h a l f b a k e r yI like this idea, only I think it should be run by the government.
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Mehbook
Remove emotive content from the user interface of social networking | |
Other social networking sites are available. This would
be
one such, and it would use a red and green colour
scheme.
Yesterday one of my FB "friends" was becoming
distressed
at the lack of response she received from people when
she
attempts to communicate with them. I'm pretty sure
this
is down to a combination of craving attention and not
understanding the algorithm which seems to hide
people's
statuses. Another factor is the fact that we're
encouraged
to call contacts on FB "friends" and consider ourselves to
"like" statuses and comments. This is all well and good
but
clearly it does tend to upset people sometimes. I
personally suspect our brains did not evolve under
selective
pressure to participate in online social networking, at
least
specifically, and that it may in fact be organically
impossible to interact authentically more than somewhat
using such media.
Consequently, I suggest a more emotionally neutral
social
networking service. You don't have "friends" but
"contacts".
You don't "like" statuses or comments, just "note" them.
There are no images. In fact, this could just be
Ponyhoof
but much less fancy, more or less.
So yeah, a Ponyhoof-type interface to FB which makes it
a
whole lot more phlegmatic. This could've been Google
Plus were it not for the fact that Google cocked it up by
pushing it in people's faces, so there you go, we need
something else.
[link]
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It should be called 'MehBook', as in "Ooh,
nineteenthly just 'casual acquaintanced' me on
MehBook!" |
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Right, well for that I'm changing the title! |
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It depends on how much they bleed into each other, which
is partly generational. Even so, that is a factor [Ian]. |
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I have no truck with social media - the HB is about as social as I want to get. |
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Howevertheless, I suspect that (as [19thly] mentioned), a lot of the problem stems from the "Like" button, the "Kudos" button on various fora, and potentially even our very own bun/bone button. What kind of person considers it meaningful to "like" or be "liked", a la Facebook? |
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I expect any day to overhear a conversation along the lines of "I liked the way you presented the sales figures this morning." "Oh shit! I didn't mean to even post them!" |
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In MehBook, the 'like' button will be replaced with a
'grudgingly acknowledge the existence of' button. |
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There's a whole definition thing going on here. If friends
are defined as people you like, FB friends are people you FB
like, which is not really liking, as in "My baby just died" -
<like>. |
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//organically impossible to interact authentically more than somewhat// |
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Authenticity in this sense is over-rated ... if it's the sense I think it is, which it may not be. |
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That's quite possible but there's still the problem of mistaking
something else for it. |
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Isn't what's described already exist in the form of LinkedIn? Certain peculiarities of appearance aside. LinkedIn is the social network no one has any desire to participate in, where any liking or sharing is motivated not by a shared feeling or a need for petty self expression but instead because each represents a penny-fraction transaction, a marginal contribution to your own financial comfort, of even more negligible utility to those of your colleagues and prospective colleagues likewise staring at their phones, at the everscrolling list of besuited corporate desperate. Yes, each click is, I have calculated it, worth exactly one forty billionth of whatever passes for the smallest coinage in your jurisdiction, being not entirely coincidentally the base economic value of one meh. |
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[+] for an interesting idea I may have just ruined. |
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