iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

one of the biggest effects facebook's had is replacing screen names/aliases with real names/identities as the default for presenting & identifying yourself on the web. like usernames obviously still exist but even on a site like twitter where ppl use usernames they generally have their real name/pic as their display name & avatar, whereas pre-facebook internet interaction happened on message boards where everyone was ShadowDragonX and had a pic of sonic the hedgehog

The whole thing of having to "log in" to comment, which includes facebook but is not limited to it, has definitely pretty much halted me from commenting on news/blog sites.

like i was always taught that revealing any personal info on the internet was A Bad Idea but facebook was the first major site to encourage it because of its origins as a college-level thing where that actually made more sense bc you were only interacting w/ people in your irl english lit class

fb is one thing the internet had to become as it mainstreamed into the "real world" i.e. the economy. i think it's a point along this continuum of claiming the reality of social interaction for the market, through a syntax of desire created from the forms of representation that networked machines allow. the fb effect i've noticed the most irl is people it would seem increasingly turning their lives into a bunch of discrete performed categories in this ongoing game for visibility, sort of the same for all social media it's true but fb was there first. not pretending to be an expert or anything, just cobbling stuff together from a limited pov

and fb being there first prob why it's the most boring lamestream version of it now i guess

xp 'log in to comment' is a necessary evil now because spambot technology has gotten too good

fb effect i've noticed the most irl is people it would seem increasingly turning their lives into a bunch of discrete performed categories in this ongoing game for visibility, sort of the same for all social media it's true but fb was there first.

and not like this is super new or bad or anything, just a thing people do that is aided by fb imo

people definitely did things for the sole purpose of bragging rights long before they could take selfies and post them to their news feeds, although facebook tends to elevate that aspect of social experience.

more like: did millennials ruin the internet or did the internet ruin millennials

my wife's news feed seems way more annoying than mine but that's because people actually share personal information whereas my friends are pretty laconic. something related to gender going on there.

realizing i could do this was a big breakthrough for me. instead of arguing w/ the void i could argue w/ ppl who i chose to friend on fb. also they have better killfile + blocking mechanics.

― Mordy, Monday, February 23, 2015 12:31 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

You moving a lot of this to FB has definitley made ILX a much more pleasant reading experience, ty

xps definitely, it makes that process very easy and "liquid".

don't mean to march into the convo, just "sharing" some "thoughts" in a box. i feel like there were visions for the internet, flawed geek visions with totalitarian flavor maybe, that posited it as something outside/above "the hustle" or w/e but that was not to be the case lol, and that sort of thing is definitely being pushed against because it isn't really compatible with "we have to turn everything into a possible revenue stream", see for example why ISPs in the US are actually worse for free and clear access rn.

Twitter's problem is that people can hide behind seemingly endless fake profiles and numerous accounts. Facebook is way stricter on this and pretty much always has been so it's harder to post evil shit on there, or if you do it's under your own name. still happens like but even Twitter's head honcho did some major mea culpa last week about how useless they are at dealing with trolls/ spambots and how he personally Will Sort It. god knows how.

i mean i have my suspicions about why ISPs really want to throttle service but nothing solid at all, that info isn't exactly the first thing that pops up on google (lol) for a lazy researcher like me.

There's also kind of an interesting, unspoken sadness to my facebook feed when I look at whose posts make up 50% of it -- the divorced mom who quit her job to start an ill-advised business and seems a bit adrift, the "older cool guy" from my college town who I generally like as a person but never seems to have found his way in life, the middle-aged poet my wife knows from some discussion group -- also a very nice and intelligent person, lost her non-profit job a couple years ago and hasn't been able to get back on her feet, the perpetually single, the trapped-in-bad-relationships. And then also just a bunch of random parents and show-offs.

re what euler was saying, there are definitely gendered versions of the sharing / liking economy.

fb def. makes it easier to judge it's true

I find Facebook more depressing than Twitter because with FB you learn that some people, no matter how much they claim to care about you, think you want to read their repugnant political views. Twitter is a more appropriate place for that - I think FB should be like a set of concurring reunions.

xp - you know you can unfollow these people and your feed will change?

The interesting thing with fb, how it feels "different" from past internet experience, is the ongoing chess game with the algorithm -- how what fb presents you with is responsive to your behavior, but you aren't entirely sure how. Like if you are promoting an event, do more people see your post if you link to the event page, or if you game the system and post the event flyer as a photo, because "people prefer to look at photos"?

Trick question: The internet was never good.

twitter ruined ilx, facebook ruined the internet

xp - you know you can unfollow these people and your feed will change?

This is seriously the magic bullet right here

unfollow is so crucial

people show up more in your feed if they've been clicking on you / scoping you out - y/n? paranoid?

i still don't really get pages or events, seems like there are pros out there, i just want to make a thing for my thing and not think about anything, y can't i do that.

p. interesting to me how earnest this thread is -- like, there's a joke or two but this feels like a q that is important to people. I think about it too - feel like fb didn't ruin shit until the upworthy style of presentation got perfected but once that happened, fuckin A. if you don't curate the shit out of your fb feed it's just garbage clickbait forever and it feels like it's getting worse daily, but at some point even your ex-coworkers will get sick of that too and stuff will change a little...maybe? if upworthy headlines are the terminal point of social media that's kind of hilarious and horrible

One Shocking Truth About Social Media

think-pieces ruined the internet

wow i never get upworthy shit just constant deejay / electronic music / albums by bands news and social justice axes / snarky stuff from brit ilx zing crew ("look at that over dere!") but then i'm pretty strict about unfollow, if you post one annoying thing u r gone from the safe space of my feed immediately.

mordy otm about killfiling on facebook, pruning your feed for annoying people is so necessary. but i keep some in there just to keep me in check even though they are basically spamming my life.

i moved away from the city i had lived in my entire life this year and fb is an okay way to feel connected to my friends back home, so i appreciate it for that. i'll occasionally argue with someone in the comments but i don't find it's a great platform for that, better to have some distance than like arguing with a random dude u went to hs with over whether bill maher is islamophobic

i know this is a set up for a knee-slappingly self-deprecating comeback but communities like ilx or sa at their best is the best form of the internet imo. unless you're a celeb or "work" for it (lol) twitter is just too much shouting into the void (the only non-spam followers i have on twitter are irls and ilxors) and fb is too personal so u can't go full sociopath. like u get good writing, you can outsource a lot of 'content' mining to ppl you "trust", get enough feedback to not make u feel like a shrimpy voyeur, perfect anonymity

mords is always a welcome sighting, i don't get why everyone's always so seemingly annoyed @ u tbr. xps

Facebook fixed the internet for a lot of people who never would have used RSS, Twitter or message boards. Their options before Facebook were the "funny" email forwards from their uncle or going to the Yahoo front page.

I don't really post to FB any more, because I don't know who I'm talking to and it feels weird. But it's good that people have a way to share stuff with friends and family. I mean if all Facebook did was provide the world's best platform for baby picture sharing that's a legit thing for a few hundred people to spend time building imo.

great post flopson

i moved away from the city i had lived in my entire life this year and fb is an okay way to feel connected to my friends back home, so i appreciate it for that.

yeah this is largely its function for me, and those are the same people sharing clickbait - former coworkers who I love and care about but who are really very normal people, y'know. so like 3/4 of their posts are "are you fucking kidding me" stuff but fb is otherwise the best & probably only medium for staying connected to them.

otm about how ilx (or sa no doubt, haven't posted there so I'd only know passively) are, when they're working and people are hearing each other and responding, some of the best of the internet.

pruning your feed for annoying people is so necessary. but i keep some in there just to keep me in check even though they are basically spamming my life.

haha if i was into "truth bombing" things, this would totally be one for me

not to come off all "my friends are cool" but "very normal" != sharing upworthy trash, ime

I used to prune the feed but I opened the floodgates a while back to get the full experience

feel like fb didn't ruin shit until the upworthy style of presentation got perfected but once that happened, fuckin A. if you don't curate the shit out of your fb feed it's just garbage clickbait forever and it feels like it's getting worse daily, but at some point even your ex-coworkers will get sick of that too and stuff will change a little...maybe?

That's not Facebook ruining the internet. That's people ruining Facebook.

As a non-Facebooker (I DON'T EVEN HAVE A TV (j/k I do have a TV and I watch it ALL THE FUCKING TIME)) with a carefully curated Twitter feed and a nice selection of RSS feeds, I hardly ever see that kind of clickbait-y garbage.

on the aggregation level i find that ilx + well chosen fb friends + rss feeds + [a little bit twitter] + some online newspapers/magazines = pretty good combo for keeping abreast of all interesting developments. i'm not sure that any of them tho are /really/ very good at facilitating conversation which is probably best kept to rl f2f convos and IM chats (which fb is also pretty good for tbh - over the last decade or whatever almost all my IM conversations have migrated from AIM to gmail to FB)

might do that i need a shakeup xxp

i am due for another round of pruning. a while back, i loosened my standards for friend request acceptance as well as the prime facebook error of commenting on and liking posts by generally dull people, so I am seeing a lot of "hilarious animal videos from fake radio stations" right now

there are many different flavors of upworthy trash and all kinds of people in my fb newsfeed post it. there is a totally rad couple i'm friends with who are both social workers and they are both really into activism and he's into all kinds of cool weird music but all they post is the social justice equivalent of upworthy trash. "WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN THIS COP AND THIS BLACK YOUTH WILL BLOW YOUR MIND"

i'm not sure that any of them tho are /really/ very good at facilitating conversation which is probably best kept to rl f2f convos and IM chats (which fb is also pretty good for tbh - over the last decade or whatever almost all my IM conversations have migrated from AIM to gmail to FB)

the reason i started reading ilx was because i was 16 years old and had no one to talk about pitchfork with f2f lmao

fb messenger is really sweet because you can communicate entirely w/ stickers. i probably fb message more than i even text and if it didnt kill my phones battery i would basically only use fb message for chatting

interesting to read this thread because most of it doesnt really get at what i hate about the 'facebooking' of the internet but i am also getting old i guess

i'll cop to sharing and liking difft versions of upworthy trash. the empty whole foods candy bar calories of fb.

Stickers are cool but they stole that pretty much wholesale from azn messaging programs :\

well azn people stole the internet from whites so it's fair now

cultural appropriation sadface

interesting to read this thread because most of it doesnt really get at what i hate about the 'facebooking' of the internet but i am also getting old i guess

it seems like the content used to be 'rich', even just like random weirdo posts from some anon on a message board, but now that the mechanisms of networking, always-on-ness etc dominate every single 'publication' event, content in a global sense is being depleted, dropping to zero value

like, reading 'intellectual' thort-mag content is just the same old feeling as reading a buzzfeed listicle, only with more brow, and they all still flog it on the same more-more-more new-new-new cycle

feeling that post. liking it if u will

As much as I love ILX, this place can be so high-pressure sometimes, because the average level of intelligence and discernment is so high and people are so quick to shoot down bullshit and banality. Sometimes it's freeing to just be like "here's a picture of us having fun at a basketball game" and not have to think of something original to say.

so happy we don't have 'likes' on ilx since the way i see ppl on fb use it, esp during 'political discussions,' is just to 'like' every single comment that agrees w/ them which would obv be out of control here

the stickers and emoji things are really ugly

kind of a slave to the like tbr it's how they get you

The disputes are fiercest when the stakes are small

Twas ever thus

the only relationships i ended via facebook were all very early in the trump era. i made one of those "if you have ever even thought about supporting trump for a millisecond i fucking hate you and you're terrible" posts, and some family and a handful of high school acquaintances made it very clear that they were proud of being terrible

A great way to sort out who you do and do not need in yr life imo

I realize it's fashionable to hate on Facebook but for me it has been a pleasure. I get exactly the right amount of contact with people I only like a little bit.

The people I really love? I have multiple ways to reach those people and I am happy with how much we interact, and If I need a break from them I can just not interact with them; it's fine.

For some reason I have exactly no contact with Trumpy / Republican / conservative people. Like, at all. I literally do not see them or their stupid shit.

I don't think it's because I'm better at curating my feed than other people, nor is it because I live in a rarified coastal cultural bubble (hi I am from fucking Missouri).

For whatever constellation of reasons, the site has somehow done a good job of showing me what I want to see and not showing me what I don't. Sorry for those who it doesn't work for.

I witnessed a friendship collapse over FB recently because one person was posting about travel and referred to his long sightseeing walks as "death marches," and then someone else posted that she has family in Ukraine and is very worried about them so can we not make jokes about death marches, and Person A blew up and wrote a bunch of angry posts to Facebook at large about how he's a member of several minority groups and how could someone have the audacity to accuse him of insensitivity.

(xpost) All my Facebook issues are with the company itself, and all the weirdness they've forced on me; like you, my friends (real-life friends and FB-only friends) cause me little grief.

i have p much no far-right wing friends on FB or outside only because in my 20s and 30s I was pretty hostile to all of those people to suggest I didn't want anything to do w/ them.

The fact that some people can't quite grasp metaphor - or that other people can't modulate their language to suit the audience they are addressing - is not really the fault of the platform imo.

Even here (on comparatively civil ilx) I know I have said stuff that wasn't appropriate. Several times! I try to take those corrections to heart, apologize, and strive to do better next time.

And I have also observed some conversations where I did, kinda, think someone was intentionally looking to be offended and might have been taking something a trifle too literally, and restricting perfectly reasonable figures of speech like hyperbole and metaphor. In those instances there are (inevitable) judgment calls to be made.

To me "death march" seems like forgivable hyperbolic figurative language. But I wouldn't refer to a dinner made on a barbecue grill as a Holocaust. It's a subjective matter of taste and judgment and timing.

Working out those balances takes grace and empathy and thoughtfulness.

Whether it's real life or ilx or FB or Twitter or Reddit or whatever, it's still a matter of grace and empathy and thoughtfulness.

Pretty sure these concepts predate social media and, indeed, the Internet.

I don't think the medium is the fault, but when you're angry and on the telephone or in-person, when tensions get hot, if it truly is a misunderstanding, it's something that usually gets successfully sorted out after a few minutes.

when you're angry and online, and lack impulse control, and don't want to look like the bad guy publicly to hundreds of people, you might wind up going on the offensive and keep typing hurtful things, extending your fight-or-flight reaction to where regret has no chance to set in.

I think most people don't fall into this trap because their predilection is "ok, this has a potential to go bad, let me call so-and-so and prevent things from going south", but there are some who just seem to enjoy having their little battles out in public. idgi really.

she has family in Ukraine and is very worried about them so can we not make jokes about death marches

We recently had a pretty big tornado tear through our city, coming way too close to my mother's house.

Talking on the phone about all the damage last night with her, and she proclaimed that the whole neighborhood looked like Ukraine now!

I winced a little, but then had the warm thought of a Ukranian looking at a bombed-out office building, thinking, "Goddamm, we must look like Arkansas now!"

Watching the essential oils Christians I grew up with devolve from Paleo and CrossFit to COVID denial/anti-vax to Blue Lives Matter to Q-adjacent shit was fascinating, like a nature documentary on the lives and mating habits of white evangelicals.

Then I blocked them all.

Tornado has unfollowed you on facebook

like a nature documentary on the lives and mating habits of white evangelicals

(David Attenborough voice)

"Behold the alpha male displaying his Ford pickup truck. He hopes to attect the attention of a female, whilst also discouraging other, less dominant males whose trucks are less resplendent and not as accessorized."

Neanderthal otm. The fact that there's always an implied audience in particular raises the stakes imo.

Neanderthal OTM, yeah (as well as many others).

Not just FB per se, but … I just don’t think this many minds are really meant to be squeezed together on a social media platform. It isn’t necessarily healthy for humanity.

I’ve been on FB since 2011 and it’s been instructive to watch people grow up through trial and error (and also to grow up *myself*) in terms of interacting with people and kind of checking myself as to whether or not my comments or thoughts are really always necessary. Sometimes you just keep scrolling, or mute someone for a month, or unfriend, or whatever. And a firestorm is avoided, mental energy and emotion conserved.

A lot of people have just left social media - the combative and the mild alike. And as I’ve gotten older, my impulse has been to communicate more frequently with people in real life (remember that?) or singly or in small groups via text or DM, when I have an opinion that’s barbed or need some specific feedback about something. The whole world doesn’t always need to know why I had a bad day or a bad week (or even if I’ve had a good day or a good week).

Saw this last night, a new low?

https://i.imgur.com/xGO5U2E.png

(narrator: I saw plenty of posts from friends, and I never see ads on FB nor anywhere else)

what the hell is this

Sign up for Meta Verified on the web and get all the same benefits at a discount, including a verified badge.

I enjoy the byproduct of FB that is two strangers ripping into each other on a post about a local event and a friend who somehow knows both people intervening so the other two don't kill each other IRL

Most of my posts in this thread are about how much I hate Facebook and hate that I've let it become part of my life, so I'm really loathe to defend it in any context. But god it's nauseating to watch Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham get all self-righteous for the cameras in that hearing today. "You have blood on your hands" says Trump/Jan. 6 apologist Lindsay Graham to the approval of the room.

you don't have to watch that! you and i and everyone except the new york times knows that it's just playacting. don't do it!

that said, the part with tom cotton doggedly asking the singaporean guy if he was a commie spy who approved of tiananemen square was . . . really something

I wasn't watching, I just caught it on the news. (If I had been watching, though, I'd say so--I hate the supercilious "Why are you watching this?" posting on ILX.)

what hearing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCB-SQJLr9E

what does he apologise for

Anyone else find themselves inundated with unwanted "Reels and short videos?" Every time I hide them and ask for fewer of them, but they're never not there. Complaining via help and support is pointless, of course.

Reels seems to be a big part of FB's business strategy right now: https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-reels-revenue-narrows-tiktok-boosted-by-ai-2023-07-27/

I'll see if I can talk them into ignoring their marketing strategy to please a retired Canadian grade-school teacher.