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thebaffler.com

102 pointskyledrake33 comments

I agree broadly and admire in particular the author's application of Frederic Jameson, but feel I must speak in favour of the Facebook groups function, which, yes, even though it exists on Facebook, seems to have allowed all kinds of weird communities to spring up in a way they might not have otherwise. Like the group "famtastic lomgbois amd where to fimd them", which is dedicated to long things, and where 'n' is considered a banned glyph because it is short, and 'm' is long (or as the members would say, LOMG). [Edit: what I mean is that it's not all groups mocking boomers or digital nonnatives. The infamous NUMTOTS is another example of a vibrant fb-only community, and it has a whole series of spinoff groups for different subjects].

Regarding platforms in general, lately I have caught myself thinking of these platforms (FB and the gram in particular) as essentially shopping malls: fine if you follow the rules, maybe some pretty things to look at, but a bit boring. Everybody knows it's more fun to do stuff in the mall that you aren't really supposed to do, and those are usually the most interesting uses of these platforms from an analytical standpoint. Like the person who has obsessively collected all the leaked songs from a rapper's upcoming album, scraping them off YouTube, then circumvented copyright strikes by hosting them on Spotify as a "podcast", each 'episode' a song. Then no one who wants to hear those leaks has to dig around for MP3s or sift through youtube uploads that are often mislabelled as new releases so that the uploader can try to increase views. The "podcast" gets taken down every week or so, but always pops up again.

More "interesting" uses of these platforms: Groups dedicated to tracking the locations of police DUI checkpoints, people selling drugs through Snapchat, etc. Air traffic controller meme groups. People find previously unimagined uses for even the most boring and soulsucky platforms.

Before FB, there were niche, interesting, though a bit more local - language barriers - communities around interesting topics. Most of them dried or died out specifically because of Facebook - I can point at quite a lot of Hungarian forums and community sites that went silent around 2009-2010.

UX wise Facebook groups are abysmal compared to old style forums: they are very hard to search, to follow threads, everything is thrown in at one pile of things where something "magical" decides priority, and most comments are hidden behind "more...".

It also has fairly strict policy on acceptable topics.

Apart from all those problems, I also have the issue with FB is all-on-one. I firmly believe that most Europeans have work (colleagues and/or professional life), outside of work (family, generic friends), and private personas (very close friends, spouse, etc) - I don't know about the rest of the world. FB wants to merge these. I have no desire to accidentally mix my private persona with my professional one in case I forgot to set a post on a niche community private, or because FB suddenly changed something and reset the setting. This also applies for the visuals: everything looks the same. I want my communities/niches to look different. Cyberpunk doesn't go well with black text on white background.

I think you're on the right track with the mall parallel, but it may go even further: social media is high street stores. And it's killing specialist business.

but feel I must speak in favour of the Facebook groups function, which, yes, even though it exists on Facebook, seems to have allowed all kinds of weird communities to spring up in a way they might not have otherwise.

But they probably would have. If not on newsgroups or mailing lists or webrings or forums, then on a hypothetical, less malicious social media platform. Somewhere where the data could be preserved, sorted, filtered, and indexed by search engines.

That there is interesting information on Facebook is an argument against it, not for it, because Facebook is a prison for data and all its prisoners will eventually be executed when the warden deems them no longer worthy of life.

>If not on newsgroups or mailing lists or webrings or forums, then on a hypothetical, less malicious social media platform.

this is the dream, of course. I totally agree. I suppose what I was trying to express was that I think the specific boring ubiquity of FB is what caused these groups to grow and flourish. I can imagine an urbanism group growing on a phpbb board or community of blogs and eventually getting high-traffic and powerful, with its own set of memes etc, but the hyperniche-ing of groups (the lomgboi example) seems to be a feature of FB groups because it isn't something most people would bother to take part in if it weren't already there, in the mall. FWIW i consider reddit part of the mall too, because apart from the weirdo small subreddits I find it alienating in a community sense, since I literally grew up on phpbb boards with avatars and threads, where you were able to recognise and come to know certain regular posters within a week or two.

Stopped reading this article at the second popover. Why are so many web authors so willing to compromise their writing with this nonsense?

I'm already happy not half the page is ads on this one, but yes you get ripped right out of reading and it instantly comes off as a cheap site.

What popover? Are you not using uBlock Origin/uMatrix for some reason?

It's a subscribe popover so it doesn't count as an ad. I'm running uBlock and it didn't catch it.

Maybe give uMatrix a try, I didn't see a thing!

I use uMatrix but honestly it is not the solution if you want to “just read.” Things are broken and often I need to spend a few minutes setting a site up before it works.

Also the fact that I can’t block individual scripts (can I?) is a little irritating because often I just need one of the 50 scripts loading from a 3rd party domain to render the page but all of them load and execute.

You should be able to allow certain scripts (I think you have to go into the addon's preference page though).

uMatrix is specifically designed and optimized to work on domains. The rules syntax is:

    source hostname {white spaces} destination hostname {white spaces} [request type {white spaces} [action]]

Popover=need to scale. Can websites rlly ‘be cultural hubs’ when their ultimate goal is 2 scale at all costs?Do we rlly ‘trust’ websites that primarily exist 2 scale? Do we like businesses that only rlly want to scale and don’t actually care abt their customers?

Why do we ‘celebrate’ scalable ideas? Do ideas that are ‘scalable’ represent the optimal solutions 4 human existence? Or are they the businesses that have the most successful scalable ideas eventually oppress us by marginalizing necessary human actions into metrics & monetizable opportunities?

Not an answer to why it happens, but for any longform text like this, I find that reader mode almost always provides a better reading experience.

I highly doubt the author gets any say in the matter.

I only got the one popover (which browser are you using?) and there are plenty of sites with worse dark patterns.

> there are plenty of sites with worse dark patterns

Great argument...

They can't afford to quit their job over popovers when most of the ad money in their industry goes to Facebook and Google rather than content creators bc of the tech companies' reach and the massive amounts of data they have about everybody?

If you are using Firefox, press F9 on the article.

It’s not the writers, it’s the private equity. See: the recent demise of deadspin.

I also long for the ugly web (for the lack of a better term), and think about it a lot. I often wonder how much of my ego and/or attachment for being an individual is the foundation of this sentiment.

As a developer, I even see this echoing through the tech evolution of web development (inaccessible SPAs which take 4 seconds to load and where you can't effectively use tabs, a sea of popovers and overlays, etc.).

Surely, there will be niche places where this ideology remains (and those communities will become stronger, as a result), but maybe the fact that the ugly web is no longer the only web makes us early internet pioneers feel less special.

Reading this made me feel really old.

>I’m a digital native, older than most.

>The first time I can remember logging on to the net was around 1998, when I was five years old.

>the rise of Facebook in early high school, Instagram in late high school

I'd also consider myself a Digital Native, however I'm in my 30's.

I find it amusing that the author wrote an article about how they miss the internet of the 90s while at the same time acknowledging that they were 5 in 1998...

Coming here literally to talk about this.

The youthfulness of the article is adorable albeit a little naieve.

Maybe we are getting old. I still feel like a kid and there are many greybeards that were born of the digital revolution that are "older than most."

It is funny how people think the Internet started in 1995. I was using the Arpanet for email in 1980. And my colleagues had been using it for several years at that time.

I lived through the entire 90s and I'm not sure I actually remember using the internet at all in that timeframe. The earliest I can definitively pin my internet usage is 2000 or 2001, and the warm, fuzzy nostalgia period I remember is finding and playing online Flash games in the 2001-2004-ish time frame.

Of course, until we got broadband internet (mid-noughts), connecting to the internet was rather more annoying, and as such, computer time was mostly playing local computer games instead of browsing the internet.

I wonder whether this article will be indexed by search engines.

I has open graph metadata, works with cURL and is WordPress based. Why wouldn't it be indexed?

Internet culture is always changing. A devoted core of people is doing something cool, new people come in who are just there for the scene, finally (in the cases discussed in the article) business interests co-opt it and it becomes sterile. This is described in the article geeks, mops, and sociopaths, if you're interested.

I liken fb to reality TV. Everyone can be a star. Like Warhol said.

Twitter is pushing some weird buttons. I think it attracts narcissists, and gets people hooked-up on their own chemistry. I've always had a really low opinion of twitter users.

Missing old shit is death. Just start making the things you care about or are interested in.

It would have been more interesting without the constant injection of the author's political opinion: capitalism bad, Marxism good, neoliberalism bad (not to mention the gratuitous reference to the orange man)

Making things sterile doesn't make them more interesting.

Nor does embedding immature political statements in them though...

Sorry buddy, there's a marketplace for ideas, and this is what sells.

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