Heroin is already way past a reputational point of no return, but people are still using it.
Imagine how much more popular it would be if it wasn't banned/feared/frowned upon.
Like prescription medications, which fuel the opioid crisis?
Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
501–510 of 609 posts
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's break this apart: everyone knows big tech has its share of problems. Most liberals can stomach it. What liberals can't stomach is a company allowing the spread of nasty election lies.
"Company allowing the spread of nasty election lies" quite literally describes what any media company is doing when they give air time to pretty much any running candidate.
False equivalence
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Company allowing the spread of nasty election lies" quite literally describes what any media company is doing when they give air time to pretty much any running candidate.
False equivalence
Sort of. It's how you spread the lies. How they are delimited.
One halfway responsible way: "here is a paid announcement from someone that doesn't necessarily reflect our views: ${LIES}".
On the other end of the spectrum are sneaky, dark patterns and whatnot.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
LJ was "peak internet" for me. I had a smallish network of friends on there and we read and commented on each others' stuff. You could be as personal or as detached and anonymous as you wanted. You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself. Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it w…
Livejournal, to me, was a fusion of three things: a simple HTML editor (aka posts) + a time-sorted view and access controls + discoverability through your network. The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested /…
I enjoyed LJ for a few years (my first blog, 2005-2008). Wrote a good deal about startups that I explored as a user in that period (this was the APG era, where APG stands for After Paul Graham, meaning after he wrote his early influential essays about startups and his launching YC - called Startup School at the time, IIRC) and other software topics.
But later, after a Russian group acquired LJ:
https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html (2nd post on the subject, there was a previous one on the same blog, IIRC).
Interestingly, some years later, I mentioned the same point, on my next blog or on Twitter, and then suddenly my old blog became accessible again (it was not, for a while, after the above-linked incident).
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
My question is... why do people like us continue to work there? They know what is going on there more than anyone.
Depends what you mean by "us." If it means any engineer, engineers build everything shitty in tech. If a larger percentage of "us" are repulsed by facebook, it just means that they have to pay more. There's always hundreds of "us" willing to do anything for anybody; I'm sure somebody is helping some Syrian warlord with the spreadsheet keeping track of the books for his open air slave market, and designing a distribut…
Exactly. Plenty of engineers work on making military equipment better at killing people too. Some of them are software engineers. Facebook might seem like a moral blackhole to some but they are barely grey or neutral on the world stage of evil empires. An blind and bumbling giant perhaps, but not a purposefully evil one.
Algorithms is where the attention needs to go. The regulation probably needs to target the techniques Facebook and others are using rather than the organisations. It's the same crap as lootboxes in games training people to gamble. Newsfeeds and engagement optimization leads to attention grabbing and rage baiting posts. Just give us back the simple date based feed like Instagram has. Cut the algorithm weighted ordering. That's not everything solved but a lot of the overt manipulation of people is based on that.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook. I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own. But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirel…
>But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise. I don't use FB but I would imagine if I did and I wanted to get off it and there were dozens of people I wanted to keep in touch with but would lose touch with I would send these dozens of people a message a week before, saying "I am going to get off facebook, can you send me your email…
Facebook socialising is a lot less direct than an email. I see Instagram photos and the like from friends and enjoy it but if they all emailed those photos to me every day I’d feel overwhelmed by the experience. In any case, they wouldn’t do that anyway, because they’re already posting to Instagram because that’s where all their other friends are.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone old enough to remember and have used Livejournal, the Facebook experience is very different.
The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ?
> The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ?
https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then download your data I always do download + delete
It's not about the data. The data's the least important part. It's about that data's connection to the other people. That can't be downloaded.
Your social graph already is that data. It doesn't need to be downloaded as it is regenerable.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#509I honestly don't see how Facebook is any worse than Google, Amazon, Twitter, etc. Google can destroy a business by changing its algorithm or censoring a result and collects just as much information as Facebook, often vastly more personal. Amazon owns the entire logistics space. Twitter often makes partisan decisions when it comes to censorship and gives voice to propaganda outlets from the likes of the CCP, Taliban, etc. I think a lot of people want Facebook to fail simply because it seems more expendable. I would like to see news traffic numbers when Facebook went down for 7 hours, I bet there were some painful hits on traffic.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#510Not sure if any of you folks have tried asking your friends which companies they wouldn't work for, irrespective of the pay, but it's interesting. Facebook and Palantir are the 2 recurring names whenever I've asked around. That was before the latest 3 or 4 rounds of scandal. FB has been in this area for years.
And yet, the one person I know who actually works there is the most liberal, Bernie Democrat, socially progressive, perfect-family moral beacon of all my San Francisco peeps. Except for the part about working for Zuck. Sample size of one, but I often wonder if I should just imagine what half a million bucks a year looks like and extrapolate from there. Probably lots of people “wouldn’t” work for FB except that they a…
> the most liberal, Bernie Democrat, socially progressive, perfect-family moral beacon of all my San Francisco peeps. Except for the part about working for Zuck
This would just indicate to me that he's a fraud and all his political posturing is just cheap words compared to the real action of being a part of such a toxic entity. (And no, there's no fighting for reform from within in a place like FB.)