Comment by avgDev
14 hours ago
It is crazy to me that a lot of towns have literally switched to engaging people on FB. Not only are they at mercy of FB, but there are a lot of insane people on FB. Often people who are not even members of the community comment and see those posts. Towns can't delete comments.
I cannot wait until this whole FB trends ends. I want RSS feeds or blogs. Businesses should have their own basic websites that serve their needs.
I work in wildland firefighting.
Those comments you mentioned are a bit of a problem. Whenever admin complains about them I always say, "You're using Facebook. What do you expect? Only retired people, idiots, and bots are on there."
They never seem to understand what I'm talking about because, unfortunately, most of the folks in wildfire admin are 50+ years old
> Not only are they at mercy of FB, but there are a lot of insane people on FB.
A fair number - not all - I am convinced are foreign trolls, or bots. There's something which just feels a bit different from a normal partisan, and the kinds of folks who invade every regional (town, county, etc.) group and post nonstop partisan dreck. Their profiles are off in some way, and the hours they are posting are all over the map.
FB does have the "big tent" thing going on, where they wanted to become the tool for every possible organizing principle. So you do get some of the legitimately most wacky people on the internet as well.
Is it possible that these are real people who are unwell? I can imagine a situation where users who spend a lot of time (like, to an obsessive degree) viewing and commenting on regional content start getting recommendations for more similar posts, regardless of whether it's local to them not. If there's enough users like this - and I'm sure there are - Facebook might even start treating them as a demographic, effectively creating a sort of self-organizing trolling group.
I'm sure some are like you describe.
But what I keep seeing is stuff like this:
An account which seems like it was a normal account for like 10 years. Maybe it leans a bit in the direction of the content it is currently posting. But, it was mostly dormant for a few years. Then, it started posting a high volume of partisan content. It otherwise seems to be a real person, just it one day started posting hardcore partisan materials all over the regional groups (usually multiple). It's fishy.
Another one: An account which superficially seems to be a real account, except that it's got a generic enough name you can't pin down which person with that name it might be. Nothing about their profile identifies them as anyone in particular. They may have a lot of friends, but they don't appear to be people who know them IRL - just randos. Their profile feed is a mix of normal stuff and partisan stuff. What they post to groups is 100% hardcore partisan stuff. Their profile is very light on photos of themself, and always kind of low quality. There's never a photo of a place you can pin down to a real location. These don't tend to be accounts that have been around more than a year or three. Again, it's fishy.
Like I mentioned, in both cases, you'll see the accounts posting at odd hours for where they supposedly live.
They could be real people, or sophisticated trolling operations. TBH, the reason I lean more towards the latter is because Facebook is so goddamned lax about any kind of enforcement. Do I think someone could set up a bunch of fake profiles and operate them for years, all from the same Chinese or Russian IP address with locations all in the US, and Facebook would never ban them despite the accounts getting flagged? Yes, that is extremely easy to believe. If it drives engagement (and troll accounts do!), it's likely to be allowed to continue.
I'd be the happiest man on the internet for a split second if someone who works for Meta tromps on in here with a burner account and tells me I'm being an idiot, that they're fighting hard against troll armies and bots, that it's just a super hard problem because the troll/bot networks are so sophisticated. Hasn't happened yet.
Most all recommendation algorithms definitely do not care about locality of reference.
If I watch some local-to-me news stories about libraries, the algorithm decides that I like news about libraries, and begins to suggest library-related videos from all over the USA. It does not care that I only cared about libraries in Phoenix and San Diego.
Likewise, there is this one English teacher who is absolutely gorgeous and I only watch her videos to see her talk. But of course, YouTube got the idea that I like English instructional videos from anyone, anywhere, and the algorithm slowly fills my feed with videos from instructors who are not the lady I like. It's crazy, I tell ya.
I'm not on FB anymore. But when I was, I got interested in Irish topics, and it was often family research-related, and so I'd be studying some esoteric topic in a very small town in a specific county of Ireland, and of course, the recommendation engine would blossom with completely irrelevant Pages and Groups from every corner of the Republic, for no reason except to bait me into engagement.
And that's all it is, engagement bait. They on the other side of the algorithm, they know for sure that you don't actually care about those topics or locations. But they are simply trying to dangle stuff in front of you like a largemouth bass, and eventually something will enrage you or you'll need to correct someone's spelling, or make an angry face emoji on a post, and then they have your engagement, and that's all they really wanted from you.
Not to inform you, or entertain you, but to engage your shit until you absolutely lose your temper. That's what they want on social media.
1 reply →
This may not be the best place for this, but I run forth.news -- we publish primary sources, like releases/alerts from governments. (IPAWS -- the emergency alert system -- for example, is here: https://www.forth.news/lists/ipaws)
If there are PIOs/PAOs here who are looking for a new place to share alerts (for free), I'd love to chat. Our audience is growing quickly, and we can be a replacement for Facebook/Twitter/any other site making it more difficult for constituents to read alerts.
jared (at) forth (dot) news
I'm no fan of FB, but the problem is deeper than FB. If FB vanishes overnight, some other service will take its place, and the same people who posted on FB will post on whatever the new website/service is.
Yes, it would be nice if FB fades into obscurity. But what would be nicer is if people had some basic decency and responsibility (everyone, me included) before posting clickbaity, flammable, junk stuff. I have no clue how to achieve this, but the internet used to be a fun place (for learning, niche topics/ideas etc) - those days are gone, and it sucks
Nextdoor is a platform meant to connect communities and services.
It's as bad as Facebook - and even sadder in that you know the folks are truly local, and still just as awful.
Are our only options truly old-school, disconnected approaches versus wading through trolls in a hyper-connected world?
Surely there's something else, and maybe it has nothing to do with tech as we know it.
Nextdoor is one of the most depressing social media sites I've ever seen. It's even more depressing than Facebook, if that's possible. It's a platform that seems to be built on the paranoia of lonely, socially isolated people.
It’s slowing changing though
My friend groups are all moving to Partiful to plan events for example because so many of us are getting off Facebook
Not the same as town level engagement obviously, but a sign the audience is moving
Some previous discussion on Partiful and its Palantir ties:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01482...
Also all those data promises go out the window as soon as they are acquired. Then it's Privacy Policy updates with retroactive addendums. Would be very surprised if that wasn't the ultimate goal.
It's kinda crazy that Partiful existed for over 7 years, has series A funding, and yet is completely free.
It's not crazy at all if its monetization plan is to get bought for all the data it has.
Is it? Its a glorified ECard service. The entire thing could run on a single machine.
1 reply →
AT Proto has a chance to really help here, so that governments and other orgs and publish structured content like posts and events, and have them indexed and distributed through all kinds of AT Proto services and apps, including, but not limited to Bluesky.
I hope to see turnkey organization oriented PDSes that let an admin management multiple accounts, and also host web pages with the same content that's distributed on network. Then gov posts has a web home and can be subscribed to in AT Proto apps.
Sharecropping is bad for sharecroppers, what a surprise.
Where did the town engage online before FB groups?
Towns would just have their own News/Events sections. I don't think FB is the right place for it.
>Towns can't delete comments.
Ehhh, good? Should you be able to remove my comment here just because it's a child of yours?
On official announcements from a municipal government? Yes. Imagine a scenario like...
Foo Town: boil water advisory for Tuesday. The water department has noted a risk of harmful pathogens in tap water and recommends boiling water for 2 minutes before consumption all day Tuesday.
Commenter: It's all those [racial slur]s shitting in the reservoir. If that [expletive] police chief doesn't run them out of town, we're going to have to round them up and shoot them!
Assume the commenter has done this enough times to figure out what the platform's moderation will catch and what it won't. The town would probably like to be able to do some additional moderation.
That goes against Facebook policies and the account would get banned. Not to mention that’s a gigantic strawman.
4 replies →
> Not only are they at mercy of FB, but there are a lot of insane people on FB. Often people who are not even members of the community comment and see those posts. Towns can't delete comments.
It was extraordinarily telling when Nazi musk showed country flags to IP on shitter. The amount of astroturfing happening to local discussions is terrible. And who is doing this? Countries where 1$ is a day's or 2 days propaganda wages.
And my community is one of those "only facebook" government messaging areas. And what do they get? 1/2 are real locals, the other half who knows. But what I do know, is that they smell like AI created profiles, and primed for propaganda.
I recently signed up to NextDoor, since I'm not even on FB anymore.
Not that NextDoor is any less toxic or useful, but your hyperlocal government agencies may be signed up there, as well. NextDoor has a dedicated "Public Agencies" tab/feed where you can ignore all the hoi polloi, if you so wish.
Many "real accounts" on NextDoor actually disclose their home neighborhood, although I have no idea if/how they filter out the liars and impostors and bots.