With the new season of Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei nearly upon us, I decided Iâd pop into my Facebook group (Iâm still an admin) to see what had been happening. Iâve been there a few times this week and I have discovered some of the siteâs latest features.
Groups: these now have three posts. Thatâs it. Three. It doesnât matter how long they have been running, Facebook doesnât want you to be bothered by history or anything so stupid. Therefore, after the third post (fourth if youâve just posted something), youâve reached the end. Saves heaps on the server bills, since I guess theyâre not as rich as they would have us believe.
(This bug has been around for years but now itâs the norm, so maybe they eventually figured out it was a cost-saving feature.)
On groups: welcome to the end of Facebook. This is the last post.
Comments: donât be silly, you shouldnât be able to comment. This is a great way for Facebook to cut down on dialogue, because they can then just propagate nonsense before an election. We know where Zuckâs biases are, so they want to be a broadcaster and publisher. You can select the word âReplyâ in the reply box, you just canât type in it. (Again, an old bug, but it looks like itâs a feature. Iâm still able to like things, although on many previous occasions over the last decade or more that feature was blocked to me.)
Commenting: they let me have one reply, but replying to someone who has replied to you? Forget it, it’s impossible.
In the reply box, you can highlight ‘Reply’ but you can’t type in there. That would be too much to ask.
Notifications: these never load, had haven’t done for a long time. Remember the ad preferencesâ page? They donât load, either, so Facebook has now extended the âcircleâ to notifications. If you donât see notifications, you wonât need to continue a threadânot that you could, anyway, since they donât let you comment.
If you knew what your notifications were, you might stay longer and post stuff that makes sense. No, Facebook is for people who want to spread falsehoods among themselves. You have no place here.
Messages: why not roll out the same spinning circle here, too? They should never load, either, because, frankly, email is far more efficient and everyone should just give up on using Facebookâs messaging service.
Time to go back to email: if you were ever silly enough to rely on Facebook for messaging, then you’re out of luck.
I once thought that I encountered bugs on Facebook because I was a heavy user, but as I havenât even touched my wall since 2017, this cannot be the reason. I also used to say their databases were âshot to hellâ, which could be the case. And I still firmly believe I encounter errors because Iâm more observant than most people. Remember, as Zuckâs friend Donald Trump says, if you do more testing, youâll find more cases.
I’ve even found the “end” of Instagram, at the point where nothing will show any more.
The end of Instagram: when you can find the limit to the service.
No one’s posting much these days. In the early 2010s, there’d be no way I’d ever get to see the end of my friends’ updates.
Solution: donât use Facebook. And definitely don’t entrust them with your personal data, including your photosâeven if you trust them, they’ll potentially get lost. From what I can tell, the site’s increasing inability to cope suggests that its own technology might fail them before the US government even gets a chance to regulate! Andâthe above topics asideâit may be time to regulate Facebook and pull in the reins.
Whaddya know? Uploading an Instagram video with an Android 7-based phone is fine if itâs on a Chinese OS and not a western one. This was a bug I wrote about nearly two years ago, and I wasnât alone. Others had difficulties with their Android 7 phones with getting Instagram videos to play smoothly: the frame rate was incredibly poor. The general solution posted then was to upgrade to Android 8.
I never did that. Instead I would Bluetooth the files over to my old Meizu M2 Note (running Android 5), and upload to Instagram through that. It wasnât efficient, and soon afterwards I stopped. By 2020 I gave up Instagramming regularly altogether.
With my switch over to a Meizu Chinese OS (Flyme 8.0.0.0A, which on the M6 Note is still Android 7-based) earlier this week, I uploaded one video and it appears to be perfectly fine.
So all those who wrote on to Reddit and elsewhere with their Android 7 problems, this could be a solutionâthough I know it wonât appeal to those who arenât familiar with the Chinese language and would rather not get lost on their own phones. Those who managed to upgrade their OSs have likely already done so.
I donât particularly have it in for Google and Facebook. Iâm only pointing out the obvious: if you say your policy is x, or your product is y, then donât deliver us z. Put it into non-electronic terms: if you sell me a car and I put it into first gear, and it instead reverses, then I will complain. And if you look back through 11 years of critique, that is what lies at the foundation of every post about them. Medinge does Brands with a Conscience, Big Tech does Brands without a Conscience. Once they start being honest and levelling with people, then Iâll stop pointing out their hypocrisy.
Speaking of which, a Facebook user calling themselves Barbara Black has taken a photo of former Miss Universe New Zealand Tania Dawson, using Taniaâs photo as her profile pic and, of course, catfishing men. You know where this is going: despite numerous reports from Taniaâs friends since the D-Day anniversary, including multiple ones from me, nothing has been done. Facebook tells me that there has been no violation of their terms. Some have actually found it impossible to report the fake profile, as their screen fills up with gibberish.
Yet again itâs Facebook being on the side of the spammers, bots and phonies, as usual, because they have the potential to help their bottom line.
I can safely say that all my reports of fake or compromised accounts this year have resulted in no take-downs whatsoever, making it far, far worse than what I experienced in 2014 when I said that Facebook faced a bot âepidemicâ (I used that very word).
Very easy prediction for 2020: despite COVID-19, Facebook will have to remove more fake accounts than there are people on the planet. I reckon it has already happened but they wonât admit it. I just donât know when people will wake up to the fact that this dubious site isnât serving them, but at least the fakes have got to such a point now that everyday people recognize them: at some point, we will either know someone, or be that someone, who has been catfished or cloned. Iâve been off it for personal stuff for three years and have missed nowt.
Out of curiosity, why do people visit Autocade? We havenât had a big jump in visits with COVID-19 (contrary to some other motoring sites), as I imagine encyclopĂŠdias arenât as fun as, say, AROnline, where at least you can reminisce about the British motor industry that was, back in the day when Britain had a functioning government that seemed terrible at the time when no one could imagine how much worse it could get. Obviously we havenât had as many new models to record, but are they the reason people pop by? Or are the old models the reason? Or the coverage of the Chinese market, which few Anglophone sites seem to do? If you are an Autocade fan reading this, please feel free to let us know why in the comments.
One moan about Facebook. Go on.
Sometimes when I pop inâand that remains rarelyâand look at the Lucire fan page, Iâll spot an automated Tweet that has appeared courtesy of IFTTT. Itâs had, say, no views, or one view. I think, âSince there have been no real interactions with this bot entry, maybe I should delete it and feed it in manually, because surely Facebook would give something that has been entered directly on to its platform better organic reach than something that a bot has done?â
With that thought process, I delete it and enter the same thing in manually.
Except now, as has happened so many times before, the page preview is corruptedâFacebook adds letters to the end of the URL, corrupting it, so that the preview results in a 404. This is an old bug that goes back yearsâI spotted it when I used Facebook regularly, and that was before 2017. Itâs not every link but over the last few weeks there have been two. You then have to go and edit the text to ask people, âPlease donât click on the site preview because Facebook is incapable of providing the correct link.â Now youâre down some views because people think youâve linked a 404. Not everyoneâs going to read your explanation about Facebookâs incompetence. (Once again, this reminds me why some people say I encounter more bugs there than othersâI donât, but not everyone is observant.)
This series of events is entirely counterintuitive because it means that bot activity is prioritized over actual activity on Facebook. Bot activity is more accurate and links correctly. And so we come back to the old, old story I have told many times about Facebook and bots and how the platform is bot city. In 2014, I rang the alarm bells; and I was astonished that in 2019 Facebook claims it had to delete over 5,400 million bot accounts. You should have listened to me then, folksâunless, of course, bots are part of the growth strategy, and of course they are.
So, when feeding in links, remember this. Facebook: friendly to bots, not to humans. Itâs probably not a bad way to approach their site anyway.
Iâve looked at my May blogging stats going back a decade (left sidebar, for those on the desktop skin) and itâs always quieter. I blog less. I wonder why this is. The beginning of hibernation? The fact that less interesting stuffâs happening in late autumn as the seasons change?
This Pukerua Bay Tardis was the last thing I shot before the cellphone’s camera and gallery failed
First world problems: the cellphone. Right now my partner and I have half a phone each, so between us, we have one phone. She can receive calls on hers but no one can hear her answer. Mine no longer rings but you can hear me speak. So I guess the way to communicate with us, while there are no repairers within easy reach during Level 3, is to call her, we note down the number, and one of us calls you back on my phone. Oh, and neither of us can take photos any more: hers has had an issue with SD cards from quite early on, and mine developed an inability to function as a camera last week.
Iâm not that bothered, really. Iâve no real desire to get a new one and while itâs a shame to lose a very good camera, one wonders whether I should just get a camera. After all, those last longer than a mere 18 months âŠ
The fault on my Meizu M6 Note isnât easily explained. Iâve spotted similar errors online, solved by deleting the app cache or app data. That doesnât work for me. The camera crashes on opening, as does the downloadsâ folder. The gallery is a grey, translucent screen that does or doesnât crash eventually. The stock music and video apps cannot find anything, though the stock file manager and ES File Explorer tell me that everything is there, and the music and video files play.
Iâve not lost any important dataâIâve always backed up regularlyâand Iâve transferred everything off the SD card, including all SMSs and contacts, as well as photos.
PB (who sold my phone) says this is a software issue (avoiding a warranty claim) but Iâm sensing that the phone is crapping out whenever itâs trying to write to one of its disks. That sounds like hardware to me. I can transfer files via ES File Explorer but it crashes immediately after the transfer. It doesnât appear to be the SD card, as when I unmount it, it makes no difference.
Meizu has been useless: no forum answers and no customer-service answers, though I did contact them during the CCP Workersâ Day holiday and mainland China was, it appears, shut.
Iâd go back to my old phone but the only way to charge it is to drive to Johnsonville and ask the repair shop to charge itâthatâs been the only way since they repaired the screen last year. They claim they havenât altered the charging mechanism, but since no charger in this house works, not even a new one, I canât explain why this is. The techs there are mum because it would be giving away a trade secret, I suspect. It seems I need a special charger since the manufacturerâs one is no longer compatible, and, guess what? I bet you the repairer will sell me one at some ridiculous price.
But for now it is rather inconvenient, making me wonder: just why on earth do we need a cellphone anyway, when we have perfectly adequate land lines, when they become this much of a nuisance? They are frightfully expensive for little, fragile trinkets that I now increasingly use for just calling and not apps. There is no utility to a phone that can only be charged at one location, and there is no utility to the newer phone to which no one has posted a ready solution.
Last night, I reset the newer unit to factory settings, and, happily, none of the Google BS returned. Maybe it was software. I still canât do any updating with Meizuâs official patches, which is annoying. But for that brief, glorious period, I could take photos again. The camera, gallery and downloadsâ folder would open.
I did have to find, with some difficulty, the Chinese version of the Meizu app store, since I never saved the APK separately. This at least allowed me to get some of the Chinese apps not available on Meizuâs western app store. It was a shame to see some of the apps I once had no longer in the catalogue; presumably, the licence had expired.
And there I was, for about five or six hours reconfiguring everything, and Iâm now suspecting that I should not have put the thing into developer mode or downloaded Whatsapp. Those were the last things I did, content that all was well, before waking up this morning to find myself back to square one, with the bugs all returned. The log files tell me nothing other than Meizuâs servers not responding properly (theyâve been getting progressively worse supporting people outside China).
I never wanted Whatsapp but for one friend formerly in Germany, and one of Dadâs friends in Hong Kong. The former has moved back here and can be reached on Facebook, accessible via a basic browser. And sadly, I doubt I will hear much from the latter now that Dad has passed away. He knows my regular number anyway, and if I had a cellphone that rings, maybe he could call it.
Since Whatsapp and Instagram are owned by Facebook, it would not surprise me if both were becoming less and less compatible with Android v. 7, and Iâve charted Instagramâs increasing, Facebook-era faults on this blog before. If Facebook canât get its basics right on its flagship site, then why should I have their crap in my pocket?
Generally, I could live without it. Maybe tomorrow night Iâll give the reset another go. Iâve saved most of the APKs from this round, and it was a good opportunity to do without some apps that I seldom used. But I already lost a day to it earlier in the week, a night to it last night, and I face the prospect of more hours to come. These things are not productive when they take up this much time. And I donât like typing on tiny keyboards, I do absolutely zero work on them other than calls since it is impossible to compose a logical email (which you then have to somehow sync back to the desktop to maintain a full, professional record, wasting even more time), and they serve only a narrow range of purposes, photography being one. Iâm still quicker looking at a paper map than relying on a device.
However, I donât like faulty gadgets that have cost me hundreds of dollars, and since a reset solved the problems for a few hours, it might be worth one more shot to at least bring things closer to normal, useful or not. Letâs at least have that camera and music back.
Finally, a podcast (or is it a blogcast, since it’s on my blog?) where I’m not “reacting” to something that Olivia St Redfern has put on her Leisure Lounge series. Here are some musings about where we’re at, now we are at Level 3.
Some of my friends, especially my Natcoll students from 1999â2000, will tell you that I love doing impressions. They say Rory Bremner’s are shit hot and that mine are halfway there. It’s a regret that I haven’t been able to spring any of these on you. Don’t worry, I haven’t done any here. But one of these days âŠ
I know what youâre thinking. âDid he have six kids or only fiveâ. Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself.
A lot of the world’s population has come together in the fight against COVID-19. Except Facebook, of course, who is exploiting the virus for profit. Facebook has done well in the first quarter of 2020 with positive earnings. Freedom From Facebook & Google co-chairs Sarah Miller and David Segal note (the links are theirs): ‘Facebook has exploited a global pandemic to grow their monopoly and bottom line. Theyâve profited from ads boasting fake cures and harmful information, allowed ad targeting to âpseudoscienceâ audiences, permitted anti-stay-at-home protests to organize on the platform, and are now launching a COVID âData for Goodâ endeavour to harvest even more of our personal information.
âMake no mistake, Facebook having more of your data is never âgood”, nor will they just relinquish the collected data when the pandemicâs curve has been flattened. Rather, theyâll bank it and continue to profit from hyper-targeted ads for years to come.’
It’s been a few weeks (April 19 was my last post on this subject) since I last crunched these numbers but it does appear that overall, COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done are dropping, several countries excepting. Here is the source.
France 167,178 of 724,574 = 23·07%
UK 171,253 of 901,905 = 18·99%
Sweden 21,092 of 119,500 = 17·65%
USA 1,095,304 of 6,391,887 = 17·14%
Spain 239,639 of 1,455,306 = 16·47%
Singapore 17,101 of 143,919 = 11·88%
KSA 22,753 of 200,000 = 11·38%
Switzerland 29,586 of 266,200 = 11·11%
Italy 205,463 of 1,979,217 = 10·38%
Germany 163,009 of 2,547,052 = 6·40%
South Korea 10,774 of 623,069 = 1·73%
Australia 6,766 of 581,941 = 1·16%
New Zealand 1,479 of 139,898 = 1·06%
Taiwan 429 of 63,340 = 0·68%
Hong Kong 1,038 of 154,989 = 0·67%
Emmerdale fans will never forgive me. I’ve not been one to watch British soaps, finding them uninteresting. However, in this household, we have had Emmerdale on since it’s scheduled between TV1âs midday bulletin and the 1 p.m. government press conference on COVID-19, or, as some of us call it, The Ashley Bloomfield Show, named for our director-general of health who not only has to put up with all of this, but took a hit to one-fifth of his pay cheque. Naturally, one sings along to the Emmerdale theme, except I have no clue about its lyrics. Are there lyrics?
Never used to leave the TV on for #Emmerdale, but with #COVID19 I doâand like many, I sing along:
Who the hell cares what goes on at that farm? Donât really know who has come to some harm. Whatever you see, thereâs no cause for alarm, When we peer in the lives of Emmerdale.
Not a single like on Twitter or Mastodon. I’ve offended a heck of a lot of people.
We are supposedly at Level 3, which someone said was Level 4 (the full lockdown) with takeaways. However, we’ve gone from the 1960s-style near-empty motorways to this almost immediately.
My friend Richard MacManus wrote a great blog post in February on the passing of Clive James, and made this poignant observation: âBecause far from preserving our culture, the Web is at best forgetting it and at worst erasing it. As it turns out, a website is much more vulnerable than an Egyptian pyramid.â
The problem: search engines are biased to show us the latest stuff, so older items are being forgotten.
There are dead domains, of courseâeach time I pop by to our linksâ pages, I find Iâm deleting more than Iâm adding. I mean, who maintains linksâ pages these days, anyway? (Ours look mega-dated.) But the items we added in the 1990s and 2000s are vanishing and other than the Internet Archive, Richard notes its Wayback Machine is âincreasingly the only method of accessing past websites that have otherwise disappeared into the ether. Many old websites are now either 404 errors, or the domains have been snapped up by spammers searching for Google juice.â
His fear is that sites like Clive Jamesâs will be forgotten rather than preserved, and he has a point. As a collective, humanity seems to desire novelty: the newest car, the newest cellphone, and the newest news. Searching for a topic tends to bring up the newest references, since the modern web operates on the basis that history is bunk.
Thatâs a real shame as it means we donât get to understand our history as well as we should. Take this pandemic, for instance: are there lessons we could learn from MERS and SARS, or even the Great Plague of London in the 1660s? But a search is more likely to reveal stuff we already know or have recently come across in the media, like a sort of comfort blanket to assure us of our smartness. Itâs not just political views and personal biases that are getting bubbled, it seems human knowledge is, too.
Even Duck Duck Go, my preferred search engine, can be guilty of this, though a search I just made of the word pandemic shows it is better in providing relevance over novelty.
Showing results founded on their novelty actually makes the web less interesting because search engines fail to make it a place of discovery. If page after page reveals the latest, and the latest is often commodified news, then there is no point going to the second or third pages to find out more. Google takes great pride in detailing the date in the description, or â2 days agoâ or â1 day agoâ. But if search engines remained focused on relevance, then we may stumble on something we didnât know, and be better educated in the process.
Therefore, itâs possibly another area that Big Tech is getting wrong: itâs not just endangering democracy, but human intelligence. The biases I accused Google News and Facebook ofâviz.their preference for corporate mediaâbuild on the dumbing-down of the masses.
I may well be wrong: maybe people donât want to get smarter: Facebook tells us that folks just want a dopamine hit from approval, and maybe confirmation of our own limited knowledge gives us the same. âLook at how smart I am!â Or how about this collection?
Any expert will tell you that the best way to keep your traffic up is to generate more and more new content, and itâs easy to understand why: like a physical library, the old stuff is getting forgotten, buried, or evenâif they canât sell or give it awayâpulped.
Again, thereâs a massive opportunity here. A hypothetical new news aggregator can outdo Google News by spidering and rewarding independent media that break news, by giving them the best placementâas Google News used to do. That encourages independent media to do their job and opens the public up to new voices and viewpoints. And now a hypothetical new search engine could outdo Google by providing relevance over novelty, or at least getting the balance of the two right.
For a guy who gave up updating his own Facebook in 2017, and uses it just for work stuff, Iâm still amazed at how many bugs I come across.
Two days ago: discovered that you canât post links. The âPublishâ button is greyed out.
Yesterday: I wanted to tag one of our writers on Lucireâs Facebook page. Donât think it worked but the other thing that didnât work was the link preview. This is an old bug and I remember it from when I used Facebook regularly, so things must move really slowly there. You can post links againâsort of. Basically, the posted link and the link in the preview have different URLs. The one in the preview takes you to a 404: itâs the correct URL with the authorâs Christian name appended to it, to make it wrong. Iâm glad that for the most part, I leave this page to automationâitâs actually more accurate than going in there and posting directly into Facebook! You would think the opposite would be true.
What is good is that you can delete posts now, which you couldnât three weeks ago.
Today: theyâve got rid of the news feed, which is actually a good thing, but I know how others like it. I went in just before I wrote this post in case it was a fleeting bug this morning, but thereâs still no news feed.
Iâll might look again next week if work stuff comes up. Three visits like that, one or two a day, is anomalous for me these days. All these visits showed is that Facebook is no less buggier than it was half a decade ago, with pretty much the same bugs: regular failures in posting, linking, and displaying databased content. In fact, it may be worse as the whole thing appears to crumble under its own weight.
Not withstanding that I canât edit my advertising preferences on Facebookâthey took that ability away from me and a small group of users some time ago (and, like Twitter, they are dead wrong about what those preferences are)âI see they now lie about what ads Iâve seen and clicked on.
I can categorically say I have not seen an ad, much less clicked on an ad, for the US Embassy.
Itâs pretty hard for a person who doesnât use Facebook except for work to have clicked on any ads on their platform.
And as Iâve largely quit Instagram itâs highly unlikely I accidentally swiped and clicked on an ad there, too.
On the remote chance that I did, then it shows that either Facebookâs or the US Embassyâs targeting is appallingly bad since Iâm not American. I doubt that the US Embassy would have had such a wide market as to include me.
I theorize, and I do so with zero proof, that Facebook is so deep in its con to claim certain advertising reach numbers that itâs falsely attributing hits to random users across the site. These may have been hits done by botsâbots that it endorses, incidentallyâand now they want to pin them on legitimate people.
Itâs a hypothesis but given that Iâve been right about a few way-out ones (false user numbers, bot epidemics, malware downloads), Iâm going to advance it. Now letâs wait four years for this to blow up into something.
Above: The only way I can view my advertising preferences on Facebook is through the mobile version. But here they cannot be edited. (The web version won’t show them at all.) They are also quite wrong that these are my interests, but since when have they been right anyway?
