AxeOfWyndham

facebook is inherently structured in a way that is conducive to totalitarian pressure. I know the AMA is long over at this point, but I figured I'd mention how it puts everyone's eyes on everyone else and it encourages a lot of sycophantic behaviors. When I left, they still only had a like button.

Totalitarianism doesn't happen when there is some noisy lout at the helm, it happens when the community is turned against itself to enforce the rules for a cheap social incentive like a small step up the social ladder.

Exactly.

I can't stand the "all news needs to be good news" perspective. Most "good news" is really just news that something is as it should be.

You pick up on this if you learn classical music. The good teachers will focus on the flaws you make so that you can refine your performance. Improvement should not be cause for celebration, it should be an expectation. Do not do the same thing twice, do it better. If you get a little bit reductive, it circles back to the age old question of happy ignorance or hard truths.

The way the likes feed into the advertising algorithm is largely why I stopped using facebook. I majored in computer science, and it's absurd how some people would speak positively about facebook's data accumulation policy. There is this hilarious line of apologia being passed around in advertising where they claim that it's not about manipulating users into buying products by exploiting data-extrapolated vulnerabilities, but rather they are using the data to "make sure information about a product gets to the people who need it"- as if people NEED anything that has ever been advertised on facebook.

Anyways, it's hard for me to take seriously any platform that exclusively measures the impression of content in terms of likes. The like only gets value from how it scales against total views. For instance, on Youtube some of the most disliked videos still get 6 figures of likes against millions of dislikes. You don't even need a downvote button-If they insist on perpetuating the Hobson choice they should at least measure the number of times it has been seen so people realize your 20-like garbage has been seen by 500 people who thought nothing of it. You get to preserve the feelings of the thin-skinned by enabling plausible deniability that conflates dislikes and "mehs", and the like button carries some weight with it.

I still prefer Reddit, though. I think it's important to separate negativity from indifference. If this is a place where people come to share and build communities, it is important to point out what doesn't work so that we can improve and grow. It isn't perfect by any means, but it works as a platform that promotes good ideas most of the time.

If you look at a lot of people who incessantly use facebook for years on end, it's like they're frozen in time and never grow as people. I was in high school when facebook started exploding, and now there are adults who just kind of never stopped being who they were in 10th grade despite getting into their mid 20s... at least last I checked. I decided not to completely deactivate my profile so that I can investigate every 6 months and see if anything has improved. It's the same people saying the same shit on a different day.