iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

or was it just an inevitable by-product of a # of long-running processes that were/are changing the way people live on the internet?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Facebook_like_thumb.png

no, you did

One thing I've noticed from being friends with a lot of ilxors is that a lot of the conversations that used to happen on ILX now just happen in people's facebook posts

Which is fine except facebook is so clunky that it's just such a chore to Show More Comments and it also makes me realize that that stuff wasn't really adding to my life anyway because I don't miss it here either

im gonna risk not having a nuanced opinion on this and simply state that having constant access/exposure to the lives//opinions/inner-most-thoughs/dinners/vacations/etc of other people--and what's more the narcissistically attended curation of those things--is a "bad thing."

nothing ruined anything

everything ruined everything

it is kind of the logical endgame of the internet though; the limitless access to information essentially and necessarily leads to learning what so-and-so thinks about obama's self stick.

i really have no idea, but i wonder what effect the widespread adoption of smartphones had on the typical content that's created and shared. seems like the kind of article/website/onlinething that you would create for the perusal of someone glancing down at their phone while waiting for an elevator would be different than what you would create for someone assumed to be sitting at a desktop and with a little more time

My biggest problem with relying on facebook for what-to-read-on-the-internet is that it's the same 3 people contributing 95% of my thread at the times I happen to look, and also there's just such an avalanche of stuff to read that I feel overwhelmed and shut down. OTOH it does seem to have replaced people forwarding things around or making threads about them to some extent. I still prefer finding content through ILX. I suppose I could open one of those tweeter accounts hand just have things twitted at me.

i guess the answer to this question depends on what you think is wrong with the internet, too. like, for me, an argument on the 'inevitable byproduct of long-running process side' is that the internet is now way more streamlined and standardized now. and of course standardizing things makes sense, and it's inevitable. but i miss the glory days of proto-blogs that each looked totally unique and were detached from the rest of the internet, or existed as part of Rings or whatever. now everything has wordpress over the top, or a generic Tumblr theme, whatever. bleh

Though I am an avowed Facebook hater, I don't think Facebook ruined the internet mostly because I don't think of the internet as a static thing that can be ruined by the presence (or absence) of one website (even a really big one). It's more that the internet is a constantly evolving thing made up of whatever it is that people use it for. Plus I mean, Facebook is going to change, and its reach will be diminished, and the internet will continue to exist.

One thing I've noticed from being friends with a lot of ilxors is that a lot of the conversations that used to happen on ILX now just happen in people's facebook posts

realizing i could do this was a big breakthrough for me. instead of arguing w/ the void i could argue w/ ppl who i chose to friend on fb. also they have better killfile + blocking mechanics.

no, you did

this seems really hostile

i feel like in my head im using facebook as a proxy for a bunch of things but mostly involves 'the internet' being less separate from 'irl'. like i dont think the internet is any less awful than it was in 2003 but it feels less anonymous and interestingly weird a lot of the time. also i do think that 'internet culture' doesnt exist as much anymore? idk

Twitter's way worse

Of course there's also the whole narrative now of the kids not even taking to facebook, using all kinds of ephemeral, non-verbal communicative devices instead.

facebook is so boring and mundane and most people i'm very close with don't really use it. yet deleting my account seems like more effort than not deleting it. for some reason i still browse my newsfeed pretty regularly, just as a general "let me escape this present moment" thing (not dissimilar to ILX, but ILX generally has funnier or more insightful shit to say) but not because i find any great worth in it. in general "let me escape this present moment" is a net negative in my life so i can't say i gain anything worthwhile from facebook.

otmfm

I also use it for, "let me get a quick hit of attention and gratification by posting something funny my toddler said/something witty I thought of," which has a pretty big overlap with "let me escape this present moment"

facebook ruined books

Facebook didn't ruin the internet, but it did some significant damage to the way that Facebook users (in general) manage expectations within their interpersonal relationships.

facebook ruined faces

one of the biggest effects facebook's had is replacing screen names/aliases with real names/identities as the default for presenting & identifying yourself on the web. like usernames obviously still exist but even on a site like twitter where ppl use usernames they generally have their real name/pic as their display name & avatar, whereas pre-facebook internet interaction happened on message boards where everyone was ShadowDragonX and had a pic of sonic the hedgehog

The whole thing of having to "log in" to comment, which includes facebook but is not limited to it, has definitely pretty much halted me from commenting on news/blog sites.

like i was always taught that revealing any personal info on the internet was A Bad Idea but facebook was the first major site to encourage it because of its origins as a college-level thing where that actually made more sense bc you were only interacting w/ people in your irl english lit class

fb is one thing the internet had to become as it mainstreamed into the "real world" i.e. the economy. i think it's a point along this continuum of claiming the reality of social interaction for the market, through a syntax of desire created from the forms of representation that networked machines allow. the fb effect i've noticed the most irl is people it would seem increasingly turning their lives into a bunch of discrete performed categories in this ongoing game for visibility, sort of the same for all social media it's true but fb was there first. not pretending to be an expert or anything, just cobbling stuff together from a limited pov

and fb being there first prob why it's the most boring lamestream version of it now i guess

xp 'log in to comment' is a necessary evil now because spambot technology has gotten too good

fb effect i've noticed the most irl is people it would seem increasingly turning their lives into a bunch of discrete performed categories in this ongoing game for visibility, sort of the same for all social media it's true but fb was there first.

and not like this is super new or bad or anything, just a thing people do that is aided by fb imo

people definitely did things for the sole purpose of bragging rights long before they could take selfies and post them to their news feeds, although facebook tends to elevate that aspect of social experience.

more like: did millennials ruin the internet or did the internet ruin millennials

my wife's news feed seems way more annoying than mine but that's because people actually share personal information whereas my friends are pretty laconic. something related to gender going on there.

realizing i could do this was a big breakthrough for me. instead of arguing w/ the void i could argue w/ ppl who i chose to friend on fb. also they have better killfile + blocking mechanics.

― Mordy, Monday, February 23, 2015 12:31 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

You moving a lot of this to FB has definitley made ILX a much more pleasant reading experience, ty

xps definitely, it makes that process very easy and "liquid".

don't mean to march into the convo, just "sharing" some "thoughts" in a box. i feel like there were visions for the internet, flawed geek visions with totalitarian flavor maybe, that posited it as something outside/above "the hustle" or w/e but that was not to be the case lol, and that sort of thing is definitely being pushed against because it isn't really compatible with "we have to turn everything into a possible revenue stream", see for example why ISPs in the US are actually worse for free and clear access rn.

Twitter's problem is that people can hide behind seemingly endless fake profiles and numerous accounts. Facebook is way stricter on this and pretty much always has been so it's harder to post evil shit on there, or if you do it's under your own name. still happens like but even Twitter's head honcho did some major mea culpa last week about how useless they are at dealing with trolls/ spambots and how he personally Will Sort It. god knows how.

i mean i have my suspicions about why ISPs really want to throttle service but nothing solid at all, that info isn't exactly the first thing that pops up on google (lol) for a lazy researcher like me.

There's also kind of an interesting, unspoken sadness to my facebook feed when I look at whose posts make up 50% of it -- the divorced mom who quit her job to start an ill-advised business and seems a bit adrift, the "older cool guy" from my college town who I generally like as a person but never seems to have found his way in life, the middle-aged poet my wife knows from some discussion group -- also a very nice and intelligent person, lost her non-profit job a couple years ago and hasn't been able to get back on her feet, the perpetually single, the trapped-in-bad-relationships. And then also just a bunch of random parents and show-offs.

re what euler was saying, there are definitely gendered versions of the sharing / liking economy.

fb def. makes it easier to judge it's true

I find Facebook more depressing than Twitter because with FB you learn that some people, no matter how much they claim to care about you, think you want to read their repugnant political views. Twitter is a more appropriate place for that - I think FB should be like a set of concurring reunions.

xp - you know you can unfollow these people and your feed will change?

The interesting thing with fb, how it feels "different" from past internet experience, is the ongoing chess game with the algorithm -- how what fb presents you with is responsive to your behavior, but you aren't entirely sure how. Like if you are promoting an event, do more people see your post if you link to the event page, or if you game the system and post the event flyer as a photo, because "people prefer to look at photos"?

Trick question: The internet was never good.

twitter ruined ilx, facebook ruined the internet

xp - you know you can unfollow these people and your feed will change?

This is seriously the magic bullet right here

unfollow is so crucial

people show up more in your feed if they've been clicking on you / scoping you out - y/n? paranoid?

i still don't really get pages or events, seems like there are pros out there, i just want to make a thing for my thing and not think about anything, y can't i do that.

p. interesting to me how earnest this thread is -- like, there's a joke or two but this feels like a q that is important to people. I think about it too - feel like fb didn't ruin shit until the upworthy style of presentation got perfected but once that happened, fuckin A. if you don't curate the shit out of your fb feed it's just garbage clickbait forever and it feels like it's getting worse daily, but at some point even your ex-coworkers will get sick of that too and stuff will change a little...maybe? if upworthy headlines are the terminal point of social media that's kind of hilarious and horrible

One Shocking Truth About Social Media

think-pieces ruined the internet

wow i never get upworthy shit just constant deejay / electronic music / albums by bands news and social justice axes / snarky stuff from brit ilx zing crew ("look at that over dere!") but then i'm pretty strict about unfollow, if you post one annoying thing u r gone from the safe space of my feed immediately.

mordy otm about killfiling on facebook, pruning your feed for annoying people is so necessary. but i keep some in there just to keep me in check even though they are basically spamming my life.

i moved away from the city i had lived in my entire life this year and fb is an okay way to feel connected to my friends back home, so i appreciate it for that. i'll occasionally argue with someone in the comments but i don't find it's a great platform for that, better to have some distance than like arguing with a random dude u went to hs with over whether bill maher is islamophobic

i know this is a set up for a knee-slappingly self-deprecating comeback but communities like ilx or sa at their best is the best form of the internet imo. unless you're a celeb or "work" for it (lol) twitter is just too much shouting into the void (the only non-spam followers i have on twitter are irls and ilxors) and fb is too personal so u can't go full sociopath. like u get good writing, you can outsource a lot of 'content' mining to ppl you "trust", get enough feedback to not make u feel like a shrimpy voyeur, perfect anonymity

mords is always a welcome sighting, i don't get why everyone's always so seemingly annoyed @ u tbr. xps

Facebook fixed the internet for a lot of people who never would have used RSS, Twitter or message boards. Their options before Facebook were the "funny" email forwards from their uncle or going to the Yahoo front page.

I don't really post to FB any more, because I don't know who I'm talking to and it feels weird. But it's good that people have a way to share stuff with friends and family. I mean if all Facebook did was provide the world's best platform for baby picture sharing that's a legit thing for a few hundred people to spend time building imo.

great post flopson

i moved away from the city i had lived in my entire life this year and fb is an okay way to feel connected to my friends back home, so i appreciate it for that.

yeah this is largely its function for me, and those are the same people sharing clickbait - former coworkers who I love and care about but who are really very normal people, y'know. so like 3/4 of their posts are "are you fucking kidding me" stuff but fb is otherwise the best & probably only medium for staying connected to them.

otm about how ilx (or sa no doubt, haven't posted there so I'd only know passively) are, when they're working and people are hearing each other and responding, some of the best of the internet.

pruning your feed for annoying people is so necessary. but i keep some in there just to keep me in check even though they are basically spamming my life.

haha if i was into "truth bombing" things, this would totally be one for me

not to come off all "my friends are cool" but "very normal" != sharing upworthy trash, ime

I used to prune the feed but I opened the floodgates a while back to get the full experience

feel like fb didn't ruin shit until the upworthy style of presentation got perfected but once that happened, fuckin A. if you don't curate the shit out of your fb feed it's just garbage clickbait forever and it feels like it's getting worse daily, but at some point even your ex-coworkers will get sick of that too and stuff will change a little...maybe?

That's not Facebook ruining the internet. That's people ruining Facebook.

As a non-Facebooker (I DON'T EVEN HAVE A TV (j/k I do have a TV and I watch it ALL THE FUCKING TIME)) with a carefully curated Twitter feed and a nice selection of RSS feeds, I hardly ever see that kind of clickbait-y garbage.

on the aggregation level i find that ilx + well chosen fb friends + rss feeds + [a little bit twitter] + some online newspapers/magazines = pretty good combo for keeping abreast of all interesting developments. i'm not sure that any of them tho are /really/ very good at facilitating conversation which is probably best kept to rl f2f convos and IM chats (which fb is also pretty good for tbh - over the last decade or whatever almost all my IM conversations have migrated from AIM to gmail to FB)

might do that i need a shakeup xxp

i am due for another round of pruning. a while back, i loosened my standards for friend request acceptance as well as the prime facebook error of commenting on and liking posts by generally dull people, so I am seeing a lot of "hilarious animal videos from fake radio stations" right now

there are many different flavors of upworthy trash and all kinds of people in my fb newsfeed post it. there is a totally rad couple i'm friends with who are both social workers and they are both really into activism and he's into all kinds of cool weird music but all they post is the social justice equivalent of upworthy trash. "WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN THIS COP AND THIS BLACK YOUTH WILL BLOW YOUR MIND"

i'm not sure that any of them tho are /really/ very good at facilitating conversation which is probably best kept to rl f2f convos and IM chats (which fb is also pretty good for tbh - over the last decade or whatever almost all my IM conversations have migrated from AIM to gmail to FB)

the reason i started reading ilx was because i was 16 years old and had no one to talk about pitchfork with f2f lmao

fb messenger is really sweet because you can communicate entirely w/ stickers. i probably fb message more than i even text and if it didnt kill my phones battery i would basically only use fb message for chatting

interesting to read this thread because most of it doesnt really get at what i hate about the 'facebooking' of the internet but i am also getting old i guess

i'll cop to sharing and liking difft versions of upworthy trash. the empty whole foods candy bar calories of fb.

Stickers are cool but they stole that pretty much wholesale from azn messaging programs :\

well azn people stole the internet from whites so it's fair now

cultural appropriation sadface

interesting to read this thread because most of it doesnt really get at what i hate about the 'facebooking' of the internet but i am also getting old i guess

it seems like the content used to be 'rich', even just like random weirdo posts from some anon on a message board, but now that the mechanisms of networking, always-on-ness etc dominate every single 'publication' event, content in a global sense is being depleted, dropping to zero value

like, reading 'intellectual' thort-mag content is just the same old feeling as reading a buzzfeed listicle, only with more brow, and they all still flog it on the same more-more-more new-new-new cycle

feeling that post. liking it if u will

As much as I love ILX, this place can be so high-pressure sometimes, because the average level of intelligence and discernment is so high and people are so quick to shoot down bullshit and banality. Sometimes it's freeing to just be like "here's a picture of us having fun at a basketball game" and not have to think of something original to say.

so happy we don't have 'likes' on ilx since the way i see ppl on fb use it, esp during 'political discussions,' is just to 'like' every single comment that agrees w/ them which would obv be out of control here

the stickers and emoji things are really ugly

kind of a slave to the like tbr it's how they get you

I have only ever seen the stickers used ironically.

i exclusively use bee + puppycat stickers on fb

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/08/4b/ac/084bacd68e3fe154557366b3c84fe7ea.jpg

ilx has fun picture threads it's pro fun around here afaict

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well azn people stole the internet from whites so it's fair now

― iatee, Monday, February 23, 2015 2:52 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

Whites stole emoji too. Whites are out of control

bee + puppycat is great. also a big fan of powerrangers and internet slang.

i saw some insane screed this dude posted about the illumanti to the noize bord in like 2005 get revived the other day. feel like thats the internet i want. i mean those dudes are still posting shit but its like youtube vidz which is lame.

those stickers are cute.

luriqua? luriqua was definitely a high pt of internet weird

i think there's something about the shape and color and size related to text ... like my visceral reaction of "ugh gross" to those things feels comparable to the way some ppl responded to that trypophobia thread

like, reading 'intellectual' thort-mag content is just the same old feeling as reading a buzzfeed listicle, only with more brow, and they all still flog it on the same more-more-more new-new-new cycle

^^ yeah I mean this is what I mean by upworthy. it's all fucking upworthy. lots of right-on I'd-agree-with-this-if-I-was-going-to-follow-that-link stuff is the same shit just higher-falutin', adding nothing to anything, just back-patting "I also want to weigh in stuff"

much like this post, my bad

the cactus and monkey stickers are the best

what's a thort-mag

thort - thong/short

sometimes i get a calm peaceful feeling from liking a bunch of stuff i'm not going to click on or comments i don't really care about. steady accumulation of plus ones in the relevant slots.

tbh I read a lot of erowid for old style Internet fun

random acts of kindness xp

lol totally

Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but Facebook (and Instagram and Twitter) seem to be quite dreadful.

So, the trolls can troll me by say, "yes ure getting old", but let me elaborate for those who wish to read my opinion on this.

Facebook didn't ruin anything, yes, but it amplified people's negative side; likewise with Instagram and Twitter. I've noticed many people post the most inane things on social media; partly out of boredom, partly because they have no real interests at that point in their lives, and partly because it's impulsive. I'm sure everything on display on social media was already happening in people's minds, but now we get confirmation of these bad parts of ourselves and social media seems to fuel all of it.

To be honest, I think forums are kind of similar, but at least there are ways users moderate that; be it through shaming, criticising or even trolling. In the end, I think there is a time and place for interesting conversation on the Internet, but most people do not use it for this purpose. I don't mean to say the Internet should always be some encyclopaedia because, of course, even I like to have mindless conversation on it, but I try to limit that.

For me, the wonderful thing about the Internet as a whole is finding new things about your favourite things or hobbies. In my case, music. ILX is a cool source for music. Every time it goes beyond that, even music discussion, it falls into a trap. It's like real life in that respect, except everything is on display, because people feel more comfortable sharing their feelings or getting into virtual fights. Okay, we know people have differences of opinion, we know there are bigots among us, we know there are sociopaths, we know some agree, some don't, some have bad tempers, some don't care, etc. I don't need to see that online to confirm it.

That's probably why my Web use has gone down dramatically, I suppose. I use the Internet/Web for work stuff, read a few articles that might interest me, take them in, think about them, and either write my thoughts down in my diary or among my really close friends (who are only a few). Even when acquaintances share their strong opinions and I happen to differ from them, I just nod. Not that I don't think these people can teach me anything new, but it's just the manner in which it is done is really quite tiresome. I restrict these types of interactions with only my close friends and family.

The irony is when I do post or do something on the Web that is exactly what I say I avoid. I pin it down to exceptions/isolated cases. I guess I'm mostly a lurker, but still.

It's true also that social media is not interested in deeper analyses. For example, I once wanted to have a discussion on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations on Twitter. I posted a lot about it, got a few favorites, a retweet, but that's about it. Many will say that is not the right medium, and that is also a valid point. Twitter and Instagram are not meant for any meaningful interactions, it seems. They're like the TV of our time.

Similarly, Facebook seems to be like that, as well. I know some will say it depends on your circle of friends, but even my friends with PhDs or 'intellectual' friends shy away from Facebook because of the nature of this medium: it's public, anyone's friends can basically comment, people don't always understand a person's way of socialising/communicating/etc., and sometimes it's too much work to keep up with a Facebook conversation. Needless to say, the more educated bunch don't like the privacy issues. Plus, most of my really close friends hardly use it. Facebook comments, I find, are meant to be more spontaneous or instant, anyway.

Email seems to be a better medium but it's like writing a letter these days. It seems the best way is over a pint at the pub, to be honest.

Okay, remind me not to post semi-deep/pseudo-intellectual BS this year again.

i think that before fb boring ppl were boring in their own ways but now there are readymade templates of boredom that everyone can subscribe to so now everyone is boring in the same way which is like boring to the second power

rather than opening people up to lots of different points of views, fb and the internet seem to have caused people to become further entrenched in their views, which is a bad thing.

friends with phds are the worst, either you see them taking all these bullshit psych quizzes, or liking upworthy content, or spamming activist bait to everyone they know, or you DON'T ever see them post ANYTHING in sync w/ their supposedly elevated intellectual life and then it's like oh you're all just schmucks like everyone else collectin a paycheck and watching downton abbey or cooking competition shows or w/e

ppl have raised existing within their own echo chamber into a virtue. it's like internet ppl are offended when other internet ppl disagree w/ their v important opinions.

some of the dumbest ppl i know have phds - i guess as long as you're willing to take on a certain level of debt anyone can get a phd now.

friends with phds are the worst, either you see them taking all these bullshit psych quizzes, or liking upworthy content, or spamming activist bait to everyone they know, or you DON'T ever see them post ANYTHING in sync w/ their supposedly elevated intellectual life and then it's like oh you're all just schmucks like everyone else collectin a paycheck and watching downton abbey or cooking competition shows or w/e

― j., Monday, February 23, 2015 9:00 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what i've heard from a few is facebook is how they "wind down" and "zone out". so, that's the thing, there is a preconceived notion that social media is supposed to be this time waster and just mindless thing anyway, so people freely partake in it in such a way

I was kind of sad when everybody quit Myspace to go to Facebook, I kind of liked the (often obnoxious) "welcome to my groovy pad" thing going on at Myspace, complete with wallpaper & some song playing.

Facebook is like everybody deciding to hang out in the food court at a mall for the rest of their lives.

tumblr, twitter obv the worst obv

Not obvious at all.

(mind you I am done for good with social-networking-with-friends - my friendships will last longer without it)

snapchat the actual worst

oh its obv

its real obv

w/out tumblr tho how would the world know about otherkin?

My only ish with The Web Today is the folding-up of message boards. Most of my online activity through my 20s is gone, boards deleted and caches missing. Not saying it was worthwhile content but it's like having your scrapbooks thrown out

One thing I've noticed from being friends with a lot of ilxors is that a lot of the conversations that used to happen on ILX now just happen in people's facebook posts

― 龜, Monday, February 23, 2015 11:21 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm surprised this is true. but i guess i shouldn't be, because i look at facebook so rarely. i don't know what people do on it. do you all really talk to each other on fb?

when it comes down to it i'm much more fond of an older internet (and ilx) because i'm a private person. but i still like reading things and mulling them over. the idea of being on FB or twitter with my real name and being all hey the oscars suck or jeez what is up with isis, give it a rest over there, is just gross to me, 'curated' groups of ppl or not.

personally speaking i talk to ilxors much more now on fb (more chat than wall posts) than i do on ilx

hey the oscars suck or jeez what is up with isis, give it a rest over there

are you sure you haven't been looking just a little

phd = becoming an expert in killing time while appearing to be doing something else, so yet my years of posts to ilx are a great example of this.

I think I joined Facebook and ILX around the same time (eleven years or so ago...jesus). Almost everyone I know personally is on Facebook but I've basically diverted all time and attention I used to spend on Facebook to a site where I know no one personally. That might be what I actually want from the internet, honestly.

when i was in grad school i already noticed that a lot of grad students were majoring in their own identities and there wasn't a whole lot of original research going on - i can only imagine that trend has increased (nb i was in a trendy NYC humanities program so i probably saw the worst of the worst there) xp

it's like being the guy at the coffeeshop who is perennially on the first page of some ostentatious tome but making it your entire failed-career identity.

what i was trying to say way back at the top of the thread: i see facebook as the foremost example of a form of internet discourse in which we are way overexposed to one another. i think normal or healthy relationships with others requires a kind of opposite of intimacy--some formality or distance or something which puts a barrier between you and every passing thought of the other person. this is why almost everyone is annoying on twitter (me included). it's not quite noise out there, it would be easy to ignore if it was, but it introduces a lot of information into our relations with others that we are probably better off without.

Last year there was a death in the family and a cousin put up a fb memorial page, my mother who has never been online was relaying it to me she said "They have put a memorial on that e-bay, they don't print them in the paper any more ".

From what I have seen of fb I will probably never go on it, there are too many people from my past who I would cross the road to avoid and it looks like a stalker app.

A psychopath I went to school with used fb to groom victims, he was pretending to be a recovering alcoholic to garner sympathy and hooked in this poor lass into some horror relationship that ended in her being hospitalised. The same (middle aged) guy tried to chat up my 12 year old niece on fb, I was really pissed when my sis wouldn't get the police involved.

Last year there was a death in the family and a cousin put up a fb memorial page, my mother who has never been online was relaying it to me she said "They have put a memorial on that e-bay, they don't print them in the paper any more ".

<3 this so much. my mother persistently thinks lol means lots of love so i got a text from her saying, 'dad started chemo today lol'

dying

i think one thing about facebook - at least i never see it - is that ppl in no way for whatever reason take it as a place where they can talk about 'what facebook is about'. like it's this weird combination of being completely out of their control, because of course lol the facebook corp making everything happen and owning everything, but also completely in their control, because it's all from the perspective of you and your feed and your posts and your pictures and your likes. people get in eruptive little skirmishes about people's content flooding them, or more pertinently, people commenting up some bullshit on their own posts, but that doesn't lead to disputes about the meaning of the medium - just defriending, unfollowing, etc.

whereas at least on twitter there's all kinds of convos about ~what it means~ that they're tweeting. (as on ilx)

points to a pernicious side effect of so much of the internet being mediated thru facebook (trending links etc) now

twitter users are constantly stuck on ~what everything means~ when I'm in charge they'll be mass culled

imo what Facebook has declined a lot from just a place to kick it virtually with your friends to everybody posting dogshit links for lols and BIG IMPORTANT MESSAGES, which of course, can easily be boiled down to a GIF.

But Facebook largely helped me become more sociable - due to the event postings, yes, but also had a few relationships start there. with people I already knew, mind you, but it gave me more of a window to communicate with them (no longer had to fill up my personal email box!).

there have also been occasions I've made friends on FB and then wound up meeting them irl not long after, and a few times rekindled old high school friendships or given me the ability to hang out with friends from junior high who are still in town (which happened once!). Not that I'm in the habit of looking backwards, I barely hang out with people that I knew pre-age 25, but y'know...not deleting my account anytime soon, just not reading as much.

yeah i'd gladly not talk to the wall anymore but the event postings seem to be essential if you want to know what's going on at nonstandard venues

<3 this so much. my mother persistently thinks lol means lots of love so i got a text from her saying, 'dad started chemo today lol'

― estela, Monday, February 23, 2015 2:12 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dying

― flopson, Monday, February 23, 2015 2:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...

I have slowly unfollowed everyone and facebook is now a bonobos or shave box sponsored self-maintaining birthday calendar, which is actually very useful.

still in denial over fb. I miss usenet.

>on February 24, 2015
>ogmor said:
>still in denial over fb. I miss usenet.

Word

despite the deluge of opinions & the decline of ~websites~ & anonymity, overall I think the internet is probably better than it was. the gulf in quantity between now and 2000 is huge

I do miss the ideal of surfing the web tho, the notion of individual curiosity & wanderlust without algorithmic mediation. all the big social sites have stripped away idiosyncratic structure and design & replaced it with content in homogeneous form

tildes ruined the internet

where is your website i want to sign the guestbook

oh that's right. it is on the ~cloud~.

did you ever see this site ogmor

http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/

I do miss the ideal of surfing the web tho, the notion of individual curiosity & wanderlust without algorithmic mediation. all the big social sites have stripped away idiosyncratic structure and design & replaced it with content in homogeneous form

― ogmor, Monday, February 23, 2015 7:49 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is OTM, maybe more for the "do you miss the 'old' internet" thread but I agree, the idea of really poking through some website you find, where the person's hierarchy of information is really weirdly weighted and lopsided and some sections have one article in them and others have forty subsections with amazing chewy stuff buried deep, this is really gone. there's not much that's exploratory about the web, you just receive stuff. goes hand in hand with nobody having personal websites at all (or even the personalization of myspace pages) or more to the point - - - when was the last time you actually read somebody's facebook "profile"? in the sense of the part where you have your favorite quotes or whatever... what would have been the core not only of a "website" but of a social network page in the friendster/myspace era.

i guess that still exists as a meaningful thing in okcupid pages and such. but it's the one "slow" thing about the whole site, in that it has this longer existence, less ephemeral, you actually exist as a being rather than one of countless cloud-entities cropping up here or there in this comment thread or that re-share. and this is completely buried: you have to go to "about" and then "details about you." everything else just gets washed away immediately. i dislike this about facebook, but i'm not sure how much is also just resentment at the loss, long ago, of all the stuff i had on friendster and myspace. so many emails that just don't exist anymore at all. it's a bummer. my facebook profile i haven't updated since 2009 by the looks of it.

not exactly facebook's fault, but imo the web is a better (for users) platform for . . . content . . . than aol/facebook/snapchat/apps/etc and it kinda seems like fb led the way back into the walled gardens of aol

http://www.theawl.com/2015/02/the-next-internet-is-tv

that said, i only go on facebook when i'm horribly drunk and have exhausted other avenues of intertainment, which is rare. i'd delete my account, but there's an off-chance that someone will invite me to something on it despite my persistent failure to attend previous events

well ya never know

tbf, my inability to leave the house is not facebook's fault

xp nakh-
no, but I am charmed by it, the borgean index especially. the cheerful aphorism-laced mish mash reminds me of early internet days in a few ways bc it also reminds me of my childhood home, chatting to my dad & skimming my parents books. not sure if the peculiar crossover between weightier scholarly subject matter and lighter internet-facilitated browsing goes wider than my own experience but it is a way of thinking + feeling that I hadn't thought about for a long time

I do miss the ideal of surfing the web tho, the notion of individual curiosity & wanderlust without algorithmic mediation. all the big social sites have stripped away idiosyncratic structure and design & replaced it with content in homogeneous form

i feel you on this but there's something i've always wondered like... i get the demand side, why all most people want out of the internet is the homogenized big social media version and how that ends up being most of what we see, but what's up with the supply side? where did all the people creating idiosyncratic content go? are they still out there and no one is reading?

i mean i guess 1 answer is i'm making a huge oversimplifying assumption by calling the internet in 2015 homogenized

lots of people are making idiosyncratic content within the given social media ie being youtube millionaires or whatever

It had always sucked. But then our parents got on it. Doomed.

idiosyncratic content is different from idiosyncratic structure tho.

I think there is a heaviness to the internet now, the constant sense of tonnes of content, going back in timelines or peeking at you on sidebars

the advantage of the big sites is being able to search and filter them; searching youtube for "my first vlog" newest first, daniel lopatin's idea of having a hootsuite stream or w/e for "working on my novel" etc.

The internet surfing conditions have never been better imo. Just spend a day with archive.org! There's so much stuff there. Don't let the howlies on upworthy get you down.

I'm sure this point's been made by now, but I think it's had a negative effect on life, never mind the internet. (Mine, anyway.)

you monsters

with every post you get one step closer to becoming a harvester of sorrow

*FB post

mailing lists > Usenet forums > Livejournal > MySpace > Forums (ILX/WATMM etc) > Facebook > Twitter

Same as it ever was, really.

what about BBSs

scented doves mad underrated

realizing i could do this was a big breakthrough for me. instead of arguing w/ the void i could argue w/ ppl who i chose to friend on fb.

I feel just the opposite -- I only quarrel about politics on ILX, which is mostly separate from my IRL identity. Arguing politics on FB seems sort of obnoxious, like, why would I put my political opinions in my friends' faces? I would no more do it than I would argue about politics in person.

options open up when you realize that if it no longer shows when your wall first loads, it literally did not happen

the problem with arguing politics = friends of friends argue with other friends of friends and then it gets knockdown drag out nasty and you're like "GUYS, PLS STOP" and then five minutes later someone is lying lifeless in your living room

why would I put my political opinions in my friends' faces?

Damn, most of my friends do nothing BUT crap on about their poitical opinions .On facebook, in the pub, at someone's dinner party....

Can’t speak to “the internet” but just my own idiosyncratic pathological (((in kantian sense))) personality.

I don’t do facebook or any social media that’s tied (or tie-able) to my “IRL identity,” my proper name.

Dimly recall some article I read years ago where Zuckerberg makes reference to Stoic philosophy and something like the “radical transparency” of Facebook with respect to one’s identity— like, the idea that cultivating and manifesting a “single identity” (a centralized and ostensibly “transparent” identity/ personality, as manifest/ exercised/ performed through Facebook) = integrity. Which, ugh. (NB I’ve long studied stoic philosophy, so this reference is double ugh.)

OK just found a relevant quote: “You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” – Zuckerberg, 2009

The idea being, I suppose, that maintaining decentralized or compartmentalized aspects of your personality (your music and movie preferences, your aesthetic choices, your family life, your hobbies, your sport teams, your take on pop culture/ celebrity gossip, your religion or spirituality, your politics, etc.) is living in a kind of existential inauthenticity.

Whereas I very deeply need and relish my layers of “opacity” (by which I mean not just “privacy”) and decentralized manifestations (scribbles and doodles and babblings) of polyphonous discordant aspects of self. The idea of a “transparent” “single” “identity” (particularly qua public, as exercised and manifest through social media) is repugnant and frightful to me.

This may have more to do with my own pathologies— I may be super shy and perhaps an avoidant personality. And perhaps there is an element of “inauthenticity” or cowardice in my repugnance— but on the other hand it’s the pitfalls of “inauthenticity” here (in the Facebook model of internet self-construction or self-performance) that most repel me (particularly when it comes to politics).

TL; DR I know; will probably post some more babble later (after a little more bourbon).

not a slam, or not a deep one, but that would lose nothing if every quotation mark & parenthetical were struck

what zuckerberg misses is that judicious fragmentation was an essential component of human identity prior to the internet's integration of all spheres. the idea that this new & vastly intrusive technology in some sense morally demands a radical reconfiguration and simplification of public identity seems so naive as to verge on the idiot-criminal.

not a slam, or not a deep one, but that would lose nothing if every quotation mark & parenthetical were struck

you're OTM-- I know very well (but have not been able to rid myself of) those awful writing habits. ILX may be good for me because y'all tend to be so pithy and uncluttered and I am (so) NOT. Hope some of that will rub off on me.

lol, it was beaten out of me hereabouts, but you seem to manage a better content/digression ratio than i ever did, so more power to you.

anyway, historically speaking, one might move from whatever small town to the big city to escape the prison of comprehensive known-ness, the oppressive integration of all spheres: home, work, play, etc. why then, having escaped the benevolent & all-binding eye, would we wish to reimpose it upon ourselves, rejoin some now limitless neighborhood watch? whatever morality insists upon such a thing is both boring and tyrannical by nature.

[/rant]

no worries; i stopped reading, for better or worse, after (((in kantian sense)))

heh, glad the triple parentheses as intended did their job

((((((((((facebook is good))))))))))))

jk

i do appreciate the ability to passively keep up with people i prob wldve lost touch with tho

facebook has ruined the high-school reunion industry

lag∞n has ruined the internet

omg not my fault

take it to kinja

facebook watched me grow up

i do appreciate the ability to passively keep up with people i prob wldve lost touch with tho

This is a good. Which is one reason I qualify my opinion as subjective rather than sociological. Whether inveterately or just at this point in my life, right now just don’t want to be found, don’t want to feel obliged to respond to people from my past who find me. Especially because I feel real guilt about not responding in timely fashion to real important friends I really should respond to. I tend to go incommunicado and that’s a real problem. I don’t think Facebook helps me (personally) with that; on the contrary.

judicious fragmentation was an essential component of human identity prior to the internet's integration of all spheres. the idea that this new & vastly intrusive technology in some sense morally demands a radical reconfiguration and simplification of public identity seems so naive as to verge on the idiot-criminal.

anyway, historically speaking, one might move from whatever small town to the big city to escape the prison of comprehensive known-ness, the oppressive integration of all spheres: home, work, play, etc. why then, having escaped the benevolent & all-binding eye, would we wish to reimpose it upon ourselves, rejoin some now limitless neighborhood watch? whatever morality insists upon such a thing is both boring and tyrannical by nature.

Yes, exactly. And the Other I resist here is (of course) both external and internal. I don’t mean to come off as judgy, because almost every one of my gripes is ambivalent. Like:

I’m creeped out by the curated self, the overly curated self (or subjectivation) of current social media. The “single identity” Zuckerberg talks about has (among others) aesthetic & cultural & ethical & political valences (which overlap and blur yet are conceptually distinct, but in Zuckerberg’s monistic philosophy are all too easily conflated); my discomfort involves the conflation as well as each aspect separately.

I do find some associated ideas or practices compelling: e.g. life as a work of art, or life as practice of/ toward some kind of authenticity. But Facebook internet culture seems to accentuate theyness and idle talk; upworthiness as alignment and allegiance and orientation toward some oppressive (to me) Other(s). Facebook’s “transparency” feels more like the concoction of an ideal ego; Lacan help me out here. I don’t know, there’s some repulsion I feel here that I haven’t figured out conceptually and can’t yet articulate.

It’s like, in a postmodern age without faith in an author-function, self/ identity is constructed or performed in terms of internet likes and dislikes, positive or negative retweets, tumblr curated reposts, quotation, and the panopticon internet audience. Like a last circle of hell, eternal high school. (Not that this is a new thing; identity qua imitation is human condition, but in a historically specific form now.) Dunno— because my ideas here are so inchoate, I’m making facile allusions to philosophers here, which tbh sound like (and may be) bullshit. Gotta find my own words but I’m too lazy/ sleepy/ drunk to try to do so now.

Here’s another stab: internet self-construction/ self-performance feels like permanently maintaining a self “on display”— an ongoing self-alienated performance from which you can’t escape. Living in the house of a hoarder (oneself), doomed never to rid yourself of your (or others’) past/ trash. Internet History.

And I second the echo chamber/ political entrenchment noted by others in this thread. It’s not so much an issue of the views one is exposed to (though that’s a part of it), but the internet expectation/ impulse to work out one’s political thinking through likes & dislikes, allegiances and repudiations, as markers of one’s identity. I myself have been very happy to variously pass through or set up camp at various places, forums or blogs, left and right, and engage in dialogue from an indeterminate or at least undogmatic political position (qua party or ideology). If I was bound to a proper name/ IRL identity, my explorations and conversations would be much more circumscribed. Especially e.g. within academia.

so happy we don't have 'likes' on ilx

Jesus, can you imagine?

picturing REDACTED's crushed little face, sat there refreshing and waiting for the thumbs up that never comes

there's only one REDACTED I know

I would like likes on ILX. Actually, they should be OTM's.

I just like the passive acknowledgement without having to post anything and adding to the noise.

facebook _per se_ idk. Facebook News Feed...yes.

fb is a driver of/is the biggest driver of a set of trends and ideas and structural changes that are making the internet a worse place.

a lot of it is just the actually-fairly-recent arrival of real, serious money, and maybe worse, real, serious Brand Activity online. weird new internets like whats app are vc funded and get eaten up by facebook. & the internet ends up just being the same shit, captive to m/l the same people, that you get anywhere else. maybe worse. the awl thing about the web being the new tv is otm. tv sucks!!

great posts from drash and agree totally - this crafting/curating of an "identity," like everybody needs to devote their life to being their own brand manager, is really distressing and relates directly to certain mechanics of the post-FB internet that were not consolidated before. maybe relates to my rant about the suppression of the "profile page," as non-quantifiable ways of defining this self are not really of interest. things that aren't likeable, clickable, sharable, or up-worthy are all basically extraneous, since the ideal model is actually everybody clicking clicking and clicking without actually reading or thinking about anything since that's time they could be spending clicking. and facebook encourages you to see yourself as part of this system - you're not just passing through and playing a clicking-game, your basic goal in life is to get others to click on stuff.

it's a wacky subjectivity. it's very destructive to other kinds of discourse, i think. the jokes about ILX with a "like" button point up just how destructive those forces are once they get to the level of interface and design and begin to alter what's likely - not necessarily even what kinds of conversation are possible, but what's likely. the example i always turn to is flickr, which in may 2013 changed its entire deal to try and look more tablet-y (i guess) and to emphasize the ease of seeing a big picture and clicking "favorite" on it. i've gone on about this many times but in the process, the descriptive text under the photo, and the comments on it by other people, have been very much suppressed. (at the same moment they really obscured some of the nested-set organization of users' photos, wiping out hierarchical relationships among posts and making it considerably less likely that someone would follow one person's train of thought or meandering reflection across months or years. but honestly this may have just been incompetence as i can't see where it helps them.)

a few years ago i was having really great conversations on flickr with a relatively small group of people who wanted to talk about architecture in a non-bullshitty, non-"comments thread on archdaily" kind of way. that's really, really faded and i can only compare it to ILX getting the "like" button in terms of the loss of a certain space for reasoned conversation that was, without anybody necessarily realizing it, premised on the activity's indigestibility from the point of view of clicks and commerce.

i've been reading a lot on WW2/Cold War computing (esp. paul edwards's the closed world and to a lesser extent david alan grier's when computers were human) and a theme that keeps coming up is people with machines trying to find tasks that the machines they have are good at, and patrons/institutions that are eager to be convinced they have just those kinds of tasks. feel like the increasing divergence of the silicon valley class from regular human desires (as per this kinda deal) could reflect something similar, though that analysis really needs more "follow the money." but i could believe that there is some subclass of people who always dreamed of their every action being a trackable monetizable micro-performance. the mark zuckerberg BS about a unitary self strikes me like this, dude is deep into some horrible culture he absorbed in college where this really sounds like a wonderful thing rather than the loss of everything that makes life more living.

one of the architecture criticism programs up here did a conference a couple years ago where one premise was that it was not recorded and you couldn't take pictures. while recording is useful for people who can't make it, and has obviously been going on for ages, i wonder if it felt like a huge relief to just be in a room talking to other humans and not imagining how you look on camera etc. i would not be surprised if we start seeing more and more retreats, workshops, getaways, love-ins or other activities where one of the requirements is "for this week/two weeks/etc, you cannot post anything to the internet, because as you are thinking about whether anyone has clicked on your post, you are not here in this moment."

btw if that is tl;dr, ILX does have one useful button relating to how you feel about a post, it's just one over from 'bookmark'

^^^ Matt DC likes this post

^^^ flag post

I'm not joking about wanting likes, I actually do!

^^^ flag post

if I can't see the FP count go up, it didn't happen

things that aren't likeable, clickable, sharable, or up-worthy are all basically extraneous, since the ideal model is actually everybody clicking clicking and clicking without actually reading or thinking about anything since that's time they could be spending clicking. and facebook encourages you to see yourself as part of this system - you're not just passing through and playing a clicking-game, your basic goal in life is to get others to click on stuff.

this seems otm, and an inevitable result of letting a corporation provide our primary means of communication. it's difficult to see any way out of it short of someone creating a non-profit alternative with a similar ubiquity (yeah right) or, more likely, everyone gradually migrating over to the next ascendant corporate model that hasn't quite revealed it's big profit-making feature that ruins everything

I guess I don't see how clicking is *that* important and problematic a part of fb use. when I click like it's just me nodding my head to a friend's photo, say. I post things to let my fb friends know what's going on, get the occasional cheap laugh, throw some wild speculation into the cosmos.

fb does encourage day to day keeping-up which distracts from long-term internet building, though: I like threads here b/c they can be continued years after they've begun, whereas on fb posts and convos are gone half a day later, if they even show up at all.

i quit fb maybe 4 yrs ago in response to some bad falling outs / depressive period that lead to deep introspection after friend's suicide wherein i sort of took a look at online narcissism (mine and other's) and felt compelled to no longer "even passively take part". subsequent revaluations abt data ownership and privacy concerns have ex post facto redeemed my decision. i don't think fb is ruining the internet but i do believe it brings out a lot of bad in people and i didn't want to keep having these thoughts abt my friends and family on the daily.

subsequently im pretty much an internet hermit wrt social media generally (save a LinkedIn that is at least a yr out of date by last accounting) so my op may not hold much water here

The Top Stories is the thing that drives me crazy with FB. All I want is every post, in reverse chronological order.

I've been curating my brand since I was in high school I'm fine with it

that awl article that max mentioned is pretty great: http://www.theawl.com/2015/02/the-next-internet-is-tv

i like that article a lot and john hermans writing in general tho i dont think i really agree with it

the internet is not tv the barriers to entry ate still lower than any mass medium ever and things will continue to evolve in weird unpredictable ways imho

which is not to say its separate from the strange consumerist corporate global culture we live in

btw as far as on a more nitty gritty interaction level i agree w ppl who are saying likes are a bummer, or at least the counting of like is, same with follower count on twitter, all these stats that encourage gamification of social interactions are very neurotic and unchill and drive so much of what happens on these sites

also tho does everyone need to see that you agree w/ the one millionth post this week on fb attacking anti-vaxxers?

This thread is already very long so apologies if this is OT.
In some ways I like being 'friends' on FB with Ilxors. Some of you post incredibly worthwhile things and it brightens up my news feed no end. Somehow I feel as though I'm interacting with human beings on FB as opposed to an ever-changing hivemind of anonymous display names on ILX. ILX has always been an oracular interface to me. You chuck a stone down the well and often you get a chorus of unfamiliar voices screaming back at you. I'm more 'myself' on FB than I am on ILX. I think I'm smarter as CF than as dog latin, or at least I interact differently. All said it can be a bit of a mindfuck when say, DP and Ned end up in a discussion about sexism with an old acquaintance I knew from school, as did happen a couple of months back.

i think the real problem is that the dude that wrote that article i couldnt finish is on the internet at all

dont click on stuff if u think clicking on stuff is ruining the world

the big reason i don't post anything on Facebook (except for self-promotional music stuff) is because of the weird mix of groups/audiences. i don't feel comfortable talking to my real life friends, the co-workers that have added me, a few relatives, my young people music friends, my old people music friends, internet friends, and rando acquaintances all at once. about anything.

the relatively anonymous, self-selecting community of ILX (or even Twitter) is much more comfortable.

It's true though, that the internet is exactly what you make of it. I get puzzled when I hear people say 'Facebook is boring now'. I can understand them having a problem with the internet and spending too much time on it, but surely how interesting Facebook is is largely down to who you're friends with. All said, I've never had much time for Twitter as I find the short character count extremely limiting and the whole format overwhelming. So maybe I do understand the Facebook-is-boring crew a little more than I care to say.

yeah the forms of the networks are crucial for sure

The Top Stories is the thing that drives me crazy with FB. All I want is every post, in reverse chronological order.

― Jeff, Tuesday, February 24, 2015 7:07 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they had to reorganize their data centers so as to not store copies of everything for each user. but then I agree that they get a bit too creative with the way they present all of this data to the user. just find all your friends' posts and sort that shit chronologically? no, we need an algorithm!

i suspect for most ppl the curated timeline is better, also they never noticed or thought about it

the big reason i don't post anything on Facebook (except for self-promotional music stuff) is because of the weird mix of groups/audiences. i don't feel comfortable talking to my real life friends, the co-workers that have added me, a few relatives, my young people music friends, my old people music friends, internet friends, and rando acquaintances all at once. about anything.

the relatively anonymous, self-selecting community of ILX (or even Twitter) is much more comfortable.

― lil urbane (Jordan), Tuesday, February 24, 2015 11:07 AM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feeling this a lot. whenever i'm about to post something on facebook, i pretty much always think "my mother-in-law will see this"

i love posting audince inaproreate things on facebook gives me a thrill

for awhile after I moved to a new city, I wondered how this one dude grew up to be such a clueless asshole. but he was also from another city, and I learned from reading comments on his fb posts that he actually grew up with a whole community of assholes. so that was good to know.

i think a lot about establishing a separate fbook for my 'adult' self. fbook throngs with family, students, colleagues, etc etc etc. i was much freer on myspace. like in terms of talking abt relationships and sex, or politics. granted that the mechanisms *for* speaking were much more limited. but being on facebook is this horrible collision between intimacy with everyone, and feeling like you're in job-performance mode, meeting a potential client or describing what youve been up to to your not very close aunt. i think it may have actually affected me as a person, maybe even closed me off a bit from precisely those friends with whom i *would* be more comfortable sharing, because we're all on facebook. the connectedness becomes a glass wall at some point.

a separate fb account for the dumb stuff works but you have to care enough to bother with both, and is it worth it? signs point to no

u dont have to have a seperate account u can makes lists or whatever they call them idk ive never done it

i do not envy people who didn't grow up with a strong divide between their public and private selves
it's one of the things i cherish most in life
the expectation that i would need to remove this barrier more than i do is so not gonna happen

to answer the question: no, but my sister ruined facebook

otm. x-post

online is a good way to understand yr offline self

different posts and alter egos for your "friends" and "buds" lists

btw whenever i feel the need for the old, weird internet i go to uppers(nsfw) and it helps satisfy the need a little bit.

Am I the only one who feels like he'd like his fbook feed less, not more curated? That I'd much rather literally everything showed up on it? I mean I guess I'd like to be able to block extremely annoying people but I don't really know anyone that bad. Facebook keeps trying to get me to narrow my feed to who I want to click on but I'd rather it was a mix of everything. Maybe it's just FOMO or maybe its that I don't trust my click instincts to necessarily have my best interests at heart

not because it feels old but because it is weird and fun and full of surprises

Basically I'd rather feel in touch with a genuine cross section of people rather than letting my arbitrary click habits determine who Facebook thinks I care about

i do not envy people who didn't grow up with a strong divide between their public and private selves
it's one of the things i cherish most in life
the expectation that i would need to remove this barrier more than i do is so not gonna happen

― groundless round (La Lechera), Tuesday, February 24, 2015 11:30 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Absolutely OTM. I also understand and appreciate, in the abstract, dog latin's point in favor of getting to see ILXors more as real people via FB interaction inasmuch as it's always been hard for me to get a sense of who most people are here. As people and not as goofy, abstract usernames. I don't feel like I've ever found a comfortable middle ground wrt online interactions.

Ned Raggett runs my FB timeline :(

"i do not envy people who didn't grow up with a strong divide between their public and private selves"

feel the opposite! (most of the time)

Ned Raggett runs my FB timeline :(

― 龜, Tuesday, February 24, 2015 11:46 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Love ned of course but sometimes when he shares something I think, no way you care about that man

Am I the only one who feels like he'd like his fbook feed less, not more curated? That I'd much rather literally everything showed up on it?

― deej loaf (D-40), Tuesday, February 24, 2015 12:43 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thats the consensus amongst internet power users, everyone else has no idea their feed is being curated but prob likes it better

i hid ned a long time ago (sorry ned)

yeah you have to think fb has run the numbers on this, being that there are billions of dollars on the line

By "likes it better" do you mean "spends more time on it"

ya

tildes ruined the internet

― local eire man (darraghmac), Monday, February 23, 2015 6:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't feel comfortable talking to my real life friends, the co-workers that have added me, a few relatives, my young people music friends, my old people music friends, internet friends, and rando acquaintances all at once. about anything.

OTM. normally everything is ok but occasionally i'll be commenting on something my sister is talking about and suddenly there will be an intrusion of people that my sister doesn't know, commenting/disagreeing/making the funnies and all that, and they don't realize that it's my sister i'm talking to rather than just another person. i guess the solution is to never talk to my sister via facebook or to create a family list and keep my posts to her restricted to that level of access, but...what a massive pain in the ass that is.

Ned runs my timeline as well, but I think that goes back to the curation by algorithm thing. Ned posts lots and lots of stuff that I don't necessarily click on, but I click enough things that Facebook knows that putting his posts at the top results in more clicks/$ from me.

I see a lot of Alfred blog posts in my timeline too

btw, you all realize you can sort the timeline so that it shows the posts in reverse chronological order, right? every few days it'll try to steer you back to the curated algorithm "top stories" mode but you can keep switching it back.

xp nakh-
no, but I am charmed by it, the borgean index especially. the cheerful aphorism-laced mish mash reminds me of early internet days in a few ways bc it also reminds me of my childhood home, chatting to my dad & skimming my parents books. not sure if the peculiar crossover between weightier scholarly subject matter and lighter internet-facilitated browsing goes wider than my own experience but it is a way of thinking + feeling that I hadn't thought about for a long time

― ogmor, Tuesday, 24 February 2015 01:49 (16 hours ago)

yeah it's a wonderful site and that mode of discursive/aphoristic is something to be valued, seldom done so well or with that generosity of spirit and intellect though

that and scaruffi were my favourite personal sites as a teenager and i can't think of anything i've found since to compare to them

now even glenn mcd is working for the algorithm bots : (

btw, you all realize you can sort the timeline so that it shows the posts in reverse chronological order, right? every few days it'll try to steer you back to the curated algorithm "top stories" mode but you can keep switching it back.

Yes, but that is a gigantic pain. In order to follow everything, I need to be able to know where I was the last time. But what if the last time I was reading, I was on top stories, it's all a clusterfuck and confusing. Then I realize that I don't care enough about the content to bother.

Plus FB, still does some grouping out of order. For example in my current TL if I put it to most recent, it has a group of posts, Person X posted 7 updates, and then has a box with two of their updates in it, one 13 hours ago followed by one 7 hours ago.

what the internet needs is more threads about facebook and how shitty it is

hard hitting

what the internet kneads is artisanal bread dough, and the internet is posting about it on facebook.

what i need is your FPs

tildes ruined the internet

%7Eno/way.htm

good piece http://www.theawl.com/2015/02/the-facebook-proposition

Plus FB, still does some grouping out of order. For example in my current TL if I put it to most recent, it has a group of posts, Person X posted 7 updates, and then has a box with two of their updates in it, one 13 hours ago followed by one 7 hours ago.

This is likely because a post will get moved back to the top of yr feed if someone's recently commented on it or liked it. This is a neat method to make an old lol post or pic get reposted in peoples feeds btw (something I've seen Roxy and Hoos use to great lol effect and Ive done once or twice myself).

My "unfollow" list is almost bigger than my list of friends at this point, and in addition to this, I have a "locked down" list full of people that are excluded from seeing anything I post. All relatives bar a couple. Many ILXors. This one woman I know who *literally* compulsively clicks like on every single thing everyone posts, to the point it started to feel creepystalky. That One Guy everyone has who posts nothing but SAVE THE GAY LAND WHALES img macros with change.org petition links under it.

ima gay land whale and i vote

actually can we get a WhatsApp group going pls already

Viber or GTFO

wtf is that

I still have a silly-named snapchat account, can't wait until I am about to get sexy pics, am too lazy to set up a new one, and admit my account is g0thninja69

send nudes to weedhitlerdid911

viber is just a net-based version of SMS txting really, like whatsapp or skype.

saves money if you pay by the txt; bit pointless for me cos I get unlimited txts on my phone plan but it is also handy for group chats.

prob good for texting other non-contiguous countries

which is rly every country for aus I guess, unless you get free texts to New Zealand!

lol I dont kno anyone in NZ tbh

so many txting apps my lord everyone wants to txt

whatsapp only one ive fd with too much, its p good

iyo is twitter inherently corny? does it turn everyone corny?

twitter is good actually

you can tweet corporations

and it turns out that they are just fronts for young adults

http://i.imgur.com/R6w3ybU.png?1

ugh current worst tweeter always RTed into my feed

surpassing moscaddie

challops

In the dress controversy, the white and gold partisans are just lying to freak people out right? The dress is clearly blue and black.

keep that shit off ilx

idgaf about your rods and cones, keep that to fb

moscaddie quit

ya i discovered that when i was making that slanderous post cause i cldnt remember her name so i had to search twitter, did something scandalous happen or did she just get sick of being ppls feminist fortune cookie

an interesting cycle on twitter is like someone is good at twitter, gets popular, becomes bad at twitter due to the forces exerted by twitter popularity

dunno abt any drama, don't pay enough close attn, but i do know she had legions of haters

f the h8rs imo

lotta ppl take misandry tweets v seriously, has to be super tiring

Sweet Dan ‏@myDXMprobIem Feb 24
Rigamarock and Moscaddie left twitter to join ISIS

Murphday ‏@JuliusIrvington Feb 24
did moscaddie log off bc she said men were incapable of actually loving women? because that is a good reason to log off

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B-bXvHkCAAAHUhP.png

eh no one seems to know, fare the well

no more parsing, makes me feel worn out. adios, be well, etc

xp yeah

cant twit 'er

i wonder what the next thing is on twitter is now that the outrage olympics are wrapping up

being pretty chill / stories about happiness

thats what im about rn just little stories i can tweet

nice

kinda ruins my plan to start all my tweets from now on with "here is a depressing truth"

here is a depressing truth: the world is full of sadness

otm

here is a depressing truth: gravity

I like misandry

it was good, as a joke, but jokes dont last (5000 likes)

idk I think militant misandry is no joke and I approve 100%

i dont thats like a real thing actually

twitter?! i hardly know 'er!!!!!

moscaddie is funny

naaw

sry you are outvoted, motion passes

this is so unfair

tho if we want to get deeper into my feelings on the topic

an interesting cycle on twitter is like someone is good at twitter, gets popular, becomes bad at twitter due to the forces exerted by twitter popularity

― lag∞n, Friday, February 27, 2015 11:58 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

may you never become popular

aw

like i unfollowed netw3rk who i really used to think was just wonderful

I don't unfollow, I just send a dm saying "it's time" and they remove their twitter acct

i unfollowed netwerk like yesterday

rip

I don't unfollow, I just send a dm saying "it's time" and they remove their twitter acct

― mh, Friday, February 27, 2015 4:41 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

p good system tbh

shrill cosby has always been bad tho

like i unfollowed netw3rk who i really used to think was just wonderful

― lag∞n, Friday, February 27, 2015 4:41 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

Did he go to shit? :(

Prolly saved all his good shit for grantland

really need to have it out w/u which richard nixon tweeter is best

haha

Prolly saved all his good shit for grantland

― 龜, Friday, February 27, 2015 4:52 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

his writing for grantland is... so bad tho, bringing up the whole concept of twitter as a form which is p interesting to me but maybe is horrible to others?

https://gotrazy.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/kakao3.jpg?w=764

I thought his home alone jigsaw piece was pretty good xp

yeah i liked that too tho even there with a compelling concept addressing a subject matter dear to my heart (the saw movies) u can see how he benefits from a format that demands pithiness

like so many very hilarious tweeters when writing longer are revealed to be guys who think ironic formality and goofy words (there was an ilx thread that addressed this sort of humor maybe? that i cant find) are really good

(there was an ilx thread that addressed this sort of humor maybe? that i cant find)

Is this the thread you're thinking of?

Origins of the faux-naif bloggy voice?

no it was called like "that thing when guys go *half cocks elbow* 'hello sir'" or that sentiment is expressed within or something, idk i tried searching for it, im a fan of faux-naif bloggy voice obvs lol

didn't know you were into saw *updates notes*

subsequently im pretty much an internet hermit wrt social media generally (save a LinkedIn that is at least a yr out of date by last accounting) so my op may not hold much water here

hey how is this workin out if you don't mind my asking? I have some anxiety over this stuff, I probably can't ever hermit out completely because FB's pretty valuable when I'm away from home a lot & other social media stuff is part of my work, but I'm curious, because I have been thinking of social media time as this weird SOMA state or something, not gratifying but not irritating enough to spend less time on

i just unhid everyone tonight for some reason! well, not everyone...

it's an experiment in terror.

i spend the majority of my free/bored at work internet time on one facebook group now and it's kinda everything i ever wanted from interactive internet. don't have to bug my regular facebook friends or people here half as much with pictures of records and record talk. you're welcome! i ignore regular facebook pretty good. but some of my best real life pals are on there so it's worth it for that.

just went on fb for the first time in like a month and so much stuff is going on like ppl getting married and parents retiring and ilx0rs/their babies being cuet

kinda feel like there is a disconnect and i am on the wrong side (which isn't necessarily because i'm old, although that helps). in days of yore it was maybe ppls' duty to let their friends know what was going on? and now it's ppls' duty to monitor their friends' feeds?

i dunno -- i am ever-increasingly isolated in general, but i'd prefer friends communicated with me directly via any number of means rather than assuming that i follow their internet trails

fb is bizarre now--I used to get status updates from friends in my feed, but now all I see are outrage links

outrageous

like Jem and the Holograms

showtime (platform) synergy

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/browbeat/2015/05/19/an_interview_with_evan_arnold_who_played_leonard_in_the_final_episode_of/leonard_mad_men.png.CROP.promovar-mediumlarge.png

Cheer up, Leonard. Forty years from now, the fridge door will never close. Every minute of every hour of every day, you'll get reminders of how wonderful everyone's life out there is. Unless you unplug the fridge altogether, which is easier said than done.

https://www.facebook.com/ShutUpImStillTalking/photos_stream

100% essential reading imo, especially if you work in the content mines

https://medium.com/message/god-tier-facebook-moms-run-the-meme-game-1e56ef0d31ec

my exposure to post-memes has been so marginal the the post-post-memes registered around the same time

But Foul Bachelor Frog and Socially Awkward Penguin are presented as first-person characters for for the reader to identify with. FBF is decidedly male (he’s constantly told to “blast it with piss”)

Some good observations in there, could maybe take a few more steps -- the spiritual ancestors being funny t-shirts and posters (and coozies, and bumper stickers, and...) is right on, but i would also have to add funny email forwards/signature quotes. Those probably pre-hashed all of the punchlines and sentiments of these things ages ago; in turn they're descended from chain letters and especially newspaper columns. It would be interesting to get a little more precise (as they try to do with the straight white male nerd type) w/r/t the users and uses of those forms of communication.

The concluding hypothesis - that these things are popular because they are inoffensive and easily shared with a friends-family-coworkers set like Facebook - could thus get a bit more grounded. People in different places in their life use Facebook in different ways. My aunt, who shares the most of these kind of things of anyone I know, is linked up on Facebook primarily to other family members and her strong local community of other 75+-year-olds. She particularly likes to share things about libraries and librarians, since she's spent some time as a librarian, etc. I suspect that a 40-year-old desk worker's social network is different, and the shared sentiments too, even though the form of Ye Olde Cartoon Shirt/Maxine Cartoon appears the same. Lumping all these together kind of limits the analysis, though I do get that the article is more of a 'first step' in articulating the lines between these and other memes. That said, I don't see much sense in calling them "post-memes" - they seem pretty memetic to me and in the long run of history, it's more likely we'll see the 4chan type memes as an obscure early form of the type before it became popularized.

a friend tells me that in the US people are being offered the chance to x-fer money via FB chat !?

is that for real ?

(said friend falls for all sorts of wind-ups ..)

it's real

bloody hell.

there is no way i would ever trust FB with that information.

I haven't signed up but I'd imagine they use a third-party payment processor

I have ignored it despite the fact I apparently know the project lead? idk hope it's doing well

i've used it, its fine

idk

not a third party processer actually afaict, no option to link to paypal or anything

you can also do this through gmail/gchat iirc?

I don't see much sense in calling them "post-memes" - they seem pretty memetic to me and in the long run of history, it's more likely we'll see the 4chan type memes as an obscure early form of the type before it became popularized.

― a chamillionaire full of mallomars (Doctor Casino), Thursday, July 9, 2015 4:50 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya i think this is otm and beyond that "post-post-memes" is irredeemably stupid

re money x-fers :

no option in uk based gmail/gchat as far as i can tell.

yet.

i actually encountered many maoist minion macros before i encountered my first real minion macro but my FB is a weird tumblr/FB hybrid with a lot of people posting deep in-jokes under pseudonyms as a matter of course so that sort of made sense to me

missed opportunity for meowist memes

https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426

Found this event posting that showed up on my wall the other day kind of laughable. It's a Fast Times/Clueless double-bill at a local rep house in August. There are currently 906 people who are going. The theatre holds 200-250, and on the night of the screening it'll be me and 40 other people. Great way to apprise the world of all the great stuff you'll be attending without ever having to show up for any of it.

tbf if there were free booze they'd all show up & then some

xp plenty of ppl, me included, will "join" events as a way to have all their social/cultural options on the event calendar and then choose what to actually go to based on that short-list.

best bit is when it announces "[Bananaman Begins] went to [some shit]" and is nearly always incorrect.

I find it particularly annoying when ppl put themselves down as attending things when they're not even in the same country as the event

funny, i find it particularly annoying when people invite me to events on different continents from the one i live on

If people unfollow me, and never message me on IM, then i'd rather they just sent an IM saying that as they never see any of my posts or chat to me then they will unfriend me and do so.
But people never have the honesty or guts to do that so they either unfriend you without warning or just keep you unfollowed.

u ok hun?

lol

was just on offshoot of an earlier fb post i made on the subject

i have no idea if anyone has ever unfollowed me

People are always unfriending me. I never usually notice until they crop up in "people you may know" lists and I'm like "aren't they already my friend?" and it turns out they aren't any more. Oh well.

"always" = about three people, I think.

there's someone on my local neighbourhood thread who occasionally posts completely off-topic "jokey" image shitposts that i find actually super charming because she's just this nice lady from the neighbourhood who's trying to brighten everyone's day. someone decided to drop into the comments and be a facebook cop today so i just responded with "[dude's name], facebook cop" (note: this hood doesn't much care for cops btw) and i ahve now decided that saying "[person's name], facebook cop" is my new favourite thing to write

does everyone get lyft/uber spambots posting to public events pages where you are?

annoying af

particularly when its an event i'm putting on and people ask me when we 'partnered' with lyft or whatever and i just want to shrink into a higgs-boson

god facebook sucks so fucking bad

i don't know why i even go to this site anymore

I avoided it for a couple days, got drawn into a discussion on abortion and healthcare that ended up with me peacing out after some guy with his head up his ass took over the conversation

http://www.roughtype.com/?p=6376

iyo did facebook ruin the meaternet

I've just fell victim to the real-name policy. Facebook wants proof of my name, but the name I use on social media is not the name I was born with and I was really quite happy with that. It's so easy to think, "well it's just Facebook, it doesn't matter" but I've already had texts from people (OK, my boyfriend and my mother) wondering what happened to me, plus it's stopping me from accessing all the music groups/pages etc I follow.

Wait what real-name policy

Facebook insists people register under their assigned birth names like i do

fwiw, friend of mine was at some jobcentre bullshit, and they mentioned the danger of putting employers off with social media stuff, my friend was like, pfft I use a fake name anyway, that very evening she was shut out by facecontrol and ordered to provide proof of real name...

who knew job centre employees were utter cunts?

word

loads of my friends have jobs that make it important to remain pseudonymous, maybe fb thinks it would be easier for them to use a fake name at work

tbh Facebook might as well ban my account now, or can I turn it into a fictional band page?

It's not like I'm using a completely made-up name - when I got the email to tell me why I was locked out, I replied explaining that my first name is the same as my real first name and my surname is just the first letter of my real surname. But I doubt that will be enough and I'll just have to get my real name on it. It's just as well I'm not transgender and trying to establish my new identity through self-definition.

altho I don't use a fake name, I think this is the final straw for me. Too big for their boots these fuckers.

god facebook sucks so fucking bad

― marcos, Tuesday, July 28, 2015 2:21 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't know why i even go to this site anymore

― marcos, Tuesday, July 28, 2015 2:21 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

For about the last three months I've been feeling very close to wanting to leave it entirely. Have been posting less, deleted the app from my phone, but can't completely stay away somehow.

It's just like this weird internet junkpile, or I guess junkstream -- baby pictures from hs 'friend' you didn't like enough to keep in touch with --> look at this talented uzbeki 6-year-old breakdancer --> politician we hate said something outrageous! --> failed joke --> local parent selling some garbage --> someone still jocking the Wire --> terrible user someecard --> BEEERRRNIE SANDERS!!! --> bicycles --> IF WE CARED HALF AS MUCH ABOUT X AS WE DID ABOUT Y... --> "hey everyone, I did something on my weekend!" (person you barely know)...

and yet somehow creates this feeling like you need to "check" it to make sure you don't miss anything

basically it's shitty ilx

ilx: facebook, but less shitty

less face, more book

It's just like this weird internet junkpile, or I guess junkstream -- baby pictures from hs 'friend' you didn't like enough to keep in touch with --> look at this talented uzbeki 6-year-old breakdancer --> politician we hate said something outrageous! --> failed joke --> local parent selling some garbage --> someone still jocking the Wire --> terrible user someecard --> BEEERRRNIE SANDERS!!! --> bicycles --> IF WE CARED HALF AS MUCH ABOUT X AS WE DID ABOUT Y... --> "hey everyone, I did something on my weekend!" (person you barely know)...

this is why Facebook is good!

My feed is p sweet tbh

mine too, apart from the endless wittering of CONTROVERSIAL POSTER REDACTED

facebook should develop a big button that inverts your location in the social map and lets you see posts from ppl who aren't so deathly boring and uncool as everyone you know

maybe I need to curate my feed a little better

facebook is the worst bc humanity is the worst

picture a book of human faces, being clicked on, for eternity

humanity is the worst but with social media websites the design and the format definitely shapes folks' posting style and for whatever reason facebook seems to bring out the most dull and irritating in people or something. i just deactivated my faceboo, feeling free.

My feed is p sweet tbh

― j.enjoyhotdogs (wins), Friday, July 31, 2015 1:02 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my advice is follow national parks and the national weather service

i need to start aggressively hiding people who constantly (like several times a day) post links to depressing news and think pieces about depressing news

yeah my main problem was just so many thinkpieces. also like since my friends are primarily left-wing and educated and live in the northern hemisphere they're all the same thinkpieces, from the same publications, that if I wanted to read I wouldn't need to go to facebook to find them.

also multiple people posting the same thinkpiece

also when the thinkpieces are from different publications they all piece about the same thinks

I was bemused by a couple passages in Matt Haig's The Humans:

Mostly, humans just wanted to know about what was going on within their country, preferably within that bit of the country which was their bit, the more local the better. Given this view, the absolutely ideal human news programme would only concern what was going on inside the house where the human watching it actually lived. The coverage could then be divided up and prioritised on the basis of the specific rooms within that house, with the lead story always being about the room where the television was, and typically concerning the most important fact that it was being watched by a human. But until a human follows the logic of news to this inevitable conclusion, the best they had was local news.

Essentially, social networking on Earth was quite limited... On Earth, social networking generally involved sitting down at a non-sentient computer and typing words about needing a coffee and reading about other people needing a coffee, while forgetting to actually make a coffee. It was the news show they had been waiting for. It was the show where the news could be all about them.

you mean amused

true, dat.

the evolution of Cecil the Lion as meme on my fb feed has made me feel like a decent curator of my personal brand

my advice is follow national parks and the national weather service

― e-bouquet (mattresslessness)

^^^

kinda feel like cecil the lion and the confederate flag are precisely the level of target internet outrage should be targeted at. like police brutality is too big a target for the internet to do much more than maybe catalyze the first step in a twenty step process that maybe if we're lucky leads to a moderate adjustment in policy. but getting walmart to stop selling the confederate flag or potentially scaring business away from the doofus hemingway larping safari market, these are tangible, worthwhile goals and not insignificant ones imo. is there clearly some odd mechanism at work, is the outrage sincere or faux or outrage for the sake of outrage? yes. i don't find it an inherently immoral tactic, it's one that ppl whose politics i do find inherently immoral resort to effectively, might as well use it imo. if it stops working or leads to a turn towards politics not rooted in irrational anger all the better.

also yr facebook feed is a reflection of yrself, it's what you've made it. if yr friends are tedious bores unfriend them. if it's too painfully awkward and there are potential consequences to unfriending them just unfollow them. posting pictures of yr kids or pets or glorious sunsets you're seeing on yr vacation to glorious panama beach doesn't make you an asshole, bitching about it and then moaning that unfollowing these posts is too much bother makes you an asshole. who the fuck moans about facebook in 2015 anyway? it's like moaning about spam or telemarketers. these problems have been fixed already.

does anyone have a good facebook feed?

wins said his is pretty dope

mine too, apart from the endless wittering of CONTROVERSIAL POSTER REDACTED

― the lion tweets tonight (Noodle Vague),

fu I've slowed it way down

I remember I used to have good days, like id be like "ha my feed is really funny/entertaining today". can't remember last time I thought that.

i feel like the algorithm is kinda crappy and questionable when you have over a certain number of friends. I routinely unfollow the boring ppl, but outside of going one-by-one through my friends list and doing something (?) so that the algorithm will show me more of their posts, i feel like there are a ton of ppl i'm only friends with in theory.

i resisted facebook for a while and then finally it became like not having a phone or not owning a tv and at first i was fairly strict w/ who i friended and then that slackened and now i'm at the point where the other day i accepted a friend request from someone on the basis of i think i may have bought ginger ale at his store once.

i just unfollowed a half dozen boring ppl, this thread really helps with my productivity

fu I've slowed it way down

― irl lol (darraghmac), Friday, July 31, 2015 11:12 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm sorry this is just how i feel

the good thing about unfollowing is you can still go their page if you're curious if anything interesting has happened and find out that no, nothing interesting has happened

both noodle vague and balls are otm and good fb posters

This has inspired me to unfollow a bunch of people.

I do feel like there's something over reactive about the algorithm. Like you give someone a couple courtesy likes and suddenly they're blowing up your feed. And the more you get someone in your feed the more likely you are to give them more courtesy likes.

boggles my mind that Facebook is still experiencing user growth

seriously, I now get apprehensive about liking posts by relatively dull ppl -- if I like this picture of the cool vintage suit this person bought at a thrift store, i will end up seeing more posts by her, the high points are those of her dog, and her dog isn't that great tbrr

one simultaneously cool and sad thing about facebook is done right it turns yr friends and acquaintances into content aggregators

sarahell truth bomb about the anxiety of likes in the age of the algorithm

i think judicious unfollowing has given me a pretty good feed, but maybe only to the extent that i got rid of all the people who post all the time so really not very much happens at all.

i got unfriended for i think the first time recently, by an amanda palmer fan. i can't think of any particular plausible causes, so i'm hoping i just have such an annoying self-centred social media presence that even ampam supporters can't stand me.

potentially scaring business away from the doofus hemingway larping safari market, these are tangible, worthwhile goals and not insignificant ones imo

my feed today was like half links to the "internet mob justice about this lion has gone too far" thinkpiece in vox.

the worst thing about Facebook for me is when someone you met recently and they seem kind of cool and they friend you and it's just a constant stream of george takei and ecards about ladies needing wine shit and you feel sad.

then finally it became like not having a phone or not owning a tv

good, then?

i can totally see the point of sharing yr kids photos with all the grandparents at once etc. everything else about it sucks and always has, even apart from george takei

I have gotten unfriended quite a few times bc of rl "drama"

my feed is pretty good these days! the US national weather service provides good content ime. most of my feed are from sites I've liked, relatively few "friends" post anything in comparison. I have a couple of friends who mostly post about needing wine and related drama but it's ok, my life is o/w drama free so it gets the blood moving a little

I actually feel kind of sad that facebook makes me judge people by their george takei shares and such, cuz some of those people are people I used to have fun hanging out with in real life, but on facebook it's all about judging how refined their taste in internet is. Of course without facebook I probably wouldn't be in touch with a lot of them anyway.

good, then?

lol. no it was just i'd run into ppl and they'd be like 'i need to invite you to something, how do i invite you, you're not on facebook???' like they'd forgotten any other mode of communication or, worse, i'd have friends who told me they respected me for not being on facebook.

I've been using the Groups app more and more. Since the only thing I need to read are the various groups, like my neighborhood association, running groups, etc. Less takei there.

90% of my friends assume that a FB invitation will reach me, which it won't, cause I'm not on FB. on the other hand I probably wouldn't go to 90% of those things in the first place, so.. shrug_emoticon.tiff

http://thedatadrive.com/

I actually feel kind of sad that facebook makes me judge people by their george takei shares and such, cuz some of those people are people I used to have fun hanging out with in real life, but on facebook it's all about judging how refined their taste in internet is. Of course without facebook I probably wouldn't be in touch with a lot of them anyway.

otm

it's been amazing to see so many idiotic and boring things posted by old friends, current friends etc. actually, it's turned me into a self righteous asshole. when one of my bff's sisters posts constant anti-vax stuff, i almost can't resist commenting in a really know-it-all way. or passive-agressively posting a link to pro-vax stuff via my status. and sooooooo many people only ever post corny as fuck memes, or share business pages to be in the draw for a prize (my little sister is so guilty of that), and never post anything about themselves???

i unfriended my uncle for posting some anti-muslim shit a while ago, that was in the context of 9-11 (he lives in nz! he's never even been out of the country!). i always hated him anyway.

ok anti-vax shit I give no quarter, but corny stuff I really should give more of a pass.

there are definitely no winners when you find yourself judging perfectly nice people for being bad at the internet

it's kinda comforting to know that basically everyone ends up corny

no it's not

Turns out in recent weeks the guy I was best friends with and lived with all through university is a big Tory and pro-privatisation fan. Who'd have known? Not me because we never discussed politics at uni.

there are definitely no winners when you find yourself judging perfectly nice people for being bad at the internet

Especially since there are probably lots of people who only post non-terrible stuff and are up to speed with "being good at internet" but, e.g., read terrible books or are cruel to their children and spouses or are otherwise bad at life in ways that aren't visible on the screen.

they should post more updates about being cruel to their children and spouses

I used to post more stuff about my life but I feel like I'm one of the only people on my feed who does, and so it now feels awkward, naked. I'd prefer to see just semi-self-aware reflections on mundane things but in 2015 people have outsourced that to think pieces imo

Nb I don't know how to Twitter maybe that's what I really want

'X is a mutual friend'

… of Y, who you don't know at all, and you, who you are

i'm sure all my friends are mutual friends of me and all the fuckers they know that i don't, yeah, but what does that have to do with me

grrrrr

yes

I used to post more stuff about my life but I feel like I'm one of the only people on my feed who does, and so it now feels awkward, naked.

yeah there's a void now in social networking sites - a smaller more private network where you only share stuff with actual friends.

what if path was actually a good idea but was five years too early

man if only there was a way to share stuff with actual friends

yesterday someone posted an article criticizing the natural sunscreen Jessica Alba's company put out. I was fighting an almost 103 degree fever/bacterial infection and bored so I found a similar article supporting the one he posted and attached it. His post in response a mere MINUTE later was: "I've never understood why people respond or attach a link to a FB post without liking it first. It's always felt like a social faux paus."

sounds like a cool fucking dude

tell him you don't like his dumb shit because you don't... like his dumb shit

and unfriend his ass

one of the benefits of being sick this week = sleeping when I'd normally be FBing

I've never understood why people respond or attach a link to a FB post without liking it first

lol this statement has actually really wound me up. what kind of whore for likes is this guy

yeah that pisses me off too, moreso for the fact that it implies there's some sort of unwritten etiquette being infringed upon for facebook. it doesn't even make sense. like did i miss an emily post blog or

reminds me of the local metalhead that was like "man I can't believe I have 550+ FB friends and only 95 likes for my band's page, guess you aren't as supportive as I thought"

xp well, there is (nature of the beast of sociality)

but to make a thing of it jesus

Um WHAT? You dont't have to feel a warm and fuzzy emotion about a post to have a response to it.

That doesn't even make sense.

maybe it's like, you're up in his business, adding content to his facebarf, and not even the… reciprocity? toll-paying? obscure signal that you read the content or are appropriately aligned with it? to deserve to post your own??

Okay I get that the functional use of the like has shifted to be a general acknowledgement sometimes but that is just obsesso.

I get a bit irrationally angry at people who click "like" on everything tbh. I see it as the opposite of polite. It comes over as "I cant even be arsed engaging with you, I'll just click this button so I look like I'm making an effort. PS - I'm not."

OH! and:
"man I can't believe I have 550+ FB friends and only 95 likes for my band's page, guess you aren't as supportive as I thought"

This SHITS ME. Such passive aggressiveness, and I have a few friend-in-bands, and gig organiser types, who pull this shit all the time "no one supports the SCENE MAN".

i got appropriately called out by a friend recently for getting mad when she didn't respond to a series of links i thought she would like via pm. we have exchanged stuff before and it wasn't just random, it was stuff that i thought she would like based on her proclaimed twitter enthusiasms. i saw she had "seen" the message and not responded for about half a day and i was like "ok well that's just RUDE" and got a bit pass-agg abt it and she wrapped my knuckles over it. we're not even really friends irl but share several similar interests and fb friends. i tried to excuse it at first but then i was like ykw i'm just being an asshole and apologised. still f that "seen" function sucks and its potential for all sorts of tension regarding acknowledgement or reciprocity. there almost is an etiquette there but there isn't and you can't or are not supposed to bring it up. which is diff from the guy who duly expects a courtesy like before commenting but cringily similar.

i was severely sleep deprived at the time so not really thinking clearly about the possibilities for lack of response and most importantly that she had absolutely no obligation to respond, but it didn't make me feel like any less of a dick. she called me out on twitter too (except not by name) then took down the tweet but not before a few of her followers were like "omg rude". that sucked, even if i thought it had probably happened to them in some way and the way she had characterised it made it seem more like an unsolicited spamming instead of a continuation of occasional engagement via entertaining stuff. gah i'm terrible at engaging w ppl on the internet sometimes.

still f that "seen" function sucks and its potential

half the time people don't like stuff is cos FB LIke invites often get shipped off to Narnia where you forget about em.

also..any post that begins "IF U DON'T LIKE IT, U CAN DEFRIEND ME, BUT...."

haven't used facebook in 10 months. major depression? way down. my anxiety disorder? way, way down.

i don't really see using it as a sustainable way of communicating anymore. it only brings out feelings of isolation, dread and listlessness. the people who swear by it as the utmost form of social interaction in the modern age are also just playing into their own bullshit for the most part

this all sounds pretty cynical but i'd just like to reiterate how relaxing it is to not have that ball and chain on my ankle anymore

I don't know many people who proclaim love for Facebook, there just seem to be those who are free and those who wish they were free.

yeah, i wouldn't say there's much enthusiasm around staring at what is essentially the internet equivalent of a yellow phone book. it's more like "well i've built this empire... let's just lay in it"

which could be perceived as selfish among other things. or maybe just this stagnancy people my age or younger have these days to stay put. especially if you're not living in a city

i can't help but long for things to be more free all around

guys its just Facebook I mean rly

like

I find myself posting up a lot of opinion / current affairs / political /ideological stuff but forget that there's an audience of 800+ on my feed who maybe don't appreciate or simply aren't interested in any of that. But as a way to exorcise certain demons or get things off my chest with regards to how I feel about the world, it's too tempting. Plus these are topics that don't get hashed out as easily face to face - either people avoid politics talk or they're too polite to give thoughtful or challenging replies etc.

yeah those people probably aren't getting you in their news feed though

true. the other thing is i do a shitload of event and band spammage on my feed. like, it's relevant because it's local, and relevant to my life because it's a project i'm involved with - a band thing or a night i'm putting on. but i wouldnt' be surprised if a lot of people have unfollowed me either because of lefty soapboxing or unadulterated plugging.

surely you have all seen this popular internet image:

http://s5.favim.com/orig/140708/audrey-hepburn-breakfast-couple-facebook-Favim.com-1898667.jpg

hahahahaha

i don't understand the 'likes' a disturbing/sad/bad news link gets. why would i 'like' an article about a family of 5 killed in a house fire?

pls to change 'i love you' to 'i love it when a plan comes together' on that img thx

Sometimes my bf clicks like on miserable posts of mine but he's taking the piss and I know he is, the scamp.

Do "life events" get prioritized in terms of showing up more frequently/prominently in fb feeds?

yes, posting 'congratulations' is a way to juice a post in the algorithm

i think i might start posting about shows by my band as "life events" then

and if "everyone" starts doing this, then what will the algorithm do?

Yeah I have a few unfollowed friends who still show in my feed when the post is about wedding anniversary, death or similar. How the %^$% it knows...

My neice, the other day - got her drivers licence. How and why would FB know thats worth showing me when I hid her posts? All shes doing is holding up an L plate with "oh nooooo" underneath.

haven't used facebook in 10 months. major depression? way down. my anxiety disorder? way, way down.

i don't really see using it as a sustainable way of communicating anymore. it only brings out feelings of isolation, dread and listlessness. the people who swear by it as the utmost form of social interaction in the modern age are also just playing into their own bullshit for the most part

this all sounds pretty cynical but i'd just like to reiterate how relaxing it is to not have that ball and chain on my ankle anymore

― hackshaw, Wednesday, August 5, 2015 11:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know many people who proclaim love for Facebook, there just seem to be those who are free and those who wish they were free.

― five six and (man alive), Wednesday, August 5, 2015 11:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i need to get off of FB. would my depression and anxiety vanish altogether? no way to tell, but i'd probably be somewhat happier.

I'm really enjoying the new-ish trend of people posting "life events" like "Ray and Max have been friends for 10 months" though

there just seem to be those who are free and those who wish they were free.

Judging from everything I've read here on ILX, I have never seriously questioned the wisdom of my refusal to join facebook. Of course, it also helps that I have the personal habits of a hermit.

i would say it's beneficial in maybe finding out what you like about the world? or yourself. we're sorta engineered these days to be "plugged in" twenty four seven and if you don't take a break and just fucking think, everything starts becoming overwhelming.

my anxiety has gone down about 90%, and this is coming from a dude who has almost-seven panic attacks a day. all of this has to do with how your living your life currently though, i can only speak for myself.

but yes, i think it's urgent that anyone else feeling this way takes a break.

i quit fb because it was bumming me out about my miserable life compared to all my happening friends, then i got back on it because i was in desperate straits, and since then i've grown to hate it again but barely have any regular social contact and can hardly countenance giving up on its digital crumbs again, plus what if i'm in desperate straits again, i can hardly plead for help if i haven't been juicing the ol social machine at least somewhat

in the period where i had quit it completely i was still relatively tethered to the interweb but way less so than i had been for a good handful of years. way less anxious about it, etc. - i highly recommend escaping if you can

I'm really enjoying the new-ish trend of people posting "life events" like "Ray and Max have been friends for 10 months" though

― RAP GAME SHANI DAVIS (Raymond Cummings), Thursday, August 6, 2015 7:24 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

On the flipside of this, I find the "memories" feature to be deeply sad. "Remember five years ago when you were STILL WASTING YOUR LIFE ON FACEBOOK?"

I just uploaded a huge load of photos from 2003-2009 to Facebook. It was strange.

Like, I was tagging people I haven't had any interaction with in the best part of a decade. In a way it was a cool way to reconnect with friends who'd drifted away, in another it was nostalgic and bittersweet, in other ways I was like 'do I even know this person any more; do they even remember me??'

I would be pretty annoyed and creeped out if someone I hadn't seen in years started tagging me in things. I don't like tagging in general though.

I figured it would be better to do a couple of tags just so they knew they were in the photos. You can always untag or even ask for photos to be taken down. I did mark the album 'old old old old photos'

'just so you know, i'm putting data pertaining to you into the maw of the internet identity monster, no big, go ahead and piddle away your lunch hour trying to undo it if you want, course the pictures stay no matter what'

gave up facebook about 4-5 years ago and my social circle has most definitely shrunk and I feel left out of a lot of things. no regrets though because I felt left out of more when I was on it. I do feel like the future will have some "time machine"-eque social partition between those locked into social media and those with some desire climb their way out of the cave. more surprised that there hasn't been some Luddite revival, but then how would I hear about it?

Facebook seems like a decent way to keep in touch with people, I just kind of hate it as a content provider. But I guess I wasn't thinking that that's what it would become when I signed up in 2006 and added everyone I'd ever met. I don't really care about most of those people, and I definitely don't trust a large portion of them to be interesting or compelling, even the ones whom I like IRL. Most of the time when I log into Facebook, it all seems pretty banal, even (perhaps especially) the political/social/cultural commentary. I prefer Twitter because the rationale I have for following people is that their tweets look interesting and I want to see them in my timeline. I like following people whom I don't know personally but who provide quality content. I know I could curate Facebook to be more like Twitter, by weeding out the boring elementary-school friends, and I probably should, honestly. It just seems exhausting.

ryan:

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-58lMv4vkgng/UYrF_NDSZqI/AAAAAAAADFM/zyo-ojzxdCY/w958-h719-no/IMG_20130508_000326.jpg

ha. and sadly I would never notice that because I'd be looking at twitter or whatever. born free, everywhere staring at an iphone.

I miss the days when FB's mobile was so degraded in functionality from the web version that I didn't even bother to try using it when I was away from home.

'just so you know, i'm putting data pertaining to you into the maw of the internet identity monster, no big, go ahead and piddle away your lunch hour trying to undo it if you want, course the pictures stay no matter what'

― j., Friday, August 7, 2015 9:31 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this seems kind of out of whack. i mean maybe you're right in a way. but i mean... a major thing people actually use facebook for is tagging each other in photos? and doing 'throwback' posts of old ones? and sharing memories and so forth? like it is one of the actual kinda legitimate ways of using this dumb website.

but i'm biased of course in that i've also been posting a ton of retrography in the last few days and have a bunch more cued up. i was a big people-photographer back in the day. some people get a kick out of 'em. probably some don't. it's very possible some or many of the people tagged are rolling their eyes or not even noticing. but that could be true of non-retro photos of present-day stuff too. is posting anything at all of friends and good times just feeding the internet identity monster?

yes obv

post only enemies having bad times and you win

photographing people was always a violation, it was just relatively limited in consequences until the photographs started getting dumped into the datasphere

facebork uses your inherent narcissism wrt your life and the lives in your social circle to stop you from considering those consequences and how they affect you versus how they benefit facebork

diddums

it is pretty strange to have never been a fber and there are still hundreds of photos of me on the site w/ ppl commenting and liking away

like me to my face or don't like me at all imo

(imagines processional of people walking up to ogmor, flicking him on the forehead, and screaming "LIKE!")

that just sounds like a totally normal day to me

trending:

plague

dude from a few weeks ago who whined about my non-like FB status posts this doozy today:

"If you comment on a post without liking it you are placing yourself in one of the following categories:

1. I'm here to be contrarian and I don't want to be part of the conversation.

2. I'm here to be antagonistic and I don't want to be part of the conversation.

3. I genuinely disagree with you and I want to start a debate that may change my mind. (Rare as fuck)

4. I just want to say something dickish. I don't like you and I only keep you on fb to remind you of that cause my life is sad as fuck.

5. LOOK AT ME!!!!!!!!!!!!

6. Tagging someone who could be a REAL DICK In this conversation because I'm afraid to be.

7. I just want the notifications of people being any of the above to you or your statement because I hate books."

aaaaaaaaaaaand, done with you

haha if a 'friend' of mine did that i would so troll the fuck out of it

comment to ask what the need for the like is

but don't like it

that guy is having a mental breakdown, right?

xpost lol, thought about it.

he's married, has a house, has his life pretty together, but he's married to one of the most unpleasant shit-talkers I know so it's probably rubbing off on him.

that he can't see the irony of posting "LOOK AT ME!!!" amidst this pretentious diatribe was humorous enough for me.

4. I just want to say something dickish. I don't like you and I only keep you on fb to remind you of that cause my life is sad as fuck.

ha ha I love it that people who spend enough time online to come up with arcane rules about FB likes can still take the "people on the internet have sad lives" attitude

One of my favorite things of late re: dealing with dumb people on Facebook is leaving a real bunker-buster of a comment about them in someone else's comment thread then clicking "Turn off notifications" and never going back.

example?

None that come to mind-- like back in July a friend posted something on the anniversary of the moon landing, and someone else in the comments turned out to be a denier, and I was trying to educate him and explain why his repeatedly copy-pasted points were nonsense; and finally I just told him he was, in effect, a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt and his butt smells and he likes to kiss his own butt. Then I clicked "Turned off notifications."

yeah, that smarted for a moment Phil, but I came back with a real doozy, all our mutual friends were laughing at you

I SAID NO NOTIFICATIONS

@DarkBananamanKnight, @BarfSimpsonreal, and @PattyArquette are tweeting about #FacebookDoozies

heh I've done the No Notifications thing a lot lately too. a few times I've gotten a message from the thread starter apologizing for the nasty shit the other person said to me in response and then I'd be all confused cos I never saw it.

Holy shit HSB, I didn't realise anyone took FB (or twitter or w/e) so seriously that they think there's agreed-upon etiquette such as must-like-when-commenting, wtf. That kind of does my head in.

so seriously to think that but somehow not seriously enough to notice that it's not something anybody else does.

just to be safe i'm going to start fp'ing every ilx post i reply to

maybe these people are the wave of the future

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51MDeY-2CjL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I morbidly wish I knew that person on FB so I could reply to them with YOU ARE AN UTTER WEIRDO NO ONE DOES THIS WHATS WRONG WITH YOU.

I saw the dude at a wedding less than a week after he scolded me. He said hello to me the way a couple says it after an awkward breakup.

I was like man yr really invested in your FB persona

Did you defriend him? He sounds like type to take that as a dagger to the chest.

lol @ author of 'the wave' being called Strasser

xxpost You should have handed him a napkin with "Like" written on it

ha ha I love it that people who spend enough time online to come up with arcane rules about FB likes can still take the "people on the internet have sad lives" attitude

This reminds me of when a friend-of-friend acquaintance defriended me with a message that I was always signed in to chat all the time so I must be a sad bastard. Like, how did they know I was always signed into chat unless they were themselves checking it all hours of the day? The irony being I hardly ever used FB chat I just had the tab open on my work computer all day.

that is some real lack of self-reflection

half the people that have it on don't even realize they have it on

sad sheeple

weeple

meet the FeeBles

This reminds me of when a friend-of-friend acquaintance defriended me with a message that I was always signed in to chat all the time so I must be a sad bastard. Like, how did they know I was always signed into chat unless they were themselves checking it all hours of the day? The irony being I hardly ever used FB chat I just had the tab open on my work computer all day.

― Just noise and screaming and no musical value at all. (Colonel Poo), Wednesday, August 19, 2015 9:40 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who the fuck sends somebody a message saying that? what a psycho

Dear Poo,

I am sorry to tell you that we can no longer be FB friends. Your constant presence on chat leaves me convinced that you are hollow and sad and I must always move toward light.

Sincerely,
Guy With Lots of Real Life Friends Who All the Time Does Fun Real Life Stuff Like Having Sex

the thing abt facebook is I've been added by people from elementary school or even later than that, and these were people I'd forgotten completely and now they are back in there. It feels unnatural. Some people in your life, and I mean this without rancor or hostility, are meant to be forgotten. Just like you are meant to be forgotten by others.

Yeah, I'm fb friends with my babysitter from when I was 4. It's really weird.

Some people in your life, and I mean this without rancor or hostility, are meant to be forgotten. Just like you are meant to be forgotten by others.

In the long run I think this may be one of the biggest shifts wrought by "social media" generally. I mean we can block and unfollow, and there's clearly less shit on my feed from random people I went to high school with than from people I hang out with in the here and now, but I still know WAY more about the lives of random people I went to high school with than an equivalent 33-year-old would have known ten years ago. I'm not sure what all kind of knock-on effects this would have, but I think it'd be kinda interesting to live in a much smaller world, with a much shorter list of people whose lives I know about, or have to choose to stay abreast of. My sense is that even most people's Christmas-card lists, in my parents' generation, though being by nature broader than the people they really stayed actively in touch with, were consiiiiiderably edited down from "everyone they've ever known at all in their lives."

I don't generally re-add people from 20 years ago as I find it fairly pointless and weird, but sometimes it's actually a way of connecting with someone who maybe you missed out on the first go-round that actually connects with you. I wound up actually meeting a friend from junior high that I'd lost touch with in person and it was actually a very rewarding meeting. have also made friends with an old high school acquaintance that I didn't get to know well the first time around that actually turned out to be a cool dude that watches Dolphins games with me sometimes.

other than that, I prefer to forget I existed between ages 11-18

I still know WAY more about the lives of random people I went to high school with than an equivalent 33-year-old would have known ten years ago. I'm not sure what all kind of knock-on effects this would have, but I think it'd be kinda interesting to live in a much smaller world, with a much shorter list of people whose lives I know about, or have to choose to stay abreast of.

As someone who was a 33-year-old ten years ago, I would say that the presence of occasional knowledge about / commentary from people I went to high school with has an extremely tiny effect on my life, if any. It didn't feel like living in a smaller world 10 years ago, I can tell you that much.

Frankly I suspect if some people from longer ago than high school added me, I'd struggle to know who they were.

I ignore a lot or friend reqs anyway - especially from vague family-linked people (some old friend of my mums who I dont even know), or schoolfriends I havent spoken to in 30 years, because fuck off.

I prefer to forget I existed between ages 11-18

Found this event posting that showed up on my wall the other day kind of laughable. It's a Fast Times/Clueless double-bill at a local rep house in August. There are currently 906 people who are going. The theatre holds 200-250, and on the night of the screening it'll be me and 40 other people. Great way to apprise the world of all the great stuff you'll be attending without ever having to show up for any of it.
― clemenza, Tuesday, July 21, 2015 9:54 PM (1 month ago)

Sold out--couldn't get in. I don't know anything anymore.

I still know WAY more about the lives of random people I went to high school with than an equivalent 33-year-old would have known ten years ago.

only difference really is that it doesn't get filtered through your mom running into their mom at the supermarket

I was thinking about this, but I'm pretty thankful for not having pruned my friends list too much over the years. It's helped create a network of people who maybe I don't see every day, but are still good to have around. Just recently found a house via an old acquaintance I haven't seen in about 8 years. When my (now) other half went travelling, we connected again and got together using Facebook. She put me in touch with friends she knew, and that's how I got my first stint as a writer. I've connected and met with dozens of housemates and band members and collaborators over the years who've helped me with certain things, which all couldn't have been possible were it not for Facebook. So on the whole, I'm happy it exists and I'm glad I've never trimmed down my connections.

only difference really is that it doesn't get filtered through your mom running into their mom at the supermarket

LOL thanks to this grapevine, I once found out in my early 20s that there was a rumour doing the rounds that I'd caught AIDS, what the fuck. To this day I have no idea how it started, where it spread and why someone would think that about me (esp given at the time I barely drank let alone touched drugs or hung out with dodgy people).

hey you can add "how your name is pronounced" on your facebook profile and i'm surprised everyone isn't fucking with this

with a little siri lady saying it

Someone mentioned that on FB last week and I cant find the setting!

check under "about me" and do the drop down menus
my name is now pronounced TY-ROYL-smoo chee-WAW-lis

under "Details about you"
you can also give yourself a nickname; I went with "Sweet Jones"

One of the eeriest facebook phenomena to me is the way you can find yourself sort of snooping on some rando's life if they don't have their profile set to private. Like you're reading some not very close friend's thread, and somebody makes a post that interests you, and you click their picture, and suddenly you can see their kids, their cat, their vacations, etc., and it's just so easily to idly browse for a minute or two before you think "what the fuck am I doing here?"

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_xdN0QQwsP1A/TBZFJ_uckmI/AAAAAAAAINU/1mntZpj09eY/s1600/vlcsnap-39344.png

I can see the nickname option but theres no pronunciation option. Boh.

pronunciation option is great for lolz

Author Supports Twitter Banter

Celebrity Shares Instagram Photo

Film Franchise's Facebook Page Responds to Comment About Character's Armor

right that was the one i was forgetting

apparently it already slipped into the mists of facebork time

Facebook User Clicks on a Link and Reads for a While, then Returns to Facebook

never leaves, never really leaves

judging from my FB feed the last year or two, I'm suspecting most of whom I thought were my "liberal" friends are really just kinda conservative folk who just happen to be cool with gay people

outdated rapper opens third juice bar location

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http://40.media.tumblr.com/7a8daddf2030b685e5e776eb9af7a6ac/tumblr_njzlcpXjY91qav5oho1_500.jpg

nice

http://www.latimes.com/home/la-hm-erskine-20151010-column.html
http://www.trbimg.com/img-53fbfec8/turbine/lanews-chris-erskine-20130507/70/70x70

"The Millennial Pledge":

• I am entitled to nothing.

apparently there was a public proposal at Universal Studios last night and the girl said "no".

mostly stock "omg" responses on the reporting FB post but now of course there are a few posts where the girl has become the "bad guy" for having the audacity to say "no" in a public setting she didn't choose for a decision she wasn't obligated to say "yes" to.

fuck public "shock" proposals.

The Millennial Pledge:

Misuse of "literally" in the headline puts a Drudge siren on its intention to resemble humor.

public proposal at Universal Studios

A marriage proposal, I presume. I'd be very pissed off if I were made the focus of that kind of dog and pony show and no one I'd be interested in marrying would ever pull that kind of stunt.

I admire and adore the millennials. Obviously, it's because I am one.

The author photo is kinda small, but is this guy like 50?

One of the eeriest facebook phenomena to me is the way you can find yourself sort of snooping on some rando's life if they don't have their profile set to private. Like you're reading some not very close friend's thread, and somebody makes a post that interests you, and you click their picture, and suddenly you can see their kids, their cat, their vacations, etc., and it's just so easily to idly browse for a minute or two before you think "what the fuck am I doing here?"

This happens to me now sometimes and I've never been on facebook at all.

lmao

Think that 'obviously I am one' is clearly a gag, indeed, by far the best one in the piece.

http://news10.com/2016/05/24/is-facebook-eavesdropping-on-your-phone-conversations/

when i used to have fb my colleague and reported to each other all the times we would see ads about what we talked about

sometimes we would purposefully set our phones on the table when eating and say the same word often

later we would see ads for these things without ever having searched for them

make of that what you will

I haven't gone over to FB for the past several days and it has started sending me the "needy" messages at a not so gradually increasing rate.

Somehow the progression of Orlando -> Istanbul -> Baghdad -> Sterling -> Castile -> Dallas commentary on social media is really making me feel emotionally spent

https://itself.wordpress.com/2017/01/05/critique-of-judgment/

Whatever else the internet is, the hegemony of social media has turned it into a machine for passing judgment — an apparatus for seeking attention and courting the near-certainty of negative judgment. In the future, everyone will be hated by thousands of strangers for 15 minutes.

Why are we so addicted to passing judgment? I think we enjoy the feeling of strength and rightness, coupled with the license for cruelty. It’s an intoxicating mix, especially in an era where people experience less and less control and agency in their own lives. As previously noted, a genuine dialogue requires critical distance to one’s own views and a willingness to entertain those of others — the exact opposite of the brew of certitude and spite that the internet breeds in us. But it’s not just a question of our having picked up bad habits from social media, which begs the question of why we would turn away from (or in many cases, preemptively reject) dialogue in the first place. The truth is that dialogue is risky, because your efforts may not be rewarded with new insight. Indeed, you may be played for a fool by a bad-faith interlocutor who is purposefully trying to waste your time or even elicit condemnable statements from you.

today? yes. today i look at the past twenty years and i see companies like google, like facebook, like twitter, have spent all of this time institutionalizing an inhuman, corporate internet, one that works towards severing the connections we have built between each other. god, i have so many friends, not dead ones, but friends i just don't talk to because there's nowhere on the internet for us to talk anymore.

tell them to sign up for ilxor.com

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/zucks-sure-acting-like-someone-might-run-president/

zucks for prez

tell them to sign up for ilxor.com

― johnny crunch

i was thinking we could just send messages to each other via carrier pigeon

so this fucking Sarahah thing is all over FB this week.

for those who don't know, Sarahah is essentially like a neo-Formspring, where people can send you anonymous comments. and it's all over social media since...idk earlier this week?

sounds like a platform for inviting people to lather compliments on you or basically abuse tf out of you. Hard pass for me. I've left anonymous compliments and/or non-sequiturs for friends though.

never heard of this thing or seen anyone use it

i have at least 12 friends using it now and posting screencaps of notable "questions/comments"

Nope

yeah, I have seen zero posts with that, but fb is insanely non-gossipy in all my circles so idk

this article both informative and unintentionally funny http://mashable.com/2017/08/02/sarahah-snapchat-story/

huh

I've seen people use curiouscat or w/e on twitter, seems like it's about the same thing

I don't think I've ever had the experience of interacting with people I know in a non-anonymous way with anonymous comments like that. Seems... bad

yeah already a few people using it have reported abusive comments made, it's too much like a powderkeg for me to try it.

how old are the people using it?

mid-20s to early 30s, most of the abusive comments reported tho came from people in mid-20s

are they really teens, though

at heart perhaps

are these also the same people who grandly announce that they're trimming down their facebook friends list and that they will only keep people who like or comment on the post? or people who post things like "you really fucked up this time. i don't know if i can forgive you after last night. pray for me, friends." and then wait for people to ask about what went wrong, or even better, for the person who wronged them to publicly defend themselves on facebook so that they resume their argument in public?

maybe a handful, not most of them.

it's kind of a stupid app too cos unlike Formspring, you can't respond in the app so they have to post screencaps on FB and respond there.

half the posts are people purportedly saying "I'm secretly in love with you" in whatever crepey way they prefer

stupid brief-lived apps are the heart and soul of the net tbf

technological innovation for people to make each other feel bad :(

i haven't heard the first thing about either of these apps but strenuously avoid interacting the sort of people described above

i used the app 'yikyak' for a couple days for shits and giggles and it just made me feel awful and sad about the world

yikyak was only good for trolling college kids

and by trolling, I mean responding to people saying mean things by doing the "hmm sounds like you diss others to prop up a low sense of self-worth, maybe you should think about that!"

tbh i have no time for that (teaching jerks a lesson)

IMO all of this is a side-effect of Eternal September

this wasn't facebook, but the propensity for people to passionately adopt a stance despite having read one source of outrage reminded me of the worst clusterfucks: http://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html

(short version: a YA novel is lambasted by a single blogger who wrote a 9000 (!) word summary/takedown claiming it's horrible and racist, causing a flurry of bad reviews and complaints by people who had not read the book)

the blog rant is one of the most incoherent things I've skimmed

if we have any sort of book culture/YA fiction thread, it might be worth posting there

I posted in the "free speech and creepy liberalism" thread.

toxic drama of YA twitter is OTM
holy crap

for reference, here's where the discussion starts on the other thread:
Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Shocked and saddened master frodo

I do think people often let social media condition them into thinking they have to adopt an opinion on every hot button topic ("inaction is still an action!"), and that while ignorant people speaking on things they learned five minutes ago is hardly new, that many people were more content just letting things go by without comment like ten years ago.

that and the more link-driven format of today's social media is to blame too. I remember when FB still supported link embeds but didn't advertise it, so most people didn't do it because they didn't know how.

people gotta chime in

part of me has been tempted to create some hoax to get thousands of people outraged and somehow convince them the only way to fight the outrage is to funnel money to this Kickstarter that secretly goes to me under a pseudonym

but I'm lazy and dumb so I decided not to

Part of me wants to stop making creative work other people can see

Oh wait: done

i watched this because a pal of mine did the interviewing and this guy will seriously make you want to banish facebook from your life forever. i mean, for a minute he will. kinda drove me bonkers. i'd never heard of him. but he scared me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im_SpOdacVY&t=2135s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im_SpOdacVY&t=67s

uh never mind. those aren't showing up? whatever.

or people who post things like "you really fucked up this time. i don't know if i can forgive you after last night. pray for me, friends." and then wait for people to ask about what went wrong

OMG I used to have a few people on my feed that'd pull that shit, but if you dared to ask what the issue was, they'd say 'oh i dont really want to talk about it here' or 'its private'. FFS, you just bleated about it on FB!

OR, no one replies at all because frankly we're all sick of their shit and then they have a sook that no one gives a shit about them.

and just like that! the facebook friend most likely to post in the manner described above has posted a link to sarahah
:( people

Zuckerberg is 4 days late, can't say "Trump" or mention Facebook's role in targeting/amplifying hate. He can't run if he's this compromised pic.twitter.com/vGHG08Y3yJ

— Nitasha Tiku (@nitashatiku) August 16, 2017

run? zuck for what?

1500m world champion

LL, are you not aware of the speculation on why Zuckerberg has been doing this weird cross-country tour to small town america? surely he's running for president

not sure I buy that argument, but I would guess it has crossed his mind

he'd be better off starting his own reality show

that's the route to president, I guess

mid-20s to early 30s, most of the abusive comments reported tho came from people in mid-20s

― Neanderthal, Monday, August 7, 2017 4:54 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ILX c2006

LL, are you not aware of the speculation on why Zuckerberg has been doing this weird cross-country tour to small town america? surely he's running for president
no this is the first i've heard of his weird cross country tour. now i know!

It's not a "weird" tour. When I was young every summer my family would drive all over the country, trying to hit as many states as possible. Then again I did grow up to become President.

you didn't do so as a public figure! dude has 95 million facebook 'followers'

if I post a little bloggy-style thing on facebook with my road trip through the american west it's not nearly as performative

the bad thing is I had to search for Zuck's fb profile to get that number and figured out I have one friend in common with him

and hilariously, it's not the one who used to work at fb

I keep feeling like social media is bad for my anxiety cos i measure my feelings against other people's when things happen and i always feel mine is wrong

Largely cos i am always detached and then i cry later at a kids movie

the less close social interaction (dating or committed relationship, living in a home or apartment with other people) I have, the more likely I am to tear up at a kids movie

I think it's normal, you have to have some base level of social interaction or third-party, even fictional, situations will surface that emotional capital you're not spending

Yeah that's true. Living alone has increased that - i still get out a lot but i only talk to invisible co-workers most of my day

It's not a "weird" tour.

http://i.imgur.com/ABZS4pL.png

c'mon Karl everyone finds that truck stop entertaining

and whom amongst us has not asked a friendly trucker for a truck ride and some time sitting in the cab of their truck, as we pose for pictures

zuck is the worst

i would probably have a lot more facebook followers if i interviewed several people in every town i visited

do you suppose he's a big tipper or