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Comment by hcarvalhoalves | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

If this is their mission statement they are failing miserably.

They would be succeeding if their mission stated "keeping in touch with friends" or "share cool stuff with friends", which for me is already great.

Of course, when you have a mission statement made by a board, you end with lots of grandiose BS and buzzwords like "open" and "connected".

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"Open" in the social sense means that people know about the lives of others. Claiming that Facebook hasn't made the world more open seems odd to me.

"Connected" is even more straightforward. Facebook dramatically strengthens weak social ties. I interact with people I never would have kept up with if Facebook didn't exits.

There are plenty of rational criticisms of Facebook, but this isn't one of them.

Trying to make the world more open but keeping all the information in a walled garden.

I don't think this is necessarily hypocritical. They never claimed they wanted to be "as open as possible in every conceivable way", they just said "open". For obvious reasons, sharing all of their data would be risky, if not suicidal.

It is hypocritical when you can't view posts marked 'Everyone' (public) unless you log in.

Oh come on. This is just unnecessary pedantry. We live in the real world here where people are people and not die-hard ideologues. It makes perfect sense that they do this. If youre a Facebook member you get access to the "openness" they're talking about. Plus it'd be really dumb for "to make the world more open and connected by providing an online service that lets you comminicate and share messages and assorted media with people with which you already have or will build connected relationships with if you are a member of our open connected service" to be their mission statement. Obviously the bulk of it is implied. If you follow your argument all the way through then you eventually get to ampointnwhere you're basically arguing that they explain the entire service right in the mission statement leaving out no detail. Just, c'mon. We all know what it means.

That's not the case. I just copied url to post I made to 'everyone (public)', set my browser into private mode, went to that url and I could my post just fine.

Thanks for clarifying. It's been a while since I clicked on a Facebook link. When I tried it just now, you are right that direct post URLs will work. But when browsing a public page or profile, there are pop-us that obscure the rest of the screen as you scroll or hover over links.

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