UT-Dallas Professor Adds 'Enemies' Feature To Facebook

An anonymous reader writes "Many people have called for a 'dislike' button on Facebook, but the service has not allowed it. A professor's app lets users add 'enemies,' in what he says is critique of the service's advertiser-friendly niceness. Will Zuckerberg let the app stand or ban it?"

Comments

Who cares? Most social media accounts are fake.

[Barbara, not Barbie]

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/the-hollow-emptiness-in-social-media-numbers-most-accounts-are-fake-or-empty/2175

itâ(TM)s easy to buy âoefriendsâ and âoefollowers,â by the thousands, and âoelikesâ by the tens of thousands, for a low fee. This can jumpstart a marketing campaign if it makes it onto a top trending list. Buying such services will also help contractors meet performance goals set by clients and trigger payments. It can be a lucrative arbitrage.

The result however, is considerable inflation in the numbers of users of all the major social networks and platforms.

The operators of the networks: Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, must know who is real and who isnâ(TM)t. They have usage data that shows telltale signs of a fake account. They also know how much information a user has disclosed, and how many user profiles are empty.

Whatâ(TM)s not known is how they count the many types of users, how rigorous is their analysis? There is no transparency on the single most important pool of information for their commercial customers.

So really, who cares? Facebook users are narcissists, insecure, asocial, or bogus "marketing accounts".

Re:Who cares? Most social media accounts are fake.

[Technician]

In reality most of those accounts are ignored for the most part. Circles of family and friends tend to cull dormat deadwood from active use. I don't friend random strangers, but family and close friends.

Re:Who cares? Most social media accounts are fake.

[Barbara, not Barbie]

You're a rarity. Most people don't bother culling accounts - their innate insecurity, which led them to friend total strangers in the first place to bolster their sense of self-worth, prevents that.

This sort of behaviour leads to some funny results. One of my friends, as part of a study, was asked to contact - by phone - a bunch of people picked at random from a person's friends list for a marketing project. These were all people the person had said they knew because "I don't just friend anybody..." Not one of them knew the guy.

Facebook == lame.

Re:FBDislike?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

There's a dislike plugin already.

It's called "disable account" - but it doesn't really work. They'll keep sending you status updates via email, and tell you when someone shares stuff with you, even though you've disabled the account. I disabled mine monthas ago, after hardly using it for several years after I finally signed up.

It's one way for them to keep their user numbers artificially inflated.

Dumped twitter years ago - boring!

Thinking of dumping google+ as well - I check it every few days, but really, it's not all that interesting compared to the real world. Especially now that spring is here! (I know, it's heresy to even speak of that big blue room with the bright light in the sky that can burn your skin if you stay there too long, and the living green carpet, and creatures that look almost as real as the digital people and birds and squirrels we see every day, ... but still ... :-)

Re:Social choices

[Ihmhi]

I guess I just don't understand how people can let their lives be manipulated by people or things that they dislike. Or by people that they like for that matter.

Well, here's a good example. Governer Rick Perry's "Strong" video. It was homophobic and hateful in every way. 26,404 likes, 764,362 dislikes. If there were such a thing as god I'd say he has a healthy sense of irony as well.

This one video was Perry's last stand, his last chance at being a contender. He decided to go all out and appeal to the Christian bigotry vote.

It didn't exactly work.