Disqus - Latest Comments for fiction_writing

Re: Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Hiding in Plain Sight / Joseph — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 09:15:45 -0000

Thank you for posting this, and including the video. The interesting part in the video starts at 2:30.

Zuckerberg talks about changing the settings for his users, instead of respecting their right to change those settings for themselves, defending such a move on the basis of allegedly changing social norms. One could respond to that by arguing about whether or not those social norms really are changing - is Facebook letting itself be pulled in a particular direction by society or is it trying to use its massive influence to push society in a direction that Zuckerberg personally likes - but to do so is to let oneself be sidetracked, and to let Zuckerberg build a bad assumption into the discussion: that individual rights are a matter of social convention. They aren't, and the rest of us shouldn't be tolerant of the suggestion that they are. Zuckerberg's assumption should be met with nothing less than pure rage.

In effect, he's saying that if most people want to give up a right, then that right should be stripped away from those difficult holdouts who don't want to give it up. As a general piece of philosophy, that's horrible - just imagine its application to a society moving in the direction of fascism, and think of its implications. In the short and not as horrible term, one is left with the question of what it means to say that one has a right, if it can be taken away from one on as superficial a basis as the perception of a social trend. An individual's personal information and right to keep that information private belong to the individual, not to Facebook and not to society. The whims of the masses are beside the point.

But they do tend to determine what one can get away with, in the short term, and that tells us something about Zuckerberg, something not very pleasant. What we're seeing is what moves the man. A genuinely ethical man does not need the fear of reprisals to do right by those around him. He does right because he wishes to see that which is right done. Ethics, for him, is not something that is motivated by incentives - it is a source of incentives, itself. What Zuckerberg has carelessly revealed is that he is not an ethical man. He's just a craven opportunist who will go along with the mob, and takes pride in his own lack of character; on his own stated terms, to be or do anything else would be wrong. I think we've all known people like this, and have personally experienced that which logic should tell us instantly - that such people are never to be trusted, and are beyond redemption. One can't even accept an apology from one of them, because they won't hesitate to give an insincere one. All that one can do is keep them at as great a distance as possible, and hope that others will have the sense to do the same.

Facebook should be shunned, not just out of concern for one's own rights, but as a statement of support for the rights of others, as should any other company that Zuckerberg will ever start, for the rest of his life.

Re: Posterous Goes After Private Networks With New Groups Feature

Hiding in Plain Sight / Joseph — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:22:01 -0000

Once I got to the company blog, what I saw was another one of their users, in the comments for a recent post of theirs about their slideshow feature, asking them to please just scr** up again. This is good advice that I wish they'd take. Cool features are a nice thing for a service to have, when the service is functioning properly. But it has to function properly. No matter how many bells and whistles it might have, a service that leaves its users tearing out their hair is not a good service.

What Posterous needs to do is take care of the basics and get them right, before it goes on to work on the frills. The impression I'm getting is that the company's strategy, at the moment, is one of trying to overcome the user's frustration with breakdowns in basic functionality by talking up their latest features, using marketing as a substitute for good programming and basic common sense. We've seen this strategy used before - it's something that Yahoo has become notorious for - but Yahoo was a cultural phenomenon, something so fresh and new that a lot of well heeled people took a while to notice that it wasn't very good. 2011 is not 1996. The concept of a Internet company is no longer so novel that people will be so gullible as they once were, in so profitable a way for some.

I'd like to see Posterous do well, but it has to earn its success, and it's not going to do that with a few glossy press releases.

Re: Posterous Goes After Private Networks With New Groups Feature

Hiding in Plain Sight / Joseph — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:20:44 -0000

I'm logged into Posterous, at the moment, and three things about the experience have jumped out at me, over the last few hours.

1. If there is a way to search for public groups on Posterous, it is not clearly visible, and it really ought to be. Show up at a successful site like Flickr, and there's not a lot of searching for a basic bit of functionality like that. Right at the top of the screen is a link marked "groups". Click on the link, and you'll find not one but two forms for group search, clearly visible in the upper right.

This is a pleasant feature for group moderators, because it's a pleasant feature for prospective group members. That ease of use is one of the reasons why groups at Flickr can grow as large as they do, and why one can use Flickr to build up a network of contacts. At Posterous, though, the would-be group member is going to find himself frustrated before he's found his first group, probably saying "to H*** with this" and walking off - as he should. There are plenty of social networking sites competing for his attention, not to mention a whole world competing with the Internet for his time, so why should he deal with an experience that is frustrating, only because the Posterous team has chosen to make it so?

2. Setting up a blog, tonight, I found that the link to "manage", which one uses to set up one's blog, had effectively been hijacked twice, sending me to

http://caffeine.posterous.com/...

for the first half hour or so - then, after a brief respite during which I was able to customize my blog, started sending me to another private blog page

http://mathematical.posterous....

In order to even contact Posterous this, I had to spam their company blog, because the contact form had seemingly broken down, sending me to the aforementioned urls after information was sent, and no contact e-mail address was available. Going to Network Solutions turned up nothing other than the contact information for their privacy service.

3. Attempting to post to the blog which was finally created, after much denting of my desk with my forehead, I found that carriage returns and blank spaces that I had introduced into the text for ease of readability were vanishing, seemingly at random. So, I tried introducing periods, colored black to match the background color on my new blog, and on my Tribe profile, where it was feeding and needed to look presentable. For reasons I really don't want to know, the color of the text was stripped out of the feed, leaving me with visible vertical dotted lines on my Tribe profile, which looked terrible. So I tried inserting a blank space graphic. Which didn't show up in the feed. Why? Because that is part of the mystery that is life.

Finally, I tried entering pairs of paragraph tags, open and close, and for some reason, that worked, the blank space created by them appearing on the blog, the feed, and the Tribe profile on which the feed was being run. Of course, the Italics which I had to use, because the Posterous system refused to display tables, and insisted on surrounding blockquoted material with actual quotes - inappropriate when all I'm trying to do is enhance the visibility of some text of particular significance - turned into bolding on the feed. What resulted looked terrible, but at least it could easily be read, so I settled for that, just wanting the job I was doing to be done.

At this point, the second problem had returned, and I found that I just didn't care enough to keep going with this.