Dump facebook. Make the effort. Get non-facebook contact details from anyone you want to stay in touch with. Advertise you're going to do it a few times then just pull the plug.
As a counterpoint, Facebook also happens to be a great tool to organize people in times like this. Just today I saw a post in my feed where some acquaintances had organized to raise money for a girl they know who was diagnosed with cancer. They managed to raise about $38,000 for her. That’s a big deal.
I'm actually a member of several active public and private groups on Facebook where many posts have informative discussions. I rarely ever look at my newsfeed though. If I only had the newsfeed, I would have dumped Facebook long ago.
I just unfollowed everyone that wasn't a close friend or family. The addictive draw is pretty much gone as I'll scroll it for 5 min every week or so and be totally caught up
how do you do that? I had considered making a chrome extension to always remove the div, but instead I've just been off Facebook for a decade.
I've made one for a few months to communicate with Gen-Xers and Europeans in some special planning group here and there. Then I download and delete. Always use a new email address or new phone number for the next profile, although lately Facebook will block your account within hours if you do that, it is extremely creepy. They must be so smug that their antispam provisions coincide with their social graph vampirism.
The issue is getting all your contacts to use it. Works for about half of mine and it's ready to go for the rest when facebook do something foul that pisses them off. This is a good backstop that counterbalances all the reasons facebook want to do something evil to those users. (Eg break the encryption, put ads in the messages, provide the NSA with a backdoor etc etc.) "Mark, if we do that, we lose most whatsapp users to signal by the end of the week."
Signal is great. It costs nothing to have next to whatsapp on your phone. The desktop client is significantly better. Most of what is good about whatsapp they literally bought from signal.
Somebody always owns something, that's capitalism. But I would argue that Whatsapp works differently than FB, it's really just a communication tool, it doesn't manipulate you through a "feed".
“Last week, I posted about my breast cancer diagnosis on Facebook. Since then, my Facebook feed has featured ads for “alternative cancer care.””
In my experience, cookies and browsing history influences facebook ads more than the text in posts. For example any links sent via messenger or whatsapp or products on amazon.
Could it be the case that the authors browsing history is actually what is driving these ads? For example, if the author is an expert on pseudo science it seems natural that they would research fake cures at some point.
I am unemployed for 6 months now, and I watch YouTube from time to time, and search for all kinds of things. From a human viewer perspective, the ads were more related to my YouTube watching behaviour than my browsing history. I use DuckDuckGo but let Google Analytics see me.
Recently I decide to start doing video essays. I searched for a ton of medieval history stuff and watched a ton of related clips. I notice that YouTube began to show ads of at least 2 "I get rich from millions in debt" self-help workshops/courses to me, which I've never shown any interest in.
I have watched audio equipment review videos as well, and that's the only possible connection I can establish between the ads and my online behaviour. Are a lot of unemployed people seeking to enter audio/video making? Or are the snake oil ads showing on many people's screens because of the dire economic situation many of us are in?
I'm sure someone will tell me why this isn't happening, but I perceive a correlation between anything I type into FB Messenger (or HN) and subsequent ads. And I mean quickly.
So, my question for you is have you been making comments or sending messages online about debt, money, wealth, etc? Then again, maybe Skynet just knows you're unemployed and that's what makes you a target for get-rich-quick.
I think I've scraped the bottom of the barrel of YouTube content and ads, the worst are these Japanese weight loss commercials.
How's your situation, are you still learning and pursuing your own journey? I can totally relate to the feeling of being out of work but I believe strongly that our work is a calling and we must listen to our intuition on the journey to mastery of our art.
I have a family member with a mental illness and they think they can talk to animals through telepathy. I was worried it was a sign of schizophrenia and tried to convince them that they needed help. Unfortunately when you google "animal telepathy" or any other query to get information on telepathic communication with animals, the top results are all absolute batshit crazy sites that confirm people can do that. Now I see how someone can start to believe all kinds of crazy things. Since Google probably optimizes for some type of engagement under the hood, all sorts of alternative medicine and crazy ideas end up as top results. I really think the whole "let's make all information/speech available with no filters except for sex because clearly sex is evil" approach from SV companies is causing huge harm. Most people don't grow up thinking they need to read several scientific, peer reviewed, reproducible papers to believe new ideas.
I knew a guy that suddenly in his thirties started believing the earth was flat. His friends ignored it and tried to play it off. I tried talking to him to no avail.
One night I couldn't sleep and thought about how an average guy like him could do a 180 like that. I googled just to see what arguments the 'movement' tried to lean on. The following weeks I was bombarded with suggestions of more flat earth content, even after downvoting it YouTube kept recommending it for weeks if not months.
Who knows how many minds have been eroded already.
I worked with a guy in a position of considerable responsibility who seriously believes that reptilian aliens under the Denver airport are controlling the US government.
What result do you think google should return for "animal telepathy"? I think there just isn't any reason for "animaltelepathyisimpossible.com" to exist, and so there is nothing for google to find.
For queries that fall in the realm of "conspiracy" like alternative medicine, flat earth, telepathy, anti-vax, etc. I think results from certain "high quality" sources like Wikipedia should be weighed higher even if the content doesn't seem as relevant. For that specific example, the wikipedia article on telepathy would seem more appropriate than many of the results. There is also plenty of literature from psychology that suggests a link between belief in telepathy and certain mental illnesses, so maybe that can also be surfaced more prominently than services that claim they can talk to your dead dog. However this is not about one specific example, this is about indirectly validating false information by simply making it more accessible. On the internet a lot of conspiracies have more "social proof" (through prominence on social networks and search results) than the boring reality so they spread faster than they should.
This kind of thing can happen even if the search engine doesn't optimize for engagement. If we search for something that the alternative medicine people talk about much more often than the reputable sources do then naturally many of the top search results will be from the alternative medicine crowd.
I've noticed this kind of thing happening for search terms related to thyroid hormone testing. For example, if you search for "thyroxine"[1] the top search results are from reputable sources such as the Endorcine Society or WebMD. However, if you search for "reverse T3"[2] -- an esoteric test favored by the alternative medicine crowd -- then most of the top results are from naturopaths, herbal supplement peddlers, etc.
Is non-verbal communication with an animal too crazy of an idea for you? Because animals don't speak or obey (looking at you cat) humans too well but can sense things and act on that information.
From there animal telepathy isn't too far of a stretch for someone to make.
I haven't seen scientific proof and I don't think anyone has. But I would still expect others would make sites and claims.
But you feel there is a harm in there. Because it is reenforcing what a mental ill person believes.
I'm not sure what the best compromise is. The core problem is the fact that there are communities who want to talk about animal telepathy doesn't work with your worldview. Asking sv to exclude them makes the web a smaller more corporate place. I'm not sure that's the best approach.
In your situation you need a censored google. A google to match your worldview. In fairness google has been trying to show you you-centric search results if you are logged in. In your case this is a one-time transaction so history wouldn't place a factor.
But I come back to why is this a sv problem? The root of the problem is your family member isn't taking his medicine or it is not working or he is right and you won't listen.
If I had a family member like that I would just go along with it. Things don't need to be 100% correct in life. People need to believe in something. No harm here.
The problem here is that false information spreads quickly and is validated though sites like Google and Facebook through higher exposure. This has real consequences like the rise of anti-vaxers and other anti-science movements.
By the way, don't overestimate the influence of suggestion. Someone who believes in telepathy may simply have experienced it[1] and therefore, as they say, you won't talk them out of what they weren't talked in to.
[1]I'm not implying it's real, just that people experience it exactly as they do real things, like hearing voices.
Sometimes I wonder if there's a parallel between how neurons interact during psychosis and how human minds interact over the internet under conditions of manipulation for engagement. Maybe in both cases, there's some damping/attentional mechanism that is missing/not functioning.
I think we're just regressing to the mean. Throughout most or all of human history we believed all kinds of crazy ideas, and it wasn't until very recently that we started really valuing teaching the scientific method and good education mostly based on facts. This required filtering lots of information and putting a lot of trust in many institutions. This worked extremely well right up until the internet became mainstream. Now unfiltered information is available everywhere again, and a significant portion of the population have a hard time distinguishing what is real or not. I grew up religious so I very well understand how for many (maybe most) the burden of proof is simply that it is written down somewhere. Of course the institutions aren't blameless here, and I don't know how to solve this without all the major SV companies agreeing to lose a lot of money.
Wouldn't it be nice if facebook took proper responsibility for what they publish in exchange for money.
When snake-oil damages someone when it was advertised by facebook, facebook, who took the money to diseminate the harm are liable for that.
The other thing worth noting is that the hugely successful internet advertising campaigns, eg Tesla, who have a brand now comparable to Mercedes, paid facebook, google et al. precisely $0 to achieve that. Unless you are selling snake-oil, it would seem internet advertising is something to avoid.
I think if everyone had to take direct responsibility for the advertising they publish, quality newspapers would be more profitable and facebook & google very, very much less dominant. Would it make the world a nicer, kinder place? Dunno. I say it's worth running the experiment.
I think it's unrealistic to expect publishers to vet advertisements - all the "hur dur ads evil must ban" stuff aside - it would be nice if there was a good way to incentivise the publishers to do the right thing while being realistic about what they can do and that ads are here to stay - I'm not sure what. Technically it looks like a thing where an AI could do a 80% of the way there job - and with a human layer of sanity checks on top of it should be realistic - but still don't see a way to structure the incentives - this would cost a bunch of money and realistically do very little for FB (maybe prevent some bad PR from people getting scammed but TBH a lot of people won't even recognise they got scammed)
It's perfectly realistic. You legally mandate it and they change their business practises. You think facebook and google would actually be unviable if they had to decide weather to publish an ad when they take the money? I doubt that strongly. Less profitable, sure. Less competitive in advertising with the newspaper, yep. Smaller players would be more competitive, absolutely.
But even if they were unviable, someone else would work out how to set up a competing viable business with those constraints. Do you really doubt that? And perhaps if facebook can't be viable without advertising evil, destructive propaganda killing people who are mentally weakened by serious disease, they, you know, shouldn't be operating? Just a thought.
Oh and "hur dur" yourself, man. Not productive to a rational and sensible discussion, yeah?
> it would be nice if there was a good way to incentivise the publishers to do the right thing while being realistic about what they can do and that ads are here to stay
Fine the publisher every time they publish something fraudulent. It's not the public's problem or responsibility to solve this for Facebook.
> The other thing worth noting is that the hugely successful internet advertising campaigns, eg Tesla, who have a brand now comparable to Mercedes, paid facebook, google et al. precisely $0 to achieve that.
They don't do ads per se, but do spend quite a lot in other forms of marketing -- Discounts & perks for referrals, high-quality press photos, events, livestreams, etc.
Do something newsworthy and facebook will advertise you for free. The goal is to get bloggers/news orgs to write something about your product. Then user's will share those articles for free
How Tesla, for example, did it is a separate question relevant to marketing in general and the analysis will be complex.
Relevant here is that it is a fact that they did it paying facebook (& google etc.) absoutely nothing and have clearly been wildly, amazingly successful.
While not nearly as bad as what is in the article. Predictive text in Messages on iOS now suggests "cancer" when I type "can" and "chemotheteropy" when I type "ch". And to really rub it in "ma" brings up "magnesium". The magnesium one being the worst because if I type it that means they are doing a magnesium infusion and that means I am going to feel like I have been hit by a truck for the next two days.
A lot of the times it is actually picking the right word but somethings you don't want to be constantly reminded of.
I get that this is frustrating and deeply annoying for you, but these predictions are analyzed and made on-device. There is no tracking going on like in the case of Facebook (where it could leak through another Cambridge-Analytica-like event to many other companies).
I use to not care about conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. I found it funny even, until my mother got breast cancer and some heartless guys tried to sell her lithoterapy (stone you put in water before drinking that water, stone you have to wear to sleep and all this stuff).
Well as this "therapy" was really dangerous, there were a lot of articles on the danger and that and my insistence managed to keep her from that. She has now recovered with chirugucal operation and hormone therapy.
I then followed up on that, discovered something called zététique[0], basically applying scientific method to all claims. It worked quite well for me.
Unfortunately not everyone has the support group to help them navigate through this. Or the personality to rely on a support group.
When you're in a situation like cancer you're extremely vulnerable. You think to yourself what's the point of me keeping this money if I'm just going to die so vulture companies decide to use this vulnerable state to destroy you.
As a society we should stop turning a blind eye towards this. Yes they're an adult and should know better, but maybe that view isn't always correct? Maybe sometimes adults can't consent to stuff properly because of the situation they're in.
Why should they know better? Why are adults expected to be experts in all things? Certainly if it was bad the government would stop it or they wouldn't make enough money to advertise to lowly old me is likely what most of them think.
If I'm feeling a little sick and decide to look up the symptoms, half the results are "alternative cures" that involve drinking olive oil, applying tea tree oil, drinking green tea (I think these people think tea tree and tea tea are the same) and BOOM cured. Just this week I was looking up a couple animal videos, and Youtube's sidebar recommendations were absolutely full of "natural cures" for various pet ailments. Of course, every single one mentioned olive oil in the title.
I can't even look up basic recipes or info about specific ingredients or even simple gardening info without half the results being things like spinach being some miracle food that helps treat/cure syphilis and cancer.
I'm sick of it. I'm not exactly in favor of deplatforming, but these people are spreading actively dangerous and outright wrong information. And for what? I know there are people out there seeking to profit by selling fake cures, but there are people out there legitimately saying you should just go to the store and buy olive oil (and it's always olive oil) and eat a few oranges and your diseases will go away--they don't get any direct benefit from the deception. WHY are there so many people out there saying this bizarre shit?
Sometimes when I'm planning to buy something. I'm sure I haven't searched about them, and just talked with my friend verbally. Few hours later, ads shows in my feeds. I ask my friend about this, many of them confirm and still don't know what happened.
I've seen instances of this before, but never one that couldn't possibly be explained in any other way. For example, getting an ad for an HBO show that I talked about. Well, HBO is pushing said show among my demographic, could easily be a coincidence.
I started getting tons of ads for elder law immediately after I started watching Better Call Saul. I watched them on VLC on Arch Linux and _acquired_ the files over a year earlier. I hadn't Googled it, visited any related pages or posted about watching it. A little while after I uninstalled the Facebook app they stopped.
I was very much on the "there must be another explanation" train, especially since it should be possible to notice a ton of bandwidth if they were streaming conversation audio.
But I've really never been able to figure that one out. If you've got an explanation for me I'd be really interested.
What if your friend happened to search for that item afterwards? And FB made the connection because you were friends and it detected that your locations were in close proximity.
Readit News
Life is significantly better without it. Really.
In all those cases, you can block ads. On Facebook, you can't. The arms race between Facebook and adblockers seems to be in Facebook's favor.
Cancer patients need compassion and listening instead.
I don't miss it.
I've made one for a few months to communicate with Gen-Xers and Europeans in some special planning group here and there. Then I download and delete. Always use a new email address or new phone number for the next profile, although lately Facebook will block your account within hours if you do that, it is extremely creepy. They must be so smug that their antispam provisions coincide with their social graph vampirism.
The issue is getting all your contacts to use it. Works for about half of mine and it's ready to go for the rest when facebook do something foul that pisses them off. This is a good backstop that counterbalances all the reasons facebook want to do something evil to those users. (Eg break the encryption, put ads in the messages, provide the NSA with a backdoor etc etc.) "Mark, if we do that, we lose most whatsapp users to signal by the end of the week."
Signal is great. It costs nothing to have next to whatsapp on your phone. The desktop client is significantly better. Most of what is good about whatsapp they literally bought from signal.
In my experience, cookies and browsing history influences facebook ads more than the text in posts. For example any links sent via messenger or whatsapp or products on amazon.
Could it be the case that the authors browsing history is actually what is driving these ads? For example, if the author is an expert on pseudo science it seems natural that they would research fake cures at some point.
Recently I decide to start doing video essays. I searched for a ton of medieval history stuff and watched a ton of related clips. I notice that YouTube began to show ads of at least 2 "I get rich from millions in debt" self-help workshops/courses to me, which I've never shown any interest in.
I have watched audio equipment review videos as well, and that's the only possible connection I can establish between the ads and my online behaviour. Are a lot of unemployed people seeking to enter audio/video making? Or are the snake oil ads showing on many people's screens because of the dire economic situation many of us are in?
So, my question for you is have you been making comments or sending messages online about debt, money, wealth, etc? Then again, maybe Skynet just knows you're unemployed and that's what makes you a target for get-rich-quick.
How's your situation, are you still learning and pursuing your own journey? I can totally relate to the feeling of being out of work but I believe strongly that our work is a calling and we must listen to our intuition on the journey to mastery of our art.
One night I couldn't sleep and thought about how an average guy like him could do a 180 like that. I googled just to see what arguments the 'movement' tried to lean on. The following weeks I was bombarded with suggestions of more flat earth content, even after downvoting it YouTube kept recommending it for weeks if not months.
Who knows how many minds have been eroded already.
I've noticed this kind of thing happening for search terms related to thyroid hormone testing. For example, if you search for "thyroxine"[1] the top search results are from reputable sources such as the Endorcine Society or WebMD. However, if you search for "reverse T3"[2] -- an esoteric test favored by the alternative medicine crowd -- then most of the top results are from naturopaths, herbal supplement peddlers, etc.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=thyroxine [2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=reverse+T3
From there animal telepathy isn't too far of a stretch for someone to make.
I haven't seen scientific proof and I don't think anyone has. But I would still expect others would make sites and claims.
But you feel there is a harm in there. Because it is reenforcing what a mental ill person believes.
I'm not sure what the best compromise is. The core problem is the fact that there are communities who want to talk about animal telepathy doesn't work with your worldview. Asking sv to exclude them makes the web a smaller more corporate place. I'm not sure that's the best approach.
In your situation you need a censored google. A google to match your worldview. In fairness google has been trying to show you you-centric search results if you are logged in. In your case this is a one-time transaction so history wouldn't place a factor.
But I come back to why is this a sv problem? The root of the problem is your family member isn't taking his medicine or it is not working or he is right and you won't listen.
If I had a family member like that I would just go along with it. Things don't need to be 100% correct in life. People need to believe in something. No harm here.
[1]I'm not implying it's real, just that people experience it exactly as they do real things, like hearing voices.
When snake-oil damages someone when it was advertised by facebook, facebook, who took the money to diseminate the harm are liable for that.
The other thing worth noting is that the hugely successful internet advertising campaigns, eg Tesla, who have a brand now comparable to Mercedes, paid facebook, google et al. precisely $0 to achieve that. Unless you are selling snake-oil, it would seem internet advertising is something to avoid.
I think if everyone had to take direct responsibility for the advertising they publish, quality newspapers would be more profitable and facebook & google very, very much less dominant. Would it make the world a nicer, kinder place? Dunno. I say it's worth running the experiment.
But even if they were unviable, someone else would work out how to set up a competing viable business with those constraints. Do you really doubt that? And perhaps if facebook can't be viable without advertising evil, destructive propaganda killing people who are mentally weakened by serious disease, they, you know, shouldn't be operating? Just a thought.
Oh and "hur dur" yourself, man. Not productive to a rational and sensible discussion, yeah?
Fine the publisher every time they publish something fraudulent. It's not the public's problem or responsibility to solve this for Facebook.
How?
Relevant here is that it is a fact that they did it paying facebook (& google etc.) absoutely nothing and have clearly been wildly, amazingly successful.
A lot of the times it is actually picking the right word but somethings you don't want to be constantly reminded of.
Well as this "therapy" was really dangerous, there were a lot of articles on the danger and that and my insistence managed to keep her from that. She has now recovered with chirugucal operation and hormone therapy.
I then followed up on that, discovered something called zététique[0], basically applying scientific method to all claims. It worked quite well for me.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%A9t%C3%A9tique
When you're in a situation like cancer you're extremely vulnerable. You think to yourself what's the point of me keeping this money if I'm just going to die so vulture companies decide to use this vulnerable state to destroy you.
As a society we should stop turning a blind eye towards this. Yes they're an adult and should know better, but maybe that view isn't always correct? Maybe sometimes adults can't consent to stuff properly because of the situation they're in.
Why should they know better? Why are adults expected to be experts in all things? Certainly if it was bad the government would stop it or they wouldn't make enough money to advertise to lowly old me is likely what most of them think.
If I'm feeling a little sick and decide to look up the symptoms, half the results are "alternative cures" that involve drinking olive oil, applying tea tree oil, drinking green tea (I think these people think tea tree and tea tea are the same) and BOOM cured. Just this week I was looking up a couple animal videos, and Youtube's sidebar recommendations were absolutely full of "natural cures" for various pet ailments. Of course, every single one mentioned olive oil in the title.
I can't even look up basic recipes or info about specific ingredients or even simple gardening info without half the results being things like spinach being some miracle food that helps treat/cure syphilis and cancer.
I'm sick of it. I'm not exactly in favor of deplatforming, but these people are spreading actively dangerous and outright wrong information. And for what? I know there are people out there seeking to profit by selling fake cures, but there are people out there legitimately saying you should just go to the store and buy olive oil (and it's always olive oil) and eat a few oranges and your diseases will go away--they don't get any direct benefit from the deception. WHY are there so many people out there saying this bizarre shit?
I was very much on the "there must be another explanation" train, especially since it should be possible to notice a ton of bandwidth if they were streaming conversation audio.
But I've really never been able to figure that one out. If you've got an explanation for me I'd be really interested.