04.21.12
The vast Facebook sea of brainlessness
You’d guess I’m not a good match with Facebook. I have an account and while I post pointers to blog posts on it daily, it’s not good for much. Facebook does not tell you how many people visit your profile daily. There’s a simple reason for it. If people actually knew how many times their hundreds of friends browser their posts — statistically speaking, not at all — users would desert en masse.
Facebook is a place for lickspittles — people who actually go to the pages of American businesses and hit the “like” button. It’s hard to imagine how lame that is but hundreds of thousands of my countrymen do it.
Another manifestation of the lickspittle is the Facebook meme. That is, the posting of the same deadening pictures and drawings, many with supposed-to-be funny (and sometimes actually amusing) captions over and over and over.
They count as spam.
And anyone who has been on Facebook long enough will regret having picked up “friends” who upload lots of these things, confronting you with a long stream of repetitive dogshit every time you log on and see your customized Facebook feed. Slowly you come to the realization you have to go back through your list of “friends” and surreptitiously “unfriend” a big bunch to divest yourself of it.
It’s a special brand of brainlessness, always replenished by an army of gullibles relentlessly posting pictures of the dog in Jugoslavia who had his jaw blown off by mean kids, or the poor cat in Manitoba, served anti-freeze by a cruel and heartless owner. To your wall.
A news story describes this special kind of dumbness and the idiots who propagate it:
James Denham does not have a strong social media following. He’s basically anonymous; type his name into Google, and you’re not going to find anything about him. But in January, Denham ran across an image of what appeared to be two teenagers cruelly hanging a puppy by a string and posted it to his Facebook wall. Text on the image implores users to “share this picture??? and contact authorities if they recognize the perpetrators.
The photo has since been shared over 70,000 times from this profile, making it among the most widely viewed content on the site. Yet what Denham didn’t realize at first is this image has been circulating on the Internet for years, and the culprits were identified long ago. The photo is completely useless at this point. It appears somebody eventually notified Denham of the image’s past, as he has left multiple comments on his post trying to alert other users to its history. But it’s been in vain. The photo continues to be spread around by oblivious people every day, despite the comments and despite being of absolutely no use to the world …
Facebook may now be America’s greatest entertainment, but the junk content that is increasingly working its way into our news feeds makes eHow articles look like the Great American Novel.
Facebook would be more enjoyable for some people if it went back to the basics and focused on its original role as a virtual hub for maintaining real-life friendships. As some have suggested, it could encourage users to take time to mass-unfriend people and prune their network into a group of true friends …
Mark Zuckerberg’s great innovation was to monetize and rebrand college dormitory and high school sucking up as “social networking,” quickly adopted by Americans from their thirties to sixties.
Chuck said,
April 23, 2012 at 5:01 pm
What do you make of this story?
http://www.manufacturing.net/news/2012/04/microsoft-sells-aol-patents-to-facebook
Microsoft buys a billion dollars worth of patents from AOL and sells them for $550M to Facebook?
In any case, nothing like basic R&D is there?
George Smith said,
April 23, 2012 at 7:41 pm
Looks like precautionary measures to guarantee dead dogs at AOL never get used to bite your butt in a courtroom shakedown.
mark said,
April 23, 2012 at 7:43 pm
Boycott Facebook
http://www.oilempire.us/facebook.html
Anonymous said,
April 23, 2012 at 9:47 pm
reddit.com, for the most part, is depressingly rotten
George Smith said,
April 23, 2012 at 11:21 pm
Ah, Peter Thiel. Last time we read about him he was going to live forever, conquer all disease and build the machinery of freedom. Ha, I like the last one best.
http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/2011/12/05/libertarian-gung-fu-computing-logician-master/
Build the machinery of freedom. Well, with Facebook assuredly he is already there.
anon said,
April 25, 2012 at 8:57 am
It’s worse that all this. Facebook is private: so if you operate a web page, and somebody on facebook posts a link to some of your content, facebook benefits from your work, but deprives you of any information about who is using your content or how. this is contrary to the way the open web works. it’s basically a black hole.
George Smith said,
April 25, 2012 at 10:09 am
Yeah, totally agree. I didn’t get into it but the Facebook model looks like the aim is to set up a ‘web’ separate from the anyone-can-search-it web, collecting all the content its users post, transferring all benefit from it to themselves and corporate partners. They have a promotional service in which you can pay to guarantee your Facebook posts get seen in the communal feed of you ‘friend’ collection but only chumps, assholes and businesses would use it, guaranteeing any content promoted that way would be rubbish.
Ms. D. said,
April 27, 2012 at 11:21 pm
I have no use for Facebook. I wonder where these people get the time? A co-worker used to brag about her (nearly) 1,000 “friends” she collected by accepting all requests. My idea of social networking is actually going out meeting people, face-to-face. I don’t have the time for “liking” all the consumer garbage and the “look at me” celebrity wannabes who just want to brag on themselves and their snotnosed kids, pad their resumes and declare just how “awesome” they think they are. Facebook and its ilk have changed the way we relate and communicate. I wish it would all just go away.
George Smith said,
April 28, 2012 at 8:33 am
What happens when you accumulate 1,000 ‘friends’ is an attempt to get an audience. Since so many are into that procedure it reduces those in it to engaging in the idiotic posting of trite captioned photos, as fast as they can. Facebook’s algorithms reward this behavior by weighting the posts by the number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ they get and by hiding all those in the feeds which don’t score as well. It’s a kind of an overturning of the concept of web search and page rank gained through hard work and reputation. Since Facebook is worthless as something searchable, except to the businesses it sells user metrics to, the more people you add as friends, the more your personal feed devolves into a stream of picture spam. If you don’t know that Facebook is hiding a lot of the posts by your ‘friends,’ you wind up not seeing what the people you are actually interested in — like people you know in the real world or by business relation — are actually posting. They are buried by the repetitive picture spammers competing with each other for ‘likes.’ If you start radically getting rid of a lot of your ‘friends,’ whittling it down to people you may actually know and some hangers-on, you see they’ve been posting all along, perhaps stuff you were interested in seeing but would miss because you do not go to them directly. Facebook is not interested in a direct traffic audience or things referred by traditional web search. It’s interested in user churn producing data for clients and the churn is maximized.by having a system in which people mechanistically post as fast as possible. Picture memes were the result because it’s easier to steal and post a captioned pic of a political figure or celebrity, or a ‘cute’ animal, than it is to write anything someone might want to read. Facebook even stifles that as you’ve noticed. If a conversation gets going around a post, it quickly hides most of the posters as the thread gets longer by chopping out the beginning and the middle, leaving only the last two or three, usually of the shortest in length.