Facebook

Recently I looked at Instagram and I noticed that almost all of the “content” is vertical videos. When I look at Facebook and TikTok I notice the same thing. Yesterday I noticed that Bluesky were promoting that they have ten minute videos. I think all of these people have forgotten that we’re using antisocial media to connect with others, not to watch long videos.

Of course, there is a very good reason for allowing longer and longer videos. Ads. If we watch a video that is several minutes long we are likely to stick around during the ad break to see the end of the video. The longer a video is, the more ads we see, and the more committed we are not to skip them, or force quit the app.

For many years I would go for a hike, a via ferrata, scuba diving and more and I would take photos. I would then share them on Instagram to friends, colleagues and family. Facebook then bought Instagram and within a few months it went from being a social network built around our friends, colleagues and family to a network of influencers sharing irrelevant trash. Between that trash we would get ads. Within half a year I dumped Facebook controlled Instagram because the community that I used Instagram had been deliberately destroyed.

In the last two days I noticed several posts speaking about an upcoming tax for electric vehicles that will charge people per mile driven, as there is with petrol cars. In theory people will be charged a flat fee for the first year, and then per kilometre from then onwards.

I don’t see how this would work in practice because of two things. The first is that if you’re on a road trip you’re using public chargers and the price to charge is from 38 centimes to 1.10 CHF per kilowatt/Hour. In other words a scale could already be applied to “tax” people straight from public chargers.

If, like me you still use Facebook, then you will have noticed a dark design pattern. The pattern is to hide hyperlinks to stories in the comments, rather than to make it easy to click straight through.

Facebook has convinced content creators and social media monkeys that if they post the hyperlink in comments, rather than directly, it will promote their content and make them more visible.

Rather than encourage me to click through that design pattern encourages me to comment on the clickbait headline, and completely ignore the original post.

Today I decided to download and play with Meta AI but I didn’t use my Facebook or Instagram accounts. I used a brand new account with no connection to me. I don’t trust Facebook and the Meta “pattte blanche”, especially with AI, given how AI can manipulate us without us realising.

I asked it about Mindf*ck and genocide and it answered to both questions without skirting them. It did try to confuse me with a disambiguation question with the book. Initially it felt as if it wouldn’t answer, until I clarified that I meant the book, rather than swearing gratuitously.

Yesterday afternoon I was trolled by an American account of a person living in Germany. I commented on the absurdity of bicycle lanes that are just two hundred meters long and the troll account said “be happy to have that”. I felt like answering in a hostile manner. I refrained from doing this. I deleted my threads account instead.

You might see this as overkill, but there is something to be said about dumping toxic antisocial media sites. We invest our time and attention on Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky and Threads and if we report accounts, over and over, only to be told that they do not breach their codes of conduct rules, then they have squandered their chance to keep us as customers.

In 2006-2007 when Jaiku and Forums had threads, these made conversations flow. When Twitter was a chatroom conversations flowed too, until the arrival of the hashtag. The issue with the hashtag is that it brought in people who are toilet social media browsers, rather than habitual social media participants. I could have written users, but that is part of the issue with Social Media and Utilitarianism.

Two decades ago, back in 2007 or so I thought about the conversation about ROI for PR firms, brands and more on Twitter and every time I asked, “But what about ROI for human beings, normal users?” Twitter and company spent so much time worrying about marketers and those that want to use, rather than appreciate social media that, in the end, all social networks became cesspits, rather than social networks.

During the pandemic I deactivated my FB account for years because it felt so toxic as an environment. I reactivated it when Musk bought Twitter. At the time it felt like a “least worst” option, rather than a pleasant site. In the process I used FB extensively, and I found communities but I also found a lot of noise.

Political Bias

Recently I have noticed that when a post is written about something positive, there are a lot of angry smileys, and if something negative is written there are a lot of positive smileys. It feels as if Facebook is a Right Wing site. It has felt that way for a while. Yesterday things reached a peak.

Before Whatsapp was bought by Facebook it was a great platform for people to chat with family and friends. When Facebook bought Whatsapp, many people, including myself, migrated towards Signal to avoid remaining in the Facebook sphere of influence. Social groups, and their luddites remained on Whatsapp, so we had to revert to using Facebook owned Whatsapp.

GoSocial takes this a step further. GoSocial is a community that has a facebook page that no one can chat on, and GoSocial town groups that no one can write within. In order to write anything you need to find an activity of interest, join the chat, and then you can do the car dance.

For a while Whatsapp was a fantastic cross platform messaging tool for friends, families, groups and more. It was cross platform, fast and convenient. Eventually rather than rely on Facebook Messenger and Facebook, Facebook bought Whatsapp to consolidate its monopolistic grasp on the social web. As a result of this I tried to dump Whatsapp but it is hard to do so.

The reason for this is simple. Most people have not read Mindf*ck by Chris Whiley so for them it doesn’t matter that Facebook owns Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, Oculus Quest and more.