Bend Over, Facebook is Back

[Ari]

Indeed, I was trying to figure out why I quite like the old forum experience but hate facebook, besides just being old in internet years and one thing that dawned on me was forum topics. On FF I can ignore a thread or focus on thread, or more importantly ignore a thrad for now and then binge through it later. On facebook it's just this constantly forward crawl of disparate things. I've been convinced for awhile that facebook is purposefully designed to have shit comment threads, to be worse than old forums on finding, replying, linking etc, old comments. Old comments don't drive the feed forward, old comments allow you to hash things out instead of post, feel good about your hottake and then move on to engage in more metrics which produce data points to be sold.

Then there's the nagging feeling of needing my defenses always up because facebook will interject. That facebook itself tries to insert itself into your friends circle, "How do you do fellow kids? How do you like that latest TOY AND OR GAME today? You should interact more with NAME HERE , they would really like to hear about your support for DAY OF ACTION. Smiley face, winkey emoji. Have you wished DEAD FRIEND HERE a happy birthday?"
Check out Sally's new dog! Here's Jack's opinion of bread with raisins in it! Tim would like to remind you the president is a moron! Boogie would like to know if you are going to the Pumpkin dance! Find out these three tips for cooking Pumkin seeds. Sally hates dog poop. Only basic bitches order Pumpkin spice latte! Trump laughs at raped woman, sign this petition to feel better about it! Make Pumpkin spice latte at home! Mind blown, did you know there's no Pumpkin in pumpkin spice. and on and on and on.

There's no way to make your own choices, to choose to read about Sally's Dog, or the current meaningless norm battles, or politics, it's just kinda all vomited at you at once and then scrolls on by with the most shallowest of replies before it scrolls off the screen for the next thing to get x emotion at. The shit of the thing is that the system design provides a hiding spot, an excuse, for what is considered a type of manipulation tactic if it was coming from a single human. A way of controlling the subjects emotions so that they will tire and give in, and the more facebook fights against any changes to this the more I've been coming to the conclusion they in fact know this and are doing it on purpose.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by Ari

Like how it tries to force you to celebrate "friendiversaries" anniversaries of when you friended someone on facebook.

I especially like when it says stuff like "you have been friends for 4 years" about you and your favorite first cousin that you basically grew up with, because that relationship didn’t count before she got on Facebook.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Facebook is ruining humans in ways we haven't even begun to quantify.

Facebook is not what social networks are. Real social networks are incredibly complex, nuanced systems that have evolved over all of human history, and they're full of rules we can't even articulate, but that people understand intuitively.

Zuckerberg is not by any real measure a real adult human. He has virtually no real life experience. He grew up a spoiled, sheltered child, was sent to an Ivy league school, where he accidentally stumbled on something that made him mega-wealthy and powerful while he was still a spoiled, sheltered child with no real life experience. Facebook was not an original concept at the time, and it wasn't technologically innovative. He didn't earn that. He just got really really lucky, and he got really really rich before he even had started trying to be a grownup. So he is stunted. He is still a spoiled little child, and he has no concept of how little he knows about anything.

Mark Zuckerberg has never applied for a job or had a boss. He's never worried about paying his bills or finding a place to live or getting health care or any of those things that normal adult humans have had to worry about. He has never had to make a personal budget. He doesn't cook his own meals or do his own laundry, and he's probably never had to. He has an annual budget of $10,000,000 just for personal security. He doesn't really even have a normal Facebook account.

So he sees normal human experiences and social norms, and he literally doesn't understand them. He doesn't know what they're for, so he, being spoiled and self-centered and very very lucky, decides they're useless because he doesn't need them, and decides to get rid of them. And people just go along with it, maybe because of social pressure, maybe because they're just not really thinking it through, maybe because, like Zuckerberg himself, they're 13 years old emotionally because, unlike Zuckerberg, they're 13 years old chronologically.

Humans don't have the capacity to stay in regular personal contact with hundreds of people at a time. We don't, in real life, keep up with the ongoing life events of every former classmate, coworker, every distant relative, with friends of friends and people we know from various interest groups. Because we don't have the intellectual or emotional capacity to live through all those life events in real time. In the real world, maybe you run into someone you knew from high school or college every now and again and they catch you up on who has died, who got married, divorced, sick, etc., but we're really only built to keep up with that sort of thing in real time with a limited number of people. We're social animals, but we're naturally smart about it. Facebook is stupid.

And our social networks in real life aren't linear. We have different friend groups that we share different interests with, we have different levels of disclosure for different people, and that's not linear either. And we have individual guidelines, too. Maybe we can talk about super-personal medical stuff with this person, but don't talk about politics, we have individual off-limits topics for specific people, and we have weird limited purpose friendships even, like someone you don't really know that well personally, but you have a shared interest in a specific topic that other people aren't interested in, but you can go on about for hours with that one person.

Facebook doesn't understand that, and it doesn't allow for that. Facebook dumbs down everything to the lowest common denominator, and it's making people stupid.

Facebook is bad for humans and it's bad for humanity.

I'm just bumping this onto the next page.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Zuckerberg is not by any real measure a real adult human. He has virtually no real life experience. He grew up a spoiled, sheltered child, was sent to an Ivy league school, where he accidentally stumbled on something that made him mega-wealthy and powerful while he was still a spoiled, sheltered child with no real life experience.

s/Zuckerberg/Trump/

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by The Man

I think Oliver may have pointed this out elsewhere in his segment, but this comparison is actually unfair to toilets, which perform a useful function of sanitary waste disposal.

Yes, he does point out that (in essence) toilets dispose of shit whereas Facebook brings shit to you. If he'd consulted lisarea he'd probably also have observed that Facebook turns you into shit.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by Ari

Indeed, I was trying to figure out why I quite like the old forum experience but hate facebook, besides just being old in internet years and one thing that dawned on me was forum topics. On FF I can ignore a thread or focus on thread, or more importantly ignore a thrad for now and then binge through it later. On facebook it's just this constantly forward crawl of disparate things. I've been convinced for awhile that facebook is purposefully designed to have shit comment threads, to be worse than old forums on finding, replying, linking etc, old comments. Old comments don't drive the feed forward, old comments allow you to hash things out instead of post, feel good about your hottake and then move on to engage in more metrics which produce data points to be sold.

They also promote posts to you based on how much "engagement" you have with it.

And the best form of engagement is getting you to post on it, repeatedly.

And what does that? Posts that make you angry or start arguments.

So they basically encourage you to argue with people. People who troll will get promoted to you. And they'll encourage you to troll other people (perhaps unintentionally).

It's like Facebook is throwing a wedding, and instead of sitting the cousins who hate each other at separate tables, it puts them together and laughs gleefully.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by erimir

They also promote posts to you based on how much "engagement" you have with it.

Oh God, the engagement metrics drive me nutz as sometimes I like to read a post, maybe look something up, then reply, or come back to it later. But without something like FBP forcing it to, as soon as it sees you've read something and didn't immediately engage, it vanishes that post from your list to provide new things to engage with, leaving you hunting for a post you are sure you remember but now is nowhere to be found.

On mobile it was even worse, it would sometimes reload and vanish a post while I was in the middle of reading it! Like fuck you, I wasn't even finished with that!

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

[quote=Ari;1317982]

Originally Posted by erimir

On mobile it was even worse, it would sometimes reload and vanish a post while I was in the middle of reading it! Like fuck you, I wasn't even finished with that!

And they said the MTV generation had no attention span.

[lisarea]

Fuck everyone and everything about this, starting with the fact that Facebook has a "head of health research" in the first place:

Facebook's head of health research wants doctors to have even more personal patient data

[JoeP]

Right, "research"

[JoeP]

Social factors are estimated to contribute to more than half of a person's health.

Yes ... F******k is making us ill ... let's help them, why not?

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

If you missed it: today it was confirmed that Facebook massively & knowingly inflated its video-view statistics, which had the DIRECT consequence of 90% of media orgs firing writers in favor of expensive video producers, who also got fired when it turned out video was worthless https://t.co/WqdAUBIe6L

— Chris Conroy (@dyfl) October 17, 2018

[JoeP]

As I was saying last month,

Originally Posted by JoeP

[The Man]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

If you missed it: today it was confirmed that Facebook massively & knowingly inflated its video-view statistics, which had the DIRECT consequence of 90% of media orgs firing writers in favor of expensive video producers, who also got fired when it turned out video was worthless https://t.co/WqdAUBIe6L

— Chris Conroy (@dyfl) October 17, 2018

WTF. I went to high school and worked on several plays with him. Not relevant to this thread; it's just weird seeing him randomly cited from Twitter. Not as weird as seeing another member of the same small group of students (with whom I also worked on several plays) win an Oscar, but weird nonetheless.

[Ari]

Assuming we're not living in some sort of Mad Max hellscape by then I kinda wonder how the future is going to report on the second dot com bubble. It's pretty clear by now that virtually every tech company that's 'disrupting' old business is doing so either through complete fraud or by the old practice of stripping their workers of rights and wages until it appears to be profitable.

Almost nothing that's come out of the modern day tech boom appears to be sustainable or even real. It has taught us that if no one is watching, it's even easier to fudge or fake the numbers to give the cursory appearance that it's revolutionary, just long enough for people to dump money into it. See the current flaming fall to earth that is cryptocurrency as another example.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Next headlines:
Amazon enters private prison business
Amazon has employees arrested for vagrancy

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

pic.twitter.com/uWXyjLV97p

— Jämönes äl väpörwäve (@PlanetaTamara) October 22, 2018

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

We posed as 100 senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them. – VICE News

Facebook says it's increasing transparency around political ads but @VICE was able to impersonate all 100 senators without Facebook figuring it out. The midterms are one week away & it's clear that companies haven't taken the steps to protect our elections from foreign influence. https://t.co/w3V3lGY4xW

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) October 30, 2018

[erimir]

NY Times out with a big piece on Facebook: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/t...on-racism.html

A notable bit:

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

I was on the fence about Schumer before - he had some points where the Senate Democrats were reasonably effective, but these deals lately with judges seemed suboptimal at best.

But this is unacceptable...

Schumer doesn't come off well here https://t.co/s9UPy0sayL pic.twitter.com/1je7rZZb6N

— David Beard ��️*�� (@dwbeard) November 14, 2018

After an election in which fake news and propaganda on Facebook were used to help the right-wing elect an authoritarian bigoted idiot, and likewise Facebook has been fomenting ethnic violence in Myanmar and elsewhere, and has been exploited to promote authoritarianism and undermine democracy across multiple countries, etc. and taking advantage of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to deflect blame. The Democrats' Senate leader can't be covering for them. Schumer can't be telling Mark fucking Warner to moderate.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

My tinfoil hat sense is tingling but I'll put this here:

Other than the bit on Facebook's origin as its founder's incel-before-incels misogynist troll app - rating & comparing female students, I don't believe one spec of Zuckerberg's story.
Not one.
I don't believe he crafted & launched that platform without serious outside help. /1

— Lincoln's Bible (@LincolnsBible) November 15, 2018

Thrad.

[lisarea]

That would almost require Facebook to be some big innovative thing, and it wasn't. It's new now, but the version that Zuckerberg built was nothing that hadn't been done a million times before.

So I guess it's possible that that's the reason Facebook came out as the MySpace replacement, but I'd think you'd have heard of some other companies being approached or groomed too if that were the case. I think it goes without saying that he's in bed with all kinds of dark influencers now because he's a piece of shit, but I still think it was mostly just dumb luck that Facebook initially pulled ahead of the crowd.

I'm kind of talking myself out of my skepticism here in real time, though, because yeah, Facebook was nothing particularly noteworthy, really, and Zuckerberg would be a pretty obvious candidate for someone to collaborate on something evil. So yeah, maybe.

[Ari]

I don't buy the more crazy parts of the conspiracy because they seem to be looking back at history with a lens and not remembering it as it unfolded. I think just like so many other things, shady con-men are eager to exploit any potential happenstance to their advantage, and that Zuckerberg certainly wasn't some plant, or early control, he's just the idiot that manged to end up out on top who thinks too much of himself and is happy to not look too closely at things if it's all 'going good.' They've latched onto that and used it to their advantage.

Back in the myspace days there were competing networks that tried to get started with assorted success and there were rumblings with how Myspace was being run. Facebook came along as people were ready to jump ship, but it as much lucked into the situation as the next best thing at the right time. It was also that, Myspace was showing its age and facebook had nice games integration and better messaging features. What those tweets leave out is the huge farmville, gemdrop, words with friends, etc. push was given to facebook by having game integration into their platform. Both the games and facebook loved to bait you to sign others up and for awhile facebook was one of the top game sites for casual users (unsure it's exact status these days). Just like the jump from myspace, a lot of people disliked early facebook and still do. If Google hadn't fumbled G+ so hard, we would probably have a thread about G+ fucking us over instead. Facebook as an unwitting or 'thinks they can't be tricked' mark makes more sense than some sort of deep conspiracy.

[lisarea]

Oh, I definitely don't think Facebook started out controlled by any shady conmen other than Zuckerberg himself (I mean "The Winklevoss Twins"). I would not, however, eat my hat if the shady conmen got involved much earlier than acknowledged, and helped Facebook gain its early advantage, making it not entirely luck.

If I were a shady conman, I would definitely pick a target that was young, inexperienced, arrogant, and clearly lacking in moral grounding, and Zuck was nothing if not that. (Still is, except the young part.)

[lisarea]

Oh, yeah, and as far as Google, we do have a thread on them fucking us because they do.

I do think there's an extra level of malevolence with Facebook, though. Google, for all its MANY flaws, actually seems to be making some effort to combat the spread of false information, at least. They suck at it in a lot of ways, but they do seem to be genuinely trying.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by lisarea

If I were a shady conman, I would definitely pick a target that was young, inexperienced, arrogant, and clearly lacking in moral grounding, and Zuck was nothing if not that. (Still is, except the young part.)

Frankly if we're just conjecturing with no evidence here, Zynga would be reasonable to drag into this as it was created by some greyhat nerds, one of which had multiple struggling or failing internet investments and startups. If someone with some money or power to throw around did exist in facebook, it probably didn't take much persuasion to get Zynga as a main facebook games developer. Farmville had something like 80 million users a year or two after launch, who where now inherently facebook users as well and right around the same time as facebook started getting big and that was just one of their games at the time.

It also could be that facebook just got lucky with an exclusive deal that drove up their market share a ton, while not managing to do something stupid to mess it up.