DIYbanter - View Single Post - Electronic Repair and Design group on Facebook

Michael Black[_2_]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2014, wrote:

On Thursday, July 24, 2014 1:13:29 PM UTC-4, Adrian Tuddenham wrote:

Facebook have been spamming me for months. They appear to have obtained
my e-mail address from the adress book of friends who were foolish
enough to fall for their trickery.

Hmmm... In my considerable experience, as far as I can determine, Facebook does not spam. I'm not sure what you're talking about or whether it's really from Facebook.

One thing Usenet can be relied on is to bring out negative reactions to virtually anything, especially if it was invented after 1980, the year in which computers and networks were perfected.

I would point out that so much of these newfangled things rest on all the
experimentation and experience that has happened on Usenet over 30 years.

"LOl", cross-posting, spamming, they were in Usenet long before these
other things arrived.

People just follow blindly, so facebook is "social media" without anyone
really looking into what that means. I would point out that when I was
trying to get groups to use the internet circa 1997, one group said "but
it's too technical" and I said "no, it's social" which certainly defines
usenet long before the carpetbaggers arrived.

If nothing else, the old spaces were defined by RFCs, and were given away,
to win success because it worked. So gopher faded away, but email still
remains, even as the younger generation wants to use twitter instead. The
old ways were about giving osmething away, to set standards. The new ways
are to build branded spaces, to win the viewership over from the
competition. Facebook doesn't really care about what your experience on
facebook is like, they only care if you leave, because then their chance
at raking in money goes away (I can't even remember if facebook is making
money yet). Their goal is not the common good, their goal is to make
money, and you are the content to lure the eyeballs to the advertising.

I have a page about upcoming local used booksales, I've been posting about
them (first to the local newsgroup, then to a webpage) since 1997. It was
part of a bigger strategy to widen the contents in the local newsgroup to
lure more people in, who in turn would share their obscure interests and
lure more people in. SOme guy putting up a webpage represents the
internet of old, doing it because they can, because it costs so little.
The new internet has yelp!, pretending to be community, yet someone is
getting rich off the free content.

IN 1996, Inet '96 met here, a confereance about the internet. A good
number of the workshops there were about "community networking", and the
fear was that all the space would be commercialized. Odd, since at that
point, commerce on the internet was a relatively new thing, while it had
been communal and cooperative for so much longer. But while commerce
can't drive out pages like mine (I pay for the space for the webpage, no
freebie for me), or usenet, commerce is so much bigger it dwarfs the good.
Few see what we were doing in the old days, few see that we still exist.
So some political group that doesn't like trucks driving around for the
purpose of showing off billboards, they can't see what's wrong with
facebook, because in all their "internet life", commerce has been here.
These are the same people who think commerce has given them "community",
ie "web 2.0", becuase they just don't know what was there before.

Michael