I have 340 Facebook friends (I feel like this is on the middle-lower end of typical). I scrolled down several "pages" on my timeline and saw zero evidence of any those people --- who are predominantly friends and family, or people I went to high school with --- were playing anything like Farmville. Most updates on my timeline are people sharing pictures of the city they're visiting, or of their kids.<p>All of these people could, instead of sharing details of their lives with their friends, instead be spending time on 4chan anonymously grinding out memes. I gather from this post that I am supposed to feel bad about that.<p>Meanwhile: in a major city in the US, in a market dominated by the likes of McDonalds and Walmart, your odds of successfully starting a small business that depends on a retail channel are significantly worse than 50/50. Most people don't get a shot at starting any kind of business like that, and only a vanishingly small few get multiple bites at that apple. Yet I can use Facebook today to find out about meat specials at my butcher, or someone selling artisanal pickles, or a new theater company, or someone making custom knives as their hobby hoping to try to make a living doing it. And because of the stupid blue "like" button this article rails against, these hopeful businesses can do that without paying for pointless terribly-performing ads in major newspapers or on radio stations, and can have actual conversations with their customers. And again, I gather from this post that I am supposed to feel like this is a bad thing.<p>So I guess I'm saying: I'm not getting the author's point.
<i>It devours everything it touches and produces nothing of value, including—ironically—their stock price.</i><p>It produces something of value to <i>me</i>. I live in CA, my parents live in NY. We're in different worlds. I can't possibly communicate what my world is like to them via a daily phone call. But I can share bits and pieces of info on Facebook that they see, and it's a wonderful medium for us to have shared experiences for things that otherwise would be extremely difficult to share.<p>It's a new mode of communication. Without it, I'd be alienated from my friends and family across the continent and in a few years we would have easily grown completely apart. With it, when I go back to visit, it's as if I never left. I can <i>actually</i> exchange pictures with my grandparents, and they can <i>actually</i> be a part of my life every day. Facebook <i>seriously</i> impacts the direction of my life, with respect to family and friends.<p>One billion people realized this, consciously or unconsciously, and made Facebook a multibillion dollar company. At this point saying Facebook produces nothing of value is as delusional as saying that about Microsoft, or Apple, or Proctor and Gamble.
> <i>Facebook ... produces nothing of value</i><p>> <i>If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, nobody would give a shit.</i><p>There are plenty of people who would give a shit. You may not be one of them, but there are countless people who rely on Facebook to communicate with family members on the other side of the globe, or share their private pictures and memories with their loved ones, or just to keep in touch with friends who no longer live nearby. If that's not one of the best definitions of <i>value</i>, by touching people's lives where it matters to them the most, then I don't know what is.<p>You may not use Facebook for any of those things, and that's fine, but when a <i>billion</i> people log into Facebook every month to communicate with their friends and family, you can't possibly think that your usage is indicative of everyone else.<p>Facebook doesn't need to produce new knowledge or culture to provide tangible, long-term value.<p><a href="http://www.facebookstories.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.facebookstories.com/</a>
The thing I find myself hating about all of these anti-Facebook rants is that they all seem to operate under the assumption that Facebook has "subsumed" all of this functionality from the internet at large, which seems spectacularly false.<p>The number of people who "switched" from doing all of these things (blogging, IM, photo-posting, online gaming) on other sites to using Facebook for them is a tiny tiny minority compared to the number of people who never did any of them before.<p>It assumes that if Facebook went away, that all of these people would just go "back" to using Blogger, or Flickr, or AIM, or Armor Games, and the internet at large would be a better place.<p>I don't think that's even remotely true. Nerds can happily continue to use those services, and regular people will keep using Facebook.<p>Sure, someday there'll be a "new Facebook", and then people can complain about that walled garden.<p>People whining about Facebook feels very much like people whining about American Idol (or stupefying-ly popular CBS sitcoms). Like if 2.5 Men was suddenly cancelled, people would all start watching Mythbusters or assembling Arduinos.<p>Providing "free" online services to a billion people seems like a giant win for society.
Nitpicking, but missing disclosure:<p>OP works for a company named Instrument that does work on several things for Google. Google is a competitor to Facebook.<p><pre><code> My name is Thomas Reynolds. I'm a Technical Lead at Instrument, lucky denizen of Portland, active Crossfitter, a foodie, a cocktail enthusiast and all-around nerd.
http://weareinstrument.com/work/
In late 2011, Google came to Instrument and tasked us with designing an online product experience for the global launch of Google's first phone with Android 4.0, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
Partnering with Google, we crafted a new identity for their “Developers” brand to educate and inspire those who embrace their open-source platforms.
To welcome the arrival of one of the biggest days in sports, we created “Game Day”, in partnership with Google, to speak directly with football fans around the world about the many helpful features of Google Search.</code></pre>
> Remember Facebook?<p>This delusion that Facebook is somehow dramatically more replaceable than Google or Amazon is kinda amusing. There are plenty of other places to buy online and plenty of other places to search. I can't imagine the mental contortions that are required to hold both of these beliefs at once: "Facebook is replaceable," and, "Google is irreplaceable." They are both replaceable, but it would be tough in both cases.
I don't see what's bad about Facebook. 99 percent of the content is gossip, siloed, tucked neatly in a corner of the Internet, covered with ads. Would you rather have any idiot's rants and raves about their boy/girlfriend all over you search engine results? Long live chit chat, but keep it where it belongs.<p>Incidentally, ill thought features like the timeline or apps like the Washington post that try to turn the site to a news site or a personal mausoleum will fail and be retracted few months later
I'm interested to see how future generations perceive Facebook. For many in the current generation, Facebook became the place to reconnect with people they'd lost touch with since school ... sometimes a few years apart, but sometimes even longer. Today's children will grow up with those connections in-place. They won't need to re-connect because they'll always have been connected, so will it have the same appeal, or be used the same way?
I dislike facebook myself and for a lot of the same reasons but this guy is dead wrong that no one would miss it.<p>If facebook disappeared overnight, it would cause millions of people to come unglued. People are addicted to the connected/sharing nature of facebook and the level of withdrawal would be dangerous.
Why on earth does this have upvotes.<p>1. Thomas Reynold's post comes across as a pathetic childish rant.<p>2. If you don't think connecting with your friends is valuable then don't write a blog post about it, keep it to yourself, because I don't give a shit what you think.
I reap enormous value from Facebook and frankly feel that the tradeoff is well worth it.<p>Anytime I see an update in my feed that is either inane, useless, irritating, cloying, etc., I simply update the settings for that user's updates to "Only Show Important". After over a year of cultivating my feed, I am treated to a birds-eye view of the experiences of important people in my life every time I log into Facebook. This is nothing short of miraculous to me.
Of course we can replace facebook. If you think about it, we don't really need a "social network" - all these things can be done via e-mail, xmmp and irc (all of which are standard open protocols). Use mail groups instead of "pages" and "communities", set up your mail client to neatly arrange incoming messages in folders and voila. Use xmmp for private conversations. Use irc for group conversations. It's easy.<p>The thing is, most non-technical users won't be able to do it. Can you imagine your grandma using irc?<p>The value of facebook and similar social networks is that they unlock the power of internet communication for people who would otherwise be unable to use it.
Facebook, at its core, is about private (hah!) networks of one's friends and families. It was always designed to be insular, to form self-selecting groups. It's a platform that's inward looking. The inability to create and publicize new content with it to the Net at large is a feature, not a bug.
This is one thing that has always made me skeptical about FBs survival.<p>The majority of it's use seems to be for very short term things, like friends sharing what they are currently doing.<p>There is little value in most FB posts that are years old. As opposed to wikipedia which is a gradually building blob of knowledge.<p>Let's say FB was down for a week, many people would use G+ instead for their social networking needs and how many would come back?
I totally agree with this,
Facebook solved purely a social problem and this makes them subject to being at an existential risk of no longer being socially relevant ("cool").<p>Unlike say, Google, who started their massive empire by solving a technical problem; search.
Umm. Really?
- the arab spring
- a father sharing his son's first steps with the world
- learning of the death of an old, lost friend
- telling the world you are ok after your hotel has been bombed in Mumbai
- watching your nephew learn to ride a horse.
- learning about steve job's death and feeling the entire world grieve
- discovering a new book to read
- trash talking your friends about just how bad the Montreal Canadians really are<p>Staying connected to the things that matter.
Remembering your life.
People get bored of looking at the same thing for too long.<p>The combination of HTTP, Browsers, HTML, etc provides a broad canvas for artists, designers and makers to paint on. Facebook and Twitter are trying hard to take all of these amazing experiences, content and sites and package them up into a wall post or tweet. This is going to get boring for the majority of users and another solution for finding great content will catch our collective interest.
Think at the problem of communities like HN: as more users are arriving the quality of submissions and comments inevitably starts to be impacted.<p>Now think at Facebook as this exact process on steroids. Facebook is different because almost all the other sites on the internet where there is production of user-generated content is frequented by the elite of the internet users.<p>Facebook is different, a big percentage of facebook users are not really internet literate, they think the internet is confined into facebook, a few common sites they visit, plus searching with google when needed. They don't have a blog, don't write into forums, don't know reddit, they don't even know <i>how</i> to properly use a search engine.<p>So the quality of Facebook reflects a lot the average quality of their users, and with 1 billion users this quality is not exactly very high. Sorry, average people may be good at parenting, at helping you, at getting their work done, but the process of content production is something the belongs to an elite. Most people will just share pictures, write non-sensical status messages, and so forth.
I'm not sold on this post's content; despite my bias against facebook, it a convenient place to share common photos with friends, invite friends and acquaintances to parties, and it does keep me appraised of acquaintances' life events.<p>Can't think of anywhere else that would let me know that a guy I played club frisbee with in college recently got married. I never would have found out otherwise. You can argue that I didn't need to know that, but you can't argue that it keeps certain people on your extended network closer.<p>A lot of his argument is against the silly stuff they made for kids: farmville, frequent status updates, apps, gifts, etc. I can relate. Facebook has continually lost value since the year I joined, 2004, as a college freshman. This does coincide with their opening it to high school students, then the general population, apps, games, etc.<p>All that aside, what a fantastic URL! Slartibartfast would be proud.
If you want to hate on Facebook there should be less focus on Facebook the tool, which is a useful communication service, and more focus on Facebook the company, which is horrible.<p>Terrible business model, "shadiness", and being part of an ongoing mass of wealth evaporation (Zynga, as we speak) is what bothers me the most about Facebook.
Misleading analysis.<p>If nothing else, Facebook is obviously entertaining to many people, so this is a bit like arguing that entertainment has no value and we should just work all the time.<p>Wouldn't work itself be pointless in that case?
It is amusing how this title Facebook "the Devourer" reminds one of some dark Hindu deity, such as Kala [Time] the Devourer:<p>"At the dissolution of things, it is Kāla [Time] Who will devour all" (Mahanirvana-tantra, cited in David Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas, p. 122.)<p>Better known is Krishna's theophanic revelation to Arjuna on the sacred plain of Kurukṣetra: "Behold, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," which is also translated, "I am terrible time [Kalo, from "Kala"] the destroyer of all beings in all worlds" (Bhagavad-Gita, 11:32). Oppenheimer reportedly quoted this very line immediately after first nuclear detonation in history at Trinity Site, New Mexico in 1945.<p>Surely Facebook is too trivial to merit such cosmic appellations and apocalyptic titles as "the Devourer." Such language is best left to poets, seers, prophets, and mystics. In the context of discussing the technology industry, it is wildly hyperbolic.
I agree absolutely and have been trying to delete my Facebook account, but to no avail. How does one delete his Facebook account? If you know, please tell me. I have asked facebook to do it more than once, but they won't even respond to me. The best I have been able to do its deactivate my account, but it gets reactivated frequently and I have to go deactivate it again. Any help out there? Please respond via email stephang56@hotmail.com as I do not frequent this forum enough to see a reply.
It's either this or HTTP. I like the current level of abstraction the net has, I wouldn't like seeing it transforming in a closed platform on a single domain. I made radnation.com to be another place to be or thing to do in the internet, what we need is more indie sites like these creating different dynamics of use and features that are unique enough that copying all of them would be hard for a site like Facebook, then letting FB do one thing and stick to it.
Facebook (and now DataStax) has given me Apache Cassandra, and for that, I will be eternally grateful. Why did Zuck release it? It's so valuable and disruptive, feels like a "becuz I can" move.<p>I don't even keep a Facebook account, so to them I must be just about the worst moocher ever. :P
Another top comment that makes no sense. Alas, karma does not necessarily correlate with intelligence.<p>The point of the blog post is clear. There are other methods to do what people, such as middle-aged ones, now use Facebook for: sharing photos and text blurbs.<p>Knowing this, Facebook is pretty silly since you're posting all your private stuff on some kid's website. You do not know him and he doesn't know you. To him, you are just "Dumb fucks".<p>Can photos be shared by email? Can photos be shared via peer-to-peer? What is Skype? It's peer-to-peer. But it's not used for sharing "files". Years ago Google had something called the HELLO protocol. Anyone remember that? There are many ways to share personal photos and private text blurbs, not all of them are widely used. Posting your private photos and text blurbs on some kid's website seems like one of the dumbest ways to do it, especially when the kid calls people "[d]umb fucks" for doing so.
Just one thing: If they were the best and brightest, they would not have let themselves lured into Facebook :-) Maybe another reason why not much interesting stuff is coming out of Facebook!
There are plenty of reasons Facebook sucks, but you didn't hit on any of them. The one thing Facebook does well is allow people to share stuff and produce some value to those who receive it.
Oh look. Another blog post decrying the evils of facebook that is in reality saying "I don't like facebook, therefor it offers no value whatsoever to anyone else," like it's some universal truth.<p>A lot of hacker/geek types seem 1. to hate facebook and 2. to be unable to empathize with anyone who doesn't share their dogmatic technological beliefs. Can we stop this already? Most people on facebook enjoy using it. Most people on facebook get tons of value from it. Most people on facebook aren't on reddit or hacker news, so they get a lot of new content from things lifted from those sites and posted to facebook. I don't understand why it eats at people so much that other people enjoy something they don't like.<p>This is just a cynical blog post by someone angry that something he doesn't like is popular.