Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

TV elected Kennedy iirc

xp

twitter is still great for real-time search, sadly

we can replace Twitter's role there with a website that's just "type here if something terrible is happening around you"

let us never forget the short rise and fall of bloopblorp

Neither Twitter nor Facebook is going anywhere imho, they have total network effect - Facebook was the first place where everyone you knew was on it, and it will serve as a way of keeping in touch with people and arranging gigs / parties for decades to come.

And Twitter is what they show on the news, and what elected the US president.

I mean, both of these are a corollary of "the vast majority of people don't give a shit about the stuff that extremely online people give a shit about"

remember when people thought Facebook was going to be around forever and was an indispensable part of modern living

they'll be a shell of a company in 10 years, a zombie like Yahoo

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, November 14, 2018 5:22 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people's memories are on there

Neither Twitter nor Facebook is going anywhere

AOL still exists. Out there. Somewhere.

It is called Verizon

This thread is good

I spoke to @ColorOfChange’s director about Facebook’s reported use of an anti-Semetic smear campaign to undermine their activism. https://t.co/omMP9hhx9f

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) November 15, 2018

There’s something about this Soros story that feels significantly different than the usual Facebook scandal. Most recent negative Facebook stories are issues relating to challenges of scale and a tendency toward passivity.

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) November 15, 2018

most of what i hear about social media is through my co-workers

my spouse finally deactivated their facebook yesterday after spending months not interacting with anybody there and just reading. i guess that's some indication of how hard it is to let go. my boss was talking to me about an unpleasant argument with one of their relatives from the midwest on facebook. i think we have all this ideal of communication and exchange of ideas but there's this creeping realization that nobody is actually listening to each other. losing the pretexts people use to justify using facebook is an important step imo. the addiction is real but the good thing is the more people who quit the easier it becomes to quit, and i don't see facebook managing to reverse the process.

a lot of the youth seem to be gravitating toward instagram, which they think of as a superior alternative to facebook. the ignorance is depressing but i have yet to see the elder generation jumping on board.

twitter is good at getting talked about but in terms of actual usage i don't think it's gotten near the market share of facebook. it seems like everybody is on facebook, whereas twitter just has the loudest people. i do have some friends who insist there are viable uses for it, and of course folks here are tremendously fond of it, but i think it could sink more easily than facebook.

i continue to get most of my information from the feed on my android phone. mostly this is because i have spent several months telling it not to give me any information that isn't today's "nancy" and there's a sunk cost there. eventually something new will come along and it will probably turn out to be as bad as or worse than what we have now, i have no doubt. probably amazon will have something to do with it.

feel like twitter is only for the extremely online and facebook will be increasingly for the olds, like my aunt who still has an aol email address

fb will still have vast reach, but capitalism tends to frown on enterprises that can no longer grow

this is always worth a look: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

hard to see FB dying anytime soon when you also include Messenger, WhatsApp, and IG

if that's accurate it's amazing to think of the inflated media importance Twitter carries over say Tik Tok

i don't even know what tik tok is

yeah it's for the youth
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/5/18009260/tiktok-musically-youtube-challenge-vine

not surprisingly FB wants to devour them: https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/24/facebook-musically-competitor/

what % of Tik Tok users are in China, would be my question

good point. I should have just pointed out that Twitter has almost the same number of users as Reddit

this is the real danger for facebook imo

this sort of seems like a ... correct diagnosis, no? like a gresham's law of social networks, the less normal people trust facebook the crazier it will get? https://t.co/QCnPIuGrEb

— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) November 15, 2018

i haven't read the referenced article because i have twitter blocked on my computer, but i'm not sure gresham's law would apply here - facebook is far more centralized than a site like for instance twitter is, and for extremism to increase there facebook would have to be okay with making extremism their overt business model. i think its particular doom is more likely to look like aol, but hell i can't predict the future

I don’t think there is any evidence at all that Facebook is not ok with making extremism their business model

it's possible. i think there's going to be a fairly significant push for the new house to put them under significant scrutiny. we'll see how facebook manage that challenge - calling us all "anti-semites" will only get them so far, particularly if they're courting the daily stormer's audience at the same time.

what is a doom that looks more like aol? aol has failed in so many different ways over such a long time.

a history of aol's acquisitions reads a bit like the golden state warrior's draft history before steph curry

what is a doom that looks more like aol? aol has failed in so many different ways over such a long time.

― for i, sock in enumerate (Sufjan Grafton), Thursday, November 15, 2018

AOL's failure is kind of like Yahoo!'s -- mostly just failure to admit you caught lightning in a bottle once and you're never ever going to do it again.

Er, Yahoo is the sixth most visited website.

How much of that is because they bought the default search engine slot in Firefox though?

(oh, it's back to Google again now, but for a while they switched to Yahoo)

Er, Yahoo is the sixth most visited website.

The thing I don’t get about this FB scandal is that I’ve literally never seen the effects of it? Like I’ve never seen anyone getting slammed by Soros conspiracy theorists for criticizing Facebook. Am I misunderstanding how this works?

different filter bubble?

maybe it only happened on twitter

the article's a bit vague about it, but I think those Soros theory articles were fed to conservative news sites (e.g., Breitbart)

it wasn't just one conspiracy theory angle, is the deal

it sounds like it was almost all seeded to right-wing sites like beetbort, but the point in that type of campaign isn't to create a compelling single narrative as to why facebook is a net good. it's to cast doubt on facebook critics from as many angles as possible so there's no consensus or allied front that would push for a boycott or punitive legislation. you just want to make anyone who criticizes facebook seem like a crackpot

it sounds like it was almost all seeded to right-wing sites like beetbort, but the point in that type of campaign isn't to create a compelling single narrative as to why facebook is a net good. it's to cast doubt on facebook critics from as many angles as possible so there's no consensus or allied front that would push for a boycott or punitive legislation. you just want to make anyone who criticizes facebook seem like a crackpot

― mh

i'm not sure they're doing a very good job of this tbh

the big problem is that there are still a lot of people using facebook and _none of them like it_

or maybe _some of them don't like it_

_NONE_

even suckerberg seems to have lost his joie de vivre

with his dumbass posts about his stupid wonderful discoveries of life or whatever

never see those anymore

facebook is a self-maintaining birthday calendar that allows me to be as lazy as possible about stupid shit like birthdays. for this, i am eternally grateful.

At some point approx a decade ago I somehow exported the birthdays in FB to my computer's calendar, and I've had it activated ever since. Every now and then I drop someone with whom I have only fairly tenuous attachment a little birthday note - VIA EMAIL - and cackle to myself

they must think you are a birthday genius. i do.

man even Facebook is running ads to say "let's all go back to the time when Facebook was fun"

don't really see companies that have to run ads like that having long term success

domino's is certainly almost bankrupt after using a similar marketing maneuver

coming soon: commercials where people on the street are asked to try a social network, they report that it's really fun and fresh, and then are shocked and amazed to be told they've been using facebook!!

the Dominos thing was "we've always sucked" which is a bit different though similar I must admit

when I sign on to facebook, I want to see a little ticker that says "craig is preparing your facebook feed" below a progress bar.

facebook finally gave me the motivation i needed to start actively ignoring the birthdays of everybody i know, i guess i'm grateful to it for that