Almost no sites require a form of login.
You can login to most sites, but primarily so that you can keep a persistent pseudonym and set preferences. You can browse almost every site without logging in. There is nothing that stops you from e.g. linking to a YouTube video from your own site regardless of whether you have a YouTube account. For Facebook you need an account to even see the large majority of the content.
> So, the openness that I think people want, is access to the Facebook user base, but I would argue that everyone already has that, in is the rest of the web. The difference is Facebook is not going to give that to any other companies, because that user base is their revenue stream.
Which is why people dislike them. Who wants to be somebody else's "revenue stream"? Replacing Facebook with a decentralized social network that no single party controls would be better for everyone but Facebook.
For Facebook you only need an account to see content that the user / page has deemed not public. This has nothing to do with Facebook and everything to do with the owner of the account / page that publishes the content you're wanting to see.
https://www.facebook.com/YCombinator/
Do you need to be logged in to view PUBLIC posts or comments on that page? No, you don't. Now if you were trying to visit Mark Zuckerberg's personal profile obviously, yes, a very large amount of content is NOT going to be visible to you.
This is no different than every other site out there. Sure, you can read the news and comments posted on this (https://news.ycombinator.com/) webiste, but you most certainly CANNOT post comments without having an account.
Or want to view public pages without them being covered by some obnoxious "See more of PAGE by logging in."
Yes, it's the account owner's fault for using Facebook in the first place. But they're likely always logged in, and so are most of their visitors, so they're only marginally aware such problems even exist.
Blame that can be squarely placed at Facebook is exploiting such gaps in knowledge from their users to pressure non-users into signing up.
> This is no different than every other site out there.
This is vastly different from almost every other site out there, except for a few big players. The Internet is still a huge place, at least for the time being.
Facebook is a major erosive force on the Internet as it tries to quietly subsume and privatise it, and using it to publish content on is contributing to the demise of one of the few globe-spanning projects our species ever managed to get right.
> . . . pressure non-users into signing up.
These days you'll see similar examples by visiting any forum. Want to see some code, or a link someone posted? Sorry! You have to login or register.
> This is vastly different . . .
OK, OK. I'm sorry. This is most certainly, however, similar to any other website out there that uses real identity; don't let me get everything muddied by trying to compare real identity web to the anonymous web.
> Facebook is a . . .
Lol? I don't even. There's so many die-hard Facebook haters out there. Go build open source applications that do what Facebook is offering and does it better and before you know it the company should be gone. I'm solely basing this on the amount of comments I see for people coming out against Facebook, rather than ever for it (or even just playing devil's advocate). It seems to always be a circle jerk.
I can't imagine that would ever be the case. People hate on facbook for being behemoth that it is. No kind of open sour project would defeat it unless it is backed by the same amount of money. Who would dare to finance such an effort?
Many sites allow anonymous posting. Even those that don't, you can create an "anonymous" throwaway account. That doesn't work for Facebook because an anonymous throwaway account would have no friends and no more access to anything than not logging in at all.
You don't need what Facebook is doing for access control. The alternative is to post encrypted content and only give the key to people you want to allow access to.
Probably what that really needs to be popular is support for encoding a decryption key into a URI which isn't passed to the webserver but rather used by the client's browser to decrypt content from the server.
The web is free, you can whatever you like.
The Zuck does whatever he likes.
We can do whatever we like.
No one can do whatever you like.
Freedom gain, freedom pain.
Facebook make, facebook take.
Open source, opean sauce.
Kitchen sink, pidgeon pink.
I think this to keep all the data to themselves (from crawlers, Google, Baidu); not necessarily for the benefit of their users.
It might be that I'm required to login to a specific site in order to access my email account that is hosted there, but since everything is based on the "open" SMTP protocol, I'm not dependent on that specific site if I want to exchange messages with my friends.
An example: SMTP, to prevent spam many SMTP hosting companies activity block anyone they deem to be spammers, or those who don't properly use things like SPF.
So even SMTP is t really open any more. There's a general agreement from most SMTP providers that they will accept and deliver emails for those that play by the rules.
(I don't disagree with this, just pointing out that it's not quite as simple as just standards, etc)
> the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval.
I assume this is based on the fact that you can not directly use facebooks APIs, and can not utilize Facebook itself. Facebook does allow for people to link out to other sites content, so in that way there is no barrier to seeing external sources in Facebook. An external site can't extend the experience of Facebook though, but I don't know of any successful web business that does allow this.
I'm curious of examples that actually meet the definition of open which he's using. Almost all sites require a form of login, many news sites are putting up paywalls, and there have always been private services requiring login to get at secure data.
So, the openness that I think people want, is access to the Facebook user base, but I would argue that everyone already has that, in is the rest of the web. The difference is Facebook is not going to give that to any other companies, because that user base is their revenue stream.
To me this isn't a problem until people are incapable of accessing anything other than Facebook. This would be like the AOL of 1992, before most AOL users realized there was more to the Internet than what AOL gave them. I don't think people will want to go back to that. But competition will constintently pull on this. Email is not dead, Messenger is not the only messenging platform. Btw, I find myself barely ever using Facebook these days.
And a question, what sites operate in the way this article wants? There were no examples. Reddit?