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Poole To Zuckerberg: You’re Doing It Wrong
An anonymous reader writes "At South by Southwest Interactive 2011 in Austin, Texas this week, 4chan founder Christopher Poole (also known as 'moot') took the stage to talk about various online issues. One of these was how important anonymity is on the Internet and how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't get it."
Shame he'll not be able to hear how wrong he is through his insulating walls of billions of dollars. In fact it's surprising moot isn't aware of this issue given his similarly vast wealth.
moot on /. ? a 1st page article about 4chan ? /. introduces image attachements for each reply ? :)
How long until
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Exactly. Sorry Moot, you have a good point, but Zuckerberg didn't hear you over the sound of how much money he made in the time it took you to make that statement. Moot seems to genuinely care about online anonymity, but Zuckerberg cares about making money and doesn't think twice about selling every piece of info he has on you to anyone who wants it.
How anybody could not understand that, particularly an internet veteran like moot is rather mind boggling.
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Society is a balance between privacy and sharing. When a so-called "social" website decides that everything that goes in the website should be "public by default" that really violates the public/private social balance.
In the absence of strong information/data privacy laws, only a fool would use Facebook to put more than even the basic public details about themselves; you only need take a look at the growing legal, workplace and criminal ramifications to see the end results.
The real tough part is that rabid facebook users can get you listed on Facebook just by "tagging" your photo. So you have to join to even purge the stupid... this is anti-social.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Are you trying to suggest that we shouldn't have anonymity because the bad side of it outweighs the good? I'd take the assholes, criminals and general wankers all day long as long as it means that people can have the ability to let the world know what is really going on in their various industries, countries, whatever-elses. If we were to have the ability to be anonymous removed then the world would be a far, far worse place. Anonymity is like everything else - what it achieves depends on what you decide to do with it - good or bad.
>Remind me, which one is the billionare?
I'd say that's a bit of a false comparison. I'd be surprised if moot has even 1/4 of the business ambitions with his website than Zuckerburg does with his.
Many (perhaps most) people do not want to be anonymous. This is Zuckerberg's market.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
One of my very first bosses said to me, back when I was still a teenager, that if you have something to say, you should be able to stand behind it. Even if all you're doing is dropping a note into the cash register saying "we keep running out of nickels," you should have enough character to sign it and date it. If you feel like you can't do that, maybe you shouldn't bother saying what it is you were planning to say. I still mostly agree with him about that.
Sure, I understand there are many cases where it would be preferable, or even essential, to remain anonymous: when you're acting as a whistleblower, for example, or working against an oppressive government. But for most exchanges that we have on a day-to-day basis -- the kind of thing Facebook is good for -- I think anonymity just spoils it.
Compare MySpace to Facebook, for example. On the former, you're inundated with friend requests from "DarkLordSeth79" and "PowrGrrl," where their photographs are screen grabs from anime or movies. I haven't used MySpace in a long time, but ultimately I found the only meaningful exchanges I had on there were with the dozen or so close friends whom I knew well already. Anybody whom I didn't know came off as a troll cloaked in MMORP wish-fulfillment. (See also the people who post on YouTube videos.)
So I guess in summary, 4chan has its place, and maybe that should remain the place for it. Facebook is a place for something else, and I for one am thankful.
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For those of us with a sense of privacy, and who are a bit schooled in history, we realize just how silly and dangerous such a position is. So please, blair1q, before you go spewing more opinionated bile around Slashdot, could you back up some of your claims that:
Most people who use it do so to commit crimes, from trolling to murder.
Mind you, I count such practices as keeping sexual orientation, religious beliefs, political stances, and thoughts regarding your opinion of coworkers and/or bosses secret a form of anonymity, in the sense that you are keeping your personal details regarding those matters anonymous in the eyes of the public.
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I don't think 4chan is worthless.
Vulgar, irreverent, mob mentality... Can you honestly say facebook is none of those things? Wouldn't you say that it is all of those things, if you were honest? Is the veneer of "manners" and censorship really so important for its own sake?
Maybe your mom would feel more comfortable in the lie (see what I did there?), but 4chan's /b/ is just as valid a form of human interaction and expression as facebook -- it merely operates by different rules, with different norms, and a different history. To deny that 4chan is important as a feature of the human condition is to deny that anyone has a mental life: the life that we don't blurt out in public for fear of social repercussions. Nevertheless, this aspect of humans does still exist, and you won't make it disappear just because you get rid of 4chan and other anonymous modes of communication. Repression makes things worse, never better.
You do need both -- and you can't assert that 4chan is "worthless" and be self-consistent. Facebook, in all its corporate data-farm glory, is no more legitimately "good" no matter how much less child porn, no matter how much less gore, no matter how popular it is, and no matter how wealthy its owners.
You're a a soft-skulled, sophomoric, self-righteous hypocrite. It doesn't say anything good about /. that you were modded up (why expect an enlightened, objective moderation response from the anonymous internet, though).
Still. Parent remains profoundly inane.
That when building a tool for the masses you go by their preferences, not your own valid-but-uncommon ones. And the plain fact of the matter is that most people do not mind the Facebook privacy model as evidenced by their enthusiastic uptake of the system and their lackadaisical attitude towards all these "ZOMG Facebook is the devil" news stories.
I get it, the /. and 4chan crowds have a different set of preferences than the average consumer. This has been beaten to death so many times that there's scarcely anything more to add there except to remind you guys that not everyone must have the same preferences as you. In fact, many prefer the convenience of Facebook over the loss of privacy. We keep hearing the refrain of "if they knew the truth they'd change their minds" and yet they continue to not change their minds not matter how much bleating goes on, probably because they know and don't change their minds. I know this is an odd thing to the partisan/zealot, but really some people understand your position, heard the arguments and just aren't convinced. Try not to take it too personally.
Heck, I've got a Facebook page that shares all sorts of banality. And truth is I wouldn't at all be upset if everything on there was printed out and handed to every person I've ever known (I would feel sorry if they decided to actually peruse through that banality, to be honest). Is is "authentic" as Moot wants it to be? No and I bloody don't want that in the first instance. The fact that he thinks I give a fig about his preferences for the content and tone of my communications is really astounding, roughly equivalent to me thinking that he should consult me on whether he should have jam or cheese on his toast (cheese, with a tiny bit of Marmite).
TL;DR version: Not everyone is like you. This is a good thing, the world would be boring if everyone was the same. Quit projecting your own values onto others, at least in such cases where they have taken clear and unequivocal steps to demonstrate that they do not share those values.
4chan was never good
lol. what are you gonna do, arrest me for trolling?
*opens legs*
You mean his point is moot? /ducks
The value of Anonymity of course depends on the value of what you're doing with it.
Most people who use it do so to commit crimes, from trolling to murder.
Most people vote in democratic elections anonymously. Do you think voting is a crime, or do you consider it trolling?
Yeah, diaspora's really a resounding success, just look at their github: a handful of contributors actually working on the code (one of the more active ones recently appears to be someone who isn't even a member of the original "Diaspora" team), a steady downward trend on the pageviews graph, and no notable news since November's alpha testing started, other than a blog post at the end of January saying "We're still like, working on stuff, and we're still super-relevant, just look at these blogs that called us cool!"
With success like that, it's just a matter of weeks before Facebook is obsolete.
Actually it seems that it's a requirement nowdays.
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Wow, so it's just like Slashdot, but with porn?
Yes. Moot point is moot. /rabbits
+0 Meh
Neither was facebook
I've noticed recently that a lot of places have suddenly switched to the Facebook commenting system for their websites with that assumption that forcing people to post with their real names will cut down on trolling.
It may well do that, but it certainly comes with a cost to non-troll posts as well. I, for one, have stopped visiting Techcrunch as a result -- let alone stopped posting there. People censor themselves when they know their friends will read their comments. This is not always a good thing, this includes keeping valid and valuable opinions to themselves simply because they don't want to offend anyone. Not to mention the number of people who will simply choose to say nothing at all. What Techcrunch and anyone who switches to this new commenting system has done is throw the baby out with the bathwater, then pat themselves on the back for getting rid of that pesky bathwater. It makes me kinda sad. The Facebookification of the Internet is the death of the internet. Go down that road at your own risk.