Free software for gathering up your best Facebook content before quitting
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)