In major Facebook overhaul, Zuckerberg to focus news feed on “meaningful interactions” between friends and family

boing
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If it means fewer dopes who get their news exclusively via FB joining us in the comments section it’s good for us!

Joking aside, it’s a bit of a false equivalence to compare complaints arising from FB unilaterally pulling the rug out from under a bunch of indie media outlets with complaints arising from the FCC pulling the rug out from under a powerful semi-monopoly corporation (if only!). Further, even if BB were not affected by the FB change it would likely still be going to bat for the self-interest of other indie media outlets, where I can’t see a scenario where it would go to bat for an incompetent and greedy and lobbyist-larded “slow AI” like Comcast.

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22

After some thought, I think this is about squeezing out other voices, more so than FB already does.

Because there’s no way they’re going to exclude the big names with enormous markets in favour of “connecting friends and family”.
There’s too much money involved; this is all about controlling more, and taking more.

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23

I read my Boing-Boing at the blog link, the way God intended :slight_smile:

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24

They may have to raise your membership fee.

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26

Is this based on any evidence? Company Facebook pages are generally useless and i suspect that’s because of a limitation of the platform. What should a company use Facebook for? I’m not sure I’ve ever sought out a company’s Facebook page or cared about its existence.

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I think it is a good choice between showing everything and meaning (truly) things in the newsfeed. Well, it will save many time.

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I wonder about this topic a fair bit. It strikes me that the specific qualities that Facebook selects for (i.e. “having-a-personal-or-corporate-brand” type posture) - are sort of analogous to the observations that McLuhan had about the medium of T.V. selecting for certain exaggerated facial presentations (think Don King, Jay Leno etc.), (due to the relatively low resolution picture requiring caricatures for ready identification). Seems the present facebook-era selects for a certain personal style characterized by the self-ie orientated, filter-exaggerated, hyper-promotional stance, (which has been implicated in a lot of the recent discussions about negative mental health consequences from social media). Maybe in the mid/longer term it’s good for everyone if we are able to dis-engage from that particular architecture of communication. Do hope it ultimately allows for better and more sustainable strategies for independent outlets. Maybe it’s time to go back to print, (there was a certain je nais se quoi to picking up a paper copy of 2600 or the EF Journal that URL’s don’t quite do so well (yet)).

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29

The eyes-as-mouths photoshopping has become dreary through repetition. Please stop doing this.

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30

That is the key point. There is nothing else to discuss.

When a service moves to profit-making objectives - which an IPO inevitably drives - it sours the service, because frankly, you can’t make money being nice and never lying.

Google also. Such promise, such hope, and frankly, it’s still serving, compared to what we actually want, a dish of sour pickles and onions, very cleverly arranged to pull money out of us.

Facebook cannot be fixed.

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31

People get BB primarily through FB? Why the fuck would anyone do that? That must suck all kinds of ass.

It’s taken me awhile to realize - more than that, to understand in a visceral way - that there are huge swaths of the online population whose experience of the Internet has always and solely been through two or three platforms, rather than websites. It used to be just, you know, my mom who thought that the Internet was AOL. But AOL sucked, back then. Just like Facebook sucks now, and Google sucks, and all of the other gatekeepers that feed you things suck. I flit about. I still type in the god damned address bar. With my fingers. I go and find things. And because of that, I just flat-out misunderstood what’s happened over the past fifteen years. I still think of the Internet as a bunch of websites, that you go to, just like there used to be a bunch of BBSs, that you dialed in to. But for millions if not billions, the Internet is less like a library and more like a shitty set of Reader’s Digest condensed books that’s missing two-thirds of its volumes and smells like cat piss.

Somehow…I just missed it, when the promise died. Or, more accurately, when the promise was throttled in its crib and then the bedclothes were rearranged over its mottled little corpse, so that maybe nobody would notice the rotting dead baby when they came by to visit. Twitter was obvious - it quickly became a cesspool, where the weaponized results of the naked encouragement of cognitive biases float on top like the watery shit from 10 million dysentery patients. Facebook was always creepy, from a personal standpoint, and vaporware from a professional standpoint, making money mostly for itself and for the legion of lampreys who’ll insist you need it and take your money to tell you how to use it. Eventually it got downright harmful. Everyone can see it now. But what I didn’t realize is that the stench isn’t Twitter, or Facebook, or tumblr, or whatever the platform-du-jour is. It’s “The Internet,” that thing that Wired was so keen on in the 90s, that the Boingers evangelized, that for a brief time was the World Wide Web.

Monetized, corporatized, divvied up, sucked dry, wrapped in shiny paper, re-gifted, tossed out with the trash, shipped overseas, processed into a slurry, then reconstituted and sold as new again.

What a fucking waste.

/rant

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32

So Facebook is possibly going to de-emphasize brazen clickbait in favor of what users have always wanted, to connect and communicate with the people in their lives, and we’re…angry? We’re angry about this.

Okay.

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33

Lately, for me, crappy ‘suggested for you’ ads have taken over my feed to the point where I am missing lots of posts by friends and family because they get pushed too far down and I only have so much time to keep scrolling.

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34

Aiiiehhhh!!! Zuckerberg is the Corinthian ?!

It all makes sense now.

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35

Where is Merkin Way and how do I live there?

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36

Not all families/friends are as dysfunctional as yours are, besides which, you can filter out those who continue to post objectionable content to your feed.

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So it’s Friday morning, and my feed is more full of undesirable content than ever. Is the change supposed to have happened already?

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So learn how to change your default settings on Facebook to not post to all your friends/family but select your intended audience, object when your friends/family posts objectionable content to you explaining how they can change their FB configuration and then filter out those who won’t learn to not post objectionable content to you on Facebook.

The S/N ratio on FB goes way up.

FB still posts trash from sources they hope you’d be interested in but then you just label each one as unwanted. It’s whack a mole but at least you don’t see anything twice & screws with FB’s profiling of you.

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39

If a lot of the BB user base were composed of people that only know how to get here via Facebook, I suspect the BBS comment threads would demonstrate a good deal less user intelligence.

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40

You noticed because you have always used the internet via a computer. Those who’ve always used it via a 3x5 inch glass-fronted sugar tit think that the baby is just totes adorable.

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41

The MAU count. The Facebook audience is an undeniably large one and, weird as it is to us, a lot of them like staying within that walled garden. That audience reach and breadth is not something that can be ignored, especially when the business or brand makes a lot of regular announcements (e.g. a band publicising upcoming events) or wants to build a mailing list. I don’t understand why a company or person would use FB exclusively for their Web presence, though.

Absolutely. This is a late-stage capitalist society, so I wouldn’t expect anything else. Combine that with the platform’s user base and every company that can clear the (in FB’s case very low) barrier to entry also gets drawn into the debased medium.

I think that’s asking a lot, but I do think that FB as a company won’t have the staying power of print.

What news I receive from family and friends* through the social media platform they use with me (this thing called e-mail) is filtered nicely through the quaint algorithm of a polite request. But it’s good to hear that FB provides tools for folks like you who can’t count on members of their social circles to respect such requests.

[* disclaimer: unlike FB users, I don’t define “friends” as classmates and co-workers and relatives and romantic partners I haven’t seen or spoken to in years]

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