I honestly struggle to see the value-add of any social media site like Facebook. It seems like their central function is to atomize and narcissize, I don't see a way this sort of infrastructure can't be fundamentally negative.
I get it I didn't think you were defending Facebook. My point is the social aspect of these sites is part of what's bad about it.
For the very small subsection of people who are housebound and simply cannot socialize otherwise, yeah this kind of medium is an unqualified good. But for basically everyone else they get captured having these social interactions mediated through a screen, serves to remove time from life actually socializing with real people. It's that substitution that performs the atomization and narcissism.
I'm pretty convinced anything beyond a basic chat function like ICQ (which is now basically Signal/WhatsApp) is fundamentally negative, and the idea that aspects of it don't feel negative is part of what's negative about it.
MySpace was too much about the individual. I was in High School when it was the main thing, so that age colors my view of it, but it was super customizable, somewhere between Tumblr and Geocities, but to the point where a lot of pages were unusable. I had friends who prided themselves on making their profiles as unreadable as possible. And the auto play music was awful, even the stuff I normally liked.
Early Facebook wasn’t bad. I was on there before 2010, and I liked how kind of austere it felt after the chaos of MySpace.
And the auto play music was awful, even the stuff I normally liked.
Okay, first of all, how dare you. And second, you are out of my top 8. Please lose my icq name.
I think all you'd really need to do to revert facbook back to that earlier, more interpersonal website is remove the
sharebutton. No more effortless reposts. You wanna spread a link? Copy and paste that shit. You wanna show off a photo or a meme? Download it to your hard-drive, find it in the directory, and upload it. One little change, and suddenly facebook would be useable again.The like button also was a problem. People used to type out compliments
my ideal social media situation is a bunch of different sites that work differently for different groups of people. Homogenisation of social spaces is the problem - actual human activity takes many different forms depending on what your collective goals are, while the goal of for-profit communication software is only to maximise ad revenue & data harvesting
Social media companies are all just advertising companies - the second any one of them actually attempted to generate revenue they all regress to being glorified billboards.
Fundamentally FB is all self-aggrandizement, narcissistic status seeking and branding oneself.
Whereas Twitter is driven by hashtags, ostensibly the centrality being about news items and subject driven.
Farcebook is all about me. Filled with banal cloying pictures of people’s lunch, kids and vacations.
Twitter is about We. Much less about personal habits and more about how people feel in real time about a subject.
The latter a truly world conversation. The former like a jr high cafeteria.
The thing that ruined social media was monetization of engagement. That's it. Get rid of that shit and ads and so much bullshit just fucking disappears.
At least when I was using livejournal I had to learn to use some HTML to make my profile a garish eyesore. Part of me misses that level of customization, but maybe only because I didn't bother with myspace so I didn't see the hell that could become first hand. I find the uniformity of a Facebook or Twitter feed visually a lot more sterile and a lot of that has to do with advertising. My Facebook feed turning increasingly into ads or posts from pages I don't follow has made it more and more difficult to actually use it to keep up with people--which is ostensibly the purpose--but until a decent competitor arises what else is there?
