Please, world, let Facebook die. I’m a bit biased here, since I cut all my ties to Facebook earlier this year, but really, it has become a major source of evil on the internet. While it’s still absurdly rich and influential, there are signs that it might go the way of MySpace. Remember MySpace? For a while, you had to have a MySpace page if you wanted to be a cool kid, but now it’s an afterthought, it’s so 2009, hardly anyone cares about it.
It could happen to Facebook, too. Look at how the value of the company has been plummeting lately.
It’s also not the cool place for the kids to be anymore. When I was last on it, it felt like going down to the local legion hall for a high school reunion: lots of old people (in part, my fault for selecting who I wanted to talk to), lots of fringe kooks, a lost cause if you wanted contemporary ideas, but fine for reminiscing. It had lots of moldy corners where horrible people would sit and reinforce each other’s lunacy.
Facebook/Meta tried to put on a brave show at a recent Netroots Nation conference. It did not go well for them. Attendees picketed and protested their appearance, and they had to pack up and leave. There’s a reason for that: Facebook represents the conservative establishment.
A 2021 analysis by The Washington Post revealed that the site gives an advantage to conservatives on the platform. Facebook says that the right-wing is just better at stoking fears and responses than progressives. The reality is that Facebook has allowed false information to stand from conservative sources. While there are supposed to be protections in place to stop fake news, it typically takes so long for the review and removal that the story has already spread across the platform. As a result, the top 25 posts on Facebook are very rarely from Democratic sources.
Now Facebook is betting big on the “Metaverse” and virtual reality, and the seams are showing. Facebook is not an innovative company; they just buy stuff, they’re not big on actually engineering and creating new stuff. So they slapped together this thing called Horizon Worlds, but no one knows quite what to do with it. Also, in a fit of major incompetence, they premiered the service in Spain and France, and all of the content was in English.
“Keep on explaining things to me in English,” an annoyed member of the local outlet Real o Virtual said in a YouTube review of Horizon Worlds on Tuesday. “I’m not going to fucking listen to you.”
When asked about the lack of Spanish and bad Spanish in Horizon Worlds, a Facebook spokesperson told Gizmodo that the game was launching in Spain in an English-only capacity first.
“We want to enable more people to experience and connect with others in Horizon Worlds as soon as possible, and this means opening to more regions first in an English-only capacity,” Facebook spokeswoman Amy White told Gizmodo in an emailed statement on Friday. “We look forward to building a more localized experience soon.”
Yeah, that’s the way to market. Slap your customers in the face and shout “ENGLISH ONLY!”
The only thing Facebook really knows how to do is to market the hell out of anything — so many ads everywhere — and use it to steal your personal info to sell to the highest bidder. They’re a money vacuum. It is peak capitalism.
If Facebook wants to recover, one of the things they must do is get rid of Mark Zuckerberg. Oh my god, the man is a charisma black hole — he’s a creepy dead-eyed mannequin, with the weird lack of style I associate with frat boy business majors. This is the face of Facebook? Sheesh. Steve Jobs may have been an asshole, but he did have buckets of charisma and forged a distinctive image, and people copied him (bad people, usually). Has anyone gone down to their local barber and said, “give me the Zuckerberg”? No. No one. OK, maybe a few sociopaths.
Twitface napalma est.
Even Facebook is bailing on Facebook. That’s why they bought instagram.
Is that a connect with Facebook button I see on this blog? Tsk tsk.
They don’t sell your data.
They GIVE IT AWAY FOR FREE, so that algorithms can bid in real time for who gets to show you the ad.
There’s a “connect with facebook” button here? There shouldn’t be, I thought I killed all those pesky vermin long ago.
Facebook was a good idea done very badly.
Everyone gets their own website to do whatever they want with it.
Instead, it ended up being a good place to amplify and propagate destructive memes.
Facebook was the center of the Covid-19 virus antivaxxer movement and the related anti-public health measures (masks, closures, work from home etc..).
You might just as well call it the Friends of the Covid-19 Virus headquarters.
It helped kill around 250,000 Americans who weren’t vaccinated, caught the virus, and died.
It does accidentally serve a purpose though.
It is a good place to identify right wingnuts and assorted lunatic fringers so…you can avoid them.
I deleted my “real” FB account almost a year ago. Now, I have an account under a pseudonym that I only use very occasionally for Messenger. I’ve also recently begun migrating my photography away from Instagram to Vero.
For the first few weeks after leaving FB, I missed idly scrolling my timeline in the same way that I (still) sometimes miss cigarettes: a vague feeling of nostalgia and hazy memories of distraction. And I quit both for the same reason: they both had become a habit that left me feeling disgusted and disgusted with myself.
There is still facebook javascript here. Other than freethoughtblogs and wp.com, this page also has junk from google, googletagservices, linkedin, pinterest, reddit, sharethis, skimresources, statcounter, tumblr, and youtube. Sometimes other pages will have other nonsense too, but this one’s pretty standard.
If some people were not too fucking lazy for hyperlinks, then how would these very reputable websites spy on everyone doing everything? The whole internet would come crashing down instantly. Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria….
But maybe it would be even more “convenient” if Amazon delivered these vital bits to each person’s doorstep. Or we could reserve a bunch of nice parking spots at the local store, where the poor workers will have to do your shopping and carry it out to your fucking car. But really, shouldn’t they provide you with a one-time chauffeur to help with such an arduous trip? No need to pay them, of course. You’re too important for that.
In any case, let’s just be sure that we’ve exhaustively considered all of the worst options first. I mean, we could be enslaving children around the world to do all of this stuff by hand, which might save a few more dollars every year for … well … not you, but for the precious company which works so hard to make you comfortable and docile and domesticated and all of the good things. If the past couple decades have shown us anything, it’s that the sky really is the limit, at least until it’s so polluted that nobody can breathe anymore.
Oh, there’s also twitter. I missed that one. Because you can’t just tweet. There’s a “button” for that.
It’s time for Rupert Murdoch to buy into Facebook.
Maybe it’s time for Facebook to go back to its roots: a platform for rating the do-ability of women on college campuses.
Seriously, I’m kind of proud to say I’ve never been on Facebook. Something about it and Zuckerberg always kind of creeped me out.
I just don’t need anything they have. They’ve had many years of huge popularity and deliberately locking things away from people like me who never got accounts. And they still can’t manage to have anything I really want.
And now they’re trying to sell a 3d chat program. For a really big company they’re sure chasing some very, very marginal ideas. 3d chat programs have been around for quite awhile and there’s a reason why they’re not big or made by big companies.
I see Facebook as an option on the login splash screen in Firefox. On Safari it’s an F with a share button on the main page. Also tumblr…eeewww!
The Swedish subset of Facebook accounts have not yet undergone total garbification. But when I read the english-language stuff there is a lot of crap.
Normally I don’t spend any time thinking about it, and that only because all y’all bloggers here talk about it.
I looked up Horizon Worlds so you don’t have to: it’s a virtual reality Second Life sorta thing. Itself the ‘game’ (?) it is ‘free’, but it is only useable with their proprietary four-hundred-dollar pieces of hardware.
While I don’t see the entertainment in this, I don’t see the language thing as a marketing fail? It makes it seem exclusive, just like weeaboos with manga/anime that’s still in japanese.
It seem Zucksalot is trying to sell of Meta stock.. .and only accepting bitcon.. i mean bitcoin… talk about a double-grift….
Having been an early FB adopter, I got rid of that privacy nightmare in 2011, and never looked back. The dumbification and Q-fication of vast swathes of the population can be attributed at least in part to this disinformation multiplicator.