I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.
It seems like a mistake. If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career and ironically it feels more stiflingly conformist. Just my personal feelings on the matter, though. I'm not trying to call out anyone who likes that way of life (and perhaps has a personality that's well suited for it), just that it should not be imposed on everyone.
I kind of like the old model where you pretend to be conservative at work, and are free to be as weird as you want to in your own time.
Indeed. I live in a muslim country and here everyone uses dual-sim phones with 2 sims for the sole purpose of having 2 accounts at everything: one for the conservative part of the family, another for the modern.
However now I just let it rip. I'm not trying to be weird like I was in my 20s, and I also realize I don't need to self-censor as much as I thought I needed to.
Do note that some services aren't able to send SMS to virtual numbers in the US, for some reason. If that happens, try again with a virtual number in the UK or somewhere else, or if there is a voice call confirmation option that may also work for you as you can redirect the call programatically. Considering the phone numbers typically cost only $1/month each you can keep a few around to deal with this situation.
I think this thing has to have some ephemeral nature to it (delete account, create new one if need be later) to avoid harassers and or those who get infatuated or attached; people who just fell out in a bad way, etc.
I mean, you definitely don’t want to expose your friends and your work to new and to you unknown people. They may use your FB friends network and work and whatever other info to harass and follow, etc. also your ex-es can see activity, etc. I don’t see much good in this product.
It makes a ton of sense from their business perspective, which is to sell highly personalized ads. If you have one single internet persona, it is far easier to tailor ads to you.
Letting people show different angles of themselves through differently branded websites makes it much easier for facebook to build complete, thorough profiles of people.
I feel like the opposite may happen? I.e. instead of only showing one angle of their life, the idea is that people share _all_ angles of their lives. Either way you end up with the same result "one persona".
The only people who care this deeply I think are the same ones who block ads or don't use facebook anyway.
I disagree with this characterization. I live in SV and literally everyone I've talked to about privacy/anonymity on the internet sees the value in being able to partition one's life into different buckets for different audiences, and many of them actively maintain such partitions.
This has nothing to do with culture; this is about technology limitations and laziness. Companies like FB want to make it easier to track people online and tie everything you do to a single identity. They can certainly do a lot to link supposedly-unrelated personas through various forms of fingerprinting, but it's never perfect, and they'd love for things to be simpler.
There's also the issue of anon/pseudonymity: companies like FB don't like that because they want an indentifiable real-world person to be accountable for the things they do online.
(Really, think about it: the idea that the people who live in Silicon Valley have some magical weirdo culture where social and professional partitioning doesn't exist... well, that's absurd and doesn't even pass the smell test.)
Using SV as a synecdoche for "movers and shakers in the information technology / adtech worlds", the statement stands.
There are of course exceptions -- rank-and-file tech workers who have drunk the cool aid, and some outside tech who think this is a Good Thing (often for Others but not Themselves).
Ascribing the fixation to SV is, again, generally accurate.
Yesterday a colleague had me link a third-party application to a business-related page using my personal account, and it felt like a huge invasion of my personal sphere to have pages for a band I was in ten years ago appear on the list next to the business' pages. (Not to mention giving this third party access to all of my personal information in order to allow it to help manage a few public pages.)
Do social media workers have some kind of strategy for managing their public and private identities? I'm considering creating an alternate account just for business pages, but that seems a bit disingenuous to me.
Got me, I'm a social media refusenik. I have only encountered one third party application for work that was lazy and broken enough to require FB login, and I made up a throwaway account specifically for it. (I also had to remove all the 127.0.0.1 entries for FB names in /etc/hosts, but that's different.)
Does doing that feel disingenuous to you because of Facebook's expectations, or a different reason?
(I personally have zero problems with lying to FB, given that FB routinely and consistently lies to the rest of the world in order to decrease others' ability to not do business with them.)
Not counting work, I guess have three or four Google accounts. (Ironically, none of them are gmail.)
Frankly, I never use the social media sign ons if I can avoid it.
In China WeChat is synonymous with both your business and personal life.
When networking and meeting business contacts you don’t give out your LinkedIn, you give out your WeChat.
Obviously, it leaks loads to Facebook.
Hell, I already deleted my reddit account last year just because.
I'm from Seattle so I'm not knee deep in that, but I just don't understand how someone can actually have one persona that they represent to the world.
Different situations have different requirements and norms. You're going to have to act differently in different situations.
One might pretend that you're the same in person at work as in close social situations, but this just doesn't seem practical.
I've been using the Internet almost daily since 1988, and for the first 8 or 9 years, I embraced being pseudo-anonymous. I really can't say why, it was just what everybody was doing. If all of the online activity of all of my different personas was mixed in public, it would have been no big deal.
Having said that, I understand and respect that, I presume, most people need to be able to maintain different personas.
> You're going to have to act differently in different situations.
While I certainly don't say exactly the same kinds of things to everyone, everywhere, I do generally act the same in every situation.
And I think that's kind of unusual.
Feel free to ask any clarifying questions if you like.
FB is acutely aware that "[X] is in a relationship with [Y]" is a strong social signal in today's world. So the implication is that genuine identities ultimately should connect via any dating app.
With a name like "Facebook Dating", it doesn't sound like they're trying to enter the Tinder-esque hookup space. If the product is focused on long-term relationships, the dating profile and the career profile probably won't have that many differences. At least not for most people, and Facebook (the website) is clearly aimed at "most people".
After all, a Tinder-like app would already face huge competition, whereas the market for online dating services that work for older and/or more conservative people has been largely stagnant and is currently fragmented across sites like "FarmersOnly". You don't gain traction by solving a problem someone else already solved. Old people are lonely too.
If I brought my whole self to my job in Houston it would not go smoothly.
You're right, but I don't understand that perspective.
If my company is doing something that I think is morally wrong, I'm going to be finding employment elsewhere and telling them why. I might even speak out about it... after I leave.
If we're doing something that I think it's great but doesn't justify my quitting, then I'm going to be speaking up internally about it. Going public with a grievance against your employer just strikes me as being counter-productive - you're risking being fired, you're damaging your future prospects for advancement there, and you're potentially damaging the entity to which you've tied your financial future.
The way I see it, when I work for a company I'm part of their public face. Even though I may not (certainly don't, actually) represent the company, my actions and statements still influence people's impression of the brand. If I'm upset about something enough that I'm willing to damage the company's brand to speak out about it, then I'm upset enough that I don't want to be providing material support to them by continuing to work there.
The people who are just purely about the money won't care enough to protest at all. I think the protesters' intentions are in the right place.
> I do think that this company can be a net force for good in this world (easier to believe at Google than at Facebook). But I don't want it to do bad things, and if I damage the brand publicly, the company will still survive, but will think twice about doing something like this in the future since they won't be able to just contain it internally.
That's the thing, at least for me - if you believe the company is not currently being a net force for good in the world, then I'd be contributing to something that is a net force for evil. Even if I believed that could be changed in the future, I couldn't do that. It's the difference between utilitarianism and deontology.
This has got to be an over generalisation, surely?
People in Silicon Valley are highly unlikely to be a homogenous whole.
And given what we know about Gell-Mann Amnesia, it seems likely to me the media’s portrayal of the situation is, at best, amiss, and, at worst, intentionally deceptive.
Probably that a vocal minority generate a kerfuffle, and a huge majority keep mum.
Happy to be proven wrong.
Source was Kristine Schachinger's G+ post-mortem:
In the years between 2009-2015 (loosely speaking), there was a push by corporate entities and governments around the world to build an online ecosystem that could replace passwords.
Not only did they want to replace passwords, but they wanted to help better identify the person behind the log-in as a real human, a verified person.
This “verified” identity was to make it, so users were known to the companies they interacted with online.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-deat...
That inquiry was sparked by Andy Carvin's infamous Q&A with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
G+ was built primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names
https://mashable.com/2011/08/28/google-plus-identity-service...
The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace proposal itself: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112hhrg73124/pdf/CHRG-112... (PDF) (p.26)
(Other Trusted Identity providers included ... Equifax: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/10/14/advanci...)
The project was defunded in 2015.
Alex Howard wrote an excellent O'Reilly Radar piece, "A Manhattan Project for Online Identity"
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-pri...
My sense is that the entire social media push had a strong national policy agenda behind it. Which appears to have backfired somewhat.
Disclaimer: I helped organise migration off Google+, under the pseudonymous identity of a space alien cat. Dogs are so passe.
People are human beings before being little money-making machines. (At least outside of HN...)
It's the other way around, in my experience, not a "goal" but a reflection of the people who built it. It made them absurdly rich, and all they know how to do is double down on what makes the numbers go up.
How is that Facebook's goal? Considering the available per-post privacy settings and all, I feel like it facilitates having a different persona to different people.
> To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.
I feel like "one persona to everyone" is almost the cultural opposite of Silicon Valley. Like at every birthday party you go to, every person asks "How's your startup going?", it seems that the cultural norm is you're supposed to say "It's going fantastic, how's your startup?" except if they are a close friend, when you say the truth.
There is no relevant "out of work" for many people.
Thing is, workplace colleagues are seldom actually your friends in the true meaning of the term. Many of us lose contact with 99% of the people we worked with when we switch jobs. A friend is someone whom you have an ongoing relationship with independent of where you live or work, I think.
We might recognize that the internet never forgets and just don't put much out there, but that is a bit different than embracing a single persona life.
I understand where you're coming from, but this statement isn't necessarily a truism. You can wear who you are on your sleeve and even be quite extreme, if you're a reasonable person who can build and maintain professional relationships.
I do almost everything online under my real name, and am not optimized for career purposes. It's just me. As a result, I've had my political beliefs and such come up in interviews on multiple occasions. In one case - as I found out a year or so after being laid off - my interview process took a couple of weeks longer than was typical because one of the executives/partners at the company was concerned specifically about my politics. On the other hand, I did in fact get that job (and loved it!) and I've gotten several connections and invitations to apply based upon my discussions. Surprisingly, they seem to be about evenly split between people who agree and who disagree with my stances. I'm passionate about political issues, but I do my best to be accommodating to others and not be aggressive about them.
It would be fair to say that my positions are pretty extreme, too. I'm a political anarchist; Anarcho-Capitalist / Voluntaryist, to be more precise. I am open about that even in professional settings because it has such an influence on how I approach relationships and the world in general. I tend to be a "systems thinker", and see everything as a balance of competing forces. I see the whole world through this lens; everything is influenced by incentives and disincentives. I have exactly one tattoo, a stylized graph of supply and demand.
Or hell, even start a personal blog using your real name talking about opinions that are anathema to coastal dwellers. Watch your callback rate dramatically decline.
I grew up in a suburb of a conservative state, and I learned early on when to show "who I am and what I really believe" and when to be low-key about it. Others like me who did not learn that skill were bullied relentlessly. I got along pretty well.
If you actually had opinions many people disagreed with strongly, you'd be bullied and held back as well.
Well, a resume isn't a place for that sort of thing at all, but I do pretty much that now. My name is unique - look me up. For what that's worth, a good portion of my posts even here on HN have something to do with guns. I try to be more "informative" than "confrontational", but that's because of the nature of the site more than anything else. I'm here to discuss, share, and learn, not to argue.
I'm definitely a "card-carrying gun owner". I literally put guns in the hands of children on a regular basis (I'm a 4-H youth firearms instructor), a past board member of a state gun rights organization, and an outspoken advocate for the recognition of individuals' rights to both defend themselves and to own and carry the most effective tools possible to that end.
It would be fair to say that I'm anti-abortion as well, with the caveat that I'm much more anti-government. I believe abortion is a terrible thing, but I also believe that giving government the power to prevent it would be much, much worse.
> Or hell, even start a personal blog using your real name talking about opinions that are anathema to coastal dwellers.
I need to redesign my blog, and post more often, but hey - it's still in my real name: http://www.lyndsysimon.com/category/politics.html
> If you actually had opinions many people disagreed with strongly, you'd be bullied and held back as well.
Did you read my last paragraph? I'm an anarchist. The license plate on my Jeep is literally "ANARCHY." I'm actually not sure I could name a political position that's more strongly opposed by more people.
[edited for spelling]
Paying the government a premium to say you don't believe in it, that's rich.
It seems that we're just as compelled to create presidents, kings, and gods for ourselves as pack animals are to follow their alphas. The lone wolf is the vanishingly-rare exception in the animal kingdom, just as the anarchist is in the realm of human politics. NTTAWWT as far as having a lone-wolf personality type is concerned, but any model of human interaction that seeks to exalt the lone-wolf nature in each of us seems bound to fail. (Small-scale egalitarianism is just a separate case of that, since the same hierarchies will inevitably emerge between groups.)
If this condition isn't "natural," then why do things always -- virtually without exception and never sustainably so -- turn out that way?
I didn't mean "natural" as "default" or "as found in nature" - I meant it in the sense of a "natural right". Anarchy is the social and political system we start with, and government is a distortion placed upon it. Further, government's nature is to grow in scope and power over time. This growth leads to tyranny, and eventually, to rebellion.
Honestly, I'm not sure that a truly anarchic society is either possible or stable. I see it as an ideal, not something that I think is reasonable to see in my lifetime. To put it another way - I don't want to destroy the government, I want to shrink it to the point that people question the need for it and eventually just decide to stop pretending we have one.
I don’t agree with the viewpoints but I learned a lot from it! Really cool material.
[1] - https://crimethinc.com/
Exactly. Which is why people put different stuff on LinkedIn, FB, and dating apps.
When you combine those three, your dating profile is your resume is your friends and family persona.
> but I do pretty much that now
Good on you.
But it's not just alarmist speculation to say those things can have a serious impact on your career.
Mozilla's CEO was fired (or some version of that) for having years before donated a modest sum to a then-majority-popular activism group.
If the inventor of JavaScript can be pushed out for a now-unpopular stance, imagine the career consequences for the rest of us.
You're not an anarchist and you should stop try to adopt an identity with a vivid anti-capitalist history to represent your desire for corporate feudalism with guns. Anarchists are socialists and anything otherwise is misusing the word.
You aren't harassed for your beliefs because people with your economic beliefs literally hold every branch of government.
I'm sure you'll come back with something about republicans wanting big government to police morality, but those differences mean almost nothing when your economic incentives are aligned.
So.. you're saying that the other anarchists "own" the word itself? How does that work, exactly? Is it their private property, or merely a personal possession?
I jest, of course; I mean no offense.
The fact is, "Anarcho-Capitalist" is the most precise term for the economic side of my beliefs I've found. "Voluntarist" is the most precise term for the social side. I'll continue to use those terms until I find more descriptive ones.
> I'm sure you'll come back with something about republicans wanting big government to police morality, but those differences mean almost nothing when your economic incentives are aligned.
I'm pretty disillusioned with both major parties; I'm not going to be defending "Republicans".
I generally get along better socially with people on the political right, but that's because I grew up in a "Red State" not because of a greater number of shared beliefs.
Even if someone did put something on their resume that I personally agreed with, I still wouldn’t hire them. In the context of work, I only want someone who comes to work to do the best job they can at the company, collect a check and go home. I don’t want to talk about politics at work.
Sort of related, my wife and I are Black in a mostly White part of the city. We rode an Uber and the driver who was also Black immediately started talking politics because he assumed we “would relate to each other”. I agreed with most of his political points but that’s not what we wanted to hear when we are just wanting to have a relaxing night on the town, and have a few too many drinks.
That being said you need to be respectful of everyone, regardless of their religion, ethnicity, gender identification etc. I think it is very possible to do that and still be a strong conservative.
That is the power dynamic of our times and hence why the need for dual personas.
And obviously you are coming from a specific background and applying for types of jobs where a your contribution is valuable enough to the company that they are willing to overlook potential political issues.
If you were not as skilled, or applying for government, non-profit, banking jobs, or jobs in Red States your experience might have been completely different.
So try to recognize your coming from a privileged position. I know my organization checks Twitter accounts when they get resumes, and they will throw away the ones that use foul language immediately. This is bizarre and backward to be sure, and I'm fighting to change that but its still goes on currently.
Edit: After googling you, you are awesome, fountain pens are awesome, and smart people everywhere should want to hire you.
LOL - well, thank you very much!
Fountain pens are in fact awesome. I'm carrying a semi-custom Indian pen today, an ASA Galactic. I replaced the nib it came with with a TWSBI #6 in extra-fine that I pulled off a broken Vac700. I've smoothed it a great deal and it's probably somewhere between a medium and a fine right now. I have a broad nib that will fit it as well that I'm thinking of grinding into an Architect. My work notebook is a top-bound Clairefontaine A4. I prefer French ruled, but am using "plain" ruled right now.
I think you misunderstand - I'm saying that the professional contacts I've gained through this are about evenly split. Those contacts are not representative of the general population; people who agree with me are very disproportionally represented.
> And obviously you are coming from a specific background and applying for types of jobs where a your contribution is valuable enough to the company that they are willing to overlook potential political issues.
Of course. This applied even before I was a developer, though. For instance: when I was working as an electrician.
> If you were not as skilled, or applying for government, non-profit, banking jobs, or jobs in Red States your experience might have been completely different.
I could never work for government. I've worked for non-profits for the three of the past seven years, and the fact that they were considering accepting federal funding was a factor in my leaving that job.
I live in Arkansas, one of the reddest of Red States. My employer is in California. My previous employers are mostly in Charlottesvlle, Virginia.
> So try to recognize your coming from a privileged position.
I never said I wasn't - everyone here is coming from a privileged position. That's potentially relevant when considering what I say, but it doesn't make my perspective invalid.
> I know my organization checks Twitter accounts when they get resumes, and they will throw away the ones that use foul language immediately. This is bizarre and backward to be sure, and I'm fighting to change that but its still goes on currently.
I'm OK with that, because as I said before I see protecting the company's brand image as part of the employment contract. I wouldn't want someone working for (or with) me that doesn't come across as a reasonably mature adult. I wouldn't disqualify someone for "foul language" in and of itself, but I would absolutely do so if it featured prominently in their speech or if it were being used in an aggressive way.
Plenty of people probably think some of my views are wacko, but because they are reletively personal, noone needs to confront my wacko views. I would really prefer not to work with anyone who openly and gleefully calls themselves an anarcho-capitalist. I probably work with some people that hold similar views, but by separating our personal and work lives, we can work productively together without needing to confront that.
Different strokes for different folks though, or something, I guess.
No offense taken whatsoever.
I will note that "open" is not the same thing as "aggressive". I'm not trying to convert anyone, and I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable at work. For one thing, I'm an empathetic person and don't like to think that I've unintentionally offended someone. For another... if someone is working with me, by definition we're contributing toward the same things. Alienating them would harm damage that cooperative action, and I wouldn't be there if I didn't think it was right.
> I would really prefer not to work with anyone who openly and gleefully calls themselves an anarcho-capitalist.
Why? People's actions are what I care about, not their reasons for them.
At a previous employer I was working to increase access to scientific publications and supporting materials to the general public. One of the reasons I think that's important is because much of the work is funded by taxes, and I view it as much worse to use tax dollars for private gain than to use it and at least make the results available to anyone. Several of my coworkers were authoritarian socialists of various stripes. Their reasons for wanting to make that stuff available were wholly different from mine - but we shared a common cause. We'd discuss politics sometimes over beers or after a "crunch time" when we were all in the office at 2am and a bit delirious, but otherwise it just didn't come up.
> without needing to confront that
Ahh, that's the rub. I know I'm an extreme minority politically. I know many of the people I work with and interact with on a daily basis hold positions antithetical to my own. I have zero desire to "confront" that. Discuss it? Sure, if they're open to it. I'm happy to debate if someone wants to do so (and if they're similarly willing to not make it personal), because that's how I arrived at my positions.
Metaphorically, I feel like my positions have been forged over time by repeatedly beaten against the anvil of others' positions. Where they were deformed, they were weak. I modified them and repeated the process. At 35 years old, I feel like my views are fairly rigid - but that doesn't mean they are unchangeable, and it's because I continually do my best to test them and look for weaknesses. To me, a good political discussion is one where I come away with something to think about that I hadn't considered before. A great one would be where an inconsistency in my positions was pointed out to me.
I actively try to avoid this conversations with coworkers, because many people aren't comfortable with them. That's OK. If they change their mind later I'm happy to oblige, but it's not like forcing people to argue politics is something desirable.
Anarcho-Capitalists wouldn't be considered anarchists. An-arch means without order. Ancaps believe in private property and hierarchy as a beneficial and necessary feature in society. Anarchists traditionally believe in equality as an intrinsic good.
Reminds me more of DC.
My little brother is 16 and I know he won't use this because no one he knows uses Facebook. I don't even think he has an account. They're all on Snapchat and IG. I was talking to him about this last week. They all think of Facebook as for a different generation. As stale.
I feel similarly and know a lot of my circle does too. Except for events and sometimes messaging, nothing happens there.
Is this really true? I heard from someone at Facebook that while teenagers say they don't use Facebook, if you look at the stats, they definitely do.
Generally I'm very in agreement with the parent: The older won't want to use Facebook for dating, the younger would never look to Facebook.
That said, I'd go even farther and say the original claims are offbase here. First, teens absolutely have multiple personas they show, but they tend to be privacy circle based in that there are maybe 3/4 levels and they share increasingly more/less with each level.
Not only that, Facebook knows this. Instagram launched "close friends" explicitly because everyone was using "sinstas" and "finstas" to post to a smaller subset of people.
To me, all of this says that Facebook is probably targeting an older market of maybe say Match/OkCupid users who aren't used to a type of Hinge style interface. Anyone I know on Hinge would laugh you out of the room if you asked them to switch to Facebook dating.
Definitely not. DAU and MAU are what they base their user numbers and big milestones on
Also my 20 year old cousin didn't have a FB account until he went to college and was forced to get one to join some local FB groups. But he only uses it for that. Otherwise he's on IG and Snap.
Similarly, I referenced my circle of friends—who are not hacker news people—as not using Facebook either.
Being young and LGBTQIA+, I can assure you that I never discuss my dating life at work or with my relatives (none of whom know I'm gay, but thankfully, I don't live with them anymore).
Until there are strict federal anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQIA+ folks, I'll never trust an employer to know that side of my life.
I was on Bumble a little late at night... kinda mindlessly swiping... girl looked cute... little familiar... swipe... Instantly realize as it chimes with "boom" that it was my boss. Nope nope nope, delete the whole thing and never return. They all have a problem around showing you co-workers, and it'd be so easy to just be like, "Cool, never show me people who work here, or never show me people I know on Facebook / LinkedIn." Wouldn't catch everything, but it'd catch a lot of it. Ha, and... the bigger problem I guess is that I don't really trust any of these sites to link them to Facebook or LinkedIn. They all seem fundamentally scammy and spammy.
But... I've had some fun with Bumble. Just... yeah I don't even trust it with my Spotify playlists.
they don't mind now. One of the big problems with digital transparency is that this information will be hard to get rid off if they ever wish to in the future.
Is openness about past relationships in the workplace still a good idea if it leads to some sort of office intrigue a year or two down the line?
If you could figure out a way to make it somehow costly to falsely say you have a crush on someone, this might work, but until then, this is game-theoretically wince-inducing.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/10/20/d...
Some degree of separation/anonymity is still something people want even if they are more transparent about the outcomes.
That's Tinder territory, and tinder doesn't have a great reputation as an app that's "healthy".
Nobody thinks it's cool or fun anymore, of course. But it's still the go-to spot for sharing life events, family news, anything you want to brag about really. Or any vacation pictures that you'd like grandma and grandpa to see.
IG is still image driven, so it's not a platform you can easily use for relaying text based information to your social network.
Young is like current high school and college
People in their 30s grew up in an era where FB allowed only college students. And they were old enough not to really care once it became open to their parents.
Coworkers and classmates aren't the problem. For young people, facebook is where mom and grandma is. Not that you're gonna match with them, but just sharing the name is a turn off.
For one, I think people will be less willing to lie in a form where one company can see both profiles, but on the other side, it comes down to what Facebook lets you change. Hopefully they won't let your profile specify two different ages, for instance.
Just because I go out on a date with someone doesn't mean I want to be friends with them on Facebook.
That's true for casual dating. By the other hand on older demographics, I think they nailed it: I suspect among older people, casual dating is less relevant, so they are not afraid of adding eachother as friends. And they don't need to install anything else..
Easy example: ever seen an overweight person in a fast food commercial?
They'll usually use slightly older kids in a toy advertisement than the actual target demographic they're trying to sell to.
Part of that is that kids generally don't want to be seen as playing with toys for younger kids.
I see plenty of overweight people in ads for diabetes treatments. I see plenty of fit people in ads for workout machines. Right now I see an ad on the side of a bus encouraging people to get free STD testing, and it shows people dancing at a club.
There are aspirational ads, but the use of "rare" in your comment doesn't reflect reality.
That 70% is part of the 100% which they are actually targeting, but only coincidentally. There are plenty of fast food ads targeting health-conscious consumers.
You could also point out that 70% of Americans are also Christian, but that doesn't mean every company that sells to Americans specifically targets Christian customers...
...also, most large fast food companies also have a significant presence in multiple countries.
But there will be a very small segment of people they can capture that isn’t already captive to another bigger player like OKCupid or Match.
It's also important for a dating app to have critical mass. Almost everyone is on FB, only a fraction of those people are on IG.
I certainly wouldn't want my grandma to know I like long walks on the beach!
That's demonstrably untrue: there are articles at the top of Google results about this very subject including a guide on how to do it on The New York Times that references the breaches.
https://www.narcity.com/news/canadians-are-deleting-their-fa...
Anecdotally I deleted mine over privacy concerns but it was prior to the breaches. My wife didn't like the fact that friends of friends could see photos of her. She didn't know those people and didn't like it. I was more exasperated by Facebook tweaking privacy knobs through updates and was always to share more not less.
So I deleted my account since I couldn't promise that even if I choose privacy settings today that protected her privacy they'd be there tomorrow. Ironically she's still a Facebook customer and has no clue how to change privacy settings, but that's between her and Facebook.
Facebook's loss of interest amongst Gen Z notwithstanding, your profile is apparently different.
So glad I'm married and not having to date in this online zoo.
1. They want to differentiate their dating product. 2. There's a sector of the population interested in dating but that at the moment is underserved, too shy to try it, or just on the fence about putting the effort to try it out.
What this does is it essentially puts a dating app on everyone's phone, reducing the friction it takes to give online dating a shot.
It also "feels" different and more serious. Anecdotally Facebook seems to be, amongst my circles, a lot about life events or important stuff and less about the casual, funny, edgy, etc persona. By associating that image with their dating platform, they give it a strong identity for the get go as a place for serious relationships.
> Even announcing this through the instagram brand would have made more sense to me.
Would it? I feel like Instagram is better off being about friends and oneself, and it could be tarnished by involving dating. What dating "identity" would befall upon it? Would it lean on the side of Tinder— superficial, more about hookups than long-lasting relationships, etc? I associate instagram with influencers, young people (as in, teens), etc a lot so branding-wise it doesn't make that much sense to me personally, though of course, this is just my opinion.
its almost like facebook doesn't understand privacy at all...
https://www.michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerber...
I am not sure about this, I used to think like that but the older I grow the less I care. I even embrace the fact to show the same persona everywhere.
I haven't been actively using FB for the past few years though but maybe this is something that newer generations have already concluded in.
I do get what you mean, though. As I've gotten older, I've found that maintaining different personas is just exhausting and not really worth it. But I also don't have anything in my life that I'd be embarrassed about depending on audience, and I don't consider myself a member of any underrepresented groups or subcultures that the mainstream would consider "weird" or somehow undesirable. So it's easy for me, which isn't true for everyone else.
We have real numbers about Facebook and they no more jibe with your anecdotal experience than all of the geek rage about Uber, Amazon, or that people care about “openness” and the “right to repair”.
I see. So these people dont like FB the product not FB the company. That feels like a very restrained response. I protested by just moving to Signal (and never using insta) and boy does it suck if other people wont do the same.
If I was facebook, I would very explicitly announce this as a spin out project, under a different name and brand. While HN has a good knowledge of the ultimate parent owners of apps, I meet a lot of people who protest facebook by moving to Instagram/WhatsApp. Even announcing this through the instagram brand would have made more sense to me.