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Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

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Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#261

Post by leshow »

rabboRubble wrote: post #123
bogomipz wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Had FB's safety check feature been around in those days, I think that particular situation would not have been so chaotic for the families." Would it have helped the families of first the first responders like NYFD/NYPD/EMTs? Are first responders supposed to take time to "check in" on FB? Would it have been any less chaotic for their families? And honestly I find it really disturbing to compare tragedies, especiall…

I was comparing geographic size, the 6 miles referenced by the poster above me. Both events were in a small geographic area. I guess I feel I have the right to make the comparison. I wasn't there in NYC, but I had "some skin in the game" on 9/11 so to speak. From that experience, and from later ones, I can put myself into the shoes of somebody wondering if their loved one was mixed up in the London fire. To them, it…

None of your comments address the irresponsibility on facebook's part of sending push notifications of issues that are almost certainly guaranteed to not involve you or anyone you know.

Hypotheticals about how 9/11 would have played in the presence of a safety notification by facebook are conjecture, and seem pretty far fetched to me.

The reality is the vast majority of people are getting drawn in, dishonestly, into interaction with FB.

It happened in my city also, a underground subway was getting constructed, not even used by people yet, and a small portion collapsed. Almost everyone in the city got a safety check notification, hundreds of thousands of people, for an event that killed no one, and only affected a handful of workers. Why is it necessary to notify the city of that? It's irresponsible and dishonest.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#262

Post by lmm »

whatevthrow31 wrote: post #20

Ok, I had to make a throwaway for this because apparently its a heated debate. Why does everything Facebook do have to be so heavily criticized? Safety Check is a wonderful feature. If I remember correctly, it started off as an internal hackathon project that got turned into a full feature. They get shit if they turn it on (here), and if they don't turn it on (past tragedies where they failed to turn it on). Why does…

It's the one thing in my newsfeed that I can't remove. And I don't want it there. I can (and do) hide other people's posts, I can (and do) even hide ads, but I can't hide this nonsense except by being complicit in it. If it had a "go away" button I wouldn't mind.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#263

Post by thatwebdude »

mcguire wrote: post #257
pc86 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL asking someone you know who has been through a disaster if they are okay is a "bullshit inquiry."

Once upon a time, I had to listen to a friend complain about television tornado coverage preempting his favorite TV show. At the same time he was attempting to watch his show, I was at work dealing with a flooded basement lab and wondering if my home, which was close to the path of the storm, was still standing. Some people are very self-centered.

Some people are numbed by severe weather coverage. In the Midwest, in my experience, people just aren't phased by tornadoes because they'd be hiding in their basement for 10 months out of the year.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#264

Post by whatevthrow31 »

ebbv wrote: post #247
whatevthrow31 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything Facebook could do at this point that wouldn't make you think this? Just because someone's making money off of something doesn't mean it's inherently bad.

Your attitude is absurd, man. Making money is not inherently bad, we all have to make money to earn a living. Duh. But jumping on a disaster to make money is always bad. There's a reason being a war profiteer was a prosecutable offense (though that seems to have gone out the window in recent decades.) I'm not sure what your question is; do you mean is there anything Facebook could do when there's a disaster that woul…

Anything altruistic is going to make them money indirectly through PR. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try to be altruistic.

> Which is not to say it's impossible Facebook could come up with a useful feature that would be helpful to people during a disaster; but "Safety Check" is not that.

The top post on this thread is literally someone saying that this feature is the only reason they have kept their account.

Can it be improved? Absolutely. But to say it's not useful in its current form is absurd.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#265

Post by tzakrajs »

rabboRubble wrote: post #78

I lived through a major natural disaster that left me an evacuee for months. Facebook's safety check is the only reason I haven't killed my account and I've said this before in prior comments here on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412146 Thank god the author hasn't lived through an event where everybody you know is affected by the event. The ability to say "I'm okay", say it once, and have everyb…

Confirmation bias.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#266

Post by zebraflask »

I view it as an invasion of privacy. It's not Facebook's job to do things like that. All it accomplishes is to act like a megaphone to artificially amplify the significance of the story (insert comparisons to Fox News and tabloids here). I'm sure there could be endless debates about the propriety of doing that, but from my perspective, spreading bad news to encourage user hysteria, mostly for the sake of reinforcing platform loyalty, is ethically very questionable.

In any event, Facebook these days is only useful anymore as a convenient login mechanism for sites that use the Facebook login widget, and even there, Google's version works better.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#267

Post by _jal »

yladiz wrote: post #255
_jal wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not. I meant what I wrote.

Let me put it another way: I don't understand your argument, so I clarified and asked if your argument was X. You said it's not, so what is your argument?

The argument is that, based on the news reports, the system breaks often enough to risk causing more panic and alarm than it solves, so instead of doubling down on a bad idea, perhaps the right course of action is to reconsider the feature.

You seemed to want my argument to be some absurdly rigid form of "ship only on perfect performance". It isn't - it is more that treating misfires and the predictable, if irrational, responses something like this will generate in actual emergencies as if they were as trivial as, say, bad ad targeting is irresponsible and should be given substantially more thought.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#268

Post by tzakrajs »

jdietrich wrote: post #130
btown wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. "Not safe" became the default as soon as the concept of social media hit; if there's the slightest chance you may have been affected by an incident, anyone who would check your social postings to see if there was any "word from you" would assume the worst in the absence of such a posting. The human mind is evolved for both empathy and "what-if" scenarios, but not for probability; it will snap to "…

Safety Check wasn't a carefully planned and considered effort by Facebook, it was a hackathon project that went into production. There are many other ways that Facebook could have responded to that issue. Given the size, influence and profitability of Facebook, Safety Check seems extraordinarily half-assed. I'm not in any way convinced that Safety Check does actually dampen fear. It provides information of very poor…

It's almost like the person finder Google made, except it pushes itself on you in an attempt to drive engagement.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#269

Post by reading-at-work »

AlexandrB wrote: post #245
losteverything wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel strongly to respond. Chicken little. That's what came to mind when I read your reply. If FB OR ANY other entiry gets you so upset then stop using it. We all make choices. I always give this example. My grandmother could have voted for every losing president during her lifetime but because of other more important choices like who to marry, whether to work hard or not, what people she associates with, when to ha…

> If FB OR ANY other entiry gets you so upset then stop using it. I posted this in another reply, but that's effectively impossible. Facebook collects data on you from friends and family that use it. How do you suggest I stop that? What about Facebooks's tracking code all over the internet? Know a foolproof way to block that too?

Foolproof no, but you should get the Ghostery browser extension. You can tell it to block all social media and advertising tracking on websites you visit. From what I can tell it's effective (websites that require a Facebook login, for example, are broken unless I tell Ghostery to "trust" that site).

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#270

Post by Crespyl »

mikeash wrote: post #253
willvarfar wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It Britain, the default is "no news is good news" , which is a proverb meaning "without information to the contrary you can assume that all is well" .

I hear that phrase a lot, but is that how it actually works when things like this happen, or is it just what people say ?

I think when things like this happen, it usually falls under the category of "bad news is bad news" and people will want to reach out to friends/loved ones who may have been affected.

If my friend is going overseas for a month (and there aren't any terror attacks or plane crashes or whatever), I will probably assume they're doing just fine, haven't been mugged or gotten lost in the woods or anything unless I specifically hear otherwise.

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