't you dare trot out that "As long as I get my way fuck everyone else." line. Because intentionally spreading a deadly disease that can now be easily prevented is the epitome of: "fuck everyone else."
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However I would also suspect that it does not represent the vast vast majority of people who have refused vaccines either because they don't trust them or on ethical grounds (me for example)
Out of interest, what are the ethical grounds for refusing a vaccine?
Re: Yes but... (Score:2)
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The big appeal of facebook is for people to catch up with their family and friends so as long as their family and friends are there and keep on sharing their activities then people will come back since there will be something new. Facebook has branched out into games etc also. So it is certainly within its power to maintain user interest. Its not lack of user interest that killed AOL. Its that people got broadband and AOL was a monthly fee service for dialup so people were compelled to drop it to stop the m
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Dream on. That's never going to happen.
Re:Yes but... (Score:5, Insightful)
What got people of AOL was the greater range of 0-cost applications outside their walled garden.
No, what got people out of AOL was cable and phone companies getting directly into the ISP biz. People didn't use AOL for the abysmally bad services that were inside the walled garden, they used it because AOL carpet bombed the entire country with free floppies (and later CD-ROMs) containing their client software, so for a lot of people it was simply the path of least resistance to getting something resembling an ISP.
Re: Yes but... (Score:3)
Re: Yes but... (Score:3)
Iâ(TM)d also say it was the era of dialup. AOL made it very easy to connect to the internet and their service. Yes, it provided a browser to access sites outside AOLâ¦eventually.
But, when it became easier to connect to the internet and people discovered they could create their own presence on the internet, better options became available.
I still remember when Trumpet Winsock became available - thatâ(TM)s when I learned how to program for the net and not a single point dialup app like t
Re: Yes but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Yes but... (Score:4, Funny)
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they used it because AOL carpet bombed the entire country with free floppies (and later CD-ROMs) containing their client software, so for a lot of people it was simply the path of least resistance to getting something resembling an ISP.
They also had (still have) excellent coverage. My parents in podunk Montana used AOL as recently as a few years ago because it was the only option. No broadband and AOL was the only dialup ISP that was a local call.
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Two things killed AOL:
1) Dial-up. AOL was king during the dial-up era of internet acce
Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Insightful)
given Facebook is already "free", requires some killer app outside that walled garden. Facebook are well aware, and every time a new idea sprouts, they leap to copy or envelop it. Perhaps the only thing what will limit Facebook will be the anti-trust laws.
Which is exactly why Facebook isn't going anywhere.
We all wish Facebook, and all of its toxic bullshit, would go away. But, unlike AOL, Compuserve, etc., Facebook isn't based on selling people an actual product, i.e., "pay us $10 a month and you can chat with all your friends".
Unlike those other companies, Facebook is first and foremost an advertising company. Facebook has trackers on 25% of websites and in 60% of the most popular apps, which allows them to make a gazillion dollars a day from advertising. And one of the great things about making that much money is that you can buy up all the competition, and, buy off any politicians who start mentioning "Antitrust laws".
Just look what happened when California tried to stop companies like Uber from exploiting people who are desperate for work. Uber and the rest of its "gig economy" ilk spent a shitload of money on an advertising campaign that convinced people to vote against their own best interests. Facebook has more money than all those companies combined, several times over.
If people consumed less sugar the health benefits, to both individuals and society in general, would be huge. But it is never going to happen because sugar is an enormously profitable business. Facebook is the high fructose corn syrup of the digital world.
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"Perhaps the only thing what will limit Facebook will be the anti-trust laws."
I honestly can't see how splitting off Instagram and WhatApp from FB is going to solve the problem though.
I think better would be make Facebook pay to setup an open alternative that then gets spun off to public ownership that uses reasonable advertising (no micro targeting, no access of data to 3rd parties) at the minimal level required to make it self supporting. This would then also be subject to 1st amendment protections so we'd solve another problem at the same time.
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But rival ISPs sprang up and AOL customers left the shitty service in droves. AOL even hastened the exodus by becoming customer retention assholes to the point it made headlines.
I should also
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Anti-trust arguments against Facebook are very, very, very weak IMO. As long as someone can offer an alternative to it, and they often do, there is no real monopoly. Its entirely by user choice that people use Facebook and they have alternatives. Facebook is actually and can be protected from antitrust issues so long the cost of entry of competitors is low so you have startups, which gives Facebook the chance to say, look there are other services people can use and they are easy to start up. So its kind of
How can there be advertising without censorship? (Score:3)
If a company has the power to push advertising it has the power to censor content, which it will use to please it's advertisers.
There is no business model in fully open source federated/P2P social media.
Sure there is a model for it (Score:5, Interesting)
Here are a few good examples for chargeable features which are easy sells:
1. How much storage do most people have on their iPhones? Usually very little and with no expandability. A P2P social media app could charge for storing/caching publicly-posted content (as in posted to all users who are in your friend group) online to improve both storage and performance, as well as to take care of limited connectivity scenarios (e.g. people stuck on 3G). Otherwise, users would have to store the entire feed history on their phones, which would soon clog up or would only be able to see a few days worth of timeline.
2. Strike a deal with news paywalls. The P2P app could offer a cheap method of allowing users to read old media, at a small price. News companies can split the profit amongst a pool based upon viewership and users only have to pay a fraction of the cost of the original subscription price (basically Spotify for news). Only news which gets read gets a payout.
3. Add dating/personals promotion integration, except personals could also cater for sex workers in the local area. If you scope your P2P social media as friend-to-friend, then two people who pay for this feature (who are strangers) can communicate outside of the friend-to-friend restrictions in a safe way. To minimise on fraud, both parties can filter based upon distance and other criteria.
4. Identity Verification and Protection. Users can pay an annual charge to show as verified by providing official paperwork. The service could be outsourced to Experian or another competent company at 50:50 profit. Cryptographic tokens could be issued, bound to the users devices and then used to sign that messages came from an authorised device, while publicly-posted content could be signed by the device and then countersigned (notarised) by central servers and stored centrally (based upon a user ID).
5. Charge for API leveraging. The system could be used to enable video games (incl. retro games) to provide matchmaking over the top of the system. Games developers could be charged for API access, which would give them a system which breaks the boundaries of individual games storefronts.
Ok, so that’s just a few ideas.
Also, to guard against people making rival apps, just have an API key for the root directory servers which is regularly rotated while also requiring users to use the latest version of the app through version checking. Or, simply make the API unstable.
No, it's worse than AOL (Score:5, Informative)
AOL was made to provide services to users. facebook is designed to siphon data from users, the services are just bait.
Re:No, it's worse than AOL (Score:5, Interesting)
The original AOL model, the users were the customers. The Facebook model is that the users are the product. This is a big difference.
It would be nice if some social network could take the place of Facebook, but the problem is that it takes a TON of computing power, server design, and geographic physical presence to have something that is usable. One can't just throw a Linux box in a corner and call it done, it requires an extensive network to do it... and because people are cheapskates, there are only real two ways it will be paid for... either government grants (with people bitching how the government will have access to everything on the site, or it is politically tainted), or intrusive ads. There are not really any relevant revenue streams that a social network could use, and be able to keep up with demand.
What -might- work are smaller social networks run by organizations, private companies, etc. Basically similar to old school ISPs, and each social network is able to share stuff with others. Of course, we are reinventing SMTP, IRC, NNTP, and a lot of old school protocols in the process of doing so, but this is by far the most sustainable model, and the most secure, because only posts and such that are meant for world consumption leave the social network for others.
Re:No, it's worse than AOL (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be nice if some social network could take the place of Facebook, but the problem is that it takes a TON of computing power, server design, and geographic physical presence to have something that is usable.
Google already proved even if you build it, they won't necessarily come.
One can't just throw a Linux box in a corner and call it done
Actually, if you have something to share with the rest of the internet, that is all you need. The catch is, you have to do it without the advantage of Facebook's preexisting captive audience. Social media exists because most people don't generate enough content to truly need their own personal web server.
Re: No, it's worse than AOL (Score:3)
Actually, if you have something to share with the rest of the internet, that is all you need.
Fully agree.
I've had armies here on /. trying to convince me otherwisey although I already host several small business sites of my own amd run my own email server for 15 years now. The box in the corner is a 10 year old AMD Athlon with a 250 GB SSD for caching and OS, and a fuckton of spinning rust for the bulk of data. I've been constantly "apt dist-upgrade"-ing since Debian 6 or 7.
And although my cellphone probably has better specs these days, it works like a charm.
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Google already proved even if you build it, they won't necessarily come.
No, what Google proved, as if we needed any more proof, is that Google uses users are unpaid beta testers. They didn't kill G+, they moved the functionality into G Suite where only paying customers get access to it. G+ was just gaining momentum when they did this, because it finally didn't suck. They literally decided not to have a successful social network.
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Re: No, it's worse than AOL (Score:2)
Re: No, it's worse than AOL (Score:2)
Not even close (Score:5, Funny)
I have never gotten a coaster from Facebook! What a rip-off!
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Huh? What else could have been the intended purpose? IIRC these coasters contained 10 hours of AOL. Well, that's nice, but what was I supposed to do tomorrow?
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If they did it daily, we could've talked, but 10 hours a week?
A WEEK?
Re: Not even close (Score:2)
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No. AOL was multiple services and an ISP (Score:2)
...all wrapped up together. You literally couldnt do anything else with an AOL account other than use their services originally, whereas Facebook is at the end of the day just another website and users can easily hop to others when they get sick of it. And they do.
Re:No. AOL was multiple services and an ISP (Score:5, Interesting)
Users can easily hop to another web site, but Facebook has that covered as well. Anything with advertising can get a bit more by agreeing to send data to Facebook. They are the Big Brother Libertarians squeal about. . .errr. . .on Facebook.
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Re: No. AOL was multiple services and an ISP (Score:2)
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You do know you can clear cookies in your browser,. right?
Do not slander AOL! (Score:3)
How dare you!
Re: Do not slander AOL! (Score:2)
Gos I got so tired of it when AOL stopped metering their access. The rest of the bet got flooded with their sexual predators overnight.
Caps lock? (Score:2)
It's a circle (Score:4, Interesting)
people could meet anyone they wanted and talk about whatever they wanted
Until exactly the same pressure groups started to use exactly the same arguments and exactly the same tactics to ban certain subjects, certain people and certain groups.
We have to face it, there are some topics (for example: crime, terror, exploitation. extremism) that society - or at least vocal members of it - would like to suppress. They have always been successful in the past and as individuals grow more insecure, there is every sign that more come under edict in the future.
This is especially true as countries become more internet-aware and use their individual powers to determine what is and is not, permissible within their own borders.
The failure of AOL and all the other systems of their day is that they failed to adapt. In the 21st century it is the likes of FB and the other internet giants that are driving change, not lagging it.
I can predict the future (Score:5, Insightful)
When FB goes the AOL way, people will leave its walled garden in droves, only to be captured by yet another monopolistic company in some other, creative form of online abuse.
Why would things change? Forget your internet nirvana: it ain't happening.
Re: I can predict the future (Score:2)
Clubs and societies (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: Clubs and societies (Score:2)
Not a technical problem (Score:5, Insightful)
"Then one day, someone smart built a new technology that didn't require people to sign away their information."
Facebook is an economics and legislature problem, not a technical problem. There will always be a long line of people like Zuckerberg who will step in to make a 'free' service to compete with anything you have to charge for, until legislation is passed to make it impossible.
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There will always be...a 'free' service to compete with anything you have to charge for, until legislation is passed to make it impossible.
I've done this thought experiment before. Would it be possible to pass a law that makes illegal the monetization of data?
First, let's pretend that we magically flipped a switch, and it was illegal. Facebook, Google, and YouTube immediately cease operations, because their revenue disappears immediately, cause they can't pay their electric bill. Three most popular Ameri
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Legislation doesn't need to be so severe to have an impact, and to allow others to attempt viable alternatives. This could come in the form of splitting up the companies, that worked in the past with oil and telcos. Split away Instagram, messaging, VR, etc.
Limiting the amount of data they retain about you wouldn't necessarily kill them either, they could still serve ads, just not so surgically targeted. Revenue would go down certainly, but it wouldn't be zero. See DuckDuckGo.
Facebook have so much momentum n
Re: Not a technical problem (Score:2)
FB is the less confusing ... (Score:2)
... MySpace and a more usable E-Mail without subject lines and the pretty pictures right there in the message feed.
It has a very neat people-search-index on top of that.
Those are the selling points of FB.
Build a replacement of E-Mail that isn't from the steam-age of computing, with proper feeds and rooms/groups/threads, proper naming and indexing, crypto and sinage plus a good reference implementation of clients for that and FB loses 95% of it's usecase.
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Ah. USENET with access controls.
Re: FB is the less confusing ... (Score:2)
What exactly is wrong with email?
Re: FB is the less confusing ... (Score:4, Informative)
...proper feeds and rooms/groups/threads,
Do you know Matrix? It has what you want, but it's not an email replacement. It's not supposed to. It solves a different problem.
Deep Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
AOL and Facebook are fundamentally different in that AOL was primarily an ISP and never had any real appeal (or easy free access) to internet users not getting their internet through AOL. That meant that AOL was DOA once we moved from modems to DSL.
Facebook is the exact opposite. They are ISP agnostic and, instead of trying to trap you in a walled garden, rely on the rest of the open internet for their content. But the biggest difference is that AOL was trying to be the internet while facebook is merely trying to be the most important social site on the internet.
Re: (Score:2)
Except that Facebook, by linking in applications, is trying to peel you off the regular Internet and be only their sort of Internet. Even their non-standard use of the semantic web is calculated to render Facebook the only viable way for web developers to interact with people.
not defending FB, but... (Score:2)
"... It limited people by telling them with whom they could communicate.... "
When did fb limit who you could communicate with?
Re:not defending FB, but... (Score:4, Informative)
By requiring an account on facebook.
I can communicate via email with my friends that are hosted on gmail, yahoo, whatever.com...
Same goes for XMPP.
When someone has facebook, I have to have facebook to communicate with them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"When someone has facebook, I have to have facebook to communicate with them."
Come now. I hate FB because it's banal and insipid, but that's a flat out lie.
You are communicating with me, I have a FB account (at least I think I still do, I've never gone back to check for a decade). FB is preventing nothing.
Yes, you need an account on FB to use THEIR messaging system. That doesn't seem terribly unreasonable?
It won't be written as-is (Score:2)
Ad-funded services are inherently like Facebook. You are the consumer or the product. AOL saw (and Facebook see) users as nothing more than commodities. And nobody cries if a commodity gets broken. It's easier and cheaper to replace.
Psychological Abuse (Score:3)
I wonder how many of those teenagers were nudged towards the abyss thanks to careless comments on Facebook? How many more examples of Michelle Carter [wikipedia.org] are there out there?
The problem we face as a broader society is that we simply don't know just how harmful social networks can be. The problem we face is a lot like the problem we faced with tobacco companies - who knew how harmful tobacco was [cbsnews.com], but went out of their way to bury the research they conducted that proved it, or the petrochemical companies whose scientists predicted global warming [theguardian.com].
There is a growing body of evidence to tell us that what Facebook do is most assuredly not something has "harmless" as "targeted advertising". It is much more accurate to describe their modus operandi [wikipedia.org] as "psychological manipulation [wikipedia.org]". This evidence would suggest that for far too many people, the dynamic between Farcebook [sic] and their users is a form of psychological abuse [wikipedia.org].
Perhaps it is time for us to empanel some form of substantial congressional committee and have it demand, under the auspices of public health, that all the big social networks must be required to hand over details of all the "internal analysis" they have conducted, concerning the effects of their platform on their user base. Such a panel must have the authority to force the testimony of all psychologically trained staff employed by these companies. In fact, perhaps it is time to mandate that all such companies [over a certain user base size] must by law have clinical psychologists on staff and mandate that those personnel are involved in and oversee strategic decisions regarding the design and implementation of platform features.
There's a commonly-used expression in Courts across the land: "Ignorance of the law is no defence". By a similar line of thought, hiding acts of criminal harm or negligence would seem on the face of it to at the very least make a corporation an accessory if the original act rises to the level of criminal behavior. Unfortunately, things start to get pretty murky when you explore the challenge of defining "mental harm" in terms of a criminal act. From what I've read before posting this comment, it seems at least in part because of the challenge of establishing the degree of harm an individual may experience, coupled with the challenge of demonstrating that the harm came as a direct result of the actions in question - i.e. was the subject pre-disposed? Emotionally or mentally vulnerable?
In other words, it looks as though a company would be quite able to set up a business model that set about knowingly harming the emotional and/or mental well-being of users/customers and yet was able to operate with impunity, hiding behind the challenge of it being difficult/impossible to prove that the company was the cause of the harm.
Which may be pretty much where we are now: stymied - aware that there is harm being caused, but unable to do anything about it.
AOL died (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
This. The move away from broadband hurt AOL and they were not all that effective in transitioning away from that model. AOL was associated in the public brain with dialup, so when people got broadband, they dropped AOL because of its association with dialup. This may have influenced the failure of AOLs attempts at social networking, but the UI issues and the fact they wouldn't stick with it to let it gain momentum,
I also agree, the public doesn't care about privacy. They care about friends and facebook is
And facebook will just buy them. (Score:2)
And then absorb it into facebook.
Could be the AOL Time Warner of 2021 (Score:2)
Does the sun rise in the morning? (Score:2)
To answer both questions: Yes
Apathy ensures Facebook is not in danger (Score:2)
Several facebook alternatives exist that help protect privacy. The fact is, I don't think most people are "with it" enough to care, or even comprehend, the privacy implications of Facebook enough to stop using it;. Also, too many of their friends are on Facebook, and getting your friends to switch to something else is almost impossible, for most people the privacy argument doesn't matter, either they don't care, or can't process it. Otherwise everybody would be using Linux and no one would use Windows. I th
It has become useless (Score:2)
If Myspace is any guide (Score:2)
One distinct threat to Facebook is what took out Myspace a mass user defection contagion. Once the defection process to Myspace got started, it sort of fed on itself and snowballed. When people started seeing their friends leave, they left as well for Facebook, etc. Of course it was catalyzed by several things such as a malware plague on Myspace that made it basically become unusable and let to a chaotic user profile disaster. But this remains a great danger to facebook. Could a privacy concern cause that?
Lurking is getting boring (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I use FaceBook in Firefox, in a Facebook tab, running Adblocker plus and Ghostery - and see very few adverts unless they are 'sponsored posts'.
On my HTPC I use Chrome, am signed in and see very few ads in YouTube (whew), though every fortnight or so some algorithms update and I have to put up with delays and eventual greyed out ad spots with a 'skip ad' button that I click. An hour later, no ads again.
Ads seem largely voluntary these days.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: It was the girls... (Score:2)
"Now there are more girls than guys on Facebook, and honestly I usually find them annoying. That is, their online presence"
There is only so much "OMG! L0lLArSkAtEz" and endless 'inspirational' pictures you can take before you reach for the vomit bucket.
FB is the intellectual black hole of the internet.