It’s hardly unexpected that after the bazillionth thinkpiece about AAHHHHH FACEBOOK IS HIJACKING OUR DEMOCRACY someone would finally decide that maybe they can’t just keep on going, business as usual.
I’m reminded of Google’s experiment with G+ and real names on Youtube, which really doesn’t sound like such a bad move considering the unending whinging about the Malebolgian wasteland of Youtube comments. Of course, that didn’t work out so well either.
When Social Fixer went without updates for a long stretch, I switched to FB Purity. I can scarcely imagine doing without it.
You get friends/family sending you news stories via email? I suppose that the senders figure that given that you don’t use Facebook, they must send their latest adorable kitten/political horror/… story via email. You’re just not escaping getting those stories, polite requests or not, and email/FB makes no difference.
True, yet FB continues to be a falllback to reach the widest distribution, old folks will not and never will install instagram, telegram, etc & email is out for many of the younger but everyone but the true oldsters has a FB. Arranging family reunions with a common app that everyone, has even if they don’t consider it their main social media app much is easier than trying to thread multiple conversations on different platforms.
Thus cool or not, FB is still going to be used to share pics of cousin X’s marriage (or an external link to them for those who don’t want to upload to FB) where the most people can see them.
Of course, for things like sharing family photos or (in a business case) announcing a theatre company’s upcoming productions. If keeping up with the Joneses and status anxiety on a daily basis is your thing it also can’t be beat. It’s an awful and destructive way to get one’s news, though, whatever ad-based business model FB is using.
Sure (and vice-versa). It’s not a daily occurrence, and when it happens it’s usually news stories from reputable sources about things they think I’ll find particularly interesting, useful or important (which is nothing like FB’s constant stream of garbage). The e-mail medium also ensures they put some thought into what they’re sending, based on the fact that they’re humans who know me and who’ve gotten positive or negative personal feedback from me in the past.
People who know me understand that I like adorable kitten stories, but not every day and not just of any quality. So I get only particularly good adorable kitten stories that arrive in my inbox every few months as a nice furry surprise. In contrast, the FB algorithm, once it finds out I like adorable kitten stories, will bombard me with them (and will also correlate that preference with other info they collected about me to send me a flood of toxic crap – cf. election 2016 and Brexit).
Agreed. The common app that everyone on the Internet uses is their e-mail client, the underlying standards of which make it a common and ubiquitious platform (SMS is a close second). That’s why people will use something like Evite to bulk-mail an invitation to a reunion and ensure that everyone will get it. Polite people who use FB or Instagram to share photos after the event will also usually make sure invitees don’t need to log in with a FB account.
Ok. @nungesser 's explanation above about users flagging it makes more sense than Facebook itself doing the censoring, but I could see one of FB’s algorithms going nuts based on jerks in your social circles gaming the flagging system.
This is also true, their algorithms tend to spot trolley behavior and key words. But they aren’t in the habit of deleting reposted content for funsies.
If they would truly allow us to prioritize those “meaningful interactions,” by letting us rank whose posts we wish to see often vs. those we don’t, that could be an improvement.
They believe that would interfere with their business model and profit margins, though. It would involve some fine-grained settings (e.g. “send me family updates and kitten stories from Uncle Bigot but do not send political news stories from him”) and would reduce their opportunities for on-going data collection and profile building that undergirds the ad-based model.
They’d rather turn on the firehose and let their algorithms do the ranking for the FB user/product, because that’s the only interaction that Zuckerberg and co. truly consider “meaningful” in this discussion.
[quote=“gracchus, post:67, topic:113918, full:true”]
Of course, for things like sharing family photos or (in a business case) announcing a theatre company’s upcoming productions. If keeping up with the Joneses and status anxiety on a daily basis is your thing it also can’t be beat. It’s an awful and destructive way to get one’s news, though, whatever ad-based business model FB is using.[/quote]
Snort, you’re referring to people who “get their news” – outside news and not family/friend news from FB?
I see the problem impeding our communication. I don’t consider anything anyone has relayed on FB (often coming from a “FB thinks you’ll be interested in” craplink) to be of any reliability nor does anyone I know because I repeatedly point out that they are craplinks by backtracking the story of suspected craplinks to find the source & pointing out it’s unreliability to whoever posted it.
I remember the heyday of chain email letters and so have less confidence in people sending email being of any higher quality than FB & still receive enough spam to make me think the opposite (who hasn’t gotten spam from the email of an infected friend/family member). We pretty much agree anyway: Reputable sources are reputable sources. Craplinks are craplinks.
I grew tired of having to work at home to fix Windows issues/reinstall PC’s to remove virii, debug hardware issues for diverse PC makers, etc, and gravitated to Apple machines. Those who asked for my advice often moved as well (Apple support being much better than Dell/Acer/HP/Lenovo/… & Linux being insufficiently mature for most). So, almost all of my close friends/family have Apple devices now & we can chat/videoconf over iMessage/Facetime.
Not the situation for everyone, but for us, iMessaging is more convenient as we’ll get the content whether it is a document, an iso, a picture, etc and whatever the device we are using: Mac/iPad/iPhone. However, for everyone else, FB is just more convenient and gets to everyone.
Ah, and note that I mean Facebook, not FB Messenger. >200Mb for a messenging app!?! Not on my devices!
It’s fortunate you or I don’t personally know anyone who voted for Il Douche or Brexit, but we’re living in a world created in part due to their misplaced trust in the reliability of FB’s news feed. FB itself acknowledges this problem which is why (as described in the original article) they’re trying to make changes.
I remember that, too. E-mail providers and third parties came up with anti-spam and filtering tools to combat it. FB, in contrast, actively encourages chain-letter behaviour by its users to keep the analysable data flowing for its business model.
Not everyone, at least not like e-mail or SMS do. The way things are going with young people using messaging over anything else, Apple could absolutely crush FB by opening up its protocols (but Apple getting past its control-freak corporate culture is a separate issue).
I think I’m with you. The thing I value about FB, in so far as I sort of kind of value it, is the interaction with people I would not otherwise interact with. My childhood best friend’s parents, my cousin who lives out of town, etc. But lately I have mostly used it as a news aggregator that has a sense of the kinds of articles I like to read. I would be much better off getting that news function elsewhere I’m pretty sure.
And FB in 2018 is basically what AOL was in the 90s: a self-contained microcosm of the internet that encourages its users not to stray outside into the wild wooly scary Web. See a neat video you want to share? It’ll be Facebook-video encoded so you can only share it on FB, not in email or Twitter or elsewhere. Did your aunt share a funny news story you want to tell your mom about? You will be STRICTLY WARNED by Facebook that you should do that on Facebook; trying to venture outside is frowned upon.
Wait why? Also why the 1, it’s been like ten days for the particular year but really, what?
Next you’ll say I must have an 800 number and a soft launch.
It just needs regular mulching with keywords and cash to map people who maybe think of reform as a progressive notion to something instead of handy opposites?
OA>Positive emotion.
Yeah, I love their media presenter’s hand talkin’ Italian as he smooves through the announceplication.
This means ASCII, right?
Facebook is easy to fix. Facebook should simply start charging users $1/month for the privilege of using the platform. That would give them an operating budget of $24 billion per year, and they could do away with all the corporate advertising, sleazy profile data selling, and so on. Instead they could focus on making Facebook better for their paying customers (the users).
The reason this doesn’t actually happen is that we (the Facebook users) are too cheap to go for this. The moment Facebook instituted the $1/month fee, everyone would just move over to Google+ (or wherever). Which is too bad because we could have something really awesome at less than the cost of a cup of coffee per month.
