It's also a huge danger as the system FB uses to tag and categorize photos is clearly flawed. example: Meta took a business page I ran that had over 150K followers offline because of a photo that violated their 'strict anti-pornography' etc etc policies. The picture was of a planet - Saturn - and it took weeks of the most god-awful to and fro with (mostly) bots to get them to revoke the ban - their argument was that the planet was 'flesh-toned' and that their A.I. could not tell that was not actually skin. The image was from NASA via a stock library and labelled as such.
Google had banned (years ago) my secondary Google a/c that at best I used once in a few months - never even browed from a browser with that a/c logged in, never ever used it for anything other than Gmail - I doubt YT etc was even activated on that. The reason given was a kind of porn that I can't bring myself to type the name of. I didn't even think of appealing - I was so fucking scared and ashamed without ever indulging in that.
But that was when I bought my domain and mail hosting service and few months later I had moved my email to my domain almost everywhere.
Years later Google also killed my primary Gmail (i.e what was primary email earlier) Google Play a/c (for lack of use; true I had never published an app) and didn't refund the $25 USD even though I had finished all the tasks needed to keep the a/c alive 3 days before deadline and I had also requested them to tell me "how to add the bank a/c" to get the refund (asked at least 5 times over a span of 40 days) - because they kept telling me "add the bank a/c for refund" and never telling me "how" or sharing an article or page that told me how. I could never find out how.
They kept the $25 - not even appeals were allowed/entertained. I got "final.. no further response" and that was it, literally no further response on it.
I stop to think sometimes why.. just why we gave these trillion dollar companies this much power - the likes of Apple, Google, AMZN, Meta, MSFT.. why?? Now we literally can't fight them - not legally, not with anything else. It seems we just can't.
> They kept the $25 - not even appeals were allowed/entertained. I got "final.. no further response" and that was it, literally no further response on it.
It's the kind of thing I'd send to the small claims court out of spite.
One reads completely ridiculous cases like the one you describe, and shakes their head at those who preach the notion of creating ever more thickets of AI "powered" bots as a prima facie interface for our social services, customer support and other institutional interaction needs.
Idiocies like this are why AI should absolutely never (at least at any present level of technology) be an inescapable means of filtering how a human is responded to with any complaint. Truly, fuck the mentality of those who want to cram this tendency down the public's throat. Though it sadly won't happen thanks to sheer corporate growth inertia, companies that do push such things should be punished into oblivion by the market.
I worked on a project where one of the services was a model that decided whether to pay a medical bill.
Before you start justified screams of horror, let me explain the simple honesty trick that ensured proper ethics, though I guess at cost of profit unacceptable to some corporations:
The model could only decide between auto approving a repayment, or refer the bill to existing human staff. The entire idea was that the obvious cases will be auto approved, and anything more complex would follow the existing practice.
I miss the old days when Facebook was simply a fun way to reconnect with friend and family who lived far away. Unfortunately, those days are gone. It feels like an over engineered attention-hogging system that collects a large amount of data and risks people's mental health along the way.
Perhaps naive to say, but I think there was the briefest moment where your status updates started with "is", feeds were chronological, and photos and links weren't pushed over text, that it was not an adversarial actor to one's wellbeing.
Nah, not from the very beginning. Before the News Feed, The Facebook was great to find people and keep in contact. Following someone’s page too often was called
Facebook stalking and was socially discouraged.
Unfortunately parasocial behavior is good for engagement.
Yeah... aside from all the very obvious problems with this (network effects, most friends aren't weird techy no-images types, etc.)... the moment has passed. Nobody is going to trust another tech company with their real name & permanent social life again. They've seen what happens.
In addition to exporting one's contacts from Facebook in order to import them into an alternative, there should be a way to use whatever is provided through Facebook's "Download your data" to populate new accounts in the new alternative.
Perhaps it already exists but I have thought about writing something that takes what is provided by "Download your data" and produces a local SQLite database, a local webpage, local website or some combination thereof that is served from the user's computer instead of Meta servers.
However I do not use Facebook enough to justify the effort, and when I do I never look at the "feed".
Are you really planning to not allow photos? I understand your reasoning for why this works in places a group chat wouldn’t, and I have group chats that I wish could do what your site does (share things to all my friends but we don’t all have to have all the same friends). But something I really appreciate about some of those group chats, especially smaller ones like a group of three, are the photos that friends post. Usually it’s not low effort, it’s real photos of their real lives.
I like what you are doing a lot but the ability to post my photos to show to friends seems like a must for me.
What is the difference between this and a group chat? Most people have < 20 people that they know well enough to give a secret code to unless you're a creator or personality, in which care we are back to snapchat.
If the posts are more long form, what is the difference between this and a blog where the "secret code" is the URL?
Or even a finsta account currated the way you want.
I don't say these as a "it's not gonna work" as in consumer its about the experience, I genuinely wonder why the experience will be better
Your landing page talks about all the right goals. postx is a good placeholder name, I recommend ideating a better name for launch.
looking forward, wish you the best.
Risks people’s mental health? I would say it is pretty obvious that FB and IG are bad for people. Some may have a natural mental fortitude and can survive it without instruction but for the rest of us we need some instructions on how to use these platforms without compromising key aspects of our mental health.
I’d like to see a proper study on this that can be replicated before I jump on this train. And I’m a supporter of Jonathan “the kids are not alright” Haidt but let’s not kid ourselves his work is questionable throughout.
It’s easy to dogpile. I’d like to see more proof, that’s all. “It’s obvious” doesn’t cut it for me. For one, we have major societal problems that are being exposed through these platforms, and the mere knowledge of the problem has a negative impact on the individual. Do we shut the platform down because it’s showing us things we don’t want to see, or do we fix the societal problem? And many others.
I have similar feelings. In the early days, Facebook was more like a cozy corner of the Internet, where you could see the latest news from your high school classmates and the dinner photos posted by distant relatives. It was very relaxing. Now when I open the app, I feel like I am being manipulated by the algorithm, constantly pushing you to click and watch things, and I can't stop. It has become smarter, but also more indifferent.
myspace back in the day was a creative open canvas. You could put whatever random stuff on an HTML page and that was "you". Super unstructured, wild. Whatever.
Facebook came out and was a whole different thing. Facebook is a "database with a web (and later mobile app) frontend". It's all about data mining. Always has, always will be.
From early days of FB I remember it nagged to read all my addressbook/contacts. It was always data hungry. It wouldn't grow so quickly and big without gray ethics.
Who even uses Facebook anymore? I don't know anyone who posts to their own profile anymore, and I'm part of the generation where literally everybody was posting every detail of their lives to FB as students.
For "seeing what old friends are up to", that's entirely shifted to IG. (Yes, pedants, I know that this is an FB product.)
The only time I ever open FB nowadays is for the marketplace, and when I do, all I see in the feed is garbage brainrot from big slop accounts.
Yeah the one difference with some other enshittified things is that I really have the impression that Facebook was always meant to go this way.
It was also one of the first to drop genuine user-sercing features like the old timeline (just all the posts of people you followed which you came there to see) which it replaced with the algorithmic feed which recommended stuff you never asked for or wanted.
Instagram did keep that feature though until 2 years and still has it although it's constantly switching it off.
What I don't understand is how come they could make such a crappy product, almost everything is totally unusable both on the web and the app, it's pathetic to be a Meta engineer at that point
This is why I requested family not to post pictures of my children on Facebook.
They will get to decide what to do with their likenesses when they're older. It seemed cruel to let Facebook train a model on them from the time they were babies until they first start using social media in earnest.
I like this poetic way of putting it, though I don't agree with the message.
In Holland we have a saying, what do you bring it your house is burning down? And most people said my photos. This was before the digital age and cloud obviously. We take photos because we care. Stuffing them into everyone else's face has also been a thing at birthday parties but outside that not so much.
In some countries (notably Poland) Facebook is so burned into people's brains that you can't avoid this, and if you try, people and institutions will consider you a tinfoil hat weirdo and put pressure on you.
Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.
Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.
Here (NL) we get a form at the beginning of each school year to mark which uses of photos we find acceptable. E.g. we allow photos in the school portal (which is private and not owned by big tech), but not on Facebook, etc. It's the way it should be done, because there is not much burden on the parents. If the school also wants to put photos on social media, the burden should be on them to make sure that kids for which they don' have an ack are not put there.
A bit harder was initially convincing my parents not to put pictures of their granddaughter on Facebook. They are understandably proud and want to show their friends. But they respect it.
I think in all her life there has only been two violations of our policy. In both cases we contacted the person who published the photo/video and they took it offline.
You just need enough 'weirdos' to make it normal. I know that there are other parents that agree, but not everyone has the gut to stand up to the social media tyranny, but will join if some people set an example.
Same in Denmark. Some companies don't have websites, only a Facebook page, Facebook Marketplace has all but killed the local marketplace sites and pretty much anything related to organized sports and after school activities are coordinated on closed Facebook groups. The last one is the worst one. That's basically telling people that they will hold your child's social life hostage until you join Facebook.
LinkedIn was used in a similar manor, to coordinate meetups for our local Cloud Native meetups, but the LinkedIn algorithms are much much worse than Facebooks, so people would get "You might be interested in this meetup" two weeks after the event.
Facebook basically took over communication, no more mailing lists, no more updates on the website, if there even is a website. You just have to accept Facebook if you want to be notified about changes in scheduling, upcoming events or general information about your kids soccer practise.
For real. I've been searching for a swimming school for our daughter in Poland. The one that looked promising had a contract with clause, giving the school full rights to post any pictures of her in the swimming pool to social media. Of course, parents are strictly prohibited from making ANY photos at all. Fuck them.
There are children who don't even know if they want to be spies or undercover cops when they grow up that have already been identified by facial recognition. There will be an entire generation or more of spies and undercover agents that will have been identified before they had a chance to even contemplate their lives in that field.
Only logical thing to do personally is to take it completely off your mobile devices. You still get caught in the dragnet if you have friends and family posting you.
Also in many places WhatsApp is practically a requirement for daily life which is frustrating. What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.
Unfortunately, many of the old forums for various non-IT-related hobbies have disappeared and moved over to facebook groups and there is no alternative as such. Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers, there are some fantastic communities, but if you are into cars or mountain biking or watches or fellwalking/hiking etc......you really don't have any alternative to facebook. I'm trying to never just passively browse the main feed because it very quickly turns into pure trash, but there are communities there that are worth participating there and which don't really have any other online space.
I keep my Facebook account mainly because I use messenger for a lot of interactions with friends. I never really go on Facebook itself. I don't get the self congratulatory fest that goes on when deleting your account. I get the same feeling and outcome by just not using it.
I don’t think it’s self congratulatory to get an “I was right” in about an article where meta is covertly asking to train their AI models on your entire private camera roll
I haven’t used Facebook in years and I don’t think I will ever pick it up again. But I also don’t think “just quit facebook, bro” is an effective pitch to the average person.
Facebook (and other Meta properties) has sadly become the only popular channel for many sorts of offline activities. The average local sports group, DIY group, parents group, outdoors group etc around me are all on Facebook. The average musician and local business is on Instagram. Not to mention the millions in Europe and Latin America who only use WhatsApp for online communication.
Which is to say for many people the choice is not between Facebook and no Facebook. Their choice is between Facebook and inability to participate in their communities. Yes this sucks, but this is the reality. You cannot ask individuals to make expensive individual decisions to solve a society-wide problem. Instead you should look for regulations, and start building reasonable alternative to facebook and make it palatable to the average person.
You mentioned tobacco and gambling and I think they are actually apt examples of why the change must happen at the society level. Tobacco usage plummeted after decades of anti-tobacco education, smoking bans, advertising bans etc. And we also don’t just ask people to stop smoking, we prescribe nicotine patches to make it easier to quit. Similar for gambling. We don’t just ask people to not gamble, we regulate the industry (or outright ban it) and even in places where gambling is legal and prevalent there are still regulations like making it possible to ban yourself from gambling if it is becoming a problem.
Millions of thematic groups have existed for many hundreds of years and they did not need Facebook to organize. People are experiencing inertia and are too lazy or naive to help themselves. And, yes, some are truly addicted.
This inertia and naivete is harmful and dangerous to everyone involved. It's like if they met in a sketchy part of town or were using tools unsafely to the point where they could injure someone. Going along with that, and especially without saying anything, or trying to change the situation makes you complicit.
Facebook is the worst. I haven’t had the app itself in a decade, but use the mobile version in a mobile browser to catch up on friends’ posts. I hope they go through with Zuckerberg’s idea of removing all connections, at which point the lift to reconnect is too great and I will actually delete my account (and I was one of the first FB users when they expanded to my school just after Harvard).
I completely agree, and haven't had the meta/twitter/reddit apps in years. But facebook does keep me around (or at least keep me from deleting my account) through marketplace. I've now found my last two apartment rentals there, both of which were nicer and cheaper than alternatives on dedicated rental sites.
I find keeping an account open solely for desktop marketplace is a fine compromise
Too many people I know still use it. I created mine (and keep it) to prevent someone from impersonating me to my friends and acquaintences, and use it as a directory where friends and acquaintences can find my contact info and vice versa. I avoid feeding them any new data (other than acknowledging or blocking friend requests I receive) but deleting seems worse for me than being present but inactive right now.
I haven't had Facebook app in 12 years or so and the only thing that hampers me are
- Coordinating with Gen Xers’s burning man camps. They are just stuck in their ways. Like they say, nobody can prevent you from becoming like your parents
- A couple times I want to use Facebook marketplace, a new profile looks like a scammer. Which is the platform’s problem
I've never, ever seen an algorithm as evil and anti-social as the one Facebook's programmers created. At one point, it was showing my family and friends a comment my cousin had made about a politician, and they started getting into heated arguments with him. And this kept happening again and again. It honestly felt like the algorithm was trying to polarise entire families and friend groups, driving engagement by surfacing exactly the things people disagreed with or didn't want to hear. During the pandemic the algorithm drove everyone insane.
At one point, I compared Facebook to a virus. It hijacked conversations, infected relationships, misled people, and distorted their perceptions of others.
I got locked out of Facebook right about that time. Looking back at the last eight years, I can say without qualification that it did wonders for my personality, my mental health, and the way I interact with other people.
A couple of times I've looked back at my messages and photos from the annual data downloads I did back then. I can't believe how angry I was, and that I would think it was O.K. to talk that way to perfect strangers.
Then I dig a little deeper, and see that the early messages were fine. I was a nice to strangers. But as my Facebook use continued, the tone and unpleasantness of the messages becomes palpable. It's like watching a malignant Facebook disease spreading in my own brain. Kind of horrifying now that I put it into words.
Glad I'm Facebook-free today, and enjoying life almost as much as someone in an Apple commercial.
All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost.
This is false; and considering the hundreds of thousands of companies that people encounter every day that do not operate with your singular mindset, I can only assume the comment was not made in good faith.
They are still pushing the "AI dominance over China" argument to clueless politicians.
The anti regulation clause sneaked into the "Big Beautiful Bill" ($5 trillion new debt) facilitates consumer exploitation and has no impact at all on military applications.
If China dominates consumer exploitation, let them and shut off their Internet companies.
Strangely enough, why not invest $500 billion in a working fusion reactor if these people are so worried about U.S. dominance?
This seems like a liability nightmare. If they're just scanning all the image files on people's devices and using them for training, they're inevitably going to scoop up nudes without permission, not to mention the occasional CSAM or gore photo, right? Why would you want to risk having stuff like that sneak into your training set when you already have access to all people's public photos?
The purpose of a system is what it does. To that end it could actually be a plot by the CIA to find targets with this type of material on their devices, which can then be used against them to turn them into assets.
This is truly egregious. Facebook and Instagram are installed by default on many android phones and cannot be fully uninstalled. And even if asked for consent, many people may choose the harmful option by mistake or due to lack of awareness. It's alarming that these companies cannot be held to even the bare minimum standards of ethics.
As an aside, there was a discussion a few days back where someone argued that being locked in to popular and abusive social/messaging platforms like these is an acceptable compromise, if it means retaining online contacts with everyone you know. Well, this is precisely the sort of apathy that gives these platforms the power to abuse their marketshare so blatantly. However, it doesn't affect only the people who choose to be irresponsible about privacy. It also drags the ignorant and the unwilling participants under the influence of these spyware.
This is why I just spent weeks tracking down a modern device that I could vendor unlock and install LineageOS on. It's no longer possible on recent OnePlus devices and many people selling other brands on Swappa and Amazon claim their devices are vendor unlockable when they're actually just carrier unlockable. I don't want any vendor's crapware running on my device. I hate that I "have to" use Google Play to function in the modern world but Lineage and MindTheGapps is at least a less bad way to go.
I should sit down and try something like postmarketOS or Mobian as a portable Linux machine is what I really want ...
That's what I plan to do too. My current device is locked down pretty aggressively. But the problem here is, what percentage of the population has the skill and patience to do it? These companies need to hold only a simple majority of the population hostage. The holdouts like you or me can be eventually peer pressured into accepting the same abuse.
For example, let's say that you avoid a certain abusive messaging platform. But what if your bank or some other essential institution insist on using it to provide their service? We can complain all they want. But they will probably just neglect you until you concede in despair.
To fight this, you need affordable and ethical alternatives for the device, platform and applications. You also would need either regulation or widespread public awareness. Honestly, the current situation is hopeless on that front.
You can use ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to disable pre-installed Facebook/Instagram apps without root via `pm disable-user` commands, effectively preventing them from running or collecting data.
That's what I did. But as others point out, how many know about this? And modifications are getting harder by the year. They are relying on these factors to ensure that the majority of the population remains exploitable.
LOL at the idea that he uses Facebook. None of the silicon valley bigwigs or their kids have anything to do with social media tech except in perhaps very controlled, orchestrated ways. The normal users are just "dumb fucks."
Readit News
But that was when I bought my domain and mail hosting service and few months later I had moved my email to my domain almost everywhere.
Years later Google also killed my primary Gmail (i.e what was primary email earlier) Google Play a/c (for lack of use; true I had never published an app) and didn't refund the $25 USD even though I had finished all the tasks needed to keep the a/c alive 3 days before deadline and I had also requested them to tell me "how to add the bank a/c" to get the refund (asked at least 5 times over a span of 40 days) - because they kept telling me "add the bank a/c for refund" and never telling me "how" or sharing an article or page that told me how. I could never find out how.
They kept the $25 - not even appeals were allowed/entertained. I got "final.. no further response" and that was it, literally no further response on it.
I stop to think sometimes why.. just why we gave these trillion dollar companies this much power - the likes of Apple, Google, AMZN, Meta, MSFT.. why?? Now we literally can't fight them - not legally, not with anything else. It seems we just can't.
It's the kind of thing I'd send to the small claims court out of spite.
Deleted Comment
Idiocies like this are why AI should absolutely never (at least at any present level of technology) be an inescapable means of filtering how a human is responded to with any complaint. Truly, fuck the mentality of those who want to cram this tendency down the public's throat. Though it sadly won't happen thanks to sheer corporate growth inertia, companies that do push such things should be punished into oblivion by the market.
Before you start justified screams of horror, let me explain the simple honesty trick that ensured proper ethics, though I guess at cost of profit unacceptable to some corporations:
The model could only decide between auto approving a repayment, or refer the bill to existing human staff. The entire idea was that the obvious cases will be auto approved, and anything more complex would follow the existing practice.
https://archive.ph/rB2Rg
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Unfortunately parasocial behavior is good for engagement.
The AI is given a proxy goal- 'maximize engagement'- which it achieves perfectly.
The user's goal - 'foster genuine connection' - is completely secondary.
The AI isn't malicious, it's just ruthlessly effective at optimizing for the wrong thing.
Deleted Comment
You need to already know someone to find them here.
Check out the waitlist!
https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev/
Edit:
Here are some rough layout designs https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uLwnXDdUsC9hMZBa1ysR...
It's intentionally simple
Perhaps it already exists but I have thought about writing something that takes what is provided by "Download your data" and produces a local SQLite database, a local webpage, local website or some combination thereof that is served from the user's computer instead of Meta servers.
However I do not use Facebook enough to justify the effort, and when I do I never look at the "feed".
If the posts are more long form, what is the difference between this and a blog where the "secret code" is the URL?
Or even a finsta account currated the way you want.
I don't say these as a "it's not gonna work" as in consumer its about the experience, I genuinely wonder why the experience will be better
What can you possibly offer in this space that can not be done with a messaging group on WhatsApp/Signal/Matrix/XMPP ?
It’s easy to dogpile. I’d like to see more proof, that’s all. “It’s obvious” doesn’t cut it for me. For one, we have major societal problems that are being exposed through these platforms, and the mere knowledge of the problem has a negative impact on the individual. Do we shut the platform down because it’s showing us things we don’t want to see, or do we fix the societal problem? And many others.
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask.
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks
Facebook came out and was a whole different thing. Facebook is a "database with a web (and later mobile app) frontend". It's all about data mining. Always has, always will be.
Social media is dead to me.
That's the trick with these social systems. They don't care about the features each person dislikes or doesn't use.
You know, HN is social media.
I wonder how many people can give up effortless doomscrolling to see a limited length chronological feed made up of their friends' posts
For "seeing what old friends are up to", that's entirely shifted to IG. (Yes, pedants, I know that this is an FB product.)
The only time I ever open FB nowadays is for the marketplace, and when I do, all I see in the feed is garbage brainrot from big slop accounts.
Sure, younger people use other apps / platforms, but society as a whole here is way, way too invested in FB.
It was also one of the first to drop genuine user-sercing features like the old timeline (just all the posts of people you followed which you came there to see) which it replaced with the algorithmic feed which recommended stuff you never asked for or wanted.
Instagram did keep that feature though until 2 years and still has it although it's constantly switching it off.
They will get to decide what to do with their likenesses when they're older. It seemed cruel to let Facebook train a model on them from the time they were babies until they first start using social media in earnest.
It took the rest of us much longer to realize they were right.
In Holland we have a saying, what do you bring it your house is burning down? And most people said my photos. This was before the digital age and cloud obviously. We take photos because we care. Stuffing them into everyone else's face has also been a thing at birthday parties but outside that not so much.
wasn't the camera doing the stealing, but the holder of the photo (facebook in this case)! And it wasn't the soul being stolen, but money!
Now, realising they were 100% right.
Dead Comment
Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.
Here (NL) we get a form at the beginning of each school year to mark which uses of photos we find acceptable. E.g. we allow photos in the school portal (which is private and not owned by big tech), but not on Facebook, etc. It's the way it should be done, because there is not much burden on the parents. If the school also wants to put photos on social media, the burden should be on them to make sure that kids for which they don' have an ack are not put there.
A bit harder was initially convincing my parents not to put pictures of their granddaughter on Facebook. They are understandably proud and want to show their friends. But they respect it.
I think in all her life there has only been two violations of our policy. In both cases we contacted the person who published the photo/video and they took it offline.
You just need enough 'weirdos' to make it normal. I know that there are other parents that agree, but not everyone has the gut to stand up to the social media tyranny, but will join if some people set an example.
LinkedIn was used in a similar manor, to coordinate meetups for our local Cloud Native meetups, but the LinkedIn algorithms are much much worse than Facebooks, so people would get "You might be interested in this meetup" two weeks after the event.
Facebook basically took over communication, no more mailing lists, no more updates on the website, if there even is a website. You just have to accept Facebook if you want to be notified about changes in scheduling, upcoming events or general information about your kids soccer practise.
Also in many places WhatsApp is practically a requirement for daily life which is frustrating. What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.
Dead Comment
A company that's right up there with gambling and tobacco: designed to keep you hooked, no matter the cost.
Facebook (and other Meta properties) has sadly become the only popular channel for many sorts of offline activities. The average local sports group, DIY group, parents group, outdoors group etc around me are all on Facebook. The average musician and local business is on Instagram. Not to mention the millions in Europe and Latin America who only use WhatsApp for online communication.
Which is to say for many people the choice is not between Facebook and no Facebook. Their choice is between Facebook and inability to participate in their communities. Yes this sucks, but this is the reality. You cannot ask individuals to make expensive individual decisions to solve a society-wide problem. Instead you should look for regulations, and start building reasonable alternative to facebook and make it palatable to the average person.
You mentioned tobacco and gambling and I think they are actually apt examples of why the change must happen at the society level. Tobacco usage plummeted after decades of anti-tobacco education, smoking bans, advertising bans etc. And we also don’t just ask people to stop smoking, we prescribe nicotine patches to make it easier to quit. Similar for gambling. We don’t just ask people to not gamble, we regulate the industry (or outright ban it) and even in places where gambling is legal and prevalent there are still regulations like making it possible to ban yourself from gambling if it is becoming a problem.
This inertia and naivete is harmful and dangerous to everyone involved. It's like if they met in a sketchy part of town or were using tools unsafely to the point where they could injure someone. Going along with that, and especially without saying anything, or trying to change the situation makes you complicit.
I find keeping an account open solely for desktop marketplace is a fine compromise
- Coordinating with Gen Xers’s burning man camps. They are just stuck in their ways. Like they say, nobody can prevent you from becoming like your parents
- A couple times I want to use Facebook marketplace, a new profile looks like a scammer. Which is the platform’s problem
Deleted Comment
I've never, ever seen an algorithm as evil and anti-social as the one Facebook's programmers created. At one point, it was showing my family and friends a comment my cousin had made about a politician, and they started getting into heated arguments with him. And this kept happening again and again. It honestly felt like the algorithm was trying to polarise entire families and friend groups, driving engagement by surfacing exactly the things people disagreed with or didn't want to hear. During the pandemic the algorithm drove everyone insane.
At one point, I compared Facebook to a virus. It hijacked conversations, infected relationships, misled people, and distorted their perceptions of others.
A couple of times I've looked back at my messages and photos from the annual data downloads I did back then. I can't believe how angry I was, and that I would think it was O.K. to talk that way to perfect strangers.
Then I dig a little deeper, and see that the early messages were fine. I was a nice to strangers. But as my Facebook use continued, the tone and unpleasantness of the messages becomes palpable. It's like watching a malignant Facebook disease spreading in my own brain. Kind of horrifying now that I put it into words.
Glad I'm Facebook-free today, and enjoying life almost as much as someone in an Apple commercial.
This is false; and considering the hundreds of thousands of companies that people encounter every day that do not operate with your singular mindset, I can only assume the comment was not made in good faith.
The anti regulation clause sneaked into the "Big Beautiful Bill" ($5 trillion new debt) facilitates consumer exploitation and has no impact at all on military applications.
If China dominates consumer exploitation, let them and shut off their Internet companies.
Strangely enough, why not invest $500 billion in a working fusion reactor if these people are so worried about U.S. dominance?
As an aside, there was a discussion a few days back where someone argued that being locked in to popular and abusive social/messaging platforms like these is an acceptable compromise, if it means retaining online contacts with everyone you know. Well, this is precisely the sort of apathy that gives these platforms the power to abuse their marketshare so blatantly. However, it doesn't affect only the people who choose to be irresponsible about privacy. It also drags the ignorant and the unwilling participants under the influence of these spyware.
I should sit down and try something like postmarketOS or Mobian as a portable Linux machine is what I really want ...
For example, let's say that you avoid a certain abusive messaging platform. But what if your bank or some other essential institution insist on using it to provide their service? We can complain all they want. But they will probably just neglect you until you concede in despair.
To fight this, you need affordable and ethical alternatives for the device, platform and applications. You also would need either regulation or widespread public awareness. Honestly, the current situation is hopeless on that front.
Or you can buy Librem 5 with preinstalled Debian-like OS. Works for me.
If you buy a phone with this kind of business practice. It's still your own choice to do so. Many good brands let you remove any app.