Facebook allows Force Joining of Groups

http://calacanis.com/2010/10/07/email-i-sent-to-zuckerberg-sheryl-over-force-join-groups-on-facebook/

by feint • 16 years ago

61 80 16 years ago

wccrawford2• 16 years ago

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.

Tichy2• 16 years ago

Can you list some of the opportunities? I have an account, but no idea what to do with it.

lliiffee2• 16 years ago

As a facebook non-joiner myself, I find that I miss out on a lot of baby pictures, knowledge of other people's birthdays, and (a few) parties.

khafra• 16 years ago

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.

scott_s2• 16 years ago

I have some friends who use FB as their main means of communication. Instead of firing on a quick email to them, I send it on FB.

wccrawford2• 16 years ago

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.)

icegreentea• 16 years ago

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.

Das_Bruce• 16 years ago

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.

pvg• 16 years ago

By that test, there are probably no good ideas at all. Except maybe the moms of 13 year-old boys.

LogicHoleFlaw• 16 years ago

Oh, they'll make jokes about those too.

NZ_Matt3• 16 years ago

This isn't as bad as it looks.

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.

stingraycharles• 16 years ago

> 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.

NZ_Matt3• 16 years ago

That seems like a good solution.

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.

uptown• 16 years ago

"Only your friends can add you into groups."

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.

Stwerner• 16 years ago

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.

rb2k_• 16 years ago

> And how many of your "friends" are ACTUALLY your "friends"?

100%, but I seem to be in a minority with that decision

sprout• 16 years ago

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.

rhizome2• 16 years ago

>"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.

jfager3• 16 years ago

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?

NZ_Matt3• 16 years ago

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".

The facebook blog has a video overview: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=434700832130

tallanvor• 16 years ago

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.

sofuture5• 16 years ago

This is simply a 'mailing list' for friends on Facebook.

Why aren't you outraged that people can create email mailing lists with outrageous titles like "NAMBLA Email Monthly" that include your address?

middlegeek2• 16 years ago

"This isn't as bad as it looks. Only your friends can add you into groups"

Yes, it is as bad as it looks. If one person can add you to a group without your approval, that's bad.

sofuture5• 16 years ago

I can email you without your approval, what's your point?

That's an identical amount of control that you're surrendering. I don't get the frenzy-Facebook-rage...

stevecooperorg• 16 years ago

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.

DrJokepu3• 16 years ago

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.

chopsueyar5• 16 years ago

Heretic!

Seriously, though, can you elaborate on how Facebook 'became seriously uncool recently'?

What issues caused your loss of enjoyment?

DrJokepu3• 16 years ago

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.

meinhimmel• 16 years ago

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.

powrtoch• 16 years ago

Surely I'm not the only one to notice that apparently Facebook users number "500 people and growing"?

gonehome• 16 years ago

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?

sp332• 16 years ago

The screenshot says NAMBLA, so he actually misspelled it as NABLA twice.

notahacker2• 16 years ago

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.

callumjones• 16 years ago

I'm over Jason's constant Facebook trolling, it's distracting from his cool work with the startup scene.

nickdunkman• 16 years ago

Unless you are POTUS, don't put your middle name in your email signatures. It's pretentious.

noahth• 16 years ago

The whole sig struck me as over-the-top and obnoxious, personally. "HERE IS A LIST SHOWING HOW IMPORTANT I AM."

Hint - if you're really important, all you need to sign is your name.

epochwolf• 16 years ago

Indeed.

~ epochwolf

joshklein• 16 years ago

Not to suggest I disagree with JC, but in addition to advocating opt-in, he should have less shitty "friends".

shareme• 16 years ago

or maybe stop baiting Aron Wall?

raquo• 16 years ago

However, from Facebook help center:

> Similar to being tagged in a photo, you can only be added to a group by one of your friends.

Maybe you either don't really need 61532 "friends" or Facebook should have a distinction between Friends and contacts.

Not saying that's a reasonable feature, but still.

chopsueyar5• 16 years ago

Everyone is an equal in Facebook, just like in real life.

kmavm• 16 years ago

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.

joshfinnie• 16 years ago

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!

bps4484• 16 years ago

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.

tocomment• 16 years ago

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?

mbreese2• 16 years ago

It's not related, but when you like a page, the owner of that page can now post directly to your wall.

chopsueyar5• 16 years ago

You've been Zuckerpunched, my friend.

JeremyBanks• 16 years ago

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/facebook-like-butto... Discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646778

indigoviolet• 16 years ago

Didn't Calacanis leave Facebook?

scorpion032• 16 years ago

Exactly!! He made a big deal of it, saying he was done with it. People seem to have a bad memory!!

wyclif2• 16 years ago

Just because he commented on the feature doesn't mean he's using it.

Mistone2• 16 years ago

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.

wyclif2• 16 years ago

No, in this case Calacanis had a point. Facebook shouldn't be allowing force joins to sketchy groups.

Mistone2• 16 years ago

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.

Facebook allows Force Joining of Groups

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