Also, Facebook discourages anonymous accounts, even going as far as locking you out of the platform unless you supply the company with your cell phone number and driver's license.
As a result, there are many communities that I don't join, and there are communities that I stay silent in. For example, in the Facebook group for the area that I currently live in, it is common place to doxx people who disagree with majority of users. It's gone as far as having the mayor doxx a single mother because she was critical of decisions the city made, and I want no part of that.
Honest question: how would you reconcile privacy-centric communities like Reddit and definitely-not-privacy-centric communities like Facebook? They both have the same patterns of information bubbles generally feed content in similar ways (broadly speaking) and they both have strong troll subgroups. If anything, Facebook might have a lower overall incidence of trolling because you run the risk of having your profile picture on the evening news.
Facebook is what a social site looks like when you don't have anonymity - and I don't like it.
People end up self-censoring about 3/4 of the things they want to say on Facebook so they don't offend anyone. It's an intellectually barren wasteland of harmless platitudes and abandoned thoughts.
I appreciate where you were coming from with this idea, but I like a little anonymity to my Internet. It's the truth spice.
I've always felt that average people want to be anonymous. The internet is a place to remove your filters and be honest about what you think. You don't have to worry about people judging you and treating you differently based on your ideas. Facebook doesn't solve that problem at all, it exacerbates it. Facebook is a place you go to be judged by everyone you know. People fundamentally don't want that drama.
Facebook is not anonymous. That is enforced and by design, and fairly important in distinguishing it from other social networks. The rest of your points are still fair though.
On Facebook you can't quickly create an anonymous account to say whatever you want to your 500 friends because that account wouldn't be friends with them. You end up censoring yourself because it's friends, family, coworkers, and romantic interests on there reading your posts.
For the record, I wouldn't recommend what I wrote to any sane person. I was just pushing the privacy rhetoric to the extreme to illustrate that there will always be a trade off between privacy and social life. People seem to forget this fundamental principle too often when they talk about the evil social networks.
Edit: To the people who down voted to disagree, I'd like to ask: Do you think the world would be a better place without Facebook?
The issue is though is that people think that a different level of privacy should be associated with their data than their friends data.
For various reasons for the last few months I've been considering disconnecting entirely. I lived before facebook/twitter and I'm sure I'll survive after them. I can't really think of anyway that facebook/twitter actually makes my life better in aggregate.
Why is it essential to my life that I see every stupid meme?
Why is it essential to my life that I heard about every political travesty in the world?
Does it really affect my life? What benefit do I gain from knowing these things?
The lack of privacy do hurt our ability to freely connect, if only because of self censure. Surely you wouldn't tell the same things to your loved one if you were in public?
Facebook code being unknown let Zuckerberg be the man in the middle of every Facebook based communications. Facebook could log everything, for all we know. The sentence is accurate.
Censorship is a rather minor issue. It's ineffective because there are other channels, and it's risky because people are loud about that. I mostly worry about Spying, which is way less risky, way more effective, and way more dangerous.
If you need to say something in the public domain that can't be traced back to your own identity, don't say it on Facebook.
The entire point of Facebook is that there is an easily identified one-to-one correspondence between your Facebook contacts and people in the real world. If people are allowed to become effectively anonymous then it fundamentally changes this experience.
Facebook is mostly info that is scoped to a defined set of people. It makes implicit sense to have your access to private information removed if you no longer qualify eg no longer a friend.
Twitter is publishing data that is world visible and making it hard for individuals who have been snubbed to keep track of what everyone including them if they log out can in fact see by removing their bookmark to same.
The behavior of toggling block is weirder yet because the data is world published, you can read it, you can follow it but someone else has reached out and toggled the state of your account in some weird spooky action at a distance fashion that works only because it confuses people.
Well designed things work in a way that is predictable to users. Who would predict that your follow status on accounts would from the perspective of the user toggle itself randomly.
It's even worse that twitter sees purpose built for short toxic exchanges too short and badly organized for anyone to get each others point where the standard protocol is to disengage from anyone who disagrees and shout at all the people who believe exactly as you do.
But there's no real argument, just a flimsy assertion that this will somehow allow people to better control their privacy.
The inference is that often people are unaware that a network such as "Los Angeles" has millions of users and thus are inadvertently sharing their private data with strangers. Frankly, I call bullshit.
If Facebook was serious about my privacy they would a) Create a single page for security instead of the current maze of pages, b) Change the defaults for new content to just "Friends" and not "Friends of friends", c) Make it far easier to find how to remove yourself from Friends/Fans/Groups than it currently is.
Apart from a), which has been mentioned before but never materialized, you won't see these happening because they go against the interests of Facebook, and Facebook seems quite fearless when it comes to upsetting their users.
It's the pre-emptive foreclosure of discussion I find objectionable, negating the attempt rather than exploring the problem space.
I would personally reduce the private property privileges substantially since a social network by definition derives its value from the number and variety of people that use it. I'd like if FB were at least as searchable to its users as to advertisers, for example; arguably FB knows more about many of its users than they know about themselves.
If you share something with your 300+ friends on Facebook, I think it's obvious it's no longer private. I have always considered Facebook a tool for _finding_ interesting stuff intead of _hiding_ it.
A more open, non-evil alternative would be cool, of course. But good luck rebuilding the whole social graph there. Almost anybody who has tried that has failed.
(I view this as somebody who follows the Facebook News Feed all the time, posts several times a day, and often participates in long discussion threads about news, politics etc. with my friends.)
reply