iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

friends with phds are the worst, either you see them taking all these bullshit psych quizzes, or liking upworthy content, or spamming activist bait to everyone they know, or you DON'T ever see them post ANYTHING in sync w/ their supposedly elevated intellectual life and then it's like oh you're all just schmucks like everyone else collectin a paycheck and watching downton abbey or cooking competition shows or w/e

― j., Monday, February 23, 2015 9:00 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what i've heard from a few is facebook is how they "wind down" and "zone out". so, that's the thing, there is a preconceived notion that social media is supposed to be this time waster and just mindless thing anyway, so people freely partake in it in such a way

I was kind of sad when everybody quit Myspace to go to Facebook, I kind of liked the (often obnoxious) "welcome to my groovy pad" thing going on at Myspace, complete with wallpaper & some song playing.

Facebook is like everybody deciding to hang out in the food court at a mall for the rest of their lives.

tumblr, twitter obv the worst obv

Not obvious at all.

(mind you I am done for good with social-networking-with-friends - my friendships will last longer without it)

snapchat the actual worst

oh its obv

its real obv

w/out tumblr tho how would the world know about otherkin?

My only ish with The Web Today is the folding-up of message boards. Most of my online activity through my 20s is gone, boards deleted and caches missing. Not saying it was worthwhile content but it's like having your scrapbooks thrown out

One thing I've noticed from being friends with a lot of ilxors is that a lot of the conversations that used to happen on ILX now just happen in people's facebook posts

― 龜, Monday, February 23, 2015 11:21 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm surprised this is true. but i guess i shouldn't be, because i look at facebook so rarely. i don't know what people do on it. do you all really talk to each other on fb?

when it comes down to it i'm much more fond of an older internet (and ilx) because i'm a private person. but i still like reading things and mulling them over. the idea of being on FB or twitter with my real name and being all hey the oscars suck or jeez what is up with isis, give it a rest over there, is just gross to me, 'curated' groups of ppl or not.

personally speaking i talk to ilxors much more now on fb (more chat than wall posts) than i do on ilx

hey the oscars suck or jeez what is up with isis, give it a rest over there

are you sure you haven't been looking just a little

phd = becoming an expert in killing time while appearing to be doing something else, so yet my years of posts to ilx are a great example of this.

I think I joined Facebook and ILX around the same time (eleven years or so ago...jesus). Almost everyone I know personally is on Facebook but I've basically diverted all time and attention I used to spend on Facebook to a site where I know no one personally. That might be what I actually want from the internet, honestly.

when i was in grad school i already noticed that a lot of grad students were majoring in their own identities and there wasn't a whole lot of original research going on - i can only imagine that trend has increased (nb i was in a trendy NYC humanities program so i probably saw the worst of the worst there) xp

it's like being the guy at the coffeeshop who is perennially on the first page of some ostentatious tome but making it your entire failed-career identity.

what i was trying to say way back at the top of the thread: i see facebook as the foremost example of a form of internet discourse in which we are way overexposed to one another. i think normal or healthy relationships with others requires a kind of opposite of intimacy--some formality or distance or something which puts a barrier between you and every passing thought of the other person. this is why almost everyone is annoying on twitter (me included). it's not quite noise out there, it would be easy to ignore if it was, but it introduces a lot of information into our relations with others that we are probably better off without.

Last year there was a death in the family and a cousin put up a fb memorial page, my mother who has never been online was relaying it to me she said "They have put a memorial on that e-bay, they don't print them in the paper any more ".

From what I have seen of fb I will probably never go on it, there are too many people from my past who I would cross the road to avoid and it looks like a stalker app.

A psychopath I went to school with used fb to groom victims, he was pretending to be a recovering alcoholic to garner sympathy and hooked in this poor lass into some horror relationship that ended in her being hospitalised. The same (middle aged) guy tried to chat up my 12 year old niece on fb, I was really pissed when my sis wouldn't get the police involved.

Last year there was a death in the family and a cousin put up a fb memorial page, my mother who has never been online was relaying it to me she said "They have put a memorial on that e-bay, they don't print them in the paper any more ".

<3 this so much. my mother persistently thinks lol means lots of love so i got a text from her saying, 'dad started chemo today lol'

dying

i think one thing about facebook - at least i never see it - is that ppl in no way for whatever reason take it as a place where they can talk about 'what facebook is about'. like it's this weird combination of being completely out of their control, because of course lol the facebook corp making everything happen and owning everything, but also completely in their control, because it's all from the perspective of you and your feed and your posts and your pictures and your likes. people get in eruptive little skirmishes about people's content flooding them, or more pertinently, people commenting up some bullshit on their own posts, but that doesn't lead to disputes about the meaning of the medium - just defriending, unfollowing, etc.

whereas at least on twitter there's all kinds of convos about ~what it means~ that they're tweeting. (as on ilx)

points to a pernicious side effect of so much of the internet being mediated thru facebook (trending links etc) now

twitter users are constantly stuck on ~what everything means~ when I'm in charge they'll be mass culled

imo what Facebook has declined a lot from just a place to kick it virtually with your friends to everybody posting dogshit links for lols and BIG IMPORTANT MESSAGES, which of course, can easily be boiled down to a GIF.

But Facebook largely helped me become more sociable - due to the event postings, yes, but also had a few relationships start there. with people I already knew, mind you, but it gave me more of a window to communicate with them (no longer had to fill up my personal email box!).

there have also been occasions I've made friends on FB and then wound up meeting them irl not long after, and a few times rekindled old high school friendships or given me the ability to hang out with friends from junior high who are still in town (which happened once!). Not that I'm in the habit of looking backwards, I barely hang out with people that I knew pre-age 25, but y'know...not deleting my account anytime soon, just not reading as much.

yeah i'd gladly not talk to the wall anymore but the event postings seem to be essential if you want to know what's going on at nonstandard venues

<3 this so much. my mother persistently thinks lol means lots of love so i got a text from her saying, 'dad started chemo today lol'

― estela, Monday, February 23, 2015 2:12 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dying

― flopson, Monday, February 23, 2015 2:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...

I have slowly unfollowed everyone and facebook is now a bonobos or shave box sponsored self-maintaining birthday calendar, which is actually very useful.

still in denial over fb. I miss usenet.

>on February 24, 2015
>ogmor said:
>still in denial over fb. I miss usenet.

Word

despite the deluge of opinions & the decline of ~websites~ & anonymity, overall I think the internet is probably better than it was. the gulf in quantity between now and 2000 is huge

I do miss the ideal of surfing the web tho, the notion of individual curiosity & wanderlust without algorithmic mediation. all the big social sites have stripped away idiosyncratic structure and design & replaced it with content in homogeneous form

tildes ruined the internet

where is your website i want to sign the guestbook

oh that's right. it is on the ~cloud~.

did you ever see this site ogmor

http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/

I do miss the ideal of surfing the web tho, the notion of individual curiosity & wanderlust without algorithmic mediation. all the big social sites have stripped away idiosyncratic structure and design & replaced it with content in homogeneous form

― ogmor, Monday, February 23, 2015 7:49 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is OTM, maybe more for the "do you miss the 'old' internet" thread but I agree, the idea of really poking through some website you find, where the person's hierarchy of information is really weirdly weighted and lopsided and some sections have one article in them and others have forty subsections with amazing chewy stuff buried deep, this is really gone. there's not much that's exploratory about the web, you just receive stuff. goes hand in hand with nobody having personal websites at all (or even the personalization of myspace pages) or more to the point - - - when was the last time you actually read somebody's facebook "profile"? in the sense of the part where you have your favorite quotes or whatever... what would have been the core not only of a "website" but of a social network page in the friendster/myspace era.

i guess that still exists as a meaningful thing in okcupid pages and such. but it's the one "slow" thing about the whole site, in that it has this longer existence, less ephemeral, you actually exist as a being rather than one of countless cloud-entities cropping up here or there in this comment thread or that re-share. and this is completely buried: you have to go to "about" and then "details about you." everything else just gets washed away immediately. i dislike this about facebook, but i'm not sure how much is also just resentment at the loss, long ago, of all the stuff i had on friendster and myspace. so many emails that just don't exist anymore at all. it's a bummer. my facebook profile i haven't updated since 2009 by the looks of it.

not exactly facebook's fault, but imo the web is a better (for users) platform for . . . content . . . than aol/facebook/snapchat/apps/etc and it kinda seems like fb led the way back into the walled gardens of aol

http://www.theawl.com/2015/02/the-next-internet-is-tv

that said, i only go on facebook when i'm horribly drunk and have exhausted other avenues of intertainment, which is rare. i'd delete my account, but there's an off-chance that someone will invite me to something on it despite my persistent failure to attend previous events

well ya never know

tbf, my inability to leave the house is not facebook's fault

xp nakh-
no, but I am charmed by it, the borgean index especially. the cheerful aphorism-laced mish mash reminds me of early internet days in a few ways bc it also reminds me of my childhood home, chatting to my dad & skimming my parents books. not sure if the peculiar crossover between weightier scholarly subject matter and lighter internet-facilitated browsing goes wider than my own experience but it is a way of thinking + feeling that I hadn't thought about for a long time

I do miss the ideal of surfing the web tho, the notion of individual curiosity & wanderlust without algorithmic mediation. all the big social sites have stripped away idiosyncratic structure and design & replaced it with content in homogeneous form

i feel you on this but there's something i've always wondered like... i get the demand side, why all most people want out of the internet is the homogenized big social media version and how that ends up being most of what we see, but what's up with the supply side? where did all the people creating idiosyncratic content go? are they still out there and no one is reading?

i mean i guess 1 answer is i'm making a huge oversimplifying assumption by calling the internet in 2015 homogenized

lots of people are making idiosyncratic content within the given social media ie being youtube millionaires or whatever

It had always sucked. But then our parents got on it. Doomed.

idiosyncratic content is different from idiosyncratic structure tho.

I think there is a heaviness to the internet now, the constant sense of tonnes of content, going back in timelines or peeking at you on sidebars

the advantage of the big sites is being able to search and filter them; searching youtube for "my first vlog" newest first, daniel lopatin's idea of having a hootsuite stream or w/e for "working on my novel" etc.

The internet surfing conditions have never been better imo. Just spend a day with archive.org! There's so much stuff there. Don't let the howlies on upworthy get you down.

I'm sure this point's been made by now, but I think it's had a negative effect on life, never mind the internet. (Mine, anyway.)

you monsters

with every post you get one step closer to becoming a harvester of sorrow

*FB post