The creepiness that is Facebook

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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby Dioneo » Tue Apr 22, 2014 11:52 am

Google+ is much more user friendly--you can let in the masses who want to be friends, but also easily organize it so that you only get news from those you want to get news from. (You can sort of do this with facebook, but it's much more difficult to organize, and it never automatically opens onto a preferred feed, unlike G+.) Of course, nobody is on G+, so it doesn't matter that it's better...

I think I will use a nom de plume if I go back. (There were definitely people whose posts I consistently appreciated.) Or become much more ruthless in my social snobbery. :sun:
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby Elvis » Sun Apr 27, 2014 3:17 am

Image
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby Project Willow » Sun Apr 27, 2014 4:21 am

Hey, Elvis, let me know the name of your band and I'll like you.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby Hammer of Los » Sun Apr 27, 2014 4:49 am

...

It's still too creepy fer me.

...
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby Hammer of Los » Mon Apr 28, 2014 5:20 am

...
I would never join Facebook.

Too many creeps.
...
Last edited by Hammer of Los on Tue Apr 29, 2014 5:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby 82_28 » Mon Apr 28, 2014 8:17 am

Facebook is trying to join me! I tried to join up for our Early Clues venture with all the made up shit we have and using those credentials. But those were not good enough as I did not want to do something or another. I can't remember what. Then they started sending my fake email address warnings that I had ONE DAY to complete the fake hoops one must jump through in order to be with them. Then they just kept on sending them after the day they warned me that if I didn't act it would be over. But it's not. They're still sending me emails of "who I might like" and shit like that.

I never set up an account and yet they spam the fuck out of my fake email account with computerized passive aggressive threats as though I am a "member". It just has my fake email account and wouldn't bite on fake citiies in which I told the interface I was located. FB is poison. They aren't the only one, for sure.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby conniption » Sun Jun 29, 2014 4:36 am

RT

Facebook manipulated users' emotions as part of psychological experiment – study

Published time: June 28, 2014

Facebook conducted a psychological experiment on its users by manipulating their emotions without their knowledge, a new study reveals.

Researchers toyed with the feelings of 689,003 randomly selected English-speaking Facebook users by changing the contents of their news feed, according to a paper published in the June edition of the journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists' (PNAS).

During a week-long period in January 2012, researchers staged two parallel experiments, reducing the number of positive or negative updates in each user's news feed.

"When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks," said the authors of the paper, who include researchers from Facebook, Cornell University, and the University of California.

“We also observed a withdrawal effect: People who were exposed to fewer emotional posts (of either valence) in their News Feed were less expressive overall on the following days.”

The researchers indicated that the successful study is the first to find that moods expressed via social networks influence the emotions of others.

“These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks, and providing support for previously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network.”

The Facebook users were not notified of the experiment. However, according to Facebook's terms of service (to which every person agrees when they register on the social network), users’ data may be used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”

The researchers argue that their experiment was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy.


The paper also stated that the researchers never saw the content of the actual posts; instead, they relied on a computer which counted the occurrence of positive and negative words in more than three million status updates. Those posts contained a total of 122 million words; four million of those were positive (3.6%) and 1.8 million were negative (1.6%).

The significance of the research was reduced to a very small percentage, as the “emotional contagion” was estimated at only 0.1 percent. However, one can argue that with more than 1.3 billion Facebook users worldwide, that small percentage still includes a significant amount of people.


~

RI

Facebook fighting against ‘largest ever' govt data request in court

Published time: June 29, 2014

Facebook is locked in a legal battle over a court ruling that forced the site to hand over data from almost 400 profiles to authorities. The social media site argues the decision is unconstitutional and violates the Fourth Amendment.

Last summer, a New York court ordered Facebook to release data from the accounts of 381 people, who were suspected of being involved in a disability fraud case. The information included photos, private messages and other data.

The social media platform had previously been unable to go public about their legal struggle against the “largest data request” by a government body because of a court gagging order. However, Chris Sonderby, Facebook Deputy General Counsel published a blog post on Thursday speaking out about the case after a New York judge granted permission to go public.

"This unprecedented request is by far the largest we've ever received - by a magnitude of more than ten - and we have argued that it was unconstitutional from the start," wrote Chris Sonderby, a legal adviser to Facebook.
Sotherby goes on to say that of the 381 people whose account information was divulged, only 62 were actually charged.

“This means that no charges will be brought against more than 300 people whose data was sought by the government without prior notice to the people affected,” said Sotherby.

Facebook argues that such a request is unconstitutional as it violates the Fourth Amendment, which safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures. In their latest appeal, Facebook’s legal team filed an appellate to push to invalidate the sweeping search warrants and return the data of the other 300 people that is still being retained by authorities.

“We recognize that law enforcement needs to investigate potential crimes, but we believe all government data requests must be narrowly tailored, proportionate to the case, and subject to strict judicial oversight,” said Sotherby.

Prosecutors argue, however, that given the magnitude of the case authorities needed access to suspects’ Facebook accounts.

"This was a massive scheme involving as many as 1,000 people who defrauded the federal government of more than $400 million in benefits," says Joan Vollero, spokesperson for Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. "The defendants in this case repeatedly lied to the government about their mental, physical and social capabilities. Their Facebook accounts told a different story."

The data request eventually led to the charging of more than 130 New York civil servants, who had been cheating the system to obtain disability benefits.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby jlaw172364 » Sun Jun 29, 2014 1:16 pm

Regarding the "manipulating emotions" story, well Facebook is media, and media is used to manipulate emotions. Television, film, writing, etc. It all can be used for the same ends.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby brekin » Thu Jul 03, 2014 12:04 pm

jlaw172364 wrote:Regarding the "manipulating emotions" story, well Facebook is media, and media is used to manipulate emotions. Television, film, writing, etc. It all can be used for the same ends.


Not quite. The public assumes that the contract to be manipulated by the media is for the advertised ends, is beneficial, and is as universally applied as possible. You rent a rom-com to feel sappily good, a horror movie to be scared, a comedy to laugh, etc. People use facebook to connect with friends, show off, see what people are up to, make connections, etc. I think even that default mode makes people unhappy but no one assumes they are being secretly targeted to be manipulated to feel unhappier then another subset of users. To me this is like Pepsi putting a depressant in a limited run of soda for a certain region to see how depressed they get compared to the regular formula.

Read the study again. 689,003 randomly selected FB users were targeted without their consent to be made to feel less happy. This is more than the population of Seattle. How many of those users may have already struggled with depression? How many were possibly suicidal? This "study" was intended to cause harm, and for no other reason than profit. I summon all the class action lawyers of the world to descend upon FB and to tear it to pieces and carry those pieces off to drop them into the ocean.

Facebook conducted a psychological experiment on its users by manipulating their emotions without their knowledge, a new study reveals.Researchers toyed with the feelings of 689,003 randomly selected English-speaking Facebook users by changing the contents of their news feed, according to a paper published in the June edition of the journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists' (PNAS).During a week-long period in January 2012, researchers staged two parallel experiments, reducing the number of positive or negative updates in each user's news feed.

"When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks," said the authors of the paper, who include researchers from Facebook, Cornell University, and the University of California.
“We also observed a withdrawal effect: People who were exposed to fewer emotional posts (of either valence) in their News Feed were less expressive overall on the following days.”
The researchers indicated that the successful study is the first to find that moods expressed via social networks influence the emotions of others.


“These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks, and providing support for previously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network.”
The Facebook users were not notified of the experiment. However, according to Facebook's terms of service (to which every person agrees when they register on the social network), users’ data may be used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”
The researchers argue that their experiment was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy.
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Postby Perelandra » Thu Jul 03, 2014 1:07 pm

brekin » Thu Jul 03, 2014 8:04 am wrote:
jlaw172364 wrote:Regarding the "manipulating emotions" story, well Facebook is media, and media is used to manipulate emotions. Television, film, writing, etc. It all can be used for the same ends.

Not quite. The public assumes that the contract to be manipulated by the media is for the advertised ends, is beneficial, and is as universally applied as possible.
The public is terminally naive.

I summon all the class action lawyers of the world to descend upon FB and to tear it to pieces and carry those pieces off to drop them into the ocean.
That would be awesome, but is unlikely.

However, according to Facebook's terms of service (to which every person agrees when they register on the social network), users’ data may be used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”
The researchers argue that their experiment was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy.
And they're seeking to become inescapable.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby elfismiles » Fri Sep 05, 2014 10:24 am

What happens when your friends start leaving Facebook?
Theo Merz followed his friends onto the social networking site, and now he’s following them out. How did it come to this?
FOMO: 'It now feels like the party is happening away from Facebook' By Theo Merz
12:13PM BST 04 Sep 2014
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filt ... ebook.html
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby Luther Blissett » Fri Sep 26, 2014 8:48 am

Building something like Ello costs money. They have a team of at least seven people, and have worked on it for months. That doesn't come cheap.

The About section makes it seem like Ello was built independently, a group of artists making something for themselves, presumably funded by volunteer effort and maybe a seed investment from Ello president and CEO Paul Budnitz, who also founded Kidrobot and Budnitz Bicycles.

But a little digging shows a much more predictable source: they took a $435,000 round of seed funding in January from FreshTracks Capital, a Vermont-based VC firm that announced the deal in March.

Why is this problematic?

The Ello founders are positioning it as an alternative to other social networks — they won't sell your data or show you ads. "You are not the product."

If they were independently-funded and run as some sort of co-op, bootstrapped until profitable, maybe that's plausible. Hard, but possible.

But VCs don't give money out of goodwill, and taking VC funding — even seed funding — creates outside pressures that shape the inevitable direction of a company.

Before they opened their doors, Ello became hooked on an unsustainable funding model — taking cash from VCs — and will almost certainly take a much larger Series A round once that $435,000 dries up. (Which, at their current burn rate, should be in a couple months.)

And they'll have no trouble getting it. There's a lot of money out there right now, and it will be extremely tempting to take it, especially if refusing it would mean closure or layoffs.

The problem, of course, is that VCs aren't like Kickstarter backers, or even like angel investors. Kickstarter or Patreon backers just want the thing being made. Angel investors may have other reasons to invest beyond equity: fame, insider access, or maybe just the joy of helping something exist.

VCs may invest in things they think are interesting or want to exist, but they primarily invest money in startups to get a return on their investment, on behalf of their limited partners. That return usually takes the form of an exit: an acquisition or an IPO.

Unless they have a very unique relationship with their investors, Ello will inevitably be pushed towards profitability and an exit, even if it compromises their current values. Sometimes, this push comes subtly in the form of advice and questions in emails, phone calls, and chats over coffee. Sometimes, as more direct pressure from the board. (FreshTracks' Managing Director sits on their board.) Or, if things go bad, by replacing the founders.

The Ello team knows that how a startup is funded shapes how it behaves. They spend a good chunk of their About pages talking about how they're not going to make money (not ads or selling your data), and a little bit about how they hope to (paid premium features). I hope they're right — it'd be great to have more startups that aren't reliant on ads.

But they completely fail to disclose how Ello is being funded now, which matters just as much, if not more, as any future revenue plans.

I love seeing people build new stuff. More people trying to build crazy experimental communities on the Internet is a very good thing. And nothing's more audacious than trying to build a new social network.

Social networks become the glue that connect people together — the foundation for friendships, relationships, and new works of creative expression.

Building a social network is like opening the doors to a huge party and inviting everyone in. Without a way to get your stuff out, shutting down a social network is like locking the door and burning the place down.

At the moment, Ello is a free, closed-source social network, with no export tools or an API, fueled by venture capital and a loose plan for paid premium features. I think it's fair to be skeptical.

Like everyone else here, I hope Ello can stick to their principles, resist outside pressure, fight market forces, and find a unique and sustainable niche.

Let's hope their investors feel the same way.


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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby Project Willow » Fri Sep 26, 2014 11:44 pm

http://betabeat.com/2014/09/ello-cofounder-we-have-no-exit-strategy/#ixzz3EU3yiHy0

Ello Cofounder: ‘We Have NO Exit Strategy’
Everyone is obsessed with why Ello will inevitably sell out, against the promises of its investors, founders and developers.

By Jack Smith IV 9/26 5:09pm

It’s been about 48 hours since interest in Ello flew off the damn charts, and the number of think pieces about its inevitable downfall is … well, expectedly enormous. Outside of the Medium.com designer circle-jerk about how unintuitive the interface is or complaints that a product in beta testings feels incomplete, most of the focus has been on Ello’s promise that they’ll never sell user data or put ads on the site. Mainly the claim is they’re either lying or just wrong, with headlines like “Ello Says You’re Not a Product, But You Are.”

The first piece of the why-Ello-is-doomed puzzle is their proposed freemium model, which many think just plainly won’t work. Instead of selling ads, data or putting up a paywall, Ello will eventually offer on-site purchases like multi-user logins, layout adjustments, or new ways of organizing your follows beyond Ello’s current Friends/Noise system.

“This model works across some of the most successful companies in the history of the Internet,” Ello co-founder Todd Berger told Betabeat. “Why is that such a stretch in the social networking environment?”

It’s not. LinkedIn and OkCupid both offer premium membership services, and Tumblr—perhaps the closest thing we have to an Ello-style incumbent—has run a marketplace for pay-for-play design upgrades for a while. Then again, no one has ever tried it as a central business model, at least not in social.

But it’s been incredibly profitable for tangential sectors. Profitable messaging apps sell just these kinds of cosmetic extras in the form of custom stickers and emojis, and one look at Kim Kardashion: Hollywood can show how in-app purchases can drive success in the gaming space. How did that work out long-term? WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion, and Gluu Mobile, Zynga and King Digital are all publicly traded companies.

The difference is, Ello isn’t concerned about an exit. The most brutal, well-circulated criticisms of Ello come from people saying that since they took a small investment from Vermont-based FreshTracks Capital, their only option in the long run is to go back on everything they believe in and sell to a buyer or go public—a concern that founder Paul Budnitz told us is “silly.” Ind.ie founder Aral Balken, who boasts that he consulted with Ello briefly before they launched, wrote an impassioned screed against Ello’s future called “Ello, goodbye,” encouraging everyone to swear off Ello because of their investment:

Here’s how venture capital works: you go to an investor, before you’ve even built the thing you’re building and you tell them how you’re going to exit. It’s called an exit plan or exit strategy[...] So here’s what I’m doing: I’m leaving Ello. Before it can grow. Before it can exit. And I suggest that you do the same.

“I’ll be frank,” Mr. Berger told us earlier today, “We do not have an exit strategy.”

Is it naive not to have some kind of exit plan? Yes. But it’s not like they don’t have a business model, and their VC is willing to play the long game. Cairn Cross, the investor in question, has doubled-down on Ello’s promises of privacy, telling Gigaom that he practices “small-town venture” and has no intentions of pressuring Ello to change their values.

“We’re talking about 400 grand we took from super-lefty, forward-thinking Vermont guys,” Mr. Berger said. “Our investors are just about the least evil people you’ve ever met.”

Wired’s think piece focused on the idea that unlike Mark Zuckerberg, who has always been an ad-selling business monster, the Ello co-founders (based on the manifesto) don’t seem to be concerned with running a business, saying that their high-minded ideals are “unrealistic, and will cause the project to fail.” But it’s fallacious to say that the founders aren’t businessmen.

The seven founders, who hold a majority stake of around 82 to 84 percent of Ello, all come from successful entrepreneurial backgrounds. Paul Budnitz created Budnitz Bicycles and Kidrobot, Mr. Berger and his partner Lucian Föhr have a design studio, and the other four founders come from Mode Set, a coding collective with a client-based model.

“We are a business,” Mr. Berger said. “We have shareholders and a board, but how better to keep your founders in check than a fucking manifesto?”

Ah, but there’s always that manifesto. It’s the document that grabbed everyone’s attention to begin with, and now is haunting them, not because they’ve betrayed its values, but because…

“It might be a big leap in the tech world to make claims you intend to uphold, but that might be the difference between our team and every other tech company,” he said.

Mr. Berger blames the fear-mongering on the venture-obsessed, exit-focused mindset of tech media, laying hate down on a start-up that wants nothing to do with the typical start-up story and culture. Yes, they may be designer turtleneckers, techies and upper-middle-class white men, but they despise the scale-obsessed narrative of the early stage start-up.

“We may want to make a sustainable business,” Mr. Berger said. “But we don’t want to be billionaires.”



I joined Ello along with a portion of the arts community here. We'll see how it goes.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby 82_28 » Sat Sep 27, 2014 12:32 am

I wound up joining Ello too with the peeps I technologically interface with. Don't know if I'll use it. I kinda looked at it. Those last two comments here make me hate it. I'm "FOIB" if you wanna search for me.

Otherwise, who cares?

I was trying to think of the next "big thing" and what it will be. We've already been through what, like 5 or 6 different "social" media iterations since the late 90's -- not including "WELL".
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby Project Willow » Sat Sep 27, 2014 12:54 am

I liked Diaspora actually, but I couldn't get anyone else to move there, and now I haven't looked at my account in at least a year. I did read a quote from the Ello guys that they're considering a pay if you want option al la Radiohead. Money overrides ideals often enough.

Anyway, I just said hello to you on Ello.
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