For me going to facebook is like going to the church : I’m no fool, I hate it, but it makes my mom happy and l can have some news from my cousin’s children.
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I find this article to be unfortunately ironic, since I now regularly find that BoingBoing hosts ads on its pages that hijack my browser, forcing it to jump to the ad; play video I can’t mute; reload another video ad when the first has finished and hijack my browser all over again.
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I agree! BUT - they provide a service which can just as easily be provided by countless others. The paradox here is that the same lock-in that people justifiably complain about is also Facebook’s primary feature. When the “feature” is that something readily accessible is made only available through one gatekeeper, some will see that as extortion.
“How can that prison be a bad place? My grandma is in there!”
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Interesting angle coming from soemone who publishes on a website that has so many entires currently showing in Ghostery and NoScript.
That aside, and like the RSS feed method mentioned, I’ve always gone with the 20-page ‘Home’ button (1 being BoingBoing) as my method of delivery for the digital equivilant of my morning newspaper.
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Well, of course BB does all those things. Because Facebook forces them to.
Didn’t you read the article? 
Of course Cory hates Facebook. They force him to write clickier headlines. (Maybe even misleading ones!) They force his publisher to surround his posts with video ads that everyone hates.
Facebook is ruining his blog. It’s no wonder he hates them.
It’s all Facebook’s fault. And it’s up to me, and you, and all of us to fix it. There’s nothing else Cory can do about it, after all, since he’s a “Facebook vegan.”
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Yeah, whatever happened to blogrolls?
For several years, most of my exploration of the web was driven by following blogroll links from one blog to the next.
OP says:
find cool stuff by checking bookmarks, visiting your favorite sites by typing their URLs in your browser bar, or searching for them on your favorite search-engine.
Those aren’t way to find things; those are ways to return to things you’ve already found.
But the once-common “Blogroll and Favorite Links” sections are increasingly uncommon.
I think BB used to have one, didn’t they?
Maybe if we called it “artisanally curated gift-economy cross-promotion” (or at any rate, something catchier than “blogroll and favorite links”) we could revive the practice.
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I’m calling bullshit on that Zuckerberg post. I can believe he has 100,499,012 followers; but two friends? I can’t believe he is that popular.
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Something like…
Oops 
Large numbers people will always use whatever iteration of internet silo we are at, they provide a service that people find useful. Facebook exists to make money though, they’ll run their service however they think will make them the most money.
I’d love for the-thing-that-replaces-facebook to be something with less corrosive effects, but I don’t think the odds are good.
If people paid for social media services and/or if the protocols by which they worked were open, you could imagine a market of such services that competed on the quality of their service to you rather than using you as a way to make money via third parties like advertisers.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s likely to happen.
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“Media worth consuming is media worth paying for.”
When you pay for media, you are the customer, the media is the product, and savvy media-makers will compete by offering better-quality media.
When you rely on ‘free’ ad-supported media, the advertiser is the customer; your ‘eyeballs’ are the product. The media is simply bait to lure more product, and savvy media-makers will craft ever-flashier bait.
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Proud Facebook vegan since 2015. And you know what? No withdrawals, unlike smoking or taking heroin.
I still have a secret Twitter account. I never use it to tweet anything with, only to scan the local tweets whenever I hear sirens.
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You can’t cleanly separate the two. Facebook is an application built for the sole purpose of pumping people up to click through as much stuff as possible. If you look at 20 things, you can be shown twice as many ads as if you look at 10 things. That’s not a conspiracy theory or some rarefied pea-princess critique; they literally have teams of people working out how to provoke constant “checking”, how to keep users constantly sidetracked, how to discourage clicking away from Facebook, etc.
I would say that putting your flyers in front of people on Facebook is, at best, slightly more effective than putting posters in cafes. The difference is that on Facebook, it feels like active, urgent, ongoing work: it feels like the effort you make every day on Facebook should yield better results than an hour spent going round local cafes.
That’s pretty much their MO. The problem is “communication task X is hard”, and Facebook’s faux solution is “we’ll create the superficial appearance of solving task X, and we’ll make it feel like productive work”. (Work which, of course, involves showing you a lot of ads). It’s the same with the “Facebook keeps me in touch” argument; all Facebook really does is create a new, virtually meaningless definition of being in touch.
I don’t deny that Facebook has some effect on connecting old school friends and exposing people to local arts organisations. It’s just that the extra contact you achieve through Facebook is very, very weak sauce – by design, since anything beyond trivial small talk eats into ad revenue – and it’s delivered through a choking smog of psychic pollution.
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Exactly.
The problem is that it seems to be too difficult to
a. Encourage and facilitate people paying for the media and infrastructure they want.
b. Make alternative platforms that reach the critical mass required for those platforms to win.
That’s what I think are the barriers to better social media (and individuals online presence in general), and why I think it unlikely that the situation will change - however much I might like it to.
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The other big method of finding stuff from before Facebook times was StumbleUpon. Don’t hear much about that one anymore.
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Exactly, and the truth of that is why they must have a monopoly (if they want to make money that way).
No place for a marketplace of that sort of service, no interop between services competing on quality.
As long as we want it for free, that’s the way it’s going to be.
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For some value of private that you don’t have access to.
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sometimes i wish i could get back on facebook just to access my ca. 1980s family photos that i scanned, uploaded, and subsequently misplaced, but the facebook police are demanding i show them i.d. with my real name on it and i’m not willing to do that.
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I’d love to ditch FaceBook but it’s about all most of the people I know how to use as far as Teh Interwebz goes.
I’m not going to have a pout at my less web-saavy friends and family until they give up on a mega-corporation that sells your info like Facebook and they start contacting me via an email provider that sells your information like Gmail, or a cellphone provider that sells your information like… all of them.
But the day they find a better class of privacy abuser will be a happy one.
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Yes…
and No.
I think that much of the reason why the early internet took off was that it was based upon a protocol that anybody could use. Same with the indestructible proliferation of bit torrent. Free (as in beer) becomes free (as in speech) when it is based not on one service tied to a rent-seeker, but one protocol that anybody can use. Every other new proprietary service is simply an attempt to sell the latest GEnie/Prodigy/CompuServe. One person’s gated community is another’s prison.
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Also easier to provide the data driving the engine of a corporation complicit in censorship by authoritarian governments, complicit in selling data about algorithmicly identified suicidal and emotionally vulnerable teens to marketers, and complicit in shredding privacy with more or less all governments.
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Thanks, I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said.
I also agree about each new proprietary service being the latest sell, in an earlier post i referred to facebook as one iteration of the internet silo, content contained in a closed platform.
I agree entirely that solution/s based on an open protocol would work, as I mentioned in another post…
The issue is that at scale, this infrastructure costs money. If it’s free (beerily) to end users, who pays and how? We already know - advertisers. I’m sure there are other answers to that, but nobody seems to be suggesting them.
FWIW my preferred option is that I’d like to see some level of internet infrastructure as a public utility, I’d gladly see some of my taxes spent on that.
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