iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

http://honisoit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Computer_Cat-600x400.jpg

like im not going to cry that CBS can't dictate top-down a third of all media watched by everyone anymore, glad those days are long gone.

yes but we've traded that so that a shady-ass firm of ex-spies and Eton men can dictate "bottom up" and nobody knows who they're working for or why

Yup. Democratization of meaning isn't really that if you can still buy views with $$$.

I use Facebook to promote myself, never to donate content to them

you don't have to donate anything to them, though. all they want is to improve their model that predicts who will click what, and using facebook to promote yourself helps them to do that.

i quit facebook a few months ago, but it was mainly to try to pry myself off of the internet in general (i ended up just shifting more of my online time to other online places, similar to when i quit drinking coca-cola and coincidentally started drinking loads of coffee when i was 18). i loathe the way that facebook surveils me and my friends so that they can sell their psychographic profiles to third parties, but that's happening all the time across the internet. i bring a long trail of cookies with me wherever i go. i would feel less fatalistic about the direction of social media/internet it if i thought that it would be regulated appropriately, but i don't share tomboto's optimism on that

that's one of the reasons the printing press was regulated

the financier of the first Gutenberg Bibles was a money lender named Johann Fust (possibly demonized as one of the inspirations behind the Faust/Mephistopheles character). the demon famously prefers human knowledge to the divine and this was back when the drawing of horns was still a thing. also when they would publicly burn writings (like if you copied the Bible but you did it in your native language) to discourage it in the future.

It was once believed that Johann Fust was working for the devil. After several of Gutenberg’s bibles were sold to King Louis XI of France, it was decided that Fust was performing witchcraft. This idea came about for a few reasons, including the fact that some of the type was printed in red ink, mistaken for blood. It was also discovered that all of the letters in these bibles, presented to the King and his courtiers as hand-copied manuscripts, were oddly identical. Fust had sold 50 bibles in Paris and the people there could not fathom the making and selling of so many bibles so quickly, because printing had not come to the forefront yet in France. Parisians figured that the devil had something to do with the making of these copies, and Fust was thrown into jail on charges of black magic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Fust

that is a cool story that I did not know. but you get that's not my point, right? I'm not calling for zuck to be charged with working for lucifer. I just kind of want him to die a pauper

you don't have to donate anything to them, though.

yeah this feeling of "aha but I use THEM" is tempting but just being there and using it builds value for their company y because network effects

have we posted chrome extension already? theres a facebook-specific ad blocker and another that blocks the facebook tracking from other pages

Ultimately, I just want the most vulnerable of society to be protected from the shitshow that we may be able to readily determine as a shitshow but so many others aren't able to.

Meanwhile nobody cares about the massive influence Google has on organizing information on the web. Or the obscene data mining and pimping the data we give them. People can live without Facebook, but they can't live without Google. They can't avoid Google. Most people have already donated most of their personal data--their contacts, their emails, their websites, their APIs etc to Google. Because free.

Like my friends who brag that they've "never been on Facebook" but use Google apps for their entire personal lives and business platforms.

I went through all the promoted content "offered" to me though the apps I've downloaded. Like the Facebook app or the Instagram app. Makes sense. Flickr and Lightroom are on there because I once uploaded something to FB through them.

But Zedge? I've had this goofy Samsung Galaxy phone for, I dunno, a couple of months maybe? The Facebook app was already on it, but I threw it in the bin. Never once logged into FB on this phone. And somehow, they still know that I downloaded Zedge.

Instagram's on the phone. Did IG snitch on me? I didn't see Laps-Fuse in the apps listed...

Agreed re google apps. A company we use for ordering some IT hardware just changed over to us using an online googledocs spreadsheet. It isnt even locked, and the sheet stores ... credentials that shouldnt be public, basically. I mean fuck.

It was funny when Mordy said my opinions were all formed from "social networks" or Facebook status updates or whatever

tbf this describes most ilxors

you are what you eat

don't think this was posted; Yasha Levine:

On a very basic level, Facebook’s opaque control of its feed algorithm means the platform has real power over people’s ideas and actions during an election. This can be done by a data shift as simple and subtle as imperceptibly tweaking a person’s feed to show more posts from friends who are, say, supporters of a particular political candidate or a specific political idea or event. As far as I know, there is no law preventing Facebook from doing just that: it’s plainly able and willing to influence a user’s feed based on political aims—whether done for internal corporate objectives, or due to payments from political groups, or by the personal preferences of Mark Zuckerberg.

So our present-day freakout over Cambridge Analytica needs to be put in the broader historical context of our decades-long complacency over Silicon Valley’s business model. The fact is that companies like Facebook and Google are the real malicious actors here—they are vital public communications systems that run on profiling and manipulation for private profit without any regulation or democratic oversight from the society in which it operates. But, hey, let’s blame Cambridge Analytica. Or better yet, take a cue from the Times and blame the Russians *along* with Cambridge Analytica....

People are still trying to blame Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 electoral victory on something, anything—other than America’s degenerate politics and a political class that has presided over a stunning national decline. The keepers of conventional wisdom all insist in one way or another that Trump won because something novel and unique happened; that *something* had to have gone horribly wrong. And if you’re able to identify and isolate this something and get rid of it, everything will go back to normal—back to status quo, when everything was good.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/cambridge-analytica-con-levine

i think Zuckerberg and Facebook could go away in a week or so just out of nowhere. Myspace was a huge daily part of life for a while that similarly flaunted the data and intellectual property of its users for bubble profits that eventually burt. Friendster was also a big deal, it was just gone one day.

it seems largely like the BBSes of old with an ad-cluttered yet easy-enough-for-a-grandma GUI. the old BBSes had their Anarchist Cookbooks and Hacker Crackdowns. text files on how to pick locks, hack passwords, make bombs, fake news, folk tales, ASCII pr0n, warez and cracked software, communities of people that communicate through viral/memey graphics/art demos & self-styled cyberpunk folklore, early identity politics, etc. the early BBSes like large corners of the internet had mods and fan-fics, slash-fics and mashups, Simpsons/Star Wars/Star Trek/D&D memes & popfolk references.

add to that the boomer nostalgia market and the re-occurring signifiers: Däniken-inspired Ancient Aliens theorists, pseudo-shamans, astrology charts, tarot readings, superstitious messages, underground comics, global conspiracies, etc. it can seem like a scrapbook of National Enquirers and episodes of Unsolved Mysteries. all of it is the bread and butter of social media at large.

in the end i don't think a picture of a TV news anchor talking to another person tells you anything about what a person thinks or feels, their values, their day-to-day life, etc. the media somebody likes could be entirely non-indicative of the type of person they truly are. many nonviolent people love violent media. it is pretty simple. people have used the Bible for good things and for bad things. people do what they do and we justify it afterwards.

burt burst

this thread made me watch a ton of marshall mcluhan on youtube last night. he really liked telling corny jokes. also, he was asked during one Q&A in the 70s what would come after the screen/television and he said holograms! for a 360 degree immersive experience! dude was a VR prophet.

he also said the biggest holo-concert box office in 2020 would be for Nate Dogg:Live!

okay, i made that part up.

i think Zuckerberg and Facebook could go away in a week or so just out of nowhere. Myspace was a huge daily part of life for a while that similarly flaunted the data and intellectual property of its users for bubble profits that eventually burt. Friendster was also a big deal, it was just gone one day.

this is true, but friendster died because everyone went to myspace, which died because everyone went to facebook. i could see a similar kind of sudden exodus with facebook, but only when there is a more appealing social network for the masses to migrate to. and i'm not sure how that would play out now with facebook's global popularity - even if americans all decided migrate to, uh, ello, facebook could still be the status quo in other continents.

MySpace and Friendster never had our grandparents on it. For them and many of the other olds, I can’t seeing them leaving it anytime soon.

yeah I mean one reason I'll stay on Facebook is that my friends are all over the world & I get little bits of their worlds through their feeds. yeah I could lose my north american friends without much loss, I don't care about their lifestyles anymore, but the global stuff enriches me & I don't want to lose that

Like my friends who brag that they've "never been on Facebook" but use Google apps for their entire personal lives and business platforms.

IMO, if Facebook vanished today nothing would change and no one would miss it. But there is a lot that Google does that I use and need every day.

Massive Attack are gone off of Facebook because of you.

http://mixmag.net/read/massive-attack-delete-facebook-page-due-to-cambridge-analytica-scandal-news?utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral

"American People Admit Having Facebook Data Stolen Kind Of Worth It To Watch That Little Fucker Squirm"

https://www.theonion.com/american-people-admit-having-facebook-data-stolen-kind-1823997634

Facebook is the only way I can stay in touch with the majority of my friends, very few of whom even live in the same country as me, and sad as it is, deleting their accounts literally means I'm unlikely to hear from them ever again. I wouldn't even know where to start, tracking down their emails somehow, then what to say then? I have very little chance of being able to ever meet them irl as I have young kids and a job and can't afford to travel. I really can't stand Facebook but it would leave a hole if I deleted it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0MK7qz13bU

I've said it elsewhere before but Facebook is weird in how it not only makes it easier to prevent the natural manner in which people lose touch over time, but it also reverses it; I've had classmates I forgot even existed who I last saw in elementary school in the mid-to-late '80s send me a friend request and suddenly memories start to trickle back about these people. And it shouldn't have happened, I didn't really want it to happen. Some things and people are meant to be left in the past and forgotten.

nationalize google and facebook asap imo. or at least treat them as essential utilities subject to strict operating terms in exchange for more or less fixed, reliable, blue-chip profits and limited competition. at&t wasn't great but that model beats the current status quo.

I guess having lived in different countries all my adult life and now living in a different part of the UK to that I grew up in, plus having no time for social life means maybe this is more a problem for me than other people. If it weren't for Facebook I would literally only communicate with my family, wife, kids and colleagues. So yeah maybe it's artificial and maybe it's better not to try to bring to life dead friendships but this is the only game in town right now.

People get very upset if other people, that they barely know or have little real interaction with, unfriend them. It's super weird. I try to unfriend people every month.

Being on the socials “with” people is only sort of like being in touch with them.

I never used the site when it was in it's hey day, but I find Facebook annoying as hell and only use it mostly as an email site as I have many friends that only use it and won't use regular email at all anymore. Use it for the same reason to contact dive bars to book shows for my band, as there are many FBs the only way to contact them.

They say people really want to keep in touch, but by my experience that is only kinda true even with more ways to do so.

If people message me via FB I tell them off and direct them to txt/email me. I dont use/install the messenger app, so FB messenger doesnt even work unless i'm on a desktop machine.

The thing I wish would go away is twitter. Itd make journalists have to start actually doing their damn jobs again.

OTM. The first time I ever saw tweets from randos reported on, I was stunned.

So yeah maybe it's artificial and maybe it's better not to try to bring to life dead friendships but this is the only game in town right now.

I don't do the Facebook*. So I'm curious: do you think if you deleted your account, that after, say, 6 months you'd miss it at all?

I wouldn't miss Facebook at all. I would miss almost all the friends I have left, and who I would then be out of touch with. This is a fairly pathetic and embarrassing thing to say, but it's the truth.

I would start a movement to bring back USENET. Although usenet isnt that different to Reddit I suppose.

Friends who don’t have your phone number aren’t real friends

The only people I'm totally comfortable calling my friends are the ones I'd gladly give a kidney to

Never liked phoning people and have been living in different countries most of my adult life. Barely know my own phone number, even talk to parents by message usually. You know, it's almost like people have different lives and making generalisations about what works for you might not be true for me.

To be clear, you don’t have to make calls to stay in touch with a phone number. That’s what Signal and WhatsApp use and you can use them to have rolling chat threads with photographs and everything

i like facebook ... i use it for connecting with my parents. my dad likes to post reminisces about college for his college friends. same with my mom. and they are connected with people in iran via facebook. so that gives me a little window into their lives before i was born, and it's cool to see them interact with their friends and philosophize about life. and i think it makes them very happy when i *like* their posts. i already see my parents at least once a week and we talk almost every day on the phone but this just adds another layer. same w/ my sister and close friends who i don't get to see often because of geography / kids / schedule. so in that regard it's nice.

and maybe i'm a rube but that NYT interview with zuckerberg made me feel better about the whole fiasco

Heh, remember that time AOL owned CNN?

I like the fact that if I post a cat picture on Facebook I can get a LIKE from a former member of Whitehouse and my mum.

What, you're friends with McMaster or something?

http://media.riffsy.com/images/7c1d71cf6382dc30df8ae84c40d0bf64/tenor.gif

Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file

Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum pic.twitter.com/CIRUguf4vD

— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018

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