On 4 March 2013 00:24, hellekin (GNU Consensus)
<address@hidden> wrote:
*** Thank you for posting that Melvin. I've read that article from [1]
and it mentions cascading defections from the network: if many users
have few friends, say one or two, a friend quitting the network gives an
incentive to her friend left with only one friend to quit as well,
triggering a chain reaction. When the cost of leaving the network
becomes less than the benefit of staying, people will rather quit.
Recently, Douglas Rushkoff wrote "Why I'm quitting Facebook" [2],
explaining that the new "related contents" that Facebook rolled out,
that are actually sponsored links, impersonate users at their own
detriment as regard to their reputation vis a vis their friends. He
finds that unacceptable, and resigned for that reason.
A friend of mine, who is using Facebook, translated the article into her
language and distributed it to her 400 contacts on Facebook. As she
knows having it on her wall will not reach out to her 400 contacts (they
will probably miss it), she started sending messages to all of them in
bulk. It seems that Facebook makes it easy to share what they want you
to share to all your contacts, but doesn't provide a feature to
broadcast messages to all of them at once. So she proceeded to message
them by chunks of about 30 people. Soon enough, she started receiving
messages from the system telling her that it was considered a spamming
behavior and that her account would be suspended if she persisted. All
that she wanted to do is tell her contacts that she's closing her
Facebook account, and that they can keep contacting her by email.
Yes, it's unfortunate that facebook will resort to these tactics. They have probably have the best adoption and interoperable technology in the world, but they dont always use it for good. This is a common symptom when you have shareholders looking for a quick profit. However tech-wise facebook is the state of the art, imho...
What facebook did well was to master the LAMP stack (which is FOSS). In theory, it would be quite easy to make an open source clone, but no one did it (well elgg had a good try imho, but 2 devs can only do so much), and LAMP has become quite unfashionable these days, so the gap has got wider.
Given that there are no alternatives people sort of feel trapped in facebook, but because all their friends are there, it's hard to leave...
==
hk
[1]
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/511846/an-autopsy-of-a-dead-social-network/
[2]
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/25/opinion/rushkoff-why-im-quitting-facebook/index.html