iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

Tldr: These are people I would not ever directly call or email, but who I'm not ready to completely drift away from. Don't most people have that category? How do you reach them if not FB?

i don’t, i drift away from them. shit or get off the pot imo

if you really want this instagram does this job too. except way simpler and easier.

If I quit facebook not only would I lose the contacts of tons of acquaintances that fall into that category Puffin pointed out - people whom I'd occasionally see if I was still living in Portugal - but also tons of potential networking connections; not like anyone uses linkedin for that shit im earnest.

Instagram is terrible to communicate with beyond putting a like on someone's picture.

You're using it wrong then.

Much to my chagrin, I probably text more with acquaintances on Insta than I do with my phone number.

oh the messaging's ok, it's the commenting that's shit

I've lived for a while in three countries in different parts of the world, and now live in a city I hadn't even visited until 2014, if it weren't for Facebook I would keep in touch with people by email or sth but that's just not how it goes now, at this point it is a struggle to stay in touch with anyone beyond family and colleagues, It's a bad thing and it makes me unhappy.

Do y'all actually keep in touch with these people though? As in actually exchange messages with them (including relying to a post). Or do you just see their posts / know you could contact them if you wanted to?

I quit FB six years ago not because they facilitated genocide and collaborate with fascists or other political reasons or their relentlessly terrible data privacy policies—seriously, gtfo with this being comparable to "I don't even own a TV"—but because I had grown tired of it due to having to use it at a job. I left that job and pretty much never used my account, yet people assumed I was seeing posts & events there because they could tag me or whatever. It has worked much better being one of YMP's "two friends," and besides in my world of variously aged people no one talks about FB anymore. It's been years since anyone expressed surprise that I don't have an account. You'd have to kidnap me to get me to a high school reunion though, so I guess ymmv

Yeah, I comment on stuff occasionally, give the customary birthday wishes, order shit when I see an acquaintance has a new thing out.

I mean, some? But lots of people don't bother posting anything these days so it's a moot point. Feels like a holding pen, people who have deactivated their accounts I have lost touch with entirely, maybe they don't care.

i don’t, i drift away from them. shit or get off the pot imo

That's a valid way to be and live, of course; I guess I admire the purity in this approach. But it doesn't work for everyone.

i would like to quit instagram but where else will i see pictures of pottery and people doing that pelvic tilt stomach exercise

pinterest and pornhub?

less pottery on pornhub than you would expect tbh

"Unchained Melody" intensifies

thanks to 3 30-day bans in a short period of time, I'm realizing when I can't post to FB, I don't have any desire to read it, and just use Messenger to talk to friends and.....it just *feels* better.

that I wound up going to Twitter for a bit kind of cancels it out but it really feels like a fucking detox, taking a break from this place.

flipside - people actually msg you thinking you're depressed or deceased when u don't post for a while and didn't tell them yr banned.

through Messenger I did find out TWO of my high school friends are getting divorced....within a 5 minute span....so FB still sux.

barely a month back on, and I got banned for 30 days again for quoting Dawn of the Dead in a thread specifically about Dawn of the Dead.

I quoted the doctor saying "they must be shot on sight" in response to someone doing the "dummies" quote, and someone on my profile reported it as incitement to violence and FB agreed and upheld on appeal.

truly worthless website. i'll enjoy another vacay.

deleted my account five years ago and there hasn't been a single solitary second when i was like "damn i wish i still had a facebook account"

it's been about 4.5 years for me as well. was shortly after trump lost by a few million votes (in 2016, i mean, not 2020)

most of my posts lately had just been sharing COVID-19 hospitalization/case stats updates for friends anyway but yeah you're not missing much.

most of my actual friends I just message on messenger anyway.

i really do echo clay's assertion though - it's not something you would think about afterward. you'd adapt. i'm still on instagram by the way (obv, but just in case people don't know, owned by facebook). it's not heaven or anything, but it is not facebook

i'm with you KM

i have been edging closer to ditching IG too tbh

i'm back in the instagram game because so many artists are on it, and the medium/format/platform of ig is actually pretty compatible with that****

****in some ways. in some ways, it's horrible for art and especially for time-based mediums like film and sound. forcing the world into portrait mode on their phones rather than landscape was a bold move. anything that involves as an important element is also screwed, because people don't have sound on half the time (🔉sound on!🔉) and even if they do, they're probably listening to it through tiny phone speakers, or in a loud place. but for photos and paintings and images and stuff like that, it's pretty good

anything that involves ^^sound^^ as an important element is also screwed,

my (not really) post-pandemic fomo has been so bad that i had to reduce my instagram usage to near zero

you're missing my haircut instagram stories. RIVETING.

Clearly, you should make people upload a schematic of their video and audio setups before you decide whether they deserve to view your content or not

"you mean, you don't even have a process?!"

Sorry, Karl, I can't really read that post due to compression artifacts.

You're going to have upload it in a lossless format (pm me for the ftp information) thxbye

i will what it takes to expand my network and make new connections that could lead to personal success

goddammit

my fb account has been disabled for no reason and unfortunately since facebook is irreparably broken i can't recover it because they believe i've requested "too many sms codes"; this would be fine if my instagram weren't also disabled

not that i want to be on either platform that much but it's just annoying

Be grateful.

How is this God damn website so popular when every experience of it is anti-human. Sometimes I think it’s just AIs and bots talking to each other and clicking on each other’s videos and pages.

the food is terrible
yeah, and such small portions

Be grateful.

― Porking level G4 (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, September 21, 2021 7:58 AM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol, i mean, i am, but even though i barely use them now i kind of like to have my facebook and instagram accounts up just so my mom doesn't worry about me

also they disabled my account because of something i didn't do, so i'm like freaked out about that additionally

would prefer to delete facebook and instagram on my own terms instead of there being some inexplicable suggestion that i violated community standards

that i can't contest, because the website is irreparably broken

https://www.politicalorphans.com/something-weird-is-happening-on-facebook

"What are those accounts and why do they matter? It isn’t clear and there’s no definite pattern. A lot them are, for lack of a better term, squirrelly. They seem to be “promoter accounts,” generating dozens of posts of day consisting mostly of spam. Some are offshore. A few appear to be ordinary people. Why these tagged accounts deliver such huge impact is unclear, but the results are impressive. How this works is murky, but it’s clear that someone has found a way to gain absolutely stellar reach for these apparent spam posts. What they have in common is help from affiliate networks."

No

This hearing is extraordinary.

Side note: “Despite being battered by lawmakers all morning, Facebook seems unaffected. Since the hearing began, its share price has risen 2 percent to roughly $332 and continues to push upward.”

if anything, i'm sure investors are heartened by facebook's turn from the 'zuck apology era' to the 'nameless guys in suits who don't give a fuck era'. seems better for business

the whistleblower also said she doesn't think FB should be broken up

facebook: arguably worst than tobacco

You’ve probably seen the latest controversy about Facebook/Instagram leading vulnerable teenagers to anorexia, fat-shaming content that seems almost designed to send teenage girls and some boys into spirals of self-loathing and unsafe behaviors. What jumps out to me about this latest controversy is that most people still don’t grasp that things like this are close to inevitable because of what Facebook is. It’s foundational to the product. It is not surprising.

Let me explain. First, set aside all morality. Let’s say we have a 16 year old girl who’s been doing searches about average weights, whether boys care if a girl is overweight and maybe some diets. She’s also spent some time on a site called AmIFat.com. Now I set you this task. You’re on the other side of the Facebook screen and I want you to get her to click on as many things as possible and spend as much time clicking or reading as possible. Are you going to show her movie reviews? Funny cat videos? Homework tips? Of course, not. If you’re really trying to grab her attention you’re going to show her content about really thin girls, how their thinness has gotten them the attention of boys who turn out to really love them, and more diets. If you’re clever you probably wouldn’t start with content that’s going to make this 16 year old feel super bad about herself because that might just get her to log off. You’ll inspire or provoke enough negative feelings to get clicks and engagement without going too far.

Now you may be saying: But Josh, I would never do that. I’m not a sociopath. But that’s irrelevant. You’re just saying you’ll refuse to participate in the experiment. We both know what you’d do if you were operating within the goals and structure of the experiment.

This is what artificial intelligence and machine learning are. Facebook is a series of algorithms and goals aimed at maximizing engagement with Facebook. That’s why it’s worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It has a vast army of computer scientists and programmers whose job it is to make that machine more efficient. The truth is we’re all teen girls and boys about some topic. Maybe the subject isn’t tied as much to depression or self-destructive behavior. Maybe you don’t have the same amount of social anxiety or depressive thoughts in the mix. But the Facebook engine is designed to scope you out, take a psychographic profile of who you are and then use its data compiled from literally billions of humans to serve you content designed to maximize your engagement with Facebook.

Put in those terms, you barely have a chance.

Of course, Facebook can come in and say, this is damaging so we’re going to add some code that says don’t show this dieting/fat-shaming content but girls 18 and under. But the algorithms will find other vulnerabilities. Not long ago I read an article about researchers at Instagram experimenting with prompts that looked for people like our hypothetical 16 year old above who is spiraling on damaging content and said, ‘Is Instagram making your feel bad about yourself. Would you like take a break from Instagram for a while?’

That’s a great thing. The algorithms can be taught to find and address an infinite numbers of behaviors. But really you’re asking the researchers and programmers to create an alternative set of instructions where Instagram (or Facebook, same difference) jumps in and does exactly the opposite of its core mission, which is to drive engagement. And where does that line get drawn? What’s if it’s just a 35 man who needs to lose ten pounds and Weight Watchers wants to show him an ad? Is that okay? Maybe you’re helping him. What if I’m just spending a bit too much money on miscellaneous items I see advertised on Facebook? Do I also get a pause prompt?

Slippery slope arguments are almost all bad arguments. You make reasonable decisions on their merits. Life is about weighing factors and making decisions. Reductios ad adsurdum make everything stupid. But why exactly are you creating a separate group of subroutines that yanks Facebook back when it does what it’s supposed to do particularly well? This, indeed, was how the internal dialog at Facebook developed, as described in the article I read. Basically, other executives said: Our business is engagement, why are we suggesting people log off for a while when they get particularly engaged?

That’s an interesting debate within Facebook. But what it makes me think about more is the conversations at Tobacco companies 40 or 50 years ago. At a certain point you realize: our product is bad. If used as intended it causes lung cancer, heart disease and various other ailments in a high proportion of the people who use the product. And our business model is based on the fact that the product is chemically addictive. Our product is getting people addicted to tobacco so that they no longer really have a choice over whether to buy it. And then a high proportion of them will die because we’ve succeeded.

So what to do? The decision of all the companies, if not all individuals, was just to lie. What else are you going to do? Say we’re closing down our multi-billion dollar company because our product shouldn’t exist?

You can add filters and claim you’re not marketing to kids. But really you’re only ramping back the vast social harm marginally at best. That’s the product. It is what it is.

It can be hard to take seriously the comparison between tobacco and Facebook. We know the horrible illness and social toll of tobacco. I go on Facebook and I just see what my old high school classmates are doing living lives of quiet desperation. Surely this can’t be equivalent. But whether or not it’s ‘as bad’ there is definitely an analogy inasmuch as what you’re talking about here aren’t some glitches in the Facebook system. These aren’t some weird unintended consequences that can be ironed out of the product. It’s also in most cases not bad actors within Facebook. It’s what the product is. The product is getting attention and engagement against which advertising is sold. You use algorithms and machine learning to figure out how to keep you engaged with Facebook as much as possible. How good is the machine learning? Well, trial and error with between 3 and 4 billion humans makes you pretty damn good. That’s the product. It is inherently destructive, though of course the bad outcomes aren’t distributed evenly throughout the human population.

The business model is to refine this engagement engine, getting more attention and engagement and selling ads against the engagement. Facebook gets that revenue and the digital roadkill created by the product gets absorbed by the society at large. Facebook is like a spectacularly profitable nuclear energy company which is so profitable because it doesn’t build any of the big safety domes and dumps all the radioactive waste into the local river.

What’s so damaging about Facebook is that there’s no willfully bad person doing this. That’s just what the product is. And in the various articles describing internal conversations at Facebook, the shrewder executives and researchers seem to get this. For the company if not every individual they seem to be following the tobacco companies’ lead.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dont-be-surprised-about-facebook-and-teen-girls-thats-what-facebook-is

there’s no willfully bad person doing this

i can think of one

Twitter's not exempt from this critique

absolutely

but it's not like there are a dozen different tobacco companies marketing to kids

zuck absolutely has the ability to affect change; he chooses not to

jack is just a shitposter riding in the wake of not doing anything

While it’s good to have attention focused on the shitty FB practices and I’m hopeful that we may see some positive change, I’m bracing myself for the far likelier outcome that any action Congress actually takes will be dumb, not address any of the very real problems and will have negative consequences for the internet well beyond just FB.

everybody should stop using facebook and use instagram instead, in the meantime

just kidding about the latter part, although i use instagram

I unironically like my Instagram feed (friends+bands+architecture+animals) but any time I've looked at the recommendations page it's an absolute cesspool of hustle life and sub-fuckjerry/right-wing meme pages.