We're Thinking About Facebook Wrong 

I have noted whenever you name names, you haven't named Reddit. Just curious to know your stand on how Reddit is different (if it is) from facebook and is not usually involved in "major regulation issues". Love you videos though : )

You explained it very well. People want to feel superior.

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@@repellomuggletumify Horrible album by Ed Sheeran

@@MyBeautifulDarkTwistedFantasy6 well that's just like... Your opinion man

Same. I'm not complaining though!

@@nate.2.2 That comment really brought the room together, man. 😉

I love your content! 😊

Lol right? Loving it still

yes

hahahaha funny joke! the vlog brothers gave video essayists the blueprint to even be in this business in the first place.

@@notacaulkhead ...it was a joke

This is how postblocking worked, once you remove and replace the OG's of any solid viral meme movement it quickly gets snatched up by opportunists. The original audience was mostly leftist when polled. I don't think society will recover because the "wolves" of the system were killed off. You're left with conservative leaders who are basically rebrands from the same freakshow stockpile that leftists come from. Nobody used to actually believe in things like Q, that was all heavily mocked, but after 10 years of manually removing dissenters from your platform the mental average weakens to a point where people are helpless and begin to beg Facebook for even more manipulation/censorship etc. Truth is nobody on this earth has ever lived to explain why we're here or where we should go, and probably shouldn't.

Define alt-right and give me an example of those creators because I have only seen Conservative videos recommended, nothing outlandish.

​@@SilverHawk214 It depends on which sphere of RU-vid you enter. Alt right history channels exist, but I mostly disregard them and move on with my life. The vast majority suggested to me tend to be lefties, which is fine I guess. I think RU-vid does a bad job sometimes of pegging a person's political affiliation and it will recommend you channels based on that affiliation. Also worth mentioning, "left" and "right" are gross oversimplifications of the complex topic of politics. Everything is relative. Some moderate conservative views may be considered extream to someone on the left and vice versa simply because they have started out from two very different positions on the political spectrum. ie my alt-right isn't the same as your alt-right which isn't the same as a lefties alt-right. TBH the terms "right" and "left" are kinda BS anyway

Star wars is just space nazis

@@SilverHawk214 conservatism leads to the alt-right, especially on a place like RU-vid. Conservatism btw is bad itself

Exactly how I feel about Twitter

Yeah, as someone without social media, Its strange that people give these companies so much power over their lives

same

@@holihsredlumednil6847 people want connection with others? It’s not that mysterious lol. Sure you have to take the good with the bad but it’s not like Facebook is the only thing we engage with that has negative aspects.

@@holihsredlumednil6847 Not being on social media is practically impossible if you use the internet. The same exact things mentioned in the video happen here on RU-vid, and any other mainstream site with user generated content (unfortunately).

Thank you for appreciating it...John is going to hate it.

@@vlogbrothers yeah I can see that 😂

@@vlogbrothers which really makes it better :D

This is possibly a stupid question, but what does the p mean in this phrase?

@@loverlyrandom percent :) not a stupid question.

outrage is a much broader phenomenon than righteous superiority - he chose to focus on the most salient, dangerous thing that people tend to call "outrage"

@@GeekProdigyGuy yes. he’s very pragmatic that way. and i think that’s why he put that disclaimer before his statement

I really miss nuance in conversations. It's refreshing.

What "reality" is he not willing to ignore?

​@@larkohiya He mentions in the video that some regulations aimed at larger corporations may harm small businesses

@@ignacioaguirre9689 Well fucking said, king. 👑 Maybe we'll get back there, one day.

@@larkohiya paraphrasing-almost-quoting the video: regulations tend to benefit large incumbent businesses because regulations increase the barrier of entry

agree omg this was so good

this is basically a hankschannel video if you want more discussions like this

@@LewisFieldhouse I'm not sure if you're kidding, but in case you aren't this video is exempt from the 4 minute rule because it is an educational video

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he does look super good in it though 👀

Hopefully he isn't wearing pants though

My eyes kept fixating on when the cool texture of the jacket was in focus and when him moving around so much was too hard for his camera to keep up with. :P

I'd like to point out that people really don't need to do this anymore. Like, I'm sure it's still a calculation among the many tracked variables of what should be surfaced, but ultimately "Current" (as of this comment) RU-vid is primarily surfacing videos exactly like this, heavily favoring channels they trust with high subscriber counts, high view counts, and a history of reliability. The days of new channels growing from nothing to huge popularity are - at least for now - over, and therefore user interaction outside of passively watching a video is effectively meaningless right now.

Praise be the all mighty algorithm.

@@z-beeblebrox maybe but I don't know about that last part

@@icreatedanaccountforthis1852 praise be

Step 1: I click the video Step 2: I watch for an uncertain amount of time Step 3: it's 10 min later and I notice the more than 4:01 minutes passed

It's gonna take a bigger cup of coffee.

That'll be enough coffee to keep you up until the end of Pizzamas.

Me: "Ok, watch this chapter by chapter in the crevices of my morning routine"

@@Spiros219 ٩

I am being humble when I am telling you that I am the most powerful strongest coolest smartest most famous greatest funniest Y*uTub3r of all time! That's the reason I have multiple girlfriends and I show them off all the time! Bye bye mo

This video is incredible! People really need to think about this.

Last year it was Mr Delicious

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It's a Pizzamas miracle!

I mean that's essentially Tumblr.

Facebook is all about control, this whistleblower is fake and wants congress to give them more rights to manipulate/censor/postblock/thought police in the name of Blackrock-Finkian "wokeness".

it’s sad because there was a time when this was pretty much the case and now we are so far gone from it I remember chronological feeds and only seeing the content I specifically chose to like and follow and boy do I miss it // of course even then the “bad” stuff was always a looming search or accidental click into one off comment away but at least for the most part it was good

@@RoboticusMusicFacebook has no need to get congress to give them more rights, they can do all of those things already because the platform is their private property. It's not bound by the constitution and first amendment because it is not the US Government.

@@gemmapeter7173 There is a lot of gray area that they would like to have congress reinforce for the benefit of their internal goals.

These were all songs from my pre-show playlists for my book tour...I found the folder they were all in and was like "Oh, my work already done for me..." :-)

It seems like someone was trying really hard to get this video demonetized O.o

@@vlogbrothers The Surprise OK Go made my day better. Thank you!

Hearing Dragosta Din Tei really brought me back to orange-tinted webcams and flash games that you played while the actual entire flash animation loaded.

All of those are the band name except Dragostea Din Tei, which is the song title (Words of Love). The band is O-Zone.

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As soon as Hank described the righteous superiority thing, I instantly thought of the boom in "reality TV." People love watching dumpster fires to make themselves feel better about their lives.

@@M0rbidCuriositea Yes!! I did too!

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Too bad human brains put a lot more emphasis on remembering fear and negative emotion. So much easier to make people afraid than happy

Imagine no algorithmic manipulation, except people unironic communism-posting get instabanned for cringe. That's the perfect Facebook.

@@RoboticusMusic fascists suck too

​@@RoboticusMusic isn't Tumblr like that?

Aren't the video essayists normally doing more nuanced topics that require more setup? This seemed to me like a summary of things Hank has been saying for years.

I completely agree! I love video essays and most of my recent watch history is 30+ minute videos, but it's really nice to get such a concise video essay. I think brevity is a difficult skill that isn't easy to master but Hank seems to be good at everything (and also he talks very quickly lol)

@@anthonynorman7545 definitely. Something like this doesn’t replace video essayists at all.

I feel like Hank’s natural talking speed also helps with my terrible attention span, on top of how helpful and insightful it is

@@KatherineMackenzieSmith try watching videos with higher playback speed , you will never go back.

This suggests that librarians will be the vanguards of truth against the tide of misinformation in the modern world. And that's amazing. Thank you for sharing!

Wow I love knowing this. Totally unrelated to anything here, but, I keep running across this bizarre genre of fiction, written by authors who love the idea of being a booklover, and their main characters are librarians with cats and coffee mugs who self righteously save the world just so they can curl up in a cozy armchair with a book at the end.. and the genre's ~existence~ irks me sometimes. And I'm gladder than ever to know the self-obsessed, romanticized depiction of librarianism couldn't be farther from the truth 😅

Didn't know this! (re: info literacy training for librarians) What are ways you think we could utilize librarians more as a society? Do you see it more as tech companies hiring librarians as information literacy specialists for example? Or state governments creating "Departments of Information Literacy"?

I wouldn’t put anyone on a pedestal they didn’t ask for, we are lucky to have anyone willing to dive into genuine conversation, ready to hear disagreements and genuinely consider them. I am glad hank made this video, I put his example of genuine conversation on a pedestal because it is really nice to see

Suprised RU-vid hasn't verified your channel.

@@jesperhustad yo that's such a good point

No one thinks you're legit anymore bro.

Why is he not verified lmao

rolls eyes again.

That's how the internet changes lives.

Why am I not surprised to see you here? DFTBA

that TierZoo is here watching a vlogbrothers video affirms for me that my choice of entertainment and education content is correct

Hi Tierzoo, Love your content bruh.

Wait, how did I never know what that song was called. I only knew the early RU-vid Numa Numa guy's version...

Hahahaha excellent comment

Well and also they give it that much importance because in Hanks life it really is that important. That’s how he makes his living, so of course it seems paramount in importance to him.

Things don't receive attention until they're in the top 1% of both importance and novelty, otherwise we don't notice. Things just become normal

@@mzaite Yes that's definitely a very interesting point. My one question is whether Hank's opinion that social media wields an immense amount of power that goes overlooked more credible or less credible than the average person because he is a social media influencer for a living.

​@@kiwiboy1999 Most definitely. It is especially frustrating because most big world problems wouldn't become very severe if humanity gave them consistent attention from the moment we first discovered them.

True because I’m embarrassed for him as a well

Yeah but it describes it perfectly

From what I heard it was the people with the right knowledge and the people having access to the right servers locally, where not together. And explaining IT to someone without the right education over a phone is pure hell.

My understanding is that this is a bit of a disservice by making it sound like a foolish mistake, when in fact access to the relevant routers was intentionally split up as a security measure against people doing this intentionally.

Ah I've been there so many times in different ways.

@@bulbasa9r753 I didn't see the explanation as a foolish mistake I focused on the .. key is in the place but you can't get to the place without the key.. thing.

I know a platform like FB holds a lot of power and influence, but it's really not legit to compare it to a government. There's a plethora of competing platforms that one can walk away from FB at any time. They charge you nothing and are in reality desperately trying to get the eyeballs to stay glued. Over time, if people lose interest or they receive too much criticism, they have no power to make you participate (unlike governments). Yes, overall I think it's bad for people, but only in the sense that all social media has created a information barrage where many people are left not knowing who to trust, and the "establishment" institutions (governments, news outlets, etc.) are waging a war on this trust issue by asserting that the "legacy" media is the most (or only) trustworthy source.

@@danpro4519 No, I disagree. It's not exactly the same as a physical world government, but it hold many of the same powers. They have the power to enforce punishment within their borders, expel people from their borders, charge tax (personal data) to pay for shared goods (the platform infrastructure) where you would ordinarily apply the tragedy of the commons, and they have a structure that makes decisions about the province they govern (the company itself, it's employee structure, and investors). Furthermore, the "ability to walk away" is a total non-argument. How is that any different from saying "if you don't like your country you can move to another". In reality, that's a very arduous, and stressful experience that involves severing ties with many of the people you knew, and in a way that keeps us trapped on the platform. Most people I know only use FB as a messaging platform now, even though we hate it, because we can't all agree on a new place to migrate too, and it's difficult to keep track of who lives where. And on the note of trust, I can assure you that's not it. Old media is just as untrustworthy as new media a lot of the time. And many governments are corrupt. But I think it's only by recognising these things, as well as the near sovereignty of big social media companies over large portions of our lives, that we can begin to make positive change. What if the people who run Facebook or RU-vid or anywhere else were democratically elected not just by the shareholders, but by the employees, the content creators, and the users? What if we forced them to give up the profit motive and become a non-profit piece of internet infrastructure? A communal gathering place we can chose not to be exploited. There are lots of different options to what we currently have, but you need to know where you are on a map before you can work out how to get to where you're going.

@@danpro4519 Hard disagree. It's very comparable to a government. In fact, FB may very well be more powerful than actual governments, which is why it's banned or restricted in some countries.

Social media is here to stay whether we like it or not. The real dilemma is how we regulate it. Though I'm convinced that under capitalism, the profit motive will always push social media to promote fear and reactionary content to drive interaction and hold public attention. It's why so many people use Facebook as a news source and spread so much misinformation and alt-right propaganda.

@alex Barbosa Yeah I'm perfectly fine with social media as platforms for communities. It's the 'rogue corporate entities' part that scares me. Although as you said, it's hard to imagine how to fix the problem without entirely overhauling capitalism, which seems unlikely.

Oh man I didn't even think about that. Because the internet is a global forum. Right? So even decisions made regarding American companies on the internet might have a bigger impact globally than people realize.

Yes I wanted to know how Congress could legislate the internet when the internet is worldwide

Just informational imperialism. We’ve been doing it for decades.

I could see the EU make separate rules that are enforced 8n their area and China probably already has their own rules, but smaller countries will probably have to stick to bigger countries without any say.

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I guess that's one way to look at the notion of free will.

@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 or that our wills, free or not, are being energized by people who gleefully poise us to smash into one another

maybe WE were the Beyblades all along...

True blader spirit lmao

Doesn't a society require a set of shared culture? The problem is that with "social" media is that society has been fractured. I'm a professor. 25 years ago, I'd walk into a class and students would be talking with each other, creating a shared community. Anymore, they are all on their handheld electrical devices, each in their own worlds. The class is quiet. There is no sense of community--within the classroom (or without). For all the potential of social media, I can't see it as being really "social" in the end .... We humans need to actually engage as humans with each other again ... in person ... not virtually!

2022?

​@@waynehanley72 No not really. Most societies in the world are made up of a variety of cultures.

Agreed. I think as well, we all need to be thinking about what role these media/tech companies should play both in the world as well as in our own lives. Should they even still be classified as media companies or have they become something else entirely that will require a brand new category? Hank made a video sometime last year I think comparing social media to cigarettes and ever since then I've been mulling over which social media behaviors are actually acceptable. I feel like, especially based on what I've seen here, that a lot of us have started thinking about social media differently but I never quite know where to start with sorting this out because of course, here we are, having this conversation on social media

People seem to always forget that with social media WE are the product. And all corporations treat their products the same way. As a means to optimize profit. Sure it feels like you’re meaningfully interacting with other people, but really you’re just writing copy the Social media can use to honey trap eyes on ads.

@@mzaite This is why I think it's important to more meaningfully explore what social media _IS._ This is something else that Hank has mentioned before, and I think that our terminology around the Internet and ourselves is still woefully out-of-date and also inadequate to address the things that we actually experience by doing what we do on it. • It's not a "place" but it's closer to a physical location in more way than it isn't in terms of how people utilize it for meeting up and interacting with one another in a way that is agnostic of borders and distance. • Also, Internet & communication are something that are essentially the modern equivalent of mail in that sense. That's why it should almost certainly be considered an essential service for people to have access to. This is also why it starts to be more uncomfortable to realize what people in smaller Internet communities have known for a long time - someone else ultimately has power over your ability to interact with EVERYONE you _actually personally know_ on a platform if you have no secondary means to reach them by. For those two reasons alone, it's important look at how you can prioritize the needs of HUMANS for an environment and service like that over those of profit & corporate survival. Companies are essentially just like macro organisms that exist to sustain themselves, and by utilizing advertisement and profit-focused algorithms, it's basically creating an environment that can become an ecosystem that is psychologically predatory upon us in ways that we're designed not to recognize. THAT'S where regulation is important, because corporations as entities shouldn't have more power over people in that respect. We should never be creating environments where people are put into a psychologically manipulative set of circumstances for basic communication. If this was any smaller type of Internet community, you'd have scaled moderation staff exactly the way you do in physical communities. You're making sure that there is a chain of accountability. While a majority of that is done by bots, automation, and algorithms. This is where the most important factor comes into play, which is COST. What does it cost means what is the value in doing that. From a PROFIT standpoint, it's one that's not worth the investment, but from a human and psychological health standpoint, it's one where the cost of ensuring that those things are properly managed is imperative. The harder you lean on that, the more it pushes into the "money is an imaginary model of how to distribute a measure of trust between individuals who don't know each other for mutual exchanges of value" and it starts to poke into deeper problems of why there's a weird disconnect between the virtual and physical worlds and how they operate.

@@PierceArner thank you. I feel like this comment right here is exactly the way we need to be talking about this topic. honestly I like Hanks analogies for the "central powers" and what Facebook IS and so on. but I was having a hard time figuring out how to even approach the idea of how to regulate social media so that it can do all the good things it does, without so much of the bad, and maybe even more and new good things. and how to apply this sort of thing to the internet as a whole. your Imagery of a microbial ecosystem in regards to companies, people, and regulations seems to be exactly what I needed to better wrap my head around the idea. oh, you said "macro" not "micro", either way it helped me understand things better, and I think it's a useful way to conceptualize the issue and apply new ideas to it and hopefully have a more accurate understanding of how those new ideas might interact with and effect these systems.

@@PierceArner I think it’s important to differentiate Internet Communication vectors and “Social Media”. Social Media is the commodification of Internet Communication for the profit of the platform. It is NOT the Internet Communication itself.

That’s an incredibly optimistic way of putting it, and makes me feel way better after finishing this video terrified…even though I’ve never had Facebook

Iteration definitely helps improve and refine ideas. It is a little complicated though because it's mass human interaction so it might take a while. Personally I like Reddit being centered around communities and having a downvote button that actually does something. It's not perfect by any means but I like it better.

Seatbelts weren't offered as an option in cars until 1949. They were not popular with customers.

It's worth noting that all of the big social media sites, Facebook included, have changed a LOT since their inception. There are meaningful ways in which they haven't changed, and maybe should change to be better/more useful/etcetera, but they are already iterating internally. They are babies... And they are growing.

Honestly, I find the 'babies' point a bit weak by now. Were not the MySpaces and LiveJournals the babies? They were certainly smaller, like babies. Just because Facebook was a tiny college project that happened to blow up, doesn't make it nearly the first of it's kind. And not to get too super generalizing, but 'tech' moves fast, fast enough that we should have moved through the 'it sucks' phase (and in at least functionality, I think most people probably think Facebook sucks less than MySpace). It's often said legistation is like 20 or more years behind for 'the internet'... but 'adults' are rather more difficult to control than 'babies', so will it even be possible to catch up?

Why are you defending your masters thesis what does that mean

@@Shrekfromthehitmovieshrek After writing a masters thesis the candidate (me) has to present it to a board of faculty and explain the research, answer questions etc. They decide after that presentation if the thesis presents a substantial addition to the field and if so approve it, thus permitting me to graduate.

@@TaylorOlmstead Honest questions: Can a disapproval be appealed? Does the candidate have any resources at their disposal in that case? Or is a refusal to permit them to graduate final and permanent? What effects would this have on future employment prospects, etc.

@@dntskdnttll If they don't approve they usually want you to do revisions to get it into a version they've approved of

I think they're bad at it the way a toddler is bad at walking. Except we're looking at it having never seen a toddler...so it looks very impressive. The future will look back on now and they will say "They were so bad at that."

@@vlogbrothers Toddlers are really impressive, building a machine that learns to walk is *really* hard. Your point still stands, I just wanted to lift up toddlers.

@@Ugunark toddlers appreciate you 😌

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“I wish everyone could see this video” - ah, but they can. RU-vid hosts it for everyone to see. Who RU-vid _promotes_ it to is a different story...

I think a big part of the problem comes from how do we overcome the ‘superiority’ when its not really true or at minimum ‘misplaced’? I work in a role related to drug regulation. I have seen 1000’s of social media posts/movies/memes that are just nonsense, flat wrong, half truths etc in the last approx 18 months related to vaccines and drug regulation. The very sad outcome is after repeated exposure to so much of that, we have portions of society who are ‘anti-vaccine’ based on a pile of gibberish. While someone who really does have experience in a relating field is left shaking my head repeatedly… saying nope… not how that works at all!

Thank you, but this information is in the video description. :)

I recommend leech block add on for the computer browser, and there are apps for the phone that block your social media for a time period you choose

You're right...and in many cases they keep allowing it even though they know it's happening so...

@@vlogbrothers Silicon Valley made a fundamental mistake. They believed that all you need for a well-informed public is for everyone to have equal access to publish their ideas, and a way for people to forward the ones they like to their friends, and a "marketplace of ideas" will select the best. The mistake was that in addition to a wide variety of sources of information, to be well-informed the public needs information on how reliable each source is. That's what social media doesn't provide. It is always easier to make up lies and propaganda than to fact-check them, so fake news wins out over the truth.

agreed like the automobile market. sure it kills more people than most things and stops free pedestrian movement, but it also makes money! and it took a long time to get it from an epidemic of casualty to the more modern, manageable level of top-tier harm. so i’m definitely optimistic the chaos will decrease in the future and we’ll wonder how and why the internet became so ingrained in daily life 😀

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In my opinion, that's also indicative of a problem with another social media platform. Twitter encourages brevity, which discourages the kind of explanation that would have made this more understandable.

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Upton Sinclair

I get what you’re saying, but exponential growth of memes (meme in the sociological sense) absolutely can be controlled via recommendations. Those tweets only get shared because people see them. If those tweets never show up in someone’s feed, they can’t grow. So if Twitter decided that a given tweet should stop spreading, they could just remove its ability to show up on people’s news feed, making the only way to find the tweet visiting someone’s profile. Obviously that would have issues too, but growth can be halted to a point, and hot takes can be cut off from the world if we so desired.

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One of the great things about the human mind vs AI is that humans are still unable to discard everything that they are exposed to, good or bad. This 21-minute demonstrates the difference between a "new idea" or invention, and what can happen as the mind' continues to grow. The outcome is a kind of wisdom that includes continuing to ask questions and wandering down "what if" paths. MochaBloke, your comparison is apt!

I disagree. My friends are all people I know, so I don't have heaps of them, but my feed is still full of content that Facebook thinks I want to see.

...although it would open the can of worms of "what are normal emotional states". Maybe you could tweak your user preferences lol

Automation benefits the owners of automation. Facebook's "algorithm" isn't for you. It's for Zuck.

It would be nice and also terrifying!

But then they would make less money.

Why can't they just display everything in chronological order. They are promoting violence and cats because violence and cats are engaging, and they are responsible for that. I disagree that they are only responsible for that. If you paint a swastika on my wall to intimidate my neighbors it's my job to paint over it ASAP or I'm as bad as you.

@@rabbitwho So the reason we have laws like section 230 that give "safe harbor" for internet sites that host User Generated Content is because there is no way to catch every single instance of hate speech, porn, doxxing, etc. that random users may intentionally or unintentionally upload. No matter how diligent you are, you're not going to go 100% even if you are acting in good faith. On top of that, what counts as worthy of taking down is clearly subjective. In one society, religious imagery could be highly offensive and innocuous in another. I would absolutely LOVE to just get everything in reverse chronological order (newest at the top) but the reason we don't have that is that it makes more money to manipulate your attention. What Hank points out here is that if they did just give it to us in reverse chrono order, they could and should be able to continue to claim safe harbor BUT if they curate in any way, if they promote anything, if they change that order to push things that keep you scrolling, THEN they would be responsible like a publisher for what their users see. I feel like this is a practical compromise that gets at the heart of the actual problem: the perverse incentives engendered by using engagement as your primary metric.

It's 5:30 am here lmao but I'm awake cause of insomnia

@@sebastienvondoom8615 Yeah i’ve been there once… two days back. I’m still trying to fix my sleep schedule.

Same 😅