iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

not a status, but a close friend of mine, whose wedding I've been to, whose kids I have bonded with, whose house I watch frequently, just decided to pick a fight with me at 9 in the morning over Skype at work for spoiling Halloween for him.

Oh, wait, let me clarify - I don't mean spoiling the actual movie. I mean posting two sentences in the comments section of my FB check-in regarding what I thought about the movie ("Underwhelming. Some cool moments but didn't feel like a homerun.") in direct response to my brother asking me what I thought about it.

His only request in advance is that he didn't want to know anything about the movie, so I deliberately didn't talk to him about it, post anything about it other than I went and the comment above. purposefully didn't give any specific details about anything as pedestrian as pacing or anything. and the killer is I invited him to go w/ me but he opted not to.

this site is toxic af - we never get in real big arguments, so this is mega weird. I only visit to check on events and my friends' wellbeing now.

the whole concept/cult of "spoilers" is bizarre

I mean, "spoilers" is one thing, I will never post "OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE DEXTER GAVE BIRTH TO AN ALIEN BABY" on FB, even avoid it in the comments.

but like...not even being able to share a vague opinion on the quality of the movie, buried in the comments, in direct response to a question?

it's a stupid nothing thing, in 12 years we've known each other none of our arguments ever go beyond like, a day, but he's not the first person I've seen cry "SPOILER" at something not even remotely spoilery.

if the appeal of prestige tv is that it can be boiled down to a handful of 'gotcha' moments then maybe that explains why i keep bouncing off of the shows that people like

i'd be pretty annoyed if i had the solution to a whodunnit spoiled on me when i was halfway through but that's more of a puzzle thing than a tv/film thing

since we haven't mentioned it here uh facebook lied to publishers and got an entire generation of 'print'/word journalists fired

I posted it 6 posts ago, but yes I agree it should be bigger news

oh you sure did and i even reacted to it sorry

<3

tbf if web publishers actually believed facebook’s numbers about video then they were too stupid to survive much longer anyway

the problem is that hundreds of ppl who worked at those publishers knew it was bullshit but it only takes one executive idiot to trash 90 years of a publication out of FOMO

yeah i was always really curious where the data supporting "pivot to video" was coming from when anecdotally i could never find a single person who liked it, Facebook makes a lot of sense now though

the only possible explanation is that the executives responsible are such mushbrains that they actually click on all the videos on their web browser and thought everyone else would too

that’s probably part of it. also execs have wanted the web to be tv since the eternal september era

never underestimate the dimness of the people at the top.

execs always want something new and different they can point to as theirs, no matter how stupid

(lookin at you, andrew cuomo )

like that was specifically the rationale of the guy who pivoted fox sports’ website to video. the athletic should send him a nice xmas present

i worked for a company that thought bc of our library of videos, we could create "content" that would compete with and surpass YouTube in terms of income and viewership. they spent a lot of money on the website, it was a ".tv" site bc the company owner thought that was gold, maybe because he worked in TV. my panicked protests fell on deaf ears. i believe we peaked at around 280 users.

yet every one of those 280 users went on to form a venture capital firm

probably more like 131, there were lots of people juking the numbers. i think i personally created a dozen accounts including one for our cat.

the way you know he's feeling good is that his eyes are the exact same color as his flesh pic.twitter.com/CwjFmMaWV0

— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) November 21, 2018

Here is Facebook with the day-before-Thanksgiving news dump confirming they asked Definers to go after George Soros https://t.co/dcwE4beltw pic.twitter.com/KO7Jpotoav

— Brandon Wall (@Walldo) November 21, 2018

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/sorry-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-isnt-a-positive-force/

"Facebook makes users depressed, and Facebook posts helped fuel ethnic cleansing."

hilariously i read that as if it was written by tim berners-lee

DESTROYS zuckerkberg etc

Feel like the berners-lee association is one the journo wants you to make, with the fussy little middle initial there

a (now former, as of very recently) co-worker of mine is the president of the cdn chapter of Le@n In and it took all of me not to ask her how Sheryl is holding up these days

Something I've just noticed; every so often, I'll scroll down my wall and at a certain point it turns into an unbroken stream of third-party posts. Non-stop. Am I just noticing something that's been in place for a while, or is this something new? It's ridiculous.

Some of these posts go back two or three years. I don't know, I think something's gotten into my account...I've had other odd stuff happen the past couple of months. Maybe a new password is in order.

sounds odd.

every time i get one of those posts that are throwbacks to "your memories"--like one year ago today stuff--i tell click hide from timeline and i would like to see fewer posts like this. and i continue getting them. sort of fucked up what if there was stuff i didn't want to be reminded of?

"Posts from Across Facebook"--they don't turn up until I get past ~15 regular posts, but they're there, even after a password change. Just annoying--hopefully they don't represent anything worse than that.

i do not have this, thank god...

I was at the Atlantic's free speech panels in SF last week, and the last panel had Elliot Schrage, the guy who fell on his sword for Sandberg in the day-before-thanksgiving post about hiring Definers to go after Soros & concoct bad press about Google & Apple's privacy policies. I was glad I was in the room when he made his comments about Myanmar. Most of the coverage echoed his quote about how Zuckerberg is 'more of an idealist the real world permits', which was absolutely enough of a howler to produce click-bait. But the day's final question was a young student asking him to talk about Facebook's accountability for their contributions to Myanmar.

'I think Facebook has been a force for positive things and horrible things in Myanmar, and we have been working for a while, indeed more slowly than we should have been, in helping insure that the information on our platform was not contributing or exacerbating the violence... It's an ongoing issue, I think we are doing more now, and I think it's a legitimate question to try to understand the degree to which we exacerbated an already terrible situation. And it is something that we have been clear did not respond or respect the values that we hope, to refer back earlier to what I said, was more a reflection of our optimism in how tools like ours could be used beneficially and not effective for the status quo in the country. And we're sorry about that.'

It's online if you're interested in hearing someone who really simply does not sound very sorry about it at all

https://youtu.be/vU9lrW-z20w?list=PLwj46yNDLyTUzolpk4AzmF9RTQI8vmj9S&t=1069

/ 'more of an idealist than the real world permits'

mark zuckerberg and sheryl sandberg and the other social media executives are in over their heads. i don't even fully blame them.

the internet makes it super easy to judge people and I don't know what I would have done if I were in his position, waking up to just how much this company has broken. I'm not upset because he doesn't feel sorry; the main concern is that this is an answer which makes it clear that the people at the top don't even see the problem. I do blame them; incomprehensible amounts of income have generated incomprehensible amounts of responsibility, and they are not yet shouldering it

booming post, otm

i can't help the feeling that these people are willfully dumbing themselves down in order to keep the machine fed. i.e. jack tweeting about his stupid fucking sleep meditations or whatever

i'm sure they're all assuming the worst that can happen is that that they're forced to retire early with several hundred million dollars, maybe they have to pay a $40 million fine or whatever, who cares

I'M SURE

trust me, i know these people. sheryl does not give a shit

yup Milton nails it as usual

if i had that much money i'd probably go crazy with power in the same way. why wouldn't you? at that point the world just kind of becomes this bill or tax you have to pay every once in a while

or not, © D J Trump

mark zuckerberg and sheryl sandberg and the other social media executives are in over their heads. i don't even fully blame them.

I mean, they’re acting reprehensibly but these networks are unfathomably vast and have overturned a ton established systems in an extremely short span of time.

The Frankenstein effect.

Originally facebook was about posting photos from college. Also sometimes people would “poke” each other as a form of low key flirting. Now it’s devoured the entire media.

somebody explain the nature of evil to treeship

xpost clemenza, I get this too sometimes.

treeship (and anyone else interested) you need to watch the two part frontline about facebook
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/

if you act without thinking about the potential consequences of your actions, your actions could wind up hurting people whether you meant to hurt them or not. that seems to be at the heart of the fb dilemma afaict. on the small scale as well as the large global scale.

i missed this at the time, but this 2013 review of lean in (by mark zuckerburg's former speechwriter!) was great

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/feminisms-tipping-point-who-wins-from-leaning-in

I got a post from Facebook recently telling me that I have been on their platform 11 years. 11 years, and they think I would be delighted to hear that. To me, this speaks volumes about their naive self-belief, never considering that many of their users might have begun to resent its presence in their lives, not to mention the political issues already discussed. Time to spend less time on there, I guess.