Comment by pwdisswordfish2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pwdisswordfish2 | Hacker News Reader

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pwdisswordfish2

Member since the student requirement. I must have missed the "beacon of unity" phase. It is just another website.

I remember other websites providing similar functionality around the time Facebook appeared (not MySpace, Friendster, or any of those), including the ability to see who last visited your page: other members. You could then go visit their page. AFAIK, Facebook never had that. Instead it had "poke". If today you could see who is accessing your Facebook page, it would probably inhibit you from posting so much personal content. The entire design of today's Facebook is to dissuade you from activiely checking friends' or potential friends' pages on your own initiative. Instead Facebook wants to "feed" you content from other members (and advertisers). Default settings and behaviour discourage exploration and encourage relying on "suggestions" (by Facebook) instead. They even go so far as to ask for money to "promote" your page to others.

I remember a time when all my friends were on Facebook. Being able to connect in a concrete way with people that lived far far away seemed magical. Facebook was that scrappy SV upstart that wanted to change the world and provided an ads free experience focused almost completely on people. It seems like a hazy memory, but I do remember liking it and imagining it as an agent of good in the general scheme of things. Very different from the toxic wasteland it is today.

I wasn’t really all that surprised how it went. But then again, when The Facebook first expanded to my campus, I used it to run targeted attack ads on student government candidates, as an independent expenditure unaffiliated with any candidate or campaign committee. Maybe I was the cancer that is killing Facebook.

But I pretty much left Facebook when they introduced the News Feed — that’s when I realized they were after all of our privacy.

I probably just don't use it enough to understand this perspective, but why is it a toxic wasteland? My facebook feed has my friends from college, family far away, etc., and yeah there's an occasional political argument from time to time, but if anyone gets annoying you can just block or unfriend them, so...?

It's just so easy for a naive and trusting person to be pulled into an information bubble. Like a few off topics and then get all the confirmation-bias support you would ever need with no "need" to go search out countering information.

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