iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

I mean, they’re acting reprehensibly but these networks are unfathomably vast and have overturned a ton established systems in an extremely short span of time.

The Frankenstein effect.

Originally facebook was about posting photos from college. Also sometimes people would “poke” each other as a form of low key flirting. Now it’s devoured the entire media.

somebody explain the nature of evil to treeship

xpost clemenza, I get this too sometimes.

treeship (and anyone else interested) you need to watch the two part frontline about facebook
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/

if you act without thinking about the potential consequences of your actions, your actions could wind up hurting people whether you meant to hurt them or not. that seems to be at the heart of the fb dilemma afaict. on the small scale as well as the large global scale.

i missed this at the time, but this 2013 review of lean in (by mark zuckerburg's former speechwriter!) was great

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/feminisms-tipping-point-who-wins-from-leaning-in

I got a post from Facebook recently telling me that I have been on their platform 11 years. 11 years, and they think I would be delighted to hear that. To me, this speaks volumes about their naive self-belief, never considering that many of their users might have begun to resent its presence in their lives, not to mention the political issues already discussed. Time to spend less time on there, I guess.

thanks to FB a single post can shut down an entire school for a day

I only update my own newsfeed maybe twice a year if that and deleted some more pics. I go on page reporting binges a lot more now.

that sounds like the best use of facebook

I've tried to do that with the super annoying bootleg T-shirt people and it just seems to make even more of the ads pop up

I mean, they’re acting reprehensibly but these networks are unfathomably vast and have overturned a ton established systems in an extremely short span of time.

― Trϵϵship, Tuesday, December 11, 2018 8:49 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Would you say they moved fast and broke things? We can marvel at the distance traveled from Zuck's dorm room to now, but at some point the game plan became very explicitly to devour the media because they wanted to dominate the digital ad market. When they looked at countries like Myanmar, all they saw was that they could not just eat legacy media but own the country's entire online attention economy.

Originally facebook was about posting photos from college.

originally facebook was about ranking your daily colleagues according to their fuckability. two weeks later it was explicitly, on record, about mining their personal data and trading it to allies of facebook without the users' knowledge.

I held out until the summer before college, intimating that getting too into the internet would be a bad move. My friend made an account for me—asking for my college email address with no explanation and then i got an email saying i had a favebook account—bc she said it was necessary to have in college. Ever since then my life has been ruined bt too much online media consumption.

sounds like it's your friend you should be mad at

It’s weird to remember how tech phobic i was then compared to how extremely online i’ve gotten.

She just didn’t want me to be a weird loser who didn’t know what was going on. Understandable xp

does it feel better to know what's going on

It was bad all around. I was still a weird loser the first year of college.

does it feel better to know what's going on

― j., Tuesday, December 11, 2018 11:05 AM (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've long since decided that it doesn't, personally

soon FB will consist solely of year-in-review videos, Rayban ads, and bootleg T-shirts

God willing

those Vanity Fair & Dissent articles are great. those anecdotes about the culture at Harvard Business School are brutal. my favorite quote about Lean In from the Dissent:

Just as with any of Facebook’s competitive moves, the need to create an in-house version of a product arises due to an external threat. And put very simply, feminism is a threat to Facebook, just as Instagram or Snapchat were threats to Facebook’s photo-sharing business.

this is a good summary of Zuckerberg's new proposals for outsourcing FB moderation to an independent panel users can appeal to when their content is flagged as borderline. i.e. purports to address the problem, but the real process remains buried enough to insure FB retains control: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/facebook-punish-censorship/577654/

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/david-madden/

I can't say when Facebook first became aware of these problems. I know that as early as 2013, people were directly communicating to Facebook that this was a serious problem in Myanmar. At the end of 2013, an international journalist who had won a Knight fellowship was in Silicon Valley, and she had spent a lot of time in Myanmar, had done a lot of reporting in Myanmar and was intimate with the hate speech problem. Her name is Aela Callan, and [ she'd done a lot of reporting for Al Jazeera at the time. And so Aela went and saw Elliot Schrage, who I believe at the time was the head of Facebook's communications team, and she raised explicitly this hate speech problem in Myanmar and urged them to take it seriously. My understanding of that meeting—I wasn't there—but my understanding is that Elliot wasn't that interested in the hate speech problem. This was seen as a tremendous market opportunity, certainly in terms of user growth. Unlikely that Facebook was going to make much money out of Myanmar for sometime, but certainly in terms of user growth it was a great opportunity.

And so I made a presentation at Facebook headquarters in May of 2015, and the purpose of that presentation largely was to try to help people understand what was going on, help Facebook decision makers understand what was going on in Myanmar at the time, and just how dangerous the situation was... I really tried to help people understand just how significant the risk was and how bad the consequences could be. At that presentation in 2015, I drew the analogy with what had happened in Rwanda. There had been genocide in Rwanda, and radios had played a really key role in the execution of this genocide in Rwanda.

And my concern was that Facebook would play a similar role in Myanmar, meaning it would be the platform through which hate speech was spread and incitements to violence were made.

...it goes further, for anyone who has the time, but I'm posting this because Schrage followed his answer last week by saying that they moved instantly the second they realized there was a problem, to which the journalist next to me quietly laughed and said '2015?'

The Frankenstein effect.

― Trϵϵship, Tuesday, December 11, 2018 1:50 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

remember what happened to frankenstein

He loved

https://assets.rbl.ms/13949440/980x.jpg

I deleted the app but have hung on thru the mobile web interface. Has that gotten uniquely terrible for anybody else this week, where it logs you out after like 30 mins?

i think u should consider that a feature

March break, so my wall is dominated by vacation photos posted by people I work with. I know, I know--there are ways around this, no one is forcing me to look at them.

That aside, isn't one of the oldest jokes in movies/TV the bit where one couple is over at another couple's house for dinner, and afterwards they're forced to watch three carousels of mind-numbing vacation slides? The basic premise hasn't changed, even if the technology has and you now have the freedom to leave: of what interest is this to me? Or to paraphrase Seinfeld: I'm happy your happy--frankly, it doesn't do a thing for me.

yes i have had the same thought: it's exactly the same. i try to remember that when i want to show people pictures of things on my phone. they don't care.

no, people want to see photos of cats that I have on my phone

Ok that’s true but otherwise point is otm

sometimes they might want to see the photo on your phone, if the thing you are showing them is novel enough or interesting to that person specifically. by itself, a photo of a family on vacation or the place where they vacationed does not rate as noteworthy (imo) but maybe someone who is related to you would enjoy seeing it. i think it's a matter of knowing your audience.

no, people want to see photos of cats that I have on my phone

― steven, soda jerk (sic), Tuesday, March 12, 2019 3:32 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I do

I am only interested in seeing pics on ppls phones if it is useful to me, eg “see this is the coupe glass set at the thrift store that sounded like what you were wanting”

Also any pics from I DIED (rip) because they are really good and I love the subject matter.

like i said, know your audience! to answer the thread title question, facebook has certainly done a number on people knowing (or not knowing) who their audience is and what is appropriate to share with that audience.

I feel like most of my fb friends are using it a lot less recently, which is great. I haven't posted anything for a year and a half and before that only posted 2-3 times a year. I never posted news/linksbecause I don't want the responsibility of moderating or want to do the work of editorializing. I travel a lot and am in a stupidly happy and easy relationship but posting about that constantly/at all seems in poor taste. Even when I travel I usually only take 1-3 pics per place because who cares, buy a postcard, look it up on googleimage, people's pics are usually crappy. Unless it's of pets of course.

lately FB is where I post from concerts about how drunk I am

Also, no one should be fb friends with current coworkers.

I am but I have my security settings set to where they can't see anything that I post unless it's something innocuous that I make available for them to see like a picture of a fuckin' butterfly

I don't post pics of butterflies

My original complaint is limited to vacation photos, how I realized today how perfectly they mirror the long-standing joke about vacation photos in the real world, and I'll narrow it down even more. If it's a photo of you at the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower or whatever, sure, post away. It's photos of people sitting poolside that baffle and annoy me, or sitting down to lunch. They serve no purpose whatsoever. (Know your audience, yes--but even pictures like that from my sister I don't need.)

Also, no one should be fb friends with current coworkers.

In general, probably good advice. My present complaining aside, I've had pretty good luck with co-workers on FB.

Has always been my rule. Ive always had a few strict ones.
- no coworkers
- limited family/family set to filtered/blocked posts
- never gave FB a phone number
- never told FB where Ive worked, where I work, who my family are
- name slightly faked

My strict rule has been to ignore FB and never sign up. Works for me. I'm sure that corporate America knows more than enough about me already without my handing them the keys to my front door, my car, and the complete contents of my personal life.

yeah, I have
-no current co-workers, ( and only add previous coworkers that I like socially)
-no phone number, work, family
-no real birthdate, place
-I changed my name every 6 months until i just got locked into this one
-i trim fb friends every 4 months

I had a vote for twitter being so much worse than fb.