[BaldricksGhost]

"Facebook is where you find out your highschool friend is super in to a MLM, your uncle has drastic political views you don't share, and that your historical social class and network is largely irrelevant to your life a decade later."

This is probably the most accurate description of Facebook I've seen.

[ubermonkey]

I'm reminded of a Twitter joke from (according to the WaPo) @KevinFarzad:

"HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who never left our hometown & thinks Olive Garden is fancy. Anyway, here's a racist article."

[bko]

How is that a joke? It's just looking down on someone because of where they live, eat and their politics (assuming very lose definition of "racist"). And when did the role of journalists start including dunking on random people?

[ubermonkey]

You seem fun.

It's funny because it's something many, many people identify with. A good chunk of Americans with the ability to do so leave small, provincial areas they grew up in for better opportunities in larger, more diverse cities. This leads to a pretty huge disconnect between them and those who, for whatever reason, stayed in their hometown.

It wasn't something that you noticed as much until Facebook exploded, and then everyone got re-connected with people from high school that, in some cases, you'd neither seen nor thought about in 20 years. And then the sort of post that prompted the joke happens, and you see it clearly.

And I assure you, as someone who grew up in and later left arguably the MOST racist state in the US south, the articles these archetypes are sharing are often quite explicit in their racism.

[bko]

Many people just want a normal life around family and friends and what they're familiar with. Having family around in particular is especially important when you have children or when your parents are approaching their end of life. Children get sick and having a relative around to help watch them is essential.

Many don't optimize their life their lives around "better opportunities" and "diverse cities". It sounds like you do, and good for you.

[ubermonkey]

I hesitate to respond to you again because I think you've dug your heels in here on finding the joke troublesome, but:

You DO realize that it's not at the expense of MERELY staying in a small, provincial, homogeneous place, right? It's ALSO continuing to embrace the blinkered worldview that growing up in such a place engenders. You need both for the joke to land.

You're reacting here as thought it's JUST about moving away (or not). It isn't.

I know educated, open-minded people who stayed in my hometown who have grown personally and intellectually and morally since youth. They stayed there for a handful of reasons, and some of them are as you state: an inability or unwillingness to be more than an hour from family, for example.

But I know of far more people who have not advanced in any meaningful way since they were 18 or 20. They often find the VERY IDEA of a world beyond the hometown to be fishy and untrustworthy. They are, uniformly, uncritical consumers of Fox News. They are the ones posting racist memes about, say, the Obamas, or proudly touting their COVID vax refusenik status.

This is who the joke is about.

[RustyConsul]

lol - thanks for this. Only on HN can you start with a joke and end with this.

[Charlie_26]

Solid explanation, but I think anyone can be forgiven for taking that tweet at face value and finding it disrespectful to small town people (good or bad) .

[jcon321]

wish I could report or downvote this

[rmah]

KevinFarzad is not a journalist. WaPo was just reporting on such jokes.

[dgellow]

Journalist are normal people. Normal people write shitposts on Twitter. Presidents and CEOs can shitposts on Twitter but journalists cannot? What a weird assumption.

[bko]

Showing contempt for huge swaths of people doesn't really bode well for objectivity. It's in poor taste for anyone to just dunk on people who stay near their homes and eat at olive garden. Sure, journalists CAN shit post, and obviously they do. I guess I assume journalists that cover news for presumably everyone wouldn't have such open contempt for so many people. But hey, that's just me.

[ubermonkey]

I just realized you're basing your ire here on a misread of my post.

The joke is not from a journalist.

The joke was copied widely when originally posted, and it wasn't clear to me who wrote it in the first place -- but if I was going to reference it here, I wanted to give proper credit.

I found a story in the WaPo about online joke plagiarism, and it used this joke as an example -- and cited musician Kevin Farzad as the original author. Based on this, I credited him in my comment accordingly.

[xdavidliu]

I misread your post in exactly the same way and thought the joke was made by a journalist.

[browningstreet]

They’re not dunking on people who stay near home and eat at Olive Garden.

[meekmind]

It's different because I identify and agree with the virtue signaling of holier-than-thou social climbers who claim to do journalism. Their views represent mine, and since I am mostly without purpose or depth, I don't make petty distinctions about the definition of journalism: I only want them to validate my position that everyone I do not like is <insert adjective here> and incapable of critical thinking. The irony of this position is totally lost on me.

[tamaharbor]

What’s the matter with Olive Garden?

[r00fus]

Joke is thinking OG is somehow fancy digs.

[meowtimemania]

It is fancy to a lot of people. I think the parent tweet is funny, but no need to dunk on people that don’t have a lot of money.

[jsnodlin]

I wonder where that comes from. Do they pre-prepare their food and microwave it?

[zamadatix]

It's one of the cheapest casual dining restaurants that provide table service but avoids being fast casual dining and still tries to avoid a cheap look. Basically if eating out in general is a luxury due to cost then to you an Olive Garden or an Applebees type place is where you go to have your celebratory types of dinners because either your small town doesn't have much more to go to and/or your income doesn't really let you go spend on 1 12oz steak what could cover the entire meal for a small group at Olive Garden.

Of course there is nothing wrong with thinking OG is fancy and so on. Better to avoid folks who make a big deal out of it IMO.

[effthisis]

It's a cheap, sly way to make an anti-White dig.

[circa]

lol classic

[fooperdupes]

lol classist

[monocasa]

Not really. A lot of my high school friends in that boat are upper class. One is the new district attorney of my hometown for instance. Another is a regulelar contributer to fox news.

The stereotype is orthogonal to class.

[fullshark]

“Thinks Olive Garden is fancy” is clearly a pejorative class signal

[monocasa]

In my experience it says more about if you've left your little town for a relatively significant period of time than class. I know train kids with more exposure to the world than that, and as I said above district attorneys and national news contributors who have no interest in anything outside the commercial zone of their suburb.

[catach]

I suspect what may be tripping people up in this kind of discussion is that financial class and social class can be distinct from each other.

[dionidium]

This probably sounds like a real zinger to a certain kind of young person who moved to Brooklyn and thinks everybody back home is a total loser, but this is not the modal Facebook user, so I'm not sure it matters much.

[uncomputation]

You’re trying to characterize OP as a condescending out of touch hipster, but in my opinion your characterization of the “modal” Facebook user is actually more so. The “modal” Facebook user is equally capable of being dissatisfied with the product as your 2013 hipster caricature is because FB has failed to deliver on its mission. The social side is boring and doesn’t generate as much engagement because it turns out your friends from high school truly are not relevant to your life, yes even the “modal” Facebook user is capable of change and evolution; and the content side leaves users feeling angry, divided, and exhausted after the hundredth flame war they find themselves embroiled in over the political upset of the day. It does matter.

[jamal-kumar]

"2013 hipster caricature"

"largely irrelevant to your life a decade later."

hey, 2013 was about a decade ago, you nailed it

[drewwwwww]

i mean you can easily write the obverse joke and it has the same overall point - “hey, it’s me, your friend from high school that moved to brooklyn and got a tattoo and thinks he’s better than you. here’s an article about how big yogurt’s assumption you can use a spoon is Ableist” still underscores the fact that facebook is a pipeline to deliver brain poison.

[kwertyoowiyop]

Both jokes made me laugh and wouldn’t it be great if everyone could just CHILL?

[nopenopenopeno]

You are making a different point, though.

The original argument was that Facebook is failing to keep up with the times, hence why the back-home losers are still using it while you, the successful urban-dweller, have moved on.

Your argument that Facebook is “a pipeline to deliver brain poison” has a lot more value, even if only because it’s more objective.

[wegs]

I won't argue whether it's accurate, but I think you missed the point. You can swap words around, and get the same for any demographic.

The friend's perception of the poster would be "HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who went to New York and thinks is better than you. Anyway, here's a woke article."

[nopenopenopeno]

But that wouldn’t support their argument that FB is failing to keep up with the times.

I think it matters largely because I don’t believe that most people just want content. Everyone I speak with who uses FB on a daily basis has made the decision to excuse the habit purely because they are interested in keeping in touch with people. But by excusing that habit, they end up mostly consuming content because that’s what the feed gives them.

I left FB the day their “timeline” stopped supporting chronological sort.

[JohnHaugeland]

> this is not the modal Facebook user

the increasing hew and cry suggests that it actually is

[RC_ITR]

Well, it was always kind of doomed in this way.

When everyone is still actively building their friend list (remember this started for college students) its an amazing product because it brings you closer to people in a new way and allows for curation without investing a ton into AI/ML.

For people who stay in a static social bubbles for long times (e.g., your parents, your friends from HS who didn't move to a coastal city) it's also perfect, because they tend to value content related to their social group more than something new and interesting.

But for the highest value users (e.g., the ones with high-paying knowledge-based jobs and a willingness to try new things) the social graph will never keep up with their lives. Bad content from the edges of the graph will slowly creep into feeds (MLMs being a prime example) and those high-value users will seek out new platforms that conform better to their interests.

Instagram was a brilliant stop-gap, but Mark never saw the writing on the wall about algorithmic content (probably b/c Bytedance had the advantage of cutting its teeth in China first) and is just too far behind to ever really catch up.

So now he's trying to out-future Bytedance with VR (and even got them to burn $1bn on Pico), but unless he has some hard-tech rabbit to pull out of his hat, there's just not anything there.

We may very well be seeing the largest (negative) turn-around story in history since Yahoo! play out in front of our eyes.

[kwertyoowiyop]

When do the desperate acquisitions start?

[RC_ITR]

https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/26/facebook-buys-the-vr-studi...

They already have, and if the US Government would allow them to make another acquisition over $1bn, they already would have (I guarantee 5 different Biz Dev associates have made very long PowerPoints about Roblox and Rec Room only to be told the idea is DOA).

It's actually kind of amazing that Mark's off-putting personality and desire to remain the face of the company is what will kill it (let's just hope Aaron Sorkin stays alive long enough for the sequel, because it might rival Citizen Kane).

[hoffspot]

It's really a perfect assessment. I couldn't articulate why exactly Facebook felt like I was purely wasting time each time I engaged with the experience (few times a year). This description completely crystallizes my thinking.

[stevofolife]

Actually it’s not. Your early life social group becoming irrelevant to your life a decade later is NOT representative at all. What is accurate to say is the OP is not connecting with his old friends anymore. But let’s be real here, not everyone’s like that. Facebook is just a tool to connect with people. Attributing and expecting Facebook to make your friendships more relevant and meaningful is foolish and hopeless.

[mathattack]

Yes. There are some social groups that still use it (“no practice today”) but the novelty has gone and the youngsters have moved on. If the value of the graph increases exponentially with users, each user leaving causes a disproportionate value drop.

[earthboundkid]

A girl I thought was cute in college was totally convinced T***** would retain the Presidency on 1/6, so I guess it was useful as a sign something was going to happen.

[AzzieElbab]

I haven’t seen anyone voledermord trump b4

[Macha]

Just a couple of late night US talk shows, including the most viewed one, have done this.

[earthboundkid]

Really? I’ve been doing it continuously since mid-2016, and I don’t think I’m alone.

[tekknik]

Do you think if you say his name 3 times he’ll appear?

[AzzieElbab]

why?

[synthos]

He probably wants to avoid having a discussion with trolls and astroturfing 42 supporters who have trouble filling in blanks.

[Case81]

And you’re saying the supporters almost all share this particular characteristic that makes them incapable of filling those blanks. Well…it makes sense.