(no subject)

[randomness]

There's a Wired article going around Facebook describing what happened when the author "liked" everything on his feed for 48 hours. It's silly, so I'm not going to link to it.

As one of my friends put it, "It's not actually an argument against using likes on facebook, it's an argument against using likes indiscriminately."

Garbage-in, garbage-out. I imagine one can create something pretty awful using Pandora, as well. But an article about that wouldn't get passed around as much.

Comments

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is GIGO. At the same time, it throws into relief an already present problem. Mike's feed turned into an unrelenting onslaught of outrage porn and he was not quite sure why. I think it is that he tried to engage with outrage-y posts to have intellectual discussion on the issue - which had the negative effect of showing him even more outrage porn.

I have tried to correct some misconceptions that my Fox-watching aunt has about politics (for example, that the Medicare "donut hole" is Obama's fault). It worked, but now I am shown lots of rage-inducing Fox stuff.

Both of these are examples in which Facebook mistakes engagement for interest, and turns up the volume on things you may not actually be all that interested in reading.

[merlinofchaos]

Facebook *does* have an "I don't want to see this" that might help hide some of the rage inducing stuff.