To H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks with Facebook
damninteresting.com
damninteresting.com
> Some call it a “necessary evil,” but if that’s the case let’s do all we can to make it unnecessary.
For any organizations considering the same move, I cannot recommend it enough. It feels like cutting off contact with a toxic acquaintance--equal parts relief and optimism.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/DamnInt/posts/10158097374656961
I am on a Bitcoin group on Facebook and spambots keep making their way through the registration process.
- Do you agree not to make posts advertising any business or profit-making entity on this group?
- Do you agree that all of your posts and comments on this group will be individually written by you?
Reject any user who doesn't say yes to both of those and set all new users to post approval for the first week.
It's a lot of work because, as mentioned, FB's tools are crap.
Your problem might be exacerbated by the subject matter.
If enough organizations change their behavior, I'm hopeful the folks at Facebook will be forced to change their behavior too. I mean, shouldn't be possible for Facebook to be profitable without also doing all those toxic/evil things?
Facebook likes to try to take credit for 100% of the traffic they send from their platform, but seems like the people they were reaching would have gone anyways.
It says in the article that once facebook promotions were gone, people were not able to find the content, so much so, that they would reach out to the blog years after- to asked if the blog still operates... that sounds to me like facebook identifying new core audience for the blog. Which is a great service done by an ads company.
Previously, this meant that those people would see DI articles on their feed.
Facebook changed the algorithm so posts by pages you've liked show up rarely if they don't pay to promote them.
Facebook wasn't identifying a core new audience, they were selling access to their original audience.
> ... from scores of long-time fans who were under the mistaken impression that we had ceased all operations years ago
> ...When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their Facebook news feeds.
I understand that the article is an opinion piece against facebook, but I just think that the data provided is ambiguous. Looks like Facebook did a great job showing the blog to the relevant people. So much so, that years after the people reach to author with questions where it disappeared.
In that case, perhaps you should resist expressing strong opinions about it one way or the other. I anticipate that you, like most humans, find it annoying when other people have strong opinions in domains where they lack even superficial knowledge.
The funny truth is, I strongly suspect, I know about ads and ranking and boosting no less than you do. What's called boosting could be complex set of many different algorithms that change over time. Boosting that was a year ago is not the same one that is now, etc.
But overall the irony of our exchange is here. Quoting from DI about section:
> We are ardent proponents of quality over quantity, and accuracy over hyperbole.
Feels like this specific post about facebook is actually quite a hypebole a bit like a propaganda post. With a lot of assumptions and accusations. With the purpose to push specific agenda. In your post you spit hate towards facebook, but when confronting with some questions to test the logic of your claims, you finally appeal to authority rather than clarifying your claims.
> I strongly suspect, I know about ads and ranking and boosting no less than you do
Does not compute.
"One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not enough about the subject to know you're wrong." Neil deGrasse Tyson
Change "you're right" -> "you know the subject" & "you're wrong" -> "you don't know the subject".
Saying Facebook introduced "boosting" does not mean a lot...
I hate that the city I live in has almost zero online presence. If I want to sell something, everyone says 'use FB market.' As someone who refuses to, I have a ton of stuff waiting for the yearly yard sale.
The neighborhood I live in also only posts updates to FB. So cue the monthly surprise(garbage not picked up, road repaving, etc) and never knowing about it in advance.
And don't get me started on companies with zero website and only some FB page.
I know it's 'free', and at this point it feels petty, but I'm literally holding out until the end.
I'm sure that their laws say something vague about updates must be made available to all residents and you can swing that Facebook doesnt include all residents
Open web access then exists and yet those who choose FB are not cut off.
A website is unlikely to get nearly any traffic, and especially not timely views for upcoming events. Emails will probably head to spam or not get read.
It shouldn't be Facebook as the default, but the simplicity of reaching most of your audience is valuable.
Are there stats that show a Facebook post is better than email/sms for an important announcement?
The heavy and routine use of email in businesses 'going paperless' suggests that this claim has little basis in reality.
One person who usually isn't even the 'president' but still sycophantic about it creates a private group, which only he or she can delete things or add people. Then they distribute flyers every couple weeks informing you about it and how you need to join.
HOAs here are unfortunately the lesser of two evils, but they are far from a good thing.
But if they said, instead, "We don't print on paper any more, it's all on facebook", then I think a lawsuit could happen, and win.
Of course, you weren't replying to that. I just have seen, however, leanings in that direction here and there, so it's worth noting.
A local or state government using Facebook exclusively for announcements would arguably be covered by the ADA.
https://www.levelaccess.com/americans-with-disabilities-act-...
The neighborhood ought to have a mailing list, but yeah FB is very convenient for that.
Not even scammers interested in this place :).
But then the internet evolved. On one side prostitution and trafficking became rampant, on the other scammers and spammers. And CL did nothing until court ordered.
Sometimes that's the right decision. But legitimate people suffered through all of it, and left for the first possible replacement.
FB marketplace is a horrifyingly bad interface and platform - just like the rest of Facecrook's site. I assume it is all just some dark pattern though as they must be paying top $ for their UX people.
Pushing beyond Dunbar's number in order to maximize growth and "engagement" was a mistake.
The reason I created this is that I did not want to keep opening up a graphical web browser to check Notifications. I can also "follow" any page I want, directly, without relying on FB's algorithms which selectively hide or show certain items to maximise advertising or whatever sort of user manpiulation they are trying to pull off at the moment.
I can create a "manual feed", so to speak.
I realize I’m showing my age here, but I remember when missing an issue of a paper “subscription” was cause for anger and resulted in an apology from the publisher (and usually a redelivered copy). But I also remember when “follow” meant “show me all new posts from this user” on Facebook, too, back before they fucked up the News Feed in the 2010s and turned it into their manure delivery system.
I removed the videos from showing up on the home page with some CSS, so now I solely rely on related videos for non-subscription content. Those seem to be delivered based on engagement so they're usually longer. Unfortunately, half the time they're hour long videos.
Come on YouTube, just give me a 5-10 minute video.
Was it always like that, or is it them trying to ape Tiktok? I use Youtube a lot, but never from their home page.
One of the most annoying things is how, whenever there's some hot new thing, the old things I like seem to race to destroy themselves to imitate it.
I know this isn't a YouTube algorithm discussion thread, but just to jump-in and say that I try to use the 'home' view in the iOS app as discovery for content that's related to my subscriptions to find new channels.
The actual 'Discovery' tab is completely useless to me, as it's exclusively filled with complete trash that's trending locally (and in my case in Sweden, this means endless videos of local reality 'stars' doing 'crazy' stuff, interspersed with young women with well-filled tops talking to camera about 'something' from their beds, and what appear to be Arabic romantic dramas, and of course videos about sports cars).
The home view mostly shows me content that includes my subscriptions and is related to it (programming channels, large-format analog photography channels), but about once a month - despite being a Premium subscriber with a very carefully curated watch history (I don't even click on friends' 'hilarious' YouTube links anymore) - the whole algorithm breaks down and even my Home view is totally overtaken by big-breasted girls, Arabic(?) dramas, some sort of Free Fight boxing competition, and other trash that has to be removed one video at a time with at least two clicks each.
The whole process is really fiddly and I'm always in dread of accidentally clicking the wrong tiny and poorly-designed little interface element so the video plays instead of confirming (for the fiftieth time) that what I really want is "don't recommend channel".
I've rage-quit my Premium subscription a few times about this. But always come back as otherwise YouTube interrupts the videos every few minutes with their random spray ads these days - making it impossible to watch a 40-minute video and retain my sanity.
Don't even get me started on their adoption of the mobile UI for desktop...
Facebook strips users of those tools, and the only choice users have is to trust their algorithm to do it for them, and do it in the user's interest. They actively work against users trying to pull data from facebook's feed into their own clients not only by making it a ToS violation, but by scrambling the html layout of the page that renders it, making it extremely difficult to parse. And also using newspeak-esque language like "We are trying to protect you by doing this", suggesting that you're doing something bad by consuming your data.
I think it's becoming painfully clear these social networks have an increasingly twisted view of what they feel is the user's interest.
Surprise!
Check out Neal Stephenson Fall or Dodge In Hell. As usual, Neal called it.
1) a quick search of FoDiH brings up that it's from the perspective of a character in Reamde, which is one of his I have not read yet. Is it a mandatory prerequisite, a good-to-have but optional prerequisite, or essentially unrelated?
2) that search also brings up that it came out in 2019, but your comment says "It was 2014" w.r.t. something to do with FB (I actually had a lot of troubling parsing the meaning of that specific sentence and am still unsure, but that isn't the point). Can you really say he "called it" if he's reasoning a posteriori?
I read Reamde about 8 years before FoDiH. I recognized some of the characters but I had forgotten the details. I never got the feeling I needed to go back and reread it. And I enjoyed FoDiH for its own sake.
It means Facebook is using its system to game page owners into buying "boosts" or straight up ads. We know social media companies use the same psychological tricks that casinos use to get users to keep coming back, would it shock anyone to know that the company is turning the technology towards organizations and companies that have hitched their fortunes to it? All FB has to do is massage the algorithms just right to generate appropriate variable rewards and random payoffs to nudge page owners into thinking paying for attention is a good deal.
What strikes me is how exhausting using Facebook is for these purposes.
To read any Group you are constantly tapping tiny a "View More Comments" button. Very hard to read FB as you would HN or a forum, despite some great Groups and information there. When you get to the bottom of a group post, it shows you an endless scroll of "similar" content from entirely separate groups. I hate the entire experience. Anything to get you to keep scrolling and see another sponsored post.
Marketplace started out as a modern, local, second-hand goods CL competitor, but has devolved into shipping new cheap meme items. My main Marketplace feed is now crap like Rick & Morty stickers. Or the constant sponsored ads for new furniture or other products. Very hard to use Marketplace how I want to, which is finding local used antiques and unique items. I really wish CL had adapted to the new mobile landscape and competition a decade ago.
The uBlock codes are on reddit, search for "Blocking "Ships to you" posts in Facebook Marketplace"
What happened to craigslist?? I still use it all the time...
> We really should have done this back when it was revealed that Facebook used the ubiquitous embedded “Like on Facebook” buttons to follow people’s movements around the web without their knowledge or consent. We should have done this when Facebook literally toyed with people’s emotions by showing some people more positive stories in their newsfeeds, and others more negative stories, to see how it would affect their emotional states. We should have done this when it was revealed that Facebook allowed advertisers to target ads to people who expressed interest in topics such as “Jew hater.” We should have done this so many times before.
Couldn’t agree more. I deleted Facebook years ago and haven’t missed it.
This is the same bullshit we have been seeing for years. Nobody cares about privacy or security or social justice or anything other than their own narrow little world.
This is absurdly close to the exact same thing i say to the people i know lol. The only difference being that it's only been a little over a year since mine was deleted.
I think people overestimate how quickly competition happens and underestimate how powerful it is. There is a massive hole for new competitors to move in to the social media space. I see Brett Weinstein has finally decided YouTube is untenable, for example. This is just another data point in a trend of people with interesting opinions rediscovering the dangers of centralisation.
I single out this quote from early in the article:
> For the past few years, we at Damn Interesting have been hearing from scores of long-time fans who were under the mistaken impression that we had ceased all operations years ago.
What this says to me is it takes people a few years to notice when a social network is no longer providing value. That sits well with my assumption that users actually leaving a platform is a long lagging indicator that the platform is dead. The early sign is that the content producers are being squeezed.
Facebook has the whole tone deafness and awful governance, Twitter sucks at execution, and of course Google did many things (killing RSS, bungling messaging, etc) that were from any point of view dumb.
Youtube is untenable, lol. Hey everyone, the Ipod was untenable! Everyone is moving to Microsoft Zune! Ninja is going to livestream on Mixer, that will teach Twitch!
This is like the Death of Wal-mart or something, people constantly proclaim it but it keeps chugging along.
And Apple has historically been very methodical about closing down opportunities to compete with their products. The only part of the market they leave open is the part that has no money. There was a truly funny span of time when the iPhone accounted for more than 100% of the phone market because other mobile manufacturers were making losses. The Zune never had an obvious market segment that it could target.
At the moment, anyone trying to produce right wing content would have to be mad to be comfortable on the major platforms. Even Amazon seems to be unreliable after what looks a lot like a political hit on Parler. There is a large, obvious & dissatisfied group to target here and potentially a valuable advertising market.
They had some fairly different niches-- both the iPod and Zune were in the relatively narrow selection of high-capacity, hard-disc based MP3 players. In that environment, tje iPod was the minimalist option-- less complex UI, seamless package, but feature-poor. The Zune offered far more features and customizability. I can recall being aghast that you couldn't get a FM radio feature on an iPod, when the cheapest 'flash drive with dreams of grandeur' MP3 players offered it. (This, of course, being relevant when a 2Gb player wouldn't contain enough music to feel "infinite" and you'd want more variety)
I can definitely relate to this.
In particular, I found this passage compelling:
> In a move that feels long overdue, we at Damn Interesting are abandoning all interactions and connections with Facebook. We really should have done this back when it was revealed that Facebook used the ubiquitous embedded “Like on Facebook” buttons to follow people’s movements around the web without their knowledge or consent. We should have done this when Facebook literally toyed with people’s emotions by showing some people more positive stories in their newsfeeds, and others more negative stories, to see how it would affect their emotional states. We should have done this when it was revealed that Facebook allowed advertisers to target ads to people who expressed interest in topics such as “Jew hater.” We should have done this so many times before.
Maybe it's evil. But it fulfills a useful role.
I bet if we didn’t have Wikipedia, people would say such a project would never work. Fortunately we do.
Now, imagine a basic, open “friend book” with barebones Wikipedia-esque design for the purpose of maintaining social connections. Wouldn’t that be grand?
Wikipedia actually is failing as well.
All platforms have problems. I don’t like a lot of Wikipedia’s policies. But I’d for damn sure choose a Wikipedia run “Face Book” over Facebook, Inc.
Wasn't that the whole point of Diaspora foundation? Not really sure what ever happened to that social media project?
Secondly, the system will only break down with people leaving. Once your friends are gone, whats the point. Just being the first in your friend or family group is really tough.
The worst part is there's no viable replacement outside of what, MMS group chats?
Ha. This happened to me too. I ultimately considered it a feature and not a bug.
I deactivated my FB page over a year ago and never looked back. I still keep my Messenger and Instagram accounts active, so while I’m still in Facebook’s sphere of influence, I’ve got two ways of staying in touch with most of the people I like and I’m no longer susceptible to the doomscrolling and perpetual outrage machine of their newsfeed. It’s been a huge net positive for me. Much like fitness or improving our environmental impact, harm reduction is still worthwhile even if it falls short of some the most extreme ideals. I’d love to be completely out of Facebook’s ecosystem but for now, I’m happy to settle for limiting its ability to wreck my mood and devour my time.
There are people who want to turn the real world into a live action version of facebook/reddit/twitter. They've got this one weird trick, and historians hate them. You'll never guess where they work now.
Absolutely. just buy my book for $9.99 ahem sorry
Truly, all the things people are now seeing as bad did get mentioned by some of the crusty holdouts and refuseniks. It can be especially personally edifying, for example, to go back and read opinions you disagreed with then but now value more; this is one of those cases where there's plenty of "I told you so." Some of which was horseshit then and is still is now.
One of my favorites is "geolocation should be used as network ID"; much of the hard routing becomes "free" and the need for encryption and forwarding points becomes explicit from the start. Now with 5G we're reaching that point; but with literally layers of legacy translations that are just extra baggage now. Wouldn't it have been easier to just do it right at the beginning?
But, here is the one weird trick: If you think something is good, do it. But, if you make up your mind that it's bad, stop doing it. Following that rule would have kept a lot of people off these services.
To my knowledge, nothing people say about social media today is fundamentally different than what they were saying in 2008: it destroys privacy, it destroys discourse, it consumes attention, and it puts control over your life into the hands of corporations. And people recognize this: I can't even count the number of times I've heard someone say (or write) "social media sucks" and then kept right on with it. My only advice is, if you feel like something is bad for you, don't do it.
I stopped using social media because I was sick of having this critic in my brain constantly judging if an experience is worth posting on social media.
Of course this is a huge trade off with not knowing what my elderly neighbor at a cottage I never go to had for lunch.
I wish I had learned from them sooner.
Why would I spend time on a website that makes me angry?
What's worse is the implied social obligation to use Facebook. My mom occasionally informs me that I've been invited to a family event through Facebook. I now just wait for a normal invitation, (mail, phone call, email,) or ignore the event.
I just don't want to get sucked into Facebook just to check on party invites.
Isn't it blindingly obvious that organizations that use social media to reach their audiences are essentially putting coins in a slot machine, pulling the "show my content" lever, and getting a good feeling when the metrics show their post 'went viral'?
This trend roughly coincides with Facebook’s introduction of “boosting” for pages; in this new model, according to the stats we can see, Facebook stopped showing our posts to approximately 94% of our followers, demanding a fee to “boost” each post into an ad, which would make it visible to more of our audience. We lost contact with tens of thousands of fans practically overnight. We don’t mind paying for a service if it is valuable, but we absolutely don’t want to reach our audience by buying ad space on Facebook. Yuck. But no other option is given to reach the many people who previously followed our posts, and who presumably want to continue to do so.
We established our Facebook page in 2008 as the fledgling social media site was gaining in currency, and we continued to maintain our page on the side, mostly as an afterthought. In the intervening years Facebook evolved from a dubious curiosity into a megacorporation that is firmly in the service of bad ideas. In a move that feels long overdue, we at Damn Interesting are abandoning all interactions and connections with Facebook.
We really should have done this back when it was revealed that Facebook used the ubiquitous embedded “Like on Facebook” buttons to follow people’s movements around the web without their knowledge or consent. We should have done this when Facebook literally toyed with people’s emotions by showing some people more positive stories in their newsfeeds, and others more negative stories, to see how it would affect their emotional states. We should have done this when it was revealed that Facebook allowed advertisers to target ads to people who expressed interest in topics such as “Jew hater.” We should have done this so many times before.
To the tens of thousands of fans who follow us on Facebook: our sincere apologies. You’re probably not seeing most of our posts there, anyway. For the few who do still see them, we no longer wish to share content on Facebook which might cause people to spend time there. We hope you’ll stay in touch via one of our multiple non-Facebook options
IMO the big thing that most alternatives are missing is end-to-end encryption, like Signal. Otherwise there's no guarantee that you gain anything by moving to a new platform, as long as they can still track/profile you and sell your data, and as long as they can inject whatever garbage they want into your feed. I think this explains a lot of the reluctance to try anything new. Might as well stick with the Zucc you know than risk it with a new one.
At the heart of it connecting so many people felt great until we realized why we left people in the past.
Facebook is still the world's largest phonebook.
If you just read the HN comments and not the article... this is a taste of what you're missing out on.
And honestly, the anti facebook hate gets old. You all are just using it as a scapegoat to avoid thinking about what your own companies are doing or the changes you can make; its a ritual in this place now to have fashion-hate on certain things, and it gets really tiring. There is no way you can avoid negative interactions on the web if you have any real presence at scale, and complex systems are always going to have unintended effects that won't be seen till later and only can be mitigated up to a point.
The constant longing for a small scale web with large scale benefits simply isn't feasible.
Maybe there is but Facebook is just too greedy?
On that note, does anybody know of any way of exporting FB group content outside FB - as RSS or whatever else feed? I couldn't find any obvious way and I don't have enough free time to develop an unobvious way from scratch. Any help (even getting 80% there) would be greatly appreciated.
Now that I think of it, I just need Facebook to be an RSS reader. Show me a list of unread events from different channels in chronological order. That's it.
In any case, I don't use Facebook anymore. I unsubscribed from everything and everyone, and stopped posting a long time ago.
Instead of getting fancy, they should just give it to you straight. Chronological ordering. You subscribe to a page? You see that content. You don’t follow something? You don’t see that content.
Just keep it simple. Will there be less revenue? Perhaps, but the platform may become more enjoyable to use.
It took me a while to figure out...
Twitter gets some hate because it can push the vibe of a situation in a weird political direction, but Facebook's overzealous moderation actually stifles something closer to real debate. Also, Facebook is where communities are organising so the bans hurt more.
Facebook has everyone and is designed to drive engagement. It’s harder to prune your feed and it’s easier for people who need to STFU to speak.
Also, Twitter’s feed is (largely) chronological.
Twitter also gets criticized a lot, people talk about leaving Twitter all the time. The main difference with Facebook is probably that for many people, it covers more things, is more integral and thus harder to leave.