iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

and just like that! the facebook friend most likely to post in the manner described above has posted a link to sarahah
:( people

Zuckerberg is 4 days late, can't say "Trump" or mention Facebook's role in targeting/amplifying hate. He can't run if he's this compromised pic.twitter.com/vGHG08Y3yJ

— Nitasha Tiku (@nitashatiku) August 16, 2017

run? zuck for what?

1500m world champion

LL, are you not aware of the speculation on why Zuckerberg has been doing this weird cross-country tour to small town america? surely he's running for president

not sure I buy that argument, but I would guess it has crossed his mind

he'd be better off starting his own reality show

that's the route to president, I guess

mid-20s to early 30s, most of the abusive comments reported tho came from people in mid-20s

― Neanderthal, Monday, August 7, 2017 4:54 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ILX c2006

LL, are you not aware of the speculation on why Zuckerberg has been doing this weird cross-country tour to small town america? surely he's running for president
no this is the first i've heard of his weird cross country tour. now i know!

It's not a "weird" tour. When I was young every summer my family would drive all over the country, trying to hit as many states as possible. Then again I did grow up to become President.

you didn't do so as a public figure! dude has 95 million facebook 'followers'

if I post a little bloggy-style thing on facebook with my road trip through the american west it's not nearly as performative

the bad thing is I had to search for Zuck's fb profile to get that number and figured out I have one friend in common with him

and hilariously, it's not the one who used to work at fb

I keep feeling like social media is bad for my anxiety cos i measure my feelings against other people's when things happen and i always feel mine is wrong

Largely cos i am always detached and then i cry later at a kids movie

the less close social interaction (dating or committed relationship, living in a home or apartment with other people) I have, the more likely I am to tear up at a kids movie

I think it's normal, you have to have some base level of social interaction or third-party, even fictional, situations will surface that emotional capital you're not spending

Yeah that's true. Living alone has increased that - i still get out a lot but i only talk to invisible co-workers most of my day

It's not a "weird" tour.

http://i.imgur.com/ABZS4pL.png

c'mon Karl everyone finds that truck stop entertaining

and whom amongst us has not asked a friendly trucker for a truck ride and some time sitting in the cab of their truck, as we pose for pictures

zuck is the worst

i would probably have a lot more facebook followers if i interviewed several people in every town i visited

do you suppose he's a big tipper or

I feel like he thinks this tipping problem is something he can help solve with tech

help solve disrupt

Haha it would be amazing if he

Argh zing

It would be amazing if he was travelling all over the country, performatively not tipping people.

Oh I thought zuck had disrupted yr post lol

I'm fighting back

if I post a little bloggy-style thing on facebook with my road trip through the american west it's not nearly as performative
yeah no shit
a person who writes this many words about their personal vacation has some kind of ulterior motive for sharing the information, even if the motive is "i want people to appreciate my writing skills and jokes"

totally going to take a selfie at the I-80 truck stop in a couple weeks though

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DKMqVnxWkAUweFu.jpg:small

fails were made

the nazis are so not made of win smh lol

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-used-an-i-will-rape-you-image-to-invite-users-1818638390

UGH the new messenger thing where it doesn't let you not want to turn on notifications

One of the oddest things about facebook to me, and something I don't hear discussed a lot, is the voyeurism of it. It's so easy to just randomly wander through someone's profile, even a complete stranger. I find myself thoughtlessly doing this sometimes when reading comments on a public article -- a certain comment seems smart, or stupid, or whatever, and you click to see the face of the person who made it, and depending on their settings you find yourself just browsing random stuff -- their truck, their dog, their kids, whatever, trying to guess what state it is, cool tattoo, oh, they waterski, etc., they're liberal, they're left, they're right-wing, etc. Sometimes I come up with little stories in my head about what's going on in the people's lives, what their personalities are like, I see a picture of them with friends at a bar and I start to imagine the scene playing out at the bar, etc. I guess this sounds a little bit creepy but it's just this mindless thing I do, never actually returning again to the same person's profile or even giving them another thought in most cases.

most cases

TBC I don't ever actually go back to the person's profile, but once or twice I have just had these fictionalized facebook characters pop into my head.

sure sure

Those are all fake profiles u know that right

it matters not

one of my favorite twitter accounts' whole shtick is basically this

michael hudson's?

that easy voyeurism is not at all unique to fb although it certainly enabled it more than any other site

ya xp

https://i.imgur.com/Yduyk3k.jpg

when irl is more satirical than any parody

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/09/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-puerto-rico-virtual-reality

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia?CMP=share_btn_fb

publishers were paying george takei one cent per page view to post their stories on facebook (earning him $10k for a really popular one)

https://theoutline.com/post/2491/when-publishers-get-paid-for-promoting-narratives-george-takei-influencers

just signed up to this thing after an ~8 year absence, for one specific purpose only. took 90 seconds to make the account and almost an hour to lock it down. the surprising thing isn't how glib it is about users' privacy but how pig-headedly it takes its users for granted, e.g. the iphone app doesn't ask you if you'd like to share your contacts, it just throws up a shitty "facebook needs to muckrake your entire address book and piss it all over the internet (ok) (maybe later)" which i presume it will throw up every single time i go near this bloody app.

Recently, I've been going through mild depression and my anxiety has worsened and it became clear that a lot of it was due to being surrounded by overwhelming negativity via a variety of channels; work, politics, my aging parents who are still struggling, etc.

at one point, social media was great for me because I am an extremely shy person, and sometimes it offered me the opportunity to kick off conversation with someone which then made it easier for me to approach them in person (weirdly I've had multiple relationships start this way). It also got me back in touch with old friends that I wanted to reconnect with, allowed me to keep tabs on how my brother was doing, etc. and of course I learned of so many more events through it.

But while it was always there in some capacity, I feel like FB has just become so toxic that it actually causes me anguish to read it, so I'm starting to cut back on it. Problem is it's so ingrained that most theatre productions or fundraisers use FB to communicate things like rehearsal dates/etc and I'm in two now, and I don't want to be the one guy who insists on getting a separate email from everybody else (plus to be fair, I'm more likely to notice it this way). so I can't quit it hardcore.

One thing I miss about pre-social media and cell phone days (i know I know, this sounds very "get off my lawn") was the end of interaction and beginning of "me time" in a given day was easy to demarcate. You left work for the day, you went home, and unless somebody called you, you could go home, spend time with your family, relax.

Nowadays conversations are open-ended because there's always a last text or last FB message to respond to, and there's often pressure to respond, lest you be construed as "ignoring" someone. I've actually had to have boundary setting conversations with a few people over the years to make them understand that a) I'm not always going to be able to read their message immediately, b) even if I can, I might not be able to respond right away, and c) I value my privacy and I don't like keeping open-ended convos going with multiple people for hours at a time, so sometimes I just...let the convo die, if it's not about anything crucial. One of these people was so exhausting that I just stopped hanging out with her, as I couldn't take the constant stream of "I thought you were mad at me because you didn't return my text/respond to my message".

The real toxicity now though I think is that vicious, clusterfucky threads happen more often due to the way FB redesigned the Status feature over the year to be more of a message board style-function. I am pretty picky about who I keep on my friend's list, but there are other people who just click add at will, so what winds up happening is they post about something political or important to them, some asshole troll that they met once two years ago replies with really offensive shit, and then five or more friends respond in defense. Or maybe two of the poster's friends who don't know each other just happen to be passionate about an issue that they're on opposite sides of, and somehow it gets personal even though they don't know each other. There've been a few times where I posted something, left for the day, only to find out two of my friends had spent hours raging at each other over something innocuous. I usually wind up shitcanning toxic posters from my friend list. And then the misunderstandings. I posted an article one day about yet another politician making homophobic remarks, and I made a sarcastic comment trying to illustrate the stupidity of that kind of thinking. My cousin, who is gay, did not realize I was lampooning the politician, was upset because he thought he had just discovered his cousin was homophobic (it wasn't his fault, we hadn't seen each other in years, and I explained to him in private and apologized for the misunderstanding).

I think lately the toxicity that's affected me the most has been seeing in other friend's threads just how many shitty people there are in the world right now. Like my friend Kryst@l, who was proclaiming her distress at seeing a KKK member in a hood outside a 7/11, only for her *aunt* of all people to come plowing in to "whataboutism" black people who were also racist. Used offensive language throughout, wound up blocking Kryst@l (her niece).

lately I read it a lot less, and I have a fairly social life so that's often easy, but esp in the last few weeks with the gun debates, it's turned into a particularly gross place (not as bad as Twitter, naturally, but I don't know that's a bar to aspire to).

there's also a lot of data-mining bullshit that gets unwittingly shared

i prob said something similar upthread or elsewhere on ilx but encouraging racist grandparents to get on social media absolutely ruined the internet.

of course i'm certainly not helping matters. due to the often times 'hurry up & wait' nature of my job while being tethered to my desk, i've basically become a part time social media troll. i actually relish watching my "friend" count drop every few days when i feel like vaguebooking various garbage racist acquaintances from rural Mississippi. like, i honestly hope that i've ruined their day. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have quite a lot of American friends on Facebook, all of whom are decent enough people, but most of whom seem to have libertarians / trumpers / racist uncles on their friends lists and seem to feel like they need to respectfully discuss stuff with them, not just tell them to fuck off. Like last month one guy posting a very moderate meme about white privilege was then politely discussing it with some random alt-right fuck he'd met while he was travelling, it was exasperating just watching him waste his time trying to come to some sort of understanding about the issue, the guy obviously was just playing by the usual alt-right troll sealion playbook.

yeah those convos are not worth anyone's energy, just a simple "eat my ass raw" should be enough to get that to stop

i'll say this, getting a flip phone to replace my smart phone has drastically cut down on my social media consumption, who knew