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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

It's exasperating to see Facebook flailing about like this. A corner of the Internet where there is no anonymity and you only get what you opt into all my intuition says could be an incredibly valuable thing. FB essentially solved the spam problem for example (app invites notwithstanding) - something not even Gmail has managed. They can do things with photos Flickr can only dream of, since Flickr can't assume that the people in the photos will be members. Same with events. They could be sewing up all sorts of commercial arrangements here. If I create a LAN party event FB should be handling ordering pizza through Papa John's website (and taking a cut). If I create a group trip event FB should be partnering with travel companies, cinemas, everything.

Instead they're dumbing everything down to become what exactly, a lamer Twitter than Twitter itself?

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FB essentially solved the spam problem for example (app invites notwithstanding)

Have you been reading about the huge security holes in Facebook quiz applications? I learned about those here on HN.

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/06/09/how-privacy-fa...

http://blog.aclu.org/2009/06/11/quiz-what-do-facebook-quizze...

I'm increasingly annoyed by Facebook's flailing about with its business model, and also annoyed by the large number of network errors I've seen on it in the last forty-eight hours.

The retraction seems to be saying Facebook will make it obvious to new users just how privacy works. I've found that my friends tend to follow those notices, somewhat surprisingly. Facebook will let people know what's going on once it's happening, because you're right - a lot of people do care about privacy.

I don't see Facebook's going public as a bad thing, as long as it's not a mandatory change. Their feed system certainly works publicly: It's much more involved than Twitter, and it supports a lot of things people would use other sites for. I use it instead of Flickr for public photos. I'm thinking of switching my Vimeo videos over so I can close my Vimeo account and run most of my online activities from one place. I like writing private friend-based notes, but if I didn't then Facebook notes would make for an attractively minimal solution.

Facebook's been gradually simplifying itself. I don't see how it's dumbing down when they've been adding features rather than taking them away. The new live feed is incredible, for instance.

The new live feed is a pain. Why should I have to block every damn application individually? I want to see 3 things: status, events, photos and that's it. In fact that and messages is all I want from FB, I shouldn't even need to be aware of any of the crap.

So you're really happy that Facebook offers right-off-the-bat filters for all three of those things, right? Because that solves your problem without your ever having to worry about seeing the other things.

3 separate filters - no way to combine them and make the newsfeed like it used to be.

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