November 7, 20222 yr I came to this conclusion while posting over in the Twitter thread about deleting my account - as much as I hate Facebook as a company and service on multiple levels, I feel like I'd actually be missing out if I deleted my account. Which really annoys me. I have plenty of friends and family from around the country that post various things now and then, as I do maybe a few times a year. I’ll occasional find out things about people I’d rather not know, but thorough Facebook I can at least feel like I’m staying somewhat in touch with extended family I would otherwise see at the holidays. Facebook is also great for organizing events and sending out invites among friends and family. Facebook has also achieved "critical mass" locally, probably in the way Nextdoor thought it would but never did (here anyway). There are some very active Groups here in town that are pretty much the only place for local online discussion, covering pretty much every topic and the occasional gossip. I’ve had some great discussions (which never would have happened otherwise) with other members of the community on everything from local politics to home improvement. These are mostly discussions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That said, I do have mixed feelings of Facebook Groups overall. The low barrier for entry encourages participation by more users, but it’s killed a lot of forums which are better for certain discussions. Groups is good for the local discussion that tends to be more in-the-moment, but awful for any topics that benefit from archives. I joined both a Facebook group and forum for the car I bought last year. The forum is much better for actually finding info and viewing past discussions, but the Facebook group is WAY more active. The end result is a lot of new users asking the same basic questions over and over, since Facebook makes that easier than searching, and previous discussions are lost in the noise anyway.
November 7, 20222 yr On 11/7/2022 at 10:46 AM, taestell said: I still think that algorithmic timelines are an awful user experience for Instagram or Twitter style social networks. I just want to see a chronological list of posts from the people I've chosen to follow! I think you can do this or will shortly be able to, based on this from July, but it will be opt-in: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/facebook-chronological-home-feed Facebook Is Finally Giving People A Non-Algorithmic News Feed A few taps will allow you to see timely “Feeds” from friends, groups, or pages. Posted on July 21, 2022 at 9:01 am After years of people complaining, Facebook has finally added a way to view your posts in chronological order. Soon, you will be able to toggle into a “Feeds” button on the top of the Facebook app so you can view posts in chronological order from either Friends, Groups, and Pages. On 11/7/2022 at 11:49 AM, mrCharlie said: I came to this conclusion while posting over in the Twitter thread about deleting my account - as much as I hate Facebook as a company and service on multiple levels, I feel like I'd actually be missing out if I deleted my account. Which really annoys me. I have plenty of friends and family from around the country that post various things now and then, as I do maybe a few times a year. I’ll occasional find out things about people I’d rather not know, but thorough Facebook I can at least feel like I’m staying somewhat in touch with extended family I would otherwise see at the holidays. Facebook is also great for organizing events and sending out invites among friends and family. Facebook has also achieved "critical mass" locally, probably in the way Nextdoor thought it would but never did (here anyway). There are some very active Groups here in town that are pretty much the only place for local online discussion, covering pretty much every topic and the occasional gossip. I’ve had some great discussions (which never would have happened otherwise) with other members of the community on everything from local politics to home improvement. These are mostly discussions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That said, I do have mixed feelings of Facebook Groups overall. The low barrier for entry encourages participation by more users, but it’s killed a lot of forums which are better for certain discussions. Groups is good for the local discussion that tends to be more in-the-moment, but awful for any topics that benefit from archives. I joined both a Facebook group and forum for the car I bought last year. The forum is much better for actually finding info and viewing past discussions, but the Facebook group is WAY more active. The end result is a lot of new users asking the same basic questions over and over, since Facebook makes that easier than searching, and previous discussions are lost in the noise anyway. I saw this post of mine from 2014 earlier in the thread, and it's honestly still basically the same in 2022: On 1/7/2014 at 4:42 PM, Gramarye said: Of course, it helps that most of my friends are still engaged with it; the network effect is still strong for me. If most of my friends moved to some other social site, I'd consider following. However, in practice, very few have left Facebook at all, and of those that have, most have left the online social networking scene entirely rather than migrating to something like Google+ or Twitter. As for newer social apps like Snapchat, the very thing that makes Snapchat attractive for teens (transience) makes it extremely unappealing to me; the permanence of Facebook is a feature for a shameless narcissist like me because it lets me go back and see things myself later. This is one reason I really liked the timeline feature when it came out; I've been on the site since November 2004 (and I actually though I'd been on it earlier than that, since I seem to remember using it at OSU, but I graduated there in June of 2004), and sometimes I'll go back and look at my own posts from years ago just to see what I was doing at that time. Way easier than keeping a diary. I'm sure that something else will definitely come along at some point, but I think I'm going to be one of the last people off FB, just like I was one of the last people off the AIM boat. I can understand that Facebook Groups are not ideal for things that benefit from archival. (It's one reason I still like this stodgy bulletin board format. Lets me do things like quote myself from 2014 with comparative ease.) Ironically, while I think your Nextdoor parallel is good, my West Akron neighborhood and the ones around it actually have a pretty active Nextdoor presence. Both Nextdoor and Facebook Groups are for present-focused-content: what's happening now or maybe over the next month at most, whether it's just the ubiquitous NextDoor "lost pet" posts or upcoming school and extracurricular events. That works well for me because the one big thing that's different between then and now is that all three of my kids were born between 2014 and now, and now my life revolves around the kids' school schedules. The Facebook Page for my kids' school and various Groups for the kids' activities are primary platforms for organizing those. My other Groups are for things like my local gaming group. Same dynamic: I don't actually anticipate needing to go back and remind myself that we played Terraforming Mars in 2019, I want to know what the next meetup is and who's coming.
November 7, 20222 yr 1 hour ago, mrCharlie said: I came to this conclusion while posting over in the Twitter thread about deleting my account - as much as I hate Facebook as a company and service on multiple levels, I feel like I'd actually be missing out if I deleted my account. Which really annoys me. I have plenty of friends and family from around the country that post various things now and then, as I do maybe a few times a year. I’ll occasional find out things about people I’d rather not know, but thorough Facebook I can at least feel like I’m staying somewhat in touch with extended family I would otherwise see at the holidays. Facebook is also great for organizing events and sending out invites among friends and family. Facebook has also achieved "critical mass" locally, probably in the way Nextdoor thought it would but never did (here anyway). There are some very active Groups here in town that are pretty much the only place for local online discussion, covering pretty much every topic and the occasional gossip. I’ve had some great discussions (which never would have happened otherwise) with other members of the community on everything from local politics to home improvement. These are mostly discussions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That said, I do have mixed feelings of Facebook Groups overall. The low barrier for entry encourages participation by more users, but it’s killed a lot of forums which are better for certain discussions. Groups is good for the local discussion that tends to be more in-the-moment, but awful for any topics that benefit from archives. I joined both a Facebook group and forum for the car I bought last year. The forum is much better for actually finding info and viewing past discussions, but the Facebook group is WAY more active. The end result is a lot of new users asking the same basic questions over and over, since Facebook makes that easier than searching, and previous discussions are lost in the noise anyway. Right, forums evolve and allow knowledge to grow but Facebook is always dragging things back to the beginning -- making it much harder for people to get smarter as a whole.
November 7, 20222 yr Perhaps if Wall Street didn't like it so much when companies fire people the birthrate wouldn't be so low.
November 7, 20222 yr "Jobs" are not so fungible. If there were many layoffs at Meta because it was abandoning the "metaverse" initiative and shuttering Reality Labs, I guarantee you that the impact on the stock price would be different than if there were many layoffs at Meta because the site decided to go ad-free and laid off all its people working on consumer preference prediction algorithms in the post-iOS 14.5 world.
November 9, 20222 yr i certsainly check people out on insta, but i dont follow anyone, so i guess i dont get locked into anything in particular in the feeds. its mostly just cat videos lol.
March 15, 20232 yr A great article on the Metaverse: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html I put the headset back on, but by the time I’m allowed to return to the Soapstone, it has emptied out apart from two women avatars who, when they speak, sound 6 years old at most. There is cake at the bar, and they keep bringing me slices. I can’t eat it, so I find a discreet place to throw it, but they keep finding me again and bringing me more — slice after slice of inedible pixelated cake.
March 15, 20232 yr Is there something about billionaries wasting $40 billion and still remaning billionaires? It must be a magic number. Musk gets a lot of well-deserved scorn for his $44 billion dollar Twitter purchase, but I'd say Zukenberg's $40 billion "investment" is far more damaging since (a) Twitter was cancer before Musk, so I encourage its death (2) Tesla, SpaceX and Boring are all successful, (3) Facebook/subsidiaries are all that Zukenberg has. Meanwhile, all the Facebook/Meta money, time, effort, talent, R&D, promotions, articles, demos is gone -- and now they're supposedly focusing on AI. As though that's going to be the game-changer that Zukenberg, and ONLY Zukenberg, thought the Metaverse would be. It's all bollocks. Metaverse is dogsh-it and will be for multiple generations, if they continue to support it, that is. And AI is all hype but with limited application. At least Zukenberg abandoned minting/selling/sharing NFTs, so the guy is 1 for 3. That'll get you an AL batting crown these days. It isn't that hard. The big thing, the game-changer innovation that we all want, is NOT AI, is NOT Matrixverse, is NOT crypto/NFT nonsense. It has been and is augmented reality. That's what Facebook/Meta, and other tech companies, should have been focusing their attentions on for years. Google Glass' failure scared some, but if you really think about the value of augmented reality, my god, that's the new iPhone 2007. If Facebook/Meta were to focus on that, now we're cooking. But not AI. Sorry Zukenberg. In less than a year, AI is going the way of NFTs, 3d movies and tvs, Yolo, MP3 players, AOL IM, Blueray Players, Microsoft Kinect, Google Plus, Vine, Grady Sizemore, Pat Listach, New Pepsi, beanie babies, Doc Martens, Pac Man, etc. Edited March 15, 20232 yr by TBideon
March 15, 20232 yr 19 minutes ago, TBideon said: If Facebook/Meta were to focus on that, now we're cooking. But not AI. Sorry Zukenberg. In less than a year, AI is going the way of NFTs, 3d movies and tvs, Yolo, MP3 players, AOL IM, Blueray Players, Microsoft Kinect, Google Plus, Vine, Grady Sizemore, Pat Listach, New Pepsi, beanie babies, Doc Martens, Pac Man, etc. I think that AI might be good enough in 15~ years that people will simply turn on their TV, say a few words, and AI will generate a movie from scratch. Diaologue, scenery, music, plot. If that can be integrated into the metaverse - that you could be a participant in a limitlessly dynamic non-repeating AI-generated story, then maybe there is something there. For example, your own behavior as a participant would influence the behavior of the AI-generated characters that other people see a day or a few days from now. But it sounds like the classic problem that has always troubled the internet is still there - porn, scammers, people picking fights. But when AI (imperfectly) kicks these people out, you aren't left with unicorns or butterflies - it's just boring. That's why I'm suggesting that a 1-day delay on your behavior entering into the system would give the software time to properly assess what you did instead of you just getting zapped for repeating a rap lyric while singing along to a "live" performance by an AI-generated rapper.
March 29, 20232 yr Apparently they use the metric system in the Metaverse. Who the hell wants to buy a "square meter" of land? How big is that, exactly? https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-metaverse-is-quickly-turning-into-the-meh-taverse-1a8dc3d0 If the Metaverse had been invented 25 years ago, they would have used the smoot.
June 13, 20232 yr Something of a surprise. You can get notifications but not send. ' https://www.macrumors.com/2023/05/11/facebook-messenger-apple-watch-discontinued/
July 5, 20231 yr On the 4th I talked to some guy who told me he "doesn't have to work anymore". I asked him if he sold a company or was in real estate. He said no, I bought $500k worth of Facebook stock at $18/share. He told me that his financial advisor tried to talk him out of it and that he fired him after his investment went 4X.
July 5, 20231 yr 25 minutes ago, Lazarus said: On the 4th I talked to some guy who told me he "doesn't have to work anymore". I asked him if he sold a company or was in real estate. He said no, I bought $500k worth of Facebook stock at $18/share. He told me that his financial advisor tried to talk him out of it and that he fired him after his investment went 4X. There are few people in Ohio with $500k "just sitting around" waiting for the next FB.... but good for Some Guy!
July 5, 20231 yr 22 minutes ago, Foraker said: There are few people in Ohio with $500k "just sitting around" waiting for the next FB.... but good for Some Guy! He was from somewhere in NY state and was working in cyber security at the time. He said that he could see from behind the scenes back in 2008-09 how so much web activity was shifting to Facebook, and that's what motivated him to buy. So he did have knowledge that the average person didn't, but basically took a leap of faith regardless.
July 5, 20231 yr Facebook intentionally wiped out forums. There are some newer hobbies and interests that are only discussed on Facebook with almost no public forum activity whatsoever.
July 5, 20231 yr Well, here's to hoping Threads kills Twitter once and for all. Any lender dumb or unethical enough to give Musk and his MAGA friends even a penny for the investment deserves what little they'll get post bankruptcy. And then let Threads die its own slow death. Humanity just isn't advanced enough for largescale social media.
July 5, 20231 yr 13 minutes ago, GCrites said: Facebook intentionally wiped out forums. There are some newer hobbies and interests that are only discussed on Facebook with almost no public forum activity whatsoever. The best (and worst!) thing on Facebook is the Skelator is Disturbed meme group. I only lasted on there for about three weeks before I withdrew my membership. You've got 250,000 wise-asses in one place. It's like how the entire internet used to be before Facebook, but on Facebook, meaning occasionally someone who is offended reports somebody. Therefore, half of the group's content is memes threatening people for reporting the on-topic(?) memes. Like this:
July 5, 20231 yr 6 minutes ago, Lazarus said: He was from somewhere in NY state and was working in cyber security at the time. He said that he could see from behind the scenes back in 2008-09 how so much web activity was shifting to Facebook, and that's what motivated him to buy. So he did have knowledge that the average person didn't, but basically took a leap of faith regardless. My own early purchases of TSLA around $50 and selling at $900 post-5-to-1 split (so $4500 split-unadjusted) in January 2022 I think would be even more favorable--I just didn't have $500,000 to put into it in the early 2010s. Would've been nice. But also, $18 is close to the historic low for FB/META. Its IPO price was higher than that and went down to right around $18 before recovering. If you bought at that point, you're benefiting from near-perfect market timing. And if he was really so convinced in 2008-2009 that FB was going to go big, I'm surprised he didn't buy right at the IPO (which was in 2012) and ride it down and back up, even though it obviously worked out perfectly for him. And I'll admit that I've been surprised by FB's recovery post-Metaverse. In fact, in one of my more boneheaded decisions of the last few years, I sold in October 2022. It's basically tripled in the last 9 months. Even after witnessing it, I honestly can't explain it. Threads is still just a potential product, and Reels are basically a copycat product in a very crowded space (short-form video). Shedding the deadweight of Metaverse was a good decision but I didn't think it was going to be immediately rewarded like that.
July 5, 20231 yr 35 minutes ago, Lazarus said: The best (and worst!) thing on Facebook is the Skelator is Disturbed meme group. I only lasted on there for about three weeks before I withdrew my membership. You've got 250,000 wise-asses in one place. It's like how the entire internet used to be before Facebook, but on Facebook, meaning occasionally someone who is offended reports somebody. Therefore, half of the group's content is memes threatening people for reporting the on-topic(?) memes. Like this: Da-dunt
July 10, 20231 yr On 7/5/2023 at 3:19 PM, Lazarus said: The best (and worst!) thing on Facebook is the Skelator is Disturbed meme group. I only lasted on there for about three weeks before I withdrew my membership. You've got 250,000 wise-asses in one place. It's like how the entire internet used to be before Facebook, but on Facebook, meaning occasionally someone who is offended reports somebody. Therefore, half of the group's content is memes threatening people for reporting the on-topic(?) memes. Like this: Skeletor dropping disturbing information and running away is also pretty funny. I lucked out on FB, I stumbled onto the right-libertarian science fiction groups when the "Sad Puppies" thing was going on. A lot of my activity comes from that, or my Browns or Maple Heights groups. Edited July 10, 20231 yr by E Rocc
July 12, 20231 yr On 7/10/2023 at 3:16 PM, E Rocc said: Skeletor dropping disturbing information and running away is also pretty funny. I lucked out on FB, I stumbled onto the right-libertarian science fiction groups when the "Sad Puppies" thing was going on. A lot of my activity comes from that, or my Browns or Maple Heights groups. good work, citizen. thats a heinlien joke. glad i never did fb. i do check my spouses fb every few months to see relatives baby pics and the like. thats about all its good for. i see a lot of people seem to be jumping from the mess that is elon’s tweeter to the new threads. i’ll pass on both. walking around posting insta pics is more than enough social media for me.
August 1, 20231 yr Zuckerberg's at it again. I did not and will not read or watch any women's Tour de France articles/videos, yet my feed is being bombarded by them. They all have clickbait titles. I have not gotten a single article or promo for the actual Tour de France. Calling it the women's Tour de France doesn't mean it's in any way on par with the actual Tour de France. I have blocked over 100 "friends" due to unrelenting look-at-me posts but there is no way to block clickbait articles.
August 1, 20231 yr They have to bring all that outside stuff in since users don't create enough content themselves anymore and the ones that do create a lot of it often get muted for being too busy on there.
August 2, 20231 yr Facebook has just become one long series of ads. I feel like I used to be able to flick my thumb for a lot longer and get updates from friends and see thing I wanted about real life. Now I find myself flicking for about a minute and then I just tire of seeing the ads.
August 3, 20231 yr On 8/1/2023 at 7:01 PM, GCrites said: They have to bring all that outside stuff in since users don't create enough content themselves anymore and the ones that do create a lot of it often get muted for being too busy on there. Yeah, there don't seem to be many people who can do two modest posts per month. It's either 14 posts per day or nothing for two years. I just checked and for some reason I got a notification that Whalburger's has closed their Grand Rapids, MI location. I've never been to Grand Rapids or Whalburger's. Thanks, Zuck.
October 10, 20231 yr And now, Deep Thoughts... I suppose Facebook and Instagram bringing in all that outside stuff rather than stuff from your friends is like when MTV stopped showing music videos.
October 11, 20231 yr 50 minutes ago, GCrites said: And now, Deep Thoughts... I suppose Facebook and Instagram bringing in all that outside stuff rather than stuff from your friends is like when MTV stopped showing music videos. I've been trying to figure out why Facebook has, for years, been making it increasing harder to simply see a semi-chronological feed that is only stuff friends (or pages I follow) post. It's because none of my friends post anything either.
December 1, 20231 yr It's really awesome how when you click a Facebook or even Instagram link it opens a new tab then kills the tab you clicked from so you can't use the back button. Which is literally a browser hijack. Stop whining because I used the rest of the internet rather than just your products.
December 17, 20231 yr 14 hours ago, E Rocc said: :o Just got back from 6 weeks in Europe. I can report that retail there, including the pop up Christmas markets, is alive and well. Shopping malls were all packed. The complete demise of retail is definitely an American phenomenon (and the subject for another thread)
December 19, 20231 yr Canada's urban shopping malls with direct connections to subway stations are still thriving as well.
December 19, 20231 yr 3 minutes ago, taestell said: Canada's urban shopping malls with direct connections to subway stations are still thriving as well. I saw the same after a month in some of Japan's larger and wealthier cities. There has certainly been a concentration of retail in Japan in smaller cities - old shopping streets struggling when everyone shops at Valor or Costco or Aeon, but the big city downtown malls seemed to be thriving in Tokyo, Kyoto, Sapporo.
December 19, 20231 yr ^That could even be partially due to aging in Japan. Once people start getting past a certain age their interest in running mom-and-pop shops begins to wane.
February 11, 20241 yr I didn't know where to put this, but the author uses Facebook as his example, so here goes. Cory Doctorow in January invented the concept of "ens**ttification" or the slow death of web platforms by an accumulation of virtual excrement. Further explanation is reported in the Saturday, Feb 10th issue of the FT. The process is : first, platforms like Facebook are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers/advertisers; next they abuse their business customers to claw back all value for themselves; lastly, they die. Doctorow says it's happening to social media now. The rest of the article is about why it's happening and why now. I recommend the piece; it's nicely written and thought-provoking. Remember: It's the Year of the Snake
February 11, 20241 yr The process is starting with streaming services as well. They've all introduced ad supported tiers which will eventually replace the entry tier while the others increase in price.
February 12, 20241 yr 18 hours ago, Dougal said: I didn't know where to put this, but the author uses Facebook as his example, so here goes. Cory Doctorow in January invented the concept of "ens**ttification" or the slow death of web platforms by an accumulation of virtual excrement. Further explanation is reported in the Saturday, Feb 10th issue of the FT. The process is : first, platforms like Facebook are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers/advertisers; next they abuse their business customers to claw back all value for themselves; lastly, they die. Doctorow says it's happening to social media now. The rest of the article is about why it's happening and why now. I recommend the piece; it's nicely written and thought-provoking. This process begins when the "soft skills" people begin to gain clout and introduce politics (small p) to the decision making process. They gain influence this way, of course. The technical side gets progressively shut out, but also is unsupervised because the new regime has no clue about what they do. They get to mess around, changing things for the sake of changing them as unsupervised programmers will do. Their remaining connection with the customer base can even lead to malicious compliance with the Bright Ideas of the marketing people and bean counters. The best of them find their way to the next big thing.
January 8Jan 8 Also, they're eliminating all fact checking and just allowing users to tag post they think are misleading. They're so cowed by Trump before he's even taken office that they're going to follow the X* playbook of success. * Elon, not me.
January 8Jan 8 Meta literally created a LGBTQ exception for calling someone mentally ill as an insult. You can't do it for any other group except LGBTQ people. Very Stable Genius
January 8Jan 8 11 hours ago, DarkandStormy said: My understanding is this one had more to do with the fact that they have always de facto allowed this among Muslim users and the double standard was getting too blatant.
January 8Jan 8 11 hours ago, X said: Also, they're eliminating all fact checking and just allowing users to tag post they think are misleading. They're so cowed by Trump before he's even taken office that they're going to follow the X* playbook of success. * Elon, not me. "Community notes" is more than that because one group of "fact checkers" does not have preferred status and explanations are attached. The notes are aggregated as well. It works better than semi-anonymous checkers, in my not so humble opinion.
January 8Jan 8 The official statement on the change from third-party "fact checkers" to a decentralized "community notes" model: https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes/ =========================== This is well overdue but better late than never. We'll have to see just how thoroughly the woke police have been ousted from control, but this is clearly a step in the right direction. However, it's no longer the primary problem with FB. The primary problem now is AI-generated content, which FB is moving to embrace rather than exclude or even give users the option to exclude. If I could pay $150/yr to subscribe to "Facebook Classic Premium" that would be an ad-free version of old Facebook, where the content is almost exclusively from my friends (regardless if I haven't interacted with content from them for a while), Groups, Pages, and Events, and if that means my feed is not an endless zombiescroll and instead would allow me the satisfaction of a logical daily endpoint, I'd pay it.
January 8Jan 8 We've fully entered the yellow journalism, pre-fascism phase of the early 20th century. Except this time around the professionals churning out content have been joined by the drunk boomer uncles of the world, spreading lies to the masses from their Ipad on the recliner.
January 8Jan 8 3 minutes ago, Cleburger said: We've fully entered the yellow journalism, pre-fascism phase of the early 20th century. Except this time around the professionals churning out content have been joined by the drunk boomer uncles of the world, spreading lies to the masses from their Ipad on the recliner. Worse, they've been joined by the bots. FB and/or its lowest-effort content creators have figured out how to skip the involvement of human Boomers and give us pretend Boomers generating convincing drunk Boomer uncle content regardless of whether you even have a drunk Boomer uncle. And they can do that with almost every other {adjective} {Generation} combination, too.
January 8Jan 8 6 minutes ago, Cleburger said: We've fully entered the yellow journalism, pre-fascism phase of the early 20th century. Except this time around the professionals churning out content have been joined by the drunk boomer uncles of the world, spreading lies to the masses from their Ipad on the recliner. The thing is everyone has a voice now, if they choose to use it. The DBU's, the cynical Xers, the "PC" millennials, the "woke" Z's, and as the pendulum continues to swing, the youngest bunch. My 14 year daughter is way more pro-DJT than me, and we are learning she is far from alone. Just like happened with the people born in the late 50s and early 60s, when the "progressives" go to far, there is a backlash. To be fair the same often happens with the right. Cynicism is important. Check, check, and recheck......and mix your follows. Edited January 8Jan 8 by E Rocc
Create an account or sign in to comment