Hacker News Reader

Comment by dade_ | Hacker News Reader

It’s been over 7 years since I deleted my FB and I’ve never had Instagram. Their IP address scopes are blocked in my home. I do miss the now ancient FB, before they destroyed it with algos controlling what I got to see. That is when I got rid of it. Every so often someone will show me some hatred spewing diatribe someone in their family posted, and all the people piling on and I am happy being unaware. I get my quasi-news, conspiracy updates, and assurances that the world is about to end direct from Zerohedge.

View on HN

I can barely remember the old, authentic social media at this point. That legacy has been completely drowned out by how dark and angry the world has been made by a few monopolistic tech companies squeezing out market share, engagement, and profit at all costs.

It was beautiful. Chronological so you can see everything new with a quick scroll and not miss anything, and populated only with content posted by people you actually follow which in those days were only people you knew from real life. No influencers, no celebrities, no talking heads. Then came the brands and it all changed.

Authentic? I remember a lot of bragging and showboating and low quality (as in tabloid newspaper) content. It seemed to bring out the worst in people from pretty early on.

> a lot of bragging and showboating and low quality content

So basically a normal conversation between typical adults?

I guess expectations are (were) higher for written words :/

> I do miss the now ancient FB

Do you remember when the bottom had a quote "too close for missiles, I'm switching to guns"? My friends and I wondered what that ment for a long time.

It's a quote from the movie "Top Gun" if that helps.

Was it Facebook? I always remembered OkCupid as having that quote and a bunch of other 80s movie quotes.

Aside from being from Top Gun, what it refers to is a principle of fire control of being "danger close," meaning you or other friendlies are within the collateral damage radius of a weapon. When one fighter jet is close enough to an enemy that blowing it out of the sky might also blow themselves out of the sky, they switch to a less destructive weapon with a smaller collateral damage radius.

It's sort of interesting to think that something like this meant anything except early web 2.0 pioneers were largely xennials raised on Top Gun, Terminator, and John Hughes movies.

> I do miss the now ancient FB

I miss the "Random Play" interested in field. The modern incarnation is Facebook Dating which requires the mobile app, so I'll never use it. I also suspect they use the attributes to target ads (e.g. shirts for tall men if you fill out the height field).

+1 for the zerohedge comment.

A few months ago something happened over at Zerohedge.. The site became unviewable with JavaScript disabled so I stopped going to the site. But it looks like they’ve had a change of heart and can now be viewed with JavaScript disabled.

But it also seems like the content has changed from what it used to be.

Did they change ownership or is it just my imagination from taking a break from their site when it became dependent upon JavaScript?

I can't tell if you guys are being serious, Zerohedge is Infowars with a cnbc angle.

Yeah also deleted my account a long time ago and blocked their IPs. Now I just need to get rid of 90% of my code, which uses pytorch, react and react native...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com