iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

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.

um

Facebook told employees on Tuesday that it’s developing a tool to summarize news articles so users won’t have to read them.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-news-article-summary-tools-brain-reader

congratulations facebook, you invented headlines

lmao

On Facebook, protesters had openly discussed what they aimed to do in Washington on a Facebook page called Red-State Secession for weeks. The page had asked its roughly 8,000 followers to share addresses of perceived “enemies” in the nation’s capital, including the home addresses of federal judges, members of Congress and prominent progressive politicians.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/technology/violence-election-capitol-hill-social-media.html

One of my friends had her account hacked. The hacker then changed the profile pic to....a pic of someone else. Then wrote my friend (who created a new profile) demanding a payment of a large sum to get the profile back.

Then attempted to make a ton of purchases using Facebook Pay (which were blocked).

A bunch of us reported the profile.

Their trained goons stated this was not a case of fraud/impersonation and didn't violate community standards.

...

So apparently the reason the request was declined was because my friend needed to report her account as hacked, which is a separate flow that isn't advertised, that takes two or three clicks to find.

And my friend, who is computer illiterate, refuses to do it because she insists she can't because she doesn't have access to her account, she's locked out.

Beyond the fact that it wouldn't make any design sense to require you to log into an account to report that it's been hacked and that you can't get into it, friends can't report on her behalf, so her account is going to stay hacked because she's stubborn and computer illiterate, plus FB's security is awful.

(she doesn't have to be able to log in but like that Stuwall thread, no way we explain that to her works).

I've got half a dozen FB friends with two or more accounts because they didn't know how to recover a hacked or lost login. Sometimes I get notifications to send a birthday message to three versions of the same person.

There must be millions of similar accounts floating around.

I opened one up a FB account 10 years ago just to harvest votes for my entry in a NAS photography competition, never really used it since. Although when I went back on it one day to contact an old friend there was a 3 year old unread message from him asking if I fancied going for a drink.

the murky world of vote swapping/purchasing for online competitions was quite an eye-opener. Some cheating fuckers pay click factories for votes by the thousand.

and once I did a vote swap with someone where the link they sent me was a trojan, then my laptop slowed down considerably and they started describing the pic on my wallpaper to me in detail and what browsers I used to terrorise me. Things like that and realising most the people I know from work at the time generally just post bigoted memes about eastern European people and benefit scroungers, it made realise that it wasn't for me.

Like many of you, I hate Facebook. I never post anything there and I basically only keep my account to keep some sort of connection with people that live far outside my other circles.

For example, yesterday I noticed that I hadn't heard from an old (~20 yrs) IRL friend of mine for over 3 months. She was living across the world (8500 miles) from me where Facebook is a bigger deal and part of her social circle. So I click on her FB profile and notice on her most recent post that there had been a an unusally large amount of comments... 100+ where there normally would be ~10.

In the comments was the announcement of her death (sudden yet natural causes) and her funeral which had occurred in November, and dozens of tributes and memorials.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon & evening very confused and sad as my friend was in her early 40s and pretty healthy.

But the fact that the only way I would have found out about this in real time was if I had happened to be online around the time of these announcements and the FB algo made sure to ping me that something was up, for all of that to happen and me to luck into it by chance, it absolutely infuriates me.

Anyways my point besides Facebook being terrible, is to also check in on your friends who FB is your major connection with and find an alternate way to keep tabs on each other.

Sorry to hear about that.

This is not anything like that, but I'm spooked these days by what seems like diminished activity by almost everyone I know. Is anyone else experiencing this? Common sense tells me it's the pandemic--people are tired, worried, etc. The paranoid part of me worries about I'm not even sure what. It's not just that my own posts don't get much response--I'm used to that. It's that hardly anybody I know posts anymore. Used to be I'd go out for an hour or two and there'd be a message or two when I got back and five notifications of new posts. Hardly anybody posts anymore. Maybe it's something to do with my settings or algorithms or something else--I know Facebook has its own inscrutable system. But it's unnerving.

This thread is about Facebook, not ILX.

"This thread is about Facebook, not your whole life" would have worked just as well for me.