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Comment by ArchReaper | Hacker News Reader

I'm no Facebook fanboy but this article feels like a "why does my square peg not fit into their round hole" type of complaint. Facebook is a social network, not a public blogging platform.

Here is my interpretation of the complaints. Please point out what I am missing.

>It's impractical...

Square peg round hole.

>It's supporting their downgrading and killing the web...

Facebook posts being inherently (mostly) simple text is 'killing the web'? I don't buy it.

>Facebook might go out of business.

Just a generic SaaS complaint. Nothing unique to Facebook about this.

Am I missing a core argument here?

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Yes, you are. The argument is that facebook has become something that causes the rest of the web to be worse off. Less open, more bloated, more central.

I don't see any supporting arguments that directly support that thesis. That's a very open-ended, subjective statement.

I think the main argument of the article is a little murky. The notion that you shouldn't write an article to be shared around the web on Facebook is simple enough and pretty obvious to a technically savvy audience. But the argument is baked inside of this very emotional claim that because of this Facebook is "killing" the open internet. While that may or may not be true, the fact that I shouldn't write blog posts inside of Facebook doesn't map directly to "Facebook is killing the web!"

> Facebook posts being inherently (mostly) simple text is 'killing the web'? I don't buy it.

It's also misleading. If you want something more like a blog, then use notes instead of posts. The notes editing interface is actually better than most blog platforms, and IMO the results look just as pretty too. Then your notes appear in your timeline, searchable (within Facebook), with comments, etc. Is it everything an "open web" activist could want? No, but it's sure not just plain text.

BTW, I can't help but shake my head at people (like Gruber) who say Facebook is evil but also think absolutely everything should be searchable and monetizable by Google. That's just not logically consistent.

The difference is that Facebook articles are searchable by no one. Free web pieces are searchable and accessible via any search engine.

And this constitutes evil for you? A really aggressive robots.txt?

So two billion Facebook users are "no one" to you?

As far as I can tell, you aren't able to search for specific articles on Facebook. You can view them as they go through your feed, but you can only access them again after that by scrolling through your feed or the content creators feed until you locate it. And you must have an account for much of this.

Nope. Like you, I'm no fanboy (more an active hater), but this article seems like a general sense of unease about Facebook wrapped into a stream-of-consciousness argument.

You are not wrong.

I think the problem is not really Facebook but its users.

Sharing a blog post on Facebook is as wrong as sharing your travel photos on HN.

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