iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

lol clemenza. that was a helluva dry post.

Defriend anyone with strong opinions about GOTG IMO. not in real life but on social media.

I have FB Purity to block the words "guardians" and "galaxy" but forgot to get the acronym

Lol thank you for elaborating (I no longer look at Facebook nor have I seen the movie so I appreciate the glimpse into the Metaverse).

then again, I guess this type of thing plays out in the flesh too.

still remember freshman year of college, scurrying away angrily from the common area as two groups of six people got into a shouting match about the other's supposed misunderstanding of the Star Wars timeline (this was right after Phantom Menace came out!)

The disputes are fiercest when the stakes are small

Twas ever thus

the only relationships i ended via facebook were all very early in the trump era. i made one of those "if you have ever even thought about supporting trump for a millisecond i fucking hate you and you're terrible" posts, and some family and a handful of high school acquaintances made it very clear that they were proud of being terrible

A great way to sort out who you do and do not need in yr life imo

I realize it's fashionable to hate on Facebook but for me it has been a pleasure. I get exactly the right amount of contact with people I only like a little bit.

The people I really love? I have multiple ways to reach those people and I am happy with how much we interact, and If I need a break from them I can just not interact with them; it's fine.

For some reason I have exactly no contact with Trumpy / Republican / conservative people. Like, at all. I literally do not see them or their stupid shit.

I don't think it's because I'm better at curating my feed than other people, nor is it because I live in a rarified coastal cultural bubble (hi I am from fucking Missouri).

For whatever constellation of reasons, the site has somehow done a good job of showing me what I want to see and not showing me what I don't. Sorry for those who it doesn't work for.

I witnessed a friendship collapse over FB recently because one person was posting about travel and referred to his long sightseeing walks as "death marches," and then someone else posted that she has family in Ukraine and is very worried about them so can we not make jokes about death marches, and Person A blew up and wrote a bunch of angry posts to Facebook at large about how he's a member of several minority groups and how could someone have the audacity to accuse him of insensitivity.

(xpost) All my Facebook issues are with the company itself, and all the weirdness they've forced on me; like you, my friends (real-life friends and FB-only friends) cause me little grief.

i have p much no far-right wing friends on FB or outside only because in my 20s and 30s I was pretty hostile to all of those people to suggest I didn't want anything to do w/ them.

The fact that some people can't quite grasp metaphor - or that other people can't modulate their language to suit the audience they are addressing - is not really the fault of the platform imo.

Even here (on comparatively civil ilx) I know I have said stuff that wasn't appropriate. Several times! I try to take those corrections to heart, apologize, and strive to do better next time.

And I have also observed some conversations where I did, kinda, think someone was intentionally looking to be offended and might have been taking something a trifle too literally, and restricting perfectly reasonable figures of speech like hyperbole and metaphor. In those instances there are (inevitable) judgment calls to be made.

To me "death march" seems like forgivable hyperbolic figurative language. But I wouldn't refer to a dinner made on a barbecue grill as a Holocaust. It's a subjective matter of taste and judgment and timing.

Working out those balances takes grace and empathy and thoughtfulness.

Whether it's real life or ilx or FB or Twitter or Reddit or whatever, it's still a matter of grace and empathy and thoughtfulness.

Pretty sure these concepts predate social media and, indeed, the Internet.

I don't think the medium is the fault, but when you're angry and on the telephone or in-person, when tensions get hot, if it truly is a misunderstanding, it's something that usually gets successfully sorted out after a few minutes.

when you're angry and online, and lack impulse control, and don't want to look like the bad guy publicly to hundreds of people, you might wind up going on the offensive and keep typing hurtful things, extending your fight-or-flight reaction to where regret has no chance to set in.

I think most people don't fall into this trap because their predilection is "ok, this has a potential to go bad, let me call so-and-so and prevent things from going south", but there are some who just seem to enjoy having their little battles out in public. idgi really.

she has family in Ukraine and is very worried about them so can we not make jokes about death marches

We recently had a pretty big tornado tear through our city, coming way too close to my mother's house.

Talking on the phone about all the damage last night with her, and she proclaimed that the whole neighborhood looked like Ukraine now!

I winced a little, but then had the warm thought of a Ukranian looking at a bombed-out office building, thinking, "Goddamm, we must look like Arkansas now!"

Watching the essential oils Christians I grew up with devolve from Paleo and CrossFit to COVID denial/anti-vax to Blue Lives Matter to Q-adjacent shit was fascinating, like a nature documentary on the lives and mating habits of white evangelicals.

Then I blocked them all.

Tornado has unfollowed you on facebook

like a nature documentary on the lives and mating habits of white evangelicals

(David Attenborough voice)

"Behold the alpha male displaying his Ford pickup truck. He hopes to attect the attention of a female, whilst also discouraging other, less dominant males whose trucks are less resplendent and not as accessorized."

Neanderthal otm. The fact that there's always an implied audience in particular raises the stakes imo.

Neanderthal OTM, yeah (as well as many others).

Not just FB per se, but … I just don’t think this many minds are really meant to be squeezed together on a social media platform. It isn’t necessarily healthy for humanity.

I’ve been on FB since 2011 and it’s been instructive to watch people grow up through trial and error (and also to grow up *myself*) in terms of interacting with people and kind of checking myself as to whether or not my comments or thoughts are really always necessary. Sometimes you just keep scrolling, or mute someone for a month, or unfriend, or whatever. And a firestorm is avoided, mental energy and emotion conserved.

A lot of people have just left social media - the combative and the mild alike. And as I’ve gotten older, my impulse has been to communicate more frequently with people in real life (remember that?) or singly or in small groups via text or DM, when I have an opinion that’s barbed or need some specific feedback about something. The whole world doesn’t always need to know why I had a bad day or a bad week (or even if I’ve had a good day or a good week).

Saw this last night, a new low?

https://i.imgur.com/xGO5U2E.png

(narrator: I saw plenty of posts from friends, and I never see ads on FB nor anywhere else)

what the hell is this

Sign up for Meta Verified on the web and get all the same benefits at a discount, including a verified badge.

I enjoy the byproduct of FB that is two strangers ripping into each other on a post about a local event and a friend who somehow knows both people intervening so the other two don't kill each other IRL

Most of my posts in this thread are about how much I hate Facebook and hate that I've let it become part of my life, so I'm really loathe to defend it in any context. But god it's nauseating to watch Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham get all self-righteous for the cameras in that hearing today. "You have blood on your hands" says Trump/Jan. 6 apologist Lindsay Graham to the approval of the room.

you don't have to watch that! you and i and everyone except the new york times knows that it's just playacting. don't do it!

that said, the part with tom cotton doggedly asking the singaporean guy if he was a commie spy who approved of tiananemen square was . . . really something

I wasn't watching, I just caught it on the news. (If I had been watching, though, I'd say so--I hate the supercilious "Why are you watching this?" posting on ILX.)

what hearing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCB-SQJLr9E

what does he apologise for

Anyone else find themselves inundated with unwanted "Reels and short videos?" Every time I hide them and ask for fewer of them, but they're never not there. Complaining via help and support is pointless, of course.

Reels seems to be a big part of FB's business strategy right now: https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-reels-revenue-narrows-tiktok-boosted-by-ai-2023-07-27/

I'll see if I can talk them into ignoring their marketing strategy to please a retired Canadian grade-school teacher.

What's with this thing where someone posts something fucked up and the first thing someone does is write I HAVE 55 MUTUALS WITH THIS GUY, WTF GUYS, THAT'S FUCKED UP and yet won't state who it is that said it, like everyone knows.

Like I see it all the time now, why is it the assumption that everyone is complicit if they friend someone who eventually says fucked up shit and they're perennially online to the point where they see everything the moment it goes up.

I don't really even add people anymore but can tell you it helps a lot more if you just say "hi this person is fucked up, here's their name" so people actually are aware, particularly when the algorithm hides so much, rather than assuming everyone knows and tolerates it

It’s a bummer when I do open the app and look at memories and 12 years ago see interactions with a dozen people who don’t use Facebook anymore (me either, really), old friends who live thousands of miles away. Now maybe there are some mutual Instagram likes but no real interaction.

The depths of the enshittification of Facebook are astounding.