Least realistic New Year’s resolution ever: Fix Facebook in 365 days If the weekend’s excesses suggest that your New Year’s resolutions aren’t going to happen, spare a thought for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg because he’s given himself 365 days to fix The Social Network™. Zuck always gives himself annual challenges that he shares with the world. In the past he’s learned Mandarin, run a lot …
>>If you really want to fix Facebook... you first need to fix society...
+1 For this one. I can only give an anecdotal story in relation to this one.
Back in December, I'd decided that I'd had enough of the general narcissism, attention-seeking garbage that is FB's news feed and decided (without warning anyone else), that it was time to delete my account, so I filled in the deletion request so that the account was removed in time for the New Year.
(Here's a thing - why do you have to wait two weeks for the damn thing to be removed?)
As has previously been mentioned, Facebook is like digital crack. It's hard enough to remove the account in the first place, but various tricks are employed to stop the deletion - namely if you've ever had anything else linked to the account. Ping! It springs back into action - and you didn't even have to log in to the site to reactivate it.
So, finally, by the 2nd of January my account has gone, thank {$Deity}, but I'm now viewed by a lot of my friends/family as "the weird one" because I choose not to regularly spunk up my details of what I had for dinner last night for all to see.
When did society get so broken that we willingly invited surveillance into our lives and that not wanting it was "weird"?
Not weird, but sane and free-thinking
We recently rescued a stray cat (kitten really - only about 4 months old) and took her to the vets so that they could check to see if she was chipped (she wasn't - something we got rectified last weekend..).
The vet nurse suggested that we post about her on Facebook.. When I said that we didn't do Facebook she looked at us like we were serial axe murderers.
Bah humbug.
I do use a cellphone, just not a pseudo smart one.
My ~$40 feature phone has a working screen reader. It took a store manager less than 5 minutes to turn it on & get the phone to talk to me. The UI was intuitive, the voice clear & understandable, & I was able to do everything else by myself once they handed me the phone.
I've tried to get various "smart" phones to do the same job. They invariably cost 10x or more, take the manager 10+ minutes of fumbling, & never quite do the job right. So my $40 "dumb" phone is evidently way more intelligent than the $400 "smart" one.
What's the point? The fact that I can't run apps means I can't use one to visit FB. The fact that my phone doesn't have an internet connection nor a browser with which to surf it. The fact that the only storeage it has is on the SIM for the contact list, certainly not enough to save an app onto even if I could figure out how to get one there.
So when you say to tell them you don't have a cell phone, I get nearly as dazed & confused "Ungh?"'s when I tell folks that I've got a feature phone. "Sorry, no apps for me. My phone doesn't speak stupid."
*Cough*
It has other benefits as well. When some jerk sends me an SMS spam text with a URL to click, the message is wasted. I can't click the link, my phone wouldn't know what to do with it even if I could, so "www.ClaimsToBeFaceBook.RealDomain.not" just gets a chuckle before I delete the message entirely.
=-j
Here's a thing - why do you have to wait two weeks for the damn thing to be removed?
To be fair to FB (I feel guilty for writing that), as they replicate your data across various servers - some which don't keep their discs spun up all the time, it may take a while to go across all the servers and find & delete all your data. They may even actually over-write your old data to prevent recovery.
Of course, they could just be hoping you decide to cancel your deletion and remain connected to the collective
No, they don't remove your data - at least, not everything. It might be that they delete all your posts/photos etc, and just retain your connections - I can't be sure.
I deleted my old account a few years ago, and a couple of years (ish) created a new one with a different email address (which has remained unused until the start of this year*). Some time after doing that, I tried doing the same with the original email address as an experiment, and it offered to restore my old account. This was a while back now, so I can't remember the exact wording - it might have just been the connections. I didn't proceed in order to find out - that was as far as I wanted to take the experiment.
"Of course, they could just be hoping you decide to cancel your deletion and remain connected to the collective"
Yes, ^ this.
* A few family members have commented about me not using Facebook (and have given the impression they think I'm weird, like the poster further up). At least one thinks I'm a liar when I've said I don't use Facebook because he's seen the name crop up and doesn't understand "not having" and "not using" are two different things. So over Christmas I said that I will start using it again from this year, albeit very lightly (log-in occasionally, post something unimportant). And now that I have, all I can say is that I think it's even more awful now than it was a few years ago.
I deleted my account in 2011
They say that it will delete the data after 2 years
every 2 years since about the anniversary of that day I get the "someone tried unsuccessfully to log in to your FB account, please log in to confirm it was not you"
So they use fakery to never have to delete the data
Just block the people who post crap.
Funnily enough, I tried this on Twitter, and because obviously it'd take up one's entire life clicking on them all one at a time, I used custom filter lists to do it automatically.
I found that after a few hundred thousand blocks, the system breaks down; it stops blocking anything at all.
As a cynic I'm tempted to suspect that Twitter do it on purpose. They don't want users blocking other users on an industrial scale. Their ideal user is the one who just sits there slurping up anything that is barfed at them.
What he really means to say is he's given facebook 365 days to increase it's share in media companies to negate negative stories about facebook,
Lets face it you can't fix facebook it's broken, any attempt to do so will lose users so even if you wanted to you can't, if it was a horse it would be taken round back and shot.
Zuckerberg also wrote that encryption and cryptocurrency offer the chance for more decentralization, but said "they come with the risk of being harder to control."
Of course they're harder to control! The reason they exist is to be decentralized and avoid being 'controlled'. And now he simultaneously sees that as a risk, and he wants more decentralization?
Someone please punch him in his boneless face.
Zuck always gives himself annual challenges that he shares with the world. In the past he’s learned Mandarin, run a lot and built a home AI.
If I remember correctly, last year he challenged himself to "read five books".
I wonder how that went for him.
Janet and John build a web site.
...as well as giving web developers and app developers full access to users Facebook accounts through the Graph API to post comments or hijack web links to host scareware/adware/fraud using the users Facebook access tokens..
In fact, I'm having a real tough time trying to figure out just what Facebook would actually define as "misuse" of their tools?
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