Garbage on Facebook

[MrSaigon]

Looks like my six month opt-out of incessant, who gives a damn? Facebook email updates has expired again and I need to go into settings. I can't believe that's how they operate.

I'd quit in a second if I was willing to call my cousins once in a while and my siblings more often than I do. I'm not. As an obscure address book it's really very useful too.

[IMADreamer]

There is this new trend now on my wall of people posting bad advice. For example today it was a picture of an electrical wire that's crimped and it says "electricity is just like a water hose, just kink it to shut off the flow."

I get that it's supposed to be funny but it's also stupidly dangerous considering how damn dumb the average facebook poster is.

[tlombard]

That could get an idiot killed. Might as well start the countdown until we hear about somebody trying that now.

[go birds]

ehhh..survival of the fittest

[go birds]

RIP old lady avatar. You will be missed.

I still see an old lady yelling.

[pioneer98]

I have tinkered with social media enough now that I feel I have a much clearer understanding of the problems with Facebook and Twitter.

With both of these, anything you post is out there forever. People can (and do) dig up old tweets and rake people over the coals for something they posted 4 years ago. Another issue is all the political trash on both sites, which is the main thing this thread was complaining about. The third thing is that it is very easy to repost and retweet things. This can expose one of your bad posts to a huge audience quickly. A horde of angry commenters can descend on you if the wrong (right?) person sees the post and releases their minions on you.

These issues are nowhere near as prevalent on Instagram or Snapchat. I am sure there has been bullying on all of these platforms, no doubt, especially Instagram. So I'm not saying any of them are perfect. And the normal caveats about being careful about what you post applies to them as well. But I think these problems are way less common on Instagram for two main reasons: It is image-based, and mostly phone image based. Meaning, it is easiest for the pictures that you share to be taken with your phone. It's hard to post a political opinion or attack on someone with a selfie. You can download memes to your phone and post them to Instagram. I'm sure I could find accounts that post nothing but political memes. But I come across very, very few memes on Instagram, and the ones I do are more of the funny variety. The other reason Instagram doesn't have these issues is because you have to download a separate app to repost Images on Instagram, and most people don't do that. So those few political memes out there don't go viral on Instagram because so few people repost.

I just started playing with Snapchat last week, but some early observations...Snapchat takes some of Instagram's ideas one step further. With Snapchat it is not just harder, but impossible to post anything other than a picture or video from your phone. So you literally cannot repost another image you see, ever. You can only comment on other people's images, and if I'm understanding how it works correctly, the comments are just direct messages to the person who posted it. They aren't public. So bullying on Snapchat would be hard if not impossible because there is no audience. It's just you and the other person. The most famous feature of Snapchat is that your posts "disappear". You set the duration of a video or image. Direct message pictures you send people disappear as soon as that timer is up. It's gone. There is a "timeline" of sorts, which they call the "Story". Anything you post to the "Story" can be viewed repeatedly by your followers but disappears after 24 hours. People can still screenshot things, but they'd have to post it to some other service if they wanted to share it. Also, there are no "Likes" on Snapchat. The only thing it tracks is how many times your posts have been viewed and it has some kind of "score" which has to do with the number of followers/followings and posts you have.

So I can definitely see the appeal of Snapchat and Instagram. Those two services probably have a lot less data on their users but seem a lot more fun and drive more engagement. The scary combo is that Facebook owns Instagram. So if they combine the two sets of data, they can have some of the best of both worlds.

[tlombard]

I rarely post on FB and haven't posted since before Memorial Day until about half an hour ago. Oddly enough the post today and my last one were for the same purpose, see who wants to go to the lake and spend some time on the boat.

Why are people liking my post??? I don't want you to like it, I want you to tell me if you want to go out on the freaking boat!!! Your likes are fecking worthless.

[Schlich]

I saw my first GIF in a profile pic today. Prepare for the storm.

[wart57]

I saw my first GIF in a profile pic today. Prepare for the storm.

[heyzeus]

One of the parents of my kid's friends posted this. My brain just exploded.