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Ask HN: Who is already sick of all of these "Like" buttons plastered everywhere?
73 points by theli0nheart on April 24, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 50 comments
I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly, because it's already starting to get ridiculous even just a couple days after being introduced.



I completely ignore all that social networking stuff; my brain sees them as ads and blocks them subconsciously.


I'm the same way. I often read articles that I would like to share with people, but since I'm more interested in the ensuing discussion, I'd rather directly link a person during a conversation (or as a way to start one) rather than throw it at my Facebook page or similar.

I consider sites like HN quite different, as that is their sole purpose :)


Yea that stuff is totally blocked out of my mind. I use Facebook to connect with my friends and family, and will share a link occasionally if it really pertains to me. For the most part, though, I don't like spamming mass amounts of data to friends. The only benefit I see to things like delicious and other "social bookmarking" tools is the fact that they're "up in the cloud", aka, backed up somewhere away from my browser config folder.

Has anyone noticed the new Mahalo-esque stuff they're doing? All of your hobbies, movies, music, etc... that they're making part of this social graph is now linked together a lot better.

Example, one of my interests (for fun) is "underwater basket weaving" which now links to a page like this, http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Underwater-basket-weaving/1...

"Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for Underwater basket weaving, sign up and we'll let you know when we're ready for your help."

Pretty crazy.


Do people really use the whole "social bookmarking" part of Delicious? I mean, I've tagged a few things for:whomever, but 99% of my usage has been bookmarking stuff for myself, or looking for stuff I've bookmarked.


I use it pretty heavily. It's one of the main ways I share links with friends.


Not to worry, there'll soon be plenty of Greasemonkey scripts that take care of this well enough for you that your brain can tend to other tasks.


or you can just adblock the iframe url with a filter:

  |http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?*


some sites seem to use widgets/like.php so you should block that too.


Same here...there are so mamy of them they are shrinking down all the time. Makes me feel a bit sorry for bloggers, watching their retweet and like and digg scores all the time.


Can we re-phrase the question in less of a reddit-style way?What's the discussion we want to have behind this?


I can't agree more. Look at the first comment: 20 karma points, and no real substance, hackerish or otherwise.

I'd like to see a discussion about (a) what it actually means to "like" something, (b) what demographics currently use the "like" buttons (c) are there any startup ideas to revolutionize the distribution of information etc.


Clicking "like" is like saying I have nothing to actually contribute but I want to feel like I'm participating. Also, I guess it stops the thousands of comments that would just say "I agree," "Yeah" or whatever?

But what good is a "like" button if there is no "dislike/hate" button?


> But what good is a "like" button if there is no "dislike/hate" button?

That's how HN is if you're under the karma threshold.


Poor digg, that was supposed to be their trick


People may end up preferring liking to digging (though who knows at this point), but when it comes to actively looking for interesting content, digg's still got something to hang onto. It begs the question, however, whether facebook will ever make an attempt to organize all of the outside links users promote so that such content becomes discoverable by topic and not just incidental lines on the newsfeed?


On some pages, the number of affiliate aggregator upvote links takes up some significant portion of the page (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.). It would make sense for somebody to aggregate the aggregators, a meta-aggregator if you will, and just have one button on the page that sends it to all of them.


Can't say I've noticed one yet. :(


Surely you mean ":)"?


I added the following rule to Adblock plus:

   * facebook.com/plugins*
The iframes disappear seamlessly.


Is "Who else" a legitimate question that you can "ask HN" nowadays? I've been gone for a while.


Simple solution: Complainbook.com. The web is viewed through a frame that that adds Dislike buttons to every piece of content. It aggregates what people are disliking and recommends things to the user that they will be sure to hate. It will instantly gain a high market share amongst content degregators, and Facebook will see everyone disliking their Like buttons with the Dislike button and be less evil.

It would also include location based features where users upload geotags of places they've never been, nor would want to go to.


Not only are they bad, they slow down the rendering speed of the pages they're on.

http://twitter.com/SlexAxton/status/12663859611


Well it depends how you look at it. It definitely adds to network traffic and CPU load. But IFRAME content and javascript-injected IFRAME are both loaded asynchronously.

Browsers are pretty good in progressive rendering of page content these days. So user should see the main page first and then it starts loading these additional resources. So no big deal IMHO. The button should not degrade user experience during page loading.


We use it via FBML and JavaScript SDK and the slow down seems to be minimal. We load their script right before </body>.

Biggest annoyance is that it doesn't degrade very gracefully when FB has availability problems, you get a white square in the page in Firefox.


I think they can solve it when using Javascript SDK on modern browsers. IFRAME could be loaded offscreen and when it finishes then it does postMessage to notify the parent window. Javascript SDK injector then unhides the IFRAME.

Easy to do, but they are probably busy doing other stuff.


You can block them in Firefox by using the RequestPolicy plugin. At least, I assume that you can, because I am not actually seeing any ;o)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9727

At first it seems like overkill, because it blocks sites from accessing data from other sites, but you can enable certain sites (either globally or on a per-site basis) and it remembers those, so after a little playing around, sites you visit frequently look quite normal.

It's also very interesting seeing how people assemble sites these days...


"I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly"

http://www.openlike.org/


I thought things were getting ridiculous with all the buzz, digg, sphere, reddit buttons already. From what I can see, those are being replaced with a single option (though I admit, I haven't seen many of the facebook implementations yet).

It is nice to have a 'standard' rather than voting for multiple items. At the same time, how much is liking something really doing for ya?

I don't think it has the benefit of a community like HN, so Facebook doesn't have it all yet.


Do you think reddit (or twitter or digg or stumbleupon) users will start liking the "like" and prefer it to replace other buttons? Completely agreeing about the ridiculous aspect of so many buttons though.


I don't know that it has to be an if/else situation. I do suspect sites will start putting only the 'like' button, as it is cleaner, likely loads the page faster, and has such a larger audience.

At the same time, I suspect people will still visit digg, reddit, etal to find new articles, and up vote them there.

However, I wouldn't be surprised to see sites like Digg get significantly less posts added.

I hope we don't see the same suspected decline here on HN, as my friends on FB aren't HN types.


I haven't noticed this yet. Would someone kindly point me towards an example?


http://techcrunch.com/

Every story has a Like, a Buzz and a Retweet button.


The first story I checked had 422 retweets and only 10 likes. Maybe FB is not taking over the internet yet.


I see. Thanks for showing me. It seems largely unobtrusive, but also pretty useless for me.


IMDb updated with the button the same day FB announced it


Cannot find any FB integration on IMDb. Care to explain?


I'm just seeing a lot of broken iframes because I've now blocked facebook & their subdomains on my personal machine.


Why do we need all these buttons to do things we already all have our own specific ways of doing?

If you want to bookmark something, bookmark it in the way you know how (in browser, Delicious, etc). If you want to tweet about something, go tweet about it in the client of your choice.


It's the new "tweet this" -- a stupid trend people will wonder about in a few years.


I don't care for the unnormalized "number of diggs/tweets/karma" etc.

I'd actually use the "like" buttons if they learned what I liked/disliked, rather than just being there to show off an unnormalized and somewhat meaningless figure.


Or any kind of sharing widgets, for that matter. If only web admins would trust visitors to have their own bookmarklets or extensions, so that pages wouldn't have all the cruft.


"food and shows"- that's what the masses want, unfortunately


I think "bread and circuses" is more standard :)


I actually like them.

But someone could make a quick userscript to hide them :-)

Edit:

  // ==UserScript==
  // @name           I-Dont-Like-The-New-Facebook-Like
  // @namespace      I-Dont-Like-The-New-Facebook-Like
  // @description    Hide all Facebook 'Like' buttons
  // @include        *
  // ==/UserScript==
  
  (function () {
  	var i = document.getElementsByTagName('iframe');
  	if(i) {
  		for(e in i) {
  			if(i[e].src.match(/http\:\/\/www.facebook.com\/widgets\/like.php/gi)) {
  				i[e].style.display = 'none';
  				i[e].style.visibility = 'hidden';
  			}
  		}
  	}
  })();


I have iframes globally disabled with only few websites allowed to use them. Try it.


<--- What, you mean like that?


I wish there was a "Like" button on this post.


I wish this topic had a Like button!


Try this one; http://youlik.es/l/4f (this site lets you create a like button things on the web)


What do you mean by "less evil"? The whole point of the "Like" button is that it's universal. Something being mildly annoying is not "evil" by any stretch of the imagination.




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