I get that this is a joke, but I believe it touches on an important subject. And this article was much more than the author announcing that he doesn't use FB-- That announcement was only an introduction to an article about possible downsides to sharing social information
I know it isn't a popular sentiment among hacker circles but if you stop to think, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious. Information about people has always been a precious commodity and now we're giving it away.
Another subtlety I noticed is this generation's concept of Self is becoming contorted into your number of 'Friends' and quantity of 'Likes'. Not really this intelligent HN crowd but, more so the other 99% of society that unconsciously uses fb.
> Another subtlety I noticed is this generation's concept of Self is becoming contorted into your number of 'Friends' and quantity of 'Likes'. Not really this intelligent HN crowd but, more so the other 99% of society that unconsciously uses fb.
Yes, us intelligent folk here on HN would never stoop to accumulate arbitrary, meaningless "likes" (or "points" if you will) based on some groupthink valuation of our opinions. And us hackers would never consider shaping our published opinions to match the group's thinking so that we could accumulate more of these..."likes".
This reminds me of the concept of "whuffie" in Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" where he posits an entire future society based on these principles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie
It did not occur to me at the time I read it that this was based on contemporary online media. It is interesting to consider that society might actually be moving in that direction.
I know it isn't a popular sentiment among hacker circles but if you stop to think, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious. Information about people has always been a precious commodity and now we're giving it away.