Substrate

But when it really mattered, Facebook chose inaction.

That's been one of the more disorienting parts of this: separating what I see on my feed and what’s directly around me. This compounded by the fact that I can hear sirens and the helicopters constantly. Trying to process what’s happening and assess danger, especially when you have little kids, feels bewildering. It was always about the will, ethics, and incentive structures within the company.

I don’t see this changing any time soon, so I believe the solution will have to be technical.

In the post-Facebook era, which many of us are already living in, there is no single platform, or place, where we can even expect to find everyone we know, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there never is again in our lifetimes. ​ The increasingly-maligned model of VC-funded, loss-leading hypergrowth in the pursuit of market dominance, understood another way, is a quest to create voids that matter, voids that will hurt if we let them emerge by rejecting the product currently filling them ​ The residue of buildings and cities determines what gets built on top of them, and if we’re conscientious, we’ll build with a more distant future in mind.

It’s not a political movement. It’s not even some coordinated, nicely branded “techlash.” It’s just regular people, watching inaction and outcomes, who are fed up. ​ I know Zuck’s persona of nerdy programmer has long disappeared, but the level of NFL Wide Receiver cockiness is still jarring to hear. but the anger is not the problem to solve, it’s the lung cancer.

Facebook’s deflection of responsibility is merely the latest instance common line of argument that social media companies like Facebook put forward is that their work exists on a different plane of reality. The digital realm ties into the analog, but the relationship is not a two-way street. Rather, they claim, it is a set of two one-way streets. One of these streets is from computers to the real world, where only the good stuff travels, enabling free speech, liberating the oppressed, democratizing the internet. The bad stuff, however, only goes the other way, where bad individuals misuse and abuse internet platforms. In other words, Facebook argues the good things happen on Facebook, but the bad things happen to Facebook. ​ Most other fields of engineering, like civil engineering, already have this built into their culture, but software engineering is lagging behind. Tech employees need to realize that their responsibility doesn’t end at the last line of code — that’s just where it starts.

forget running for office if youve ever tweeted about, like, anything. ​ I cant remember at what point my posts started becoming a liability rather than a rich text of my life.

A hidden Facebook API shows online activity, and can be used to make graphs of when people are awake.

Maybe the credential store (culprit 1) is so cumbersome, that the growth oriented team (culprit 2) had to build something sketchy to meet their managers’ (culprit 3) KPIs!

platforms have to act as though their algorithms work and don’t work at the same time, and this equivocation fosters a paranoia about how algorithms work. The point of advertising, after all, is not to nail down what people are, as if that were static; it’s to shift currents of demand, to alter behavior patterns. But the logic of data profiling uses the past to repeat it as the future. This mystification is not an unfortunate side effect; it’s the value Facebook adds. Users are isolated from each other so they can feel as though they are the implied subject of all the discourse they experience on the site — so that they can be targeted in “one-to-one brand building” campaigns. Users get to feel important, singled out, worthy of decoding, and at the same time they get to interpret whatever they read through the lens of “Why did the algorithm choose this for me? What does this say about me and my tastes?” But that works only through an effort of disavowal: You have to feel that the algorithm is right enough to cater to you but not powerful enough to control you (even while it controls all those “indoctrinated peers”). In this London Review of Books essay about Brexit,William Davies offers this description of accelerated finance: The mentality of the high-frequency trader or hedge fund manager is wholly focused on leaving on better terms than one arrived, with minimum delay or friction in between. To the speculator, falling prices present just as lucrative an opportunity as rising prices (given the practice of ‘shorting’ financial assets), meaning that instability in general is attractive. As long as nothing ever stays the same, you can exit on better terms than you entered. The only unprofitable scenario is stasis. In a sense, platform paranoia is akin to market volatility; it reflects and promotes a high-frequency trading of sorts in various propositions, accelerating cycles of belief and skepticism as we churn through a much higher volume of information. Advertising is more likely to be effective amid these conditions, where it seems that everybody and not just marketers is being manipulative and deceptive. How we are targeted is always incomplete and inaccurate, but these inaccuracies in themselves can still drive and reshape behavior. Being targeted itself affects the targets, regardless of what is targeted at them, or if anything hits. They want to sell control over that connection, the moment at which your feelings become actions in the world. (Advertisers understand that link between feeling and acting entirely as a matter of “conversion rates” — when you actually buy something.) When we remember our lives authentically, we ask a fundamental question: Why did I remember this thing, at this moment? The “Why now?” question gives memory its meaning. Facebook randomizes and decontextualizes memory and detaches it from our current self. And why would I want to know what I looked like 10 years ago?

“@vgr The assumed consensus becomes its own reality - a position others can respond to. It doesn't actually need to accurately describe what's happening, the narrative can just live its entire life in the medium where it was created”

Growth hacks everywhere — and it’s about to get even worse

Jason Koebler and Jordan Cox of Vice penned a blockbuster investigation into Facebook’s content moderation practices that’s worth your time. They interviewed “dozens” of sources, including several on-the-record conversations with Facebook employees in charge of their moderation efforts: The thing that makes Facebook’s problem so difficult is its gargantuan size. It doesn’t just have to […]

Casey Newton of the Verge spoke with content moderators who are employed by Cognizant but working on Facebook’s behalf: Collectively, the employees described a workplace that is perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos. It is an environment where workers cope by telling dark jokes about committing suicide, then smoke weed during breaks to numb […]

the shadow version of you that Facebook creates is its property; it's what's targeted etc.; meanwhile that entity is used against you (it's used to determine what you're qualified to see), which intensifies pressure on us to adopt that as our "real self— Rob Horning (@robhorning) January 25, 2019

“My original sin wasn’t making a Facebook account, it was abandoning my own website that I controlled (the original site was hosted on Tripod, but if I had to do it all over again, I'd pay for web hosting.) All these years later, maybe it’s time to update Jason’s Site.”

If the past teaches us anything, it will happen one day. In fact, the process might have already started.

More Facebook drama, this time from an interview with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton. What was most noteworthy, though was the response.

Growth hacks everywhere — and it’s about to get even worse

On September 12, as far as Facebook is concerned I won’t exist. Yesterday, I permanently deleted my Facebook account. I let go of 300,000 followers, 1200 friends and the blue seal of authenticity. …

“The problem with focusing on features as a means of differentiation is that nothing happens in a vacuum: category-defining products by definition get a lot of the user experience right from the beginning, and the parts that aren’t perfect — like Facebook’s sharing settings or the iPhone’s icon-based UI — become the standard anyways simply because everyone gets used to them.”