Facebook adds video search to combat original content sharing decline
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Really annoying to constantly see videos in my feed that are just blurry, partially cropped copies (what is this, VHS?) of videos from a great youtube channel with no attribution and no context.
When this whole controversy came up last summer and fall, it was said there would be easy ways for viewers to flag videos (since the original creators have no way of finding arbitrary uploads of their videos), but I can find no way of doing that. Maybe this will help on the other side, at least.
If Facebook offered an API for Video Search, that would be different, but Facebook's depreciation of APIs that can pull data from arbitrary profiles makes that hard. (you could scrape the Pages of likely suspects though.)
Facebook is 10x worse as you might expect.
Can't facebook do this for you? I don't want to have to police facebook 24/7 when I'm their product. They can lend a hand here.
Facebook seems to have become this battleground for status. People post to Facebook when they :
a) are travelling to some exotic or foreign locations
b) got admissions to prestigious schools or got amazing jobs
c) had a pretty picture of themselves taken
d) are outraged by some social injustice
etc
When I meet past friends who are going through a slump in their life I am reminded how little I know what is happening to them. They would have stopped posting to Facebook a long time ago. The site offers less human connection these days.
> b) got admissions to prestigious schools or got amazing jobs
> c) had a pretty picture of themselves taken
What do you mean by `photos and status updates about their own lives` if these points don't match that description ?
Ideally, what I want to get from people on Facebook is the kind of 'candid' talk I would get if I were to take them out for drinks—because the people I add to Facebook are exactly the people who I don't live close enough to to take out for drinks.
Originally, this was what Facebook was actually used for—asynchronous catching-up. In this it was contrasted against e.g. Twitter, which was much more about broadcasting your "personal brand."
These days, I feel like the place to get what you used to get from Facebook is Tumblr (at least for teenagers.) The same sort of "I'm going to sit here and whine into a pipe; you can listen if you like; we can have a back-and-forth running thread if we are all mutual friends" vibe of Facebook ca 2009.
Linkedin: online resume
twitter: for people to broadcast clever witticisms, suck up to their professional contacts, complain to brands. Very front line of "personal brand." Seems like people have two twitters pretty often- one for random chat about whatever and one "professional" one to push their career agendas.
facebook: bragbook for social striving/status updates of vacations, jobs, new cars, cute kids, flattering photos. Also to cheer on and suck up to friends and family/like their content. Getting more and more annoying lately with political posts. Being able to block people from your newsfeed has helped with this immensely.
instagram: more personal photos than facebook, less likely to be "friends" with your boss etc, also less likely to be attached to your real name, so easier to showcase your real personality/quirks. More artsy than facebook.
snapchat: original video content, people are more "real" than on facebook because there is less perceived risk of people they know irl or professionally finding them and seeing all their doofy posts. Here I am riding my bike, here I am at the beach making a silly face, etc. People feel more free and less worried about it hurting their careers. More fun than facebook with the facial editing tools and stickers which seem really neat.
periscope: dunno, never used it but heard it's the hip new thing
about.me : I still don't understand this one. Guess it's supposed to be the landing page for all your other social medias?
medium.com: starting to pick up lately, not just a place to write Open Letters to Whoever anymore! Extension of personal brand for writers.
Path: dead
Google plus: annoying, stupid
Reddit: enjoy the anonymity, so refreshing after being forced to use the "real you" constantly on facebook etc. Surprisingly intelligent discussion and relevant content in the subs. Was actually recruited for a fantastic job off of my reddit comment history of all things!
hackernews: kinda new, still learning the ropes around here but I've been loving the intelligent discussions and learning a lot.
quora: Place to show off your smarts and push your personal brand. I am actually really annoyed about this because I used to answer and ask a lot of great questions on quora about embarrassing stuff (LOTR, Star trek, whatever) and then all my coworkers and professional contacts started following on me and now I feel very constrained on there.
any other thoughts?
Then there's /r/TheRedPill, /r/KotakuInAction, and several other bastions of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. My personal use of the site makes for a strange sort of dilemma. Unfortunately, the gaming subreddits are really the best place to keep track of all the disparate news sources for my favored platforms. :-/
I own the domain for my name, my personal email address is at that domain, etc. About.me makes sense to me as a page to point that domain to (and I would... if I wasn't a web developer and somewhat expected to make that page its own portfolio-item.) It's effectively a business card, as a webpage. The personal equivalent of those trivial sites that restaurants and the like put up, which are just becoming Facebook Pages these days (boy is that a weirdly-clashing secondary use-case for Facebook.)
I'm guilty of doing it, too.
But who wants to make themselves look bad? To be fair, I do see occasional posts from people who are seemingly going through a perpetual rough time.
It is not an indication of your mental state or a diary.
Yes, I understand that I'm applying my own rules, and folks are free to use it for about anything. I'm trying to share the social way the site works.
As such, it actually has a function that many of both its supporters and detractors miss: it's a quick mental health check first thing in the morning. Are you able to interact in a positive way to people smiling? Do you have something light and funny to share? Can you just not be an asshole? If so, you might have a chance at being a decent human being today. If not -- might want to meditate, drink an extra cup of coffee, or whatnot.
What I'm seeing, especially with your item d, is people using Facebook to virtue signal and try to express themselves in writing -- people who may have never been used to doing this in their life. So it's rough going for them.
With a, b, and c, it can either be a sign of insecurity and competition or simply a way to share something innocuous and inoffensive. It depends on the pattern.
One thing I've noticed -- there are a lot of really nice, quiet people in life that have a pretty freaking nasty internal dialogue going on. Getting that out in the open is probably good for them. Sucks to be reading it, though.
YouTube did that how many years ago & it seems like Facebook would have at least the engineering capability to do that now.
I think you'd see a huge movement for them to do something like that if big movie companies were having their stuff ripped & uploaded, but since it mostly effects small players - it seems no one at FB really cares all that much :(
There is no proof of this, I'm sure a ContentID like system is prioritized or even is implemented. Ultimately if you're a legitimate content producer, having a system like this in place would only encourage you to use the platform and it would have a net benefit to usage overall.
If they show up among my friends' postings they're always pre-muted, so I miss the first couple seconds as they autoplay and have to run it back after unmuting.
Even if I wanted to watch videos, they're interspersed among all this social crap - I'm not in the mood when I'm really only looking to get an idea of what others are doing. Wish it were easy to filter content if you don't want to see everything.
Anyway, I hate Facebook as much as the next guy - but this seems like an obvious feature one would add, regardless of content sharing 'decline'.