@lizgannes notes:

They say that only 1 percent of people on the Internet create all the content, while the other 99 percent passively show up to view it.

But these days, lurking is becoming much more of an active behavior than it was before, because even just looking at content is something that gets reported back to other people.

As of this week, if you look at a post within a Facebook group, the social networking site will tell the rest of the group that you saw it and when.

That means an end to the question “Hey, did you guys see that thing I posted?,” because the evidence is right there.

But it also points to a world where one of the most core online activities — lurking — gets increasingly stamped out.

I say Facebook is wrong to do this.

Automatically exposing what people have read goes against what The Web stands for.

At PandaWhale we are committed to our Lurkers -- and yes, they make up 99% of our community.

We will *never* expose what people read on PandaWhale.

So please, keep lurking.

Use PandaWhale to get away from Facebook whenever you want.

read receipt failed as a commonly used feature for a reason...

Facebook doesn't believe in learning from history.

They like to learn the hard way.

First step on the slippery slope....page counters. ;-)

"Automatically exposing what people have read goes against what The Web stands for."

That's an interesting point, because we were toying with adding page counters to PandaWhale pages.

I remember that a lot of early web pages had those, but of course they were anonymized.

I think what Facebook has done is taken the anonymity away from the Web.

See The Facebook Fallacy.

And What Facebook can give back to The Web.

"Kill all lurkers... Kill all lurkers..."

If Bender kills all the humans, won't he be lonely?

"Automatically exposing what people have read goes against what The Web stands for.

At PandaWhale we are committed to our Lurkers -- and yes, they make up 99% of our community."

Amen.

-Proud Lurker

Thanks for de-lurking to let us know, MC.

Right now there are tens of thousands of others like you. ;)