iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

that’s fine with me if they stay (barely) profitable

counterpoint: every Facebook executive should be jailed for 90 years for their deliberate program of sabotaging democracy and destroying journalism

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xp ^

My dad is holding out, refusing to engage w the internet at all and I respect his decision.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Saturday, January 11, 2020 8:09 AM bookmarkflaglink

It’s somewhat difficult to communicate w him but that’s the only real issue it has caused.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Saturday, January 11, 2020 8:10 AM bookmarkflaglink

the internet doesn't make dads easier to communicate with tbh

lol

lol true

i've only got the one and tbf it has never been easy

someone I'm "friends" with on Facebook, for his birthday, posted a form that lets people give him anonymous feedback

"Stop posting"

"Did Antman crawl up Thanos's ass?"

In 2016, an internal report found that 64% of people who joined an extremist Facebook group found it through the company’s recommendation algorithms https://t.co/2XSFUiNST8 pic.twitter.com/RzY1eb4ni9

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) May 26, 2020

I got locked out of it over the weekend and found it very isolating not being able to see what friends are doing (even when all they were doing were posting pictures with no descriptions).

on the one hand, it's doing great things for BLM right now, because when the next protest is, what bail funds/other organizations are good to donate to, the latest news is hitting my feed and helping quite a bit.

on the other hand, literally everybody else is sharing a gif meme about your gif meme about their gif meme being a bad gif meme is in fact a bad gif meme....

...or being racist

the only person i know who ever mentions interacting w/ facebook is my mom

if you've seen these tweets...

Top-performing posts on Facebook today (link posts only, ranked by interactions, data from @crowdtangle) are from:

1. Donald J. Trump
2. Franklin Graham
3. Fox News
4. Fox News
5. Ben Shapiro
6. Ben Shapiro
7. Ben Shapiro
8. Blue Lives Matter
9. Occupy Democrats
10. Sean Hannity

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) June 16, 2020

interesting background...

—@CaseyNewton reports that @kevinroose's tweets showing the top content on Facebook — most often from right-wing pages — have "been driving people at Facebook absolutely crazy." https://t.co/FLc92TLKMV

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) July 22, 2020

the lack of effort on the latest Facebook interface is mind-boggling.

there are two big bugs I've discovered, and frankly that's probably a fraction as I don't spend as much time on there anymore.

1) when selecting your audience, there are random friends from your friends list who will not show up in a search when you do it on a computer. it will say "not found". when you pull FB up on your phone and edit the audience, those friends magically re-appear.

2) When doing a Feeling or Activity, the activities only have 4 choices on the computer. If you do it on your phone, you have about 4 times as many, including Listening, which I used to use the most.

3) I couldn't even change my profile picture the other day. It kept returning a 'try again later' message. Worked instantly on my phone.

on the plus side, this just makes me use it less.

probably to encourage you to use it on your phone, which they can steal much more useful data from than a stationary computer?

probably, yea

it's aight, I just use other ilxor's data anyway when I sign up for things

was it in this thread that someone recommended unfollowing everybody for an empty feed? seems facebook broke that function recently

My account has been mothballed for about two years. I just went in to permanently delete and got given a bunch of 'options' to verify myself: call three friends and get a code from them or upload a passport photo. FFS.

i've noticed a thing it sometimes does where the box i'm trying to write a comment into appears as a single line, so i can't see what i've written without hitting up or down

love how we're now just getting phantom notifications because one frequently-interacted with friend comments on another friend's post that you didn't even look at, really great way to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio there.

think it happens mostly when they don't have anything else to show you, it's a "wait, come back!" manouevre.

it's the same on twitter btw, seeing responses from ppl you follow to a tweet by someone you don't follow

frankly shocking display of ... sorta doing their job for once

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/05/facebook-takes-down-stop-the-steal-2020-group-organizing-around-false-claims-of-election-chicanery/

Is there anything really singular about facebook? I deleted my account around the time of the 2016 election, mostly cause it was starting to feel a lot like following hundreds of random tumblr pages. I might as well have packed my things and moved into a cave, of course. No doubt fb wanted me to have to sift through more viral garbage to find the few posts authored by friends in order to keep me on the site longer, but I remember feeling like they were deliberately trying to make the interface more like twitter some years prior. facebook mainly excels at imitating other platforms that threaten to overtake its popularity as far as i can tell.

Is there anything really singular about facebook?

Yes. It allows me to control my relationships with friends and family at very precise closeness levels.

There are some people I only want to interact with at arm's length - at the level of an annual holiday card or Christmas letter (back when people did those things).

We went to high school together, we have some shared history, I don't mind keeping in vague touch with you at a strict informational level. Wow, you moved. You had a kid. You got a puppy. You're doing macrame now. Great. Then I move on with my day and I don't need to have a face to face interaction or a phone conversation that gets steadily more awkward until one of us needs to make an excuse to hang up.

For a while lot of people in my life, that's exactly the right amount of contact. Not too much or too little.

Further, I can create several other highly customized levels of engagement - people with whom I will share goofy music jokes with, but not politics.

People with whom I will talk politics but not music.

People with whom I will talk pets but not books.

People with whom I will talk kids but not pets.

My closest friends? I will always have them and always have ways of finding. Facebook is really good for interacting with this whole huge penumbral group of people who aren't BFFs but aren't strangers either.

Ymmv - if it isn't something you need or value, fine.

That's interesting. I always found fb fairly pointless/useless for interacting with people i know irl. Most of my correspondence through it was with people I met on nessageboards, etc, kinda to the opposite effect you describe of decompartmentalizing online relationships that were compartmentalized by interest.
We went to high school together, i forgot that you exist tbh.

To answer the original question the rise of e-commerce was what made the internet grating for me, probably.

It made that whole thing of avoiding confrontations with right-wing relatives in other countries who i get along with fine in person on the rare occasions we see each other much more difficult, come to think if it.

Is there anything really singular about facebook?

they're a right-wing psyop that actively tried (and has been very effective at) destroying journalism and undermining democracy

I guess this is the blind people and the elephant. You're seeing political / news / information / opinion / journalism on it, and being outraged. You feel the tusks and say "this animal is like a spear."

Maybe I'm lucky or have done a good job choosing and manipulating what to see, I dunno. I mostly just see kids, cats, aunts. And I mostly just share what my kids are up to, what my cats are doing, etc.

I do see political content but have bubbled it successfully so that it's just people I already know I agree with. On the rare occasion that I want to say something that reflects my politics I can restrict it such that it's among people I trust.

And before you say it, YES, I understand that this also means that right-wingers and nazis and Q fans can also bubble such that they see only the stuff that they agree with and that whips them up i to a partisan froth. But 1. They would be doing that anyway, regardless of the platform.

And 2. This is not even remotely new. Journalism started with rival partisan newspapers, and there is a rich tradition of partisan-aligned information sources. People choosing to bubble. See Hearst etc.

I studied journalism and worked as a journalist for many years; if anything "objectivity" is a recent invention and illusory to boot.

we should bring back rival partisan newspapers

I guess this is the blind people and the elephant. You're seeing political / news / information / opinion / journalism on it, and being outraged. You feel the tusks and say "this animal is like a spear."

Maybe I'm lucky or have done a good job choosing and manipulating what to see, I dunno. I mostly just see kids, cats, aunts. And I mostly just share what my kids are up to, what my cats are doing, etc.

I do see political content but have bubbled it successfully so that it's just people I already know I agree with. On the rare occasion that I want to say something that reflects my politics I can restrict it such that it's among people I trust.

And before you say it, YES, I understand that this also means that right-wingers and nazis and Q fans can also bubble such that they see only the stuff that they agree with and that whips them up i to a partisan froth. But 1. They would be doing that anyway, regardless of the platform.

And 2. This is not even remotely new. Journalism started with rival partisan newspapers, and there is a rich tradition of partisan-aligned information sources. People choosing to bubble. See Hearst etc.

I studied journalism and worked as a journalist for many years; if anything "objectivity" is a recent invention and illusory to boot.

I do not have a Facebook account and did not mention objectivity

we should bring back rival partisan newspapers

Should we? methinks we have.

Washington Post - establishmentarian centrist accused of being liberal

Washington Times - right-wing with a dash of Moonie weird

Washington City Paper - once a liberal alt-weekly, compromised by consolidation

New York Times - establishmentarian centrist accused of being liberal

New York Post - right-wing with a dash of nationalist/populist weird

Wall Street Journal - come the fuck ON

St. Louis Post-Dispatch - previously center-left, now suborned by right-wing interests due to market consolidation

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - previously center-left, now suborned by right-wing interests due to market consolidation

Richmond Times-Dispatch - previously center-left, now suborned by right-wing interests due to market consolidation

USA Today - gah let's not even go there

those do not seem to be partisan rivals to each othe

r

In Washington, Post and Times are absolutely partisan signifiers.

In New York, Post and Times are likely partisan signifiers.

(But opposite)

https://scontent-lhr8-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t45.1600-4/cp0/q75/spS444/p180x540/121924616_6249331957723_3812299589916061477_n.jpg?_nc_cat=1&ccb=2&_nc_sid=7e83b1&_nc_ohc=uVT5UdJHSboAX8noCu4&_nc_ht=scontent-lhr8-1.xx&oh=0663ab186cf414fae413e7281f3b496f&oe=5FDA1DCF

So this is the sort of shit that Facebook ads are throwing at me now.

if that's the new Wachowski sequel I want no part of it

How it started: How it's going: pic.twitter.com/tg02vKxQlM

— everything bad happening is zuckerberg's fault (@GraceSpelman) November 17, 2020

Wow the FTC is really going for it: calling for Facebook to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp https://t.co/aQqiQwIfNG pic.twitter.com/ySJNZRzrhP

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) December 9, 2020

hell yeah

(like button)

wow.

Wow, that's actually quite shocking!

FB stock down only 2%, I wonder if investors think the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts here.