iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

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.

My personalized recommendations are generally decent (mostly baby elephants). But it’s weird how quickly liking some random post will lead to right wing memes being thrown in the mix.

Like “Oh you liked a generic meme about the 1980s? Well surely you’d like this post about the EVILS OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY too!”

And then for a couple of days back it started forcing the personal recommendations into my main feed (it used to come at the end after I scrolled to the bottom). I left a really shitty review on the App Store and it stopped. Maybe they made me a Guinea pig for a new feature? Or else I just flipped the switch for maximum addictive potential.

One issue that seems generally glossed over in all this hand-wringing about social media is how Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube (and probably TikTok) appear to be practically purpose-built for bad faith manipulation. I don’t think this is so true for Twitter, mainly because it’s so personality-driven. Much of the manipulation involves claiming a false identity, or a process of radicalization based on shifting claims about identity.

So with the case of the radicalization through recommendations that I described, it’s completely opaque whether this is a bug or a feature. I suspect the latter, but then I’ve spent a lot of time tending my personal paranoia garden lately.

it's kind of really funny that facebook really is going to build a metaverse or whatever, a hundreds of millions of people will willingly walk into it

They built the pyramids

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

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Tuesday, September 21, 2021 7:11 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

update: i contested it, they never got around to reviewing my account, and now my instagram and facebook are permanently disabled

no idea why this happened

That extra sucks. Wtf.

Potentially political? I only ask cause when I tried to post the "We told them it would trickle down roffle" image macro on FB in various formats, it was apparently completely blocked.

i quit facebook a few months ago, but it was mainly to try to pry myself off of the internet in general (i ended up just shifting more of my online time to other online places, similar to when i quit drinking coca-cola and coincidentally started drinking loads of coffee when i was 18). i loathe the way that facebook surveils me and my friends so that they can sell their psychographic profiles to third parties, but that's happening all the time across the internet. i bring a long trail of cookies with me wherever i go. i would feel less fatalistic about the direction of social media/internet it if i thought that it would be regulated appropriately, but i don't share tomboto's optimism on that

― Karl Malone, Wednesday, March 21, 2018 5:32 PM (three years ago)

for those who are still on facebook: what would it take for you to delete your account?

is there a limit to the amount of misuse/selling of your private data that can occur before you've had enough? or is the real issue just that facebook is too useful in certain ways (staying in touch, finding local event invitations, telling everyone you're engaged or pregnant, etc), so you wouldn't delete your account until there's a functional equivalent that you could migrate to?

not trying to be judgmental here. i deleted my account back in january, pre-Cambridge scandal. i was well aware of facebook's shittiness, but i quit because of personal reasons/depression. and i'm still on instagram (owned by facebook), which is probably analyzing all of my images to see what kinds of products i enjoy and where i like to hang out, and connecting all of that to my friends' patterns of behaviors so that some other company can increase the persuasion factor of their advertisements by 1.5%.

i'm digressing, as always. but it's very depressing. we know that something is deeply wrong, but we're also getting used to how all of this works. we lose our privacy and we know we're being manipulated, but we keep allowing them to do it because the product is useful enough to outweigh the abuse. right?

― Karl Malone, Monday, April 9, 2018 12:17 PM (three years ago)

i wish everyone would quit facebook and join are.na. you can search for me there under my name. you create "channels" (general topics, like "minimalism" or "things that look like butts" or "media criticism") which contain "blocks". blocks are links to things, images, files, etc. you can take anyone else's "block" and add it to any of your own channels. you set the privacy level of each channel you make - you can make it private, you can set it to public/closed (which means others can see your channel but can't edit it), or public/open (which means other people can add blocks to it).

it is tiny and awesome and they're not surveilling you. just join in addition to facebook and get used to another place to share things with people that isn't brazenly fucking you over all the time.

it is one of the best 2 sites on the internet

― Karl Malone, Sunday, April 15, 2018 2:40 PM (three years ago)

i know, i know. i own an OUYA. :-/

but i like to try new things and think that it's possible to do better than facebook

― Karl Malone, Sunday, April 15, 2018 5:28 PM (three years ago)

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

just kidding about the latter part, although i use instagram

― typo hell #11: i plan to set-up an even better on in my prospectiv (Karl Malone), Wednesday, October 6, 2021 12:06 AM (two months ago)

well i'm back on facebook

which of your free "welcome back" gifts did you select?

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/breakingbad/images/a/a9/BB_James_Kilkelly.jpg/revision/latest/top-crop/width/360/height/360?cb=20111216184552

i’m pretty close to deleting instagram, which gets me one step closer to being entirely off big tech (apart from uh, my apple ID). whatsapp is the other big one, though. that’s harder to surmount. feels more like a utility than the others and i would have a very hard time doing without it.

facebook i haven’t thought about in years and years apart from what i read in the news.

I check in on Facebook only because my family worries about me if I don't. None of friends or family enjoy it because everyone's nosy old aunt or neighbor or grammar school teacher is also reading their timelines. It's become depressing.

Also what's really awkward is when a school friend posts a tasteless joke and five minutes later your other school friend announces that their brother has just died or something. Having all of these disparate contacts in one place has made a lot of people reticent. No one knows what to post anymore so they just post pictures of food or their dog.

The latest tragicomedy was this week when I damn near permanently crippled myself obtaining a giant bottle of Galliano for my brother. Also dropped the $50 bottle but thankfully it didn't crack. By the time thing made it to my kitchen table, I was in tears.

However I cannot seek consolation on FB regarding my fragile holiday emotional state as it would entail revealing said gift and the hell I went through to get it.

i learned through FB pics who the new girl my bro is seeing is. because even though he wasn't tagged in the pic, his best friend posted it, so his ex blew up at him ("you're already over me!!!"), and my brother told my mother, and she told me.

sadly, someone I was kinda into, but my dating life has pretty much ended until pandemic ends/caregiving stabilizes, and plus I'm looking scraggly and ugly these days. (though I did shave finally)

I M Losted you are right about people being tentative about the climate right now of what to post. there's so much sadness I think people are afraid to share some joy as it might come across the wrong way?

Absolutely. You don't want to post something happy or trivial when someone else in your extended circle is having a rough time.

i post once a day, if that these days. except for when sports are on

Can never delete Instagram because I'd miss Brisk God videos

one of my friends is, for what seems like the third time this year, publicly telling everybody that he's done with his fiancee and tagged her in the post AND made the post global.

if this fits the usual pattern, it will be deleted in ten minutes, and tomorrow there will be a huge pic of the two of them that he shares, all smiles.

don't get on facebook

Bruce!

Sorry for the clickbait source but I can't see beyond the paywall. (Original source is the WSJ.)

https://www.rawstory.com/mark-zuckerberg-2656194176/

The company's "sharp-elbowed" response to Haugen's claims was driven by Zuckerberg as the social media giant faced its biggest crisis in years, according to the report. Zuckerberg "told employees not to apologize" and announced the company was changing its name to Meta.

"Mr. Zuckerberg pushed subordinates to respond more forcefully to the bad publicity, according to people familiar with the discussions," according to the Wall Street Journal. "In a virtual meeting in late November, some of Meta’s largest institutional investors asked Facebook to address some of the issues around user safety, according to people familiar with the call. Some investors found Mr. Zuckerberg, who also is chairman, defensive on the call, these people said. They left dissatisfied with Facebook’s overall response, because the company reiterated previous talking points and didn’t share any big new changes, according to a written briefing about the meeting described to the Journal."

the company reiterated previous talking points and didn’t share any big new changes

when was this ever not true of FB?

That time they made Breitbart part of their "fact checking" group?