Facebook Fraud

[Aristotle]

To clarify, I'm not asking "why is Frogdice posting things on Facebook". The answer to that is obvious: That's where the people are. My question is: Why are the people there? What's the benefit of seeing a random part of your news feed, with weight given to the people who've paid more money to make it more likely you'll see their posts?

Same answer, unfortunately. The people are there because everyone else is there. It has a tremendous social inertia that makes it nearly impossible to unseat.

Sometimes people compare Facebook to AOL or MySpace when arguing that Facebook could get surpassed or go away. But neither of those had anywhere near the scope and breadth of Facebook's market penetration.

Think about how weird it is when you every now and then know someone who isn't on Facebook. It is almost unsettling. I've had this experience a few times:

"WTF? How come this person isn't on Facebook? I want to tag/share something with them and that would be the easiest way."

That's the nature and the extent of Facebook's reach. It would take something truly spectacular to come in and wrest control away from Facebook unfortunately.

[Rosuav]

Same answer, unfortunately. The people are there because everyone else is there. It has a tremendous social inertia that makes it nearly impossible to unseat.

And yet everyone's on email, but mailing lists haven't automatically swept the board. It's sad.

Facebook will eventually be tipped out, I think. The more of this sort of thing they do, the more people will get dissatisfied, and some day there'll be an alternative that suddenly sweeps them away. Google Plus maybe was just a little too soon.

[Speedster]

Think about how weird it is when you every now and then know someone who isn't on Facebook. It is almost unsettling. I've had this experience a few times:

"WTF? How come this person isn't on Facebook? I want to tag/share something with them and that would be the easiest way."

That's the nature and the extent of Facebook's reach. It would take something truly spectacular to come in and wrest control away from Facebook unfortunately.

Wonder if I did that to you! Facebook is too corrupt and propogates too many bad attitudes for me to stomach creating an account there!

One of my most hated sayings is "if you can't beat them, join them"... much prefer "don't be a part of the problem" so I'm not creating a Facebook account unlelss they reform (ha!) or it becomes a legal requirement

[Aristotle]

Wonder if I did that to you! Facebook is too corrupt and propogates too many bad attitudes for me to stomach creating an account there!

I salute you. You're making the tough sacrifice for us all. I wish I could do that.

[Rosuav]

One of my most hated sayings is "if you can't beat them, join them"... much prefer "don't be a part of the problem" so I'm not creating a Facebook account unlelss they reform (ha!) or it becomes a legal requirement

I technically have an account, but I basically never log it in. Anyone who posts updates on Facebook is missing me. But given that they probably miss a large proportion of people who actually *do* follow them, it's not that much different.

My biggest beef with most forms of social networking, definitely including Facebook, is that it's really REALLY hard to find back any serious discussion point. With blogs, linking to people's posts is normal and expected. With mailing lists, it's usually easy to link to a particular post in an archive (this does depend on the exact software used, but Mailman + Pipermail makes it easy) - PEPs often cite python-dev/ideas posts, eg PEP 461. Bug trackers invariably make it easy to link to specific bugs, and often to specific comments on those bugs. But Facebook is designed for the ephemeral. Have you ever tried to hunt something down that was posted over a year ago? To share it, with a link to a specific comment? It may be possible (though I'm not sure it even is), but it's definitely not easy. And that means words are less valuable and less valued than they are in a place where people stand by what they say to a greater extent.