Facebook

I don't have the timeline yet, but FB is definitely messed up for me today.

BTW, here's a Facebook peeve of mine for this morning. Picture it: I try to load my news feed. It stalls out in some broken way and only loads about 20 posts. I get to the bottom of those posts. Facebook (paraphrase): "Sorry, that's all the posts in your news feed. I guess you just don't have a lot of posts today. Hey, I have an idea, why don't you try making some more friends? Then you'd have lots of posts to read." FUCK YOU MARK ZUCKERBERG I HAVE PLENTY OF FRIENDS. Why don't YOU try fixing your goddamn website?

I am finding the transition to the Timeline really frustrating. I selected a cover photo, and thought everything related to my Timeline was private until next week, and yet a ton of people were able to "like" the photo, and did so, almost immediately. So I don't even know what is public anymore, because the "view as" is only displaying the Timeline. A friend said she only saw the photo, but who knows what others are seeing?

I am tempted to just go back and hide everything I've ever done, but dear lord, I am a prolific Facebooker, and I just don't feel like going through 8 years worth of content. I also get a little weirded out changing all the privacy settings; it's like I edited what happened at the time and if I was using the Timeline as a history of my online life, I kinda like the idea of keeping available who I made available to whom and when (WHOA, crazy sentence). I wish I could preserve all that and just make the VIEW of the Timeline available to me. I think what I hate is making this information much more easier for people to search, whereas it took tons and tons of scrolling before, and who would bother to do that? But now it servers it all up with a simple click.

But mostly, I'm annoyed I need to devote several days to going through everything, and it makes me tired. I mean, do I want to hide? Resize? Change who can see it? Delete? GAH, TOO MUCH.

Facebook is telling me again that this group is scheduled to be archived.

Fine, except "this group" that the notice is pasted to the top of is my news feed. Lord, Facebook.

Apparently setting a photo album as friends-only means your friend's friend can still comment on it. That's a little creepy. (Though at least it was a positive, innocuous comment, but still, weird.)

Yeah, I was weirded out by that too. It turns out that if you tag someone in a photo, they and all their friends can see it no matter what you have the privacy settings on the album set to (even if it's "only me"). I can see why the person themself should be able to see it, but it still bugs me that their friends can!

I knew they could see it, but I swear you used to be able to set it so they couldn't comment on it. In fact, I remember looking at photos friends of mine were tagged in and having no ability to comment or like them if I didn't know the person who posted them or it wasn't a public album.

One of my Facebook friends tried to text her husband a nude photo of herself standing in front of a mirror and accidentally posted it to Facebook. She caught it after about five minutes and pulled it down, replacing it with an apology for anyone who happened to see; good lord, how embarrassing. Don't text naked pictures of yourself, kids!

Ha! That is hilarious.

I've really come to loathe the "so-and-so read an article" feature on FB. Or maybe I've come to loathe the people who are severely over-estimating the interest I have in every single, mundane thing they read on the internet.

I get using it if it's something really interesting that you wanted to share, but more than one person on my list seems to click it for EVERYTHING they read in a day.

I know with any article linked to the "Washington Post Social Reader" it requires you to sign up for it to see the article. So you do it for the first one and then it automatically updates your news feed with every single article, without asking. They might not even notice it's doing that on their page.

Yeah, those Facebook news apps are the bane of my life. Most people seem NOT to understand (or care) that it's reposting every article. Sometimes I REALLY DON'T WANT TO KNOW which FAMILY MEMBERS are reading about "Fifty Celebs That Look Good Naked" (or whatever).

I get annoyed because I want to sometimes read the articles but I don't want crap posted on my wall about it. I think I signed up to have it not post, but who knows.

I will often click on what looks like an interesting article, only to encounter the "this is a social reader! you want to sign up for it! yay!" roadblock. I think with Washington Post it will let you read the article anyway if you say "cancel,"* but with Yahoo canceling just brings you back to Facebook. This sums it up pretty well for me.

I mean, that is like one step from those FB viruses that, when you click on someone's link, posts the same link to your page. How is it different if it's about some showbiz story instead of "dad catches daughter naked in bed, oh noes!" or some other kind of porny gross thing?

*at least I hope so...if I've inadvertently been spamming everyone's Facebook with Washington Post articles, let me know.

Haha, I love that Oatmeal comic, Instant Monkeys, and I feel the same way. I've noticed that allowing some of those apps makes your FB revert to the timeline version, and I quickly click away from those, because I refuse to get the timeline. They're going to have to force it on me.

I really wish you could set a filter for individual users so that you could see all of their posts except those about a certain topic. There are people on my friends list that I love and enjoy, and in order to keep loving and enjoying them, I have to studiously ignore their political posts. It seems to be getting worse every day with the buildup to the election.

I just want to get rid of all those "Like If You Hate Cancer/Think She's Beautiful!/Are Against Child Abuse! [picture of bloody kid]/If You See Jesus! [horrible photoshop of Jesus with angel]!" updates that take over my news feed when somebody goes on a "I'm so aware!" liking spree. I could get rid of all the likes/comments from others, but then I'd miss if someone decided to like a show/book/artist that I also like.

Please! Also, I don't care about the color of your Hacky Sack.

I wish I could get one woman on my friends list to stop entering her infant's picture in photo contests and then begging everyone she knows, multiple times per day, to vote for her kid. Yes, your child is cute, but no, I'm not voting.

I finally just defriended an old college roommate for just that. She was getting insane about it- the site that was having the contest listed the names of people that voted so she compared it to her friends list and sent messages to those who hadn't voted. All for getting some flower barrette clip named after her daughter. (The name was Alison! I'm pretty sure most brands already have a style or something named "Alison.") She didn't even get a free hair clip out of it! I did not get it. She did end up losing though, which I enjoyed a little too much.

I bet it wouldn't be hard to build some plug-in or app to block certain types of facebook posts. They already group posts together by themes on holidays, so it's got to be possible. Instead of seeing "17 friends mentioned Easter!" you could see "12 friends mentioned politics!" or "34 friends used the word 'vote'!" with an option to ignore. I wish I knew how to program.

Speaking as someone named Alison, I can tell you that most of that personalized stuff says Allison. A small, but important, distinction. Or, at least, it all did 25 years ago when I would have wanted something with my name on it. (On a side note, I started to type 10 years ago, then thought it was more like 15, then realized it was more like 25. I apparently got old at some point.)

Not that that justifies a nonsensical online contest or spamming your friends list, of course.

There's a new piece of nonsense floating around saying that if you post some "legal-eze" statement, anything you post is yours and the government or anyone else can't steal your stuff and yada yada yada. Even though you've signed up for Facebook, you can't change their privacy policy (much as everyone would like to do), so putting "All Rights Reserved" on your posts doesn't cover your butt from diddly.

I think this is fantastic in the way that I want to have some fun with it. I think I'll start posting the most mundane things I can think of and add "All Rights Reserved" to the end. "This burger could use more ketchup. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED."

OMG, person who is a first-generation American herself, shut up about illegal immigration. The gist of the thing she shared on her wall was that "Hey, in North Korea, you get shot if you cross the border illegaly, but in the US, you get a tax-free business for seven years (huh?)." Yes, let's all emulate North Korea! USA! USA!

Ugh, and on top of that, the right hand woman to the mean girl who tortured me in middle school just sent me a friend request. She went to my high school too, where we had little to do with each other, and she didn't even say hello to me at our reunion. I guess I'm supposed to be jealous that she got thin and is married with a baby?

Why am I on Facebook?

Any political point that boils down to "Be more like one of the worst regimes on the planet" is an utter failure on every level.

I've seen that picture posted by three different relatives of my husband.

Why do people keep reposting these stupid things? I'm getting sick of seeing them in my newsfeed. First Facebook tells me my friend commented on it, then that my friend 'liked' it, then that they shared it on their own wall! I get it already! Whether political, gender-related, or just a lame joke, the tone is always so self-congratulatory. And they're not even that clever, yet people act as if they're so smart and/or funny for reposting.