iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

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?

im beginning to think sociopaths shouldnt control everything, sorry thats just how i feel

"Move fast and break things then don't apologize."

There just needs to be a culling of all tech billionaires. I'm sure the videos of such would go quite viral and generate a lot of hits.

i use it mostly to catalogue my music movie and game collection!

https://www.garbageday.email/p/viral-content-optimized-to-piss-off

I've noticed the last few weeks, in politics and COVID threads, and just now in a baseball thread, people posting Twitter threads where the person tweeting has a lot to say and breaks everything into a whole bunch (meaning, what they need to say/140) of tweets. Is this relatively new, or have people always done that on Twitter? Facebook's zillion and one problems are well documented in this thread, but it also has this amazing feature (shared by ILX and other message boards) where you can say everything you want in one place.

‘1/997’ tweet threads have been a running joke for at least a decade.

They began the minute someone decided to use the platform for something other than dick jokes or micro-blogging about where they got a latte.

Okay. Almost all the tweeting I see is what shows up here.

It just seems so dumb to me that people would do that.

You're not wrong. There are rare occasions when the format works because each succeeding tweet reveals something more insane in a deep dive, like a slide show of horrors

The thing you need to understand about today's Zillow find is that it was built in 2010 in the United States of America. 1/ pic.twitter.com/Rd5JrrsVgr

— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) January 14, 2022

I'm immediately launching a new social media platform called Slide Show of Horrors, for people with stories to share that get worse and worse by the sentence.

that's a helluva thread there

facebook.com itself is on borrowed time, their only hope is whatsapp and insta (and lmao metaverse)

Holy shit. Facebook just *got smaller,* probably for the first time in its history. https://t.co/59xqrmpB9M pic.twitter.com/bAo0cHIrh1

— Will Oremus (@WillOremus) February 2, 2022

Diediediediediediedie

tis a consummation devoutly to be wished

some of their ivermectin hydroxychloroquine posters stopped using the site because they are dead

stock down 25%

Sheesh. Not every day that $230 billion in market cap goes poof.

pic.twitter.com/aobBLaWeCN

— drill (ON THE RUN) (@drilliebobby) February 7, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/07/facebook-metaverse-horizon-worlds-kids-safety/

I can't express how peeved I am that these douches are ruining the word metaverse which Atlus shd've locked down

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/facebook-hate-speech-misinformation-superusers/621617/

what a shithole. Interesting to see how the weightings work/ change. would love to run an experiment slowly turning all the popular content more and more lefty.

eh

Instagram owner Meta said it would let its users in some countries call for violence against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian soldiers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60709208