This week feels like a tipping point: the moment when general sentiment toward Facebook went from trending negative to overwhelmingly negative. Setting the stage: A year ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced a change to the algorithm orienting it toward "meaningful interactions" like content from friends and family. The change was bad for news publishers, burying their content, and it was good for any content that was shared or engaged with more often by non-publishers. What this has created is a place that is not only much angrier as outrage-inducing click-magnet content rises to the top but also more active: engagement has actually gone up since the change. Fast-forward a year: Now there's tangible proof that people literally use Facebook for hate, according to NeimanLab and NewsWhip.
The most shared story of the year is about a sex offender with a misleading headline making people think the story was local to them. The “angry” reaction (😡) dominates many pages. And FoxNews.com is far and away the top English-language publisher by engagement in 2019.
Instead of becoming a place for meaningful interactions Facebook seems to have become a place where people go to get angry. This reality became all too obvious this week when Facebook users insisted on uploading 1.5 million videos of the Christchurch mosque attacks. All this hate finally seems to have led to a collect sigh of relief when Facebook and Instagram were down for two days. Zuckerberg announced yet another pivot this month focussing on private conversations and Elizabeth Warren called for breaking up the company. But neither solution addresses the real problem: people may have been happier when Facebook and Instagram briefly just went away.
The binge never ends now
Operation Varsity Blues was binge entertainment for the desk rather than the living room, a season-long dump of content tailor-made for a moment when we have unlimited time on our hands to inhale content. It's definitely not the first. But something about the endless angles, bit characters, raw court materials, transcripts, intersecting cultural narratives and hot-button issues brought to mind the bottomlessness of Game of Thrones or any other streaming-era giant IP. In place of Netflix's auto-play function were push notifications and social metrics that nudged us to keep going deeper and deeper. All day we're all glued to platforms with incentives to keep us glued: at work, between work and home, in meetings. We can binge all day while still technically working.
The power of the not-now
What people are looking at: a somewhat obscure Twitter account that posts press photos from 90s and aughts movie premieres. We're not the first to document it, but what makes the account so refreshing and so popular is that it's hilariously asynchronous. We follow for the jarring effect of seeing something that is clearly not happening now but has the faces and the rituals of now. When every nanosecond brings another update from right now, these images feel like an interruption from the past.
Meet the working stiffs of power washing porn
What’s it like to discover a massive online audience celebrating the day job you experience tired and alone in the baking sun?
Feeling the Churn
Why Netflix Cancels Shows After A Couple Of Seasons & Why They Can’t Move To New Homes
Forget fake news stories. False text posts are getting massive engagement on Facebook.
It takes virtually no time for users to create text posts, yet they get massive engagement on Facebook. Why?
Happy Birthday, Isabella Stewart Gardner Heist!
19 years ago to the day, 13 works of art valued at a combined total of $500 million were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.