Reward > revenge = staying with FB, but don’t like it.

I just hope Facebook goes out of fashion soon.

It’s giving the internet a bad name

Another thing: facebook already is boring. The people who appear more, there, are not the ones you like best, are the ones who post more, which happen to be the ones who do more attention whoring. We somehow sift through, but the basic problem is there as much as it is on student meetings or office politics or any other group context. So… Old problem, new guise.

Another point: There are options. There are plenty of them. There are actually too many. As per a recent Dork Tower: «It finally happened, i have more friend networks than friends.» Orkut, LinkedIn, myspace, fotolog, i stopped keeping count when they made one where you were supposed to share the books you have and stuff, mostly because it was such a thing i would love but at the same time so superfluous.

I know what you mean that “there is no option” because i live in Brasil and here the “no other option” used to be (still is, amongst the less tech-savvy, a demographic group i have no contact with unhappily) Orkut, much maligned by informed US people. Now it is cool to “migrate to facebook”. And in around 4 to 6 months enough people did to make cluster effects. So there are options yes.

And the real lesson of orkut to facebook migration in Brasil is that it does not matter. Orkut did suck, i know, but it never mattered because what was important and cool was the hanging out. In fact some of the inconvenience of the thing worked for it, like the whole “scrap” thing, whereby you don’t post in your page, you post in others’ pages, which end up making those strange truncated conversations, which ended up being much more personal than email. It didn’t feel like email. The orkut equivalent to email was so soon flooded by spam that it never mattered, me being one of the few people who actually tried to use that as messaging always being met with “i do not read those… do you?”

It is sad that facebook is bad at privacy, but, again, it does not matter. Actually, i believe what’s going on is not a claims for privacy, it is a backlash against this Zukeberg (who knows how to spell this?) guy who seems to make a point of being an a$$ — which, let’s not forget, is one of the many tactics you can use to gather some attention.

Do not leave facebook. Just leave a message: I do not check very often, if it is important please consider emailing me. Even if you DO check often.

That is not the first and it will not be the last time someone tries to monetize human beings longing for being with each other. As in i bet there were big discussions about that in antiquity. Fighting them just gathers more attention — which feeds their business model. The only thing that works is creating cultural mechanisms around those risks.

And those will come. Rather sooner than later. But there will be a lot of pain involved, and as sad as it is, it is normal. I have the deepest admiration for people willing to be on that front-line and trying to minimize this pain, i do, but at the same time i recognize this is palliative. In a good way, but still.

Again, just as early usenetters learned the difficult way that the only weapon against a troll is the shun, so we as a culture will learn that posting photos in facebook is kinda silly.

Until they come up with a new privacy problem. It comes in waves — things are getting faster but not as much as the news would make you believe.

I really really hope this doesn’t come up as downplaying your post or anything like that — different country, different social norms and everything. I just wanted to take things to a different complementary viewpoint. Hope it helps.