Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch - <AUTHOR> http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/facebook-you-needy-sonofabitch/ <comment><USER3> The best thing I ever did was delete the Facebook app from my phone. I had already disabled all the notifications, but that didn't change things like deleting the app. Not being able to get to Facebook wherever you are. As silly as it sounds it was _liberating._ I still access Facebook from my laptop - <USER2> now that it's off of my phone, I'm accessing Facebook less and less frequently and I'm find I'm happier as a result.

Less Facebook == more happy. It's the best advice I can give.

<comment><USER4> > Less Facebook == more happy

More productive, less distracted, etc., sure but was FB really getting you down that much? Am I just using Facebook "wrong" in that it's not upsetting me the same way it upsets others?

<comment><USER5> Every time I'm on FB. It's pleasant, really pleasant. But, every single time I'll go on the site and to do a thing like, check on the plans for my friend's birthday party. I end up spending like 30min or so more time than I expected to just browsing aimlessly.

It's not like they are putting a gun to my head but, they are using a billion dollars of research and my friends' faces to entice me into doing something I don't want. I'm more or less a monkey and my social circuitry just is so super-stimulated that it's annoying.

And all of that is before the FOMO kicks in and I start feeling bad that my life isn't as nice as my friends even though among my friends, I have a very enviable life (my friends have confided in me as much). But, my every day life cannot compete with the highlight reel of all the best moments of all my friends' lives.

Even though I know all of this stuff consiously, it still affects me because keeping guard and watch over everything constantly is hard. Falling into how it's designed to make you feel is easy.

Deleting FB off your phone is the best thing.

This overwhelming feeling, I'm convinced, is one of the driving factors that created Instagram and Snapchat because it was smaller and less invasive. Ironically, they became just like FB or in some ways (to some people) worse as they grew.

We are social animals and FB weaponizes the faces of all of your friends to suck as much attention from you as possible. It's as unfair a fight as there ever has been in the history of commerce.

<comment><USER6> Funny thing is that anyone with half a brain cell notices this if you just try to look at it even a bit. People are manipulable to do things they do not like to do. Yet any time there is a comment in HN stating that marketing may not be the best thing since sliced bread, there will be tons of messages of type "hey, just last week I saw an ad of an even I actually wanted to go, so there is nothing bad ever in people throwing ads at my face against my will". Weird. (And don't get me started on the whole damn "science" of economics being based on the (obviously unfalsifiable as per popper) assumption that people always and anywhere just maximize their utility.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ye, Facebook is Facebook, which is creepy.

Some friends asked me to sign up for it because they wanted to use the messenger service for a groupchat. When I registered it immediately propagated my profile with information about my highschool (10 years ago) and suggested a lot of people I knew from back then as well as some devs I've collaborated with on Github. All this from a new email.

So I went into the settings and changed all privacy settings I could find, and was suddenly banned for "suspicious activity". To unlock the account they demanded my phonenumber, surely only for 2FA. But because my friends kept nagging I gave them it so I could chat with them.

After about 10 minutes of chatting I got banned again for "suspicious activity". This time they demanded a recent photo of my face to confirm my identity. But also said that I shouldn't worry because only their servers will see it. So I just sent a photo of some random from a local magazine and they replied that it was not me in the image.

So although I've never posted any photos online, never used the email, never posted my phonenumber online. They know everything about me, including what I look like. Can't imagine what data Google has if Facebook has all that..

<comment><USER8> it's possible they rejected your photo because they did a reverse image search and it matched the magazine?

<comment><USER9> Facebook allows you to tag people who aren't on facebook in photos - so maybe it was using those photos for comparison.

<comment><USER10> This. I went through the same process - Facebook rejected a photo from a really obscure magazine, so I asked one of my friends to send me an image they already uploaded to Facebook. FB quickly accepted that one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This ties into a phenomena that I've noticed with a lot of social networks lately-- fake content.

What I mean by that specifically is putting things into your feed that _nobody actually intended to share_. e.g. "XXXX liked this thing!" Or generating notifications of non-events, like "Hey, share a thing!"

The share button is literally right next to the 'uplike' button. And they specifically did not press it. But you're gonna press it for them, because you gotta have content and folks keep pretty mum on facebook (and everywhere else) lately. There is very little I'm interested in sharing with _every single person I know_. And even less I'm interested in sharing with strangers a la Twitter.

To say nothing of the overall click-baity trollish quality of aformentioned articles. Every time one of my dear friends gets triggered and feeds the trolls, facebook is dutifully shoving it in my face. There is a high correlation between virality and unredeemable shit stirring.

Facebook is doing it. Twitter is doing it. Reddit is perhaps the most shameless of all with their mobile app working _hard_ to spam you with posts that you.... haven't commented on, or even upvoted. (I can't say one way or the other about Snapchat because I'm not a millennial.)

I do believe this is the intersection of 100% social media saturation and the public markets' relentless demand for growth. This is peak social media. They're flogging live video hard, but news flash: I grew up when you had to make plans to watch your favorite TV show, and it's the worst. Live video sucks. I got shit to do. I can't even be bothered to DVR things any more.

<comment><USER12> Snapchat is pretty good about this. They only send notifications for direct messages, not for sponsored content, stories, or group chats.

<comment><USER11> For now. The others didn't, until they did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The tricks, hooks, and tactics Facebook uses to keep people coming back have gotten more aggressive and explicit. And I feel that takes away from the actual value the platform provides."

This is why I stopped using Facebook. I really didn't mind the platform until they crossed the threshold of being a useful product to reminding my each time I used it that I AM the product.

I like to fly under the radar and prefer people to find my pictures and posts naturally. Once they started force feeding people my content I decided to stop inflicting my peers with fuel for facebooks social cannons.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I wonder how long before most of FB's users notice how aggressive this is and, perhaps more likely, how boring the feed becomes with these tricks.

Is FB getting more aggressive because it wants even more or because it is actually losing clicks/logons/attention?

<comment><USER15> Facebook is definitely losing engagement.

[http://fortune.com/2016/04/07/facebook-sharing- decline/](http://fortune.com/2016/04/07/facebook-sharing-decline/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a facebook account, but I haven't even logged in in the mast few years. Recently (like a week ago), I started receiving text messages on the number i had setup, after constant nagging by fb about security, looking like this :

Robin, get back on Facebook by clicking: [https://fb.com/l/someIDhere](https://fb.com/l/someIDhere)

I am OUTRAGED by this. My phone text messages is one of the only communication medium that has no spam, and i basically use it for urgent stuff. I never agreed to fb using it for anything further than 2fa. If it wants to spam me, it may send emails.

This was basically the last straw for me. I'm going to send a message to all my friends telling them to send a mail if they want to contact me, delete everything on my profile and wall, and bid farewell. My account will stay up mostly to keep scammers/impostors at bay.

<comment><USER17> You are in luck!

At one point in time, text messages were extremely expensive (several cents per message, depending on the plan you had). At that time, laws were passed (in many countries, I don't know where you are) that made it illegal to send unsolicited text messages.

You should see if you can scare Facebook.

<comment><USER18> I don't know of many countries outside the US where you had to pay for receiving texts or calls.

Most everywhere the cost was always borne by the sender (except when roaming)

<comment><USER19> Even roaming, it is free to receive SMSes for my plan and most plans in Australia.

If you need to receive an 2FA token, well, you need to receive an 2FA token.

<comment><USER18> Yes, I failed to mention the roaming exception was for calls only.

Since this summer, roaming charges are also banned altogether within the EU.

<comment><USER20> Not 100% right as some companies in EU member countries such as Finland, where I'm from, were allowed to use a certain clause that would allow them to still add roaming charges (mostly data related). This is done because the majority of operators sell contracts based on the speed and not a monthly GB cap. Almost all contracts are unlimited in data. I for one have a ~30€/month contract that has unlimited data with 50Mbps down / 30Mbps up.

After the roaming change my contract includes ~6GB of roaming data within EU. When that's reached there is a 0.0057€ per MB price in data abroad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Although I'm not on Facebook anymore, I have the same problem with LinkedIn. To deal with it, I just add to my email sieve filter every so often. So far I have:

      ## Linkedin - Trash useless email
      if allof(
        address :is "From" "firstname.lastname@example.com",
        anyof(
          header :regex "Subject" "^(Congratulate|Say happy birthday to) .+",
          header :regex "Subject" "^Check out .+ (updated profile|new skill|new photo)",
          header :regex "Subject" ".+ is a?waiting (for )?your response$",
          header :regex "Subject" "^News about .+",
          header :regex "Subject" "ou have [0-9]+ (unread message|new update)",
          header :regex "Subject" "Do you know .+",
          header :regex "Subject" "^.+, you have .+waiting for you on LinkedIn$",
          header :regex "Subject" "see who you already know on LinkedIn$",
          header :regex "Subject" "^.+, more than [0-9,]+ new jobs in .+$",
          header :regex "Subject" "^Connect to your classmates from .+$"
        )
      ){
          addflag  "\\Seen";
          fileinto "Trash";
          stop;
      }

I'm sure you could do something similar for Facebook if you just switched to email notifications and stopped using the mobile apps.

<comment><USER21> Slight tangent, but any suggestions on how to do this kind of real-time filtering with Gmail? The filter functionality doesn't quite let you do regexes.

<comment> l-p Imapfilter [1] would work.

It also uses regexes so it would be easy to convert mike-cardwell's rules.

[1]: [https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter](https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter)

<comment><USER21> Oh cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> They also ensure there's ALWAYS at least one notification when you sign in. Even if nothing of importance happened, they find _something_ to notify you about just so you can see the red notification count every time.

I deactivated my account yesterday and look forward to a FB-free life.

<comment><USER23> Did you deactivate on purpose? Unless you still use Messenger or are considering changing your mind, you should delete your account instead. Deactivation just flips a bit; deletion actually removes your data.

<comment><USER24> > deletion actually removes your data

Keeping in mind that this is Facebook we are talking about, I doubt the data is actually removed.

<comment><USER19> GDPR means Facebook can face fines in the billions for not deleting data when you delete your account

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here is a perspective I read that I thought was interesting[1]:

"There are a billion active accounts on facebook and other than the 208 that are set to private, I can communicate with every single one of them. I don't know what other word I can use other then Power. This is great power, just like the power held by the presidency, with great power comes great responsibility, and loneliness.

The worst thing about Facebook is not the power it gives me. The worst thing about facebook is what I chose to do with the power it gives me.

I certainly couldn't handle it. You might as well say the worst thing about facebook is me.

On facebook, why would I give someone privacy when I have access to all this information. And I don't even need their permission. I can watch your private pictures because you made them available. It's not that I can find out where you work, where you live, where you eat, everything about you. It's that I actually do find out without ever hiring a private detective. It's not what I can do, it's what I do!"

[1]: [https://idiallo.com/blog/facebook-and- me](https://idiallo.com/blog/facebook-and-me)

</comment><comment><USER26> Lots of things we see as innocuous online would seem really weird, clingy, abusive in other contexts. Imagine if every time you walked into a store before you even looked at anything someone steps up right into your face and says "Sign up for our newsletter!" Then you walk two steps and someone steps up to you with a phone in their hand "Hey, call your friends and tell them you love our store! We'll give you 5% off!" then a couple steps later a marketer comes up to you "Hey, our advertising department wants your phone number so they can call you up and just say something to you a few times a day!"

I just want to buy a damn pillow! (Don't forget to review it, your opinion is important to the world! And the manufacturer would like to know how useful it was to you but won't do anything if it wasn't!)

<comment><USER27> Every postmodern retail shop in the US already does this. Have you been to a Lush, Rituals, matress sales, or any clothing boutique lately? Their peppy, pseudo-personal sales staff has a perfectly crafted script and they know it cold. They'll interrupt me when I'm obviously happily browsing on my own. "Just to let you know, everything in the back is 5% off, everything with a red tag is 6% off, and if you sign up for our email newsletter today, we'll give you $2 off. What is your name, by the way?" I want to ask them if there will be a quiz on the material. They also ask for your phone number or email at checkout. When I politely decline, they often act like that has never happened before

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Perhaps the growth of the platform or certain internal user-based metrics are not being met, so whoever is in charge of making sure they "hit their numbers" is pushing like mad to find ways to grow product. I can see some very aggressive people sitting around a table coming up with ideas to force engagement. Then after a month, they sit back and figure out all the A/B testing that drives the machine.

This reminds me of the quote, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

<comment><USER29> I keep expecting companies to suffer from this "hit your numbers" approach, and it seems like they're starting to.

Every A/B test makes your site less predictable and straightforward for your users. Every push notification dilutes the value of every other notification sent. Every 'fake' event undermines the thrill of real engagement with other users.

At a certain point you're burning real value to create better metrics, and that's not sustainable for a company that actually wants to endure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As someone with maybe an "outside" perspective (I never got "in" to Facebook, I never logged in with any regularity, I've posted once, and I essentially have a blank profile), the "We haven't heard from you in a while" thing is what keeps from using the platform at all. I'm an "inbox zero" kind of person, and there's so much noise on Facebook that I can't get any signal.

Every time I log in I somehow have around 6 notifications. Facebook _always_ finds something to notify me about. It's never a daunting number, but it's never zero either. If I log in twice in a week, I'll have something under a dozen notifications both days. So you'd think that after not logging in for 3 months I'd have dozens of notifications, right? Nope. Always some kind of number that I imagine Facebook has decided is the ideal number of notifications to keep me interested.

I've tried in vain to limit my notifications to things that I actually care about, but I've never been able to get rid of the random noise. Facebook is _determined_ to send me push notifications about _something_. I can't stand it.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's official. I will never work for Facebook. In terms of hipness (lack of it), positive impact (lack of it), and sliminess, this puts them on the same shelf as Comcast for me. It also frames their ruinous impact on societal discourse as "hostile" rather than just a "a naive and clumsy mistake".

For Facebook employees: Is this really the company you want to work for? Is this the impact you want to have on the world? Is this really the best place in society to apply your talents?

<comment><USER32> No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

<comment><USER33> yeah plus $$$

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Unfortunately for $FB, they may have bigger fish to fry than user revolt over cloying UX dark patterns.

The "Facebook reaches coveted non-existant people (NEP) demo" story would be amusing, if it weren't symbolic of greater industry-wide risks concerning click-fraud scrutiny.

But of greater concern as investigations into Russian meddling of the election heat up, is that $FB profited enormously from microtargeted ads specifically engineered as part of a program of mass psyops. With everyone looking for a scapegoat, this could result in actual indictments.

Why Nobody Can Trust Facebook

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-11/why-nobody-can- trus...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-11/why-nobody-can-trust- facebook)

Facebook Wins, Democracy Loses

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/facebook-wins- dem...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/facebook-wins-democracy- loses.html)

</comment><comment><USER35> I haven't used Facebook for anything other than _chatting with family_ in more than a year. I still get "notifications" about things that I literally could not care any less about. Someone posted something on _their_ wall? I don't fucking care! Someone said something and it got a lot of attention? I literally hate that person, why are you telling me this?

And... you might tell me that I could just unsubscribe. Yeah. I did, multiple times. The notifications still come. They just go to the spam bucket now.

Facebook is one of the worst "products" on the market and I'm pretty close to telling family to find some other means of communicating with me. Like, you know, a good old fashioned phone call.

<comment><USER36> I'm in pretty much the same situation - the main reason why I use Facebook is to message friends. Basically all my friends have Facebook, so it's the easiest way.

Messenger seems to be moving more and more towards a snapchat clone, where as I just want something to message people. I don't want to post updates, play games, see ads, make phone calls, get spammed when someone new signs up.

iMessage before iOS 10 was perfect, except not all my friends use Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> There probably should be a robot that responds about Facebook posts "you aren't the customer, you are the product."

The article is pretty careful to use the term user - undoubtedly we are users.

But here is the problematic statement:

"This is what happens when the metric of how much time users spend using your thing supersedes the goal of providing legitimate value to your users."

The thing is - sure, the user time spent is measured, and "providing legitimate value" is not. How would one measure that, exactly?

But - more importantly - the metric, the ONLY metric, that really really matters is revenue. From real paying customers - ie: advertisers, some alluded to in the article.

So that is the one for which all optimizations are directed - via the indirect metric of "user engagement" where "user engagement is a pretty good proxy for "users see ads" and perhaps "users click on ads."

It does not appear that "providing legitimate value" is part of any of that, nor is there any reason that it ever would be.

IFF sufficient value could be provided that people would actually pay money just to use Facebook, so much money that it dwarfs all other forms of revenue (and perhaps even anti-correlates with ad revenue).... THEN we'll see Facebook focussed on user value. But not until then.

<comment><USER38> I've always thought would be interesting to create a survey that would ask FB users: what is the maximum amount they would pay per month to use Facebook? What is it really worth to them? Or, would they continue to use it if it was $10/month? How about 50 cents?

<comment><USER39> Check this article out. Cites a study that puts the estimated annual value of Facebook to study participants @ $750!

[https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/2172707...](https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21727073-economists-struggle-work-out-how-much-free-economy-comes- cost)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I can't even get to Facebook anymore on any of my devices. On all of my Macs, my `/etc/hosts` file includes:

      0.0.0.0    facebook.com
      0.0.0.0    www.facebook.com

And then to double down, I have a custom 1Blocker rule to prevent accidentally opening up any Facebook links on my iPhone:

      https?://([a-z\.]*)?facebook\.com.*

<comment><USER41> I've done something similar but technically that only prevents you from visiting the main site.

If you want to be really shocked you should search for some of the host files out there that attempt to list every known Facebook-owned host; there are hundreds of lines or more. It is _extremely_ difficult to prevent Facebook tentacles from being loaded by other sites, and it's surely a losing battle (I bet they register new domains daily).

<comment><USER40> I've already got that covered[1].

      …/~ cat /etc/hosts | wc -l
      50773

[1] - [https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> As a small part of a larger change in my personal life, I've also decided to delete my facebook account as well as Linkedin and other social media accounts. Basically I was in the need for a mental break.

Too much mental stimulation, specially from things that don't have much interest, was making my mind very shallow and easily distracted. I still read a lot of HN, but I'm trying to reduce my internet leisure time to 1 hour per day at most.

Since now I easily get bored, I started doing some sudokus (on a paper book) and I am finally starting to feel my mind a little bit sharper. I also feel the need to find more productive things to pass the time. For instance, three days ago I explored, quite in depth, C pointers and pointer arithmetic because of the first comment on this hn thread [0]. Also, yesterday, starting on the hn thread on microkernels [1], I started reading about these "alternative" OSes (Minix, HelenOS, etc), checked the source code of some of them, and eventually played a bit with nasm assembler and made a 32 bit and 64 bit "hello world" app for MacOS. These are things that I wouldn't learn and do if I was being mentally "stimulated" by facebook and that kind of things.

However, one positive thing about facebook is that those friends that used to send emails with funny memes, videos and what else, now use facebook for that. As a result, my email inbox is now much cleaner and calmer.. :)

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15198093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15198093)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15216615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15216615)

<comment><USER43> Thanks for sharing your experience! :)

Funny now that you mention.. I've been doing less and less side projects since my life got 'invaded' by social media. I wonder if I'm suffering from a similar problem...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think so many platforms these days employ so many attention-grabbing techniques, that they wear down people. So now they have to go to the bottom of the barrel, notifying you for things that aren't really notifications -- the fact that you haven't posted in a week, for example.

The content quality is abysmal. People simply do not care to share on Facebook in ways that they have in the past. Their awful algorithm ruined the user value.

I think if they returned to a default chronological sorted news feed, with still sprinkling in ads as they do, they could increase the amount of time people spend on the service, show more ads, and increase revenue all while providing a superior experience. Why they don't return to this level of simplicity that the platform once had is beyond me. Too many engineers and too many PM's pushing for their pet projects, I assume, and you really just end up with an overdeveloped product.

</comment><comment><USER44> If you want to delete Facebook from your phone but your friends use Facebook Events, there is a stand alone Events app. That being said, I wish my friends didn't use Facebook for events.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/events-from-facebook-find- th...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/events-from-facebook-find-things-to-do- near-you/id1153443320?mt=8)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.S...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.Socal&hl=en)

<comment><USER45> Better yet, use the [https://mbasic.facebook.com](https://mbasic.facebook.com) website designed for feature phones. It doesn't even require javascript!

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm beginning to wonder if our ability to sympathize only serves to advance the agendas of those who want to make money on us. Facebook's pushiness is and should always be held as unacceptable, in all circumstances and for all people.

"I sympathize that the company needs business users to keep it afloat" does not justify the kind of begging they've been up to lately.

The author's (and all our) collective sympathy keeps them soliciting us with their bullshit

<comment><USER47> > I'm beginning to wonder if our ability to sympathize only serves to advance > the agendas of those who want to make money on us.

Using your adversary's virtues against them is a strategy as old as humanity. With social media it's baked right into the name. Who doesn't want to be social? Who doesn't want to share? Is something wrong with you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago and quickly found that it provided little value to my everyday. I would say longer term, as friends had kids, I missed some of the "social bonding" experience via the web, but din't miss anything in person. A month ago my phone died and as a test, I didn't install Instagram. Instagram was the last FB connection. I always defended Instagram to myself. It didn't require as much attention as FB and barrier to entry was low (post some pics sometimes). In the last year Instagram has shifted more towards the FB notification style and adopted more Snap features. My feed became filled with ads, stories gained dominance, and notifications became persistent. I figured that is sufficient mental intrusion to warrant my departure.

As a heavily connected individual, work in tech, I find that disconnecting does alleviate mental baggage. I have gained more time to read and that brings me more joy than scanning an insta-feed.

</comment><comment><USER49> Another notification type not mentioned in the article is "you last updated your profile X weeks ago."

This one is _worse_ because it also uses the _iOS /OSX notifications system_ for maximum passive aggressiveness: [https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/887740777031278592](https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/887740777031278592)

<comment><USER50> The one that finally did it for me was the "Do you know x?" notification that I couldn't disable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Something i've noticed recently is that my feed is flooded with the "x has become friends with y" type of notifications. I literally see 5-10 of them in a row, they make for a very monotonous feed experience. I think its supposed to be a nudge for me to add co-workers and acquaintances to facebook.

<comment><USER52> They're running out of things to notify you about. I've recently been getting a lot of "X updated their status", where X is someone who I've recently chatted with or whose status I've liked within the past month.

It's silly, but I suppose it's worked on some people.

<comment><USER53> "x commented on {totally unrelated y}'s status" ... 6 days ago -_-

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I've never been on Facebook but I have a few fake accounts. Those accounts don't have photos, never posted anything, never friended anyone, never even connected to anybody, etc. Yet they constantly get new "friends requests" and pokes and whatnot.

Why would any real person want to be friend with a ghost fake account?

Facebook is not only "needy", it's a big bullshit engine.

<comment><USER29> Those prompts almost certainly aren't Facebook-run. Too much effort and risk, no real need.

Rather, Facebook has a huge number of scammers. A few might be scamming _you_ , but mostly they're from clickfarms that are trying to increase 'organic' behaviors so their accounts won't be banned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> What really pissed me off recently, is that after deleting my FB account, whenever I login with email/password to a web site where I previously connected my FB (Spotify, for example), it _restores_ my FB account without asking me and tells about it to my FB friends. Why the hell does it even keep a list of friends if I _deleted_ the whole thing?.

</comment><comment><USER56> Facebook has notified me once a day of "2 new notifications and 1 message" for the account I created in order to access a developer tool once and I think once clicked one "like" for several months ago. I've never put any more information in than the bare minimum necessary to create an account, never posted, never done anything.

I get that they've essentially tapped out the market for users, but jesus christ, take a rest Facebook.

<comment><USER57> So far, I've only had to miss one opportunity from not having a Facebook account. Err... I've never had one. Even then, I could still have that opportunity, it'd just take a bit more work and can't be done online.

I guess that I'm trying to say that it's possible to not have social media accounts and still function in the digital world. I know others who don't have accounts but I'm going to call them passive users of the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> For those who want to go a step further and block all Facebook traffic on their Linux machine

# for net in $(whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS32934' | grep '^route:' | sed -e 's/.* //') ; do ipset add block-facebook-ips $net ; done

and if you have ipset-presistent

# /etc/init.d/ipset-persistent save

The same for IPv6 is left as an exercise for the reader.

</comment><comment><USER59> It's much better to not have a Facebook account. After a while you get used to that feeling of not knowing what people are up to, but then you realize your life isn't negative because of that.

There's probably someone in your circle of friends and family that isn't using Facebook, so your friends and family are already used to reach to that person through other means.

Also, every time you meet friends and family you'll have things to talk about.

</comment><comment><USER60> Apart from the core message that the author was trying to push across, I immediately noticed that names/faces of family/friends were not masked. I personally wouldn't like it if someone put out my information this way. I think that is breaching someone else's privacy.

</comment><comment><USER61> "I'm likely not going to delete Facebook entirely since I do genuinely enjoy staying in touch with the people in my life, and for better or worse Facebook is where those people hang out"

Is it likely that most people are willing to move and the only problem is there are no compelling options?

<comment><USER62> No option is compelling until everybody you know is on it. And there is no such option besides FB.

<comment><USER63> If there was an easy way to automatically process email address changes in your address book and have links to people photoblogs (like RSS) it seems like all the key features would be there. A decentralized email based event manager would be nice. Does Lightning do that, I wonder?

<comment><USER64> Not email-based, but I'm keeping my eye on ActivityPub from W3C: [https://activitypub.rocks](https://activitypub.rocks) . Seems to be a step in the right direction

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I still don't quite get why people (especially alleged news sources) post pictures of a twitter box, rather than just say _' User NoodleHead on twitter is quoted as saying "I don't like this"'_.

This feels like a not-so-gentle manipulation.

Some guy, who might be sitting next to you on the bus right now, said something on twitter, but that's now news because it's got their @IGN, their actual name (or maybe not), a weirdly formatted date string, the numbers '1' and '6' adjacent to icons at the bottom of the box, a 'Follow' button so you can forever be bombarded with more nuggets of wisdom from this person you don't know, all inside a box that doesn't even have rounded corners.

</comment><comment><USER66> > you've shared x days in a row and your friends are responding

A month ago, FB's first senior software engineer was saying on the Internet History Podcast that FB would never create useless features/tactics to bring users to the platform like the Snapchat streak. Listen here, 27:20 mark. [http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/08/facebooks- firs...](http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/08/facebooks-first-senior- software-engineer-karel-baloun)

<comment><USER67> lol. This is just so lol. Good find. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Years ago I wrote a Chrome extension to block the news feed [1] so I could keep using it without losing my sanity.

Recently though, I've noticed that Facebook seems to be moving what was once in the news feed to notifications. Now that they've spoiled the feed with useless information - the notifications box is the next exploit.

The cognitive overload from using Facebook is now so high for me that I almost never visit the site. Once a daily user of Facebook, now deleting my account would hardly affect me. If I have a choice, I always prefer to communicate with friends over anything but Facebook.

I believe Facebook's constant neediness will eventually be the demise of the platform. The mindless profit driven motives for constant engagement are harmful not only to its users, but society, and the company itself. I wrote more about this here: [https://blog.west.io/2016/11/30/the-birth-and-death-of- faceb...](https://blog.west.io/2016/11/30/the-birth-and-death-of-facebook/).

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed- eradicat...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator- for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER69> I deleted my thefacebook.com account in 2008 when the daily privacy rollbacks were the rage du jour. The chief reason was that 90% of the content I was seeing was who received a banana in Mafia wars, which in retrospect is annoying but relatively benign.

</comment><comment> nikki-9696 Since they changed the timeline to the point where it's impossible for me to see things in reverse chronological order (even if I try to tell it to), I've unfollowed EVERYTHING, set up notifications for the few family members whose posts I don't want to miss, and mostly quit using it for anything but family. I'm so tired of all the ads and marketing crap. I was missing posts I cared about and just seeing crap every day. No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER70> The Facebook app is an abomination. It takes up all your battery, caches all it wants, needs access to every permission my phone has to offer and those goddamn notifications.

And it's not just Facebook. Every platform these days has been spamming with notifications. Quora's infamous un-turn-off-able x upvoted an answer after seeing your upvote or your Facebook friend y is now on quora, welcome him by sacrificing a goat to the mighty God Ra. Irritating.

</comment><comment><USER71> My favorite is a _push notification_ to the effect of, "You haven't posted in N weeks. Would you like to post something?" The first time I got it it was annoying. Then it kept happening weekly, by the third time I deleted the app.

</comment><comment><USER72> Can you imagine being a product manager at Facebook?

You are competing against other product managers and people at the company to be a rising star or to get that big bonus. You are rated on the code that makes it to production and it's lift.

I can't imagine the scheming that goes on to get your stuff into the website or app. All in the name of drawing in more advertisers or people who will pay for the data.

</comment><comment><USER73> Facebook is just dying and they know that from their internal metrics long time now so these features have been developed to save the engagement because otherwise facebook's stock value will plange.

<comment><USER74> I was about to say exactly the same thing. This stinks of desperation on Facebook's part to keep their metrics swinging up and to the right. They are acutely aware that any levelling off in these metrics will have a knock on effect for their share price.

Whilst I don't use Facebook, and dislike the social impact that Facebook has brought about (acknowledging the amazing precedents Facebook has set too of course) I do wonder how they get around this. There are only so many humans on the planet that they can play these engagement tricks on. The number of new users and amount of engagement will have to level off at some point.

I'd love to hear what Facebook plan to do to continue to "grow" in the the sense that shareholders are kept happy when they reach this saturation point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> It's far not the first time when Facebook is using cheap manipulative tricks. I remember when I only registered on Facebook for the first time, its contact suggestions were mostly females (I'm a guy) in a proportion way more than I actually have females on my contact list or in my social circles. Manipulation is deeply in Facebook's DNA.

</comment><comment><USER76> I generally find that people are too quick to point to features as "manipulation" when they actually have benefit to the user as well: I saw this feature for the first time this morning, and my immediate reaction was mild disgust. I can't think of a single way this is remotely beneficial to me, which makes it just pure manipulation to increase engagement.

Facebook truly is the poster child for sleazy tech company: I can't think of any point during their existence where they stood for anything but cold, exploit-the-user amorality, as opposed to (e.g.) Google's traditional "only earn profit by creating value" and Apple's "bring your vision to the world because it needs it"[1].

[1] I don't even like Apple as a company, but I do believe that company culture is rooted in prosocial motivations at some level, which is something I have never thought about Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER77> It's interesting the large amount of regulations that are involved with gambling, due to how addictive and potentially harmful it is.

Facebook seems to be one of the few things even more addictive than gambling. What is one of the only things humans value more than money? Attention, love, affection, friendship, relationships...

<comment><USER78> >large amount of regulations that are involved with gambling, due to how addictive and potentially harmful it is.

Regulation in the gambling industry is not there to protect you. It's there to enforce monopoly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> When Facebook's sound for getting a chat message was a "pop", I could imitate it pretty well with my mouth, and trick my friends into checking their messages.

</comment><comment><USER80> I think one of the more interesting things in this article is that I read this line, and it sounded 'normal'

       "I can appreciate the businesses paying for posts keeps the big blue ship afloat"

It seems so natural, until you think about who used to be called "Big Blue"..

</comment><comment><USER81> I removed Facebook from my phone because I didn't like how impulsively I was using it at any moment of waiting or downtime.

It was hard-ish at first, and it took a lot of "Do I or Don't I?" before I actually did it. I didn't delete my account or anything, so I could still check it from home, but as time went on and I was _only_ able to check it from home, I would frequently find myself thinking, "wow, there's really not much good here." which is one of those things that only occurs to you after taking time away from it.

I realized I replaced my Facebook habit with an Instagram habit, so I deleted that too. The only remaining distraction is Reddit, but I've never been as impulsively hooked into Reddit as I was the other two.

When people say that it's better without Facebook, they're not kidding. You should try it.

</comment><comment><USER82> Today I finished unfollowing everything on my fb feed. Now it's just 5 or 6 ads, some relevant, some not. I'm curious to see if this cures the addiction.

</comment><comment><USER83> Once upon a time I had a Dell Streak mobile, carrier locked. Without rooting there was no way to remove the default Facebook app. It would keep asking for you to log in. There was nothing you could do. If you dismissed the login activity it would just respawn within two minutes.

</comment><comment><USER84> Since FB got Instagram under the belt, it's no less annoying. On the mobile app, I've turned off all notifications, because why? If I want to check in on my Instagram apps, I'll open the app myself, thank you very much. No need to litter my screen with that stuff. But guess what? The app of course knows if you have notifications turned off, and there is no way whatsoever to get the app to stop bothering you about this when you open. Every time, it asks me why I don't have notifications turned on, and does so in a half-screen-sized banner that is obnoxious. No matter what I do, this never tops appearing until I turn on notifications again.

<comment><USER85> I don't know about iOS, but I think it recent versions of Android you can suppress notifications from an app at the OS level? Does it nag you about that?

</comment></comment><comment> Paul-ish Lately Facebook has been pestering me to enable notifications in my browser nearly every time I visit. This is an anti-patern as I suspect once I accept notifications, it is hard to remove. Some services just fatigue their users into opting in.

</comment><comment><USER86> I also get this quite frequently. I setup a Facebook page for a side project of mine that I hope to turn into a sort of side business and I wanted to make sure the name didn't get taken. I get notifications almost EVERY SINGLE DAY that my page won't be visible unless I add more stuff to it. I literally got 3 emails a few days ago, in the same day, saying the same thing for my page.

I feel forced to use Facebook to keep up with friends and family but I absolutely hate using it the entire time and I try to avoid it where possible. It's just amazing how spammy it's gotten and how their popularity continues to just go up.

</comment><comment><USER87> I've recently received several friend requests a day from spambots. This is annoying, but I can just ignore the "friend request" tab and go on with my life.

However, as if it wasn't a nuisance enough, Facebook now gives me plain notifications of these friend requests in my normal notification feed. "Spambot is new to Facebook and just sent you a friend request."

I'd switch to only Messenger, but Facebook seems to think that I don't have Messenger, so I keep receiving invites to install Messenger from my friends as it covers half their conversation with me with that notification.

<comment><USER88> I get these too. But for some reason, I believe it might be facebook which is doing A/B testing by sending friend requests from random bots to people whose activity is very less. The friend requests are usually from the opposite gender apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> "This is what happens when the metric of how much time users spend using your thing supersedes the goal of providing legitimate value to your users."

Don't forget, you are not the user, you are the product ;)

</comment><comment><USER90> I held out on Messenger for a very long time for the reason that it required way too many permissions upon installation. I was not going to give FB access to my camera, file storage, location, microphone, contacts, etc. No thanks. I've never had the FB app installed. For a while I was checking my messages via the FB website requesting desktop mode or via the desktop browser. I also used to be a big opponent of notifications. Once three things aligned, namely granular permission granting for Messenger, a person I cared to actually chat with enough, and my realization that the only value I got out of FB was in messages, I installed Messenger. Still being the opponent to notifications that I am, I only turned on push notifications for a few select people. No sounds or lights or any other bullshit. Surprisingly, I'm way happier with this setup. I'm far less likely to check FB. I'm not habitually checking for messages from the few people I care about, in general now I feel more control, and I'm not annoyed. I found the result surprising. Occasionally I'll log in to FB and take a look at what's going on, but aside from the skating vidyas it's mostly vacuous crap. In hindsight this all makes sense. Increase the valuable communication between users, give them more control and they'll be happier (at least in my case). Who would've guessed?

</comment><comment><USER91> Everyone needs to understand one simple fact:

The PRIMARY use of Facebook should be to post about stuff like this, explaining all the ways Facebook is unethical.

Note: write something like "I saw this article that really made me think… and you should get in touch with offline to learn more about what's going on in my life" and no link. Then you can link to this article in the comments. Facebook has decided that links that get people to leave Facebook are bad, so you have to pretend your post is about something personal.

</comment><comment><USER92> I deleted my facebook account last year and haven't looked back. It was a great decision.

However, I don't think me (and may others in this thread) are a big cause of worry for facebook. While tech-savvy/privacy-aware users are leaving facebook in greater numbers, their absolute percentage is a fraction of the gigantic market of users in the developing world.

The developing world is a huge pie for facebook that is totally primed for taking. Majority of people in that group have absolutely no qualms about happily sharing private information (if at all any awareness of them being the product). In such a demographic, the social/economic/caste divide has been so wide and entrenched that facebook is seen as something that breaks barriers. People from lower socio-economic strata who have always been treated poorly by the privileged can now buy a cheap Android smartphone and be on the same platform of the people they serve and communicate as equals. They used to look aspirationally at the privileged sitting in air-conditioned shops sipping coffee while browsing smartphones - now they can (atleast partially) fulfill the fantasy.

They have all the time in the world, they love the notifications and they are eager to share. Our leaving barely makes a dent.

</comment><comment><USER93> I'm seriously puzzled how reddit isn't eating facebook's lunch. the content is light years better (and is upstream for much of the facebook feeds I eventually see)

<comment><USER94> I am an avid redditor with a mostly dead facebook account, so I agree that the content is better, but it's different networks entirely. Reddit has still held on to its psuedo-anonymous roots, and thus hasn't lived up to the "social" part of the social network. The people still consumuning content on facebook are doing so because that's where their friends are.

You know the people that feel a need to tag their friends in a comment on funny posts? That's the kind of user that reddit hasn't been able to convert. Whether reddit wants or should try to garner that traffic/content is a choice they need to make, but the site is doing fine regardless.

<comment><USER95> I think the bigger issue is why FB hasn't been able to create the kind of conversations that reddit does- the lack of real threading and the lack of a true downvote (preferably anonymous) keep conversations on FB abysmally superficial. You can't engage in a debate with someone if the back-and-forth gets impossible to follow after the second reply, especially with more than two participants. Likewise, FB and users have no idea whether people disagree with a post or are simply ignoring it; or on something like a critical article, whether a user agrees with an article and it's the article's subject which makes them angry or the user disagrees with the article and the post itself makes them angry. FB, with its status as the defacto social network could be a place where people have real constructive discussions, but instead its inability to foster real dialogue has a lot to do with the current stupidity of political discourse and the problems with reality bubbles and whatnot.

<comment><USER96> Reddit's system has its issues too. Early comments always get more votes and have more sway than later ones, and the "reality bubble" effect is worse because the general consenses upvotes posts that agree with their opinion and downvotes ones that disagree - effectively hiding them whether they're factually correct or not.

Hacker News is much better than Reddit in general for allowing comments on both sides of an issue to be heard, but it's not perfect either. I think it benefits from not being able to see the number of votes on someone's post because it removes that way of checking the previous hive consensus. I'm not sure I even like the greying effect on heavy downvotes.

The best real discussion (especially for ongoing topics and events) I've seen is still on old-school forums like SomethingAwful. The barriers to entry help ($10 on SomethingAwful, 500 points to downvote on Hacker News) but I think Discourse went too far in that direction, where anti-spam limits can make it hard for new users to even write a good post or respond when they want to. I'd like to see a modern forum site where anyone can create a subforum and moderate it themselves the way anyone can create a subreddit on Reddit.

<comment><USER97> > I'd like to see a modern forum site where anyone can create a subforum and > moderate it themselves the way anyone can create a subreddit on Reddit.

Isn't that...Reddit?

<comment><USER96> Reddit is very geared towards short-term discussion. Top comments on a post are usually from the first couple of hours and posts last less than a day. For long-term discussion traditional forums with chronological posts and threads that get re-bumped to the top are still king.

<comment><USER97> Meh sounds like Reddit just needs a sort by 'weight' option that sorts by amount of comments.

<comment><USER96> That's quite different if I'm reading your meaning correctly. That type of system tends to result in the biggest threads staying at the top and getting bigger and bigger while new ones never appear.

<comment><USER97> Weight can mean anything, freshness of nested posts eg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Facebook is/was important step in the evolution of our understanding for social interaction and what is import as information and what not. The complete exhaustion of the moving force behind FB is needed for us to transcend into the next hyper-dense digital-society.

There's a saying that 'many things fly, only few are edible', and understanding FB is fundamentally understanding this principle.

I doubt the service will ever completely disappear, but its high time it gets marginalized (at least in developed societies) the same way TV is marginalized as FB is essentially the same programmed stream of bullshit, that you don't normally need in your life.

Understanding what the author understood in his article is a cathartic moment, that besides other things, has something to do with the conscious decision to actually consume what you want and not what you were given. This means focus.

Dropping out of FB and similar means of "social presence" is essentially taking back control over where you are going in terms of information being consumed by oneself.

Of course it will feel liberating to not feed oneself with irrelevant information. It doesn't mean stopping being social, but re-evaluating what socialization effectively means.

</comment><comment><USER99> Reading the comments here reconfirms that I had a good idea not using the FB _app_ on my phone—using inside Firefox it is, of necessity, less pushy. If you want to use FB messages without the crapfest, note that using the url mbasic dot facebook dot com will get you a text-minimalist version of the site (designed for very old mobiles) where you can receive messages without the app. (No push notifications, but afaic that's a feature.)

</comment><comment><USER100> I'm sure Facebook, the company, enjoys posts like these:

1\. Complain a whole lot about the state of affairs with FB,

2\. Say "but I still like FB and will probably keep using it"

3\. Propose no alternatives to the status quo.

I think this post underscores the fact that FB really didn't have anything to lose doing these things. In fact, these things caused some mildly annoyed users to write lengthy blog posts about FB to give the company even more attention attention and mental time.

</comment><comment><USER101> Not going to comment on the article, but I liked the contrast of text and background on that site. It's nice to see something that is not grey on light grey.

</comment><comment><USER102> > it seems strange and disturbing to talk to regular users like they're all > marketeers

It doesn't surprise me, not anymore. A lot of marketing is getting high on its own supply, as in, they actually somewhat believe what they are saying; even if they're not believing the euphemisms they put out externally, they still have euphemisms internally they are really not thinking through.

The other explanation is A/B testing, which would be even more sad.

</comment><comment><USER103> The best thing I did was uninstall the official Facebook app and replace it with Friendly. The features like having most recent posts as defaults and no ads are nice (paid feature) but I also like it because the UI feels a bit clunky so I use it less. I don't seem to have a lot of the BS anymore and notifications are off and I'm feeling better not glued to the app anymore.

</comment><comment><USER104> Cache/Mirror/Ctrl-F: [http://archive.is/LFRxq](http://archive.is/LFRxq)

</comment><comment><USER105> I wonder when the majority of the people will get fed up and leave, like, when have they pushed everyone over the edge and the last person on earth has gotten the hint that Facebook is just a massive timesink with some social sprinkled on...

I, for one, have just logged out and never logged in for a solid 3 months now and haven't looked back.

</comment><comment><USER106> Im glad that im not on facebook. 20 years ago, facebook could be equivalent of sitting in street and checking on what others are doing/liking/commenting/ranting/watching. Nutsos.

And even for that matter i ve stopped limited use of twitter. As i see some of good classmates have become kind of trolls on few topics.

</comment><comment><USER107> I have one word for Facebook: Myspace; and it's not a second to early for that bunch of scheming zuckers.

</comment><comment><USER108> Every time I see news about facebook I feel better about the fact that I deleted my account several months ago.

</comment><comment><USER109> Interesting in this context that they killed the groups app so as to bring people back into the main app.

Makes me wonder if the real reason is that so many people got sick of "normal" Facebook when all they wanted is to use groups that engagement suffered and they needed to bring everybody back.

<comment><USER110> I don't think groups was that successful, was it?

<comment><USER109> No idea about the app, but the service itself is hugely popular. From what I can tell, there's a huge iceberg of hidden group activity that we don't see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> I find it interesting that they guy is talking about tweaks, hooks and pokes to keep you interested, and the whole trying-to-expose-you-to-new-stuff phenomenon... but I find it all makes fb less appealing.

I check it a couple of times a day now I guess. Never allowed it to get its mitts on my phone, though, web use only. More and more of my feed is "Your friend X liked some inconsequential response by Y on a boring post by Z" where I don't even know who Y and Z are.

It may be that my friends are gravitating away and posting less - I certainly am - but I suspect if it is then it's part of a big feedback loop initiated by facebook trying to become a news source rather than just a place to share everyday happenstance and a few pictures with friends.

</comment><comment><USER112> Btw has anyone tried alternate social networks like ello. at the launch it seemd like a good idea (having privacy protections in the company charter). honestly I'd be happy to pay FB something like 100 bucks a year for a just leave me alone, no-ads/no-tracking version.

<comment><USER113> Registered my desired username there in case it took off, found a single friend there (who was also doing the same thing), haven't been back since.

It looks like it's done a pivot since the last time I was there, going by the new onboarding process asking me if I'm an artist or a fan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> I have no idea what I did, but I don't get any of that nonsense.

I have all notifications turned off in the app, I've disabled all email except if someone explicitly mentions me by name in a discussion (I should probably switch off that one, too) and I've made an effort to hide all kinds of stupid apps and games and pages that are nothing but time wasters. I also only like and follow pages that I have a genuine interest in (such as concert venues and bands I love).

Sure, there's a token notice from time to time ("why not repost a picture from 7 years ago?" and so on), but I find them easy to ignore.

Once you beat Facebook into submission, it becomes a reasonably useful tool.

<comment><USER115> Maybe they are collecting enough data about you that they don't feel the need to bother you. Are you signed in to Facebook in your primary browser? Do you have the mobile app running in the background?

Since I've signed out of Facebook on my PC and kill the mobile Facebook app while not using it, I tend to get multiple push notifications per day, most of them asking if I know some random person.

My girlfriend, who is on Facebook daily, has never seen any of these notifications.

<comment><USER114> Possibly. Or maybe whatever they have is so boring they can't be bothered to ask me for more. I share very little personal stuff on Facebook. Actually none at all, now that I think about it. Most of my profile is empty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> Yepp Facebook is more or less a big Machine Learning Apperatus tuning in on user brain grabbing.

Like a cheap TV Channel or a Casino and similar crap.

Yes i still use Facebook but only to chat to people. It replaced icq and i don't wan't to lose my contacts :(.

</comment><comment><USER117> Please don't use facebook. it is bad for you.

</comment><comment><USER118> I don't find it difficult to be a casual user. I've disabled all email and notifications from them. I look at it maybe once every 2 weeks. There's nothing really ever on it aside from a band mentioning they're touring again. All the other stuff is just noise. Photos of babies, photos of people at landmarks, shared news articles and outrageous comments.

That's why I only look every couple weeks, though. There's nothing worth looking at on the site. I probably should delete it, to be honest. I never post and I rarely find something worth looking at.

</comment><comment><USER119> The appeal of getting likes, making numerous amounts of friends, sharing awesome posts, etc. is lost within the pile of nonsense that fills up the feed every single day. it's simply not cool any more. At least on other platforms I can follow a catered list of people that I find worthwhile. And the number of followers mean much more. Facebook is just a jumbled mess right now. The only thing it's good for is making it easier to keep in contact with others that phone numbers can't do. Notifications are facebooks way of trying to encourage engagement I think

</comment><comment><USER120> I have an old phone with only the facebook app installed on it so i dont have to log in.

Facebook is permanently quarantined

It sits on a desk closed up and never comes with me when i am out.

i look at once week at most to see if i need to respond to anything.

</comment><comment><USER121> On a meta note, I really like the design on the OP's site. The interactive SVG circles is a nice touch, and trying to color them all in with my pointer was almost as satisfying as popping bubble wrap.

<comment><USER122> I wasted a few enjoyable minutes doing just that. Then I realised that if I revisited a circle I'd already coloured in, it would change colour. The thought leaped into my head: "Can I make all of them _the same colour_?"

I realised I was standing on the edge of the abyss, and closed the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER123> It feels like growth tactic desperation levels have hit a new high. The interesting thing is that it isn't just limited to tiny startups trying to grab market share as this type of language once was - Facebook seems to have no hesitation to just flat out beg for usage.

Personally, it comes off to me as desperate and presumptuous. They seem to have come to the conclusion that most users see value in getting "engagement" on Facebook, even in a nebulous and non-specific sense.

</comment><comment><USER124> I went cold turkey a while back, never looked back. Facebook is the digital equivalent of opening the fridge & staring inside, even though you're not hungry.

</comment><comment><USER125> What kills this platform is entities other than people participating. I ignore anything else of facebook baits for posting/visiting.

In the beginning I added artists and maybe some companies I fancied: that's a huge mistake. FB is only an ad framework for these entities and they are going to occupy 100% of your feed.

You erase all that and I started to see some friends doing stuff again, which is nice. I still think tho the algorithm to generate your feed is real s __*.

</comment><comment><USER126> [https://twitter.com/janamjohnson/status/900372990881402880](https://twitter.com/janamjohnson/status/900372990881402880) (linked from the article) is dead. Does anyone have a saved or cached copy of the image in this tweet? Or a similar screen shot? I don't have Facebook, so I haven't seen this engagement email

</comment><comment><USER127> Before, I checked Facebook like 50 times a day. Now I check it once a day.

It was so easy to make the change! Facebook is just a habit, a bad habit, but it's easy to break.

</comment><comment><USER128> people respond to sincerity. once you've learned to fake that, you've got it made.

facebook teaches us to be sincere to others because facebook cares. it really does.

</comment><comment><USER129> i have never had a facebook account. seeing everyone agonize over the pros and cons of using facebook is ridiculous to me. is it better on a phone? with or without notifications? are my privacy settings dialed in? facebook is genuinely useless, if you agonize over how its so bad but also so good, just stop using it. if someone is really your friend, you can keep up with what their current email and phone number is.

</comment><comment><USER130> All the tactics described in the article fall into the category called "growth".

Facebook has specialized Growth teams that come up with features like that in order to move metrics such as retention, signups, active advertisers.

It's one of the reasons Facebook is so successful and the number of people using it daily keeps growing, as well as revenue and stock price.

I believe most tech companies have teams 100% focused on growth.

</comment><comment><USER131> Is it that hard to ignore your Facebook feed?

I don't understand the people that find peace only after deleting the whole app from their phones.

I've had a FB account since inception and it has loads of people in it. Yet I probably look at facebook a maximum of maybe 10 times a year because I'm able to mentally compartmentalize the people there into groups of "important" and "not important"

</comment><comment><USER132> Hate this kinda of self-righteous, so called growth hacking gimmick, it is borderline distraction, worse case harassment. It is cancer, please stop.

</comment><comment><USER133> Off topic, but jesus check out this guys' clients: Exxon, Time, TechCrunch, about.com. He's sitting on a motherload of a portfolio.

</comment><comment><USER134> Checking up on your friends and family once a week is good enough for most people, Facebook will try to lure you to check it every 4 hours.

</comment><comment><USER135> Deleted Facebook in 2011 and I've never looked back. I've got a faceless account with no personal data whatsoever I use for social log-ins but that's it. It's popular to bash social networks but I think it's probably more effective to thoroughly educate users on the tactics used by social networks to keep users hooked.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's been over a month or so since I logged in and I received an apparently- real E-mail trying to "help me log back in to Facebook". I thought, _oh the gall to act like that's the reason I am not there right now_. They're seeming increasingly desperate-and-therefore-creepy lately and it's not encouraging me to return.

</comment><comment><USER136> Yes! Thank you! This crap has been driving me crazy lately and I'm so glad I'm not the only one.

</comment><comment><USER137> Yet another post on that subject... It's so disappointing that there are still people discovering life without Facebook when they should have uninstalled it long ago. They're very late in that process since sooo many have done it and written about it in thorough details.

<comment><USER113> It's disappointing that people are doing the thing you want them to do? What else would you like, them to hop into a time machine and do it at the right time too? :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER138> Deactivated my Facebook account last week and it's been one of the best things I've done. No more mindlessly logging in, I still use messenger to communicate with a couple of my friends who use it.

</comment><comment><USER139> I also deleted facebook app from my mobile 2 weeks ago. And I feel better. Although, sometimes I could not resist and open facebook in chrome but still it feels better. And i agree to the point that these days I get a lot of unnecessary notifications. It sucks!

</comment><comment><USER140> I've received 160 emails over around 200 days after signing up with a temporary email to load up ads. I've even filmed this: [https://youtu.be/xUwjs2Te5hw](https://youtu.be/xUwjs2Te5hw)

They are a juggernaut.

</comment><comment><USER141> Facebook, I rather use any other service that do NOT violate my privacy or my political views !

</comment><comment><USER142> I deleted the FB app when I had a nexus 5 as it was a major battery drain. I barely go on facebook these days.

What every tricks they are playing, it has reached saturation in my mind.

I just don't find it that interesting or providing any value at this point in time.

</comment><comment><USER143> THis. i too have noticed a 5x uptick in these dark patterns. perhaps the only way to bend back their new algo is to manually disable/opt out of each one? perhaps that will retrain their Ai? its seriously disgusting at this point.

</comment><comment><USER144> I started using Twitter 3 months back. From that day onwards, my time spent on Facebook started reducing dramatically. I just use FB to connect people and reach them, if i don't have any other medium to reach.

</comment><comment><USER145> I deactivated my facebook account. It was more and more annoying these days.

Facebook is full of memes, trolls and pages whose sole purpose is to get more likes and comments. It's not a social network anymore.

</comment><comment><USER146> I don't get it. If you don't like facebook or how they operate their platform, don't use it. Surely every person in your life has one or more of a). a phone number you can call them on or send an sms to, b). whatsapp/skype, c). linkedin, d). email address, e). instagram/snap, f). postal address, e). slack/irc channel they hang out on?

I gave in to "big blue" and created an account in 2009 when I moved to a new country. I deleted it about 4 months later and am happy to report NOTHING IN MY LIFE CHANGED (other than feeling happy with myself for calling facebook's bluff and deleting the fucking thing).

If you don't like the crack, put the pipe down. It's that easy.

</comment><comment><USER147> I only use this Facebook from this page on my phone: [https://mbasic.facebook.com/](https://mbasic.facebook.com/)

</comment><comment><USER148> I don't get what is this fuss all about. Just turn off ALL the email notifications in Facebook and Bob's your uncle - you won't be bothered anymore.

</comment><comment><USER149> Facebook is annoying and grabby? This guy obviously hasn't ever used ResearchGate. Facebook is the paragon of non-intrusive user experience compared to RG.

</comment><comment><USER150> I had over 180 "friends" on facebook. I deactivated my facebook account 6 months ago, and I've never regretted the decision one bit.

</comment><comment><USER151> Deleted account in 2013.

All facebook related domains blocked via hosts file on my router and on VPN that my iPhone uses.

Used Instagram but it got creepy too. Never used WhatsUp.

</comment><comment><USER152> Unlike Twitter who just sends me the same 'you have 3 notifications' email everyday about 3 email notifications I don't have!

</comment><comment><USER153> Here's my approach. Whenever I see a post that I don't like, I simply unfollow the person who posted it.

</comment><comment><USER154> i also get a popup about browser notifications with the options to activate or "not now", how about never?

</comment><comment><USER155> Is there a way to create an icon on the home screen on iOS that when clicked opens Facebook using Firefox Focus?

</comment><comment><USER156> I still use FB a lot, but I did disable a lot of notifications, especially those "X page is on live."

</comment><comment><USER157> This is why I switched to Instagram which is still technically Facebook but the experience is so much better.

</comment><comment><USER158> _" I have a page for my business..."_

Facebook has a page for your business, that you maintain for them.

</comment><comment><USER159> Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's bad; but what else do you expect me to do when I poop?

</comment><comment><USER160> I didn't even read the post yet but I already agree with the title.

</comment><comment><USER161> <This comment is only viewable for FacebookPremium® users>

</comment><comment><USER162> Welcome to the group. I deleted the fb app and was never happier.

</comment><comment> neat0-ninj4 Deleted FB because of this last night. I've already saved so much time by not scrolling through the infinite feed of false smiles...

</comment><comment><USER163> Why is not capitalizing titles becoming popular :(

<comment><USER164> There are (at least) two different conventions when it comes to titling: headline and sentence. It's a matter of taste and something that changes over time. I'm not sure if there's a reason deeper than that. In general, I think it's good practice for a publication (or site) to have a style manual for consistency, but just as there are separate AP[0] and Chicago[1] style manuals, it's unlikely you'll see one global style.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Stylebook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Stylebook)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style)

</comment></comment><comment><USER165> > This is what happens when the metric of how much time users spend using your > thing supersedes the goal of providing legitimate value to your users.

What metric would be better to gauge "legitimate value"?

</comment><comment><USER166> I mean, they do this shit for a reason. I'm not defending them or saying it's okay, but either stop using it (actually stop), or don't. This sanctimonious "look at them prompting me to do the thing they want me to do!", what purpose does it serve?

Yes Facebook is bad. They're an advertising company. Advertising companies are bad. We know this. Saying "How dare they, I can't believe..." is a defense against change.

</comment><comment><USER167> OK, I get it, Facebook marketing is dialing it to the 11 to get you to use it more. But really, how hard is it to ignore it? The article says:

There's no respite from these messages, so it constantly feels like a gun to your head to get you to boost, promote, and pay.

Really? Like a gun to your head? So you are in fear for your life and you think if you don't click on this link, you literally are going to die this second? Or maybe it is a tiny annoyance which you completely can ignore and go on with your life, and you are over-dramatizing it a teensy bit?</comment>


Boycott Docker - <AUTHOR> http://www.boycottdocker.org <comment><USER2> Oh boy, as someone who's been using Docker for a while there seems like a lot of misinformation here.

> _strict restrictions like single process per container_

This isn't a real restriction, you can run as many processes as you want under a container. However, in _most cases_ they recommend against it because it usually means you're doing something wrong.

> _Software developers forced to vendor lock-in their software_

I've made Dockerfile's for quite a few different apps now, and I have never once had to actually change the application. The applications still work completely independent of Docker, so I'm not sure where the "vendor lock-in" comes in here.

> _Docker won 't be able to run even Postfix (or FTP daemons)_

[https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver](https://github.com/tomav/docker- mailserver) [https://github.com/atmoz/sftp](https://github.com/atmoz/sftp)

> _Docker is designed with cloud computing providers in mind exclusively_

I would disagree, although this is a matter of opinion I suppose. Having used both VM's and Docker for deployment, Docker is ridiculously more developer- friendly than a standard VM architecture.

> _No way to escape dependency hell_

I don't worry about dependencies anymore. If I want to try a new app, I `docker run` it. No dependencies. My apps themselves comes with all of their dependencies so I don't have to screw around with dependencies on a host provider. Sure, it doesn't completely solve dependency problems (you still need to write a Dockerfile) but it makes my life a whole lot easier compared to without Docker.

Docker isn't the right fit for everything, and there's a lot of ways that I can think of where it can be improved. It strikes me like this was written by a frustrated sysadmin who hasn't spent the time to learn the tools (which is understandable, the learning curve is high and most things are different from traditional sysadmin tools).

In fact, in _alot_ of cases Docker is needlessly complex and overkill. However, spreading FUD doesn't do anything to address these concerns and might scare away a lot of developers who could benefit from Docker.

<comment><USER3> > However, in most cases they recommend against it because it usually means > you're doing something wrong.

Docker-novice question for you:

What's the best practice for this? What assumptions are at play for said best practice? I can understand separating DB from App, but what about other cases where an app might naturally have to have multiple processes running?

•••

 _Edit: I hate calling this out, but if you 're going to downvote questions asking for elucidation of the_ reasons _surrounding best practices for a platform (something I 'm frankly having a hard time finding in the case of Docker), keep in mind that doing so does nobody any favors and only discourages productive discourse. You've got over 500 karma enabling your capacity to downvote. Be responsible with the practice of doing so. Nothing in this comment (except perhaps this edit) warrants one._

<comment><USER4> There really isn't such a restriction.

I sometimes need containers with several services, and that's perfectly fine if it makes the setup simpler. Services can be dynamically enabled/disabled for instance with daemontools. As a matter of fact, docker brought new life to djb's daemontools for me. This makes it possible to conditionally add even an sshd to my containers (just by mixing in a directory with the run configuration), so I can go into them and check what's going wrong.

And when things need to be hardened up, just drop the corresponding service directory.

<comment><USER5> I prefer exec to installing an sshd inside the container.

      docker exec -it "id of running container" bash

<comment><USER4> great tip, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are some major factual errors in this post. A few of them:

> Docker has lower memory footprint, because of forcing to run only single > process per container

Docker doesn't force you to use a single process per container - that's a design choice that some people espouse, but not a requirement. For instance, we run the official GitLab Docker image and it consists of many processes.

> Docker won't be able to run even Postfix

I'm running Postfix in a Docker container right now and it's working fine.

> But we are talking about Docker: it does not support IPv6 at all.

IPv6 support is incomplete, but not non-existent. I'm running IPv6 in my containers right now.

</comment><comment><USER7> "because of forcing to run only single process per container"

Which isn't really true, because you can still fork processes / run an init system. A lot of people don't do that, for reasons I don't really want to get into, just to say that this is a factually-invalid point, there is no forcing going on here.

</comment><comment><USER8> Every few hundred days... [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=boycottdocker.org](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=boycottdocker.org)

<comment><USER9> As they say on reddit, "I haven't seen it yet!" \- but reposts are a bit annoying.

That said, only one of those accounts seems scammy at all, so it is a harmless repost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This would be a lot more compelling if it included testimonials from actual projects bitten by any of the arguments against docker. On its own it just looks like a thorough but not necessarily real world rant.

Also it doesn't provide practical alternatives. The link to Guix at the end says not ready for production. I am having a hard time accepting the veracity of the contents if they recommend something that's not production ready.

<comment><USER11> > This would be a lot more compelling if it included testimonials from actual > projects bitten by any of the arguments against docker.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the author. I just experience endless issues with docker in production. Enough to write a book. (just testing future audience for the book)

That, I can provide in a separate blog post! :D

What selection of bugs would you be interested in?

\- Critical linux kernel bugs killing the host when running docker

\- Containers crashing and corrupting all data on the mounted directories [from the host drive]

\- Worldwide outage of docker.com killing all CI pipeline in the world for 7 hours straight

\- More critical linux kernel bugs destroying the docker host

\- Major breaking changes in docker and docker API (usually between all minor versions), breaking all existing stuff

\- Randomly dropping critical features, distribution and filesystem support (to the point where there is actually NO filesystem supported by Docker on some distribution. No kidding xD)

\- Various DNS fuckups (special issues on Ubuntu)

\- No build-in commands to free disk space of old containers/images (this one is major hassle)

<comment><USER10> Awesome, you _should_ write a blog post if you have time :)

I'm particularly interested in what you did to get around all the bullet points. Are you still using Docker, with some bandaids, or did you move to something different?

<comment><USER11> Hope you're still here. Comments and feedback welcome.

[https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/docker-in- product...](https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/docker-in-production- an-history-of-failure/)

<comment><USER10> Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone who cites not being able to run an FTP server as a reason for not using something else these days turns me off to the rest of their arguments regarding that something else, _especially_ when their core argument is about what they consider the right/wrong tools for given jobs in a modern environment.

FTP was a pain to work with back in the day when I wrote and sold client applications using it, when there wasn't an alternative for many use cases, but these days there are few (if any?) reasons to want to run an FTP server where there isn't a better alternative.

<comment><USER13> isn't the point that anything that fork()s can't run?

<comment><USER12> With regard to forking it was specifically talking about tasks that fork in order to change their identity at runtime as is common in daemon processes that can act as or on behalf of many different users. Processes within docker can fork more generally otherwise how would a great many things (like bash at all) work?

The second point where FTP was specifically mentioned is the use of dynamic port allocation. That is a bad point as that is an existing problem for many firewall & related solutions, generally and with regard to running in virtual architectures, so not specific to docker at all. Depending on what you might want FTP for there are many FTP daemon options that don't need to do this, and better protocols supported by services that don't need to do this either.

Using FTP as a bad example here is silly. What compelling reason is there to _want_ to run an FTPd for which there isn't a much better solution anyway? If you are wanting to run an FTPd then you either have a very specific requirement or you are stuck in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't like Docker, I feel that most people who claim it's "easy" don't really have sufficient experience with stacks that do _not_ use Docker, and I think it's overall an overhyped piece of rubbish that shouldn't be recommended to people other than in some very specific usecases.

That having been said, this site is terrible. It suggests a conspiracy without ever actually providing any evidence, and it's full of claims and assertions but very little to back it up. Docker has plenty of legitimate problems to address, and I don't really understand why somebody would half-ass their criticism like this.

</comment><comment><USER15> This page looks seriously out of date now, as a result its criticisms are inaccurate in a wide range of areas.

To pick one in particular, Security. the claim that Docker doesn't know anything about AppArmor and/or SELinux just isn't correct.

and the other security claim about having to trust docker hub is also now not correct, you can use signed builds to avoid that concern.

</comment><comment><USER16> What a rant about Docker! Would love to hear the motivations for setting up this site.

It seems that the owner of the domain [1] likes boycotting [2] a lot. Not that a disagree with him.

[1]

Registrant ID: XGX4VME-RU

Registrant Name: Sergey Matveev

Registrant Email: email@example.com

[2] [http://www.stargrave.org/Boycotting.html#Boycotting](http://www.stargrave.org/Boycotting.html#Boycotting)

</comment><comment><USER17> The vendor lock in thing has embarrassingly been a concern of mine as well. It seems presently you are either locked in with your cloud provider or your locked with docker (e.g. using Google container engine vs Google deployment manager).

As a JVM shop I just can't see the value of using Docker when we can provision faster images using the cloud providers API (ala libcloud, jclouds, or directly using gcloud) and just build exectuable uber jars. That is in JVM land you only need to install Java (and for Go and Rust I suppose you have even less dependences).

I understand the value in the OSS world of providing docker images but I'm not sure I can justify the complexity of switching over yet. Are there any major companies (especially JVM) that have fully dockerized (ie converted and not started off using docker)? I know Netflix started too but I'm not sure they every did fully.

<comment><USER11> Use packer for EVERYTHING [https://www.packer.io/](https://www.packer.io/) => better tools + avoid locking

As a benefit, you use ansible/chef/puppet for the installation and configuration (instead of Dockerfile). You can reuse your scripts.

As a benefit, you generate any output DockerImage/AWS-AMI/VmWare/VirtualBox. You have more flexibility. (e.g. Make an AMI for auto scaling groups + make a docker image for test environment).

<comment><USER18> I dig packer, but it's getting pretty hard to find a cloud provider or on-prem solution that doesn't take a Docker image as an artifact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Okay. I will boycott Docker and use LXD instead if that makes you happy. ;)

Anyways, I am so glad I converted all my VMs to LXD containers. If I want to test something, I can spin up a new container in seconds as opposed to have to install the OS in a VM (or do clones / snapshots etc.).

</comment><comment><USER20> The minor gripe I have with Docker is how they're tying swarm into the docker tool. I can see a future where sysops will use the tools built into Docker because it's included just like how Windows made IE6 the default browser.

<comment><USER6> > The minor gripe I have with Docker is how they're tying swarm into the > docker tool.

This is actually what I was expecting the article to be about when I read the title. Swarm integration has become a big controversy, and there's been serious discussion of forking Docker over it: [http://thenewstack.io/docker- fork-talk-split-now-table/](http://thenewstack.io/docker-fork-talk-split-now- table/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why not simply choose not to use it if it doesn't fit your personal use-case? What is the purpose of inciting a boycott?

</comment><comment><USER22> I am the former owner of boycottsystemd.org. I think I may have started something terrible.

<comment><USER23> No, you actually had a valid point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was hoping for some reasoned arguments from experience, but this just seems like a rant from someone who has read about Docker.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is this a joke? There is so much very inaccurate about this.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Everyone is a stupid noob chasing shiny things but me."

</comment><comment><USER26> > strict restrictions like single process per container

Oh boy. Have you seen phusion/baseimage ? It supports boot time init scripts and then uses runit to let you add as many daemons as you want. It even has a "Wait, I thought Docker is about running a single process in a container?" brief chapter in the readme.

</comment><comment><USER27> The author makes too many claims without actually supporting it.

But I do agree with the author on that Docker these days doesn't seem to respect Unix philosophy. It wants to be everything. Case in point : integrating Swarm into docker.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm new to Docker, but from what I know, it makes a microservices architecture extremely easy to set up. Right?

<comment> jon-wood It makes a microservices architecture less painful to set up. Nothing is going to make one _easy_ to set up, and even less so easy to run.</comment></comment>


Buffett Donates $1.6 Billion to Gates Foundation - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-02/buffett-donates-1-6-billion-to-gates-foundation.html <comment><USER2> Gates actually donated more to his foundation -- he donated his time. I believe that if Gates stayed Microsoft's CEO -- Microsoft would be more successful company and delivered more to the society.

<comment><USER3> _I believe that if Gates stayed Microsoft's CEO -- Microsoft would be more successful company and delivered more to the society._

interesting opinion about microsoft possibly delivering more to society. would you care to speculate on what possible ways they could better benefit society if billg were still in charge? i can't think of how a new version of SQL Server or MS Excel could do more direct benefits than malaria vaccines, etc. but perhaps msft could put more money into basic research, using computational methods to solve the world's problems, etc.?

<comment><USER4> Well, if Microsoft delivered more value to shareholders (and to its employees), then those folks could choose to contribute that money to a variety of sources, philanthropic and otherwise. I'd personally think that the Foundation has done more good than a better MSFT would have, but suppose (1) billg delayed retiring by 10 years (2) we assume that billg's presence would have drastically improved MSFT's fortunates, then I think it's plausible that it would be a net benefit for society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With looming death tax, is there an alternative for Gates <http://www.nodeathtax.org/deathtax>

</comment><comment><USER6> He should build a moonbase with it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Amazing.

<comment><USER2> What exactly do you find amazing in it?

<comment><USER8> The guy spent his entire life accumulating massive amounts of wealth, spent virtually none of it, and is now using it to make the world a better place. What don't you find amazing about that?

<comment><USER2> I agree in general. But it seems you put a lot of weight on donation part. Donating to charity is OK activity. Gates Foundation is probably one of the best charities, but donating is not nearly as important in comparison with Buffet's contribution to the society while he was making his billions. The billions Buffet made is a rough indicator of how much he contributed to the society. If he did not contribute -- he wouldn't make his fortune. Buffet also shared his investing advise, which is extremely valuable. So again, in comparison with what Buffet did already donations themselves do not look as amazing.

<comment><USER9> The greatest thing either of these men have done with their lives is commit to philanthropy. Everything else pales in comparison, and the biggest impact they will have on the world will have been through their philanthropy. They'll be remember for two things: being filthy rich, and what they did with those riches. Little will be remembered about either of the men personally, I dare say.

<comment><USER9> Tell me, downvoter, what Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have done that will be more memorable than perhaps in a few years having wiped out malaria? Windows Vista? The Zune? Buying Gillette and Geico?

Downvotes contribute nothing to a discussion, and without commentary they serve little purpose, save to inform the downvotee that you have something against what they said yet felt disinclined to share it..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Gates Foundation seems to have a lot of high-profile donators sticking a lot of tax-free money in there.

Not to be cynical or anything - but there is as much malaria in the 3rd world as there was before this foundation started.

<comment><USER11> Um, no.

<http://www.globalhealthreporting.org/article.asp?DR_ID=54529></comment></comment>


[eBook]underlying Working Methodology of Customer Journey Management - <AUTHOR> This eBook is devoted to describe the underlying working methodology of Customer Journey Management and how it can be used to deliver remarkable customer experience. It is this structured approach that helps us to navigate through the wide range of opportunities by assuring that we start with the right pre-requisites and then choose the appropriate opportunities for further exploration. <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the link: [http://tinyurl.com/j7adn7c](http://tinyurl.com/j7adn7c)</comment>


Sketch-n-sketch: Programmatic + direct manipulation + SVG - <AUTHOR> http://ravichugh.github.io/sketch-n-sketch/ <comment><USER2> Very cool! I'm stongly in the TikZ camp for creating vector diagrams, but with tools like this, SVG is starting to look very attractive...

link to demo: [http://ravichugh.github.io/sketch-n- sketch/releases/index.ht...](http://ravichugh.github.io/sketch-n- sketch/releases/index.html) (click on v0.4 link)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm immediately reminded of Bret Victors work: [http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming](http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming)

I hope this is really the future

<comment><USER4> Great resource, thanks for sharing this!

For me, transparent meaning is far easier for understanding systems than, for example, visual programming (I'm thinking the Unreal Blueprint[1] system)

[1]: [https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/i...](https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those short on time, skipping through the videos helped me understand why this is cool pretty quickly.

[http://ravichugh.github.io/sketch-n-sketch/blog/03-user- stud...](http://ravichugh.github.io/sketch-n-sketch/blog/03-user-study- videos.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Great concept. The text editor is broken for me (I place the caret, then try to type, and it only works half the time and jumps around to other spots the other half of the time without inputting any text). Also, I'd like to see results directly, à la CSS editor in Chrome devtools rather than having to run the code.

<comment><USER7> It's broken for me too. When I try to type, it places the cursor at the top of the code, no matter what I try.

<comment><USER8> You have to switch between "Run code" and "Edit code".

<comment><USER7> I see. That's what I get for going straight to the demo without checking the documentation.

<comment><USER9> To be honest, I think clicking on the left or right window should automatically switch between these modes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is neat. It reminds me a lot of WebCode for the Mac, which has a real- time SVG mode.

[http://www.webcodeapp.com/](http://www.webcodeapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is pretty cool and I definitely think direct manipulation is essential to learnable programming.

That being said, direct manipulation should ideally work both ways: it's awesome that changes to the image update the code in real time, but code updates should also instantly update the image. The "run code" workflow is very clunky, especially when popular tools in production today actually do hot code reloading.

</comment><comment><USER12> it's just a IDE for a programmatic manipulation. Nothing else.

the very thing they show on the 1st video as a flaw of the old approach (run script, then delete some random nodes) still can't happen on their solution.

</comment><comment><USER13> Liked it. Reminded me of CMU's Andrew project from, egad, decades ago.</comment>


DIY Autonomous Lego Drone - <AUTHOR> http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844:BlogPost:728

<comment><USER2> DIY drones is a really amazing crew. I ran into one of the guys behind DIY drones (Jordi Muñoz) at the last SparkFun robot competition. At the time I had my (land based) robot's electronics box open when Jordi walked by. I was probing the connection points of a ribbon cable with my meter. Jordi gave a sort of derisive snort and said, "I would have used hot glue to secure those wires," and continued walking by. Later I tracked down a difficult glitch to one of the dozens of ribbon cable connections having broken off at the solder point. If only I'd used hot glue to secure those wires...</comment>