"Asocial media" and collective self images

[Song of storms]

I hate all social media. Bring back forums for everyone!

 

[notimp]

Facebooks internal decision model during the trust crisis followed the "predatory wall street company" template (delay, deny, deflect...), 40 whistleblowers currently tell the NYT.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/...tion=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

What an astonishing surprise.

Its about time John Oliver also makes a show about Facebooks domestic policies. :/

Millennials still huge fans of the instagram though. They very smart. Also love to buy products advertised.

 

[notimp]

Zuckyboy reacts.

In an hourlong videoconference broadcast to Facebook offices around the world, Mr. Zuckerberg responded to questions [...]

Drums up a company meeting. Tells employees - 40 whistleblowers aside - media just unfair, and printing fake news.

src: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-mark-zuckerberg.html

Huh.

But allowing alt right to create the "fake news" trope on Facebook was a mistake, right? Facebook?

Lets see what Yuval Noah Harari, current California Tech szene technology philosopher darling says to this form of reality management:

Ah -

An Alphabet media relations manager later reached out to Mr. Harari’s team to tell him to tell me that the visit to X was not allowed to be part of this story. The request confused and then amused Mr. Harari. It is interesting, he said, that unlike politicians, tech companies do not need a free press, since they already control the means of message distribution.

He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. “I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people,” he said. “They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/business/yuval-noah-harari-silicon-valley.html

Essentially, message control is the future - no one needs media. Come work for a megacorp. They are good people.

Ehm...

Lets have this conversation again after most of you have played CDPRs Cyberpunk..

Also, that last instagram posting of yours - wonderful. I mean, that jacket is -heaven- I'll bet it will go viral. Cant do that in the New York Times.

 

[notimp]

For anyone interested in the actual proceedings of the companies internal messaging video sessions - after the NYT article hit:

Its the usual stuff.

But Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg said The Times’s investigation was “completely unfair” and at times “simply not true.”

Much of the discussion centered on boosting employee morale. Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s former vice president of global communications and public policy, returned to the company for the meeting on Friday.

Mr. Schrage said that Facebook was in a difficult news cycle, and that things would eventually calm down, and he urged workers to keep trying to do their best and work on the company’s tough problems.

Some Facebook employees indicated that they believe The Times and other news outlets are unfairly targeting the company because of its outsize influence — a sentiment shared in the session on Friday when employees asked executives what would happen to employees who leak information to the press.

Mr. Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook would not hesitate to fire employees who spoke to The New York Times or other publications.

But after an employee asked whether the company should issue a report about how many leakers Facebook had found and fired, Mr. Zuckerberg played down the idea.

Leaks, he said, are usually caused by “issues with morale.”

Ah, Mr. loves his roman emperor Augustus knows a thing about morals, and is not afraid to tell you all about it.

src: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-mark-zuckerberg.html

So the typical millennial not only is fine with a world without independent media, he is also fine with a world without leakers. And he will make sure of it, because he will deplattform them by calling them amoral (probably toxic, thats more a word he is familiar with) - just as the company said. Then he will visit the company store and get todays news from it.

Then he will clap, when someone tells him to do just that, because thats exactly what just happened at Facebook (the Instagram company).

The greatest generation.

 

[Gimzie]

You seem to have a large obsession over millennials, man.

No community is going to be perfect, and especially not one of this size. You can't change every single person in the world for the better; which means you'd be much better off just accepting this as it is.

 

[notimp]

Dont worry - I just use the term as bait for people to care about social issues.

For the probably 10th time, I'm a millennial myself.

It works, because no one wants to identify with the public image this generation has. Wonder how you could change that...

(By not falling for easy emotional bait, and actually reading the content/context of a story as well - would be a start. Then you could continue by actually forming an opinion, that doesnt have to be mine, but that isnt just "kill the messenger, he made me feel/look bad".

God I would be so loved in here, If I'd hand out coupons for free Gucci bags, for people to take instagram selfies with to share with their friends, but sadly - I'm all out of coupons. )

 

[notimp]

There is an addendum to that.

People still line up for free service treatments in here every day. If you act PC - they leave an entirely meaningless like in return. Means nothing. I have several hundred thousands in my lifetime - just from helping people out. (Different from posting a puppy video and getting the exact same in about three minutes.. Also tells you something about the worth of a like. (like inflation ))

For them the transaction is over at that point. They dont care to give something back. Much in the same vane, as they dont care - if a company like facebook just told their employees in televised telescreenings, that the New York Times, just prints fake news, and they should continue to work hard - as the news cycle will eventually shift. And their families wont ask them those hard questions anymore.

(There is a big logic gap I jumped, but bare with me if you like - because at this point the story becomes personal.)

In their mind, there is a certain kind of people out there, who just loves to give them free and personal basic tech advice in their sparetime, and which they shout at - if they dont do it with a smile on their face.

This comes from them growing up in ad financed online models, where people act as they do in normal (capitalist) economies. "Customer is king" - works in tid for tad models (give cash, get service).

But then you took away their function as customers. You made them the merchandise, by collecting personal data, and showing them ads in return. And because they had nothing to do in any exchange - you gave them a like function, so they could click on something - and think, that from that point, things would just work out. (Clicktivism, but even more low effort.. )

But those likes simply fuel empty attention economies, where all I could get for them is a .jpg of a "medal of participation", and the odd dopamine fix from feeling that I helped an old lady over the street today.

In economies like that you cant optimize for "customer is king" because the economical thing thats driving growth - is essentially decoupled from the product they are producing.

The product gets produced as voluntary, self organized work by a handful of idealists, who cant stand it, if people trade along misinformation. Especially long term.

So for example you can try to make them think about that the "ad financed (optimizes for visits, promises you free, personalized, and friendly support) - keep the site running", and the "producing individual support services - most people are in here for" models arent coupled in any way. The people with the ad money - just give the space.

So if you post request like "Has this program an update function already, I was on Discord a few months ago, and they said - it would probably get it in the future" - as their own "items", content bubbles for people to address. And you do that - collectively - in the thousands. You actually take away the opportunity for a platform to exist where people could learn (search as a paradigm, by the tech industry has been replaced by "personal assistance") stuff - and make it a place for volunteers to become very cynical indeed.

Also, not something made up, but a real example from the switch emulation subforum about an hour ago.

Think about it as opportunity space. Every low effort "support me" post, is 1/100 of the decision of someone somewhat intelligent to leave.


I know tldr; ...

Short version is - pay for your news outlets, thats more important than this silly argument here. You expecting everything to be run by ad economies, has produced 100.000 professional youtubers and nothing else. Or Twitch streamers, if you prefer them to work for amazon and not google.

 

[notimp]

Rob Feris on 'The rise of fake news'.


The essential quote I'm after for the purpose of this thread is: "[...] being honest and accurate apparently didn't play an essential part in popularity on social media." Which is a small understatement.

He also pronounces the theory, that more people are trying out new stuff, to see what works in the new arena.

 

[Saiyan Lusitano]

This community still thinks the "worst" generation are the millennials, heh, that's funny in itself.

@smileyhead amen to that.

 

[notimp]

To clarify, in public, they are not. (Damn, that smarts... ) From my perspective. Also, because if you start to believe in labels for entire generations, you are doing something wrong. (Asked about self images. )

 

[notimp]

Since no one else jumped in with the (cultural) positivist side of current social media - let me now take some time, and helm this position as well.

Best illustration of the concept I came across is the following video:
https://alpbach.apa-ots-video.at/video/5333013067a14a6eb3013067a17a6ef3

You have to click through, it isnt on youtube.

The position helmed by the futurist philosopher in there is roughly the following.

We all have to overcome the "social imprint" of only having 200 followers similar to us (tribal) and have to instead basically teach people how they can get 5000 followers instead (social nodes). Then everyone is a social node, and can be happy - potentially even become an entrepreneur by selling products to people.

The other side of the spectrum is seen as a majority of people stuck in consumerism as well - btw who identify through "products". And trolls who rank even lower.

So thats instagram and facebook currently. With -let everyone strive to become an influencer- attached to it.

It also acknowledges that people are self censoring as a result and that you are optimizing towards popularity - but, then thats argued to be a social norm anyways.

 

[notimp]

And here is the animated/racy speech (much in the same manner as the millennial rant up front - but coming from the opposite end ) laying out, why people not optimizing for a "PC" public culture are now deserving of help:



According to his wikipedia entry (/an entry on speakersnet ):
Bard has given public lectures since 1997, including three TEDx presentations (as of 2013), with a major focus on the social implications of the Internet revolution and has become one of the leading speakers on the international management theory lecturing circuit.[4]

 

[notimp]

What happens, when facebook "combats sensationalism, misinformation, and political polarization, by emphasizing local networks over publisher pages"?

Well - according to buzzfeed of all sources - this:

Moneyquote:

These [yellowjacket protester network] pages weren’t exploding in popularity by coincidence. The same month that Nogueira set up his first group, Mark Zuckerberg announced two algorithm changes to Facebook’s News Feed that would “prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local.” The updates were meant to combat sensationalism, misinformation, and political polarization by emphasizing local networks over publisher pages.

src: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/france-paris-yellow-jackets-facebook

Now this is the first time I might call into question if this was actually fbs (the instagram company) "fault", but its an entertaining read nevertheless.

Ah - the new social graphs driven world is all here to benefit us all. And then france burned... This has a poetic quality to it.

(Is that a HDR picture, btw? )

Ludosky, an entrepreneur who currently sells organic cosmetics and aromatherapy advice online, told Le Parisien that she started the petition after she googled fuel taxes and was scandalized at how high they are.[...]

So, in less than two weeks, what you end up with is this: A Change.org petition with fewer than 1,500 subscribers gets talked about on a local radio station. The radio appearance is written up by a local news site. The article is shared to a local Facebook page. Thanks to an algorithm change that is now emphasizing local discussion, the article dominates the conversation in a small town. Two men from the same suburb then turn the petition into a Facebook event. A duplicate petition goes viral within the local Facebook groups. Then a daily newspaper writes up the original petition. This second article about the petition also goes viral. So does the original petition. And then the rest of French media follows.

Ludosky’s petition now has over a million signatures.

No further questions, your honor.

 

[notimp]

Journalists don't want to work for facebook as "factcheckers" anymore, as they realize, that facebook just uses them for crisis PR purposes.

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...g-in-disarray-as-journalists-push-to-cut-ties

Now quickly, all act surprised.

 

[ThoD]

Dude, why keep bumping this pointless thread just to "inform" everyone of what they already know, only in the most unproductive way imaginable?:/ I see the last 5 posts and 8 of the last 9 on here are just by you monologuing as if you are proving some major hidden point to the world and everyone should accept your opinion as fact, but you are preaching to the choir, what are you even trying to prove? You tried to revive this twice in the past half month, get a hint no one cares...

PS: I'm not one to shut down discussion, but isn't this too pointless to be getting the spotlight in the recent threads on the FP? It's time to lock this if you ask me...

 

[FAST6191]

Hmm. I was busy watching vox, vice, buzzfeed et al come crashing down and missed that one. Only thing that came down to me was pondering their human image scanners getting PTSD*.

Hopefully we do get some decent fact checking sites though. There are a few that rate journalists and news companies but going down to individual stories is harder.

*actually a subject I find quite fascinating. Nothing like that affects me (finally got over my dislike of skin grafts), though I suppose I have not really been immersed properly for days on end and face only that tomorrow, but I have been places and seen things happen since I was very young so the idea of images on a website causing me trauma is almost laughable. On the flip side the sufferers of helicopter parents that shield their kids from everything until traditionally they would have landed in the real world many years prior might well have no mechanisms for dealing with such things, and depending upon how old they actually are may truly struggle to get them (I don't know the full psychology here, indeed I don't know if anybody does, but general discussions of risk aversion, neuroplasticity, means of learning as it pertains to age and such will probably be the things to look at, I imagine militaries probably have something here as far as what they do with older recruits).

 

[notimp]

Factchecking wont solve this. Talked to people who are in fact checking consortiums already. They are actually grateful for every visibility push they get on facebook or whatsapp, and they currently are pondering how to reach the 40+ demographic, because they dont reach it at all.

Which is the same conclusion the factcheckers complaining in the Guardian article just came to. They only are used for crisis PR purposes. (Their work has almost no impact.)

They even see state side censorship of fake news as a positive, if you talk to the ones situated in Brazil.

Then there have been amusing occurances, where state sponsored PR agencies (foreign office, military) use dark PR on social networks against instate targets, while their neighboring agencies are supposed to protect the public from fake news.. See: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/foreign-office-funds-2m-info-13707574

Facebook has been caught doing the same, namely hiring PR agencies, to use right wing PR tactics, to discredid their critics. Not one agency, several. Which is also partly what the guardian article is about.

If you want to take this even one step further - you are talking about "influencing elections with limited candidates" by "distributing fake news optimally" all of a sudden becoming a solvable problem - as this AI whiz at Ben-Gurion University set out to proof:
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/mel...ziente-Algorithmen-und-Fake-News-4250939.html
(article in german - but you should be able to cross reference his name - and maybe even find his talk at the IJCAI)

So - to condense this down - fact checking to counteract this will never work, because there is no "consensus majority anymore", Basically people trust their friends and closed facebook groups more, than journalists, politicians, ...

So if you are spreading fake news efficiently, you are targeting social nodes ("influencers") with sponsored messages, that no one else will ever see, but that can be micro targeted to "what works to convince them", then they get to influence their peers. No big trending news story needed.

The way to solve for this is to --

- make facebook not to allow targeted ad campaigns for political purposes

- and make them actively censor ads based on quickly adopting algorithms on what could be seen as a political campaign

(edit: An unforseen negative could be that people then wouldnt participate in the political process any longer, because -simplyfied- instagram doesnt allow for political messages to be shared... )

No one wants to do that of course, so you are left with a broken system, that basically destroys the democratic process - and can be instumentalized, by really anyone that comes along. (This is what the political hearings with Zuck are about (despite teaching old people how tech works.. ). They are demanding, that facebook gets a grip on this.)

Another way to look at it (from the Ben-Gurion AI research chap) would be to look at facebook as a general sociental system and just bow to the new default - but then you are left with a system that -

- disallows for the opposite party of an argument to be heard (thats a pre roman society setback )
- optimizes for emotional impact on every story
- allows people with money to buy visibility, but this time without efficiency loss (buing and running a newspaper in the past wasnt very efficient... )
- isnt reliant on common narratives, or commonly shared public opinions to influence, or direct action
- allows for anonymized public influence campaigns at never before seen cost/benefit ratios
- doesnt have any channels for that content to become visible to anyone but the person (group) that was targeted with it.

Factchecking would solve part of this if people would lend credence to those factchecking accounts, but in the overall scope of things, they dont. Even they have a visibility problem. (Mostly because they are even more boring and non personal than conventional media.)

Some of this is edgy stuff - but then, I listed sources..

Yet, people still dont want to stop feeding instagram. Where just a few days ago, news reported that Kendall Jenner was the highest paid model of 2018. Reason, even that has become a mixed calculation, because you now also pay them for the people they are able to influence on your companys/entitys behalf on social media.

 

[notimp]

For people that dont click through anymore, this is the lead in paragraph of the guardian article:

Journalists working as factcheckers for Facebook have pushed to end a controversial media partnership with the social network, saying the company has ignored their concerns and failed to use their expertise to combat misinformation.

Current and former Facebook factcheckers told the Guardian that the tech platform’s collaboration with outside reporters has produced minimal results and that they’ve lost trust in Facebook, which has repeatedly refused to release meaningful data about the impacts of their work. Some said Facebook’s hiring of a PR firm that used an antisemitic narrative to discredit critics – fueling the same kind of propaganda factcheckers regularly debunk – should be a deal-breaker.

“They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” said Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, a factchecking site that has partnered with Facebook for two years.

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...g-in-disarray-as-journalists-push-to-cut-ties

 

[Subtle Demise]

1. Asking for "support service", in an online forum - if you are not able to "give back" along the line (because you have no in depth knowledge about a topic, and no intention to ever change that) is not ok. It shifts the burden to answer the bulk of the questions to a small group that gets not much in return - and when they stop responding, you usually are left with "communities" that disseminate wrong answers and false information for a long time, before people notice, that they arent "working" anymore.

Prerequisites to getting your questions answered should always be:

- Actual participation
- Getting some base level knowledge to be able to ask informed questions

What takes place in here instead:
"What is best" polling attempts and "It doesnt work, someone help me" service solicitation.

Have you not been on any other forum ever? The ratio of questions to people giving answers is alwayd going to be very high. That's just how it goes. Very few people are experts on a particular subject. That's what makes forums and the internet so great, the people with knowledge can volunteer that knowledge. That's the thing, all that "technical support" you hate so much is completely voluntary. No one is being compelled or coerced into helping each other. If they don't want to answer questions, they won't. Don't see the problem here.

If we did things your way, this site would have closed years ago due to lack of activity and resulting loss of ad revenue.

open racism and fascism is on the rise again

It's been on a constant decline since the Civil Rights Movement, but those millenials you mentioned changed the definitions to include things that were innocuous before just so they'd have something to be outraged about.

3. There are oxymorons all over the place -
- People think that they want help with "getting privacy settings right on facebook" // but at the same time they want to overlook the simple fact, that FB is an ad network, that designs their settings so most people get them "wrong"
- People think that labeling everything *toxic* gets rid of issues // but its actually preventing some of them from being discussed
- People want PC and safe spaces // but also to participate in every sh*tstorm that comes along
- People acknowledge that social media profiles are not "their real selfs" // but then tend to engage in parasocial relationships with twitch streamers and instagram influencers because of celebrity appeal ("Have you seen how many followers?")
- If you want to get a community like gbatemp "going", you pull all the tropes of a millennial lifestyle you can think of ("Watch us twitch stream and sponsor us on patreon!1") // Even if this results in 50 active viewers at a time like it is for 99% of all Twitch streamers, because there are no platform synergies whatsoever, and people really only need about 20 celebrities accounts to follow at a time.

I tend to agree, but I don't think it applies here so much.

. If you demand, that we have to pretty much ignore all of this - just to have a not necessarily real, but decent online experience - something has gone wrong a while ago. The structures are still here, forums arent dead yet, lets have the discussions about whats "expectable social behavior" right now

Who's to decide what's acceptable? You? Your writing style comes off as belittling, demeaning, berating, exclusionary, and off-putting. If that's your idea of acceptable social behavior then maybe some introspection on your part may be necessary.

I believe in being kind to others and caring for one another, and trying to plant a seed of positivity. All we have is each other in this cold, dark, uncaring universe, why can't we be more empathetic to others? When a random stranger is venting about a recent break-up and how he has no luck with girls, why ignore him or worse yet, call him an incel or tell him to get over it? Why not a simple "it gets easier, pick your head up and try to be more confident"? Why not help a young teen who tried his best to follow the directions to hack his 3DS or Switch, but missed some minor detail? We have all been in these situations, why berate and belittle others for doing the same thing? You don't have to hold their hand, you only need to plant a seed of knowledge and the motivation for them to seek out knowledge and solve their own problems in the future. As the great scholar Keanu Reeves once said: "Be excellent to each other."

 

[notimp]

Have you not been on any other forum ever? The ratio of questions to people giving answers is alwayd going to be very high. That's just how it goes. Very few people are experts on a particular subject. That's what makes forums and the internet so great, the people with knowledge can volunteer that knowledge.

The crucial difference is knowledge generation/sharing versus service arrangements. People in here dont want to learn anything, they want their problems to be fixed - and dont care what it takes.

If they are ignored the first time, because they havent shown any chops or even preliminary understanding of the matter they repost their query three times in different threads. Stuff like this is not moderated.

If they dont get any traction in the corresponding thread, they post their own mainline thread version, of "help me personally - I'm so confused, lol". Usually with a nonsensical title, so the thread cant even coincidentally help another person who finds it.

The Choixdujournx software thread is currently abused for "should I update or not, and to which version, and how" baselevel support.

The Switch emulation forum is frequently overrun by people reading "softwareprojects" in the title and thinking that every softwareissue they've ever experienced in their life would fit in there.

None of the just mentioned issues are issues of "information distribution" - every single one is expecting personalized support, from the baselevel up.

Information is free - support is not. As simple as that. If someone has a hard time understanding a somewhat new concept - I'd be the first one out of the box trying to assist him or her in their effort - if the 500th voice tries to trick people into assisting them in correctly updating to "most recent version" easily. Thats something different.

You see it in the posting frequencies of support requests on these forums, the target is not any longer, that people should have access to information (use search), the target is to serve every one with a service wish and a smartphone.
(More people being able to "participate", more traffic, more ad revenues.)

Because high quality service for free, doesnst scale (its the same ten people...) you are forced to choose between "do you let the overal information quality suffer by also having some wrong solutions, and made up memes circulate" or do you try to educate a generation of users that "visit this forum, there is where you get helped", isnt a concept that is economically supposed to be provided by forums at all.

No one gets paid, they are abusing the system. If their insisence on getting "personal support services longtime" doesnt stop, actual information quality suffers. Communities (some of which I have co managed in the past) are destroyed this way.
--

I initially mounted this as a distributed campaign, to at least get the Switch Homebrew forum to a point, where people could visit to read release postings, changelogs and converse with developers again -- without being interrupted by "fix my thing" solicitations five times a day.

I was under no illusion to be able to "fix" the rest of the forum.

A community never is and never was a place, where you get all this great free help, without being able to provide anything on your own. They only became that, once corporations started to popularize the concept of a "service community" ("this is where you get helped") which is an oxymoron. (People hunting for points to get a jpeg of a participation medal, as the underlying economy?)

People growing up on facebook never quite realized that, because to them, what ever they did, had no consequences - everything just scrolled away after a while -

Facebook never was about search or information distribution. It was about 800 "nice to meet you" on the street encounters a day. And wishing four people a day happy birthdays.

Thats was originally the "asocial" aspect in the titled of the thread.)