Go a bit further to this link, and there they are, nearly 500 preferences linked to me, compiled even though I had opted out of personalizationāmaking Twitter just as bad as Facebook.
What do I do? Exactly what I did on Facebook: I deselected each and every single one. Twitter doesnāt need this to market to me. Frankly itās enough that it has my IP address and it can geo-target. It doesnāt need any more precision than that. I get to the bottom of the page, having done them all:
And just like Facebook, within hours it has reselected over 400 of them, repopulating preferences and overriding what the user wants.
In fact, some were being reselected within seconds, but I put that down to the fact I was using a cellphone. As of this writing, the second deselections have been done on the desktop.
This is simply not right, but we have been seeing signs in the latter part of the 2010s that Twitter is as bad as Facebook, with its love of bots, bigotry and its mass censorship. Now itās as devoted to selling its users as the rest of Big Tech. The net result is Iāll begin limiting my time on Twitter because its privacy intrusion has gone too far. It cannot be trusted. It will probably become a work tool as Facebook has, where I do little of my own stuff, and only serve my clients; or I simply have automated content.
I suppose you can always say, āWell, at least itās not as bad as ā¦ā and on that note, I checked in to Facebook to see if I could post a question on why advertising preferences were not editable.
Eventually I found four others had managed, after wading through Facebookās many layers of pages before getting to one where you could pose a question, to ask the same.
Except none of them are clickable to a question-and-answer page. They all take you to a Facebook Business advertising queriesā page.
Therefore, I asked the question even though it had already been asked. I doubt Iāll hear back, as I noticed that on the same visit, Facebook had censored two of my earlier responses.
Why? They reveal that Facebookās platform is buggy, that I was unable to do some things on pages that it claimed I was able to do.
All I can say is that this is petty. Facebook: for the last 15 years your platform has been buggy. Everyone knows this. Covering up a couple of comments made in your own forums, comments that are truthful and actually helpful to others who encounter the same thing, doesnāt make your platform any less buggy. But this is the Zuckerberg way: all-too-precious, wimpy against criticism, with a self-belief that not publishing something will make it go away. I mean, itās worked against equally wimpy governments. It is a page out of the Google playbook, too: its forums are full of cultist believers who ask, āHow dare you question our god?ā when you post about bugs. However, it alienates users.
Itās probably why the old Getsatisfaction Facebook forum was closed down, because it revealed so many bugs about the system.
Iām hoping the 2020s will see some sort of mass rejection of these Big Tech social-tracking platforms, but I thought that would happen years ago. I was wrong. There are still good people on them but there are also good people on Mastodon and elsewhere.
PS.: Here we are, four hours later, after I unticked all the preferences. At least 300 of them have been reselected by Twitter. So it is like Facebook. Once again, we have to say to a US Big Tech firm: stop lying. Your claims about your settings are bogus.
P.PS.: Day two, still fighting Twitter, which reticked a lot (but not all) of the preferences. Still in the hundreds.
Some of you will have noticed that Po.st went out of business, so all the Po.st sharing links disappeared from our websites.
The replacement: addtoany.com offers a similar service without the hassle of header codes. Just customize at their website, grab the code, and insert it where you want it. Itās now on the main Lucire website, Autocade (at least on the desktop version), and this blog (desktop as well). Strangely, the plug-in for Wordpress didn’t work for us, and the HTML code with Javascript is far more practical.
There are fewer customization options but itās a remarkably quick and handy way to replace the old code.
Despite providing a sharing gadget, I wonder how much Iāll use one. Itās been seven days since I last Instagrammed and I donāt miss it. Granted, something major happened in my life but organic sharing had been dwindling through 2019, and if their algorithms arenāt providing you with the dopamine hit that you seek, and youāre unlikely to pay for it like a junkie (which is what Facebook wants you to do), then you have to wonder what the point is. It might, like Facebook, just become one of those things one uses for workāand thatās not something I could have predicted even a year ago.
I see Twitter is introducing features where responses can be limited by the user. The logical outcome of this is Tweets that are directed at limited audience members only, maybe even one-to-one. That looks remarkably like email. And these days I seem to be more productive there than I am on any social network.
When Twitter is awesome. Thank you, everyone, tÄnÄ rawa atu koutou.
Wellington Twitter. Our friend @jackyan's Dad is extremely unwell in hospital so please can you send him good wishes and strength. Jack, we are all with you through this trying time, but still hoping for a miracle. Arohanui to you and Amanda ❤
Ah Jack, sending aroha to you and your family. Glad it was a peaceful passing. 💞He knew how much you cared, loved and supported him. The end of a rich journey, and now peaceful slumber.
Jack, you will be in my prayers. 🙏❤ It is hard to lose someone, especially at this time of year. Having experienced it personally, I wish for you that the memories of your father will help sustain you through this time. Lots of love!
@jackyan Iām terribly sorry to hear your dad has left us. I know you cared for him as well as loved him. My sincerest condolences and hugs go out to you.
Those who remember Visual Arts Trends, a publication created and edited by my friend Julia Dudnik-Stern in the late 1990s and early 2000s, might recall that I didnāt have kind words about the Rt Hon Tony Blair and his government. In those pre-Iraq war days, one reader was so upset they wrote to Julia, who, to her credit, defended my freedom to express a political view.
It was actually quite rare to attack Blair, Mandy, the Blairites and Labour thenāthe fawning interviews given to Blair by the likes of Sir David Frost, and so many of the British media establishment made their 1997 campaign relatively easy. They shrewdly pitched themselves, light on substance and heavy on rhetoric, and that may have been what I was calling out. For once, I donāt recall too clearly, but I can tell you that I do sweat, and did so even when the Falklands were on.
How times have changed. In 2019, an independent study has shown that Labour largely gets negative press coverage in British newspapers, while Conservative gets positive. As covered in The Independent, Loughborough University researchers assigned negative scores to negative articles and positive scores to positive ones, to arrive at an index.
In the period from November 7 to 27, 2019, coverage on Labour scored ā71Ā·17 in the first week, ā71Ā·96 in the second, and ā75Ā·79 in the third.
By contrast, the Tories received +29Ā·98, +17Ā·86 and +15Ā·87.
Tonight, Colin Millarās thread made for an interesting read, where the Rt Hon Jeremy Corbyn is damned if he does, and damned if he doesnāt.
There is a possibility Jeremy Corbyn will be Prime Minister of the UK by the end of next week. There is no better time to highlight how, no matter what Corbyn does or whatever position he takes, his critics will attack him – even if they totally contradict themselves (thread).
Corbyn's problem? He's both too centrist. He's also too much of a fringe figure. Both are argued in the same piece by Tom Peck: https://t.co/OZH41FavKm
Now, I’m sure I’ve shifted my position on things, but generally not in the same year. And yes, Labour itself hasn’t had the best comms in the world.
However, the UK population, and, for that matter, we here in New Zealand, look at the state of news in the US and think we somehow are above the phenomenon of āfake newsā. But itās very clear that we arenāt, and I have insisted for years that we arenāt. This may be uncomfortable for some, but the truth often is. I can only imagine some are all right with being lied to, just as they are all right with being surveilled by Big Tech.
There seems to be little outrage in a week when an article by the UK PM saying that his countryās poor are made up of chavs, burglars, drug addicts and losers emerges, and that poverty is caused by low IQ. In a separate story of his, admittedly older than mine for Julia, he says that children of single mothers are āill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimateā. One wonders what our former PM, Sir John Key, raised by his mother, makes of that.
Just like 1997, one side is being given a free pass by the British media, whether you like them or not. Are ‘we British’ smart enough to see through it? History suggests we are not.
When Douglas Bader recorded in his log book on the aeroplane accident that cost him his legs, he wrote, āBad show’.
It was men like Bader, Audie Murphy, Claire Lee Chennault and Douglas MacArthur that my father spoke of as heroes from his childhood.
There were plenty more from our own culture but Iām using these ones given my largely occidental audience, and Dad really did cite them as well.
None of these men, by the accounts Iāve read, were braggarts. Most were indeed very humble about their contributions to their countries.
But even my late pacifist veteran grandfather (he served, but desperately hated war) would consider these men heroes, as my father did.
I may have blogged at other times about my first years in New Zealand, but I wonāt go into depth about it as it would be too much of a digression from the point I want to make.
Perhaps itās growing up in an immigrant household that what your father tells you a real man should be trumps what you witness at school from your classmates about what they think masculinity is.
And you see your own father display the qualities of what he considered to be gentlemanly. Children are good mimics.
A gentleman, he would say, has the ability to refrain. A lesser man might act out, or strike someone, but that is not a civilized man. Society runs best when people are civilized.
Those ideas of what we call toxic masculinity today were never displayed in my household and are utterly foreign to meāand as an immigrant, āforeignā has two meanings in that sentence. I may be the āforeignerā as far as others (such as certain Australian-owned newspapers) are concerned, even after living here for 43 years, but from your own perspective, you can more easily distance yourself from any undesirable behaviour, saying, āThatās not who I am.ā
In the early years at my first high school, I may have had some cause to doubt the fatherly advice because what I witnessed was an extreme and intellectually stunted form of hero worship that might was right. That the brute force of the rugby player was true masculinity and if you didnāt have it, then you were a āpoofterā or a āfaggotā. Brag, brag, brag, be it about sports or sexual encounters.
This, as any real rugby player knows, and I have met men who have represented our national side, is a wholly inaccurate perception of who they are.
They will tell you that true men display values of camaraderie, teamwork, quiet achievement, tolerance and decency. No All Black I know talks himself up as anything other than one of the boys who happened to be lucky enough to be chosen.
Indeed, some of the bigger blokes who wound up in the school rugby teams, especially the Polynesian and Māori lads, were generally gentle and protective fellows with strong family values.
Yet that misplaced perception held by immature high school boys, I fear, informs many young men of how they are to conduct themselves in adult life.
They think that being jerks toward women is the norm. ‘Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen,’ is the familiar refrain.
Iāve had comments over the years of, āWhy didnāt you make a move on me?ā when I either could not read the signs or felt that forceful āmasculineā behaviour was not particularly respectful. As a middle-aged man I wonder if the patriarchy, ājust the way things areā, has warped expectations for heterosexual men and women. (I canāt obviously speak for our LGBTQI community.)
However, what I do know is sending intimate pictures of yourself via a dating app or messaging service is disgusting (and, incidentally, has not worked for any man in the history of the planet), and that constant desperation is particularly unappealing.
I remember a female friend showing me the sorts of messages she received from potential suitors on a dating website.
āHoly crap,ā I said. āThis is the calibre of men out there?ā
And when I talk to my partner today, she tells me that that was par for the course.
But I have a quality relationship because I did listen to my father and behaved in a way that I thought he would approve of. Whatever he taught me wound up being hard-wired in me and I never aped the boys in my first high school. He was right after all, even if it took longer for me to be in a long-term relationship.
No, I donāt have a massive list of āconquestsā because it honestly isnāt about quantity and life is too short for empty encounters. And while my behaviour at uni age, and shortly after, wasnāt always exemplary, as I tried to figure out the norms, Iāve also come through this knowing that I didnāt have to lie to any woman, and not a single woman out there will be able to say I did anything physical without her consent.
While I obviously told my other half of my career when we met (āSo what do you do?ā), I never mentioned my mayoral bids till our fourth date, a month in to our courtship (she lived out of the country when I ran), and I admitted I didnāt always have an easy time in business during a period of my life, including the recession. I am human, after all. And if one canāt accept me for the bad as well as the good, then is the relationship founded on reality? Or simply fantasy?
Weāve recently had a murder trial here in New Zealand with the accused a young man who is described as a serial liar, and accounts from women he had met were tragic: he would lie about his occupation, bigging himself and his family up, or pretend he had terminal cancer. Enough has been written on this creep.
I had the misfortune to meet another young man who has since been exposed by the Fairfax Press as a con man, who also told constant lies about his life, thinking that talk of personal wealth would impress me and a co-director of one business we have.
Mercifully, the latter case didnāt wind up with anyone physically hurt, and I know plenty of young people who would never behave like this. But it got me wondering whether the core of these cases tells us something about how certain young men feel inadequate, because of a misplaced hero worship of a warped form of masculinity that leaves them as outsiders.
Iām by no means excusing the murderer because he frankly committed a heinous crime, in a premeditated fashion. I remain appalled at the victim-shaming that I saw reported as though the deceased, the one person who couldnāt answer, were on trial. Iām also not excusing the failed con-man who any viewer of Hustle would be able to spot a mile away: his actions, too, were his own. But I am pointing at society and how we men have shaped expectations.
For I look at some male behaviour and they are entirely at odds with what a man should be.
While examples like Douglas Bader might not resonate with young men today, because his example is too far back in history for them (the biopic is in black and white), surely we can find ones of humble men who accomplish great deeds and donāt have to go on social media to talk themselves up.
Just tonight I was at a dinner for Merrill Fernando, the 89-year-old founder of Dilmah Tea, who was earlier today conferred an honorary doctorate by Massey University.
When I asked if he was now Dr Fernando, he replied that he would still be Merrill Fernando, and that all the honours he had receivedāand they are plentifulāwould never change who he was. His humility and his faith continue to inspire me.
This is the mark of a decent and admirable man.
And surely we can find examples where men arenāt being disrespectful to women and show us that that is the norm.
Surely we donāt need to berate anyone who doesnāt fit the trogoldyte mould and use homophobic slurs against them.
Because, chaps, I donāt believe what defines a man, a real man, a fair dinkum bloke, has actually changed, at its core, from what my Dad told me.
There is room for the jocks, the geeks, the musos, the artists, the romantics, the extroverts and introverts, because we all have our strengths.
One female friend of mine tells me that itās safer for her to presume all men are jerks as her default position till proved otherwise, and I know fully why she would take that position. On social media she points to the ābrosā, men whoāll gang up on women because they donāt like them for calling it as it is, or having a different viewpoint. In real life she has had unwanted attention, even after she tells them sheās queer.
These men, the bros, the braggarts, the dick-pic senders, the liars, the bullies, the slanderers, are actually trying to change the definition of what a real man isāand that, to me, seems to be non-masculine, insecure and inadequate. We can do betterāand history shows that we had done once.
Iāve discovered that the newer the Instagram, the buggier it is. Weāve already seen that it canāt cope with video if you use Android 7 (a great way to reduce video bandwidth), and, earlier this year, filters do not work.
I downgraded to version 59 till, last week, Instagram began deleting direct messages as its way to force me to upgrade. Neither versions 119 or 120 are stable, and are about as reliable as one of Boris Johnsonās marriages, although they have fixed the filter problem.
Neither version has an alignment grid to aid you to adjust an image so itās square, even though Instagramās own documentation says it remains present. Presently, only Tyler Henry and other psychics can see the grid:
I imagine this is Googleās way of saving on bandwidth and it is utterly successful for them as nothing is ever transmitted.
The ZIPping process took probably 15ā20 minutes a go.
A comparable service like Wetransfer or Smash just, well, transfers, in less than the time Google Drive takes to archive a bunch of files.
I also notice that Google Drive frequently only sends me a single image when the sender intends to send a whole bunch. Thereās no age discrimination here: both an older friend and colleague and a young interviewee both had this happen in October when trying to send to me. It is, I suspect, all to do with an interface that hasnāt been tested, or is buggy.
Basically: Google Drive does not work for either the sender or the recipient.
This morning a friend and colleague tried to send me more files using this godawful service, and this time, Google Drive at least gave me a sign-on prompt. Even though I was already signed on. Not that that does anything: you never, ever log in. However, for once, the files he tried to send me actually did come down in the background.
I should note that for these Google Drive exercises, I use a fresh browser (Opera) with no plug-ins or blocked cookies: this is the browser I use where I allow tracking and all the invasiveness Google likes to do to people. Now that it has begun grabbing Americansā medical records in 21 states without patient consent in something called ‘Project Nightingale’ (thank you, Murdoch Press, for consistently having the guts to report on Google), weāre in a new era of intrusiveness. (Iām waiting for the time when most Americans wonāt care that Google, a monopoly, has their medical records, after the initial outcry. No one seems to care about the surveillance US Big Tech does on us, which puts the KGB and Stasi to shame.)
Looking at Googleās own help forums, it doesnāt matter what browser you use: even Chrome doesnāt work with Drive downloads in some cases.
The lesson is: stop using Google Drive for file transfers, as Smash does a better job.
Or, better yet, stop using Google. Get a Google-free phone, maybe even one from Huawei.
Meanwhile, I see WordPress’s Jetpack plug-in did this to my blog today without any intervention from me. I imagine it did an automatic update, which it was not set to do.
Thereās untested software all over the place, ignoring your settings because it thinks it knows better. News flash, folks, your programs donāt know better.
A great way for one tech company to get rid of criticisms of another tech company for a few hours, I guess, harming its ranking in the process. Google itself has done it before.
Farewell, Jetpack. Other than the stats and the phone-friendly skin, I never needed you. I’m sure there are alternatives that don’t wipe out my entire blog.
I would have loved to have seen this go to trial, but Facebook and the plaintiffsāa group of advertising agencies alleging they had been swindled by the social networkāsettled.
Excerpted from The Hollywood Reporter, āThe suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth of the problem. āThe average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%,ā stated an amended complaint.ā
Facebook denies this and settled for US$40 million, which is really pocket change for the multi-milliard-dollar company. Just the price of doing business.
Remember, Facebook has been shown to have lied about the number of people it can reach (it now admits that its population estimates have no basis in, well, the population), so Iām not surprised it lies about the number of people who watch their videos. And remember their platform has a lot of botsāI still have several thousand reported on Instagram that have yet to be touchedāand Facebook itself isnāt exactly clean.
Every time they get called out, there are a few noises, but nothing ever really happens.
This exchange between Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mark Zuckerberg is a further indication that nothing will ever happen at Facebook to make things rightāthere’s no will from top management for that to happen. Thereās too much to be lost with monetization opportunities for questionable services to be shut down, while Facebook is all too happy to close ones that donāt make money (e.g. the old āView asā feature). The divisions and “fake news” will continue, the tools used by all the wrong people.
It’s your choice whether you want to be part of this.
"So, you won't take down lies or you will take down lies? I think that's just a pretty simple yes or no."
Complete exchange between @RepAOC@AOC and Mark Zuckerberg at today's House Financial Services Cmte hearing.
That #Brexit bill is typeset in Palatino. That was designed by a German. Come on, people, donāt you want to use British typefaces? Tell Johnny Foreigner what you think of his fonts!
Strictly speaking, I realize it was Book Antiqua, though as we all know, that’s a Palatino clone.
Since even English types like Baskerville were influenced by what was happening on the Continent, for official use, the UK really needs to go back to Old English. And yes, I realize that suggestion has unpleasant parallels to what was going on in Germany in the 1930s ā¦
There was a great follow-up to my Tweet, incidentally:
I need a "Tell Johnny Foreigner what you think of his fonts!" tee shirt, and I do not even wear clothes with writing on them.
In the last month, maybe the last few weeks, my likes on Instagram have halved. Interestingly, Lucireās Instagram visits have increased markedly. But as I use my own account more than a work one, I can see the trend there a bit more clearly.
Itās not unlike Facebook, which, of course, owns Instagram. While I havenāt used it for personal updates since 2017, I maintain a handful of pages, and I still recall earlier this decade when, overnight, engagement dropped 90 per cent. It never recovered. Facebook, like Google, biases itself toward those who can afford to pay, in the great unlevelling of the playing field that Big Tech is wont to do.
They know that theyāre structured on, basically, a form of digital drug-taking: that for every like we get, we get a dopamine hit, and if we want to maintain those levels, we had better pay for them and become junkies. But hereās the thing: what if people wake up and realize that they donāt need that hit any more? I mean, even Popeye Doyle got through cold turkey to pursue Alain Charnier in French Connection II.
Iāve written about social media fatigue before, and the over-sharing that can come with it. More than once I blogged about being āFacebooked outā. And as you quit one social medium, itās not too hard to quit another.
Iāve made a lot of posts on Instagram but I value my privacy increasingly, and in the period leading up to the house move, I began doing less on it. And without the level of engagement, whether thatās caused by the algorithm or my own drop in activity, Iām beginning to care less, even if Instagram was more a hobby medium where I interacted with others.
And since I have less time to check it, I actually donāt notice that I have fewer likes when I open the app. I only really know when I see that each photo averages 15 likes or so, when figures in the 30s and 40s were far more commonplace not very long ago.
So whatās the deal? Would they like us to pay? Iām not that desperate. I donāt āGram for likes, as it was always a hobby, one that I seem to have less time for in 2019. I never thought being an āinfluencerā on Instagram was important. The novelty has well and truly worn off, and as friends depart from the platform, the need to use it to keep them updated diminishes. In the last fortnight I recorded three videos for friends and sent them via Smash or Wetransfer, and that kept them informed. You know, like writing a letter as we did pre-email, but with audio and video. Instagram just isnāt that vital. Email actually serves me just fine.
As I said to a friend tonight, even Twitter seems expendable from oneās everyday habits. Especially after March 15 here. You realize that those who are already arseholes really want to stay that way, their life ambition probably to join certain foreign-owned radio stations to be talking heads. But since they lack the nous, the best they can manage is social-media venting. And the good people want to remain good and have the space to live their lives happily. So why, I began wondering, should we spend our time getting our blood pressure up to defend our patch in a medium where the arseholes are, by and large, gutless wannabes who darenāt tell you have of the venom they write to your face? Does anyone ever put a Stuff commenter up on a pedestal and give them respect? While there are a great many people whom I admire on Twitter, and I am fortunate enough to have come into their orbit, there are an increasing number of days when I want to leave them to it, and if they wish to deal with the low-lifes of this world, it is their prerogative, and I respect them for doing something Iām tiring of doing myself. Twelve years on Twitter is a long time. At the time of writing, Iāve made 91,624 Tweets. Thatās a lot.
Unlike the arseholes, each and every one of these decent human beings have successful lives, and they donāt need to spend their waking moments dispensing hate toward any other group that isnāt like them in terms of genitals, sexual orientation, race or religion. And, frankly, I can contact those decent people in media outside of social.
Maybe the fear of Tweeting less is that we believe that the patients will overrun the asylum, that weāre the last line of defence in a world where racists and others are emboldened. That if we show that good sense and tolerance prevail, as my grandfather and others wanted to do when they went to war, then those who harbour unsavoury thoughts toward people unlike them might think twice. I canāt really argue with that.
But I wonder whether Iāll be more effective outside of social. I publish magazines, for a start. They give me a platform others do not have. I donāt need to leave comments on articles (and over the years, I havenāt done much of that). And I have websites I visit where I can unwind, away from the shouting factories of American Big Tech. Most of us want to do good on this earth, and the long game is I may be better off building businesses Iām good at rather than try to show how much smarter I am versus a talentless social media stranger.
No, Iām not saying Iām leaving either medium. I am saying that Iād rather spend that time on things I love to do, and before 2007 I had enough to do without sharing. Some of the colleagues I respect the most have barely set foot in the world of social, and right now I envy just how much time they have managed to put into other important endeavours, including books that are changing lives.
Big Tech must know the writing’s on the wall.
PS.: From a discussion with the wonderful William Shepherd when he read this on Twitter (the irony is not lost on me given the subject).āJY
One thing about Twitter, it never sleeps. So when I can't sleep, it is an easy way to waste the early morning. 4:15 in LA, hey Jack.
"Last line of defense" is a good way to phrase it. Or, at least know when they have gone totally crazy from their own venomous rage.
My feeling is there will be an exodus soon but I donāt know why yet. My online activity on Facebook is not unlike my forum activity during Bush 43. And I know itās diminishing here and on Instagram.
I remember on Vox, I was happy blogging to an audience of strangers, and I wonder whether something similar is going to be the next creative outlet for people, especially as workālife balance becomes more important, and the US ā20 election cycle heats up.
The media will give politics wall-to-wall coverage, the consequence being that the public tires of it when going on to social media platforms. At some point, self-preservation has to kick in and that rage is going to do no one any good. The bots will also put people off.
