iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

great posts from drash and agree totally - this crafting/curating of an "identity," like everybody needs to devote their life to being their own brand manager, is really distressing and relates directly to certain mechanics of the post-FB internet that were not consolidated before. maybe relates to my rant about the suppression of the "profile page," as non-quantifiable ways of defining this self are not really of interest. things that aren't likeable, clickable, sharable, or up-worthy are all basically extraneous, since the ideal model is actually everybody clicking clicking and clicking without actually reading or thinking about anything since that's time they could be spending clicking. and facebook encourages you to see yourself as part of this system - you're not just passing through and playing a clicking-game, your basic goal in life is to get others to click on stuff.

it's a wacky subjectivity. it's very destructive to other kinds of discourse, i think. the jokes about ILX with a "like" button point up just how destructive those forces are once they get to the level of interface and design and begin to alter what's likely - not necessarily even what kinds of conversation are possible, but what's likely. the example i always turn to is flickr, which in may 2013 changed its entire deal to try and look more tablet-y (i guess) and to emphasize the ease of seeing a big picture and clicking "favorite" on it. i've gone on about this many times but in the process, the descriptive text under the photo, and the comments on it by other people, have been very much suppressed. (at the same moment they really obscured some of the nested-set organization of users' photos, wiping out hierarchical relationships among posts and making it considerably less likely that someone would follow one person's train of thought or meandering reflection across months or years. but honestly this may have just been incompetence as i can't see where it helps them.)

a few years ago i was having really great conversations on flickr with a relatively small group of people who wanted to talk about architecture in a non-bullshitty, non-"comments thread on archdaily" kind of way. that's really, really faded and i can only compare it to ILX getting the "like" button in terms of the loss of a certain space for reasoned conversation that was, without anybody necessarily realizing it, premised on the activity's indigestibility from the point of view of clicks and commerce.

i've been reading a lot on WW2/Cold War computing (esp. paul edwards's the closed world and to a lesser extent david alan grier's when computers were human) and a theme that keeps coming up is people with machines trying to find tasks that the machines they have are good at, and patrons/institutions that are eager to be convinced they have just those kinds of tasks. feel like the increasing divergence of the silicon valley class from regular human desires (as per this kinda deal) could reflect something similar, though that analysis really needs more "follow the money." but i could believe that there is some subclass of people who always dreamed of their every action being a trackable monetizable micro-performance. the mark zuckerberg BS about a unitary self strikes me like this, dude is deep into some horrible culture he absorbed in college where this really sounds like a wonderful thing rather than the loss of everything that makes life more living.

one of the architecture criticism programs up here did a conference a couple years ago where one premise was that it was not recorded and you couldn't take pictures. while recording is useful for people who can't make it, and has obviously been going on for ages, i wonder if it felt like a huge relief to just be in a room talking to other humans and not imagining how you look on camera etc. i would not be surprised if we start seeing more and more retreats, workshops, getaways, love-ins or other activities where one of the requirements is "for this week/two weeks/etc, you cannot post anything to the internet, because as you are thinking about whether anyone has clicked on your post, you are not here in this moment."

btw if that is tl;dr, ILX does have one useful button relating to how you feel about a post, it's just one over from 'bookmark'

^^^ Matt DC likes this post

^^^ flag post

I'm not joking about wanting likes, I actually do!

^^^ flag post

if I can't see the FP count go up, it didn't happen

things that aren't likeable, clickable, sharable, or up-worthy are all basically extraneous, since the ideal model is actually everybody clicking clicking and clicking without actually reading or thinking about anything since that's time they could be spending clicking. and facebook encourages you to see yourself as part of this system - you're not just passing through and playing a clicking-game, your basic goal in life is to get others to click on stuff.

this seems otm, and an inevitable result of letting a corporation provide our primary means of communication. it's difficult to see any way out of it short of someone creating a non-profit alternative with a similar ubiquity (yeah right) or, more likely, everyone gradually migrating over to the next ascendant corporate model that hasn't quite revealed it's big profit-making feature that ruins everything

I guess I don't see how clicking is *that* important and problematic a part of fb use. when I click like it's just me nodding my head to a friend's photo, say. I post things to let my fb friends know what's going on, get the occasional cheap laugh, throw some wild speculation into the cosmos.

fb does encourage day to day keeping-up which distracts from long-term internet building, though: I like threads here b/c they can be continued years after they've begun, whereas on fb posts and convos are gone half a day later, if they even show up at all.

i quit fb maybe 4 yrs ago in response to some bad falling outs / depressive period that lead to deep introspection after friend's suicide wherein i sort of took a look at online narcissism (mine and other's) and felt compelled to no longer "even passively take part". subsequent revaluations abt data ownership and privacy concerns have ex post facto redeemed my decision. i don't think fb is ruining the internet but i do believe it brings out a lot of bad in people and i didn't want to keep having these thoughts abt my friends and family on the daily.

subsequently im pretty much an internet hermit wrt social media generally (save a LinkedIn that is at least a yr out of date by last accounting) so my op may not hold much water here

The Top Stories is the thing that drives me crazy with FB. All I want is every post, in reverse chronological order.

I've been curating my brand since I was in high school I'm fine with it

that awl article that max mentioned is pretty great: http://www.theawl.com/2015/02/the-next-internet-is-tv

i like that article a lot and john hermans writing in general tho i dont think i really agree with it

the internet is not tv the barriers to entry ate still lower than any mass medium ever and things will continue to evolve in weird unpredictable ways imho

which is not to say its separate from the strange consumerist corporate global culture we live in

btw as far as on a more nitty gritty interaction level i agree w ppl who are saying likes are a bummer, or at least the counting of like is, same with follower count on twitter, all these stats that encourage gamification of social interactions are very neurotic and unchill and drive so much of what happens on these sites

also tho does everyone need to see that you agree w/ the one millionth post this week on fb attacking anti-vaxxers?

This thread is already very long so apologies if this is OT.
In some ways I like being 'friends' on FB with Ilxors. Some of you post incredibly worthwhile things and it brightens up my news feed no end. Somehow I feel as though I'm interacting with human beings on FB as opposed to an ever-changing hivemind of anonymous display names on ILX. ILX has always been an oracular interface to me. You chuck a stone down the well and often you get a chorus of unfamiliar voices screaming back at you. I'm more 'myself' on FB than I am on ILX. I think I'm smarter as CF than as dog latin, or at least I interact differently. All said it can be a bit of a mindfuck when say, DP and Ned end up in a discussion about sexism with an old acquaintance I knew from school, as did happen a couple of months back.

i think the real problem is that the dude that wrote that article i couldnt finish is on the internet at all

dont click on stuff if u think clicking on stuff is ruining the world

the big reason i don't post anything on Facebook (except for self-promotional music stuff) is because of the weird mix of groups/audiences. i don't feel comfortable talking to my real life friends, the co-workers that have added me, a few relatives, my young people music friends, my old people music friends, internet friends, and rando acquaintances all at once. about anything.

the relatively anonymous, self-selecting community of ILX (or even Twitter) is much more comfortable.

It's true though, that the internet is exactly what you make of it. I get puzzled when I hear people say 'Facebook is boring now'. I can understand them having a problem with the internet and spending too much time on it, but surely how interesting Facebook is is largely down to who you're friends with. All said, I've never had much time for Twitter as I find the short character count extremely limiting and the whole format overwhelming. So maybe I do understand the Facebook-is-boring crew a little more than I care to say.

yeah the forms of the networks are crucial for sure

The Top Stories is the thing that drives me crazy with FB. All I want is every post, in reverse chronological order.

― Jeff, Tuesday, February 24, 2015 7:07 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they had to reorganize their data centers so as to not store copies of everything for each user. but then I agree that they get a bit too creative with the way they present all of this data to the user. just find all your friends' posts and sort that shit chronologically? no, we need an algorithm!

i suspect for most ppl the curated timeline is better, also they never noticed or thought about it

the big reason i don't post anything on Facebook (except for self-promotional music stuff) is because of the weird mix of groups/audiences. i don't feel comfortable talking to my real life friends, the co-workers that have added me, a few relatives, my young people music friends, my old people music friends, internet friends, and rando acquaintances all at once. about anything.

the relatively anonymous, self-selecting community of ILX (or even Twitter) is much more comfortable.

― lil urbane (Jordan), Tuesday, February 24, 2015 11:07 AM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feeling this a lot. whenever i'm about to post something on facebook, i pretty much always think "my mother-in-law will see this"

i love posting audince inaproreate things on facebook gives me a thrill

for awhile after I moved to a new city, I wondered how this one dude grew up to be such a clueless asshole. but he was also from another city, and I learned from reading comments on his fb posts that he actually grew up with a whole community of assholes. so that was good to know.

i think a lot about establishing a separate fbook for my 'adult' self. fbook throngs with family, students, colleagues, etc etc etc. i was much freer on myspace. like in terms of talking abt relationships and sex, or politics. granted that the mechanisms *for* speaking were much more limited. but being on facebook is this horrible collision between intimacy with everyone, and feeling like you're in job-performance mode, meeting a potential client or describing what youve been up to to your not very close aunt. i think it may have actually affected me as a person, maybe even closed me off a bit from precisely those friends with whom i *would* be more comfortable sharing, because we're all on facebook. the connectedness becomes a glass wall at some point.

a separate fb account for the dumb stuff works but you have to care enough to bother with both, and is it worth it? signs point to no

u dont have to have a seperate account u can makes lists or whatever they call them idk ive never done it

i do not envy people who didn't grow up with a strong divide between their public and private selves
it's one of the things i cherish most in life
the expectation that i would need to remove this barrier more than i do is so not gonna happen

to answer the question: no, but my sister ruined facebook

otm. x-post

online is a good way to understand yr offline self

different posts and alter egos for your "friends" and "buds" lists

btw whenever i feel the need for the old, weird internet i go to uppers(nsfw) and it helps satisfy the need a little bit.

Am I the only one who feels like he'd like his fbook feed less, not more curated? That I'd much rather literally everything showed up on it? I mean I guess I'd like to be able to block extremely annoying people but I don't really know anyone that bad. Facebook keeps trying to get me to narrow my feed to who I want to click on but I'd rather it was a mix of everything. Maybe it's just FOMO or maybe its that I don't trust my click instincts to necessarily have my best interests at heart

not because it feels old but because it is weird and fun and full of surprises

Basically I'd rather feel in touch with a genuine cross section of people rather than letting my arbitrary click habits determine who Facebook thinks I care about

i do not envy people who didn't grow up with a strong divide between their public and private selves
it's one of the things i cherish most in life
the expectation that i would need to remove this barrier more than i do is so not gonna happen

― groundless round (La Lechera), Tuesday, February 24, 2015 11:30 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Absolutely OTM. I also understand and appreciate, in the abstract, dog latin's point in favor of getting to see ILXors more as real people via FB interaction inasmuch as it's always been hard for me to get a sense of who most people are here. As people and not as goofy, abstract usernames. I don't feel like I've ever found a comfortable middle ground wrt online interactions.

Ned Raggett runs my FB timeline :(

"i do not envy people who didn't grow up with a strong divide between their public and private selves"

feel the opposite! (most of the time)

Ned Raggett runs my FB timeline :(

― 龜, Tuesday, February 24, 2015 11:46 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Love ned of course but sometimes when he shares something I think, no way you care about that man

Am I the only one who feels like he'd like his fbook feed less, not more curated? That I'd much rather literally everything showed up on it?

― deej loaf (D-40), Tuesday, February 24, 2015 12:43 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thats the consensus amongst internet power users, everyone else has no idea their feed is being curated but prob likes it better

i hid ned a long time ago (sorry ned)

yeah you have to think fb has run the numbers on this, being that there are billions of dollars on the line

By "likes it better" do you mean "spends more time on it"

ya