iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

this is my fave me:

"Former Parramatta Eels boss Scott Seward gets good behaviour bond over salary cap scandal."

Good rule for anything on the internet is to never list your real name, dob, pob, workplace on any social/entertainment site. Use burner email accounts too when signing up for shit.

even then it only has a limited effect if you're planning to connect with your real-life friends and family - i don't use my real name on fb but it would be pretty trivial for anyone who wanted to to track me down via my connections

he also LOOKS even more suspicious than me. which i didn't think was possible.

https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/2f441b3b9b69c625a1ef9bbbb54ad569

No one really "needs" to track me down via the internet so I feel fine about it.

imo the best is to go back in time and have your parents name you something ridiculously common

prevent catastrophe of ur own birth imo

gets it ^

FB got less and less fun or interesting, and became a toxic environment as the 2016 election drew closer. I found later that I would go through the same cycles with other social networks. I found myself getting sickened by the whole thing every time. I have since deleted every social media account I had...ok not true I still have Linkedin but that's like having nothing. ILX is now my only locus of social interaction on the internet. To the extent that FB and social networks ruined the internet, I think they are not especially positive social forces, but I'm being myopic here. I'm glad ILX still exists.

see, i just went to The Economist website and this is at the top. this should always be at the top:

"By continuing to browse this site you permit us and our partners to place identification cookies on your browser and agree to our use of cookies to identify you for marketing. Review our cookies policy for details or change your cookies preferences."

that's a european regulation, and it's excessive in that it appears on every damn site to the point where it's meaningless

i'm told california is like that with the "this could give you cancer" warnins

imo the best is to go back in time and have your parents name you something ridiculously common

― mh, Tuesday, March 20, 2018 12:46 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is precisely what i used my time machine for

"make sure i have the same name as 436 professors and the guy who invented tang, thanks"

not only is my name uncommon, there's only one other person who shows up on google with my name and he seems to be financially much more successful than me so fuck him

the most famous person w/ my name is a photographer, rendering all photos of me impossible to find

parents needs to consider this

name your kid index.html

think it's just the lack of transparency that makes me mad. and i don't get why there aren't really clear laws about it. but if laws can't get passed then just keep suing them, i guess.

There are really clear laws about election advertising in Washington! That have been on the books longer than Zuckerberg has been alive! Facebook just a) never cared to check the legality of their practices in the first place and b) is refusing to comply with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission

the most famous person with my name is fictional, which is even better

Mine is a current NFL player. So I’m way down the list in search results.

Incredibly rare in the US last name + a first name that's incredibly rare to non-existent in my surname's country of origin means that I am, as far as I can tell, the only person in the world with my name. Search results are all me.

My last name is virtually unique yet somehow there is an 80s New Haven metal band whose name is my last name. No band members share my last name. I have no idea how or where they got the name from, and there is very little info online about them.

is it Firefight? Please say yes.

yeah it wasn't until the advent of social media that i came to appreciate my parents' choice to name me 'adolf hitler'

Incredibly rare in the US last name + a first name that's incredibly rare to non-existent in my surname's country of origin means that I am, as far as I can tell, the only person in the world with my name. Search results are all me.

― joygoat, Tuesday, March 20, 2018 2:20 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Same.

there is one other me that i'm aware of - a woman - and i when i was still on facebook i friended her. she silently accepted the friend request. we have had no other contact. when i quit facebook (9 years ago!!?) i somehow managed to export everyone's birthdays as an iCal. no memory of how i did that. so whenever it's the other me's birthday i get a little notification and feel momentarily eldritch and uncanny

hard to believe it's been 20 years since your bud light cup series debut

As someone else put it, if the product is free, then you are the product.

Getting a little touchy over there, I see.

https://lawandcrime.com/exclusive/facebook-forces-nyt-to-quietly-delete-unflattering-reference-to-sheryl-sandberg-in-story-about-russian-trolls/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E2z-1Mi6Zo?t=1m12s

"See, now, that's just not, the way, to go, here, Karen."

I never gave FB shit like where I work/where I went to school/who I am related to/my phone number. It has none of that. I dont use the app on my phone, I use it via Chrome browser (they make this purposely VERY HARD TO DO btw). This isnt my real name, obviously. Ive never made a public post, and dont even make many "all friends" ones either (tho that shit is moot for FB themselves of course).

Hell I have an old Livejournal Ive had since 2001 and that sites owned by Russians, its probably way more in peril and I really should just delete it.

hard to believe it's been 20 years since your bud light cup series debut

lol somebody i am gonna meet that guy. and apologize.

someDAY

i enjoy this chat, i do, not least because i get to show off about how long i left facebook, but the CA stuff that's come out this week is so monumental - i dunno, maybe that's why we've gone down this rabbit-hole of nostalgia and evaluating our personal routines? because it's too gruesome to even to think about? about how public sentiments being manipulated en masse to swing an election isn't a flaw in the system? it is rather the ultimate perfection of marketing? that it's just an exaggerated version of what we live with all the time anyway? that our thoughts aren't really our own? or maybe they are, but how are we to know? sorry to get all p.k. dick ~think abt it~ but i feel like we've reached a kind of event horizon here somehow

we've always been adaptive little desire machines

i just ghosted on facebook, wonder how long that'll last. there are only one or two people on there who i need to get emails / numbers from so maybe it'll stick.

we have evolved into the body without organs

i know they have other issues but I'm mad that they moved Most Recent to a submenu in the iphone app

one of my friends who made leaving facebook hardest emailed me today wanting to stay in touch. that was really nice. maybe this will work out and we can all finally be rid of facebook.

It’ll be ok

I love that one of the trending stories tonight is about how nobody can find Zuckerberg

pic.twitter.com/gcXw3JNjn3

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) March 20, 2018

pic.twitter.com/j4aprRQiUE

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) March 20, 2018

because it's too gruesome to even to think about? about how public sentiments being manipulated en masse to swing an election isn't a flaw in the system? it is rather the ultimate perfection of marketing? that it's just an exaggerated version of what we live with all the time anyway? that our thoughts aren't really our own? or maybe they are, but how are we to know? sorry to get all p.k. dick ~think abt it~ but i feel like we've reached a kind of event horizon here somehow

Exaggerated version of what we live with all the time for me. Every time we talk about this swinging an election I think it's important to remember how that happened: bullshit links from dodgy sites being favoured by the algorithm, and for me that sorta comes down to a lack of media literacy amongst people, which has been a problem for decades and decades. I don't want to sound smug about that, and have no real solutions to offer that aren't just wonky "talk more about this in schools" shit, but it certainly feels like an old problem.

it gets down into the marrow of communication and sociability - the now-definitive proof that people are more likely to pay attention to and be interested by strong opinions, rather than evidence-based sifting. and yes i think this has probably always been true. but the speed and penetration of opinions and news has weaponized this disparity of effect. organizations like the bbc which, natural tendencies to toady to those in power aside, yes i see you there calzino, have a statutory duty to present all sides of an argument, find themselves at a yawning, material disadvantage compared with accounts and organizations that can publish what they like. on a fairly innocuous level it means the bbc could never make a podcast like "pod save america" because it has a slant. the less innocuous effects are well documented obv. i don't really see the way out of this. even if facebook did all the things they should do privacy-wise i don't see how we avoid the trollbot battalions armed with inflammatory, juicy headlines. on whatever platform.

Yeah, it's a difficult situation, for sure. It's a question of there no longer being a perceived centre that discussion can spring from - which is interesting from a leftist pov because for much of the 20th century the left worked hard at explaining that this centre is artificial, that its claims to objectivity are false, that it toadies to power, etc. and now you have this type of Chomsky analysis dumbed down and used by wide swathes of the population to justify their biases. At this stage I mostly see people who're aware of this trying to return to this centre, which I find both impracticable (for the reasons you listed) and also disingenuous. I suppose one way of looking at this which is cozy/hopeful for leftists is that the breakdown of a centre of consensus is a byproduct of the breakdown of social cohesion as a whole - if there's no community why bother about what anyone else thinks? - and so the solution is more welfare state/social justice hooray, though I don't know if I even believe that.

on a really bone-simple level, the extent to which platforms can turn a profit off of effectively targeted advertising matches pretty exactly with the extent to which our inner lives and public politics are undermined or turned against us. so it's a question of where the balance of power is on this spectrum. clickbait matters less if it's not targeted accurately.

I don't care about facebook because I joined late and barely share any info. I knew something was way off when my first profile got corrupted and the actual real famous hockey player goalie's (that I share a name with and was linked to my full name gmail account) candids started appearing in my profile that I wasn't using. I btw still have access to this account where his friends and family send me messages. I care that my dad fell into that targeted fb hellmouth, started posting complete trash before the election and it was the swan dive for our relationship.

:(

even if facebook did all the things they should do privacy-wise i don't see how we avoid the trollbot battalions armed with inflammatory, juicy headlines. on whatever platform.

That's because doing all the privacy things is antithetical to the company's business model. As someone observed, it's really hard to take seriously any proposed efforts by these companies to self-police to prevent data mining and micro marketing because that is how they make their money. The Russians (for example) exploited Facebook (for example) but they did it by doing exactly what the platform was designed to do.

I was relatively late to Facebook, but have been distrustful from the start. Once it became clear that the company was more or less scrambling posts to show or order what it surmised was what I wanted to see - in a roundabout way, what *they* wanted me to see - I started looking less and less. God knows I don't get news from the site. Otherwise, if Facebook is my only "connection" to certain people then it's really not much of a connection, and if those people can't or don't want to reach me some other way, then they don't really want to reach me. It's like not answering a suspicious or unfamiliar number on my phone. If it's important, they'll call back.

zuckerberg steals facebook idea --> becomes real billionaire --> enables fake billionaire trump to become president, in part by letting him steal / launder stolen and deceitful information on facebook. who woulda thunk it?