Several of my remaining Facebook friends have announced plans to leave the platform. They say that they are gradually deleting all of their old posts and that they can be reached via email(!).
For those who wish to preserve some of their best Facebook content in PDF form, Postclipper.com is a free service that allows users to select favorite Facebook postings into one or more books and, for each book, export a PDF version. (I was one of the authors of this software/service, along with Avni Khatri and John Morgan.)
We designed the software/service for people who were going to stay on Facebook, but wanted to segregate out content related to one child or one vacation. It turns out, however, that Postclipper is useful for people who are leaving Facebook.
Separately, can anyone tell me what Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday at the Senate? I didn’t tune in myself because it strikes me that the most serious problems with Facebook are right out in the open, e.g., that it turns people into junkies for news and political information that has no effect on their lives, or that it turns formerly fairly nice people into 24/7 hate/outrage-spewers. (ARPAnet and USENET discussion forums could degrade into flame wars, but the percentage of content that was devoted to hatred regarding abstract political phenomena was much smaller. So this is not a problem inherent to Internet.)
Finally, is there any reason for the average American to need news, other than the weather forecast, more than once per week? Or political information more than once every calendar quarter? Let me scan today’s nytimes.com:
- FBI wants to find out which women were paid to have sex with Donald Trump 10+ years ago and keep quiet about it
- Nigerian schoolgirls previously abducted by an Islamic group are now at a university
- The Law is Coming, Mr. Trump (editorial hatred from the nytimes)
- Paul Ryan is retiring (so people in his district will have to vote for someone else this fall)
- Walter Mondale says that we are ignoring the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (if we have been ignoring it for 50 years, why can’t we ignore it for up to one additional week?)
- The FBI is attacking Trump through the lawyer that paid off Stormy Daniels
- Trump is allegedly taking the bait on Syria (the government supposedly used chemical weapons there, which doesn’t make any obvious military sense (since the government has bombs, artillery, etc.), but it provides a perfect pretext for a U.S. invasion or similar)
- “Pro Cheerleaders Say Groping and Sexual Harassment Are Part of the Job” (photos suggest substantial age and gender discrimination by employers, but the nytimes is not upset by this; see also Family Law Issues for NFL Players, Child Support, Paternity & Prenups by Randall Kessler for a guide to the profitability of getting close to a football player)
- Ilyushin Il-76 plane crashes in Algeria
How would any of the readers have been worse off waiting until Sunday morning to learn about this? It is unfortunate that people died in the plane crash, but is any reader today going to hop on a plane to Algeria and try to help out?
How about the news that I got on Facebook today, highlighted by friends…
- a purported white supremacist died in his home bomb lab in Wisconsin
- “Zuckerberg made it clear he doesn’t care about users.” (over an article about Zuckerberg’s testimony)
- an article on how to tell if one’s information was shared with Cambridge Analytica (how would I behave differently if it had or had not?)
- Arizona cuts off college tuition subsidies for non-citizens (DREAMers can still go to college, but they have to pay the same tuition as, e.g., a citizen-resident of California)
- BP said that an oil spill off the coast of Australia would boost the local economy (probably true if we use the GDP measure; another good reason to get rid of GDP, which also goes up when citizens’ lives are degraded by population growth)
- “Elon Musk to the Young and Ambitious: Skills Matter More Than Degrees” (Inc.); see also Tesla’s recent recruiting effort at Harvard University
- a bunch of articles related to young American women who purported had sex with an old rich guy and/or the ensuing cash flow
I could have waited until Sunday for this stuff too.
Maybe Americans who want to be productive and happy need a firewall programmed so that social networking and news sites are available only on Sunday mornings?
Related:
- “Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook hearing was an utter sham” (by Zephyr Teachout)
- Why Facebook is so addictive: the Like button
- Facebook is bad for us (says the sociologist)
“most serious problems with Facebook are right out in the open, e.g., that it turns people into junkies for news and political information that has no effect on their lives, or that it turns formerly fairly nice people into 24/7 hate/outrage-spewers”
Says the guy who comments on his Facebook feed on an almost daily basis. Heh.
Grumpy: I never claimed to be more virtuous or self-disciplined than the next person (addict)! I would definitely pay Verizon $50 extra per month if they would block me from seeing news (including from Apple News and other news apps) or Facebook, either at home or on mobile, except Sunday mornings and maybe for a total of 5 minutes per weekday. (VZ is also our home FiOS provider.)
I still don’t have a (legitimate) Facebook account, know nothing about Twitter or Instagram, and don’t have a smartphone or TV. I read what’s published as news on four or five MSM news websites, at least until I consume whatever is offered as free.
Phil, I am pretty sure that you could yourself in short order knock off a chrome extension that blocked access to any user-created list of sites everyday except Sunday.
ZZAZZ3(apparently I am posting comments too quickly (twice in one month?))
The problem is that phil is about the only person who’d pay. Everyone else wants the features of facebook or twitter or whatever but nobody wants to pay to skip the advertorializing and data mining. Nobody wants to pay but everyone wants to live in 1997 internet privacy and politics-wise.
(Ok, I’d pay, but that takes us to .00000000001% of the internet, maybe).
Practical: I wouldn’t be paying to skip the data mining or to gain privacy, but just to prevent myself from wasting time.
ZZAZZ3: I want this across all devices and applications, not just Chrome on Windows.
A couple generations ago, network nightly news was only a half hour, plenty of time to cover important topics (vs. 24/7 bloviation CNN et. al provide now).
These days, I watch the intro to Seth Meyers. Just as informative, much more entertaining.
“it turns people into junkies for news and political information that has no effect on their lives” – right up there with the tenth rule for insight and truth. The new “opium of the people”.
Zuckerbot’s emotional processing unit was updated to version 7.1, but he still didn’t pass the Turing test.
Fun fact: “THE PENTAGON CANCELED its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a every person’s entire existence” … on 2004-02-04 … the exact date that Facebook was founded.
Obama says if you like your Facebook you can keep your Facebook!
This is not meant to be rude, but isn’t postclipper slurping up the kind of information on facebook that I want kept private?
By using postclipper to archive facebook, I am necessarily sharing that facebook data with a third (or fourth or fifth) party and trusting postclipper to be more responsible than facebook.
Why is postclipper more trustworthy than facebook? Isn’t it dumb to trust either?
I’ve tuned out of the news almost entirely, not just because much of it is unimportant to me, and run only to fill air time, but because I can’t trust much of it any more. Even if it’s factually correct, it’s being peddled with a cause, so as to be propaganda. Lots of really, really wealthy people are pulling the strings on this. I suppose they always were; we just know about it more clearly now.
You’re absolutely right about not needing to know any of this through the week. Probably not even on Sunday, either. This has got to be the first real-world use of AI. I want a service which will scan the entirety of the news feeds I want to track, and…
* Filter out the things that have no actual impact on my existence
* Bubble up the local stuff which might
* Limit the “scientific” and political posts to what I can tolerate
* Weight computer-industry items heavily
* Score each post with a reliability metric
Not only would I pay for that, if it worked well, it would be worth significantly more than a couple bucks a month to me.
Mememe: Your data, except for posting IDs, never leaves your desktop browser. Postclipper is mostly a massive JavaScript program that pulls stuff via the Facebook API. The PDF generation is also done within your browser. So the transfer of content, such as text and pictures, is the same as if you were doing the browsing yourself.
(When you “log in” to Postclipper with your Facebook credentials you are not giving Postclipper the ability to go surf around Facebook as you. Postclipper sends JavaScript down to your browser that makes use of your Facebook credentials. You don’t have to trust this code blindly because you can simply look at the JavaScript.)
I have an older repairable car and am becoming addicted to youtube mechanics, but they don’t push their content to me. Remarkable resources with just a little advertising, and the repair cost savings pay for my broadband (which is a time sink overall).
I have an older repairable car and am becoming addicted to youtube mechanics,
I’m always doing the same for boat repairs and home improvement & repair projects.
philg:
If I give postclipper my facebook credentials and post id’s, what’s to stop postclipper from generating an identical script to slurp up what the user is slurping?
You’re not “giving postclipper” the credentials. The credentials stay on your browser. So there is no way for the Postclipper server to transfer content from Facebook directly. If you are worried about what the Postclipper JavaScript actually does within your browser, as with other JavaScript downloads you can look at the JavaScript.
philg: I am curious whether protecting user privacy was a design consideration or a happy collateral effect of programming efficiency, but that is broadening the scope of this discussion
Thanks for the answers. They help sell the product and address privacy concerns clearly and forthrightly.
Now you just need to design a social media platform on the same principles to really disrupt the space. : p
Mememe: We probably should say something about it on our web site. This is kind of the standard way to use the Facebook API so we can’t take any credit for it.