The Ghetto Called Facebook

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381827,00.asp

by evo_9 • 15 years ago

54 35 15 years ago

pcmag.com

nod• 15 years ago

What the crap?

stanleydrew• 15 years ago

How is this comment useful?

Apocryphon• 15 years ago

Er... isn't Facebook's primary feature for, I don't know, social networking? Being a means to connect with people you know?

It's certainly expanding to provide many services besides that, but I don't think anyone is replacing the rest of the internet with just FB.

devtesla• 15 years ago

Divorak needs to get off the internet and realize that the online communication doesn't create some separate place but is a part of real life. This "second class citizenry" rhetoric is harmful and absolutely misses the point. People are relying on Facebook for their online presence (overly so, of course) because there are many benefits to doing so (ease of use, lack of cost, easy mobile access, ability to pester customers etc.). We don't need to end the Facebook "ghetto" as much as we need to make the rest of the internet make as much sense to end users as Facebook.

jawngee• 15 years ago

Divorak hasn't been relevant since the death of floppy disks.

zi• 15 years ago

After reading the article, it kinda sounds to me like Dvorak just can't see Facebook's relevance as a communication tool for people who aren't super skilled with computers. I'm not really a fan of Facebook myself, but shantanubala is right; It does help people connect and share information easier. I wouldn't agree with Dvorak that Facebook is a ghetto, then again the definition of the word "friend" seems to be a little different these days.

sandofsky• 15 years ago

I think it would have been useful to include "Dvorak" in the submission title.

Turing_Machine• 15 years ago

Right. Dvorak is a professional troll.

bluehat• 15 years ago

I think if you want to compare Facebook to something outdated or controlling, I'd try the "portals" of the turn of the millennium. It's a pretty natural extension we see with almost anything which subsists on advertisements: more attention means more views means more ad-clicks means more revenue. Of course Facebook and everything else financed by ads with a brain is moving to push as much of your activity onto its platform as possible.

rgejman• 15 years ago

This is possibly the most poorly written article I have ever read on HN.

shantanubala• 15 years ago

That's cool. I'm glad to hear Dvorak's opinion. Here's mine:

Quit whining about Facebook. It's opt-in. People like it, so they opt in. Believe it or not, AOL was actually relevant and somewhat useful to people over a decade ago. Was it the best? No. Did it help people? Yes.

I hate to say this, but people do need training wheels with tech. Facebook makes things simple. I no longer have to sign up for 20 different accounts, figure out which friends use which services, remember different passwords, or have to learn 20 different interfaces -- I can now message, chat, organize, collaborate, send pictures, share links, and do a bunch of stuff at once. It's called having a broad set of features. Facebook is "training wheels" the same way something like the Windows OS is "training wheels." Internet Explorer is bundled, but you are free to download Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Flock, Opera, Seamonkey, etc. It bundles Windows Media Player, but you can download VLC, Miro, iTunes, Foobar2000, MediaMonkey, WinAmp, or hundreds of other things.

Facebook didn't magically kill Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hacker News, Instapaper, or the thousands of other companies and products available. It's called choice. People have choices. They have a lot of choices. Let them decide. If a product is easier to use, by all means use it.

(end of rant)

narkee• 15 years ago

People had the same choice a decade ago, and chose against AOL.

I think Dvorak is simply pointing out the fact that Facebook is being praised like the second coming of Jesus, while AOL is regarded as an internet backwater and failure, where they both provide/provided very similar functions.

alexgartrell2• 15 years ago

One huge divide between people in the tech community and those outside of it is the meaning of free. Facebook's a walled garden to people who want APIs and generously licensed (or public domain) data, but, to most of everyone else, the only cost with Facebook is creating an account -- something many people want to do anyway for the other features of the site. This is in sharp contrast to AOL, which was very expensive and only offered its data to paid subscribers.

codeup• 15 years ago

Spot on. But this is exactly the kind of article that one would expect to get many negative comments on HN. It's critical of a hyped website and the argument isn't even economic.

drivingmenuts• 15 years ago

> Load World of Warcraft and play something that reflects real development efforts rather than cute marketing tricks.

I love that line.

The achievement of WoW is to inflate the importance mouse clicks to an insane level by a more complex mechanism.

That is all.

zinkem2• 15 years ago

I mostly agree with your sentiment. I think WoW and Facebook are very similar in function, connecting people socially through software. I don't really think one is any better or worse than the other.

However, I do think something like WoW is a significant artistic achievement as well as a social tool. I really think this artistic product is the "achievement" of WoW.

SkyMarshal2• 15 years ago

I really think this artistic product is the "achievement" of WoW.

That's one take. Another is its achievement was taking an entertainment medium that people used to pay for only once, applying Skinnerian behavior modification techniques to keep them coming back and paying for monthly, then scaling that model to an unprecedented massive scale.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-gam...

Granted the social aspects of online games are truly fun, but the nice thing about Facebook is that it (initially at least) succeeded and scaled with just the social part and not the psychological manipulations mmo's like WoW relied on from day 1.

Some of the stuff that's been added recently, like Farmville and whatnot, exploits both the social and psychological, but the core value of FB is that it is still primarily a social experience, a way for people separated by distance and/or life (new baby, etc.) to maintain connections and know what's going on in each others' lives.

jevans• 15 years ago

I just thing people don't care how technically difficult a game was to make; they just care if it's fun. The issue of these games all relying on the same underlying psychology to cultivate addiction is also relevant, of course

sixspeed• 15 years ago

Dvorak has a seriously warped view of Facebook and life-in-general IMO. Facebook's main competitor is Second Life? Who on earth thinks that?

There's nothing "fake" about the community on Facebook. Ask Hosni Mubarak.

FlemishBeeCycle• 15 years ago

I don't think he seriously views Second Life as a real competitor - he was just using it to draw an analogy.

As for the community, I believe the "fakeness" he's getting at is the ability of the user to carefully cultivate their likeness and project a version of themselves that may or may not be truly reflective of "reality".

Of course, one could argue that we are always cultivating a "desired image" of ourselves. However, Facebook and similar platforms provide visual and textual clues that allow users to more concretely realize social relationships. This in turn may allow them to go above and beyond the normative level of image moderation. Whether that is "good" or "bad" is another question altogether.

juiceandjuice2• 15 years ago

Dvorak hates facebook because it allows people like Dvorak a soap box to stand on.

In reality, my friends, on facebook and in life, are not Dvoraks. They are normal people with jobs, with hobbies, etc... People (usually) too busy to worry about online image or rant about popular internet culture. That's why I like facebook. If I had a bunch of Dvoraks for friends, I'd probably hate it too.

lazerwalker• 15 years ago

> I think it's brilliant that the boys at Facebook are taking on Netflix by developing their own streaming service

Assuming Dvorak's talking about the newly-announced Dark Nights rentals, he's talking about a third-party app developed by Warner Bros, not a ploy by Facebook itself.

I wouldn't bother bringing up a small factual error like this, but it really digs into the point of his article: it's a lot harder to build up the idea of Facebook as an evil monopolizing force trying to lock people into their platform when it's third-party content producers that are actively pulling people into the FB ecosystem.

You could argue that this is a result of their efforts to attract developers to the FB Credit platform, and that's just an attempt to attract and lock in users. That's definitely true, but you can't really call a neighborhood a 'ghetto' when it's got a posh shopping mall full of big-name department stores.

talleyrand• 15 years ago

Facebook will too pass....

juiceandjuice2• 15 years ago

Are all Dvorak's friends on facebook pre-teen girls? It's probably worse than that, they are probably 'writers'

The fake people on facebook, at least on MY facebook, are the people that are fake in real life. Yes, it is easier for them to broadcast how fake they are. Luckily facebook also makes it easy to filter out their broadcasts. It's also much easier for the friends I care about to broadcast important information as well. For those of us without a media site/platform to broadcast our cra... err articles, facebook works great.

Also, I never get along with WoW addicts.

ARobotics• 15 years ago

You may be underestimating how many small bits of 'fake' are common. A facebook profile is much more accurately described as "how someone wants themselves to be seen" rather than how they are in reality. Some of it is self-censorship, some is self-promotion, some is subconscious, but the cumulative effect is such that the reality show analogy is quite apt; it's based on real events, but edited and filtered into something misleading.

Think about it this way, an autobiography is probably mostly true, but you're going to read it with the understanding that it's not an impartial, objective viewpoint.

gnosis• 15 years ago

"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from inside is simply a series of defeats."

         -- George Orwell

genera• 15 years ago

AOL keyword: Facebook

shortlived• 15 years ago

Would someone like to clue me in on all the hate of this guy named "Dvorak"?

idle_processor• 15 years ago

It's the name of the linked article's author.

dasil003• 15 years ago

To add to that... his specialty is intentionally specious and sensationalist arguments that don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny, thus inviting rabid rebuttals from people in the know, driving tremendous traffic well beyond what either A) a plainly idiotic argument or B) a extremely well-honed analysis would produce. In other words, he takes trolling to heights 4chan can only dream of.

kaiwen1• 15 years ago

As I see it, the problem with Facebook is that it is monopolizing a space that we should all desire to see open and dispersed. Is it good to have one company monopolize all online social interactions among all humans on the planet? Of course not. People spend egregious amounts of time on Facebook, which is wonderful for Facebook and stifling for the rest of the internet. If you recognize these problems you should abandon Facebook and reject it on principal. With so many people and business on board, this is actually quite hard to do, which is exactly why it should be done.

The Ghetto Called Facebook

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