Debunking The Silly Complaints From People Who Don't Like Social Networks
from the yes,-it-sucks,-get-over-it dept
Cory Doctorow has a fun column over at The Guardian responding to three of the common quips used by people to dismiss social networks, and pointing out why those complaints miss the mark. He responds to the following three:- It's inconsequential -- most of the verbiage on Twitter, Facebook and the like is banal blather, by noting that what's inconsequential to you is most likely not inconsequential to those it's actually targeted at.
- It is ugly -- MySpace is a graphic designer's worst nightmare, by noting that this is done for a good reason, which is to make it a place where blatant overly designed marketing can't take over.
- It is ephemeral -- Facebook will blow over in a year and something else will be along, by noting this is a feature and makes sure that the services adapt or die.
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Filed Under: complaints, social networks
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I dispute that ;)
Seriously, the information I get from some social networking contacts can be better than the so-called "journalists" being paid to write.
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the author's counter to this is stupid. if you are sending a message to a bunch of people who don't care (or who would be annoyed by you sending it to them), then you're using the wrong medium.
and overly designed marketing not taking over myspace? are you [mike] on drugs? who could forget the whole myspace exodus? and that the number 1 cited complaint was that newscorp started spackling really annoying ads all over every person's page? only for newscorp to later publicly state that google dumped myspace because the users are low value and only get about a 10 cent CPM? mike is a tech tabloid/blogger... he's supposed to know these things. domain parking and spam link pages better CPM than that.
as for being ephemeral, there's very strong evidence for that. facebook was massively unprofitable until they started allowing companies like zynga to sell digital items/currency through those free ipod type scams... so long as facebook got kickbacks. virtually every web 2.0 site is still ridiculously unprofitable, and if you take a look at techcrunch's deadpool, the statistics are against every social network. twitter is barely floating (read: zero profit), and digg is STILL millions in the whole every year, while reddit is conde's loss leader... and these are just the big guys.
on top of these 3 complaints, you still have MAJOR privacy issues. and let me tell you, there's only 3 legitimate categories for facebook pages today:
1) you're in that .000001% who are international celebrities and are MORE likely to get hired for your shenanigans
2) your page looks like you're running for congress
3) your page looks like it was screened by ABC family / the Disney channel
anything else nowadays is a possibility of missed jobs/clients.
then again, mike always thinks marginal arguments win over majority, so that's why he gives this guy credence.
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Ambient Awareness
It bears some relation to intelligence gathering - the individual pieces may be trivial, but the aggregation of them creates a perspective that you would otherwise be missing.
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Soicial Networking Sites SUCK!
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So are malls, airports, public playgrounds, carnivals, the rodeo, church... Difference is, Norton doesn't work in these places.
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The answer to twitters what are you doing? Not of your f** business!
That simple.
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They are often one an the same. For example, I have family & friends in 12 countries on 4 continents who I keep in touch with via Facebook. I never see them in physical form due to the distances involved. Does this make them "real" or "virtual" by your definition?
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I don't think that really qualifies as a complaint. There's nothing there to debunk. Imagine yourself as Facebook customer service, and one of your customers complains that "real friends vs. virtual friends". Not really anything to go on, but maybe you can flesh it out.
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strange
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YOU forget mike
and thats the big big one and cause of the lack of provacy well
too bad so sad the real smart people dont use it cause of the two things i mention
not any OTHER reasons
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Don't care for either
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Don't care for either
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But that aside, I don't like social networking sites for one main reason, and that is the fact that I don't feel any desire to put my whole life out on display for the world to see. Unlike most these days, who complain about privacy and then turn around and freely give it away, I value and protect my privacy. I did create a Facebook account to see what all the fuss was about, and after poking around a bit, I wasn't impressed, and the account has sat dormant since then. If I ever do find a reason to actually use it, you can be sure my account settings will be as locked down as possible. I refuse to make myself available to any and all random people who think they can be my online friend.
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Granted, from how you rant, you are one of those people who believe that only their opinion matters and every one else is wrong.
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i hate them just showing off to impress sum1 else(the teenage things).. are u nuts... can u impress a girl by ur facebook account(do some real life thing if u want to impress.. u r just wasting ur valuable time in that s/n rush and loosing urself...
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Social Networking
Their elitist attitudes limit the quality of their communication. Because quality on social networks is not about data, but about just hanging out with people you know but can't always be in the same room drinking a beer together.
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What a crock of shit
And no-one ever disputed that the blathering of teenage girls is important to those teenage girls, especially if they think they have an audience. But who would think it's important to anyone else?
Social networking (and blogs, and pod-anythings, and whatever2.0) is just there for technically illiterate people to feel important.
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Sorry, this "debunking" is ridiculous. Kids make ugly myspace pages because the tools myspace provides are awful and the templates themselves are ugly. Incompetent users then take these abysmally ugly templates and build even more abysmal monstrosities on top of them because they are incompetent at both using computers and design.
It's not intentional, it's just incompetence. And if I'm saying "I don't want to go to myspace because it is heinously ugly and is like stabbing my eyes with rusty forks", you haven't really debunked that reason by saying "yeah, but they wanted it to be ugly, so it's ok!". Oh! Proceed with stabbing my eyes with forks, then! If it's intentional, I don't mind!
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A Little Bit
BUT I am really sick of the 'updates' with peoples farms. And Fish tanks. And cafes. And Mafia and on and on and on. It seems that so many now just use FB for meaningless time wasting.
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Re: A Little Bit
It means my feed is generally a collection of status updates, photos and links my friends have posted, which generally makes for interesting reading.
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Re: Social Networking
Its primary functions seem to be a means to keep up with the daily lives of celebrities, and respond to CNN news stories so they'll say your screen name on-air and make you feel important.
So why do I use it? I'm not sure what made me sign up, but the only thing that keeps me using it is it serves as a makeshift journal that I can use to record the day's events, knowing no one will ever read it. This may not make a lot of sense, but this works fine for me and I see no reason to change it.
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OMGLOLBBQ SOCIAL FACESPACEBLOGTWEETERS SUCK!!!
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Tear Down The Walls
I have successfully avoided any contact with Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. My excuse is that with so many people, these environments must be overly mainstream. But, I don't really know this because I haven't been there.
And, I don't see any reason to add to what is a fairly busy and fulfilling life outside of those walls. Do I really need to be corralled into a controlled environment? Do I really need to be part of some carrot-on-a-stick social game?
Most of the intelligent arguments (as opposed to the silly ones) about these social environments tells me that I really don't need to waste my time with such things.
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But isn't the government supposed to provide businesses with guaranteed success?
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trivial communications
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Ownership & topology is the real story.
http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0
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I wanna know an example about silly complaint.
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The privacy thing is a big issue for those of us in countries with limited human rights
Now it is damn hard to live a secret and the Net gives one a chance to be themselves to some extent. I NEED to be able to be gay online to some extent, but I also need to be able to control or restrict that to some extent. What Twitter, Facebook and the like do is put your stuff out there in ways you could never imagine. Admittedly search engines do that too, so if you've got stuff out there it is going to be stumbled upon. But these networking sites up the ante BIG TIME.
The result: Facebook, Twitter, et. al. make me very uncomfortable. Great tools if they don't risk getting you imprisoned for just being who you are.
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