(no subject)

[jilder]

Facebook’s Australia news ban is the best decision it’s ever made

Facebook and Google are giant advertising platforms, not tenets of an open web. It’s time to start treating them as such.

" For many, Facebook and Google are part of the mythical “open web” – one where hyperlinks can be freely posted on any website. That makes sense on, say, Wikipedia, but it does not make sense on Facebook and Google which, despite their scale and mission statements, are essentially closed advertising ecosystems.
....
The problem here isn’t Facebook or Google. Nor is it the decades-long failure of the media industry to innovate. The problem isn’t Murdoch’s belligerence or a digitally illiterate Australian legislature. The problem is that we’ve ended up at a moment in history where almost all information in the world is disseminated by two gigantic advertising companies that are better at making an ad for buttless pyjamas stalk you around the internet than they are at stopping an attack on the US Capitol or preventing genocide. Regulators can and must do better to address this imbalance. And no, the answer to our broken internet is not to hand News Corp more power and money. "

I have a pretty huge swathe of feelings about this. I've always hated Facebook. I hated it when it was a gated community, intent on trapping everyone inside. I hated it more when it then killed off discourse outside and forcibly drew everyone in. I hate how it's become the default way of viewing the vastness of the web for the majority of internet users and what that's done for discourse online, especially since its heavily wedded to smartphone usage and the impact that's had on how much effort people put into their content, comment threads in particular. I hate how it makes fact checking and research hard, in the interest of keeping eyes inside their ecosystem where the ads are, and I hate how its taken hostage of my entire social life thanks to the pandemic, and no matter how much I try I can't get people to move outside it. I mean my sister organised her fucking wedding on Facey. It's ridiculous.

I would love to see it die.

But I'm also aware for a lot of people it's the only way they know how to use the internet and the best way they have of staying in contact with the people around them. The internet is a heavily gated environment. You need a certain degree of technical skill, education and money to get past the first hurdle - using anything other than a smartphone. A cheap smartphone is a few hundred clams, and that's it. You're good to go. A decent laptop is three or four times that at least. And then there's knowledge - the Facebook app on a smartphone requires one tap, and the app is often right there, preloaded. Using a laptop to get to Dreamwidth, for example required a whole host of knowledges, not in the least that it exists in the first place. There's no phone app for it, so you need to either monster through the browser version on a phone screen, or stick to desktop. You also need the competency to use an older style journaling site too. As it is, the copying and pasting of the top bloc of text did some crazy things to the formatting of the rest of this entry. I'll have to go into the html and fix it there. I can do that, because I learned html back in like 2001 when if you wanted to be online in any capacity, you needed to be able to handle a bit of light coding. That's out for say, my parents. My dad can barely drive Facey. DW is completely out of the picture for him. It's also out for the overworked and under-supported, excluding huge swathes of people.

I guess I just want the internet back. I want what it was before the big majors turned it into an angry ad revenue generating machine. I wish all the people I knew on Livejournal back in the day would stop posting butchered news articles, copied and pasted, discussing the matter in the ugliest way possible, and just come on over here or literally anywhere else. It's deeply frustrating to see people I know remember how it used to work posting long comment threads with hand edited news URLs over on FB rather than just doing it one one neat post on DW or tumblr or fucking twitter, people I know who have accounts here but for some reason who have forgotten how to do it. And you can just link to Facey too! It's not like its one or the other! You can do both, flip the bird at Facebook while having a cogent conversation somewhere that won't delete it and ban you at a moment's notice.

I'm so fucking done with it. I've been trying to remind all the older users what we used to have and the nostalgia is there but we're all on phones and its Hard. I understand that. I took FB off my phone because it was too easy, just sucking up every free second I had. I'm objectively better off with it off my phone.

But until my social circles move off FB I'm stuck there, because I am already deeply isolated by the dual terrors of the pandemic and parenting small kids while attempting a career, and if I just cut and burned that would be it. I would have very little left. I can't go to a café to hang out or just drop by for a visit, because when I have time my mates are working and when they do I'm busy. Not to mention that the shitshow of Australia's real estate landscape means I have friends now that are two or three hours apart because that's the only way you can afford to buy a house with functional plumbing and a roof that keeps off the rain for less than a million. I can't go to a club because they've mostly been cancelled and we're all too old now anyway, or busy, or sick, or tired. Even my Stitch and Bitch is out of reach right now. It's unfathomably hard.

So while this act of bastardry from FB is complicated and bad on a number of more broad ways, I hope like mad it forces more people to re-evaluate their stance towards what is in essence a cage with ads stuck to the side. But I'm not holding my breath.

Comments

And here we are, I couldn't even respond to the right post... =P

[bunnitos]

It's true, people need to find somewhere else. The problem is that there is nowhere else that currently meets all the needs people have become used to. Most people are not going to even have email addresses and postal addresses for people they know, let alone phone numbers. So if facebook went down there would be dribs and drabs of us on these various other platforms reaching out in the darkness. We need a monopoly-destroyer but at this stage it would require some other evil corp with tonnes of money to spend and similar problems. There's no way the rellies are going to learn how to use this stuff. Even some of the newer ones are cludgy. CounterSocial is CounterIntuitive. Most people don't have patience for it. I'm on all of them pretty much, waiting to see if people move, but they're not going to. So I mean we can talk to each other, which is nice but we still have to go back to fb to find everyone else. And using multiple platforms is time-consuming, so I'm only going to wait and see for so long. It's frustrating. I like longer form posts and responses, I also like quick meme sharing, I like to curate my own feed, so I don't want to see everything but I don't want anyone choosing it for me. Idk. I sort of feel like we're so close to the fall of civilization it hardly matters, but here we are trying. So cheers to that!

Re: And here we are, I couldn't even respond to the right post... =P

[bunnitos]

A bit more on the contact details thing. I, for example, have birthdays and addresses and phone numbers written down in an address book and a birthday book, old style. I don't always remember to update it, but it's there. So I can put reminders in my diary (also old school paper) to send cards/presents to family for example before their birthday. If you rely on fb, you don't know until the day, and depending on the time of day you look, you still don't know. So it means decline of physical correspondence as well (not in itself a bad thing due to waste, but part of the disconnect). I have often reached out for people's email addresses or real world addresses over facebook but I get very few replies. So come the apocalypse I don't know where to send the rescue crews or how to contact the comrades when fb is heavily monitored. The covids of course do nothing to help with real world connections, it just reinforces the gathering all in one place online where you can find everybody.