Ask HN: Who is already sick of all of these "Like" buttons plastered everywhere?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1289973

by theli0nheart • 16 years ago

73 50 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly, because it's already starting to get ridiculous even just a couple days after being introduced.

alexro2• 16 years ago

"food and shows"- that's what the masses want, unfortunately

jff• 16 years ago

I think "bread and circuses" is more standard :)

cpr• 16 years ago

I completely ignore all that social networking stuff; my brain sees them as ads and blocks them subconsciously.

Batsu• 16 years ago

I'm the same way. I often read articles that I would like to share with people, but since I'm more interested in the ensuing discussion, I'd rather directly link a person during a conversation (or as a way to start one) rather than throw it at my Facebook page or similar.

I consider sites like HN quite different, as that is their sole purpose :)

whalesalad• 16 years ago

Yea that stuff is totally blocked out of my mind. I use Facebook to connect with my friends and family, and will share a link occasionally if it really pertains to me. For the most part, though, I don't like spamming mass amounts of data to friends. The only benefit I see to things like delicious and other "social bookmarking" tools is the fact that they're "up in the cloud", aka, backed up somewhere away from my browser config folder.

Has anyone noticed the new Mahalo-esque stuff they're doing? All of your hobbies, movies, music, etc... that they're making part of this social graph is now linked together a lot better.

Example, one of my interests (for fun) is "underwater basket weaving" which now links to a page like this, http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Underwater-basket-weaving/1...

"Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for Underwater basket weaving, sign up and we'll let you know when we're ready for your help."

Pretty crazy.

jimmyjim• 16 years ago

Not to worry, there'll soon be plenty of Greasemonkey scripts that take care of this well enough for you that your brain can tend to other tasks.

treyp• 16 years ago

or you can just adblock the iframe url with a filter:

  |http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?*

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

Same here...there are so mamy of them they are shrinking down all the time. Makes me feel a bit sorry for bloggers, watching their retweet and like and digg scores all the time.

asnyder• 16 years ago

Not only are they bad, they slow down the rendering speed of the pages they're on.

http://twitter.com/SlexAxton/status/12663859611

aschobel• 16 years ago

We use it via FBML and JavaScript SDK and the slow down seems to be minimal. We load their script right before </body>.

Biggest annoyance is that it doesn't degrade very gracefully when FB has availability problems, you get a white square in the page in Firefox.

woid2• 16 years ago

I think they can solve it when using Javascript SDK on modern browsers. IFRAME could be loaded offscreen and when it finishes then it does postMessage to notify the parent window. Javascript SDK injector then unhides the IFRAME.

Easy to do, but they are probably busy doing other stuff.

woid2• 16 years ago

Well it depends how you look at it. It definitely adds to network traffic and CPU load. But IFRAME content and javascript-injected IFRAME are both loaded asynchronously.

Browsers are pretty good in progressive rendering of page content these days. So user should see the main page first and then it starts loading these additional resources. So no big deal IMHO. The button should not degrade user experience during page loading.

throwthisaway• 16 years ago

It's the new "tweet this" -- a stupid trend people will wonder about in a few years.

tdmackey• 16 years ago

Can't say I've noticed one yet. :(

ElbertF• 16 years ago

Surely you mean ":)"?

Detrus• 16 years ago

Poor digg, that was supposed to be their trick

peterzakin• 16 years ago

People may end up preferring liking to digging (though who knows at this point), but when it comes to actively looking for interesting content, digg's still got something to hang onto. It begs the question, however, whether facebook will ever make an attempt to organize all of the outside links users promote so that such content becomes discoverable by topic and not just incidental lines on the newsfeed?

elblanco2• 16 years ago

On some pages, the number of affiliate aggregator upvote links takes up some significant portion of the page (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.). It would make sense for somebody to aggregate the aggregators, a meta-aggregator if you will, and just have one button on the page that sends it to all of them.

pedalpete2• 16 years ago

I thought things were getting ridiculous with all the buzz, digg, sphere, reddit buttons already. From what I can see, those are being replaced with a single option (though I admit, I haven't seen many of the facebook implementations yet).

It is nice to have a 'standard' rather than voting for multiple items. At the same time, how much is liking something really doing for ya?

I don't think it has the benefit of a community like HN, so Facebook doesn't have it all yet.

alexro2• 16 years ago

Do you think reddit (or twitter or digg or stumbleupon) users will start liking the "like" and prefer it to replace other buttons? Completely agreeing about the ridiculous aspect of so many buttons though.

pedalpete2• 16 years ago

I don't know that it has to be an if/else situation. I do suspect sites will start putting only the 'like' button, as it is cleaner, likely loads the page faster, and has such a larger audience.

At the same time, I suspect people will still visit digg, reddit, etal to find new articles, and up vote them there.

However, I wouldn't be surprised to see sites like Digg get significantly less posts added.

I hope we don't see the same suspected decline here on HN, as my friends on FB aren't HN types.

_ouxp• 16 years ago

I'm just seeing a lot of broken iframes because I've now blocked facebook & their subdomains on my personal machine.

larsberg• 16 years ago

I wish this topic had a Like button!

superrobot• 16 years ago

Try this one; http://youlik.es/l/4f (this site lets you create a like button things on the web)

cmelbye• 16 years ago

What do you mean by "less evil"? The whole point of the "Like" button is that it's universal. Something being mildly annoying is not "evil" by any stretch of the imagination.

kevinh2• 16 years ago

I haven't noticed this yet. Would someone kindly point me towards an example?

j-g-faustus• 16 years ago

http://techcrunch.com/

Every story has a Like, a Buzz and a Retweet button.

kevinh2• 16 years ago

I see. Thanks for showing me. It seems largely unobtrusive, but also pretty useless for me.

Tichy• 16 years ago

The first story I checked had 422 retweets and only 10 likes. Maybe FB is not taking over the internet yet.

barredo2• 16 years ago

IMDb updated with the button the same day FB announced it

philf• 16 years ago

Cannot find any FB integration on IMDb. Care to explain?

asdflkj• 16 years ago

Is "Who else" a legitimate question that you can "ask HN" nowadays? I've been gone for a while.

chaosmachine• 16 years ago

"I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly"

http://www.openlike.org/

bprater• 16 years ago

Can we re-phrase the question in less of a reddit-style way?What's the discussion we want to have behind this?

resdirector2• 16 years ago

I can't agree more. Look at the first comment: 20 karma points, and no real substance, hackerish or otherwise.

I'd like to see a discussion about (a) what it actually means to "like" something, (b) what demographics currently use the "like" buttons (c) are there any startup ideas to revolutionize the distribution of information etc.

what• 16 years ago

Clicking "like" is like saying I have nothing to actually contribute but I want to feel like I'm participating. Also, I guess it stops the thousands of comments that would just say "I agree," "Yeah" or whatever?

But what good is a "like" button if there is no "dislike/hate" button?

petercooper• 16 years ago

Why do we need all these buttons to do things we already all have our own specific ways of doing?

If you want to bookmark something, bookmark it in the way you know how (in browser, Delicious, etc). If you want to tweet about something, go tweet about it in the client of your choice.

barredo2• 16 years ago

I actually like them.

But someone could make a quick userscript to hide them :-)

Edit:

  // ==UserScript==
  // @name           I-Dont-Like-The-New-Facebook-Like
  // @namespace      I-Dont-Like-The-New-Facebook-Like
  // @description    Hide all Facebook 'Like' buttons
  // @include        *
  // ==/UserScript==
  
  (function () {
  	var i = document.getElementsByTagName('iframe');
  	if(i) {
  		for(e in i) {
  			if(i[e].src.match(/http\:\/\/www.facebook.com\/widgets\/like.php/gi)) {
  				i[e].style.display = 'none';
  				i[e].style.visibility = 'hidden';
  			}
  		}
  	}
  })();

Raphael• 16 years ago

Or any kind of sharing widgets, for that matter. If only web admins would trust visitors to have their own bookmarklets or extensions, so that pages wouldn't have all the cruft.

resdirector2• 16 years ago

I don't care for the unnormalized "number of diggs/tweets/karma" etc.

I'd actually use the "like" buttons if they learned what I liked/disliked, rather than just being there to show off an unnormalized and somewhat meaningless figure.

imurray• 16 years ago

I added the following rule to Adblock plus:

   * facebook.com/plugins*

The iframes disappear seamlessly.

metamemetics• 16 years ago

Simple solution: Complainbook.com. The web is viewed through a frame that that adds Dislike buttons to every piece of content. It aggregates what people are disliking and recommends things to the user that they will be sure to hate. It will instantly gain a high market share amongst content degregators, and Facebook will see everyone disliking their Like buttons with the Dislike button and be less evil.

It would also include location based features where users upload geotags of places they've never been, nor would want to go to.

aw3c2• 16 years ago

I have iframes globally disabled with only few websites allowed to use them. Try it.

andrewcooke• 16 years ago

You can block them in Firefox by using the RequestPolicy plugin. At least, I assume that you can, because I am not actually seeing any ;o)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9727

At first it seems like overkill, because it blocks sites from accessing data from other sites, but you can enable certain sites (either globally or on a per-site basis) and it remembers those, so after a little playing around, sites you visit frequently look quite normal.

It's also very interesting seeing how people assemble sites these days...

elblanco2• 16 years ago

I wish there was a "Like" button on this post.

inboulder• 16 years ago

<--- What, you mean like that?

Ask HN: Who is already sick of all of these "Like" buttons plastered everywhere?

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