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How Facebook makes us dumber

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Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#101

Post by snowwrestler »

sly_foxx wrote: post #29

What I don't get is dumb companies who post a link to their FB(or some other social media) page on their site: 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No. 2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there. If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you'v…

People spend way more time in Facebook than email, and (paradoxically) it's way easier to get them to like a Facebook page than to enter their email address in a form and hit submit.

So yes, email is great, but marketing is multi-channel or pointless. Facebook is the single biggest channel out there.

Yes, you have to invest some $$ in Facebook to get above the noise floor, but again: that's marketing. Email costs money too. Nothing comes for free.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#102

Post by danieltillett »

zappo2938 wrote: post #73
danieltillett wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK it sounds like you are actually of the belief that spanking should be rare, rather than never. In this I agree, but I do think from personal experience that spanking is a useful "thermonuclear" option to stop dangerous behaviour in young children. To give you an example, I once caught one of my children at the age of two inserting objects into electrical power points. I gave him a good spank on the bottom and he n…

I strongly agree with this author: Spanking and Child Development: We Know Enough Now To Stop Hitting Our Children[1] > Spanking remains a common, if controversial, childrearing practice in the United States. In this article, I pair mounting research indicating that spanking is both ineffective and harmful with professional and human rights opinions disavowing the practice. I conclude that spanking is a form of viole…

Yes this is one of the reasons I spend far more time on HN than Facebook.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#103

Post by snowwrestler »

themartorana wrote: post #78
yoz-y wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished, nevertheless I do think that it is better than having an e-mail. There are several reasons for that: - First (at least for me), an unsolicited e-mail goes directly into trash and I seek the unsubscribe button. Under no circumstances I am interested in additional stuff somebody…

Facebook likes have become almost useless to us. We have 61,000+ likes on one page and we're lucky if we "reach" (show up somewhere down their timeline) 1/12 of them in a week or month. "Boosting" every post is prohibitively expensive. So for 55,000 or so people, we'll never be able to interact with them in any way. So, not worth much anymore.

Only boost your few posts that are getting interest on their own. It saves a lot of money and you already know it's engaging content.

If you're not getting any interest in any posts at all, maybe your content is just not interesting. Facebook always shows some of your posts to some of your followers.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#104

Post by danieltillett »

DanBC wrote: post #79
danieltillett wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK it sounds like you are actually of the belief that spanking should be rare, rather than never. In this I agree, but I do think from personal experience that spanking is a useful "thermonuclear" option to stop dangerous behaviour in young children. To give you an example, I once caught one of my children at the age of two inserting objects into electrical power points. I gave him a good spank on the bottom and he n…

You subjected your child to violence because you failed in your duty to keep him safe?

Do you have children Dan? In this case I think I would have failed if I had not spanked my son.

The reason why spanking is so effective is it ties the action and punishment very close together. Children get pretty used to you yelling at them to stop doing something they want to do, so when they do something really dangerous you need to have someway of getting across to them that whatever they have done should never be done again. Spanking is a tool that should be rarely used, but I have no issue with being used in the appropriate situation.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#105

Post by snowwrestler »

return0 wrote: post #65
TeMPOraL wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No. First of all, it doesn't matter. Facebook is not your competitor, so you're not harming yourself. Secondly, Facebook is an immensely popular communications platform . Even if for some reason you dislike them because they're privately owned, it doesn't change the fact that that's where people are . If you want…

> That is totally by design and again, very much a feature. No, it wasnt like that when most of the Pages acquired the bulk of their followers, they could reach all their audience freely. It was a shitty idea solely to make money, it didn't "add value" to users. There were other, more meaningful ways to implement this, e.g. show Page posts on a separate tab, have limits of posts/day etc. Paying for views is a bad str…

Facebook did not just give every "fan" page an equal-sized traffic haircut. They started limiting page content in accordance with how much organic (non-paid) engagement it gets.

So for example Facebook pages like "Humans of New York" or "I Fucking Love Science" or "Amy Poehler's Smart Girls" still get popped into a lot of timelines despite (to my knowledge) not paying at all for boosting. Why? Because a lot of people love that content.

But if some other Facebook page saw a huge drop-off that stayed dropped off, then maybe that content is just not as interesting as other pages (like the ones above for example).

And in fact this is why Facebook made changes to page content visibility in the first place. Most pages posted boring obvious ads instead of interesting content.

Pages can still pay for higher visibility, but those are ads. Just like people can pay to "get into the New York Times"--via ads, not articles. And just like the NY Times, there is only a fixed amount of ad inventory at Facebook. Even when pages are paying, Facebook limits their audience, in order to keep the audience happy. No one wants to see a newsfeed full of 100% ads. Or even 50% ads. Or 25%.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#106

Post by danieltillett »

DanBC wrote: post #82
danieltillett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity why do you think children should never be spanked? Do you have children?

It's always a failure of parenting. It's abusive - it's an abuse the the rights of the child. It's ineffective. You always hear some fucking idiot saying "my child ran out into the street, so I hit him". Hear the useless parent put their child at risk of harm by not teaching the child about road safety, by not providing adequate supervision in a dangerous situation, and then punishing the child for the parent's lack…

It is not ineffective. I don't have to smack my children now they are older, but when they were very young reasoning with them was not an option.

I think we can avoid false emotional comparisons between spanking a young child and beating your wife.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#107

Post by danieltillett »

warkid wrote: post #68
danieltillett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity why do you think children should never be spanked? Do you have children?

Imagine there are giant creatures(like 5-6 meter tall) and they are proportionally stronger than you. They follow you everywhere and(though they wash and feed you) they also sometimes hit you with their huge palms?

I have quite a good memory of my childhood and my complaints about it are not over the occasional smack I received, but of the arbitrary and inconsistent nature of the punishment I received. Like the powerless everywhere, children are strong advocates of justice and rules and they absolutely hate inconsistent and arbitrary displays of power.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#108

Post by dang »

DanBC wrote: post #79
danieltillett wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK it sounds like you are actually of the belief that spanking should be rare, rather than never. In this I agree, but I do think from personal experience that spanking is a useful "thermonuclear" option to stop dangerous behaviour in young children. To give you an example, I once caught one of my children at the age of two inserting objects into electrical power points. I gave him a good spank on the bottom and he n…

You subjected your child to violence because you failed in your duty to keep him safe?

> You subjected your child to violence because you failed in your duty to keep him safe?

Good grief. Come on Dan, you know that comments like this are not allowed here, whether you agree with someone's parenting practices or not.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#109

Post by mcintyre1994 »

eggie wrote: post #71
raverbashing wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, too bad it fails at some searches and falling back to google is needed For controversial stuff, the bubble is definitely a minus. For factual queries, it just makes things easier (yes, when I type 'python' I don't mean the reptile)

How does it fail for you? I persisted and find that although the results are different, they are often just different. Once I became used to DDG it's started to seem like Google is the broken one. It did take a while for me to switch, maybe 3 tries before it was working right.

One of my really lazy really common searches is the module codes at my university. It's really nice that Google know which university I mean and always get it right even if I've never searched that code before.

Re: How Facebook makes us dumber

#110

Post by arama471 »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #14
tomp wrote: post #7

Hm... the alternative explanation is, people were always dumb, Facebook (and internet in general) just makes it more apparent by giving us more oportunities to display our stupidity.

Or: people were always tribal and concerned more with shibboleths identifying the in-group than truth. Facebook (and Tumblr and Reddit, etc, even HN) just automates it.

I disagree with Tumblr and Reddit being compared with Facebook in this regard, and completley disagree that HN is in anyway similar in this regard. Facebook will automatically stop showing you things you disagree with, whilst it has to be a conscious choice on your part on Reddit and Facebook.

On HN you don't actually get to choose the content in any meaningful way, and therefore have no means of creating an echo chamber for yourself through other means then down voting.

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