iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

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

I blocked someone who was upsetting my FB friends with his casual misogyny. I let him stay long enough for my feminist friends to tee off on him.

I have precisely one Trumper on my feed, and I haven't banned him for the same reason (one friend told me she enjoyed daily smacking him down). Humorously enough our own NYCNative went at him once too lol.

yeah back in the early days of fb i would actually endeavor to have civil discussions with people. but after oh, idk, maybe 2012 or so it became increasingly clear that the kinds of tea party/ "libertarian"/ alt-right/ gun nut/ literal racist that social media platforms were emboldening were never going to debate in good faith, so i just started clowning them mercilessly.

I'm also sick of the Harry Potter memes. I have FB PUrity so Potter and every permutation is blocked but that doesn't extend to GIF Memes if the post itself doesn't have the word Potter in it.

I mean I read the books and enjoyed the movies and I know we have the Potter park at Universal here but it's like find another damn franchise guys.

my mom cried at Thanksgiving cos she saw me post "fuck God" on someone else's thread

I have given myself the gift of just saying “no, this is wrong” to people and refusing to engage on topics further

realized the other day some people, myself at times included, just want an excuse to argue and be “right” about something. and if you do that enough, it twists your outlook and you become the worst version of the ideals you espouse

the alternative is the clowning, as will mentioned, which is beautiful in its own way and defuses the same impulse

seem to feel like they need to respectfully discuss stuff with them, not just tell them to fuck off

in the wake of the 2016 election there was a lot of talk about how well-meaning white liberals should confront their more blatantly racist family and friends. telling people to fuck off doesn't really win them over or help them to learn anything, no matter how obviously wrong they are. but many of those well-meaning people decided to stage this confrontation on facebook, for convenience (facebook is where a lot of people spend the majority of their time communicating with other people, rather than face-to-face/telephone/email/other) and for support (when the racist uncle completely makes up something he saw in an imgur meme, friends will provide backup and upvote the counterattack, etc). which i guess makes sense in its own way, but is fucking awful to have to bear witness to on a daily basis.

xpost
will you should quit facebook! not that i have much authority on the matter, i only quit a couple weeks ago. but once it has reached that stage where the social media platform has dragged you down to its level and you're adapting and trying to fight evil-with-evil or whatever, it's probably best to just leave it behind

also I have zero friends who post Harry Potter memes and I thank the universe for it every day xxp

but it's... fun :-/

and at this point i'm not even really trying to 'fight'; more just kind of entertaining myself.

seems like we’ve sorted this then

Thanks tombot I'll take it from here

The American need to evangelise is a cancer

Yes, all of you, even those of you that are always right

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

― constitutional crises they fly at u face (will)

i don't believe this and i've never believed this. i was on the internet in its "halcyon days" (never existed, the running jokes at the time was "imminent death of the net predicted, film at 11"). the conversation was "better" than, more intellectual, often more interesting, but the flipside was that it was a bunch of mostly-male nerd elitists. and one of the ways they avoided straightforward elitism was in believing not that they _themselves_ were superior, but believing that the system they were _designing_ was superior. it wasn't. it was socially inferior, just like they were socially inferior, and it didn't scale. we're in an age where the people in charge of twitter are _defending_ themselves by publically announcing their own incompetence, because it really is to a point where we have to decide whether they're evil or incompetent, and close to the point where we have to ask whether it matters what sorts of overlords we have, if the results are the same and if there's no meaningful hope for improvement.

people are scum and always have been scum. the founding problem of the internet was the delusional belief that human beings have ever been otherwise, and particularly the toxic belief that human beings are somehow innately _rational_.

regarding your job, i find that reading a book is a better use of your "hurry up and wait" time than by increasing the aggregate misery on an addictively miserable internet platform. the one thing that keeps me as (marginally) sane and balanced as I am is my rigid avoidance of social media on my phone and at work.

I decided to take a break from FB the the night of the election and when I came back a few months later I started using an app that blocks me from viewing my timeline, essentially restricting my use to birthday notices, events, interacting with people reaching out to me on my wall or with tagged posts, messages with friends, private groups I'm in with close friends, and probably best of all having to actively go to a friend's wall to check in on them. I still check FB almost daily but it takes up very little of my time and is a lot more useful/fulfilling as a a social media platform. The timeline is a fucking abyss. I still get little nagging feelings of fomo once in a while but they're pretty easy to shrug off and every few months or so I'll check my timeline when I'm on another computer and it's shocking how toxic it is.

but it's... fun :-/

― constitutional crises they fly at u face (will)

so is day drinking

i use facebook because i have serious good friends, friends of 20 years and more, that i care about who post interesting shit to it and i've tried but i can't abandon them. i'm waiting for something better to show up. i believe eventually something will.

i guess i like that a otherwise hermetically sealed 40 year old fox watching, breitbart-reading dad living in a white flight suburb of Jackson, Mississippi is sort of forced to deal with the very "normal", moderately successful, otherwise pleasant, similarly white hetero church-raised dude he sat next to in homeroom mercilessly shitting on his idiotic memes and dumbfuck links every day until he defriends me.

it's not healthy or helpful to anyone. but man i really dngaf.

xpost oh i day drink, too. which can make the social media engagements that much more lively

i don't believe this and i've never believed this. i was on the internet in its "halcyon days" (never existed, the running jokes at the time was "imminent death of the net predicted, film at 11"). the conversation was "better" than, more intellectual, often more interesting, but the flipside was that it was a bunch of mostly-male nerd elitists...

^fair point. i guess i should have clarified that racist grandparents swarming social media m/l ruined the experience for me personally.

fetch boy what is that app that blocks your timeline?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/will-2018-be-the-year-of-the-neo-luddite

M@tt https://www.facebook.com/fluffbustingpurity/

worth using just for making sure it stays on most recent for the news feed

I am almost always a late adopter of new technology and oftentimes a non-adopter, based on the idea that worthwhile new technology must be judged according to cost vs. benefit, and the complete costs of a new technology are rarely apparent until they have been widely tested in real life. This probably qualifies me as a neo-luddite.