iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

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.

this is a good thread, thank u ilx

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

― Algerian Goalkeeper (Odysseus)

so i didn't count, how many paragraphs did it take them to get from a discussion of the popularity of ad-blocking software to a picture of ted kaczynski? two paragraphs? three?

maybe 2018 will be the year somebody at the guardian finally figures out how to differentiate the two

I'm on FB and regret most time spent there but what I did when I started using it a few years back was unfollow anyone who posted political stuff and all news media (except for one local tv station that mostly has fun stories, often with cute animals)

works pretty well

uninstalled the app on my phone and a few weeks ago I removed the browser shortcuts on my phone too, not in attempt to stop browser FB usage (though this was also an effect) but to stop myself from doing a google search for every inane question that pops into my head, so far it works

inspired by the article with the FB designer who said the notification button was initially FB blue but users found it too easy to ignore, I switched my Android theme to one with light blue notification badges (for apps like Snapchat etc.)

I've also begun having my phone on silent all the time, no vibrations, it's quite nice

for a good period (I think around 2008-2015) I had no computer, no social media, no smartphone, but eventually I found it difficult to create music and videos on analogue and borrowed equipment, also I'm not sure how I could ever promote my stuff without these networks

that longer post was really good rushomancy

maybe because it gets at a lot of the things I’ve been trying to articulate. please join my new social network, “otm”

as an outsider (i never really did much with that account i created in january) it baffles me that people persist with people they don't like on facebook. i have a few enormously bigoted relatives and would not hesitate to unfriend them (or mute them at the very least) and tell them why to their faces.

thanks mh. maybe one day i'll wean myself from underscore overuse but it's been 25 years and hasn't happened yet :)

multiple xps

The app I use is a chrome app called News Feed Eradicator for Facebook. It works in incognito mode, too.

thanks!

my internet use is almost entirely OCD-related at this point. it has nothing to do with any interest i have in anything. facebook/look up records/ilx. facebook/look up records/ilx. every working day. the record part the only essential part.

i pretty much stopped bringing my laptop home from work at night and i don't have a phone or a desktop and that is the way to go for me. so, i'm online from 9 to 5 during the week. which is more than enough. much more.

though i have it at home now cuz looking up records...

I defriended all of my actual friends a few weeks ago. I put a public post on my page just saying "look, I'm changing the way I'm using social media. if you want to actually chat with me, I'm still available on messenger." So now I'm just left with all the family members and uncles who joined up in 2011 or whatever (most of whom AREN'T conservative thank god and those who are thankfully have stopped posting about politics). Plus a bunch of local businesses that I actually like and local news pages so I can keep up with where the fire engines are heading off to this time or whatever.

i think my brother and his daughter are the only extended family on my facebook. and they keep their cool.

my fb is pretty much just news, hardly any of my friends ever post anything, so it's just like what google reader used to be, more or less, with pictures. I wish people posted more stuff about their lives, ordinary things, because I find that light and charming, which is what I want out of social media (because my "real life" is neither light nor particularly charming)

look folks we all make mistakes, facebook is no different

Facebook has admitted it was a “mistake” to ask users whether paedophiles requesting sexual pictures from children should be allowed on its website.

On Sunday, the social network ran a survey for some users asking how they thought the company should handle grooming behaviour. “There are a wide range of topics and behaviours that appear on Facebook,” one question began. “In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures.”

The options available to respondents ranged from “this content should not be allowed on Facebook, and no one should be able to see it” to “this content should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it”.

A second question asked who should decide the rules around whether or not the adult man should be allowed to ask for such pictures on Facebook. Options available included “Facebook users decide the rules by voting and tell Facebook” and “Facebook decides the rules on its own”.

In neither survey question did Facebook allow users to indicate that law enforcement or child protection should be involved in the situation: the strictest option allowed involved turning to the social network as arbiter.

Yvette Cooper MP, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, condemend the survey. “This is a stupid and irresponsible survey,” she said. “Adult men asking 14-year-olds to send sexual images is not only against the law, it is completely wrong and an appalling abuse and exploitation of children. I cannot imagine that Facebook executives ever want it on their platform but they also should not send out surveys that suggest they might tolerate it or suggest to Facebook users that this might ever be acceptable.”
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Other parts of the survey asked similar questions about content glorifying extremism, and asked users to rank how important they felt it was that Facebook’s policies were developed in a transparent manner, were fair, took into account different cultural norms, and achieved “the ‘right outcome’”.

Facebook’s vice president of product, Guy Rosen, said the surveys were “a mistake”.

“We run surveys to understand how the community thinks about how we set policies,” he said. “But this kind of activity is and will always be completely unacceptable on FB. We regularly work with authorities if identified. It shouldn’t have been part of this survey. That was a mistake.”

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson added: “We understand this survey refers to offensive content that is already prohibited on Facebook and that we have no intention of allowing so have stopped the survey.

“We have prohibited child grooming on Facebook since our earliest days; we have no intention of changing this and we regularly work with the police to ensure that anyone found acting in such a way is brought to justice.”

Lmao, facebook's libertarian roots showin thru

just a little bit of kid-fucking everyone be cool

What did Cambridge Analytica do with all the data? With whom else might it have shared it? In 2015, Facebook sent a stern letter to Cambridge Analytica asking that the data be deleted. Cambridge Analytica employees have said that the company merely checked a box indicating that the data was deleted, at which point Facebook decided not to inform the 50 million users who were affected by the breach, nor to make the issue public, nor to sanction Cambridge Analytica at the time.

The New York Times and The Observer of London are reporting that the data was not deleted. And Cambridge Analytica employees are claiming that the data formed the backbone of the company’s operations in the 2016 presidential election.

If Facebook failed to understand that this data could be used in dangerous ways, that it shouldn’t have let anyone harvest data in this manner and that a third-party ticking a box on a form wouldn’t free the company from responsibility, it had no business collecting anyone’s data in the first place. But the vast infrastructure Facebook has built to obtain data, and its consequent half-a-trillion-dollar market capitalization, suggest that the company knows all too well the value of this kind of vast data surveillance.

Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. In many countries, Facebook and its products simply are the internet. Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles, and there are increasingly vast swaths of public and civic life — from volunteer groups to political campaigns to marches and protests — that are accessible or organized only via Facebook.

The problem here goes beyond Cambridge Analytica and what it may have done. What other apps were allowed to siphon data from millions of Facebook users? What if one day Facebook decides to suspend from its site a presidential campaign or a politician whose platform calls for things like increased data privacy for individuals and limits on data retention and use? What if it decides to share data with one political campaign and not another? What if it gives better ad rates to candidates who align with its own interests?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/facebook-cambridge-analytica.html

ugh
this has been making me sick

Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution....unless you are in a position of social privilege and your connections don't rely on facebook for promotion :(
not mine

that's exactly why fb ruined the internet. you can say what you want about apple and google, at least they have competition.

"the observer of london"

facebook as an entity owns several of the most popular messaging systems, which is kind of parallel to the data mining but also dizzying

the insidiousness of Facebook is such that if you leave it, it's not even that you feel like you're missing out, it's that you begin to suspect people who rely on it for socializing forget about you if you're not readily available on it.

I quit a couple months ago and it does feel like being erased kinda

I figure if anyone who relies on Facebook for socializing has forgotten about me because I’m not on it, it’s not worth trying to be their friend if they don’t care enough to ever reach out to me some other way.

fb users should know better by now

i think there's a certain (unfounded) expectation of privacy with email that will truly freak ppl out when we learn the details of how it isn't

i quit a few months as well. felt erased but that's kinda what i wanted, i think. i missed seeing everyone's infants so i got back on instagram