Exiled from the Metaverse before it even started: Facebook bans are for life
brian.jp
brian.jp
Direct link to the material--I can see it, if I'm trying to find additional material, nope.
The negative patterns are too bold.
At least that's how it was until I stopped logging in about a year ago. But I can still access linked content. On mobile, I just have to paste the url into the browser address bar and it works.
Yeah but it feels like navigating around gets weird if you're not logged, because any link from the direct-linked content (original tweet for RTs, comments, etc...) will navigate then immediately hide the information behind a big popup, and if you close that popup... it sends you back where you came from.
[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
Well, they work as long as the company is powerful. And push people away as soon as the power reduces.
It's one of those policies that provide metastability, but increase the rate of change once the stability is lost. Powerful people normally like them, as they care much less about rate of change than about conserving power.
Me neither. The "dumb fucks trusted me" vibe rubbed me the wrong way right out of the gate.
Wish someone had stopped them grabbing Whatsapp, etc., deleted my account there too.
TT's addictive nature is more insidious because it's more internal: Humans are pattern-matching machines and TikTok will show you a LOT of very niche content to the point where your brain thinks it's important and true (think TV/movie product placement; they wouldn't do it if it didn't work). Because of TT's form, it's harder for the average person (non-creator) to be drawn into a social group, but it's easier for them to be firehosed into accepting false narratives through sheer repetition. TT distorts a person's idea of HOW PEOPLE LIVE; imagine if your main idea of how Americans live was USSR propaganda. TT makes people apathetic and prone to hug-boxes.
They're both taking advantage of the fight-or-flight mechanism, FB just wants you to fight and TT wants you to 'flee' (into its loving escapist arms, of course).
There are healthy use cases for both FB and TT (and even Twitter), but they're directly at odds with the incentives of the platforms themselves + we have a society full of unhealthy and traumatized people, so instead you get these evil clone versions.
I'd also say that both the US and China are authoritarian countries. China more so, but the mental health/addictive problems with TT are inherent to its design and medium decisions, not which nationality made it.
I never got into instagram, but Facebook is always trying to lure me in with suggestive “interviews” of college girls and weird mom videos on the Facebook feed, which is otherwise very curated.
TikTok is a maximizer of wasted attention.
'Reels' is a lot worse. It shows you generic stuff that's slightly personalized by things you "liked" over a decade ago. No reason to use it.
Facebook says that Oculus won't require a Facebook sign in anymore.
When they bought Oculus they made a definitive statement saying that Oculus devices will never need an FB account to use.
To me they lost all credibility. Not just because of this instance but many other instances of lying and deceit.
I just read and reread the Boz words and don’t see how any of it translates into “no Meta (Facebook) account needed”?
(Would've bought an Oculus by now if it wasn't for that requirement.)
We are not contributing to the metaverse, why would they? The value of selling a handful of games for approximately $100 of revenue is peanuts compared to their metaverse idea.
Given that FB probably loses money on each quest sold, I think it's likely they are happy every time one of us grumpy loners declines to purchase their device
This isn't even mentioning the rampant misinformation and divisive bullshit permeating the platforms (yes both of them)
The more socially competent you are, the less useful this probably is. Many people probably have some useful network of friends they built in college. I have little to draw on aside from a handful of people I worked with which I had professional rapport with which I never developed a personal connection. So thus, I am stuck on LinkedIn on the off chance I need a new job and a reference.
People also have large group chats, which is a trend across all networks and general interaction.
Easy to miss that this trend is happening if you aren't part of any.
Its publicly accessible content on social networks like this which are going by the way side. The engagement is much less visible.
Fast forward to today, and we now know that Facebook and other social media are encouraging narcissistic behavior, because narcissists are easy to manipulate: They are highly likely to have multiple addictions, they are easy to emotionally provoke, have nearly no ability to moderate there own behavior, and they take any attack on there beliefs as a persona attack, and will hate there attacker forever, becoming flying monkeys.
I highly encourage everyone to watch the documovie: The Social Dilemma.
People will only invite you to events on Facebook. Restaurants will only post updates to Facebook. Businesses have support forums in Facebook groups. Etc.
You do miss out on a portion of the internet by not being on Facebook. But I think that's because people rely too much on it.
It may sound like a dumb reason, but I have seen the pattern of some eponymous innocent suffering because lazy HR didn't verify waaaaaaay too many times to not take the threat seriously.
To the point of I have folders, digital and physical full of sworn statements I've had to make, and official court documents from six different states attesting "no the John Doe before you applying for this job is not the one who came up in your background check database for grand larceny, no he's not the one who came up for involuntary manslaughter either." and I'm always ready for that conversation later in the interview when I get an email from the recruiter/HR "hey, we have a question about something that came up in your background check"
Even at a small town library there was another patron with my name.
That's right - in 2021, Facebook doesn't make you immediately verify your email when you sign up! They eventually close the account if you don't verify but by that point whoever signed up with your name and email already has access to parts of your shadow profile Facebook leaks (ex through 'suggested friends').
I'm not confident that is true in any meaningful sense as it seems to align too nicely with what Facebook would like people to think.
If you are only using the FB account on your Oculus, its an Oculus account that calls itself an FB account. You need an account for most game devices these days and for Steam. I am not saying its perfect, I am saying that not using an Oculus because you are off FB doesn't make that much sense to me. I do exactly that.
How would I remain as anonymous as I am on Steam for the community and still work within Facebook's terms of service?
Facebook pretends this is the case, but they use some dirty tricks to require personal information without explicitly requiring it.
In particular, if you create an account without a phone number, you'll find that within a day or two your account will inevitably be flagged for "suspicious" behavior, and you'll be required to enable two-factor-authentication with a valid phone number. (I assume the "suspicious" behavior here is your account existing without a phone number.)
I've seen this pattern and the excuses people make for it too (anti spam prevention, as if there are no other anti spam prevention methods)
Use Firefox, it automatically puts Facebook in its own Firefox Container so no FB cookies tracking you everywhere. And don't use their app it's basically spyware.
That said, I'm keeping their creepy apps off my phone...
Literally yesterday, I was looking through my ignored friend requests and found some random profile that had thousands of 'friends', and all the posts in his timeline were ads for dodgy weight loss and/or boner pills, with hundreds of people tagged in the photos. Dozens of posts a day, every post title full of punctuation-as-text to avoid triggering spam filters. Reported it as a spam account, got a response a few hours later that they had checked the profile, determined it didn't violate their community standards and that it would not be removed.
I guess it's just fascinating that with all that money and power, they've managed to build a moderation system with such a high rate of both false-positives and false-negatives. You'd think they could at least constrain it to being terrible in one direction.
And maybe they make money from it, so they don't want to kill the goose. I would also guess that heavy FB users are a terrific concentration of suckers.
Like the Apple Mac tower and a generator... very dangerous weapons.
That's why burglars and shoplifters call it Fencebook.
Or elevators. I'm in New York City and everyday I go into some building that has a terrible algorithm for its elevators. I don't need advanced AI, my life would be improved with even minor tweaks to most algorithms for elevators.
Clearly how good it is (not) is not an impediment to being pushed upon us and replacing humans. FAANG certainly seem to prefer the low cost over the quality of the results.
why would anyone want to constrain it that way? To ban no one or ban everyone would be terrible.
Do the math: 1 million of 2 Billion legit users get banned wrongly. 2.9 Billion of 3 Billion slammers get banned. That leaves a huge amount of false positive and false negatives while still being almost perfect.
They recently reversed this decision. Facebook is no longer required, and your Oculus account is your primary way to sign in again.
I was being the 10th man for a moment. In a group of 10, one is designated as the 10th man (or person, but I'll go with Erik's term.) When 9 people agree, the 10th man is required to disagree. This throws a monkey wrench into groupthink.
2016 - One Hacker Way Rational alternative of Agile - Erik Meijer (at minute 25:00 in case the time param doesn't work)
https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ?t=1499
Edit: He's now Director Of Engineering at Meta so maybe he can be the 10th man at Meta
In all seriousness though: It's time to find some name for this behaviour where the only chance for support or help is being a VIP or making the news headlines somehow.
"I'm a VIP, you can't pleban me."
Any other term more fun and memorable?
“Zuck permabanned me but I frontpaged to get back my account”
So, no, under the old def HN was never about becoming trillionaires by selling our accts to google or whatever. And under the new definition HN has intense political leanings but is still primarily technical in nature and doesn't censor as much as Reddit or other fundamentalist or inquisition like as sites.
On a message board, 1) I don't have a profile that's rich with personal information, 2) I don't have a dedicated wall for my musings, 3) I don't have an individually-curated timeline, and 4) I don't have first-class social connections embedded in the platform.
Point 1 means that there is much less ability to identify me for the purposes of advertising, which avoids much of the perverse incentive that comes with monetizing social media users.
Point 2 means that I have much less personal attachment to this place as an outlet for creative self-expression, which helps to defuse both a sense of toxic entitlement that I might feel on behalf of the platform providers, as well as the sunk-cost fallacy that might keep me active here even if I no longer experienced pleasure from being here.
Point 3 keeps filter bubbles from fractally proliferating; there is still one bubble, but it's the bubble that everyone else on the platform inhabits.
Point 4 provides a mixture of all of the above benefits.
Again, this isn't to say that message boards are perfect or that social media must be inherently bad, but IMO the differences are important.
The details you list seem incidental to the social media of today. Reddit fits much of what you say but most people would classify Reddit as clearly social media even though Reddit is closer to HN than FB by this divvying of conceptual boundaries. Perhaps the social media of tomorrow involves no wall and meetings in Oculus land. Then we would be talking about how social media is psychologically or socially problematic because of 3D immersion.
IMO the easiest bright line between social media and "something else" media is that social media is populated with content by amateurs or indie producers. If FB became 100% business then it would lose its credentials as "social" media and simply become "traditional" media, notwithstanding any timeline, wall, bubble or heuristic curation. If YouTube became all professionals then it would just become HBO, regardless of whether there are subscriptions, notifications, or channels.
As for the "indie producer" aspect, that's certainly one useful property to consider, but I don't think it's sufficient since pre-internet we had things like 'zine culture which were the bastion of indies, and I would find it a stretch to call zines a form of social media, rather than just indie media.
If not, what would they be?
Like HN bans, Facebook/Google bans wouldn't really be too much of a problem if they weren't _the_ platform in their respective domains. As much as I advocate for alternative platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube, them being a viable alternative is a future I hope to see, not the present reality.
So long as the site acts only as the big room in which the party happens, it's benign. Once the room becomes an active participant and manipulator it becomes what is now a modern "social networking" site, and should be regarded as poison. At that point, leave for your own sake.
Hacker News is one of the most aggressively moderated forums you'll ever come across, the room is very much an active participant and always has been.
And the entire purpose of the karma system (particularly the censorship of downvoted items) is to suggest and promote some content over others. That HN doesn't use machine learning is just a quibble about complexity.
Flagging/purging content is to me more acceptable than manipulation via suggesting/promoting, though, especially if the moderators are members. Maybe making this distinction is hair-splitting, though.
Shadow banning, on the other hand, is a disgusting technique. That seems like more a childish prank than a means of moderation, and only invites negativity (which is what was trying to be avoided, right?).
Overall, it's a pretty reliable source of links to good articles -- and some discussions.
Maybe it's just me, but I never got the hang of the social network part of GitHub. Sure, I interact with issues related to work and I star repos that I might need later, but I never used the feed or had some discussions on it which are not work related.
But I did receive comments in private from acquaintances who had picked up on my GitHub activities. On the one hand, I felt happy for the feedback, because it was people that I like to interact with. On the other hand, I felt like I wasn't aware that this information was aggregated and posted on a dashboard page that anyone who ever clicked "follow" on my profile was looking at with some frequency.
I do use the GitHub profile as a resumé, and as a work platform. I don't have LinkedIn. I do use it to showcase some of the stuff I find interesting to work on, and to show my skillset. But I also realize that I'm giving away timestamp information about my work habits, and I don't know if I like that.
It's not the only reason. Not even at the top on my list for reasons. But if there is going to be a metaverse, Facebook cannot be the gatekeeper, or any other US tech company that randomly and for no given reason permabans you cough Google.
People that have platforms with millions of listeners should start using their platforms - not just to make their friend unbanned this one time, but to illuminate the dangers of the dystopian situation we're sleepwalking into. People should know that facebook is unreliable, erratic, capricious platform, where you could get randomly excluded for life without any recourse, and friends shouldn't let friends use facebook, at least not for anything remotely important.
Matrix is for now one of the few actually federated things (in addition to email) that still has a chance of not failing. As such it's a good basis for people to build a Metaverse on top of. Of course it is going to require people actually showing up and doing that. Email completely destroyed it's competitors by virtue of "you can email everyone instead of just the morons that bought the exact same shit that you bought". Thirty years on, nothing has changed. Whatever it's going to be, Zuck's ffing walled garden ain't it.
Neal Stephenson has been repeatedly answering the question what he thinks about the whole Meta thing as part of his recent book tour for Termination Shock. He'd be the person that coined the whole notion of the Metaverse in Snowcrash in the early 90's.
He does not seem very impressed with this effort by Facebook and nor did Facebook bother to even talk to him about their plans. I think that is probably a tactical mistake by Facebook and it kind of outlines how desperate they are.
Over recent years Facebook has been clamping down with those same sort of messages (sometimes it will appear after a few days or weeks for people I know) and for better or worse the main fix was having a picture with a face on a brand new account.
Older accounts don't have this problem though.
It's a similar tactic to how in recent years twitter lets you sign up without a mobile number but after some time you will suspiciously get your account locked until you "verify" with a mobile number.
Not the vision you’ll get from Meta however
(I am aware the language here potentially indicates willing participation in some kind of arbitrary totalitarianism, but it's for the point of discussion)
So this is an equivelent of a life sentance, what's next, special towns where only people banned by facebook live? Or maybe execution.
From Facebooks business model perspective, this probably doesn't hurt them while the numbers stay under some smallish magic threshold, but cross that threshhold range and all of sudden they might find they have banned themselves into irrelevance and be just be another MySpace.
I dreamed of a OS filter that lets you turn "meta" back to "facebook" where appropriate. We can't bring AI to the OS fast enough.
Block and filter anything related to their platforms.
There should be a "no-tether" law.
My GoPro camera once worked fine without signing into their service. Then one day they forced me to create an account and log in, just to continue to use the app to control my hardware.
This pissed me off so much that the camera was “accidentally” destroyed not long after, but not before thinking hard about tying it to a brick and returning it via their corporate office window. Now, I tell everyone that will listen to avoid buying their products. Shame on them and any company that does such despicable things to their own customers.
If you’re going to disallow disconnection between meatspace and VR, there’s nothing virtual left in it.
I could not link a phone, but I need to link my phone number if I want to get access to more advanced functionality such as running ads, pages, et cetera.
Surely there are a thousand other ways I could sign up again -- but to be honest I don't want to jump through those hoops. I just want my account back. And since that isn't happening, I hope my tale serves as a warning for people never to rely on Facebook as they can take your access away if their bots think you're suspicious.
Also a few weeks into using an account I made for testing a product that uses their signin system, it asked me to scan in and upload my passport.
Luckily it wasn’t a core part of my job so I just gave up having any kind of Facebook account.
They really care that you have exactly one account in your real name.
It’s one of the best things that can happen to you, to be honest. Facebook is a cancer on society.
Also having two facebook accounts is not allowed by their TOS. That's the first thing our partner manager asked me: "do you have multiple accounts by any chance? That often gets people banned".
Bonus: economic opportunity for lower class.
Hang in there. De-Zucking your life is a net positive.
So it's two-fold: I want people to know they can get banned, at any time, for life, without much of a warning. And two: you might depend on Facebook more than you'd like to, so plan accordingly.
I really hate that I can't talk to James anymore. I didn't even bother to swap email addresses.
Huh. Potential future social media conceirge service.
I already waste too much personal time on junk mail, spam, robocalls.
Nope, not allowed to sign up. No idea why, no reason given. The email address and my real life identity is never used in any offensive way (or really in any way at all). I don't have some weird name that sounds offensive either.
They didn't offer any way to remedy, no way to contact, no way to do anything about it. I just said screw it, I probably shouldn't be on there anyway.
Yet what I know about it and what I've seen of it, people I've known are perfectly acceptable posting hate speech, violent threats, spreading misinformation about people for lulz deliberately, etc.
Why is this company not considered the same as 8chan? I don't really care if it exists, just why culturally is it considered some sort of bastion of existence and 8chan is demonized when I see them as equals?
I guess you don't care enough to try such experiments, but for somebody who was kicked off and actually wants to be there, is there any special obstacle to creating a new account?