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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?"
Amything that circumvents FB choices will be banned. Or integrated.
So, in the end, that app will die for sure.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
He can't patent the idea, President Nixon came up with it first.
So really, who cares? Facebook users are narcissists, insecure, asocial, or bogus "marketing accounts".
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
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.
The truth shall set you free!
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.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
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.
I select what products I want based primarily on my own judgment. If I know someone and respect their opinion, I may give some weight to it in my choices. But that respect doesn't always correspond one to one with friendship. Some of my friends are lacking in their knowledge in certain areas. Likewise, some people I don't like do display some common sense.
The whole 'freinds have got to stick together and stand up against common enemies' is exploited far too much politically as well as in marketing.
Have gnu, will travel.
Dear user, did you know that your sworn enemy Frin44 really hates Farmville? Would you like to add him to your Farmville notification list?
Was just thinking that. Disliking something doesn't fit into the doubleplusgood world where everyone is liked and everyone's a winner. See, mom, everyone likes what I do, I got $somerandomnumber people liking what I do!
Being able to dislike something would actually make people see just how many people really not only don't care about them but care enough about them to wish they would just die and leave a very shallow grave.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
if the application suberts or negatively impacts the model of facebook, which is data mining for the purposes of targeted advertisement, it will be banned.
i predict the addition of a enemy feature will work to incense negative emotional responses to facebook that so far have been confined to things that can be relatively mitigated, for example its policies and terms of service. an "enemy" on your facebook will make you less likely to check facebook, or its related applications. users who previously had ignored intentionally obfuscated security settings may begin to pay more attention to them, thereby costing you advertising data. you may switch social networks for one without any enemies or abandon social networking alltogether for a more controlled and privatized relationship with your friends. the implications of "enemy" are pretty big.
Good people go to bed earlier.
At least here on /., you actually can. Well, at least occasionally, when you got modpoints. You're not forced to mod every crap up or, if you think it's prime grade bullcrap, can only leave it be. You can actually go and mod it down.
The net effect is that if I talk out of my ass constantly on FB, I will still think people agree with me and like me. Because from time to time, everyone, even the dimmest idiot in the world, is prone to saying something witty, useful or at least funny. Even if 99.9% of the time, whatever he rambles about would instantly be dismissed as idiot drivel.
What does that mean on FB? That you get the occasional "please die, dumbass" comment while, if just looking at your "likes", you'll see how there are still people who actually agree with you, giving you the general feel that what you say is valuable input. On here, if you're a complete idiot 99% of the time, you will be shown in no uncertain terms that you are.
That's basically why FB will never endorse such a dislike feature. Because they don't give half a shit about just how much of a dork you are as long as you're there, use it and hand them information. And, well, people don't tend to stay where they're constantly told that they're idiots.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now I'm almost tempted to get onto Facebook. Except I'd never use a real name/address/email/etc., so maybe I'm still not tempted at all.
But let's see who tries to add 800 million or so to their list of enemies (minus a few who might even be actual friends)...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Maintaining a personal list of adversaries sounds to me like a needless security risk. What's the purpose? The only uses I can think of off the top of my head: Remembering which entities to avoid, and/or to warning others of to avoid the same.
Publishing a list of adversaries, accessible by those listed (either directly/intentionally or via hearsay, etc.) is foolish. For one thing, it invites unwanted attention from the listed entities, who may have otherwise been oblivious/benign. Further, it places one's self into the suspect pool of anyone listee who believes that they're on the receiving end of some (real or imagined) external harm. Finally, it tips one's hand, increasing the risk of being identified as the cause of any future action taken against those listed*.
As a brief example, consider Slashdot's relationship system. Your Freaks list looks like some decent targets for some good old fashioned abusive down-mods. Are you being harassed by an AC or experiencing an suspicious share of down-mods? Well, how large is your Foes list?
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Instead of a binary variable, friend or not friend, 1 or 0, It should be a floating point value with a range from -1 to 1. -1 = strong enemy, 1 = strong friend, anything in between indicates strength of the connection. Default value is 0 for everyone not specifically set to another value. Then you could set levels where certain info is revealed. For example: only friends above 0.9 get to post to my wall, anyone at 0 or below does not even see the wall. etc. That would make it a much more useful social service than now, where some random company that I want to keep up with gets the same privileges as my brother.
The thing is that nobody actually behaves based on what happens on facebook. Nobody buys a product because a bunch of people "like" it. Heck, most people can't even remember any of the last 100 posts they read (try it - interrupt someone who's surfing facebook, and ask them to recall what they were reading. Their brain is in "zoned-out mode" - for the most part nothing they read really registers).
We're in a "social media bubble", one which will collapse when advertisers realize that they can get better returns by spending their "social media budget" on booze and returning the empties for a refund.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
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 ... :-)
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
That's not as far-fetched as you think. We're raising the current generation of younglings with the impression that they get a gold star and excessive praise no matter what they do. There can be nothing negative ever.
This is why half the recent college grads I've been interviewing lately have unreasonable expectations. They've been raised in a fantasy land that doesn't exist in the real world.
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.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
So really, who cares? Facebook users are narcissists, insecure, asocial, or bogus "marketing accounts" [theglobeandmail.com].
Some/majority != All.
Every single person on my friends list is a real life friend or acquaintance. Admittedly some of them are old college friends who I pretty much lost touch with, but occasionally check up so see where they've gone in life, but most of them are people I still keep in touch with (IRL when possible), and at some point I've had a real life beer with every single one of them (all, big whopping, 60 of them). Obviously, then, I'm asocial, insecure, a narcissistic, or a bogus marketing account.
The same is true with my girlfriend (incidentally we're friends on Facebook, and share a house in life), and her mother, and my father's wife, and a vast majority of my friends. Yes, some of them are social media whores, I've had a friend go and try to friend all of my other friends a couple times, even though she never met a single one of them, and shares nothing in common with them (she's from my wilder youth, and most of them are from college), her "friend" total sits at 1500+. There is obviously something wrong there, in my 32 years on this earth I doubt I've even met 1500 people I could tolerate, much less consider "friends". A couple of my friends are spammy, and constantly need attention (which would be true without Facebook), and some of them are spammy because they use Facebook as a tool (one is one of the heads of our local Occupy movement, one is very involved in Occupy LA, and one is a Rave/scene promoter). Most of them are like me, and post once a month or so, and generally use it as a way to keep up to date with geographically distant friends and acquaintances.
Yes, I'm guessing a majority of social connections are bogus, insecure, asocial, or narcissists, but probably the vast majority of users aren't.
In the end, as with most things, Facebook is a tool. You can use it however you want, and what you get out of it depends on what you want from it. Even if 99.9999% of users were undesirable whatnots, it wouldn't effect me, or my use of it, in the slightest.
The "i don't use facespace!" crowd is the obnoxiously snug "i don't watch tv" hipsters of yesteryear. Good for you, but why should I care?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Facebook is not only an enabler, it's also become the instigator in many cases. If it were to disappear tomorrow, long-term, society would be better off.
If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, then something just like it would show up the next day. All social media (since newsgroups, at least) has been vocally dominated by people desperately seeking attention, and using it as a crutch for their own psychological problems. This pre-exists the internet, go to a typical trendy college bar. Go hang out with your obscenely outgoing co-worker... Go to your local shopping mall and listen to the screaming teenagers (which was the social media of my generation, ignoring IRC and BBSs for us nerds).
People said the same stuff your saying about AOL > Geocities/Angelfire > Livejournal > Myspace, and now Twitter. Yes, there are problems with them, but if mature people use them maturely, then these problems are mostly mitigated. The same can be said of things like alcohol, idiots will use them and degrade themselves, but some of us can enjoy a tasty glass of scotch after dinner and be fine. Do the idiots degrade the responsible ones? Only if the responsible ones can't ignore the idiots.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey